“It looks like you’ve just taken over,” Valentine said, eyeing the scatter of papers across the desk.
“My first day,” said Ashes. He glanced at the tear sheets he was still holding and tossed them into the wastepaper basket. “Honest to God, Drysdale kept anything and everything that had his name on it. I found a file folder with pages torn out of old telephone directories. He had circled his name in green ink on every one of them.” Ashes pulled open a drawer and scooped out a handful of small squares of pink paper. “Telephone messages,” said Ashes, rolling his eyes. “Arranged by year.” He tossed them in on top of the tear sheets.
Ashes continued to burrow into the desk drawers.
Valentine looked idly about. “Is it always so quiet around here?”
“No,” said Ashes, glancing at the watch that was attached to his wide, studded wrist band. “But this week’s edition went to the printer about two hours ago. And our two star reporters— our only reporters, I should say—are out on a marathon lunch, to see who can eat the most guacamole without actually turning green.”
“Is the BAR running a tribute to Sweeney?”
“Well, Bernie thought they should, but she couldn’t think of enough nice things to say about him that would fill up two whole lines, so they just stuck his picture on the front page with the dates of his birth and death, and what Bernie calls ‘a smart black border.’ Both tasteful and chic.”
“Which Sweeney never was.”
Ashes took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair with his feet up on the desk. He put his hands together at the back of his head, and rolled one of the spurs on his boots across a pile of Sweeney’s old correspondence, shredding it slightly. “Would you believe me if I said I was sorry Sweeney was dead?”
“To be honest, I’ll have to say no.”
“Well, I am sorry he’s dead. I’m sorry for his parents, I’m sorry for his creditors. I’m even a little sorry for Sweeney himself—”
“But?”
“But nobody believes me,” Ashes said with a shrug.
“Who is nobody?”
“Your neighbors across the street,” said Ashes.
“Have the police been bothering you?” asked Valentine in surprise.
“They haven’t been bothering you?”
“Not really. They hauled Clarisse and me in there the other day and insinuated that I’m a closet heterosexual, among other things. They’ve talked to Linc a couple of times, too. And they are always coming over to talk to Julia, but mostly they want to look at her motorcycle. And they all know Susie Whitebread. I don’t think they have any leads at all; they’re just fishing. How have they been making things difficult for you?”
A slight frown came over Ashes’ face. “I don’t have an alibi. Joe and I were in the basement that night. We got coked up, and then we wandered over to Charlie’s Cafeteria for some food. But nobody saw us, as far as I know—nobody who’d remember us, I mean.”
“Are the police talking to Joe?” Valentine asked.
Ashes shook his head. “I’m the one they’re coming down on. God knows why.”
“You know why,” said Valentine, looking around the office.
“Why?”
“You seem to have had a motive,” Valentine explained. “You wanted Sweeney’s job—and you got it.”
“This isn’t a job. This is a pastime. I can’t make enough here to live off of. They’d know that if they ever saw me cash my paycheck at the fruit stand on the corner. Besides, Sweeney was going to be fired anyway.”
“Fired? For what?”
“Because he was writing libelous columns, that’s why. A lot more damaging stuff than anything he said about you or the bar. He was tracking down real dirt.”
“What is real dirt?”
“Like So-and-So was paid two hundred dollars to wrap a senator in hospital adhesive tape, and it was So-and-So’s roommate who saved the senator from being strangled.”
“Was it true?”
“Probably not,” said Ashes. “Though you’d be surprised at the number of men in public office who are obsessed with hospital fantasies. Sweeney wrote down stories he got third-hand. And he was too lazy to check sources. He was putting stories like that in the ‘blind’ section at the end of his column, but everybody knew who he was talking about. He was also going around snapping pictures of people at gatherings when they were acting silly, and he’d run the photo with a caption like ‘So-and-So Grabs His Ankles for Fun and Profit’.”
“So why didn’t Bernie—or whoever is in charge of this place—just fire him?”
“Because gay people have never discovered the joys of a libel suit. So the paper was safe. And Sweeney’s column helped sell advertising.”
Bernie came to the door and leaned inside. “Have you found Sweeney’s last column copy yet?” she asked Ashes.
“No,” said Ashes, “and I’ve looked through everything.”
Valentine looked surprised. “Sweeney wrote a column that was never published?”
“He sure did,” said Bernie. “And it was all finished except for Mr. Fred’s party. He was supposed to turn it in the next morning. I was hoping to run it next week as a kind of memorial. Besides, I had already paid him for it.”
“After the way he acted at Mr. Fred’s party,” said Valentine, “it was probably going to be a lulu.”
“Well,” said Ashes, sitting up and slamming shut the drawers of the desk, “I can’t find it, so I guess we’ll just never know for sure, will we?”
Chapter Eleven
IN MID-AFTERNOON ON the day before Thanksgiving, Clarisse entered the small office overlooking the bar. In one hand she carried a pair of leather gloves and a soft leather overnight bag. The sash of her tawny camel-hair coat was untied, and underneath she wore dark brown corduroy slacks and a charcoal-gray cable-knit sweater.
