Back and forth Nesha swam the length of the hotel pool, the muscles in his body sang with pain and he knew he would have to stop soon. Pretty good for an old geezer, he thought. Forty-eight. Where did it all go? Since Margie left he’d been forced to look at himself and he didn’t like what he saw. He had to hand it to her, he would’ve gone on like that forever if she hadn’t left, then not realized how wrong things really were till he was on his deathbed. Yeah, thanks Margie, thanks for nothing. He didn’t know how to love anymore, she had said. He had no love left. Well, how wrong she was. He could love. What he loved was feeling the water all around him, the water pulling at his memory, submerging it all into a deep corner of the pool. Wasn’t that love?
If he could have done what he wanted when he was eighteen, he would’ve swum. Instead, he studied numbers. Numbers had always been magical for him and it might have worked. But the commerce and finance courses turned numbers into ciphers and sent him down to the pool at the university in search of comfort. After two years he realized he would make life easier by apprenticing himself to an accountant.
It wasn’t until Nesha was married and a father that an American pup named Jastremski, coached by a breast-stroke champion, shortened and quickened the leg and arm movements of the stroke to come up with unheard-of speeds that smashed three world records. No sissy stroke then. Only fifteen years too late for him. By that time he had a house and a mortgage and several expensive cars to support. The breast-stroke became part of those deepest-sleep dreams that dissolve upon awakening.
In his heart, his painfully ledgered accountant’s heart, he had always known there would be a day of reckoning. It was a matter of checks and balances, credit and liability. He had played with numbers long enough to know they were the only things you could count on.
After twenty years of marriage, Margie came to him and told him that she wanted to live. A man courting death had no use for love, she said, and love was what she needed. Once Margie left, he realized that the only reason he was getting up each morning to go to work was that he’d done it the day before. One morning he went to a Y instead. He reacquainted himself with the breast-stroke and found to his relief that like old friends, they were still compatible.
His partners noted his tardiness at work. Clients were starting to complain. Mr. Malkevich was not paying as much attention to their financial affairs as he used to, he wasn’t available when they called. After so many years with their company, did they deserve such treatment? There were other firms who would be happy to get their business.
When Nesha showed no signs of “snapping out of it,” the partners offered him a deal. They knew about his wife and his tragic past but they couldn’t really understand what was going on. He knew they were much relieved when he accepted the deal even though they had to buy him out.
His needs were modest. The bungalow he had bought was paid for; he didn’t care about fancy cars or clothes or even travelling. Where could he go where it would be different? His memories, his pain, he carried with him like baggage.
chapter nine
The uniformed young constable stationed Rebecca in the den and questioned her with official politeness, calling her “ma’am.” She watched from the doorway across the length of the dining-room as the police photographer took shots of the body in detail. Rebecca folded her arms across her chest, repelled by the violation of Mrs. Kochinsky’s privacy. From now on, the woman she had compared to Garbo would be a photo of a corpse in a police file accessible to anyone with a badge. While she gave the young constable particulars about her patient, then herself for the record, the forensic team went to work in their white coveralls. One man scowled as he dusted the door for fingerprints. A plump woman scraped something from the floor of the entrance hall. When the photographer was finished with the living-room, the woman cop, her long hair pulled back in a pony tail, searched on her hands and knees through the mess on the floor. All pickings were dropped by tweezers into glass vials and paper bags. “Shit” she muttered, crunching something under her leg.
“So Sharon,” said the photographer aiming his camera at the dining-room buffet, its drawers hanging open. “What would you grab if you had five minutes to shop in K-Mart like this guy?”
Two men, one in tweed sports jacket, the other in a trenchcoat, walked in and stood at the edge of the living-room. Both were broad-shouldered, but where the trenchcoat was muscular, the sports jacket was stocky. He was also half a head shorter.
“This another one of those, Ed?” said the heavier man addressing the photographer. “One of those ‘five minutes shopping in K-Mart’ jobs?”
The constable immediately excused himself to Rebecca. “Don’t touch anything, ma’am,” he added. He walked back through the hall where she could no longer see him.
Rebecca watched the two men turn to greet the constable who was still out of her sight. His words were an inaudible mumble over the bustle of activity in the apartment. Both men took out pads and began to take notes after a moment of what she took to be the constable filling them in. At one point, they turned to look at the body, gestured toward something in the room, took more notes. She still couldn’t hear anything. Then suddenly they turned to look at Rebecca over the distance of two rooms. The stocky detective sized her up. What struck her was the blankness of his expression. Nothing showed. While the taller man faced the invisible constable, the sports jacket disappeared into the hall. She knew where he was heading.
“I’m Detective Wanless,” he said, entering the den. He showed her his identification badge. “You’re the one who found the body? Dr. Temple?”
He was not much taller than Rebecca but gave the impression of size with the solid mass of his chest and shoulders, bulky beneath the jacket.
“Are you a relative?” he asked, preparing his notebook. His brown hair was thin and short on top, brushed forward over a high forehead. His large ruddy cheeks eclipsed a neatly trimmed moustache.
“No.”
“What was your relationship with the deceased—” he searched his notepad “Goldie Kochinsky?” His thick fingers held the pen, waiting.
“I was her doctor.”
“This was a house call, then?” His blue eyes studied her face, the pencil poised above the paper.
“Not exactly.”
“Why exactly were you here then?”
The blankness of his face made it difficult for her to explain. “I was worried. She didn’t show up for her regular appointment.”
The blue eyes didn’t change but the tone of his voice became human. “You must be one in a million, Doctor. Mine wouldn’t notice if I didn’t show up for an appointment. He’d go on to the next guy. Do you normally check up on your patients when they miss an appointment?”
“Mrs. Kochinsky was a special case. She came to my office yesterday very upset. She was a very anxious person.”
“Why was she upset?”
“She said she’d just seen the man who was going to kill her.”
Wanless arched an eyebrow. “And what did you do?”
“I made a note of it,” she said. He looked up, still scribbling in his book. She couldn’t read his face, though she could imagine what he was thinking. “You know, there’s doctor-patient confidentiality,” she said.
“There’s also a murder. To me this looks like a robbery gone bad. But I need more information before I can put it to bed.”
Rebecca looked