Why was I overjoyed? “It’s all right.”
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw you ride up with that jerk. I felt like I’d lost my last friend.”
“Well— you haven’t.”
He sat on the foot of my bed. “Where did you go with him, anyway?”
“Out for a mad spin. You don’t have to wonder if I’ll ever do it again. He drives like a lunatic.” I considered, then went on, “He doesn’t want Vivien to do the book.”
Ross raised his eyebrows. “That’s the first time he and I ever agreed on anything.”
“He’s really against it. Says it isn’t good for Vivien.” The bribe offer, I decided, had to remain secret.
“I’m surprised he could stop thinking about himself long enough to realize that.”
“I’m not sure he has stopped thinking about himself.”
He looked at me speculatively. “Which means—”
“I don’t know.” I slid the clips back in their envelope. “Could he have a reason of his own to want the project stopped?”
He shrugged. “I guess he could. I have no idea what it would be.”
He reclined on his elbow, watching me arrange the materials on my table— the clipping file on top of the yellow pads, interview tapes stacked neatly in their plastic boxes next to the tape recorder, typewriter in the exact center with a stack of typing paper to one side, pencils lined up like yellow logs. The pencils were all sharp. “Work has ground to a halt, anyway,” I said.
The troubadour warbled the tribulations of love. Ross said, “It did something to me when I saw you hanging on to him like that. I felt it in my gut.”
“It was only a motorcycle ride, Ross.”
He shook his head. “I know it was innocent. I have no right to feel anything anyway. I felt it before I could think.”
I took a deep breath. “Let me tell you something. I won’t be a pawn in whatever game you’re playing with— or against— Vivien. I deserve better than that.”
He winced. “Yes, you do.”
“I wish I could help you,” I said. “I wish I could— save you.”
“And I wish I had more to offer.” His voice was all but drowned in the music.
I wanted him to go. Men, no more nor less than my fair share, have languished for me now and then, and it engenders soft-headedness in me. If he didn’t take off, I was likely to be over there cradling his head on my shoulder, telling him in soft whispers how he would certainly get over my rejection, given six months or a year. And then—
He sat up. “I’m sorry. I feel like an ass.”
“No—”
“Yes.” He got up and crossed the room to rest his hands on my shoulders. My face tilted toward his in a posture not exactly indicating rebuff. He kissed me, as I was pained to realize I’d anticipated, and even hoped. Then he went away, and I was left alone.
PICNIC
I didn’t have long to brood about my star-crossed flirtation, because in less than ten minutes there was another knock on my door. Since the music had ceased shortly before, this one was clearly audible.
It was Blanche. Dressed in jeans, sandals, and a loose beige cotton sweater, she was carrying her Book of Betrayal notebook hugged to her bosom, the way we used to carry books in junior high school to conceal our budding breasts. After greeting me with a diffident, “Hi,” she seemed at a loss.
I rushed to take up the slack. I didn’t want her to regret seeking me out. “Blanche! I was about to come see you. How are you?”
She answered, “OK,” to my barrage of cordiality. I had the feeling she had come for a reason, but at this rate it would take her hours to divulge it.
“How’s your writing going?” I continued with manic enthusiasm.
“All right.” She looked down at the notebook and riffled the pages with her thumb.
I stopped talking to give her a chance to get a word in. When she didn’t take it, I said, “What can I do for you?”
“Oh— nothing.”
We were getting nowhere. I said, “Listen. Want to go for a walk? We could take a picnic lunch.”
She looked uncertain. I urged, “Come on. It’s a pretty day. Don’t you want to get out?”
“I guess so.” A halfhearted assent, but an assent.
Soon we were on the road, Blanche still clutching her notebook while I carried a plastic bag containing paté de campagne, bread, cornichons, cherries, apricots, and a half-liter of Badoit mineral water. We walked down through the woods toward Beaulieu-la-Fontaine. The sun was baking hot. I sensed Blanche relaxing under the influence of those perennial tonics, fresh air and exercise. When we’d gone far enough to be out of breath, we settled under a tree at the edge of a poppy-strewn field to eat lunch.
