Jade in Aries Read online

  “You’re goddam right I have something to say!”

  “—you’ve chosen,” I finished, “the worst possible way to get me to listen.”

  “I don’t like to be accused,” he said, and jabbed himself in the chest with his thumb. “I don’t like people prying into my life. I don’t like it when the cops do it even with a warrant, and I sure as hell don’t like it when some stumblebum like you does it.”

  “Does what?”

  “Don’t crap with me,” he said. “I don’t take hype, I really don’t. That jerk Cornell gave you a list.”

  “He’s a jerk?”

  “Some investigation,” he said with angry scorn. “He can’t even get people’s horoscopes right. And he gave you a list.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “My name’s on it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, get it the hell off it,” he said. “You want to make lists, make a list of everybody driving on the Brooklyn Bridge, that night. Maybe one of them saw it happen through the window. But don’t make any list with me on it, or you’re in for trouble.”

  I said, “Give me a reason to take your name off, and I’ll be happy to.”

  “Because I’m telling you! You’re the guy I read about in my horoscope, that was gonna try to give me a bad time. Well, I don’t take bad times, see? Those faggots can play their little games with each other all they want, but they can keep me the hell out of it. And that goes for you, too!”

  I said, “You aren’t a faggot?”

  “I said you can keep me out of it! Out of it!”

  “You don’t want your mother to know, is that it?”

  He was heading directly for uncontrollable rage. Before we left this kitchen, I was going to have to hit him very hard in order to keep him from hitting me. I knew it was going to happen, and he didn’t, which was the only edge I had on him.

  Now he said, “My mother? You think you can pressure me, you son of a bitch? You want to call her? Go ahead! Call her on the phone, tell her any smutty damn thing you can think of. What I’m talking about is individual liberty, and I do mean privacy, and I mean you stay out of my life!”

  His dare was an obvious and pathetic bluff—the tremble in his body and voice was only partly rage, the rest was ill-disguised fear—but I didn’t call him on it. Instead I stayed with the main point, saying, “But what if you killed Jamie Dearborn?”

  He was speechless for a few seconds; just long enough to drop an octave, but not long enough to get some sense. “You’re really asking for it,” he said from between clenched teeth.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” I told him. “You come into my house, you claim to be Bruce Maundy, you talk inco—”

  “Claim to be? What the hell are you, insane? What do you mean claim to be?”

  “You talk incoherently,” I said, “and make silly, impossible demands. You don’t behave at all—”

  “Wait a second, wait a second. Claim to be? I am Bruce—and what do you mean impossible demands? What kind of jerk are you? You want to see who I am?” And he started pawing in his hip pocket.

  “You don’t behave at all rationally,” I said, “and if I’d been hired simply to find some patsy to take—”

  “Here. Here. Here’s who I am.” Incredibly enough, he was waving his wallet in my face, showing me his driver’s license.

  “Some patsy,” I repeated, “to take Cornell’s place, my personal choice for the job would be you, and only partially because I’ve taken an instant dislike to you.”

  The wallet lowered, and he glared at me. “Oh, yeah? What are you talking about?”

  “The fact of the matter is,” I said, “you obviously came in here hoping to get my back up. You’ve succeeded, you’re good at it.”

  “Your back up? People poking into my private life, you think—”

  “So I suppose,” I said, drowning him out with stronger projection, “that means you’ve had a lot of practice at it. Getting people mad at you. You probably have some sort of record for brawling. It wouldn’t take much to show that you’re the right kind of person to be Dearborn’s killer. You don’t have an alibi, and I’m sure I could count on you to wise-off to any police offi—”

  I thought he’d turn out to be a headhunter, and I was right. I stepped inside the punch he aimed at my face and hit him twice just above the belt. He made the sound men make when the wind has just been punched out of them, and took two faltering steps backward before sitting down hard on the floor.

  He didn’t give up easily. Even before he could breathe again he was gesticulating, trying to say things. I waited until he’d managed the first deep breath, and then I went over and reached down and took his right thumb in my left hand.

  There’s a way to hold a person’s thumb that is called the come-along hold. You have it bent down at the knuckle, and if you apply a little pressure, it hurts very much. You hold a person that way, say, “Come along,” apply a little pressure, and they come along.

  I said, “Come along.”

  We went into the living room, where I sat him in an armchair and stood in front of him to say, “We’ve used your system so far; shouts and fighting. Now we’ll use mine.”

  “Boy, I can believe you used to be a cop,” he said. His voice was hoarse, his manner lowering and still belligerent. “You never get over the taste for it, do you?”

  “If we’re going to go on using your system,” I said, “maybe we’d better go downstairs, where we won’t bother my wife. Do you want to come along, or do you want to try things my way?”

  He was nursing his thumb. “What choice do I have?”

  “To be a fool or a grownup,” I said. “You’re twenty-six years old, isn’t it time you stopped pretending you were about to liberate a campus?”

  He didn’t say anything to that, just glared at me. He was going to be sullen now.

  I was tired of him. I said, “You have no alibi for the time when Dearborn was killed. But if you have one for the time Cornell was attacked, I’ll be happy to take you off my list.”

