Rita liked the novel. She also made fun of it. “That lady had a true critic’s eye. She could do anything. She was so goddamn talented.” George appears to choke up.
Rob says we are interested in Rita and what she was like, but we’re especially interested in her death; who might have killed her. We think her death is related to a death at the museum, but maybe not. We’d like to know what enemies she had.
George appears amazed. “Rita didn’t have enemies. She was all light and bright and sparkling.”
We are silent for a minute, digesting this. Do you remember the Japanese movie where you get four different views of a crime?
I finally say, “But she was excitable, don’t you think?”
George agrees, “Hey, absolutely; a basic part of her charm.”
“Do you think,” Rob gently suggests, “that could have been misinterpreted?”
“No way.” George is steadfast. “Everybody could see. Right off.”
Rob and I spend about five minutes saying, “Well, but . . .” and “Don’t you think maybe . . .” and “Did you notice that . . .” with almost no effect.
George remembers a Rita who was sunny and responsive. “Yeah, awfully energetic,” he finally concedes. “I guess it’s possible that someone or other . . .”
He’s not saying that someone or other killed her for being too energetic. No, no, he thinks it was a plot of some kind.
George looks like a guy who might believe in Martian invasions or worldwide schemes to redress the wrongs of the Boer Wars. He doesn’t say anything like this, though; he begins to act distressed and puts one hand in front of his eyes. “God, was I ever lucky. Of course it couldn’t last.”
I decide to be ashamed of myself.
My father tells George that he should not have been up on the ladder so long. “The bat droppings. They’re piled in drifts on the floor and they rise and affect your balance.”
“Rita was really fond of you,” George tells my father.
We take a few minutes off to lean back and stare out George’s window, which holds a view of a eucalyptus tree.
When George takes his hand away from his eyes, he agrees that anybody can get mad about anything. He’s read about that happening. But he doesn’t remember anybody ever calling Rita up, middle-of-the-night, threatening. Yeah, he’s heard of that; he just doesn’t remember it with her.
Sure, he’ll give us a list of people that possibly could have, maybe. Sure.
People maybe from archaeology.
But he really thinks it had to be something in this last week. It all ties up, doesn’t it? “Listen. She was a child of light. Everybody loved her.”
I say, “Right. Yes, we, too, think it was something that happened recently. In the museum. For her to be shot near there. Was she in touch with you while she was there?”
George says, “Oh, sure. All the time.”
“Did she have . . .” I pause and rephrase. “Was she feeling bad part of that time?”
“She was. And she mentioned Rob here. She said he helped her.”
There’s a pause while Rob and I wait for elaboration.
“She never let feeling bad affect other people.”
Do I want to leave behind me a lover who’s as blind to my faults as George is? I guess not. I certainly haven’t taken any steps in that direction.
What did she say about her adventures with us?
George agrees the adventures were interesting. “She was with great people.” He interrupts himself to ask if we’d like a beer. A lemon Crystal Geyser? “Hey, sorry not to have offered sooner, kind of upsetting, you know?”
We follow him down a long gray hall and into a minute kitchen that looks out onto a sea of wooden back porches. I resist thinking about a fire in this area. The whole neighborhood would go up like a pile of Presto logs.
George has one of those refrigerators where, when you open the door, everything falls out on the kitchen floor. “Well, hey, I guess there was one thing,” he says. “Well, two things. Or maybe three. First of all the sheriff.” He tries unsuccessfully to open a Crystal Geyser with his thumbs and ends up handing it to Rob. “That’s an enemy to almost anybody, that sheriff, but you know about him, you know all about that.
“The rest aren’t enemies.” He finds only two other bottles of Crystal Geyser, which go to me and my dad. He takes a beer for himself and sits us at a wobbly oblong table, bathed in light reflected off the other back porches. “Kind of nice here, right?”
We agree, yes, nice.
