Tom wasn’t doing well himself.
“We both need lifestyle changes, Tom,” she puffed, eyes peeled for Kowalski.
“You, more than me, love.”
Olivia chuckled. She missed this. And she craved a drink badly. Between Tom’s contempt and the Jack Daniels in her pocket, she chose the former.
“There’s Kowalski.”
Tom gestured at a man in a wheelchair, seated by the stump of a tree. His back was turned to them, his face raised up as though he contemplated something in the trees. Vehicles sped by on the highway nearby. An occasional honk caused birds in the street to scatter in the air.
The chair had stainless steel handles and wheels like the ones on bicycles. His legs were crossed in front of him. The book on his thin lap was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
“Hello, Mr. Kowalski?”
Tom stood in front of the man. His steely brown eyes left the trees and found Tom’s own.
“Who’re you?” he asked in an incongruous, soft voice.
“I’m Sheriff Tom Garcia.”
Olivia joined Tom.
“And this here is my assistant, Olivia Newton.”
Olivia smiled weakly. Hey there pops, she thought.
“We’d like to have a word with you about Harald Kruger, your neighbor.”
“You like coming here a lot?” Olivia inquired.
Kowalski raised his head and looked around. There were more wrinkles on his neck than on the entire clan of oldies in the Baker Home.
“No law against it Sheriff, is there?”
“None whatsoever,” said Tom. “Did you see or hear anything unusual last night?”
“Nope.”
Olivia stepped in. “Mr. Kowalski, we are trying to catch the man who murdered Harald. We have tried but found no trace, no prints, nothing. And he escaped through these woods last night—”
“Yes. He did.”
“—the cameras didn’t catch his face, maybe you could—”
“Harald knew they were gonna come for him soon. He knew,” Kowalski said quietly.
Olivia felt her pulse race. Beside her, Tom stiffened in anticipation. Perhaps he was going to get a quick break on this one after all. He allowed himself a little smile. Olivia was tenacious, she was good.
Olivia touched Kowalski on the shoulder gently. Her voice dropped to a low compassionate whisper.
“Were you close?” she asked.
Kowalski nodded. His eyes shone with age.
“Then help us catch his killer.”
After a moment of thinking, in which Kowalski’s eyes glazed over and Olivia thought they had lost the old man to probable amnesia, he spoke again.
“He had a secret, Harald did. A big one,” he confided, looking from Olivia to Tom and back. “Roll me down to the facility, I’ll show you.”
6
Eddie Kowalski’s room was a bare one beside Harald’s own. It was obvious that he lived alone, as did Harald. Olivia noted that there was only one bed in it. The walls had things written all over them, an intaglio of meaningless scribble from the depths of an enfeebled mind.
Tom had asked Olivia how she had gotten onto the man in the first place.
“He was reading the book upside down in the hallway,” she had whispered.
“So?”
“He wanted us to come to him, he wanted to talk?”
Kowalski rolled over to his bed. He pulled it away from the wall. He glanced at the two visitors. Olivia watched with interest as Kowalski pulled himself out of his chair and got on the bed.
Olivia thought the man was going to sleep but Kowalski started rubbing at a spot on the wall.
As they watched he pulled off a paper tape. Olivia held her breath. She could have sworn that place on the wall was clean.
Kowalski pulled the brick out of the wall to reveal a groove. He reached in. His hand went in up to the elbow before it stopped. When he retrieved his hand it came back out with a black box.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tom breathed.
Kowalski turned the box around in his hands, as though weighing the thing. He looked at Olivia and Tom.
“Harald kept this with me the year he came here. Said I should keep it and show it to nobody.” His voice trembled. “But I figured when he died he’d want me to turn it over to the cops.”
“Why?” Olivia asked.
The man gazed at the box again. “My guess is, the contents of this box here got Harald killed.”
Olivia was sweating already. Her heart was beating fast. The implications of mementos left by the dead were huge; there was a great story here. Olivia resisted the urge to reach out and grab the black box.
“Contents? Have you opened it before, Mr. Kowalski?” she asked, her eyes not leaving the man’s face.
“Yes. But it’s all a collection of stuff I don’t understand,” he confessed. He shoved the box at Olivia. “Here, maybe you could make something of it.”
Olivia took the box from Kowalski.
“Keep it,” he said.
It occurred to Olivia that if the box was so innocuous to Kowalski, she couldn’t trust it to give her much to go on. She needed a background and it was this man who could provide it.
Olivia handed the box to Tom.
She came closer to Kowalski. “You knew Harald. He must have said something about himself, something that this box could never tell us—”
“I get what you mean,” Kowalski interrupted.
“Mind if I sit?”
“No, I don’t. I could use the company.”
Olivia nodded at Tom. He stepped outside and leaned against the wall there with the box in his hand. Olivia quickly extracted her bottle and opened it.
Kowalski smiled knowingly. “It takes a toll, huh, the life.”
“You would know, pops.”
Olivia invited him.
“I’ll pass, that bottle is why I wound up in Baker Home. Sue would ground me if she even so much as sniffed alcohol a mile from me.”
“Okay, pops, hit me.”
“Too early to drink, lady. You should quit.”
A pained look crossed her features. If this man only knew how much she wanted to. If only anyone knew how deep the pain of her loss went. The booze kept her afloat, she always told herself. Now she wasn’t sure if she believed that anymore. Just this morning, just a few minutes ago, she came alive in ways that the booze hadn’t helped. Maybe Tom was right, after all.
Kowalski began talking without preamble.
“Harald told me a lot of stuff. You know, at lunch when we ate, or just when we are out there watching the trees dance and the birds sing. Sometimes we just miss our former lives, our grandkids, and the closest we can get is hearing the birds sing and that highway…”
His eyes became dreamy.
Tom had opened the box. He was out of earshot. He had brought out what looked like a map, folded into place. Tom was staring at the contents now, his mouth opened.
“I think some of the things in that box, he got from the labs during the war.”
“What lab?”
“Harald, he did some stuff for the military in World War Two. Science experiments—”
“He was a scientist?”
“Yes, a very smart one.” Kowalski glanced at Tom too.
Tom had opened the map. Hard lines had formed in the map like a mesh from staying folded for so long. Tom was peering at, and frowning.
“Harald always looked at that map every chance he gets. He pored over that map so much I thought he’d go crazy, or blind,” said Kowalski.
“What exactly did Harald do in the labs?”