Then he’d gone back to his mother’s town house. He’d let himself in by the front door and called out to her. He’d listened to the silence as if it were music.
Then he’d walked all the way to the back and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor.
After that, he’d sued the “retirement community” for not keeping their own rules and allowing the fuss of the children that had given his mother her fatal heart attack. It had taken ten hours for his lawyer to talk him out of suing the neighbors on both sides for having the children there.
“You can’t prove it was the children who caused the heart attack,” his lawyer had said. “She was an old woman. It could have been anything.”
That was the kind of thing people said these days. Whether they made any sense at all, people said them. That was why Walter was hearing his mother’s voice in his head today.
“You should never think you know somebody unless you check,” she’d said. “You should check and check again. People lie more than they tell the truth.”
This was absolutely true. Walter knew it from experience.
He stopped looking through the kitchen window and backed up to get the papers he had put on the table. Jessica was sitting there, not really drinking a cup of coffee, the way she had been all morning.
“Don’t tell me why I shouldn’t go,” Walter said. “We had all that out last night.”
Jessica looked down. “I thought you were looking at something,” she said, mostly mumbling. “I thought there was something out there you wanted to see.”
“It’s Horace Wingard and those asshole cops,” Walter said. “The cops are back. They’ve fucked up everything and now they’re going to muck around here again, making a scene. I told you they were going to fuck it up. I told you right from the beginning. Yes, I did. But nobody listens to me. I’m just a jerk. I’m just a bad-tempered old man. And here we are. That man is out there.”
“What man?” Jessica looked confused.
“Gregor Demarkian. The detective the police have hired to cover their asses. Never mind it’s just locking the barn door. We could all be dead by now.”
“I don’t see how we could all be dead,” Jessica said. “He didn’t kill anyone, Michael Platte. He was killed himself.”
“She killed someone,” Walter said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know it as soon as you saw her. Why the two of them ever got let into this complex, I don’t know. Waldorf Pines. An exclusive community for discriminating people. An advertising slogan meant to gull the idiots, and the world is full of idiots. Exclusive doesn’t mean expensive. Exclusive means you keep the people you don’t want out.”
Jessica shook her head. She was staring so hard at her coffee, it was as if the thing was a crystal ball, a place where she could see visions. Walter wanted to hit her.
“Think what it must be like for his mother,” she said. “She is his mother, no matter what he turned out to be. Mothers don’t stop loving their children because the children don’t turn out well. Think of what she must be going through.”
“If it were me, I’d be damned glad I was rid of him,” Walter said. “And all I want right now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again. You can’t stop me, Jessie. You shouldn’t even try to stop me.”
Walter headed out for the foyer and the front door, the door that led to the road and not the green. Jessica did not try to stop him, but he hadn’t really thought she would. Back when they were first dating, she had tried to stop him sometimes, when she thought he was going off the handle too quickly. It had never worked out well.
It would be a better place if other people understood him as well as Jessica did. It would be a better place if everybody just stopped being idiots.
“Never have children,” his mother had said to him, when he was twelve years old. “Never have children. They’ll only be a disappointment to you.”
She had been absolutely right.
Walter stepped onto the road and watched the scene just ahead of him. His house was the one right next to the pool house and clubhouse on the right when looking up the green, so he was right next to the action as it happened. He saw Horace Wingard come out, leading Larry Farmer and the big man Walter assumed was Gregor Demarkian. He saw the three of them stop at the pool house door and look at it. It was ridiculous. What did they expect to get by looking at it? It was the kind of things detectives did on television shows, to make themselves look intelligent.
Walter clutched his papers in his hand and walked faster. He could walk very fast, even at his age. He walked every day. You didn’t have to become a cripple at sixty unless you wanted to. You didn’t have to let yourself go to hell. Most people did, and then they called it arthritis.