“Well, it was things that happened there at your place. Not the big things, but the little ones. Of course, all of it was real dramatic. Out of synch. It all sounded like it belonged in my novel. Not in real life. Y’know?”
Yes, we say. We know.
“First of all, the guy that died twice. Marcus. He did that?”
This, of course, is hard to explain. It takes us a while.
“Well, she knew him. Real well. You knew?”
We agree, yes, right.
“She knew everybody there. Except, of course, you.” He squints in my direction. “This Marcus was her lover. Sounds like a real interesting guy.”
Rob and I are silent. I put my energy into not blinking.
“And Scott and she were lovers, too. She was real good about that. About keeping on being friends. She liked Marcus and she liked Scott.”
I say, “Oh.” What was it Rita called Scott? Studly?
Scott was hit hard by her death, though.
“She talked about both of them.”
I look at George, who gets an A-plus at the moment for coolth. Can he possibly be as okay with all this as he seems? The only sign of stress is that his beer is going down fast.
He revolves the glass. “Had a lot of stuff to say about them.” He takes a big final swig and puts the empty glass down.
“Hey, don’t stop,” I tell him. “It’s nice sitting here. Kind of . . .” What phrase would George like? “Bonding.” I get up to find him another beer.
He agrees, “Bonding.
“I’ve never been the kind to be jealous,” he picks up. “And one of the great things about Rita was her frankness. Y’know?
“She could talk about those past relationships. That was so cool. Made me feel I was with her then.”
This is beginning to be creepy, but I nod agreement. I want to keep George talking.
“This Marcus—she said he was a dynamite moneymaker when he felt like it.
“She made a lot of money one month in that place. Thebes. Just on his recommendations. ‘Big wads of profit,’ she said. ‘Along with all the digging and identifying and bonking.’
“ ‘Wow,’ is how she put it.” George looks nostalgic.
I want to say, “It can’t be that okay with you.” But I just repeat, “Wow.”
We’re silent, letting the word drugs hang around.
“Marcus was an artist, sort of?” I suggest. “Sculpture, maybe?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess. Like collecting Japanese tin toys and something or other with steel welding. And painting.”
“Did he make movies?”
“Hey, come to think of it . . . Rita said something . . . I guess this guy could do anything.
“A good archaeologist, too. Though Scott was the one there. Scott and your dad.
“She revered your dad.”
We’re back to the different versions of reality.
And Scott? What else about him?
“Oh. Like I say, she was friends with them both.” George swigs his beer and lets a troubled frown dent his high pale forehead. “Well, a couple of times she seemed almost, you know, cross?” He stares, troubled, at the sun and shadows on the neighboring back porches. He doesn’t want to admit any small negative emotions into his Rita-memories. “Something or other about Scott and a lady named Danielle.”
I pounce. “Danielle. Tell me. What about her?”
“Rita had a picture of her.”
This is a stopper.
It takes me a minute to get hold of it. “A picture. My God. Why?”
“Well, it was kind of odd. Because this Danielle was the only person Rita ever spoke real harshly of.”
I’ll bet she did. The Danielle that stole both her boyfriends. I can imagine Rita’s comment: “Card-carrying bitch.” And that’s the expurgated version.
“George, I’d love to see that picture.”
“She threw it away. It was a big picture.” George makes squaring-off motions. So Rita had a studio picture of Danielle. I do not get it.
“What did Danielle look like?” I ask. “Was she pretty? Tall? Skinny? Oval face?”
George is completely stymied. “Lots of hair,” he finally volunteers. “Oh, and Rita felt something about that picture, know what I mean?”
George, a novelist is supposed to notice detail; nobody ever told you that, huh?
Silence descends on our back porch. George drinks beer and broods. My father begins softly, “She was lying on a long white table . . .” Rob smiles at a blue jay on the porch rail.
George adds, “It was a nice picture. A nude study.”
Oh, for God’s sake.
That even wakes Rob up. He turns to me, and for the first time in a while he tries to share a moment.
