“Why do you ask this? Why tonight?”
“Never mind for now. I’ll talk about it another night. I can see you’re not up to it yet.”
This was one of our briefer reunions. She gathered up her eleven other books and walked back to the trees. Facing away from me, she waved a quick goodbye over her shoulder.
Back in the cottage, I brushed sand from the cover of The Victorian Chaise-Longue. Reading it, I finally fell asleep at about four A.M., though just for half an hour, during which time I had a dream that I absolutely despised having, despised the thought that I was capable of having it. In this dream I had driven to Halifax, to the police station. I went to a room that had Forensics stenciled on the door. I opened the door and there was Lily Svetgartot wearing a white lab coat. I handed her Elizabeth’s copy of The Victorian Chaise-Longue. She set it on a rectangle of glass, which she then slid under a big microscope. “Come back in five hours,” she said. “I’ll know by then whose fingerprints other than yours I’ve found.” I spent the rest of the dream trying to find my pickup truck.
I woke in a cold sweat, heard myself give a gasping cry. It was lightly snowing out. I turned on the bedside radio. I saw that the book had fallen to the floor. The weather report said, “an accumulation of up to a half inch of snow.” I went into the kitchen, made coffee, and read more of The Victorian Chaise-Longue, but couldn’t concentrate. So I drove, mainly in the dark, to Halifax. It was Tuesday, I realized, but my session with Dr. Nissensen was not until ten. At seven o’clock I was at Cyrano’s Last Night, disappointed not to find Marie Ligget there. I sat in the café through two espressos and a regular coffee, looking out the window, waiting for my appointed fifty minutes.
You Are Getting It All Wrong
SOMETHING NOT GOOD was happening with me. How else to explain why I went to the shoot.
The Chronicle-Herald listed where the day’s scenes would be shot; today the crew was doing “night shots” in the Essex Hotel. I got there at about nine-thirty P.M. Though my picture had appeared a few times in the newspaper (“Author Samuel Lattimore, whose wife’s murder was the inspiration for the movie Next Life, now filming in Halifax, said through a representative, ‘I want nothing to do with the movie. True, I sold the rights, but that is the full extent of my participation, and I wish the filmmakers neither good nor bad luck’”), there was my mug, scowling like I had a degree in scowling. That is to say, no one would recognize me except Lily Svetgartot and Istvakson, so I kept well back from them. I stood with thirty or so people behind a cordon from which hung a sign: NO SPECTATORS BEYOND THIS POINT. According to the papers, the crew had struck up cordial relationships with the city, though there had been complaints about traffic being rerouted and actors being seated in restaurants while regular customers had to wait. Nothing much at all. The movie brought a boost to the local economy, of course, even if it was a relatively low-budget operation.
I had told Istvakson nothing of my observations and opinions of Alfonse Padgett, absolutely nothing. I’d read somewhere that he’d had a few “audiences” with Padgett in the interim prison in Bedford, on the outskirts of Halifax. (Padgett had been sentenced to forty years to life. It would be twenty years before he’d qualify for a parole review.) So I could only assume that some of Istvakson’s screenplay was based on things Padgett had told him. After much preparation—crew members checking the lobby furniture, various actor-bellmen and hotel patrons standing around in costume, sound and lighting equipment set up—Istvakson appeared. Lily Svetgartot followed close behind, carrying a clipboard and a thermos of coffee. (“Coffee spiked with God knows what,” she had said.) Next, the actor playing Alfonse Padgett—I never learned his name—stepped onto the set. The physical resemblance to Padgett unnerved me. But when he spoke his first lines (“I’m taking those dance lessons Arnie Moran is giving, whaddaya think of that, Mr. Isherwood?”), I felt great relief that his voice scarcely resembled Padgett’s. Actor-Isherwood replied, “You trip over your feet just carrying a suitcase to the lift. The thought of you doing the lindy makes me think that ten notes into the first dance, you’ll end up in hospital.”
They shot the scene a total of twelve times. Finally Istvakson said, “I’ll look at all this in dailies later on. Okay, everybody, go home, and thank you very much.” He spoke briefly with Lily Svetgartot, and she pointed to what was obviously a shooting schedule on the clipboard, because Istvakson said loudly, “More hotel lobby scenes starting at six A.M. Nobody late, please!” The crew went to their rooms or out the front door of the hotel, and the onlookers in the street dispersed.
