Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (21 page)

Rennie hopped back from the open hatch of the Geo Metro when he saw Bernal come down the steps. “What the hell—”

“It’s been a bit of work,” Bernal said. “You’re a hard man to find. Though I bet you thought it was impossible. Remember me?”

“I . . .” Rennie looked exactly as he had when Bernal had seen him the night Muriel disappeared, slender, with the neatly trimmed gray hair that made his age hard to judge. His sweatshirt was from Jacob’s Pillow and showed stylized dancers leaping through space. “You’re . . . the guy . . .”

“The guy you hit in the face with a hunk of iron? Yeah, that’s me.”

It had been kind of an intellectual puzzle, finding the Connoisseur. He was a guy who might have information about what Muriel had been up to and what had happened to her. But now that Rennie was in front of him, Bernal was furious.

“I. . . I’m sorry.” Rennie shifted his weight in his impeccably white sneakers and looked everywhere but directly at Bernal.

“You’re sorry?” Bernal found himself yelling. “That’s it? That’s what you have to say? I was just standing there.. . . What the hell do you know about the judicious use of force? You could have killed me, you moron.” 

“No, really, I’m sorry.” Rennie’s eyes, to Bernal’s dismay, were full of tears. He blinked, then shut his eyes deliberately a couple of times. “I just didn’t ... I didn’t know what to do. I was ... your friend stole my car; I had a plan, and the car was gone, and I had to get out of there, right then. I brought your car back. Didn’t I? I brought it back.”

“Did you check me out? See if I was okay?”

“You were gone! On the lawn, there. I did look. You were gone, and the sprinklers were on. Everything was quiet, and you’d gone on your way, or someone had picked you up. No cops around, no ambulance, no one out, nothing. I left your car.”

Bernal thought about how the car had seemed to appear while he was in the house, washing up. He’d thought he just missed it on his way in but hadn’t been sure.

“And that makes it all okay?”

“No. Not okay. But I did the best. . . you got my car stolen. You left me no choice.”

Despite himself, Bernal had been cooling down, but this attempt to evade responsibility sparked him up again. “We all have choices. Don’t we? You could have decided not to hit me with that stupid metal dog. You could have.”

“Yes. I could have. I don’t know what else to say.”

For an instant, Bernal thought about just hitting him. He didn’t really even know how to hit someone and knew he’d probably hurt himself in doing it, but it was the only thing that really made sense.

A hint of motion at the edge of his vision caught his attention. He looked up at the house. Had that curtain been up before? He sensed someone, far enough back in the room to be invisible.

Then he snapped back to Rennie. That was exactly what had caught him the last time, a moment of inattention, and Rennie had clocked him.

But Rennie stood right where he had been. Bernal set the chair down, and Rennie winced. “Please. The concrete . . . you’ll scratch the legs.” He reached into the open hatch and pulled out a blanket. He laid it on the sidewalk and placed the chair carefully on it.

Punching Rennie was no way to get Maura to like him, Bernal figured. If that was important. If that mattered.

“You didn’t arrange with Muriel for her to take the car?”

“What? No! I Was just minding my own business when someone ran up, hopped into my car, and took off with it.”

“First of all,” Bernal said. “It wasn’t your car. It belonged to a guy named Alistair Smithson. And you weren’t minding your own business, you were breaking into a house.”

“Okay, fine.” Rennie sighed. He too looked up at the window with the pulled-back curtain. Maura had kept Bernal from hitting Rennie. Maybe she was keeping Rennie from running away. “I knew I should have left the area when I saw you wandering around the side of Muriel’s house.”

“Muriel’s ... So you admit you knew her.”

“I didn’t know her. I’ve never seen her, except, I guess, when she took off with the Mercedes. But,” he patted the chair, “I have been in her house since. Nice place, Italianate, 1870s, designed by Elbridge Boyden I think—he did a lot of stuff, Gothic, whatever, but I think it’s his. I should look it up down at City Hall.”

Now they were just two guys, standing on a sunny street, talking, feeling the spring breeze. Bernal wasn’t sure he was quite comfortable with that but didn’t know how he was supposed to change it. Just be glad Rennie was talking rather than running, he supposed.

“Wait,” he said. “Back up. You saw me around the side of her house?” He’d never been there.

With one finger, Rennie caressed a spindle on the chair back. He glanced at Bernal and looked puzzled. “That wasn’t you. It was someone else. Bigger, anyway. Wider.” 

“How long before you saw me?”

“An hour, maybe. Not more than that.”

