“You look too young to be retired.”
“Didn’t retire.”
The blocky woman who’d opened the door came plodding into the room holding a silver tray and tea service. Appolonia looked a little startled. The woman thrust the tray under her nose.
“It’s your tea, girl. You haven’t had it yet.”
Appolonia looked at me with mild exasperation.
“Honestly, Belinda.”
Appolonia was forced into the ritual of pouring the tea into a cup, dropping in sugar and squeezing the lemon. It seemed to take about four hours.
“We haven’t offered Mr. Acquillo any tea?” Appolonia asked.
Belinda looked over at me like I’d just broken into the house. I held up my hand.
“I’m all set, thanks.”
“Not a tea drinker, I surmise.”
“Coffee. And vodka. Not usually at the same time.”
Belinda plodded out of the room with the tea tray. The room struggled to regain its state of repose.
“I’m at a bit of a loss,” Appolonia said over the lip of her teacup.
“On why I’m here.”
“Yes.”
“Me, too.”
“So maybe we should start with that,” she said, helpfully.
One of the trainers who helped teach me to box used to say fights were won with the legs, not the fists. Balance and movement put you where you were supposed to be, or kept you away from where you weren’t, like that killing zone between the inside clutch and the full extension of the other guy’s reach. But sometimes, for no reason at all, the canvas felt like it was full of bumps and ridges, and ripples that undulated and shifted and screwed up your balance. Your feet got all tangled up and you lost your sense of where you were supposed to be. I’d been feeling that way ever since I’d driven up Mrs. Eldridge’s street.
“They’re afraid of you.”
She cocked her head and widened those crystal blue eyes.
“Who?”
“The cops. They don’t know how to talk to you. They aren’t used to this kind of thing. They spend ninety percent of their time with dumb hard cases, or routine stuff that’s safe and predictable, and that’s how they like it. This is all way too weird for them.”
“As am I. Way too weird.”
“Not what I meant.”
“Well, you said they were afraid of me. That’s awfully silly, if you think about it.”
“I agree. Any ideas?”
“Ideas?”
“About who killed your husband?”
She smiled at me.
“Ah, this is why they sent you. Your diplomacy.”
“Sorry.”
“What exactly did you retire, or whatever you did, from?”
“R&D. Hydrocarbon processing.”
“Jonathan wanted to be a scientist.” She sipped her tea. “No. No ideas.”
“I know this is hard.”
“It’s all right. How’s your hearing?”
“Most of it came back. Jackie’s not so lucky.”
“Jonathan had to sleep with a sound machine. It was set for crickets and rain. He said the house was too quiet. He had ears like a spaniel.”
That reminded me.
“What was the poodle’s name?”
“Pierre. He’s fine. They fished him out of the water. Belinda knows where he is. I didn’t like him. I’m sorry. Jonathan was the dog person.”
Her dead husband was right. The house was too quiet. No clocks, no creaks. No sound intruding from outside. It was clenched within a white, funereal stillness. A busy little poodle would have been like the sound machine—a little blast of chaos, a connection with the living.
“He wanted to be a scientist, but became an investment adviser,” I said.
“It’s no less intricate than the hard sciences, but the money’s better.”
“He did pretty well?”
“It would appear that way from the proceeds of the will.”
She looked down at her hands.
“Mr. Acquillo.”
“Yeah?”
“Jonathan lived his own life. I knew very little about his business or the people he worked with. We never discussed those sorts of things. Never, not one single, solitary word. We never entertained or traveled together. That would have been impossible. He wanted to leave his job back at the office, and find some relief from it all here. With me. He was gone at least half the time. He traveled all over the country, all over the world, visiting companies his clients might have an interest in. That was one of his specialties, fieldwork. Few advisers ever bother to visit the companies they recommend, but he believed it was the reason for his success. They were technology companies, applied science. So science did find its way into his career. And that, sir, is the sum total of everything I know about Jonathan’s work life.”
“How long have you had it?”
“What?”
“Agoraphobia.”
Her shoulders slumped a little, but she still looked stiffly amused.
“It’s an anxiety disorder. I don’t know if agoraphobia is exactly the right term. And I don’t relish discussing it, I’m afraid.”
“Sorry I’m just thinking it must be difficult.”
“It’s a bitch, Mr. Acquillo. That doesn’t make me one.”
“’Course not.”
“Or some terrifying creature.”
I jerked my head toward the back of the house where we could hear Belinda rattling around.
“You’re not the one I’m afraid of,” I said.
That loosened her up a little, or so I imagined from an almost imperceptible shift in the way she sat in her chair.
“It isn’t much of a life, you know, but it was infinitely better knowing that, at least some of the time, it could be spent with Jonathan. We would sit, right here in this room, and chat. About just about everything. I read the newspaper every day, and watch a little CNN—you have to be careful not to watch too much, it’s habit forming. And I have a group on the computer with whom I converse. And Belinda, she’s out and about a bit. You can keep up very well if you try a little. And, of course, Jonathan lived in the whole world. He knew so much. But then, you know, we didn’t just discuss current affairs. He really wasn’t the big stiff people thought he was. If you knew him as I did. You can’t imagine what it means to me to have him taken away”
“I can. I can imagine, but that’s all. I’ve lost a lot of people, but not like that.”
Her composure began to waver. She put her teacup down on the tray as if the weight of it was suddenly impossible to bear.
“I still can’t quite understand why you’re here.”
I shrugged.
“One of the cops investigating the case asked me to talk to you.”
“Very curious.”
