by Lee Harris
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling confused. “I don’t see the connection between that and the missing manuscript. Had he sold it?”
“He gave it to someone as collateral against a loan.”
“I see.”
“Don’t ask me who it was; he never told me. But at the time that we were negotiating our divorce, he didn’t have the manuscript or the typewritten copy.”
“There were two copies?”
“Art wrote in longhand on lined pads using number two pencils sharpened to a fine point. That’s the manuscript I edited. He wasn’t a very good typist himself. When he was satisfied, I typed the whole thing up for him on his old Royal portable. That was the copy he sent to the agent.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “All those hundreds of pages written in pencil.”
“Nowadays everyone has a computer, and all they have to show for their work is a floppy disk and a printout. His manuscript showed every change, every hesitation, every place where he struggled to find the right word. The manuscript itself is a history of the book. I’ve had it appraised. If the time ever comes that I need money, I can sell it.”
“Is that why you wanted it?”
“Partly. Mostly I felt it belonged to me. It was dedicated to me and my blood, sweat, and tears are on every page.”
“I’d love to see it,” I said.
“I’d be glad to show it to you, but understand, I can’t let it out of my apartment.”
“I do understand. Tell me, how does the original compare to the published version?”
“It’s quite close. The editor took out a couple of chapters that he felt were weak and didn’t contribute enough to the main story. But they’re still in the original.”
“So how did it work?” I asked. “How did he get the manuscripts back?”
“He probably borrowed more money to pay off the loan, although there was something else going on there, now that I think of it.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. Whoever it was didn’t want to give the manuscripts back. I don’t know any more than that, and at the time, I assumed Art was lying. He’d lied about so many things at that point, I thought this was just another excuse not to give me what was my due.”
“How long did it take for him to get the manuscripts back?”
She looked away. “Months,” she said. “I don’t remember how long, but long enough that our lawyers were screeching at each other.”
“Is Fred’s mother’s suicide included in the book?”
“In a way. Art made it someone’s father instead. He didn’t want people to be identifiable, not because he thought they would sue but because he respected their privacy.”
“Was Fred angry about it, do you know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he was. And that’s not the reason he doesn’t come to the reunions. He just doesn’t like New York and the bad memories. Or I thought he didn’t.”
“When the book was published, was anyone hurt or angry at his portrayal or the portrayal of some event?”
“If they were, I didn’t hear about it. Art did a wonderful job of disguising the real people who were the basis for the characters. You know, he reduced nine to five.”
“Yes. One other thing, the man who died, George Fried, did you know him?”
“I met him. I can’t say I knew him. He was another one who didn’t like New York. In fact, I think Art may have combined him and Fred in the book, but the character is mostly Fred.”
“Mrs. Wien, did anything happen when the men were young that might have had repercussions later in life? Some incident which they all participated in or some of them did, which came back to haunt them?”
“You mean something criminal?”
“Possibly.”
“I don’t know about anything like that and I don’t think such a thing happened. I know what you mean—robbing a bank or accidentally killing someone. They weren’t tough kids, Chris. I don’t think what you’re suggesting is possible, given the men involved. You think there was some kind of blackmail going on and it ended up in Art’s murder?”
“I’m looking for a reason why someone walked into that restaurant carrying an ice pick.”
“I don’t know any reason for what happened. I grew to hate him at one time, but I came through that. He always sent me my alimony payments, most of them on time. He was unfaithful to me when we were married, but after the divorce, he didn’t treat me shabbily. I didn’t hate him these last years. If anything, I felt sorry that he never felt secure enough to be a happy person. I’ve made a good life for myself without Art.”
“One last thing,” I said. “I heard he had an affair with the wife of one of the men in the group. Do you know anything about that?”
“Art? With one of the men’s wives? I think you’re misinformed. I’m the oldest woman Art ever went out with. He wanted young, not middle-aged or old.”
It sounded reasonable. I thanked her and told her I would call if I wanted to read the original manuscript. It was still early afternoon when I started for home.
12
With much of the afternoon still left, I felt it had been a very successful day. I knew that Fred Beller and his wife had been at the restaurant the night of the murder. I knew that Dr. Greene, and possibly others in the group, had lent Arthur Wien money, and in at least one of those cases, he hadn’t paid it back. I knew that one person had been so concerned about being repaid that he had held the original manuscripts of The Lost Boulevard as collateral. And now I knew that both Fred Beller and Arthur Wien had known Alice and loved her. It was a tantalizing triangle, the young man with the wounded psyche and the confident, possibly even arrogant man with great optimism, great drive, and I thought, probably great sex appeal. I would have liked to see what Alice looked like all those years ago. Her face had aged and softened; there were light wrinkles where smile lines had once been, but she was a good-looking woman now and she must have been very beautiful when those two young men wanted to claim her for their own.
