“Never mind, Rodney,” I said. “I’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Try to remember when he came home.”
“I know who’ll remember,” he said. “That young man who works with Professor Stone.”
“Who’s that? Someone named Sanger, perhaps?”
“I don’t know his name, but he comes around here all the time. He’ll know; he was with him.”
“Could he be the one?” I asked, but Rodney shook his head.
“No, miss. They went upstairs together, then the young man buzzed the elevator about twenty minutes later. While I was bringing him down to the lobby, he said he forgot something upstairs. I called Professor Stone on the intercom right then and there from the elevator, and he answered. So, I handed the receiver to the young man, and they settled it between themselves.”
“Do you know what he forgot?” I asked.
“No, miss. He must have mentioned it, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“So you didn’t take him back upstairs to get it?”
Rodney shook his head again. “No, Professor Stone told him he’d give it to him on Monday.”
“Did you tell the police about that guy?” I asked.
“About thirty times before they was through with me.”
Rodney whisked me up to the fifteenth floor and left me alone in the long, still corridor. The walls hummed peacefully, almost inaudibly, as all these prewar New York residences do. Lugging my bag to the last apartment on the southeast corner, 1505, I fished two brass keys from my pocket and turned the lock, then the dead bolt. Inside, the apartment was dark. The smell of the house had changed; the last whiffs of my mother’s perfumes had faded, and more masculine scents had settled in. The place was spanking clean, but the odor of old books and oriental rugs defies feather dusters and pine wax.
I flicked on the light, dropped my case next to the bench in the foyer, and stepped through the archway into the parlor. Everything looked different; it had been two years since I’d left. Flowers spewed from pots in every corner, on every end table. I recognized them as my mother’s favorites, but couldn’t remember what they were called. She had tried to teach me about flowers, but I was more interested in the boys who played baseball. Not a tomboy, but a fan. I suppose I still am. The wallpaper had been changed, and some new pieces of furniture anchored the grand old Kashmiri rug that my mother adored. Silk on silk, nine hundred knots per square inch—woven by children with very small hands, no doubt. One of the old paintings was missing: a Wyeth watercolor of a hillside, framed by a barn window. My mother had received it as a gift from the artist in the late forties. In its place was a portrait of my late mother beside a vase of orange tulips, painted by someone named Romich—most probably an artist she represented. Not my taste. On the mantelpiece in the parlor sat a simple gray vase. My mother’s ashes were inside. I wondered how my father had managed the redecoration project, since the room didn’t strike me as consistent with his dark and austere style.
My father had been found unconscious in his study on Saturday morning, struck on the back of the head by a heavy object, unknown at present. The police had scoured the room that very afternoon, but had taken nothing away. The fingerprint experts had left a dusty trail over most of the study, since, judging by the scattered books and papers, the intruder had touched nearly everything in his search for valuables.
Despite the late hour, I wanted to have a look at what had happened. I circled around my father’s desk, swiveling his green leather chair with a distracted hand as I examined the room I had so rarely visited as a girl. The three windows behind the desk were dark, locked tight with the louvered shades drawn. The desk drawers had been pulled out, some dumped on the floor. I stepped over the mess and opened the shades to look outside. The airshaft: twenty feet of nothing, then a brick wall. No access and very little light. I had never understood how my father could work in that cave, but he liked the dark, insulated peace of the room.
I glanced at the ponderous book on his desk: a magnificent, 1861 Gustave Doré Divine Comedy. No surprise there; Dante was my father’s life’s work. He had more than fifty different versions in various languages. The papers strewn about on the floor had not been moved by the police. I knelt down and picked through a few of them. Students’ dissertations, notes for lectures, decades of professional correspondence . . . The contents of an academician’s desk. His personal documents were scattered on the floor between a filing cabinet and the wet bar. I cracked an ice cube, dropped it into a tumbler, and poured Scotch over it. As one of the boys, I had learned how to drink whiskey, and hold it well. I had to hold my drink or be ready to defend my virtue.
