I sat on a stool at one of the worktables and Mike folded himself into a wicker chair.
“We have continued our investigation into your husband’s possible involvement with the late Mr. Venables. I’m sorry to say that Mr. Stuart has not provided very satisfactory answers to some of our more pertinent questions. And we have found—”
“Not the shotgun!” I exclaimed.
“No, not the shotgun, though I expect he’ll eventually tell us where it is. Sooner or later. No, we found a rather interesting entry in your husband’s diary. I have a copy and I would like to read it to you, if you have no objection. Let me assure you that your husband provided us with the diary in the course of giving us access to all his belongings. And of course we had a warrant. It’s all very proper.” He smiled reassuringly, as if that would make all the difference.
“Go ahead,” I said. Mike shifted nervously, as if the whole invasion of privacy made him uncomfortable.
“I quote, then,” Antonelli said, reading from a typed sheet. “‘Venables has come back and it was grand seeing him, until I realized why he was here. He’s still playing the old game and he just laughed when I confronted him with it. He’s totally insane on the subject and the whole thing just keeps getting worse. At first I thought he’d come back for Sally and I didn’t know what to tell Harry. But I was wrong. It’s Belinda he’s come for, all right. He says there’s no way I can stop him. Well, he’s wrong on that score. I can stop him but I may have to stop the son of a bitch once and for all. What a mess! What idiotic, foolish children we were!’” Antonelli cleared his throat and folded the page, replaced it in his inside jacket pocket. “Now, I ask you if that passage means anything to you, Mrs. Stuart.” He tugged at his earlobe, then crossed his arms on his chest, which I took to mean that the pleasantries had been pretty nearly exhausted.
“It seems self-explanatory,” I began, then stopped when his eyes clicked up from the floor at me.
“Hardly. Or perhaps it explains itself to you. But not to me. ‘The old game’—now, what does that mean? Why might Mr. Venables have come back for Sally? Why, indeed, would he have come back for you? What was Mr. Venables’ rationale, I wonder. Stopping him ‘once and for all,’ I grant you, doesn’t need a great deal of interpretation.” He stared at me, waiting.
“I have no idea what game he’s referring to except that Venables was a good friend of all of these men in college. As to Sally … well, Venables stayed with them and maybe Jack drew that conclusion. Why he might have come back for me passes all rational understanding, but isn’t that what Jack’s saying, that Venables was ‘totally insane on the subject’? And as far as I’m concerned, stopping him for good could just as easily have meant punching him in the nose.”
“Not, however, in the light of events, eh? Well, I would ask you, Mr. Pierce, what does any of this mean to you as an old friend of both Mr. Stuart and Mr. Venables?” The arms remained crossed impassively, the comforting face not very comforting anymore.
“Oh, God, I don’t know. He could have meant almost anything. It was such a long time ago.” Everybody was changing now that the pressure was being put on. Mike didn’t look at all like Bertie Wooster anymore. He looked worried and his eyes behind the thick lenses darted from Antonelli to me to the floor.
“But what,” Antonelli persisted, “could this subject be that Venables was totally insane about? Surely it must ring a bell of some sort? What old game would Stuart know about that you wouldn’t?” He tugged the earlobe again. “Think, man.”
Mike furrowed his brow, scowled, pursed his lips, and succeeded only in looking more innocent and hopeless and foolish than ever. “I’m thinking, but nothing comes,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me.” He sounded like an amateur actor reading his lines for the first time, and badly at that.
“Why,” Antonelli said quietly, “would there be this confusion about Sally and Belinda in his mind? Or does it matter? Who cares? Mrs. Stuart doesn’t seem to be involved at all—except as a possible motive. And the unfortunate Mrs. Granger merely found the body.”
“Why don’t you just ask Jack?” I said.
“Oh, we have. But he doesn’t seem to have much to say. Curious, isn’t it? Says he was just writing, a stream-of-consciousness he calls it—well, I’m only a police officer, Mrs. Stuart, but I’ve dabbled in my James Joyce, and your husband’s idea of a stream-of-consciousness and mine are worlds apart, I’m afraid.
“Well, where does that leave you?” I said.
“It isn’t so much a matter of where it leaves me, Mrs. Stuart, as where it leaves your husband.”
