“You don’t think it’s a bit in the way?” Johnny Buell asked that afternoon, walking around it. Johnny was Marion’s stepson. He was six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds and was not fat. His dark brown hair had a nice wave; he had deep-set blue eyes, like his father’s. But his eyes did not sparkle with amusement the way Max Buell’s eyes did.
Marion raised her unkempt eyebrows at Johnny. “It’s supposed to be in the way, damn it,” she said. “That’s what death’s all about, for God’s sake. We can’t keep pussyfooting around it forever. Let it come out into the open, get in the way for a change. No one’s going to trip over it, for Christ’s sake!” Since the piece was five feet tall and massive at the base, with shiny metal here and there, and several kinds of wood here and there, it was unlikely that anyone would trip over it.
Toni and Janet Cuprillo had entered the house in time to hear this exchange. Janet had been Toni’s roommate in the beginning. She was very pretty, with short black hair shingled in the back; her brown eyes were almond shaped and beautiful, with long, long lashes. She was extremely talented, everyone agreed, but within days Toni had come to realize that words were not the same for Janet as for other people. She liked some more than others for the way they sounded, or the way they looked, and she rarely gave a lot of thought to what they meant.
She had summed up John Buell for Toni during her first week here. Johnny took the world seriously. Living was a serious matter with him. Like a saint with arrows sticking out all over, he bled a lot. Toni had looked at her with incomprehension. “You know,” Janet said, “he has a mission and if he has to suffer for it, that’s fine with him. That’s what a serious person does, suffers and bleeds if he has to, but he gets his mission done.”
“A mission?” Toni had echoed.
“Like missionary? A message to give. In his case buildings to build.”
This was the day that Toni had come to realize that Janet took a lot of interpreting. Mission, message? Buildings as message? She wasn’t sure what Janet had meant, but the gist of her comments was clear enough. Johnny was a serious young man with an important job. He took work seriously, took Marion seriously. The Max Buell Company was building a multimillion-dollar condominium complex a mile away from Marion’s house, and Johnny took that most seriously of all. Then, Janet had added dreamily, if he weren’t already engaged, she’d go for him. But as it was she was indivisible, and so was Toni.
Invisible, Toni decided, and that was fine with her. As far as she was concerned, Johnny’s attitude was no more false and unreal than his father’s: Max Buell seemed to find everything amusing, and took nothing seriously; Johnny found nothing amusing and everything was serious. He was unreal, and Janet, who was only twenty-one, was almost as unreal as Johnny.
Toni and Janet had stayed back out of the way while the movers strained getting
Seven Kinds of Death
in place; both young women were grimy with sweat and caked dust from the work in the barn, Janet nursing a splinter in her finger, and anxious to go give it a soak. After the movers left, they started up the stairs, but stepped aside once more as Max Buell came down. Unlike his son, he not only saw them but everything about them, every smudge, every scrape, every speck of dirt. He grinned as he passed them on his way to the living room.
“Message for you,” he said to Marion. “Your friend Paul Volte is bringing a lady friend with him.” Max was as tall as his son, and heavier, thicker in the shoulders and chest. His face was weathered dark brown, and there were crinkly lines at his eyes. He walked to the piece in the center of the room and whistled. “Hey, that looks like hot shit there! Marion, I think it’s just dandy!”
“He’s bringing someone,” Marion said in a grating voice. “I don’t suppose we know if the lady friend will want a separate bedroom, do we? My God, I’m going mad! I’ve rearranged sleeping accommodations a dozen times already! Why didn’t he tell me weeks ago? That bastard! He didn’t even tell me he was coming. What does he think, I’m running a goddam hotel or something?”
Max chuckled. “I don’t think you need worry about it. It’s that lady editor, and from what little I know about things like that, I think you could call them real friendly.”
At the doorway Toni gasped and clutched the framework to steady herself. Not Victoria! He wouldn’t! She was aware that they were all watching her as she turned and fled upstairs.
THREE
Later, Charlie would be
able to pinpoint the exact moment when he wandered innocently into the trap, and then the exact moment when it was sprung, but that morning in early June he had no intimation of hazardous moments ahead. Things had been peachy, he thought later, recapitulating that morning. He had done a little job for Phil Stern that had put a little money in the bank, and, more, had been entertaining in its own way, culminating in a little joust with a very good arsonist who had had very bad luck and cursed his date of birth for it. Good clean fun. The guy probably would beat the rap in court, but that wasn’t Charlie’s problem. And the car had not needed the overhaul he had been dreading. The sun was shining, the weather strange, but rather nice. The whole world had had strange weather that spring, but few places had it as nice as upper New York in early June.
