Though I suppose that in this memory of bereavement there is some for poor Walter, as wrongly and surely dead as my son, and just as absurd. I have tried not to be part of it. But why shouldn’t I? We all deserve mankind’s pity, his grief. And maybe never more than when we go outside its usual reaches and can’t get back.
No one answers at X’s house. She may be taking the children to a friend’s. Are we going to have to have another heart-to-heart, I wonder. Am I going to be the recipient of other unhappy news? Is Fincher Barksdale leaving Dusty and getting X knee-deep in mink-ranching in Memphis? On what thin strand does all equilibrium dangle?
I leave a message saying I’ll be by soon, then I’m off to the police, to have a look at Walter, though I have hope that a responsible citizen — possibly one of the Divorced Men with a police scanner — will already have come forward and performed this service for me.
The police station occupies part of the new brick-and-glass car-dealerish Village Hall where I rode out the heart-sore days of my divorce. The Hall is located near some of our nicer, more established residences, and it is closed now except for the brightly lighted cubicles in the back where the police hang out. From the outside where you drive around the circular entry, the last drowsy hours of Easter have softened its staunch Republican look. But it remains a house of hazards to me, a place where I’m uneasy each time I set my foot indoors.
Sergeant Beni valle, it turns out, is still on duty when I give my name to the watch officer, a young Italian-looking brushcut fellow wearing an enormous pistol and a gold name plate that says, PATRIARCA. He is in wry spirits, I can tell, and smiles a secret smile that implies some pretty good off-color jokes have been going the rounds all day, and were we a jot better friends he’d let me in on the whole hilarious business. My own smile, though, is not in tune for jokes, and after writing down my name he wanders off to find the sergeant.
I sit down on the public bench beside a big framed town map, breathing in the floor-mop smell of waiting rooms, leaning on my knees and peering out the glass doors through the lobby and across the lawn of elms and ginkgoes and spring maples. Outside is all almond light now, and in an hour a dreamy celestial darkness will return and one more day find its end. And what a day! Not a typical one at all. And yet it ends as softly, in as velvet a hush and airish a calm as any. Death is not a compatible presence hereabouts, and everything is in connivance — forces municipal and private — to say it isn’t so; it’s only a misreading, a wrong rumor to be forgotten. No harm done. This is not the place to die and be noticed, though it isn’t a bad place to live, all things considered.
Two cyclists glide across my view. A man ahead, a woman behind; a child in a child’s secure-seat strapped snug to Papa. All three are white-helmeted. Red pennants wag on spars in the dusk. All three are on their way home from an informal prayer get-together somewhere down some street, at some Danish-modern Unitarian hug-a-friend church where cider’s on tap and damn and hell are permissible — life on the continual upswing week after week. (It is the effect of a seminary in your town.) Now they’re headed homeward, fresh and nuclear, their frail magneto lights whispering a gangway to old darkness. Here come the Jamiesons. Mark, Pat and baby Jeff. Here comes life. All clear. Nothing can stop us now.
But they are wrong, wrong these Jamiesons. I should tell them. Life-forever is a lie of the suburbs — its worst lie — and a fact worth knowing before you get caught in its fragrant silly dream. Just ask Walter Luckett. He’d tell you, if he could.
Sergeant Benivalle appears through a back office door, and he’s exactly the fellow I expected, the chesty, flat-top, sad-eyed man with bad acne scars and mitts the size of work gloves. His mother must not have been a spaghetti-bender, since his eyes are pale and his square head stolid and Nordic. (His stomach, though, is firmly Italian and envelopes his belt buckle, squeezing the little silver snub-nose strapped above his wallet.) He is not a man to shake hands, but looks at the red EXIT sign above our heads when we meet. “We can just sit here, Mr. Bascombe,” he says. His voice is hoarse, wearier than earlier in the day.
We sit on the shiny bench while he fingers through a manila file. Officer Patriarca takes his seat behind the watch desk window, props up his feet and begins glancing through a Road & Track with a black drag-strip hero-turned-TV-personality smiling on the front.
Sergeant Benivalle sighs deeply and shuffles sheets of paper. Silent as a prisoner, I await him.
“Ahhh. Okay now. We’ve been in touch with family … a sister … in … Ohio, I guess. So …” He lifts a stapled page briefly to reveal a bright photograph of a man’s feet clad in a pair of rope sandals, toes pointed upward. Absolutely these are Walter’s feet, which I hope will be identification enough. Bascombe identifies deceased from picture of feet. “So that,” Sergeant Benivalle says slowly, “should eliminate your need to identify the, uh, deceased.”
“I didn’t really feel that need, anyway,” I say.
Sergeant Benivalle glances at me dismissively. “We have fingerprints coming, of course. But it’s just easier to get a positive this way.”
“I understand.”
“Now,” he says, flipping more pages. It’s surprising how much paper work has already been compiled. (Was Walter in some other kind of trouble?) “Now,” he says again and looks at me. “You’re the sportswriter, aren’t you?”
“Right.” I smile weakly.
Sergeant Benivalle glances back into his papers. “Who’s taking the AL East this year?”
“Detroit. They’re pretty good.”
He sighs. “Yep. Prolly so. I wish I had time to see a game. But I’m busy.” He protrudes his bottom lip, looking down. “I play a little golf, once in a blue moon.”
“My wife’s the teaching pro over at Cranbury Hills,” I say, though I add quickly, “my ex-wife, I mean.”
“That right?” Benivalle says, forgetting golf entirely. “I’ve got grass asthma,” he says, and since I can add nothing to that, I say nothing. “Do you,” he pauses, “have any idea why this Mr., uh, Luckett would take his own life, Mr. Bascombe, just off the top of your head?”
“No. I guess he gave up hope. That’s all.”
“Um-huh, um-huh.” Sergeant Benivalle reads down his folder. Inside, a form has been typed: HOMICIDEREPORT. “That usually happens at Christmas a lot more. Not that many people do it on Easter.”
“I never thought much about it.”
Sergeant Benivalle wheezes when he breathes, a small peeping noise down inside his chest. He fingers toward the back of the file. “I could never write,” he says thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t know what to say. That must be hard.”
“It’s really not too hard.”
“Um-huh. Well. I’ve got this, uh, copy of this letter for you.” He slides a slick Thermofax sheet out the back of his sheaf, holding it out daintily by a corner. “We keep the original, which you can claim in three months if the estate agrees to release it to you.” He looks at me.
“Okay.” I take the page by another of its greasy corners. It is badly copied in gray with a nasty embalming-fluid odor all over it. I see the script is a neat, very small longhand, with a signature near the bottom.
“Be careful with that stuff, it gets in your clothes. Cops smell like it all the time, it’s how you know we’re in the neighborhood.” He closes his folder, reaches in his pocket and takes out a pack of Kools.
“I’ll read it later,” I say and fold the letter in thirds, then sit holding it, waiting for whatever is supposed to happen next to happen. We are both of us immobilized by how simple all this has been.