A Nice Murder For Mom Read online

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  To Robert Freedman, my friend and my agent,

  with gratitude for understanding what it’s like.

  PROLOGUE

  My darling son Davie,

  I’m sitting here in the airplane, flying back to New York, and writing to you this letter. And even while I’m writing it I know I’m not going to send it.

  For a couple of days now I’m arguing about this inside ’myself. Should I tell you the truth, or should I keep it strictly to myself? On the one hand, is it good for my health I should keep it inside myself like a bottle? On the other hand, if I tell you the truth, don’t I know what you’ll do with it?

  So what I decided is, I’ll write this all down on paper, get it out of my system, and then I’ll throw it away.

  What I’m referring to is who killed the professor.

  No, it isn’t exactly that I told you any lies again. Everything I explained to you two days ago was true. My chain of reasoning didn’t have anything wrong with it. It was a beautiful chain of reasoning. But even while I was putting it together, I felt funny about it. I couldn’t pretend there weren’t a few bits and pieces which just wouldn’t fall into place.

  What I finally realized is, these bits and pieces don’t contradict my earlier conclusions. What they show me is, there are other conclusions, too. The ones I can’t ever tell you about.

  Probably you could work them out by yourself, if you went over in your mind everything that happened in the last week.…

  CHAPTER 1

  MY MOTHER ALWAYS WANTED me to be a professional man. It didn’t matter to her what kind of profession. Any kind would do, as long as it was really “professional,” and absolutely not “business.”

  “Your uncles are in business, your cousins are in business, your father was in business, and none of them ever made a cent of money,” Mom always said. “Except your Uncle Max, and he doesn’t count, because God forbid you should turn out to be such a physical and nervous wreck as your Uncle Max and your Aunt Selma.”

  And so, even when I was a small boy in the Bronx, Mom saw to it that I got some professional training. She gave me chemistry sets for my birthday; she made me take violin lessons; on vacations she took me down to the law courts to watch the cases. And finally Mom got her wish. I became a professional man. But I’m afraid this fact never gave her much satisfaction. She didn’t exactly expect me to become a policeman.

  From the very beginning she raised objections, every day a new objection, but most of them were smoke screens. Her antagonism to the life of a policeman really boiled down to two points. One: The work is dangerous. “All those gangsters and dope fiends and bookies and hatchet murderers and other such goniffs you have to deal with,” she said. “Isn’t it possible that you could get hurt someday?”

  Two: She thought the job was beneath me. “Always it was my ambition that you should take up something that needs a little intelligence and brainpower,” she said. “But this detective work, this figuring out who killed who, and playing cops and robbers like the kiddies in the park, this is no work for a grown-up man. For all the brains it takes, believe me, you might as well be in business with your uncles.”

  And there was simply no way of talking Mom out of this opinion, convincing her of the dignity and difficulty of my profession. Even though I did pretty well for myself, became an inspector by the age of forty—the youngest in anybody’s memory—Mom never stopped making fun of me.

  And with justice. Because to tell the truth, this cops-and-robbers business was child’s play—for Mom. Figuring out who killed who was an easy job—for Mom. With her ordinary common sense, and her natural talent for seeing into people’s motives and never letting herself be fooled by anybody (this talent came from her long experience with large-thumbed butchers and shifty-eyed landlords), Mom was usually able to solve, over the dinner table, crimes that kept the police running around in circles for weeks.

  In fact, there were times when I suspected that my chief value to the New York Homicide Squad lay not in the strenuous investigating, manhunting, and third-degreeing I did all week, but in the revealing conversations I had with Mom every Friday night, when she invited my wife, Shirley, and me up to the Bronx for dinner.

  Those dinners continued for years, even after the neighborhood went down and Mom finally agreed to move to Ninety-second Street and West End Avenue. She took all the things from her old apartment with her—the heavy old furniture she’d had since her wedding, the faded family photographs, the tintypes of English landscapes and Roman ruins—and was soon solving my cases for me as neatly as ever, between the matzo ball soup and the apple strudel.

  And then, a couple of years ago, everything changed.

  My job put me in contact with death practically every day of my life. I thought I was hardened to death, until I found out the truth about myself. Shirley’s illness lasted less than four months, and when she died, I turned out not to be so hardened after all.

  One of the things that came out of it was, I couldn’t go on living in New York. Okay, it wasn’t exactly rational, and I kept telling myself the feeling would go away. But it didn’t go away, and while I was wondering how I was going to survive with it, the opportunity came along. Like a bolt out of the blue, they say—meaning, I suppose, that God does it for you, as suddenly and arbitrarily as He produces bolts of lightning. If you happen to believe in God.

  I’m not sure I do, but I certainly didn’t turn up my nose at this bolt, wherever it might have come from.

