Duplicate Keys

by Jane Smiley

  “About eleven.”

  “Then I’ve only been asleep for forty-five minutes.”

  “Alice.” Still he stopped and wouldn’t or couldn’t go on. Alice was thankful. Perhaps if everything could be put off as long as possible, then the dangers, whatever they were, could be averted. Somehow, in a few weeks or months, she would come up with more time, plenty for Susan and Henry both. Perhaps, in a few months, they would even overlap. That she could not imagine. And she still hadn’t told him the salient fact about herself, had she? That she had discovered a murder, reported it to the police, answered probing questions about her relationship to the victims, one of whom had slept with her just as Henry had. Alice coughed.

  “You’ll come then?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you mind that I woke you up?”

  “Not re—”

  “I meant to. I wanted to take you unawares.”

  “You did that already, last night.”

  “Mmmm. Last night.”

  “Henry, do you consider yourself a romantic sort of guy?”

  “Nascently so. You?”

  “I consider myself the quintessential librarian.”

  “I’ll bet. Good night, Alice.”

  “Really! I—”

  He hung up on her with evident affection. While Alice was cradling the phone in her two palms and smiling, the door buzzer shrilled.

  IT WAS Ray with another man, a boy in fact, only about twenty. He was very graceful looking and rather shy. Alice knew at once that this was one of Ray’s “homosexual companions,” perhaps the homosexual companion. She was not really surprised to see them. Ray had cut his hair and was wearing sunglasses, which Alice had to ask him to take off. The boy, Jeff, was hungry. He and Alice sat at the kitchen table while Ray fixed him a sandwich. Alice didn’t quite know what to say. Finally Ray said, “Were you in bed? I’m sorry to come by so late.”

  “I was on the phone. But you’re supposed to be in Miami.”

  Ray and Jeff exchanged glances. “Who says?”

  “Detective Honey, as a matter of fact.”

  “What does he care?”

  “I’m not exactly sure, but when you didn’t show for work Friday, the police ended up searching your apartment.”

  “No shit! But I left a god-damned message at Studio Midtown. I had to go up to Massachusetts. Didn’t they get the message? I left it with the new kid, and also on the bulletin board.”

  “No message, and then Honey told Noah that you had been seen in a Miami airport, and that your companions were known to the Miami police.”

  “What did I look like?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I haven’t talked to him about it.”

  Jeff finished the sandwich and ate the last bits of lettuce while Ray got up and poured him a glass of milk. He closed the refrigerator door thoughtfully, then said, “Well, do you think I’m under arrest?”

  “What would you be under arrest for?”

  “Nothing that I did. I didn’t kill them. I was with Jeff the whole night.”

  Jeff nodded.

  “I don’t think you’re under arrest. I just think Honey wants to keep his eye on us.”

  “Alice, will you put us up for two nights? Just two. Tonight and tomorrow night. After that we’ve got a place to stay.”

  “What for? Why don’t you go back to your place? Doesn’t Jeff have a place?”

  “Can’t. Can’t go to work, either, not for a couple of days. By the end of the week this whole thing will be straightened out, but I need someplace to stay until then.”

  “Honey knows we’re friends. Besides—”

  “It’s not Honey I’m worried about. Believe me, he’s way down the list of priorities. Please, Alice? For old times’ sake? Is it such a big deal?”

  Alice put her forehead in her hand.

  “You’ve got lots of room. We won’t be any trouble. You won’t even know we’re here.”

  “Let’s get out of here, man,” said Jeff, but Ray shushed him.

  “I—,” said Alice.

  “What? Say it.”

  “It scares me a little, that’s all.”

  “Don’t be scared. It’s no big deal. You won’t get in trouble, really you won’t, I promise.”

