Jade in Aries (13 page)

A while later I saw Leo Ross emerging from the room with the bar in it. He was alone, and I intercepted him before he could return to his friend with the sunken cheeks. “Hello,” I said, stepping in front of him, and he looked irritable for one brief second before tacking a carefree smile on his face. He said, “How did you and Henry get along?”

“Fine. He tells me you cruise when you’re supposed to be at novenas.”

The smile flicked out, and the irritability showed itself undisguised. “He did? What did he do that for?”

“Because it makes him sad, I suppose. The point is, for my purposes it would be better if you
were
cruising. If you were successful, I mean. That way, you’d have an alibi.”

The smile returned, but this time intermixed with the irritation. “Sorry, my friend,” he said. “Monday I was truly a good boy. I was really at the novena.”

“It wouldn’t have to be a public alibi,” I said. “Koberberg wouldn’t have to know about it. That’s the advantage in my not really being a policeman.”

“Another advantage,” he said, his smile getting tighter all the time, “is that I don’t have to talk to you.” He stepped around me, and moved on.

I
LEFT THE PARTY A
little after one. Except for Bruce Maundy, none of my suspects had yet departed; in fact, I was almost the first to leave. Jerry Weissman had attempted to distribute his coffee and cookies about an hour before, with very limited success, and the party I left was almost exactly the same as the party I’d arrived at three hours before. The same volume level, the same arrangements of standing conversational groups, the same chipper superficial chatter. I had expected, as the drinks were consumed, that some sort of change would take place, toward more happiness or toward some kind of trouble, but it hadn’t happened and it looked now as though it wouldn’t. If these people were most of them wearing masks, the masks seemed to be very securely in place; drink alone wouldn’t dislodge them.

It was still snowing, as lazily and steadily as before. Walking the four blocks to where I’d parked my car, I tried to visualize Jamie Dearborn at that party. How would he have behaved? How would he have talked with the differing groups, with each of my differing suspects? That he would have disappeared in there like a minnow in a school of minnow I had no doubts, but what specific kind of minnow would he have been?

Jamie Dearborn had been clubbed to death, in a time-honored tradition, by a brass candlestick, a part of the décor of the top-floor bedroom in which the body had been found. I tried to visualize each of my suspects wielding that candlestick, and at first I could see none of them doing it. But then, as I thought about them further, I could see every one of them swinging that shaped piece of brass at Jamie Dearborn’s head.

Stewart Remington judiciously.

Bruce Maundy enragedly.

Cary Lane hysterically.

David Poumon coldly.

Henry Koberberg agonizedly.

Leo Ross irritably.

There is no type of human being which is a killer type; all men can kill, given the proper impetus.

If only I had met Jamie Dearborn in life, I would know better what kind of impetus he would be likely to give, which of the six he would be most likely to rub the wrong way.

The only one of them who had said anything against Dearborn was Koberberg, who had claimed Dearborn was generally disliked for being unpleasant in some way about his successes in life. Did that make Koberberg my prime suspect? Or, since he had talked about his feelings so plainly, did it make him my least likely suspect?

I had to know more, and I wasn’t even sure where to do my looking.

Tomorrow I would visit Cornell again.

I suddenly wondered who would get Jammer and the three houses if Cornell, too, were to die. I would have to remember to ask him about that tomorrow.

And where would I find out Stewart Remington’s current financial condition? I didn’t know, but it was probably worth looking into.

I reached the car, my head full of notes and questions. I cleared accumulated snow from the windshield, unlocked the door, and slid in behind the wheel. I keep a notebook and pencil in the glove compartment, and now I wrote down in this all the questions I could think of that I wanted to try to find answers to tomorrow.

My best route home was over to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and out the Long Island Expressway. There was quite a bit of traffic out on the highways, as usual for a Saturday night, but it was fast-moving and made for easy driving. The roadway itself was clear of snow, for the most part.

