Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “Ah,” Fred said. “Thus she affords her disinterested generosity toward her clients, who also provide her with salable stories?”

  “The stated purpose of the foundation,” Molly went on, “is to sponsor a halfway house for abused children who have become adults. It is called Adult-Rescue, Inc. She goes in for hyphens. There is no mention of devils or devil worship in the charter—which would have made it harder to get past the lawyers and IRS types, I don’t care how snowed they might be by the trappings of good works. The charter sounds like clean, misguided social work.”

  A couple of elderly women in scarves and raincoats came out of the library into the parking lot, looked for a car, laughed at the mistake they were making in trying the wrong one, and finally selected one they could get into.

  “A friend of mine, a good friend, whom I hadn’t talked to in a couple of years, called me recently and told me he lost two kids in a scam like this one, out in San Francisco,” Molly said. “Similar story but without the devils—the same theme, one generation turned against another, in a mess where you can’t tell which is which between delusion and evidence and precious feelings that are symptoms offered in proof of forgotten crimes. We are all prone to gravity, Fred.” She was not answering him, but enunciating a tangent that might apply if Fred was patient. “Aside from gravity the biggest threat to a human person is self-delusion. I don’t care if she’s paid for it or not, what that woman is doing is perverse, because it pretends to be conversation. But the proper function of conversation is, or should be, that each side of it continually makes a balance or correction for the native self-delusion existing in each of its participants. It’s our job as humans. It’s the contract we must assume between each other. If I feel something imaginary crawling up my cheek and you point to it and scream, ‘Look out, a bug!’ I’m going to believe it. I’m going to jump and smack my face.”

  “So what did I say?” Fred protested.

  “Don’t be such an asshole, Fred,” Molly said. “I’m not talking about you. Listen a minute. I’m ashamed of myself. I’ve got this creepy undermining going on that started with Doctor Loving-Caring and Ophelia and found a willing playmate in my native scheme of self-delusion. I can’t help it’s there. I can’t shake it.

  “I’m preoccupied with the ridiculous notion that my poor old dad, after a night hauling and lifting crates and barrels in the warehouse in Watertown, used to come flying home and drag his daughter out to fuck with goats and kill babies at crossroads and the rest of it, all the seventeenth-century junk Cover-Hoover has been withdrawing from her clients’ revived memories. I can’t stop shuddering with fear and loathing at the idea.”

  The bare trees scratched against the wet darkness, on the far side of the library’s lawn in front of the stores on Broadway. Molly said, “I can’t stop asking myself, ‘What does Ophelia know I don’t?’ Even if it’s all made up?’

  “I’m going to stop that woman. She was so convincing when she touched my stupid scar and jerked her finger back, saying ‘It’s hot.’ I feel it myself now, two and three times a day. It’s hot.”

  Fred said, “I will sleep on your couch until you feel like having a visitor in your bed again.”

  “The children are talking,” Molly said.

  “That’s OK.”

  “They think one of us is a heel and they can’t decide which.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “They think you’re going to leave, Fred.”

  “Not until we have a fight and one of us loses.”

  * * *

  Clay invited Fred up to his living quarters. “The occasion of your discovery calls for strong drink,” he said on the house phone. He’d been listening for Fred to come in. It was almost seven. Fred had not been upstairs for several months. He was basically aware of which paintings came down from Clayton’s walls, and which were selected to replace them. The circulating exhibition in Clay’s rooms was handled, under Clay’s supervision, by the husband-and-wife team that came in twice a week to polish Clay’s spotless quarters.

  Clay met him at the top of the spiral staircase. He had removed his suit jacket and replaced it with the scarlet dressing gown that proclaimed him to be in an advanced state of leisure. “Congratulations, Fred,” he said. “Have a glass of crème de menthe.”

  “Let me join you in spirit and accept a beer if you have one,” Fred said. “Or ginger ale or soda water. Anything wet.”

