A Ticket to the Boneyard (3 page)

I’ve told that story a couple of times at AA meetings. Sometimes it comes out funny, and other times it’s anything but that. It depends, I guess, on how it’s told, or how you listen.

Elaine lived on Fifty-first between First and Second, on the sixteenth floor of one of those white brick apartment buildings that went up all over town in the early sixties. Her doorman was a West Indian black, very dark-skinned, with perfect posture and the build of a wide receiver. I gave him her name and mine and waited while he spoke on the intercom. He listened, looked at me, said something, listened again, and handed me the phone. “She wants to talk to you,” he said.

I said, “I’m here. What’s up?”

“Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“You just mentioned a man who blew a fuse. What was his name?”

“What is this, a test? Can’t you recognize my voice?”

“This thing distorts voices. Look, humor me. What was the fuse man’s name?”

“I don’t remember his name. He was a patent lawyer.”

“Okay. Let me talk to Derek.”

I handed the thing to the doorman. He listened for a moment while she assured him I was okay, then motioned me to the elevator. I rode up to her floor and rang her bell. Even after the ritual over the intercom, she checked the judas peephole before opening the door for me.

“Come in,” she said. “I apologize for the dramatics. I’m probably being silly, but maybe not. I don’t know.”

“What’s the matter, Elaine?”

“In a minute. I feel a lot better now that you’re here, but I’m still a little shaky. Let me look at you. You look terrific.”

“You look pretty good yourself.”

“Do I? That’s hard to believe. I’ve had some night. I couldn’t stop calling you. I must have called half a dozen times.”

“There were five messages.”

“Is that all? I don’t know why I thought five messages would be more forceful than one, but I kept picking up the phone and dialing your number.”

“Five messages may have been better,” I said. “They made it a little harder to ignore. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is I’m scared. I feel better now, though. I’m sorry for the inquisition before but it’s impossible to recognize a voice over my intercom. Just for your information, the patent attorney’s name was Roger Stuhldreher.”

“How could I ever have forgotten it?”

“What a day that was.” She shook her head at the memory. “But I’m being a terrible hostess. What can I get you to drink?”

“Coffee, if you’ve got some.”

“I’ll make some.”

“It’s too much trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all. You still like it with bourbon in it?”

“No, just black.”

She looked at me. “You stopped drinking,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I remember you were having some trouble with it the last time I saw you. Is that when you stopped?”

“Around then, yes.”

“That’s great,” she said. “That’s really great. Give me a minute and I’ll get some coffee made.”

The living room was as I remembered it, done in black-and-white with a white shag rug and a chrome-and-black leather couch and some matte black mica shelving. A couple of abstract paintings provided the room’s only color. I think they were the same paintings she’d had before, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I went over to the window. There was a gap between two buildings that afforded a view of the East River, and the borough of Queens on the other side of it. I’d been over there a matter of hours earlier, telling funny stories to a bunch of drunks in Richmond Hill. It seemed ages ago now.

I stayed at the window for a few minutes. I was in front of one of the paintings when she came back with two cups of black coffee. “I think I remember this one,” I said. “Or did you just get it last week?”

“I’ve had it for years. I bought it on impulse at a gallery on Madison Avenue. I paid twelve hundred dollars for it. I couldn’t believe I was paying that kind of money for something to hang on the wall. You know me, Matt. I’m not extravagant. I always bought nice things, but I always saved my money.”

“And bought real estate,” I said, remembering.

“You bet I did. When you’re not handing it to a pimp or sucking it up your nose, you can buy a lot of houses. But I thought I was crazy, paying all that money for a painting.”

“Look at the pleasure it’s brought you.”

“More than pleasure, honey. You know what it’s worth now?”

“A lot, evidently.”

“Forty thousand, minimum. Probably more like fifty. I ought to sell it. Sometimes it makes me nervous, having fifty grand hanging on the wall. For Christ’s sake, when I first hung it I got nervous having twelve hundred dollars on my wall. How’s the coffee?”

