Slate (14 page)

“Forty-one hours and thirty-five minutes, providing the trains are on schedule. Of course, they rarely are.” She got up and moved impatiently about the office. “Where is the Woodworking Wonder, anyway? Where is the man who's stolen your heart—or at least captured your attention?”

She glanced through the one-way mirror. Below, in the bar, the fan-and-globe lights were turned up bright while an electrician and his assistant, amid a scattering of tools and spools of wire, worked at cutting away a long, narrow section of wainscoting along the back wall between the restrooms and the kitchen.

“He said he had a little job in Brookline this afternoon— rehanging a cabinet or something.”

“Did you invite Joe and Ashes for tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“So that's how it's to be,” she said despondently. “While I am in remotest suburbia, dispensing artificial cheer to twelve extremely unpleasant persons who have masqueraded for thirty-three years as my relatives, you and Linc and Ashes and Joe are going to be having a wonderful time, lounging around a turkey carcass. Someday,” she added wistfully, “when I'm old and gray, I'm going to find out what it's like to have Thanksgiving dinner with a tableful of people I actually like.”

“You should have flown to Morocco to spend Thanksgiving with Noah. He asked you to—he even said he'd pay for your ticket.”

Clarisse pursed her lips tightly. “I couldn't afford the time away. I have a paper due in Contracts.”

“Don't complain to me if you've decided to become a slave to your career.”

“I'm not complaining about my career, I'm complaining about my life. Do you know how long it's been since I had a date?”

“Is that a euphemism?”

“It certainly is,” replied Clarisse with a grim sigh. “And I'll even bet the four of you are going out dancing tomorrow night.”

“We're going to Metro,” said Valentine.

“While I'm in the attic room at Beverly Farms, with the wind whistling down the chimney, reading
Pre-Industrial English Sentencing Systems
by the light of a guttering candle.”

She sighed and turned back idly to the window, gazing down at the bar below again. Her eyes narrowed suddenly when she saw a squat, chrome- and black-striped jukebox sitting at an angle against the wall across from the bar.

“What's that?” she asked.

“What's what?”

“That thing that looks like a jukebox.”

“That's what it is—a jukebox. It was delivered yesterday.”

Clarisse looked at Valentine in surprise. She pointed to the corner of the office, where a number of boxes of stereo components were stacked, still in their manufacturers' crates and boxes. “You spent a fortune on that system. Why in the world do you need a jukebox?”

Valentine shrugged.

“And it shouldn't be down there anyway,” said Clarisse. “The wood dust will get into it.”

Valentine laughed shortly. “It's never even going to be plugged in.”

“If it's not going to be plugged in, why did you order it?”

Turning back to his bills and his advertising brochures, again Valentine merely shrugged.

“How much did it cost?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“What?!”

“Plus fifteen hundred a month rental. Starting today.”

Clarisse closed her eyes and shook her head. Then a thought came to her, and she sat back down in the chair. “Is this like the business where the man in the blue suit and the purple shirt and the white tie comes in and orders a Coke and you give him a Coke and he pays you with a dollar bill and you give him five hundred dollars in change?”

“You got it,” said Valentine.

Clarisse pounded the arms of the chair with her fists. “Pay off!” she breathed. “Where did you manage to find twenty-five thousand dollars?”

“Noah had budgeted for it,” said Valentine. “There's a separate account book marked ‘Incidentals.'”

“Did someone actually approach you and say he would bust you and this place up if you didn't pay protection money? Or was it a little more subtle than that?”

“If we put in the jukebox,” said Valentine, “we are assured that a certain Italian family won't lob bombs into the bar after hours, discouraging our patrons.”

Clarisse grimaced. “I hate all this. You always know that corruption is there—especially in
this
city, but—”

“I know,” said Valentine, “it's unpleasant. You're also not used to it.”

“And you are?”

“Don't forget, I've been a bartender for a while. At Bonaparte's, it was part of my job to give the cop a guided tour of the basement every month. He also got a cold beer and a bulging envelope.”

“Oh, no! Do you mean we're going to have to pay off the cops too?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“That answers my question.” Clarisse sighed. “The young lawyer gets a taste of real life.”

