“He didn’t say what he thought. Nor whether he’s inquiring on his own or for somebody else.”
“A negligence liability issue for the building’s owners?”
“That’s what I would have thought, but there’s something else.” I told him about the door on the roof. “It should have been marked by the rope pulling away. I’m waiting for a cop to call, to tell me what they’re thinking.” I turned on the seat. “So, fitness equipment, for Ma?”
“A healthier body can lead to a healthier mind.” His eyes stayed fixed on the road.
For years, Ma Brumsky-a low-slung, gray-haired babushka who favors catalog housedresses and furry slippers-had run a proper Polish, fish-on-Fridays Catholic home. She played bingo at the church, knitted for charity, and had other Polish ladies-all but one widows like her-over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. Other than tippling at Leo’s whiskey, and stealing the occasional coffee cup or silverware setting for two when Leo took her out to dinner, the woman had led an exemplary life.
Until Leo bought her a big-screen television.
It loomed in their front room, taller even than the high-backed sofa Ma had kept pristine for decades under a succession of clear plastic slipcovers. With its side speakers, the set was almost as wide, too.
It wasn’t the size and the sound of the new TV that took over Ma’s life, though; it was the adventure it summoned. For, after a week, possibly two, of marveling at how her regular shows-the soaps, the realities, the cop dramas, even the shopping channel-had been transformed by being quadrupled in size, Ma Brumsky ventured toward newer horizons. She found channels she’d never seen before. She discovered soft porn.
Out went having her friends over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. In came big-screen events for Ma and the other ladies, every night there wasn’t bingo at the church.
At first, Leo saw it as harmless. On those movie nights when he wasn’t staying at Endora’s condo, he worked in his basement office, willing to dial up the volume on his bossa nova CDs to drown out the excited Polish chattering and occasional stomping of an orthopedic shoe or metal walker leg just a few feet above his head.
Then Ma’s tastes in videos expanded even more. She discovered hard-core, pay-per-view. Suddenly, she was witnessing twosomes and threesomes and foursomes interact in ways she and Pa Brumsky, rest his soul, never would have imagined in the dark beneath their goose down comforter.
Out went the tame romance novels from the library; out went the Polish-language newspapers. Out went words in general. Daytime hours were now for rest, so that she could be fully alert and observant far into the night.
Leo became concerned.
“A healthier body can lead to a healthier mind,” Leo said again, working his lips as though mumbling an incantation, as he pulled into the Home Depot.
He had me wait in the truck. Fifteen minutes later, he came out pushing a contractor’s cart. On the cart were long lengths of metal tubing and a box filled with metal parts. After strapping the pipes onto the truck rack, we started back toward Rivertown.
“What’s with the pipes?” I asked, ever the ace investigator.
“Surely it’s obvious.”
“A fence?”
“Some detective.”
When I pressed him, he offered up a sly smile and changed the subject to an exhibit Endora was curating at the Newberry Library. “Female literary provocateurs of the 1920s,” he said.
“Endora is no mean provocateur herself.”
“Amen to that.”
He parked in the alley behind his house. We carried the poles, hardware, and my tools through his back porch, past Ma’s cases of diet soda, cheese curls, and All-Bran, and down the basement stairs.
Where I stopped, stunned, at the bottom.
Through its unfinished door opening, Leo’s office was as it had always been, a mismatched medley of cast-off furniture and state-of-the-art magnifiers, enclosed by untaped, unpainted drywall. The rest of the basement, though, had been ruined.
Leo’s basement had always been a jumble of the artifacts of the Brumskys-the fake, small Christmas tree they used to shake off and put on the television, before the big screen; boxes of old dinnerware, some bought, most liberated by Ma from one restaurant or another; the model train layout on green-painted plywood I’d helped Leo put together in grammar school, on one of those many afternoons when I’d sought sanctuary at his house instead of trudging to whatever aunt’s apartment I’d been assigned for the month. As a child, I’d envied Leo his basement clutter of family things. As an adult, I envied him his clutter more, because it showed good in his past.
No longer. The basement had been cleared out. Ruined.
“What did you do with all of your nice things?” I waved my arm at the newly denuded space.
“I rented one of those big storage spaces. That’s where I got the truck.”
“For what?”
“I decided Ma and her friends need an exercise room,” he said simply.
“And less movies?”
“Absolutely.”
I touched the toe of my shoe to one of the pipes we’d just set on the floor. “So these are…?”
He pointed up to the ceiling. He’d chalked eight circles on the wood joists. One for each of the pipes he’d gotten at the Home Depot.
“For stretching, kicking,” he said.
I looked down, then back up. An outrageous image had blown hot into my head.
“No,” I managed, but it was tentative.
Leo’s lips widened into a sly smile. “Brilliant, huh? Low-impact workouts, easily done, standing up.”
“Not pipes.” I pointed to the hardware on the floor. “Poles.”
His smile broadened until his head was half teeth. “Ma’s lady friend Mrs. Roshiska has a nephew, Bernard. He’s an accountant. He told me it’s all the rage. Excellent exercise, particularly for older ladies.”
“Septuagenarians?” I started laughing. No, not laughing; shrieking. The picture forming in my head, of Ma Brumsky and her lady friends, struggling to work poles like the torsos who pranced in the joints along Thompson Avenue, was going to blind me.
“Just muscle toning, you letch,” Leo sputtered, trying not to lose control himself. “Bernard-”
“I know.” My eyes had filled with tears. “Bernard, the nephew accountant, says it’s all the rage.”
With great will, I calmed myself, and we went to work. Periodically, though, I had to pause, to wipe my eyes, and to convulse.
It took less than an hour to mount the eight pipes to the floor and ceiling. When we were done, I stood back to study the loose maze we’d created. Almost all of the poles were within five feet of each other.
“They’re too close together,” I said.
“They can’t really kick high.”
I chewed my lower lip. “What about that one?” I asked, when my breathing had steadied. One of the poles was set farther apart from the others.
“Mrs. Roshiska’s. She needs a walker.”
That did it. I howled all the way up the stairs, across the yard, and into the truck. I was still laughing when he threw me out in front of the turret.
A Lieutenant Jawarski called at six fifteen that evening.
“I was told you had questions regarding the death of James Stitts.” His words were clipped, impatient. The Bohemian’s clout must have come down hot from someone important.
“James Stitts was the clown?”
“You don’t even know his name?”
“Actually, I have very few questions.”
“Insurance questions?”
“Any doubt as to cause of death?” I asked, sidestepping.
Jaworski took a minute, evaluating my obvious evasion.
“Lousy Boy Scouting,” he said, finally. He must have decided I wasn’t worth more anger.
“Pardon me?”
“Mr. Stitts never learned his knots. He tied his safety rope around the door on the roof. The knot came loose, the rope came away, down he went. Simple carelessness. Death by poor knotting.”