Vermilion

by Aldyne, Nathan

  “Doesn’t it make you feel the tiniest bit obligated, that he gave you a jacket tonight—in the presence of witnesses—that would cost you one-seventy-five on the open market?”

  “Well,” said Valentine, and then paused. “Maybe I won’t make him sleep on the couch after all. The trouble is, he’s not going to want to sleep at all.”

  Clarisse hurried him up Exeter Street. “One more look at the Christmas tree—they take it down tomorrow.”

  Boylston Street was busy with foot traffic, especially right around the jazz bars and the liquor stores. A fat bearded man was distributing questionnaires on the state of passersby’s souls; two young women with long straight hair were playing a recorder duet near the entrance of Burger King; and drunks were taking shelter with their bottles of Thunderbird in the recessed doorways of banks and travel agencies. Tourists stumbled along dazedly, afraid to ask directions. A disco version of “We Three Kings of Orient Are” filled the sidewalk outside of Strawberries record store, but as they continued uptown it was gradually overtaken by more traditional versions of Christmas carols that poured out of windswept Prudential Plaza.

  There, Valentine stood behind Clarisse with his ungloved hands deep in the pockets of her fur coat. They stared up at the tremendous blue spruce. The sixty-foot tree was covered over with tiny twinkling colored lights, and a star the size of a high-seas distress signal was perched at the top. Chubby white plastic winged cherubs with white lights in their bellies were scattered among the branches. The wind whipping around the base of the tall building stirred the branches and the cherubs seemed coyly to pursue one another through the greenery. “Jesus Bambino” in a reed-organ-and-carillon accompaniment played lustily.

  Clarisse thrust her hands into her pockets and squeezed Valentine’s wrists affectionately. “Got a blowtorch?” she whispered.

  “I hate Christmas,” he replied.

  A strong gust dislodged a cherub and smashed it against the concrete a few feet from them.

  “It’s an omen,” said Valentine.

  “We’ll have good luck for the rest of the year. Let’s drink on it.”

  They hurried to the Café Vendôme on Commonwealth Avenue, which was mercifully out of sight of the Christmas tree. The small, intimately lighted café was uncrowded and warm, and they were so taken with the bartender, who didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind between them, that they stayed through two rounds of Black Russians. When they made their way out onto the unpopulated boulevard of Commonwealth they did not mind the increasingly sharp gusts of wind.

  As they neared Berkeley Street, Clarisse abruptly stopped and grabbed Valentine’s arm. She nodded to direct his attention across the street, and as she did so she stepped back a few feet into the shadows. Retreating also, Valentine saw nothing more than a battered blue Fairlane, probably ten years old, maneuvering into a parking space. Its front fender was an incongruous bottle green.

  “What are you pointing at?”

  “The car,” said Clarisse in a low voice.

  “Who’s in it?”

  “Wait and see.”

  A tall man wearing a denim jacket opened the driver’s door, and as he did so the interior light came on. He reached over into the backseat and retrieved a steering wheel lock, which with some difficulty he placed around the brake and wheel. He snapped down three locks on the doors, and climbed out of the car.

  When Valentine saw the black sweater beneath the denim jacket he knew that it was the man who had sat beside him in the bar.

  “What was his name?” he demanded.

  “Hougan. Frank Hougan.”

  Hougan pulled a key ring from his back left pocket as he slid between the front of his car and the back of a painted van. He crossed the sidewalk, and leapt up the dozen steps of a narrow five-story town house. They watched him enter.

  “That’s his house?” said Valentine.

  Clarisse nodded. “I have that house, and the one next to it. Eighteen flats in all. It’s more—” She broke off, and pointed upward.

  Valentine looked at the third floor. There, lights suddenly blazed on in two of the windows. After a moment Hougan passed in front of one of them and dropped his jacket to the floor. He disappeared. In another second, the third window was dimly lighted, and then became black again. Evidently he had opened a connecting door, so that light from the living room shone through, and then he had closed it again.

  Valentine laughed. “I can see the beams.”

