Like Bigelow, Corbin thought darkly, and what Bigelow had done to him.
“Okay, so I've been a high-class London whore. What are your black secrets?”
”I didn't say high class. That's your story.”
“Don't be a smart-ass.” She took his drink. “While I'm refilling this you can prepare to make a full confession and it better be juicy.”
Corbin watched her leave the room by the door where Laura Hemmings had stood. And hugged Margaret. And was her friend. But was ruining everything. What was it about Laura Hemmings? High-class whore. Those words popped into Corbin’s mind when he thought about Aunt Laura, but that was impossible. Out of the question. She was so small and dainty. And nice. She would sit on this floor rolling a rubber ball to him, a white one with red stars, or she would crawl after him, making buzzing sounds like a bee, and try to sting him on his leg with her finger, or she would sit him on her lap at her piano and help him pick out tunes. No, Aunt Laura could never have been a whore. But she must have known about Margaret because she was trying to protect her. From what, though? Exposure, maybe, or the fear of it. Yet Margaret had been happily out in public with Tilden all that spring and summer. What happened?
More names.
Gould.
Colonel Mann and his scandal sheet. Carling. The cop, Clubber Williams. And Bigelow. Always Bigelow. A name that has nothing to do with any of this.
Wait a minute. Except for Bigelow, these people were the reason for Margaret's new name in the first place. They wouldn't just have gone away. But as many as three years must have gone by since those items first began turning up in Town Topics. Corbin knew that because he had a clear memory of himself, out on the front lawn, trying to swing a cut-down bat at that same white rubber ball. There's Tilden, lobbing it. He's wearing a striped shirt, no collar, and an open vest. See? I've got to be at least two in that scene, but much younger when I'm looking up at Aunt Laura. All these scenes, all these names, keep jumping around.
Sequence.
Maybe the problem is sequence.
You try to see things out of order and they get all messed up. They come in disconnected flashes. Random sparks, Sturdevant says, from genetic imprints. Everybody gets them. But they come so out of context that almost everybody brushes them off and decides they don't mean anything.
Go back. Pick up with Colonel Mann. Or with Jay Gould. Tilden wouldn't just have let that lie. Gould wouldn't have, either.
Sequence. Try Mann first.
Corbin closed his eyes and called up the Santa Claus face of William D' Alton Mann as he'd seen it that day in the publisher's hack. It came, but it would not focus. Just bits and pieces. Words and facial expressions. Corbin tried to concentrate harder, but a part of him became impatient with the effort and said it didn't matter. The colonel was a minor player. Gould, then. Try Jay Gould. Corbin erased the scene in the hack and replaced it with the melancholy face of Mephistopheles. That's what they called him—the Mephistopheles of Wall Street. And he heard Gould's high-pitched voice ... Hold it. Gould didn't have a high voice. It was low and soft, very measured, because if he took in too much air he'd risk a coughing fit. The high voice sounded more like Teddy. Teddy Roosevelt. Corbin wiped Gould aside to look for Teddy's face, but all he could see was a door with smoked glass. The voice seemed to be behind it, shouting, not angry but shouting. Don't waste time trying to make sense of this. Teddy's always shouting about something. It seems like his normal voice some days.
Talk about fragments!
Let's try this one more time; he decided. Chronologically.
What do we know?
We know that Tilden went to see Colonel Mann. We know that Mann would not agree to lay off in return for a mere lifetime subscription because it was Jay Gould's wish that the heat be kept on. Mann was very open about that. But a dollar was a dollar, and he did sell Tilden that information about Carting. What would Tilden have done with it? Wouldn't he have gone to Gould to make some kind of a deal? If Gould stayed out of his personal life, Tilden would not reveal what he knew about Carting. Gould just might have folded, at least until he had some new cards. The last thing Gould needed, as Mann pointed out, was for his business enemies to know he'd been plucked. That he'd hired a total fraud, a confidence man, a convict. Worse, he'd hired a Jew who had denied his Jewishness, just as Gould was suspected of adding an extra vowel to his name in order to grease his way into the Protestant business community.
Yes indeed. His enemies would have a grand time with this Carling affair. They'd have him in the laughing stock. A few would start getting bold ideas. They'd start trotting a little closer to him like one of those coyote-dogs Teddy wrote about in The Hunting Trail who amble alongside a sick buffalo for a while, taking its measure and then testing it with a nip at its hindquarters to see whether it could run and did it have a fighting heart.
The Hunting Trail?
Don't stop. Don't ask. It's Teddy's book. It came out the year it snowed and you know that so don't worry about how. And there was a party at Delmonico's to celebrate its publication and you should have gone but you didn't because you knew he would have heard these whispers about your “soiled dove” and you didn't know what you'd say to this good and moral man if he asked you outright about Margaret and God forbid that he, not knowing the depth of your feelings for her, would characterize her with words that could not be forgiven.
Have him read the inscription.
The shouted words came from the outer office, from beyond the smoked glass of Tilden's office door.
Have him read it aloud.
Tilden winced at the shrill nasal voice that put him in mind of a dentist's drill fast pedaled.
