Park Lane South, Queens

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “You got that vest on,” he popped open a Coke and passed it to her.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, you had that on the first time I saw you.”

  “Yes.” He must know that she was after him. She wished she could float away. This looks, thought the Mayor, like it’s going to be a long one. He made himself comfortable in the shadow of a plastic tree. “Back then,” Claire nodded. “Before the murder.”

  “Same day.”

  “Right. Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

  “You like Frank?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Frank. Frank Sinatra.” He waved a battered album.

  “Oh. No, I uh … prefer Billie.”

  “Billie?”

  “Holiday.”

  “Yeah? What’s he, new?”

  “No.”

  “So. You wanna get in the air conditioner with me?”

  Claire laughed politely. She straightened her spine. “Actually, I came here to discuss the murders. I had the feeling I ought to tell you what I thought.”

  “Oh yeah? Is that why you came here? All right. So discuss.”

  She cleared her throat. “Well. Both murders took place in a circle. A circle. Nobody seems to have made anything of the idea of the circle itself. And I just thought … I don’t know … maybe somebody could look into that aspect of it. You see, nowadays, cultists seem to go in more for the pentagram, but traditionally it was the circle used in all diabolical ceremonies … in occult ceremonies.” As she spoke she realized that what she had said would certainly implicate Iris von Lillienfeld. Everyone in Richmond Hill knew that Iris was known as a witch. All Claire could see was Iris’s poor white face. Oh, she didn’t want it to be Iris. Still, it was her duty to tell. “You see,” she continued, “babies have always been used in black magic ceremonies as sacrifice … often eaten … or … or parts of their bodies made into unguents or soups … to be drunk or used later to cast spells. Please don’t look at me so disbelievingly, it’s quite true. The principles of evil have always fed on innocence … literally. It’s recorded word for word in the Malleus Maleficarum, in the report to Peter the Judge in Boltington concerning thirteen children devoured in the state of Berne. You can read it for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  “Sounds like the third shelf at the video rental.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it? Because there are still so many people who are fascinated with that sort of horror. And always will be, I suppose. All that I’m trying to say is this: instead of a murderer working impulsively, chaotically, perhaps what we have here is a thought-out plan of treachery. A person consumed with power … satanic power. I mean, if there is a sort of system here, one could conceivably figure out what might happen next.”

  “I think you oughta have your head examined.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! I came here to share my feelings with you, to be helpful if I could, and all you can do is try to make me feel strange. I’ll be perfectly frank with you, after you left this morning I felt bad. I started smoking one cigarette after the next and then I thought, great, this is just what I’m trying not to do. It seems everything I try not to do, I do just that. To which you will surely reply, stop trying. Which is, by the way, the essence of Buddhistic thought. Anyway, I stopped smoking only to find myself eating everything in sight. I caught myself and so I naturally thought of you—”

  “Naturally.”

  “And I … I felt really close to you and I thought I had to come over here and tell you how sorry I was. For the way I behaved. After you went out and got me the camera. So I came and here I am and I don’t feel close you at all. I feel as though you’re this perfectly horrible person with whom I want nothing to do—”

  “‘With whom’? Did I hear you say ‘with whom’?”

  “Please don’t make fun of me.”

  “Oh, I get it. You can come over here and tell me I’m a perfectly horrible person and you don’t want to have nothin’ to do with me but I shouldn’t make fun of you.” Claire watched as the determined upper lip she found so attractive curled inward. “I think you think the whole police force never heard of cult murders. And like it’s going to take you to tell us about them. You know what your problem is?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “Your problem is that you always gotta be the one in control. The minute you feel anybody else gettin’ up there with you on your Buddha pole, you go all to pieces.”

  “I truly dislike this room. Did you paint it pea green for your own amusement or was it like this when you got here? Or perhaps it’s your idea of a political statement?”

  He ignored her. “You’re scared shit to give anyone power over you because poor little you could get hurt.”