  “Yes,” said Clarisse, “and it’s a funny thing. There’s no reason for them to be there. No structural reason, I mean. They’re nowhere else in the building, and they certainly aren’t original. Somebody who had the place before liked beams, I guess, and put them in.”

  “Where do you suppose Boots is tonight?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lights were out when he got home. He was probably looking in the bedroom for her, that’s probably why he opened the door.”

  “I imagine she was in there asleep. It doesn’t matter what time you call over there, you’re bound to wake up Boots. Noon, three o’clock in the afternoon, eight o’clock in the evening.”

  “You sleep late too sometimes.”

  “At least I don’t go to sleep and wake up stoned.”

  “How do you wake up stoned?”

  “Ask Boots,” said Clarisse. “I’m cold.”

  She pulled him on, in the direction of her own apartment, but Valentine jerked her back into the obscuring shadow.

  Clarisse started to protest but Valentine touched his hand to her mouth. She was silent.

  He pointed at a tall man moving toward them down the center of the boulevard. He proceeded in and out of the black shadows of the massive trees. Sometimes the lights of turning cars flashed over his flapping coattails, but his downturned face remained hidden.

  Valentine backed tensely from the sidewalk onto the frozen mud of the boulevard. He dragged Clarisse with him. He relaxed a little when the man veered away from them, crossed the expanse of beaten dead grass, and stepped into the street. A car blew its horn at him, but he was oblivious to it, and by the time it had passed he was already marching down the sidewalk. He went up the steps of the same building Frank Hougan had entered. He stepped into the vestibule, and without hesitation, pushed a button there. In a moment, Clarisse and Valentine could see that he was buzzed in.

  “Searcy?” said Clarisse.

  Valentine nodded. “The walk gives him away. Arrogant. He could have a sex change, plastic surgery, and a new wardrobe by Diane Von Furstenberg and I’d still know him by his walk.”

  “You think he went in to see Hougan?” asked Clarisse. She looked back toward the building, and pointed. The light in the bedroom had come on.

  “Boots was in there asleep,” said Valentine.

  “And the buzzer woke her up. I wish,” continued Clarisse, “that we were on a level with those windows so that we could see what was going on. We can’t see a damn thing unless somebody in there is practically leaning out over the ledge.” She glanced behind her at the building directly across the boulevard. “We couldn’t see anything from there anyway, trees are too thick I think.”

  “Why do you suppose Searcy is going to see somebody like Hougan?”

  “Maybe he’s answering the ad,” said Clarisse lightly.

  “Maybe he’s on the vice squad.”

  “No,” said Clarisse after a pause. “Hougan knew Searcy was coming. That’s why he looked so funny when you mentioned Searcy’s name this evening in the bar. That’s why he left.” Valentine nodded thoughtfully. “But the question is: what is Searcy doing, going to see somebody like Hougan?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  Clarisse withdrew her hands from her pockets, and opened the leather envelope that she had carried all the while beneath her arm. “How’d you like to get a better angle on what’s happening in that room?” She rummaged through her envelope, and handed Valentine a thick sheaf of dog-eared papers.
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  “There’s no better angle. If we moved down the block, we couldn’t see anything at all.”

  Clarisse triumphantly extracted a large ring of keys from the envelope. A tube of lipstick fell to the ground. Valentine leaned down, picked it up, and thrust it back into the envelope.

  “What are you going to do?” he demanded.

  “Something illegal and rude.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going inside. I’ve got the keys to the building. I was showing a place in the building next to it to two sweet little boys from Ohio yesterday, and they were pretending that they weren’t gay, talking about their girlfriends and so forth, they probably thought we wouldn’t rent to faggots—and as if they could fool me!”

  Valentine gestured impatiently.

  “Anyway, I had the keys, and it was cold and too far to walk back to the office, so I just kept ’em. So now all we have to do—”

  “—is go in there, and walk up to the third floor, and knock on Hougan’s door, and say ‘Hi! We were just in the neighborhood and stopped by to see if your plumbing was OK!’?”

