It's a Crime: A Novel

by Jacqueline Carey

  Virginia’s eyes were drawn to Luster. The struggle between his loyalty to his grandmother and his need to distance himself from her gullibility was terrible to see. Pat’s babble must have sent him over the edge. He carefully lowered his head into his hands as if it were precious china and then spoke to no one in particular. “She has almost nothing left,” he said slowly. “Why did she waste it on Fripp?”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Virginia tossed and turned that night. As usual, the shell of her, the outside part, the skin and muscle, was exhausted, but the inside part, her mind and nerves and will, were racing around and around on a single track. The check that Pat had given the Masseys could screw up Luster’s chance of getting a full scholarship next year at Villanova. If they’d already applied for aid, and the college found out about the check, they might be accused of fraud. But if word got out in town, there would be problems sooner than that. The daughter could come back to get some of it. She might rob or terrorize them.

  Virginia was used to not sleeping. Sometimes she thought of these nighttime hours as constituting a second, hidden life. It wasn’t the moonlight, or the shadows, that truly characterized the night. It was the fluidity. She could not always distinguish among her wakeful cogitations, the quick flashes of her dreams, and the snatches of the mysteries she read in the interstices. She was reminded of the library on the third floor—a room right out of a whodunit. She would look for the new Lydia Bunting.

  Earlier she’d had only a general impression of bookshelves. This time when she switched on the overhead lighting she felt the full force of the three walls of books. The upper shelves were accessible because of a library ladder on a hidden track. In the center of the room, wands of full-spectrum lighting were suspended above a cluster of leather club chairs and matching hassocks. The mysteries looked as if they were arranged aesthetically rather than alphabetically, with uniformly sized vintage paperbacks grouped together, as were the slim old hardbacks and the Detective Book Club threesomes.

  Virginia tried to remind herself of the financing behind this bonanza, but it was hard not to feel a mix of awe and envy.

  When she’d started to write, she’d wanted to do everything in an entirely new way. She reread Cornell Woolrich, for the horror, and Jorge Luis Borges, for the form to put it into. Her main problem, she decided, was what to do with the boilerplate of the more typical mystery. Most authors simply copied it, throwing in a few variations on their own. Others stripped it away, or ignored it, with mixed results. Virginia decided to zoom in for a close-up, and she ended up with “The Red Door,” which was almost Dadaesque in its repetition. A man sought, over and over, to get in somewhere. He never gave up, just as men never give up trying to get inside women. “The Red Door” proved to be Virginia’s entrance into the publishing world.

  Her next story, “The First Funeral,” zeroed in on the funeral of a postal clerk: The funeral was the only topic of conversation, and the motive for the murder turned out to be the funeral itself; the identity of the body was irrelevant. She also wrote about a killer’s attempts to pass a Rorschach test, a duel between expert witnesses about maggots, and the angry confession of a private eye’s “black widow” girlfriend. Virginia was elated when a small press offered her a contract for a collection. The press had previously published a book of morgue shots she actually owned, and she was happy to be associated with it.

  She received two complimentary quotes for the book jacket. One came from a hot young story writer still in rabbinical school, the other from a no-longer bestselling author whose thrillers were set in carefully researched foreign lands. He referred to her “high-voltage” suspense. The best part of the book, though, was that it looked and felt real, with pages and a spine as well as a jacket. You could grab on to it, if you suddenly felt that you were in danger of falling backward through life.

  For her next book, a novel, Virginia decided to reach deep into the innards of the boilerplate and pull it inside out so that all the flesh and blood and organs were protecting the skin. She called it Hell Is a Mystery, and the twist was that the detection itself caused the crime. The main characters were a pair of lesbian exterminators based on those who’d come to her apartment in Providence a few times. They careened through the book, laying rubber as they had in real life. But Virginia was not happy when she finished. The victims were lifeless even before they were actually killed. Her foreknowledge of their end suffused their very being. She went back to her stories and found them similarly static. When death marched in, it poisoned the past—before it happened. That was her greatest weakness as a writer, she decided. She could not grapple with death.

