The Lemur

by Benjamin Black

  “So he said. He knew nothing about me.”

  “Oh, he did, my friend. He knew plenty about you. He made it his business.”

  “Facts are just facts. You know that as well as I do.”

  “True, brother, I won’t deny it. A fact is a fact is a fact, as the poet said, or something like it. Unless it’s a fact that somebody wants to keep us from learning about. You know what I mean?”

  Glass could hear the faint susurrus of rain outside. He pictured an antique greensward and sheep at graze; it might have been a scene by Winslow Homer. Surely Cleaver had invented the shepherd of Central Park and his flock. He did not know quite how to take the man, with his gleaming grin and vestigial beard and black-and-white minstrel getup. He had the distinct, uneasy feeling that this seemingly rambling conversation in which he had become more and more deeply entangled was about everything except what Cleaver really wanted to say, what he wanted to find out, whatever it might be. He asked: “What did you write about Mr. Mulholland?”

  “In Slash? Oh, nothing very terrible. His James Bond days of derring-do, the Mulholland millions and how he made them and what he does with them-that sort of thing.”

  “And what did you write about the Mulholland Trust?”

  Cleaver hesitated, tapping a fingernail against one of his big front teeth. “I know you have a particular interest there, Mr. Glass, what with Mrs. Glass being the head honcho-ess of the Trust and all. And now her son, Sir Youngblood Sinclair, is taking over the controls, so I hear.” He snickered. “My friend,” he said in his Dixieland croon, “you going to find it tough to write dis-passion-ately about all that. Ain’t that so?”

  He gulped down the last of his drink; Glass had hardly touched his.

  “Tell me,” Glass said, “tell me who you think killed Dylan Riley.”

  Cleaver turned on him a stare of mock startlement, making his eyes pop. “Why, if I knew that I’d go straight to Cap’n Ambrose down there at Po-lice Headquarters and tell him, I sure would.”

  “Do you think my father-in-law had a hand in it?”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you think that what Riley found out was something about him.”

  “Maybe it was-you’re the one Riley spoke to, he give you no idea at all what kind of secret thing he had uncovered?”

  Glass shook his head. “I told you, I thought at first it was something to do with me, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “You got a secret worth killing for, Mr. Glass?” Cleaver grinned teasingly, showing a pointed pink tongue tip. “You don’t seem the violent type, to me.”

  Glass pushed his drink aside and stood up. “I’ve got to go. It was interesting talking to you, Mr. Cleaver.”

  He offered a handshake but Cleaver ignored it, and sat back on his seat with his legs crossed and jiggled one elegantly shod foot, smiling broadly with his head on one side. “You a cool customer, Glass,” he said. “Guy calls you up to stiff you, so you say, and a few hours later he gets a bullet through the eye. You mention to the po-lice about Dylan trying to blackmail you? ’Cause I bet old Cap’n Ambrose would be real interested in that. Don’t you think?”

  “Good-bye, Cleaver,” Glass said.

  9

  ODALISQUE

  They had been in bed together all afternoon, Glass and his girl, and now at evening he was sprawled pasha-like in his undershorts against a bank of pillows while at her worktable Alison sat, with her back turned toward him, naked, on a red-plush piano stool, before the glowing and intently silent screen of her laptop. Glass was smoking a cigarette. He was happy, or at least content. There was something so sweetly sad about sex in the afternoon. It was raining outside, and the pearly light falling down through the studio apartment’s big, slanted window was almost Irish. He only ever felt really homesick when it rained. He was thinking in a dreamy vacancy how much the sound that the computer keyboard made reminded him of his long-dead granny clacking her dentures, and how Alison’s shapely back recalled Man Ray’s photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse posing as a violin.

  “Jesus,” she said suddenly, “have you seen this blog?”

  “This what?”

  “For God’s sake, don’t pretend you don’t know what a blog is.”

  “Something on the Internet?” He liked to tease her.

