Jade in Aries Page 11

“I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You have no curiosity.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you anyway,” he said. “James Dearborn was murdered by someone he picked up and took home in order to engage in unnatural acts with him. Ronald Cornell tried to kill himself out of grief over his boy friend’s death. That’s what happened.”

  He said it forcefully; that either meant he believed it himself or he insisted that I believe it. I said nothing.

  He said, “Now that you have no curiosity any more, you don’t have any reason to hang around these faggots any more. Do you follow me, Mr. Tobin?”

  “I follow you,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. He took my license. and registration from his pocket and read them again, slowly. Finally, extending them toward me, he said, “I can always reach you if I need you, isn’t that right, Mr. Tobin?”

  “That’s right,” I said. I took the two forms from him.

  He nodded heavily at me, and turned away. As he walked back through the snow toward his car, I tucked my license and registration in my coat pocket, and opened my car door. Glancing at Manzoni’s car, I saw that his back-seat passenger had twisted around and was looking out the rear window at me, his expression intense.

  It was Bruce Maundy.

  15

  THE PARTY WAS STILL going on, though more quietly. I could barely hear it from the sidewalk, and it took only one ring to be let in.

  It was Remington himself who came out this time, and from his expression as he came down the corridor to open the outer door he wasn’t all that happy to see me back again. When he opened the door and I stepped inside I could tell why: the slight scent of marijuana again.

  I said, “So I did put a crimp in your party, after all. Did you really think you had to hide the pot till I left?”

  “No one wanted to be at more of a disadvantage than necessary,” he said. “Is that why you came back, to see if we were doing anything different?”

  “No. I came back to talk to you. Seriously, but briefly.”

  “Privately?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go upstairs.”

  We didn’t have to go into the first floor of the apartment, there was a front flight of stairs to take instead. We went up, and Remington led the way down the hall, past the entrance from the rear stairs, and on the familiar route from there to the library.

  Henry Koberberg was still in there, alone, reading. He looked up when we walked in, and correctly read displeasure in Stewart Remington’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “did you want this for a conference?” He started to get up.

  “That’s all right,” I said, closing the door. “I’d like you here, too. I think between you, you two know most of what there is to know about my list of suspects.”

  “We both appear on it,” Remington reminded me.

  “That complicates things,” I admitted, “but doesn’t make them impossible. Tell me about Bruce Maundy.”

  Remington said, “Why?”

  “Tell me first.”

  Remington raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Rough trade,” he said, “with an éclair center.”

  I turned to Koberberg. “Do you agree?”

  “Approximately. Bruce has an unfortunately abrasive personality.”

  “He lives at home with his mother? That makes him the only one on my list who isn’t in some sort of on-going living relationship with another man. Does he try to hide the fact of his homosexuality at home?”

  Remington laughed for an answer, and Koberberg said, “Rabidly. He believes that his mother knows nothing, and he is violent that things should stay that way.”

  “You say he believes it, about his mother. You think she knows?”

  “I’ve never met the lady. I have no idea how perceptive or intelligent she is.”

  Remington said, “He probably has it well covered. He lives in two separate worlds, with bulkheads in between, that’s all. There are probably half a dozen downstairs like that. No one at home knows, no one at work, no one in the neighborhood. One of them downstairs is married.” He turned to Koberberg. “You know—Carl.”

  “You needn’t mention names,” Koberberg said.

  “In front of Tobin?”

  “Any time. An attorney should know better.”

  “The things about which I should know better,” Remington said in satisfaction, “are legion.”

  I said, “What was Maundy’s relationship with Dearborn?”

  Remington said, “They were an item once, long ago. Before Ronnie.”

  “Why did it end?”

  Remington shrugged elaborately. “Why do all Gardens of Eden end? Some sort of snake appeared, I should think.”

  “You mean Cornell took Dearborn away from him?”

  Sounding exasperated with Remington, Koberberg snapped, “Not at all. That was over first.”

  “They fought, I believe,” Remington said. “When one is a black man, and one is in a love affair with a white man, the normal slights and abrasions of love become terribly intensified. Henry could tell you about that.”

  Koberberg looked offended, as though he would close up entirely and have nothing more to do with the conversation.

  I said, “Let’s stick to Dearborn and Maundy. What kind of trouble did they have?”

  Remington said, “Jamie was not a boy to hide his light under a bushel. But then, he wouldn’t be a model otherwise, would he? Jamie loved to be paraded on the arm of his sweetheart; a charming and innocent desire, really. But with Bruce, of course, all had to be secrecy. They couldn’t live together, Jamie couldn’t visit at Bruce’s home, couldn’t even phone him. Naturally, he would after a while begin to wonder if it was all because of Bruce’s desire for secrecy, or perhaps just a little bit because of Jamie’s skin color.”

  I said, “Is this a guess on your part, or do you know?”

  “I know.” His rather heavy-lidded face expressed nostalgic pleasure. He said, “When things were bad between them, Jamie would come to the baths. And there I would be, the fat old spider in the middle of my web. Two or three times he cried on my shoulder, so to speak.”

  “The break was violent?”

