“Let’s do it…”
Laughter and receding footsteps.
Shellee muttered, “It just frosts me when they talk like that. They’re like kids on the schoolyard.”
True, they were, Tal thought. Math whizzes know a lot about bullies on schoolyards.
But he said, “It’s okay.”
“No, boss, it’s not okay.”
“They live in a different world,” Tal said. “I understand.”
“Understand how people can be cruel like that? Well, I surely don’t.”
“You know that thirty-four percent of homicide detectives suffer from depression? Sixty-four percent get divorced, twenty-eight percent are substance abusers.”
“You’re using those numbers to excuse ’em, boss. Don’t do it. Don’t let ’em get away with it.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and started down the hall, calling, “Have a nice weekend, boss. See you Monday.”
“And,” Tal continued, “six point three percent kill themselves before retirement.”
Though he doubted she could hear.
The residents of Hamilton, New York, were educated, pleasant, reserved and active in politics and the arts. In business, too; they’d chosen to live here because the enclave was the closest exclusive Westbrook community to Manhattan. Industrious bankers and lawyers could be at their desks easily by eight o’clock in the morning.
The cul-de-sac of Montgomery Way, one of the nicest streets in Hamilton, was in fact home to two bankers and one lawyer, as well as one retired couple. These older residents, at No. 205, had lived in their house for twenty-four years. It was a 6000-square-foot stone Tudor with leaded-glass windows and a shale roof, surrounded by a few acres of clever landscaping.
Samuel Ellicott Whitley had attended law school while his wife worked in the advertising department of Gimbels, the department store near the harrowing intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. He’d finished school in ’57 and joined Brown, Lathrop & Soames on Broad Street. The week after he was named partner, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, and after a brief hiatus, resumed classes at Columbia Business School. She took a job at one of the country’s largest cosmetics companies and rose to be a senior vice president.
But the lives of law and business were behind the Whitleys now and they’d moved into the life of retirement as gracefully and comfortably as she stepped into her Dior gowns and he into his Tripler’s tux.
Tonight, a cool, beautiful April Sunday, Elizabeth hung up the phone after a conversation with her daughter, Sandra, and piled the dinner dishes in the sink. She poured herself another vodka and tonic. She stepped outside onto the back patio, looking out over the azure dusk crowning the hemlocks and pine. She stretched and sipped her drink, feeling tipsy and content. Ecstatic.
She wondered what Sam was up to. Just after they’d finished dinner he’d said that he had to pick up something. Normally she would have gone with him. She worried because of his illness. Afraid not only that his undependable heart would give out but that he might faint at the wheel or drive off the road because of the medication. But he’d insisted that she stay home; he was only going a few miles.
Taking a long sip of her drink, she cocked her head, hearing an automobile engine and the hiss of tires on the asphalt. She looked toward the driveway. But she couldn’t see anything.
Was it Sam? The car, though, had not come up the main drive but had turned off the road at the service entrance and eased through the side yard, out of sight of the house. She squinted but with the foliage and the dim light of dusk she couldn’t see who it was.
Logic told her she should be concerned. But Elizabeth was completely comfortable sitting here with her glass in hand, under a deep blue evening sky. Feeling the touch of cashmere on her skin, happy, warm…No, life was perfect. What could there possibly be to worry about?
Three nights of the week — or as Tal would sometimes phrase it, 42.8571 % of his evenings — he’d go out. Maybe on a date, maybe to have drinks and dinner with friends, maybe to his regular poker game (the others in the quintet enjoyed his company though they’d learned it could be disastrous to play against a man who could remember cards photographically and calculate the odds of drawing to a full house like a computer).
The remaining 57.1429 % of his nights he’d stay home and lose himself in the world of mathematics.
This Sunday, nearly 7 p.m., Tal was in his small library, which was packed with books but was as ordered and neat as his office at work. He’d spent the weekend running errands, cleaning the house, washing the car, making the obligatory — and ever awkward — call to his father in Chicago, dining with a couple up the road who’d made good their threat to set him up with a cousin (email addresses had been unenthusiastically exchanged over empty mousse dishes). Now, classical music playing on the radio, Tal had put the rest of the world aside and was working on a proof.
This is the gold ring mathematicians seek. One might have a brilliant insight about numbers but without completing the proof — the formal argument that verifies the premise — that insight remains merely a theorem, pure speculation.
The proof that had obsessed him for months involved “perfect numbers.” These are positive numbers whose divisors (excluding the number itself) add up to that number. The number 6, for instance, is perfect because it’s divisible only by 1, 2 and 3 (not counting 6), and 1, 2 and 3 also add up to 6.
The questions Tal had been trying to answer: How many even perfect numbers are there? And, more intriguing, are there any odd perfect numbers? In the entire history of mathematics no one has been able to offer a proof that an odd perfect number exists (or that it can’t exist).
Perfect numbers have always intrigued mathematicians — theologians, too. St. Augustine felt that God intentionally chose a perfect number of days — six — to create the world. Rabbis attach great mystical significance to the number 28, the days in the moon’s cycle. Tal didn’t consider perfect numbers in such a philosophical way. For him they were simply a curious mathematical construct. But this didn’t minimize their importance to him; proving theorems about perfect numbers (or any other mathematical enigmas) might lead to other insights about math and science…and perhaps life in general.
He now hunched over his pages of neat calculations, wondering if the odd perfect number was merely a myth or if it was real and waiting to be discovered, hiding somewhere in the dim distance of numbers approaching infinity.
Something about this thought troubled him and he leaned back in his chair. It took a moment to realize why. Thinking of infinity reminded him of the suicide note Don and Patsy Benson had left.
Together forever…
He pictured the room where they’d died, the blood, the chilling sight of the grim how-to guide they’d bought. Making the Final Journey.
Tal stood and paced. Something wasn’t right. For the first time in years he decided to return to the office on a Sunday night. He wanted to look up some background on suicides of this sort.
A half hour later he was walking past the surprised guard, who had to think for a moment or two before he recognized him.
“Officer…”
“Detective Simms.”
“Right. Yessir.”
Ten minutes later he was in his office, tapping on the keyboard, perusing information about suicides in Westbrook County. At first irritated that the curious events of today had taken him away from his mathematical evening, he soon found himself lost in a very different world of numbers — those that defined the loss of life by one’s own hand in Westbrook County.
Sam Whitley emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of old Armagnac and joined his wife in the den.