They sat side by side on the couch, almost touching. The night’s conversation had seemingly run its course. Playfully, perversely, she decided that it was time for a test.
“If this were a detective story,” she said, “we’d consider all the possibilities. No one would be beyond suspicion, even ourselves. Especially ourselves, if we were using the tools of post-modernist critical theory.”
Dubin seemed more bored than curious. “What are you talking about?”
“For example,” she asked, “how do I know you’re not the murderer?” In spite of her playful smile she made it clear that she was waiting for an answer.
“Are you serious?”
“I’ve heard that you’re a blackmailer.”
“Who told you that?”
“Never mind who told me. Is it true?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Naturally if you were a blackmailer you’d deny it.”
Dubin shifted around to face her, trying to see if this was just one of her pranks. She looked away.
“All right,” he said evenly. “Just for the sake of argument, assume I am a blackmailer. What I’ve been focusing on is the death of Maria Morgan. So I couldn’t very well be the one who killed her, could I? Or the others, for that matter. I’d have to be blackmailing myself.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Nicole said. “In literature and probably in life as well. Maybe, for you, blackmail is an elaborate form of denial and defense, a game of cat and mouse between yourself and the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s an indirect form of confession—don’t criminals really want to get caught?—or just a convoluted way of returning to the scene of the crime.”
He ventured a smile. “This is really very funny.”
“Or maybe on the subconscious level you imagine that you can expiate your sins by exacting blood money from someone else for the crime you committed.”
“I’d prefer to stay on the conscious level, if you don’t mind.” He was still smiling but he sounded annoyed. “My subconscious isn’t someplace you’d want to go.”
“In that case the whole thing would appear to be even more cunning and diabolical. You could be trying to pin the blame on someone who isn’t guilty by blackmailing them for your crimes. If they pay you, that would look like an admission of guilt and then you could say what you said a few minutes ago—that you couldn’t possibly be guilty of murder and blackmail at the same time.”
“I didn’t even know I was a suspect.”
Nicole laughed. “The killer is always the last person you’d suspect, isn’t it? If you’re the detective, that would be yourself.”
Dubin’s smile had faded. “It’s getting light,” he said, standing up to leave. “I’d better be going.”
Nicole sat on the edge of her bed, lighting matches one after the other and letting them drop to the floor as they started to singe her fingers. She felt bad about driving Dubin away, yet grateful for his absence. This was the most difficult part of her day and she needed to face it alone. In a few minutes she would fall asleep, and while she slept a new chapter would open in the book of the world. We’re like fictional characters, she thought, highly complicated ink blobs which through natural selection have come to believe that we are different. Memories, dreams, personalities—these are the tales we tell ourselves to create a character we can identify with.
* * *
The search for Hunter Morgan spread like a slow-burning fire through the wooded backcountry that hangs like a shadow just beyond the bright lights of Megalopolis. Within a week there had been sightings from Maine to Florida, along with reports of strangled livestock and satanic inscriptions on barns and chicken coops. Avery Morgan moved his army of volunteers upstate, fanning desperately through the misty bare mountains before their hopes would vanish under winter’s first snow. Frank Lynch stuck closer to home, in radio contact with the volunteers, digesting the intelligence that came in from all directions—none of which, in his opinion, was worth the time of day. By the end of the week, he would have no choice but to ask the state police to bring in their dogs. Sniffers, they called them. They could smell anything, even a dead body that no one wanted them to find.
Lynch sat in the cruiser with Tom Wozniak in front of the Seven Eleven, listening to the country music station as they drank coffee out of huge styrofoam cups. “Researching, then disappearing,” he mused. “Researching, then disappearing. Quite a job description, isn’t it?”
“You talking about Dubin?”
Lynch nodded slowly. “He’s not a writer and he’s not a detective. But he suddenly shows up and starts asking a lot of questions about Maria Morgan and how she died, then he drives away in his BMW. What does that sound like to you?”
“Blackmail?” Wozniak was incredulous. “After all this time?”
“If you’ve been covering up a crime for seven years, a little blackmail is just a cost of doing business. Of course Dubin wouldn’t be blackmailing you unless you had enough money to make it worth his while.”
Wozniak took a long sip of coffee as he thought about the implications of what Lynch had said. “You think Avery Morgan killed his wife?”
“Not necessarily. There’s such a thing as a psychiatric coverup. If you have enough money and someone in your family commits a little indiscretion like killing another member of the family, you can always get your doctor to dump so many anti-psychotic drugs into the killer that it actually makes them psychotic. Then you can lock them up and avoid the whole criminal process. No prosecution, no trial, no guilty plea, no publicity.”
“Then it’s the kid? You think the kid killed his mother?”
Lynch smiled maliciously. “The same little psycho we’ve spent the last week trying to flush out of the woods. He killed the nurse and the librarian too. For all we know this whole disappearing act is a fake and they’ve got him stashed around here somewhere until they can spirit him out of the country. Or maybe he’s already out of the country.”