Call it perverse intuition. I don’t know what it was, really, but when I saw Istvakson step into the lift (Lily Svetgartot had gone to her room, which was right off the lobby), I inquired at the desk—there was a clerk on duty whom I didn’t recognize—about leaving a note for the director. The clerk, a woman of about thirty whose name tag read Miss Claridge, said “Certainly.” She slid a piece of hotel stationery over to me, and then a pen. I wrote, “You are getting it all wrong.” I didn’t sign it. I folded the note and handed it to Miss Claridge, and saw her put the note into a slot in the wooden mail-and-key hive: room 58, Elizabeth’s and my former room. Istvakson had done his research, all right.
I got back in my truck and drove to the cottage, getting home by about five-thirty A.M. There was the faintest tinge of light on the horizon out to sea.
A Tear in the Fabric
DEREK BUDNICK WAS sixty-two years old. He’d been a policeman in Halifax for twenty-five years and then a security guard at Pier 21, the museum of the history of immigration into Canada; after that he became house detective at the Essex Hotel. He was a bachelor and lived in room 28. Elizabeth and I were on a first-name basis with him.
It wasn’t more than five minutes after Elizabeth telephoned him in his room and described the damage we’d found to the chaise longue that Derek walked through our open door. He held a Kodak flash camera. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said. “Let me first take a few pictures and then—can you make some coffee, please? Then let’s sit and talk.”
We must have woken Derek up. His hair was mussed and I could see the collar of his pajama shirt under his sweater; he had on his woolen trousers and sports coat and black shoes. He took snapshots of the chaise longue from three different angles.
“That’s a nasty tear in the fabric,” he said.
After one sharp inhale of sobbing, Elizabeth said, “Definitely it is.”
“Derek,” I said, “you have to talk to Alfonse Padgett about this.”
“Let’s have coffee,” Derek said. “Let’s sit down and talk.”
I made coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. “Okay, let me get my notebook out here,” Derek said. “Okay, how did you discover this violation?”
Elizabeth sat down across from Derek. “I’m taking lindy lessons offered by Arnie Moran in the ballroom,” she said. “Tonight was lesson number two. Alfonse Padgett was in the ballroom. He acted like a creep. Toward me, he acted like a creep. After the lesson, Sam and I went to a café. We got home maybe eleven, eleven-thirty. We’d left a floor lamp on. That’s about it. I mean, we walked in and saw the tear in the fabric right away. Then we telephoned your room.”
Derek nodded and said, “Sam, it’s a serious accusation, your mentioning Padgett. Him being a hotel employee.”
“He should be in jail. Starting tonight. Starting right now.”
“Calm down, now,” Derek said. “It doesn’t come out of the blue, your naming Padgett, right? You have your reasons?”
“He’s a creep,” Elizabeth said. She placed her hands over mine on the table. “He assaulted me at the lindy lesson.”
“What?” Derek said. “How do you mean? Assault’s a serious—”
“Close your eyes a minute, Derek. Please. Then I’ll tell you.”
Derek set down his coffee cup and closed his eyes. Consciously or not, he held on to the side of the table as if for dear life. “I’m all set,” he said.<
br />
“He touched my breast,” Elizabeth said. “You can open your eyes now. I just didn’t want you looking at me when I told you what I just told you.”
Derek opened his eyes and took a sip of coffee. “During a dance lesson, doing that might’ve been not on purpose,” he said.
“The lindy doesn’t call for a lot of holding close,” Elizabeth said. “No, he definitely, um, copped a feel. I pushed him away.”
“He assaulted me this morning in the lift,” I said.
“Whoa, Jesus, hold on here,” Derek said. He set down his cup again. “Two assaults on the same day?”
“He pushed me against the wall of the lift,” I said.
Derek, as he finished jotting a note, said out loud, “. . . against the wall of the lift.” He sighed painfully. “I think I’d better ask Mr. Isherwood to call the police.”
