Cobalt

by Aldyne, Nathan

  She swallowed the remainder of the drink in one gulp. “Well, no more pussyfooting,” she said in a stern voice. “I have come here today as a recruiter.”

  “For what?” Valentine asked uneasily.

  “Next week’s show at the Plymouth House cabaret. The man they had hired to MC it got hepatitis from one of the boys in the chorus, and I leapt into the breach.”

  Valentine paused a moment to consider this image, then said: “Are you going to MC it, or are you taking the place of the chorus boy?”

  “I’m going to MC.”

  “And you want me for the chorus—no?”

  “You won’t have to say any lines. But it’s a great part. Great costume too—made me hungry just to look at it.” She took a breath and closed her eyes in ecstasy. Valentine poured more vodka.

  “Get the White Prince.”

  “He’s already signed up. He’ll probably want to do that weary Salome number again—coked to the falsies, of course. Unless the cartilage in his nose collapses between now and then, which would be a blessing to us all. I mean,” she went on, snatching up a few maraschino cherries from Valentine’s side of the bar and popping them into her mouth, “everybody likes cocaine, but not everybody uses it as a substitute for literature, red meat, and love.”

  “As addictions go,” said Valentine, “it’s cheaper than swallowing semiprecious stones.”

  “Be in the show,” Angel begged, clasping her hands on the bar between them. “You’d only be on stage for fifteen seconds. No lines—you don’t even have to move. You’d just be a mannequin for the costume. No one will recognize you, I promise. I’ll do your makeup myself.”

  “No,” he said. “But just out of curiosity—I’m very curious today—what’s the role?”

  “It’s a tableau vivant—Madame Du Barry mounting the scaffold. Oh, Daniel, you should see the dress! Lace at the bosom, and panniers so wide that they’re having to stick the executioner down in the orchestra pit.”

  “What is the show, Angel?” asked Valentine suspiciously.

  Angel tipped the ice from her first drink into her mouth, and bit down loudly. “We’re calling it Prostitution through the Ages.”

  Only with two more vodkas did Valentine at last convince Angel that he had no intention of taking the role of Madame Du Barry in the series of tableaux vivants being prepared for the following week. As she was leaving she made the identical proposition to a stranger who was madly drying his recently permed hair with a stack of paper napkins from the bar. Though bewildered, the young man accepted. When Angel had gone, he whispered in awe to Valentine, “I’m from the Midwest. Is Provincetown always like this?”

  The rain had grown even heavier and the sky was now quite gray. The bar was crowded with wet customers and the plants that had been brought in from the patio. Valentine gave a stack of quarters to the waiter, and told him to choose something quiet on the jukebox.

  The first selection was Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”

  Valentine wiped up the bar, and rubbed specially hard at the rings left by Angel’s several glasses.

  “Hey,” said the man who had taken her place, “this stool is loose, you ought to have the screws tightened up.”

  Valentine looked up quickly. The man was Terry O’Sullivan.

  Valentine closed his eyes briefly, then opened a bottle of Perrier, jammed in a wedge of lime, and set it before Terry.

  “Thanks. You remembered.”

  “It’s part of the job. I get bigger tips if I remember.”

  “Your skin is so red! How did you get so burned?”

  “I met a hot man from San Francisco—he was into sunlamp torture.”

  Terry frowned. “You’re making that up.”

  “No I’m not.” Valentine lighted a cigarette.

  After a moment of silence, Terry said, “Have you thought about our relationship anymore?”

  Valentine pulled back. He had been waiting for this. “No,” he replied.

  “I asked you to think about it—and you didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Daniel, I want to tell you something. I see you a whole lot differently than you see yourself. What you need is a stabilizing force in your life. That’s what deep down inside you really want. I can see that in everything you do. It’s absolutely clear.”

  “Aren’t you late for an est meeting or something?”

  “No,” said Terry. “The only reason I’m here in Provincetown is because of you.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d come back here.”

  “You’re here.”

