As
we stepped into his office, he instructed his secretary that we were not to be
disturbed. On his desk was yesterday’s paper turned to the story of Hugh’s
death. I sat down on a comer of the desk while Aaron stood irresolutely before
me.
“I
was going to call you,” he said.
“I’ve
saved you the trouble.” I lifted a corner of the newspaper. “Hugh told me he
was in danger of being murdered. I didn’t believe him.”
Gold
said nothing.
“He
even told me who the murderer would be, his grandfather, Robert Paris. A
client of your firm.”
Gold
shook his head.
“That
can’t be true,” he said, unconvincingly.
“Then
what were you going to call me about?”
Gold
wandered over to the liquor cabinet and poured himself some scotch. He held the
bottle at me. I shook my head.
“You
got Hugh’s letters from someone,” I continued, “presumably the recipient. If
Robert Paris is involved in Hugh’s death and you’re protecting him, you’re
already an accessory.”
“Don’t
lecture me about my legal status,” Aaron snapped. “I just want to talk.”
“I’m
listening.”
“Judge
Paris’s account is managed by the two most senior partners in the firm,” he
began, “but there’s enough so that some of it trickles down to the associates.
I’ve done my share of work on that account and I’d heard of Hugh Paris, knew he
was the judge’s grandson. I’d heard he was bad news,” Aaron shrugged. “I really
didn’t give it much thought.”
He
sipped his drink.
“Still,”
he continued, “when you told me he was in jail, I thought that was important
enough to mention to one of the partners on the judge’s account. I thought we
might want to do something for him.”
You
did, I thought, but said nothing.
“I
got the third-degree,” Aaron said. “The two partners questioned me for more
than an hour. When they were satisfied I wasn’t holding back anything they
explained to me that Hugh had made threats against the judge’s life. I was
shown the letters and asked to report back to them anything else that I might
learn from you of Hugh’s activities.”
“And
did you?”
“Of
course I did,” he replied, emptying his glass. “The partners had me convinced
that Hugh was dangerous. They told me that he was a drug addict, that his
father was crazy. There were disturbing reports from private investigators who’d
been hired to keep an eye on him in New York. I not only believed Hugh was a
threat to his grandfather but also to you.”
I
shook my head. “You never met him.” Aaron wasn’t listening.
“But
the more they confided in me,” he said, “the stranger it seemed that the judge
would go to such lengths and to such expense to keep track of Hugh. It seemed
completely out of proportion to any possible threat Hugh may have posed to
Robert Paris.”
“And
now Hugh is dead.”
“Yes.”
He rose from the couch and went back to the liquor cabinet, pouring another
drink. “Three days ago I had a meeting with the partners on the Paris account.
They asked me a lot of questions about you — questions that contained
information they could have got only by having had you followed.”
“What
kind of questions?”
“They
wanted to know the nature of your relationship with Hugh.”
“And
did you tell them?”
“No,
but I think they already knew.”
We
looked at each other.
“Three
days
ago,”
I said, “and the next day we had lunch and you tried to talk me out of seeing
Hugh. And that night he was killed.”
“I
swear I had nothing to do with that,” he said.
“But
your client — the judge did.”
“I
don’t think it’s that simple,” Aaron said. “I’ve been doing some research.
Something’s going on that goes back a long time and involves a lot of people.”
“You’re
talking in riddles.”
“I
can’t speak more clearly — yet.” He looked at me. “I’m going to stay here,”
his gesture encompassed the entire firm, “until I find out. But I don’t want to
see you. It’s not safe for either of us.”
“This
is no time to split up,” I said.
“They’re
watching you, Henry. But they’re not worried about my loyalties. You’re my
diversion.”
“Why
are you doing this, Aaron?”
“I
won’t be an instrument of crime,” he said. “I either have to clear my client of
this murder or urge him to turn himself in. That’s my obligation.”
“Then
our interests are different,” I said, “because I want justice for my friend.”
He
nodded. “I’ll be in touch, Henry. Wait for my call.”
“You
have to give me something, Aaron. Something to go on.”
“All
right,” he said. “Robert Paris inherited his wife’s estate after she was killed
in a car accident. She had a will but she died intestate.”
“That
doesn’t make sense.”
“If
you can make sense of it,” he said, “you’ll know who killed Hugh Paris.”
I
heard the tremor in his voice and I was frightened for both of us.
*
* * * *
I
was sitting on the patio of the student union at the university having left
Gold’s office an hour earlier. I had come to find Katherine Paris. I stared out
across the empty expanse of grass
and
pavement. Misty light hung from the branches of the trees. A white-jacketed
busboy cleared away my breakfast dishes.
School
had not yet started for the undergraduates so there was none of their noise and
traffic to shatter the stillness. I was thinking about Hugh. The same money
that raised this school was responsible for his death. The money was everything
and nothing, something that overwhelmed him and which, perhaps, could only be
contained by the institution. It had not done Hugh any good, but was merely the
background noise against which he played out his unhappiness.
I
got up and walked across the plaza to the bookstore. It was a two-story beige
box with a red tile roof, a far cry from the excesses of the Old Quad. But
then, as the campus moved away from the Old Quad the architecture became purely
utilitarian as conspicuous displays of wealth, whether personal or institutional,
went out of style. I entered the store and stopped one of the blue-frocked
salesclerks, asking where the poetry books were shelved. I was directed to the
back wall of the second floor. The poetry books covered a dozen long shelves
and it took me a minute to figure out that they were arranged alphabetically.