“It’s fine.”

“Is it strong enough?”

“It’s fine, Elaine.”

“You really look great, you know that?”

“So do you.”

“How long has it been? I think the last time we saw each other must have been about three years ago, but we haven’t really seen anything much of each other since you left the police department, and that must be close to ten years.”

“Something like that.”

“You still look the same.”

“Well, I’ve still got all my hair. But there’s a little gray there if you look closely.”

“There’s a lot of gray in mine, but you can look as close as you like and you won’t see it. Thanks to modern science.” She drew a breath. “The rest of the package hasn’t changed too much, though.”

“It hasn’t changed at all.”

“Well, I’ve kept my figure. And my skin’s still good. I’ll tell you, though, I never thought I’d have to put so much work into it. I’m at the gym three mornings a week, sometimes four. And I watch what I eat and drink.”

“You were never a drinker.”

“No, but I used to drink Tab by the gallon, Tab and then Diet Coke. I cut out all of that. Now it’s pure fruit juice or plain water. I have one cup of coffee a day, first thing in the morning. This cup’s a concession to special circumstances.”

“Maybe you should tell me what they are.”

“I’m getting there. I have to sort of ease into it. What else do I do? I walk a lot. I watch what I eat. I’ve been a vegetarian for almost three years now.”

“You used to love steak.”

“I know. I didn’t think it was a meal unless there was meat in it.”

“And what was it you used to have at the Brasserie?”

“
Tripes à la mode de Caen
.”

“Right. A dish I never liked to think about, but I had to admit it was tasty.”

“I couldn’t guess when I had it last. I haven’t had any meat in close to three years. I ate fish for the first year, but then I dropped that, too.”

“Ms. Natural.”

“
C’est moi
.”

“Well, it agrees with you.”

“And not drinking agrees with you. Here we are, telling each other how good we look. That’s how you know you’re old, isn’t that what they say? Matt, I was thirty-eight on my last birthday.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“That’s what you think. My last birthday was three years ago. I’m forty-one.”

“That’s not so bad either. And you don’t look it.”

“I know I don’t. Or maybe I do. That’s what somebody told Gloria Steinem when she turned forty, that she didn’t look it. And she said, ‘Yes I do. This is what forty looks like now.’ “

“Pretty good line.”

“That’s what I thought. Sweetie, you know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been stalling.”

“I know.”

“To keep it from being real. But it’s real. This came in today’s mail.”

She handed me a newspaper clipping and I unfolded it. There was a photograph, a head shot of a middle-aged gentleman. He was wearing glasses and his hair was neatly combed, and he looked confident and optimistic, an expression that seemed out of keeping with the headline. It ran across three columns, and it said, area businessman slays wife, children, self. Ten or twelve column inches of text elaborated on the headline. Philip Sturdevant, proprietor of Sturdevant Furniture with four retail outlets in Canton and Massillon, had apparently gone berserk in his home in suburban Walnut Hills. After using a kitchen knife to kill his wife and three small children, Sturdevant had called the police and told them what he had done. By the time a police cruiser arrived on the scene, Sturdevant was dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

I looked up from the clipping. “Terrible thing,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did you know him?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“I knew her.”

“The wife?”

“We both knew her.”

I studied the clipping again. The wife’s name was Cornelia, and her age was given as thirty-seven. The children were Andrew, six; Kevin, four; and Delcey, two. Cornelia Sturdevant, I thought, and no bells rang. I looked at her, puzzled.

“Connie,” she said.

“Connie?”

“Connie Cooperman. You remember her.”

“Connie Cooperman,” I said, and then I remembered a bouncy blond cheerleader of a girl. “Jesus,” I said. “How in the hell did she wind up in—where was this, anyway? Canton, Massillon, Walnut Hills. Where are all these places?”

“Ohio. Northern Ohio, not far from Akron.”

“How did she get there?”

“By marrying Philip Sturdevant. She met him, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago.”

“How? Was he a john?’’

