Liberty Falling Read online

  Maybe she’d been out of circulation too long. He’d said he was newer to the game than she, but he seemed totally at ease. Anna hadn’t the least excuse for turning down a night on the town. Except the way he slid that unmarked folder into his desk. Then locked the drawer.

  Could be anything: politically sensitive patient, movie star in for cosmetic surgery, an abortion . . .

  “Stop it,” Anna ordered herself.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’,” came a mumbled response, and she realized she’d been talking out loud. Not an uncommon practice in New York City.

  Dragged from self-absorption, she saw that the guys from the cleaning crew had come to the stern for the short trip from island to island. The speaker was the oversized white boy with the offensive tattoo. Anna wondered what he was apologizing for. He looked like one of those habitual screw-ups who either bow and scrape or stab and punch, and both with equal lack of provocation.

  “No problem,” she said, stepping away from his bulk. Clouds of smoke suggested the janitors had come out not to enjoy the late-evening air but to have a cigarette. Three had lit up. The fourth chewed. A quick survey: everybody smoked filter cigarettes. The observation was knee-jerk; Anna didn’t doubt her ephemeral ash was from Hatch’s Gauloise.

  “Hey, Idaho, you bidding for S-six again tonight?” This from a wiry Hispanic man. Smoke came out with every word. At the end of the sentence he took a deep drag lest any moderately unpolluted air should make its way into his lungs.

  Anna sneaked a look at his chest. “Jason” was embroidered over his pocket, proving fashion could be thicker than culture.

  “Yeah. S-six,” mumbled the lunk they called Idaho.

  “White guys,” Jason said with disgust. “Boobs is everything. Latinos know the power’s in the boot. The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’.”

  Anna let this sexual shorthand rattle around in her head till she made sense of it. S-6: the sixth level in the statue. That would be about where the lady’s bosoms would be located, if she had bosoms. Anna moved away. She didn’t want to get to know these guys that well. If she thought her obvious aversion might offend, she was mistaken. Nobody noticed. To a clot of twenty-year-old males, a middle-aged woman was only slightly more interesting than a stray cat.

  Having drifted toward the bow, she joined Dwight in the cabin. “Fine night,” she said, because it was.

  “It’s always a fine night on this harbor. Fog’s fine. Gales are fine. The sea never makes a mistake. Of course she’s not very understanding when we do,” he said, and laughed. “But that’s part of her charm. Sailors who get bored aren’t paying attention. Everything’s always changing.”

  Anna attained her accustomed perch and let her legs swing with childlike freedom, her heels bumping the wood gently. She asked after Dwight’s son, Digby, and found, as she’d expected, that the boy was perfect, had done and said any number of funny, dear or genius things. Letting Dwight ramble on about this scrawny child who had taken over his heart, Anna basked in his contentment, his love and his pride. Without hearing each and every word, she let the essence of happiness wash over her, removing the sting from the paper cuts life had left on her psyche.

  When he’d finished and silence, made isolating by the guttural roar of the engines, had slipped between them, Dwight said, “I hear you got marooned the other night.”

  “Yes,” Anna replied in sepulchral tones. “You abandoned me and I wandered the streets in the rain fending off gang-bangers and stepping on drunken homeless people.”

  “Terrance said you sacked out on the Coast Guard table.”

  “God, I hate small towns,” Anna said mildly. “Nobody can get away with anything.”

  “I couldn’t wait.” Dwight was explaining, not apologizing. “At eleven-thirty when I get home, I tippy-toe in to give Digby his goodnight kiss. If I’m late he don’t sleep so good.”

  Anna doubted much would disturb the rest of a boy Digby’s age, but Dwight’s reasoning delighted her just the same. “Did Mandy make the boat?” she asked, remembering her flashing by, framed in the window of the subway train.

  “Nope. She got left behind too. You party girls have got to pay for your sins.”

  “She didn’t stay at MIO,” Anna said.

