“You can go straight to hell.”
The huge cop was laughing hard. “Shit, don’tcha feel like we’re finally breaking the ice here? I think we are. Now, I’ll drop you off back at your car, Einstein, and you can go on this secret mission all by your lonesome.”
His stated purpose was to ask her if she’d ever seen the mysterious woman in the baseball cap and sunglasses, driving a small car, at the Whitleys’ house.
Lame, Tal thought.
Lame and transparent — since he could’ve asked her that on the phone. He was sure the true mission here was so obvious that it was laughable: to get a feel for what would happen if he asked Mac McCaffrey out to dinner. Not to actually invite her out at this point, of course. She was, after all, a potential witness. No, just to test the waters.
Tal parked along Elm Street and climbed out of the car, enjoying the complicated smells of the April air, the skin-temperature breeze, the golden snowflakes of fallen forsythia petals covering the lawn.
Walking toward the park where he’d arranged to meet her, Tal reflected on his recent romantic life.
Fine, he concluded. It was fine.
He dated 2.66 women a month. The mean age of his dates in the past 12 months was approximately 31 (a number skewed somewhat by the embarrassing — but highly memorable — outlier of a Columbia University senior). And the mean IQ of the women was around 140 or up — and that latter statistic was a very sharp bell curve with a very narrow standard deviation; Talbot Simms went for intellect before anything else.
It was this latter criteria, though, he’d come to believe lately, that led to the conclusion that his love life was the tepid “fine.”
Yes, he’d had many interesting evenings with his 2⅔ dates every month. He’d discussed with them Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. He’d argue about the validity of analyzing objects in terms of their primary qualities (“No! I’m suspicious of secondary qualities, too. I mean, how ’bout that?”). They’d draft mathematical formulae in crayon on the paper table coverings at the Crab House. They’d discuss Fermat’s Last Theorem until 2 or 3 a.m. (These were not wholly academic encounters, of course; Tal Simms happened to have a full-sized chalkboard in his bedroom.)
He was intellectually stimulated by most of these women. He even learned things from them.
But he didn’t really have a lot of fun.
Mac McCaffrey, he believed, would be fun.
She’d sounded surprised when he’d called. Cautious, too, at first. But after a minute or two she’d relaxed and had seemed pleased at the idea that he wanted to meet with her.
He now spotted her in the park next to the Knickerbocker Home, which appeared to be a nursing facility.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi there. Hope you don’t mind meeting outside. I hate to be cooped up.”
He recalled the Sierra Club posters in her office. “No, it’s beautiful here.”
Her sharp green eyes, set in her freckled face, looked away and took in the sights of the park. Tal sat down and they made small talk for five minutes or so. Finally she asked, “You started to tell me that you’re, what, a mathematician?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled. There was a crookedness to her mouth, an asymmetry, which he found charming. “That’s way pretty cool. You could be on a TV series. Like CSI or Law and Order, you know. Call it Math Cop.”
They laughed. He glanced down at her shoes, old black Reeboks, and saw they were nearly worn out. He noticed, too, a worn spot on the knee of her jeans. It’d been rewoven. He thought of cardiologist Anthony Sheldon’s designer wardrobe and huge office; he reflected that Mac worked in an entirely different part of the health care universe.
“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. “Sometimes. Numbers make car brakes work and keep airplanes in the air and let you call 911. 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, 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?”
“Sometimes it’s 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 worshipped — and it seemed to Tal that if you don’t get hooked early by some kind of spiritualism, you’ll rarely get the bug. 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 low-fat 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.”