  “So what’s keeping you up?”

  Virginia jumped.

  Pat was at the door. “I heard someone up here and figured it was you,” she said.

  “Oh, I never sleep,” said Virginia. But she explained her misgivings over what might happen to the Masseys.

  “The things you think of,” said Pat, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “And who is this secretary of Frank’s?” asked Virginia, worried afresh. “Why did she give you their name?”

  “Well,” said Pat. “Her name is Ellen Kloda. She told me she lost most of the deposit on a cabin, so I figured I’d replace it. But she didn’t cash the check. Finally I called her and got her, unlike anyone else, and she said she couldn’t take the money until I met with some other people who needed it more.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Virginia.

  “Oh, nothing makes any sense,” said Pat, starting to examine the spines on her books.

  Virginia started to ask about the new Lydia Bunting, decided she was too tired, then rallied, and went ahead.

  “I don’t know why anyone would kill herself when there are so many murder mysteries left to read,” said Pat. “I can always read about Nurse Pomeroy, no matter what state I’m in.”

  “You can’t keep someone from killing herself by giving her mystery novels,” said Virginia dryly.

  “Why not?” said Pat. “Even if a mystery is really, really bad, I always stick it out because I want to learn who did it.” She handed over the new Lydia Bunting, which was still in hardback. It had the usual innocuous cover: a plain white background, bold lettering, a disembodied hand with a red-stained knife. Then Pat fell heavily into one of the club chairs. “Not being able to sleep isn’t so bad when you have company,” she said. But she was blinking her eyes as she spoke, as if to blink away her fatigue. “Do you have, you know, a boyfriend or anything?”

  Virginia shook her head dumbly and slumped into the chair opposite. Her current loneliness would make sense only in the grave.

  “Sometimes all you need is company,” said Pat earnestly. “It’s funny that Will is Lemuel’s son.”

  “Does he remind you of him?”

  “I never thought about it,” said Pat. “Lemuel wanted to get him away from certain ‘bad influences’ in the country. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Maybe he meant himself,” said Virginia. She thought she’d detected a desperation in Will Samuel that she sympathized with and had no desire to expose. Both of them were freeloaders, though probably not without good reason. Will’s presence made her own feel less singular. Her plight became less pitiable, somehow, if Pat had plucked her out of Maine because that was the sort of thing Pat did.

  “People like Lemuel don’t get more virtuous when they get older,” said Pat. “Just more exhausted.”

  “Not exactly ready for a roll in the hay,” said Virginia.

  “It might have killed him,” said Pat.

  “Maybe for him it would have been worth it.”

  Pat frowned, but Virginia closed her eyes. She was so tired herself that there were pictures on her inner lids, pictures of inert foliage. She felt herself floating away, and she imagined Pat floating away in tandem, each of them leading separate lives behind their eyelids.

  During Virginia’s brief romance with the Christmas tree farmer,
he told one of the telecommuters, a young man from Boston, that he knew of an old woman who had a hand-sewn baby quilt for sale cheap. Without thinking, Virginia agreed to accompany them, regretting her decision only later, in the backseat of the car. It struck her that the men might be planning to exploit the woman’s ignorance of her wares. Virginia’s apprehensions grew when the car drew up in front of a shack that smelled even from the road. The Christmas tree farmer knocked on the door, and the other two followed him straight into the tiny front room as a doughy gray-faced woman was still struggling to her feet. She sank back, panting. In here the smell was nauseating, a combination of something like burnt sugar and a deep, deep rot. Beside the old woman’s sprung armchair was a cradle empty except for a dirty, badly sewn, and irregularly shaped baby quilt. She pointed to it without speaking.

  “Beautiful,” said the Christmas tree farmer—a remark all the more astonishing because he didn’t seem to realize that it wasn’t remotely true. There were folds and bulges in the quilt where the pieces of fabric did not fit together.

