Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Which of them approached Oona in the first place? Or was it more than one?

  * * *

  Fred was still sitting at his desk, hesitating. He had nothing more than Bookrajian’s voice to go by, and Dee’s assurance, “He’s good.” But it was time to have a look at the next step. He telephoned the headquarters of the Cambridge Police Department and was switched over to the detective’s office.

  “Ernie Bookrajian’s in Atlantic City getting laid the hard way,” Fred was told. “Whatta you want him for?”

  “When does he get back?”

  “See, he wins a free trip for two on the bus,” his informant went on. “Beyond that he pays meals, hotel, limo, booze, and he’s gonna bet, right? And he’s gonna hafta let her play too, right? We figure that’s about three K it’s gonna cost him.”

  “When does he get back?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Bookrajian and I already talked,” Fred said. “Some things we were talking about, you know? It’s a continuing conversation.”

  “He’s on like a witness protection program,” the Cambridge end of the line claimed. That inspired a scuffle of laughter. “Monday morning he’ll be here at eight. I was you I’d wait, call about ten.”

  “Ask him to call Fred Taylor,” Fred said. He gave both numbers, Molly’s and his line in Clayton’s office. It was nothing that couldn’t wait, what he had to say. What was dead was dead. The Kwik-Frame crowd was not going to destroy the remainder of the painting now. They wanted to put it together as badly, maybe, as he and Clayton did.

  Who was the subject of the portrait? Mr. Pix, as he was known to his friends. Fred knew of only one African head in all of Copley’s work, but it was painted much later than 1765.

  Before he left, Fred wrote another note to drop in Clay’s door.

  The point is I don’t know how badly these people want what they threw away. Call me. F

  Fred drove along Commonwealth Avenue looking for signs of incipient engorgement in the buds on the magnolias. All this water should be giving them ideas. There wasn’t a hint of the first tingling throb. Too early in the year. The magnolias were closed tighter than Oona’s shop.

  “Things have their own logic,” Fred said aloud. The statement had the vacuous ring of American pop wisdom, like the recently best-selling title Wherever You Go, There You Are. It was just dumb. Even so, his instinct, speaking aloud in a dumb phrase, urged he not push too hard to turn events while he understood so little of what was causing them.

  He’d see where Ann Clarke went tomorrow.

  He drove along the gray mud of the riverbank until he picked up Route 2 and swung west and north toward Arlington, saying to himself, I ought to hear the rest of Molly’s story. He thought of her shopping with the kids, and smiled.

  * * *

  Ophelia and her cowboy painter lover did not ride into the sunset until well after sunset. They left behind them a presentation copy of the fat book, eighteen by eighteen inches, entitled modestly, in letters two inches high, Byron Ponderosa, beneath the smaller Best-Loved Works of. The picture on the cover was fake, pale, ill-drawn imitation Remington. “It’s not a coffee-table book, it’s about right for the bathtub,” Molly said, when they were gone.

  The only good moment of the evening had been when Ophelia referred to her lover as an ‘old cowpoke’ and then tittered and blushed and said, “Oh, mercy, I never thought! I didn’t mean it that way!”

  Terry loved the Ponderosa book almost as much as she had been awed by the man himself, who called her ‘Podner.’ She sat on the couch with the book in her lap, struggling to manage its weight. “He must love horses a lot,” Terry called into the kitchen, where her mother and Fred were cleaning up the aftermath of beer and pizza and a big salad.

  “When they start talking horses the next step is the training bra,” Molly whispered. “Oh, honey, leave the horses alone a couple more years, won’t you?

  “You’ve both got homework,” Molly shouted into the atmosphere. “And it’s Sunday night, and it’s already eight o’clock.”

  “I’m taking this book to my room,” Terry said. “I’m never watching TV again as long as I live.”

  Sam sidled into the kitchen. “Where is Burma?” he asked.

  Molly looked in Fred’s direction. Fred started explaining. Molly asked, with interested suspicion, why the question occurred at eight o’clock on a Sunday night.

  “Social studies project,” Sam confessed.

  “Due when?”

  “Friday.”

  “You have a week then.”

