An American Dream (19 page)

“What?”

“Oh, with sex extracted, of course.” He gave a chuckle; we were coming back on course. “You see, she believes that the last meal a person eats before they die determines the migration of their soul.”

“You mean if you die with a belly full of cereal you migrate to the wheat fields!”

“In her mind, it’s somewhat more complicated than that. Has to do with omens and lots and portents and whether one’s a meat
soul or fish soul, and of course it’s not divorced from the phases of the moon and the horoscope.”

“Demeter and Persephone. You poor bastard, Tharchman.”

“She’s a marvelous woman, my wife, and this may be a small cross to bear. But I can tell you she’ll give me no quarter if I don’t ask. Because, you see, in all good intention, she wishes to reach Deborah—Deborah made a vast impression on her—and for that she needs to know—”

“What Deborah ate?”

“Dear God yes, Steve. Hecate has to know.” Now a skinny little sense of hilarity, as if he were a skinny boy in the blissful discomfort of asking an athlete the last line of a dirty joke, came into his voice. “Yes, Steve, what was in her tummy at the end?”

I could not resist. “Why, Fred, I’ll tell you,” I said.

“Yes.”

“It was rum. A bottle of rum, just about.” And hung up.

In ten seconds the phone rang again. It was Tharchman. He was angry now. “You shouldn’t have disconnected, Stephen,” he said, “because there was one thing more.”

“Yes?”

His voice had a Midwestern twang, a sort of “Don’t kid with me,
boy
.” He clicked his tongue once. “I think you ought to know,” he said, “I’ve been formally questioned about you today.”

“By police?”

“No. Somebody much more hush-hush. What in Hell have you and Deborah been up to?” And then
he
hung up.

Next moment the phone rang again. My perspiration flowed.

“Hello, Stephen?” came a breathless voice.

“Speaking.”

“Stephen, I have to whisper.”

“Who is it?”

“Chookey-bah.”

“Who?”

“Chookey-bah lamb. Gigot!”

“
Gigot
, how
are
you?”

“Chookey-bah, I’m just chookey-bah.”

“Well, crash!”

It was idiotic to have said this, but I was in a kind of exhilaration by now. There was a curious exhilaration as if we were all the subjects of a nation which had just declared war. So I said, “Crash,” said it again.

“Well, no,” said Gigot, “I’m not chookey-bah really. I have to whisper. Blake’s in the next room, and he doesn’t want to speak to you. But I must.”

“Speak to me.” She was one of Deborah’s ten best friends, which is to say that she was Deborah’s best friend for one month in every ten. She was also huge. She was five feet eleven and must have weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. She had a fortune of blonde hair which hung down to her waist or piled like a palisade six inches above her brow. She had the voice of a tiny little blonde five years old.

“Blake thinks I’m bound for the crazy house again. I told him I would ask Minot to shoot him if he committed me, and he said, ‘Your brother Minot can’t even shoot a hole in his own pants.’ Blake was
obscene
. I think he’s crazy. He never talks like that. Besides he knows Minot is sexy. I told him so.”

“That brought peace.”

“Blake thinks I’m cockaloo over Deborah. I’m not. I told her to jump last year. I said, ‘Honey, you better go jump and squash yourself. You’re getting fat.’ And Deborah just gave that little pig laugh of hers, oink, oink, you know, and she said, ‘Bettina, your advice is exquisite, but if you don’t stop, I’m going to call Blake and tell him it’s time to have you
cooped
again,’ and she’d do it. She did it to me once. I told her I knew she’d been up to something with her Daddy-O, and she called my family, and had me in the hatch six hours later, in
Paris
, just the two of us, she was my
roommate
.”

“When, Gigot?”

“Oh, years ago, I don’t know, some
fearful
time past. I never forgave her. French mental hospitals are unspeakable. I almost didn’t get out. I had to threaten my family that I would marry the
resident
there, a funny little old dark French Jewish doctor who smelled like the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, I swear he did, and my family sprung me. They weren’t going to have some ratty little French Jew slurping up their soup and telling them how to go on a wild boar hunt, you know the French, they tell you everything whether they know it or not. God, I hate the French.”

