Jade in Aries Read online

  “Yes. You want to see it?”

  “Please.”

  Weissman produced his key ring again, and unlocked the door. “The light isn’t working,” he said. “Just a second.” He fumbled around inside, and produced a long flashlight. “Here we are,” he said, and switched it on.

  The shed was as I’d imagined it: simple, wooden, unheated, with a concrete floor. Soft-drink cases had been placed face down on this floor and one-by-twelves stretched across them. On these were stored the bolts of cloth, as brightly colored and fantastically designed as anything in the shop itself.

  Weissman said, “Some of the cloth was ruined, of course. Stew’s trying to see if we can collect on the insurance.” He flashed the light upward, and I saw the hole where Cornell had crashed through. He had torn down the light fixture with his passage, and had left a ragged, jagged hole oddly circular in shape, about three feet in diameter. Boards had been laid across the roof to cover the hole and protect the interior from the elements. “We’ll have to get it fixed soon,” Weissman said. “If there’s a thaw, that stuff I put up there won’t keep the water out. But we can’t do anything until we hear from the insurance company.”

  “Why is the cloth here?” I asked. “Do you make the stuff you sell?”

  “Not really. But lately a lot of men”—he used the term without apparent self-consciousness—“have gotten into doing their own clothes. So we sell material, too. And patterns. I do some patterns, and then you can get some commercially, too. Not much yet, but it’s coming in.”

  “I see. You aren’t a partner, are you?”

  “Oh, Lord, no. I get a percentage on patterns they sell, naturally. And when they sell things that were made from my designs, I get a part of that, too. Also, I help out in the store sometimes, I clerk and like that, and Ronnie pays me.”

  “What about Stewart Remington? I understand you live with him?”

  He suddenly blushed, and seemed very flustered. “Well, sort of. Just for a while, you know, until I get used to New York. I haven’t been here very long.”

  Weissman wasn’t a suspect; I wasn’t interested in him. I said, “Remington is Cornell’s lawyer. Did he do the legal work for the store?”

  “Oh, of course. He does all our legal work, the whole crowd. Whatever we might need, contracts or whatever. And he does our taxes, and he’s Jammer’s accountant.” He smiled, over his embarrassment now. “He’s sort of our link to the square world,” he said. “He makes sure we have all our i’s dotted.”

  I would have to talk with Remington again, away from Cornell. I stepped back out of the storage shed, saying, “What about Bruce Maundy?”

  “Bruce?” Weissman shut the door and put the padlock back in place. “He’s all right. He wants to be a playwright. Actually, he’s had a couple of things produced. In coffee houses, you know. Off-Off-Broadway.”

  We went back into Jammer. I said, “Does he live around here, too?”

  “No, in Queens. He lives at home with his mother.”

  “Does he do anything for a living? Besides the playwriting.”

  “Oh, sure. He works for a ticket agency in Manhattan. To be near the theater, you know.” Weissman grinned, poking amiable fun at his friend’s pretensions.

  I remembered the other two names from Cornell’s suspect list. “Leo Ross,” I said. “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s an interior decorator, he and Henry Koberberg have a business together. I understand they’re very successful.”

  Henry Koberberg was the final name on the list. “Do they live together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Around here?”

  “They used to, but they moved to Manhattan last year. Before I came around. I never saw their old place. The new place is really beautiful, it’s like being inside a giant plant.”

  “Where in Manhattan?”

  “In the East Sixties.”

  A very expensive section; Leo Ross and Henry Koberberg must be doing very well indeed. I said, “And is Remington their lawyer, too?”

  “Oh, sure. He takes care of all of us.”

  I wondered if Weissman’s strong sense of community was shared to that degree by the others. Lane and Poumon both seemed, in their varying ways, too self-centered for that. I remembered Remington’s description of Weissman as an “Army brat,” by which I inferred that Jerry Weissman was the son of a professional career Army man. If that was true, Weissman had undoubtedly grown up in a dozen or more different locales around the world, depending on his father’s shifting assignments. That would tend to produce the strong desire for a feeling of community that Weissman was displaying.

