Seven Kinds of Death (14 page)

“Well,” he murmured to Bill Gruenwald. “Seems I’m being paged. Why don’t you just let me out here? Look, if my guy in New York calls with anything about Victoria Leeds I’ll pass it on, and I guess it’s time to start going over the books at Musselman’s company, as well as Buell’s. Musselman was onto something. And it’s going to take time, maybe lots and lots of time, to find out what. I sure wish we could keep this whole aspect under wraps for a while.”

Gruenwald nodded in complete agreement. “We’ll do what we can as quietly as we can. What I’d like right now,” he said, coming to a full stop, “is to be a fly on your shoulder. Something’s on her mind. See you later, Charlie.”

He waved to Tootles, made a tight U-turn, and left. Tootles walked toward Charlie with her hands outstretched.

“I’m going out of my mind,” she said, her voice low and husky. “Charlie, please, I have to talk to you. Let’s go to the barn where no one will disturb us. Charlie, this is more than I can bear. I really feel as if I’m going to crack wide open.”

He wanted to put his arms around her and pat her shoulder and stroke her back and tell her not to worry. He was startled by the intensity of his desire to help her, to comfort her. He told himself that she was an aging woman without a bit of charm, or grace, or beauty; she was coarse, and a liar, and her feet were dirty. Also she was up to something that he distrusted completely. It didn’t matter, he wanted to hold and comfort her. He took her hands.

“Okay, the barn,” he said. “And calm down. What’s happened? What’s got you so upset?”

“A murder! My life’s work destroyed. Maybe my life itself destroyed. Oh, Charlie!”

She ducked her head and withdrew a hand to wipe her eyes. Now he put his arm about her shoulders and steered her across the dirt road toward the barn.

The big doors were closed; inside the barn the light was dim. There were the crates that had been roughly opened, the fronts, tops, sides ripped apart to reveal the messes inside. No one had been back here yet to clean up the mess.

She stopped a few steps inside the barn, and suddenly she bowed her head and buried her face in her hands and sobbed. This time he did hold her close while she wept.

“I didn’t realize how hard it would hit me, coming back here,” she said in a choking voice a few seconds later. “I just wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. I’m all right now.”

She groped in her pockets for a tissue and blew her nose, and then walked away from him, to the far end of the building where there was another narrow door. She opened it and stood in the doorway, taking great long breaths.

With her back to him, she said, “Charlie, will you please take Constance and leave? We made a mistake in hiring you. I’ll explain it to Max. I talked a long time with our lawyer today, and he’s sure the police don’t have enough of a case even to pretend to arrest me.”

He had moved closer in order to hear her softly spoken words. “If Max fires us, we’ll probably take off,” he said. “Why, Tootles? Why do you want that?”

She shook her head, still facing away from him. “You can’t understand what my life’s been like. You’re so orderly, you and Constance, so very much together, so happy with each other. I’ve never had that, Charlie, not for more than a few months at a time, and then only a few times. Half a dozen months in a whole lifetime! That’s what I’ve had. I have a chance now with Max. Maybe we can make it last. But you have to leave, and Constance has to leave, or it will fall apart again. You’re… you’re a disturbing man, Charlie. I had no idea how disturbing you could still be.”

Roughly he took her by the shoulders and pulled her around to face him. “Knock it off, goddamn it! What are you up to?”

She looked straight at him and made no motion to pull free; her hands hung down at her sides. Abruptly he released his grasp of her shoulders and backed away a step, then another.

“I meant what I said, Charlie. I want you out of here as soon as possible. Both of you. She knows how I feel, the attraction I feel, and she… she is trying to force me to do something I absolutely must not do, something that will drive Max and me apart, and she understands that very well. Take her away, Charlie. Please. I need this one last chance with Max, one last chance to make some kind of life for myself finally. Charlie, please!”

She did not touch him, did not lean toward him, or make any overt motion, but he felt surrounded by her, within a circle that was Tootles so that no matter which way he looked, which way he turned, how he reached out, he would collide with her.

He shook his head. “Tell me the rest of it,” he said, his voice harsh to his own ears. “What does she want you to do?”

“Hold a séance with Ba Ba,” she whispered. “And Max won’t have it. He really won’t tolerate that sort of thing. She has it in her head that Toni is in some kind of danger, and that Ba Ba and I can do something about it by means of a séance. Charlie, I haven’t done anything like that since I was a kid. And Ba Ba nearly had a nervous breakdown years ago, fooling around with the occult. It could be dangerous for her. I don’t know what’s got into Constance’s head, why she brought this up. I don’t understand, but she says if I don’t do it, she’ll turn Max against me, and she can. She knows how. She’s so clever that way. She knows so much about me.”