  “She might not even have been headed to the boat. She’s got a boyfriend stashed away somewhere. She’s tucked up in her own little bed tonight, though. I took her on the four forty-five from Ellis.”

  Anna laughed. “Fishbowls have got nothing on islands when it comes to lack of privacy.”

  “You got that right,” Dwight said amiably. “Somebody knows everything. Maybe not a single somebody, but all the somebodies added up. Right down to how much toilet paper you use.”

  PATSY WAS HOME, and despite Dwight’s assurance to the contrary, Mandy was not “tucked up in her own little bed.” She was nowhere to be found. An ideal situation, from Anna’s point of view. She left an apologetic message on Dr. Madison’s phone machine, changed into her bear cub pajamas, accepted a glass of her own wine and folded down on the sofa with a heaping plate of spaghetti left over from Patsy’s dinner. A far superior evening to dining at Windows on the World with the double burden of having to be pleasant and attractive simultaneously.

  As Anna twirled pasta and wiped sauce from her chin, Patsy talked on the cordless, her lush and compact body draped over a chair only a woman as loose-limbed and well upholstered as Patsy could make look comfortable.

  The conversation was centered on the disposition of a Honda and a battered old pickup truck she had left behind in Cortez when she abandoned Mesa Verde for the fast track. Anna remembered Patsy’s daughter, both blond and as sumptuously constructed as their mother. They’d be in high school now, one maybe off to college. Both had opted to stay the year out with Grandma in the Southwest when Patsy moved. From the one-sided conversation, Anna figured the younger had just been divested of the Honda in honor of the elder’s pilgrimage to the university and was arguing the damage her deep and abiding shame at being demoted to the pickup truck would cause her. Not to mention the end of her social life for all time.

  Anna enjoyed the byplay. A year younger than Anna, Patsy sounded like a “modern” mom, the kind that read the books and knew it was important to be firm yet validate feelings, compassionate yet authoritative. A thin and faded line between mother and friend.

  Not for the first time, Anna was glad she was childless. It was traumatic enough to deal with the emotional needs of a dog. Children were probably worse. At least dogs couldn’t call you on the phone. The guilt trip had to be laid on as one left, and by the time one returned, the silly buggers were so overjoyed, all sins were forgiven. Dogs were eternally optimistic. They seemed to believe each abandonment was the last and each homecoming eternal. They were Catholic not only in their ability to inspire guilt but in their unwavering faith.

  “So,” Anna said as Patsy hung up, “were you on the island the night Hatch tried to learn to fly?”

  Patsy laughed her wonderful laugh and said, “Shouldn’t you be on Prozac or something? Or did you come visit because not enough people were dropping dead in Mesa Verde?”

  Anna spun up another forkful of pasta. There was a touch of the compulsive about her. Maybe when her mother was pregnant with her she’d been frightened by a bloodhound. Anna had been sniffing out the truth most of her life, one way or another. Usually it wasn’t worth knowing. Still, she had to search. Prozac could perhaps save her—if salvation was what she needed.

  A folk art exhibit she’d seen once in New Orleans bloomed in memory. Fabulous stuff done by strange fundamentalist people with unique visions executed on old barn siding, corrugated metal, pipe, rocks, weathered pickets from decayed fences. Much of it was inspired by the Bible. There were many depictions of heaven and hell. Anna’s favorite was made in an old potbellied stove. Heaven was on top, slathered with sky-blue house paint, clouds and hand-carved angels with wings hefty enough to keep a B-52 aloft. Inside, where the
wood had once burned, lurked hell. It dripped in red paint, was floored in cracked black rocks and housed devils holding pitchforks, each sporting an erection a third his body size.

  Prozac was going to wipe out an entire art form, Anna was sure of it.

  “I’m used to being me,” she said. “If I were nicer, I’d annoy myself.”

  “Yeah, me too. Mellow is too weird to contemplate. So. What? You think Hatch was pushed?”

