Jade in Aries

by Donald E. Westlake

  It wouldn’t be, of course, and eventually Cornell would have to give up the idea. In the meantime, though, it seemed harmless. It would give him something to do while learning to forget, and it would keep him from a futile assault against City Hall.

  So I didn’t argue with him about his plan. Let him occupy himself in busywork; wasn’t my own life built on the same irrational soil? Wasn’t I digging this sub-cellar? Wasn’t I, when the weather was better, working on my wall?

  I said, “I still don’t see what you want me to do.”

  “I asked around,” he said. “I was told about you, that you used to be on the police force. I thought you would know how I could find out the birthdays. I don’t know how to go about it.”

  “You need date and time of birth?”

  “Yes. It’s always on the birth certificate.”

  “I know that. How many people?”

  “Six.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. “You have it narrowed to six?”

  “Yes. I made a list of the suspects, and found out who had alibis, and these six are left.”

  “How did you make a list of suspects?”

  “Well, it had to be somebody that Jamie knew. He was very careful about letting people into the apartment, he would never have let a stranger in. Not even the grocery boy, he’d make him leave the package in the foyer. He’d put the chain on the door, and open it just enough to give him the tip.”

  “So you made a list of people Jamie would have let in.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And eight of them had alibis.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve done all this in four days?”

  “Two days, actually,” he said. “I didn’t start until Monday, when I finally saw that Detective Manzoni wasn’t going to do anything.”

  I was taken aback. Cornell had gone about his investigation in the most professional way possible; listing the potential suspects on the basis of the habits of the victim, eliminating from the list on the basis of alibi. And now he was going to make a direct about-face into the irrational.

  I felt the terrible temptation to become involved. But I wasn’t going to, I was going to stay completely out of it. Not only because of the problem of a private detective’s license, but also because I had enough pain of my own, I didn’t need to envelop myself in someone else’s agony.

  What Cornell hadn’t realized yet was this: Even if he did find Jamie Dearborn’s murderer, even if he managed to obtain convictable evidence (as astrological charts, of course, would not be), even if he somehow got the murderer arrested and convicted and jailed, even then Jamie Dearborn would go on being dead. Cornell didn’t really want vengeance, I could see that in his eyes. What he wanted was his partner back, alive and well. But that was the one thing he was not going to get, no matter what he did, and when all the activity was done, he was going to have to face it. That moment would be terrible, and I had no desire to be present.

  So I made no suggestions, I made no offers. I simply said, “All right, you have six suspects. Were they all born in New York?”

  He looked surprised. “I really don’t know. Of course, I’ll have to know that too, won’t I?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Yes, I should have thought of that. Location on the planet is just as important as time, astrologically.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “Birth certificates are maintained in the county where you were born, so we’ll have to know the counties before we can get the certificates.”

  “Oh, of course.” He frowned, and said thoughtfully, “I know some of them. I suppose I might be able to find out the others. Would it be imposing too much to use your phone?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “Thank you.” He stepped back to let me go first up the stairs.

  I was still wearing my work gloves, which I now stripped off and dropped on the floor before going up. We went silently up to the kitchen, where I said, “I’ll wash up out here. The phone’s in the living room.”

  “Thank you very much.” He paused, looking awkward, and said, “I really appreciate this.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.

  “You didn’t dismiss me out of hand,” he said, and flashed his embarrassed smile, and went on into the living room.

  I washed at the kitchen sink, fully realizing now what a study in contrasts we must have been down in the basement, he so neat and so elegantly turned out, me in ripped old sneakers, paint-stained trousers, frayed flannel shirt and work gloves, my face and forearms smeared with dirt and perspiration. I felt an urge to go upstairs and change into cleaner clothes, but of course as soon as Cornell left I would go back to my digging.

  Above the kitchen sink was a window facing the back yard. Out there it was still grim, snowflakes endlessly dropping like miniature parachutists down through the windless air, making anonymous mounds of my wall and the canvas-covered stacks of matériel waiting for spring.

  I have been working on my wall now for close to two years. The work is its own purpose, so I have seen to it that the job goes very slowly. When completed, the wall will be ten feet high and two feet thick, composed of brick and concrete block, built on a solid concrete-block footing that extends into the earth below the frost line. There will be no windows or doors or other openings in the wall, which will completely enclose the yard on three sides. The house itself will form the fourth wall, so that when I am finished the only entrance to the yard will be through the house.

  The wall is now about four feet high all the way around. I am progressing slowly, but no matter how slowly I move, the wall continues toward completion. Some day it will be finished, which I don’t like to think about.

  Last winter, the second winter since I was thrown off the force and the first winter since I started the wall, was a very difficult time. I couldn’t work on my wall during January and February, and I had nothing else to do but sit in front of the television set all day, hoping the movements on the screen would distract me from thoughts of where I was and how I had put myself here. This winter the idea came to me to give myself a second project, indoors, to carry me through the time of worst weather. So I am digging a sub-basement. Beginning at the rear wall of the house, I intend to first dig a flight of steps down to a depth of eight feet. Then I will dig a room out of the earth under the concrete floor of the basement. I will be careful not to dig under any of the structural supports of the house, and I will erect firm supports for the basement floor as I dig. This project may last much longer than the wall, and give me a much longer respite from myself.