Charlie had turned to ice. A moment earlier he had been afraid to move, for fear of coming into contact with her; now he could not move even if he had wanted to. Ba Ba and Tootles in their apartment, he was remembering with a sense of dread and fear, summoning something, striking fear into him with their intensity, their belief. And Constance was using her awareness of that incident from his past in some sort of scheme that she had not even bothered to tell him about. She knew he would not go along with anything like that; she knew, and chose to go around him, bypass him, tackle Tootles head-on by herself. Why?

He felt betrayed, and strangely humiliated. Why? he asked himself again. She didn’t believe any more than he did that Tootles had had anything to do with Victoria’s death, or Musselman’s. Why was she harassing Tootles with such an insane demand, believing her to be innocent? Jealousy? He did not accept that, not for a second. There never had been cause for jealousy between them in either direction. If he had not told her about that stupid incident that had terrified him so, she would not have thought of this, he felt certain, and his sense of betrayal and humiliation arose from that knowledge. In some way she was using his past fear.

If this was all a lie of Tootles’s, then what for? She must know he would get to the bottom of it. Like most liars, she built her castles on a grain of truth; the truth was that Constance was holding something over Tootles, something big enough to make Tootles appeal to him for help. He believed that was the germ of truth here. If it had anything to do with Toni, or if it threatened Tootles’s marriage to Max, or if Max would not tolerate a séance, or Babar was a basket case, none of that seemed to matter. Details. Constance, apparently, intended to force Tootles to hold a séance with her screwball sister Babar; that was the only important thing Tootles had said.

The very idea of it filled him with a deep fear.

Suddenly Tootles put her hand on his arm. “Charlie,’’ she whispered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know this would hurt you so much. I’m so sorry. Just take her home and forget all this. You will, you know. Let the police deal with the murder, get back to your own lives. I won’t forget you, Charlie. I won’t forget.”

Her touch freed him from the block of ice that had encased him completely. He turned to walk back through the barn. “We’d better get to the house.”

“You haven’t answered me,” she said from the open door, a dark silhouette against the bright light.

He nodded. “I know,” he said. At the moment he didn’t have an answer. He only had questions. When he left the barn she was still standing at the door at the far end.

FIFTEEN

Charlie found Constance
with a small group of young people who were not officially students on the back porch of Tootles’s house, eating sandwiches, drinking iced tea, talking. Constance patted a wicker sofa where she had saved him a seat. He shook his head, helped himself to a sandwich, and sat on the top step trying to be unobtrusive. He decided he had succeeded; the boy who had been talking had not paused.

“I said, I agree. You hear me this time? We’re all born creative, I give you that much. I’ve read some of those tests on newborn babies, on preschool children, and so on. I admit up front that something happens to squelch it real early. What I said was that a
good
study would find out first why it doesn’t get burned out in everyone if the pressures are all the same in a family, for instance, and, two, why really creative people so often don’t do a thing with it.”

The other boy shook his head. “That’s where you get off the track. You have to make a value judgment about what is or isn’t creative. What you really mean is that a lot of people don’t do anything with it that the rest of the world is willing to pay money for. A weaver weaving can be creative, a cook cooking, a gardener producing a beautiful garden…”

“Bull shit!” the first boy said. “Let me tell you about my grandmother. She knitted endless booties and scarves and God knows what all, all beautiful, really expert. Creative? Maybe, but she sure would have preferred to be a concert pianist, her ambition at one time, and then marriage, kids, life got in the way. Now and then she played the piano, not very often, and it was terrible to hear her. She would goof up and cry, start over, goof up, and on and on, over and over. I say that’s how it is with most of your creative folks, they’re hurting to make a real contribution, settling for a pretty cake, or a nice arrangement of roses, or a good paint job on a model car… like having your whole body burning with fever and sprinkling a drop of water here or there and making do with it.”

He had become very flushed as he talked. Abruptly he lifted his sandwich and took a massive bite.

Toni had not moved during all this. She held a partly eaten sandwich that she seemed to have forgotten. “You have to keep coming back to the capital letters, don’t you?” she said softly. “You’re talking about creativity with a capital C. Creativity versus creativity; capital A Art versus art.”

Charlie found himself thinking déjà vu, the scene he had walked out on thirty years ago, playing itself over again, this time without Tootles, but her input was there, shaping the direction the conversation had taken. Or maybe there really wasn’t any other way to talk about what they were talking about.

