The Lemur (7 page)

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Authors: Benjamin Black

Tags: #Family Life, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

BOOK: The Lemur

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Something flickered in her eyes, a far-off lightning flash. “Charles?” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s a figure in the landscape—your father’s landscape.”

Her mood had altered now: she seemed impatient, angry, almost. “He’s been dead for twenty years, more.”

“How well did you know him? Was he a figure in
your
landscape?”

She put down her fork again and lowered her head and turned it a little to one side; it was a thing she did when she was thinking, or upset. “Is this how it’s going to be if you write this book?” she asked, in an odd, low voice with a shake in it. “Will there be dinnertable interrogations? Will I be required nightly to pick over the past for you? A pity your researcher got shot, he would have spared me a lot of work.” She rose abruptly, not looking at him. Her napkin had fallen to the floor and she found herself treading on it. “Damn!” she said, in that same, angry undertone, and kicked the napkin off into the shadows, and strode away, the skirts of the kimono ruffling about her. Glass thought to call after her but did not. The silence seemed to vibrate faintly, as in the aftermath of something having shattered.

What had Dylan Riley discovered, and why had he been shot? And how were the two things connected, as Glass was now convinced they were? He looked again to the window, but this time saw only his own face reflected there.

THE CLEAVER

John
Glass woke early out of a riot of vivid and disorderly dreams, all detailed recollection of which drained from his mind the moment he opened his eyes. He lay in the half dark feeling paralyzed by dread. What was the matter, what terrible thing was amiss? Then he remembered the murder of Dylan Riley, the black weight of which lay over him like a shroud. How was it he could have been so calm yesterday, so detached, when he heard of the young man’s killing and Captain Ambrose summoned him to Police Headquarters? He marveled, not for the first time, at how the self insulates and protects itself against life’s shocks. He closed his eyes again, tight, and burrowed down into the warmth of the bedclothes and his own familiar fetor. He knew that things would seem different when the sun came up and the ordinary business of the day began. For now, though, he could have done with someone else’s warmth beside him, another’s body to cling on to for solace. But Louise had long ago, and without fuss, banished him from the master bedroom into the box room at the end of the corridor beyond the library. The arrangement suited him; mostly he preferred to sleep alone, if sleep was all that was going to happen, and it was some time since anything else had happened in bed between him and Louise.

He tried to fall back to sleep but could not. His mind was racing. It felt as if he were not so much thinking as being thought. Memories, nameless forebodings, speculations and conjectures, all were jumbled together in the ashen afterglow of the dreams he had forgotten. He turned on his back and lay gazing up at the shadowed ceiling. As so often late at night or in the early-morning hours he asked himself if he had made a mistake in moving from Ireland to America—no, not if he had made a mistake, but how great were the proportions of the mistake he had made. Not that he and Louise had been so very much happier living in Ireland, in Louise’s father’s gloomy gray-stone mansion at Mount Ardagh, and not that they had seen so very much of each other, for that matter. They had both spent the greater part of their time traveling, he on assignments abroad and Louise promoting charities across five continents. He knew he should not but in his heart he despised his wife’s career, so-called, as an ambassador of good works.

Maybe they should have had children.

He shifted, groaning angrily. The pillow was too hot, and his pajama top was damp with sweat and held him fast like a straitjacket. He could hear Clara in the kitchen, getting her mistress’s day started—Louise was an early riser. It made him uneasy, having a live-in servant. His father had died young and his widowed mother had kept house for a rich Dublin lawyer so that her only son could have an education.
Coarse
, he thought again,
coarse as cabbage
. He sighed. It was time to get up.

Dylan Riley’s murder was not reported in the
Times
, or at any rate he could find no mention of it. Louise would not have the
Post
or the
Daily News
in the house, so he had to go out and buy them. He took them into his workroom—where he never did any work—and sat on the silk-covered chaise longue that Louise had bought for him as a house-warming gift when they had moved in here six months ago. The
Post
had a couple of paragraphs on the killing, but the
News
ran a bigger story, on page five: Computer Wiz’s Mystery Slaying. There was nothing in either report that was new. Captain Ambrose of the NYPD was quoted as saying that he and his team were following a number of definite leads. There was a photograph of Riley’s girlfriend, one Terri Taylor, leaving the premises on Vandam in the company of a policewoman. She wore jeans and had long black hair; she had turned her face away from the cameras.

