Vermilion (7 page)

“I hate card games,” Valentine had said.

The kettle whistled. He poured the boiling water into a cup that held three times the recommended amount of instant coffee, and took the mug into the living room. He sat on the overstuffed white sofa that faced the bay window. He smiled to see the snow falling more heavily.

He had raised the cup to his lips, when he noticed a neatly folded piece of blue notepaper resting above the jack of clubs embedded in the coffee table. He put the coffee down, picked the note up, unfolded and read it. In neat clear script was written: “
Had to get to work early. Didn't want to wake you. Thanks for a great time. Call me soon. Your number wasn't on the phone, so I'll just leave mine
.” It gave the telephone number, a Boston exchange, and was signed “
Gary
.”

It had been no dream. Valentine tried to remember what Gary looked like.

Valentine raised the cup to his lips, and the door buzzer sounded. He groaned, and swallowed a quarter of the cup of burning coffee. On the fifth insistent buzz, he went to the door and pressed the intercom.

It was Clarisse's voice, quick and blurred. After thirty seconds of incomprehensible speech, Valentine pressed the door-release button for a sarcastically long time, opened the door, and retreated to the sofa.

A few moments later, Clarisse rushed in. She was wearing her fur coat, but no hat. As Valentine watched, droplets of snow melted in her thick black hair like tiny dissolving pearls. Under one arm was her leather envelope with a newspaper sticking out of it, and in her other hand was a glazed paper bag, torn, with the logo of an expensive and fashionable Italian bakery on it.

“Gorgeous day!” she cried, and kicked the door shut. She threw the envelope and the bag onto the glass table, and then pulled off her coat. Beneath she wore full-cut black corduroy slacks and a white silk blouse opened one button too many. Around her neck was a gold chain fashioned of square links.

The coat flew over Valentine's head and fell behind the couch.

“It's too early in the morning for June Allyson,” said Valentine sulkily.

“No,” said Clarisse, “I'm Faye Dunaway this morning. To do June Allyson, I'd have to be drunk.” She craned her neck in several directions. “Where is he?” she demanded.

“Who?”

“The man of the hour. The trick of the day?”

“He left. I was too much for him.”

“Too bad,” she said, disappointed. “I brought breakfast for three.” She ran to the kitchen, leaned through the doorframe, balancing precariously on one high-heeled shoe, and flicked on the flame under the water.

“Why are you out so early?”

“Guilt,” replied Clarisse, turning back with a ravishing smile. “This morning I got up and decided I was going to pull a real nine-to-fiver. First one in, last one out. That office wouldn't know what hit it.”

Valentine glanced at the clock on the mantel. “You mean you already put in two hours?”

Clarisse paused. “Actually, no,” she admitted. “I haven't quite made it in yet. I left the apartment though at eight-thirty. I really did. But it was so cold I couldn't put in my contacts, because I was afraid they'd freeze to my pupils, and I got on the wrong train, and I ended up at Haymarket. So as long as I was there, I figured I might as well have coffee with this cute fireman who was just getting off duty, and I did, and we have a date, and you'll be real jealous if I ever let you meet him, and then I thought that as long as I was
still
there, I might as well run across to the North End and buy you and Mr. Nameless some breakfast, and then I was headed back and I remembered that my passport needed to be renewed so I stopped in at Government Center and filled out all the forms, and ran across the street to have my picture taken, and here I am. I'm considering this an early lunch hour.”

“I don't know why you even try.”

“Well,” said Clarisse, returning languidly to the kitchen to prepare coffee for herself, “I feel so virtuous, you just can't imagine.”

Valentine had pulled the newspaper out of her leather envelope and opened it onto his lap.

“It's on page three, lower right,” called Clarisse from the kitchen.

A small headline above a short column read, NEW CLUE IN HUSTLER DEATH. Valentine read the first sentence, lost the sense of it, and brushed the newspaper off his lap onto the floor.

“Not ready for the gory details this early?” said Clarisse.

“Not awake.”