  The man from Boston was overwhelmed by the scene. He wiped his face with his hands, hard. “Yes, beautiful,” he said. “My friends would appreciate it, I’m sure, but they are strict about federal guidelines. You know, they are first-time parents, very young and concerned parents. I’m not sure that this—”

  “Just throw it in the washing machine,” said the Christmas tree farmer. “It’ll be fine.” Except that the quilt couldn’t have withstood a single wash.

  The fat woman’s sunken eyes and inexpressive mouth did not change. Virginia was afraid she was mute or even averbal. At least her state of mind seemed uncomplicated by hope of any sort.

  “How much?” said the Christmas tree farmer. “Forty dollars, if I remember correctly?”

  The woman moved her head in some ill-defined way.

  “All right,” said the man from Boston, taking two twenties from his wallet with bad grace. Then he plucked the quilt from the cradle and hurried out to the car.

  “Nice to see you again,” said the Christmas tree farmer to the old woman, whose face remained inanimate.

  “I don’t get it,” he said to Virginia when he had closed the door, which was half plywood, behind them. “He didn’t have to take it if he didn’t want it.”

  Virginia said nothing. The stink had followed them to the car: It was in the baby quilt.

  Virginia kept on saying nothing. She wouldn’t have minded, really, if the Christmas tree farmer had been shaking the guy down, Robin Hood–style, but she didn’t think he had been. Or maybe not consciously? The pity and repugnance she felt for the old woman filled her with disgust. She went home and wrote a story called “The Empty Cradle” about the woman, the sale of the quilt, and a missing baby. Evil hovered, diffuse, until the end, when it was pinned down to an unholy and surprising alliance. Virginia sold the story to Black Cat magazine and never saw the Christmas tree farmer again—never spoke to him, either, except for that one late-night call.

  She could not have said exactly why. Certainly the results of the visit were, in sum, good. The man from Boston was out some cash, but he could afford it. It might even be argued that he deserved to forfeit the forty dollars because it was less than the difference between what he’d expected to pay and what he’d expected the fair market value of his purchase to be. Either way the benefit to the old woman was presumably greater than any loss he could have sustained. The Christmas tree farmer may have sensed some small problem, but he wasn’t troubled by it. You couldn’t say he tricked the man from Boston, because he had no consciousness of doing so. And Virginia had benefited the most of all, through her first sale of a story in several years. The old woman remained a cipher. It was not clear whether she understood the true value of the quilt or the degradation of her circumstances. She may have endured their scrutiny simply in order to survive. She may no longer have been able to distinguish between humiliation and fraud.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Pat and Virginia were sitting in a Teaneck bagel shop sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups when Karl Kupmann burst in. Even before he began on his excited tirade, Virginia had been overwhelmed with information and noise and choices. From a counter that stretched down the left side a handful of Hispanics dispensed two dozen different types of oddly puffy bagels and enough other foods of varying nationalities to fill three large chalkboards with cramped writing and to provide what seemed to be endless additional signage on the grill, on the microwaves, on the refrigerators, on the register, and even on the thick blond polyurethaned tables the women were sitting at, presumably after their decisions had been made. Televisions tuned to different financial stations were anchored high in opposite corners. They were on mute, but the two ribbons of words that crawled across the screen were more insistent than sound. Although their import escaped her, Virginia couldn’t help reading them as soon as they jumped into her field of vision: S&P…DOW…LKG…HOW TO GET IN ON THE BOOMING LUXURY MARKET, TONIGHT AT 8…

  “I guess a lot of investors come here,” Virginia had said.

  “Oh?” said Pat, looking around at the customers. “What gives you that impression?”

  Virginia gestured at the TVs.

  “They have this stuff on all over the place,” said Pat. “I never really thought about why.” She made a face at the coffee. “Frank called this morning and told me about every meal he’s had in the last three days. He complains when it’s bad, because it’s a waste of money, and he complains when it’s good, because that’s a waste of money, too.”