“And how does Dubin fit in?”
“Dubin got onto him somehow. Or onto the coverup, more likely. That’s where the money is—the coverup. And who would that be? Avery Morgan and his wife and the doctors at the Institute.”
* * *
As Nicole rolled into the parking lot she saw Dr. Ned Hoffmann hurrying out the front door with a suitcase in his hand, so preoccupied that he didn’t seem to notice her waving to him as she parked her car. The Institute looked grim in the late November drizzle and there was something almost desperate in the way he threw himself and his suitcase into his car and drove away. She was tempted to follow him but it occurred to her that his absence might make it easier to carry out her plan. When she pushed open the heavy front door she was relieved not to be greeted by the snippy Julietta. In Julietta’s place sat a fat blond woman she had never seen before. She strolled past the desk and down the carpeted hall.
“Can I help you?” the woman called after her.
“Oh!”—Nicole laughed and shot a reassuring glance over her shoulder—“ I work here.”
She stepped quickly around the corner and up a flight of stairs before the receptionist could say another word. At the end of the upstairs hallway she found Hunter’s room unlocked. Someone had straightened it up but nothing seemed to have been removed. His books and magazines were still there, his compact disks stacked in neat piles along the walls. There were no old fashioned records, not surprisingly since his equipment didn’t include a turntable. He did have a TV and a video player and a collection of videos, which Nicole was about to ignore until the title of one of them caught her eye. It was The Tales of Hoffmann, directed by Michael Powell—the same beautiful, surrealistic version of the opera she had enjoyed so much when she checked it out of the library. What a strange coincidence! she thought. But videos were not what she’d come here for—she was interested in records. And there was one other place she needed to look: the patient lounge, where she remembered a turntable and a collection of long-playing records t
hat no one listened to anymore.
Back in the hallway, she eluded the stares of a sour-faced nurse and slipped downstairs to the patient lounge, which fortunately was not in use. This cavernous room—where she’d spent much of her time with Hunter when she was here as a patient—was really more like a library than a lounge. The walls were lined with books, which no one but Hunter ever read. There was a TV and a stereo and of course there was the grand piano where three months earlier he’d given the surprise performance that was still reverberating inside and outside of the Institute. Behind the stereo stood several shelves of old fashioned records. Nicole picked through them one by one until she found what she was looking for: Piano Music of Robert Schumann, played by Alicia de Larrocha. The record, according to Dubin, that had disappeared from Maria Morgan’s studio after her death. Nicole squinted at it in the dim light. Was it the very same record that Maria Morgan had in her studio—or just another copy? No, she realized, this was not just another copy—it had come from the library and it was seven years overdue. The due date stamped on the return slip was in the month Maria Morgan died.
Nicole could hardly believe her own good luck. She ran over to the stereo and started to put the record on. But then she realized there was no way she could play it here—the forces of law and order, alerted by the receptionist and the sour-faced nurse, would soon be on her trail. She slipped the record into her backpack and hurried back out to the car, smiling a warm good-bye to the receptionist as she passed.
She could think of only one other place with a turntable—the music listening room at the library. She dreaded going there, repelled by memories of Miss Whipple and her gruesome death, but now that she had the record she could think of nothing else. If Miss Whipple were still alive she would have known how the record fit into the mystery, and in fact—Nicole realized with a start—maybe that was one of the reasons Miss Whipple was no longer alive.
The morning drizzle had thickened into a misty rain, and the cars had their headlights on, beaming their way through the downpour like visitors from another world. The library parking lot was almost empty and Nicole found a spot near the entrance. She was hoping to get in and out quickly with the record in her backpack, and without seeing anyone she knew. But as she stepped into the library she came face to face with Peter Bartolli, who was hurrying out the door with an armful of books clutched in front of him. They greeted each other with the quizzical smiles of people trying to remember how they were acquainted, but something in Bartolli’s dark eyes told Nicole that he knew exactly who she was. “I met you here once before,” she said.
“Yes,” he nodded. “I remember. You asked me about The Tales of Hoffmann.”
She smiled and started to walk away but Bartolli stood where he was, watching her expectantly. “You know Hunter Morgan, don’t you?” she asked, turning back around.
He bowed slightly in his old world manner. “I worked with him for years when I was at the Institute.”
“He’s not a killer.”
“I know that.”
She lowered her voice. “Every night—I say every night but it’s really during the day, that’s when I sleep—I have the same dream. Hunter comes to my apartment and plays the piano, even though I don’t have a piano. He plays the same piece he played at the Institute, Schumann’s Kreisleriana. He plays until he comes to the same place in the music where he always stops and then he runs away.”
“And then what happens?”
“I stand there calling after him, but he doesn’t turn around. He just runs farther and farther away. And I keep chasing him until I wake up.”
“You want to help him.”
“I want to help him but all I can do is dream about him.”
Bartolli glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “Dreaming is no idle occupation,” he smiled, reaching out and clutching her wrist in his thin hand. “It’s the way you build your world.”