  “Last Friday, I mean. She’ll maybe give me an extension. You had to reach into a hat and pull out something and I got Burma.”

  “How many pages?” Molly asked.

  “Five.”

  “I’ve been in Burma,” Fred said.

  “Then you two better get busy,” Molly said, drying her hands. She went upstairs.

  Fred said, “They eat dogs.”

  “They do?” Sam stood at the kitchen table in indecision.

  “They cook ’em first. Get your paper and notes and books.”

  “I have paper and pencils. It’s not in our textbook; see, it’s a research paper. Five pages but two can be maps and art. I can make Terry draw a dog, except it’s gonna look like Snoopy, which nobody will believe people will eat. How come dogs?”

  “The key to any nation’s economy is protein,” Fred said. “Get your paper and an atlas. There’s one next to the telephone in your mom’s bedroom.”

  “It’s old.”

  “Burma is older than the atlas.”

  “Did you eat dog?”

  “You’d be surprised what people eat when they are really hungry,” Fred said. “Get your stuff.”

  * * *

  Shortly after midnight, after Sam had jury-rigged a paper that might pass quick inspection, Fred went up to Molly’s bedroom. The room was dark and she was sleeping. Fred stood next to her and nudged her cheek until she could understand him.

  “Sorry. Don’t wake up. Just reassure me. Ophelia drove you back last night?”

  “Yes, Fred.”

  “And my relationship with you has not been a topic of conversation?”

  “No. No. You get your paper done?”

  “Yes. It’s going to rely heavily on informed sources. Sam’s tracing a map now.”

  “You coming to bed?”

  “If you want,” Fred said.

  “You think a person enjoys sleeping alone? It ain’t friendly.”

  “How friendly you want us to be?” Fred offered.

  “About like yay,” Molly said, and slept.

  30

  “I’m driving you to work,” Fred told Molly in the morning. “I haven’t seen you.”

  “If you’ll bring me home.”

  “Deal.” Fred poured himself coffee. Molly went up to wake Sam again. The morning was dark, but looked as if all the rain had been squeezed out of it. The sky was hanging slack and ashamed. The sun was somewhere else. When Molly herded the children into the kitchen at seven-thirty, there was a small commotion. “Close your eyes, Fred,” Terry was demanding.

  Sam objected, “You’re crazy. He’s gonna know.” He held something bulky behind him. Molly took her scarf down from the hook beside the door to the garage; the scarf with Eiffel Towers on it. She used it to blindfold her lover. “OK, Fred,” she commanded. “Hold up both hands.”

  Fred put down his cup and complied. He heard the children come to join their mother. There was activity in the vicinity of his left hand. He felt the breeze of furtive rustling. Whispered consultation adjourned to the hallway and became heated. There was agreement. Molly removed the blindfold. Sam and Terry sat at the table and poured cereal. Molly went up to get dressed. Fred looked at the newspaper. The sky puckered outside the kitchen window but did not offer rain.

  * * *

  In the car, driving Molly into Cambridge, Fred told her the fragment of recent Clarke family history he had learned fro
m Jeff Blake the day before. “I’m at sea,” Fred said. “I realize, much as I hope I’m thinking like your fellow human, I don’t know what it is to have a child; in the present context especially.”

  Traffic was heavy and slow, waterlogged, it seemed, on Route 2. Everything conspired to make it Monday morning. Molly said, “As soon as you have a child you become a hostage. Once you learn to wake in the night and worry, your mind changes forever. A child holds a mortgage on your identity and you don’t have control over it.”

  Fred changed lanes and moved at the same pace in the new lane.

  “It’s not your life you are willing to lay down for your child,” Molly said. “Because that’s your life in the child. Of course you want to save it. You’d do anything.”

  “That’s the mother,” Fred said. “Here is where I’m stuck. Blake said the father of these two inner girls of advanced years—Ann and Alexandra, or Sandy, Clarke—whether or not he was in his right mind, admitted to participating in these things: raping the daughters, or offering them up. If he didn’t do it, why would he say he did? Maybe he did it, or something like it. People do awful things. But if he didn’t, why does he confess?”