  She turned to look at him, the rain-light silvering her breasts. “How did you ever manage to be a journalist, with so little experience of the world?”

  “The Internet is not the world, my dear.”

  “Well, my dear,” she drawled, “everyone in the world uses it, except you.”

  Her dark hair reached almost to her bare shoulders, making an oval frame for her sharp-chinned, long, pale face. Without her clothes she looked less like a madonna than one of Modigliani’s pink-and-platinum odalisques. She had put a towel under her bottom to keep what of him was still inside her from leaking onto the plush of the piano seat. He marveled how she had managed to shed so comprehensively the Irish squeamishness before the prospect of being. He had grown up expecting that a girl getting out of bed would immediately wrap a sheet around herself, tucking it deftly under her armpits, as girls in the movies always did.

  “It’s this fellow Cleaver,” she said. “The fellow who phoned here for you.”

  “What?” He was all attention suddenly. “ What is him?”

  “His blog. Cleaver’s Cleaver, he calls it. All the news that’s fit to punt. He’s writing about that researcher you were going to hire-Dylan Riley? The one you were asking me about the other day.” She read on in silence, then said, “ Jesus, ” again. “Did you know he was murdered?”

  “Who?”

  “This Riley person. He was shot. Someone shot and killed him.” She turned to him again, almost angrily. “Did you know about this?”

  He looked at the ceiling. “Umm.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? And don’t give me some smart answer.” She was glaring at him now. “You said he tried to blackmail you. About us.”

  He sat upright, dashing cigarette ash in the direction of the Betty Boop plastic ashtray he had bought one winter day on a trip he and Alison had made to Coney Island. “I didn’t say it was about us. I thought it might be about us. He claimed to know something, to have found out something, that’s all.” He did his mime-artist’s shrug, lifting high his shoulders and pulling down the corners of his mouth in a show of helplessness. “He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

  Alison sat without moving, seeming hardly to breathe, watching him steadily. She had gone into her idling mode, waiting for what was to come. Under her blank scrutiny he grew twitchy and irritated, as always. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know anymore about this business than you do. I spoke to Dylan Riley a couple of times, and met him once. The next thing I knew he was dead. Christ knows who killed him. He was a professional busybody, he had a lot of enemies.”

  Angrily she pushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. “He had it coming to him, is that what you mean?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. What do you want me to say?”

  “What do I want you to say? Sometimes I think you think you’re living in a play, spouting cliches someone else has written for you. I want you to say what you know. I want you to tell me the truth. ”

  He climbed off the wide, low mattress-the bed was a bare wood frame resting on four squat pillars of bricks-and strode off to the bathroom. This was a cramped space, not much bigger than a closet, with an angled ceiling and an unshiftable dank smell. He locked the door behind him and sat down on the lavatory lid and held his face in his hands. He felt harried, and almost comically hampered, like a clown who has got something stuck to the sole of his big, floppy shoe and cannot shake it off.

  He heard the sound of Alison’s impatient barefoot step approaching. “Come on,” she said through the door, “don’t hide in there.”

  “I’m not hiding.” He stood up, and caught his reflection in the mirror on the wall abov
e the sink. He had a desperate, querulous look, like that of an escaped convict who has heard the first faint baying of bloodhounds in the distance. He put his fingers under his eyes and pulled down the lower lids, making a lizard face. He stuck out his tongue; it had an unpleasant gray coating. For a second he seemed to see, superimposed on his own face, that of Captain Ambrose, dark skinned and saintly, smiling at him with mournful compassion. “What do you want me to tell you?” he called back over his shoulder.

  Alison struck her knuckles angrily on the door. “Stop saying that.”

  “But I don’t know what you expect me to say!”

  He yanked open the door. She was leaning against the jamb, still naked, with her arms folded under her breasts. The hair at her lap was glossy and tightly curled. How lovely she is, he thought, with a stab of sorrow, how lovely.

  She spoke in a low voice, evenly, showing him what an effort she was making to be forbearing and reasonable. “For a start,” she said, “tell me what that Cleaver fellow talked to you about.”

