Jade in Aries (8 page)

“The face is completely new?”

“I don’t know what he looked like before; he says he’s destroyed all the old pictures, even some his mother tried to hide. But I guess it’s all brand-new, yes.”

“And the hair? That didn’t look real.”

“Oh, Lord, no, that’s straight out of the bottle.”

“And the teeth?”

“Caps, all across the front.”

I said, “He didn’t change his height, did he?”

Weissman laughed and shook his head. “No, he’s the same height. We turn here.” We turned, and he said, “But he lost weight. Apparently he used to be kind of fat, like me.”

Weissman wasn’t fat. He had a layer of baby-fat over a somewhat chunky frame, but he wasn’t fat.

They made a nice study in contrasts, Weissman constantly diminishing himself, making himself a servant, denigrating his appearance, and Cary Lane exalting himself from within an entirely manufactured frame. I said, “Is that his real name? Cary Lane?”

“Yeah, it is, isn’t that weird? People in California have names like that, I don’t know why.”

“How old is he?”

“I think Cary’s twenty-eight now.”

A good six years older than I would have given him. I said, “And the other one? Poumon?”

“Dave’s twenty-four.”

And I had been thinking of Poumon as the older; a generation older. I said, “Tell me about him. Poumon.”

“He’s from Canada. Toronto. He wants to be a composer.”

“So he said. Serious music, or popular?”

“That’s hard to say these days, isn’t it?” Weissman said, and nodded ahead of us. “Here we are.”

Jammer had begun life as an ordinary storefront in a building that had apartments above; the kind of storefront in which to find barbershops or tailors. There had originally been two display windows, with a recessed entrance in the middle, a perfectly ordinary design.

It was ordinary no longer. The display windows had been covered with sheets of plywood painted a garish bright pink. Four-foot-tall letters, also cut from plywood and painted an equally bright purple, stood out three inches or so from the pink plywood, spelling JAMMER, three letters on each side of the entrance. The two M’s were narrower than the other letters, cramped-looking, as though the entrance had been forced between them as an afterthought. And the entrance itself was a completely plain black door with a single glass porthole in it at eye-level and a brass letter-slot at about the level of my waist.

I stood to one side while Weissman unlocked the door and reached inside to switch on some lights, and then we both went in.

Inside, it was very crowded and disorganized-looking, with round racks of clothing everywhere, counters on both sides, shelves up behind them, and narrow meandering aisles for customers amid the confusion of stock. The ceiling, a mass of heat ducts, exposed wiring, suspended fluorescent lights, plumbing and odd angles, had been painted flat black—like the top-floor ceiling in Cornell’s apartment—undoubtedly in order to get rid of it.

Weissman said, “I guess you want to see the office. It’s back here.”

I followed him—with the bright colors and the crowding, it was more like being in a plastic jungle than a clothing store—and at the rear we went around a counter piled with see-through shirts, through a hanging paisley drape, and directly into the nineteeth century.

It was an office out of Dickens: small, piled high with papers, crowded with old furniture made of wood. There was no paint on any of the wood, only stain that let the grain show through. There was a very old roll-top desk, a wooden swivel chair, even a tall wooden filing cabinet. The calendar on the wall above the desk was of this new year we had just embarked on, but the picture was a Currier & Ives print of ice-skaters, and the company which had sent out the calendar—a belt and wallet maker in Philadelphia—had chosen an old-fashioned kind of script for its name and message.

Was I at last in the influence of Ronald Cornell? All the rest of it, the apartment, the storefront, the store itself, seemed to bear the heavy stamp of Jamie Dearborn, whose confident Now face I had seen only once in the advertisement Cornell had shown me. But this room was not Dearborn; Dearborn would have made it all Camp somehow, would have mocked the spirit of wood. This was no fey imitation of a bygone style, it was a room that a man worked in, and which he had made comfortable for himself so he could do his work better.

I said to Weissman, “Did Cornell do most of the business details around here?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Jamie brought in the customers, you know, he was the contact man. But Ronnie did all the paperwork.” He looked around the little office, smiling. “Jamie hated this place. He kept threatening he was going to come in some day and rip it all out and turn the place into a big white cube. Translucent white glass on all the walls and the floor and the ceiling, with fluorescent lights behind them. And two more white cubes in the middle of the floor, one with a typewriter on it and the other for Ronnie to sit on.”

