We joined the huddle to hear what we could of the post-mortem.
“What set this thing off?” I asked, trying to separate us from the disassembling hoard, and at the same time get them talking louder.
“You’re Cooperman, right?” asked a uniform with a red head sticking out the collar. “I’ve seen you with the sergeant.”
“This is Mr. Geller’s secretary. She sent in the alarm.”
“Her and half a dozen others. Geller had good neighbours. Nobody likes seeing property threatened. On that they stick together.”
“What started the fuss?” I asked again. The policeman looked at the departing mob.
“I guess it was the paper. It could have been on the noon news too. I don’t know about that.” Another cop confirmed that he had heard the whole story on the radio. Whether the paper had the scoop or not was something for the likes of Wally Skeat to argue.
“Who’s the officer in charge?”
“That’s Chalice.” The red-headed cop hoisted his thumb in Chalice’s direction. “He’s good, isn’t he? I think he likes it. I wouldn’t give three cents to be holding a bull-horn when a crowd really decides to get ugly. Give me cruiser duty any day.”
Ruth Geller, who must have slipped out of the house without anyone noticing, came into sight and grabbed Chalice by the arm. “We can’t go on living like this,” she said. “Anything could have happened. What about my kids?” The rest got louder and shriller without making more sense. Chalice was talking to her, his voice low but steady. Ruth nodded to the tune of his words until she caught sight of Rose Craig standing near me. “Rose!” she called, tears overflowing. “Thank God for you, Rose. You are such a friend.” They were hugging and crying in that way women have. I didn’t hear what they said, they were both talking at the same time.
“Benny drove me over while I called the police.” I made out the words but the sense was obscure. Ruth looked over at me and tried on a smile for size. It didn’t fit and the colour was wrong. I took advantage of it, though, and ambled over to join the ladies just as the policeman moved off to other duties near one of the cruisers. I was standing on a crushed tomato.
SIX
After picking up three green garbage bags full of dead oranges, cabbages and other missiles, Rose and I were invited into the house for coffee. Nathan Geller was in the living-room putting a square of cardboard over a window that had been broken. Ruth Geller looked like a zombie; she walked around the living-room touching the corners of tables and lamp-shades. I thought she was going to fall on the floor and melt. With a fragile smile at the corners of her mouth, she seemed to be listening in to a stereo station on Mars. Her sister hovered over her like a protective, stronger other self. Although we had been asked in for coffee, no one in fact made a movement in the direction of the kitchen. Nathan was working on his window; the task seemed to occupy him totally. Work was liberating. Debbie made an attempt to make Rose Craig comfortable, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Ruth kept glancing from the window and Nathan to the stairs, whose broadloomed steps led to the second floor. Nobody noticed when I went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
A few minutes later, Rose sat with her heavily tweeded knees close together balancing her cup and saucer, watching Nathan now applying masking tape to the spider-lines of a cracked window-pane. He took a professional pride in his work, and kept commenting on each step as though we were a film crew watching and recording the artist at work. “That’s good enough for the moment. I’ll try to get a man to come around to replace both panes in the morning.” Then he took the measurements and made a notation on the inside of a package of cigarettes.
From upstairs I heard the voice of a child calling. Ruth bounded up the stairs without a word. A few minutes later, two kids, a boy and his older sister, appeared with a strange woman and their mother, each carrying a suitcase. Debbie, Ruth and Nathan rallied long enough to try to make the send-off look like an event. They hugged and kissed the children, tried to make a flourish of it, but they weren’t up to it and the kids didn’t want it.
“I’ve got to have my bike,” the little girl said with a serious expression. “I need it tomorrow, Mommy.”
“We’ll see, dear.”
“I need it.”
This was my first opportunity to see a fair piece of the family together acting like a family. I watched the aunt and uncle help bundle the kids off in a car with the woman who was later identified as an unmarried cousin of I never did figure out whom.
With the kids out of the house, a source of tension was removed. Debbie lit a cigarette with her butane lighter, and I cadged a light for a Player’s off the same flame. Rose rattled her empty cup in her saucer as she got up to return the coffee things to the kitchen. “Leave it,” Ruth ordered, but didn’t take any notice of Rose continuing her mission anyway. Nobody said anything except in hoarse whispers. If Larry Geller had been laid out on trestles in front of the fireplace with his hands crossed over his chest, the atmosphere couldn’t have been more funereal. We smoked in silence. Rose returned to her place on the chintz-covered chair behind the coffee-table. Ruth huddled in a narrow occasional chair. Her painted smile was peeling away. Nathan pulled out a rounded stone from between the pillows of the loveseat in front of the windows. When she saw it, Ruth began to cry.
By now I was feeling like the fifth shoe under a bridal bed. If I’d been looking at this scene through a transom or a keyhole I couldn’t have felt more like a voyeur. The room itself seemed to be crawling away from the patched window. In a way it didn’t seem like the room I’d been in the day before. Somehow a pile of broken glass glinting on broadloom and masking tape on painted woodwork completed the work the mob tried to do. “Safe as houses,” the Welsh say. This house seemed as safe as a circus tent in a hurricane.
“Your wrist, Nathan. Look!” Debbie crossed to where Nathan’s bare arms had been dangling between his knees as he sat on the edge of the loveseat. He raised first one arm then the other. A twisted line of darkening blood snaked down his long left arm. He raised it like a surgeon scrubbing up, and then began to lick it.