Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  His quick-darting eyes saw, but did not quite grasp the significance of, a finely honed steak knife tossed onto a pile of pillows on a sofa close by. It had not occurred to him that Nicholas Reickmann had been what is called murdered and that consequently the agent of the murder, the murderer, might be a threat to him, might in fact still be on the premises of the Christensen house.

  Brendan could not remember, if he’d ever known, the Forest Park emergency number. Was it the same number in all communities? He was too alone—too much of an isolate—to know. He’d lived a selfish life and now he must pay. What did it mean, FAGS DIE? He was trying to dial the telephone, dialing O for operator, but his strength was melting from him … slowly at first, as in a dreamy cinematic dissolve, then more abruptly, rudely. His consciousness was snuffed out. Brendan Bauer was gone. Falling, he struck his head against the edge of a chrome-legged coffee table. As the pulsing percussive sounds of The Rite of Spring continued, as the music plunged toward its cruel, convulsive, dance-to-the-death conclusion, Brendan heard nothing. The dance played itself out without him.

  19

  And now, thought Maggie Blackburn, what must I do?

  On all sides she was being advised not to become further involved with Brendan Bauer, yet she seemed never to doubt that it fell to her, however obliquely, to do something. She was involved already; she was responsible. Brendan, who had less than $200 in savings and no possessions of any value, was arraigned on charges of first-degree murder (a capital offense in Connecticut) in the slaying of Nicholas Reickmann and his bail set at a crushing $175,000; the Bauer family, by way of Brendan’s oldest brother, Ryan, who flew unhappily east to deal with the emergency, could afford no more than $4,000 against the $17,500 required for posting bond; naturally it fell to Maggie to provide the remaining $13,500. And though she wanted her help to Brendan kept a secret, it was very quickly no secret at all.

  Nor was it a secret that Maggie was providing an attorney for Brendan too.

  Portia telephoned Maggie when she heard, to voice her strong disapproval. “I know you’re very fond of that young man, and if he’s truly innocent as he claims it is a terrible thing, but the coincidence is really too much, isn’t it? First Christensen, and then Reickmann? And Brendan Bauer so involved? And this ugly talk that’s going around”—in fact, the talk, wholly unsubstantiated, had been instigated by an anonymous letter mailed from Forest Park to The New York Times two mornings after Reickmann’s death that “there is some sort of sex ring here in Forest Park, a gay sex ring involving students”—“it’s all so ugly, Maggie, so horrible. And you’ve done so much for Brendan already, do you think you should do anything more?”

  Maggie Blackburn, downhearted, ran a hand through her short-cropped hair and could think of no adequate reply. I feel sorry for him. I want to help him. I feel … guilty for him.

  “He does have family of his own, doesn’t he?” Portia persisted. Her flawless soprano voice had a particular authority over the telephone. “What on earth would he do, if not for you?”

  Maggie said, “Brendan is in a tragic situation. If you were in his place—”

  Portia said, a bit tartly, “But I’m not in his place. And neither are you.”

  “He says—”

  “I know what he says, but what is the truth? Why are you so convinced he isn’t lying?”

  “—whoever killed Nicholas Reickmann must have been holding the knife to his throat and forcing him to speak with Brendan over the telephone. And then, as soon as they hung up, and Brendan was on his way—”

  “And what of the tape? The blackmail tape, one of the newspapers has called it? To think that Rolfe Christensen went so far as to record the sounds of his … behavior … with Brendan and with others! Wouldn’t that be a sufficient motive for killing Nicholas, to get the tape back? I mean, if the young man is unbalanced, as people say?”

  “Portia, please,” Maggie said, “he is not unbalanced. He has been going through a difficult time, an unspeakably difficult—”

  “Not that Nicholas, our Nicholas, would have blackmailed him or anyone. Of course he wouldn’t, he wasn’t the type. But Brendan may have misunderstood and been desperate to get the tape back. What a tragedy for us all!” Portia paused, for she was speaking excitedly. Maggie could all but see pinpoints of moisture gleaming on her face. “Only just imagine, Maggie: a secret society, a ring of some sort, in our midst, without any of us knowing … isn’t it extraordinary? People are saying that Bill Queller must have been involved. Poor Bill! But most of all, poor Nicholas! And Christensen at the center, a fat, malicious spider in his web, corrupting young men and boys and daring to keep an archive of his wickedness, like the Marquis de Sade. And then one day he went too far, and misjudged one of his young victims, and—”

  “Portia, please: Brendan Bauer is innocent.”