  “My, my,” Claire sucked the inside of her cheek. “You figured this out all by yourself, I suppose. A genuine fling into the dizzying heights of psychoanalysis.”

  “Oh, come on. Anybody acts that superior has got to have some sort of complex.”

  “It might surprise you to know that there’s a vast world out there just full of people who function and communicate on levels other than dese, dems, and dose, and they’re perfectly happy.” Her eyes bulged. “They’re not looking down on anybody. They’re just trying to live a gentler life.”

  He burst out laughing. “I’m talking about apples and you’re talking about oranges.”

  “You’re the most infuriating person I have ever met.”

  “But you’re crazy about me. You know you are. Otherwise you never would’ve come here.” He settled back comfortably on a wedge of foam rubber.

  That was the trouble with living on a cop’s salary. Even if you knew what was good, you’d never be able to afford it. It made her so mad she could spit. “You haven’t heard a single word I’ve said!” she shouted at him.

  “I heard you. What do you think, I’m sleeping? I only ought to follow my brain instead of my heart. You’d be my prime suspect if I didn’t keep making excuses for you inside of my head.”

  She bolted upright. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. None of this started happening until you got back to town did it?”

  Claire was speechless. She stared, paralyzed, into a framed picture of Johnny Walker Black as if it might tell her something.

  He squashed his cigarette into a dirty pie plate and looked at his watch. “You could have done them both as far as a jury would be concerned.”

  “But my cameras,” she whispered.

  He shrugged. “You could have got rid of them yourself. Throw suspicion in another direction. Could easily have been a woman who did it. Not a trace of semen to be found. And sweetheart. While I got your attention, let me tell you something. You’re just the type some jury would love to hang. Expatriate. Member of a weird Indian cult—”

  “Cult?! that was an ashram … of a very respected guru! And the other an extremely high lama!”

  “Try telling that one to a jury. You know what the Post would make outa you? With a past like you got? Growin’ weird magical herbs in your kitchen? Mincemeat, that’s what.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “No, I ain’t outa my mind. And I didn’t say you did it. Alls I’m sayin is you coulda done it. Wandering around in the middle a the night like you do. Talking to yourself. I’ve seen you talking to yourself. Wacky broad.” He shook his head. “Shit!” He sprang up suddenly. “Hang on a second.” He jumped from the couch to the window, picked up a pair of binoculars and studied the racetrack through them. He wrote something down on a piece of paper, smiled, and picked up the phone. While it was ringing he looked at her and winked. “Eddie? Yeah. Johnny. Gimmie Four Leaf Clover thirty times in the fifth. That’s all. Yeah. Statta bene.” He hung up the phone and rubbed both hands together.

  “You have someone at the track passing you signals!”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s illegal!”

  “So’s the grass you got growin in your mother’s backyard.
”

  Claire stood up slowly. She walked to the back door and fiddled clumsily with the lock.

  “Just flip the top part to the right,” he said.

  She waited till the Mayor was beside her, then walked into the bright sunlight and looked into the startled eyes of a golden horse. She hadn’t even gotten to the part about the near electrocution. The door slammed tight behind her.

  CHAPTER 10

  Carmela was ready for her, pacing the porch when she got back home. She was livid. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with my car? You don’t even have a license!”

  “Here are the keys. I have such a headache. I’m sorry. I won’t take your stupid car anymore.”

  “That’s right, you won’t. You’ve got a lot of nerve.” She snatched the keys and went back into the house. Claire went in, too. Mary was sitting at the kitchen table and Zinnie was sprawled across the countertop. The Mayor, for one, was glad to be home before supper.

  “My God!” Claire cried. “You’ve cut your hair!”

  Mary looked up, frightened. She snatched apologetically at her neck. “Yes,” she whispered. “And your father hasn’t seen me yet.”

  “Mom! Your beautiful hair!”

  “Dead on the hairdresser’s floor.” She folded her hands and placed them in her lap. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “It’s your new look, Ma,” Zinnie said. “No big deal.”

