Duplicate Keys (8 page)

Her mother answered, even more whispery than usual. They talked about the weather in Minnesota (very changeable, that’s the worst kind), about the garden, about the grandparents, about her father. “You must be psychic,” said Doreen. “He wants to send you something.”

“Uh, oh.”

“I’ll let him tell you.”

“Do you want him to send it to me?”

“I don’t have an opinion.” That meant he had overridden Doreen’s basic practical objection; now she simply thought it wasn’t a good idea. “I’ll get him.”

“Ma!” But Doreen had turned away from the phone already, and Alice could hear her calling in the distance.

“Did she tell you?” Her father never greeted her, either in letters or on the phone. He always simply talked, as if she had just gone out of the room for a minute and returned. Alice said, “No, but I can imagine.”

“Honey, you’ll like this a lot, really you will.”

“What is it?”

“It’s all boxed up and ready to go,”

“Good, Daddo, what is it?”

“A microwave oven. Radarange. It got to the store with a couple of big scratches in the finish, so rather than sending it back to the factory, I just thought I’d send it to you. Now look, honey, you just set it on the counter and plug it in.”

“Thanks, sweetie.”

“Sure. Say, have you seen this show called
Ain’t Misbehavin’?”

“No, but some friends of mine have tickets.”

“I bought the records. Pretty good.”

“Daddy, come to New York. We’ll go see it.” Guaranteed to get him off the phone. In a moment, she said to her mother, “Don’t let him send it. I’ll have to pick it up at the post office in a cab. It’ll be a mess.”

“I tried to tell him that, but the ball’s rolling. Can you give it to some daycare center, or something?”

“I don’t know any daycare centers. I’ll ask the police what to do with it.” But Doreen didn’t perk up, didn’t wonder what Alice might have to do with the police. The police in Rochester would know what to do with it, and have time to do it. Alice sighed. After talking for a moment about the new strawberry bed, a kind of earthen ziggurat in the middle of the garden, Alice hung up, unable to tell them after all.

She went into the living room. She was terribly ready for bed, but somehow afraid to go. It was better to stay near the still-warm phone, imagining her parents in Rochester. Her mother would have turned on “Masterpiece Theatre,” and her father would have stuck his hands in his pockets and gone out to inspect the new ziggurat yet again. After “Masterpiece Theatre,” Doreen would call her mother to say that she would call in the morning, then Alice’s father would go through the house, locking doors and windows, buzzing the smoke alarms, sniffing all around the gas stove, turning down the heat if the day had been chilly. Then he,
too, would go to bed, and sleep would come to them at once, and stay with them hour after hour. They were excellent sleepers. Alice stood again by the window, wondering if any relative of hers ever had insomnia. Was sleep the clue to their longevity? She sat down on the couch and rested her chin on the arm, gazing idly down Eighty-fourth Street toward West End. She almost never sat in the living room. The couch, a convertible, did not wear its machinery very comfortably, but still, from one window or another, she had probably gazed pensively down Eighty-fourth Street a hundred thousand times in the last five years.

A figure came down the other side of the street, and she recognized it as it stepped into the light of the building across the way as the man she’d shared the cab with the other day, last night? Henry. Henry Mullet. He pulled open the big door, reached with his key to the inner door, and disappeared. Alice imagined him crossing to the elevator, pressing a button, getting into the elevator, pressing another button, rising slowly in the shaft, getting out, crossing to his own door, fumbling with his keys, unlocking two, maybe three locks. Sure enough, the light went on in a window one floor above hers, and then in the window next to that one and the one next to that. After a moment, in the middle window of the blazing apartment, Henry Mullet himself appeared, with a beer, yawning. He looked out at Eighty-fourth Street, too, out at her in her dark window. He was handsome. Had she noticed that the night before? He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, revealing a ribbed sleeveless undershirt. Alice wondered if he had ever seen her unconsciously naked, scooting down the hallway, secure in being alone. He drained the can of beer and, turning, threw it toward some invisible wastebasket. Alice reached for the overhead light, pulled the string, waved vigorously at Henry Mullet, who waved back, then pulled the string again. Henry Mullet laughed and turned away from the window. She could see the moldings of his walls, painted a dark color, possibly blue, over cream. Looking at them made her feel funny—contained, as if her apartment were a vessel in which
she and Susan floated from one horror to the next. The lights went off across the street, and Alice sat back on the couch. She let her head slip back, and felt her mouth open. Soon she was asleep.

I
N THE
middle of raucous buzzing, she awoke with a start and kicked her shin into the coffeetable. There was silence, then, as she realized she was in the living room, the buzz, flat and blaring, came again. Her shin throbbed, and she sidled carefully around the table, also avoiding the sharp, high runner of her rocking chair. She had just enough wits to press “talk” instead of “door.” “Who is it?” She cleared her voice and repeated, “Who is it?”

“Ray.”

“Shit, Ray, it’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s not that late. I need to talk to you.”

She buzzed the door.

He appeared in a moment, oddly apparelled, a different incarnation from the one who had eaten dinner with her a few hours before. His very nice shirt and very tight jeans looked binding and uncomfortable. The shirt was unbuttoned nearly to his waist, revealing a few red hairs and a prominent breastbone. She stepped back into the apartment, and Ray followed. He obviously wasn’t going to take time for preliminaries. He said, “Some people are waiting for me. Listen. You were the last person in Denny’s apartment. What did you see there?”

“I saw dead people. Plants. Furniture. All the usual.”

“Anything unusual? I mean, besides Denny and Craig?”

“I don’t know. Honey asked me that. I don’t remember.”

“Just think about it.”

“It’s the middle of the night! You woke me up.”

“Please. Think, okay?”

Alice inhaled deeply and rubbed her eyes. “I didn’t see it, Ray. I don’t know what it is, and I didn’t see it.”

