They had been married for thirty-one years, and the
following spring, full of resolve and a measure of hope,
he would marry again. But that day, on a late afternoon
near the end of March, Mr. Alejandro Stern had returned
home and, with his attaché case and garment bag still in
hand, called out somewhat absently from the front entry
for Clara, his wife. He was fifty-six years old, stout and
bald, and never particularly good-looking, and he found
himself in a mood of intense preoccupation.
For two days he had been in Chicago -- that city of rough
souls -- on behalf of his most difficult client. Dixon
Hartnell was callous, self-centered, and generally
scornful of his lawyers' ad- vice; worst of all,
representing him was a permanent engagement. Dixon was
Stern's brother-in-law, married to Silvia, his sister,
Stern's sole living immediate relation and the enduring
object of his affections. For Dixon, of course, his
feelings were hardly as pure. In the early years, when
Stem's practice amounted to little more than the decorous
hustling of clients in the hallways of the misdemeanor
courts, serving Dixon's unpredictable needs had paid
Stern's rent. Now it was one of those imponderable duties,
darkly rooted in the hard soil of Stem's own sense of
filial and professional obligation.
It was also steady work. The proprietor of a vast
commodity-futures trading empire, a brokerage house he had
named, in youth, Maison Dixon, and a series of interlocked
subsidiaries, all called MD-this and -that, Dixon was
routinely in trouble. Exchange officials, federal
regulators, the IRS -- they'd all had Dixon's number for
years. Stern stood up for him in these scrapes.
But the present order of business was of greater concern.
A federal grand jury sitting here in Kindle County had
been issuing subpoenas out of town to select MD clients.
Word of these subpoenas, served by the usual grim-faced
minions of the FBI, had been trailing back to MD for a
week now, and Stern, at the conclusion of his most recent
trial, had flown at once to Chicago to meet privately with
the attorneys representing two of these customers and to
review the records the government required from them. The
lawyers reported that the Assistant United States Attorney
assigned to the matter, a young woman named Klonsky,
declined to say precisely who was under suspicion, beyond
exonerating the customers themselves. But to a practiced
eye, this all had an ominous look. The out-of-town
subpoenas reflected a contemplated effort at secrecy. The
investigators knew what they were seeking and seemed
intent on quietly encircling Dixon, or his companies, or
someone close to him.
So Stern stood travel-weary and vexed in the slate foyer
of the home where Clara and he had lived for nearly two
decades. And yet, what was it that wrested his attention
so thoroughly, so suddenly? The silence, he would always
say. Not a tap running, a radio mumbling, not one of the
household machines in operation. An isolated man, he drew,
always, a certain comfort from stillness. But this was not
the silence of rest or interruption. He left his bags on
the black tiles and stepped smartly through the foyer.
"Clara?" he called again.
He found her in the garage. When he opened the door, the
odor of putrefaction overwhelmed him, a powerful high sour
smell which dizzied him with the first breath and drove up
sick- ness like a fist. The car, a black Seville, the
current model, had been backed in; the driver's door was
open. The auto's white dome light remained on, so that in
the dark garage she was wanly spotlit. From the doorway he
could see her leg extended toward the concrete floor, and
the hem of a bright floral shirtwaist dress. He could tell
from the glint that she was wearing hosiery.
Slowly, he stepped down. The heat in the garage and the
smell which increased revoltingly with each step were
overpowering, and in the dark his fear left him weak. When
he could see her through the open door of the car, he
advanced no farther. She was reclined on the camel-colored
leather of the front seat. Her skin, which he noticed
first, was burnished with an unnatural peachish glow, and
her eyes were closed. It seemed she had meant to appear
neat and composed. Her left hand, faultlessly manicured,
was placed almost ceremonially across her abdomen, and the
flesh had swollen slightly beneath her wedding rings. She
had brought nothing with her. No jacket. No purse. And she
had not fallen back completely; her other arm was rigidly
extended toward the wheel, and her head was pinned against
the seat at a hopeless, impossible angle. Her mouth was
open, her tongue extruded, her face dead, motionless,
absolutely still. In the whitewashed laundry room
adjoining the garage he was immediately sick in one of the
porcelain basins, and he washed away all traces before
calling in quick order 911 and then his son.