“Then don't read the Letters to the Editor either. Some imbecilic woman from Jamaica Plain wrote in, talking about Billy G., saying he was one down and seventy-five thousand to go—”

“Not a bad estimate for a bigot,” remarked Valentine. “That is, if she was talking about just Boston.”

“—and that she thought it was a good sign that he had been dumped on Scarpetti's lawn, except that his grass probably wouldn't ever grow there again, and that she hoped someone was seeing to it that the boy wasn't buried in consecrated ground.”

“That's great. Find out her address, and later we'll ride by and fire-bomb her house. That'll be one bigot down, and two hundred million to go.”

Clarisse tossed the bakery bag into Valentine's lap. He opened it, handed Clarisse an enormous sweet bun filled with honey and covered with crushed walnuts. He took a second one out for himself.

“This snow could get on my nerves if it keeps up,” said Clarisse. “Maybe you and I ought to go away somewhere.”

“Sure,” said Valentine, “let's go back to Bermuda. We can stay in that hotel where we met—relive our first happy days together—”

“Yes,” said Clarisse. “Those happy days when I fell in love with you by the pool, those happy nights in my cabana, and those happy mornings that you spent in bed with the assistant manager—”

“I didn't know quite how to break it to you…”

“I thought your impotence was
my
fault—but by the time you got around to me in the evening, you were just worn out. God was I upset when I found out!”

“I would have been impotent
without
the assistant manager,” smiled Valentine, consolingly.

“So why did you even try?”

“Because you were in love with me, and I was in love with your tits. I still am.”

“Let's go to Rio instead,” said Clarisse. “Rio's great this time of year.”

“I can't afford Rio,” said Valentine.

“You could if you didn't spend half your salary on a maid for this three-room apartment.”

“I have to have someone to clean. Housecleaning depresses me. That's something else that makes me impotent. I don't even like to watch other people cleaning. That's why Joyce comes in at night, when I'm at Bonaparte's.”

“You've got the only maid in town who comes in three times a week to watch the late movie!”

“Clarisse, I'm not paying her for the work she does, but for the work that I don't have to do.”

“Anyway, if you weren't supporting Joyce and her two husbands, you'd have enough money to go to Rio.”

“Probably.” Valentine shrugged.

They finished the buns in silence, watching the snow blowing against the bay window.

Clarisse pushed the last bit of pastry into her mouth, licked her fingers, and sat up. “Nearly forgot. Guess who called this morning?”

From the tone of her voice he knew. He closed his eyes, dropped his head against the back of the sofa, and groaned. He lifted his head, opened his eyes, and said, “Mark.”

“He called at seven-thirty. Seven-thirty in the morning, can you imagine? To chat?!”

“Clarisse, he works at a logging camp. He was probably already on his second morning coffee break. Why did he call?”

“Because your number is unlisted. He fell in love with you and you wouldn't even give him your phone number.”

“Only two people in the world have my phone number. You and my father.”

“Why are you so mean to Mark?”

“I'm not mean to him.”

“Yes you are. All he wants is to see you once in a while. It must be lonely up there in the wilds of New Hampshire—”

“—surrounded by three hundred lumberjacks—”

“Yes,” said Clarisse, “but he's not in love with them, he's in love with you.”

“Clarisse,” said Valentine, with hard-got patience, “he stayed here two weeks last summer. If you're generous, I suppose you could call that an affair. It began in August, it ended in August. How can you take seriously anything that begins and ends in August? Hot nights and steamy days for two weeks, and then he asks me to marry him. I could have accepted I suppose, but my heart wouldn't have been in it. Mark is hot, Mark has the body of death, Mark is just about the handsomest most rugged man I've ever come across in my life, and he'll make somebody a great wife, but not me!”

Clarisse smiled condescendingly. “He'll be here tomorrow to renew the proposal.”

“What?!”

“I promised him I wouldn't tell you. He wanted to surprise you. I swore on my mother's grave I wouldn't tell you.”

“Your mother's not dead.”

“She's got her plot. Anyway, he said he'd be in about dinnertime.”