As we set out the food on a big flowered napkin, Alexander zoomed by on his motorcycle, going toward the village. If he noticed us, he gave no indication. His bike had been parked in front of the Auberge de Ventoux yesterday, and I wondered if he was going there again. Blanche watched him pass without expression. “There goes Alex,” she said when he had disappeared.
I unwrapped the paté. “He took me for a ride this morning,” I said.
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I saw you from my window.”
Was that why she’d come to my room? “He’s very reckless,” I said.
“He always has been. Nothing scares him.” She smoothed a wrinkle from the edge of the spread-out napkin. “Everything scares me.”
A breeze played over us, lifting the limp hair from her forehead, setting the poppies nodding on their slender stems. “Surely you’re brave about something,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m not.”
I pointed to the notebook lying beside her. “Writing a dialogue in blank verse is courageous.”
She smiled faintly and shook her head again.
We ate, pulling bites of bread from the slender loaf and topping them with paté. Afterward, my stomach full, I was drowsy. My sleep hadn’t been tranquil lately. I settled myself against the tree. “Alexander doesn’t want Vivien to write the book. He’s trying to talk her out of it,” I said.
Blanche, sitting cross-legged in the grass, picked up a cherry and cradled it in the palm of her hand, studying it. “Really?”
“So he told me. I wonder why.”
“He didn’t say why?”
“He said it wasn’t good for Vivien.”
She half-smiled and put the cherry in her mouth. When she’d spit out the stone she said, “What does Alex care about it? He wasn’t even there.”
I was too tired to shrug. Blanche stared out over the field. “He’s lucky, too. Brave and lucky,” she said bitterly.
“Lucky because he wasn’t there?”
“Yes.” The word was clipped.
“It must have been awful.” I was trolling for information, a journalist’s habit. Vivien hadn’t wanted me to interview Blanche, but this wasn’t exactly an interview. No tape recorders were running. And surely it was up to Blanche to say what she pleased.
“It was awful.” Her eyes were unfocused. “They thought maybe I did it,” she said suddenly.
“Who did?”
“The police. I went to the movies that night. They questioned the woman at the box office, to see if she recognized my picture and could say if I’d really been there. They asked the counter man at the coffee shop, too.”
“What movie did you see?” I asked to keep her talking.
“I went to a Marx Brothers double feature at an art house downtown. A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.”
“Funny movies.”
“Yeah. I’d seen them before. I never want to see them again.”
If she’d seen them before, she would know the plots whether she’d been at the theater that evening or not. “Did the woman at the box office recognize you?”
“No. The weather was terribly cold. I had a hat on, and a scarf wound around my face.”
“Not r
eally a good night to go out.”
“No. I didn’t want to go, but my mother insisted.”
She looked petulant, as if still upset about being sent out in the cold. For my part, my eyelids no longer felt heavy. Was Blanche telling me Vivien had deliberately gotten her out of the way that evening? “She insisted?”
Blanche had drawn her knees up. She bent and rested her cheek against them, and I couldn’t see her face very well. “She didn’t know the weather was going to be so bad,” she said, her voice low.
“No, but—”
“She said she’d give me the money to take a friend to dinner and the movies that night. I called a couple of people, but nobody could go. I told my mother I couldn’t get anybody, and I wanted to stay home, but she told me to go anyway.”
The story had a rote quality. I was sure she had recounted it to the police in exactly those words. Yet, wasn’t it damaging to Vivien? Had Vivien sent Blanche to the movies so she’d have a clear opportunity to kill Carey? “Why did she want you to go, Blanche?”
Blanche hugged her knees tighter. “She was going to talk with Carey one more time. About letting me go to the program in Avignon. She knew they’d argue, and she didn’t want me to be there.”