“No, nothing like that. She was on vacation, she was up at Stowe on a ski weekend. He was there, he was divorced and unattached, and he fell for her. I don’t know that he was rich but he was comfortably well-off, he owned furniture stores and made a good living from them. And he was crazy about Connie and he wanted to marry her and have babies with her.”

“And that’s what they did.”

“That’s what they did. She thought he was wonderful and she was ready to get out of the life and out of New York. She was sweet and cute and guys liked her, but she was hardly what you’d call a born whore.”

“Is that what you are?”

“No, I’m not. I was a lot like Connie actually, we were both a couple of NJGs who drifted into it. I turned out to be good at it, that’s all.”

“What’s an NJG?”

“A neurotic Jewish girl. It’s not just that I turned out to be good at it. I turned out to be capable of living the life without getting eaten up by it. It grinds down an awful lot of girls, it erodes what little self-esteem they started out with. But it hasn’t hurt me that way.”

“No.”

“At least that’s what I think most of the time.” She gave me a brave smile. “Except on the occasional bad night, and everybody has a few of those.”

“Sure.”

“It may have been good for Connie early on. She was fat and unpopular in high school, and it did her good to find out that men wanted her and found her attractive. But then it stopped being good for her, and then she got lucky and met Philip Sturdevant, and he fell for her and she was crazy about him, and they went to Ohio to make babies.”

“And then he found out about her past and went nuts and killed her.”

“No.”

“No?”

She shook her head. “He knew all along. She told him from the jump. It was very brave of her, and it turned out to be the absolute right thing to do, because it didn’t bother him and otherwise there would have been that secret between them. He was a pretty worldly guy, as it turned out. He was fifteen or twenty years older than Connie, and he’d been married twice, and while he’d lived all his life in Massillon he’d traveled a lot. He didn’t mind that she’d spent a few years in the life. If anything I think he got a kick out of it, especially since he was taking her away from all that.”

“And they lived happily ever after.”

She ignored that. “I had a couple of letters from her over the years,” she said. “Only a couple, because I never get around to answering letters, and when you don’t write back people stop writing to you. Most of the time I would get a card from her at Christmas. You know those cards people have made up with pictures of their children? I got a few of those from her. Beautiful children, but you would expect that. He was a good-looking man, you can see that from the newspaper photo, and you remember how pretty Connie was.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I had the last card she sent. I’m not the kind of person who keeps things. By the tenth of January all my Christmas cards are out with the garbage. So I don’t have one to show you, and I won’t be getting a new one next month because—”

She wept silently, her shoulders drawn in and shaking, her hands clasped. After a moment or two she caught hold of herself, drew in a deep breath, let it out.

I said, “I wonder what made him do it.”

“He didn’t do it. He wasn’t the type.”

“People surprise you.”

“He didn’t do it.”

I looked at her.

“I don’t know a soul in Canton or Massillon,” she said. “The only person I ever knew there was Connie, and the only person who could have known she knew me was Philip Sturdevant, and they’re both dead.”

“So?”

“So who sent me the clipping?”

“Anybody could have sent it.”

“Oh?”

“She could have mentioned you to a friend or neighbor there. Then, after the murder and suicide, the friend goes through Connie’s things, finds her address book, and wants to let her out-of-town friends know what happened.”

“So this friend clips the story out of the paper and sends it all by itself? Without a word of explanation?”

“There was no note in the envelope?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe she wrote a note and forgot to put it in the envelope. People do that sort of thing all the time.”

“And she forgot to put her return address on the envelope?”

“You have the envelope?”

“In the other room. It’s a plain white envelope with my name and address hand-printed.”

“Can I see it?”

She nodded. I sat in my chair and looked at the picture that was supposed to be worth fifty thousand dollars. Once I’d come very close to emptying a gun into it. I hadn’t thought about that incident in a long time. It looked as though I’d be thinking of it a lot now.

The envelope was as she’d described it, five-and-dime stuff, cheap and untraceable. Her name and address had been block-printed in ballpoint. No return address in the upper-left corner or on the back flap.