The Nature of My Inheritance (7 page)

What happened was that our Sunday walks
developed into shared evenings, dinners and
movies, a train ride now and again into Manhattan
to go to Carnegie Hall and hit some museums,
and it wasn’t long before she and I were
spending lots of time together, more than I had
ever hoped for back in my lusting tenderfoot
years. In all seriousness, I was astonished to find
that my daydreams, my wet dreams, my longing
boyhood dreams were not wasted on some kind
of delusion, and that the girl I thought I loved
back in my youth turned out to be the woman I
truly loved later. Cynical and defensive as I had
been when I was younger, I always figured what
I was experiencing was pure fiction, not the real
deal like my father’s death, my mother’s decline.
Such joy was, I knew, dangerous since it was
fragile and rare. As fragile and rare as any of my
hidden rarities.

Because the reverend had always adored
Amanda, never privy to my filthy thoughts, of
course, it was easy for my mother to embrace
her current presence in my life. Deep down, I
think my mom would have given up a dozen of
me and my brother to have had just one daughter,
not that I could blame her, for all the minor
scuffling trouble Drew and I brought into her
life over the years. A daughter would have made
her time with my starchy pater a little more gently
rumpled, and I mean that in a good way.
Well, to some degree, Amanda filled that daughterly
role for her, helping her make a pot roast
after church some Sundays, advising her about
hair colors when the old lady wanted to get a dye
job, stuff like that. And it couldn’t have made me
happier for both of them, since it turned out
Amanda’s mother was no picnic, another story
for another day. My courtship, a term my mom
actually pulled out of the mothballs of her mind
to describe my dating Amanda, was going better
than I might ever have imagined possible. Not
only did we say we loved each other, but
Amanda claimed she liked me more than anyone
she’d ever met.

She one day said it like this. “I’ve always had
a secret crush on you, the handsome son of the
handsome preacher. I guess you could say I’ve
always loved you from afar. But I really like you,
too. Silly as it sounds, I’m in like with you.”

I don’t think I could honestly claim that
anybody I’d ever known, Harrison included, my
family included, might be able to make the same
statement. Oh, that Liam fellow? Now there’s
someone I truly and sincerely like. Forget about
it.

During one of our Sunday afternoon suppers,
I think it was lamb chops and new potatoes
on the table, the doorbell rang unexpectedly and
I went to answer.

“Hello, Liam,” Reynolds said. “How’s all and
everything?”

Acting unsurprised as I could manage,
though he probably wouldn’t have been surprised
to see me surprised since he hadn’t
stopped by in years, I told him all and everything
was fine, thanks.

“I was just driving by the house and thought
I’d check in on you and your family.”

No choice but to let him in. “That’s really nice
of you.”

“Who is it, Liam?” my mother called from the
dining room.

“Detective Reynolds is here,” I answered,
praying she wouldn’t ask him to join us.

“Ask him on in to join us if he’d like.”

“No, tell her that’s okay, Liam. I don’t want to
bust in on Sunday dinner, especially unannounced
like this.”

Not wanting to shout back and forth, I said
to him, “That’s all right, come on in why don’t
you. I’m sure she’d love to say hello. My girlfriend’s
here, too.”

“You have a girlfriend now, do you? That’s
great,” he said, but didn’t budge an inch farther
into the house. “I hate to be rude, but it was you
I wanted to talk to if you had just a moment.”
He looked at his watch, a fakey-fake gesture that
sent up, as my father used to put it, all the red
flags in China.

“Hang on,” I told him, then went to the dining
room to say the detective wanted to have a
word with me privately and I’d be back right
away.

“Something about your dad?” my mother
asked, setting her fork down on her place, voice
fluttering like a buckshot bird falling out of the
sky.

“No idea,” I said, and looked at Amanda, who
had picked up on my mom’s nerves and clearly
shared her concern. “Don’t worry. Just go on
eating and I’ll see what he has to say.”

Back in the foyer, Reynolds tipped his head
to suggest we step outside. I grabbed my slicker
off the coat rack and walked with him into a
mist so fine that it looked like it was raining upwards
instead of down. Parked at the end of the
walkway was that same dark blue unmarked
Chevy he was driving when I first met him.