  Once, in the first year after I was thrown off the force, I dreamed that Jock called me on the phone. Though he spoke to me at length, I couldn’t seem to make out any of the words. But the astonishing thing was that he didn’t sound angry, and when I awoke in the morning I felt both pleasure and amazement at the memory. I almost said to Kate, “Jock isn’t mad at me, isn’t that incredible?” But I realized in time that it was only a dream.

  I find it difficult to describe what I did, to put it in words; I tend to talk in circles around it. How fast can I say it, in how few words? My partner, Detective Jock Sheehan, was shot to death because, instead of being at his side, I was in bed with a woman other than my wife. Oh, but there’s even more to it than that. Jock knew where I was, the affair had been going on for four years and he had helped me keep it going and keep it quiet. And the woman, Linda Campbell, was the wife of a jailed burglar I had arrested. How do I betray thee, self? Let me count the ways.

  It is to keep myself from counting the ways that I work on my wall, and that now, in the dead of winter, I dig a hole beneath my basement.

  The water was running in the sink. I had been staring out the window at the gray air, the white snow, how long? Sometimes I think I will stop like that once and never start again; and in many ways, that would be best.r />
  I shook my head, and turned off the water, and dried my arms and hands and face on a towel. Over by the cellar door were my slippers. I went over there, kicked off the muddy sneakers, and put the slippers on. Not to track dirt on Kate’s carpets.

  I heard Cornell talking in the living room as I came down the hall. He was sitting perched on the edge of the sofa, talking into the phone. He had a silver pen in his hand and a notebook open on the end table. He was saying, “Yes, well, one has to go on, doesn’t one?” And then a pause, and, “Oh, not till next week. The thought of the shop without Jamie, not yet. I’ll open next Monday.” Another pause, and, “You are sweet. Everyone’s been so kind. I’ll see you Friday, then. Yes. Ciao.”

  He hung up and turned to me. His movements seemed more effeminate when he was sitting down. He said, happily, “I got them. I knew some, and I got the others.”

  “Fine.”

  “Here’s the list.”

  I took the notebook from him and looked at the names and locations. “This one in Toronto might take a little longer, I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, God, I’ve got time. That’s all I have.”

  “Three of them are New York.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which borough?”

  “Oh, dear.” He stood up beside me to look at the names. “Stew I’m not sure about,” he said. “Is it important?”

  “It would be easier, but it isn’t vital.”

  “It just might be a little tricksy to ask. Now, Bruce was born in Queens, I know that for a fact. Here, you want the pen?”

  “Thank you.” I wrote “Queens County” after the name Bruce Maundy.

  “And Henry,” he said, “I’m not sure about either. I think he was born in Manhattan, you know, Lower East Side, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  I nodded, and wrote “Manhattan?” after the name Henry Koberberg. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and sat down where Cornell had been sitting.

  As I reached for the phone, he said, “We haven’t talked about money yet.”

  “Money?” I looked up at him, not understanding.

  “I understood that you sometimes do police-type things,” he said, “but of course you have to be paid.”

  “This isn’t anything to be paid for,” I said. “I’ll make one phone call, that’s all.”

  “Oh, but that isn’t right. I came here a perfect stranger, you can’t do it for nothing.”

  I didn’t want pay. It is true that from time to time in the last few years I’ve taken on jobs that had some connection with my police training and abilities, but I’ve done the work reluctantly, finding the contact with other people painful. But I’ve had no other way to make a living; how could I expose myself by filling out a normal employer’s application form? And how can I allow Kate to support me forever?

  But those jobs were difficult, and took considerable time, and I received fairly high sums of money. Even if I wanted to charge for making one phone call to an old friend, how much would be a proper price? Ten cents?

  So I said, “I’m not doing enough to charge you. If you want, I’ll stop in the store sometime and you can give me a tie or something.”

  He looked doubtful, knowing I didn’t intend ever to come to him for a tie, and said, “I just don’t feel right about it.”

  “Let me make the phone call,” I said, “and then we’ll talk.”

  “All right,” he said, reluctantly, and stood frowning at me as I called the Missing Persons Bureau.

  Eddie Schultz didn’t answer, but he was on duty now and they switched the call to his desk. “Mitch Tobin here,” I said, and he said, “Hey, Mitch, how you doing?”

  “Fine,” I said. I haven’t seen Eddie for nearly three years, but we’d been friends for fifteen years or so before that, and he was one of the ones who didn’t turn against me after Jock was killed.

  Now he said, “What can I do for you, Mitch?”

  I said, “I have six names, and places of birth. What I want is date and time of birth on each of them. Could you do it for me?”