  Alice sat back and looked at Ray. He was not looking good. The haircut emphasized the roundness of his cheeks and the pallor of his skin. He reached up to straighten the collar of his shirt and his hands were pudgy and pointed. He was a very nice man. Perhaps Jeff appreciated that. Otherwise they were remarkably mismatched. Jeff had taken off his sandals and turned in his chair, relaxing, sticking out his feet. His feet were slender, with long toes and pronounced definition, high arch and high instep, like the feet of a Donatello. Behind the grace and the self-satisfaction of simply being himself, Alice could see that he, like Ray, was ill at ease and a little worried. She said, “Can I ask you how old you are?”

  He glanced at Ray, who shrugged and then said, “Nineteen.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “He’s from Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

  “How long have you been in the city?”

  “Are you going to give him the third degree, Alice? Do you want a letter from his priest? It’s just going to be a couple of nights. Big deal.”

  Alice flushed and fixed her eyes on the boy. “When did you come here?”

  Jeff shrugged and opened his mouth, but Ray interrupted him. “Don’t be such a bitch, Alice. He’s my friend. Isn’t that enough?”

  Alice felt like saying that if he didn’t like it they could go elsewhere, but after some effort, she couldn’t say it. She jumped up, furious, and went into the living room. After a moment of marshalling her thoughts, she stalked back. “Ray Reschley, you’re in trouble and you’re going to drag me into it. Maybe you don’t think you will, but you will.”

  “What trouble? We’re not in trouble at all, we just have a little matter to settle, and it’s going to be settled for sure in a day or so. I guarantee it won’t affect you at all.” Ray was coaxing. “I thought we were friends. This is nothing. We just need a place to stay. You won’t even know we’re here, and no one else knows we are, either. There are eight million addresses in the naked city, Alice.”

  “I doubt it.” Alice looked out the bluedark window.

  “We’ll go if you really want us to. If you really, really don’t want us here, we’ll be glad to go.”

  Alice said, “Oh, shit! Okay. Do you hate me for being reluctant?”

  “Never!” said Ray, grinning. From the grin, she knew how desperate they were, and she felt a deep misgiving.

  In the morning they were gone even before she was up, and their absence (they had made the bed and washed their dishes after eating breakfast) was rather reassuring. Whatever trouble Ray was in, she thought, did not have to be her business right away. The polite remarks she had rehearsed went unspoken, and she realized with a twinge of remorse just how unwilling a hostess she was being. Perhaps if Ray had come alone? But one look at Jeff had let her know that the solitary Ray she was used to was a false Ray; the complications of coupling were as natural to him as to anyone. Of Jeff she did not know what to make, but she hoped he was from a nice family and that his intentions were honorable.

  8

  RYA was an assistant publicity director for a recently formed cable TV group. She wore her long blond hair upswept to work, a dazzling white silk shirt, a narrow black skirt slit up the front, and extremely high heels which she managed, when she stepped forward to greet Alice (flat shoes, seersucker A-line skirt, pink cotton blouse) with the neatness of a dancer in the movies, Cyd Charisse, maybe. Alice always wondered what she did at work. Alice smiled.

  “Do you think it’s better,” said Rya, “to sit in the corner or the middle of the room?”

  “Definitely booth,” said Alice.

  “Aren’t they always bugged? Isn’t it sort of well known that most booths in Manhattan restaurants are bugged by the FBI and the CIA?” />
  “There’s one,” said Alice, stepping in front of Rya and moving to claim a high, private booth in beautifully buttoned black leather.

  When Alice’s plate was piled high with hors d’oeuvres, Rya leaned forward across the table and said, “Tell me what Noah told you yesterday.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know he told me anything?”

  “He was there for over an hour.”

  “Does that make you jealous or something?”

  Rya shook her head.

  “Then why do you want to know what we talked about?” She thought of Rya and Craig and Noah “going on as three.” It annoyed her. In addition, she simply couldn’t imagine the woman across from her, pretty as she was, having the depth to satisfy Craig as well as Noah. They had been friends, but Alice didn’t feel any friendship at the moment.

