Styx & Stone (33 page)

“Who is it?” a sleepy voice asked through the door marked 4.

“It’s Ellie Stone,” I said. “Is that you, Hildy?”

I heard her swear, and there was a frantic rustling inside.

“Just a minute,” she called, and I heard a man’s voice.

A cold hand crawled up my back, and I felt my eyes turn green. I’d never experienced the nauseating churning of jealousy, not with Steve Herbert, not with any old flames or passion-pit Romeos, not even with Stitch Ferguson, and I didn’t like it. Hildy and Gigi, just as I had suspected? I pressed my ear to the door, listening closely, feeling like a wronged woman on the heels of her erring man.

“I’ll be right there, Ellie,” called Hildy amid more shuffling and hushed voices. Finally, about a minute later, she opened the door, puffy-eyed, wrapped in a terry cloth robe, her teased brunette hair looking like cotton candy.

“Not alone?” I asked, my heart thumping in my chest.

“As a matter of fact, no,” she said, piqued by my intrusion. “How may I help you this early Sunday morning, Ellie?”

I slipped past her inside, looking around the disheveled studio apartment. There was a bed, rumpled sheets pulled back, but no handsome Gigi Lucchesi lying supine in postcoital glow. A straw bottle of Chianti lay on the floor, empty, as were the two tumblers—stained red—on the end table next to the bed. The sink in the kitchenette was stacked high with pots and pans, crusty with some kind of tomato sauce. The bones of an intimate dinner.

“What do you want, Ellie?”

I scanned the room again for signs of Gigi. The bathroom door was closed.

“Ellie?”

“I want to talk to you, Hildy,” I said, trying to cap my rage. “And I want to talk to him.”

Hildy seethed. “Look, Ellie, I’m sorry, but it’s no big deal. We’re both adults, we can do as we please,” she said, gathering some indignation. “He’s not your property, whether he’s your father’s favorite or not.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, a glimmer of my misunderstanding just dawning. “Who is it in there?”

She glanced to the bathroom door and back to me, words failing her. Then the door creaked open, and a hand emerged.

“Ellie,” he smiled sheepishly in a T-shirt, a towel knotted around his waist.

“Bernie!” The nauseous soup in my gut fell calm, as if the high flame boiling it had been blown out.

“You won’t tell your father I’ve been here,” he said.

“Grow a spine, Bernie,” ordered Hildy.

“What’s this all about, Ellie?” asked Bernie.

I felt my land legs beneath me, and smiled. “I came to ask Hildy if she knew who had lunch with my father last Friday.”

Bernie looked to her for an answer, and Hildy frowned. “No, I told you the other night that I saw him in the office last Friday, but not at lunchtime.”

How could she have remembered that, I wondered. She was quite drunk when she told me at the reception.

“What about Friday evening?” I asked, well aware Bernie had been with my father that night.

“I told you, Ellie,” she glared. “I had a date. It doesn’t concern you.”

“You had a date?” asked Bernie.

“Let it go,” ordered Hildy.

“OK, well, what about Chalmers?” asked Bernie, the stress showing in his neck. “If he finds out about this, he’ll have my head. And yours too, Hildy.”

Hildy threw back her head and laughed. “You’re right about that. Chalmers would pluck the hair off your head, Bernie, if he knew. But don’t worry; Miss Eleonora Stone won’t tell anyone. Isn’t that right, Miss Eleonora?”

I didn’t like the “Miss” bit, but I nodded, intent on hiding my jealousy and bother from Hildy. I forced a broad smile, as if I were enjoying Bernie’s discomfort as much as she was.

“We don’t know who had lunch with your father last Friday, so why don’t you just shove off?” said Bernie, now clearly annoyed with the ribbing. “Go ask Roger Purdy; he told me he saw your father leave and come back from lunch that day. Or ask Gigi Lucchesi.”

“Gigi Lucchesi?” I asked. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” said Bernie. “Didn’t he help your father catalog his books? He spent hours with him a couple of months ago. Of course that was before the Barnard girl fell in love with him. Your father was incensed that Chalmers tried to cover it up.”

“Don’t be jealous, Bernie,” said Hildy with a snicker. “Your boyfriend needed help, and Gigi was Johnny-on-the-spot. You were too slow off the mark. And that girl was moony over Gigi. He did nothing wrong.”

“That’s enough of that, Hildy,” said Bernie, but I was suddenly sobbing fiercely into my hands. My lungs burned with each gasping breath. The tears poured down my cheeks unchecked. I was disconsolate, beyond humiliation; my emotions had dissolved without warning, and later I wondered if it was my anguish for my ailing father or for Gigi that had pushed me to tears. I felt a wretch, alone and unworthy of affection or even sympathy. And pathetic to have tried to surprise Hildy Jaspers on a cold Sunday morning. I didn’t respect myself; why should anyone else?

“Ellie . . .” said Hildy softly, coming to my side to comfort me. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I waved her off and ran through the door and down the stairs. My jealousy was stronger than my love for my father, I feared, and I was crushed.