  I waited. He said nothing. He had put the thumb in his mouth.

  I said, “Maundy, this isn’t a bus depot. If you have nothing to say to me, get up and leave.”

  “I’ve said what I’m going to say.”

  “Then leave.”

  He hesitated, reluctant to take any of the options open to him. Finally, squinting up at me as though we were in bright sunlight, he said, “It’s nobody’s business where I was Monday.”

  “Not if you weren’t at Jammer.”

  “I don’t want you poking around, or you’re likely to get yourself in big trouble.”

  “You’d better get out of here now,” I said. “You’re beginning to repeat yourself.”

  “You really think you’re tough.”

  “If you really want me to throw you out physically,” I said, “I will.”

  “I’m going,” he said, blustering. “Don’t worry, I don’t want to hang around here any more than I have to.” He got to his feet, shrugging his shoulders around in his denim jacket as though to impress himself with his cowboy toughness. “Just you forget about me and Monday,” he said. “That’s all you got to know.”

  I walked him to the front door, where he had a Navy pea jacket and an African safari hat. He put them on, pulled on racing-driver gloves, glared at me while trying to think of an exit line, failed to find one, and left. I saw him stomp out toward an old rusted white MG with a racing rollbar, and I shut the door.

  As I started down the hall, I heard the vacuum cleaner begin again upstairs. I smiled upward; Kate had been listening. I went on to the kitchen, and back down to my work.

  9

  IT HAD STARTED TO snow again after dinner, another slow and lazy fall, without wind. It hadn’t amounted to much yet, but if it kept on like this, it would count as a real storm by morning.

  Driving, at ten in the evening, was still no problem, but finding a parking space in Brooklyn Heights
, as always, was. I walked nearly four blocks from the car to the address shared by Stewart Remington and Jerry Weissman. I had my hat pulled down and my coat collar turned up, but the slow-descending snowflakes still managed from time to time to get through to the back of my neck. And when I turned in at Remington’s building my hat and shoulders were covered completely with a dusting of white.

  The building was similar to Cornell’s, except that at some point in its seventy or eighty years of life the high stone outside steps had been removed, and the main entrance had been switched to the ground floor. From the design of the tile-and-glass entryway, I would guess the alteration had been made shortly after the Second World War.

  I could hear the party from the sidewalk. I had purposely chosen to come late, after the party was already in full swing, so that my entrance could be more unobtrusive and I would have a better chance to observe without being observed.

  The party was in full swing, all right. I had to ring twice before someone came to let me in. Looking through the glass at a cream-colored corridor, I saw a youngish Negro with a restrained Afro haircut and a bushy mustache come out of the door at the far end and wave to me that he was coming. He was dressed, I noticed, almost conservatively, in suit and tie and ordinary oxford shoes. Of course, the suit lapels were shaped a bit oddly and the tie was very wide and many different colors, and his shirt was canary-yellow, but at least he was in a suit, and so was I; I wouldn’t be entirely out of place.

  (It had been difficult deciding what to wear tonight. Would I be more unobtrusive in my regular clothing, no matter how anachronistic I might look against the other guests, or should I dress myself, at least partly, out of Bill’s closet? I finally decided I would feel best appearing as myself, so that’s what I’d done.)

  The Negro came and opened the door, laughing at the snow on me. “Now that’s what I call a white man,” he said.

  I took my hat off and looked at it. “You mean a wet man.” I said.

  He shut the door and looked keenly at me. “I probably mean Tobin, don’t I? Mitch Tobin?”

  “That’s right.”

  He grinned. “You see? I penetrated your disguise.”

  “Very clever of you. I’m afraid you have the advantage of me; I haven’t penetrated yours yet.”

  “Nobody has,” he said. Was there a touch of self-mockery in his smile for a second? He extended a hand toward me, saying, “I’m Leo Ross.” And then, in a dramatic hoarse whisper, grinning all the while, “Suspect.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and took his hand. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “And isn’t that the truth,” he said. “Do you want to grill me now, or wait and boil me later?”

  “If you have an alibi for nine o’clock Monday evening,” I said, “I’d love to hear it right now and cross your name off the list.”

  “Monday evening.” The smile never entirely left his face, but seemed to hang there for a moment without his volition while he thought of other things. “An alibi,” he said, “means that other people saw me where I say I was.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I don’t have one.” A helpless smile, a spreading of the hands. “I wish I could help you out.”

  Why could none of these people take this thing seriously? One of their number was dead. Another was in the hospital, and well on his way to being railroaded into an asylum.

  I remembered a few of the words in the astrological description of Leo Ross: “charming, clever, superficial, sexually dominating.” I didn’t know about the last, but the others seemed to apply. I said, “Where were you, that you can’t prove?”

  “In church.” The smile grew wistful for a second, as though he had trouble himself believing he’d been in church, but then it disappeared entirely, and very earnestly he said, “I’ve been doing a novena to the Sacred Heart. For world peace. Nine days, eight-thirty each evening. It was over Thursday.”

  “And you went alone?”

  “Henry isn’t Catholic.” Then he laughed and said, “We don’t know how we’ll bring up the children.”

  “You don’t know anyone else in the congregation.”