Have him read, ‘For my great and good though absent friend, Tilden,' but let him know that it is a singularly insincere sentiment motivated solely by past affections and that I can no longer regard him as such because of his shocking abandonment of me.”
The door opened following a timid knock. Tilden's head clerk, a Mr. Levi Scoggins, stepped through it bearing a volume held open in his hands.
“Sir, I'm afraid it is...I mean, I am to tell you ...”
“It's all right, Mr. Scoggins.” Tilden smiled. ”I heard.”
“This is terribly embarrassing, sir. I had no notion that he'd begin carrying on so.”
Tilden stood at his desk and took the autographed book from Levi Scoggins.
“Ask Mr. Roosevelt, please, if I dare ask him into my office without first calling the riot police to stand by.”
“Lord, where have you been?” Sturdevant heard Cora Starling's agitated voice through the pay telephone at the Greenwich Library. “You said you'd call in regular.”
Harry Sturdevant checked his watch. It was barely past noon, not as if he'd been out all night. “Sorry,” he said. ”I lost track of the hour. I'm doing some research in the library up here.”
“Well listen, Dr. S, I don't think the three of you is all there is up there. I think you been followed.”
Sturdevant chewed his lip. “Have there been more mystery phone calls?”
“It's not the calls now. It's people. There's a man, maybe two of them, who followed you when you drove off out of here.”
“You're certain, Cora?”
”I can just tell you how it looked. You remember you went by a beat-up car double-parked across the street? Well, there was this white man in it and he was blockin' in another white man in a blue car. I wasn't watching them real close but all of a sudden the double-parked man starts screamin' at the other like a maniac, and the man in the blue car starts handin' stuff through his window like he was bein' robbed and one of the first things he hands through looked to me like a sawed-off shotgun. I been half out of my mind not knowin' whether to call the police.”
“It's just as well you didn't, Cora.” It's also possible you've been watching too much television. “You said you thought we were followed?”
“The first man, the double-parked one, he took right off after you went
by. The second man, he messed around under his dashboard for maybe five minutes, but then he took off too, lookin' real mad.”
“That one couldn't very well have followed us, Cora. What did the first one look like?”
“‘You know some of them old football players who come over here, they're not fat exactly but they have to go sideways through a door? The first one was like that. And mean lookin'. ”
“Thank you, Cora. I'll keep an eye open.” But Sturde-vant had an idea he'd already met the man with the mean face.
“When are you coming back, Dr. S?”
”I imagine I'll have dinner here with Gwen and Jonathan and then drive home after that. I'll call you if there's a change.”
“You call me change or no, Dr. S,” Cora Starling insisted. ”I don't have a real good feelin' about today. Is Mr. Corbin still getting 'his stirrin's?”
”I think so, yes.”
“Well, when he gets them, you listen. Don't go thinkin' what I said was just granny talk.”
”I won't, Cora.”
I promise you.
Sturdevant gathered up his papers, his mind now on the thickset man with the mean face but friendly manner who knew so much about Greenwich. The man he said would make a good detective. The man who was probably going through his notebook while he was away from the viewing machine.
As he walked toward his car, Sturdevant carefully noted the other automobiles parked both in the library lot and on the nearby streets. He saw nothing that resembled the double-parked car he recalled from that morning. He did notice, however, that the morning's brightness had gone. A dark gray quilt of clouds had been drawn over Greenwich; only a narrow band of blue remained far to the east. Sturdevant smelled snow in the air.
Lesko did not have a good feeling about entering that house. Not alone. All the time he was a New York gold shield he always had a back-up. He'd never even been in a house like this except for once when this Wall Street big shot who was a closet fag killed a male prostitute who was putting the arm on him. And Lesko had blown that one, he knew. Big shot, big house, a shitload of money, and he hangs around with senators. You get intimidated. You get polite. And by the time you tell yourself you got to lean on the guy, he's got six lawyers around him. The papers say rich guys get away with murder because they can hire all those lawyers. That's not why. It's polite cops. How can you expect a cop whose idea of luxury is a rinkside ticket to the Islanders games and sneaking in a six-pack of imported beer to treat a guy whose house looks like an art museum the same as he'd treat some pimp who sliced up one of his whores. Polite cops, polite assistant district attorneys. Cops shouldn't have to come to houses like this. Crimes in houses like this are for Nick and Nora Charles.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Lesko looked up and saw Dancer at the window, hitting it with his ring, motioning impatiently toward the front door. He relaxed a bit. Politeness wasn't going to be a problem with Dancer.
‘‘We don't have all day, Mr. Lesko.” Dancer had opened one of the white double doors and stood waiting. Lesko, with Tom Burke's trench coat draped over one arm, climbed the portico steps and entered.
“You can leave your coat on that chair”—Dancer pointed—“and any weapons you're carrying as well.”
“Behave yourself, Dancer.” Lesko looked past him. “Where's your boss?”
“Leave your weapon or get out.” Dancer folded his arms and stepped into Lesko's path.
Lesko leaned over and kissed his forehead. Dancer leaped back, sputtering. An open right hand raised to shoulder height and for a moment Lesko thought he was actually going to get slapped.
