Man With a Squirrel (24 page)

“If the subject is my ex, most any place you start will get you somewhere you don't want to be,” Jeff Blake confided. He used his voice as if he wanted you to conclude he'd passed the bar but found the insurance business far more stimulating and rewarding.

“Why don't we do this over a drink, or coffee?” Jeff Blake said. “I'm open until two o'clock. What's the exchange I called you at, Arlington? I'm J.P. Tell you what, my lady is out of town. Conference. I got nothing to do until this after. And I am aching to eat grease. Split the difference. I'll be in the Watertown Diner in Watertown—you know it?—in about thirty-seven minutes, eating hash and eggs. I'll be the one in the suit. If you want to come by and talk, we'll talk. I'm easy. Something comes of it, fine. Nothing comes of it, that's fine too. Like I say, I'm easy. See the suit is because I have a wedding at two o'clock. Did I say that already? And it's no use getting dressed twice when you can get dressed once.

“I'd as soon not talk on the phone, you know? I like to see the whites of their eyes. So. You want to talk, we'll talk. At the diner. Half an hour, give or take a few. That good for you?”

“You bet,” Fred said.

Terry and Sam came in, preceded by sounds of intense discussion. They fell silent when they saw Fred in the kitchen. Sam said, “You said you thought one time you would be a pitcher, Fred. In those days did the pitchers use the same dorky gloves they do today?”

“Some did. I always preferred a fielder's glove.”

“What color?” Terry asked.

“They all come out about the same after you use them awhile,” Fred said.

Sam and Terry nodded. Fred divided the comics into sections and handed Terry the portion containing Garfield. Her week was ruined if she did not read Garfield before Sam did.

“I have to go talk to this guy,” Fred told Molly. “After, depending on what develops, I may go check in on Marek Hricsó; or the guy I'm going to see now, Jeff Blake, who was married to Sandy Blake for ten minutes once according to my informant, may point me in another direction.

“Cutting that painting up. I still don't get it.”

“They called it weaning, or transimaging,” Molly said. “The abused child, revolting against the enormity of what she knew, shifted the blame onto an innocent icon—the painting—and the blame must be shifted back where it belongs, by the ritual dismemberment of the mistakenly selected alternate surrogate.”

“And they don't care they're wrecking a quarter-million dollars worth of painting? A real icon?”

“Presumably they don't believe that. Who is Mr. Pix?”

“He's not a problem. I'll tantalize you now so you'll want to stick with me. I'll call if I can't make it back for the hoedown with Byron Ponderosa and Ophelia.” Outside the window it was dark and damp. The lilac bush at the foot of Molly's garden looked like a bad dream about insects: not a sign of a leaf.

“Gloomy today,” Molly said.

Fred started out to the living room to put the bed up and get his jacket.

“I'll do the bed,” Molly said.

Terry and Sam markedly paid no attention.

“Wait a minute,” Fred said. “You say Manny was watching for someone they called the Stalker?”

“Correct.”

Fred stalked out.

*   *   *

Once you have made it successfully past the age of twenty, it is hard to follow eggs on toast (which Fred, in solidarity with Molly, had eaten for breakfast) with hash and eggs. Fred ordered coffee, sitting in a booth at the Watertown Diner, and watched for Jeff Blake, who should be a man in his late twenties or early thirties wearing a suit on his body and a handshake in his smile.

Blake did not show up until almost noon. Fred knew him right away. He was five foot five and already had a well-advanced paunch, which accentuated the almost-baby-blue double-breasted suit with the pink carnation. Blake's face was less pink than the carnation, but it was working in that direction and, by evening, if the wedding reception went well, who knew?

Fred stood, and a mysterious unseen power, common and widespread, caused him to reach out his hand in welcome. “Fred?” Blake said. “Good to see you. I'm running late. If you don't run, something bites you in the tail.”

He laughed. The waitress behind the counter looked over. Jeff Blake held his hand up. “They know me here,” he said. By now they knew Fred, too. They'd been watching him drink coffee for an hour, wondering if he didn't have a place to live. The waitress came over. “What'll you have?” she asked.

“The usual.”

“The usual what?”

