Nate Rosen Investigates

by Ron Levitsky

  She swallowed hard. “You make it sound so cold.”

  “Tell me, can you achieve orgasm with a man or just with your Hasselblad?”

  Her eyes widened, as if she’d been slapped, and tears ran down her cheeks. But for the first time since he’d known her, Andi didn’t say a thing.

  He stared into her eyes, big and hurt like a child’s—like Sarah’s that first time he mentioned the divorce. Did his own eyes show the same look of pain when, as a boy, he was sent away by his father? No, damn it, he wasn’t his father! Given the chance to forgive, when could Rosen not forgive? Besides, this wasn’t doing either of them any good.

  He gave her his handkerchief. “Look, Andi, I’m sorry. I’ve got no right to judge, to say such terrible things to you.”

  She shook her head. “You’re right. Everything you said about me is—”

  “No, let me finish. I knew what Sunday night was all about, but I let it happen anyway. Maybe it was a way for me to get back at my ex-wife, to justify in my own mind the Jewish divorce we never had. She made love to her new husband, so I made love to you. I’m not sure, except that it was wrong . . . I was wrong. You know, you remind me a little of Bess.”

  Hands shaking, she lit a cigarette. “Gee, thanks.”

  “Take it as a compliment. Both you and Bess are ambitious. When you want something, nobody stands in your way, especially me. You two should start a ‘Skate Over Nate’ club.”

  “You’re just trying to cheer me up.”

  He looked at her hard, then suddenly began laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You and me, and trying to change the way of the world. I was just being a little sensitive—that’s an oxymoron for a lawyer. Go to Chicago, and knock ’em dead.”

  She dabbed her eyes dry. “You’re not mad?”

  “No, I’m not mad. In fact, next time I’m in town, we’ll go to dinner, take a long walk along the lake, see the Cubs.”

  “You know, Nate, you really are a nice guy.”

  “Sure. Give me your car keys. I’ll drop you home. Just promise me one thing,” he said, opening the door.

  “What’s that?”

  “You won’t marry a podiatrist.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was nearly five o’clock. After dropping Andi at her house, Rosen drove back up to Main Street. He pulled into the corner gas station and hurried inside to ask directions.

  “Good thing you’re going up the hill now,” the attendant said. A few snowflakes shaped like tiny needles, struck the window behind him. “Big storm coming tonight—making it tough getting up there later.” Shaking his head, he pointed to the thermometer just outside the door. “Eight below, not counting the wind. Folks used to say it couldn’t snow when it got this cold. I think it’s got something to do with all those trees they’re cutting down in the Amazon.”

  Rosen’s headlights bullied their way through the thickening snowfall as he drove on a road that corkscrewed up one of the hills behind town. There were no other cars out, just the noises of the old Mercury—the heater’s wheezing and broken muffler’s rumbling like a sick man gasping for air. What if the car broke down? Gripping the steering wheel, he stared through the windshield wipers. The way the road curved, and the sheet of snow on the pavement, would make it easy to slide onto the shoulder and off into the fields.

  The homes grew larger as Rosen reached the hilltop. “Can’t miss it,” the attendant had said, and he was right. Alone at the end of a cul-de-sac, the house was a two-story brick with four colonnades and an attached garage. It was actually dug into the earth so that the second floor, rising above the hill, looked like its crest. The view from the back yard must have been magnificent.

  There were no cars in the driveway, but they’d be kept in the garage on a day like this. Light from both floors glinted through the falling snow. Rosen had counted on someone being home for dinner. He parked along the curb a few feet from the driveway. Staring up at the great house topping the hill, he thought again of his old rabbi’s warning against bamot—the unholy high places where Baal and other false gods were worshiped. He had already participated in the inipi ceremony on Saul True Sky’s ridge, which somehow hadn’t seemed a betrayal to his faith. But this house on the hill . . .

  The snow swirled around his feet as Rosen skittered up the driveway to the front door. He rang the bell and rubbed his arms impatiently, until the door slowly swung open.

