“Hello,” she said at the same moment he looked up and saw her.
“Hello,” he said, standing up so quickly that he knocked over his chair.
“Oops—sorry,” said Claire reflexively.
The waiter, hovering nearby, reached for the chair at the same moment as Claire and Detective Jackson, and the three of them laughed. The waiter replaced the chair with an embarrassed smile, then left them alone.
“Please join me,” said Jackson, indicating one of the empty chairs at the table.
“Thank you,” said Claire, and sat down.
The waiter reappeared to take her order. He was a thin dark man with a wiry little mustache and thick black hair. Claire ordered the chicken tandoori lunch special and the waiter disappeared again, leaving them alone. There were no other customers in the garden. There was an awkward pause. Claire could hear the faint hum of traffic from First Avenue, mixing with the soothing clatter of kitchen noises coming from inside the restaurant. She took a deep breath.
“Do you—do you come here often?” she said. “I mean, since your office is around the corner?” she added lamely.
Detective Jackson laughed.
“As a matter of fact, I do. I’ve tried just about all of the places on Sixth Street, but this is my favorite.”
There was another pause, and then he said, “What brings you down to this neighborhood?”
“Oh, just shopping. And I thought I’d wander through Blanche’s neighborhood. She was writing this book, and I’m going to sort of finish it for her. I mean, it’s mostly done, and I’m really an editor, not a writer, but . . .” She trailed off, wondering why she felt she had to explain. Peter had practically begged her to finish the book, and now she was falling all over herself apologizing for it.
Jackson nodded as though it were quite natural.
“The Klan book, you mean?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Well, it’s part of my investigation into her murder.”
“Oh? You think there might be a connection?”
“Not necessarily, though it’s possible. We’re trying to learn everything we can about the victim, in the hopes that it may lead us to her killer.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I haven’t read any of the book myself. So you have a copy of the manuscript?”
“Yes, would you like a copy? It would be easy to copy the computer diskette.”
“Yes, thank you.” He paused and studied his hands. “Actually, I was going to ask you if you come across anything you think might be helpful that you let me know. Would you mind doing that?”
“Well—no, not at all. But how would I know what would be helpful?”
“You might not. But if you do see something, I would appreciate knowing about it.”
“Sure. I’ll be glad to help if I can.”
The thin waiter returned with their food. Claire was glad for the distraction, though she suddenly didn’t feel much like eating.
“Is it a difficult job, being a book editor?” Jackson said as he helped himself to lentils and boiled cabbage.
“Oh, not as hard as being a police detective, I’m sure,” Claire said. Jackson didn’t answer, so she continued. “What made you—I mean, why did you become a policeman?”
“Well, I didn’t set out to become a homicide detective . . . it was kind of a default plan, I guess you might say.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, I was teaching high school English by day and by night taking a stab at writing the Great American Novel.”
“What happened?”
Jackson stroked the lip of his water glass, and again Claire noticed how beautiful his hands were.
“I had a chance to experience a homicide close up,” he said softly.
“What happened?”
“My wife, shot once through the head as she sat in her car.” Jackson looked off in the direction of the door. “It turned out to be some punk out on a spree, but after that I couldn’t go back to teaching. It seemed pointless, when all I wanted to do was catch people who killed other people and put them in prison.” He took a sip of water and then looked toward the exit again. “It’s funny, though; unlike most cops, I don’t believe in capital punishment.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “A bunch of reasons. For one thing, I don’t really believe that it’s a deterrent to crime, and for another thing, it’s racially biased. And I don’t believe the state should have the power to kill anybody.”
There was a silence between them, not an uncomfortable one this time, but Claire suddenly had an irrational fear that he knew what she was thinking. What she was thinking was that she would like to get him alone, and massage away all the pain and misery of his past, to make him forget losing a woman he loved—and, if possible, forget the woman herself. Claire’s skin ached just being near him, and she couldn’t eat much of her food.
“There’s only two reliable ways to lose weight,” Blanche had once said, “grief and love. Given a choice, I’ll take love anytime.”
Claire agreed with this, though what she felt right now was so acute, so sharp, that it felt as much like grief as it did love.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s terrible about your wife.”
“I’ve tried hard to put it behind me, because I think personal matters cloud your judgment, as they say. There’s a danger that every time I’m after a criminal . . . well, you know, that I’ll be looking to avenge Anne’s death.”
Anne. So her name was Anne. Claire imagined her: tall and willowy, with light brown hair and doe eyes, a wise and noble, and yes, sainted creature, gentle as a summer’s day . . . and then she looked back at Jackson, sitting across from her, looking so forlorn. Was it just pity, this feeling she had for him, an expression of her long dormant maternal instincts, jolted into life now with the presence of Meredith in her life? She turned to the waiter, who was hovering nearby, wiping off tables.
“May I have some more water, please?”
Jackson looked at her plate.
“You’re not eating very much. Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, yes, I do! I just, uh—I guess I wasn’t as hungry as I thought,” she replied, feeling foolish.
