by Dick Cluster
Once the Triumph was done and returned to its owner, Alex was through for the day. The Saab had to wait until its valves were ground, probably tomorrow morning. Judging by the direction of bequests to the ICA, either Rosemarie Davis or Caroline Davis was or had been a patroness of the arts. Alex punched out, washed up, and called the only artist he knew.
6. ROSEMARIE
The only artist was also his oldest friend— the only friend, in fact, who dated back to before he’d come east from Nebraska with Laura and settled in Boston. Her name was Kim, and she was the one who had painted the Viking car that advertised his shop, as well as the abstract oils in shades of gray and blue that hung above his living room couch. He called her up and asked whether the name Davis meant anything in the art world. Kim reminded him that the art world was big and snooty, that she still classified mainly as an interloper, and that if he was flattering her there must be a reason why.
“Reason coming,” Alex said. “But what about it? Caroline Davis, or Rosemarie. That’s Rosemarie (Sturgeon) Davis, parentheses courtesy of the Globe.”
“No,” Kim said. “Rose-mahrie, not Rose-mary. Rosemarie Sturgeon was once well known, oh, in the thirties, I guess. She’s mostly forgotten now, how did you hear of her? Anyway she’s something of a legend in my circles. She’s the oldest known dyke painter in town.”
“She’s the grandmother of Caroline Davis,” Alex said doubtfully.
“Even lesbians can be grandmothers. Most probably got to be, in her day. Now, reason for asking, please.”
“Her granddaughter was hit by a car in New Hampshire. Killed. The guy who ran into her was the ex-boyfriend of a student of Meredith’s. Then he got killed, murdered, in the apartment of that student’s friend. The friend says she’s afraid the student will be suspected. There’s a lot of fear and lies flying around. I’d like to talk to Rosemarie, but I can’t call her up and say, ‘You don’t know me but I think this is too much coincidence.’ I don’t have any good reason for thinking it, either.”
“A damsel in distress,” Kim said. “Not a bad reason. Not a good one, though. I met Rosemarie once. I can get to her. If you do have information, I think she would want to know. One condition.”
“Okay,” Alex said.
“Don’t be a middleman. Bring the source of your information too.”
Alex would have preferred to learn what he could from Rosemarie Davis and then tackle Natalie again. However, one of the bases of his and Kim’s twenty-year friendship was that each knew better than to argue with the other when the other had made up his or her mind. So he agreed, then called Natalie Cooper, but got no answer. He went home to an empty apartment and called her again. He found her suspicious but willing; if Alex told her when and where this meeting was going to take place, she would come on her own. He said nine o’clock at Petros’s coffee shop in Central Square.
Petros’s was a small, unpretentious place featuring nice china, Greek or American coffee, and Greek desserts or spinach-cheese pie. Alex liked it much better here, where old men chatted over papers from Athens, than in Harvard Square’s French and Italian cafes, where doctoral candidates sat studying every word of papers from Manhattan instead. The last time he’d set up a meeting here, it had been late summer and hot. He’d carried a sick feeling in his stomach and the air conditioner had wheezed above the door. Now a few customers turned to stare at Alex as he let in a piercing arctic draft from outside. Rosemarie and Kim were seated drinking coffee at the farthest table, with their backs to the wall. A Day-Glo image of the Parthenon shone above their heads. Alex felt a small twinge of embarrassment— was he making something of nothing?— and a strong tug of expectation.
Rosemarie Sturgeon Davis was no longer in her powder-blue suit. She was wearing loose blue jeans and a sweatshirt. When she stood, Alex could see that the sweatshirt displayed a woman with a paintbrush. Its legend said, FRIDA KAHLO, LA PINTORA MAS PINTOR. Alex knew hardly any Spanish and did not recognize the name. He did see that Rosemarie Davis’s hands were stiff, almost contorted, and he wondered whether she was still able to paint.
He shook her right hand gently and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms. Davis, please sit down.”
Rosemarie said, “This afternoon, I wondered who you were. I thought of mentioning you to the detective, but I decided I’d better not.”