  “Not a soul. And it’s a big old church, stone, very dark, and not many people come to novenas any more. We tend to scatter around the place. Someone might remember seeing me there, but I doubt it. And if they did, how could they be sure which night it was? No, I’m sorry, I’m going to be a problem for you.”

  “We’ll work it out,” I assured him. “Somehow.”

  “I do believe you will,” he said, peering at me. “You don’t go ha ha as much as most people.”

  It was a strange description; it drew a chuckle from me, which may have been its intention. In any case, Ross promptly grew frothy and cheerful again, saying, “But the party isn’t out here, it’s inside. Come join the festivities.” He took my arm, and we went in together.

  10

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO get much of an idea of the apartment; it was too full of people, most of them giving the appearance of having bought their clothes at Jammer. I was more than an anachronism here, in my dark gray suit and slender figured tie, I was a fantasy from an entirely different world.

  It was strange, but that was the effect the party had on me. Not that they were fantasies, though some of them were in out-and-out drag, feminine pants suits and coiffed hair and false eyelashes and make-up and earrings, but that I was the fantasy, intruding on their reality. Because they were the majority, I suppose, and I was alone.

  Ross shouted in my ear, “Drinks through that doorway! Want to talk to Henry?”

  Henry Koberberg, he meant, his partner and the sixth suspect on the list. I nodded, he nodded back with a big smile, and he was off and I was alone.

  But not for long. Stewart Remington emerged from the surge of guests like a luxury liner out of a fog bank. He extended his hand to be shaken—I noticed again the lack of strength in it—and leaned close to bellow, in an even deeper baritone than usual, “Jerry told me he invited you!”

  I shouted back, “I hope it’s all right with you.”

  “It’s fine with me!” he yelled. “Manzoni’s going into court on Monday! Anything you do is fine with me!”

  I nodded, rather than shout again.

  He waved an arm—I noticed that tonight he was wearing a cape, waist-length, blue, white satin lining—and roared, “Drinks through that door over there!”

  I nodded my thanks, he gave me a meaningless nod and wink and smile, and off he went into the fog bank again, patting shoulders and cheeks as he went.

  I saw no one I recognized. The room was long, but rather narrow, and there were probably twenty-five people present, all standing, all drinking, but less than half smoking. They were in five or six fluctuating conversational groups, and it was obvious that all these people knew one another, that I was the only one meeting the group for the first time.

  They all seemed so happy. Watching them, I thought at first it was a kind of hysterical happiness, urgent and artificial: Germany in the twenties. But it wasn’t that, or at least I soon stopped thinking so. What I finally decided was that the apparent artificiality and overstatement came from the fact that these people were more expressive and outwardly emotional than most men. To be in a room full of men dressed like South American birds and chattering like a beauty salon made for a certain sense of dislocation; it became difficult to say what was a normal level of behavior and what was strain.

  Leo Ross had not returned with Henry Koberberg. Stewart Remington was no longer in sight. I caught a quick glimpse of Cary Lane, blond hair gleaming as he pirouetted in the middle of a conversational group at the far end of the room, but then people moved in the intervening space and I lost him again. David Poumon and Bruce Maundy were supposed to be here as well, but I didn’t see either of them.

  There was steady traffic in both directions through the doorway that both Ross and Remington had pointed out to me, so after a minute or two I headed in that dir
ection, skirting along the edge of the room and getting only a couple of questioning glances from people I passed. Most of the partygoers were deeply involved in their conversations or in one another or simply in their own reactions to things.

  I got to the doorway finally, started through, and bumped into Bruce Maundy, who was coming out, carrying two highball glasses with iced drinks. He was in a blue turtleneck sweater tonight, black trousers, and a wide glittering silvery belt that looked like an outsized wristwatch expansion band.

  His reaction was immediate; he glared at me, glared at the drinks in his hands as though they were the only things keeping him from throwing himself at my throat, glared at me again, and leaned close to my face to snarl at me through clenched teeth, saying, “I told you to stay away from me.”

  “I was invited here,” I said. I preferred not to have a scene in public, it would complicate the work I had to do.

  “You won’t follow me around any more,” he said, and brushed by me with more than the necessary roughness.

  I watched him, hoping to see who the other drink was for, but I lost sight of him midway through the room. Also, I was blocking the doorway for other drinkers, so I continued on through into a fairly small room with yellow-and-white wallpaper, antique-looking white sideboard and hutch, and a long table against one wall covered with glasses and bottles and a couple of ice buckets. Half a dozen guests were grouped at the table, and it seemed as though every time one left with a replenished drink, another one would take his place. But none of them the people I was interested in.

  I moved on, and in the kitchen I found Jerry Weissman washing glasses. Up to his elbows in dishwater. He grinned at me and called, “Hi! You just get here?”

  “A few minutes ago.” The noise level was way down in the kitchen, making it possible to speak in normal tones.

  Jerry Weissman held his soapy hands up for me to see, saying with humorous resignation, “Isn’t it always the way? People drink a drink halfway, put their glass down, forget where they put it, and go make another drink in another glass. So you’ve got to keep on washing glasses all the time. You could wind up with dishpan hands.”