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2001-06-17 | 5:38 p.m.

[continued from previous entry]

I knew without knowing it that those blue gloves had to be forensic in some way. Even more conclusively, I watched the cop dab something on his upper lip, under his nostrils. I didn't tell the kids what I was thinking as I drove them to school, but I felt certain we had seen the last of Mr. Bartkowski.

Back on my street, Mr. Bartkowski's house was bustling with activity. Two more patrol cars were parked in the driveway, and I could see the shapes of men moving behind the curtains, backlit by incandescent living room light at 9 o'clock in the morning. The front door stood wide open. I took a few steps across my lawn, hesitantly. The cop I had spoken to before noticed me, drew himself away from the group he was talking to, and approached me.

"Doesn't look good," I murmured.

"The resident has passed away," he confirmed with a kind of respectful formality. "He appears to have been deceased for approximately 10 days to two weeks." I made a face, and he confirmed, "It's kind of a mess in there." He told me Mr. Bartkowski had died in bed, in his long johns, and this made me feel a little better; to know that he had not fallen and lain in a crumpled heap and waited for the end that way.

A professor once warned me, paraphrasing Proust, to be wary of people who are too sympathetic, who cry too easily over the misfortunes of others, because they are really crying for themselves. I was as shocked as if he had accused me of this to my face. I think of his words every time it happens, as I did now.

"I feel bad," I sniffled. "I ought to have noticed sooner."

The cop reassured me that I had done the right thing by calling at all. He tried to convince me, as delicately as he could, that without our intervention the situation would have gone unchecked indefinitely, leading to an even smellier outcome. He got more information from me about the grandson, Rick, whose name I couldn't remember, and his wife, Connie, whose name I could. I also mentioned that there was a cat, or had been at least, and asked him to leave some food out for it.

"At least he got to die at home," the cop and I agreed. Mr. Bartkowski was always independent, and that seemed like the way he would have wanted to go.

Just then Connie pulled up my street going about 70 miles an hour. She parked her old 5.0 in front of my house and stormed up the drive, looking comically self-important. I like her all right, but she has every known characteristic of a speed freak, including missing teeth, and she can almost literally talk your ear off. Or maybe it's just that once she has initiated a conversation, you want to remove your ear and give it to her to use at her leisure while you return to your regularly scheduled life. But today she was uncharacteristically quiet. As she passed me, I said, "I gave them your name---I didn't know anyone else to call." She had told me more than once that they wanted nothing to do with the old man. Couldn't stand him. Said he was "scary." She said, "Is he dead then?" and I nodded very slightly. Here I was thinking it must be an inconvenience to her to be called away from work, when it was the old man's other family that would probably benefit from his death. But I was wrong about that.

Within a day or so after Mr. Bartkowski's remains were removed, Rick and Connie and their friends were at the house, removing things and carting them away in their vintage truck. Where was the other family, I wondered? One day Rick approached me, and we had an awkward discussion. He thanked me for calling the police, and I apologized for not being more observant, and then he tried to get me to agree that Mr. Bartkowski had been an angry and impossible old man, which I politely declined to do, not wishing to speak ill of the dead. Eventually, we were able to agree that he had been a Real Character. Rick told me he had not been able to find Blackie, but afterward I saw Blackie on the porch rail, and started leaving out open cans of tuna fish on Mr. Bartkowski's back steps. I think Blackie got at least one can, though raccoons may have gotten all the others. One day, an older woman and man appeared on the front steps with a bouquet of flowers, to thank me for noticing Mr. Bartkowski's absence, but I didn't catch who they were. I think it might have been Rick's mother, though I had been led to believe she was dying of terminal cancer or something. Of course, there was nothing to indicate that the woman on my porch that day wasn't dying, I just couldn't say for sure.

Day after day, the exodus continued. One day Rick mentioned he was going to have his friend, Mitchell, stay in the house, to keep an eye on it. I realized that this was the same Mitchell my sister had told me about, a former heroin junkie who for a while took on maintenance duties around their building; someone she remembered from some place on the distant fringes of the afghan of her long and checkered past. He had asked once about her television and she warned him, only half in jest, not to even think about stealing it. "Awww, Diane," he had replied, "I never stole from my friends."