  “But your friend died here in Provincetown,” said Valentine. “I would have thought you’d be too upset to come back here so soon. I would have been.”

  “I don’t care about Jeff, I care about you, Daniel!”

  “Jeff!” cried Valentine in astonishment. “I was talking about Ann Richardson—your administrative assistant, remember, who drowned in our swimming pool? I didn’t even know you knew Jeff King.”

  Terry O’Sullivan suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “YOU KNEW HIM, didn’t you?” said Valentine.

  Terry O’Sullivan turned uneasily on the stool. “Everybody knew Jeff.”

  “But when I talked about somebody getting killed in P’town, the person who leapt to mind was Jeff King—not the woman you worked with for five years. You must have known Jeff pretty well.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. No, it’s just that Ann wasn’t killed, Ann committed suicide. You should see our office now, it’s a real wreck. And there’s been a budget cut, so I can’t hire—”

  Valentine got the waiter’s attention and motioned him to fill in behind the bar. He mixed a strong gin and tonic for Terry and then pointed him toward a small table in a corner next to the front window. When Terry sat down, his face was framed with palm fronds. Valentine lighted a cigarette.

  Terry tasted his drink, made a face, then squeezed out the remaining lime. “You know I don’t like hard liquor.”

  “You’ll be thankful for it when we’re finished talking. Now what about Ann Richardson? Did she know Jeff King too?” Terry took a swallow of his drink and Valentine read the gesture as a delay tactic. “Ann had some pretty hefty drugs in her when she died,” Valentine went on. “Angel dust and MDA. Maybe she got it here in P’town.”

  Terry remained obstinately silent.

  “Did she get it from Jeff?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Valentine smiled, reached across the table, and tightly grasped Terry O’Sullivan’s shaven jaw. He lifted his face. “Yes you do,” he whispered. “And I want to know.” He dropped Terry’s jaw, and said, in an entirely different tone of voice, “You remember my friend Clarisse?”

  “How’s she doing?” asked Terry automatically.

  “Fine, just fine. She’s got a new boyfriend. His name’s Matteo. Matteo’s the cop in charge of investigating Ann Richardson’s death.”

  “It was suicide. There’s nothing to investigate.”

  Valentine shrugged, as if it were none of his concern to interpret police procedure. “But as long as you’re in town for a few days, I’m sure he’d like to talk to you.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Terry hissed. “It was an accident!”

  “What was?”

  Terry paled and blinked several times.

  “Tell me,” said Valentine.

  “What difference does it make to you?”

  Valentine smiled. “I just don’t want Clarisse’s boyfriend getting on your case, that’s all.”

  Terry O’Sullivan pursed his lips, and swallowed the rest of his gin and tonic. “All right, I sort of knew Jeff King. Satisfied? We weren’t close. But he sold grass, and he was always easy to find when I needed it.”

  “You?” Valentine smiled. “The watchdog of homosexual morality? You smoke grass?” He signaled the waiter, and another drink was brought for Terry.

  Terry looked at Va
lentine sourly. “If you must know, I have…I have sexual problems if I’m not a little stoned.”

  “We’ve all got problems,” said Valentine dismissively. “But why were you buying angel dust and MDA from him?”

  “I didn’t! You know how I feel about hard drugs!”

  Valentine snapped his fingers. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?” He smiled sweetly at Terry O’Sullivan. “Jeff King was in your room at the Boatslip that afternoon. You’re the one who put him up, aren’t you?”

  Terry grimaced with consternation. “Yes. I ran into him at the Boatslip pool Saturday afternoon. He had his bag with him, and he said he didn’t have a place to stay and could he stay with me. I said no, and then he said he’d give me an ounce of grass if he could just sleep on my floor. Well, I knew I could use the grass and I figured I’d end up at your place anyway, so I said all right.”

  “You didn’t have any grass at the party.”