  “He asked if I had spoken to the po-lice.”

  “He’s black?”

  “As the ace of spades.”

  “Don’t let them hear you speak like that over here.”

  “He put on an Uncle Remus act for me, all hominy grits and natural rhythm. It seemed to amuse him.”

  She was not listening; she was frowning; she was, he could see, worried; he did not know what he could do about that. “And did you?” she asked.

  “Did I what?”

  “Speak to the police.”

  “They spoke to me, or one of them did, anyway. A Captain Ambrose. Melancholy type. Wanted to know about the Menendez brothers.”

  “The who? ”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’d read a piece I wrote.”

  He walked past her, back into the big studio room. It was growing chill as the twilight densened, and voluminous shadows, gray like watered ink, were gathering under the raked ceiling. He always felt that he should duck when he came in here, under all these slants and angles, and the big grimed window leaning over like that gave him the impression of constantly falling backward very, very slowly. Alison followed after him. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked. He wished she would put on her clothes. He had to think carefully here-what should he tell her and, more important, what not-and her nakedness was distracting. When he was growing up in Dublin the glimpse of a nipple would set a young boy’s gonads going like the tumblers in a fruit machine. “What did Cleaver say, in this blog of his?” he asked.

  Alison went and stood at the table and clicked a key on the laptop. “What did Dylan Riley know,” she read, “that someone felt the need to put a bullet through his eye? Riley, a well-known private researcher, was found at his Vandam workshop on Tuesday, slumped lifeless over his MacBook Pro-”

  “He wasn’t slumped over anything,” Glass said.

  “-with half his brains splattered across the screen, which in the circumstances is surely symbolic of something. As usual, New York’s Finest are scratching their heads for a who and a why. Riley’s girlfriend Terri -with an i-Taylor told police that yadda yadda yadda. The Cleaver is reliably informed-i.e. the cops told us-that Riley’s last phone call was to internationally renowned bleeding-heart journo Mr. John Glass, who, as unhappy chance would have it, is at present working on a biography-nay, the biography-of his daddy-in-law, electronics mogul and former Company spook Mr. William ‘Big Bill’ Mulholland. The Cleaver asks: have we stumbled into a wilderness of mirrors here? ” She turned from the screen. Glass was standing by the bed, buttoning his shirt. She crossed to her side of the bed and took a printed silk wrap from the closet and put it on, all the while studying Glass out of a narrowed eye. “What did Cleaver say when you met him?”

  He stooped to put on his trousers, lifting a shoulder defensively against her. “Nothing much. He was just fishing for information, looking for a story.”

  “And did he know about”-she made a sardonic grimace-“us?”

  “Probably. He called you because he thought your number was mine-he got it from Riley, whose filing system seems to have left a lot to be desired.”

  “Then Riley did know about us.”

  “Obviously.”

  She made a brief laughing sound. “You think there’s anything obvious about any of this?”

  He sighed. He felt weary. He wished he had never heard the name Dylan Riley, and silently cursed his contacts who had recommended him. He began to light another cigarette, but Alison said: “Would you mind not? The place reeks already.” She never smoked in the studio.

  He fitted the cigarette back into the pack, deliberately, resentfully. “Let’s go out and eat,” he said.

  “It’s early.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Don’t snap.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did.”

  This was how it was between them now, so often, the sudden lunge and whip of irritation, followed by a fuming silence. He took a long breath. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Where do we ever go?” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “You find a table, I’ll get dressed and follow you.”

  He turned. “Alison.”

  She looked at him. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She would not look at him. Something like embarrassment, like shame, almost, sat heavily in the space that separated them.

  “This fellow getting killed,” she said, “do you think it had something to do with your father-in-law?”

  “I don’t know.” He needed that cigarette. “I hope not.”

  “Have you talked to… have you talked to Louise about it?”

