“Most murders are committed by ordinary people,” he said. “Usually someone the victim knows.”
Janet pulled up a chair at the table. Kevin watched from in front of the TV, interested now that the subject of murder had come up, the figurines given a breather. When my pop spoke like this, you felt like you should sit at his feet and listen.
“If you want to find out who killed the girl, you need to know everything there is to know about her: What did she do? Where did she go? Who did she talk to and why?”
“Why?” I asked. “Why bother? What difference does it make if we find the killer? It doesn’t bring Angelina back to life.” At this moment, everything seemed futile. I couldn’t think of any reason to do anything, so I took it out on my old man.
As usual, he had an answer, whether I wanted one or not. “Taking a life is wrong. Wars, executions, crimes of passion, or just plain neglect, all of it is wrong. Life is the only thing we have. Instead of doing what it takes to prevent murder, our society’s response in these barbaric times is to track down and capture the culprit. We think this makes up for not doing what we might have done to keep the murder from happening in the first place. But maybe it’s a step in that direction, a recognition that life is sacred.”
***
Janet and I took Kevin into Manhattan. He wanted to see the Star Wars movie.
“It’s not what you think, Dad,” he said, patronizingly, standing on the corner of 41st and Broadway in his black jacket, his shoulders hunched, one hip thrust out—a stance learned on the street corners of Brooklyn.
“Oh?” I said. “And what is it that I think?”
“That it’s violent and pro-capitalist and anti-working class.”
“Is that what Grandpa said?”
“That’s what he says about everything: TV, movies, my school books.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
Kevin’s sullenness broke; his face shone with that kid’s earnestness too often missing. “Everything isn’t terrible, is it? Something is good, isn’t it?”
All of a sudden, he was young again, eager, earnest, hopeful. Watching him, I remembered the night I talked with Nigel about his not seeing his father for so many years. It made me wonder if I might be driving Kevin away with my own bleak take on life. I thought again how lucky I was—even if I was a lousy father—to have my son. This was one of those moments when just because I was with Kevin I was filled up with this whatever it was—joy, or something ridiculous like that.
I tousled his head. “Sorry, pal.” I said, then, as brightly as an ingenue, “Let’s go to the movies…”
He laughed, then grimaced. It was a line from Annie, a movie he loved when he was little—something he was now too cool to own up to.
***
When we’d walked up Broadway a block or so, Kevin stopped me. “I got an idea,” he said. “Her and I can go to the movie. You go to the library.”
This was okay with me, and seemed to be even better than okay with both of them. We agreed to meet later at my apartment, so I gave Kevin a quick hug and handed Janet the key to my apartment, kissing her quickly on the lips as I did, figuring she wouldn’t make a scene and slug me in front of the kid.
I’d gone a half block east on 42nd Street toward the library when Kevin trotted up behind me. “We decided to stay downtown. Meet us in front of the theater at 5:15.” Then, as he turned to leave, he almost smiled. “She’s nice,” he said and trotted on into the crowd.
***
In the library, I found the New York Times from November 18, 1952. From thirty years past, on paper now yellowed, bound in one of those pebbly black hard back covers that pre-date microfilm, a blurred picture of a young, strong Reuben Foster looked stonily out at me. He stood between two gray-suited detectives, both surely retired by now if not dead. He’d just been convicted of manslaughter for the murder of his wife Dorothy, the story stated matter-of-factly. Murders weren’t happening three to the day in 1952, but even so I was surprised he got a write-up in the Times until I realized his wife was white. Fascinated, I read the news story over and over, expecting it would tell me something about why Reuben killed his wife, about what their lives had been like. But it told the story without really telling me anything, just facts and figures.
***
Later at Nathan’s, where we’d gone on my insistence, Janet told me something I would have known myself if I watched TV and went to more movies: a manslaughter charge meant you killed someone without having intended to in advance.
“What now?” I asked after my hot dog, french fries, and beer.
“God, what a lame supper,” Kevin said. “Let’s walk around until we get hungry and eat something decent.”
We browsed through record stores, bookshops, and a couple of glittering electronics stores, meandering our way uptown. I sucked in the hum of the street and the glaring lights, the unending rush of people picking us up like a conveyor belt, rushing us forward until we got off at our next stop. The energy electrified me. I took strength from the city on nights like this; chaotic life made sense for a time.
Around 9:00, we ate a late dinner at a Chinese on Broadway in the Nineties. Kevin stayed at my apartment that night. Janet agreed to have breakfast with us the next morning downtown and go to the comic bookstore across from the Strand on Broadway near Twelfth.
The first thing Janet said when we slid into the booth across from her in a coffee shop on Eighth Street the next morning was, “The older man with Angelina drank Jack Daniels.”