  “—and everything came tumbling down. And two people are dead, and who knows how many have been affected? And the young man who was driven to such desperation—what a tragedy for him.”

  Maggie sighed and let her friend talk, for, once started, Portia was capable of arialike extravagances. She was splendidly overbearing, she was enormously persuasive. And all that she said, of a secret ring, of young Brendan Bauer being driven to commit not one but two murders, of his very madness—these were things virtually everyone in Forest Park was saying, more and more knowledgeably and recklessly as the days passed. The assumption—indeed, the romantic premise—was that Brendan Bauer, though he strenuously denied it, was an agent of retribution, tormented to madness by his abusers: innocently guilty, but guilty nonetheless.

  FAGS DIE. The news media had made much of this crude warning.

  Certainly the case, as it was officially presented, looked very bad against Brendan Bauer. Had Maggie known nothing of the circumstances involving Brendan with Nicholas on the night of January 16, had he not explained it to her in detail, she might have believed, as so many others did, that the young man found with Nicholas Reickmann’s lifeless body, in the very home of the late Rolfe Christensen, must have been the man who killed him. And if he had killed Reickmann, surely he had killed Christensen too? The rumor of a sex ring, a secret society involving young men and boys, some of whom were connected with the Forest Park Conservatory of Music, would seem to give credence to such a belief. (But did such a ring exist? This too Brendan strenuously denied.)

  The very circumstances of Brendan’s arrest by police seemed unjust: according to his testimony in police headquarters, he had gone to the Christensen house because Nicholas Reickmann had telephoned him, late in the evening of January 16, to insist that he come to see evidence (a diary, Reickmann had promised—but there was no diary amid the clutter of Christensen’s music room) pointing to the identity of Christensen’s murderer and exonerating Brendan from all susicion; when he arrived, it was to discover, to his horror, that Reickmann had been killed, had died shortly after speaking with Brendan, his throat savagely slashed with a razor-sharp steak knife (one of a set of expensive knives in Christensen’s kitchen); intending to telephone for help, he lost consciousness and fell, injuring the side of his head, and did not revive until some fifteen minutes later, when Forest Park police officers entered the house. (Someone, apparently a man, had telephoned police headquarters to complain of a “disturbance” at 2283 Littlebrook, at 11:50 P.M. He identified himself only as a neighbor, declined to give his name, and could not afterward be located by police.)

  The killer had drawn Brendan Bauer to the murder scene, and then he had drawn police to Brendan Bauer.

  Portia was saying in a warmly urgent voice, “Please do consider, Maggie. For a week or so? Byron and I have been talking, and others too.… We feel you really aren’t safe over there by yourself.”

  Maggie had not been following the drift of her friend’s argument. Was Portia inviting her to stay at her house? But why?

  “The fact that the ‘suspect’ is out … that you’ve been so involved with him … and if he’s unb
alanced—”

  “Portia, he isn’t. He’s upset.”

  “And if, as he insists, there is another person who has done the killings, why then … there is another person who has done the killings. And who knows what he might do next?”

  It was Maggie’s belief that there was, of course, a pattern to the killings and a single intelligence behind them, yet even in her most fanciful theorizing she could not see how that intelligence could in any way involve her. “Portia, I’m simply not important enough!”

  Said Portia warningly, “Nicholas must have felt that way too—my God, Maggie, to think that lovely man is dead! And we’ll never see him again, hear him laugh again, play the clarinet again, he’s just—so suddenly—gone. It isn’t a time for you to be stubborn.”

  Maggie laughed, startled: for how could one defend oneself against a charge of stubbornness without appearing stubborn?

  Portia tried to convince Maggie for several more minutes, but Maggie held her ground, for she had work to do, and this was her home, and, truly, she did not feel herself threatened, but by the time the conversation ended Maggie realized she had become badly frightened … these little spells had begun to come over her since Nicholas Reickmann’s death, small fits of shivering, spells that passed as mysteriously as they came, leaving her, afterward, both physically weakened and morally resolved not to give in.