“Guess you like that car,” I said, breaking the
ice, if ice it was between us that caused the silence.

“You got a good memory, Liam,” he said with
a light laugh. “I’m still wondering why you
didn’t become a detective like I thought you
might. You have all the smarts it takes to solve
mysteries. God knows, you probably have more
smarts than the job requires.”

I thought it best not to thank him.

“Plus, it might beat working in a grocery
store.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” was all I could think to
say. It annoyed and worried me that he knew
where I worked, since I had never once seen him
in our aisles.

“So, it’s been quite a while since we talked
about your father, how he passed.”

“Yeah,” I said, as we turned onto the sidewalk
and ambled down the street away from the
house.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing it up
again, hope I’m not opening old wounds.”

“I guess not,” I said, looking away from him
toward the window of our neighbor’s house
next door. Why was it their curtains were always
drawn, no matter what the weather?

“Well, I didn’t want to get your mom’s hopes
up but I think we may have a possible break in
his case. After all this time, it doesn’t happen that
often. I mean, for a cold case to suddenly get
warm again.”

That same strange feeling of guilt, like I had
killed him myself, came over me then. It wasn’t
a feeling I liked one bit, a ridiculous sensation
since I was sitting right there with my little
brother and mom when the accident happened.
But I felt it anyway. I just hoped that Reynolds,
who was sharp as ever and curiously intimidating,
couldn’t feel it, too.

“How so? What happened?”

“There’s a man, his name doesn’t matter, who
passed away a few months ago, died of natural
causes. Lived with his wife on the Upper East
Side of New York. An advertising exec, did well
in his career, made good money.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who
would push a minister down some stairs.”

Reynolds paused, took in a deep breath, exhaled.
“Well, you’re right. At least partly right.
You see, this man was a collector. Collected all
sorts of things from coins and stamps to paintings
and books. He had great taste, to say the
least, and as it’s beginning to come clear to those
who were tasked with probating his estate, it
looks like his taste went way beyond his income,
which was already pretty hefty.”

I naturally had already made the possible
connection, but said, doorknob dumb, or trying
to be, “I’m not seeing what this has to do with
my dad yet.”

“Well, I’ll get to that now. You see, it looks like
he was working with some dealers, suppliers of
fine art stuff, not all of them totally legit. For instance,
turns out one of his best paintings, a portrait
of some girl by Degas—”

Reynolds mispronounced the name so it
rhymed with Vegas, but I kept my tongue glued
to the roof of my mouth. I didn’t like the direction
any of this was going.

“—was stolen from a museum in Austria.
And there were other items, not by any means
all of them, by the way, that seem to have come
from institutions here and there. So, here’s the
bit that bothers me regarding your father. His
address and phone number, both at the church
and your house, were in a little book this collector
kept in a wall safe.”

“That’s nuts,” I said.

“It is nuts, you’re right. Especially since, so far
as the authorities working on all this have been
able to determine, a number of the other names
and contact info listed in his book could be
traced to dealers in coins, stamps, art, and various
collectibles like that. Now some of them
have checked out, but others are under investigation.
And as you can imagine, all the assets of
the estate are frozen until his collections can be
gone through with a fine-toothed comb to see
what’s what.”

I made my first mistake ever with Reynolds
when I said, “I’m lost here.”

“Well, I have to doubt that, Liam,” glancing
over at me as the heavy mist turned to light drizzle.
“I can imagine you wouldn’t want to think
your father, being a preacher and all, could be
caught up in anything even slightly illegal. But
there are some questions about why he was in
this man’s address book that will have to be answered
at some point. Whether your dad found
himself involved in any of this, which I seriously
doubt, by the way, isn’t really my ballywick. But
his death was and is.”

I said nothing, not wanting to say something
wrong. Tongue glued, tongue glued.

“Did you ever know your father to be interested
in collectibles at all?”

“No, sir,” now finally lying.

“People used to like stamp collecting a lot.
My grandfather had a humongous collection of
stamps and when he passed away, we had them
appraised, since he had always talked about how
valuable they were and that we could all retire
on it. Well, turned out his stamps were basically
worthless, moneywise. The whole value was in his enjoyment cutting them off of envelopes and
buying them out of catalogues for nickels and
dimes.”