  “You think I just want to pry, but I don’t. If Noah was over there making love to you, I wouldn’t ask about it and wouldn’t want to hear about it.”

  Alice could not help shrugging, even as she bit down on a hot, juicy, pork-stuffed wonton.

  “I need to know what he said to you, because I need to know what is going on.”

  “Nobody knows what’s going on. That’s the point. Last night that detective came over to Susan’s place and told us that some guy with a prison record that neither of us had ever heard of had a set of keys to her apartment. And—” but it would be best not to mention Ray.

  “Who was it?”

  “Somebody Brick. David Brick. He used to be Nina Starlette’s boyfriend.”

  “I’ve heard of her.”

  Alice shrugged again. It was hard to be sympathetic to someone with Rya’s chin. It was a gorgeous chin, pointed and clean. From it her throat swept upward and back, promising decades without flab. It made her face.

  “That’s only part of it, though. I mean, the murder was awful, and all that.” Rya’s fingernails, vermilion, speared a shrimp toast from the pile on Alice’s plate. “Do you mind? But I don’t even know what’s going on between myself and Noah. Do you know that we don’t even talk to each other when somebody else isn’t around?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “We haven’t spoken to one another in six months. Can you believe that?”

  Alice wiped her fingers on her napkin and picked up a spoon. “No,” she said.

  “It’s true. I tried for the first month or so to engage him in conversation. Even just about little things like food and stuff. He bought a blackboard. He writes me notes on it, and I write him back.”

  Alice spoke judiciously. “Maybe you forfeited his trust, Rya.”

  “Ha!” exclaimed the other woman, triumphantly spearing another wonton. “He told you I was sleeping with Craig, didn’t he?”

  “I suppose I can admit that, yes. Why don’t you get your own?”

  “I’m not really hungry. It’s not like he said, though. Really it isn’t.” She blushed. “Or wasn’t.”

  “Were you sleeping with him?”

  Rya looked up at the ceiling. “Yes.”

  “Did Noah like it?”

  “No.”

  “Then the facts speak for themselves, don’t you think?”

  “Craig was making me.”

  “Oh, bullshit. Do you want anything? I’ll be back.”

  Picking over the laden steam table, Alice grew angrier and angrier. How could Rya be such a dumb bitch? How could she, Alice, have gotten mixed up in such a stupid tangle? That was exactly what it was, too. Stupid. Not tragic. At this moment, not even sad. Stupid. If people gave out keys to their apartment to ex-cons, they were stupid. If people slept around indiscriminately, flying in the face of long-standing personal and professional relationships, that was stupid. If people bought thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine and didn’t worry about paying for it, that was stupid. If you let your life get into the chaos that Craig Shellady, and now, it appeared, Ray Reschley, had let their lives get into, how could you be surprised at whatever might happen? And Denny. Innocent bystander, yes, but after standing by for fifteen years, mere innocence was the biggest stupidity of all. Alice’s spoon jumped, flipping three wontons onto the floor behind the steam table. She put the damned spoon down and began picking them up with her fingers. Rya wasn’t the worst. Her dumbness couldn’t even be blamed on her. It was probably half inherited and half socialized into her. Alice turned her head and glanced across the room. Rya had pincered the orange slice in her drink between her thumb and fingernails. She pulled it out and stuck the pulpy part in her mouth. Stupid fucking cunt, thought Alice, balancing extra wontons and shrimp toast on her plate, then putting another plate beneath hers. “Here!” she barked, setting it in front of Rya and letting some food slide off her pile onto it. “People in my house, people eating my food!”

  “Who’s in your house?”

  “No one. Forget it.” Alice ate furiously.

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “How can I help it? You tell me these lies.”

  “They’re not lies.”

  “Then explain everything to me.”

  “Will you be mad?”

  “What do you care?”