“How can I get away from him?”

“We could go to Ibiza,” suggested Clarisse. “He wouldn't find us on Ibiza.”

“Call him back,” said Valentine, “tell him I have infectious hepatitis. Tell him—”

“Eat the third roll,” said Clarisse, “you'll feel better if you're fat.”

Valentine tore open the bag and devoured the pastry.

Neither said anything for a few moments.

Clarisse pointed to the discarded newspaper. “Don't you want to know what the new clue is?”

“No.”

“It's a lipstick smear.”

Valentine looked up. He brushed sugar and crushed walnuts from his moustache and beard. “That kid wasn't the type, not even for clear gloss.”

“It wasn't on him. It was on a handkerchief.”

“And?”

Clarisse looked at him blankly. “That's all. It was in his back pocket.”

“And?” Valentine demanded again.

“Maybe Billy was with a woman that night. Maybe a woman killed him and then kissed him in the handkerchief.”

“Maybe,” said Valentine doubtfully. “Maybe she could have bashed his head in with a single blow, but she'd have to have been built like Catherine the Great.”

“Billy was just a scrawny kid, so maybe it was just a lucky hit. Or maybe it was teamwork—a man
and
a woman.”

Valentine crumpled the bakery bag. “What are you getting at?”

“Maybe Searcy is looking in the wrong place. The dead kid was a hustler and so the police are looking for a gay killer. But maybe, if it was a woman…”

Valentine stood and walked to the bay window. He stared at the snow. He turned and stared at Clarisse. “Maybe a hooker kissed his handkerchief. Maybe he lent it to a drag queen in the bus station. If the police had thought it was an important clue, they wouldn't have released it to the press.”

“Maybe it was leaked, maybe the police didn't want the information to get out. The
Globe
's against Scarpetti, and they'd probably like to see it turn out that this kid was murdered by a straight couple out for sleazy thrills.”

“That's a bit involved for the
Globe
, don't you think? They have enough trouble deciding whether they're for or against fresh water.”

“Have you talked to that good-looking cop yet?”

“Searcy?”

Clarisse nodded.

“I called. He wasn't there. I left a message.”

“You're making excuses, Val, you—”

The telephone rang.

“Must be your father,” said Clarisse, “
I
'm already here.”

“I gave my number to the cop to call back.” Valentine picked up the receiver.

It was Searcy. “I got your message just this minute, I—”

Valentine heard two telephones ring on Searcy's end.

“Just a minute,” said Searcy. The line went blank.

Valentine sighed and leaned against the cold glass of the bay window. “I love it. First man I've given my number to in two years, and he puts me on hold.”

Clarisse leaned forward over the coffee table. She had taken a small plastic contact-lens holder and a bottle of wetting solution from her leather envelope, and was snapping the lenses into her eyes. The left one went in immediately, but the second popped off her finger into the high pile of the carpet.

“Hang up, hang up!” she shrieked.

“What the hell's going on?” Searcy demanded. Valentine had not heard the line reconnect.

“That was Clarisse,” said Valentine.

She had dropped to her hands and knees on the carpet.

“Who?” said Searcy.

“The woman in Bonaparte's.”

There was a pause. “In the checkroom…?”

“That's Irene. Clarisse, the one with the big—”

One cheek against the carpet, Clarisse glared at Valentine.

“—big fur coat,” said Valentine.

“I remember,” said Searcy.

Valentine gave Searcy a circumstantial account of meeting Golacinsky on the Block.

“Well,” said Searcy, “I'm glad you decided to come clean—”

“What!”

“You're sure you didn't take Golacinsky back to your place for a quickie? You could have afforded what a kid like that was charging. He wasn't—”

“Lieutenant, I told you what happened.” Valentine gripped the receiver hard. “There was nothing else.”

“Well,” said Searcy then, “it won't do me much good. I was hoping that you had called about something important. I've talked to a number of people already who saw him after you ran into him on the Block. What you've given me isn't much help.”

“You told me to call if I had
any
information.”