  Clay disappeared into his kitchen. Fred looked around the living room. He’d never heard Clay’s grand piano played. The portrait of Clay’s wife, born Prudence Stillton, who had died so quickly and so tragically after their marriage, gazed out of her silver frame, which stood on the Kashmir shawl that draped the piano. The room was done in reserved Boston Antique: a style that falls between French and English, and between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. From Fred’s brief glimpse of the furniture and china vases and ormolu clocks beneath Sandy Blake’s underwear, she could have provided things to complement or match Clay’s.

  What stood out, and the only part of the setup Fred was kin to, were the paintings hanging on the stolid green walls of the large room. The current program included an early female human nude by Chase, looking like the young painter’s homage to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus; a Géricault sketch of a madwoman; a huge late-seventeenth-century Dutch flower piece Fred and Clay had despaired of identifying further.

  Clay’s sideboard between the gold-draped floor-to-ceiling bow windows overlooking Mountjoy Street carried a silver tray with the cut-glass decanter of green liqueur and two snifters to rub it in. Clay had been waiting for Fred before himself indulging.

  “It is Amstel,” Clay said, entering with a filled glass mug in one hand and a silver bowl of crackers in the other. He poured a glass of sweet green and lifted it in a toast, then sat in an armchair near the window while pointing another chair out for Fred.

  “Now,” Clay said. “Tell me everything.”

  * * *

  After fifteen minutes there was no further discussion as to their first priority. They must get hold of the missing fragment. “It is a shame you could not overpower her,” Clay said. “A shame, I mean to imply, about the ethical imperative. It is eight o’clock. We’ll go now. At least I can offer a new face, and a different approach.”

  Clay went upstairs and came down again, having changed back to his suit jacket, and carrying both a checkbook and six thousand dollars in cash. “It is all I have on hand,” Clay said, putting on his coat. “I agree with you, Fred, the thing to do is to acquire the fragment now and make adjustments later as needed. We don’t want to take unfair advantage, not indefinitely. Not if there is an alternative that’s practicable.”

  Each drove his own car, Clay following Fred in his golden Lexus. They parked and conferred at the corner of Hay and Mount Auburn, and Fred pointed out the building where, if Fortune blinked, Sandy Blake was, unbeknownst to herself, preparing to sell Clayton the final installment on the Copley.

  Clay said, hesitating before he advanced to the fray, “Will that young woman expect me to rape her also?”

  “On that you’re on your own.”

  “A person who can do such shocking violence to a painting,” Clay said, holding back, “it gives one pause. However, as you say, the cause is just. My approach shall be straightforward.” He patted the inside pocket of his jacket, where the cash rested.

  Standing on the sidewalk they must have looked like anarchists discussing the final details in a plot to bomb or purchase or otherwise dispose of St. Paul’s Church, which rose nearby in its brick Italian-Colonial way.

  “If Miss Blake is not at home,” Clay said, “I am thinking ahead, Fred. In that case would it be wisest for you simply to break in and—no, I suppose not.”

  The ethical imperative again.

  Fred sat in his car and watched Clay approaching the stairs to the building’s entrance. He looked elegant and out of place. Fred rolled down the front windows and drove down the
block, keeping behind Clay. If Clayton was admitted, Fred wanted to hear when Sandy started screaming so he could pop in and give Clay the benefit of a corroborating witness. Clay climbed the stairs and pushed the buzzer, standing on the porch in his black cloth coat. The wind blew his wad of white hair around. If Sandy was expecting a visit from the Evil One, she might not be surprised to find Clayton Reed on the stoop.

  The door opened. Clay talked to the opening. Fred saw him nod, then shake his head slightly. Clay raised his right hand behind him in the gesture he and Fred had agreed on, which acknowledged that it was Sandy Blake, and by herself, answering the door.

  Clay went inside. Fred double-parked in front of the building. Sandy Blake’s third-floor windows were lit, and the blinds drawn.

  Fred recalled Molly’s rueful observation in the car, earlier that evening, that sanity and culture are the continuing result of human disagreement expressed in conversation.

