April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  I searched for this case and learned the crime had taken place in July 1916, one month after Ingrid’s death. The similarities were striking. The suspected murderer was found dead from an apparent suicide, a gas tube from a stove stuck in his mouth, in a seedy one-room flat on the Lower East Side. The young man left a note that ended with the following words: “I’m sorry I done it, but I got crazy, as I often do, and you can’t blame me or anyone. It was caused by the beautiful make up of women.” I searched for more cases and found yet another. In June 1914, two years before Ingrid’s murder, an eight-year-old girl named Veronica Brennan was strangled to death in the cellar of a tenement house on Second Avenue and 117th Street. She was left by the coal bins. The marks on her neck were identical to Ingrid’s. Two “Italians” had been sought for this crime. They were never found.

  Might the same person have committed all three murders? Captain Morrison was involved in two of the investigations. Though I searched extensively, I found no evidence of anyone who’d thought to link them together. Or was it just that young girls in big cities are always at risk from damaged men?

  Alexander J. Conlan, the plumber married to MacBride’s sister, in whose apartment MacBride was living on the night of the crime, had split up with his wife by the time of the appeal trial. He died five years later in a flu epidemic. The Andersons had also left the neighborhood by the time of the appeal trial, moving across the Harlem River into Manhattan. There was something about them. The disembodied tones of their testimonies stuck with me. I had the feeling they were hiding something. A sordid Nordic noir side of me even contemplated the possibility that perhaps they’d been involved in some way. Which led me again to the quiet, barely mentioned Edwin—Adranaxa Anderson—with whom, it seemed, I had a direct link thanks to my father, the Judge, and the Cuddihy-Woodward clan. Might the solitary life that Caro had described to me over the phone—assuming it was true—have been due to something surrounding the trauma of his sister’s death?

  – 27 –

  The Pittsfield airport is two miles from the center of town, a town that was once a thriving city with factories, a museum, and an opera house. In 1851 it was the closest outpost of civilization to Herman Melville’s Arrowhead estate where, far from the sea, he wrote Moby-Dick. The end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first had not been kind to any of the mill towns in north-western Massachusetts. Plants closed, real estate values dropped, education flagged, and places like Pittsfield took on a sorry pallor. Starting in 2015 or so, things began to improve, and the place was picking itself up, opening some decent restaurants and a new hotel, but in general I tended to avoid it.

  As soon as Carmen stepped off the little jet, I drove us straight back to Lenox. We went along Church Street and then took Route 183 west, out past the Tanglewood Music Center before turning onto Hawthorne Road, named from the time when Nathaniel Hawthorne lived on it, renting a little red house with his wife and young children that had since been destroyed and replaced with a facsimile. It looked down at rolling fields interrupted by patches of pine forest, ending at the spacious Stockbridge Bowl, where the author was said to have swum every morning.

  I was nervous, of course, wanting everything to look and be just right. Carmen loved the puppy. She dug the car. She had a vague memory of Lenox. And as I hoped, she was bowled over by the Wheatleigh as we glided in through its reclusive, winding, landscaped driveway. I pointed out that it was originally built in 1893 as a wedding gift from a wealthy father to his daughter to celebrate her marriage to a penniless Spanish count. They were glad for the Spaniard’s title and hired Frederick Law Olmsted to do the grounds. The couple summered there in robber-baron luxury for the rest of their lives.

  Carmen’s room was next to mine with its own monster bed, massive fireplace, and massive old-fashioned bathroom that was equipped with a plethora of high-end beauty products. She shared the same view as mine as well, out through tall, beautifully crafted windows of thick old glass, looking at the gardens that led down to the pool.

  “I thought we might relax and hang out here for what’s left of the day and night and then see the house in Williamstown tomorrow.”

  “Sounds perfect,” she said.

  She wore white jeans, a black blouse, a short, light denim jacket, and a slightly raised pair of velvety navy sneakers. It was around three and we took Corru to the pool, where to my dismay another couple occupied two of the chaise longue beds at the far end. Both of them exuded an air of complacency. The woman’s flowery green, stiff, one-piece bathing suit might have come from Talbot’s or from Lord & Taylor before it closed. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat spiced up with a bandana, and oversized sunglasses through which she was reading a novel by Ann Patchett. The gentleman was balding and wore wire-rimmed glasses and was engrossed in the latest Stephen King. He was wrapped in his own yellow terrycloth robe that bore some kind of oversized club insignia on the breast pocket. A pair of brown, well-worn, well-polished tasseled loafers lay on the grass next to him.

  I grabbed us some extra towels from a stack at the bottom of the garden stairs and guided us to the opposite end. Carmen dragged her chaise onto the grass and into the sun while I let mine stay where it was in the shade of a large umbrella. Corru went sniffing around the borders of blossoming shrubs. A distinct whine from maintenance men cutting the grass on the great lawn nearby was also a source of minor irritation. But Carmen seemed happy and proclaimed the entire setting divine and that the prospect of doing nothing but lying by the pool was her idea of heaven and that she’d worried I might be one of those anxious Americans tied to the dreary plow of illusory self-improvement in need of constant activity and distraction.