He and Constance had corralled the cats inside and she had taken them out to the patio one by one to dose them with ear drops. Ashcan had ear mites, but you don’t treat only one cat. Brutus had to be first always; he had an elephantine memory, and the sniff of medicine was enough alert him that it was hiding time. Charlie admired Constance’s ability to snag a cat, hold it in a grip that made the cat look as if rigor mortis was well advanced, and then do whatever was needed. Afterward, Brutus streaked off shaking his head, flinging medicine to the wind in both directions; he would not return until supper, and by then it would be time for another treatment. Candy complained in her scratchy voice when it was her turn, and Ashcan, who was the bearer of evil tidings this time, tried to crawl under the doormat.
Then Charlie had gone out for the mail. Constance was drying her hands when he returned and sorted it at the kitchen table. Very little, very dull looking. He was browsing through a catalogue with high-tech fishing gear that featured things like a computerized casting outfit that you attached to a box that told you what was biting, what bait to use, how to use it. Maybe if your Aunt Ethel was coming for a visit, he was thinking, grinning, when the trap opened.
“For goodness sake,” Constance murmured. “Do you want to go to a send-off party for a gallery tour that Marion Olsen is having?”
“Nope,” he said, and turned a page. At the time he did not hear a clash of metal, did not hear the door bang, but later he knew that was the moment. That Nope was the magic word. Without looking up, he asked, “Who’s Marion What’s-it?”
“Oh, Charlie,” Constance said in that particular tone of voice that held such a mixture of exasperation and patience that it was hard to tell which was uppermost. “You remember her. We went to some of her shows. I grew up with her. We saw her all the time in New York when we were all just out of school, before she moved down near Washington. We exchange notes and Christmas cards every single year.” She sounded like a saintly teacher struggling with an overgrown student who couldn’t quite grasp Dick and Jane.
“Oh,” he said. “You mean Tootles.”
“I mean Marion Olsen,” she said coldly. “She’s finally surfacing again as a sculptor, after all these years. A fifteen-gallery touring show. Good for her. I’m so glad.”
“She did that thing she called the
Seven Kinds of Death
, right?”
“You know very well she did.”
“And she asked you if you really had married a fireman, and then she said, ‘A terrible waste.’ “
“Charlie, I’ve told you a dozen times, she didn’t say that. You misheard her.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “It could have been “What terrible taste.’ And everyone at that last party was a kook of one kind or another, including sister Babar.”
Constance’s look this time was withering. “Her sister’s name is Beatrice. When she was a very small child they called her Ba Ba.”
“She was never a very small child,” he said. “And she’s a nut. Your pal Tootles has a knack for nuts.”
Constance opened another envelope, a bill, and he said, “Anyway, her husband was making passes at you right in front of me. Now is that a kook or isn’t it?”
Constance ignored him. She crossed the kitchen to throw away the junk mail and envelopes.
“And you know damn well Tootles was making passes at me. You thought it was funny!”
He
had been indignant.
Constance was heading toward the hall. She paused. “Maybe she wanted to see what kind of equipment a fireman had. I did marry a fireman, you know.”
“And was it a terrible waste?”
She walked from the room carrying her mail and the bill with her. Charlie was grinning again when he went back to the fishing-gear catalogue. Later, he knew if she had phrased the question differently, he would have said sure, let’s do it. The way you ask a question is important, he would have said. There was no doubt that he didn’t want to go, and that was the question she had asked, after all. A yes or no answer was required, and a yes would have been a lie. If she had said she wanted to go, he would have agreed without question, maybe with a few jabs at Tootles, but without real argument. If she had brought it up again in any way, he would have said he had intended to go with her all along, just teasing a little that morning. If she had left the invitation lying about, he would have picked it up and said something like
Why not?
None of those things happened, and neither of them mentioned Tootles or Babar again until two weeks later when he found Constance poring over a road map.
“What’s up?” he asked. He had mowed the lawn and carried the fragrance of newly cut grass with him into the house, which already was perfumed with roses in just about every room. Mowing his own lawn always made him feel virtuous; shoveling snow did also, although he complained about both chores.
“I thought I might drive down,” Constance said. “The flights are awful, with changes at La Guardia or Philadelphia or somewhere. Or else the shuttle and then rent a car. And the train’s even worse. Three hours in Penn Station.”
“Down where? Are we going on a trip?”
“I am. Marion’s party. I’ll leave on Thursday, get there that night and start home on Sunday. If I’m too tired, I might stop at a motel Sunday night. Depends on what time I get away.”
“You’ll drive more than three hundred miles for a party?” He heard the incredulity in his own voice.
She looked up at him and said yes. Her pale blue eyes were glinty.
It was that damn Viking blood surfacing, he thought then, a streak of stubbornness, a fierce loyalty that verged on insanity, a perverse determination… . If she thought he would yield just like that, he also thought, she was wrong. Why didn’t she come right out and ask him nicely to drive down with her? Make a little vacation out of the affair.
