Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3 Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  RETURN TO SENDER

  REPULSE MONKEY

  OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE

  Also by Dick Cluster

  About the Author

  Praise for DICK CLUSTER and RETURN TO SENDER:

  “Gripping … Raises the mystery into the realm of literature.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “Cluster’s evident knowledge of the locales (Boston, London, Berlin) and his engagingly offbeat characters mark him as a writer to watch.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “While never forgetting it is a thriller, Return to Sender adroitly works on the primal concerns that make up life’s real intrigues, and in so doing provides thoughtful and satisfying entertainment.”

  —Boston Phoenix

  Return to Sender

  An Alex Glauberman Mystery

  BY

  DICK CLUSTER

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Return to Sender

  Copyright © 1988 by Dick Cluster

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9904543-7-3

  Originally published by Penguin Crime fiction

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble electronic publication: March, 2015

  1. Tough Nut

  Through millions of revolutions, shaft and nut had clung tightly to each other. Now, Alex Glauberman’s wrench and forearm could not persuade them the time had come to let go. With a certain fondness, Alex wiped oil from the shiny, machined Swedish steel. Gently and carefully he attacked both camshaft and fastener with a propane torch. When the steel began to glow a faint, hot red, he shut the torch off. This time the nut spun easily under his wrench.

  Alex drummed with greasy hands on the front bumper. His hands echoed the punk-retro beat pulsing from the radio. “All right now,” the deejay exulted, “and that was the Cramps. It’s exactly two-thirty-five on Friday morning, and I’m the Manic Insomniac, with you till four to put a little fun into your perfect life. You know me, and I know you, so let’s not pretend otherwise. Now I’ll shut up and play music for twelve full minutes. Then we will converse again…”

  “Not me,” said Alex. He left all the Volvo parts spread neatly on the floor, punched his antique Bendix time clock, shed his overalls, and headed for the shower in back of the shop.

  The warm water felt like summer rain, the abrasive soap like the brand-X face in an old Gillette ad. Alex dried himself on the only towel and stepped into a pair of cutoff jeans and a Royal Shakespeare Company T-shirt, a gift from Meredith that had arrived, airmail, only a week after she left. He hit the off switches on radio and lights and the down switch on the garage door mechanism. He let himself out the street door into the warm, quiet, late-September night.

  It would take him half an hour to walk home. Alex wished he got more exercise, somehow. Not for his figure— his metabolism had always kept him thin, even cadaverous. It was more a question of keeping all the moving parts lubricated and fit. He did ski, in the winter, and he kept up with a nine-year-old half the week. He played some first base on a softball team, but this summer he’d been forced to put himself on the disabled list. So he walked home. He wondered who else in the city was awake now, and why. He hoped the walking, and the wondering, would help him sleep.

  * * *

  It took a Dalmane to put Alex out. Then he slept solidly till ten-thirty in the morning, when an electronic beeping busted up his dream of hunting elephants. He’d been attacking the sad, lumbering, gray beasts with a flamethrower. He knew it was his job, and no one else’s, though he couldn’t remember why. He knew it was for their own good, but he didn’t know the why of that either. He only knew the tears coursing down his cheeks, the solid feel of the flamethrower in his workmanlike hands. The roar from the weapon and the roaring of the dying animals flowed together into a tight, unyielding knot that only the intermittent insistence of the alarm could finally pierce.

  Massacring elephants. Mercy killing. Jesus Christ. Alex felt the pillow to make sure it was not really drenched in tears. He might stay up till three and sleep past ten, but his subconscious remained on duty, reminding him of what needed to be done. He slid back into the T-shirt and cutoffs and shuffled to the kitchen.