An hour before Bernal got to Muriel’s house for some R 
&
R, eyes gritty, off the road from western New York, someone had been prowling around Muriel’s house. Someone big, someone wide. Someone who had finally succeeded in breaking in and threatening Muriel. Only Bernal had stumbled in and thrown off the plans, allowing Muriel to escape.

And as she had run, she had thought she was still being pursued by the same person, who had, instead, stayed somewhere inside the house.

Suddenly, Bernal knew who it had been.

When he had run into Ignacio Kuepner, sullen and wrathful proprietor of Ignacio’s Devices 
&
Desires, in the Near Earth Orbit parking lot, Ignacio had seemed, for a moment, to recognize him. Bernal had decided that that impression had been wrong, since they had never met. But then, during their confrontation at the yard, Ignacio had remarked that he was now wearing a leather jacket, rather than the windbreaker he had been wearing the last time they met.

But Bernal had been wearing that leather jacket at NEO. He had worn the windbreaker the night he came to Muriel’s.

He had taken it off because of the blood on it from getting smacked in the head by John Rennie.

Oddly, now, that reminder did not raise his anger at Rennie again. He had other things to think about. Ignacio had been there that night at Muriel’s, hidden somewhere, but he had seen Bernal.

“Okay,” Bernal said. “You didn’t know Muriel, and it was just a coincidence that she stole your car. So why the hell are you now breaking into her house? Why do you have her desk chair, right from her bedroom?”

“Because you just gave it to me.”

Rennie looked guileless and straightforward. Bernal had to remind himself that Rennie was anything but. He was a criminal with a long and successful record. He didn’t get that from being stupid.

“You’re working with Naomi Wilkerson,” Bernal said. “What do you two want with Muriel’s things?”

“Sounds like Maura’s been chatting up a storm.” 

“Hey, your sister cares for you. Wants the best for you. You should give her a break once in a while.” 

Rennie raised palms. “Whoa. Back off. I just don’t like people in my business. I think you can understand why I’d be nervous.”

“So why are you working for her?”

“She made me.”

“Made you?”

“Yeah. Blackmail.”

“How did Naomi blackmail you?”

“By knowing things about me. By knowing who I was. By knowing that I had stolen a car that had ended up with a body in it. I would have tried to do something about it, but stealing a few pieces was all she wanted. No vig, nothing like that. Just a couple of pieces. I decided to take the chance.” 

“How did she find you?”

“I don’t know. She came up to me in the grocery, and I was so off my game I forgot the food. Boy, was Maura mad. We had to order pizza again. She hates that. Says it’s bad for her complexion. Like you can do anything about her complexion.”

“Her complexion looks fine to me.”

Rennie eyed him. “Okay.”

“Can you help me put the chair in my van? I know you’ll want to pack it up nicely.”

“You know . . .” Rennie paused.

“Yes?”

“That would actually be a big help. This Naomi . . . nice folks, really. But a bit intense. All witchy and all. Kind of hard to deal with. It’d be fine for you to make this final delivery.”

They picked up the chair together, even though it was not that heavy. Bernal thought that he’d have to find Maura a substitute chair for her kitchen table. Was that a good first date? A visit to Jordan’s? Maybe it was.

“I didn’t expect to-see you.” Naomi’s bracelets jangled as she put her hands on her hips. “Is . . . John all right? Did you ...?”

“I didn’t do anything to him.” Bernal was startled, and almost pleased. Someone thought he looked dangerous! “Not that he wouldn’t have deserved it. I just told him I could handle things from here on. Where do you want this?” He looked up the steps at her. He’d had to haul the chair several blocks from the only parking spot he’d been able to find.

She hesitated.

“Let me get this up there for you,” Bernal said. “It’s one of Muriel’s best pieces. I’ll be careful with it.”

“I just wish he’d said goodbye.” She held the door open for him.

He carried the chair after her as she clipped up the narrow stairs on short heels. Naomi lived in an old courtyard apartment building partway up a hill above Cheriton. The railings and lighting fixtures looked original. Light came from a skylight above the stairwell.

“Careful with that thing,” she said over her shoulder. “Muriel always told me it was Biedermeier. John doesn’t think so—but then, he doesn’t care for Biedermeier, except for some unusual Russian stuff. He loves that birch veneer. John’s an interesting man. I’m sorry you two didn’t get along . .. oh, here we are.”

She spoke as if the appearance of the door to her apartment was a surprise.

“Why?” he said. “Why have you been stealing all of Muriel’s things?”