  Judge Whistler wore a silver smoking jacket and held a drink in one hand. “Yes?” Rosen pushed back the hood of his parka. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “You know it’s improper for us to meet. I’m trying your client’s case.”

  “I knew you’d say that. That’s why I didn’t call first.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “I think you know. May I come in? It’s really cold.”

  Rosen half-hoped he was wrong, and that the judge would send him away. Whistler hesitated, then nodded, letting him inside. They stood on a black slate floor in an ivory-colored hallway.

  “Give me your parka,” the judge said. He put it into a long closet filled with fur coats.

  A large oil painting hung on the wall across from the closet. It was a portrait of some turn-of-the-century gentleman whom Whistler very much resembled, although the man in the painting was stouter and more self-assured.

  “Your grandfather?” Rosen asked.

  “Yes. He was a member of the state supreme court. I’m named for him.”

  “Quite a resemblance.”

  The judge stared wistfully at the painting. “No, not really.”

  Whistler led him through the foyer and up six steps to the second floor. The room ran the entire length of the house, the far wall made completely of glass. Outside, in the darkness, snowflakes scratched like small animals against the glass.

  On their left stood a wet bar stocked with rows of liquor bottles. Past the bar stretched a long dining room table and twelve chairs; against the wall a cabinet and corner hutch were filled with fine china. All the furniture looked handcrafted from heavy, dark wood, as old and substantial as Judge Whistler’s grandfather.

  Across a polished wooden floor of tongue and groove, time leapt a hundred years. A contemporary couch and chairs of black leather, their edges mushrooming over the sides, were arranged around a glass-topped coffee table with granite base, all resting on a carpet of gray and white swirls. The couch faced a large fireplace, with built-in bookshelves along either side of the wall.

  Directly above the mantelpiece hung an oil painting of the same dimensions as the one in the foyer Pearl Whistler smiled down upon the room, her red hair lustrous as her lips, and the black evening dress showing the swell of her breasts. Even without the fireplace, her smile would have heated the room.

  Whistler poured them both a drink. “My favorite sherry.”

  Rosen sat on the couch and took the glass from Whistler, who sat on the chair to his right. They sipped their drinks in silence, as old friends or strangers did. Since they’d first met at the preliminary hearing the previous summer, Rosen had liked Whistler for his dignity and common decency. But all along he’d been afraid it might come to this.

  Nodding at Pearl’s portrait, Rosen said, “She’s a very beautiful woman.”

  The judge shook his head. “She’s more than that. I like to think of her in an Aristotelian sense, as the ideal of beauty itself. You think I’m waxing romantic? That portrait was painted five years ago, when we were first married, and she hasn’t aged a day—you’ve seen her. She doesn’t drink or smoke, works out every day. Remember Oscar Wilde’s story of Dorian Gray, about the portrait that aged while the man didn’t?”

  “As I recall, the portrait aged to show all the evil that the man had done.”

  “And what does that portrait up there tell you? Certainly not any evil on my wife’s part?”

  “Perhaps the evil men do because of her.”
>
  Whistler stared into his drink. “Are you married?”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “Why did you and your wife . . . No, I’m sorry. That’s not any of my business. Besides, we’re not here about your wife.”

  “That’s all right. I guess ‘irreconcilable differences’ is as good a term as any.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Whistler looked at Rosen. “Yes, it is—covers any number of sins of commission and omission. When I was an attorney, I refused to handle divorce cases. Didn’t believe in divorce, not really because of religious reasons or even particularly moral ones. I suppose because marriage was a contract and, like any other legal document, you honored it. Later, I had to listen to my share of divorces in court. They sickened me—people airing their failures in public like so much dirty linen. I was the perfect man of virtue, like my grandfather. Another drink?”

  Without waiting for Rosen to reply, Whistler took both glasses to the bar. “You know, my grandfather’s portrait used to hang above the fireplace. Taking it down was one of my great acts of rebellion. I like to think of it as my guillotining King Louis or shooting the czar. Here.” He handed Rosen the drink and returned to his chair. Did you love your wife—I mean really love her, truly and passionately?”