  “Next she’ll be going on a diet,” Carmela said.

  “And that starts with d and that rhymes with p and that stands for pool,” said Zinnie.

  “All I meant was—”

  “Just shut up. Nobody cares what you meant.”

  “Oh, I’ve got that straight. That’s nothing new to me.” Carmela’s eyes filled with tears. “Nobody cares about me at all since the mystic marvel here ran out of luck and had to condescend to live with the likes of us!”

  The telephone rang and Zinnie picked it up. “It’s for you, mystic marvel.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him,” Claire shook her head. “And don’t anyone use the bathroom radio. It’s dead. And so, almost, was I.”

  “It’s that Stefan.”

  “Oh. Oh, all right. Give it to me. Hello?”

  “Good evening.” His accent was thicker over the phone. “How are you holding up in this heat wave?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “So la la. Listen, the reason I’m calling … I’m driving into town tonight … Soho. Julio Marble is having a show and I thought I’d have a look at his new work. Perhaps buy something for the entrance hall. Would you like to come along?”

  “You couldn’t have called at a better time,” Claire scowled at Carmela. “That’s exactly what I’d like to do. Get away from everything for a little bit.”

  “Pick you up at seven, then.”

  “All right.”

  “Ciao.”

  “And tomorrow,” Zinnie was telling her mother, “we’ll go up to the mall and get your ears pierced.”

  Stefan drove along the Long Island Expressway with the top down. Claire’s hair whipped unnervingly across her eyes but he was going so fast that she couldn’t catch hold of it to anchor it down. Gladys Knight and the Pips blasted from quadriphonic speakers, Stefan yodeling along with staccato clumsiness. You could take the boy’s soul out of Bialystok but you couldn’t take the Bialystok out of his soul. By the time they got to the colorful, raggedy streets of Soho, Claire was ready for a calming drink and a cigarette, the hell with reform. Stefan left the red Porsche open and the top down. If he closed it up, he explained cheerfully, they would simply break the window to get the radio and that would be worse still, what with insurance costs and unreasonably long waits for import replacements.

  “That’s absurd!” marveled Claire.

  “Ah, but true. Just look at the other cars.”

  Sure enough, two other German makes had signs taped to their windows, letters to potential thieves: “Radio not here” and “No Radio.” It was so funny. These people had spent fortunes on exotic cars, and there the automobiles sat, with brown-paper-bag letters Scotch-taped to their windows. What an incredible city! Perhaps one day an inventive thief would break into one of these cars and leave a note himself. “Just checking,” it would read.

  She followed Stefan into the gallery. The place was packed. There were playboys and models and agents, record producers and suntanned androgynes in from the Hamptons. The mayor and his entourage, Stefan whispered, were sure to come. Where, Claire wondered, would they put them? A crackling recording of Les Brown and His Band of Renown competed with the din. There was the cloying smell of everyone’s perfume. “I’ll get us some bubbly.” Stefan pressed her hand and joggled away through the swarm.

  Claire tried to get a look at the paintings. All she could make out were the brown and red peaks of the canvases. Everyone was chattering about how marvelous they were: “eclectic” and “revolutionary” were the words she heard again and again, and so she dutifully wriggled her way over to the main wall. On a canvas as broad as a barn door was what looked like smashed rubbish. She narrowed her eyes and went right up to it. Crushed flowers were glued onto the canvas and covered with muddy spray paint. “You see,” the dowager beside her was instructing the undergraduate at her elbow, “what it means is the end of the world. The annihilation of all that is vivre.”

  “Yes.” The young man in his expensive suit nodded, his sudden light dawning. “Yes, I see that. He’s expressing his irrevocably disappointed self, isn’t he? The conquering power of darkness! Gad, it’s marvelous. More than anyone else, he has his finger on the pulse of decadence.” They gripped their heaving chest cavities, the both of them, overwhelmed by the wonder before them. Claire was inspired herself, only not by the painting. It was the two of them that got her. Had she brought along that Olympus she could have taken the two of them from the rear, the way they stood there bent, deferential and solicitously awestruck in front of the ill-looking painting, groveling meekly at the foot of some critic’s approval.