  Cover-Hoover seduced her patients, if Molly was right, by guiding them in the direction they were already tilting, while at the same time propping them up, and so becoming a structural necessity. Fred had not realized how deeply Molly had been disturbed by her two hours with Eunice Cover-Hoover. Molly was normally a balanced, sane, and cynical observer; but she had predispositions of her own. Whatever old strands of grief, fear, love, hate, shame, anger, affection, jealousy, chagrin, pleasure, or longing existed in the elements of Molly’s being that reflected her relation with her father—those had been tweaked and strummed. Ophelia was a fool to hand such an effective opening to Cover-Hoover. And Cover-Hoover was cruel, and maybe something still more common, to use it: carelessly stupid and self-important, as abetted by avarice.

  Part of the setup of this caregiving was that it forced or tricked the patient into a child’s posture of submission. Sandy Blake had been made not just submissive, but aggressively impotent. It is not invariably the organism’s most practical defense to faint when threatened.

  Clay had been inside about ten minutes. Fred could see clear down to the river. The body of water itself was dark, and reflected lights moving on the far side, from traffic between the water and Harvard Business School. The length of Clay’s absence began to make him uneasy. Clay was in his own fashion a genius at negotiation. He came on as such a nitwit that a person’s instinct was frequently to help him, or to take advantage. Whichever approach Clay’s targets selected, often enough they found they’d assisted him in buying something they had not meant to sell—and for less than they wanted.

  Wind blew straight through the windows of Fred’s car. It was cold and wet and dark. He waited twenty minutes before Clay came out alone and put his head in at Fred’s window.

  Clay said, “She is an interesting woman, more coherent than you led me to expect. She owns a number of reasonably good pieces, none of which I want. However, she is not familiar with the fragment of a painting you described to me. She never saw or heard of it.”

  Fred said, “You were able to look where I told you? In her bedroom?”

  “And she was very well behaved,” Clay went on. “You are sure we have the right apartment?”

  “Third floor. Blake.”

  “It was the third floor, but that was not her name. It is Covet or Covert something—here, she gave me her card. Yes. Here it is. Cover-Hoover.

  “Fred, from your expression I gather something is going on.”

  23

  Fred beckoned Clay to sit in the passenger seat, and he rolled down the street toward the river until he reached a spot where he could pull in to the curb. Using the rearview mirror he kept his eye on the entrance to Sandy Blake’s building.

  Clay looked around the inside of his car, interested. “I would not have thought to find one of these still on the road,” he said. He sniffed like a dog arriving on an unfamiliar vacant lot.

  Fred said, “Something’s going on all right. The painting was there yesterday.”

  “You allowed them to suspect our interest.”

  “I offered to buy the thing,” Fred said. “Of course they know I’m interested. But it was to the framer, Manny, I made the offer. The fragment itself I saw here. Sandy Blake, though she was here yesterday, is not here now. Cover-Hoover also denies knowing the painting. I am going to make Cover-Hoover’s acquaintance. Why don’t you go back to Mountjoy Street and I’ll call when I have something to tell you.”

  Clay said, “She seemed so different from the woman you described, in many ways—although you did say long black hair. She seemed, in my judgment, not so likely to be raped as to take the upper hand. She is a different person. Women often are.”

  Clay’s observation put in mind a question Fred had meant to ask. “The pianist, Oona Imry’s nephew, on the night she was killed, apparently was playing at the home of a patron, an older woman named Madeleine. There may be a close attachment. Do you have an idea who that would be?”

  Clay, contemplating the river, answered, “Madeleine Ruppel is not wealthy enough to reward his cultivating. My guess is—Fred, the young man’s fingers move like water. His interpretations may be somewhat dry, but that is the taste of this faithless age. The soul is affirmed but not exposed or tested. I suggest Madeleine Shoemacher. She would enjoy showing a prize like that on her arm, and I suspect her of possessing a strong goatish streak. I may be able to find out. Would that help our inquiry?”

  “It is a loose end I wonder about. I’d like to know if he did not kill his aunt,” Fred said.

