by Avery Corman
“I knew they were divorced.”
“But not those particular details. I never told you, Ronnie.”
“Yes. You did.”
They were all uncomfortable and eased into safer conversation, work-related conversation. But Ronnie was positive Bob told her about his father; that he had too much to drink that night, which was why he couldn’t recall.
Richard arrived bearing gray pearl earrings, which triggered an immediate reaction from Ronnie, of caution, I don’t know if I can accept these, they’re beautiful, but too expensive. He had chosen a middle-range Italian restaurant on the East Side, and offered the gift. As she sipped a glass of wine and appraised the handsomest man in the place, she wondered about her priorities. She danced around what was appropriate and not appropriate in a sexual relationship; that’s what it was primarily, certainly not an intimate relationship in a talking-about-intimate-things sense; and yet she was willing to conceal from the police that she was unable to account for an hour and a half on the day when Randall Cummings was murdered. She wasn’t going to tell Richard, By the way I’ve developed a little habit of blacking out and sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’ve been.
“I can’t accept these.”
“I knew it. Here’s the receipt.”
“Why do I want the receipt?”
“Look at it.”
“A place in Munich.”
“Sixty-four dollars, American. Sixty-four dollars, Ronnie, that’s less than a dinner in most places. They’re pretty, it was a steal, please accept them.”
She could hear Nancy telling her to lighten up, just accept a gift from the guy, you can accept a gift from someone you’re sleeping with if he travels around the world and decides to pick something up for you.
“They’re beautiful. I’ll accept them on one condition.”
“Which is.”
“We go bowling.”
“Bowling?”
“When you were away, I had this fantasy. That the man I’d be with would be the kind of person who I could do normal things with, like bowling, and we would also have sex in some kind of order.”
“You give new meaning to high maintenance.”
“I know. Aren’t I interesting?”
“Bowling. Sure. The whole time, dealing with these cult people in Germany building primitive altars to Satan, sacrificing farm animals, I thought, when I get out of here, I’m going bowling with Ronnie.”
“Somewhere in there is the point—that it’s so ordinary it’s good.”
She accepted the earrings, they were going to make plans for bowling, she was even going to get to invite her friends to come along, Richard consented to that, a bowling double date.
Back at his apartment, the sex was as she fantasized it, the best sex she ever had, except for the last time with him, that was the best sex she ever had. Afterward she thought holding on with this transient man was the right thing to do, to not bolt because of his inconstant behavior. Being here with him at this place at this time had the power to obliterate, if only for these moments, the disquieting events in her life.
In the morning they went to their breakfast place. He was going to be in New York for a couple of weeks and then he needed to return to Munich. He described the cult, an atavistic group that favored ancient satanic rituals, that somehow was attracting young people from the city. The cult leader was a man in his sixties who wore farmer’s clothes for his mystique, there was always a mystique, he explained, and the dogma was a return to the land and simple pursuits, the cult members joining a working farm, with a nearly medieval worship of Satan. Antoine Burris thought there was a book in it; Richard wasn’t so sure, but he needed to go back. This was clearly the deal, which she fully recognized: Richard was there when he was there, and then he was gone.
“What do you do with all your frequent flyer mileage, get luggage?”
“Maybe I should use it for bowling lessons. Is there such a thing?”
“Richard, there’s something we need to talk about.”
“Still not married, Ronnie. You’ll be the first to know. Maybe not the first.”
“It’s about Cummings. I can’t get rid of the idea that if I just left him in obscurity, he’d be alive today. If I never wrote about him—”
“Wait just a minute. He had over a thousand members. He was rolling along. If you didn’t write about him, somebody else would have, me even. Someone somewhere was going to write a piece on him.”
“But I did. And he’s dead.”
“And? Where’s the connection?”
“I put him in the spotlight.”
“You’re a professional journalist and you wrote a professional journalist’s piece. You wrote the piece that needed to be written.”
“It wasn’t a rave review, Richard.”
“Appropriately.”
“His father was on TV. He said Cummings was—creating theater.”
“That was his problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at enough of these—he was a dabbler, Ronnie. He probably was creating theater. He wasn’t a true believer like this German guy. It wasn’t well thought out. Be evil, but not too evil. You picked it up in your piece.”
“Then he wasn’t that harmful. Makes it even worse.”
“You did a terrific job. Stop. You can’t beat yourself up over it.”
“Still—”
“His death had nothing to do with what you wrote. What you have to do is focus on this book, put every bit of your energy and intelligence into the book, make it as good as it can be. I was watching tennis on television and the announcer said something very interesting. Not all points have the same value. Some you have to win. It’s like this book. It doesn’t have the same value as an article. It’s your chance to win, to do something really substantial. All of you should go into it. And you can do it.”
He leaned over, took her hands in his, and kissed them. For all his sexual athleticism, he was not a particularly physically affectionate person, no light touches on the hand or on the waist, and this was as intimate a gesture outside of sex as he had made toward her.
