The Bright Spot Read online

  It was time to get a new pair of shoes. I moved their purchase to the head of the line, next paycheck, right after Buck’s monthly bag of food. Lost in this pitiful reflection, I almost didn’t notice a limo emerging from the next street over from mine as the bus pulled away. But I soon talked myself out of it meaning anything. It shot away in traffic the opposite direction I was headed. I was a whole lot more worried about the cops than mysterious black limos. I was surprised the feds hadn’t talked to me yet. Maybe they had no intention of solving this one. Maybe they already decided who did it, and I didn’t fit in their frame. If I was lucky, maybe I could keep it that way.

  CERTAINTY AGAIN

  11

  “Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth—more than his own mother, more than— himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.”

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

  MURPHY HAD SHOWN UP AT RECREATION, SO LU knew most of what I knew from him. Gary was still upset about a cop questioning one of his actors on his dime, but Wally was fascinated. Murphy, thinking Wally might be the imaginary writer who’d told me about Galatea Ritsa, proceeded to question him at length as well. I would’ve loved to have heard that conversation.

  As soon as I arrived, Wally rushed up and asked what I thought of the name Galatea Ritsa for a character in the show, and I said I liked it just fine. “The policeman was looking for her,” he said. “Do you know her?”

  “We’ve never met. Are you going to fit her into your war story?”

  He drew a blank for a moment until he recalled our conversation of an hour before. “Oh, no. Well, sort of. It’s all cops now.”

  For now, I thought.

  I played catch-up all day, getting myself pasted into the scenes I’d missed, so I never got a chance to talk to Lu about the whole business until we were riding the bus home. We had two seats together. Lu sat by the window. She liked to look out.

  “What did Murphy want to know from you?” I asked.

  “Whether I knew Jesse Salvador, Dumfries, Galatea. I just kept saying it was your gig, and I didn’t know much about it. He wants to think I’m not involved, so he went for it well enough. Mostly, though, he was nosing around about you. You didn’t tell him you knew Salvador, did you?”

  “Course not.”

  “Do you think you going to see Kennemeyer had anything to do with him getting killed?”

  “With Salvador turning up in a landfill? I’m sure of it.”

  “But how can something that happened forty years ago be worth killing somebody over now?”

  “Whatever they didn’t want known back then. So far I’m hoping we’re just a couple of actors who did a job and aren’t worth killing, but I can’t seem to shake loose of this thing. Now Murphy’s got me riding out to see Dumfries’ ex with him tonight. Sooner or later the wrong cops are going to notice I’m everywhere I shouldn’t be.”

  “Are you sure it’s cops?”

  “Of course it’s cops. Who else can make dead women disappear, poof! Who else can take ordinary pool guys and garbage men and make them assassins? They could be corporate, government, secret—there’s all kinds of cops—but it sure looks like cops to me.”

  “Murph says the Kennemeyer woman is really hot.” She didn’t act like she’d changed the subject at all.

  “Murph?”

  “He’s always gone by Murph. Don’t ever call him Clarence or Junior, and don’t change the subject.”

  “Me? I don’t remember we were talking about ‘the Kennemeyer woman.’ ”

  “I know. You’ve been trying to avoid the subject of what you did all morning. Like now. You won’t even answer a simple question without getting all defensive about it.”

  “Okay. She’s hot—very, very hot—but heat isn’t everything. Let me guess. Murph said if that actor fellow don’t do you right, L’il Lu, you can just come to me for solace, ’cause you know my love is true.”

  “He didn’t sound like some singing cowboy, but something like that. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him to forget it. You’re the only one for me, Lu.”

  “Good, because that’s what I told him.”

  Then I told her what I’d learned from Dee, told her about the shoe box, Ed’s acting career and his love life, and that bastard, Trey, wherever he might be. I was even stupid enough to tell her Dee’s babysitting story. I thought she’d think it was cute.

  “Sounds like you two really talked.”

  “We tried pretending but found the real thing worked better.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. We really talked. She really liked me. She was bored and lonely and beautiful and thought I was cute and wanted to have her way with me. She asked me if I had a wife. I told her ‘as good as.’ And I stuck to that story.”

