Jade in Aries

by Donald E. Westlake

  He needed to be smiled at, to be told that nothing was serious after all, the way most people need to breathe. He was good at wheedling that sort of response, obviously; the smile I gave him now was small and grudging, but honest, and he smiled back at once, managing to smile through tears without actually having shed any tears.

  Weissman came back with a tray loaded with coffee cups and saucers, spoons, sugar, cream and an electric coffeemaker. There was a certain amount of confusion now as he set the tray on the floor between Poumon and me and distributed coffee around to everyone.

  I could no longer smell the marijuana, and I suspected they hadn’t smoked much of it before I’d arrived. I know the popular conception of marijuana seriously overrates its powers but, like alcohol, it does begin to show an effect, and these young men might have had no more than a couple of drinks. Lane was being somewhat odd and flamboyant, but I imagined that was his style most of the time.

  When we finally got our coffee, and Weissman settled on another inflated chair, I spent a few seconds trying to think how best to bring the conversation back to Monday night. Before I formulated my next question, though, Poumon did it for me, saying, “About our alibis for Monday. Unfortunately, neither of us has one.”

  “Well, I know where I was,” Lane said. He acted miffed.

  “But nobody else knows you were there,” Poumon pointed out.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The ballet,” Lane said. He raised his arms over his head and pretended a pirouette. “I love the ballet.”

  “You went alone?”

  “I always go alone. David won’t come with me”—with a little pout in Poumon’s direction—“and I’m disgustingly faithful. Besides, the ballet is so intensely personal an experience, at least I think so.”

  I said, “What about your seat? The ballet’s all subscription, isn’t it? We could find the people in the seats on both sides of yours, and they’d surely remember whether your seat was occupied or not.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I couldn’t go like that. So structured.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “If I feel like going to the ballet,” he said, “I just go.”

  Poumon explained, “There’s almost always a few people selling their subscription seats outside the door. Cary just goes and buys a ticket.”

  “I almost never fail to get a seat,” Lane said happily.

  So that was no good. Lane wouldn’t be the type to keep his stubs, nor to remember exactly where he sat. And if he was as much a ballet buff as he sounded, he would not only know which ballets were performed last Monday (whether he’d actually been there or not), but would surely have seen them several times in the past.

  I turned to Poumon. “And you?”

  “At home,” he said. “Alone, with Cary out. Working.”

  “You’d better be alone,” Lane told him, with mock ferocity.

  I said, “Working? At what?”

  “Music,” he said. “I’m learning to be a composer.”

  “And you have no way to prove you were really home all evening.”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Neither do I,” Jerry Weissman said. “Am I a suspect?”

  “I understand you were in Atlanta with Cornell when Dearborn was killed.”

  “That’s right, I was. So that clears me, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Cornell tells me you’ve been keeping the store running this week.”

  “As much as I could,” he said. His unassuming modesty didn’t ring quite true; I thought he was probably very proud of himself for having been such a good Samaritan. Self-congratulation lurked just beneath the surface of his modest smile.

  “Could you let me in there this evening?”

  “Surely. No trouble at all.”

  The color photograph of the 747 was beginning to get to me. It showed nothing but sky and clouds and that huge fat plane. There was nothing solid, nothing to anchor oneself to. The room, with that picture dominating it, with the other walls so totally white (except for the eyes on the window shades), and with all this transparent furniture, gave an atmosphere of spaciousness and floating, but not in a good way. I was almost getting airsick in here, the effect was one of disorientation. I said, “Is this the room where Dearborn was killed?”

  “No. That was upstairs. Do you want to see it?”

  “Yes.”

  I managed to get up from the chair, and put my coffee cup on a nearby transparent lucite cube table. “This way,” Jerry Weissman said.

  Between the corridor doorway and the far wall, there was just space for another door, painted completely white, even the knob. Weissman opened this door, and a rather narrow flight of stairs led upward. I motioned for him to go first, which he did reluctantly, and I followed. Poumon and Lane stayed behind in the living room.

  The interior walls had been removed on the top floor, which had been turned into a giant bedroom, twenty feet wide and fifty feet long. Only this staircase, some wide closets and a smallish bathroom shared the space up here.

  And again it was Dearborn’s taste—or at least I assumed so—that predominated. The long wall opposite the staircase was papered in bold tiger stripes, and the entire ceiling was painted a flat black, so that it virtually disappeared. Both ends of the room were almost totally windows, those in front translucent and those in back of clear glass, and now I could see why Cornell had chosen the top apartment rather than the bottom. The view out the back, over the tops of a few smaller buildings, was of the Manhattan skyline; just about the same view as from the Promenade, but four stories higher. At night like this, with the black ceiling and the dark maroon carpet keeping the room unobtrusive, the strings of lights that were the Manhattan skyscrapers and the necklace of lights that was the Brooklyn Bridge were unbelievably impressive. It was the most beautiful view of New York I’d ever seen.

  “None of us had ever seen this place,” Jerry Weissman said. “Isn’t it something?”

  “It certainly is. You never saw it before now?”