“And where’s that?” Mike asked.
“We’ve taken Mr. Stuart into custody. We’re charging him with murder.”
If Antonelli had wanted to shut us up with his quiet bombshell, he must have felt enormously satisfied. He left immediately thereafter, thanking us for our time, and Mike and I sat looking at each other like two fools. Somehow the murder seemed more real than ever in light of Jack’s arrest. It had gone from the abstract to the concrete in a lightning flash and my first thoughts were of what it must be like for Jack. In a cell, deprived of what life really means to any of us, the freedom of movement. I wondered what it would do to him, how he would take it, and I feared the worst.
Mike was staring into space, still scowling.
“Why did you lie to Antonelli?”
He jumped as if I’d stuck him with a needle. “What? What are you talking about?” His eyes flickering past me, his voice brittle and tense. He wouldn’t look at me. Poor Mike, so transparent. It was so easy to forget that he ran the publishing company. Maybe the appearance of innocence was something he could use to his advantage. I hoped so, for his sake.
“You know what that diary means. You must. I just want to know why you lied to Antonelli, that’s all.”
“Why would I lie to a cop? Be serious, Belinda—”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. Why would you lie to a cop? What could be so important? But it’s none of my business … except insofar as it affects Jack.”
“Well, there you are!” he cried, leaping to his feet and striking a Bertie Wooster pose, hands on hips. He was wearing an elegantly wrinkled white linen suit with a French-blue shirt and a lemon tie. “Jack won’t even tell what the diary means.”
“But what has that got to do with you? Jack’s not here right now, you are, and I’m asking you why you lied—”
“I don’t know what it means! It’s Jack’s diary, not mine. And I’m damned if I see where you get off calling me a liar, Belinda. I mean, it’s me, you know, Mike …” His look of innocence seemed suddenly tired and forty years old, the big round eyes not quite so bright, the hair a little thinner, the complexion not quite so pink. He was right, of course, he was Mike. Mike Now, not Mike Then. I kept confusing the two. If he had lied to Antonelli, I had to remember that Mike Now might have pretty good reasons.
“I don’t think Jack killed Venables,” I said. Mike dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. Shouts from the street rose, battered at the silence we’d built for ourselves in the loft. The bare wall where all the Belindas had once hung looked down on our little dialogue, rose around us like the treacherous North Face of Greenwich Village. Full of faults, chasms, betrayal, and sudden death. “Somebody knows what was going on with Peter and Jack and all the rest of you—you may not know who killed him, you may know but not realize it, for all I know you killed him, Mike—but somebody knows what the subtext of all this is. And that somebody isn’t telling. I’m afraid the result is that Jack’s going to be convicted of a murder he didn’t commit.”
“Subtext! If you don’t mind my saying so, you’d be better off keeping your theories to yourself—what does subtext mean? Somebody shot Venables and it looks bad for Jack. What else matters?” He shot me an exasperated look. “Really!”
“Why did you come down here now, I told you I’d call you. What was so important that it couldn’t wait?”
/> “Well, I don’t know … I just wanted to talk to you.” He brushed a long wedge of lank dark blond hair from his high, noble forehead. “No big deal.”
“You sounded pretty urgent on the phone,” I reminded him.
“I don’t know, Belinda, all right? I was antsy in the office, I wanted to see you, I came down. Is that all right? Did I need a permit, for God’s sake? What is it with you? You act like a cop—is all this because you think Jack is just some harmless and misunderstood delinquent who needs our sympathy?” The face I’d smiled on for so many years had taken a new turn, had sprouted a kind of petulance I hadn’t seen before. “He beats you up, he acts like a perfect fool, malevolent and stupid … and still you carry this pathetic torch? What in the world’s the matter with you, Belinda? I’ve been watching Jack for the past year or so and I always wind up with a face-ache from trying to stay civil while he gets drunk and dashes about insulting people, mainly you—I cannot stand to see him treat you that way, Belinda. You’re too decent and sweet and … well, you know what you are. And now you insist he’s innocent! He’s been heading for this for a long time, and why can’t you admit it? Don’t you want the responsibility? Can’t you handle the idea that you drove one man to kill another over you?”
“That’s melodramatic and imbecilic!” I was shouting and Mike was staring at me, his face white and shaking.