It wasn’t that they never did things apart. He did little investigative jobs for Phil Stern’s insurance company from time to time. They both did other investigative jobs now and then that took him to one place, her to another. She had presented a paper at a psychology conference just a few months before and had been gone almost a week. He went fishing now and then, and had done some workshops in the past year on techniques of arson investigations. It wasn’t that they would be separated for a few days, it was the glint in her eyes, the too-cool, too-aloof expression on her face that made this different.
“Watch out for the husband,” he said coldly.
“I think I’m a little old for such a warning, but thank you. You needn’t worry, that one’s been gone a long time. Actually, she’s married again, to a millionaire, a fact I’ve mentioned more than once—when it happened, and again this past Christmas, as I recall. I sometimes worry about your memory, or is it that you didn’t want to hear anything about Marion? Anyway, she probably will keep her eye on the current husband.”
The fact that Tootles could snag four or five husbands, and her looking like a horse, meant to him that Constance could have had a dozen, if she had chosen that route.
To
his
eyes Constance was the best-looking woman he had ever seen; she had been the most beautiful girl he had ever seen back when they were both students in Columbia, and the years had been loving and kind to her. Her platinum hair had never darkened, and now that it was starting to turn gray, it looked no different from all the years he had known her. She moved with the grace of a dancer, and her slender body had not changed that much. The little bit of weight she had picked up over the years was a plus, he thought. Back when Tootles either had said what a waste, or hadn’t—he really wasn’t all that certain—he had been cut sharply, because he had believed it. Constance was wasted on anyone but a god, he had thought then. He knew the theory that the passion of youth matured and became companionship, if the couple was lucky, and he knew that if he were a religious man he would thank God that the theory was baloney. They had the companionship and the mutual respect their maturity demanded, and they still had the passion. But also they were individuals, not a matched set, and by God, he thought then, she was the one who had to give a little; just a fraction of an inch would have been sufficient, but it had to come from her.
If he had said any of those things at that moment, if he had simply kissed her, he thought later, they probably would have gone to the party together. But he said, “Send me a postcard,” and stalked from the room.
Constance knew almost precisely what had gone on in Charlie’s head during those few moments, not the word-byword struggle, but the essence. She knew far better than he did if he gained or lost a pound; she knew to the day when the first gray hair had appeared in his crinkly black curls. She knew the way the light came into his eyes and then left them flat and hard black, the way his face softened or turned to stone, the way the muscles on his jaws worked, and each nuance spoke multiple meanings for her. The words had formed in her mouth, “Oh, Charlie,” meaning, this time, we’re having such a silly quarrel. Her hand had nearly spasmed when she restrained its motion toward him. The moment passed that could have ended all this.
The day the invitation came, she had been dismayed by his instant reaction, his instant refusal to go to the party, but after no more than a second or two, she had decided he was right and probably he should not go. Actually, she did not want him to go with her. When Charlie first met Tootles—she bit her lip in exasperation with herself, but that had been her name from the time they both wore diapers and it was hard to remember it was no longer appropriate. When Charlie first met Tootles, she started again, he had been deeply offended. Charlie, so faithful and steadfast, so young, had not approved of promiscuity, and Tootles was promiscuous. Honest and truthful, he had not approved of lying, and Tootles sometimes seemed to make little or no distinction. He suspected that people who talked of their work as Art, always with a capital A, had to be phonies of some sort, and Tootles had talked of her WORK as ART, and of little else in those days. Charlie, unstinting in his own generosity, was suspicious of people who were born to be takers, and Tootles, he had said, was a saltwater sponge.
Those first impressions had endured for more than twenty-five years and nothing else about Tootles had stayed with him, although they had been with her subsequently half a dozen times at least. He had failed to see the three or four other artists Tootles always maintained because they were even hungrier than she was. He found no virtue in her real appreciation of the work of others. He never had seen her working with a child, a teenager, any talented novice.
Constance began to fold the map. She had not shown the invitation to Charlie, had not left it lying on the table for him to see because Tootles had written a message on the bottom in her scrawly script.
Please, Constance, please come. I am in desperate trouble. I have to talk to someone I can trust. Please.
The message would have confirmed his worst feelings about Tootles and the little spat would have been blown out of proportion because he would have tried to prevent Constance’s going. He believed Tootles was never happier than when she had created a maelstrom, when she had her stick in the waters muddying them more and more, involving everyone possible.
Aware of all this, Constance had phoned Tootles, whose voice had been husky with desperation. “I have to talk to someone,” Tootles had whispered. “I have to! I’m in so much trouble. You know me, Constance. You know the good and the bad, all of it. You can tell me what to do if anyone can. And if there’s no way out, I’ll just kill myself!”