  She was quiet for a moment, staring at the world passing by, or her reflection in the glass, or maybe she was trying to get her own glimpse through time. Into the future. “Really? Is that how you feel?”

  “Certainly.”

  She smiled. “Certainty again.”

  “I never lost it.”

  She turned back to me. “If I’m as good as a wife, does that mean we’re as good as married?”

  “We could get married and find out.”

  “You better watch yourself. That almost sounds like a proposal.”

  “Everybody keeps telling me to watch myself. I know what I’m doing. It was supposed to sound like a proposal. It was a proposal. So, what do you say? You want knees? I can do knees. There’s a big aisle.”

  She broke into a smile and sprouted tears like a fountain. “Yes,” she said, and we almost missed our stop, celebrating and snuffling and generally making a spectacle of ourselves for the entertainment of our fellow passengers, who applauded us as we got off the bus.

  I hadn’t really planned on proposing, but once it’d happened, I found I really liked the idea, that it was just about the best idea I’d had since my last really good idea—running to catch up with Luella at that bus stop three months earlier.

  We walked Buck together, tried the idea out on him, and he went for it big-time. Ipso Factos like stability and closure. We would’ve all gone out for a pizza or something, but I had a date with a cop. I managed to wolf down a sandwich before Murphy showed up. Lu met him at the door with the news we were engaged. He took it well, I thought. At least he seemed to be walking okay. I lingered over my goodbye to tell Lu one more time I adored her, and where I’d stashed the shoe box in case she’d like a crack at it, then hurried after Murphy for another cruiser ride. This one was out to where the old money slumbered and cops showed up by invitation only. Murph even wore a hat for the occasion, so he could hold it, I guess.

  Dusk was falling. Murph and I waited in the drawing room. It was that kind of place, the sort of new house old money built, nostalgic for the past even when it was new. I’d counted three rain forests’ worth of mahogany getting here. Impeccably detailed but understated rain forests, mind. Nothing brash or showy.

  It was quiet in the drawing room. Neither one of us spoke. We sat up straight. We didn’t fidget. We breathed quietly through our noses. We were both good boys. My eyes roamed the room. There were three floor-to-ceiling windows, where the last of the light was making a stand. I didn’t give it long. The gloom was already knee-deep. The bent curves of the furniture glinted darkly like crouching insects. I imagined Gregor Samsa in the wing-back, waiting with us, imagined the whole place scurrying down a hole if anyone were to switch on a light. There was a white marble fireplace that smelled like wet ashes, though it was hard to believe this hearth had ever been warm. It radiated a chill, like moonlight. There was a white grand piano parked massively in a corner like it had just taxied in, the open lid its folded wings. Music sat on the stand. I could almost make out the title in two-inch letters. Nocturne in something-something.

  A high door opened—closed.

&nbs
p; We rose.

  She glided forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She clasped my hands, totally ignoring Murphy. “My God, you look exactly like him! It’s remarkable.”

  I didn’t know what to say. What was remarkable was that she could see me at all in this light. “Nicholas Bainbridge,” I said, in case she was inclined to forget it. Murphy had told her I was an actor playing her ex and that I would be coming along for reasons he’d left vague.

  “Delighted,” she said. She squeezed my hands for a moment and let them go. She turned to Murphy. There was something wrong with her neck, so she had to turn her whole body. Part of the floating-head effect came from a white neck brace. “You must be the policeman,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Murphy allowed.

  The light was failing at such a rate Murphy would soon be invisible except for the whites of his eyes, or his teeth if he should smile. All the furniture had disappeared but the piano perched in the shadows like a fat white moth. The white fireplace was a cloud of smoke behind us, dissolving in the gloom.

  Her head floated back to the door, and she flipped a switch. The room flooded with light. She was wearing black satin pajamas and slippers. Her hair was a tight gray frizz. Her face, a thick maze of lines stretched taut over her skull. Sharp, quick eyes looked out.