Valentine looked up from a pile of bills and advertising brochures scattered over his desk. He glanced at the desk clock and said, “I thought you’d gone an hour ago.”
Dropping her bag by the door, she came over to the desk. She scribbled quickly on a scrap of paper and dropped it on the pile of bills before Valentine. “That’s my brother’s telephone number. In case there’s an emergency and you need me back here immediately.”
Valentine wadded the slip of paper and tossed it into the wastepaper basket.
“You mean something by that, don’t you?” said Clarisse. “You’re trying to tell me something.”
“Clarisse, I know that number by heart,” said Valentine. “You taped it to the fridge yesterday and last night it was on my bathroom mirror. For a while I thought it was some trick who kept breaking in.”
Clarisse threw herself wearily in one of the armchairs. She crossed her legs, grasped the arms of the chair, and pressed her head back over the top, as if preparing against the g-force of a rocket blast-off.
“It isn’t fair…”
“What isn’t fair?” said Valentine.
“It isn’t fair that all the family holidays should be in the fall and winter—Thanksgiving, Christmas. Indoors. Overheated rooms. Too much food. Not enough to drink. Nowhere to hide. Bars on the windows. Sadistic matrons patrolling the halls.”
“You’re not going to a state correctional facility, Lovelace, you’re going to Beverly Farms. The third richest township in America, I believe you once told me.”
Clarisse lowered her head. She smiled a ghastly smile. “It’s true, and it’s beautiful there. So come with me, Val.”
“I told you, Linc and I are spending the day together. Look, you’re coming back on Friday. You’ll be there less than forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-one hours and thirty-five minutes, providing the trains are on schedule. Of course, they rarely are.” She got up and moved impatiently about the office. “Where is the Woodworking Wonder, anyway? Where is the man who’s stolen your heart—or at least captured your attention?”
She glanced through the one-way mirror. Below, in the bar,
the fan-and-globe lights were turned up bright while an electrician and his assistant, amid a scattering of tools and spools of wire, worked at cutting away a long, narrow section of wainscoting along the back wall between the restrooms and the kitchen.
“He said he had a little job in Brookline this afternoon— rehanging a cabinet or something.”
“Did you invite Joe and Ashes for tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“So that’s how it’s to be,” she said despondently. “While I am in remotest suburbia, dispensing artificial cheer to twelve extremely unpleasant persons who have masqueraded for thirty-three years as my relatives, you and Linc and Ashes and Joe are going to be having a wonderful time, lounging around a turkey carcass. Someday,” she added wistfully, “when I’m old and gray, I’m going to find out what it’s like to have Thanksgiving dinner with a tableful of people I actually like.”
“You should have flown to Morocco to spend Thanksgiving with Noah. He asked you to—he even said he’d pay for your ticket.”
Clarisse pursed her lips tightly. “I couldn’t afford the time away. I have a paper due in Contracts.”
“Don’t complain to me if you’ve decided to become a slave to your career.”
“I’m not complaining about my career, I’m complaining about my life. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a date?”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“It certainly is,” replied Clarisse with a grim sigh. “And I’ll even bet the four of you are going out dancing tomorrow night.”
“We’re going to Metro,” said Valentine.
“While I’m in the attic room at Beverly Farms, with the wind whistling down the chimney, reading Pre-Industrial English Sentencing Systems by the light of a guttering candle.”
She sighed and turned back idly to the window, gazing down at the bar below again. Her eyes narrowed suddenly when she saw a squat, chrome- and black-striped jukebox sitting at an angle against the wall across from the bar.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What’s what?”
“That thing that looks like a jukebox.”
“That’s what it is—a jukebox. It was delivered yesterday.”
Clarisse looked at Valentine in surprise. She pointed to the corner of the office, where a number of boxes of stereo components were stacked, still in their manufacturers’ crates and boxes. “You spent a fortune on that system. Why in the world do you need a jukebox?”
Valentine shrugged.
“And it shouldn’t be down there anyway,” said Clarisse. “The wood dust will get into it.”
Valentine laughed shortly. “It’s never even going to be plugged in.”
“If it’s not going to be plugged in, why did you order it?”
Turning back to his bills and his advertising brochures, again Valentine merely shrugged.
“How much did it cost?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“What?!”
“Plus fifteen hundred a month rental. Starting today.”
Clarisse closed her eyes and shook her head. Then a thought came to her, and she sat back down in the chair. “Is this like the business where the man in the blue suit and the purple shirt and the white tie comes in and orders a Coke and you give him a Coke and he pays you with a dollar bill and you give him five hundred dollars in change?”
“You got it,” said Valentine.
Clarisse pounded the arms of the chair with her fists. “Pay off!” she breathed. “Where did you manage to find twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Noah had budgeted for it,” said Valentine. “There’s a separate account book marked ‘Incidentals.’”
“Did someone actually approach you and say he would bust you and this place up if you didn’t pay protection money? Or was it a little more subtle than that?”
“If we put in the jukebox,” said Valentine, “we are assured that a certain Italian family won’t lob bombs into the bar after hours, discouraging our patrons.”