  Karl burst in at this point. He was a tall, stooped, ash-faced man sporting a big gold watch exposed by a too-short shirt sleeve. He looked a little trembly, and his bones jutted out in unexpected places. He spoke with his chin out as if he were still hurrying toward them. “I wish you could meet my wife, May,” he said. “But she’s safer in the house.”

  He glanced at his watch, then glanced at it again as if he hadn’t taken in the time. He never stopped talking. He moved a small A-framed cardboard sign, gingerly felt the bench for stickiness or moisture, and sat, all without pausing. He had met his wife twenty-five years ago, when he was working for an American engineering firm in Hong Kong. She’d been born outside Chicago, but her parents were from China. When she turned eighteen, they sent her to Hong Kong to marry her own kind. But what kind might that be? She did not speak Chinese. And she was too quiet for many young American men, too deferential. Karl, more than twice her age, had never encountered anyone like her. “She was so beautiful, like a painting,” he said fervently. “She had a natural stillness. It made me calm and happy just to look at her. Her parents did not approve of the marriage, but she was American enough that they could not prevent it. She chose me because she thought I would always protect her. She used those very words when she accepted my proposal.”

  Virginia glanced at Pat to see if she had any better idea of what was going on. His wife was safer in the house?

  “Don’t you see?” he was saying. “We have two boys. They’re men now. One is getting his Ph.D. in experimental psychology. The other is in business. I never had to worry about them. That was May’s job. She made sure they worked hard and got ahead. She took care of them. She took care of all of us. You know what it can be like when you have a houseful of males. I guess it was hard sometimes. But she never complained. She was always content to be there for us. And now I can’t be there for her. I’ve let her down.”

  The man’s nervous volubility had prompted a similar response in Pat, whose head began to bob back and forth. Soon her words came tumbling down over his: “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m serious. I tell Frank that all the time.”

  As Virginia raised her eyebrows at this sentiment, the other two kept talking at each other, louder and louder:

  “I don’t know what to do. I’m looking for work, but it’s hard. Experience counts against you these days. It means you’re hidebound. But I have to keep trying. And I can’t let May know that
at this point I will do anything.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Pat.

  Karl blinked, then said, “If only I were younger. Then I’d have a fighting chance.”

  “I’m sure you still do.”

  “How was I supposed to know what was going on? Our division wasn’t really profitable, but I figured everyone else’s was. Sometimes at night I dream that I am drowning and I wake up gasping and choking for air.”

  “I wonder how anyone survives certain nightmares.”

  “It’s very easy to interpret. I’m drowning—drowning financially. I’m desperate.”

  “That’s why we’re here! To give you a check! But first I promised you some coffee!”

  “I don’t know how I can thank you.”

  “I’m going to get the coffee!” Pat rushed off clutching her purse, this one covered with cherries.

  Karl was left blinking uncertainly at Virginia. Although he’d blamed no one, his tone had been harsh, maybe out of fear of looking weak. He did not seem unusually weak physically; the height, the jutting bones made him appear brittle at most. But his features held an unmistakable softness. There was that defensive chin. And his mouth was blurry. His tall forehead, his arching eyebrows, his high cheeks, all served to accentuate the alarm in his eyes. He was probably dismissed all his life as a nice fellow and a real team player, although neither of these descriptions was necessarily true. Because of his looks, no one would ever look to him for inventive new ideas, or leadership, or strength of any sort.

  He blanched. “May!” he breathed. “May, please!” He leapt up from the bench as if stung.

  A very pale, small, beautifully dressed Asian woman was wavering silently just inside the door.

  “I know these ladies from work,” he tried. But there was only Virginia, in black clothes rusty with age, clearly not corporate material.

  May was clad in slightly darker versions of the beiges and ochres in the room, and so looked as if she were not a person but a shadow of a person, cast upon the bagel shop wall.