  A high counter separated cooking space from dining space. On its ash wood top were two bottles of pills, one round and one square. Alex poured himself a glass of orange juice and used two gulps to down three prednisones from the round bottle. These were steroids, high-dose synthetic hormones. They were what kept him up late at night. He put whole wheat bread in the toaster-oven, deposited Cheerios, milk, and banana slices in an orange plastic bowl, and made sure the half-smoked joint was still in the glazed purple bowl his daughter had created in day camp two months ago. By now Maria seemed to have settled in with her new third-grade teacher, which made this as good a time as any for Alex to take a vacation. But which vacation— from whom or to whom, from what or to what? Alex had been around that circle several times the night before. He passed it up, this time, and ate the toast and cereal in the same orderly manner with which he’d handled the flamethrower. He lit the joint, which lasted for six drags.

  Speedy at night, groggy in the morning, then get high. Getting high was supposed to keep the nausea down. Drugs and counter-drugs, winding up, winding down. Stay on this cycle for one week, then lay off it for two. The whole procedure, Alex liked to say, made him into a kind of human yo-yo.

  It was lucky, at least, that he’d always been fond of that particular toy. Once, during his couple of years of college, he’d kept a yo-yo in motion for three hours without rewinding. It had seemed as good for mental and physical discipline as editing and retyping an essay he had already thought through enough. Now he exhaled a last long, smoky breath, scratched about in his curly black beard, and brought himself to uncap the square bottle, the one that had remained untouched. He counted out thirteen chalk-white tablets, laying them on the counter like files of toy soldiers. The soldiers waited in ranks of two, with a lone leader at the front.

  Soldiers about to invade, Alex thought. Crusaders, out to burn the infidels and recapture the Holy Land, and none too picky about who or what they might loot and shoot along the way. He imagined the Manic Insomniac making a wee-hour pitch for the thrill of cyclophosphamide: “Take too much of this, boys and girls, and you can kiss your white cells and your platelets good-bye. Instant immune deficiency. Instant hemophilia. By prescription only. See your druggist today.”

  Alex grimaced and reminded himself that he was only a machine. Last night he had found a chipped tooth on a timing gear. If you let something like that go, more teeth would chip off, and sooner or later the engine would stop running. So you pulled the pair of gears and replaced them. You dealt with the minor dysfunction. You didn’t worry about the rest of the car. If, inside your body, certain cells multiplied out of control, you did your best to remove them before they got seriously in the way. You didn’t worry about the rest of the machine. To prove that this strategy was working, Alex felt the flesh below his right ear. He could not feel any more tumor there. He slid off the stool and ran cold water into a tall glass, and then he swallowed the baker’s-dozen pills. Two at a time, and one at the end.

  Twice, when he felt a gag coming on, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose while clamping his jaw shut with his free hand. When all the tablets rested safely in his stomach, he rested his head in his arms until the sensation of draining blood was gone. Then he r
olled another joint, took two drags, replaced it in the little purple bowl, and went back to bed. Propped against the pillows, he dialed Kim.

  “It’s Alex,” he said. “I got up, I did my drugs. I’m going to sleep some more, and write Meredith, and stay away from the shop until the buzz hits tonight. Do you want to go to an early movie?”

  “Don’t you want to talk before you write?” Kim asked. Her tone was helpful but not really pressing. Alex imagined her in patched jeans and a smeared work shirt, paintbrush in hand, smothering her irritation at being interrupted.

  “No. I want to go to a movie after I write.”

  “Okay, Alex,” said Kim cheerily. “Do you want to be fed or anything? Or I’m available to stay over, if you want company. Maria’s room is up for grabs, right?”

  “No, thanks, Kim. I’m doing okay so far. Can I call you like sixish?”

  “Okay. You’re the boss. If I’m not quite home, the machine will be on. Or Sally will be here.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Yeah. See you.”

  The Boss. It occurred to Alex that, in the dream, he had held the flamethrower very much the way, on the cover of his retrospective album, Bruce Springsteen stood and handled his guitar. That was not, however, the reason why this week he was the boss.

