Jo suddenly began to search frantically under her napkin, under her cup, and then under the table.
“Find what?” I asked again, now concerned about the old woman’s bizarre behavior.
Jo relaxed and grinned. “Life, Alice, life. The life you told me to live.”
We both laughed so loudly at the joke that the waitress threw us disapproving glances.
Mona Aspen’s house was indeed beautiful. Originally an eighteenth-century farmhouse, of which the kitchen, hallway, and dining room were still extant, it had been extended several times, and even its modern wing retained a colonial feel. Jo and I wandered from room to room, staring at the lamps and chairs and rugs, each of which were tagged with the same kind of yellow cardboard on which an auctioneer’s code was inscribed. A strange man in a black hat handed each of us a descriptive catalog of the house’s contents with prices.
Jo seemed to want to touch everything, to gather everything in, as if she was the sole trusted guardian of her late friend’s sensibility. Other people came and went, some greeting Jo, some just walking by with a smile and a nod.
“I’m going to have to sit for a while,” Jo said finally. Spotting an armchair by the fireplace, I guided Jo over to it.
She said, once she was seated, “I keep forgetting that you never were in her house before. You were in the stable area that time. Well, you ought to look at Mona’s bedroom. It’s really beautiful. And I’ll take a nap here.”
I hadn’t taken three steps away from her when Detective Senay slipped out of an alcove, oddly light-footed for such a large man.
“Well, well, the cat lady,” he said. I didn’t like the inflection of his voice. And I didn’t like the way he had moved right next to me, violating the space that was necessary to maintain a conversation. That, I realized, was one of the reasons I had always disliked him—his willingness to get too close physically. I wondered whether it was a trick of the trade he had learned while interrogating suspects. Did he consider me a suspect?
I smiled and started to move on.
“I made some inquiries about you,” he said.
I stopped and turned. “Inquiries?”
“Well,” he said, “not really. Let’s just say I spoke to some people out in Suffolk County and they said you interfered with a homicide case at Stony Brook.”
“No, Detective, you and your friends have it all wrong. I didn’t interfere. I just taught them the difference between suicide and homicide. They didn’t seem to know the difference.”
He didn’t like what I said. I don’t blame him. But he had started it. “God save us from another dilettante. Tell me, do you have a psychic approach to crime?”
“Right,” I said with an equivalent dose of sarcasm. “I solve murders by dissecting birds and reading their innards.”
“Birds sound like your speed. Anyway, you may be interested in knowing that two kids in Manhasset tried to sell an eighteenth-century silver tea service that may have come from the Starobin place.”
He grinned and started to walk away.
“Wait,” I said.
“You want to tell me something?” he asked.
“Yes. I want to tell you that you’re crazy if you think Harry Starobin and Mona Aspen were murdered by thieves looking for silverware.”
He winked at me as if I was some kind of pathetic eccentric. He strolled off.
It took me a few minutes to compose myself after he walked away, but then I acted on Jo’s instructions. I located a long hall which led to a parlor and then to a staircase which, I thought while ascending, had to lead to a dank, dark attic but which instead ended abruptly in an enormous bedroom flooded with light.
It took my breath away. For a moment I longed to be out of the city for good, to live in a room like Mona’s. I could envision Bushy and Pancho staring for hours out the room’s many windows in feline bliss as the squirrels and the birds danced on the tree limbs before their eyes.
Then I began to inspect the room. The furniture was old and simple and low—oak and cherrywood. The four-poster bed was tiny and fragile, graced by two frayed and no-longer-bright comforters. One of them had a sunflower design.
On the longest wall two oil paintings of horses hung side by side. Between the windows on the shorter walls hung bird prints, mostly waterfowl. One of them was a magnificent print of a loon, done in deep dull purple and black. Like the other rooms in the house, all the items in Mona Aspen’s bedroom were also yellow-tagged.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
The voice came from the stairs.
I whirled toward it. Mona’s nephew, Nicholas Hill, was standing at the top of the stairs. His sudden appearance frightened me. For a moment I remembered that feathered hat on Fifth Avenue. Or had it been someone else? He wasn’t wearing a feathered hat now. He was wearing nothing peculiar except for a very old-fashioned tie with some kind of insignia on it.
I fought back my fear, telling myself it was stupid. Why did I think he would harm me? Did I think he was the one who had driven that pickup truck? Jo had said he was a heavy gambler, but that didn’t mean he would murder his aunt. I remembered how grief-stricken he had been after his aunt’s death. I remembered how he and Jo had embraced spontaneously over their loss.
He walked into the room toward one of the windows, and his slow, almost lumbering gait kept me on edge. Weren’t gamblers supposed to be chipper, nervous little men? For a moment I caught myself measuring his build, wondering if he could hang people on door hooks. But no, that was silly.
If he had been following me that day on Fifth Avenue—if the hat with the feather in it had been his—then maybe he was in the room now to finish something. His hands seemed even more powerful to me than when I had first met him in the barn, cleaning a shovel.
“Do you like those?” he asked, pointing at the two horse paintings.
I looked at the paintings again. For the first time I noticed that the space next to one of the paintings was slightly paler. A third painting had obviously hung on the wall there. Had it been sold?
