Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Marek said, “Her note to you, and your friendship, oblige you to be interested.”

  Fred said, “I don’t oblige easy, Marek, and not on cue. It is almost five. I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day.”

  Marek said, “I shall take a taxi. I see them at the supermarket. In the subway I risk my fingers. I shall take a taxi if you refuse to drive me.”

  “I refuse,” Fred said. Marek climbed out to the sidewalk and tried to slam the passenger door petulantly, but Fred’s car did not take on the displaced emotions of its passengers. Fred had parked across the street from Kwik-Frame, and down a block, to watch the doorway. He would like to learn more about young Manny, discover what he could before he made his interest known. He would not enter the shop today. He tended to make the same impression, Molly said, as the Commendatore in the last few minutes of Don Giovanni.

  Mass. Ave. was at one time the principal artery connecting Boston, with its Atlantic harbor, to Cambridge, Arlington, and Lexington. It was the route the British army took that morning a couple of hundred years back—through farmland when they got past the village of Cambridge and reached what is now Porter Square. A slaughterhouse stood here, long after the Revolution; and Porter’s Hotel, which served its guests famous steaks.

  Fred saw the disappointed woman with red hair come out of Kwik-Frame at six. She wore a tan raincoat and held a red umbrella she did not open. She crossed the street and entered the T stop. Half an hour later, Manny came out, wearing brown tweed jacket, white shirt, red necktie, and khaki pants—in battle dress, like Fred. Manny locked the glass street door’s top and bottom, checked them, and turned. He stared at the street, then shrugged and hunched his shoulders, loosening them in their tweed; or loosening the tweed itself. He crossed the street and entered the subway station. Fred followed, pausing to lock his car. It would be all right where it was until the meter started racking up violation points at 0800:01 in the morning.

  The subway was attracting a good crowd. Manny chose to go inbound, and Fred shadowed him from the next car. He stood at the passage and watched Manny lolling through Harvard, Central, Kendall, and Charles stations, then poising to make an exit at Park. At Park station both fought the crowd up one flight to the Green Line and boarded a trolley destined for Arborway. The cars were crowded. Fred was obliged to shove his way into the car in front of the one Manny chose, and to watch at each stop to see where his quarry would get off.

  They jounced noisily through Berkeley, Clarendon, and Copley, until the Symphony stop on Huntington, where Manny shouldered his way out. Once on the street, Manny was fast, shadowboxing, moving his feet like a fighter and making a good deal of room for himself on the sidewalk.

  “He’s on his way to the Gardner,” Fred muttered. “To revise Titian’s Rape of Europa. We can get rid of that bull. Titian didn’t know from bulls anyway; we’ll make it look like the little lady’s taking a bath in her nightgown, like a nun.”

  Fred dropped back far enough to keep a low profile while he followed Manny along Huntington Avenue, past the North-eastern University complex to the massive brick edifice that is Massachusett’s public college of art. From a short distance down the street, Fred watched Manny talking to the uniformed and comfortably seated guard, who was well inside the entrance. After Manny went up a short flight of stairs and turned a corner, Fred entered.

  For an art school, there wasn’t much art to be seen at Mass. Art. But there were lots of posters. Fred walked over to the guard. Inside his slouched uniform he was a pinkish gray presence needing a shave. “Satanon meeting here tonight?” Fred asked.

  “What?”

  “I think I got the name right,” Fred said. “Satanon. Like Al-Anon but … It’s Cover-Hoover’s group. A doctor; a shrink.”

  The guard said, “What I do, I check IDs. I wouldn’t know what the kids are doing, half of them, or the perfessers either. The things they get into, I don’t know. These days you call it art, it’s art, it don’t matter what it is. Put a sign on it it’s art. That’s democracy.” The guard folded his hands. “Your tax money and mine, buddy,” he said. “You want to show me some ID?”

  “I may come back later. I thought there was a Satanism meeting, or group, here tonight, with Doctor Cover-Hoover? That name ring a bell?”