“It’s like the Major Arcana in the Tarot deck,” Toni said. “Once they show up, the forces acting on you are outside yourself, uncontrollable. Once you start talking about capital C Creativity or capital A Art you’re talking about forces from outside that are uncontrollable, that demand obedience if you want recognition. A pretty garden or a nice scarf can’t bring recognition of the sort we’re talking about here. A good piece of Art can.”

“Even bad Art can,” the first boy said. “Most Art is bad, of course. You know the rule; ninety percent of everything is crap, but it gets the recognition and respect it should have as long as you don’t cop out.”

Constance knew that Charlie would be ready to leave as soon as he finished his sandwich; this was the kind of talk that sent him off in a dead run usually. It had not surprised her to have him choose the step instead of the seat next to her; to have joined her he would have had to walk through the small clump sitting near the table with the food; it might have broken up the conversation. That had been her first reaction to his sitting over there; now she realized, however, that he was looking at her with exactly the same interest and neutrality that he was showing all the others. He was looking at her no more or less than at the others, and she felt he was trying to figure her out exactly as he would try to figure out any stranger who happened across his path.

Charlie was unaware of her scrutiny. He had been thinking about recognition, the importance some people placed on it. Max saying Tootles deserved recognition, attaching more importance to it than to money. Charlie knew theater people who would never dream of going to Hollywood or working for television; they needed the instant feedback of a live audience, the recognition of their talent, their skill, now, instantly. They said television people played to the sponsor, who didn’t give a damn what they did as long as they kept an audience and sold product; movie people played to one person, the director. For some people neither of those options was enough although the money might be very good. Delayed recognition was not enough, either. These young people were giving each other the recognition they all needed, getting it from Tootles, finding it enough for a time, until they were ready to take on the rest of the world.
Which one would succeed out there?
he found himself wondering, looking from one young face to another.

“Your grandmother is a good example of what we were talking about a while ago,” one of the boys said. “I mean, for every one who makes it, who doesn’t cop out, there are thousands of others with more talent, more skill, more training who don’t make it. By itself Creativity is nothing, worthless.”

Toni was nodding emphatically. “Luck is what we usually fall back on, but that isn’t it, either. Luck is important, but without the other kind of help, no luck or talent or work or determination will put you over the edge.”

Her impassioned words were followed by a silence that became prolonged as the young artists all seemed to have turned their attention inward, to contemplate something that had not yet been named.

“What will, then?” Constance asked softly.

Toni turned toward her with a distant look. She opened her mouth and then snapped her lips together hard, and instead of speaking, she shrugged.

It was over, Constance realized with regret, as the boys got up, dusting off their shorts. She had felt compelled to ask, and for a second she had thought there might be an answer. “We’d best be on our way,” she said to Charlie. “You’ll give Tootles our number, won’t you?” she reminded Toni who was standing up, stretching. Constance remembered thinking how Toni was the responsible one-Janet had been the bopper. And how they together reminded her of her own daughter although neither of them had done so singly.

“Oh, sure,” Toni said. “No problem. We’re off to hang the birdhouse, I guess. When she comes back, I’ll tell her.”

Toni watched them leave. Constance at the wheel, Charlie slouched down in the passenger seat. As soon as the Volvo was out of sight, she stopped pretending any interest in the silly birdhouse Roger had put together. They all knew he had needed to hammer and pound, and do something with his hands; that had been understood, and they had accepted the monstrosity he had built, but it should now languish in some dark place in the barn.

She wandered back inside the house restlessly. She inspected the dry-erase board, and added Constance’s motel number to the other messages, making a heavy black circle around it to attract attention in the hodgepodge of messages already there. She was in the studio a few minutes later when Spence arrived with a dapper little man who looked like the model for the groom on the wedding cake. His cheeks were very pink, his hands delicate and pale. Spence looked like a thug beside him.

“Where’s Marion?” Spence asked, at the studio door. The other man was beside him, eyeing everything with great curiosity.

“Taking a walk.” Spence had said he would bring out the man from the insurance company, and she knew that Marion had no intention of seeing him. She guessed that Marion had gone all the way to the end of the woods to her little retreat, and that she would stay there until she was certain this man had seen what he needed to see and had gone again. Spence could show him whatever he wanted, she had said before leaving.

In a short while Spence came back alone, and called in to her, “He’s gone. If you see Marion tell her the coast is clear.”

She grinned. Spence understood Marion better than anyone else on earth, she was certain.

“What’s that mean?” Marion’s voice floated into the studio then. “Was someone here? Who’d I miss?”

Spence laughed. “I want a drink. You too?”

“Well, maybe, but a small one…” Their voices faded to inaudibility.