“I want you to pretend you just had amnesia for the last few minutes,” Valentine said.

Clarisse thought for a moment, and then nodded. She stood, closed her coat, and tied the sash. She was about to say goodbye when they heard someone come pounding up the metal stairs from below. In another moment, the door opened and Ashes came inside.

“You arrived just in time to tell me goodbye,” said Clarisse glumly. “I'm going away. You're staying here.”

Ashes looked at her strangely, as if he had no idea what she was talking about. “I would have been here sooner,” he said uncertainly, “but I stopped in at Fritz for a beer and ran into Linc. He talked my ear off. And then I nearly got run down by a limo that came to pick up Susie Whitebread.”

“A limo?” said Clarisse.

“Yeah. I guess she got back on the Birkin Hare payroll.” The Birkin Hare Institute was a long-established and prestigious medical research facility located a few blocks from Slate on the edge of Boston's Chinatown. Ashes' remark made no obvious sense to them. Clarisse was just about to ask him to explain what he meant, but Valentine shook his head very slightly as a warning for her not to say anything.

Then Valentine said, “I thought Linc was in Brookline.”

“Rehanging a cabinet,” added Clarisse.

Ashes shrugged. “Well, he wasn't. He was over at Fritz, spilling his guts.”

“About what?” asked Valentine. “Our sex life?”

“No, unfortunately. He was telling me his life story. Year by year. The only thing he forgot was to ask me if I cared. Thank God he's only twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five,” said Clarisse.

“Twenty-three,” said Valentine.

They all glanced at one another.

“He told me he was twenty-six,” said Ashes. “Because he said he'd been a carpenter since he was nineteen— apprenticed to somebody in New Orleans.”

“He told me he had to drop out of Tulane when his scholarship ran out,” said Clarisse.

“He told me he just went to night school in New Orleans. He said Tulane was so expensive he hadn't even considered it.” Valentine glanced at Ashes. “What else did he tell you? About his life.”

“Born in Maine,” said Ashes, remembering and slowly recounting. “Father remarried. Ran off to New Orleans, hustled for a while. He was proud of that,” Ashes added parenthetically. “Had a lover. Lover jilted him. Moved to San Francisco. Had an affair with his shrink. Went back to Portland. Father dead. Nursed his stepmother until she died. Moved to Boston. Fell in love.” At this last, Ashes looked up at Valentine with a cold smile.

“That's
nothing
like the story he told me,” said Clarisse.

“His parents aren't dead,” said Valentine slowly. “They're not even divorced.”

“Maybe you and Linc should have a little talk during my absence,” said Clarisse, getting up and again preparing to go.

“I think so too,” said Ashes. “I'm going down to see how Ralph is getting along with the wiring.” He bade Clarisse farewell and, yanking the door open again, clattered quickly down the stairs.

“Are you going to talk to Linc?” Clarisse asked. “If he lied to you about those things, he could be lying about other things, too.”

“Other things?”

“Like where he was the night Sweeney got killed.”

“He was home,” said Valentine.

“He
said
he was home,” Clarisse corrected. “Not necessarily the same thing.”

Valentine said nothing for a moment. He pointedly looked at the clock on the wall. “I think it's time for us to sit down and solve this crime,” Clarisse said.

“Fine,” said Valentine. “I mean, we have all this free time on our hands. Setting up the bar is nothing. First-year law school—you can do that off the top of your head. So why don't we just go out and do it? Find out who killed Sweeney. It shouldn't take more than a couple of thousand man-hours.”

Clarisse sighed. She looked around. As if randomly, she remarked, “Now that I've given up cigarettes, do you have any heavy drugs I could take with me? Some anti-psychotics would be nice.”

“I'll talk to Linc,” said Valentine, “if you'll talk to Susie.”

“About what?” Clarisse asked in surprise.

“Ashes said that Susie was on the Birkin Hare payroll. They do lots of experiments over there, but they're not Masters and Johnson.” Clarisse looked at him blankly. Valentine sighed. “I think law school must be turning your brain to mush.” Slowly he explained: “What if Sweeney had had something on Susie—in regard to her connection with somebody at Birkin Hare?”