“All in its time. Bernal, right? Come in and have a seat—not in Muriel’s chair, just set that down ... thanks. Take the club chair there, it looks like your style. I’ll be right back out.”

Late afternoon sunlight came through the wide slats of the blinds. He’d expected somewhere crowded with tchochkes, peacock feathers, draped tapestries, but her apartment was serene and bright, with little on the walls. The chair she’d directed him to was leather, with a masculine feel. It was, in fact, his style, and so he picked the pale-green upholstered wing chair by the fireplace.

In a couple of minutes she was back out with a silver coffee service, complete with sugar bowl and tongs. She smiled to herself when she saw where he was sitting and set the tray down on a small table. She wasn’t dressed for being home alone, he saw. She wore a skirt and jacket of some nubbly fabric, in lilac, and earrings in addition to the bracelets.

She’d been looking forward to John Rennie’s visit. “Mr. Haydon-Rumi, you strike me as black.” She poured before asking whether he wanted coffee at all. 

“Um, light, no sugar, actually.”

“Oh, dear. Just a moment.” Naomi bustled back into the kitchen.

She emerged a few moments later with a small carton of half-and-half. She took a quick glance at the expiration date, hesitated, then added some to his coffee. He sipped and nodded. He hated cream in his coffee, but he was going to be damned if he’d admit it.

It didn’t help that the cream was going sour.

“I know why you’re here,” she said.

“I’m here to find out what you know. You’ve been stealing Muriel’s most important possessions out of her house. I don’t think you decided to do all that yourself. You even boosted something at the funeral.”

“A porcelain doll’s head. Sure. I needed it.”

“You needed it? For what?”

“Bernal, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“You think I’m not doing this on my own. And you’re right. But whose directions do you think I’m following?” The believer in messages from the afterlife was teasing him. Well, he could take it.

“If you’re going to be difficult... Muriel.” He found himself speaking louder than he planned. “Muriel Inglis.” 

“You think she’s still alive,” she said, with sudden fierceness. “She’s 
not.
 Everyone thinks I don’t take death seriously, because I think souls can communicate from the other side of it. Well, that’s just not true. It’s because I’m one of the few people who does take it seriously. Death is real, irreversible, and awful. Do you want some advice? Don’t wait until you’re dead to try to communicate. Do it now. You still have a chance. Not a great one, but a better one than you will have. If you think it’s hard to get your point across now, and that no one really understands what you’re about, just try it when you’re dead.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“No, you won’t,” she snapped. “No one ever does. I guess I shouldn’t complain, it’s how I make up the shortfall in my retirement funds . . . but think of what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and for God’s sake 
say
 it.”

“But you think Muriel has managed to . . . communicate with you?”

Naomi smiled. “Muriel. She always was clever, you know. Sly, you might even say. I didn’t like her when I met her, but I grew to like her. Took a few months, actually. In high school. But we’ve been friends ever since.”

“How did she manage to get you to steal her furniture?”

“I was coming back from the dry cleaners. Muriel was missing. I don’t know if anyone else knew she was missing, but I did. She usually gave me a call during the week. We didn’t talk about much, movies, what we’d been reading, whether we’d get out to the Arboretum this spring. When I called, she didn’t call back. She always called right back. I tend to put my dry cleaning off until I have absolutely nothing left to wear, so I had a huge amount of stuff hanging in the car. I used to kind of throw it back there, but it would get all creased. Muriel read me a lecture about how to treat my clothes. She always knew the best way to deal with things.

“I’d been in such a hurry, and there had been so much, that they had given me a few things that weren’t mine. Not typical for them. Nice place, Armstrong Street Cleaners. Laotian. But this time they messed up.

“I had all my windows open, the radio on. And I saw a blue dress in the rearview. It blew around in the wind, and it wasn’t mine.

“It was Muriel’s. I recognized it immediately. Muriel always dressed like a grown-up. Not like an old lady. Oh, okay, I see that look on your face. She wasn’t old. I’m not either. You were about to point that out yourself, weren’t you?”

Bernal hadn’t been about to say anything, and felt embarrassed.

“So I recognized the dress. Dark blue, rayon, a classic. Fit her perfectly, and she still had a great figure. A pair of spectator pumps, the Dooney and Bourke bag, pearl earrings. No hat. Not even Muriel could pull 
that
 off anymore.” Naomi sighed. “So I glanced in the mirror, and there it was, waving at me, from among my own clothes. Like it was trying to get my attention. ‘Hey, Naomi, over here!’ It was right then that I knew she was dead.”

“Just. ..” Bernal cleared his throat. “From a dry-cleaning error?”

