Now her eyes narrowed. “What?”
The waiter interrupted to drop our coffees on the table, then withdrew.
“The police suspect Ercolano was the burglar who tried to kill my father and stole his manuscript,” I said.
She struggled to understand. “That’s impossible,” she said calmly. “Ercolano was a good scholar, Ellie. He wasn’t stupid enough to steal a noted professor’s latest book and try to call it his own. And he was a nineteenth-century scholar, besides.”
“I said the police suspect him. I don’t.”
“What makes them think he had anything to do with the attack on your father?”
“We checked his mailbox and found a return receipt from the post office for a package sent to Princeton. When we retrieved the package, my father’s manuscript was inside, with Ercolano’s name on the title page.”
“It’s absurd,” she said.
“Maybe. But we did find my father’s gold pens and strongbox in his desk.”
“Then someone planted them,” she blurted out. “Ruggero was an honest man. And he respected your father. He liked him very much.”
Before Ruth and I parted company, I managed to find out that she had gone on a date Wednesday, and had seen Suddenly Last Summer by herself on Friday night.
“Alone?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s better than spending time with my family. I’d already seen it, but I had nothing else to do.”
I sipped my coffee and decided not to mention that it was my mother’s ruby she was wearing on her left hand.
I walked her to the West Fourth Street station then headed back through the park and up Fifth Avenue. The phone rang a few minutes after I’d walked in the door of my father’s apartment.
“McKeever here. I’m calling about Tiffany’s. We know who bought the tie clip for Ercolano.”
“Surprise me and say it wasn’t Ruth Chalmers.”
Silence down the line. “Why do you bother asking me to look into things if you already know the answers?” he asked. “It took two men three hours to get that information out of a Tiffany’s clerk without a warrant.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just spent a couple of hours with Ruth. It was clear she was in love with Ercolano, and that she was defending him with a lover’s passion.”
“Just a hunch?” he asked.
“I got lucky; the ring she was wearing just happened to be one of my mother’s favorites.”
“What?”
“Mom wore that ring until the day she died. I had assumed it was buried with her.”
“I thought no jewelry was missing from your father’s apartment.”
“You tell me,” I said. “I asked if any had been taken, and the police said it appeared not.”
“So, what do you figure?” he asked.
“I think Ruth was Ercolano’s young girlfriend, the one his neighbor mentioned. Do you remember what the police report said about Ercolano’s death?”
“I can recite it chapter and verse. What about it?”
“Who did it say found the body?”
There was a pause on the line. “Ruth Chalmers’s father.”
“Exactly. Victor Chalmers paid me a visit the other night to explain how he had happened to be in Ercolano’s neighborhood after midnight on a Saturday. Chalmers lives across the park on the Upper East Side. He tried to have me believe Hildy Jaspers had called him from Ercolano’s apartment.”
“Are you sure she didn’t?”
“I haven’t found any of my mother’s possessions on Hildy’s person.”
“So, you’re saying that Victor Chalmers went to Ercolano’s apartment to bail his daughter out of a bad situation?”
“I believe so,” I said. “Ruth was there that night. And if the neighbors and super are to be believed, Ercolano died at ten thirty. Chalmers called the police at what time?”
“The call was logged in a little after one o’clock.”
“Then I’d say Ruth found her boyfriend dead in the bathroom and panicked. She called her father, who came over and decided what to do and what story to tell.”
“Then how did Ruth get the ring?”
“She probably found it in Ercolano’s apartment before her father arrived. She wanted a keepsake of her lover and took it. She seemed to treasure it.”
“Then we’re back where we were with Ercolano as the most logical suspect,” said McKeever.
“The ring was in his apartment,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with logic.”
“You think she’s innocent?” he asked, already convinced of his answer. “Innocent enough to sleep with a debauched professor ten years her senior? Do nice girls do that, Ellie?”