"You must come straightaway," he said to Peter. He had
found him' at home. "Straightaway." As usual in stress,
lie heard some faint accentuation of the persistent
Hispanic traces in his speech; the accent was always
there, an enduring deficit as he thought of it, like a
limp.
"Something is wrong with Mother," Peter said. Stern had
mentioned nothing like that, but his son's feeling for
these things was sure. "What happened in Chicago?"
When Stern answered that she had not been with him, Peter,
true to his first instincts, began to quarrel.
"How could she not be with you? I spoke to her the morning
you were leaving."
A shot of terrible sympathy for himself tore through
Stern. He was lost, the emotional pathways hopelessly
tangled. Hours later, toward morning, as he was sitting
alone beneath a single light, sipping sherry as he
revisited, reparsed every solemn moment of the day, he
would take in the full significance of Peter's remark. But
that eluded him now. He felt only, as ever, a deep central
impatience with his son, a suffering, suppressed volcanic
force, while somewhere else his heart read the first clues
in what Peter had told him, and a sickening unspeakable
chasm of regret began to open.
"You must come now, Peter. I have no idea precisely what
has occurred. I believe, Peter, that your mother is dead."
His son, a man of thirty, let forth a brief high sound, a
cry full of desolation. "You believe it?"
"Please, Peter. I require your assistance. This is a
terrible moment. Come ahead. You may interrogate me
later."
"For Chrissake, what in the hell is happening there? What
in the hell is this? Where are you?"
"I am home, Peter. I cannot answer your questions now.
Please do as I ask. I cannot attend to this alone." He
hung up the phone abruptly. His hands were trembling and
he leaned once more against the laundry basin. He had
seemed so coldly composed only an instant before. Now some
terrible sore element in him was on the rise. He presumed
he was about to faint. He removed his tie first, then his
jacket. He returned for an instant to the garage door; but
he could not push it open. If he waited, just a moment, it
seemed he would understand.
The house was soon full of people he did not know. The
police came first, in pairs, parking their cars at
haphazard angles in the drive, then the paramedics and the
ambulance. Through the windows Stem saw a gaggle of his
neighbors gathering on the lawn across the way. They
leaned toward the house with the arrival of each vehicle
and spoke among themselves, held behind the line of squad
cars with their revolving beacons. Within the house,
policemen roamed about with their usual regrettable
arrogance. Their walkie-talkies blared with occasional
eruptions of harsh static. They went in and out of the
garage to gawk at the body and talked about events as if
he were not there. They studied the Sterns' rich
possessions with an envy that was disconcertingly
apparent.
The first cop into the garage had lifted his radio to
summon the lieutenant as soon as he emerged.
"She's cooked," the officer told the dispatcher. "Tell him
he better come with masks and gloves." Only then did he
notice Stem lurking in a fashion in the dark hall outside
the laundry room. Abashed, the policeman began at once to
explain. "Looks like that car run all clay. It's on empty
now. Catalytic converter gets hotter than a barbecue six,
seven hundred degrees. You run that engine twelve hours in
a closed space, you're generating real heat. That didn't
do her any good. You the husband?"
He was, said Stem. "Condolences," said the cop. "Terrible
thing."
They waited.
"Do you have any idea, Officer, what occurred?" He did not
know what he thought just now, except that it would be a
kind of treachery to believe the worst too soon. The cop
considered Stern in silence. He was ruddy and thick, and
his weight probably made him look older than he was.
"Keys in the ignition. On position. Garage door's closed."
Stern nodded.
"It dudn't look like any accident to me," the cop said
finally. "You can't be sure till the autopsy. You know,
could be she had a heart attack or somethin right when she
turned the key.
"Maybe it's one of them freak things, too," the cop
said. "Turns the car on and she's thinkin about somethin
else, you know, fixin her hair and makeup, whatever.
Sometimes you never know. Didn't find a note, right?"
A note. Stern had spent the moments awaiting the various
authorities here in this hallway, keeping his stupefied
watch beside the door. The thought of a note, some
communication, provided, against all reason, a surge of
hope.
"You'd just as well stay out of there," the policeman
said, gesturing vaguely behind him.
Stern nodded with the instruction, but after an instant he
took a single step forward.
"Once more," he said.
The policeman waited only a moment before opening the
door.