“Well, I guess I’d better get back,” said Jackson, looking at his watch.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Claire jumped up from her chair. “I didn’t mean to keep you.”
“Oh, you didn’t keep me.” Jackson smiled at her. “I kept myself. Don’t worry; they don’t make me punch a clock at the precinct.”
Out on the street, he said, “By the way, where’s—”
“Meredith? She’s in school in Connecticut.”
“Oh, so she doesn’t live with you?”
“Not really, no. I’m just . . . looking after her for a while.”
“Oh.” Jackson looked up and down the street, as if reluctant to leave. “She’s really something, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Well, tell her if she comes across anything useful to give me a call.”
“Oh, that’s very nice, really,” said Claire, but Jackson looked at her seriously.
“No, I mean it,” he said. “Between you and me, we’re stuck on this case, we really are. The killer just hasn’t left any of the tracks you might expect in a case like this. It’s as though he—or she—has vanished into thin air.”
There was another pause, and then Claire said, “Well, Meredith would be only too thrilled if she could help somehow. She’s a real armchair detective, you know.”
Jackson smiled. “Well, we all have to start somewhere.”
“Oh, by the way, Meredith thought I should tell you this, though I don’t know if it’s important or not,” said Claire.
“What is it?”
“Well, sometimes my phone will ring and then when I answer they hang up.”
“They don’t say anything?”
“No, nothing; they just hang up. Do you think it’s relevant
?”
Wallace Jackson ran a hand through his thick grey hair.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It may be nothing, or it may be the key we’re looking for.”
Chapter 14
At work on Friday Claire’s phone rang just as she was about to go to Peter’s office for a meeting. She picked up the receiver but regretted it instantly. It was Willard Hughes.
“Hello, Claire,” he said, and she knew immediately he wanted something from her.
“Hello, Willard,” she said, and waited.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he said sweetly. “I thought we might have lunch.”
Claire sighed. Her first impulse was to put him off for a week or so, as she usually was booked for lunch far in advance, but it so happened that an agent had called to cancel a lunch date with her just this morning. She decided she might as well get it over with.
“As it happens, I’m free. Shall we meet at Keens at twelve-thirty?”
Willard was so surprised to hear her suggest Keens that he just stuttered an affirmative and Claire was able to get him off the phone quickly. She looked at her watch; it was ten, which meant she had two and a half hours of freedom before she faced Willard. She headed for Peter’s office.
“Chin up,” said Peter when she explained the reason for her grim expression. “At least you have an excuse to leave early.”
Claire did have another author coming into the office at three o’clock, and so lunch with Willard would have to be fairly short.
“Give my regards to Willard the Dread,” Peter said cheerfully as Claire grabbed her coat and headed for the elevator a couple of hours later.
Claire glanced at herself in her pocket mirror as she stood waiting for the elevator. She considered putting on some lipstick, but as the elevator arrived she decided not to bother. It was only Willard, after all. She was running a little late but felt like walking, so she set a brisk pace and walked the twenty blocks down to West Thirty-sixth Street.
Keens Chophouse had become one of Claire’s favorite restaurants from the first time she ate there, courtesy of Peter, who had taken her there to celebrate her hiring at Ardor House. She loved the rows of thin-stemmed meerschaum and clay pipes on the ceiling left by past and present customers, the mahogany paneling, the nineteenth-century London club atmosphere, carefully wrought but nonetheless convincing, and was still a little thrilled by it every time she went there. When she saw Willard sitting by himself at a table along the wall, a little of the thrill evaporated, but Claire took a deep breath and vowed that even Willard would not ruin this lunch for her. When she approached the table he raised his eyebrows in a gesture that was clearly a reproach for her lateness—all seven minutes of it—but Claire ignored this and greeted him cheerfully.
“What are you drinking?” she said, indicating the glass in front of him.
Willard looked up at her and blinked. It was common knowledge that he was in The Program, as he liked to call it, and did not drink. (Claire personally thought his writing had been better when he did drink, an opinion she shared with Peter once over a glass of Merlot.)
“Uh, ginger ale,” Willard replied, and Claire noted with satisfaction that his left shoulder was beginning to twitch.
“I’ll have a pint of Bass,” she said to the waiter in the long white apron who approached their table. Sometimes she felt guilty about drinking around Willard, but she was damned if she was going to face him sober today.
Claire looked around the low-ceilinged dining room, which was beginning to fill up with the usual lunchtime trade, mostly businessmen and women mixed in with the occasional party of tourists out on a spree at Macy’s. The tourists were conspicuous in their bright mall clothes and shiny, open faces, while the business customers wore expensive suits and spoke in subdued tones, glancing around to see who might be listening.
Claire listened to the waiter recite the list of daily specials even though she knew exactly what she was going to have: the mutton.
“I never even think about ordering anything else here,” Peter had said at that first lunch. “Trust me; I know what I’m talking about.”