  Not to give in: to what, exactly, she didn’t know.

  Though official statements released to the news media by Forest Park police carefully noted that there was no substantial evidence linking the January 16, 1989, murder of Nicholas Reickmann with the December 8, 1988, murder of his friend and Conservatory colleague Rolfe Christensen, at least at this time, thus no certainty that the person who murdered Reickmann had also murdered Christensen, the consensus of belief in the community—and, unofficially, among the police—was that there was only a single killer, and that the young man arrested as a suspect in the Reickmann case would shortly be arrested again as a suspect in the Christensen case.

  At his hearing and arraignment in county court, Brendan Bauer entered a plea of not guilty to the charges of first-degree murder being brought against him. His attorney, a Hartford man named Coder, had warned him not to speak except when speaking was required, but Brendan Bauer, ashen-faced, oddly arrogant, holding his thin body stiff as if, like St. Sebastian, he was welcoming a hail of arrows, said, “‘Not guilty’ to both—I didn’t k-kill Nicholas Reickmann, he was my friend, and I didn’t k-k-kill Chr-Chr-Chr”—his stammer overcoming him so that a rude hot blush rose into his face and he had to compromise by saying—“the o-o-other.”

  Brendan had consented to being represented by a private attorney instead of a public defender only after Maggie and his brother Ryan appealed to him. Not that the Bauers could help with Brendan’s legal fees, much; but here was Maggie willing to pay, or willing—for Brendan subsequently insisted upon this arrangement—to lend him the money, in such stages as Mr. Cotler required. Despondent in the early hours of his arrest, Brendan had said, “I am d-d-destitute, practically, why not a public d-d-defender? What’s the point of a d-d-defense anyway? My life is r-r-r-ruined.”

  Maggie had said, sympathetically yet sharply, “Brendan, that isn’t so. You are innocent, and we know you are innocent”—she’d glanced up at the brother, a man in his mid-thirties with a blood-heavy face, disapproving eyes, mouth, jowls, proprietor of a canoe-rental outlet in a small town north of Boise, and saw to her dismay that her sentiment might not be exactly shared—“and, since you are innocent, it will be impossible for the police to prove a case against you.” To Maggie in her excitable, combative state, this truth was self-evident as the glaring white of the snow outside the window.

  It was a barred window: they were in Forest Park police headquarters at the time.

  Later, when Brendan was released on his own recognizance and the taciturn brother had flown back to Idaho and Maggie was helping him reorganize his life, Brendan allowed himself to be swayed, or nearly, to Maggie’s point of view. It was logical, wasn’t it? Proof that one has committed a certain act simply cannot be assembled if, in fact, one has not committed that act. And, under U.S. law, it was not enough for a prosecutor to launch a case against a suspect (no matter how circumstantially damning the case) for the suspect to be found guilty: he had to be found guilty. “It’s as if, in th-theory, there’s this essence called ‘guilt,’ and you have to be f-f-found in it,” Brendan said with childlike hope, staring at Maggie. “And the person who is guilty, really guilty, he will be f-f-found in it instead; d’you know what I mean?” Maggie could not help but see how the young man’s fingers twitched, and she wondered if they moved with a pianist’s instinct to strike an invisible but ubiquitous keyboard, as her own sometimes did, or whether—she shivered at the thought—his fingers recalled the stickiness of Nicholas Reickmann’s blood.

  Maggie said, “We’ll find out who that person is, even if the police can’t. I promise!”

  With childlike hope herself, or, perhaps, something more than childlike hope, so very strangely, Maggie had a fantasy lately that her father was still alive and she could drive out to Old Westbury to see him, as she’d done for years, but this time to rejuvenate him by laying out the puzzle pieces of this mystery before him, in confidence that, using only his powers of mind—of calculation, deduction, unchecked suspicion—Mr. Blackburn could find a way out of their impasse.

  (Though possibly he would complain—Maggie could very nearly hear the timbre of his voice—that she had failed to bring him sufficient evidence. You must do more. Do. More.)