  “No,” said Clarisse sternly, “that would be silly. We go into the building next to theirs.” She pointed to the third floor of the adjacent building. There, the windows of the flat next to Hougan’s were dark.

  Valentine eyed her dubiously. “That apartment’s empty? That’s the apartment you were showing to the little boys from Ohio yesterday?”

  Clarisse nodded, after a moment of hesitation. “It belonged to the two Michaels and they moved to Newport.”

  “You think we can hear through the wall?”

  Clarisse shrugged. “We can try. Valentine, aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know?”

  “Yes,” he nodded, reluctantly, and followed her across the boulevard. They said nothing as they waited for the light at the corner to change. They hurried across the street and up to the door of the house. Clarisse tried six keys before she found the one that admitted them. “Someday I guess I really ought to label these keys. When you have more than about thirty, it’s hard to remember which goes where.”

  They climbed quickly and silently to the third floor. They stopped nervously in the hall. Valentine listened intently while Clarisse hunted for the key to the apartment. At last she found it, and unlocked the door.

  She turned the knob, but held the door closed. “Take a deep breath,” she cautioned him.

  She flicked the light switch and opened the door on a completely furnished and inhabited-looking apartment.

  “Jesus,” cried Valentine, “it’s a Neapolitan bordello!”

  The small square room was covered in sea-green flocked wallpaper and had three large sofas upholstered in green plush velvet. The veneered end tables groaned beneath large crystal lamps with gold-fringed green damask shades. The curtains were of thickly lined gold silk, and behind them were shirred Austrian drapes. The floor was wall-to-walled in deep-pile gold carpeting. Directly beneath the three-foot gilt-and-crystal chandelier—the ceiling was only eight feet high—was a glass-topped coffee table on a brass base. On one corner was a collection of crystal frogs and on the other a stack of Architectural Digests.

  “Clarisse,” said Valentine severely, “this isn’t what I’d call an empty apartment. Who the hell lives here?” His voice suddenly dropped to a whisper. “What if they’re in the bedroom?”

  “The two Michaels—nice Italian boys. One of them is very pretty, and one of them has a lot of money.”

  “And neither of them has any taste. But where the hell are they?” demanded Valentine.

  “Providence. They were here yesterday when I showed the apartment—the two little boys from Ohio nearly fainted when I opened the door. You can’t get this kind of furniture in Ohio, I bet. Anyway, the two Michaels said they were going down to Providence tonight to see a new production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Trinity Square Rep. The Topsy is supposed to be a scream. They asked the two little boys from Ohio to go with them. They probably won’t be back for another hour or so.”

  “God, Clarisse, what if the production is awful, and they leave before it’s over? What if they came in right now?”

  “They won’t. I’ve heard that the production is very fine. And probably they’ll go to the bars afterwards. I hope.”

  Clarisse pushed open the bedroom door and snapped on the light. Though he was still nervous and muttering, “breaking and entering, breaking and entering,” Valentine peered with fascination into the room. A low queen-sized bed with a chalk-white headboard and gilded finials took up most of the room. It was covered with a flocked black-and-brown spread in a lozenge design. Large white-and-gold bedside tables, of the same design as the end tables in the living room, bore lamps with high shades and crystal drops, while the bases were gold reproductions of Michelangelo’s “David.” The walls were robin’s-egg blue, the taffeta curtains were canary yellow, and the carpet was scarlet. There was a gilt-framed mirror on the ceiling.

  Valentine groaned.

  “How do you have sex in a room like this?” asked Clarisse.

  “With three Valiums and nerves of steel.” Valentine collapsed on the edge of the bed, then suddenly stood, and straightened the material. From the nightstand nearer him he took a manual light dimmer and turned the dial, lowering the lights until the clashing colors were substantially muted.

  Clarisse pulled her hair back, and pressed one ear against the wall, just to the side of a large gilt crucifix. “Hougan’s bedroom is on the other side of this wall.”

