City Of Lies (17 page)

‘It’s okay Walt,’ Harper said resignedly, perhaps for no other reason than he couldn’t listen to any more. ‘It’s okay. It’s been one helluva couple of days, that’s all I can say, and I haven’t had a chance to figure out what I’m going to do.’

‘Do?’ Walt asked. ‘What makes you think you have to
do
anything?’ He smiled, laughed almost. ‘You don’t have to do a goddamned thing, John. Just stick around for a few days, have Cathy and me keep you company. We’ll go out, have dinner, maybe see a show or something.’

Harper shook his head. He couldn’t really comprehend what he was hearing. Have dinner? See a show? He possessed no context within which to place any of this.

‘John?’

Harper looked up at Walt Freiberg.

‘It
won’t
make sense, none of it. He was shot. He was in a liquor store Sunday night and someone shot him. He’s going to make it or he isn’t, it’s no more complicated than that. He’s in the hospital, and those people know what they’re doing. Everything that can be done is being done, and there isn’t anything we can do apart from be here. The doctor is going to call me if he comes round, you know? And if he does we go see him, okay?’

Harper nodded. Walt was right. There was nothing any of them could do.

‘So we go see someone,’ Walt said. ‘That’s what we were going to do today, go meet someone and get some things organized for yourself.’

‘What things?’ Harper asked.

Walt smiled. ‘It isn’t a big deal, John, just a little sartorial influence. If you’re going to play the game then you have to look the part, right?’

Cathy smiled. She took Harper’s arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go see Mr Benedict.’

Harper walked with them to Walt’s car. He didn’t enquire where they were going or who Mr Benedict was. Truth be known he was past the point of challenging any of it. The questions he asked never seemed to realize answers. A little while longer, a few days, surely no more, and regardless of what happened he would be out of New York and on the way home. Had to be. There they were again, the rock and the hard place – Evelyn and Frank Duchaunak on one side, Cathy and Walt on the other. Perhaps the easiest thing was not to try and make a choice. Go with it, go with the flow, deal with whatever might come when it came.

Harper sat in the back of the car, Cathy Hollander right beside
him, and he was intensely aware of her closeness. At one point she reached out and closed her hand over his, gave it a reassuring squeeze, and then let go. He looked at her but she did not look back. He wanted to feel her hand again, wanted to touch her once more, but he dared not. The woman was a confusion of messages, or perhaps not. Maybe it was him, him and him alone. Maybe he just wanted something to be there, wanted it so much that he justified his wishful thinking with everything Cathy said and did. His life in Miami, however narrow it might have been, was neverthless under control. This was the opposite, a complete dichotomy, and dealing with it did not come easy.

Walt Freiberg drove, silently for a little while, and then he started to tell Harper a story about Edward Bernstein, his friend and partner, and Harper listened with a sense of detached interest. But within moments his attention was distracted by the city beyond the window. It started to rain, lightly at first, and then Walt had to put the wipers on to facilitate a clear view of the road ahead.

Harper leaned back. He closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of Cathy Hollander beside him, the ghost of her perfume, not only that which she had applied, but also that which she possessed.

Walt’s voice was something that belonged to a distant past. Try as he might to associate and identify with all that it represented, everything within John Harper urged him to leave that past alone. What was done was done.

And if his father lived? Well, if he lived, that would be another bridge to burn or build when the time came.

Harper listened to the sound of the rain, the sound of the engine, the wheels on the road, the breathing of New York City as it swallowed him. Here he possessed no real identity, and perhaps never had. Surely without awareness and recognition of the past there could neither be present nor future. A tree without roots is not a tree.

John Harper opened his eyes as the car drew to a halt.

‘Where did you go?’ Cathy asked.

Harper turned and looked at her. She was smiling.

‘Nowhere special,’ he said quietly, and then a gust of rain unexpectedly caught him as Walt Freiberg opened the door.

‘Who said that? That New York becomes a small town when it rains?’

Duchaunak shook his head.

Evelyn was silent for a moment, and then, ‘Gunther, John Gunther, I believe.’

She reached into her apron pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. She opened it and offered one to Duchaunak.

He raised his hand, shook his head, smiled. ‘Trying to quit,’ he said.