  “Ronnie and Jamie kept the top floor just for themselves. Guests had to stay downstairs. They made a whole thing about it, you know? Their private world.”

  “A beautiful world,” I said.

  Weissman pointed beyond the bed. “He was found on the floor over here.”

  I looked at him. I wanted to ask someone how any human being could commit murder in front of these windows, but Jerry Weissman wasn’t the one to ask.

  Perhaps I would get a chance to ask the murderer.

  I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t want to see where Jamie Dearborn was found dead. I didn’t want to walk around in anybody else’s private world. “Let’s go to the shop,” I said.

  Weissman looked surprised, but made no comment. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just a couple blocks, we can walk it.”

  I went first back down the stairs.

  6

  DAVID POUMON AND CARY Lane walked a block with us. They lived in the neighborhood, and were going home.

  After they left us, I said to Weissman, “Tell me about those two.”

  He said, “You don’t really think they did it, do you? Either one of them?”

  “I don’t know yet. Tell me about them.”

  “I don’t know what to tell,” he said. “Cary’s from Los Angeles originally. He’s a model.”

  “Like Jamie?”

  “Yes, with the same agency.”

  “Any jealousy between them?”

  “Oh, Lord, no. You saw Cary, he doesn’t worry about anything like that. He bought that face and he’s absolutely happy with it. He isn’t jealous of anybody.”

  “He bought the face? How do you mean?”

  “Plastic surgery,” Weissman said casually, as though that were all the explanation I would need.

  “Was he in an accident?”

  “No, nothing like that. He just didn’t like the way he looked, he thought he was too ordinary.” He grinned unselfconsciously an
d said, “I suppose he used to look something like me. So he did himself all over, top to bottom.”

  “The face is completely new?”

  “I don’t know what he looked like before; he says he’s destroyed all the old pictures, even some his mother tried to hide. But I guess it’s all brand-new, yes.”

  “And the hair? That didn’t look real.”

  “Oh, Lord, no, that’s straight out of the bottle.”

  “And the teeth?”

  “Caps, all across the front.”

  I said, “He didn’t change his height, did he?”

  Weissman laughed and shook his head. “No, he’s the same height. We turn here.” We turned, and he said, “But he lost weight. Apparently he used to be kind of fat, like me.”

  Weissman wasn’t fat. He had a layer of baby-fat over a somewhat chunky frame, but he wasn’t fat.

  They made a nice study in contrasts, Weissman constantly diminishing himself, making himself a servant, denigrating his appearance, and Cary Lane exalting himself from within an entirely manufactured frame. I said, “Is that his real name? Cary Lane?”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t that weird? People in California have names like that, I don’t know why.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I think Cary’s twenty-eight now.”

  A good six years older than I would have given him. I said, “And the other one? Poumon?”

  “Dave’s twenty-four.”

  And I had been thinking of Poumon as the older; a generation older. I said, “Tell me about him. Poumon.”

  “He’s from Canada. Toronto. He wants to be a composer.”

  “So he said. Serious music, or popular?”

  “That’s hard to say these days, isn’t it?” Weissman said, and nodded ahead of us. “Here we are.”

  Jammer had begun life as an ordinary storefront in a building that had apartments above; the kind of storefront in which to find barbershops or tailors. There had originally been two display windows, with a recessed entrance in the middle, a perfectly ordinary design.

  It was ordinary no longer. The display windows had been covered with sheets of plywood painted a garish bright pink. Four-foot-tall letters, also cut from plywood and painted an equally bright purple, stood out three inches or so from the pink plywood, spelling JAMMER, three letters on each side of the entrance. The two M’s were narrower than the other letters, cramped-looking, as though the entrance had been forced between them as an afterthought. And the entrance itself was a completely plain black door with a single glass porthole in it at eye-level and a brass letter-slot at about the level of my waist.

  I stood to one side while Weissman unlocked the door and reached inside to switch on some lights, and then we both went in.

  Inside, it was very crowded and disorganized-looking, with round racks of clothing everywhere, counters on both sides, shelves up behind them, and narrow meandering aisles for customers amid the confusion of stock. The ceiling, a mass of heat ducts, exposed wiring, suspended fluorescent lights, plumbing and odd angles, had been painted flat black—like the top-floor ceiling in Cornell’s apartment—undoubtedly in order to get rid of it.

  Weissman said, “I guess you want to see the office. It’s back here.”

  I followed him—with the bright colors and the crowding, it was more like being in a plastic jungle than a clothing store—and at the rear we went around a counter piled with see-through shirts, through a hanging paisley drape, and directly into the nineteeth century.

  It was an office out of Dickens: small, piled high with papers, crowded with old furniture made of wood. There was no paint on any of the wood, only stain that let the grain show through. There was a very old roll-top desk, a wooden swivel chair, even a tall wooden filing cabinet. The calendar on the wall above the desk was of this new year we had just embarked on, but the picture was a Currier & Ives print of ice-skaters, and the company which had sent out the calendar—a belt and wallet maker in Philadelphia—had chosen an old-fashioned kind of script for its name and message.