  “Not really. Louise doesn’t take much interest in things like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like people that she doesn’t know getting murdered. Her range of concerns is limited. Her stocks portfolio. Getting a really good table at Masa. The quality of the top snow at Klosters this year.” He could not stop. “The Mulholland Trust. Her son’s future. Me getting my comeuppance.”

  She tightened her lips. “Go and find us a table,” she said.

  They ate at the little French place round the corner where they went most evenings when they were together, which were not many, and were becoming fewer. He did not know why Alison put up with him-he would not have put up with himself. She was lonely, he supposed, as he was, two exiles from a tiny place stranded here amid all this enormity. The image he entertained of America was that of a buffalo standing foursquare with its great head lifted in the direction of old Europe, and him a microbe perched precariously on the tip of the creature’s mighty muzzle. Perhaps he should go home, to Ireland; perhaps they should both go home; together, even; perhaps.

  After dinner they strolled over to Washington Square. The rain had stopped and there was a fresh, clean fragrance on the night. Glass recalled their meeting here that winter noon before Christmas when they had walked in the glassy air round and round this bare rectangle, under the spectral trees. The time that had elapsed since then seemed far more than a mere four months. “It was at the Washington Square Bookstore here, in 1920,” he said, “that the head of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, chap called Sumner, I believe, bought a copy of the Little Review with the Gerty MacDowell episode from Ulysses in it, and lodged a complaint with the police that led to the trial of the book for obscenity. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “You’re a mine of information,” Alison said drily.

  The air had softened with the coming of darkness. Glass loved this city at night, the flash and gleam of it, the heavy hum of life going on everywhere, driven, undaunted.

  “What will you do,” Alison said, “if you find this killing really is somehow connected with Mulholland?”

  “I’m not going to find any such thing,” he said, in almost a snarl, surprised at his own anger. He took a measured breath. “I told you, there must be dozens of people who would have been glad to see the last of Dyla
n Riley. Why do you automatically think my father-in-law must be involved?”

  “Why are you being so defensive?”

  He sighed. “I’m not defensive. I’m just tired of being crossexamined.”

  “You came to me in a panic after Riley phoned you. Have you forgotten? You were terrified he might have found out about you and me. What else were you frightened of, but that he would tell Big Bill Mulholland you were two-timing his daughter?” She linked her arm in his, not out of affection, but sidling close like an assassin, he thought suddenly, positioning herself to drive the dagger all the deeper. “You’ve always been afraid of him,” she said, “of what he could do to you-of what he could take away from you.”

  He stopped, and made her stop with him. The square of sky above them had a sickly orange cast. He was breathing heavily, a man at bay. “What do you mean, what he could take away from me?”

  She did not reply at once, but stood regarding him with a halfsmile, regretfully sardonic, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “Look at you,” she said. “Look what you’ve become-what they’ve made of you.”

  She detached her arm from his then, sadly but firmly relinquishing him, and turned and walked back in the direction of Bleecker Street. He watched her go. Police sirens, two or three of them together, were whooping somewhere close by. He knew he should follow her, the sirens behind him seemed a frantic urging, yet he could not make himself take the first step. She seemed, like so much else, to be receding from him down a long slope that steepened steadily into darkness.

  10

  BIG BILL

  Glass stepped out of the elevator into the apartment and his wife came from the shadows quickly, as if to forestall him, and asked in a low voice, sounding tense and cross, where he had been until this hour. The question was rhetorical; she knew where he had been, more or less. She took his arm, much as Alison O’Keeffe had taken it an hour ago, with urgent and unfond intent. “Billuns is here, and he wants to talk to you. He’s mad about something, I can tell.” Glass said nothing. He might have guessed his father-in-law had arrived. Something happened to an atmosphere when Big Bill Mulholland stepped into it. They walked forward, Louise’s high heels making a sharp rapid noise on the parquet that sounded as if she were clicking her tongue. The light in the apartment was muted, no overhead bulbs burning and all the lamps shedding their subdued radiance downward, as if in deference to the great man’s presence.