  “Date and time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Local?”

  “Four local, one Los Angeles, one Canada.”

  “So you want birth certificates.”

  “I don’t need the actual certificates, just the information.”

  “Mitch, are you working again?” Once before I’d called him, in connection with one of the jobs I’d taken.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You don’t want to get yourself in trouble.”

  “I’m careful,” I said. “And this is just to be passed on to a friend.”

  “Okay. Give me the stuff.”

  I read him the six names and the six places. When I was done, he said, “Some of these I could have tomorrow. The LA and Toronto will take a little longer. You want them all together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me a call Monday.”

  “Is it okay if my friend calls you direct? Cut out the middleman.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Thanks, Eddie. His name is Ronald Cornell.”

  He repeated the name, and said, “Tell him to call before eleven. In the morning.”

  “I will. Thanks a lot, Eddie.”

  “Any time. Mitch?”

  “Yes?”

  “Otherwise, how are you?”

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “You come out of the house at all?”

  “Not very much.”

  “Give me a social call sometime, will you?”

  “I will,” I promised. “Thanks again.”

  “Sure thing, Mitch.”

  We hung up, and I wrote Eddie’s name and phone number in Cornell’s notebook. Giving it to him, I said, “Call him Monday, before eleven in the morning. He’s expecting you.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate this, I really do.”

  I got to my feet. “But you saw how easy it was. I’d be embarrassed to take money for it.”

  “You must come to the shop,” he said. “I insist on that.”

  “I will,” I said.

  He thanked me some more, and then he got ready to leave. And now I saw why he’d arrived with no sign of snowstorm on him; he’d removed his outerwear just inside the front door, before finding me in the basement. If the house had been empty, obviously, he’d intended to wait.

  The buckled shoes disappeared first, inside knee-high brown leather boots that zipped up the side, enclosing both the shoes and the flared bottoms of his trousers. He then put on an ankle-length dark brown coat in a trench-coat style, but with a fur collar and brass buttons, and topped it all with a hat that looked like an outsized baseball cap, brim and all, made entirely of dark brown fur. After all that, the gloves he took from his coat pocket and pulled on were almost disappointing in their ordinariness.

  “Well,” he said, “ready to brave the elements. Thank you again, Mr. Tobin, you were really very kind.”

  “I did nothing at all,” I said. I reached for the doorknob to let him out, but then stopped and said, “I wonder if you’ve thought about what you’ll do afterwards.”

  He frowned at me. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Let’s say you find him,” I said. “Let’s say you narrow it down to one person, astrologically. You can’t take astrological charts to court, or to a police station. What if you become convinced it was one particular person, but you don’t have any proof to back up the stars?”

  “Then I’ll have to look for proof,” he said, as though it were as simple as that.

  I said, “The reason I’m asking, I wouldn’t want to have helped you if you were planning to take the law into your own hands.”

  “Revenge?” His smile was both astonished and bitter. “Me? Go out and beat somebody up, kill somebody? Oh, Mr. Tobin, you don’t have to worry about me, I won’t do anything effective at all.”

  That self-hatred of his could turn violent; I considered tellin
g him so, warning him to be on guard before he did do something “effective,” but I knew he would neither understand nor believe me, so I said nothing about it, only, “In that case, I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you again,” he said, and I opened the door, and he left.

  The front door has a window in it. Looking through it, I watched Cornell go cautiously down the snowy stoop and out through the deep snow toward his car, a blue Corvette. His car, or Jamie Dearborn’s?

  He reminded me of somebody, going away through the snow, stepping high and cautious, wearing his boots and his long coat and his fur collar and that fur hat, a long slender dark figure surrounded by snow.

  And then I realized who it was: Greta Garbo, in Anna Karenina. I smiled to myself, wondering if Cornell would be pleased at the image. I thought he probably would.

  He got into the car, and a moment later it drove slowly away. I turned from the door and went back to the kitchen, where I changed again to the muddy sneakers and went back downstairs to the basement.

  Two days later, Friday, a package came for me in the mail. Kate was home, then, and watched me curiously as I opened it and took out a tan cashmere scarf. “That’s beautiful,” she said, and reached out to touch it.

  It was beautiful; soft, delicate, clearly expensive.

  She said, “Who is it from?”

  There was a small note: “Thank you. Ronald Cornell.”

  I hadn’t told Kate about Cornell, but now we sat together at the kitchen table and I described Wednesday’s meeting to her. When I finished, she said, “He didn’t want you to do anything else? Help him find the murderer?”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t ask.”

  Kate has been strongly in favor of those few jobs I’ve done the last couple of years, not because they’ve eased our financial problems but because she believes that if I only remain active in the world I will sooner or later become my old self again. I won’t, that old self was buried with Jock, but nothing will destroy her hope.

  Now she said, “Maybe he’ll come back if the astrology doesn’t help.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I think I’ve heard the last of Ronald Cornell.”

  She reached out to touch the scarf again. “That was really very nice of him,” she said.