Toni lay down on the couch in the studio, not to sleep, but only to relax, to rest. The thought of falling asleep out in the open like this made her shudder. She had nailed her window screens in place, and at night she locked her door and wedged a chair under the knob, and still lay awake rigid and fearful hour after hour. But all this would end, she told herself repeatedly, and then what? She tried to think through the next few days, the next months. … The house would fill up again, she knew, remembering the mob who had been here when she first arrived. Twelve, fourteen? She didn’t even know how many there had been, all talking, all busy. It would be like that again, and this time she wanted to be right here, in the middle of it all, working, critiquing, being critiqued. But first she wanted Paul Volte to come back, because if he didn’t return, she would have to go to New York, and she was reluctant to do that, although she would. She had lived in New York for nearly five years, an interlude that she felt now had been snipped out of her life; New York was like a nearly forgotten dream, without value, without interest except for Paul Volte, and if he did not come back, she would go to him. This had to be soon, she knew, without being able to say why or how it could be done, or even if Paul would change his mind and cooperate. All that seemed minor detail-arranging. It would happen, here or in New York.

She had not intended to sleep, but she came awake with a rush of fear that subsided as she recognized Max’s voice: “What are you talking about? I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

“She will destroy us,” Marion said hoarsely. “I can feel it coming. From what she said it seems inevitable. If not me, then you, or even Johnny. It’s like a big black cloud hanging there. I want you to fire them both and tell them to leave, no more questions, no more insinuations. Let the sheriff do his job. He’s being paid by the government, let him earn it. Or the state police. I thought they had taken charge of the investigation. They have the resources, the manpower to get to the bottom of this without private detectives. Fire them. Max. For my sake. For yours. I wanted to do it, but I can’t. You’re the one who hired them, they won’t pay any attention to me.”

There was prolonged silence. Toni realized they were in the small office down the hall from the studio; that door was open, the studio door was open. Even if they had glanced in here, she had been hidden by the back of the couch. Now she did not dare move.

“Honey,” Max said finally, “I don’t know what in hell’s happened between you and Constance, but if you want them out, that’s okay with me. Let me talk to Knowlton first, though. It doesn’t have to be this minute.”

Knowlton was their lawyer, Toni knew, the one who said they needed outside help. He had been very happy with the choice of Constance and Charlie, she understood. She strained to hear what Marion was saying.

“No, of course not this minute. Just very soon. And, Max, promise me something. Promise me you won’t talk to her, you won’t let her ask you any more questions, or have anything to do with her.”

“Damn it, Marion, you’ve got to tell me what she said! Has she threatened you? Does she think you’re involved, after all?”

“No! No, nothing like that. She knows I’m not. It’s… not me, not you. It’s us, the family, everything we’ve put together, all in danger of crumbling to dust—”

“Jesus Christ!” Spence’s gravelly voice interrupted her. “You’re talking like a soap-opera queen. It’s not good enough, Marion. Even if Max bows out, I’m involved, too, you know. I won’t fire them. Goddamn it! You’re the only suspect the police have, remember?”

“This is all your fault!” Marion yelled harshly. “You and that stupid show! Why don’t you butt out of my life and leave me alone? I don’t need you and I haven’t needed you for years. Butt out and leave me alone!” Her heavy footsteps pounded down the uncarpeted hallway.

“Shit,” Spence muttered. Toni could scarcely hear when he continued, “Sorry about all this. Max. You were handling her just fine. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“Forget it. Do you know what Constance said to start this?”

“Nope. Something Marion doesn’t want told, something Constance has ferreted out that she wants buried again. God knows what. Marion usually couldn’t care less who says what about her.”

“Well, come on. Let’s see where she’s got to.”

Toni lay without motion for a long time after the voices were gone. Constance, she thought, she would be the one to find out things. She remembered how freely they all had talked to her before Victoria’s death. She had, and Paul, Spence, all of them, even Max and Johnny. She was so easy to talk to, so understanding. She bit her lip and finally sat up, got up. What had Constance found out?

Constance drove well, careful but not anxious about it; most of the time she stayed right at the speed limit, only now and then exceeding it a little. Her silence was not because she had to concentrate on the road or the car or traffic; it was because she had not yet decided how to tell Charlie what she had done or why. His silence was just as deep; he was searching for a way to tell her he knew she was trying to coerce Tootles to do something he considered if not obscene, then very close to it, and there simply was no good way to say that.

There were silences and silences between them, and most of the time the silences were as companionable as the conversations, but this was a different kind of quiet that had come between them. Too uncomfortable for him to endure. He cleared his throat and said, “Max had Spence put the touring show together.”

“Ah,” she said, not surprised.

“He paid for all the galleries. Hired them, rented them, whatever they do.”

She nodded.