  Any other week, Kim would not have let him off so easily. As matchmaker, she had a proprietary interest in his relationship with Meredith. She had fixed them up in the winter, under the guise of recommending a mechanic when Meredith’s fuel pump gave up the ghost on a five-degree morn. Meredith had promised that if her car purred like a kitten when she turned the key, she would take the mechanic to dinner— an offer no one had made before or since.

  Now, three seasons later, Meredith was away in England, their first lengthy separation. They’d planned for Alex to come to London to meet her— and her family, and her friends. But just now Alex did not want to go on that sort of pilgrimage. What he felt was, he supposed, a version of the old cancer-patient cliché: what would you do if you were told you had only six months to live? Alex was confident, almost always, that he had many more months than that. Yet the kind of pilgrimage he wished for, deep down inside, was the kind that went with that x-months-to-live loosening of life’s regular ties. It was an adolescent, knight-errant fantasy, he told himself severely. Springsteen again: No Retreat and No Surrender.

  But there it was, and the visit to Meredith just did not fit. He knew that Kim could not be happy about his canceling the trip. And Kim was not normally reticent about her views. During his weeks of medication, though, what Alex said went. That was one of the luxuries that came with his condition. So, left to his own devices, he hung the receiver on the phone and shoved the phone on the floor. Within minutes, he was asleep. The crusaders did their killing without bothering their host. The flaming elephants did not come back.

  2. Regulations

  The match seethed before going out. Angry bubbles hissed on its short, round stem. Like lava, cooling on contact with Alex’s rapid explosion of breath.

  Seethed? Alex shook his head and curled thin lips at the corners. He blew quickly on his singed fingertips. The matches were foreign, made of some woody, quick-burning substance, coated with wax to slow the flame. That was why they bubbled, not because they were angry. Alex took another deep breath of the smoky atmosphere inside the car, then crossed the gritty street and slid into the stale, air-conditioned ambience of the little post office in Davis Square.

  The wall clock said he’d made it ten minutes before closing. The nausea that had peeked around corners while he sat at his desk, writing Meredith, had gone for a while. First he had tried fighting it with meditation, letting thoughts and sensations swim by like graceful, placid fish, neither shutting them out nor holding on to them. Snorkeling among them, he had thought, but then realized that was paying attention to the fish, which was wrong.

  Alex was getting better at meditation, with practice, but he still had a long way to go. Once he reached the correct state, he was supposed to visualize his medications as friendly creatures, cute little Pac-Men assiduously gobbling up the haywire cells. Alex had no objection to this procedure. But for now, for relief from the nausea, he depended on the dope. Fighting fire with fire, he told himself. An eye for an eye, a drug for a drug. As a result, he now felt pleasantly stoned. He felt giddy and well disposed toward the world, though the world did seem to be something of a spectator sport.

  Alex took his place in one of the two lines. He stood behind a teenage girl in a plaid parochial-school skirt. He named her Donna Marie. She looked at her watch, scuffed her loafers on the floor, and leaned out to peer at whatever transaction was stalling the line. She fingered a sky-blue envelope, squarish, addressed in a neat round hand. A love letter, Alex thought. A nice, simple one, unlike his own.

  At the head of the other line, a small woman filled out forms in the cramped counter space left by a big box. She wore a sweater despite the lingering summer heat. Snatches of her conversation with the clerk drifted back— “return receipt, catalog sale, I knew this would happen, my sister said…”

  Alex wanted to know what rejected, unsatisfactory item lay inside the box. The clerk lifted the package easily to the scale with one hand. Alex closed his eyes, visualizing masses of Styrofoam peanuts protecting a ghastly display of artificial flowers, or a Scandinavian-style wooden light fixture imported from Taiwan. He could ask, he supposed, but then he would have to take on the burden of the woman’s complaint. He realized suddenly that, aside from Kim on the phone, he’d talked to no one for the past twenty-four hours. He fingered his own letter, sealed tight against his urge to reread, to edit, to try to explain his decision one more time.