  Rya was silent.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Okay. Thanks. I was, well—” She looked at the ceiling again. “Did I seem funny on that day that the guys were killed?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I felt funny. I was sorry about Denny, I really was. We didn’t talk very much about him, though. And I wasn’t sorry about Craig. Noah thought it was just killing me, but I was actually incredibly relieved.”

  “I’m not going to believe that in 1980 you were Craig Shellady’s white slave. I’m just not.”

  “Well, I wasn’t his slave, or anything.” Rya seemed genuinely shocked. “I couldn’t get out of the relationship, though. And I wanted to. I told Noah I wanted to. He didn’t believe me.”

  “Well, why didn’t you just do it?”

  “That’s what Noah wrote on the blackboard back to me, but it was harder than that.”

  “You do it, you do it.”

  “Why do people always say that? People do what they want to, blah blah. You want bullshit, that’s bullshit. In the first place, I had to think of Noah’s job.”

  “Noah could have found another job.”

  “In 1979? 1980? There aren’t any other jobs. Nobody’s going on the road any more, records aren’t selling. Besides, Noah never made anything of himself apart from Craig. You know that.”

  “Craig told you that if you didn’t sleep with him he would kick Noah out of the band? That’s positively medieval. Besides, Craig wasn’t like that.”

  “I’m not saying he said it, I just worried about it.”

  “So what else?”

  “I was worried about how Craig would react. To me. I mean, remember Iris North?”

  “You thought he would beat you up?”

  Rya shrugged.

  “Did he ever?”

  Rya shrugged again, then nodded. “He gave me a black eye once. And he burned me with a cigarette.” She unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse and rolled up the sleeve. On the inside of her arm above the elbow was a white circle the diameter of a cigarette.

  Alice inhaled sharply. “Did he threaten you?”

  Rya shrugged.

  “Did you tell Noah?”

  “Sort of. He knew about the burn, and he knew I was afraid, but he thought I could take care of myself.”

  “There must have been something—”

  “You don’t understand, Alice. I realize I am sort of a dizzy person. And Noah’s been fucked up by so much dope, he really has. Craig knew more than we did, or at least more than I did. All the time. I felt like he was always two steps ahead of me. If I was with him, and wishing to go home, he’d say, ‘I know you want to go home, don’t you? You can’t stand to come here. I love you and you don’t love me, and now you want to go home.’”


  Alice looked at her.

  “He was getting sort of weird, you know. Mad about everything, like anything that happened just went to prove something about him, either good or bad. It wasn’t like it was when he was with you.” Alice smiled coldly. “Anyway, I felt bad about his life. I mean, he seemed to have had such a terrible life, I felt sorry for him. He didn’t think anybody really liked him, except maybe Denny, and he always thought Susan was trying to break up Denny’s friendship with him. I liked him a lot at first. He was exciting to be with, after all that time with Noah. He always had something to say and there was always something to do. He was good in bed. You know that.”

  Alice nodded.

  “I guess I even thought I loved him. At least I told him so. Then I was afraid to take it back. Don’t you understand that?”

  Alice nodded again.

  “He made me feel goofy. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted everything to be all right, and I guess I thought we would never get away from him, and so if I went along with him, everything would be all right enough. I tried to tell all of that to Noah, but he wouldn’t talk to me, and besides, I couldn’t say it right. This is the first time I’ve ever said it right.”

  Alice didn’t know what to say. She pushed her plate away, although there were three samosas and a shrimp toast left. She put out her hand and then put it over Rya’s. After a moment, she said, “You didn’t kill him to get out of it, did you?”

  Rya shook her head.

  “Say yes or no and look right at me.”

  “No.” She looked right at her.

  “Who did? Noah?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I thought he might have said something to you that would have told you something. I called home that night when he said he was home. About one. There wasn’t any answer, and our phone doesn’t unplug. I’m scared to death.”

  “Did you tell Honey that?”

  “He didn’t ask me. He just asked if I was there, and where I was.”

  “Noah didn’t tell me anything like that.”