  Was I at last in the influence of Ronald Cornell? All the rest of it, the apartment, the storefront, the store itself, seemed to bear the heavy stamp of Jamie Dearborn, whose confident Now face I had seen only once in the advertisement Cornell had shown me. But this room was not Dearborn; Dearborn would have made it all Camp somehow, would have mocked the spirit of wood. This was no fey imitation of a bygone style, it was a room that a man worked in, and which he had made comfortable for himself so he could do his work better.

  I said to Weissman, “Did Cornell do most of the business details around here?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Jamie brought in the customers, you know, he was the contact man. But Ronnie did all the paperwork.” He looked around the little office, smiling. “Jamie hated this place. He kept threatening he was going to come in some day and rip it all out and turn the place into a big white cube. Translucent white glass on all the walls and the floor and the ceiling, with fluorescent lights behind them. And two more white cubes in the middle of the floor, one with a typewriter on it and the other for Ronnie to sit on.”

  “Did he mean it?” I asked. It occurred to me that men had killed other men for less violent forms of rape.

  “No, not really. He meant he thought it would be better that way, look better, but it would, wouldn’t it? Ronnie likes all this old stuff, though, so Jamie wouldn’t actually do anything to it.”

  I thought of Ronald Cornell in the living room we’d just left, with the 747 perpetually in flight, perpetually coming at him. I thought of the clothing he’d worn when he’d come to see me. I was beginning to understand just how totally he’d submerged himself within a reflection of Jamie Dearborn, and just how empty he must be now, with Dearborn gone. Cary Lane had gone ahead and superimposed his ideal onto his own body, but Cornell had sought it in another person and then lived on reflected light, like the moon with the sun.

  I sat down at the desk, and Jerry Weissman stood back and watched me, attentive, prepared at any time to be of assistance. The top was shut, and I tried it experimentally, to find it wasn’t locked. I rolled it back, and the surface of the desk—like the top, like the top of the filing cabinet, like the surface of the small wooden table against the opposite wall, like the floor beside the desk—was spread with a thick confusion of papers. I began to poke through them, and saw at once that the confusion was more apparent than real. The papers to the right had to do with the business of the store, but the papers to the left had to do with the killing of Jamie Dearborn.

  That they were still here disappointed me, to some extent. I had no doubt the killer had sat here last Monday evening, as I was doing now, and had gone very carefully through these papers. That he hadn’t taken them with him, or destroyed them, meant he felt there was nothing dangerous in them, nothing that would lead anyone to him.

  Unless he had been selective, had only removed one or two sheets? I would eventually bring the whole pile to Cornell at the hospital, and he could see if anything was missing.

  For the moment I just glanced quickly through all the papers, sorting out those that had to do with the murder. About half of them seemed to have some bearing on astrology, and I considered leaving these behind, but eventually decided to include them, too. Four books on astrology were also on the desk, up amid the secondary confusion on top, but I didn’t take them. I leafed through them for any papers or notes they might contain, found nothing, and returned them to their places.

  The desk drawers produced nothing of value to me except a large manila envelope in which to carry the papers I wanted, which made up a pile about an inch thick. I put the papers in the envelope, finished my search of the desk, got up to check out the filing cabinet, found nothing of interest there, and turned back to Jerry Weissman: “Now the stairs,” I said.

  “Sure. This way.”

  We went back out to the store proper, and immediately turned left, going along behind the counter with the see-through shirts, an
d then left again through another paisley drape, this time to a strictly functional rear staircase, which had obviously been left in its original condition. I became aware again of how totally Jammer had created its own environment within the building, so that the store and the rest of the building no longer had any sort of common bond at all.

  The stairs were very narrow, and seemed to have been put on the rear of the building as an afterthought. They doubled back on themselves halfway up each floor, and at these landings there were windows that looked out on, presumably, some sort of back yard. Only darkness could be seen out there now. Green wooden doors were closed at each story, facing other windows; at the third floor there was a bag of clothespins hanging on the wall beside the window. I heard nothing from within any of the apartments we passed.

  The final flight led to a trapdoor, fastened on the inside by a large nail stuck through the ring of a hasp lock. Weissman removed this nail, set it to one side on a step, pushed up on the trapdoor, and we went on up the stairs to the roof.

  And here was another reason for the killer to push Cornell off the back rather than the front. The rear edge of the roof was no more than three feet from the trapdoor. It must have been tiring work to drag Cornell’s body up four flights of stairs, and a strong temptation to simply roll him off the nearest edge at the top.

  And without leaving any sign. I had hoped for useful marks in the snow on the roof, but there were none. Of course, there had been more snow since Monday, and wind. I wondered if anything useful might have been found that first night, had the police been in a mood to look.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go back down.” It seemed colder up here than it had before in the street.

  We went back down the wooden stairs. The light was poor, low-wattage bare bulbs in the ceiling at each floor, but even with floodlights I knew I would find no signs of the murderer’s passage, not four days after the event.

  At the first floor, instead of a window facing out back, there was another green door, this one securely fastened with a padlock. I said, “Is the storage shed through there?”