“It’s the truth! You’d better just grow up and accept it!”
He knew a decent exit line and that was it. I was barely aware of his departure. I was rooted to the spot, like someone planted with Krazy Glue, and my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I felt as if he’d driven a skewer of truth through my heart.
Chapter Thirty-five
IT WAS EARLY EVENING BY the time I got out to La Guardia and the Eastern shuttle terminal. As always, there wasn’t an empty seat. All the passengers had that dazed, glassy-eyed, helpless look, and one and all they glistened like creatures who’d been rained on. I sat with my eyes closed, willing myself not to open them until we landed, except for the moment when they stopped the cart at my seat and I produced my credit card.
I almost made it, not looking until we were sweeping low over the water lapping at the edges of the runway. Logan Airport in Boston looked blurred through the heavy, dirty fog swelling up where the city met the ocean. The lights of the city pulsed behind the humidity. I waited stickily for a cab, took the quick five-minute ride into the heart of town, curling off Storrow Drive and up into the Back Bay. I’d been lucky and gotten a single in the old part of the Ritz-Carlton on Arlington Street.
The shower was a dream come true. I threw the windows up and looked out on the Public Garden, the globes of light on the poles, the willows waving gently. I dressed slowly, feeling almost crisp, and walked up Newbury Street, found a cafe with tables outside, and ordered a light dinner and a glass of Beaune, almost ice cold. I began to feel myself relaxing for the first time all summer. It was Boston, I suppose, the contentment I always found in the unique solitude the city provided.
I tried to organize my thoughts without getting upset. I shifted through the men involved in the death of Peter Venables, summing up whatever struck me as pertinent. Jack: a personality in trouble, a man losing so much of what was important to him, awash in self-pity and luckless middle age looming ominously on the horizon; recent violent outbursts against both me and Venables. But he was trying to turn the corner, fight his way back; he’d taken the job of writing the dirty book, but he’d had his reasons. Two things really mattered: First, did punching someone and threatening him imply the capability of killing him? And, second, where was his shotgun?
Harry: obsessed with what he believed was love for me, having decided to leave his wife once he’d satisfied himself that I really was at the end of my marriage; then learning that Venables had his own plans for me … and possibly benefiting by the removal of both Venables and Jack—for the murder—from the scene. What really mattered? How serious were his feelings for me? And would he actually have used Jack’s shotgun, thereby not simply betraying but framing a fellow Ruffian?
Mike. Well, yes, Mike. He was a Ruffian. He was an old friend of mine. But no matter how I turned the crystal ball, I couldn’t discern a motive. Working on the Theory of the Least Likely, he’d be the perfect murderer, driven by something I knew nothing about. But that was absurd, surely, and made a total hash out of the whole ghastly business.
And Hacker Welles. Fascinated by the past, immersed in Ruffian history for the past year while writing the show—but not terribly involved. More of an observer. Then, there was his idea for a novel, which involved a figure based on me murdering a Ruffian. Had he told me why she was killing a Ruffian? I couldn’t remember.
I drank a brandy with my coffee and suddenly felt very tired. I walked back down Newbury. A breeze had come up and for the first time in weeks I was able to shut my mind off and sink thankfully into a deep sleep. The last memory of the night I had was the curtain swaying in the draft of balmy air swirling through the willows across the street from my window.
I was having breakfast when I remembered why Hacker’s heroine killed the Ruffian-type, the ones she didn’t turn into swine because, as he said, they were already swine. It was because she’d been so disillusioned by them—because she was such an innocent. She’d killed the one who most epitomized the shock of reality.
Now, how could I make that fit in?
Wondering got me through much too large a breakfast, with the sun streaming down outside the Ritz-Carlton’s dining room. Then I made a telephone call and set off across the garden, past the great statue of George Washington on his horse, through the flowerbeds, over the little humpbacked bridge with the elegant white swan boats bobbing beside the pier. It was going to be ungodly but the heat hadn’t yet hit and the morning was crystalline, every color defined and perfect, every sound clear and almost musical. I tried not to think what I was actually doing in Boston. For a moment I felt a long way from murder.