  “Quite the contrary,” I said. “Like I told you the other night. I’m lazy and like nothing better than just lying around.”

  “The plane was amazing, by the way,” she said. “I’ve been pretending to be blasé, like it’s the kind of thing I’m used to, which obviously I’m not.”

  “I hope it wasn’t too rocky.”

  “Not at all. And the pilots, the super attractive gay steward, the whole thing was out of a movie. I don’t want to think about what it cost. Half a year’s salary for all I know. If I told anyone at work how I got here I’d lose tenure.”

  “Mum’s the word.”

  This conversation was mostly fueled by mutual nerves regarding the reveal about to take place. She delivered what was for me a coup de grace, overpowering my Irish heart, when she stepped out of her sandals and took off the hotel robe to lie down and apply some sunscreen. She was wearing a small black bikini and looked amazing. Though neither of us would admit it, we were surely aware of the moment as being a first between us, seeing each other so nearly naked in sunny daylight. I noticed the gentleman at the other end of the pool interrupting his reading to steal a glance over the top of his glasses.

  Then it was my turn. When I was younger, I was a fine specimen, lean and fit without being overly muscled and with no strange growths of hair in aesthetically challenging places. But I have never exercised, at least in the programmed way everyone seems so obsessed with, and I liked my food and wine. I wasn’t fat by any means and my legs were still long and strong, but I’d gone somewhat predictably soft around the middle. Anyway, I got it over with when she wasn’t looking and just lay down. She took me in without making it obvious and we went on talking as if it were the kind of thing we’d done for years.

  In less than an hour, as shade from some tall trees began to drift across the pool area, the other couple gathered their things and left. They’d hardly spoken a word to each other. We went for a swim and Corru started barking until I got out. Emerging from the chilly water and drying off on a towel spread on the grass while Carmen swam laps, I stared at the sky and closed my eyes seeing red through my eyelids while listening to her steady strokes.

  She got out and put her towel down next to mine.

  “Feels great, doesn’t it?” I said after a while.

  That
neither of us had felt a need to say something right away pleased me.

  “God yes,” she replied.

  The kind of god I imagined her calling forth in that two-word response was one I could relate to, a Dionysus or a Pan. I wanted to kiss her. After a final swim we walked back toward our rooms. The lawns and gardens, the surrounding forest and the small flowering trees that lined the graveled path, the statues stained with dried moss—all of it was blessed by the sun’s diminishing glow. Everything was tinted in peach and orange tones. It would have been the perfect time to take her by the hand and lead her into my room. But it was still too soon, or I was still too shy. Instead we retired to our respective rooms, our respective laptops and cell phones, and to our own beds for a lie-down.

  I lay there and pictured her in the room next door, wondering what she was thinking, what she might be communicating to some girlfriend or confidante. Though un-annunciated the chemistry was there, plain to the both of us. It had been plain even on that first night in Paris at Dirk and Consuelo’s. I went back there in my mind, to my bedroom on the Quai de Bethune that would be in the dark at that hour, my clothes in the closets and drawers, the antique walking sticks in the large Chinese vase by the front door, the river outside.

  Before dining there at the hotel, we met as if for a date out on the slate-covered patio. We sat in chairs with a view of the vast sloping lawn that rolled down to the forest. We were offered champagne, but she chose a vodka on the rocks and I a Sancerre blanc that came from my own stash I kept there, something I didn’t mention. The sun had set but true twilight had yet to settle in. She was radiant and looked rested and had some color. She wore a navy silk jumpsuit and black heels and her hair was down.

  The only other people near us sat at a round table, a group of well-heeled Brits of a certain age and class who might have stepped out from an issue of Country Life or Hounds. The men had ruddy cheeks and puffy thick fingers, including pinkies strangled by battered signet rings turned just so. All of them drank champagne, the expensive stuff, and I assumed they were there for the music festival that was getting underway that week.

  “It is so beautiful here,” Carmen said as we clinked glasses. “I totally understand why you live here.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “No. I really do.”

  It was beautiful, and private. I’d no idea how the place managed to stay afloat with such high rates and so few guests. But that evening, sitting with her, it also felt a tad stodgy, and though I was pleased to see her so content, I experienced an undercurrent of embarrassment, already envisioning that were we to get together and manage to live together some day, she would tire of this and come to view it as some kind of high-end retirement home. On the other hand, there was little chance of that happening any day soon. We worked at institutions located almost four hours away from each other.

  “I often worry this place will go out of business when I least expect it,” I said.

  “Well, you always have your actual house as a fallback plan.”

  I smiled and nodded at her ironic tone. “Yes, I do.”

  Over dinner we talked about Edwin Anderson.

  “You don’t remember him? Come on. This is key,” she said, those hazel eyes opening wide.

  “He was the car guy, the garage guy, a guy who kept to himself. I only remember a slim fellow with a hawkish face who wore a kind of khaki uniform with an oily rag sticking out of his back pocket. I was a teenager with other things on my mind.”