“This all must sound strange to you, I bet,” Elizabeth said. “Try to understand. He’s a creep, bellman Padgett is. I agree with my husband. Padgett did this awful thing to the chaise longue. Bellmen have master keys, don’t they? They can go into any room in the hotel.”
“I think I’d better get the police involved here,” Derek said.
“Why not get Padgett in a room with you, us, Mr. Isherwood? What do you think of that idea?” Elizabeth said. “Confront him.”
“Obviously there’s no love lost between you both and Alfonse Padgett. My concern is, just because he’s a creep is not exactly evidence that he tore the fabric on this nice sofa, eh?”
“Chaise longue,” Elizabeth said, a little snappishly, then shook her head and said, “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. You’re upset. You should be upset. I need to get my vocabulary correct, anyway, for my report. I’m careful with my reports. I don’t like to spell even one word wrong, so if I’m in doubt, I look it up in the dictionary.” He wrote down and said out loud, “Chaise . . . longue.”
“Nobody but Alfonse Padgett would do this,” Elizabeth said. “He’s acted like a creep. He’s said creepy things. He’s done creepy things.”
“Okay, but this had to be from a knife. This is more than creepy, I’m afraid. You’ve called the house detective, which is exactly what you should have done, by the way. Exactly what you should have done. But it’s now officially hotel business. Someone wielding a knife against a private piece of furniture like this. I have to make a report. There’s got to be an investigation.”
“Derek,” I said, “he left the ballroom before we did. He knew we weren’t home. He used his passkey.”
“Sam,” Derek said, “maybe you want me to drag Padgett—and by the way, I have my own judgments about him—drag him out of his room and kick the hell out of him in the alley next to the garbage cans. But what if later I find out it wasn’t him did this thing? Just consider that. Please consider my position here. We have to follow procedure. Now, Mr. Isherwood will be in at eight o’clock this morning, and I’m going to talk to him first thing, I promise you both that. I’m going to get these photographs developed first thing, too. If you can think of anything else I can do for you in this circumstance, tell me. Ring me right up. I mean it.”
“It’s just that this chaise longue means a lot to me,” Elizabeth said. “And Alfonse Padgett—I just thought of this—he delivered it to our apartment. He knew it was here.”
“I’ll put that right into my report,” Derek said. “I’m going back to my room and start to type it up.”
Derek, with some formality, shook Elizabeth’s hand, then shook my hand. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said. “I’m sorry it happened at all, especially on my watch. Believe me, there’s all sorts of things happen in a hotel. House detectives can tell all sorts of things out of school, if they’re so indiscreetly inclined, they could. I’m very upset to see you suffer this violation.” Derek left and closed the door behind him.
Elizabeth took an antique quilt out of the bottom drawer of her bureau and laid it over the chaise longue. “Let’s go to bed, Sam,” she said. “Maybe neither of us will be able to sleep, but if we can’t sleep, at least we’ll stay awake together. I hate that goddamn creep bellman.”
“We could tune something in on the shortwave. Try for Amsterdam. Or London.”
“Good.”
Fingerprints
With Dr. Nissensen, January 9, 1973:
Dr. Nissensen was wearing a black suit and tie, white shirt, black dress shoes. This was far from his familiar, casual attire. I’d never seen him in a suit before. “Wedding or funeral?” I asked.
He looked down, surveying his clothes, and smoothed his tie with his hand. “Now that you’ve winnowed it down to two possibilities, is it important for you to know?”
“Not important.”
“Which would you prefer it to be?”
“Funeral.”
“Ah, well, I asked for that, didn’t I? Yes, Mr. Lattimore, sadly, I have to attend a funeral later today.”
Silence a moment.
“He’s in our apartment,” I said. “In the Essex Hotel.”
“Who is in the apartment you and Elizabeth previously occupied?”
“Istvakson.”
“I see. And how did you discover this.”
“I went in to watch the movie being made. I found out that he’s been living in room fifty-eight. Can you believe it? Lizzy’s and my one and only apartment.”
“Hardly arbitrary. Part of his needing to thoroughly identify with you, a requirement to keep his soul progressing. Are you thinking along those lines?”
“I’m thinking Istvakson makes me more sick by the minute.”