  “I don’t need to smoke at parties, just when I’m going to have sex. So when Ann got sick—Ann always had too much to drink at parties—and her friend and I helped her outside, I ran up to my room and got the grass. I had it with me when we went back to your place. But I never got the chance to use it,” he added with a bitter smile.

  Valentine thought for a few moments. “And when you left my place that morning, you went back to the Boatslip…”

  “And I passed the meat rack and everybody was talking about this body that had just been found on the beach.”

  “Did you know it was Jeff King?”

  Terry shook his head. “When I got back to my room, his bag was there, and he wasn’t, and I started getting nervous. So I went back down to the meat rack, and when somebody said it was a drug pusher who got killed, I knew it had to be Jeff. Then I got scared.”

  “So,” said Valentine, “you dropped the bag on the doorstep of Maggie Duck’s Duds?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Sublime detective work. But you kept Jeff’s merchandise?”

  “I couldn’t walk the streets with a bagful of drugs!”

  “So you gave them to Ann instead. Didn’t you bother to tell her that you were presenting her with a lethal dose of angel dust? You shouldn’t be giving anyone angel dust anyway.”

  “I don’t know anything about drugs,” said Terry O’Sullivan with a little shrug of pride. “Jeff told me he was selling grass and Quaaludes and MDA and that’s all. So I kept the grass, and I flushed the Quaaludes down the toilet, and then I mixed all the white powder together in one envelope and gave it to Ann, because I knew she liked MDA. Ann would take anything.”

  Valentine sighed with unhappiness and disbelief. “You mixed drugs without knowing what they were?”

  “Jeff told me it was MDA! It all looked alike. How was I supposed to know he was selling angel dust too?”

  “Because Jeff King lied with every step he took.” Valentine looked closely at Terry O’Sullivan, who managed at once to look morose and arrogant and greatly put-upon. “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re the one responsible for Ann’s death?”

  “It was an accident!” protested Terry. “I’m not responsible. She shouldn’t have taken so many drugs. Her friend didn’t die, her friend didn’t gobble up drugs the way Ann did. You know what Ann used to say in the office? She used to say, ‘Show me a drug and I’ll introduce it into my system.’ And she meant it too!” Terry finished off his second drink. This time he signaled for another. “I used to make Ann take her lunch hour at three o’clock. You know why? Because she always came back drunk.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in drugs—so why did you give them to Ann?”

  “Well, Ann and I had had this fight—it was about work—and I came down hard, and I probably shouldn’t have. And I wanted to make it up to her. So when I had those drugs, I thought it was just as easy to get rid of them that way as flushing them down the toilet. MDA is so expensive I didn’t feel like dumping it.”

  “Where are you staying?” asked Valentine quickly. He had no interest in Terry’s excuses.

  “I’m at the Boatslip again. But in a different room.”

  “Why don’t you go back there now? Take a nap or get something to eat. I’ll stop by after I get off my shift. There are probably some more things I want to ask you, but I want to think a little first.”

  “Listen, you’re not going to tell that cop, are you? I didn’t really do anything wrong, Daniel. I told you, it was an accident.”

  “It was also very bad judgment, giving away drugs you’re not sure of, mixing drugs you’re not sure of. You should have gone to the police anyway and told them what you knew about Jeff King.”

  “They would have thought I did it!”

  “You couldn’t have done it, you were with me the whole night.”

  “Please don’t tell the police.”

  “If I did,” said Valentine, “they’d probably arrest you for terminal stupidity.”

  The waiter brought a fourth drink, and Terry finished it off in one long swallow. Without another word to Valentine, he stood and walked unsteadily out of the bar. The rain had lightened to a mist and more people had taken to the street. Valentine turned and looked through the window. The early dusk was gathering and the paling light took on a faint green hue through the rain. Valentine watched Terry O’Sullivan make his staggering way down the sidewalk toward the Boatslip—he evidently wasn’t used to hard liquor. Valentine sat for a minute longer then rose to return to the bar. When he pushed back his chair, it slammed into another, and he turned to apologize to the person who occupied it.