The hi-fi, hidden inside a cherry wood cabinet, was untouched. A record sat on the turntable: Gounod’s Faust. The encyclopedic collection of classical music records (78s and LPs) lining five long shelves of the chest above, had been ransacked. I say “classical” with a twinge of guilt, since my father insisted on pointing out the misnomer whenever he heard it. Classical, he declared, was a period of music dating roughly from the mid-1700s to about 1830. Mozart and Beethoven were classical composers, he maintained. Brahms and Tchaikovsky were Romantics.
One March evening fifteen years earlier, as we sped north up Sixth Avenue in a taxi, heading to the Ninety-Second Street Y to hear Lotte Lenya sing Weill, my brother Elijah referred to The Three Penny Opera as classical music.
“Kurt Weill is in no way classical music,” corrected Dad. “You can say he wrote operas, music for the stage, or modern music. But you cannot say he wrote classical music any more than you can say he wrote West Texas Swing.”
“But everyone calls it classical,” Elijah said in his defense. “At a certain point, you’ve got to accept common usage. You don’t speak Middle English, do you?”
“I don’t need to accept incorrect usage,” said Dad, and Elijah just shook his head and watched the streets whiz by.
“Daddy,” I asked once I realized the argument was over. “Is Paul Whiteman classical music?”
He laughed. Elijah roared, and my mother patted my head.
“Not exactly, dear.”
Back in my father’s study, I surveyed the mess again. Most of the disks lay on the floor, including several that had been maliciously shattered and trampled. Among the items missing, I noted three small silver picture frames, a gold pen set that had belonged to my grandfather, and the strong box my father had kept in his desk. I swept a few pages of one of my father’s manuscripts off the divan and plopped down to have a smoke while I nursed my drink. After shaking out the match, I realized the crystal ashtray, which had always sat on the low table before the couch, was gone, along with the silver Aladdin’s lamp cigarette lighter. I placed the cool match on the table, and took my cigarette and Scotch into the parlor.
MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1960
A brilliant January sun splashed through the south and east windows, warming my stiff bones: I had fallen asleep in one of the armchairs in the parlor. After a couple of false starts, I managed to brew myself a potent cup of sludge in my father’s little Italian coffee machine.
Down the hall, past my father’s study, three bedrooms squared off the northwest end of the apartment. My parents’ room, an elegant, polished art-deco suite with bath and dressing room, was on the left. Elijah’s room was directly opposite, and mine was between it and a second bathroom at the end of the hall. My bedroom smelled hollow and looked cold. The furniture was still there, shrouded by dust covers, just as I had left it two years before. If it hadn’t been my own bedroom, I would have thought the child who had slept there was dead. But that was Elijah’s room. I didn’t even look inside.
I showered in my father’s bathroom, put on my face, and dressed. Passing the study door on my way back to the kitchen, I heard a noise and froze in my tracks. I should have run for the front door, but, strangely, I couldn’t help but look. My eyes came to rest on a woman, a Negro of about thirty. Dressed in a faded cotton wrap-around dress, tan hose, and black shoes, she gl
ared at me, maybe from curiosity, maybe from suspicion. Then I noticed the man. He was across the room, toying with a paperweight on my father’s desk, as if he was bored. I looked him over: solid, average height, light-brown skin, and clear-blue eyes. He gave me the creeps.
“What you doing here?” the woman demanded, her tones unmistakably Caribbean.
“I live here,” I said tentatively, wondering why I wasn’t running for the door. “I mean, my father lives here.”
“Professor Stone’s girl?” she asked. “Eleonora?”
I nodded. “Excuse my curiosity,” I said, “but who are you?”
She laughed. “Oh, you’re Professor Stone’s girl all right!” (My father and I are said to have the same eyes.) I waited for an explanation. “My name is Nelda, your daddy’s cleaning woman. It was me that found him,” and suddenly her smile faded. “Terrible what happened to Professor Stone. Terrible.”