  Brendan continued. “Oh, Jesus, sometimes I think if I could just t-t-talk to the right person! Get all the words out. I don’t mean a j-judge, or the damned detectives—they look at me like I’m a m-m-mental case, they just know I’m g-guilty—but someone, well,” he said, grinning at Maggie, “I guess I mean—God? And I could explain everything, and understand it myself, and this would all end, like a bad dream. You know what I m-mean, Maggie?”

  Quickly, Maggie Blackburn gave Brendan Bauer’s fingers a reassuring, sisterly squeeze.

  Yes. She knew what he meant.

  Sisterly! So that was how Maggie felt.

  She had been an only child. She’d never particularly wanted a brother, so far as she could remember, but, intermittently, as a girl, she’d longed for a sister: for years she’d indulged herself in a fantasy of a twin sister, often imagined her twin sister playing four-hand piano beside her. She’d had murmurous little conversations with the sister, nonsense exchanges: Hmmm? Hmmm! Yes? No! Right? Left! You? You! But a brother: no.

  Maggie did not tell Brendan of her final, highly disagreeable conversation with his brother Ryan, whom she’d driven to Kennedy Airport on the day following the arraignment. With an expression of furious distaste, Ryan had been discussing the case, and speculating on the outcome, and interrupting himself to say, repeatedly, “My God! What a disgusting thing! My poor parents! It’s an unforgivable shame!”—by which he meant, Maggie supposed, that the shame was not to be forgiven Brendan; until Maggie was moved to say, half pleading, “But Brendan is innocent, you know. He has been the victim in all this horror.”

  Ryan regarded her with a look of contempt. “A lot of good that does us, Miss Blackburn.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “A lot of good that does us, his family,” he said, shaking his head so that his jowls shuddered, “after he’s dirtied our name, and all. It’s in the papers back home, you bet. Getting mixed up with men like that … queers … fags.”

  “But Brendan was a victim,” Maggie protested. “He is a victim. Don’t you feel sorry for him?”

  “Oh, we’ll support him, and all—he never killed anybody, I’d swear to that. My parents have been talking to him on the phone, haven’t they? But, like I say, I feel sorry for us. It’s an unforgivable shame, what he did.”

  “But he didn’t do anything,” Maggie said, confused. “What exactly
did he do?”

  Ryan regarded her with a look of incredulity. “Dirtied our name, dragged ‘Bauer’ in the dirt. What d’you think he did, made us proud? Jesus!”

  They parted without a handshake, and Maggie walked quickly away, trembling. She was thinking that Brendan Bauer was as without a family as she; the realization depressed her.

  For what if, after all, there is only … me?

  20

  He would have to leave his job at Ajax Car Wash, and he would have to move. Again. He dared not go anywhere near the Conservatory campus, for feeling ran high against him; though he was a stranger to virtually all the undergraduates, everyone knew his face from media likenesses, and his name was on everyone’s lips: Brendan Bauer? Brendan Bauer? Brendan Bauer?

  Though the grotesque poisoning death of Rolfe Christensen had sent a shock wave of horror through Forest Park, and a seemingly inexhaustible fund of lurid speculation, there had been, over all, only a respectful show of grief; for the composer had been known by many, admired by some, but genuinely liked by only a select few. Rolfe Christensen had boasted in interviews of preferring envy to affection, and his Wildean bravado had not been misplaced.

  By contrast, Nicholas Reickmann had been the object of a good deal of affection. He had been envied and admired and emulated and adored; when news of his violent death first struck the Conservatory campus, on the morning of January 17, students stood about like shell-shock victims. There were public tears, there were public lamentations. There was anger. And that weirdly familiar name leapt about on all sides: Brendan Bauer? Brendan Bauer? Brendan Bauer? Brendan Bauer murdered Nicholas Reickmann? (An incident that occurred on January 20 was related by Si Lichtman to Maggie, who thought it dreadful and did not repeat it to Brendan: a young bespectacled man who resembled Brendan had entered a dining hall, and people began to call out, “There’s the murderer!”—“There’s Brendan Bauer!” Only by showing his identification card did the young man escape being mobbed and injured.)