  “I thought you said they had their flat soundproofed. How do you expect to hear anything?”

  “Shhh.”

  Valentine moved about the room in short nervous steps.

  Clarisse glanced at him and then hurried out of the room, motioning for him to remain. While she was gone, Valentine lowered the lights again.

  Out of nervous curiosity, he opened the drawer of the bedside table, and to his delight, found a pack of cards, bearing on its reverse a photograph of the Monte Carlo casino. He riffled through the pack, extracted the joker, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He put the pack at the back of the drawer, and pushed it closed with his knee.

  Clarisse returned with a highball glass, with a gilt gothic-letter M engraved on the side. She placed the glass against the wall, base down, and pressed her ear within the mouth. Her face contorted with concentration.

  She brightened almost immediately. “Moaning…”

  Valentine moved over. Clarisse backed away, and Valentine placed his ear in the glass.

  “Did you hear the whip?” whispered Clarisse.

  “Sounds like a radiator to me. We’re not going to be able to hear anything through a glass, Clarisse.”

  “Maybe we’ve got it backwards, and it’s the open end that should go against the wall.”

  “No, I don’t know. But this is a fire wall, and it’s much too thick to hear anything through.”

  Clarisse shrugged, pulled back the heavy flocked drapes and unlatched the window.

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe somebody threw the radiator against the wall.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Frigid air blew through the room as Clarisse raised the window high. She lifted one leg onto the sill.

  “Do you want a push?” said Valentine.

  Clarisse turned. “I want to get a look in there. There’s a fire escape here that goes across both buildings. If they leave the curtains open in front, they probably leave ’em open in the back too.” She tossed her leather envelope to Valentine.

  “I think we ought to get out of here! I think you are out—”

  Clarisse was gone. Valentine moved to the corner of the room beside the open window, so that he would be out of the way of the drafts. He took out a package of cigarettes, but glancing around the room, saw that there was no ashtray. He replaced the pack and picked up the Boston white pages from the bottom of the night table. He memorized the number of Randy Harmon’s ex-lov
er Cal, the trial lawyer. He rubbed the cover of the book against his pants to destroy his fingerprints.

  Clarisse’s legs were pointed through the window. Valentine reached an arm through and pulled her in. Her face was red and her eyes glistened. Her breath came shortly, almost in sobs.

  “Are they after us?”

  She shook her head convulsively, and leaned heavily against the wall.

  Valentine closed the window, latched it, and drew the drapes.

  “What’d you see?” he demanded.

  “Let’s get out of here. The two Michaels will be back any minute.”

  Valentine nodded. He pushed Clarisse out into the living room, flicked out the light and pulled the door shut. In another moment, they were out in the hallway, moving toward the stairs.

  “What’d you see?”

  “Don’t ask,” said Clarisse darkly.

  They were on a landing, and Valentine pushed her against the wall. “What’d you see?” he demanded sternly. “Were the curtains open?”

  She nodded. “I hunched against the bricks and looked in.”

  “Did they see you?”

  She moved down the stairs, and whispered to Valentine over her shoulder. “No, they were busy…”

  “Whips and chains?”

  “Talk about wall hangings. You can see why Hougan wanted those beams.”

  “Somebody was hanging from the ceiling?”

  Clarisse wasn’t to be rushed into this. “They were doing it by candlelight, so I didn’t see everything, and I couldn’t look directly in, because they would have seen me…”

  “Who was hanging from the ceiling?”

  “Well, Hougan had on some sort of leather contraption, all straps and buckles and studs…”

  “Was Boots there?”

  “Valentine,” said Clarisse, “Boots has a figure like a pair of Dixie cups nailed on a two-by-four. All black leather and spiked heels.”

  “What about Searcy?”

  “Val,” she said excitedly, as she pushed open the door into the vestibule, “did you put that glass back in the kitchen?”

  “No,” he said, unperturbed, “it’s still in the bedroom, and it’s got our fingerprints all over it. Not to mention the doorknobs and the light switches. Are your prints on file anywhere?”