  But Weissman was not on the list. There were six others I had to concern myself with. I said, “I’d like to see these people, but I wish it could be casual some way.”

  “There’s going to be a party at our place tomorrow night,” Weissman said. “Why don’t you come?”

  “Your place?”

  “You know, Stew’s place. Stew Remington. Most Saturdays there’s a party at one place or another, and it’s kind of our turn tomorrow night.”

  “I’d be glad to come,” I said.

  A frown touched his face, a sudden doubt. He said, “There won’t be any straight people there, you know.”

  “If it’s a party,” I said, “and not an orgy, I’ll be happy to be there.”

  “Oh, no, just a party. People might go off into another room after a while, something like that, but it won’t be, you know, a lot of naked carrying-on or anything like that.”

  “Then I’ll come.”

  “Fine,” he said, and gave me a sunny smile, and I realized his wide-ranging net had just included me within his community.

  7

  HENRY KOBERBERG

  CARY LANE

  Bruce Maundy

  David Poumon

  Stewart Remington

  Leo Ross

  It was a mark of Cornell’s character that he would bother to make his list of suspects in alphabetic order.

  I stayed up late Friday night, studying the papers I had taken from his desk at Jammer. His pre-astrology steps had been careful and reasonable and perfectly competent detective work. Under the heading “People Jamie would have let into the apartment,” there appeared a list of fourteen names; his starting point. And why not? Even if Dearborn had buzzed to let the murderer in the front door before looking to see who it was—and all he had to do was come to the head of the stairs and look down and through the glass of the door to identify the caller—the killer still had to go up that flight of stairs and through another door. And there had been no indication of forced entry; Jamie Dearborn had agreed to the entrance of his murderer into his home.

  Cornell knew his friend, I had to accept that. If in his judgment Dearborn would not have permitted anyone other than these fourteen people into the apartment, there was no reason for me not to go along with him.

  Gradually, Cornell had whittled the fourteen names to six, and his reasons for eliminating each suspect were methodically written out in detail, a separate sheet of paper for each name. But finally he had come to the point where he could reduce the list by logic and factual research no further, and it was at this point he had turned to astrology.

  In many ways, the papers relating to his astrologic search were the most fascinating of all, and in addition to what I looked upon as astral mumbo-jumbo, they also gave me many facts about the suspects I hadn’t known before: the age of each, for instance, and the place of birth.

  And Jamie Dearborn’s place of birth, as well, Cornell having cast his friend’s horoscope in apparent hopes of finding something in it that would connect to the horoscopes of one of the suspects. I had assumed Dearborn to be a New Yorker, or at least an Easterner, but it turned out he had been born in Omaha, Nebraska. Which undoubtedly explained why there were no relatives of his among the fourteen names on Cornell’s original list.

  Of the six remaining suspects, three were born New Yorkers: Henry Koberberg,
born thirty-six years ago in Manhattan; Bruce Maundy, twenty-six years ago in Queens; and Stewart Remington, forty years ago in Brooklyn. Of the others, Leo Ross was almost a New Yorker, having been born in Nassau County, Long Island, thirty-two years ago, while Cary Lane, twenty-eight, was from Los Angeles, and David Poumon, twenty-four, had originally been a resident of Toronto.

  There were brief character analyses of all of them, and though I supposed they came from horoscopes rather than observation of the individuals, they seemed reasonably accurate in regard to the three I’d already met, describing Lane as “sociable, spontaneous, affectionate, imaginative, naïve, a follower, undisciplined, not interested in material things,” David Poumon as “cerebral, nervous, flexible, abstract, carnal, intellectually curious, a loner, instinctive,” and Stewart Remington as “emotional, visionary, facile, sensual, melancholy, passionate, combative, materialistic, dominating, driven.” I didn’t know whether all those words applied or not, but none of them seemed to me contradictory to my first impressions, so I read the descriptions of the other three with more interest than their source might otherwise have warranted:

  Henry Koberberg: “balanced, intellectual, practical, constrained, susceptible, overly modest, passive, organizer, anti-disciplinarian, emotionally harmonious.”