I claimed my little son when I got to Elsie’s, arriving as he was waking, warm with red cheeks and a few sleepy tears. Elsie had her usual treat for Eddie, milk and an incredible cookie. Eddie is truly blessed where cookies are concerned. Both Elsie and Mel see to it that he gets the best, and I occasionally manage to benefit from their generosity as well.
When Eddie and I got home, we walked a little, stopping to talk to neighbors. Then we sat behind the house while Eddie played in his sandbox with occasional assistance from me.
I had The Lost Boulevard on my lap and was determined to get to the end of it as soon as I could. Unless something had happened quite early in the relationships of these men, I didn’t expect to find a clue in the book to who had killed Arthur Wien. But I wanted to see how he painted his friends and his friends’ wives, whether I could detect the scent of a deadly sin in his prose, some envy, anger over an old hurt, somebody’s lust. There was plenty of lust, but it never seemed to interfere with the men’s relationships with each other. These were people who got along with each other, who supported each other.
The theme of convincing his parents to move out of their old apartment ran through the book like a drop of water making its way across a sloped plane. The Arthur Wien character seemed to sense that the old neighborhood would decline before his parents would. What he wanted was not so much that they leave the Bronx but that they find an apartment on the Grand Concourse. There the buildings were more refined, the men went to better paying jobs, the women dressed better, the children went to expensive colleges, colleges with reputations that extended beyond the five boroughs and the Hudson River.
But his father felt he would get less for the rent he would pay and his mother said it would be a longer walk to the stores she shopped at. They liked where they were.
For the Wien character the Concourse was a dream. It had elegance and class, neither of which was apparent in his neighborhood. But for himself, the Village became
the center of his life. He made friends with poets and writers who lived there or who, like him, spent their time there. He met girls who admired him and who, eventually, had sexual relationships with him although finding a place was always a problem. He lived at home, and most of the girls that he met also lived at home, although occasionally one lived in a dormitory at Barnard or New York University. They became adept at finding people who were going away, friends with an extra room they would not need till after midnight, at which time they would drag themselves out of bed and sleepily find the nearest subway. He would take her home and then work his way over to a D train stop and go home himself.
I had the sense that everyone lived in a permanent state of exhaustion. As a person who throughout her twenties got up daily at five in the morning, I could not imagine surviving the kind of affairs Arthur Wien described. But his character thrived on that life, even did well in school, got raises at work, and seemed to hold together in his personal life.
I became aware, as I was reading, that Eddie was crying. He had gotten tangled in a toy and I went over to extricate him and sit on the grass beside the sandbox and help him play. I had made a good dent in the book, but besides enjoying it, I had learned nothing that would lead to Arthur Wien’s murderer. I wondered if it was worthwhile sitting in Alice’s apartment and turning the pages of the original to see if something had been excised that might be telling. But before I did anything else, I thought it was time to call Dr. Horowitz and confront him with what I knew about Fred Beller.
* * *
When Eddie was down for the night, I called Morton Horowitz. He must have known when he came to the phone what my first question would be because he preempted it.
“I understand you’ve met with Fred Beller,” he said.
“I had lunch with him and his wife on Saturday. From what he said, I gather you saw him last week.”
“I did. We all got together. I know you think I should have mentioned it to you when we spoke the other day.”
“Is there a reason why you didn’t?”
“It didn’t seem relevant.”
“Dr. Horowitz, the Bellers were at the same restaurant that your group was at on Father’s Day.”
There was a silence. As his friends had been shocked to hear that Fred had been in town, he was shocked to find out Fred had been at the restaurant.
“He was there at the same time that we were?” he asked.
“Approximately. I’ve confirmed it with the restaurant. He used his credit card to pay for his dinner.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well.” I started feeling guilty about confronting him with this information. “That’s one of the surprises I’ve had since we’ve spoken. I’ve seen all the men now except Mr. Reskin. He hasn’t been home when I called. I hope to reach him tonight.”
“He’ll be there eventually. Chris, about Fred Beller, if he used his credit card at the restaurant, that would tend to clear him if you were thinking he might have killed Artie.”
“That’s true, but it took a lot of digging to find out he was even there. He used another name to make the reservation. I only found out because his wife gave me a picture of the two of them and I was so surprised they were in town that I went back to the restaurant this morning and made them check.”
“I can’t fault you. It sounds like you’re doing a very thorough job. Have you learned anything else?”
“Nothing that points me toward a killer. All the men have been very cooperative except Dr. Greene. When I called, he refused to talk to me, but I went to his lab this morning and he came down and was very pleasant once we got together. He told me he’d lent money to Arthur Wien a long time ago.”
“I believe it. Ernie’s very generous.”
“He also said many of the men in your group lent money to Mr. Wien, but no one else has admitted it.”