Tony Chalmers lived in a narrow house on Joy Street, half a stone’s throw from the State House, which sat grandly beneath Bulfinch’s gold dome atop Beacon Hill. He greeted me with a smile, a wreath of smoke from a long curved pipe circling his head. He was wearing a seersucker jumpsuit dabbed with mud and he apologized for not shaking hands because his hands were dirty. “When the time comes to repot, by God, there’s nothing to be done but repot. But,” he said, “your call was a most pleasant surprise. Though it does occur to me that there’s probably something rather serious on your mind. Hacker called to tell me that Jack seems to be a suspect in Peter’s murder …”
He led me through a mid-Victorian apartment with gilt-framed paintings and Boston ferns and heavy settees done in rich blue and red upholstery. The wood shone, smelled of furniture polish. A couple of cats watched my arrival, not without a slight air of misgiving. They lay in blobs of bright sunshine. There was an opulence to the professor’s surroundings which intimated that the collection of furniture and trappings long predated him.
He led the way through a long crowded dining room and out onto a deck, which I’d recognized from the street as the top of a carriage house. He’d made a grand mess with huge terra-cotta pots, countless trowels and bags of earth and plant food and watering cans and a hose curling like an emaciated green snake in search of a tiny mouse. The furniture was white wrought iron mixed with old-fashioned yellow-red-and-green-striped canvas chairs.
Chalmers was wearing a seersucker hat, with his gray Afro bulging out beneath it. He looked like an aging, pint-sized Bozo the Clown. He poured me a cup of coffee and nudged a basket of sweet rolls toward me. “Let’s sit in the shade and reminisce. If that’s what you have in mind, of course.” He settled into one of the canvas chairs and I perched on wrought iron and found myself looking down at him. He took off his hat, dropped it on the wooden planking, and sipped noisily at his coffee.
“Well, you’re right, reminiscing is what I have in mind. And I naturally thought of y
ou, not just because you were what I’ve heard described as the Ruffians’ gray eminence but also because of what you said to me that night at the Grangers’ party—when you spoke, sort of worriedly, of always having a funny feeling about the Ruffians. Something unhealthy in the closeness …”
“Mmm.” he nodded, nibbled at a roll. “So I did. But I thought I was being a mindless old worrier. I take it you’ve come to think I was onto something—I’m not at all sure you’re right, mind you. From what I’ve heard, Venables’ death may have been pretty straightforward.”
“The police certainly think so. Jack’s been arrested.”
“Good Lord!”
“And I don’t think he did it. It’s not because I’m his wife or because I’ve suddenly realized what a prince he is and how much I love him. I haven’t. But I’m convinced that I know him pretty well, I know how screwed-up he is, I know he gets angry. I also know he didn’t kill Venables. His reaction has been all wrong. It’s difficult for me to explain and I surely couldn’t convince the police. But I am convinced Venables was killed because of the past, something back there that’s hidden. I was hoping you could shine your memory into the darkness and let me see what it is.”
I told him about the things I had heard Jack say to Venables in Leverett’s office. I told him about what Antonelli had found in the diary. I told him about the evening I had spent with Venables and what Venables had proposed for the two of us.
He listened and ate his breakfast and when a cat joined us Chalmers put his cup down and let the cat finish off his coffee. He lit his long swooping pipe again, puffing contentedly, listening.
“Belinda,” he sighed, “for the last twenty years you’ve had what amounts to a Ruffian overdose. I can’t help but feel you’ve earned the right to pick my brain. Which is something I’ve never let any of the Ruffians do.” He absentmindedly tickled the cat’s ears and it hissed at him. He pushed it over on its back and scratched its tummy and it went to sleep. “As you know, I’ve always had that nasty little fear that something ugly might come out of the Ruffians. They were so wrapped up in romanticism, the one-for-all-and-all-for-one thing. They were so close. I’ve sometimes wished I’d discouraged Harry when he brought up the idea of a club. He was thinking about the old Rakehell bunch, Merrie England and all, but then I was smitten by the spirit of youth, that spirit of camaraderie they—we—all felt. They were going to be my pipeline to what was happening, to the sixties.” He laughed abruptly, his eyes wrinkling to slits. “God, did I pick the wrong bunch for that! One of life’s little jokes, I guess. But it was fine for a while. Took me back to my own undergraduate days, somehow. I should have known better, I was the grown-up, so on and so forth, but what’s the good of saying all that now?
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