  “Maybe somewhere, but I can’t hear it,” the guard said.

  “The man I just saw go upstairs,” Fred said. “I’ve seen him at these meetings.”

  “I do not know from Satan, being Catholic, which they take care of that themselves. The heavyset guy, he’s meeting somebody. Go on up if you want.”

  “You want ID?”

  “You’re not going to steal anything,” the guard said, waving him past. “And if you’re hoping to see naked chicks in the life room, be my guest. There’s nothing up there tonight but a guy, and he’s old.”

  15

  The building housed offices, classrooms, and bulletin boards crowded with lapsed opportunities. There were eight floors, and no one vantage point from which to view who was coming and going—all the building’s exits could not be covered. Fred’s best bet was a random search, starting on the second floor and working his way up. He used the stairs, leaving the elevators uncovered. Some classrooms were dry and empty; others were for wet work, and smelled like Roberto’s studio. In the evening only a few classrooms were occupied, and Manny was not in any of them—not even the one where the old guy, sprawled naked on red cloth, was being painted by about thirty continuing-ed students, using easels or wooden horses.

  Some floors held faculty offices, all of which were closed and locked. Fred searched the whole place and, after he’d finished with the top floor, took the elevator down to the lobby again.

  “Find what you wanted?” the guard asked him.

  Fred shook his head. “That guy come down again?”

  “With someone,” the guard said.

  “Kind of a gorgeous woman?” Fred asked.

  “I would not say gorgeous,” the guard said. “No, I’d say the reverse.”

  “Did you happen to notice which direction they went?”

  The guard shook his head and, after some mental effort, said, “Say, what is this?”

  “A student?”

  “You want to show me some ID?” the guard asked.

  Fred shrugged.

  “You want to pick up girls, go somewhere else,” the guard advised.

  * * *

  Fred looked up and down Huntington Avenue. Manny had left with someone and Fred had missed him. He should have waited at the door maybe, in which case it would turn out Cover-Hoover had a meeting upstairs.

  We’ll pick him up tomorrow, Fred said. He took the subway back to Porter and, before retrieving his car, had something to eat at the Indian place next to Kwik-Frame. He hadn’t eaten since morning, in New Bedford.

  After eating, Fred walked back to the bridge overlooking the place where Oona’s body had been thrown. It was shortly after nine, and the lights of cars and buildings fought against the night.

  Marek, with his combined self-pity and self-possession, made him uneasy. The young man was overspecialized: out of his element on a sidewalk or bridge, or confronted with the possibility of getting mud on his loafers. He didn’t want to say where he had been the previous night. He broadcast his conviction that Oona had been killed, and gave more than a strong hint that he was to be Oona’s heir. Oona had been eliminated by ruthless force.

  The fact that Fred had the second fragment of the painting proved that a person or persons, pleased with earlier success, had brought it in to sell and Oona had snapped it up, setting it aside for Fred and expecting to collect twice as much for the second piece as she had for the first. She’d have paid less, saying it was dark, and small, and had no squirrel.

  What next?

  Fred walked back and forth on the bridge and looked out in both directions. The heavy riveted iron of the barricade on either side made a cold chasm. Suppose Oona had convinced the seller to let her come lo
ok through the rest of Granny’s attic? But this wasn’t a part of Cambridge where people had that kind of granny. Walk down Appleton Street at twilight, yes, before the people pulled their curtains—from the top of the hill toward Brattle and the river, you saw pretty nice pictures in the houses that way. But not in this part of town.

  Fred spent an hour walking the neighborhood. He followed Richdale Avenue to its ends, going in both directions—first in a swooping curve that met Upland Road; then in the other direction, west, past a jumbled sequence of vacant lots and warehouse and office space, and housing, some of which was decrepit, some newly refurbished, as far as the complex of apartment buildings that served as a dead end. Then he started at the bridge and walked down Walden, looking up side streets, until he reached Masse’s corner and the hardware shop across from Paddy’s Lunch. It was a series of originally modest, even humble, neighborhoods in the simultaneous process of slow collapse and gentrification. The streets were busy with cars. The children he had talked to earlier were right. You would not stand or sit on the bridge railing alone, or in the company of an enemy large or numerous enough to overpower you, without attracting interested attention—especially if you were old, fat, female, and in your underwear.