And so Claire followed his lead that day and many days since, always amazed at the huge, juicy slab of rare meat which transcended any lamb she ever had in her life. It was almost impossible to imagine that meat could be as good as Keens’s mutton, which was aged on the premises. Every time she ate it, she felt herself slipping further away from any notion she ever had of becoming a vegetarian.
When they had ordered, Willard put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you was that I have the idea for my next book.”
“Oh, good.” Claire hoped she sounded interested.
“I want to write about Blanche’s murder.”
“What?”
“Oh, I’ll fictionalize it, of course, but I just think it would make such a great hook for a story: mystery writer killed, and all that.”
Claire looked down at her beer and scratched her left palm, which was beginning to itch.
“It’s been done before, you know.”
“Oh, I know, I know; it’s just that being based on fact and everything—well, you know—it’ll help sell books.”
Claire had never seen anyone so obsessed with his own success as Willard. He was forever coming up with ideas for selling his books, marketing schemes, promotional concepts. Willard could nudge you to death until you gave in from pure exhaustion.
“If he were half as interested in doing his job as he is telling us how to do ours, he’d be a halfway decent writer,” Peter muttered once in a moment of uncharacteristic grumbling. (Some people in the office referred to him as Peter the Positive.)
Claire took a big swallow of Bass ale. It was cold and sharp on her tongue, but already she could feel the warmth of it going down, relaxing her body.
“I think a more important question would be why do you want to write this particular story?” she said.
Willard’s left shoulder twitched impatiently. He ran his hand over a thin oily strand of hair which threatened to slide from its carefully arranged perch atop his bald head.
“It’s as good as any other story,” he said irritably. “It’s what you do with a story that counts.”
Claire had to admit he had her there. She tried to think of a reply, but was saved from the effort by the arrival of their food. She looked at the plate of sizzling mutton in front of her, warm in its own juices, with just a hint of garlic. Not even Willard can spoil this pleasure, she told herself with grim determination. The mutton cost twenty-seven dollars on the lunch menu, and as Claire savored the first bite she thought it was worth every cent—an easy conclusion, since Ardor House was footing the bill.
Blanche had been much too delicate ever to initiate a free meal, but Willard always made sure he got his share of expense-account lunches. If Claire didn’t call him for a while, he would invent a pretext and suggest they meet (the unstated rule, of course, being that Ardor House would pay).
The one thing Claire did like about her relationship with Willard was that it was totally financially based, and both of them knew it. Neither one pretended that it was anything else, and that allowed for a certain honesty between them. Willard was irritating, but he didn’t look to Claire to solve his personal problems. She knew very little about his private life, in fact. He lived on the Upper East Side, and Claire knew his address, his phone and fax numbers, but not much else. She had no desire to know more. Having lunch with Willard was as close as she ever wanted to get to him. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he worked for the CIA (unlikely, since he hadn’t gone to Yale and was heterosexual, as far as she knew), or that he was a member of a satanic cult, or was raising ferrets in his basement. Anything was possible with Willard, but somehow you just didn’t want to know.
Meredith was different, of course.
“You know that weird author of yours—Willard Hughes? What’s his story?”
Claire would then explain that she really knew very little about Willard and that she liked it that way. Meredith would complain about her lack of curiosity, and that would pretty much be it. Then a few hours later Meredith would mutter something about Willard being an ideal murder suspect, and they would start all over again.
Now the ideal murder suspect sat across from Claire devouring his mutton with religious fervor. Willard ordered the mutton not because he liked it particularly but because it was the most expensive thing on the menu.
“You know,” he said, chewing and speaking at the same time, so that Claire had to look away, “that inspector fellow has been ’round to see me.”
“Oh, you mean Detective Jackson?” Claire said, feeling the blood rush to her face as she said his name.
“Yeah, him,” said Willard, spearing a crisp homemade potato chip.
“What did he want to know?”
“Oh, he asked me a lot of questions about ‘my relationship to the deceased.’ You know, the usual thing.” Willard smiled, revealing a piece of spinach that clung to his teeth. “He told me he’s read some of my books.”
“Oh?” Claire decided not to mention the piece of spinach. As usual, Willard was beginning to get on her nerves.
“Yeah—he said he even got some ideas from one of them.”
“Oh, which one?”
“I think it was Death Pays a House Call.” Willard always had some form of the word “death” in his titles; he claimed that it sold books. Willard impaled a piece of cucumber on his fork. “He told me he likes mysteries.”
“Well, he should; he’s a detective.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t seem like a detective, you know? He seems more like . . .”
“Like what?” Claire enjoyed talking about Jackson, even if it was only with Willard.
“Oh, I don’t know . . . like a history teacher or something. He just doesn’t seem like most of the cops I’ve known.”
Willard liked to hang around police stations doing research for his books. He was a familiar figure at the Nineteenth Precinct, where they called him Twitchy.
Who Killed Blanche DuBois? Page 14