It was as I took the exit ramp off the Long Island Expressway that I saw the flashing red light behind me. I knew I hadn’t been exceeding the speed limit, and so I was certain the light wasn’t for me. A few cars had passed me at fairly high speed; it would be one of them the patrol car was after.

Except that it followed me down the ramp. And it wasn’t precisely a patrol car. It was a detective’s car, which is to say it was an ordinary-appearing car with no police colorings or markings on it, and the red signal light was mounted on the dashboard just inside the windshield rather than on the roof.

And it was me he wanted. As I left the ramp and rolled out onto the street, this one fairly dark and completely deserted except for the two of us, he pulled up beside me and I saw him waving at me to pull over and stop. He was alone in the front seat, but there was another person in the back.

I stopped the car, and he angled to a stop in front of me. I didn’t bother reaching for my wallet to get out my license, because I already believed this was something other than a normal traffic problem.

He was a burly man, made burlier by the heavy overcoat he wore. The falling snow made him somewhat indistinct as he walked heavily back toward me, but my impression was of a large, heavy-set man of about forty, in black overcoat and black hat.

I rolled my window down as he reached me. “Yes, Officer?”

His face was heavy, too, with the shadowed jaw of a man whose beard is too heavy for any razor. “License and registration,” he said, mumbling the words from long practice.

Was it a normal traffic check after all? But it just didn’t have the right feel to it, and in any case, uniformed patrolmen handle that sort of thing. I had the feeling I was meeting Detective Aldo Manzoni.

But I followed his lead, merely getting my license out of my wallet and my registration out of the glove compartment, and handing them to him. He stood in the snow, studying them, for an interminable time, and then stepped back a pace and said, “Would you get out of the car, please?”

I opened the door and stepped out.

“Shut the door, please.” He had put my license and registration in his overcoat pocket.

I shut the door. “What’s the problem, Officer?”

“We’ll get to that, Mr. Tobin,” he said. His voice was heavy but uninflected; a monotone, as though he were reading prepared statements. He said, “Turn around and put your hands on the roof of the car.”

He was going to frisk me? But it wouldn’t be a good idea to argue, so I did as he said. And now I was beginning to comprehend Ronald Cornell’s helplessness. When a policeman is your enemy, he has more power than you can deal with. He can do many things to you that skirt the fringes of legality without ever quite falling over the edge, and there is nothing you can do to him at all, nothing at all, that doesn’t give him an opening to do even more in return. You cannot beat a policeman, not directly, it’s an uneven contest. You can only obey his orders and try to minimize the damage and hope for the best.

I put my hands on the top of my car, and leaned forward on the balls of my feet when he ordered me to do so. He frisked me, quickly and efficiently, and kept nothing but the sheet of paper from my notebook on which I had written down, in brief abbreviations, the questions I wanted to ask Cornell.

“All right, Mr. Tobin, turn around.”

I turned around. He was holding the slip of paper, unfolded. He glanced at it, and then looked at me. Snowflakes fell on the paper, and I knew he would not be giving it back to me.

He said, “What is your employment, Mr. Tobin?”

“I don’t have any,” I said.

“Unemployed? What was your last employment?”

“New York Police Department.”

“Yes,” he said. He already knew about that. “When did that employment end, Mr. Tobin?”

“Two years ago, a little more.”

“Why did it end, Mr. Tobin?” From the way he asked it, he didn’t yet know the answer.

“I was dismissed.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” I said. “It’s a matter of record.”

“I’ll look it up,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Mr. Tobin,” he said, “since leaving the force, have you applied for or received a license to practice in the State of New York as a private investigator?”

“No.”

“Have you
ever
been licensed as a private investigator?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you ever worked as a private investigator?”

“No.”

He smiled thinly at me, and slowly crumpled the piece of paper between his two hands. “Then you have no need for this,” he said.

I said nothing.

“And you have no need to talk to any faggots in Brooklyn Heights,” he said.

I said nothing.