“Honey, I wonder if you don’t have a tidbit for me.”

“I do. But I can’t tell you now. My scalp is itching and that means Blake is going to come right back in this room.”

“Well, before he does.”

“Oh. I can’t remember. Yes, now I do. Listen, when I said to Deborah that she ought to jump, she gave that bitchy smile of hers and poured me a glass of sherry, no, it was hundred-and-fifty-year-old Madeira, I remember, she said, ‘Let’s finish off Steve’s Madeira, it gets him so frantic if there is none,’ and then she said, ‘Pet, I’m not going to jump, I’m going to be murdered.’ ”

“What?”

“Yes. She said that. She said it was in her horoscope. She said it was going to be terrifically catastrophic because Venus was together with Saturn and Uranus was in Aquarius. It was even worse than that. Every single planet was bad for her kind of Scorpio.”

“You mean she said she was going to be killed last night?”

“I think she did.”

“She killed herself. Gigot, you forget.”

She sighed audibly. “Steve, you didn’t do it, did you?”

“I didn’t,” I said softly.

“Steve, I’m glad I called you. I thought I ought to call the police. Blake said he’d break my nose if I called them and got my picture in the papers. And he would break my nose, too. He hates my gift of
smell—I once caught the teeniest whiff of perfume on him even though he’d gone to a sauna bath afterward and tried to come back smelling like birch twigs. But I could smell the perfume and I could even smell the hands of the coon who’d been giving him a massage. How do you like that?”

“Phenomenal.”

“Steve, you
are
telling me the truth. I know you like me.”

“Well, Gigot, if I had done it, could I tell you the truth, could I?”

“But you didn’t?”

“Well, maybe I did. You seem to think so.”

“Oh, I guess she could have committed suicide. She was very upset about Deirdre, you know. She didn’t know what to tell her about her father.”

“Pamphli?”

“How do we know Pamphli was the father? We don’t, do we, sheik?” said Gigot.

“I never had any reason to doubt it,” I said.

“Well, a man never has anything but empty space between his certainties,” Gigot said. “Oh, darling Steve, I know it wasn’t suicide. Deborah
knew
she was going to be murdered. She was
never
wrong about that sort of thing. Steve, maybe somebody gave her poison that sent a message to her brain to make her jump. You know, some new hallucinatory drug or something. All the doctors are flippo now. They spend their time cooking up things like that. I mean maybe the maid slipped it into her rum.”

“Come on, love bucket.”

“No, the maid was in cahoots.”

“Angel Bettina …”

“I know something you don’t know. Deborah never told you anything. You know why I was her best friend? Because no matter what she told me, nobody ever believed it. And besides, I know something about that maid.”

“What?”

“Promise to believe me?”

“Promise.”

“That maid is Barney Kelly’s mistress. You know the kind a man his age has. They always have those thin lips which can go anywhere.”

“Now why would Barney Kelly be so interested in what Deborah was doing that he would give up such a mistress?”

“All I know is the maid came as a condition of Deborah’s allowance.”

“She didn’t have one.”

“Kelly gave Deborah five hundred dollars a week. Did you think you were supporting her by yourself, Horatio Alger?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Somebody killed her.”

“I really doubt it, Gigot.”

“She was done in.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I
know
.”

“Then go to the police.”

“I’m afraid to.”

“Why?”

“Because I think there are
repercussions
to this.” Bettina spoke in a whisper which was quite inside her normal whisper. “Deborah was a spy.”

“Bettina, you
are
mad.”

“Better believe me, handsome.”

“Why in the name of heaven would Deborah be a spy?”

“Steve, she was bored. She was always bored. She’d do anything to avoid being bored.”

“Who was she a spy for?”

“Well, I don’t know. She was capable of
anything
. I once accused her of being CIA and she laughed. ‘Those
idiots
,’ she said.
‘They’re all college professors or gorillas wearing paratroop boots.’ Anyway, I know she used to be M.I.6.”

“When?”

“When we were in the convent in London. That’s how she would get a pass to get out. She had a boy friend who was M.I.6,
anyway
.”

“Gigot, you’re really a very silly little girl.”

“And you’re a fathead. Blake’s a fathead and you’re a fathead.”