Alex felt the wind on his back and turned to see Natalie Cooper coming in the door right on time. He signaled, and when she got there he made introductions: “Natalie. Ms. Davis. Kim.” He added, “Natalie, thanks for coming. Can I get you anything?” When he came back from the counter with two more coffees, he thought the three women were waiting for him to start the show. But before he could, Natalie laughed the wise laugh of the old lady. She pointed an index finger across the table. “Rosemarie Sturgeon. That was really your maiden name? Your father was named after a fish?” Alex sat down next to Natalie and tried to figure her out. She would be a woman accustomed to getting a lot of mileage out of her presence and her looks. She liked taking control. It helped that she had such a ready tongue.
“You won’t believe this,” Rosemarie Davis said, “but it’s a case not of named after but of named himself.” She said this gravely, not lightly, as if to disbelieve her was a serious step, not to be taken without thought. “The name was Sullivan when he was born. He made the change after he made enough money to forget he was Irish. Not that he would have admitted to such a charge, of course. The lines that made you sit up at the service today, Mr. Glauberman, those were from Yeats. They were about Ireland, really, not just any hills and dews. But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? There’s nothing truly new anymore. The challenge is to take something old and make it somehow your own.”
“You saw me sit up?”
“Oh yes, seeing is still my strong point. My eyesight hasn’t suffered in the general deterioration, not yet. Besides, there weren’t many people there. Friends of mine and of my children. None of Caroline’s, so far as I know. Except, I thought perhaps, the two lone men, one of whom was you.”
“I’m afraid not me,” Alex said. “Then, the younger people…”
“Groupies is not a kind word,” Rosemarie said. “So I will not use it. But devotees would be too kind, and I’m not sure what fits in between.”
“Fans,” Natalie said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of about having fans.”
To Alex’s disappointment, Rosemarie Sturgeon Davis did not pick this offer up. “I’m afraid that comes from ‘fanatics,’ ” she said. She paused, waited, and then said, “There was that one other man, younger and more substantial than you, who didn’t introduce himself either. Well, later this afternoon I was visited by a detective from the Cambridge police, who did. Detective Sergeant Trevisone told me that the person who plowed over Caroline was murdered last night. He said he was visiting not so much as a part of his investigation, but as a courtesy. Yet my sense was that he wanted to know whether someone might have been exacting revenge. I told him that as far as I knew Caroline had no connections in Boston except for me. And she visited me as much out of duty as anything else.” She let unasked questions hang in the air: Who was Natalie, and what had she come to say?
“I didn’t know your granddaughter,” Natalie said. “I’m sorry she got hit, I don’t know what else to say.” She followed this with a rush of words directed to the older woman across the table but apparently intended also to answer the questions Alex hadn’t yet had a chance to ask. Alex was conscious of her persuasiveness, her sincerity and warmth. At the same time he wondered whether everything she said was always so full of gaps and shadows.
“I didn’t know her,” Natalie repeated. “But I knew him. He was a, you know, a fuckup. But Suzanne, my friend Suzanne had hooks in him and vice versa. Suzanne was taking care of Alex’s kid that night, the same day your granddaughter got hit. She claimed she saw it on the news, but I think he called her up and she didn’t want me to know. She wanted to make it seem like it was all on her ini
tiative. Anyway she went right up there, to New Hampshire, and the first I knew was when the two of them showed at my house Sunday with a story about how Scat had killed somebody in an accident and was all broken up about it and needed to get out. I didn’t know how to take that, but I told him to stay at my house a couple days. The last thing I wanted was for him to move in on Suzanne. Monday, Suzanne told me the trouble was more serious than that. She didn’t say more serious how. She said he needed help, and so did she.”
“Meredith’s help?” Alex asked. He looked at Kim, who nodded, meaning she had already explained to Caroline’s grandmother who Meredith was.
