Fiddlers

‘Please don’t get angry with me. I’m only trying to…’

‘I’m not getting angry.’

‘Was that really a nightmare you had, Chaz?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because, the way you were clutching yourself…”

‘It was a nightmare, Reg.’

‘… you seemed to be in pain.’

‘It was a painful nightmare.’

‘You’ve got a lot of pain pills in the bathroom, Chaz.’

The table went silent.

‘Chaz? What are all those pills for?’

‘I sometimes get headaches. Remembering Nam.’

‘Headaches in your belly?’

‘Let it go, Reg.’

‘Don’t get angry, please don’t.’

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Where are you going tonight, Chaz? What business do you have to take care of tonight? That’s stopping us from staying at a bed and breakfast up here?’

‘Old business.’

‘You told me this would be the end of it…”

‘It will.’

‘The end of what, Chaz?’

‘All this old business.’

‘What old business? Chaz, if I’m not a whore, then trust me, okay? Let me help you with whatever…”

‘I’m all right, Reggie. There’s nothing you can do to help, believe me.’ He squeezed her hands. ‘Believe me.’

She looked into his eyes.

‘Believe me,’ he said again.

She wished she could.

She wished she didn’t feel that something very terrible was going to happen very soon.

* * * *

‘Christine and I were both fresh out of college,’ Susan Hardigan told them. ‘Both of us very young, and very arrogant, and I fear not very attractive.’

She was sitting in a wheelchair in fading sunlight, a fading woman herself, in her late sixties now, they guessed, frail in a blue nursing home robe and woolly blue slippers, her gray hair pulled to the back of her head in a tidy bun. They suspected she had never been a pretty woman, but age had not been kind to her, either. Her crackling mind came filtered through a quavering voice, and she sat wrinkled and shriveled, as if cowering from death itself.

They had found her name on a stack of letters in Christine Langston’s desk, the most recent dated April 24, almost nine weeks ago. They had called ahead and asked if they might come talk to her, and an administrator at the Fairview Nursing Home had told them that would be fine if they made the visit a short one. The drive out to Sands Spit had taken a bit more than two hours. Now, at seven in the evening, they sat on a porch in a wide bay window, dusk falling swiftly around them.

‘And you’ve kept your friendship all these years?’ Kling asked. He sounded surprised. He was still young enough to believe that friendships fell into clearly defined periods of a person’s life: Childhood, High School, College, Grown Up. He couldn’t quite imagine a friendship that endured into a person’s old age, perhaps even to his death. But here was Susan Hardigan, who had known Christine Langston when they were both young teachers at Warren G. Harding High School in Riverhead.

‘Yes, all these years,’ she said. ‘Well, we don’t see each other all that often, especially since I began having trouble with my legs. But we correspond regularly, and we talk to each other on the phone, yes. We’re still very good friends.’

It occurred to both detectives, almost simultaneously, that she did not yet know Christine Langston was dead. Brown glanced at Kling, found him turning to him at the same moment. So who would tell her? They both suddenly wished they hadn’t driven all the way out here today.

‘Miss Hardigan,’ Brown said, ‘there’s something you should know.’

His voice, his eyes transmitted the message before he said the words.

‘Has something happened to her?’ Susan asked at once. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

‘Ma’am,’ Brown said, ‘she was murdered.’

‘I dreamt it,’ she said. ‘The other night. I dreamt someone had stabbed her.’

Brown told her what had actually happened. He told her they’d been talking to associates of hers, students she’d taught, trying to get a handle on the case. Susan listened intently. He didn’t know quite how he should broach the matter of Christine Langston’s… sexuality? This was an elderly woman sitting here in a wheelchair, a spinster woman who reminded him of his aunt Hattie in North Carolina, albeit white. How did you ask her if she knew her close friend had once phoned in a false rape charge back then when you and I were young, Maggie?

‘Did you know of any trouble she’d reported to the police?’ Kling said, gingerly picking up the ball.

‘What sort of trouble?’ Susan asked.

‘Curried favors from a cab driver,’ Kling sort of mumbled.

Curried, Brown thought. Well, an Indian cab driver.

‘A cab driver curried favors from her?’

‘No,’ Kling said, and cleared his throat. ‘Miss Langston curried favors from him.’

‘Nonsense,’ Susan snapped. ‘What kind of favors?’

Kling cleared his throat again.

‘Sexual favors,’ he said.

Brown wished he was dead.

‘Are you talking about that trick she played one time?’ Susan said. ‘Is that what you’re referring to?’

‘What trick would that be, ma’arn?’

‘Back at Harding? The young man who needed an A?’

‘Tell us about it,’ Brown said.

‘But he wasn’t a cab driver. He was a student.’

Plainly about to enjoy this, almost rubbing her hands together in anticipation, Susan shifted in her wheelchair, leaned forward as if to share a delicious secret, lowered her voice, and said, ‘This boy desperately needed an A in the course Christine was teaching. Basic Elements of Composition, whatever it was. This was high school, he was a graduating senior, eighteen years old. But he needed an A from her to pull up his average from a C to a B. He’d applied to a college, some dinky little school in Vermont, and acceptance was contingent on his maintaining a B average.’

Susan grinned. Her teeth were bad, Brown noticed. She suddenly didn’t remind him of Aunt Hattie at all.

‘Well… this is really rich, I must tell you. As a joke, Christine told the boy…” She suddenly winked at the detectives. ‘I don’t know if either of you are old enough to hear this.’

‘Try us,’ Brown said.

‘She told him if he’d go to bed with her, she’d give him an A. Joking, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Brown said.

‘But he took her up on it!’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ Brown said.

‘Can you imagine! She’s joking with the boy, and he thinks she’s truly propositioning him?’