“Thank you, Richard. I hope I hear you.”
Just when she wasn’t expecting much, his latest time in New York turned out to be better than she would have thought. They went to the theater to see Doubt, and to a New York Philharmonic Concert in Central Park—bona fide New York activities.
An oddity, but she noticed that when she was at his place the phone never rang. She wondered if he had a telephone system that screened calls, and yet the phone in his bedroom was connected to an ordinary answering machine. He had told her he didn’t have any relatives and that Antoine Burris was his closest friend. Apparently he had no other friends, and when she was there Burris didn’t call, nobody called. This had the effect of making their time together unique, it was just the two of them. However, she found it strange to never hear a phone ring in someone’s apartment because there was no one else in his life to call him, apparently. At the least this did damage to theories about a wife, or other women.
On his last night in New York they went bowling. Ronnie arranged it and booked an alley at Chelsea Piers. Ronnie was not a particularly good bowler. Her idea was people leading regular lives go bowling and that is why they were there. Nancy was a little better than Ronnie, Richard slightly better than both of them. Bob, the runner and athlete and someone who did bowl frequently when he was growing up, was fairly competent.
“I don’t think off this performance we should get club jackets,” Ronnie joked as they were leaving.
The women went to the ladies’ room and Bob excused himself to go off to a hallway so he could make a business call on his cell phone. Richard was left alone at the lane. He looked at the pins set up and with sudden seriousness, picked up a ball and, with perfect form, threw a strike. Bob came back into the area and happened to observe this. Richard hadn’t thrown a single strike while they were playing and had a couple of gu
tter balls. As Richard walked away from the lane, Bob stepped toward him.
“What was that, you were dumping when you played with us?”
“Nothing to think about. Lucky, that’s all.”
“That was perfect, like you could bowl a perfect game if you wanted to.”
“Bob, really, a lucky toss.”
“You were patronizing us. Why would you? I don’t get it.”
“Nothing to get.”
“And now you’re off again, right, big guy? And Ronnie sits around, seeing nobody, basically waiting for you to show up.”
“Is this really your business? She seems to be happy.”
“I saw an interview with Sting and he said some people have as their song, ‘I’ll Be Watching You,’ which he said was strange since it’s a paranoid statement. Paranoid this may be, but whoever you are, buddy, I’ll be watching you.”
Bob couldn’t get over the image of Richard, after a spotty bowling performance, throwing a perfect strike. At his apartment, before they went to sleep, he described it to Nancy.
“Maybe he was just being social, he’s a good bowler and he didn’t want to outshine us.”
“Customer bowling?”
“That’s the effect it had, we were all sort of on the same level, except maybe for you, and you’re no champion, and we had a good time.”
“Here are the possibilities—”
“Bob, please, let’s go to bed.”
“He was being social, like you say, holding back for the group. Or it’s an indication of something duplicitous about him, he’s not always who he seems. Or, and this is interesting, that the last strike was for me, that he wanted me to see it, a little dig at me: You thought I was just like you, but I’m not, buddy-boy, I’m so much better than you.”
“So this is really about you, in competition with him.”
“If it is that, he’s still not who he pretends to be and he was still duplicitous with us.”
“I’m saying good night now. Call Oliver Stone.”
“Ms. Delaney, Doctor Lawson here—”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You’re in excellent health. The blood test, the CAT scan, everything is normal.”
“Really? Excellent.”
“Sometimes simple medical advice is the best. When it’s warm, drink plenty of fluids. If you exercise, do it at cool times of the day. Not too much alcohol or wine at night, it can disturb sleep. A hat when you go out in the sun. Call me if you have any more problems. We detected absolutely nothing, Ms. Delaney.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Relieved, she happily consigned the episodes to not taking sufficient care of herself in warm weather. Richard was off to Munich. She went back into seventeenth-century France, loving it.
A consultant to police departments in New York State, Charles Larkin, a bookish, slightly built man in his forties, came in to talk with the detective squad at the Twenty-sixth Precinct. His expertise began ten years earlier with Satan’s Hand, a satanic cult in Watertown, New York, whose members were committing crimes in the community. While working as a detective on the case, Larkin became interested in cults and eventually became a police expert in the field. He told the detectives he doubted Cummings would be murdered by anyone from a rival cult; there weren’t substantial rivalries between cults. As to a competition for Internet members, he suggested there were enough odd people to go around and doubted anyone in another cult would be so antagonized by Cummings’s operation as to kill him. Rourke also questioned whether it was likely for one of his cult members to be a suspect, since they were, after all, his followers. Larkin didn’t rule out jealousy as a motive, or someone who felt they received bad advice, but he thought a cult member would be extremely unlikely to murder Cummings. His general feeling was that it would be more productive to concentrate on this as a murder by someone with a grievance: the Anti-Satanist Group, who were public in their objections; someone in his personal life, a lover, a lover who might have hired an assassin; or it might have been a thief, an intruder. Simply because nothing was stolen didn’t preclude its having been a robbery gone awry.