George misinterprets our reactions. “Hey, I don’t feel anything about that. I mean, the naked body is beautiful. A temple.”
I let this percolate for a while. “But why did she have the picture?
“Other than for an art object,” I add quickly, forestalling whatever pious remark George is hibernating. “Was it for some personal reason?”
George says oh, and uh. I can tell that he does have an idea. “Well,” he admits finally. “I guess she had some kind of a plan.
“Because when she threw it out, she looked at it for a minute and said, ‘You know, Jidge’—she called me that sometimes—‘you think about doing something mean and after a while you get bored with it. That ever happen to you?’
“And then she chucked it in the recycle bin.”
But Rita did have a plan, which I am interpreting as follows: Danielle is an archaeologist. She has a job at the Luxor Museum. The Luxor Museum, Arab-managed, would hate a nude picture of a female staff member.
I look at Rob, who is back to admiring the blue jay, his face smooth. He looks like the nice American boy he is. My father has arrived at, “Let her go, God bless her.”
“And she said, ‘There’s something that bothers me. Something not great, Jidge. I guess I was real dumb. I don’t always get it.’ She used to say that about herself: ‘I’m real fast with archaeology. Not other stuff.’
“And then she wouldn’t tell me what she meant. She said she hated to say and she wasn’t really sure and she’d been wrong about something else lately—something about you, Dr. Day . . .”
My father stops singing to turn a pink interested face in George’s direction. “I doubt that I can help.”
“And when I tried to push her, she just said, ‘This friend gave me a serious secret. It started back in Thebes. A deep, deep secret. I think I’ll try to check up on it.’ ”
George adds, “Not that it’s anything about an enemy. But it’s strange, don’t you think?”
“George,” I say, “if you think of anything else about that—any clue about who may have said something, or if Rita read something or noticed something somewhere—anything else she said that might tie in—please call me. It’s important.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He’s dubious. “I’m not real good at that kind of stuff.”
“Listen.” I try for a strength infusion. “It’s vital. It could tell us who killed her.”
He looks upset. He says he’ll try. He takes my phone number.
The answer is no, but of course, we say yes.
George’s clay figures are the kind where you’re not sure whether it’s a dog or a tree or a model of your fist. I tell him they’re suggestive and he seems to like that.
I’m disbelieving. “Are you kidding?”
He shakes his head no. “When he was talking, it kept sounding familiar. But I couldn’t picture it.”
“Robbie, we were in Thebes for six weeks. In a camp. We had a tent. We cooked stuff over a fire. We were there when Daddy found the coffin lid.”
“Oh,” he says, in a tone of discovery. “That place. Yeah. Okay.”
I don’t follow up with what do you mean, that place, and what did you think the name of that place was, and what in the hell gives, Rob, and all the other questions I could ask. I decide to be quiet and stare sullenly at the scenery.
Rob is so taken up with Cherie that he has completely abolished the part of his past that includes me. Good-bye, Rob, good-bye, old playmate. Everything passes, right, chum? Right.
My father fills the sound gap by singing. He finds a new appropriate song: Where it all goes, the dear lord only knows.
Egon makes an announcement about Daddy. Egon looks around proprietarily; he pauses; he is pleased. “He will be helping me recover some of our memories of earlier archaeology.”
“No, there won’t be Western silverware,” he asides to a complaining Bunny. “You pick the lamb up by wrapping the pancake around it. Anybody can do it.”
“Yeah? Well, not me.” Bunny turns toward my father. “What’s this about Pop?”
“He’ll be helping me with his memories.”
“Hey, Mr. Rothskellar, memories? Pop and memories? Come on.”
Egon levels a mild gaze her way. “Surely you agree that Dr. Day can be a help.”
Daddy looks up from his lamb. He is the only one who has kept on eating; he’s good at this hands-on method. “Dr. Day,” he says cheerfully, “that’s me; I’m Dr. Day.”
Bunny agrees. “Yep, you sure are.”