“Chookey-bah, I do adore you.”

“You better.”

“I always thought Deborah was a Communist,” I said.

“Divine lamb, that’s what I was going to tell you. I’m willing to bet she was some kind of double agent, you know, a spy within a spy. I have something I want to tell you about that.”

I groaned. There was an awful possibility that some blighted hair of truth was still alive in all of this. I could feel mysteries revolving into mysteries like galaxies forming themselves, and knew with some sort of defeated woe that I would never learn a tenth of what had really happened, not ever.

“Cheese it, the cops,” whispered Bettina. “Why, Blake,” she said loudly, “you angel ape of a stud, who do you think I’m talking to? It’s Marguerite Ames. She’s calling me from a phone booth. Hang on, Marguerite, Blake wants to talk to you. Oh, darling, get a nickel up fast, or call me back.… Damn, we lost her.”

I hung up even as I could feel him reaching for the phone. My shirt was wet. I was like a man in a burning house who has three minutes to get the valuables together. I had just those three minutes to hold myself in line, and then the desire for a drink would sear the walls. I stripped off that wet shirt I had chosen with such care, scrubbed my back and under my arms with a dry towel, put on something else quick as I could find it, and stepped out the door. I didn’t realize until I reached the street that I had been holding my breath. My uneasiness was almost tangible now; I could feel some
sullen air of calm, exactly that torporous calm which comes before a hurricane. It was nearly dark outside. I would be late, but I had to walk to the precinct, I had the conviction that if I entered a taxi there would be an accident. I turned abruptly and felt a flicker in the mood. There was some sense of a dull but intent intelligence nearby. Then I knew I was being followed. My eye picked out a man half a block back on the other side of the street who went on strolling. A detective, no doubt. That was almost pleasing. Had they been following me since I left the precinct last night?

For this interview Roberts’ office was in the basement, a box of a room ten feet by twelve with a desk, a few wooden chairs, two file cabinets and a wall calendar. There was also an enlarged map of the precinct with red pins in it. I had been led here by a policeman on duty near the desk sergeant’s tribunal, and we had gone down a flight of iron stairs and down a long corridor which gave a view through one window of the cellblock, a row of steel doors and walls of yellow institutional tile. As we went by, I could hear somebody yelling—one of the drunks.

Roberts did not get up to shake hands. “You’re late,” he said.

“I needed a walk.”

“Sweating out some booze?”

“You look hung yourself.”

He nodded. “I’m not used to living with the poison.” His blue eyes, alert last night and precise as a micrometer, now seemed larger and red-rimmed and somewhat boiled—the blue had gone pale. As he leaned forward, a waft of exertion came off him, sour with use, and also too sweet, as if he had borrowed some of O’Brien’s smell. Then he opened a file. “We have the autopsy now. Yes, we got it all here,” he said, and tapped the file slowly. “It doesn’t look so good for you.”

“Care to give detail?”

“I have enough here to lock you up.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Probably I will.”

“Maybe the time has come for me to get a lawyer.” I put no emphasis on this. I still could not be certain whether he was serious or merely beginning a serious game.

“I’d rather talk a while first.”

“Why?”

“You’re an intelligent man. I think you’re entitled to know how bad your situation is. I want your confession, this evening, right here.”

The desire for a drink had passed. It was as if I’d been laboring these last few hours to get myself ready to meet him.

“You know, of course,” he said, “that when a body has been dead for six hours, rigor mortis sets in.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“Well, there was no evidence of rigor mortis on your wife when we found her on the street.”

“How could there be?”

“There wasn’t. However, we know another way to measure the time of death. I don’t imagine you’re familiar with that.”

Something in his posture told me not to answer.

“Ever hear,” Roberts asked, “of dependent lividity?”

“I’m not positive.”

“Well, Rojack, when a death occurs, the body blood begins to coagulate at exactly those parts of the body which are touching the floor or leaning against a wall. That’s dependent lividity. Within an hour and a half you can begin to see black and blue areas with the naked eye. Now by the time the autopsy was made on your wife, her body was covered with dependent lividity front and back.”

She had been lying on her face and then I had turned her over.