Which made sense, whether true or not. “So you went to the movies,” I prompted.
“Yes. I was— really tense, and I didn’t want much to eat. I went to a greasy spoon coffee shop near the theater and had a horrible tuna sandwich. The counter man remembered me. While I was eating, the snow started. By the time the movie was over, it was coming down hard, and naturally there weren’t any taxis. I walked for a long time before I found a cab. I got home just as the police arrived.”
The story still sounded singsong, automatic. Maybe telling it without expression kept her from feeling what she’d felt then. She went on, “I saw Carey’s body. Pedro was crying.”
“How horrible, Blanche.”
“Oh, it was. Pedro was crying, but I didn’t cry. I wasn’t going to pretend I was sorry.”
She was perfectly calm, so I felt I could ask, “What do you think happened?”
She raised her head then, and eyed me gravely. “I don’t know.”
“But you must—”
“I don’t like to talk about it,” she said with finality.
We gathered the remains of our picnic and walked back to Mas Rose through the heat of the afternoon. We hadn’t seen Alexander again, and his motorcycle wasn’t there. As we were crossing the yard, Blanche stopped. Abruptly, she thrust The Book of Betrayal into my hands. “Here it is, if you really want to read it,” she said in a rush.
“I’d be delighted—” I began, but she had rushed into the house.
VIVIEN’S STORY
Touched by Blanche’s gesture, I took The Book of Betrayal to my room, intending to read it immediately. My plan was derailed, however, by a note written on a pale yellow Post-It stuck to my door. It read, “See me when you get back if you’d like to work this afternoon.” The signature was an arrow-like “V.”
I was taken aback. I had assumed Pedro’s death and Alexander’s arrival would initiate a round of delays. Instead, while Blanche and I were picnicking, Vivien was here raring to go. I felt as if I’d been caught playing hooky.
“Where were you?” Vivien asked suspiciously when I’d gathered my materials and gone to join her.
“I took a walk,” I answered, adding “with Blanche,” reluctantly.
“I see.” What she saw didn’t lead to more questions. If her morning meeting with Constable Reynaud had been an ordeal, she’d bounced back. She looked fresh and cool in a loose shirt and pants, her hair clipped in a ponytail, her lipstick vivid red to match her toenails. We went down and settled ourselves at the outside table. The door to the shed, Ross’s “workroom,” was ajar, and I heard an occasional movement inside.
When I was set up with a fresh tape in the recorder and a clean legal pad in front of me, she said, “What should I talk about?”
Blanche’s story was still fresh in my mind. “Why don’t you tell me about the night of Carey’s murder?” In half-apology I added, “We have to talk about it sometime.”
The suggestion didn’t seem to discompose her. She said, “All right,” calmly. She leaned forward, hands clasped on the table in front of her, like a student about to deliver a prepared recitation.
I pushed the “record” button. When she didn’t start talking, I said, “You can go ahead.”
Her lips were parted. I saw her swallow. She didn’t say anything.
I said, “Is something wrong?”
She shook her head and put her hands to her temples. “I— blanked. You’d better ask me a question to get me started.”
“All right.” The color had drained from her face, and her lipstick now had a purplish cast. “What did you and Carey quarrel about the night he died?”
“Blanche.” The word was creaky, but she got it out, and she picked up steam as she went along. “I’d decided to have one more discussion about his paying for the program in Avignon. I’d pulled together what I thought were rational arguments. I had a plan worked out for repaying him. Our conversation was going to be tremendously civilized.”
I said, “But in the end, it wasn’t.”
She shook her head. “He got very abusive.” She glanced toward the shed and lowered her voice. “He said if I wanted to sleep with a second-rate artist, I’d have to lead a second-rate life. He said why should he help Blanche when she was a whore’s daughter and would probably end up as a whore herself.”
Carey sounded like a nice fellow. “And you said—”
“Oh, I didn’t keep my head at all. I was screaming at him. It was a lovely scene. Pedro heard us all the way back in his apartment.”