“For heaven's sake,” came the woman's voice, “bring that man in here.”
“I'll keep the coat.” Lesko winked. “Thanks anyway.” He smoothed it over his left hand and over the Beretta model 92 he held in its folds. Lesko stepped past toward the sound of the voice.
“Some sherry, Mr. Lesko?” She was seated behind a desk, her hands in her lap. Dancer followed and remained standing to one side, his arms folded.
“Nothing for me, thanks.”
“I'd offer you some coffee but I'm afraid there's no one here to serve it.”
Lesko made a face. “I'm supposed to think the three of us are alone in this big house?”
She read his eyes. “My brother is here but he's quite indisposed. He is asleep in another part of the house. There will be no servants until late afternoon.”
Not bad, Lesko thought. She's quick. If I knew Dancer was here, I knew who he came with. Lesko looked past her, down the hill toward the gate and then at the area surrounding the window for some evidence of a switch that might have opened it. There was nothing. The question became, If he was standing down at the gate looking up at the old dame and Dancer standing in this window looking back at him, who opened the gate?
“You're full of shit, lady.” Lesko showed the Beretta. Politeness. Politeness can kill you.
“But where,” Roosevelt bellowed, “was Tilden?”
Arms flailing the air, he paced the oriental carpet in front of Tilden's desk. Tilden could only sit in helpless silence. Teddy, he fully realized, was intent upon a monologue performance. To offer an excuse or apology before its crescendo was reached would verge on rudeness.
“There I was”—he pointed stiff-armed in the general direction of Delmonico's—“dutifully ensconced behind a great mound of books—would that I might sell as many as were given away that evening—enduring the literary pretensions of the following.” An index finger shot up, trembling. “First there was the Tammany crowd, for whom cuspidors were invented and who to a man have not cracked a book since McGuffey's Reader, if then, and certainly not the Constitution of the United States, telling me how breathlessly eager they are to devour my book, and one of whom, God as my witness, actually saying that he's 'hoid of dis Hunting Trail` and thinks his wife has a cousin who lives there.” A second finger joined the other. “Next we have the fur-draped dowagers who are stunned to learn that animals actually suffer death in the process of making a coat and that they do not, like New York's poor, merely pawn their pelts every spring.” A third finger snapped into place. “Next we have my editor, a worthy who without consulting the author changed ‘leg of venison to limb of venison, so as not to offend the sensibilities of refined lady venison, and who hovered at my elbow suggesting appropriate flyleaf sentiments until I stabbed him in the hand with my pen. Which, of course, was entirely Tilden Beckwith's fault.”
Roosevelt paused but Tilden chose not to rise to the bait. He would only hear that he, not the editor, should have been at Teddy's side and that he, by his absence, was responsible for the editor's impalement.
“Sam Clemens!” Teddy tried another hand, another finger. “Samuel Clemens had the grace to drop in and wish my humble effort well. As did Henry James and Ida Tarbell and little Nelly Bly who, by the way, inquired after a friend of yours.’’
A second pause. A second lure left untaken.
“But no Tilden Beckwith.” Roosevelt pounded a fist into his palm. “The loss, however, was his own. For if he'd been there he would have seen Maurice Barrymore reciting Hamlet while attempting, on a wager, to juggle four live lobsters. He would have heard his friend Nat Goodwin cornering the aforementioned dowagers and regaling them with the proper technique of disemboweling a jackrabbit, and our friend John Flood who tried for the knockout punch with tales of biting the heads off chickens as a lad in County Sligo.”
“Ireland?” Tilden could not help himself. “John was born right here.”
”A detail of no consequence to a lady sliding down the wall in an attack of the vapors.*’ Roosevelt's face softened just a fraction. ”I missed you, Tilden.”
”I am sorry, Teddy.” Tilden rose from his chair, his hand extended. “Life has been complex this past year.”
Roosevelt took the hand and held it. He looked into Tilden's eyes through his spectacles. “And the widow Corbin, is she quite the rose by whatever name that John and Nelly claim
she is?”
“John told you?”
”I threatened to go a round or two with him if he didn't.”
.“She is a very good woman, Teddy,” Tilden said solemnly. “She fills all the corners of my heart and I honor her.”
“Then may God bless you both.” He released the hand. “But may I curse you first for thinking that your friend is such a prig?”
“There were private things I could not tell you, Teddy. With what remained, I did not think I could make you understand.”
Teddy leaned closer. “May I also curse you for thinking that your friend would be your friend only as long as you thought as he did?”
“Accepted.” Tilden bowed. “And deserved.”
Roosevelt clasped his hands behind his back. “You have other friends, you know, who think differently from either of us. Have you noticed that your name is nowhere to be found in the pages of Town Topics these past weeks?”
Tilden had noticed, as much with apprehension as relief. He shook his head to show that Roosevelt's meaning eluded him.
“John Flood and Nat Goodwin are your friends,” Teddy said quietly. “And they in turn have a friend who seems to have visited Colonel Mann and told him, after clubbing his bodyguard to the ground, that the next mention of any Beckwith in his paper would be at the cost of both his eyes. I am to tell you that Billy O'Gorman sends his compliments.”
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