Santini and Gomez sat in their unmarked car as Ronnie went to the recreation center for volunteer time with the youngsters. She didn’t work on the newspaper project at this time of year, she merely went to encourage any of the young people who were hanging around to develop their computer skills. The detectives ate dinner in the car, pizza from Patsy’s on First Avenue, and waited until she emerged an hour later. She was standing on the sidewalk with two teenage girls, joking with them, then made her way over to Second Avenue to take a bus downtown, and a crosstown bus to the West Side. They trailed her to the point where she entered her apartment building.
“Excellent pizza is what I get out of the night,” Santini said.
“So she’s doing ordinary things. So was Batrak.”
“We’re wasting our time with this girl.”
“Placed at the scene of the crime, at the time of death, with a grievance against the victim.”
“You see that show on the comedy channel last night, the old comics?”
“No.”
“They had Don Adams from Get Smart and his routine was a takeoff on old courtroom dramas and this defense attorney has a thing for the defendant and he says, ‘I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are those the knees of a homicidal murderer?’”
“Very funny. But she was still there.”
“Let’s go home.”
Detectives Carter and Greenberg went to Staten Island to work their way through the Anti-Satanist Group. Peter Askew, the unemployed recovering alcoholic, was not present the day of the murder, according to his colleagues, John Wilson and Beattie Ryan. The detectives found him at Staten Island Hospital, where he was recovering from a heart attack. He was sitting up in bed, playing cards with his mentor in the church recovery group, Martin Beale, another member of the Anti-Satanists.
“I’m Detective Carter, this is Detective Greenberg. We’re here about the Randall Cummings murder.”
“Right,” Askew said.
“We read about it,” Beale added.
“And your name, sir?” Carter asked.
“Martin Beale.”
“You were in the group, too.”
“When I could.”
“I’d like to ask why you guys were interested,” Greenberg said.
“Because he was a dangerous individual,” Askew answered. “He encouraged people against God’s ways.”
“The kind of person it was a good idea to eliminate?” Carter asked.
“I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t have killed him to get him out of business. I’m not sorry he’s out of business.”
“And you, Mr. Beale?”
“I’m not sorry either. They were looking to do evil. Somebody did it to him.”
“Why would you care?” Greenberg asked, intrigued. “To come all the way from Staten Island—”
“Somebody had to … to stand up to those people. Wilson told us what he was doing and it seemed like a good idea to us,” Askew said.
“Tuesday, May twentieth, you recall where you were that day?”
“I was here. First time I had problems.”
“You were admitted—”
“Day before. I would’ve been there with them, but I couldn’t.”
“And you, Mr. Beale?” Carter asked. “Can you account for your whereabouts that day?”
“I was here, too. The nurses saw me, if it’s an alibi I’m needing. We didn’t like Cummings or what he stood for, but we didn’t murder him. We were right here.”
“All right,” Greenberg said, on the complete strikeout. “It’s still a lot of energy to expend, to go all the way to Upper Manhattan from Staten Island just to protest somebody.”
“It was something to do,” Askew said.
Beattie Ryan was seated on a chaise in the small patio behind her garden apartment going over the Daily Racing Form. The detectives questioned her and
she talked to them while reading the handicap charts. She repeated the account that Santini and Gomez were given on the day of Cummings’s murder: Her arrival was after twelve o’clock with John Wilson and they were in their position until the police cars arrived at the building close to five when they went over to observe. She saw the strange guy come out of the building at about the time the girl went in. The girl came out about an hour and a half later, then the strange guy returned an hour or so after that. Nobody else went in or out of the building that they could see, and she and Wilson were there the entire time from noon to the arrival of the police.
They found Wilson at home. He was packing orders into boxes when they arrived.
“We’d like to talk to you about the events of Tuesday, May twentieth,” Carter said, showing his badge.
“I already spoke to the police. I can’t spare much time. I’m very busy.”
They stood while he sat in a chair in his living room/storage room.
“We’re trying to reconstruct the events of the day of the murder and we need your help,” Carter said.
“God has already given his help, removing this evildoer from the world, praised be the Lord. I don’t know what help I can provide.”
“Your colleague, Ms. Ryan, has you at the site where you were protesting that day. When was that?” Greenberg asked.
“We got there about noon and we left after your other detectives talked to us. We already talked to you people, you know?”
“We’re other people. And who went in and out of the building?
“The man who worked there. And the girl.”
“She was there how long?” Carter asked.
“About an hour and a half.”
“She says a few minutes,” Carter said.
“‘She says.’ She’s the Devil’s mistress. He entered her with his evil staff,” Wilson declared.
“Was that something you observed from an open window?” Greenberg could not resist asking.
“The Lord had a hand in his death, I’m certain. Not directly, but it was His will.”
“And who, in your opinion, acted on his will?” Carter asked.