“Did he mean it?” I asked. It occurred to me that men had killed other men for less violent forms of rape.

“No, not really. He meant he thought it would be better that way, look better, but it would, wouldn’t it? Ronnie likes all this old stuff, though, so Jamie wouldn’t actually
do
anything to it.”

I thought of Ronald Cornell in the living room we’d just left, with the 747 perpetually in flight, perpetually coming at him. I thought of the clothing he’d worn when he’d come to see me. I was beginning to understand just how totally he’d submerged himself within a reflection of Jamie Dearborn, and just how empty he must be now, with Dearborn gone. Cary Lane had gone ahead and superimposed his ideal onto his own body, but Cornell had sought it in another person and then lived on reflected light, like the moon with the sun.

I sat down at the desk, and Jerry Weissman stood back and watched me, attentive, prepared at any time to be of assistance. The top was shut, and I tried it experimentally, to find it wasn’t locked. I rolled it back, and the surface of the desk—like the top, like the top of the filing cabinet, like the surface of the small wooden table against the opposite wall, like the floor beside the desk—was spread with a thick confusion of papers. I began to poke through them, and saw at once that the confusion was more apparent than real. The papers to the right had to do with the business of the store, but the papers to the left had to do with the killing of Jamie Dearborn.

That they were still here disappointed me, to some extent. I had no doubt the killer had sat here last Monday evening, as I was doing now, and had gone very carefully through these papers. That he hadn’t taken them with him, or destroyed them, meant he felt there was nothing dangerous in them, nothing that would lead anyone to him.

Unless he had been selective, had only removed one or two sheets? I would eventually bring the whole pile to Cornell at the hospital, and he could see if anything was missing.

For the moment I just glanced quickly through all the papers, sorting out those that had to do with the murder. About half of them seemed to have some bearing on astrology, and I considered leaving these behind, but eventually decided to include them, too. Four books on astrology were also on the desk, up amid the secondary confusion on top, but I didn’t take them. I leafed through them for any papers or notes they might contain, found nothing, and returned them to their places.

The desk drawers produced nothing of value to me except a large manila envelope in which to carry the papers I wanted, which made up a pile about an inch thick. I put the papers in the envelope, finished my search of the desk, got up to check out the filing cabinet, found nothing of interest there, and turned back to Jerry Weissman: “Now the stairs,” I said.

“Sure. This way.”

We went back out to the store proper, and immediately turned left, going along behind the counter with the see-through shirts, and then left again through another paisley drape, this time to a strictly functional rear staircase, which had obviously been left in its original condition. I became aware again of how totally Jammer had created its own environment within the building, so that the store and the rest of the building no longer had any sort of common bond at all.

The stairs were very narrow, and seemed to have been put on the rear of the building as an afterthought. They doubled back on themselves halfway up each floor, and at these landings there were windows that looked out on, presumably, some sort of back yard. Only darkness could be seen out there now. Green wooden doors were closed at each story, facing other windows; at the third floor there was a bag of clothespins hanging on the wall beside the window. I heard nothing from within any of the apartments we passed.

The final flight led to a trapdoor, fastened on the inside by a large nail stuck through the ring of a hasp lock. Weissman removed this nail, set it to one side on a step, pushed up on the trapdoor, and we went on up the stairs to the roof.

And here was another reason for the killer to push Cornell off the back rather than the front. The rear edge of the roof was no more than three feet from the trapdoor. It must have been tiring work to drag Cornell’s body up four flights of stairs, and a strong temptation to simply roll him off the nearest edge at the top.

And without leaving any sign. I had hoped for useful marks in the snow on the roof, but there were none. Of course, there had been more snow since Monday, and wind. I wondered if anything useful might have been found that first night, had the police been in a mood to look.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go back down.” It seemed colder up here than it had before in the street.

We went back down the wooden stairs. The light was poor, low-wattage bare bulbs in the ceiling at each floor, but even with floodlights I knew I would find no signs of the murderer’s passage, not four days after the event.