  “I will look into it. An element of your thinking is that if he did not, someone else did, whom we may encounter?”

  “I’m going up to meet the healer,” Fred said.

  He let Clay drive away before he walked up the stairs to the front door and buzzed next to the empty space which yesterday had carried the cardboard tag with the name Blake. In forty-seven seconds, Eunice Cover-Hoover appeared in back of the door’s glass. Her hair was pinned up. She was in jeans and a thin, pink, long-sleeved top looking like a T-shirt designed for a cool climate. When she opened the door to him she wafted a scent of forbidden luxury. Her face was lean, her skin stark white—whiter than Molly’s description of her had prepared him for—and her breasts would win prizes if she cared to offer them in competition.

  Eunice Cover-Hoover searched Fred’s soul while he stood on the porch. She pursed her lips but reserved judgment. “Yes?” she admitted.

  “I want to talk to you,” Fred said.

  “Yes?”

  “About your work.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t we go upstairs?” Fred said.

  Cover-Hoover completed her judgment. “Come up.” She led him up the stairs. “There was another man here not long ago,” she said, between the second floor and the third.

  “There was?” Fred asked.

  She closed them into the apartment, and sat on the couch where yesterday Fred had deposited the helpless Sandy Blake. Fred went to the kitchen for the chair he favored for himself. He saw no signs of packing, or of a hurried departure, but the bedroom door was closed. The two mugs he’d intended making coffee in were on the table still, and the instant-coffee jar was open as he’d left it, with the spoon tilted in.

  “Where is Sandy Blake?” Fred asked, bringing the chair back and sitting.

  “Her slave name?” Cover-Hoover asked. “Interesting. My relationship with her is confidential. She is very much disturbed. She is in a fragile transitional phase. However, she is safe, and in good hands.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  Cover-Hoover said, “The healing process has been interrupted, but it will continue if she is not disturbed. What is your interest?”

  “I was here yesterday and saw a painting,” Fred said.

  “There is no painting,” Cover-Hoover said. “The other gentleman also asked about it. With that I am not able to help you. There is no painting.” She smiled and spread her arms, allowing her breasts to emphasize the finality of the denial. Her voice was soft, definite, and reassu
ring. Its cadences presupposed acquiescence.

  Fred said, “I know, I’ve seen your photo in the paper. Your name is—wait a minute, I’ll remember it—Cover-Hoover, the author of Power of Darkness. Is this one of the people who was offered up?”

  What was this woman dressed for? Moving? Was she here to pack a bag for her patient? Cover-Hoover continued evenly, “I allowed you to come up for one reason. I want to make sure you hear me. I do not know what relationship you claim with my patient; but it is deleterious. Stay away from her.”

  Fred said, “Not to be rude, but we seem to have started off on the wrong foot.”

  “You are trespassing. I have nothing to add.”

  “I don’t care where she is or how she is,” Fred said. “I bought part of a painting I managed to trace here, and I saw another part here yesterday. Upset as she happened to be, I could not offer to buy it. If you can tell her…”

  “Because I am a physician I can’t help noticing that you have suffered,” Cover-Hoover interrupted. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, raising them slightly to observe him better. “You have suffered far more than what shows in the overt scars I see on your face.”

  Fred hadn’t seen it coming, but he knew the routine: the quick shift, soft music, move to the tender vulnerable part if you can find it. Get them to accept your sympathy and you have them by the balls. Caress until the moment comes to squeeze.

  “Scars?” Fred asked.

  “On your cheek and chin.”

  “Not when I shaved this morning.”

  * * *

  “I got nowhere with her,” Fred told Molly. “I presume she’s got my informant locked away somewhere, playing Go Fish with her other personalities. I don’t exactly want to start following Cover-Hoover around town. I am not going to land that painting either by guile or by duress. They have it sequestered, like the patient. It’s infuriating.” He’d called to see if Molly and the kids were hungry for pizza. “I suppose she has a legal means to spirit a person away like that?” Fred added.