Blake attained the color of his carnation. “Hash and three eggs over easy, extra side of home fries, whole-wheat toast, coffee, grapefruit juice,” he said.

“I guess she's new,” he told Fred. “No offense. See, people remember me. I don't know what it is about me. Women especially. Because I make people feel good, my lady says, and if they don't want to feel good then the hell with them.”

Fred said, “I called about Sandy Clarke.”

“She still uses Blake,” Jeff Blake said. “You can't blame her.”

“What happened?” This did not seem a person who would respond to less than an accurate blow with a hammer.

“She was a fucking introvert,” Jeff Blake announced. “That's to begin with. Then she got turned off of sex. And frankly, between you and I and the bedpost, I did not have time for all the whining. Still, no hard feelings. What does she want?” His friendly, open look was immediately canny.

“I don't represent her in any way.”

The waitress brought Blake's order in two trips. He decided not to send anything back or say, Thanks, honey. Instead he took a bite of hash and leaking yolk and said through it, “You talk. I eat.”

“My business put me in touch with the family,” Fred said. “I need to understand how to handle them. I'm having a hard time figuring out how they tick.”

Jeff Blake laughed hash. “They're a bunch of loonies is why,” he said. “They don't tick. They go
sproingngng!
What business you in?”

“Antiques.”

“OK, look. I was set to give you a hard time. Figured she sent you to feel me out, see will I go back on our deal. But you're straight up, and if you're not she's not getting anything back anyway. We made a deal and shook on it. You got that?”

Fred said he got that. Jeff Blake struck fear into the survivors on his plate. He took a swallow of coffee and signaled for a warmup. Fred covered his own cup with his hand.

“There was the three of them. The old lady died a long time back, way before I'm in the picture. So it was Daddy Clarke and the loony sister, Ann, who was already divorced and had moved out to I don't know where. We didn't see much of her. They'd used the whole place on Hay Street once, the family did; then as people died and moved out, the old boy took the second floor and rented out the first. Sandy and I took the top. I never could make out how much he had. See, he was well off the deep end then; would wander around in his underwear at night and pee anywhere—Sorry, dear, I didn't see you.” The waitress had bowed to accept certain of his soiled dishes.

“Pretty well-heeled, was he?”

Jeff Blake looked at the ceiling. “Nobody was hurting. Except they were all crazy. I'll tell you the truth,” Jeff Blake leaned across the table to whisper crumbs of toast, “I blame everything on the older sister, Ann. She got this enormous wedgie nothing could get past, and this is before it got popular—she's like a prophet pioneer; before everyone else started seeing ghosts and whatever like they do today. Like now it's a whole industry I wish I could get in on. Anyhow, Ann'd come roaring in, screaming about how the old man used to sacrifice her to the devil, and eat people's liver and the rest of it. I didn't listen. Till the old guy started to believe it. One minute he'd be as sensible as I am, the next he'd be crawling on the floor moaning, ‘I'm sorry.'

“When it got too bad—Sandy and I are married by this time—Ann, the sister, took the old man to live with her, wherever that was. Tell you the truth, I and Ann did not get along. This is about four years ago. Then Sandy starts seeing ghosts too, and wouldn't put out—sorry, honey—and that was about it for me.”

Fred watched the waitress struggle away with the remainder of Jeff Blake's dishes. He asked, “Did you ever see a painting the Clarkes had, an old one, of a man holding a squirrel?”

“Sure. Mr. Pix. Black guy. I'm not prejudiced. Here's how loony old man Clarke is. White as he is, he claims the picture is an ancestor. How is Sandy anyway? She's not trying to go back on our deal? Oh, I get it. You think the picture's worth something. There I can't help you.”

“Thanks,” Fred said, standing.

28

Marek did not answer the shop bell. He had not answered either telephone. Fred said, “To hell with this.” He went around to the rear of the building and let himself in the back door. That placed him in a vestibule giving him access to either the stairs going up, or to the shop's back door. Once in the vestibule, Fred heard the piano upstairs. Marek was practicing.