  Remington shrugged, smiling. “Everything with Bruce is violent.”

  Koberberg said, “Shouting only. If you mean physical violence, there was none.”

  “Only,” Remington said, “because Bruce knew just how vain dear Jamie was. To touch Jamie’s body in anger would have been to court disaster. Jamie was delicate, but he could be as nasty as a cat if he wanted.”

  Koberberg said, “In any case, it’s all ancient history. It was all over four years ago.”

  “Was there anyone else for Dearborn between Maundy and Cornell?”

  “No,” Koberberg said. “Ronnie had been talking about starting a boutique for a long while, but he didn’t have enough capital by himself, and he really needed a partner with more flair than he had.”

  “You should have seen the way he dressed in those days,” Remington added.

  I nodded; I could guess.

  Koberberg said, “I believe Ronnie and Jamie started out as a business partnership, and the other thing happened afterward.”

  “Propinquity,” Remington said lovingly, as though it were a dirty word he’d just looked up in the dictionary. I didn’t know how much to believe this leering, oversexed surface of his, it didn’t really go with the kind of mind that would be a whole tribe’s legal and financial adviser. So it was a mask; but why that particular mask, and what was under it other than the normal shrewdness and sound business sense of the normal businessman?

  I said to Koberberg, “You say it was all over with Maundy a long time ago. It hasn’t come back to life at all since?”

  “I’m sure not,” Koberberg said.

  “If it had,” Remington said, “I’m sure word would have gotten around.”

  “Who is Maundy connected with now?”

  “No one that I know of,” Re
mington said. “I see him at the baths from time to time. Only to wave to, I assure you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why only to wave to?”

  “I prefer a more submissive type,” he said delicately and smiled.

  Koberberg said, “Bruce doesn’t have long affairs, usually. Because of his personality, I suppose, partly. And because he has to keep everything so secret.”

  “There’s no one you can think of since Dearborn?”

  “Well—David,” Koberberg said, and glanced at Remington. “David Poumon was going around with Bruce for a while, wasn’t he?”

  “Just for a month or two,” Remington said dismissingly. “It wasn’t in the stars.”

  I said, “What was the relationship between Maundy and Dearborn most recently?”

  “They were friends,” Koberberg said.

  “All passion spent,” Remington added. “Long, long after the divorce, you might say.”

  Koberberg said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Not at all.”

  He asked me, “Why this concentration on Bruce? Do you have some specific reason for thinking it was him?”

  “He came to my house this morning to threaten me and warn me not to poke into his affairs. When he saw me at the party tonight he left and went to Detective Manzoni to tell him what I was doing. Manzoni just had a talk with me.”

  Koberberg said, “Bruce did that? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Security,” Remington commented. “He’s petrified out of his little wits that you’ll go asking his mama questions. He talked to me this afternoon, too, wanted to know what we could do to get rid of you. I suggested he sneak up behind you in the dark with a knife. He wasn’t amused.”

  “I’m not either,” I said. “I wish you’d told me before.”

  “I didn’t think his jitters were important.”

  “Important enough to make trouble for me with Manzoni,” I pointed out. “Is there anything else unimportant you’re holding back?”

  Remington bridled a bit, but then relaxed and nodded. “You’re right to be upset,” he said. “That was an error of judgment on my part. I frankly haven’t been thinking of us as colleagues in this matter, but I suppose I should.”

  “You should,” I said. “What influence have you with Maundy?”

  “When he is in a mood to be reasonable, quite a bit, actually. When he is in a mood to be unreasonable, wise men don’t answer the phone.”

  “Can you get him to stop obstructing me?”

  “I can try.”

  “You can point out that if I’m left alone, I won’t cause him embarrassment at home, but that if he tries to interfere with me any more, I’ll go straight to his house and have a talk with his mother.”

  Remington gave me a piercing look. “That’s not a good bluff,” he said, “unless you’d do it.”

  “I’d do it.”

  “In that case, it’s excellent.”

  “One thing more,” I said, turning to Koberberg. “Everyone I’ve talked to has had nothing but good things to say about Jamie Dearborn. Except you. Why is that?”

  “I am truthful,” he said. “Humans generally avoid being unkind about the dead, which is to say, truthful about them. I am truthful.”

  “And the truth about Dearborn?”

  “I had a private nickname for him,” he said. “I called him Jamie the Jade.”

  “What did that mean?”

  “If you go downstairs,” he said, “you will see any number of thin young things with heavy eye make-up, trying to look like depraved actresses of the silent era. Fake decadence is very modern right now.”

  “And that was Dearborn?”

  “Not at all. Jamie was truly decadent, he was jaded and bored. The truth is, Bruce Maundy is a nasty brute, and Jamie loved being mistreated by him. Not in any physically violent way that would show or affect his good looks, Stew was right about that, but in subtler ways.”

  “He was a masochist?”

  “He was everything. He retired to Ronnie, you know. He was destroying himself, and everyone knew it, and finally he knew it, too. That was why he broke with Bruce. And that was why he went with Ronnie. The way old men sometimes will marry their nurse.”

  I said, “But from time to time he’d revert to his old ways?”