“But if Ashes knows something, then it isn't a secret,” Clarisse argued. “And if it isn't a secret, then you can't have blackmail.”

“Maybe Ashes read about it in Sweeney's last column,” suggested Valentine.

“You told me that that column was lost.”

“Ashes
said
it was lost,” said Valentine carefully.

Clarisse pondered this. “You know, I've never been completely satisfied with his and Joe's alibi. They were down in the basement. Then they went out to get something to eat, but nobody saw them.”

“It's as good an alibi as Susie and Julia's,” Valentine pointed out. “Watching ‘Demolition Derby,' and not hearing a sound from the room directly above. And they both obviously hated Sweeney's guts.”

Clarisse nodded agreement. “While I'm in the emotional wilderness of Beverly Farms, I'll figure a way to pump Mr. Fred about Susie. Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” She sat back in the chair and gazed for several moments at the window that looked out over the bar.

“Aren't you going to be late?”

“No,” said Clarisse. “I'm sorry to say that no matter how much I put off and put off, the train is always waiting at the station. I was just wondering what you were going to say to Linc.”

“About his different stories? I don't know if I care. They're all just stories.”

“You're hedging.”

“I don't really want to call him on it though,” sighed Valentine. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Why not?” asked Clarisse.

Valentine looked around the room as if he were embarrassed.

“I know why,” said Clarisse. “It's because opening night is less than six weeks away, and you can't afford to change carpenters at this point, right?”

“Something like that,” admitted Valentine.

“So in the meantime, you'll let him continue to lie to you.”

Valentine winced a little. “It's not lying, exactly. It's making up stories about your past. Everybody does that. It doesn't mean anything. Most people have led pretty boring lives. It's sort of nice when they go out of their way to provide some interesting personal history.”

“As long as he keeps his prevarications limited to what happened in the distant past,” said Clarisse. “As long as he's not lying about what happened this morning, yesterday, and a couple of weeks ago, right?”

“I'm not going out and looking for grounds for divorce, if that's what you mean.”

“I didn't know you were married.”

Valentine looked more and more uncomfortable.

“We're not. Or at least I'm not.”

“But he thinks he is?” asked Clarisse.

“I don't know what he thinks,” said Valentine quickly. “When he starts to talk about it, I change the subject. I talk about the bar.”

Clarisse was silent.

“What are you thinking?” Valentine asked.

“I'm thinking,” said Clarisse, “that this has all the earmarks of an eventual confrontation, and not a pleasant one, either. Linc lies to you about the past, and you lie to him about the present.”

Valentine didn't answer. “You really are going to be late,” he said.

Clarisse got up, kissed him on the cheek, and was gone.

O
N THE SATURDAY immediately following Thanksgiving, a shroud of dark gray clouds was driven in over the city by a raw northerly wind. As the last of a dreary twilight faded into darkness, a steady rain began to fall and, according to the weather reports, would continue well into the next day.

After she'd dressed, Clarisse sat in her darkened living room and listened to a Billie Holiday recording and watched the rain spatter the windows. She experimented with various things to do with her hands now that she no longer smoked. Occasionally, the room was bathed with the flashing blue light from a police cruiser arriving across the street. Curses floated up from below as policemen came out of the station into the cold rain.

Clarisse was in a kind of soft and weary mood. She had, that afternoon, finished a paper that had been a difficult assignment. She was particularly pleased with the result but hoped her confidence wasn't specious. Although grades for midterm exams in her other four courses had been posted on Wednesday evening, she had not had the chance to look at them. She was confident that she had done well but she decided to stop by the school on her way to the PUMA fund-raiser that evening to take a look. She wished now that she hadn't promised Valentine she'd try to question Mr. Fred at the fund-raiser. On the other hand, she told herself, she hadn't been to a nice cocktail party in months, and the cause for the Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts was a good one. Susie had told her the organization was raising money to retain a lawyer for their members. She leaned back and closed her eyes, listening to the music and the rain, and relishing the knowledge that she wouldn't have to see any of her relatives again before Christmas. If she played her cards right, maybe not even until Easter.