  Fred was on the bridge looking south when the purple-striped ten-seventeen toward Concord passed under him, picking up speed after its stop at Porter. You want to do it from the darkness under the bridge, Fred thought. The girl had been correct. She had talent and would go far.

  From a public phone at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Porter Square, Fred called Marek at Oona’s number and told him, “I’d like to come over if it’s not too late.”

  “It shall always be too late,” Marek mourned. “I shall descend. Ring three times and then two. Others I am not admitting.”

  At ten-thirty Molly would be drowsy but not sleeping. Fred called to let her know he wouldn’t be back this evening.

  “Dee says Oona Imry was half naked, and full of gin,” Molly said. “Everyone’s agreed, and the nephew also, that she got drunk and put herself in the way of the train.”

  “The nephew agreed to this?”

  “That’s what Dee says. If he was making trouble they’d have to leave it open a while, and make inquiries.”

  “Interesting,” Fred said. “You and the kids OK?”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “I’m going to have a sit-down with the nephew,” Fred said.

  * * *

  “You are obliged to learn what happened to her,” Marek insisted. He had opened the shop door and now locked himself and Fred inside. He winced at the door’s bell’s ringing. They moved gingerly in darkness. The shop seemed less filled with things.

  “I will not invite you to her apartment,” Marek warned. “That would be obscene. Come to the back room and we will have light. I do not like them to see me from the street.” Marek had pulled a navy sweater over the white turtleneck. Wearing the black gloves, he looked like a burglar. “The taxi cost me twenty dollars,” he complained.

  “Subway would be eighty-five cents,” Fred told him.

  They sat as they had in the dark hours of the morning, Marek on the table and Fred on Oona’s leather chair. The jumble of items set aside in the room—books, china, prints, a Japanese kimono—looked like a lifework for the legatee.

  “You told the police you were content to let this stand as an accident?” Fred asked.

  Marek shrugged.

  “It seems awfully quick,” Fred said.

  Marek announced, “The nature of police is corruption.”

  “We are not in Hungary.”

  “We are in the world.”

  “Marek, where did you play last night?”

  “There are reasons.” Fred waited. “Reasons of honor,” Marek said.

  Fred noticed an engraving of a British horse race. He would not have guessed it special enough to keep in the back room.

  Marek said, “I want you to find the person; you yourself, Fred Taylor.”

  Fred said, “You don’t know me.”

  Marek opened a wooden file cabinet and took out a bottle. “Slivovitz,” he said. “In Oona’s honor.” He went into the front of the shop. Fred heard stealthy fumbling. Marek came back with a pair of cordial glasses in Bavarian crystal, each of which bore a paper sticker reading “$25.00 the pair.” Marek poured and they drank, leaving the stickers in place. The liquor was too cloying for any purpose other than nostalgia.

  “Did Oona speak about her work?” Fred asked.

  “I did not listen,” Marek said.

  “She didn’t tell you why she went to Cambridge? Or who she was going to see?”

  Marek shook his head, frowning at his empty glass. “It is like the rest of my country,” he said. “What rots in a certain way can last forever.”

  “If she went to buy something, would she carry cash?” Fred asked. “Did she have cash with her when she left? In her purse or her car?”

  “If she did, the police have stolen it. There was no money in her purse, they say, but again, the police…”

  Fred said, “I imagine she kept cash in the office, to buy from people?”

  Marek shrugged. “Three thousand dollars in the desk,” he said. “That much I find. Are you saying I must pay you to help me?”

  “That’s all right,” Fred told him.