It was a fluid, graceful, marvelous, and completely disciplined touch. Chopin, one of the mazurkas. It sounded like someone reaching into a stream and tickling trout. “Fingers like water,” Clay had said. It was passionate and remarkably cold, looking to conceal its own intent and trap an alien life, in order to exploit it.

“So he's here,” Fred said. He started up the stairs, thinking, in the words of Molly's mother, What's good for the sauce is good for the gander. The music's complexity increased as he got closer to the third floor. The door to Oona's apartment on the second floor was open. It did not follow from the shop downstairs. It had the generous, sparse look of a farm kitchen. All Oona's romance was downstairs. This was functional. Fred could look through it later if he wanted, if Marek did not have him arrested.

Fred climbed the next flight. Marek paused and switched to a new mazurka. Fred heard Marek laugh. This selection had a formal, haunting quality that seemed, in a dance, an eerie joke. Marek played it with abandon. It sounded like a king in his coronation regalia falling down stairs. The fall was in slow motion. Odd and unnerving as it was, it sounded exactly like what Chopin was thinking about: the vandalism of something precious, sad, and despised; and beautiful.

Fred eased his bulk onto the landing. The door to Marek's apartment was ajar. Because of the door's placement he could see nothing without poking his head into the opening. He saw only the foot end of the piano—which, by its sound, had cost Oona Imry some thousands of dollars. More arresting was the wobbling white hind end, with zits, of the pudgy young man executing a parody of dance while Marek played.

“Oh, come on,” Fred said, walking in.

Marek stood up with a screech and a chord more Hindemith than Chopin. He was as naked as the room's other occupant. The space was large and contained almost no furniture aside from the black mass of the piano—a Steinway. Marek had placed a large Oriental rug from Oona's shop on the floor; around it were a few throw pillows, two antique-looking chairs, and a daybed whose state of undress Fred was in no mood to appreciate.

Marek was holding his beautiful hands, stripped of their gloves, up to his mouth. The other man used his in a more conventional gesture for the first encounter with an unexpected stranger when in a state of nudity.

Fred assessed the situation. Marek was not going to call any cops. Fred gestured toward the pudgy young man who now, defiantly, removed his hands from their easy task of concealing the obvious.

“Your alibi for that night?” Fred guessed.

“Not here. No. Never. Not while Oona might…” Marek faltered.

“I'll need your name, address, phone, all that,” Fred told Marek's companion in a pleasant, official tone.

The young man was sullen. Fred spotted his shirt, suit, and accessories draped on one of the chairs and went over to them, shaking the wallet out of the suit's jacket pocket—English cut, brown wool, side vents. The suit's most recent inhabitant peeped an objection. Fred flopped the wallet open.

“Sylvester H. Penny?” Fred asked, looking at the driver's license. Massachusetts. Address on Forham Place, not far from here, halfway up Beacon Hill.

The pudgy young man put his hands on his hips. He was a real blond. Marek kept distance between himself and his companion. He looked interested, but made no protest. His was a beautiful, boyish body, like that of Michelangelo's David before the Holiday Fitness Program started working him over.

“Number ten Forham Place,” Fred read. “Birth date three, seventeen—say, you just had a birthday! What are you, twenty? And Social Security number—I'll make a note of this…”

The young man tottered toward Fred to retrieve his identity: Visa Gold, Diner's Club, American Express, Boston Public Library, Videosmith, Hollywood Voyage Club, Boston Museum of Fine Arts membership, the rest of it.

“I don't mean to embarrass you, Penny,” Fred said.

“He is called Hop,” Marek said, enjoying the moment. “And yes I was at his home, and yes if his parents discover certain things Hop will find himself in the street as you see him now.”

Marek was not posing consciously. He fell naturally into graceful postures designed by a profligate creator to enhance his beauty. Hop, on the other hand—Fred handed the wallet to him—had not been so endowed. He looked like one struck by a change of wind direction in the fourth grade; his childish shape remained, but with bulk added.

Marek stretched luxuriantly. He and Fred watched Hop picking up his clothes. Marek said, “Boston is not kind to those of its sons who exhibit artistic temperament. Often they are driven into a wilderness of exile.”

Fred asked, “Hop, was Marek Hricsó with you last Monday night?”