  Bruce Maundy: “passionate, aggressive, courageous, generous, ambitious, rebellious, voluptuous, inventive, hasty, headstrong, frank, financially prodigal, a gambler.”

  Leo Ross: “charming, diffuse, impulsive, clever, imaginative, expressive, generous, imprecise, superficial, social, sentimental, sexually dominating, financially unconcerned.”

  None of the six said “Murderous.” Unfortunate.

  There was more that Cornell had done, astrologically. Jamie Dearborn, born in April, was an Aries, and Cornell had decided—I couldn’t quite figure out why—that somehow Aries was the key to the murder. He had put down all the suspects’ connections with Aries, in phrases the meaning of which I was very vague about. Henry Koberberg had “Uranus in Aries,” Cary Lane had “Aries ascendant,” Bruce Maundy had “Mercury in Aries,” David Poumon had both “Moon in Aries” and “Mars in Aries,” Stewart Remington had both “Uranus in Aries” and “Venus in Aries,” and Leo Ross had “Venus in Aries.” (Dearborn, besides having been born under the sign of Aries, also had “Mercury in Aries” and “Aries ascendant,” which may have had something to do with Cornell’s theory, I don’t know.)

  Well, we all had our methods for going forward once the logic and the facts ran out. Cornell’s was to go poking in among the stars; mine was to go poking into the suspects’ heads. Who can say which was the more irrational? I would see all six of these people tomorrow night, sometime after nine P.M., in the Brooklyn Heights apartment shared by Stewart Remington and Jerry Weissman.

  It was now after four in the morning. Reluctantly, exhausted, I put the papers back in their envelope and went to bed. Kate moved in her sleep, but didn’t awaken, when I crawled in beside her. The sheets, which had been cold on my side of the bed, gradually warmed. My mind, which had been spinning with thoughts on homosexuality, on astrology, on murder, on psychology, on detection, on belonging, on solitude, gradually slowed. I slept.

  8

  BUT I MET ANOTHER of my suspects sooner than I’d expected.

  I got up late the next day, Saturday, and had breakfast as Kate and Bill were having lunch. Kate asked me about the evening before, naturally, partly because she was interested and partly because she always hopes to fire my own interest, and I told her a somewhat edited version of what I’d seen and the people I’d met, down-playing the homosexual aspects, the fact that these men were mostly living together in pairs, that one of them claimed to have been taking part in homosexual group sex at a public bath during the time of the attack on Cornell, that the homosexuality which gave their community whatever cohesiveness it might have (less, I suspected, than Jerry Weissman believed or wanted to believe) was also probably the central factor behind the motivation for Dearborn’s murder. My story, though edited, did get through to her, as I could tell from some of her questions.

  And in the process of answering those questions I was surprised to find my attention turning away from the subject at hand and focusing instead on Bill, sitting at the table to my left, listening to every word.

  Bill, my only child—William Blair Tobin, that being Kate’s maiden name in the middle—is fifteen now and still a healthy open boy of a style that seems hopelessly old-fashioned. He was on the high-school baseball team, a husky cheerful boy an inch taller than me, and I couldn’t help looking at him from time to time and wondering what I might be—uncontrollably—doing to him. Our household atmosphere was much of the time silent and tense and empty, because of me. Although we had never talked about my having been thrown off the force, Bill and I, he did know the reason for it; for two or three days my multiple betrayals—of wife, of partner, of my uniform, of myself, in a way even of him—had been the joy of the tabloids.

  And what did Bill think of it all? What did he think of the life we three lived in this house? What effect would it all some day have on him?

  I don’t know if I can be proved right or wrong, but I hold to the belief that homosexuality almost always shows a failure of some kind on the part of the parents. The failure of the father to be a man, or of the mother to be a woman, or of both to give their child security and love. Whatever the particular style of the failure, I think it almost always lies in the parents when the son emerges to adulthood as a homosexual.