  “Yoga,” she said, gesturing at her clothes. “It keeps me young. You should try it,” she added, as if she’d already judged what shape we were in.

  It was Murphy’s party, so he took the first dance. The old lady liked to lead. I felt like sitting down at the piano and playing a tango, but I just sat on my hands and watched them wear each other out.

  “I hope this is important,” she said.

  Murphy smiled to allow he hoped so too.

  “I don’t know if you’re aware, Mrs. Dumfries, but—”

  “My name is no longer Dumfries. Mr. Dumfries and I have been divorced for almost forty years. My name is Jean Brand now.”

  “Yes, Ms. Brand. I don’t know if you’re aware, but your husband—your ex-husband—has been missing from the facility where he lives for over two months. Would you have any idea where he might be? Anyplace he might go? Have you heard from him, by any chance?”

  She laughed out loud. It was like Katharine Hepburn. Hopelessly theatrical. It might be her real laugh, but you could never be sure. “I can only imagine what he would say to me!”

  “So he hasn’t contacted you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Are there hard feelings between you?”

  She looked at him as if he were a hopeless idiot. “We are divorced. Why wouldn’t there be hard feelings? Don’t be ridiculous. I’d be the last person on Earth he would contact. You’ve wasted your time and mine coming out here, I’m afraid. Jim Dumfries, really. That was over and done with many years ago.”

  “Is that what you called him?” I piped up, since Murphy was getting nowhere. “Jim? Such details are helpful to me,” I added, “playing my part.”

  She looked into my eyes. No matter what she did to tell herself otherwise, when she looked at me, she was half looking at him, way back when, when she used to love the guy. Still did, it seemed, in her memories. Her wrinkled eyes glinted with something that hadn’t been there a moment before. “Jim,” she said. “I called him Jim.”

  I smiled at her, and she smiled back. It wasn’t easy for her. You could see traces of the pain, probably from whatever the brace was for, but still it made her look younger by a decade or so. “How did you two meet for the first time?”

  “In college. William and Mary. We were in a play together. He was a scientist, but he had a passion for the theater. I was a theater major, but I wasn’t very good. I found him and his work more fascinating. His dedication, his drive. He was already showing everyone what he could do even then.”

  “So you must’ve known his friend, Ed Kennemeyer. He was in theater too, I believe.”

  There was a silence that seemed to have something in it, as if I’d banged out a dramatic chord on the big grand and it was fading ever so slowly away. “Yes,” she said icily. “I knew Ed. He and Jim were friends.” She put a little extra weight on that word friends. She should’ve left it well enough alone.

  “Ed Kennemeyer was murdered yesterday,” Murphy cut in, and she swiveled his way.

  “My God! How awful! You don’t think Jim had anything to do with it, do you?”

  “Why do you say that?” Murphy asked.

  She fixed him with a deadly glance. “Oh, don’t talk like a stupid policeman,” she snapped.

  The big Murph didn’t have a ready answer for that one, so I stepped in. “The two men did seem to have been more than friends at one time,” I suggested. “Perhaps—”

  She turned on me, wincing for the workout her neck was getting. “If you’re implying my husband was homosexual, Mr. Bainbridge, you are very much mistaken. My husband and I had two children together. I think I would know if he was a homosexual. Ed was a friend, nothing more.” The speech had a practiced, pious efficiency about it, like the Pledge of Allegiance. But she’d knocked the bottom out of friend this time, erasing any doubt she was lying. I couldn’t help but notice how Jim had been promoted to her husband again at the mere suggestion he might’ve been gay. Murphy and I traded a glance. He caught it too.

  “We don’t want to leave you with the impression we suspect your husband of any wrongdoing,” Murphy assured her, meaning he did suspect—he just didn’t want her to know. “But we are trying to locate him. He was under treatment for memory loss. He might be disoriented, confused. Possibly in great danger. Anything that you could tell us to narrow our search could prove invaluable.”

  If the image of the poor lost Jim doddering around tugged at her heartstrings, it certainly didn’t show.