“Think again. Did you look in any closets or cabinets in the kitchen or anything?”

“Of course not! What do you think I was doing there?”

“A box maybe, a tin box with poinsettias. On the coffeetable or on the floor, or on one of the other tables.”

“You don’t have to be so cagey, Ray. I know what you’re talking about and I didn’t see it. It was probably gone.”

“Did Honey mention it?”

“No, Susan. She said it was supposed to have been gone two weeks ago.”

Ray sighed doubtfully and buttoned one of the buttons on the shirt. “Maybe it was gone. Maybe they did sell it. Craig was sure he had a deal. You don’t think—”

“What?”

“That the guy he was going to sell it to just killed them instead of paying—”

Alice smiled. Surely that was it. “Well, there wasn’t any money there. I would have noticed that, I’m sure.”

“I just wish I knew—” Ray, pacing around the room, looked out the window, then came back and said, “Listen. This is too important for you not to remember. It’s got to come to you at some point, it just has. I’m sure it was the box with the poinsettias—”

“Are you going to tell Honey about this idea, or am I?”

“Does either one of us need to? It’s just a theory. Craig didn’t say anything definite. I don’t want—”

“I can imagine.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“If he asked—”

“Well, obviously, if he asked, you’d have to, but you don’t have to let him know that there might be something to ask about.”

“Unless you have a sense of responsibility.”

“Does a sense of responsibility have to include every little notion?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe you should—”

“Don’t say it. Leave it to me.” He turned and kissed her on the cheek. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Don’t even think about it until tomorrow, okay?” He opened the door and disappeared down the stairs. Alice locked up carefully behind him, put up the chain, and went to the window. Although he must have left, he was too close to the building for her to see him. It was tempting not to think about it. A life of never thinking about it was quite easy to imagine. She thought of how the police had their own methods, much more reliable than gossip or speculation. She shivered, then walked down the hall toward her room.

4

A
LICE
’
S
Monday morning at the library was well advanced by the time Susan called, her voice furred with sleep. Alice had been cataloguing, rather peaceful, impersonal work that gave her a spurious sense of distance from the events of the weekend. On her coffee break, she could not bring herself to mention the murder to Laura, Sidney, and Howard. When they asked her what she had done during her two perfect days, she didn’t answer.

At the very sound of Susan’s voice, her heart swelled painfully in sympathy. Didn’t she remember with absolute clarity how the moment of awakening was the worst moment of the day, a hole of a moment out of which, some days, one never even climbed? Susan, however, said that she felt much better, strengthened by her fourteen hours of sleep and by the task Detective Honey, who had just called, had given her. She needed Alice’s help in remembering everyone who would have or could have had access to a set of keys. Alice groaned.

“I know,” said Susan. “Can I meet you for lunch so we can brainstorm it? He sounded so disapproving. I have this vision of us flinging keys out of a basket like flower petals at a wedding.”

“Bring some pastrami sandwiches,” said Alice. “We can eat on the steps of the library. I only have half an hour today.”

The list filled two pages of lined secretarial paper. Two pages! thought Alice. “Only two pages,” said Susan. It included people Alice had never heard of as well as people she had not only heard of, but whose records she owned and played. “I didn’t know he was a friend of Denny’s.” She pointed to a name on the first sheet of paper.

“He wasn’t.” Susan pursed her lips angrily. “Craig met him in California and gave him a set of keys, in case he ever needed a place to stay in New York. As if the record company wouldn’t put him up at the Waldorf. Craig just wanted to be able to say that ‘Kenny had keys to my place.’ Except that it wasn’t his place.”

Alice counted the names on the list. “Do you really think you gave away forty-seven keys?”

“There were only six or eight sets that we ever had made, but any key can be duplicated. Honey said we should write down the names of anyone who might have had one or might have borrowed one.” After a moment of regarding the leisurely lunchers and eager pigeons on the steps of the library, she went on, “And I don’t even know who Ray’s friends are. Talk about a doorway into the void.”

“Say!” exclaimed Alice, but then she hesitated. Had Ray really been to see her in the middle of the night? The incident was so brief that until Susan started talking about him, Alice had forgotten it. She said, “Ray wouldn’t give away keys to your apartment, would he? He’s always kept those people separate from us. He’s not crazy. I mean, he may like the sense of danger he feels with them, but he does recognize the danger. Anyway—”

Susan interrupted her distractedly. “That’s the way it seems, or at least, it did seem.”

“Listen to this—” How would she state it? Alice paused.

Susan filled the pause, warming to an angry glow. “I know that’s where he got the cocaine. Who’s to say that somebody
didn’t get impatient about waiting for the money? Who’s to say that Ray, having failed as the go between, didn’t hand over the key for an evening, so that the dealer could impress upon Craig how much he wanted his payment? It’s not exactly Ray I distrust. But Craig was always dismissive and belittling with Ray. He liked him, but he always teased him and patronized him, and he never saw that it hurt Ray’s feelings. So, what if some guy was pressuring Ray and threatening him, why should he put up with it, when he could just lend the key for a few hours? It might be good for Craig to be taught a lesson.” She was bitterly sarcastic.

Alice said, “It all seems to revolve around the cocaine, doesn’t it?”

“What cocaine? That’s the question. Maybe it was really gone. Maybe they did what Denny said they were going to do two weeks ago.”

“What if we told Honey all this?”

“What if? I don’t know. Do you ever talk about drugs to a cop, voluntarily?”

“What did they keep it in?”

“What?”

“The cocaine. How much is that much? A salt shaker full? A breadbox full?”

“In between. They kept it in various containers. Fruitcake tin, plastic box, that kind of stuff. Craig talked about having a brass-bound cherrywood box made, all lined with some special metal.”