“Perhaps you’d be less sick if you hadn’t inquired in the first place.”
“The point is, isn’t it, that I did inquire. And he’s living in our apartment.”
“I admit there’s a perversity to it. Far past—what?—artistic license.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
A moment of silence. I felt that Dr. Nissensen was debating whether to say something or not.
“For your information,” he said, “the funeral is for my dry cleaner’s wife. I’ve known them for thirty years. In fact, over the weekend I’d left all my sports coats to be dry-cleaned, and yesterday, when I went to pick them up, the dry cleaner was closed. That left me with just this suit and tie to wear. So, it’s ironic, in its own way, that the one thing I have to wear is the proper thing to wear today.”
“Well, thanks for tying up those loose ends.”
“You’re welcome.”
Silence another moment.
“I had an upsetting dream. I hate talking about dreams. You know I hate it. But this one . . .”
“Was upsetting.”
“I drove to the police station in Halifax. I walked in and right away went to a room that had a big stenciled word on the door. It said Forensics. I opened the door and I was taken aback. Because there was Lily Svetgartot, and she was dressed in a white lab coat. The whole room looked like one big chemistry lab. Microscopes. And she was as cool as a cucumber. And I handed her Elizabeth’s copy of The Victorian Chaise-Longue—”
“Not Elizabeth’s dissertation, but Laski’s novel.”
“The novel itself, yes. She puts it under a big microscope and says, ‘Come back in five hours and I’ll tell you if I’ve found Elizabeth’s fingerprints’—no, no—‘found fingerprints other than yours on the book.’ Then I left the police station, and I couldn’t find my pickup truck.”
“Excuse me a moment,” Dr. Nissensen said. He poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the table next to his chair. He took a sip, set the glass down, and said, “Fingerprints—”
“—means verification. Because in a past session I told you that Elizabeth asked me to put her copy of the novel on the beach, and that she picked it up to check a reference. So you’re suggesting that if I allowed Lily Svetgartot to examine the fingerprints, it might be that I am having doubts it’s actually Elizabeth I see on the beach. Fuck that. I don’t need verification.”
“I’m afraid that no matter how strong the will, a person can’t control where the mind goes in sleep.”
“I don’t care about rumor.”
“That’s quite funny, Sam. To see insights into the human condition as rumor. Are we done with the dream?”
“For today.”
“That’s fine. We’ll pursue it later if you want.”
“Maybe in ten years.”
“Saying ‘ten years’ doesn’t show much confidence in our—”
“Finding some closure?”
“I have purposely not used that word.”
I needed to keep something from Dr. Nissensen. Ever try to have privacy in a therapist’s office? I looked over at Theresa Nissensen’s charcoal drawings and said to myself, I love those, but kept it to myself.
“Sam, I’m going to break professional protocol here. It might be inappropriate for me to even mention it. Certainly it’s an imposition. Perhaps it doesn’t technically fall under therapist-client confidentiality, because this person didn’t actually become a client. It’s sort of a gray area. But considering my concern for your strong, even violent feelings toward Mr. Istvakson—”
“Istvakson? What about him?”
“He inquired about an appointment with me.”
I stood up, then sat down.
“Naturally, I declined. All sorts of professional conflicts there. But it does speak to the extremes of his—”
“Yeah, his fucking research.”
After the session, in my pickup truck en route to Port Medway, I figured out who had probably provided Istvakson the information that I was a client of Dr. Nissensen’s.
House Detective Budnick Was Ambidextrous
TWO DAYS AFTER the Victorian chaise longue was damaged, Derek Budnick asked to meet with Elizabeth and me. It was midmorning and we’d been working. Again, we all sat at the kitchen table. Elizabeth made a cup of coffee for Derek. He had a satchel and took out some papers, which he set on the table. “Mr. Isherwood and I interviewed the entire staff one by one, individually,” he said. “We felt this was the best approach. Best not to point the blame when we don’t have actual proof. What I’ve brought here”—he touched the papers—“is affidavits. All signed and dated. Every single employee of the Essex Hotel, including the fact that Mr. Isherwood questioned me, and I questioned him. For the record.”
Next Life Might Be Kinder Page 9