  I cut in. “You were with him when he did all his important work, weren’t you? During the war?”

  “Why, yes,” she said, holding her head a little higher in spite of the brace. “Jim was once a brilliant, brilliant man.”

  “I’m trying to find out about some of his associates, but all I have are their first names.” I rattled off the list of suspected other men from the diner scene. I never forget a line—a phone number or a bill, yes, but never a line. Not a single one of the names meant a thing to her.

  “Lots of people came and went during the war,” she said.

  “But you were the one constant. It must’ve been hard on you to see him embroiled in controversy after the war.”

  “I told him to stay out of it, but he wouldn’t listen to me. Ed got him into it—Ed and his precious ethics.”

  “Into what?”

  “You know, the whole anti-’ware nonsense, as if what had saved the world from the extremists all of a sudden wasn’t good enough for the common man. It lifted them up out of poverty is what it did, gave them hope, a new life, a purpose, a way to feed their ever-growing families.”

  I’d heard this line before, but I didn’t know there was still anyone around who had the gall to say it anymore. Jean and Jim must’ve had some interesting political discussions of an evening when they weren’t avoiding the subject of sex. I decided this was a good time to lead trumps. “Is that where he met Galatea Ritsa? In the anti’ware movement?”

  If the silence before was a chord on the piano, this one was hoisting the piano to the ceiling and dropping it on the marble hearth. “I-I don’t know where he met her exactly. I never actually met the woman. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m really quite tired. At my age, I’m not used to so much excitement.”

  Murphy moved in. “Galatea Ritsa was hit by an SUV while jogging and killed not too far away from here forty years ago. Do you recall that incident, Ms. Brand?”

  “I-I seem to recall something like that, yes. My husband was terribly upset.”

  “Were they close, Ms. Brand—Galatea Ritsa and your husband—or were they just friends as well?” Murphy’s little cop smile was a beaut. He just kept it
trained on her, the question hanging in the air.

  Jean Brand’s eyes narrowed. She would’ve gladly strangled Murphy, I’m sure. Exactly the result he’d been hoping for. “Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing,” she seethed. “You’re trying to imply Jim killed that woman in some crime of passion. Nothing’s changed after all these years. You’re still all determined, aren’t you, to rake up some dirt on him? Well, you’ve got the wrong man for that one. I kept quiet all those years because he wanted me to, but I don’t see how it matters in the least now. You want me to say it? Okay, I’ll say it: Jim was gay. He told me, told himself I suppose, that he was bisexual. I bore him two children. He wanted children. He was bisexual enough for that. But there was no passion there. He fucked Ed Kennemeyer more than he ever fucked me. He tried to make it work with me, but Ed wouldn’t leave him alone. Ed never understood that Jim needed me. Me! Not some philosopher with his head in the clouds. No one believed in him like I did. He said so. He said so! You happy now? My husband was a faggot. He married me, but he loved another man. Now, why don’t you get the hell out of my house!”

  HERE THEY COME

  12

  ESTRAGON: We’ve lost our rights?

  VLADIMIR: (distinctly) We got rid of them.

  —SAMUEL BECKETT, Waiting for Godot

  “I THOUGHT THAT WENT WELL,” MURPHY SAID As We got back into the cruiser. “This Galatea Ritsa just stirs things up wherever she goes, doesn’t she? I almost hate to see her go.”

  He punched us on our way, leaned back in his seat, loosened his tie. He didn’t look so good. He closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. We were moving past any crimes way too fast to see them. The cruiser was almost silent inside. His voice came out heavy, pissed, and weary.

  “You want to know how I spent my afternoon? I asked the feds for their files on Dumfries and Kennemeyer from forty years ago to see if there was anything there for the current investigation. They told me they were still classified. I tried to give them an argument, but they weren’t having any of it. An hour later, maybe less, my chief calls me in, tells me the case is closed, just like that, and I should drop my investigation into classified matters that don’t concern me—specifically any link between Dumfries’ and Kennemeyer’s past activities and the current murder investigation. ‘We still got a dead guy,’ I said. ‘Is he down with that?’