“Nice girls do a lot of things you wouldn’t suspect,” I said. “Ruth Chalmers was in love with Ercolano; so much in love she couldn’t see how he was playing her for a fool against that other woman. All the other women.”
“I’m bringing her in,” announced the cop.
“Give me a couple of days,” I said. “With a little luck, I’ll clear this thing up.”
He mulled it over. “If you’re not pressing charges for theft of the ring, I suppose I can wait.”
“I appreciate your hanging in there on this,” I said. “I mean for not taking the easy way out and pinning this on a poor dead man.”
He was quiet for a long while, and I felt he wanted to say something important to me. I thought his silence betrayed a pain, though not one I could identify. In the end, he said simply that it was his job. And then he told me the pens found in Ercolano’s office, the ones I knew belonged to my father, had all been wiped clean. No prints at all.
“That doesn’t exactly implicate Ercolano,” I said.
“It doesn’t clear him, either.”
I took a few minutes to go through my father’s mail, which had been accumulating on the secretary near the door in the foyer. There were some bills, a letter from Carnegie Hall, a couple of journals and glossy magazines, and various pieces of bulk mail, but little in the way of personal or professional correspondence. The only letter worth noting was an airmail envelope plastered with colorful foreign stamps and a postmark from Padua, Italy. A Professor Nardone had written the letter, and it was in Italian. I could make out the gist in only the grossest terms, relying on cognates and my sketchy memory of a summer in Italy years before. Why hadn’t I, the daughter of a renowned Italianist, studied Italian? My father has often begged me to answer that one. One of the few words not needing translation was Bruchner. The letter was obviously a response to an earlier inquiry from my father about the visiting professor.
Chiarissimo Professor Stone,
La prego di scusare il ritardo di questa mia risposta alla Sua cortese lettera del 15 novembre scorso; purtroppo mi trovavo all’ospedale per un intervento non tanto grave quanto scomodo.
Le posso assicurare innanzi tutto che il Professor Bruchner, da quanto ho potuto osservare negli anni in cui era mio collega qui a Padova, si è sempre comportato da persona colta e perbene . . .
Formal Italian. The object, my father always said, is to achieve a one-sentence, multi-paragraph letter. That, of course, is impossible, but Italians take a stab at it anyway each time they pick up a pen to write. Wading through the successive clauses, I managed to cull something of the mess: Nardone, a colleague of Bruchner’s in Padua, was writing to dispute some kind of accusations my father had leveled against Bruchner. But, my Italian being what it was, I couldn’t figure what the accusations entailed. I fetched an Italian–English dictionary from a shelf and looked for the word that had me stumped: ebreo. Nardone had insisted that Bruchner was indeed “ebreo.” Aware of Bruchner’s background in the concentration camp, I was surprised to find that the word meant Jewish or Jew. My father suspected Bruchner was not a Jew.
There was one other thing: if I understood Nardone’s closing, my father had also solicited a response from Professor Arturo Marescialli, the old friend who had recommended Bruchn
er in the first place. Since Nardone opened his letter with an apology for his tardy response, Marescialli must have already sent his answer. Where, then, was the letter?
Nelda had cleaned up the study, swept up the bits of broken vinyl and shellac, and put the desk back in order. I slid open the lower right-hand drawer and flipped through the hanging files Nelda had returned to their rails. Near the front I found a folder tabbed Correspondence in my father’s handwriting. Inside were two manila folders labeled Personal and Professional, respectively. I dumped the contents of Personal on the desk. The birthday card I’d sent him the previous August was in the mix, along with notes from colleagues, friends, and relatives. The latest postmark in the bunch was a January 10, 1960, letter from my Aunt Lena, my mother’s sister, from Florida, wishing him a happy New Year. Apparently my father’s concerns about Bruchner were anything but personal.