  They reached the traffic circle at Fresh Pond. Molly said, “In a way that would reduce the enormity of the accusation. It’s a desperate trade-off. Suppose the child makes the accusation in good faith, believing it is true—and all these stories and fads and memories and recovered so-called repressed memories are convincing, so full of detail; anyway, the child accuses him or her of some intimate assault that violates the natural bond between parent and child. The accusation is so awful maybe the only way to bring it down to manageable size, and at the same time free the child from such a weight—because a false accusation of the kind is really an awful crime—is to say, ‘I love this child. Therefore it must have happened.’

  “And, we can all be moved by the power of suggestion, as long as it finds the right way to sneak in; you see the child jump off the cliff and you jump after, hoping somehow you’ll land first and break her fall.”

  They drove silently for a while.

  “The children’s father used to say—I’m not talking about him, Fred, but you want to know what goes on in a father’s mind. Ask Walter. But my kids’ father said once, and I still love him for it, ‘A man would do anything for you if you let him get enough of that sour, sweet, milky smell on a little baby’s neck, under the chin.’ He said that. I’ll never understand what happened, Fred. He cared for his own bottle too much after all.

  “What happens when the kid is old enough to spot the mileage he can get by shouting at the parent, ‘You betrayed me!’? The parent wants the child’s success so much, maybe the parent goes along because that’s better than to think, ‘My child is killing me.’

  “I don’t know. Sam and Terry are too young. Ask me in ten or twelve years. Today’s program is bad enough. Terry wants me to bring her back a ‘big, big, huge book about horses.’”

  * * *

  Bookrajian met Fred in an upstairs room filled with pencils and No Smoking signs. His eyes were bloodshot and he smiled crookedly. A man in his late forties, he was thin and tall and dark, and wore a greenish suit that may have started black, and a blue necktie loose at the collar. He chewed a toothpick. “You got something on that lady antique dealer from Boston,” Bookrajian said. He had stood to test his height against Fred’s when Fred walked in. Having proved it better by an inch of hair, he sat behind his desk again, motioning toward a hard oak chair on Fred’s side.

  Fred said, “Another thing came up.”

  “What were you, in the service?”

  “Like that,” Fred agreed.

  “I notice a man comes in the room and spots where all the weapons are,” Bookrajian said. “Easy, not making a big deal out of it; but he’s got the setup cold before he opens his mouth.”

  “About Marek Hricsó,” Fred began.

  “For the moment he’s out.” Bookrajian took the toothpick from his mouth, looked at it, turned it, and started chewing on the splayed dried end. “Seems the boy wonder is doing an old lady in Boston. She came forward during the weekend, says he was with her that night. Called and left a message I got this A.M. I gotta drive into Beantown and follow up.”

  Fred said, “Madeleine Shoemacher?”

  “So what you got for me?” Bookrajian asked. “I’m busy.” Bookrajian grinned. He’d stolen Fred’s thunder and gotten laid in Atlantic City, both.

  “A question,” Fred said.

  Bookrajian spread his hands, then checked his watch.

  “A week, maybe two weeks ago, an old man’s body turned up on the bank of the river. You recall?”

  “John Doe.” Bookrajian chewed his bit of tree. “Neck broken. In the water maybe three months.”

  “I heard about a missing person and I thought I’d take a look at the body.”

  “The body, no,” Bookrajian said. “It’s too late. Nobody wanted it. Autopsy reports and the rest of it you can see if you get authorization. The body we didn’t need. Photos, though, those you can look at. Maybe give us an ID. That would be a favor.”

  Bookrajian riffled through a pile of manila folders on the right side of his desk. “These are all wide open,” he said, choosing a fattish folder and tossing it across to Fred. When Fred opened it Blanche Maybelle Stardust, clad only in a glossy black-and-white eight by ten photograph, gazed up at him invitingly. Molly’d been wrong about those perfect breasts.

  “Lighter than air indeed,” Fred said. “It’s a canard.”