  “Yes . . . once.”

  “Then you were lucky. Even with the divorce, all the dirt and pain, you were lucky to have been in love. Most people never feel the heat of that kind of love. I didn’t for the longest time, practically my entire life. I married a woman whose family knew my family—same club, same church, same handicap on the golf course. I accepted her, and why not? One was just as good as another, like rows of cereal boxes on the grocery shelf. We have two boys, grown-up now, of course. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Rosen felt a queasiness in his stomach. “I understand.”

  “I read a poem once in school, by Wilfred Owen. It was about a soldier watching his friend die of poison gas. He says something like, ‘In all my dreams, I see him guttering, choking, drowning.’ Exactly the way I was with my first wife. For God’s sake, we made love with the sheets tucked under the mattress.” The air shuddered into his lungs. “I was guttering.”

  “And then you met Pearl.”

  He smiled. “Funny how paths cross and crisscross and sometimes you never know. Pearl actually baby-sat for us when she was a teenager; she’s five years older than my eldest boy. Pretty thing. One night, I remember her coming over in her cheerleader’s outfit—short skirt, tight sweater, and that beautiful red hair tied in a ponytail. I teased her about something or other, and she blushed. You know how something a woman does, the most casual of things, can stay with you the rest of your life?”

  Rosen remembered the way Bess would play absently with a curl of her long black hair. Damn it! He clanked his drink upon the glass top of the coffee table.

  Whistler didn’t seem to notice. He was gazing at his wife’s portrait. “Ten years went by, and I saw her at a party given by Belle and Albert Gates. I reminded her how she once baby-sat for us, and she blushed again. At that moment, I knew I had to have her.”

  “So you divorced your wife.”

  “Not just then. It was about a year. I started seeing Pearl. We’d have dinner, go for drives, even spent a weekend together in Denver. We never . . . I didn’t commit adultery. I owed Eleanor that much. The boys were grown and had already moved away. Considering Eleanor had her own inheritance, my settlement was quite generous.” He snickered. “I suppose it was conscience money on my part, but she took it quick enough. She’s out East now, near the boys and their families. I don’t see much of them.” Again he looked at the portrait. “Not that I really mind. You know, I’m the only one in my family ever to have divorced, and probably the only one ever to marry for love. What do you think of that?”

  The question could have been rhetorical, but from the way Whistler turned his head, Rosen knew the other man was waiting for an answer.

  Rosen cleared his throat. “I think you want me to play judge.”

  Whistler began to reply but stopped suddenly, as he looked past Rosen to the stairs. Pearl stood just inside the room. She wore a tight black leotard and was dabbing her neck with a towel. Her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, sharpened her features, like a statue of the goddess Whistler imagined her to be.

  “Finish your workout?” the judge asked. “Come in, my dear, we were just talking about you.”

  Had she been listening to their conversation? Pearl continued to pat her face, her gaze darting between the two men. Finally she dropped the towel onto the carpet, walked to the bar and poured a glass of Perrier. Joining the two men, she sat in a chair across from her husband, on the other side of Rosen. He smelled something in the air—her perfume, mixed with the sweat of her workout. That fragrance . . . familiar . . . of course. Of course.

  Droplets of water beaded Pearl’s upper lip—the Perrier, or was she nervous? “Mr. Rosen shouldn’t be here. I mean, he’s arguing a case before you. Isn’t this some kind of legal impropriety?”

  “Perhaps, but isn’t it nice to have company to share this wonderful fireplace. We don’t have too many mutual friends, Mr. Rosen. The age difference and such. Besides, dear, we’re not discussing the case. We’re talking about you. Mr. Rosen admires your portrait nearly as much as I.”

  “I still think it was wrong to let him come.”

  Rosen said, “You’re very careful about appearances.”

  “Of course. Cal’s a judge.”