“But he didn’t hear anything later, when Carey was killed.”
“Later, he was watching television.” She ran her fingers over the table’s rough surface. “I slammed out of the apartment. The temperature was in the teens, and it had started to snow. I was crying. The tears gushed out of my eyes and felt like ice on my cheeks a minute later. I walked over to Central Park and walked around in the wretched cold, and when I had a better grip on myself I found a phone booth and called Ross.”
She stopped. “And Ross said?” I prodded.
She licked her lips. “He told me to come to his place. I said I would. After I hung up, I realized I’d left my handbag at the apartment. I only had my keys in my coat pocket. I didn’t have enough money to pay for a taxi, provided I could’ve found one.”
I heard the motorcycle. Alexander rode through the gate and pulled up next to the shed. His eyes flickered over the recorder and note pads. He waved and walked toward the house. Vivien watched him until he went inside.
“So you returned to the apartment,” I said.
She nodded slowly— reluctant, I thought, to enter that world again. “Just for a minute, to get my bag. But while I was out, one of the tenants had collapsed in front of the building. There was a lot of commotion. The doorman didn’t see me go in, but I passed a neighbor in the hall. That’s when I’m supposed to have— done it. I can’t prove I only stayed a minute. Nobody saw me leave.”
“Did Pedro hear you?”
“No. He was watching television.”
“What about Carey?”
“I don’t know. The last thing I wanted was to see him. I raced in, grabbed my bag from the hall table, and raced out. And the thing is”— she rubbed at the frown-creases between her eyes — “I guess I didn’t double-lock the door.”
“You mean it was unlocked?”
“It was locked, but the deadbolt wasn’t on. When Pedro found Carey’s body, it was standing open.”
So, as Pedro had suggested, someone could have broken in without much trouble. Broken in, beaten Carey to death, and departed, taking the murder weapon but stealing nothing. Not a likely story.
Vivien was looking peaked. Her self-possession was wearing thin, I thought. I wanted h
er to finish before she decided to quit and take to her bed. “What did you do next?”
“There was a lot of turmoil in front of the building, so I walked along Park trying to find a taxi. Ross was living in a loft down on Broome Street. I couldn’t find a cab, so I broke down and did what I’d promised myself I’d never do again— I took the subway.” She hiccuped a laugh. “Since I’d married Carey, I hadn’t taken the subway once. But it’s something that comes back to you.”
Without warning, her eyes were brimming. “Nobody saw you go in Ross’s apartment?” I pressed, wanting to get it over with.
She shook her head. “I had— a key.” She drew a shuddering breath and continued, “I stayed all evening. Got a gypsy cab home. Illegal. The driver never— came forward. When I got there, I was afraid to say where I’d been.” She bent low over the table and rested her face on her clasped hands.
I shivered. The dark, freezing New York night, the icy pavements and blowing snow, seemed like an alien nightmare world here in this fragrant, blossoming land. Yet the hurts inflicted then continued to cut and blight, even here.
I heard running feet and looked up to see Alexander coming toward us. He must’ve been watching from the kitchen. Obviously in a fury, he bore down on me and grabbed my shoulder. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “I told you, didn’t I?”
Vivien began to sob. Alexander shook me, and my head danced around as he said, “Is this what you like to do? Torture people?”
The door of the shed slammed open, and Ross erupted from it. “Leave her alone!” he yelled, shoving Alexander away from me.
Alexander squared off and said, “I don’t need a failed so-called artist to tell me what to do.”
“You worthless, freeloading punk!” Ross’s face was blazing.
“Freeloading? Where would you be if Vivi hadn’t—”
“Stop it!” Vivien shrieked. She got to her feet, wiping at her tears with her fingers. Across the yard, I could see Marcelle looking anxiously out the kitchen door.
Vivien said, “You’re fools. Both of you.” Bent as if in pain, she walked toward the house.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 33