“No,” I said.
“I don’t think I do either. You have more?”
“Four more,” I said.
“Do you think any of them are funny?”
“No,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Do you know why I told you to collect jokes?”
“To cheer me up,” I said.
She shook her head no vigorously, and said, “It was to get you to make contact with people, to ask them for something that might help you, to let you know that people are willing to respond to a request for a little help. The important question isn’t whether the jokes are funny, but whether the people who told them to you smiled when they told you. Did they smile?”
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know about the ones I got over the phone.”
“Next assignment,” she said. “Memorize these jokes and the other ones you have and tell them to someone you care about.”
“I can’t tell jokes,” I said.
“Of course you can. You just did. You simply tell them badly. Memorize them and tell them to someone.”
“You want me to do a stand-up comedy act?”
“If you want to put it that way,” she said. “Before we get together again you present your act to someone.”
“Who?”
“To Catherine,” she said. “Not the baby. Your wife. Imagine her responses. Come back and tell me if she finds your jokes funny, if she smiles, makes faces, groans.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can do it,” she said soothingly. “You can do it.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, succeed. You know who was a great teller of jokes and stories? General Patton. Loved to tell jokes and funny stories. I think he was depressed, too. I’ve been told he sometimes had his jeep driver completely naked when he drove him around after a battle. He’d pretend not to notice and people were too embarrassed to look at the driver or say anything. Patton thought it was hilarious.”
“That reassures me,” I said. “But I don’t think the world’s ready to see me walking around naked.”
“Sarcasm,” she said. “A small step toward recovery. A step to one side of comedy. Let’s try something. You’ve told me all the wonderful things about your wife, her beauty, wit, kindness, idiosyncrasies. Tell me things you didn’t like about her.”
“There are none,” I said.
“She was a human being, not a goddess. It is not disloyal to remember her as a human being. Besides, it is easier to tell jokes to a human being than a goddess.”
I looked down at my cup of coffee, cocoa brown with two packets of artificial sweetener. I drank.
“Start small,” Ann prompted.
“She left cabinet doors open,” I said. “I always had to close them. I told her about it at first and then I just gave up and did it.”
“You liked doing it, closing the cabinet doors?”
“I didn’t mind. Sometimes it bothered me but usually…”
“You smiled and did it,” said Ann.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not sure I’d count that as a fault, but it’s a start.”
“She told me what to do when I drove, told me if I was going too fast or too slow, or not passing other drivers when I should or passing them when I shouldn’t.”
“That bothered you.”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re a good driver?”
“Yes.”
“Progress. More.”
“She was always telling me to stand up straight, sit up straight. We’d be out somewhere and she’d come up behind me and press her hand into my lower back to remind me to straighten up.”
“She press you hard? Did it hurt?”
“No, it wasn’t that she was wrong. I guess I didn’t like the criticism.”
“Keep going.”
“She was almost always late when we had somewhere to go. She’d tell me she would be ready in five minutes and it was always fifteen or even twenty and we’d have to drive like hell to get where we were going on time.”
“And she would be telling you how to drive during all this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you want to cry?” Ann asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Because you feel disloyal to her memory?”
“Because I miss her faults,” I said.
“So cry?”
“I can’t.”
“I’m pushing too hard,” Ann said. “You want a Diet Coke? I’m still thirsty. I’ve got some in the refrigerator.”
“Sure,” I said.
While she left the office to get the Cokes, I tried to imagine Catherine reacting to the joke about the Wongs. I tried to see her face. She would groan and then she would smile supportively. Or maybe she wouldn’t.
Ann came back with the two Diet Cokes, sat down, and said, “So, in the time we have left, do I tell you what I’ve learned about recently discovered innovations in surgery that were employed by the South during the Civil War or why Serbians are so good at preparing Middle Eastern food, or do you tell me what you’ve been doing for the past three days?”
I opted for the last three days. I had already told her about Hoffmann and Stanley and Roberta Trasker, so I told her about Digger and the boy named Darrell Caton and his mother in Sally’s office. I told her about Dr. Obermeyer. I told her about Ames’s little gun. And I told her about the Severtsons.
“And this is all true?” she asked with great interest. “You’re not creating any of it?”
“I don’t know how to create it,” I said. “And why would I make it up?”
“To please your therapist,” she said. “People do it all the time. I suggest something and the patient, wanting to please me, agrees even if they don’t believe it. Don’t try to please me. It gets in the way.”
“I didn’t make any of this up,” I said.
“For a man who is trying to hide from the world, you seem to have been drawn very deeply into it.”
“Not by choice,” I said.
“You could have said no. No, I won’t look for the woman and her two children. No, I won’t try to find the county commissioner. So, why did you say yes?”
“I don’t know. You want me to think about it?”
“Yes, but not consciously. The dead woman,” Ann said. “The actress. You want to know who killed her.”
“Of course.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Closure,” I said.
She said nothing, just looked at me till I said, “The closure I can’t find with my wife’s death. You think the reason I take on these searches for people, why I’m a process server is to find people responsible for things they know or have done wrong? You think I do it because I don’t know who killed…”
“Catherine,” Ann supplied. “And do you know who killed Mrs. Trasker?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“But?”
“Nothing’s ever simple about death. Nothing’s ever simple about murder.”
“We are once again out of time.”
I got up and handed her a twenty-dollar bill. She placed it on her desk and rose.
“Remember, tell the jokes to Catherine.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure I could do it.
The sky was threatening but no rain was falling. The homeless, shirtless black man who slept in the park right across the street, with traffic whizzing by on Tamiami Trail, was sitting on the green metal bench on the corner, his arm spread out along the back of the bench. He was talking to himself. I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Hi,” I said.
He nodded back.
“Want a cup of coffee?” I said.
He nodded back again. I didn’t have to tell him to wait. I went back to Sarasota News amp; Books, got him a coffee and a bran muffin, and went back to the bench.
He took the coffee cup in one hand and the muffin in another.
“You want to hear some jokes?” I asked.
11
Heavy black clouds were moving in quickly from the east, pushing the heavy, slower-moving gray clouds out of the way.
Dr. James Obermeyer’s office was in a three-building complex on East Street right across from Michael’s on East restaurant. I’d been in one of the buildings a few months ago for an eye exam.
The picture on my television had started to look fuzzy, but Dave had come up to take a look at it and pronounced the television healthy and me in need of an eye doctor. I went to his.