  Five years ago, the NYPD paid my expenses so I could go to a symposium on Investigative Techniques that was held in Mesa Grande, a middle-sized town nestling in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A couple of hundred police officers from all over the country gathered for a week at The Richelieu, the big resort hotel on the outskirts of town, and attended lectures and workshops on Fingerprints and Bloodstains, How to Question a Suspect without Offending the Supreme Court, and so on. At night, to tell the truth, a lot of drinking went on.

  While I was at this symposium, I met Ann Swenson, a young lawyer who was working as an assistant DA in Mesa Grande. Almost young enough to be my daughter, if Shirley and I had ever been able to have children. We hit it off nicely. We had the same ideas about law enforcement and what it has to do with justice, and we both thought most of the other participants in the symposium were idiots.

  In the years since then, we wrote back and forth a few times, and suddenly, a few months after Shirley’s death, I got a long-distance call from Ann. She was the public defender in Mesa Grande now—a six-year appointment by the City Council, infinitely renewable—and she’d been holding the job for a few months. She had finally convinced the council to appropriate money so the public defender’s office could have an investigator of its own—till now it had been dependent on the DA’s investigative staff, which meant that Ann had to do it all herself. She wanted to know if I was interested in the job.
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br />   I accepted then and there, over the phone. The salary wasn’t nearly what I’d been getting as an inspector in the New York Homicide Squad, but how much money did I need, a man living alone, without a wife?

  And it would get me out of New York.

  It isn’t true that I didn’t give a thought to how Mom would feel about it. I gave that a lot of thought. I was the only child Mom ever had, and she was over seventy now. Who would keep her company at dinner on Friday nights? Would she ever get another chance to ask me about my cases and exercise her wits in the manner that made those Friday nights so interesting and enjoyable to her?

  So I invited her to come with me. I pointed out to her that there was nothing for her in New York, when you got right down to it. Sure, she had friends from her neighborhood and the synagogue and the bridge group she belonged to, but there was a synagogue out in Mesa Grande, too, and I was sure she’d be able to find plenty of bridge players: With her sociable nature, she would make new friends in no time at all.

  And her deepest commitment, after all, had always been to her family. None of whom were left for her back in New York. I was her only family now—just as she was mine. Well, there were a few relatives on Shirley’s side, but Mom and I had pretty much the same opinion of those people.

  Mom thanked me for the invitation and said she’d like very much to visit me someday. Not that she felt any particular enthusiasm about seeing the mountains—“What do we need them for?” she said. “If God had intended that people should climb to the top of things, why did he invent elevators?” On the other hand, she admitted that it might be interesting to find out what cowboys and Indians were like. (I had told her that very few of either species could be found in Mesa Grande, but she chose not to believe me: It was “out West,” wasn’t it?) She couldn’t accept my invitation just yet, she said. She was involved in too many things, she wouldn’t be able to find the free time for a while.

  I understood what she was feeling. She wasn’t ready to turn her back on everything her life had been up to now, even though the most important people in it were gone. Maybe later, I told myself, and got on the plane without looking back.

  For the next year or so, at regular monthly intervals, I issued my invitation to her all over again. Even if she wouldn’t settle with me for good, would she at least come out for a few weeks and pay me a visit? She always thanked me and turned me down.

  And then, a few months ago, one morning early in March, Mom called me up long distance.

  “So, Davie,” she said, “if the invitation is still open, I’ll come to visit you like you asked. You’re sure you’ve got an extra bathroom?”

  “I promise you, Mom.”

  “And you keep it clean, I hope?”

  “It’s spotless. I’ve got a cleaning woman who comes in once a week.”

  “I can imagine what kind of cleaning women you get out there. All right, don’t worry about it. Once I’m there, I’ll give her a talking-to. I’m taking an airplane, you can be at the airport to meet me? If you can’t, I’ll take the airport bus.”

  “I’ll pick you up in my car, Mom. There is no airport bus.”

  “You don’t have buses? Let me take a guess. You don’t even have a subway, am I right?” I could hear one of her deep exasperated sighs, undiminished by long distance. “All right, I’ll see you four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You’re coming tomorrow?”

  “Why not? You’re too busy? You’ve got an important case?”

  “Not at all. In fact, it’s a perfect time for you to come, things are a little slow just now. But I’m surprised, you seem to have decided so suddenly.”

  “If I didn’t decide suddenly, I wouldn’t have decided. So what’s the weather like out there? I should pack my flannel underwear? I should buy galoshes?”

  “Well, we did have a snowstorm a few days ago. But it’s mostly melted now. Actually, it’s been a very mild winter, it never gets as cold and nasty here as it does in New York.”

  Her snort was the quintessence of disbelief. “I’ll pack the underwear,” she said. “Galoshes I can buy in this town of yours, I suppose. What’s the name of it again?”

  “Mesa Grande.”

  “What is that, some kind of foreign name?”

  “It’s Spanish, Mom.”

  “The people in the stores talk English though, don’t they?”