  There you go, she told herself. If you thought about work as much as your bloody pride and righteousness, you’d have a camera right here, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t be worried about what a dishonest detective thought of you. You couldn’t create art and worry about what people thought. This artist certainly didn’t, and look where it got him: a show in trendy Soho.

  “Having fun?” Stefan came up behind her. “Don’t you love his work?”

  Claire didn’t know what to say. To voice the obvious cop-out, “Well, it’s different,” would have been a lie. It was certainly no different than all the other current, atrocious mediocrities. But then, what did she know? “It’s very big, isn’t it?” she smiled.

  Stefan paused. He was disappointed in her. “You don’t understand it. I see that.”

  “Hmm. I guess not.”

  “What he’s trying to say,” Stefan explained patiently, “is that there’s no point to it all. All the effort. The miracle of birth … it just ends up in death. The beauty of creativity … goodness itself … it becomes polluted by society, … it wilts and it rots.”

  “It certainly does.”

  “It’s very pure, you see. In its essence.”

  “Oh.”

  Annoyed with her, he scanned the room. “Uh-oh! Look who’s here! Jupiter Dodd! Now the heads will roll.”

  “Who’s he?”

  Stefan looked at her, appalled. “Only the biggest art critic on the East Coast, that’s all. He’s deadly.”

  “Really? He looks harmless enough.”

  “Don’t let that docile demeanor fool you. He eats up artists and spits them out for the sheer fun of it. Once he even shot one of them.”

  “Not really.”

  “Yes. About ten years ago. This young artist was poking fun at him in a Village paper. Doing caricatures and that sort of thing … ribbing him. Dodd walked into the city room and shot him, point blank. Oh, there was the devil to pay. He was ruined of co
urse. Had to leave town for five or six years and by then everyone had forgotten him.”

  “How did he make his comeback, then?”

  “Comeback? I’m talking about the artist. Jupiter Dodd was an overnight sensation. The toast of the town. Still is. And he hates women. Utterly. Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to have a closer look at him.”

  “Claire,” he sneered. “Darling. One doesn’t just walk up to Jupiter Dodd and introduce oneself. You don’t talk to him. He talks to you.”

  “Is that right?” Claire disconnected his hand from her sleeve. She hadn’t had the slightest desire to talk to the man, but the way Stefan put it to her irked her to no end. Got her Irish up. She approached the dapper little man and extended her hand. “How do you do.” She gave him a direct smile. “Claire Breslinsky.”

  “Ah,” he said, looking past her at someone else and flagging them with his eyes.

  “I wanted to introduce myself,” she groped. She could feel Stefan watching with vindictive triumph. “… because I’m doing a book on … um … faces. Faces in the art world, and I thought”—she had him now. Good God. Was there no end to people’s vanity?—“well, I rightly thought that a face like yours ought to be included. That arch sense of aristocratic sensitivity. You know what I mean. Black and white, I’m afraid.” These fancy schmancy types always went for the subtle. She knew what she was doing, too. He was all ears. If there was one thing every snob believed, it was the manifest validity of his own importance. One of the prettier cosmopolitan sluts was dangling herself before Stefan. Annoying, but not fatal. Stefan’s eyes were still on her. She had just been ready to find herself contemptible and stop the silly game. Now she felt fired up, in gear for the chase. She was running amuck with it, chattering rapid fire nonsense, but she was enjoying herself.

  “Larson in Paris? You don’t say,” Dodd said. “I thought he was dead.”

  “Dead? I should say not. He’s got the cleverest, glossiest printing setup in Europe.” All lies, of course. But it wouldn’t hurt to throw in a little butter-up for an old friend. “He’s who’s backing me. Surprised you haven’t heard anything about him lately. Strictly innovative stuff. You know.”