“Yes, I like them, but I doubt if I could afford either one,” I replied. “Or those waterfowl prints.”
Nicholas nodded and edged closer to the paintings. “My aunt loved these paintings. They were done by Becker. He painted those horses as they were chewing grass in the big field behind the second barn.”
“They were your aunt’s horses?” I asked.
“Oh, God, no. These are famous racehorses. The first one is Lord Kelvin. The other one is Ask Me No Questions. Both are multiple-stakes winners. Mona just took care of them for a while. One had a bucked shin. The other . . . I forget. Mona nursed them back to health. When they got back to the racetrack, they did nothing but win.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets angrily and turned, as if he had committed a felony by reminiscing. “But, as I think I told you before,” he continued, “my aunt only liked wounded things. So once they got better, she couldn’t have cared less.”
He was very close to me now and I began to feel apprehensive once again. I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Then the steps reversed themselves and the sounds vanished.
“I have to get back to Jo,” I said.
“Then go,” he retorted bitterly, as if I was betraying him in some manner. I slipped past him and down the steps.
By the time I finished accompanying Jo throughout the rest of the house, I was totally exhausted. I was sorry I had agreed to come out, even though I knew that Jo had considered it a reinstatement of the friendship. I begged off on Jo’s request that I come back to the Starobin house, so she dropped me reluctantly at the Long Island Rail Road station.
As the train left Hicksville station I pulled out a paperback copy of Romeo and Juliet, promising myself that I’d use the train ride to give some serious consideration to Carla Fried’s offer to play the Nurse. But I got only as far as Act I, Scene ii, before I shut my eyes. I started to doze, then woke, then dozed again.
When the train r
eached Jamaica, I sat up with a start, looking around desperately. Should I change trains? The conductor assured me it was a through train to Manhattan. I relaxed and realized that while I was dozing I had dreamed about those two horses whose paintings had hung in Mona’s bedroom.
What were their names? I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the auctioneer’s list that had been handed to me the moment I entered the house. I ran down the paintings for sale. There they were, at forty-seven hundred dollars each! Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions.
What funny names racehorses are given! I was about to crumple and throw the list away when I remembered the empty space on the wall next to the two paintings, where obviously another painting had once hung.
Curious, I looked at the next entry. Superimposed over the name was a rubber-stamped sold.
The third painting on the wall was Cup of Tea.
13
At noon the next day, Charlie Coombs called. It had been a good week for him. His horses were winning. He wanted to come early and buy me an opulent dinner. I suggested an Indian restaurant in the area. He said that he had never eaten Indian food in his life, but for me he’d do anything.
He came over at four and we sat around and talked to each other, then talked to the cats, then made love, and then went out to eat.
It was one of those small Indian restaurants on Lexington Avenue. The outside was innocuous, but inside was a bizarre profusion of colors: black candles, pink tablecloths, gaily patterned flower plates. Charlie studied the menu carefully, almost compulsively, but he was obviously not really interested in the food.
It was odd. I could understand his relationship to me much better than I could understand my relationship to him. I knew how I impinged on his life. But there it stopped.
Being with me, in any mode, exhilarated him. I turned him into an adolescent.
He wanted to do much more with me than just make love to me—but he couldn’t bring that “more” off. He sensed that I was distant, always distant, and that I would fade away because he was essentially without the substance that bonds permanently. And he needed me forever. I elicited a kind of adolescent inferiority in him, which may or may not have been warranted. I had no idea of his worth even if I could measure such a thing in a man.
He wanted to tell me about his life, his work, his hates . . . but he always pulled back. There was always the thought that I wouldn’t truly be interested . . . that I was beyond him . . . thinking other thoughts.
I knew that he loved my body, my face, my long hair, the way I cocked my head before I spoke, the way my face became blank during rapid mood swings which I couldn’t control. I knew he wanted to ravage me and protect me at the same time. Poor, desperate, kindly man. I knew he hallucinated that I was aging with just the right mix of head and heart—like good horses age.
I knew all of that—but I knew little about how his feelings for me impacted on me. And what I did know I could not articulate.
Charlie decided on a dish with lamb and spinach. And a mango drink.
I selected an assortment of breads and small appetizers and avoided a main dish.
It felt good sitting across from him. I appreciated his harmless affectations, one of which was dressing like a hayseed horse trainer—short denim jacket under which were a dress shirt and tie, light-colored flannel pants, and his red sneakers.
“I have some more horse questions for you,” I said after we had both ordered and settled in.
“Shoot. That’s my business.”
“Did you ever hear of a horse called Lord Kelvin?”
“Sure. One of my horses ran against him in Philadelphia Park—the Keystone Stakes, a seven-furlong race. Lord Kelvin won, my horse came in sixth.”
“Is there anything peculiar about the horse?”
“Peculiar? What do you mean?”
“I mean like Cup of Tea—a rags-to-riches story.”
“That I don’t know,” Charlie said, adding, “Lord Kelvin was just a good stakes horse, not a ‘horse of the year.’ I don’t even know if he’s still racing.”