  “Don’t tell me you weren’t into cars,” she said. “Look at the one you’re driving.”

  “Well, that’s true.” She had a point.

  “I do remember him as a benign presence,” I said, making an effort to recall him. “He had a certain nobility about him, and his reticence was intriguing.”

  “Jesus, he was Ingrid’s brother,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Your dream begins to take on all kinds of new intimations.”

  “Another sort of weird thing is that, after I ran away from home for a few months when I was sixteen—I just refused to stand another year of Jesuits—I worked out a deal with my father and Caro and ended up spending my senior year living above the garage in Southampton—I graduated from the local public school there. I lived in the same apartment where Edwin had been so many years.”

  “I don’t get how you turned out the way you did,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Your father was a district attorney, and then some kind of killer lawyer. Didn’t he want you to follow suit?”

  “He did. But I didn’t. And after I ran away from home, I pretty much negotiated my own ticket.”

  “A rebel.”

  “A rebel with patent leather dancing pumps.”

  She laughed. I continued.

  “I think my life would have been very different had my mother not gotten ill and died. Even with my interest in art and the humanities, it would have been difficult to rebel with her around. I might have been coerced into law school. My father wouldn’t have married Caro—with all that led to in my life. There’s a fair chance I would have married someone more conventional.”

  ***

  Deep into the night a gentle knocking on my door awakened me. I got out of bed, put my robe on, and kept the lights off. She came right into my arms, burying her face against my shoulder. I pulled her in and closed the door. She took off her robe, and in the darkness, I watched her climb into my bed and get under the covers in panties and a T-shirt. I joined her and held her for a while. We were sleepy and excited at the same time. Corru hardly stirred. Wise enough to let nature take its course, we hardly said anything. It was as if all of our banter up until then, our nervous commentary and conversation, fell away like scaffolding, like the cracked shell of an egg, broken by the force of an instinct unwilling to remain hidden any longer.

  I woke again at five. Silence pervaded the room. A linen sheet and a cashmere blanket covered us. The hotel gardens and Berkshire forest surrounded us. I watched her sleep.

  My life began playing stoopball in the Bronx and riding waves in the Atlantic Ocean. I’d lost my mother. I’d traveled the world and known pleasure and pain. I’d had a marriage of sorts. I dedicated energy to educating young people about the value of art in this unforgiving universe. Carmen studied the matter we’re made of. There were things stored in her brain sleeping next to me, of towering sophistication, stored as yet more folded proteins, cheek by jowl with memories of smells and places, lights and caresses, all of them, like mine, en route to extinction, to be reduced someday to roadkill.

  At dawn the smallest bit of light crept through a gap in the thick curtains. I smelled her hair. She stirred and rolled into me. Our hands began to wander. It was good to be alive.

  – Part Three –

  How can’st thou endure without being mad?

  —Herman Melville

  – 28 –

  The Court: “The People have presented for your consideration two classes of evidence. The first class refers to circumstantial evidence and relates to the acts and conduct of the defendant on the day the body of the deceased was found in the cellar of the house at 1077 Ogden Avenue in the Borough of the Bronx, New York. The second class refers to the alleged voluntary confession made by the defendant. You must determine whether the witnesses who have testified have told the truth or whether they have willfully falsified their testimony, and whether they are biased or mistaken as to facts.

  “Upon you alone rests the responsibility of determining the weight you will give the testimony of the police officers in this case, and it is of supreme importance for you gentlemen to analyze the evidence free from any feeling that you might have against the police department as a whole. Whatever impression you might have as to some of the police officials in this city you must lay aside in considering the testimony of these officers; you must consider whether they are truth-telling officers.”

  ***

  What was one to make of Eugene MacBride? Born
in Scotland, dragged across the ocean as a boy, only to have his mother die, like mine. To end up in the Bronx, as both sides of my family did, just when the borough’s last remaining pastures were being paved over, transformed into mazes of hilly, cobblestoned streets lined with narrow houses teeming with immigrants. He didn’t have a vocation. There was no mention anywhere of his having had any kind of spouse or romance in his life. When the trial took place, he was thirty-three years old. He’d gone to Fordham. He had drifted from job to job. He’d been the loser brother, dependent on the limited patience and generosity of sisters who had married men of meager means. He may have had a weakness for drink, like everyone in my family. Reading his testimony, it felt like he’d wished to be seen as a gentleman in the eyes of others, and that he had failed. He had to beg for nickels and dimes. He’d been accused, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old Swedish girl he may never have laid a hand on. The satanic irony of it. The grim American tale it told, of a kind rarely chronicled, stories of the ones who didn’t make it, for whom the glory of the Promised Land was a pile of shit.

  – 29 –

  We drove to my home in Williamstown, known to all the realtors in the area as the Cole Porter estate. It was chilly and damp inside the main house from being shut up for such a long time. Just as Caro had done with my mother’s things in the Bronx, Carmen and I gathered what remained of Scarlett’s shoes and clothing and stuffed them into heavy-duty garbage bags that we then drove to a collection bin. I was all right with it.