He said, “Faggots are not in your normal circle of acquaintances, are they, Mr. Tobin?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re not doing them any favor,” he said. “Or yourself. You follow me?”

“Yes,” I said.

He studied me for a minute, brooding, and then said, “Are there any questions you’d like to ask me, Mr. Tobin?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You have no curiosity.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll tell you anyway,” he said. “James Dearborn was murdered by someone he picked up and took home in order to engage in unnatural acts with him. Ronald Cornell tried to kill himself out of grief over his boy friend’s death. That’s what happened.”

He said it forcefully; that either meant he believed it himself or he insisted that I believe it. I said nothing.

He said, “Now that you have no curiosity any more, you don’t have any reason to hang around these faggots any more. Do you follow me, Mr. Tobin?”

“I follow you,” I said.

“Good,” he said. He took my license. and registration from his pocket and read them again, slowly. Finally, extending them toward me, he said, “I can always reach you if I need you, isn’t that right, Mr. Tobin?”

“That’s right,” I said. I took the two forms from him.

He nodded heavily at me, and turned away. As he walked back through the snow toward his car, I tucked my license and registration in my coat pocket, and opened my car door. Glancing at Manzoni’s car, I saw that his back-seat passenger had twisted around and was looking out the rear window at me, his expression intense.

It was Bruce Maundy.

T
HE PARTY WAS STILL
going on, though more quietly. I could barely hear it from the sidewalk, and it took only one ring to be let in.

It was Remington himself who came out this time, and from his expression as he came down the corridor to open the outer door he wasn’t all that happy to see me back again. When he opened the door and I stepped inside I could tell why: the slight scent of marijuana again.

I said, “So I did put a crimp in your party, after all. Did you really think you had to hide the pot till I left?”

“No one wanted to be at more of a disadvantage than necessary,” he said. “Is that why you came back, to see if we were doing anything different?”

“No. I came back to talk to you. Seriously, but briefly.”

“Privately?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go upstairs.”

We didn’t have to go into the first floor of the apartment, there was a front flight of stairs to take instead. We went up, and Remington led the way down the hall, past the entrance from the rear stairs, and on the familiar route from there to the library.

Henry Koberberg was still in there, alone, reading. He looked up when we walked in, and correctly read displeasure in Stewart Remington’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “did you want this for a conference?” He started to get up.

“That’s all right,” I said, closing the door. “I’d like you here, too. I think between you, you two know most of what there is to know about my list of suspects.”

“We both appear on it,” Remington reminded me.

“That complicates things,” I admitted, “but doesn’t make them impossible. Tell me about Bruce Maundy.”

Remington said, “Why?”

“Tell me first.”

Remington raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Rough trade,” he said, “with an éclair center.”

I turned to Koberberg. “Do you agree?”

“Approximately. Bruce has an unfortunately abrasive personality.”

“He lives at home with his mother? That makes him the only one on my list who isn’t in some sort of on-going living relationship with another man. Does he try to hide the fact of his homosexuality at home?”

Remington laughed for an answer, and Koberberg said, “Rabidly. He believes that his mother knows nothing, and he is violent that things should stay that way.”

“You say he believes it, about his mother. You think she knows?”

“I’ve never met the lady. I have no idea how perceptive or intelligent she is.”

Remington said, “He probably has it well covered. He lives in two separate worlds, with bulkheads in between, that’s all. There are probably half a dozen downstairs like that. No one at home knows, no one at work, no one in the neighborhood. One of them downstairs is married.” He turned to Koberberg. “You know—Carl.”

“You needn’t mention names,” Koberberg said.

“In front of Tobin?”

“Any time. An attorney should know better.”

“The things about which I should know better,” Remington said in satisfaction, “are legion.”

I said, “What was Maundy’s relationship with Dearborn?”

Remington said, “They were an item once, long ago. Before Ronnie.”

“Why did it end?”

Remington shrugged elaborately. “Why do all Gardens of Eden end? Some sort of snake appeared, I should think.”