Evelyn laughed.

Duchaunak frowned, watched her as she lit her cigarette. ‘So you were saying?’ he prompted.

‘I was saying that Walt Freiberg called me the night Edward was shot. He told me that it was what Anne would have wanted now, that she would want John to know he had a father, that I should call him and tell him to come to New York.’

‘And if Walt Freiberg hadn’t called you?’

‘I would’ve left it all well alone, Detective. I have to admit there was an element of self-preservation in there somewhere.’

‘Self-preservation?’

Evelyn nodded. ‘I was the one who told John that his father had died. I’ve kept that up for thirty years or more. That’s what Anne wanted me to do right from Edward’s departure, and it went on after her death . . . went on until the day before yesterday.’

‘It came as a shock to him,’ Duchaunak said.

‘What do you think, Detective?’

‘I think it came as a shock to him, Mrs Sawyer.’

‘A thunderbolt.’

‘And now?’

Evelyn shook her head. ‘I’ve told him to leave, to go home,
but knowing John he will please himself. John is a single-minded and independent man, was that way even as a child. He stayed here long enough to save enough money to move out, and then he left, went all the way down to Florida. We didn’t keep in touch, not the way a family’s supposed to, and that was how he wanted it. We had a difficult time. He lost his mother, I lost my husband, and yet we somehow made the best of it despite everything. There is a certain irony, however, in how things have turned out, don’t you think?’

Duchaunak said nothing. His expression was quizzical.

‘That the one man we decided to have disappear from our lives is the one man who brought us back together.’

‘Edward Bernstein,’ Duchaunak stated matter-of-factly.

Evelyn smiled resignedly. ‘Edward Bernstein.’

‘You don’t like him . . . never did like him, did you?’

‘You ever read Stanislavski?’

Duchaunak shook his head.

‘You know who he is, right?’

Duchaunak shrugged. ‘Some Russian guy?’

‘Constantin Stanislavski. He developed a school of acting, a philosophy if you like. He wrote things, you know? One of them was about the phenomenon of an actor being entirely alone despite the audience. He called it ‘solitude in public’. He suggested that even though an actor is presenting himself to an audience of thousands he could still remain in a circle of light, like a snail in a shell, and he could carry that shell with him wherever he went and whatever he did—’

‘I don’t understand—’ Duchaunak started.

Evelyn scowled at him. ‘Let me finish what I was going to say and you might.’

‘I’m sorry. Please, continue.’

‘This was Edward Bernstein, you see? This was the point I was making. He possessed this ability to be anywhere he chose without ever being there at all.’

Duchaunak leaned forward. The smell of cigarette smoke was both irritating and exceptionally appealing.

‘Edward led his own life. He possessed people—’

‘What d’you mean?’

Evelyn Sawyer looked at Duchaunak. ‘Where the hell did you grow up?’ she asked.

‘Eh?’

‘You grow up someplace where people have no manners at all? What is it with this interrupting me every other word? You come here and ask if I have time to answer some questions for you. Did I tell you to go to hell? No, I didn’t. I said sure I can answer some questions, come on in and sit down. Have some coffee. I offered you some coffee, right? Fact you didn’t want any doesn’t change the fact that I asked. This is manners, you see? This is what we call manners, Detective, and now you’ve asked a question and I’m answering it, and the way it works in this house is I talk until I’m finished talking, and then you ask me something else. We understand one another?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Duchaunak said.

‘Well, good. Now don’t interrupt me. You have a question that you want to ask, well you make a mental note of it and ask it when I’m done.’

Evelyn took a drag of her cigarette and looked at Duchaunak. Her gaze was sharp and unflinching. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Right, good . . . so where were we?’

‘Edward Bernstein possessing people.’

‘Oh yes, the Stanislavski philosophy. He did that. He would be there, right beside you, and yet you’d feel as though his mind was always three or four steps to the left. It was a very strange feeling. And like I said, he seemed to have the capacity to possess people, and that’s what he did with Anne, my sister. She was all of twenty-three or twenty-four, nothing more than a child really, and Edward was quite a bit older. He must have been – oh, I don’t know – he was nine or ten years older than she was. He was an extraordinarily charming man, Detective . . .’ Evelyn paused. She smiled to herself as if remembering some particular moment. ‘It was Trilby and Svengali,’ she went on. ‘He possessed a manner quite unlike anyone we had ever met before. Edward Bernstein took a shine to my sister—’ Evelyn stopped mid-sentence and looked directly at Duchaunak. ‘She looked a lot like Marilyn Monroe, the real Marilyn, Norma Jean Baker, you know?’

