Mr. X (38 page)

It was the luxuriant, gravel-bottomed Western voice I remembered from that morning. If Otto Bremen had sung “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” I would have followed him across the street, too.

He knitted his hands over his belly and exhaled. “First time any graduating class honored a crossing guard that way. Nine months of the year, I’m the crossing guard at Carl Sandburg.” Bremen tapped the cigarette, and ashes drifted toward the floor. “If I had it to do all over again, I swear, I’d get a degree in elementary education and teach first or second grade. Hell, if I wasn’t seventy years old, I’d do it now. Say, care for a drink? I’m about ready.”

A few minutes later, I managed to get across the hall.

EDGERTON POLICE DEPARTMENT
was printed on the front and the sealed flap of the manila envelope Lieutenant Rowley had
entrusted to Helen Janette. Inside it was a plastic bag, also sealed, with four white identification bands. A case number and my name had been scrawled on the top two bands. Lieutenant George Rowley and someone in the Property Department had signed the other two. The plastic bag contained a wad of bills. I dumped out the money and counted it. Four hundred and eighty-one dollars. I laughed out loud and called Suki Teeter.

50

The bus dropped me off in College Park two blocks south of the Albertus campus. I walked down Archer Street until I saw the weathered wooden signboard,
RIVERRUN ARTS & CRAFTS,
over the porch of Suki Teeter’s three-story clapboard building.

The room to the right of the entrance surrounded racks of posters and greeting cards with paintings, graphics, woven tapestries, and shelves of pottery and blown glass; the smaller room to the left doubled as an art-supply business and framing shop. Although she exhibited work by local artists, Suki supported herself mostly through poster sales and picture framing.

“This is the only place for decent brushes and paints in a hundred miles, but I can’t afford the inventory I should have,” she said. “Everything costs so much money! The roof needs fixing. I could use a new oil burner. Twenty grand would solve all my problems, but I can hardly pay my two part-time assistants. They stay on because I cook them dinner and act like Mom.”

In her living room, abstract and representational paintings hung alongside shelves of clay pots and blown glass. “All this work is by artists I show in the gallery, except for that painting on your left.”

A dirgelike complication of muddy, red-spattered browns occupied a fourth of the wall.

“What do you think?”

“I’d have to look at it for a while,” I said.

“It’s hopeless, and you know it. Rachel Milton gave me that
painting years ago, and I never had the heart to get rid of it. Can I give you some tea?”

Suki came back with two cups of herbal tea and sat next to me on the yielding cushions. “I shouldn’t be bitchy about Rachel. At least she kept in touch with Star, or vice versa. She might even come to the funeral.”

Suki’s glowing corona glided forward, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I leaned into her aura of mint and sandalwood. She kissed my cheek. The golden haze of her face swam two or three inches back from mine. Her eyes shimmered, intensifying their deep jade green and shining turquoise. “Tell me. You know what I mean, just
tell
me.”

I swallowed ginseng-flavored tea and described my mother’s last day and night. At the mention of Rinehart’s name, Suki gave me a glance of uncomplicated acknowledgment. Without saying anything more, I told her about Donald Messmer’s appearance on the marriage license and my birth certificate.

“It’s like I’m walking through a fog. My aunts and uncles act as though they’re guarding atomic secrets.” A tide of feeling surged through me, and everything else shrank before its necessity.

“I have to get
out of the fog
. I want to know who Rinehart was, and how this Messmer came into the picture.”

She patted my hand and released it.

“He was my father, wasn’t he?”

“You look so much like him, it’s eerie.”

I remembered Max Edison’s subtle relaxation when I said that I had come on a family matter. He had known instantly whose son I was. “Tell me,” I said, echoing her words. “Please, just
tell
me.”

Suki Teeter leaned back into her cushions.

51

In the autumn of 1957, the more adventurous students of arts and literature at Albertus noted the frequent late-night presence at a rear table in the Blue Onion Coffeehouse of a man whose strikingly compelling face, at once pallid and dark, was framed by his black hair as he bent in concentration, one hand holding a
papier maïs
Gitane cigarette and the other a hovering pencil, over what appeared to be a typewritten manuscript. This was Edward Rinehart. An awed fascination gathered about him.

Slowly, Rinehart’s barriers relaxed. Yes, he was a writer; he had come to College Park to enjoy good bookstores and congenial companionship; if he wished for anything more, it was access to the Albertus Library, of course superior to its civic counterparts. Erwin Leake, a young English instructor among the earliest to establish a beachhead of acquaintanceship, soon found a mechanism, an only slightly dubious mechanism, granting Rinehart entry to the college library. Thereafter, Rinehart could often be discovered laboring over his art at one of the desks beneath the rotunda of the Reading Room. He was perhaps thirty-five, perhaps slightly older; his physical attractiveness was magnified, though it needed no magnification, by a kind of lawlessness. The Rinehart era had begun.

He became the intellectual and social focus of a select cadre of students, available for consultation at all hours. At the end of Buxton Place, an obscure cul-de-sac otherwise owned by the college, Rinehart had purchased two adjacent cottages as studio and living quarters. The elect, the chosen, the most passionate and promising of the Albertus population, congregated within his residence—the studio, being sacred, was off-limits. In Rinehart’s house, someone was always talking, generally Rinehart. A perpetual sound track, usually jazz, drifted from the speakers. An unending supply of wine, beer, and other beverages magically replenished itself. Rinehart provided marijuana, uppers, and downers, the drugs of the period. His parties went on for two
or three days in which the favorites wandered in and out, talked and drank until they could talk and drink no more, listened to readings, mostly by the host, and had frequent sex, mostly with the host.

Suki, Star, Rachel Newborn, and the other young women had fallen under Rinehart’s spell. He was a charismatic, unpredictable man who encouraged their aspirations while seeming to embody them: unlike the boys who claimed to be writers, Rinehart had actually published a book, one they had no difficulty accepting as too fine and daring for the blockheads in charge of the publishing world.
Of course
the book was dangerous—Rinehart exuded danger. He had secrets past and present, and there were days when without explanation the house on Buxton Place stood locked and empty. At times, one or another of his harem glimpsed Rinehart getting into or out of a Cadillac parked at a Hatchtown curb. An overexcitable dual major in fine arts and philosophy named Polly Heffer discovered a loaded revolver in a bedside drawer and screeched loudly enough to bring Suki in from the living room at the moment a naked Rinehart entered disgusted from the bathroom. Rinehart silenced Polly with a growl, said that he kept the revolver for self-protection, and invited Suki to make up a threesome.

Did she join in?

“You think I turned him
down
?”

Now and then, Rinehart’s devotees would come upon him in conference with men clearly unconnected to Albertus. These men drew him whispering into a corner, Rinehart sometimes laying an arm across a burly shoulder. The younger, more presentable of these outsiders surfaced during the whirlpools of long parties, and the students included them in their circle. One of these men was Donald Messmer, who lived in the Hotel Paris on Word Street and did whatever came to hand.

“Don Messmer wasn’t a criminal,” Suki said. “Basically, Don was this very easygoing guy who just sort of hung out. To us, he was like Dean Moriarty in
On the Road
, but more laid-back. And he was crazy about your mother. The guy probably never read a book in his life, and all of a sudden he’s walking around with novels sticking out of his back pocket because he wants to
impress Star Dunstan. I used to hear her talking to him about, you know, Cézanne and Kerouac and Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker—
Don Messmer!
—but he didn’t have a chance, she was in love with Edward Rinehart, along with the rest of us.”