“Yeah.” Natalie nodded eagerly— maybe too eagerly, Alex thought. “Uh-huh. So I went to collect Professor Phillips, at the restaurant. Alex knows this, he was there. When I got back, the cops were at my house, Scat was dead, and Suzanne was gone. Listen. In this company, I’ll be upfront. If Suzanne killed him, he must have deserved it. If she didn’t— and that’s what I think— then somebody set things up to make it look like she did. Either way, she’s got good reason to run and hide.”
“What about that story you told me,” Alex said, “about how Scat made advances and threatened you Saturday night?” He thought “made advances” made him sound like Trevisone. Well, better than “made sexual advances,” which would sound like a copywriter for the news. Came on to you? Put moves on you? He wanted Natalie to trust him. He wanted her to trust him with the truth.
“I didn’t want to get into all this yet, okay? So I admit, I told you the first thing that came into my head.”
“You made up a story that would make me sympathetic to you, and give Suzanne a reason for doing him in that I might approve of.”
Natalie lifted her chin, and her face lost its softness while her eyes turned to sharp-edged jewels of ice.
Kim said, “Okay, you two, cut it out.”
“Why do you think,” Rosemarie interjected, “that she wanted to consult with this Professor Phillips, the sweetheart of Mr. Glauberman here?”
“I think,” Natalie said, and she put her elbows on the table, leaning across, “that she talked Scat into confessing.” Her head was almost touching the grandmother’s, the black curls on top of one reaching like Velcro for the white curls on top of the other. “But she wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing. She wanted some kind of authority figure to back her up.”
“Confessing?”
Natalie looked down and twisted a silver bracelet on her left wrist. She did not move any closer, did not try to take Rosemarie Sturgeon Davis’s hand. “Confessing that your Caroline’s death wasn’t an accident.”
Rosemarie’s face lost none of its composure. It only looked a bit more tired in the creases between her pink cheeks and pale eyes. She sat back, and thought, and didn’t say anything right away. She didn’t seem the type to leap to conclusions, nor would she want to have to abandon one, once it was reached.
“If I were confessing to that detective,” she said, “I’d want a lawyer, not a professor of Literature and Women’s Studies.”
“If you were Scat. I’m talking about Suzanne Lutrello. Suzanne wanted Professor Phillips, somebody she could talk it over with, somebody that might be able to tell her how to go.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. Maybe, he thought. But all this seemed beside the point. When Rosemarie didn’t fill the silence, Alex did. “Natalie, did you ever hear of Caroline before this? Was she somebody that Scat or Suzanne knew?”
Natalie shook her head, twisting the bracelet some more but not speaking. Alex turned to Rosemarie. “So that’s it, that’s what I wanted you to know. Maybe I just want to make your granddaughter’s accidental death make sense. Maybe Kim’s right, I’m just trying to help out Suzanne, a damsel in distress.” He waited for her to contradict him, to present the connection that would make everything fit.
“I hardly knew her,” Rosemarie said. “She was my granddaughter, and so she turned to me when she arrived in the East. She registered for college, as she’d been sent to do, and after the first week of classes she dropped out. I think she’d planned to do that all along. I supported her in this decision. I lent her money to get started on her own.”
Alex saw the creases threaten to collapse into valleys. He dropped his eyes and saw the taut fingers gripping each other on the table. This time Natalie covered them with her hand. Alex felt like the bull in the china shop, or maybe just like a man among women where he didn’t quite belong. Kim said, “Whatever happened could have happened in the city, outside a dorm or a lecture hall. You know, Alex and I left college together. It may have put our futures at risk, but not our lives.”
“Yes, but with my help she was able to get to this particular place, a particular road. She might have been somewhere equally dangerous instead, but she would not have ended up precisely there.”
“Did she stay in touch with you?” Alex asked. To himself he sounded cop-like, Trevisone-like, again. “Did she talk about anybody in her life up there? A boyfriend, a girlfriend, somebody who’d want to exact revenge?”
“She visited me a few times, but only once did we really talk. She didn’t tell me about her personal life, romance. She wanted to talk about some women she knew who were whores.”
All three younger people stared. “She had friends that were hookers?” Natalie asked at last. She was trying to put a less harsh, more fashionable sound to what this bereaved grandmother had said.