  “Oh yes, their accent is pretty thick, of course, but once you get used to it you’ll be able to understand every word.”

  Another snort, but friendlier. “You didn’t change much in a year, I notice. Just as fresh to your mother as ever.”

  She hung up, and I thought how nice it would be to see her. Only one thing worried me. I didn’t know how I was going to keep her amused and occupied during her visit. Mesa Grande doesn’t offer all that much for the tourist from the big city.

  What was needed, of course, to make Mom’s vacation a total pleasure for her, was a murder. A nice complicated one, full of twists and turns, the type of murder Mom really loved.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHICH BRINGS ME TO the night before Mom’s arrival, which also happened to be the night before the murder.

  I had a date that night. I don’t go out too often. Just enough to keep the pressure down, if you know what I mean. I’m not ready yet for anything more serious, and who knows if I’ll ever be? My attitude is, if it happens, it’ll happen, and meanwhile I’m not worrying about it.

  The woman I had the date with was Marcia Lewis, who was co-owner of a local ski-equipment shop. She was in her late thirties, a dozen or so years younger than me, with a divorce behind her and a six-year-old daughter. She was a brunette with a nice slim figure that she works at hard, but what I liked best about her was, she was easygoing, she wasn’t full of ideas and opinions that she had to argue about, in company she didn’t do much talking but she did do a lot of listening, and she laughed at my jokes.

  Maybe it sounds funny that somebody like Marcia should be attractive to me. After all, I was married to Shirley for twenty-five years, a woman who had a psychology degree from Wellesley and always kept up with the latest developments in the field, even though she never used her degree professionally. The only explanation I can think of is that Marcia agreed with me about keeping the pressure down. For example, we got together for our date one night a week. Regular, like clockwork, every Tuesday we could depend on each other. But never any more than that. On other nights we felt no temptation to see each other, and except to work out the time and place for Tuesday, we didn’t call each other up on the phone.

  Tonight we were planning to take in a poetry reading at Mesa Grande College, the small undergraduate liberal arts school located in our town. That may not sound like the most exciting way to spend an evening, but Marcia loves poetry. She shows this love not by analyzing it but by clasping her hands together and making little sighing noises. She likes her poetry to rhyme and have what she calls “a lot of rhythm” in it.

  Before the reading we had dinner at Pasquale’s Pasta Paradise, which is a lot of cuts below half a dozen places I can think of in Little Italy, but it’s the best Mesa Grande can offer. While we ate, Marcia told me about the customers who had come into the ski shop that day, and I told her about my exploits in the public defender’s office. She responded to them with her eyes wide and lots of interpolated “Goshes” and “Gollys” and “Wows.” So I was in a good mood when we finished dinner and drove up to the college in my little 1978 Ford two-door, which is noisy, uncomfortable, and gas-guzzling, but we suit each other.

  It was dark out when we reached the campus. I could still see the shreds of last week’s snow, clinging to the sparse brown grass. Spring would be along in a month or so, but in this section of the world winter always uses the month of March to give us a few last-minute surprises.

  The building we were heading for, home of the Humanities Division and the theater auditorium, was Llewellyn Hall, the college’s newest gift from a grateful alumnus
. A huge square block of concrete, with tiny windows: exactly the same, in its architectural style, as every new office complex, condominium, and prison all over the world.

  Poetry readings seldom bring the public out of the bars and grills. A small crowd was gathered outside the auditorium, waiting for the doors to open. Among the assembled poetry lovers, I spotted Mike Russo, who taught American literature with an emphasis on poetry.

  Our friendship is an unlikely one. He’s twenty-five years younger than I am, pushing twenty-nine, tall and thin and dark, with his hair always unruly and his chin always looking slightly unshaven. The only bond between us—but it’s enough—is that we’re a couple of transplanted New Yorkers. We met for the first time a year ago at the grand opening in one of the new shopping malls of an establishment that advertised itself as “a genuine New York delicatessen.” It turned out to be no such thing: Any deli chef who did what those clowns did to a pastrami would be run out of New York on a rail. But in our annoyance, Mike and I discovered our common bond, and we had kept up an intermittent friendship ever since.

  Mike always had a slightly gloomy look on his face—I think it came less from his temperament than from the permanent arch of his thick black eyebrows—but tonight it seemed to me he looked even gloomier than usual.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, after disposing of the amenities and introducing him to Marcia. “You look as if you’re coming down with something.”

  “I am,” he said. “It’s a disease called life.”

  “When you get to be my age,” I said, “you’ll understand that the only cure for it is a lot worse than the symptoms.”

  Mike allowed only the faintest flicker of a smile to pass over his face.

  “How about having lunch with me this week?” I said. I was making the suggestion to give him a chance to pour his troubles into a sympathetic ear. Also, I was curious about what was eating him. You don’t choose a career as a detective without a certain natural nosiness.