For a moment Nicole felt herself transfixed by Bartolli’s fathomless eyes. She pulled away and he dropped two of his books. As he stooped to pick them up she murmured a quick good-bye and made her escape, glancing over her shoulder in time to see him shuffle out the door.
The new librarian—her name was Margot and she was from a neighboring town—escorted Nicole to the music listening room and showed her how to operate the old-fashioned record player. After Margot left, she pulled the record she’d found at the Institute out of her backpack, set it on the turntable and sat back to listen to the music. It was the same Kreisleriana she’d heard Hunter perform several times, both at the Institute and in her dreams, a skittish, disconcerting piece that made you conscious of your breathing. The music was building toward some kind of climax when suddenly—just at the point where Hunter always stopped playing—the needle hit a scratch and bounced back. It bounced back again and again, repeating the same annoying notes, until Nicole lifted it off the record. The scratch began right at the point where Hunter stopped playing and continued all the way to the end.
Obviously this was how Hunter had learned to play the piano. And the mystery of why he always stopped where he did had been solved. He stopped when he came to the end of the music.
But why did he always run away?
Chapter 25
I come now to the part of the story I’d been hoping I would never have to tell. By the time Julietta and Gottlieb flew off to Venice for their “Getaway Vacation for Two,” my symptoms had reached the tipping point: unbearable anxiety, sleeplessness, a growing sense of not knowing who I was—and finally the sensation, at all hours, that there was a radio playing in the next room in a language I couldn’t understand. Someone or something was trying to send me a message, or to send a message through me to someone else—as if indeed, as Nicole had warned, I had been taken over by some external force. Should I have tried to get help from Dr. Neuberger? Should I feel guilty for what I did? We all do exactly what we have to do, no more, no less, especially when it comes to the basic instincts. Apeneck Gottlieb deserved no better than he got, though Julietta herself probably deserved better. She was an innocent, in spite of her sluttish ways. And Nicole—well, for obvious reasons I’ll say as little as possible about Nicole. All I can say is that I wish none of it ever happened.
I arrived in Venice on a Thursday morning after a long, uncomfortable flight and scarcely two hours of sleep. It was raining, as it always is at that time of year, and the airport was shrouded in fog. I had booked a room in the same luxurious hotel where the “Getaway Vacation for Two” was unfolding in all its unsavory splendor, with a choice location on the Grand Canal, and quickly confirmed that “Dr. and Mrs. Gottlieb” were registered as guests. The mere knowledge that Julietta was in the hotel put me in a state of excitement that made it hard to think coherently. And the prospect of a confrontation with Gottlieb—especially one where I would have the advantage of surprise and embarrassment—triggered a sensation of anxious anticipation. Of course I’d brought my knife along on the trip, though without any intention of using it. I removed it from my suitcase, wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuck it in my jacket pocket. In retrospect that was a reckless and unnecessary thing to do. But at the time all I could think about was how large and obnoxious Gottlieb was and how angry he would be to find me there.
That first day I spent the better part of the afternoon sitting in the lobby behind a newspaper which I could raise in front of my face if either of them made an appearance. It was a gilded, high-ceilinged room in the style of a baroque palazzo, and the guests who tramped in and out had the bored, predatory look of habitual tourists, weary with the ennui of exhausted itineraries. After nearly two hours I spotted my quarry: Gottlieb, unshaven, characteristically oafish in a baseball cap and a windbreaker half-covering a New York Mets T-shirt; and Julietta, sensuous and faux baroque like everything else in the room, parading the spoils of what must have been an expensive shopping spree at his expense—a low-cut dress, a slinky raincoat, a pair of black leather boots laced up to her knees, and
a necklace that sparkled like a string of diamonds. Without glancing in my direction, they joined a group gathering on the terrace, where a motor launch stood ready to take them on an excursion. When the boat had puttered a safe distance away I asked the ticket taker where it was going.
“San Marco,” he said, offering me a ticket for the next vaporetto.
The vast piazza of San Marco was teeming with tourists and I knew I would never find Julietta and Gottlieb in that throng. Wandering past the campanile and the Doge’s Palace, I bought a pastry from a street vendor and made my way to the enormous domed basilica. As I entered the church I was plunged into darkness, as if I had stepped into a vast, cavernous underworld, echoing with the muffled cruelty of time. High above my head, like sunlight playing on the ocean’s surface, shimmered a mosaic of the Last Judgment. Its reflection lighted my way as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, along with the hundreds of tiny candles burning in the chapels that lined the church’s perimeter. There was St. Mark, there St. Peter—and there, suddenly, was Gottlieb, still wearing his Mets cap, stalking around the nave pretending to look up at the mosaics as he ogled the women. Where was Julietta? I raced through the shadows until I found her in the Chapel of the Madonna, kneeling in prayer—her head bowed, her hands clasped in front of her, her lips moving slightly, the light from the votive candles flickering on her painted face.
The Rules of Dreaming Page 21