He returned to the living room window, drew down the paper shade for privacy, and began turning on lights.
This should have resulted in a jarring contrast: a place of misery cloaked in darkness, revealed in brittle brightness as even worse than imagined. Instead, the reverse proved true. What Willy discovered was a poor, rundown, seedy little apartment enhanced by paint and colorful fabrics, highlighted by fake flowers and cheerful calendar pictures. The mask couldn't hide the reality of the setting, but the attempt had been heartfelt and thorough, and by and large successful. The mess covering the couch stood out not as confirmation of the lifestyle echoed throughout the rest of the building and the neighborhood, but in gruesome contrast to Mary's concerted efforts to make this hole a home.
Willy made a second survey, still not touching anything, carefully placing his feet. The apartment was far from tidy, although the mess had clearly been made by others: the bedroom drawers had been rifled, the nearby desktop pawed over, the closets opened and their contents disturbed. All signs of a typical police search. Somewhere in here, the detectives who'd caught this case had found Mary and Willy's divorce papers in their pursuit of a next-of-kin, and, he assumed, had removed them and any other relevant records and items of value for safekeeping. What they'd left behind was the miniature version of a passing army's pillaging.
But as with any army, what had been taken were things of specific worth, here relating to identity and research and to closing a case quickly. Left behind was the rest, details of a life interrupted in midcourse, and the very items Willy Kunkle most wanted to peruse.
He returned to the kitchen, scattering all but the most brazen of the roaches, and began reacquainting himself with his ex-wife from the outside in, starting with her eating habits. Using his pocketknife or grabbing things by their edges, he opened drawers, doors, and cabinets and took inventory.
What he found didn't fit the usual profile of a junkie. The standard binge items heavy in sugar or fat were missing, the lopsidedness of a larder composed solely of canned soup and frozen dinners was also absent. Instead, he was left with an economical and healthily varied assortment, neatly sorted and arranged. He closed the last cabinet softly, leaned up against the doorjamb, and gazed out into the living room again for a moment's careful reflection. A process born of instinct but without particular purpose now shifted gears with this finding. He began thinking like an investigator.
He crossed over to the bedroom, knowing the living room would hold the least, although perhaps the most subtle, information.
He started with the bed. It was disturbed, but only slightly, as if the person sleeping in it had just gotten up. Otherwise, its bottom corners and far side were tucked in, indicating the habitual tidiness he remembered of Mary in her prime, and he could tell from the single pillow and the way the night table and reading light were arranged that she was used to sleeping alone. Pushing his nose against the sheets to close off the odor from the room next door, Willy found they were also clean, and smelled faintly of detergent.
He checked beneath the bed. The floor was free of dust, and all he saw was a small, empty suitcase and a pair of well-worn slippers, neatly arranged.
Next came the closet. Again, he was struck by the same sense of order that had ruled the kitchen. There were no clothes on the floor, the few shoes were lined up, the odds and ends found in every closet were either stacked on the overhead shelf or hidden away in several small cardboard boxes. He checked their contents and found only belts, gloves, rolled-up pantyhose, hair clips, and an assortment of other mundane items. He went through the two purses he also unearthed and the pockets of every coat, jacket, and pair of pants. All he located were a few neighborhood grocery receipts, an old movie stub, and several more expired Metro cards, which he placed in a small stack along with the other Metro stubs he now extracted from the window jamb.
He moved to the desk, knowing the most obviously useful material had already been removed. Still, as he went through what was left-mostly old bills-he was once more struck by the sense of a life under control, rudely interrupted.
The desk doubled as a makeup table, and after looking through its one deep drawer, Willy sat back and studied the boxes, bottles, and paraphernalia spread before him, again mentally subtracting from them what had obviously been disturbed in the search. What it revealed to him was a woman concerned with her appearance, whose aids in caring for it were new or well maintained. All the containers of lipstick or powder or mascara were capped, carefully arranged, and out for ready use.
Willy paused thoughtfully. Now that his professional interest had been called up, he regretted the thoroughness of those preceding him. They'd taken almost everything of value. Mary had used a date book in the old days. It was missing. She'd always kept personal letters. There were none around. No phone records were in the desk, no bank statements. Oddly, touchingly, tucked into the mirror's edge was a small snapshot of Willy and Mary on a ferryboat crossing Lake Champlain, with Burlington in the background.
He reached out and plucked it from its niche. On the back, in pencil, was the year they were married. He stared at it for a while, studying both their faces, watching his own eyes for any signs of what lay ahead, thinking he saw it all clearly, and wondering why she hadn't. He also looked at his then-functional left arm, draped casually across her shoulders. The guy who'd taken the picture had asked him to do that, saying it would look friendlier. Willy had told her later he'd thought the guy was an asshole. She'd merely looked at him sadly. In his mind's eye, he could again feel the warmth of her shoulders through the fabric of his shirt.
He tossed the picture onto the tabletop and got up. So far, he hadn't found any sign of her being involved with another man.
He went to the small bathroom beside the kitchen. There was a shower curtain running around the inside of an old claw-foot tub, a pedestal sink facing a wall cabinet with a mirrored door, and a toilet. It was all ancient and battered, but built to withstand the average artillery assault-heavy porcelain, cast iron, a tile floor. What Mary had been able to make clean, she had. The rest was either chipped, cracked, or stained beyond the help of minor surgery. It was standard New York fare, and made him think back to his own bathroom as a boy, or at least the one he'd shared with the rest of the family. He'd hated that bathroom-the constant interruptions when he'd hoped to be alone, the presence of so many other people's personal items, from Kotex pads in the pail by the toilet, to mangled toothbrushes and mysterious smears of whoknew-what around the sink. And his mother used to leave her underwear hanging off the shower nozzle overnight, after washing it in the sink. Drove him nuts.
Not Mary, though. Here, nothing was out of place. That had driven him nuts, too.
He opened the cabinet door: aspirin, brush, comb, a headband to hold back her hair, cotton balls in a dish, a variety of lotions and creams, toothbrush and paste, a backup bar of soap, still in its wrapper.
And a birth control dispenser, its dated slots empty up to the day she died.
He held the plastic clamshell in his hand, reading the prescription on its cover. These were sometimes taken medicinally, he thought, not just for practical purposes. Other times, they were merely wishful thinking in pill form, and didn't actually indicate any active sexuality. Given the lack of romantic evidence elsewhere in the apartment, Willy was left to wonder.
Finally, ignoring the stench, he returned to the living room and tried imagining the life it had once contained. Here, books were read, conversations held on the phone by the couch, the TV was watched. Sometimes, the walls were studied during daydreams or in thought-or in despair. Frugality spoke for itself. Everything was threadbare, worn, or cheaply made. But there was pride as well. The place was clean, the colorful accents he'd noticed earlier had been strategically placed to either please the eye or cover a defect, or both.