Dear Editor,
Thanks to “Tips for Living” for bringing some levity to the struggles faced by average residents. You can tell Ms. Glasser is “one of us.” She probably drives a car that’s more than two years old. At least I doubt she owns a 7,500-square-foot summer home along with a Manhattan penthouse. Make no mistake about it: there’s a class war raging in Pequod, and I know who is winning. The greedy real estate developers who are profiting by polluting our wetlands and scarring our beautiful landscapes. The superrich Summer People who build giant vacation homes and then charter helicopters in their rush to get here and “relax,” inflicting deafening noise on the rest of us. Why is nothing ever enough for any of them?
Tim McNulty
Pequod, NY
Chapter Eight
Compared to Pequod, Massamat is a big city. Population over thirty-two thousand, according to the last census. But the downtown area was depressed. We were driving through a ghost town. At least on weekdays, you’d see some shoppers. Or young and old men in front of the empty display windows of vacant stores on State Street. They sit on graffiti-marked benches or overturned milk crates, smoking and shooting the bull while waiting for contractors to drive by and hire them as day laborers. Today everyone was at the discount mall.
The financial crisis or prolonged recession or end of the great capitalist experiment, depending on your point of view, has made downtown jobs scarce while creating other employment opportunities. Some of Massamat’s formerly college-bound youth have been joining gangs and dealing drugs. The quarterback for the Massamat High School Mastiffs became involved with a gang and was arrested for selling Vicodin and meth. Last year saw three homicides—two of them gang-on-gang kills. The third was a gas station attendant shot during a robbery. The police suspected gang involvement there, too. Just 10.8 miles from Pequod, there’s a growing culture of violence.
What if some of Massamat’s angry desperados rode over and shot Hugh and Helene in the course of robbing them? Or it could have been a gang initiation rite. Killing someone to become a member of the club. Maybe they’d slashed Hugh’s “artsy” self-portrait in a final gesture of contempt? It was possible, yes. Especially if Hugh had shown up on their radar because he was buying drugs. I’d known him to indulge in the past. Besides spreading through America’s suburbs like the plague in the last few years, heroin had become hip in the art world again, reprising the ’70s, when artists snorted in the toilet stalls at Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club. At least that’s what New York Magazine said. Maybe Hugh and Helene were using and abusing?
I let my head fall back against the car’s hard seat.
There were surely people besides myself with motives to murder Hugh and Helene. Killers with guns. In my muddled thinking, I’d failed to consider that if the unconfirmed report was accurate and Hugh and Helene were shot . . . well, I didn’t own a firearm. I wasn’t 100 percent certain how the police viewed me, but my own lurking, illogical doubts eased.
We drove by city hall and pulled up to the new police station conveniently located next to the county court complex. Unlike the rest of Massamat’s traditional brick government buildings, the station was conspicuously modern—all black steel and dark, tinted glass. Some failure of the imagination had led to the placement of a large bronze badge “sculpture” in the middle of the concrete front walk. A good portion of the county’s boom-year tax dollars went here when property values rose: not to job retraining or after-school programs, but to law enforcement and monuments. The police budget was a hot issue in Pequod, too.
Detective Roche came around to the back of the car, opened the door, and guarded my skull again. “Careful there, Ms. Glasser.”
Flanked by Roche and our golem-size chauffeur, whose nametag read “Sgt. Klish,” I climbed the marble stairs of the massive precinct as if I already dragged a ball and chain. You are small and helpless and dwarfed by our power, the building said. The lump in my throat felt as big as a walnut. I entered the immense lobby with its floor made of black polished stone and a vaulted ceiling overhead, three stories tall.
Metal detectors and conveyor belts blocked access to a glassed-in front desk. Likely bulletproof. The setup resembled a security gate at an airport, except there were no lines. I was the only passenger on this trip. For a second, I wondered if Massamat’s criminals took Sundays off. But the constant squawk of Klish’s hand radio told me the town’s gangsters were still busy on the Day of Rest.
“I’ll take the phone,” Klish said gruffly. “Outer garments, purse, and shoes go on the belt. Empty your pockets of keys, lipstick. Anything metal. Deposit them in the plastic cup.”
I removed my coat. “The scarf, too?”
He flashed me an icy smile. “I said outer garments.”
Give a former C student some authority and Klish is what you get. I did as he instructed and passed through the metal detector. An Asian officer with a big gray plastic wand met me on the other side of the arch. Pretending he was about to cast a protective spell made me feel less anxious for about a second. He waved the wand over my jeans and black cardigan, and it dawned on me that for weeks I’d been wearing nothing but black: black jeans, black Pilates pants, black T-shirts and black sweaters. Yet another symptom of my dark emotional state.
When the officer finished, he directed me to Sgt. Klish again, who lorded over my belongings at the end of the conveyor belt. I refilled my purse, gathered up my coat and scarf and bent over to put on my black boots, vaguely aware of something fluttering to the floor as Detective Roche’s voice warned from behind.
“Don’t forget this.”
Straightening up, I turned around. Roche held out the cream-colored envelope I’d taken from my kitchen. I nearly snatched Hugh’s letter from his hand, but caught myself.
“Thanks,” I said, casually taking the letter and returning it to my coat pocket.
“The other shoe, Ms. Glasser.”
“Huh?”
“If you’ll put on your other shoe, we’ll get going. We’ve got room six. Best in the house,” he said. As if we were checking in to a five-star hotel.