Duchaunak nodded.

‘We saw her one time, me and Anne, right here in New York City.’

‘No,’ Duchaunak said, in his voice an element of surprise and incredulity.

‘Sure as you’re sitting there, Detective, we saw her. I cannot even begin to describe how beautiful she was.’ Evelyn smiled, closed her eyes for a moment.

Duchaunak edged forward on his seat. ‘Where?’ he asked. ‘Where did you see her?’

‘Not far away from where we are right now . . . the old New York Picture House on Broadway.’

‘What was she doing here?’

‘She was promoting a film called
Bus Stop
—’

‘1956,’ Duchaunak interjected.

‘You know it?’

Duchaunak nodded.

‘There was a scene when Marilyn has her first upset with the lead man—’

Duchaunak smiled. ‘Bo and Cherie in the Blue Dragon Cafe. He tries to grab her costume and the train comes off the back.’

Evelyn laughed. ‘You’ve seen it then?’

‘A couple of times, yes.’

‘Anyway, she has this expression, feisty, independent, a real firecracker . . . and when we saw her, me and Anne, you could tell that she had that kind of character inside of her. Anne had that too, that kind of fiery attractiveness, the kind of thing that drew men to her like moths to a flame.’ Evelyn paused and shook her head slowly. ‘Edward Bernstein broke that down. She became dependent on him, like she was nothing unless he was around. It made me mad, but Anne couldn’t see any of it. She was blind to what he was really like.’

Duchaunak watched the woman as she remembered her sister; he saw the way her hands seemed to clench and unclench into white-knuckled fists as she spoke; he saw the way she took a cigarette from the packet, the lighter flame stuttering, evidence that she was nervous, perhaps angry. She would not hold his gaze, and when she was done talking and he asked about Walt Freiberg she seemed to tense up completely.

‘Walt Freiberg?’ she asked. ‘What about Walt Freiberg?’

Duchaunak leaned back, tried to give the impression of nonchalance. ‘He was around, I understand, for a little while after the death of your husband.’

Evelyn looked back at Duchaunak, and the agitation vanished as rapidly as it appeared. ‘Why are you here, Detective?’

‘Why am I here?’

‘I don’t need you to repeat the question, I need you to answer it.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Sawyer. Why I’m here . . . well . . . I’m here because someone shot Edward Bernstein, and now his son has appeared out of nowhere, a son I wasn’t even aware he had—’

‘There was no reason for you to be aware of him,’ Evelyn said. ‘You’re talking the better part of forty years ago, and however liberal and forgiving the society might be today it was not the same then. Unmarried people did not live together, they didn’t admit to sleeping together, and they sure as hell didn’t have children. John Harper was an accidental child, and as soon as Anne was pregnant Edward Bernstein figured he should take his business elsewhere.’

‘Didn’t he stick around for a while?’

‘You ever seen someone someplace who wasn’t really there at all?’

Duchaunak frowned.

‘That’s what Edward Bernstein was like from the moment he found out she was pregnant. He left by inches, little by little but, from the moment she told him, he was never the same person to her. That’s what broke her, Detective. She loved him more than anything, more than life itself, and after he left I just watched her slip away into nothing at all. When Edward left he took the very best of what made Anne so special, and with that gone there was so little left she couldn’t survive.’

‘How did she die?’ Duchaunak asked.

Evelyn tilted her head to the side. She smiled ruefully. ‘You don’t know?’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘She took an overdose, Detective . . . just like Marilyn Monroe.’

‘A Chesterfield Regent in black,’ Mr Benedict said. ‘Three button, double vent, a deep cuff on the trouser, and I have another Aquascutum in navy with a pinstripe.’ He smiled, walked back and forth, left and right, looking John Harper up and down as if considering a purchase.