  Bill? Could that be what I’d done to him? Watching him now, with the memory fresh in my mind of the people I’d met last night, I was suddenly hypersensitive to every nuance of his expression, every slightest move of his hands or head. Was there anything there? His hair and clothing were in the normal style of teen-agers these days—I am not one of those parents who insists on sending his child off to school dressed and shorn as though a time warp existed outside the front door and the child would find himself a classmate of the father—and the differences between today’s youth styles and today’s homosexual styles are frequently more narrow than a man of my generation can readily espy. But what of his manner? Were there any clues?

  But that was foolishness, and in reality I knew it. There was not the slightest sign of homosexuality in Bill, there never had been, and I had no true reason to suppose there ever would be. I was simply adding fronds again to the landscape of my guilt.

  After breakfast I went down to the basement again and to my new project. Bill had gone out somewhere and Kate was upstairs running the vacuum cleaner; I could hear it faintly, just at the threshold of hearing.

  I did about an hour of work, finishing the concrete-block work I’d left off with yesterday, and then starting again to dig. I heard the doorbell clearly, heard the vacuum cleaner shut off, did not hear it start again. I paid no attention, and went on with my work. I would say I was successfully thinking about nothing.

  The basement door opened. Kate called, “Mitch?”

  I straightened, resting the shovel blade into the ground. I work very hard, and whenever I’m interrupted I discover I’m sweating and breathing heavily. But it keeps me from putting on weight; I suppose I should be happy for that. I called, “What is it?”

  “There’s someone here to see you. I told him you were busy, and he insisted. He said to tell you his name is Bruce Maundy, and he won’t go away until he sees you.”

  Bruce Maundy. One of the six, the attempted playwright, currently working for a ticket agency in Manhattan. I remembered him from Cornell’s papers, he was the only one who didn’t live with another man, he lived in Queens—possibly around here somewhere—with his mother.

  What had the astrological profile been? I could only remember a few of the words: “passionate, ambitious, headstrong, a gambler.”

  “I’ll be up in five minutes,” I said.

  “All right.” She shut the door again.

  When working I keep my watch in my p
ants pocket so it won’t get scratched or knocked around. I took it out now, made a mental note of the time, put the watch back in my pocket, and returned to my digging. If Bruce Maundy was, as the stars proclaimed, passionate and ambitious and headstrong and a gambler—and for him to come beard me in my den suggested he was probably all of those things—it would do him good to wait five minutes; give him a chance to cool a bit.

  The next time I checked my watch, seven minutes had passed. I put down the shovel, removed my work gloves, and went upstairs. In the kitchen I changed from sneakers to slippers and went over to the sink to wash up.

  He hadn’t cooled. He came lunging into the kitchen, a stocky strong-looking young man with a wild frizz of brown hair out from his head like an exaggerated parody of the style among blacks called Afro; except it wouldn’t be a conscious parody and he himself might call what he was wearing an Afro. In which case I was wearing a Euro, I suppose.

  On his feet were boots, vaguely cowboyish. He was wearing dungarees that looked to have been artificially faded; they had bell bottoms. He was also wearing a dungaree jacket open over a lime-green turtleneck sport shirt. Two sets of wood-and-stone beads hung around his neck, and on his face were eyeglasses with octagonal yellow lenses and plain wire frames.

  He said, “I want to talk to you!” He sounded belligerent, and desperate.

  I said, “I’ve been working. I am washing up. When I am finished washing up I will come see you in the living room.”

  “I can talk to you right here.”

  “But I can’t listen,” I said, and turned my back on him, and continued to wash my face and hands and arms. He talked; I didn’t listen.

  When he grabbed at my shoulder, I turned and slapped him backhand across the face. “I don’t know what idea you have, Maundy,” I said, “but you’ll behave yourself in my house.”

  “Little tin father figure, is that it?”

  “Before delivering the speech,” I said, “that links me with Hitler, Duvalier and the Pentagon, let me point out that if you have something to say to me—”