  Marek said, “After the three thousand is gone I do not know what I will do. Taxis are expensive in your country; also restaurants.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Fred said, “I’m going to see if I can get an idea what she was doing in Cambridge. She might have made a note about a meeting.”

  “I know she will trust you to look,” Marek said. “Please.”

  Fred looked around the room. It seemed less cluttered, but if Oona had made notes to herself and hidden them, there’d be no finding them. Therefore he’d look only in the obvious places—desk drawers, and next to the telephone. While Fred searched, Marek stroked the cylindrical silver canister Fred had noticed early that morning, which he had seen before—and, he suddenly realized, making allowances for generic similarities, which he had recognized from the still-life section he had carried to New Bedford.

  “You found something?” Marek asked.

  Fred shook his head. “I’ll take her Rolodex with me,” he said. “I don’t recall the object you are holding, Marek, being here when I was in last week.”

  Marek shrugged. “Bartholdi says I must have everything appraised,” he said, “except what she has given me as presents over the years. My poor aunt. How she loved knowing more than everyone what everything is worth. For me, I can say that if I saw this last week or the week before, I do not know it.”

  Marek put the piece down. To Fred it looked like a nice bit of old silver. Clayton would understand it, but Clay was in New York.

  “If she went to Cambridge to see more of a collection that this piece came from, for instance,” Fred said. “If that is what she was doing…”

  Marek interrupted, “Then who was it? Someone living near that bridge? Or would they not rather be criminals living in Brookline or the North End of Boston, who say, ‘We will take this old woman and kill her in Cambridge to lead the fox away from the nest’?”

  “True,” Fred said.

  “Her car is on Henry Walden Street, but that is exactly what the fox will do,” Marek went on. “She will drive Oona’s car to Cambridge and leave it for everyone to say, ‘This proves Oona Imry drove herself to Cambridge drunk to die under a train, maybe for love.’ The person who killed her,” he finished. He stared into the darkness of an ending to his sentence that he did not speak aloud.

  “Why would a person kill her?” Fred prompted.

  Marek explained, “I do not care why. You Americans, you are always asking of each other the question ‘Why?’ about a criminal villain, and listening with sympathy to the answers you tell each other, for comfort. For me, I do not care why. I want to know who did this. Then I will kill him.” The fingers of
his gloved right hand executed a quick arpeggio on the surface of the table, followed by a brisk chord, almost an afterthought—the flick that does for the fly. “The question why is sentiment and nonsense,” Marek said. “For persons who talk when they should act.”

  Fred asked, “May I take the Rolodex?”

  “You want her watch?”

  “The addresses,” Fred said, pointing to the spool of cards.

  “Sure. Take it.”

  Fred would work through them at his office. “I’d caution you against killing people, Marek,” Fred cautioned.

  “Because of my career,” Marek said, biting the red plumpness of his lower lip, “you are right. Once we know who, we will decide. Fred, you must do it.”

  “Speaking of foxes,” Fred said, “this evening would not be the first time I had a drink with someone who turns out to be a killer.”

  Marek winked. “If I put poison in the slivovitz, who would know? The horrible taste it has…”

  16

  Clay, calling from his temporary quarters in the Carlyle the next morning, said, “The Zorn is disappointing. Christie’s fiddled with the color in the photograph, and it’s thin even for Zorn. It’s been skinned.”

  “Too bad,” Fred said.

  He’d come back last night and immediately started going through Oona’s addresses, recording all names within reach of Porter Square. The proximity of framer and Bob Slate to the site of Oona’s violent death was too much to be coincidence. It was a triangulation. Fred had not thought to sleep until first light. Clay’s call had stirred him from the old leather couch.

  “This evening, after the Frick has gotten rid of its visitors, I shall examine the Vermeers, together with their curator and conservator,” Clay said. “Their library is, as you know, unparalleled, and in the meantime, during the day, I shall gather information about the other known Vermeers, including Boston’s. The procedure I have outlined, though requiring patience from us both, is sound.”