He switched on the miniature television set that squatted on a corner of his desk. There was an item on Fox 5 News, just a plain reporting of the facts. New York 1 had sent a camera and a reporter, and there was footage of Terri Taylor briefly on the pavement outside the warehouse. She was a pale, waiflike creature with a little pointed face and haunted eyes. She did not seem entirely heartbroken; rather, her look was one of bafflement and dismay, as if she were wondering dazedly how she had come to be involved in this mess. The camera team had managed to corner Captain Ambrose. On screen he looked even more like a tormented saint, in his brown suit and his big black brogues. He talked here also of “definite leads,” and then walked away quickly from the camera at his Indian-scout lope. Common to all the reports of the murder was an underlying note of—not indifference, exactly, but of halfheartedness, and faint impatience, as if everybody felt that time was being wasted here, while matters of far greater import were calling out urgently for attention elsewhere. What this meant, Glass knew, was that no one expected the murder to be solved. Dylan Riley had been a loner, according to the
Daily News,
so there would be no one to press the police for action. Even Terri Taylor, it was obvious, was leaving the scene as fast as her skinny legs would take her.

Glass went into the kitchen to get himself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, but Clara was there and of course insisted on doing it for him. He stood leaning against the refrigerator pretending to read the sports pages of the
Daily News.
Louise had already breakfasted and left—she had a meeting at the United Nations with someone from UNESCO. Glass wondered idly if his wife ever met anyone who was not someone. Covertly he watched Clara as she bustled about the windowless room. He knew almost nothing about her life. Her people were from the Caribbean—Puerto Rico, was it, or the Dominican Republic? He could not remember. She had a boyfriend, according to Louise, but so far there had been no sightings of the ghostly lover. What did she do in the evenings, he wondered, in her room off the kitchen? Watched television, he supposed. Did she read, and if so, what? He could not imagine. It struck him that for a journalist he felt very little curiosity about people, how they thought, what they felt. Dylan Riley, for instance: what did he know of him, except that he resembled a lemur and did not wash often enough? Maybe that was why he had given up journalism, he thought, because fundamentally he had scant concern for human beings. It was events that interested him, things happening, not those involved.

Clara handed him his coffee. “Real strong, Mr. Glass, like you like it.” She smiled, flashing her shiny white teeth. The toast had the texture of scorched plaster of paris.

The day outside was fresh and blustery, and there was a lemony cast to the sunlight. He took a taxi to Forty-fourth Street to check his mail. As usual, there was none. He sat with his feet on his desk and his hands behind his head and studied the sky, or what he could spy of it, between the jumbled buildings. He believed he could see the wind, faint striations like scour marks etched on the clear blue. He wished he could feel something solid and real about Dylan Riley’s murder—anger, indignation, an itch of curiosity, even. Yet all he could think was that Riley was dead and what did it matter who had killed him?

Then he remembered something, and he shifted his feet from the desk and reached for the telephone, fishing Captain Ambrose’s card out of his wallet.

When he said his name the policeman betrayed no surprise. Was he looking out at the same sky, that streaked azure?

“Who else did Dylan Riley call?” Glass asked. “Before he called me, I mean.”

There was a breathy sound on the line that might have been a low laugh. “Called lots of people,” the policeman said. “You thinking of anyone in particular?”

“I mean, did you trace all the numbers on his phone? Did you identify them all?”

“Sure, we traced them. His girlfriend, his dental hygienist, his mother in Orange County down in Florida. And you.”

“No one else in my family? Not my father-in-law?”

“Mr. Mulholland? No. You think he might have called him about this research you wanted him to do?”

“I expressly told him not to.”

“You said Mr. Mulholland didn’t know you were bringing in someone to check out his history.”

Glass closed his eyelids briefly and pressed an index finger to his forehead. “I told you, I hadn’t decided finally whether to hire Riley or not.”

