“So I was wondering,” she asked. “Why this interest in the Whitleys’ deaths?”
“Like I said. They were out of the ordinary.”
“I guess I mean, why are you interested? Did you lose somebody? To suicide, I mean.”
“Oh, no. My father’s alive. My mother passed away a while ago. A stroke.”
“I’m sorry. She must’ve been young.”
“Was, yes.”
She waved a bee away. “Is your dad in the area?”
“Nope. Professor in Chicago.”
“Math?”
“Naturally. Runs in the family.” He told her about Wall Street, the financial crimes, statistics.
“All that adding and subtracting. Doesn’t it get, I don’t know, boring?”
“Oh, no, just the opposite. Numbers go on forever. Infinite questions, challenges. And remember, math is a lot more than just calculations. What excites me is that numbers let us understand the world. And when you understand something you have control over it.”
“Control?” she asked, serious suddenly. “Numbers won’t keep you from getting hurt. From dying.”
“Sure they can,” he replied. “Numbers make car brakes work and keep airplanes in the air and let you call the fire department. Medicine, science.”
“I guess so. Never thought about it.” Another crooked smile. “You’re pretty enthusiastic about the subject.”
Tal asked, “Pascal?”
“Heard of him.”
“A philosopher. He was a prodigy at math but he gave it up completely. He said math was so enjoyable it had to be related to sex. It was sinful.”
“Hold on, mister,” she said, laughing. “You got some math porn you want to show me?”
Tal decided that the preliminary groundwork for the date was going pretty well. But, apropos of which, enough about himself. He asked, “How’d you get into your field?”
“I always liked taking care of people... or animals,” she explained. “Somebody’s pet’d get hurt, I’d be the one to try to help it. I hate seeing anybody in pain. I was going to go to med school but my mom got sick and, without a father around, I had to put that on hold — where it’s been for... well, for a few years.”
No explanation about the missing father. But he sensed that, like him, she didn’t want to discuss dad. A common denominator among these particular members of the Four Percent Club.
She continued, looking at the nursing home door. “Why I’m doing this particularly? My mother, I guess. Her exit was pretty tough. Nobody really helped her. Except me, and I didn’t know very much. The hospital she was in didn’t give her any support. So after she passed I decided I’d go into the field myself. Make sure patients have a comfortable time at the end.”
“It doesn’t get you down?”
“Some times are tougher than others. But I’m lucky. I’m not all that religious but I do think there’s something there after we die.”
Tal nodded but he said nothing. He’d always wanted to believe in that something too but religion wasn’t allowed in the Simms household — nothing, that is, except the cold deity of numbers his father worshiped — and it seemed to Tal that if you don’t get hooked early by some kind of spiritualism, you’ll rarely get the bug later. Still, people do change. He recalled that the Bensons had been atheists but apparently toward the end had come to believe differently.
Together forever...
Mac was continuing, speaking of her job at the Cardiac Support Center. “I like working with the patients. And I’m good, if I do say so myself. I stay away from the sentiment, the maudlin crap. I knock back some scotch or wine with them. Watch movies, pig out on lowfat chips and popcorn, tell some good death and dying jokes.”
“No,” Tal said, frowning. “Jokes?”
“You bet. Here’s one: When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather... Not screaming like the passengers in the car with him.”
Tal blinked then laughed hard. She was pleased he’d enjoyed it, he could tell. He said, “Hey, there’s a statistician joke. Want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“Statistics show that a person gets robbed every four minutes. And, man, is he getting tired of it.”
She smiled. “That really sucks.”
“Best we can do,” Tal said. Then after a moment he added, “But Dr. Dehoeven said that your support center isn’t all death and dying. There’s a lot of things you do to help before and after surgery.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Didn’t mean to neglect that. Exercise, diet, care giving, getting the family involved, psychotherapy.”
Silence for a moment, a silence that, he felt, was suddenly asking: what exactly was he doing here?
He said, “I have a question about the suicides. Some witnesses said they saw a woman in sunglasses and a beige baseball cap, driving a small car, at the Bensons’ house just before they killed themselves. I was wondering if you ever saw anyone like that around their house.”
A pause. “Me?” she asked, frowning. “I wasn’t seeing the Bensons, remember?”
“No, I mean at the Whitleys.”
“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “Their daughter came by a couple of times.”
“No, it wasn’t her.”
“They had a cleaning lady. But she drove a van. And I never saw her in a hat.”
Her voice had grown weaker and Tal knew that her mood had changed quickly. Probably the subject of the Whitleys had done it — raised the issue of whether there was anything else she might’ve done to keep them from dying.
Silence surrounded them, as dense as the humid April air, redolent with the scent of lilac. He began to think that it was a bad idea to mix a personal matter with a professional one — especially when it involved patients who had just died. Conversation resumed but it was now different, superficial, and, as if by mutual decision, they both glanced at their watches, said goodbye, then rose and headed down the same sidewalk in different directions.
Shellee appeared in the doorway of Tal’s office, where the statistician and LaTour were parked. “Found something,” she said in her Beantown accent.
“Yeah, whatsat?” LaTour asked, looking over a pile of documents that she was handing her boss.
She leaned close to Tal and whispered, “He just gonna move in here?”
Tal smiled and said to her, “Thanks, Detective.”
An eye-roll was her response.
“Where’d you get all that?” LaTour asked, pointing at the papers but glancing at her chest.
“The Internet,” Shellee snapped as she left. “Where else?”
“She got all that information from there?” the big cop asked, taking the stack and flipping through it.
Tal saw a chance for a bit of cop-cop jibe, now that, yeah, the ice was broken, and he nearly said to LaTour, you’d be surprised, there’s a lot more on line than wicked-sluts.com that you browse through in the wee hours. But then he recalled the silence when he asked about the cop’s family life.
That’s something else...
And he decided a reference to lonely nights at home was out of line. He kept the joke to himself.
LaTour handed the sheets to Tal. “I’m not gonna read all this crap. It’s got fucking numbers in it. Gimme the bottom line.”
Tal skimmed the information, much of which might have contained numbers but was still impossible for him to understand. It was mostly chemical jargon and medical formulae. But toward the end he found a summary. He frowned and read it again.
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“We maybe have our perps.”