  “He could have fallen by accident, I guess, but suicide doesn’t sit right with me.” She told Patsy about the cigarette and was gratified to see her take it seriously. It was a first for that particular string of revelations.

  “I used to go up with him sometimes. Night shift’s a bore and I tend to stay up late anyway. He did his cigarette ritual a couple of times,” Patsy volunteered.

  “What time?”

  “Eleven forty-five on the dot,” Patsy said with a laugh. “Irregularity was not Hatch’s problem.”

  In law enforcement, however, regularity was a problem. It made the officer predictable and therefore vulnerable. Bad guys—assuming there were bad guys involved—could watch and know precisely when one was at one’s weakest.

  “I can’t see him dropping his cigarette butt either,” Patsy continued. “Hatch cared, I mean cared, about almost everything. Too much. He was a softie with everybody else but hard on himself. He’d never litter. Maybe he accidentally dropped the cigarette, was totally appalled and dove off to retrieve it.”

  They both laughed, albeit a little shrilly.

  “God, we’re awful,” Patsy said. “I really liked Hatch.”

  “Funny image, though.” An undercurrent of giggles rippled the surface of the silence for the next several seconds.

  “Hatch was moody,” Patsy said after a while. “I can’t imagine him littering, but I can sort of see him killing himself if I squint and try real hard. I’ve been here—what? Eight months. You get to know people quick on an island.”

  Patsy would get to know people in a trailer park in Yazoo, Mississippi, in the Sahara or in downtown Hong Kong without being able to speak a word of Chinese, but Anna didn’t interrupt the flow with this irrelevancy.

  “Hatch knows everything about me: kids, exes, favorite color, Mom’s death, Dad’s new Land Rover. All this time I thought we were having two-way conversations, but you know what? I don’t know anything about Hatch. God. I feel awful. I just talked and talked and didn’t notice. I don’t know if he has family, friends. I don’t even know if he’s got a wife, where he goes on vacations—nothing.”

  Letting a sip of red wine roll around on her tongue, Anna mentally reviewed her conversations with the deceased Park Policeman. The talk had been fairly unstrained, open and honest but, she reflected, it was not personal. Hatch didn’t talk about himself. He spoke of the statue, of the jobs he’d had; enjoyable but, when analyzed, fairly free of content of the kind that could give a peek into the man’s heart.

  “Moody, you said.” The word echoed those of the Assistant Superintendent.

  “Yes. He was always good as gold, polite, friendly, all that, but he’d kind of go on autopilot once in a while. You’ve seen the look: hiding the pain.”

  Anna had seen. EMTs learned to love brave patients—they weren’t nearly such a pain in the ass as the whiners—but not to trust them. In the name of courage, they would hide symptoms, not ask for help when there was help hovering around anxious to give succor—or just anxious to stick an IV in. Less than four sticks a month and an EMT-IV lost her license.

  “Like they’re seeing you through a thick piece of cheesecloth and your voice is distant and so tiny they can barely make out what you’re saying.”

  “Yes. That.”

  “I take it he never did any classic suicide things: previous attempts, references to being ‘too tired,’ suddenly going from morose to peaceful, giving things away?”

  “None of that. At least not around me.”

  Anna told her the story of the leaper at Golden Gate National Recreation Area while Hatch was serving a tour of duty there, of his being deeply affected by the death of a stranger and a death he, personally, did not witness. She told Patsy of the wildflowers strewn over the death site. In the telling she recalled a detail she’d put out of her mind. “There were flower petals at the base of the statue where the girl hit. I went out late that night because I am a morbid, blood-sucking voyeur, and someone had scattered azalea blossoms.”

  “Hatch?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  “That Hatch was a nice guy?”

  They sipped a moment. Patsy had moved on to chamomile tea. Anna was sticking with wine.

  “Okay, so maybe he could have jumped,” Anna said finally. “But for the sake of argument let’s say he didn’t. Who was on this island that night?”

  Patsy threw her head back and howled like a hound after a fox. “You are incorrigible, Anna!”