Back to the Professional file, this time to find my father’s letters; he kept meticulous track of his own correspondence, making carbons of everything he ever wrote. The file for 1959–60 (the rest was archived somewhere else in the room) ended abruptly on October 25, 1959, except for one brief letter. It was from my father’s cousin, Max Zeitler, a noted pro bono lawyer in Washington, DC. He looked forward to seeing my father on December 28 in Washington, and he outlined where my father should carry out the research he’d mentioned in his letter. In closing, he asked my father not to forget to bring the book on Southwestern Indian Art. Cousin Max had finally succumbed to the harping of his friends and agreed to take a vacation to Arizona. A train lover from his days as a child, Max wrote that he had reserved a sleeper from Washington to Phoenix on January 19. I wondered why my father considered Max Zeitler’s letter professional instead of personal.
There were no other letters, received or sent, after that date. I found it hard to believe my father hadn’t written a letter in three months, or that he had run out of carbon paper, which he hoarded as if speculating.
I lit a cigarette, leaned back in my father’s chair to think, and watched the smoke rise to the ceiling. Some of the correspondence could be at the Italian Department, but all of it? Even his weekly letters to his cousin Max Zeitler?
The rest of the mail from the foyer was discardable altogether, except for the letter from Carnegie Hall. It had been addressed in an elegant hand, and the envelope was a fine rag-content variety: not a run-of-the-mill bulk mailing. So I opened it.
January 19, 1960
Dear Dr. Stone:
I am writing to thank you for your generous contribution to this year’s fundraising drive. It is especially important to us at this time, as we fight to save our beloved hall from demolition. We will send you your complimentary tickets (under separate cover on the 20th) for Van Cliburn’s recital on Sunday, January 31, at 8:00 p.m. If you do not receive them, please contact the box office immediately.
I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to a special reception with Mr. Cliburn in the Recital Hall following the concert. I look forward to seeing you there.
Sincerely,
Laszlo Vanek
Events Manager
I went back to digging through the drawers in my father’s study. This time I was looking for complimentary tickets to see Van Cliburn. None. I checked the bedroom, his briefcase, and the pockets of all his suits. No tickets anywhere.
I relieved McDunnough bedside at eight o’clock for the night watch. The burly Irishman said he’d return at seven the following morning. I settled in for a long night of beeps and pumping bellows; my father’s heartbeat had strengthened, according to Nurse Tielman, and his blood pressure was higher. Reason for hope, although the improving signs said nothing of possible brain damage.
I tried Bruchner’s number without success every hour on the hour, from the public phone outside the ICU. Among other questions, I wanted to ask him the name of the man who had arrived with my father the previous Friday afternoon at the Faculty Club; what my father had meant by demanding to see his “other” tattoo; and how Bruchner could share a name, birthplace, birthday, and history with a man living in a walk-down tenement in Millwood, Brooklyn.
As I sat vigil bedside, I struggled to make sense of the two attacks. An endless procession of scenarios marched through my head, including Victor Chalmers’s story of Hildy and Ercolano. I was sure it had been Ruth in the dead man’s apartment that night, but maybe a playboy like Ercolano shuffled girls in and out like a hustler dealing three-card monte on the street. Maybe Hildy had been there that night. And what about my father? The elevator man at 26 Fifth Avenue knew Hildy’s name and said she’d recently visited the apartment. I didn’t even want to think about the possible implications of that piece of information.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 1960
When Sean McDunnough showed up Saturday morning at seven, I headed straight to Murray Hill and the tower on Thirty-Eighth between Lexington and Third. The concierge stopped me, asking which apartment I wanted to visit. I had anticipated just such an eventuality, so he didn’t catch me off guard.
“My name is Joanna Morgan, from the firm of McKim, Mead & White,” I said, thinking of the Morgan Library which I’d passed a few minutes earlier on Thirty-Sixth Street, and the architects who’d designed it. “I’m here to serve Mr. Bruchner a summons. Would you be so kind to call up?”
The man frowned. “Isn’t it a bit early to be serving papers? And on a Saturday?”
“I’ve made every effort to contact Mr. Bruchner during normal business hours,” I said. “But people do their best to avoid us.”