She gritted her teeth. "We're NOT friends!"

So Mitchell moved in next door. I was aware of him coming and going, but that was about it. Once there was a fracas, and I called the police, because I heard a young woman's voice shouting "Let me go! Let me go!" I didn't know where it was coming from. Apparently there were some young people over there playing what my sister likes to call "grab-ass." I felt a little sheepish about it, but I didn't really care. It's not as if I call the police all the time. After that, I never heard anything.

I became aware of high school students loitering around Mr. Bartkowski's back fence. When I opened my kitchen window noisily, they dispersed. I saw Rick shortly thereafter and he confirmed that kids had been breaking into the place and setting the remaining furniture on fire with lighters. He invited me in to see the damage and I jumped at the chance to tour the house. I'd only ever been in the kitchen before. Mr. Bartkowski had once asked us to help pull out a small gasket that had fallen into his disposal. One at a time, we stuck our hands down there and rooted around, but couldn't find a thing. Mr. Bartkowski said he was sure it was still in there. He seemed to doubt the honesty of our efforts, which made me try that much harder to locate something, anything, in the drain. But there was nothing except a thin film of slime covering the disposal parts. When I finally tried to pull out my hand, it got stuck, but it came free with a good tug. Some weeks hence, Mr. Bartkowski had happily reported finding the gasket in one of the many empty cat food cans he kept lined up along his sink.

The rest of the house was, dare I say it, a shitheap. Most of it, I assumed, was due to Mr. Bartkowski's poor housekeeping, but I wasn't sure why Rick and his minions hadn't done more to clean it up. I don't think Rick himself could have explained it; it simply seemed beyond him. He appeared to think it was something the realtors should take care of. He had told me once before that the police had left behind Mr. Bartkowski's mattress of doom, which did not surprise me, and he had pulled it out of the house into the backyard. (Bonnie had also let slip, without any prompting from me, that Mr. Bartkowski's blood had all pooled on one side of his body, given half his face a deep purplish cast, and that there were maggots.) The carpets were scored with spills and grease marks, which made sense, given that Mr. Bartkowski's favorite occupation had been repairing and maintaining his van. Duff told me he once worked as a machinist on Mare Island. The whole place just seemed shabby and badly used, not to mention tiny compared to our place. So I was shocked when Rick told me it had appraised for $260,000, as is.

"You don't think you can actually get that, do you?" I said, not very diplomatically.

In the end they did get $235,000 for the place. Rick and Connie got $70,000 of it for themselves. I still find it unbelievable. The sale price is half again what our house sold for less than three years ago. Proof that the California real estate market is in a class of its own, and that barring economic crisis, no house on our street will ever again sell for under $200K. Not that I care very much, since Duff's parents own our house, and we rent it from them.

So it's always been a bit of a freak show over there. First Mr. Bartkowski himself, of whom none of our other neighbors had anything kind to say, though I liked him well enough. He once told me that his parents had been the victims of pogroms in Russia. Then he asked me if I knew what a "pogrom" was, and he seemed relieved when I said I did. Then Rick and Connie, strange yet utterly familiar, acquaintances for life, and then quiet but tainted Mitchell. From a distance I like them all. None ever bothered me in the slightest. I was actually sorry to hear the house had sold. Next to them, we bear a stronger resemblance to the Nelsons than the Addamses, and that's the way I like it. Now here comes a bouncy realtor promising me the unknown and telling me I'm going to like it. Normal people. I'm not so sure. They've been known to knock on your door when you least expect it, never anticipating that you will have to run around to find appropriate clothes to put on just to answer it. They want you to go in with them on fences, never expecting that you have no money set aside for such necessary extravagances. They like to chat, never understanding that optimally, your schedule is budgeted to within an inch of its life. They tend to have all their teeth, and whatever turbulences plague them are carried on the inside, where I can't see them. How can I help but worry?

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