  “I have never been corriged,” Anna admitted. “Or if I was, it was so insignificant I never even felt it.”

  “You were sacked out on the conference table, so that lets you out,” Patsy said. “I was here. Hatch trusts me. I didn’t see anybody and nobody saw me and I wasn’t on the phone or anything nifty during the—what shall we call it? The window of opportunity. I was curled up in bed, dreaming of Sean Connery or, if I was feeling particularly depraved, Leonardo DiCaprio. Such a pretty boy. Charlene—she’s the Chief Ranger’s secretary—was home. I saw her lights on next door. And her kids, fourteen and seventeen, both boys, were home. I heard the pounding bass of something totally witless. Those boys could teach the party boats a thing or two about rude noises.”

  “Maintenance?” Anna tried.

  “Let’s see. What time are we talking about? When he smoked? Eleven forty-five to midnight or thereabouts?”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “They could have been, but if the earliest Hatch could have died is eleven forty-five they would have been minutes from catching the boat and, as you have reason to know, Dwight does not wait for stragglers.”

  “How about Dwight?” Anna suggested.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Why not. Can’t stoop to prejudice. Dwight is big and strong and wears a diamond stud in his ear. What more could you ask for in a murderer?”

  “Well, I guess he could have come in a few minutes early, jumped ship, sprinted to the top of the pedestal, done the deed and hoofed it back. Why not Cal? He was probably deckhand that night.”

  It was Anna’s turn to be surprised.

  “See. You’re prejudiced too. Because he’s genteel and treats you like a lady, you think he’s above murder.”

  “He’s old—” Anna thought aloud.

  “Ageism. Illegal. Cal is strong and, since he’s sixtyish, I guess the word would be spry. Think about how strong his hands must be, handling and throwing line thick as your wrist all day.”

  “Okay. Cal, Dwight, Charlene, her boys, you, cleaning crew. How about Trey Claypool?” He’d marooned Anna at MIO shortly after ten. He could have been home in plenty of time.

  “He was here,” Patsy said. “Well, his lights were on and I heard his door. So I assume he was here. I suppose it could have been a housebreaker without any sense of sneakiness.”

  “What time did you notice the lights, the door?” Anna demanded.

  “God, girl, can I get you another glass of wine? Some Xanax?”

  “Sorry. What time?” she asked again, careful to keep her voice meek and kindly.

  “Better,” Patsy commended her. “Beats me. I went to bed around eleven, so it must have been before then. If pressed I couldn’t even swear to it. It’s kind of background music, you know. You remember it but it’s so unimportant and everyday it could even have been another night I’m thinking of. Repetitious events sort of acquire a timelessness. Did the sun come up August fifteenth, 1965? It must have but I don’t remember it.”

  “True.” Big event
s stood out—deaths, marriages, births, divorces—landmarks between the miles of sameness. Not that sameness was bad. Anna recalled the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” “I’ll find out.”

  “You do that,” Patsy said.

  Even Patsy Silva had her limits. Anna let the subject drop.

  “Bedtime,” Patsy said, looking at her watch. “I wonder where Mandy is.”

  “I thought she was off island.”

  “Nope. She’s here. Went out jogging. Evidently you can get a decent workout if you run around this rock enough times. I, personally, would not know. Unless Dobermans or Nazis are after me, I’m your basic stroller.”

  Mandy struck Anna as a stroller too, but she didn’t want to draw unflattering comparisons. Not ruled by justice, she was perfectly at ease with liking Patsy’s soft silhouette and finding Mandy’s offensive.

  In accordance with the ancient warning “Speak of the devil and up he jumps,” the front door banged and Mandy stomped into the living room. Her jogging suit, lavender with narrow piping in lime green, gave her the look of an overripe kiwi. The suit was rumpled but spotlessly clean, no sweat stains. The woman’s hair was disheveled and she was breathing hard, so Anna had to accept the fact that maybe she did run.