It was the busiest time of year for me, thank god, because I’d just been laid off at the company and I needed the money. Fortunately, as an accountant, I could work freelance at home, in my pajamas, and that’s what I did, preparing people’s taxes for less than they’d charge at H.R. Block and slightly more than they'd spend purchasing a download of Turbo Tax, depending, of course, on the complexity of the return.
Anyway, there was a plumber who lived in the same apartment block as I did. Up to now, I’d been working nine-to-five, so I’d only see him now and then. Now, I saw him regularly. Usually, it was when we were both throwing out our trash in the big dumpsters at the back of the parking lot. We’d nod to one another, then pause a moment, expectantly, as if we had something to say, but we didn’t, and after another moment of awkward silence, we went back to our respective hovels inside the Soviet-style block buildings until next time when the whole gray pantomime would begin again.
I have to say that I became somewhat fixated on this plumber and these frustrating interactions. Working at home, they served the basis of the majority of my interactions with people. An unacknowledged depression had been working on me, eroding my social confidence, leaving me fairly well isolated from friends and family. My romantic life had been in a transitional phase even before I’d been laid off.
But back to the plumber. He was a tall, well-built man with a shock of black hair and a square jaw, blue-shadowed, even when freshly shaved. He looked like an actor playing the part of a plumber. At all hours of the day and night, I’d watch him from the desk where I worked, positioned by the only window in my apartment with anything like a panoramic view. He’d climb into his truck with a heavy-looking box of tools and head off, presumably to fix someone’s pipes. A few hours later, he’d return.
One afternoon I saw him being led away in handcuffs by a couple of plainclothes detectives. In the laundry room the next day I asked one of my neighbors if she knew what had happened. “He was arrested for murder,” she said, to the thump of her kid’s sneakers in the dryer.
Apparently three women had been murdered in separate incidents over the last three months in our county. It was all over the news. Hadn’t I been following the story? No. Somehow I’d missed hearing a word about it.
“Do you think he really did it?” I asked, having a hard time believing it. The man looked no more like a serial killer than he did a plumber. What he looked like was an actor who could be playing a serial killer pretending to be a plumber.
“Who knows,” the woman shrugged. “If he didn’t do it, he probably did something else. Otherwise, why would they have arrested him?”
Three days later, the plumber was back, throwing out trash at the dumpster. We nodded at each other, as usual. I didn’t ask him about his arrest but obviously he wasn’t the serial killer they were looking for—or they just didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.
We walked back to our separate apartments without exchanging anything but our usual nods.
Over the next two months I got into a minor fender-bender in the parking lot at the SaveMore! supermarket, the Russians started dropping bombs in the middle east, and I had to take my computer to a certified Apple dealer because of a problem with my hard drive. I slipped half-consciously into a tepid affair with a married guy whose taxes I did and they caught the serial killer. It wasn’t the plumber, who eventually I had my first real conversation with at the dumpster.
“Hey,” he said.
“How’s it going,” I said.
But by then, the summer was over, and the sharp chill of autumn was in the air.
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