  Yes, he had tried to put on paper, I meant what I said on the phone. I am not getting on tomorrow’s plane. I am not coming to visit, not now. Because, because I’ve been working hard and I want my time: a break from the chemicals, a break from the job, a break from my daughter— and I don’t want to replace them with you. Let’s spend two weeks in London when this is all over, when you can be my guide and not my nurse. Because I don’t want you to be my nurse— or, maybe, because I do. Because I don’t want to meet your father— not now, not yet. Very much love and equally much stubbornness. See you in November, here, with open arms. Love again, Alex.

  It was not the kind of message Meredith would like: it was not logical, nor did it, most likely, show much love or much trust. It did not say whether, or how, his feelings about her had changed in the month they had been apart. But Alex felt, or hoped, that the issue had to do with him, not with her or with them. He wanted just now to be free to follow his own fancies, to find his own fate, without having to demonstrate how these were good for him, without having to explain them to anyone. He hoped that was the kind of message Meredith could accept.

  A tentative cough from behind reminded him he was not alone. He opened his eyes to see that a space had opened between himself and Donna Marie. The cough behind him was repeated, less tentatively. He turned, a spectator again, to inspect a balding man in a brown business suit.

  The man’s suit was soft, almost fuzzy, a subtle pattern of dark brown on light. An expensive suit, a downtown suit, not quite right for Davis Square. The man himself was shorter than Alex, maybe five-ten, neither fat nor thin. He had a pointed chin, sad eyes, and wide, bloodless lips. Sweat glistened on a high, round forehead. It wasn’t healthy, outdoor, Marlboro Man sweat. It was cold sweat, giving a sickly cast to the pale skin.

  “Oh, sorry,” Alex said, realizing he was staring. “You look like you’re in a hurry. Do you want to go first?”

  The man drew the translucent lips back around the bony jaw. Despite his agitation, his smile was somehow superior— lecturing, professional, something like that. An expensive, downtown sort of smile that irritated Alex. Here in the Davis Square post office, it aroused his curiosity as well.

  “Thank you, young man.”

  The voic
e was softer than Alex had expected. The man’s eyes flickered over his. It wasn’t what people called a flicker of hope, Alex thought. A flicker of appreciation, perhaps. If “young man” had been intended as a compliment, Alex didn’t take it that way. Almost forty, he was mourning the time when being considered young had been a matter of right. He dropped his eyes to the floor and noticed that the creases of the man’s pants landed just at his shoelaces. It had been a long while since Alex had bought a suit, and he wondered whether this was the fashionable length. It used to be, he thought, that the crease was supposed to buckle. The shoes were old-fashioned wingtip dress shoes. The swirls of holes punched into the leather reminded Alex of his father, who had worn shoes like that to funerals, or to the theater. Church-going shoes, only his father had not been one for going to shul.

  The man passed by Alex to take his place behind Donna Marie. He held a flat corrugated box, about the size of a ream of paper, under his arm. At the head of the other line, the small, unsatisfied woman turned and left. A younger woman, tall and better dressed, dropped a heap of bound bundles of envelopes on the counter. She said, “Another day, Sal.”

  Sal was beefy, white, middle-aged. He left his uniform shirt open at the collar. He said, “Yeah, another dollar.” At the head of Alex’s line, Donna Marie licked a stamp, left her letter, and hurried out. The clerk who had sold her the stamp, a light-skinned black man with a pencil mustache and a tightly knotted government-issue tie, said mechanically, “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Yes, you can,” began the man in the soft, expensive suit. “I have an overseas package, for Germany. I’d like it to go by registered mail.”

  Most overseas packages from Somerville, so far as Alex had noticed, went to relatives in the old country— to Italy, Portugal, Greece, sometimes Haiti. This man spoke with a trace of New York, an accent familiar, even Jewish perhaps. A package to Germany… why? Alex leaned to the side to check the clerk’s reaction. The clerk frowned and pointed at a rack full of forms on the counter by the window. “Fill out one of those,” he said. He looked pointedly at the clock on the side wall, hands nearing five o’clock.