This morning when I park at 44 Clio it is eight-thirty and already a third way up the day’s heat ladder and as still and sticky as a summer morning in New Orleans. Parked cars line both sides, and a few birds are chirping in the sycamores planted in the neutral ground decades ago. Two elderly women stand farther down the sidewalk chatting at the corner of Erato, leaning on brooms. A radio plays somewhere behind a window screen — an old Bobby Bland tune I knew all the words to when I was in college but now can’t even remember the title of. A somber mix of vernal lethargy and minor domestic tension fills the air like a funeral dirge.
The Harrises’ house sits still empty, our agency’s green-and-gray FOR RENT sign in the yard, the new white metal siding and new three-way windows with plastic screens glistening dully in the sunlight. The aluminum flashing I installed below the chimney and above the eaves makes the house look spanking new, which in most ways it is, since I also installed soffit vents, roll-in insulation in the attic (upping the R factor to 23), refooted half the foundation and still mean to put up crime bars as soon as I find a tenant. The Harrises have been gone now for half a year, and I frankly don’t understand my failure to attract a tenant, since rentals are tight as a drumhead and I have priced it fairly at $575, utilities included. A young black mortuarial student from Trenton came close, but his wife felt the commute was too long. Then two sexy black legal secretaries came frisking through, though for some reason felt the neighborhood wasn’t safe enough. I of course had a long explanation ready for why it was probably the safest neighborhood in town: our one black policeman lives within shouting distance, the hospital is only three blocks away, people on the block get to know one another and pay attention as a matter of course; and how in the one break-in in anybody’s memory, citizen-neighbors charged out of their houses and brought the crook to ground before he got to the corner. (That the crook turned out to be the son of the black policeman, I didn’t mention.) But it was no use.
For reasons of my restricted access, the McLeods’ house isn’t yet as spiffy as the former Harrises’. The seedy brick veneer’s still in place, and a couple of porch boards will soon begin “weathering” if nothing’s done. Though hiking up the front steps I can hear the new window unit humming on the side (Larry demanded it, though I got it used out of one of our management properties), and I’m sure someone’s home.
I give the doorbell one short ring, then stand back and put a businesslike but altogether friendly smile on my face. Anyone inside knows who’s out here, as do all the neighbors. I glance around and down the hot, shaded street. The two women are still talking beside their brooms, the radio is still playing blues in some hot indoors. “Honey Bee,” I remember, is the Bobby Bland song, but can’t yet think of the words. I notice the grass in both yards is long and yellowed in spots, and the spirea Sylvania Harris planted and kept watered to a fare-thee-well are scrawny and dry and brown and probably rotten at the roots. I lean around and take a quick look down the fenced side yard between houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas are barely blooming along the foundation walls where they conceal the gas and water meters, and both areas seem deserted and unused, inviting to a burglar.
I ring the bell again, suddenly conscious that no one’s answering and that I’ll have to come back after the weekend, when the rent will be more in arrears and possibly in jeopardy of being forgotten. Ever since I became the owner here, I’ve wondered if I shouldn’t just move out of my house on Cleveland — put it up for sale — and transfer into my rental unit as a cost-cutting, future-securing measure, and as a way of putting my money where my mouth is in the human-relations arena. Eventually the McLeods would take off out of pure dislike for me, and I could then locate new tenants to be my neighbors (possibly a Hmong family to spice the mix). Though under current market stresses my house on Cleveland could conceivably sit empty for months, after which I could get lowballed and sustain a major whomping — even acting as my own agent and carrying the paper. Whereas, on the other hand, finding a quality, short-term renter for a larger house like mine, even in Haddam, is a tricky proposition and rarely works out happily.
I ring the doorbell one more time, stand back to the top of the steps, listen for sounds within — footfalls, a back door closing, a muffled voice, the sound of kids’ bare feet running. But nothing. This has happened before. Someone’s, of course, inside, but no one’s answering, and short of using my landlord’s key or calling the police and saying I’m “worried” about the inhabitants, I have nothing to do but fold my tents and come again, possibly later in the day.
Back up on busy Seminary Street, I park in front of the Lauren-Schwindell building and make a fast turn through the office, where the usual holiday realty-office languor hangs over the still-empty desks, blank Real-trom consoles and copy machines. Almost everyone, including the younger agents, has stood steadfastly in bed an extra hour, pretending the holiday exodus means no one’s doing any real business and that anybody who needs to can just jolly well call them at home. Only Everick and Wardell are glimpsable, passing in and out of the back storage room, the outside door to the parking lot left standing open. They’re returning FOR SALE signs retrieved from the ditches and woodlots where our local teenagers toss them once they’re tired of having them on their walls at home or when their mothers won’t stand for it any longer. (We offer a no-questions-asked, three-dollar “capture fee” for every one brought in, and Everick and Wardell — grave-faced, gangly, beanpole bachelor twins in their late fifties, who are lifelong Haddamites and oddly enough Trenton State graduates — have made a science out of knowing exactly where to search.) The Lewises, who I usually find impossible to tell apart, live around the corner from my two rentals in a duplex left them by their parents, and in fact are tight-fisted, no-nonsense landlords in their own right, owning a block of senior-citizen units in Neshanic, from which they enjoy a nice profit. Yet they still work part-time for the agency and regularly do minor upkeep chores for me on Clio Street, duties they perform with a severe, distinctly put-upon efficiency that might make someone out of the know conclude they resented me. Though that is not at all the case, since they have both told me on more than one occasion that by being born in Mississippi, even with all the heavy baggage that brings along, I naturally possess a truer instinct for members of their race than any white northerner could ever approximate. This is, of course, not one bit true, though theirs is an old-style racial stationlessness that forever causes baseless “verities” to persist on with the implacable force of truth.
Our receptionist, Miss Vonda Lusk, has I see exited the ladies room and parked herself halfway down the row of empty desks, with a smoke and a Coke, and is sitting, one leg crossed and swinging, happily answering the phones and leafing through Time magazine till we shut down in earnest at noon. She is a big, tall, bulgy-busted, wry-humored blonde who wears a ton of makeup, bright-colored, ludicrously skimpy cocktail dresses to work, and lives in nearby Grovers Mills where she was head majorette back in 1980. She was also best friends with Clair Devane, our murdered agent, and regularly wants to discuss “the case” with me because she seems to know Clair and I once had a discreet special something of our own. “I think they’re not pushing this thing hard enough,” is her persistent view of the police attitude. “If she’d been a local white girl you’d have seen a big difference. You’d have FBI here out your butt.” Three white men, in fact, were taken into custody for a day, though they were let go, and in the weeks since then it’s true that no apparent progress has been made, though Clair’s boyfriend is a well-connected black bond lawyer in a good firm in town, and the realty board along with his partners have established a $5,000 reward. Yet it’s also true that the FBI made inquiries before deciding Clair’s death was not a federal crime but a simple murder.