Clarisse grimaced. “I hate all this. You always know that corruption is there—especially in this city, but—”
“I know,” said Valentine, “it’s unpleasant. You’re also not used to it.”
“And you are?”
“Don’t forget, I’ve been a bartender for a while. At Bonaparte’s, it was part of my job to give the cop a guided tour of the basement every month. He also got a cold beer and a bulging envelope.”
“Oh, no! Do you mean we’re going to have to pay off the cops too?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“That answers my question.” Clarisse sighed. “The young lawyer gets a taste of real life.”
“I want you to pretend you just had amnesia for the last few minutes,” Valentine said.
Clarisse thought for a moment, and then nodded. She stood, closed her coat, and tied the sash. She was about to say goodbye when they heard someone come pounding up the metal stairs from below. In another moment, the door opened and Ashes came inside.
“You arrived just in time to tell me goodbye,” said Clarisse glumly. “I’m going away. You’re staying here.”
Ashes looked at her strangely, as if he had no idea what she was talking about. “I would have been here sooner,” he said uncertainly, “but I stopped in at Fritz for a beer and ran into Linc. He talked my ear off. And then I nearly got run down by a limo that came to pick up Susie Whitebread.”
“A limo?” said Clarisse.
“Yeah. I guess she got back on the Birkin Hare payroll.” The Birkin Hare Institute was a long-established and prestigious medical research facility located a few blocks from Slate on the edge of Boston’s Chinatown. Ashes’ remark made no obvious sense to them. Clarisse was just about to ask him to explain what he meant, but Valentine shook his head very slightly as a warning for her not to say anything.
Then Valentine said, “I thought Linc was in Brookline.”
“Rehanging a cabinet,” added Clarisse.
Ashes shrugged. “Well, he wasn’t. He was over at Fritz, spilling his guts.”
“About what?” asked Valentine. “Our sex life?”
“No, unfortunately. He was telling me his life story. Year by year. The only thing he forgot was to ask me if I cared. Thank God he’s only twenty-six.”
“Twenty-five,” said Clarisse.
“Twenty-three,” said Valentine.
They all glanced at one another.
“He told me he was twenty-six,” said Ashes. “Because he said he’d been a carpenter since he was nineteen— apprenticed to somebody in New Orleans.”
“He told me he had to drop out of Tulane when his scholarship ran out,” said Clarisse.
“He told me he just went to night school in New Orleans. He said Tulane was so expensive he hadn’t even considered it.” Valentine glanced at Ashes. “What else did he tell you? About his life.”
“Born in Maine,” said Ashes, remembering and slowly recounting. “Father remarried. Ran off to New Orleans, hustled for a while. He was proud of that,” Ashes added parenthetically. “Had a lover. Lover jilted him. Moved to San Francisco. Had an affair with his shrink. Went back to Portland. Father dead. Nursed his stepmother until she died. Moved to Boston. Fell in love.” At this last, Ashes looked up at Valentine with a cold smile.
“That’s nothing like the story he told me,” said Clarisse.
“His parents aren’t dead,” said Valentine slowly. “They’re not even divorced.”
“Maybe you and Linc should have a little talk during my absence,” said Clarisse, getting up and again preparing to go.
“I think so too,” said Ashes. “I’m going down to see how Ralph is getting along with the wiring.” He bade Clarisse farewell and, yanking the door open again, clattered quickly down the stairs.
“Are you going to talk to Linc?” Clarisse asked. “If he lied to you about those things, he could be lying about other things, too.”
“Other things?”
“Like where he was the night Sweeney got killed.”
“He was home,” said Valentine.
“He said he was home,” Clarisse corrected. “Not necessarily the same thing.”
Valentine said nothing for a moment. He pointedly looked at the clock on the wall. “I think it’s time for us to sit down and solve this crime,” Clarisse said.
“Fine,” said Valentine. “I mean, we have all this free time on our hands. Setting up the bar is nothing. First-year law school—you can do that off the top of your head. So why don’t we just go out and do it? Find out who killed Sweeney. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of thousand man-hours.”
Clarisse sighed. She looked around. As if randomly, she remarked, “Now that I’ve given up cigarettes, do you have any heavy drugs I could take with me? Some anti-psychotics would be nice.”
“I’ll talk to Linc,” said Valentine, “if you’ll talk to Susie.”
“About what?” Clarisse asked in surprise.
“Ashes said that Susie was on the Birkin Hare payroll. They do lots of experiments over there, but they’re not Masters and Johnson.” Clarisse looked at him blankly. Valentine sighed. “I think law school must be turning your brain to mush.” Slowly he explained: “What if Sweeney had had something on Susie—in regard to her connection with somebody at Birkin Hare?”
“But if Ashes knows something, then it isn’t a secret,” Clarisse argued. “And if it isn’t a secret, then you can’t have blackmail.”
“Maybe Ashes read about it in Sweeney’s last column,” suggested Valentine.
“You told me that that column was lost.”
“Ashes said it was lost,” said Valentine carefully.
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