I wandered through Chelsea, past Seventh and Sixth Avenues, and ended up sitting on a cold bench in Madison Square Park, staring at the Flatiron building. I wiped my nose with a handkerchief and thought of my father—he insisted on calling it the Fuller Building. He was always stuck somewhere in the past, stubbornly defending some obsolete garrison of prescriptive grammar or fighting a lost cause against the advances of Philistinism.

I drew a deep sigh and wished my life was different, not the isolated existence I had built around myself. No real friends, just boyfriends and pals. No family, just relations. It felt like a dirge was playing in my head, an insufferable lament that never stopped. How had I come to this spot? Was there anywhere else to go?

I don’t know why, but I thought about my mother and her quirky, sweet nature. Despite my father’s cantankerous disposition, they had never quarreled. It seemed a miracle to me, but she was patient with him, and he was tender with her. Perhaps she acted as a tonic for his hot temper, and he a stimulant for her quiet temperament. She could be prickly with him at times, but I had never heard her raise her voice to him. They fit together like pieces of a puzzle, flanges neatly accommodated by bespoke notches.

I sat on the cold bench, considering my parents’ enduring love affair, and I felt distracted, if not comforted, from my misery. The interruption allowed me to breathe, relax, and the tightness in my throat eased. It allowed my mind to wander off on other tangents, focus on the mundane—a greasy black pigeon poking around at my feet—and the sublime—a carillon of church bells sounding somewhere to the east. I looked up at the gray Sunday sky and remembered I had work to do.

I pushed myself off the bench and crossed Fifth Avenue to the northwest corner of Twenty-Third Street. There, I folded myself into a phone booth and dialed Roger Purdy’s number, saving myself a subway token.

“I’m on my way to church,” he said after I’d identified myself. “What do you want?”

“One question, if you please,” I said. “Then I’ll leave you to your genuflection.”

“Please, Miss Stone,” he said with disdain. “I’m a Presbyterian, not a papist.”

“What about Anthony Petronella? Isn’t he Catholic?”

A pause grew stale down the line. “You had a question?”

“Bernie Sanger says you saw my father last Friday on his way to lunch at the Faculty Club.”

“It was a supreme pleasure, yes.”

“And you saw him return.”

“I wondered if I was worthy.”

“Who was he with?” I asked, thinking what an ass he was.

“Come on, Miss Stone,” he said, the coy boy. “I’m sure an investigator as tenacious and perspicacious as you should have an educated guess.”

“I do. But I need confirmation of my hunch.”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

He’d have to hit me over the head first. “Ruggero Ercolano.”

Static down the line. Then, “That’s right.” He sounded disappointed.

“Thank you,” I said. “I think I know who hit my father on the head, and who threw that radio into Ercolano’s bathtub.”

I needed a motive, something more than the vague threat my father posed to Bruchner. I needed to know exactly what he suspected the gray man had done, and how the tattoo fit into the picture. Without understanding the tattoo, I didn’t know where to look for the proof. All I had were my father’s suspicions. On the surface, it seemed unlikely that a Jew would be an anti-Semite. It was even more improbable that a concentration camp survivor would harbor such hatred toward his own people.

I believe in logic; people do things for reasons, whether choosing a color for a new car or deciding to murder someone. There is always a sense to an action, unless you’re dealing with a defective mind. So, I dismantled the enigma in a taxi uptown and as I walked west toward Riverside Park and Professor Saettano’s apartment.

My first question was, what had kicked off my father’s suspicions? Bruchner himself admitted that the incident in the steam bath at the gym was the beginning. The tattoo on his chest, as innocent as it appeared, communicated a significant clue to my father. I couldn’t figure what it meant to him, so I moved on to my second question.

How could Bruchner be an anti-Semite if he was Jewish? That’s where Karen Bruchner came in. One of the two Bruchners was a fake, why not the professor? Maybe my father had discovered Bruchner’s charade. But would such a discovery prompt such hostility? I’m sure there are lots of people using assumed names, especially war refugees; it shouldn’t make my father blow his stack in a restaurant full of colleagues. There was something more to it, and I was back to the tattoo.

Three: something had convinced my father that his doubts about Bruchner were justified, or he never would have leapt at his throat in public. What was it? Perhaps a letter from Professor Arturo Marescialli had arrived that morning. I didn’t know for sure that such a letter existed, but I hadn’t located it among my father’s files. Or did he have other sources of information? Being the compulsive cataloguer that he is, he would have filed the letter in his correspondence folder. The burglar—Bruchner, I thought—knew to look for the damning evidence, and had apparently found it.

Four: Why kill Ercolano? This was the only question I could answer. Roger Purdy had seen my father leave the office with Ercolano before lunch and return with him afterward. I figured it a safe bet that Ruggero Ercolano had been the man with my father at the Faculty Club lunch that Friday afternoon. Bruchner’s motive for killing Ercolano, therefore, could have been the latter’s knowledge of my father’s suspicions and/or proof of Bruchner’s charade. Unfortunately for my cluttered mind, this scenario presented another question.

Five: How did Bruchner get into Ercolano’s apartment? No idea.

Libby opened the door tentatively.

“Please excuse the intrusion,” I said. “Is the professor in?”

“It’s a bit early to be calling on a Sunday,” she said peevishly. “But come in. I’ll let him know you’re here.”