Other couples were beginning to enter the restaurant. A low, gentle buzz surrounded us.
“What about Ask Me No Questions?”
Charlie arched his eyebrows. He was a bit confused by those names coming out of the mouth of a lady who didn’t know a thing about the racetrack.
“A pretty horse. A filly, a big gray filly, about sixteen hands high. She used to run in Gulfstream Park, in Florida. A stakes horse, she won a big filly race two years ago when she shipped into Belmont.”
“Anything strange about her?”
“Other than her color, nothing at all that I know of. I remember that she didn’t do well as a two-year-old; she didn’t even break her maiden until she was four years old. But then she turned out real good. Billy Patchen trained her.”
I nodded and concentrated for a moment on one of the appetizers which the waiter had just brought. I could sense that my casualness in stopping and starting the questioning was beginning to infuriate Charlie. He always wanted total disclosure. But there was nothing I could do. I was groping for information and I didn’t even know what kind of information.
“Should I know more?”
I smiled at him but didn’t speak.
“Hell,” he said, his irritation rising, “I don’t know much. I don’t even know where you were all day yesterday. I tried to call you for eight hours straight.”
My fork hung in midair. I had never heard him so upset before.
“I guess,” he continued sarcastically, “that I’m not supposed to know about the travels of Alice Nestleton. I mean, after all, all we do is sleep together.”
I put the fork down and stared at it.
Why had he used the word “travels”?
Had he known that I had been out to Long Island for the auction of Mona Aspen’s furnishings?
How could he have known?
Had he really tried to get me for eight hours, or was that just a cover for his knowledge?
What if Charlie Coombs was not who he pretended to be—just my lover? It was odd that he had arrived at the same time—the exact same time—I had begun investigating Harry Starobin’s murder. And it was very possible that he had known Ginger Mauch a lot better than he claimed . . . maybe as well as old Harry knew her.
“I’d like you to answer me,” Charlie said in a low but threatening voice.
What if the whole affair between Charlie and myself had been orchestrated to keep watch on me?
Or to deflect my interest in the murders?
I could not dispel the growing horror I felt that Charlie Coombs was somehow tied to the whole mess—to the deaths of Harry Starobin and Mona Aspen.
The appetizers lay in a semicircle in front of me. They now looked uniformly loathsome.
“If you don’t give me the dignity of a goddamn answer, Alice, I’m walking out of here and you’ll never see me again.”
I thought: Answer? What was the question?
His voice had started to quake with fury, and perhaps shame.
I couldn’t look at him. But I felt him. It was as if he had grown larger and larger; as if he was hovering over the table—over . . . under . . . behind. I closed my eyes. Then I could feel him inside of me . . . in a sexual sense . . . as if we were making love. I could feel a kind of synchronicity, like the rhythm of love. For a moment I hated him more than I had ever hated anyone in my life. For a moment I loved him, as if my life hinged on his every move. It was a crazy few minutes. For the first time since I had known him, I was reciprocating, unconsciously, his passion. But it was all about betrayal.
“Walk,” I said, smiling grimly at my fork.
And he did.
14
I stared at the contents of the tall closet in the hallway, the one that contained all my clothes. A depression was coming on, I could feel it—one of those bone-crushing, brain-deadening depressions that turn limbs and will to jelly. I had to get out of the house—to
be among people.
Hour after hour I had been analyzing the breakup with Charlie Coombs. But it was too exhausting and too confusing. Of course I knew that I had provoked it by my attitude, and my attitude in turn had originated in my fear and suspicion that he was part of the conspiracy. My attitude alone, however, could not account for gentle, kindly, mature Charlie Coombs’s sudden transformation into an abusive, jealous lover.
It was as if someone else had popped out of his body full-blown, like a moth. I didn’t want any part of the new Charlie Coombs, under any conditions.
I pulled out of the closet a long white lace Blanche DuBois kind of dress. I pulled from a box on top of the closet a wide-brimmed floppy hat with a black ribbon around the crown. From the bottom of the closet I pulled a pair of red leather shoes.
It was six thirty in the evening when I stepped out in my antidepression wardrobe, and I had hardly gone a block when the stares of passersby enlightened me to the fact that I was dressed oddly for my age and for the season. It was a young woman’s outfit to be worn on a very hot day. The stares didn’t deter me. I had a destination, a new restaurant on Twenty-third Street called Brights.
I had never been in there before. I couldn’t even conceive of a single reason why I would go in there. But to fight a depression that is about to engulf you, one is forced into very strange alliances.
Brights was done in the latest minimal style; very brightly lit, much space between wooden tables. All of it was done in hard-edged style which was designed to do something, but that something was never articulated. And interspersed in all that minimal confusion, like peaches on a dessert, were a few garish wall paintings.
When I entered I saw that the end of the bar was crowded with people and the other end was empty. I slipped onto a stool midway between the extremes, removed my hat, and placed it on the stool next to me.
The bartender, a young man with well-coiffed red hair and an open white shirt, placed a napkin in front of me and smiled. The name of the restaurant was embossed on one corner of the napkin. In fact, everywhere I turned, I saw the name embossed—on the matches, on the stirring sticks, on the clocks.
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