  “No, I mean yours.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  “The judge and I were talking about love.” The sickness Rosen had felt in his stomach returned. He wanted to get it over with, and sensed Whistler felt the same way. “Pearl, do you love your husband?”

  She took a long drink of Perrier, her eyes peering over the glass. “Of course I do. Such a question.”

  “Have you been unfaithful to him?”

  “How dare you. Cal, are you going to—”

  “Suppose I were to tell you that—”

  “You don’t have any proof!”

  Both her hands gripped the glass. She looked at her husband, but he was staring at her portrait.

  Rosen said, “That’s not the response of an innocent woman, is it?” Then he thought of a passage from the great sage Maimonides. “If people see a spice-peddler leave a woman, then they go inside and see her rising from the couch, tying her belt, and find moist saliva above the canopy, it is enough for a husband to dismiss her for harlotry.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Last summer, the day I arrived in Bear Coat, Andi took me to see Tin Town. We walked through the deserted houses, and in one of them I found a duffel bag. There was a bedroll inside, and a smell . . . a smell that’s been bothering me all these months. Once or twice afterward I thought I smelled something like it—I even asked Jack Keeshin, thinking it was his cologne. But it wasn’t. You’d passed by. It was your perfume mixed with something else. What I just smelled a minute ago—perfume mixed with the sweat of your workout. Only on the bedroll, it was the sweat of your lovemaking.”

  “I think you’d better leave.”

  “Bad enough that you committed adultery with Will True Sky. What was worse, you had your husband lie for him.”

  With great deliberation, Pearl put her glass upon the coffee table. “I said, you’d better leave. Cal, would you see Mr. Rosen out?”

  Her husband’s gaze remained fixed on her portrait.

  From his shirt pocket, Rosen took the old iron nail Ike had given him and placed it on the table beside Pearl’s glass. “It had to be Will. After Stevie Jenkins’s testimony in court, I knew Saul was innocent, just as I knew Will was lying—that he killed Albert Gates.”

  “You’re crazy. In court today, Stevie said that Gates named Saul as his killer.”

  “That’s what the boy and, I suppose, most everyone else thinks, but it’s not true. Gates was
right-handed—I asked his wife—but he thrust his left hand at Stevie. You know what was in that hand—the rusted remains of a nail that once was like this one.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the evidence Will took from the police station, and why he knocked out Andi and stole her photos of the same object.”

  “Why would he do that? You’re not making any sense.”

  “What would make Albert Gates angry enough to call the cops on Will?” Rosen asked. “Not arguing over $500 for a dead Indian’s medicine bag. Besides, Gates had only given Will $50. According to his wife, the only thing that really angered Gates was being taken. That’s what Gates discovered when he and Will returned that night to collect the wotawe.”

  Pearl was no longer protesting. She sat very quietly, like a defendant waiting to hear the judge pass sentence. Exactly the way her husband was sitting.

  Rosen continued, “I examined the Indian remains a few days after the murder. Digging under the bones, I came up with what was left of an iron nail, exactly like what Gates held in his hand, what he must’ve found when he dug under the body. I also found the tip of one of his picks there. Under the body. You do understand.”

  She shook her head, more a shiver than a denial.

  “The last Indians to roam the countryside died at Wounded Knee in 1890. The man who forged those iron nails didn’t come to the ridge until 1910. How could those iron nails have gotten under the remains? It’s a physical impossibility. But of course there was a way. Will put the skeleton there. The day of Belle’s horse show. I went with Will and Stevie into the field. I tripped over some soft earth near a fence that Will was supposed to have fixed. That’s where White Bear came from. Will saw the remains and the wotawe and figured that Gates would pay good money for it, but only, of course, if it wasn’t on his own land. So Will dug up the bones, put them in his pickup, and reburied them on the ridge. I wonder how Gates felt when he brought up the nail from under the bones and realized that he’d been tricked.”

  Pearl stared at him. “How’d you know? How the hell’d you know?”