“Why, yes. That’s how these signs come. Through life as we live it. As soon as I could safely do so, I pulled over to the side of the road to have myself a little cry. Easier said than done; with the traffic. Traffic engineers don’t design grief turnouts.” And she brushed at a tear. “Oh, dammit. When you get older, all sorts of valves get loose, or stuck, or whatever. And you know what? Your emotions go along with them. I cry now more, so I feel grief more. Hard to imagine what emotions you might feel without a body . . . but I have one, and it’s giving me the raspberries right now. You’ll have to excuse me.” She pulled out an embroidered handkerchief and wiped away her tears. That, at least, looked just as he would have expected.

“And then?” Bernal said. “How did she communicate with you after that?”

“Well, once I understood that she needed to communicate, that there was something she had left undone, I went to work. I knew that the most comfortable thing, the thing that was most likely to bring her out, was her own space, her own furniture, everything she’d had around her. So I got John to take a few pieces. I know I shouldn’t have done it, Jennifer must be furious, I’ll have to apologize.”

“How did you get Rennie to do it?”

“I don’t really need to reveal all my sources, do I? I knew who John Rennie was. A few people do. You can’t run his type of business and not reveal yourself at least a bit. Never mind who told me or what they said. John asked me, and I didn’t tell him either. I came up to him in the produce section of Whole Foods. He was poking at some vegetables. I came right up to him and said ‘John Rennie, I need you to steal something for me.’ You should have seen him! He didn’t know whether to run or smack me with an eggplant. Then he pretended he had no idea what I was talking about. I mean, really. You can tell he’s a behind-the-scenes kind of gentleman. Not quick with his words. When I mentioned Muriel Inglis, he just about came apart. I had to take the eggplant away from him before he put his fingers through it. I hadn’t known that . . . that he had been there that night, the night she died. She died in a car he had stolen. Did you know that, Bernal?”

“I did.”

She eyed him more closely. “So you understand. He had to help. He was unhappy, but he felt guilty or something, I don’t know. He’s a good man, really, despite his unfortunate habit. He loves beautiful things. And he just has so much fun stealing them.”

“So, what else has Muriel told you? What else has she communicated to you?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Bernal, but she has been silent. I do feel her presence, but, despite everything, despite all that I have arranged, there has been nothing from her. I really had thought... but we’re not always right about these things, no matter how much we hope for them.”

Bernal was overcome with the immensity of his own disappointment. He’d thought that, in some way, John Rennie was working for Muriel. That assumption went all the way back to the fact that he’d left a car running for her to escape in.

But, of course, that had been coincidence. A coincidence, he saw now, that had eventually given Naomi a lever on Rennie and made him a tool in her own strange schemes. And Naomi no more thought Muriel was alive as a disembodied brain than anyone else. She thought Muriel was a ghost. It had absolutely nothing to do with what he was looking for.

What he was looking for could not be found: proof that whoever it was he had been communicating with was actually the uncorrupted mind of Muriel Inglis. So there it was. “Muriel” was a fictional construct invented by Hesketh to delude foolish human beings, or she was just a ghost, an expression of a human refusal to let go of the dead, or she was a trick being played on him by a serial killer called the Bowler.

He’d be damned if he’d just stop right here. Not after everything he’d been through. “Where is that chair supposed to go?”

“No need. I can handle it from here.”

“I need to see what you’re doing. I need to get as close to Muriel as I can. Can’t you understand that?” He stopped himself from leaning forward and grabbing her hand. “I have to.”

“People use that as an excuse all the time.” Naomi was crisp. “It sounds like an explanation but doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means that if Muriel is in trouble, if she’s not a ghost but something else, then I’m her only hope. It means that if you want to help your friend, the highest-expected-value thing you could do is let me see what you’ve set up for her.”

“Just a moment.” She got up and disappeared into the kitchen. He heard the clink of a cup, but when she came out a few moments later, she had nothing in her hands.

“Go in, Bernal.” Once Naomi decided something, she didn’t look back. “Take the chair into the room. Maybe she’ll talk to you after all. She loved you, you know.”

“She . ..”

“Oh, really, she did. She was so sad for what had happened to you, and then happy as you got better and were such a pleasure to work with. She had a lot of plans for what the two of you were going to do together. It was wonderful just to listen to her. Of course, as you know, it always was.”

“I do know. I miss her too.” He carried the chair down the hall, and through the door at the end.

“Put it by the desk, under the window,” Naomi called behind him. “I think that’s the last bit. We’ll see what happens.”