“I’ve been waiting,” Daddy says, “for further material. There’s a sign out front.”
The banners advertising Scott’s new discoveries have been augmented during the last week; Egon has had two new ones painted. One of these reads, THE SUN QUEEN’S SECRETS. Nefertiti is the sun queen. The other one says, WONDERFUL NEW DISCOVERIES. TICKETS NOW.
“New discoveries,” Daddy says now, apparently recalling this slogan. “I don’t know. There is a poem about the new; Perhaps I can quote it, Now the shadow of the new comes across . . . No, now the threat of the new comes across . . . Re may not be terribly happy.”
Scott says, “You’re remembering the poem right, Edward.”
My father says, “Ah. But the point is that when we are . . .” He founders here and quits trying to deal with his lamb. “There is an image of . . . what am I trying to say . . . perhaps of radical coherence . . .” He stops and sits with his head bent, staring at his dish.
Bunny is the one who states the obvious. “Dr. Rothskellar, listen, I mean, do you think that Pop . . .” (When did Bunny started calling my father Pop? This has snuck up on me.) “I mean, Pop’s memory isn’t all that great. Do you really think he can, well . . . How long ago archaeology is it you want?”
Scott says to my father, “That’s okay, Ed, you’re doing great.”
Egon agrees enthusiastically, “Scott, you are right. Absolutely.”
Bunny’s question of what period in archaeology my father is supposed to help with still hangs around unanswered. All of us return to our lamb. We seem to have gotten better at managing the pancakes.
Now, after dinner, I find Daddy in the museum office, sitting in front of a computer.
I stare at him with my mouth open. I don’t want to think about the collision between him and a computer.
But then I notice that there are pictures on this computer and that by hitting a button he’s able to get a new picture whenever he wants. The five-year-old grandchildren of my Manor residents can do this.
The pictures all seem to be ones of Egyptian scenes or Egyptian art.
I ask Daddy how he’s getting along with Mr. Rothskellar and he says, “My what?” and then says, “Mr. Rothskellar?” as if he�
��s never heard of such a person. After a minute at his Egyptian website he says, perfectly coherently, “I am rejoicing at feeling needed.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say. “I’m glad.”
He gestures at the computer screen. “Most of these were photographed in a museum. Where you can’t make a mistake on what it is. But they are good clear images.”
He looks okay, body erect, shoulders back. I ask myself if he could have followed a computer website this closely before he came here, punching the right button each time, and for a minute I’m not sure. Then I realize that of course he could; he used the TV remote at the Manor; he could summon up This Old House and Antiques Roadshow.
But still, it’s a nice sign of adjustment, I tell myself.
So it was okay about his coming here, I also assure the anxious me. It was an okay thing.
Stop feeling wary, I tell myself. Stop following him around. Quit worrying that he, or you, is riding for a fall.
It’s perfectly normal that Egon wants him to talk about the past.
The minute I state that to myself, I feel peculiar again. I have to come hang over Daddy’s shoulder and look at his website pictures. One flashes up now, an image of Hathor from the British Museum, stately, perfectly poised, balancing her unwieldy horned crown. Daddy greets her with enthusiasm. “A queen indeed.”
But then the next page has no picture, just the website’s address, and he asks me to go get Bunny. Bunny, he claims, will be able to get him a new set of pictures.
Chapter 14
“Hello, darlin’,” says Cherie’s voice over the phone.
Do not forget that Cherie is deeply Southern, and that the word darling comes across as dahlin’! A pronunciation that sometimes, when I remember that this lady is efficient and feisty and my father’s lawyer, I start to find appealing. At the moment I’m still smarting over my afternoon with Rob, and Cherie does not seem appealing.
I tell her Hello, Cherie and she says that that asshole (meaning the sheriff) has just gotten around to calling her because she told him she would sue the cojones off him if he didn’t keep her in the loop, and the asshole is going to question my dad this afternoon.
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