“Right. So you did, I remember.” There was a silence; it hummed in Glass’s ear. The policeman said: “You were the one he called—twice. That’s why I asked you to come in. You were the only one we couldn’t account for, the only one who wasn’t his girlfriend or his dentist or his mother.” Another pause. “You got something you want to tell me, Mr. Glass? About Mr. Mulholland, maybe?”

“No,” Glass said, and expelled a breath. “I was just curious.”

“And worried?”

“Worried?”

“That Riley might have let your father-in-law know you had hired—were thinking of hiring—a snoop.”

“No,” Glass said, making his voice go dull. “I wasn’t worried.” He could sense the captain thinking, turning over the possibilities. “Mr. Mulholland and I have an understanding. He trusts me.”

Again there was that snuffle of suppressed amusement. “But you hadn’t told him about Dylan Riley.”

“I would have,” Glass said, still in that dulled, dogged tone.

“Sure, Mr. Glass. Sure you would.”

When he had put down the receiver he sat for a long time drumming his fingers on the desk and gazing unseeing before him, trying to think. His mind was still fogged with the after-traces of last night’s unremembered dreams. He picked up the phone again and called Alison O’Keeffe and asked if she would have an early lunch with him. She said she was in the middle of work but he pressed her and in the end she gave in, as he had known she would. He telephoned for a table at Pisces, a little fish place down at Union Square that had been a favorite haunt of theirs in the early days of their affair. Like Mario’s, it was becoming depressingly fashionable, and Glass worried that someday Louise would come in with one of her someones in tow and find him and Alison all snug and cozy at their accustomed corner table.
That
would be awkward.

He had not spoken to Alison since yesterday. He did not like to think of her being involved, however peripherally, in the business of Dylan Riley’s death, and was sorry he had mentioned Riley to her in the first place. He still could not think how Riley might have found out about him and Alison; he supposed he was naive for having imagined that New York was big and impersonal enough to allow him to carry on a love affair without anyone knowing.

In the restaurant he sat at the table with his back to the wall and watched the door, impatient with himself for his nervousness. So what if Louise should appear and find him with Alison? They were not children, they knew about each other’s lives. Probably if she did come in she would merely sweep the room rapidly in that way she did and let her glance glide over the happy couple and then change her table to one as far from theirs as possible.

In his honor Alison had exchanged her painter’s smock for a skirt and a blue silk blouse. When she kissed him he caught behind her perfume a faint whiff of acrylics; the smell always reminded him of brand-new toys at Christmastime. He waited for her to mention Dylan Riley but she did not; she must not have seen the news of his death. She wore her hair drawn tightly back from her face and tied at the nape of her neck with an elastic band. She touched his hand, smiling, and asked what it was they were celebrating. “Nothing,” he said. “Us.” She nodded, skeptically, still smiling with lowered eyelashes; she knew about Glass and spontaneity.

They ate Chilean sea bass and green salad, and Glass ordered a bottle of Tocai from Friuli, even though Alison had said she wanted to work in the afternoon and would drink only water. He downed the first glass of wine in two long draughts and poured another before the bossy waiter had time to wrest the bottle out of his hand. Alison, watching him, frowned. “Why are you so edgy?” she asked. “You’ll be drunk in a minute, and I’ll have to carry you home to your wife.”

She was right: the wine had gone straight to his head already. As he looked at her, seated there before him with the crowded room at her back, she appeared to shine, in her blue blouse, a living, bloodwarm creature. It seemed to him he had never noticed her ears before, these intricate, whorled, funny and lovable things attached at either side of her dear face. He wanted to reach across the table and touch her. He wanted to hold her head, that frail and delicate egg, between his palms and kiss her and tell her he loved her. Tears were welling in his eyes and the back of his throat was swollen. He felt ridiculous and happy. He was alive, and here, with his girl, in the midst of the cheerful clamor of midday, and it was spring, and he would live forever.

“By the way,” she said, “do you know someone called Cleaver?”

He blinked. “What? No. Who?”

She gave him a frowning smile that made her nose wrinkle at the bridge. “Cleaver,” she said. “Wilson Cleaver.” She shook her head. “What a name.”

He was having some difficulty with his breathing. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”