“Who’s he?” I asked, motioning to the man at the desk.
“That’s Nelson, my brother. I’m afraid to come here alone after what happened.”
Nelson was still standing there, paperweight in hand, grinning smugly at me.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, turning to Nelda.
“I come in about this time Saturday,” she began. “I opened the door and called to Professor Stone, ’cause I don’t want to surprise him. Most days, he answers hello, but Saturday nothing. I called again, then I went to look. He was flat on the floor in the study, bleeding from the head! I thought he was dead. I screamed bloody loud. Then I called the police.”
“Didn’t you call an ambulance?” I asked.
Nelda’s eyes darkened. “No, the police done that. What you mean by that, Miss Eleonora?”
I waved a hand and walked into the study and crossed the room. I approached my father’s desk, and Nelson moved away, around the other side, and wandered to the door where he leaned against the jamb as if to block the exit. Nelda took up a position in front of me.
“Did you notice anything missing when you found him?” I asked.
“A couple of things. Silver things, gold, you know. I didn’t look much, ’cause the police was in charge.”
I thought a moment. “Are you the only person besides my father who has keys to this apartment?”
“I think so,” she said. “Excepting you. Why’re you asking such questions? Can’t you see that a burglar come in here and bashed Professor Stone on the head? That’s what the police said.”
“I’m just wondering how the burglar got in,” I said.
“Well, don’t go suspecting me, Miss Eleonora. The professor is good to me, and I am always good to him.”
Nelda told me she and Nelson had come to clean up the mess in the study, but I asked her to leave things alone for the time being. She cast a wary eye my way.
“We have not come to steal anything, Miss Eleonora,” she said.
“No, I didn’t think so. But I want to have a closer look at this mess before you put things back in order.”
Nelda shook her head. “You going to be staying here, Miss Eleonora?” she asked.
“For a few days, anyway.”
“Well, if you don’t mind the mess, I won’t clean it. Come on, Nelson,” she called, and the man with the unsettling eyes followed her out.
“Your father’s condition is critical,” said Dr. Mortonson, calling my attention to a set of x-rays on a light box in his office. “He’s suffered a depressed fracture of the skull behind the right ear. The resulting bleeding has created what we call an extradural hematoma. If you look closely at this shadowy area beneath the surface of the skull,” he circled the area in question with his forefinger, “you’ll see blood trapped between the meninges and the bone.”
“What does that mean in practical terms?” I asked.
“The cerebellum was subjected to an increase in pressure, which, in turn, can cause brain damage, coma, or death.”
“Can you relieve the pressure?”
“Of course.” He yanked one of the x-rays from the light box and snapped another in its place. “These,” he pointed to a pair of small, black circles on the film, “are the two holes we drilled to let the blood out. We discovered a clot and removed that, but there’s still swelling from the general trauma. We’re trying to reduce that by other means. If he regains consciousness, we’ll be able to assess how much, if any, damage occurred.”
“Which faculties are controlled by the cerebellum?” I asked.
“Motor functions, muscles, coordination. He may walk out of here like before, or maybe not at all.”
“Paralysis?”
“Or death.”
The man waiting for me in the visitors’ lounge was a slightly built redhead in his late twenties, maybe thirty. Wearing a rumpled gray shirt, black tie, and brown jacket, he introduced himself as Detective-Sergeant Jimmo McKeever of the NYPD. I thought he looked more like a jockey than a cop.
“I’m sorry about your father,” he said softly.
I asked him about the investigation.
“It looks like robbery. An intruder gained entry into the apartment, apparently through the front door, and surprised your father in his study.”
“Are you sure my father was taken by surprise?”
McKeever started, as if I had ambushed him. “I believe so, Miss Stone. You see, the blow was struck from the back, which is consistent with, well, surprise.”
His timidity was curious. I wondered if he was in the habit of speaking to girls. “Then you don’t think my father might have known his attacker?”