“Yeah, wonder why,” he sneered at me as he picked up the house phone. After consulting a list of tenants, he dialed a three-digit number, and listened. “No answer,” he said finally.
“Could you accompany me up to his apartment?” I asked. “My office requires that I make a physical knock on the door before reporting that the servee is not in.” (What a crock.)
The concierge looked around. “Look, it’s 7:20 on a Saturday morning. I got one guy on the door and an engineer in the basement; do you think I’m going to leave my desk just so you can knock on the guy’s door?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.” I didn’t want to be the one to suggest I go up unaccompanied. Somehow people are less suspicious when they’re the ones who actually suggest bending the rules.
Again the look around the lobby. “Oh, go on up,” he said finally. “But if he asks, don’t say I let you in.”
I thanked him humbly, still offering to let him escort me up and down, but he just waved me by.
“It’s 2210,” he said as the elevator doors closed me inside.
The car whooshed up to the twenty-second floor, stopping only at the twelfth floor where a confused woman with a Chinese pug had pushed the up button instead of the down.
“Can’t you let us go down first?” she asked. “Little Leon, here, has to do his business.”
I explained that the elevator wouldn’t change directions just for little Leon, even if I relinquished my right of way. She seemed distrustful, and I shrugged my shoulders apologetically as the doors closed once more.
When the car stopped again, I stepped out onto the twenty-second floor, face-to-face with 2210, bang opposite the elevator. I buzzed, waited a few seconds, then buzzed again. Glancing to either side, I reached down for the knob to give it a twist; you never know. Just then, however, the door swung open, and a man in a long silk robe and pajamas stood before me. I nearly fell into his arms. It was Professor Gualtieri Bruchner.
“What are you doing here, Miss Stone?” he asked, his gray eyes even darker than usual with early-morning rings.
I consider myself reasonably unflappable, but I confess the sudden appearance of the grim Bruchner set my heart to racing like a piston. In truth, I hadn’t expected him to be at home or, at least, not to answer. Now, as he stood there glaring at me with his spooky eyes, I groped for something to say.
“Good morning, Professor Bruchner,” I said, righting myself. “I’ve
been trying to contact you for a couple of days now.”
His right eyebrow climbed his forehead. “Indeed?”
“Yes. Sorry to intrude at this hour. I didn’t think you would be in.”
“Then why are you here?”
A good question. I probably would have tried to break in, though I wasn’t about to tell Boris Karloff that.
“I was going to leave you a message to call me.”
“Why didn’t you leave a message with the concierge?”
He had me there. I was letting him dictate the proceedings. We had been talking for at least a minute, and he had asked all the questions. I struck back.
“Look, I know you’re avoiding me, but I really need to ask you some questions. I’ve been phoning you for two days, and there’s never an answer.”
“I was out. You should call when I’m in.”
At least I had regained control. “All night long? Five minutes ago?” I asked. “I called from the lobby before coming up here.”
“Tell me, please, why I must endure this in my own home on a Saturday morning,” he said, trying to reverse the tide himself.
But I had my trump to play. “Because you had lunch at the Columbia Faculty Club last Friday afternoon, and plenty of people saw what happened.”
Bruchner stiffened, thought of answering, then gave up. “Perhaps we have started poorly this morning, Miss Stone. Would you like to come in for a coffee?”
Gualtieri Bruchner’s apartment was a modest one-bedroom facing north. A spectacular view of the Chrysler Building made the northern exposure more palatable. The furniture was functional—rented, I figured—just a sofa, two stuffed chairs, and a small dinette set. The walls were bare, except for a framed Chagall poster from the Museum of Modern Art and a pair of prints by Klimt.
“About this misunderstanding,” said Bruchner, pouring me a cup of black coffee.
“My understanding is that you had an altercation with my father at the Faculty Club last Friday,” I said, cutting him off.
“It was more a contretemps. Your father is an excitable man.”
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