Sebastian Junger - A Death in Belmont

Leah could tell from her father’s voice that the news was really far worse. She dropped the phone, and she and one of her roommates dashed out to her car and drove down Concord Avenue to Belmont Center and then turned up Pleasant Street to her old neighborhood. There was a police cruiser and an ambulance in front of her house, and neighborhood children watching from the street. Leah ran up to the front door and caught a glimpse of her father through the living room window. He saw her as well and just raised his arms in grief.

Leah’s memories of the next few hours are jumbled. She answered a lot of questions from the police but was in such a state of shock that the exchanges were utterly calm. The police sent her to a neighbor’s house to recover, but later she could not remember whether her father had come with her or not. She had trouble making sense of the fact that she had seen her mother just the previous evening; everything that followed seemed like an insane dream that inevitably had to end. It was not a dream, and it was not going to end. Not only had her mother’s life been truncated, but in some ways her father’s life had as well. He was sixty-eight years old and had been married to Bessie for almost half of that. He was the one who had discovered the body. He was the one who had rushed over to help his wife and then realized that she was dead. Every morning for the rest of his life he would have to greet that image in his mind and then fence it out and somehow keep it out of his thoughts for the rest of the day until it was time to go to sleep again. He would have to do that for another twenty-six years. It was worse than any sentence Smith could get from a judge.

The unsavory details about Smith helped make sense of the crime but also raised other agonizing issues. Mrs. Martin at the Division of Employment Security thought she might have smelled alcohol on his breath. So why did she send him on the job? It was known that Smith had an extensive criminal record. How could Mrs. Martin have failed to warn Leah’s mother that an ex-con was coming to clean her house? Police investigators also thought that Smith might be a drug addict or have an extremely low IQ. Is that why he would commit a murder that he was virtually certain to get caught for? The aspects of Smith’s personality that could explain his impulsive murder inevitably made the crime seem senseless and avoidable.

It was possible, Leah Goldberg realized, that her mother had died simply because Roy Smith had wanted to get high. It seemed hard to believe, but why else would someone kill another person for the fifteen dollars on their nightstand?

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