“Yes. Whores, I think, was once a perfectly simple Anglo-Saxon word for the line of work. Do you remember the scandal about the female students at Brown who were ‘recruited as prostitutes,’ as the papers say? I think this was something similar, college women who serviced visitors to the ski resort, you see. The town is called Jericho, but there is a large, self-contained resort, Pepperell Woods. There are so many potential customers— vacationers and conventioneers and skiers, single men and married men away from their wives.”
“Why did she want to talk to you about this?”
“It was a moral problem, I think, that troubled her. She couldn’t make up her own mind whether prostitution was just a job, or not. In her gut she found it degrading, but her friends apparently told her it was no worse than serving food all day. I think she was severely tempted… to see for herself what it was like. She seemed to think that I had done something similar, and so she wanted to know what I thought.”
“That you had?” Natalie asked. “Had somebody been spilling family secrets about you?”
“No. Or yes. I mean that I am a lesbian, unambiguously, and have been all my life. Yet I married, and lived as a married woman. That was what she wanted to know about, what that was like.”
Natalie showed nothing, but she was apparently at a loss for words this time. She removed her hand from Rosemarie Davis’s at last. “Well,’’ Kim said, “your marriage accounted for her existence, after all.”
“Yes. In those days, if we wanted children, or grandchildren, we had no other way. She wanted to know if that was what my marriage had been about, or whether it had been a means of survival in comfort, a career, a job. It was a very personal conversation. As you can imagine, it’s not something many people would ask.” Rosemarie withdrew her hands from the table to her lap, indicating that this topic was, for now, closed.
“Well,” said Alex, “do you know how she resolved this moral problem for herself?”
“No. After that, she was almost as reserved as before. But I do know that she resolved it. She stopped by to see me last week, for just a few minutes. She had driven down, she said, just for part of the day. She said the question was settled for her, but as yet she couldn’t explain how or why.”
“And these friends… you don’t know any of their names?”
“Unfortunately, no. She didn’t tell me very much about them, or even whether her friendship was with a group or really with one woman in particular. It was the problem in her own head she wanted to settle. I felt, actually, that the friendship may have been one-
sided— that she was not as important to these women as they were to her.”
Rosemarie had been making eye contact with each of her listeners as she talked, knowing even in her private grief how to behave before an audience. Now she let her eyes rest on Alex, and for the first time she seemed to have found something to smile at.
“It would be very simple for you to locate these women, you know— even without knowing their names. My husband, who traveled in the coffee business, once told me that in Brazilian hotels the custom was to ask the desk clerk for a blanket to warm you during the night. He said you requested a blanket, and you specified the race by the color: white, black, brown. Do you ski, Alex?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Rosemarie Sturgeon Davis repeated. “And how much are you paid for your time?”
“My time?” Alex had been imagining explaining himself, before a wood fire in a New Hampshire resort, to the ladies of the night whose time this grandmother had just been encouraging him to buy. The white woman was like Meredith, as he imagined her when she’d been twenty. The same as now, but less practiced, just trying herself out. The mulatto woman was like Natalie, tall and brash, though lighter-skinned, and in demeanor she was alternately hot and cold. The blacker woman was like certain statues of African goddesses that he had seen. It took him a while to understand what Rosemarie was now offering to do.
“I’ve spoken to the police in New Hampshire,” the dead girl’s grandmother explained. “They believe it was an accident, without negligence on the driver’s part. Even if I could now convince them it may have been something else, they would say that the driver is dead, so there’s nothing more to do. But I would like to have the full story, because that was a sweet and honest girl who did not deserve to die.”
“Why do you think,” Alex asked slowly, “that I could get that story for you?”
“Perhaps you couldn’t. However, I can see that we both distrust coincidence. After the police sergeant visited me today, I opened the Yellow Pages to detective agencies. The agencies trumpeted their skill at catching thieving cashiers, skipped debtors, runaway children, and non-monogamous husbands and wives. I closed the directory and wondered where I might find someone more appropriate. Soon after that, Kim called. And she tells me you’ve done something of this sort.”