The policeman wiped his lips with a handkerchief and laughed nervously. His eyes avoided mine. “Ah, I don’t think so, but it’s a possibility. What makes you think he knew the intruder?”
I shrugged. “Did you speak to Rodney the doorman?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, gulping down some saliva. “Mr. Wilson was quite eager to cooperate. He told me about a young man who accompanied your father home that evening.”
“You don’t know who that man is, do you?”
He shrank into his jacket and shook his head. “No, miss, but he may be a colleague of your father’s. I’m going to check on that.”
“What else can you tell me about what might have happened?” I asked, amused by this funny little man, despite the circumstances that had brought us together.
“Well, we think we know what was taken. I have a list here,” and he patted his pockets until he’d located the scrap of paper in question. “The cleaning lady helped us with this.”
McKeever read off the list, mostly items I had noticed myself, plus a few knickknacks from the parlor. Nothing irreplaceable.
“Billfold?” I asked.
“Still in his pants’ pocket. Nothing missing there.”
“What about the bedroom? My father kept some of my mother’s jewels in there. Mostly heirlooms, and quite expensive. He liked having them around.”
“By all appearances, the intruder did not enter the bedroom.”
I tapped a finger absently on my lip, thinking.
“What is it, Miss Stone?” asked McKeever.
“It’s just strange,” I said. “Why didn’t the burglar search the bedroom? Most women keep their jewelry on a dresser or in a box. Jewels are lightweight, easy to conceal, and easy to unload.”
“But your father lives alone. Your mother is . . .” McKeever stopped short, maybe out of reluctance to use the brutal word with me, or maybe he had just gotten my point.
“Yes, my mother is dead,” I said. “But the burglar wouldn’t have known that, unless he knew my father.”
McKeever fidgeted, uncomfortable with any new scenario that didn’t include a pat conclusion. “You say her jewels were expensive?”
“No Star of India,” I said. “But they’re the goods.”
“Perhaps the intruder was scared off,” he said. “Maybe he fled after hitting your father. To be honest, Miss Stone, the idea that this could have been the work of an acquaintance
of your father’s hadn’t crossed my mind.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “It’s just those little details that bother me: How did the assailant get in, and why didn’t he look for the real trove? And the billfold. Why overlook that?”
McKeever nodded, unconvinced. “You’d be surprised how many break-ins present similar inconsistencies. Take last week, for example. I investigated a burglary where only a bicycle and a jar of small change were taken. The thief ignored a drawer crammed with silver, some antique vases of some value, and an expensive hi-fi.”
“What did you deduce from that?” I asked.
“That the burglar was probably a kid. He stole only the things he could carry and could use. My guess is that he rode off on the bicycle with the jar of change under his arm.”
“Sounds like a logical conclusion,” I said, and McKeever seemed relieved. “But how did your bicycle-thief burglar get inside in the first place?”
The detective’s face flushed, and I could see I’d unnerved him again. “Well, through a window off the fire escape. We found it wide open.”
I nodded. “But there was no open window at my father’s place,” I said. “And no forced entry.”
By noon, I was on the Saw Mill River Parkway, rolling toward Irvington and the cemetery where my brother was buried. Elijah had skidded on the slick pavement of Route 9A after a June rain two and a half years earlier, and his motorcycle careened over the shoulder and plunged down a steep hill. He was dead on the scene, a quiet woodland in Westchester County. My parents decided that he should be laid to rest where he died, so he was buried in Irvington.
The caretaker was embarrassed by the desecration. He apologized a little too insistently, explaining that the vandals, probably local juvenile delinquents, had broken into the cemetery late at night and made no noise.
“It’s such a big cemetery,” he said, as we walked over the cold ground toward Elijah’s grave. “I couldn’t have heard them if they’d thrown a party.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Dibb,” I said, touching the gaunt man’s elbow. “I understand these things happen all the time.”
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