At the first floor, instead of a window facing out back, there was another green door, this one securely fastened with a padlock. I said, “Is the storage shed through there?”

“Yes. You want to see it?”

“Please.”

Weissman produced his key ring again, and unlocked the door. “The light isn’t working,” he said. “Just a second.” He fumbled around inside, and produced a long flashlight. “Here we are,” he said, and switched it on.

The shed was as I’d imagined it: simple, wooden, unheated, with a concrete floor. Soft-drink cases had been placed face down on this floor and one-by-twelves stretched across them. On these were stored the bolts of cloth, as brightly colored and fantastically designed as anything in the shop itself.

Weissman said, “Some of the cloth was ruined, of course. Stew’s trying to see if we can collect on the insurance.” He flashed the light upward, and I saw the hole where Cornell had crashed through. He had torn down the light fixture with his passage, and had left a ragged, jagged hole oddly circular in shape, about three feet in diameter. Boards had been laid across the roof to cover the hole and protect the interior from the elements. “We’ll have to get it fixed soon,” Weissman said. “If there’s a thaw, that stuff I put up there won’t keep the water out. But we can’t do anything until we hear from the insurance company.”

“Why is the cloth here?” I asked. “Do you make the stuff you sell?”

“Not really. But lately a lot of men”—he used the term without apparent self-consciousness—“have gotten into doing their own clothes. So we sell material, too. And patterns. I do some patterns, and then you can get some commercially, too. Not much yet, but it’s coming in.”

“I see. You aren’t a partner, are you?”

“Oh, Lord, no. I get a percentage on patterns they sell, naturally. And when they sell things that were made from my designs, I get a part of that, too. Also, I help out in the store sometimes, I clerk and like that, and Ronnie pays me.”

“What about Stewart Remington? I understand you live with him?”

He suddenly blushed, and seemed very flustered. “Well, sort of. Just for a while, you know, until I get used to New York. I haven’t been here very long.”

Weissman wasn’t a suspect; I wasn’t interested in him. I said, “Remington is Cornell’s lawyer. Did he do the legal work for the store?”

“Oh, of course. He does all our legal work, the whole crowd. Whatever we might need, contracts or whatever. And he does our taxes, and he’s Jammer’s accountant.” He smiled, over his embarrassment now. “He’s sort of our link to the square world,” he said. “He makes sure we have all our i’s dotted.”

I would have to talk with Remington again, away from Cornell. I stepped back out of the storage shed, saying, “What about Bruce Maundy?”

“Bruce?” Weissman shut the door and put the padlock back in place. “He’s all right. He wants to be a playwright. Actually, he’s had a couple of things produced. In coffee houses, you know. Off-Off-Broadway.”

We went back into Jammer. I said, “Does he live around here, too?”

“No, in Queens. He lives at home with his mother.”

“Does he do anything for a living? Besides the playwriting.”

“Oh, sure. He works for a ticket agency in Manhattan. To be near the theater, you know.” Weissman grinned, poking amiable fun at his friend’s pretensions.

I remembered the other two names from Cornell’s suspect list. “Leo Ross,” I said. “Tell me about him.”

“He’s an interior decorator, he and Henry Koberberg have a business together. I understand they’re very successful.”

Henry Koberberg was the final name on the list. “Do they live together?”

“Yes.”

“Around here?”

“They used to, but they moved to Manhattan last year. Before I came around. I never saw their old place. The new place is really beautiful, it’s like being inside a giant plant.”

“Where in Manhattan?”

“In the East Sixties.”

A very expensive section; Leo Ross and Henry Koberberg must be doing very well indeed. I said, “And is Remington their lawyer, too?”

“Oh, sure. He takes care of all of us.”

I wondered if Weissman’s strong sense of community was shared to that degree by the others. Lane and Poumon both seemed, in their varying ways, too self-centered for that. I remembered Remington’s description of Weissman as an “Army brat,” by which I inferred that Jerry Weissman was the son of a professional career Army man. If that was true, Weissman had undoubtedly grown up in a dozen or more different locales around the world, depending on his father’s shifting assignments. That would tend to produce the strong desire for a feeling of community that Weissman was displaying.