  “Yes.”

  “With whom?”

  “With anyone. Though he preferred to seduce people who were already involved with someone else.”

  “The equivalent,” Remington said, “of the unfaithful wife who sleeps only with married men.”

  “Anyone on my list?” I guessed that Koberberg’s partner, Leo Ross, would be one of them.

  But the name that Koberberg said, reluctantly, was, “Cary Lane.”

  That surprised me. Lane’s face was unreliable, of course, but I’d thought of him as more innocent than that. I said, “Are you sure?”

  “It’s common knowledge.”

  Remington said, “David and Ronnie are about the only ones in the world who don’t know.”

  It was a very narrow world he was talking about there, but I didn’t pursue the point. I said, “You’re sure David Poumon doesn’t know?”

  “David doesn’t know,” Koberberg said flatly. “Cary has been very careful; he cares about David very much. And even if David did know, he wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “And if he killed anyone,” Remington said, “it would be Cary, not Jamie. Besides, he doesn’t know, I’m sure of it.”

  The sexual and emotional ties among these people, which had seemed so simple at first, were starting to complicate themselves. Living in a sub-culture within the normal world, they were more limited for actors from whom to cast the roles in their lives. The same individuals had to play a variety of parts in each other’s histories; it became very incestuous after a while.

  And which of these threads that I was just beginning to find the ends of would lead me to the killer?

  I said, “Then Dearborn was the equivalent of the suburban sleep-around wife, is that it? Slept with the husbands of all her friends.”

  “As many as possible,” Remington said dryly.

  “Anyone outside my list?”

  “God knows,” Remington said. “When Ronnie would go off on a trip, Jamie might do just anything.”

  All at once, everything was turning inside out. I said, “You mean, he might go pick up a stranger somewhere?”

  “He could very well,” Koberberg said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “But not take him home,” Remington said. “Jamie never did do that.”

  “You can’t say that for sure,” Koberberg said to him. “Besides, there’s always a first time.”

  For a few seconds I didn’t know what to say next. I had to get used to this idea first, because all of a sudden Manzoni’s theory of the Changeable Sailor was a possibility! Cornell had been operating on the false premise that his lover was faithful. But now everything was turned completely around.

  Still, did the Changeable Sailor theory explain the attempt on Cornell’s life?

  Unless that was false, too. Unless Cornell really had tried to kill himself, in a state of depression. And was either lying about it, in a panicky attempt to stay out of a mental institution, or had blocked his memory of the truth. It wouldn’t be the first time an attempted suicide would have no memory afterward of the attempt.

  No, I didn’t believe it, not this time. My initial reasoning, when I’d first seen the item in the newspaper, was still valid. And Cornell wouldn’t have fallen into despair, if he ever would at all, until after he’d finished his astrology research, which he’d apparently barely begun before being hit on the head and thrown off the roof.

  Two killers? The Changeable Sailor killed Dearborn, and someone else tried to kill Cornell. Coincidence? Something resulting out of the first death?

  I couldn’t do it now, standing here. I had to go away and think
things out. I said, “Thank you for talking to me. I’ll probably see you both again.”

  “Any time,” Koberberg said, and Remington said, “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  We left the library, and neither of us spoke until we’d reached the first floor. Then I said, “I take it Leo Ross was another of Dearborn’s conquests.”

  “Of course.”

  “And Ross was less efficient at hiding it from Koberberg than Cary Lane was at hiding it from Poumon.”

  “Much less. Leo is always inefficient that way. It’s part of their relationship, you know.”

  “Yes. Don’t forget to call Maundy.”

  “I won’t.”

  The aroma of marijuana was stronger than before. “Good night,” I said.

  “Every night is a good night,” he said, and smiled me out.

  16

  CORNELL HAD A VISITOR. Cary Lane was sitting in a chair next to the bed, and the bed, the tray, Lane’s lap and the floor were covered with open books and sheets of paper. “Jamie was an Aries, too,” Lane was saying.

  An Aries? And a Jade, according to Koberberg. Faithful, according to Cornell. Faithless, according to Remington and Koberberg, and faithless with this guileless blond young man sitting here in eager participation next to the cuckold.

  Was the betrayed member of a homosexual liaison a cuckold?

  “But Mars in Aries doesn’t lead to compatibility,” Cornell said. “Particularly with Mars in conjunction with Venus, and David has it right there.” He poked at a sheet of paper.

  I said, “Am I interrupting?” It was eleven o’clock, Sunday morning. I hadn’t had enough sleep, and I wasn’t yet sure what I thought of last night’s revelations.

  Cornell looked at me with pleasure and hope. “Mr. Tobin! Come in, come in!”

  Lane said, “Here, I’ll clear off the other chair.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’d rather stand.”

  “We’re making progress,” Cornell said excitedly.

  Lane was more cautious. “Not really,” he said. “We still don’t know who the murderer is.”

  “But we’re narrowing it,” Cornell said. “We eliminated two.” His leg was still up at an angle, but his arms were free to move and the bed was cranked up to a half-sitting position. He was excited to the point where he’d forgotten his physical and legal condition.