“I never saw my father collect anything”—
no, I didn’t slip up and say, except for Bibles—
“and that even included collecting enough
during services to keep his church fixed. He and
my mom sat around all the time worrying about
money. Collecting would have been about the
last thing on his mind.”

“Well,” Reynolds said, taking me subtly by the
elbow and turning me around with him to head
back toward my house. “If anything comes to
mind, anything at all, that might explain what
your dad’s info was doing in this man’s possession,
would you let me know?”

“I doubt I’ll come up with anything, but you
can count on me to call if I do.”

“You still have my card?”

“I’m sure I do.”

“Look there. You have the instincts of a collector
as well as a detective,” he said, the wiseass.
“Let me give you another one, just in case.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You sure you wouldn’t like
to come in for dessert? Amanda, that’s my girlfriend,
makes a mean pecan pie.”

“I’ll raincheck that, but next time for sure,
okay?”

“You got it,” I said, and shook his hand with
the best smile I could summon from my slim arsenal
of smiles. I turned to head back up the
walk as he opened his car door. “Am I supposed
to keep all this stuff to myself? Should I ask my
brother anything?”

How I hoped he would say yes even as he
said, “No. Just keep it to yourself for now.”

“What am I supposed to tell my mom when
I go back in?”

That did seem to throw him off a little.
Hadn’t thought that part through, I guess. “I
don’t know, just say I wanted to check in, catch
up a little for old time’s sake. I’m sure you’ll
come up with something.”

My thoughts chasing in circles, I used
Reynolds’ excuse on Amanda and my mom,
having no better bright idea.

That night, in bed, having driven Amanda
home, my worries only darkened. I wanted to
call Harrison but feared that my phone might
be tapped. I wanted to get my Bibles and their
precious charges to a safer place than my closet,
but where in the world could I stow them until
any danger passed? Above all, I desperately
wanted not to believe my father had been
pushed down those stairs to his death because
of some sort of book deal gone sour. This last
desire was the toughest of the three because it
never seemed more plausible that this was exactly
what had happened. I went through the
faces of all the Claudes I had met over the years,
wondering which Claude might have been this
attorney who was fishier than sushi, but had no
way of sorting out one from the next. That was
how it was meant to be, of course. Just for occasions
like this. If nobody was connected with
anybody else, then nobody would take a fall
simply because somebody else did. No game of
dominoes here. And no one was ever supposed
to have written anything down, which is why
the reverend had his cost code and the Claudes
were all blank slates. I never asked Harrison
where he had deaccessioned all these books
from, what library’s rarely visited shelves were
a little emptier than they had been, their onceupon-
a-time presence having been erased forever,
like some calculus equation a stupid
schoolboy solved incorrectly on the chalkboard.
The only common link was, like my father before,
me.

What I did early the next morning, dawn failing
to slice through the dense overcast, was—
Amanda, my saving grace—I drove over to my
girlfriend’s and asked her if she could take the
morning off work.

“You seem serious today, Liam. Are you all
right?”

“I am serious, and I am all right. Better than
all right, better than I’ve ever been.”

We strolled to a pretty little park, one we liked
a lot, not far from Amanda’s apartment building.
The sun hovered above us, white as a flag of
surrender, trying like anything to break through
the clouds. The bench we found was, like the rest
of the park, empty and wet from last night’s
rain. I took off my jacket and wiped dry a spot
where we could sit, holding hands. Damned if
Amanda didn’t look lovelier than ever, the shadows
on her face softened in the pearl-gray light.
Rotten as my juvenile thoughts about her over
the years had been, I realized they’d brought me
to this place, me sitting with her, not with some
lewd made-up story about her but Amanda herself.
When I asked her, “Manda, I love you so
much, always have, and I wonder if you would
marry me?” and she answered without hesitation,
as if she’d pondered the possibility for a
long time, “Nothing would make me happier,
Liam,” I felt the sun break through and even
though it didn’t it may as well have, given how
full of warmth and light I felt. We kissed each
other, held each other close, and as I walked her
back so she could get ready for work, we agreed that we would tell my mom that evening and afterwards
go out to dinner somewhere special
and celebrate. Caviar and champagne, the
works.