  Bookrajian, who had half-risen to see Fred’s response, turned purple. “Wrong folder,” he said. He snatched it back. “Different case. The boys mix ’em up. Try this one. Sorry about that.” He tucked the Blanche Maybelle Stardust file into his top desk drawer, next to the matches and cigars.

  Fred opened the new folder and looked at the face of the cadaver of the man who had called himself Martin last winter, in front of Molly’s house. The face was leaner and more horselike, and, naturally, rendered somewhat more desperate by death and immersion; but it was the same face. Fred kept his own face still, but not too still.

  “Know him?” Bookrajian asked. His chewing became lazy.

  Fred scratched his face and studied the picture. “Problem is, I didn’t know the guy myself. Some people were talking and what they said started me thinking.”

  “These people have a name?”

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” Fred suggested. “If you can spare one of these photographs a day or two, I’ll see what they say.”

  “Are these local people? There’s no missing-persons report on file that fits my guy, who is a homicide, incidentally.” Bookrajian reached out for the folder.

  “If you can’t spare a photograph, I can’t help you,” Fred said.

  “A photo you can’t have, but I’ll get you a Xerox. Wait here,” Bookrajian said. He looked at his top desk drawer and chewed. “No, why don’t you wait downstairs at the desk.”

  * * *

  It took Fred twenty minutes to lose, without appearing to know he was there, the adept young man in blue jeans, white sneakers, and brown leather jacket who happened to be on the Green Street sidewalk, opposite the entrance to the station, when he left it carrying his envelope with the couple of good Xeroxed heads, full face, and profile.

  Fred was on foot, having left his car in Molly’s space at the library. He put his nose inside and found Molly at the reference desk. “You’re not seeing Cover-Hoover again today, are you?”

  “It’s on the schedule. I got your note and I’ve been working on your problem. Don’t start protecting me, Fred. I’m to see Cover-Hoover with Ophelia. Lunch. We’re Cover-Hoover’s guests. I can’t sink her ship unless I’m in it. Ophelia’s ready to brainstorm over big plans she has that include both book and TV series, called Rescuing Satan’s Children.

  “Ophelia’s really bought this?”

  “Filly—you gotta love that little cowboy artist’s attention to deta
il, don’t you?—does not buy. She sells. And yes, she is ready to sell it unless I convince her otherwise. This business is a dangerous flaming pile of horseshit, and Ophelia deserves to get burned. But the rest of the public does not, and anyway she’s my sister. I am going to open Cover-Hoover up and show her guts to Ophelia, and suggest an alternate course to equal profit. Look what I’ve got. In less than five years the Adult-Rescue, Inc. foundation has socked away over a million bucks. They own the property on Hay Street outright. That’s worth another, what, two hundred thousand? Their annual report shows shares in Portuguese banks, Euro Disney, and AT&T, and they pay out a seventy-five grand annual salary to Miss Loving-Caring-I’ll-Scare-You-Out-of-Your-Pants Cover-Hoover.” Molly waved a sheaf of papers. “That’s what I have. What about you?”

  “It was our guy,” Fred said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Photos?” Molly asked, shivering. Fred nodded. “You need me to look at them?”

  “No.”

  “I was afraid of him. The fear was right,” Molly said. “I smelled it. I translated it wrong. I should have feared for him.”

  “We don’t know for certain he was Martin Clarke,” Fred said.

  “No. But we know. They got his house, didn’t they?”

  * * *

  Fred called Clay from the pay phone in the library’s vestibule. Clay could take a hint, and had moved to the Ritz, having called Fred last night at Molly’s to interrupt his description, to a rather awed Sam, of nightlife in Rangoon.

  “There’s only one African head in all of Copley,” Clay said. “It appears a couple of times, but it’s much later than ours. What does ours look like?”

  Fred told him, “Can’t talk now. Got to keep moving. You’re OK there?”

  “I shall try the MFA library tomorrow,” Clay said. “I must look deeper into this Copley puzzle. You did say it is signed?”

  “It’s OK on that front.”

  He’d forgotten Billy, at the reference desk, who was said to be the one who had talked to someone on the telephone about a picture signed I. S. C. Pix. He went back in and asked Molly, “Did you check with Billy?”