“Maybe because they felt it wasn’t significant. I once gave him fifty dollars and I don’t think he ever repaid me, but until this moment, I haven’t thought about it for years. People forget these things. They don’t kill over them.”
“What do they kill over?” I asked.
“I wish I knew.”
“Someone told me Arthur Wien had had an affair with the wife of someone in your group. Do you have any idea who that might be?”
“With one of our wives? I don’t think so. Artie liked them young.”
That was what Mrs. Wien had said. “I talked to Alice Wien this afternoon.”
“I hope you’re not going to tell me she was at the restaurant too,” he said lightly.
“I didn’t ask. She told me she had dated Fred Beller before she met Arthur Wien.”
“Well, that was a famous switcheroo, I can tell you, one of those unlikely crossings of paths. It happens. Fred was very unhappy at the time, but he met Marge and Marge was the right woman for him. They’ve been married for over forty years.”
Too long to carry a grudge, I thought. “Well, I’m going to talk to Mr. Reskin as soon as I can arrange it, and I may look at the original manuscript of The Lost Boulevard. Alice Wien has it, and she’ll let me see it if I read it in her apartment.”
“Alice has it,” he said with surprise. “Interesting. He dedicated it to her, you know.”
“It was very important to her. She requested it as part of the divorce settlement.”
“I don’t blame her. It’s probably worth a fortune.”
“Dr. Horowitz, I’m having a difficult time finding a motive for this murder. Everyone says nice things about Arthur Wien, but underneath the surface I find that he cheated his friends and his wife. It sounds to me as though he made a practice of borrowing money and not returning it. He was unfaithful to Alice. He met Alice when she was practically engaged to Fred Beller and he destroyed that relationship. And there’s a possibility that he had an affair with the wife of one of the men in the group.”
“Chris, you’re painting a very dark picture of a man who wasn’t as bad as you make him seem. Half the people I know met their wives or girlfriends when they were going out with other men. That’s not a calamity; it’s life. So he borrowed money and forgot to return it. Forty years later you don’t kill over fifty dollars. There has to be something else and it has to involve someone outside the group.”
“I’m still looking,” I said.
I didn’t feel very satisfied after talking to him. I had made a report, which I felt was due at this time, but I was left with the sense that everyone I had spoken to, with the possible exception of Alice Wien, had been holding back. Was a man who lent the victim fifty dollars forty years ago afraid the finger of justice would point at him if he admitted the loan? I had asked all of them or nearly all of them whether some event had happened when they were young, something they would all want covered up, and all of them had assured me there was nothing. In fact, as I thought about it, sitting in the family room with my notes and my recollections, even Alice Wien had said such a thing was not possible, although she would know only from hearsay if she met her husband while in college.
I went back to the kitchen and dialed the number for Bernie Reskin. This time a woman answered on the second ring.
“You must be Chris,” she said when I started to explain why I was calling.
“That’s right, Chris Bennett.”
“Mort said you’d be calling. We’ve been out a lot the last few days. When would you like to talk to us?” She sounded almost eager.
“Anytime starting tomorrow. Whatever’s convenient for you.”
“Let me check with Bernie.”
The conversation with her husband took only a minute and then she was back. “Bernie gets home at one tomorrow. Anytime after that.”
I asked if after dinner would be all right. Then Jack would be home to baby-sit. She said it was fine.
I wrote down her directions and hung up. If the Reskins didn’t come up with something new, I wasn’t sure what my next step would be. Everyone wanted the killer to be someone
outside the group, but I didn’t see how that was possible. I wondered if the police, when they responded to the call on Father’s Day, had questioned everyone in the restaurant. I wondered, too, whether Fred Beller had been there when the murder occurred. He had had a fairly early dinner reservation. How many hours could two people sit at a table after they had finished eating? For a moment I thought that might clear him. The party in the back had lasted hours but Fred Beller had arrived at six-thirty. Even with lingering over dessert and an after-dinner drink, they should have been ready to leave by nine.
I thought about it. Say he gave them his credit card, signed the receipt, and disappeared into the men’s room while his wife went outside. That would make her an accomplice. He could have waited in a stall with the door locked till Arthur Wien came in. Not that it was a sure thing that Wien would visit the men’s room, but it was a pretty good bet. If Fred were waiting in the first stall, he could see through the crack who was there. He could have come out, plunged the ice pick into Arthur Wien’s heart, and walked out of the men’s room and on out of the restaurant to join his wife, who would, of course, swear they had left together much earlier if she were asked, which was unlikely.
But I needed a motive, and if Fred had killed his old friend and had had the cooperation of his wife, the motive could not have been that Arthur Wien broke up an almost engagement to another woman forty years ago.
I knew I would have to call Fred Beller at home in Minnesota before I was done, and I didn’t look forward to it. I now knew something he had gone to some lengths to keep secret, and even if I didn’t threaten to tell the police, he was smart enough to know the threat existed.