  “Sorry,” he said automatically.

  “It’s all right, Val,” replied Noah Lovelace. Across from Noah, the White Prince nodded a curt greeting.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  STANDING BEFORE the full-length mirror in her bedroom, Clarisse surveyed herself from several angles. She undid one more pearl snap of the starched blue cotton western shirt and, taking a very thin gold chain from a porcelain dish on the bureau, fastened it about her neck. She surveyed each foot, checking for scuffs on her Wellington boots and then slipped a thin leather belt through the loops of her jeans. She peered at the clock on the nightstand, and found that she had three-quarters of an hour before her date with Noah at the Swiss Miss in Exile.

  She had conducted a dozen dialogues in her mind, in which she discovered from her uncle his relationship with the recently deceased Jeffrey Martin King, but each experimental conversation had seemed more absurd and rude than the last. She decided to trust to her instinct, and dismissed all further thought of the delicate task before her.

  The storm, which had seemed to her to show signs of abating in the late afternoon, had only gathered more force. The rain continued to pelt the panes of the bedroom windows, making them pale silver in the last half hour of daylight. Clarisse lighted a cigarette and leaned against the window frame as she smoked. She stared down into the empty courtyard. Rainwater had gathered almost an inch deep at the bottom of the pool, making it a shimmering black mirror.

  The rain beat down the impatiens in the window box. Clarisse raised the window a little, jumping out of the way of the water that splashed in from the sill, plucked one of the coral flowers, shook the water off it, and stuck it through the top buttonhole of her shirt. She took another drag on the cigarette before grinding it out in an ashtray on the bureau. When she turned back her eyes went immediately to the middle section of the house in the courtyard. The first-floor lights had been turned on and she could see a male figure move past the windows. She wondered vaguely who the new tenant was, but when the man did not appear again she moved back to the mirror. She carefully painted her lips a dark ruby, but decided against any other makeup. She studied herself a long moment, and was dissatisfied. Parting her hair in the middle, she pulled it back close to her head, deftly fashioned a loose chignon, fastening it with delicate combs. She wondered if anyone else would recognize the striking likeness to Vivien Leigh. Before
leaving the bedroom she sparingly splashed perfume behind her ears and at the top of her cleavage.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Clarisse spooned instant coffee into a mug and poured in boiling water. Provincetown was often too hot for coffee, and she relished the coolness provided by the rain. She sat at the kitchen table, and leafed through Valentine’s latest edition of the Journal of the American Playing Card Association.

  She was two pages into “A Cursory Examination of Cheating at Whist in the Eighteenth Century” when a light rap sounded at the door to the courtyard. She flipped the magazine closed and without getting up, called out, “It’s open…”

  She turned. Axel Braun stood in the open doorway, dripping wet. He wore only a pair of low-rise swimming briefs. He wiped water from his face and smiled.

  Clarisse rose and tore a number of paper towels from the roll and handed them to Axel. “Come on in,” she said, “and don’t mind the floor.”

  He set about to dry himself. The muscles of his arms, abdomen, and legs flinched each time he blotted off more water and Clarisse strove to keep her eyes at a respectable level.

  “I thought you had left town,” she said. “After the unfortunate business of the corpse in the pool.”

  “Yes,” said Axel. “I did. But,” he said with a quick nod and a smile, “I’m back now.”

  “Do you and Scott still have your cottage?”

  He squinted at her. “Ah, no,” he said, “in fact I’m staying here.”

  “Here? Daniel didn’t say anything—”

  “No, not here, I mean in the other apartment. I’m renting from Noah for a couple of weeks. Are you getting ready to go out?” he asked, taking note of her outfit. “Don’t let me hold you up.”

  “I have to be somewhere in a while, but I have time to brew you another teaspoonful of instant.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and seated himself at the table. “I’m still dripping,” he apologized.

  “You’re in better condition than most of the men I serve coffee to in here. Where’s Scott?”