There
had been a brief time in college when I wrote poetry. It was, like most
sophomore verse, conceived in the loins rather than the mind. It was a notch
better than most such verse, perhaps, but it was no loss to literature when I
stopped writing. My brush with poetry, however, left me with a permanent
respect for those who wrote it well. Seeing familiar names again, Auden, Frost,
Richard Wilbur, took me back to sunny autumn afternoons when I sat in my dorm
room writing lame couplets.
Katherine
Paris had published a half-dozen slender volumes over the past twenty years and
one thick book of collected poems. Each book was adorned with the same
photograph I had seen at Hugh’s house and beneath it was the same paragraph of
biographical information. She was born in Boston, graduated from Radcliffe,
took a master’s degree from Columbia and currently divided her time between
Boston and San Francisco. Her work had won the National Book Award and been
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She had been translated into twelve languages
— they were listed — and had once been mentioned by T.S. Eliot who found her
work elliptical. Nothing about a crazy husband and a homosexual son;
apparently, that information was private.
I
struggled with about a dozen of her poems before I saw Eliot’s point. Her work
was indeed elliptical, she left out everything that was essential, including
logic and meaning. Her words neither described nor observed things. They were
just words scattered across the page. This was braininess of the highest
order, the verbal equivalent of the white canvas passed off as a painting; so
abstract that to have expected some sense from it would have insulted the
artist. As my attention wandered from the poems, it seemed to me that I was
being watched. I closed the book and looked around. The boy standing next to me
quickly directed his attention to his feet.
He
wore a baggy pair of khaki shorts rolled up at the bottom over a long sinewy
pair of legs. He had on a white sweatshirt with a red paisley bandana tied
around his neck and a small button with the lambda — the symbol of gay
liberation — on it. He had a round cherubic face, short hair of an
indeterminate dark color. He looked about twenty. He raised his eyes at me and
I realized that I was being cruised, not spied on.
“Hello,”
I said, pleasantly.
Pointing
at the book in my hand he said, “I took a creative writing course from her last
quarter.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “My name is Danny.”
“Henry,”
I said. “Did you like the course?”
“Actually,”
he confided, pushing his hair with slender fingers, “she’s a good poet but a
very neurotic woman.”
“Don’t
the two go together?”
“No,”
he said, “I reject the notion of the doomed artist. I mean, look at Stevens, he
sold insurance and Williams was a doctor.”
“Sorry,”
I said, “It’s been a long time since I read poetry. Who are Stevens and
Williams?”
He
looked slightly shocked. “Wallace Stevens? William Carlos Williams?” I shook my
head. Looking at me intently he said, “Aren’t you a student? A grad student
maybe?” “I’m a lawyer and my interest in Katherine Paris is professional, not
literary.”
“A
lawyer,” he repeated as though describing a virus. “Don’t lawyers wear suits
when they’re working?” I was wearing a pair of jeans and a black polo shirt.
“Not
on house calls,” I replied. “Where can I find Mrs. Paris?”
“Third
floor, English department in the Old Quad. I’ll walk you there if you like,
okay?”
“Sure,
just let me pay for the book.”
Between
the bookstores and the Old Quad I learned quite a bit about Danny’s tastes in
poetry, his life and his plans as well as receiving a couple of gently veiled
passes. I steered the conversation around to Katherine Paris.
“She
had this great lady persona,” he was saying, “but don’t cross her.”
“You
did?”
“Anyone
with any integrity does sooner or later. Her opinions are set in stone.”
“Not
writ in water?”
“That’s
Shelley. That was pretty good. Anyway, she doesn’t let you forget who has the
power.” We had reached the English department. He smiled at me, sunnily. “What
do you want with her anyway?”
“Her
son was killed on campus a couple of days ago. He was a friend of mine. I want
to ask her some questions.”
“You
mean the guy that they found in the creek?” I nodded. “That’s too bad. Was he a
good friend?”
I
reached out and touched the button on his chest. “We were good friends.”
His
look said, “And here I’ve been cruising you.” Aloud, he said, “You must think I’m
a real jerk.”
“How
could you have known?” I asked, reasonably. “And thanks for the help.’’ We
shook hands, he a little awkwardly and I remembered how rare the gesture was
among students. “The poem with the phrase writ in water, that was about Keats,
wasn’t it?”
“Yes,”
he said. “Shelley wrote it when Keats died. He called it ‘Adonais.’” He started
to say something else, thought better of it, smiled again and walked away. I
watched him go and then turned and climbed up the stairs to the third floor.
* * * * *
Katherine
Paris did not look like a woman anyone ever called mother. Her small feet were
encased in gold slippers and she wore a flowing white caftan that obliterated any
sign of a body beneath it. The string of blue beads around her neck was probably
lapis lazuli. It was the only jewelry she wore. Her face had the false glow of
a drinker but none of a drinker’s soft alcoholic bloat. It was a hard angular
face I saw as I entered her office; deeply wrinkled, deeply intelligent. She
instructed me to sit down. I sat. She continued writing.