“That’s a start,” I said. “But lots of people drink Jack Daniels.” What I didn’t say was that Ozzie was one of them.
After breakfast, I thumbed through Tin Tin books in the comic store, more pleased than I would let on that Kevin told Janet about how I used to read them to him and that he still had his copies home under his bed, along with his Madeline and Babar books.
“Reuben Foster killed his wife before I was born,” Janet said as we browsed through the Strand after dropping Kevin and his armload of comics at the subway.
We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant on MacDougal Street and, following my father’s advice, decided we were going to talk to every single person Angelina knew. The race was on. At the moment, Reuben challenged Ozzie for the pole position, but Ozzie held on to the lead. We were barely into the first turn with the field crowded and the track sloppy.
Thinking through what my father said about knowing everything I could about Angelina, I wondered why she’d chosen the Upper West Side of all the neighborhoods in New York. If she’d been Jewish, a classical musician, a leftist, a former Barnard student, a serious acting student, it would make sense. If she knew one of the above, it would make sense.
“Why did Angelina come to New York,” I asked Janet again.
“Excitement, I guess. She wanted to be an actress or a singer. And she wanted all the glitzy and trendy things of New York, too. She wanted to dress in high heels and wear make-up. She wanted to date men who wore three-piece suits instead of guys in dungarees with grease under their fingernails. She wanted to marry a millionaire. Why? Don’t thousands of girls come to New York for the same reasons?” Her dark eyes clouded as she tried to peer deeper into mine.
“Why did she come to the Upper West Side then? Why not the East Side?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The East Side is trendy, not the Upper West Side. The East Side is where she’d find the guys in the suits and the millionaires. Did she know anyone in New York?”
“No one I could name.” Janet wrinkled her brow, not even noticing the guacamole salad the waitress put in front of her. I, however, noticed my bottle of Dos Equis. “But she might have. She went to New York a few times. Then, one day, she decided she’d move. I wondered, then, if she might have met someone.”
“But she said no? She didn’t seem to know anyone when I first met her.”
Janet said, “Looking back now, I wonder…” I pointed to her guacamole. When she returned
from her memories, she took a bite and said, “Angelina was smug and secretive when she was moving, which she never was with me. There was something about New York she wasn’t telling me.”
“Is there anyone around Oscar’s you might have seen before?”
“No.”
“Anyone who’d ever been in Springfield or wherever it is?”
“No.”
“Anyone who knew more about Angelina than you expected?”
“Why do you ask all this?” Janet pushed her plate away; her eyes flared at me. “What are you getting at?”
“I don’t know. When Angelina first started coming into the bar, I sometimes got the feeling she was looking for someone. All of a sudden, she had a lot of money. She said she had a sugar daddy. I thought she was kidding, but maybe she wasn’t. She got a really good job. I thought the money must come from that. But it seems to me now she might have had too much money for even that good of a job. A kid with no experience shouldn’t make that much money, not even if she’s as pretty as Angelina.”
“Where do you think she got the money?”
“I’m not thinking. I’m wondering.”
Janet searched my face, as if she suspected I was keeping something from her. I wondered, too, what she might be keeping from me.
“Anyway,” Janet said when she had looked at me long enough. She had an orderly business type mind and the ability to stick to the question through thick and thin. “To answer your question, the person who seems to know most about her besides you is Nigel. And also Carl. You should know how well she knew them.”
I tried to remember when Angelina met Carl or Nigel. It seemed she’d known Carl as long as she’d known me, although I couldn’t remember when she first met him. I did remember when she first met Nigel. He wasn’t around when she began coming into Oscar’s. When she did see him, though, she really latched on. Then everything cooled off fast. Maybe he’d become insanely jealous. But, Nigel, as weird as he was, didn’t seem the insanely jealous type. He’d stayed friends with her, pined after her, hung around and made a pest of himself. But I’d seen enough insanely jealous, control freak drunks to know he wasn’t one of them. Besides, Nigel told me he was in Connecticut that night.
“Do you think we should find out more about Nigel and Carl?” Janet asked, interrupting my reverie.
“I just happen to know that Nigel was visiting his father when Angelina was killed and Carl was working.”
“Oh,” Janet said, looking up abruptly from her salad. “How do you know?”
“They told me.”
“Maybe they didn’t tell the truth.” This tone of hers, suggesting I was an idiot child, was getting on my nerves.
“Nigel was with his father. He wouldn’t lie about that.”
“That should be easy enough to check,” said Janet smugly. I was sure we were having an argument, but I didn’t know about what. She took a notebook out of her shoulder bag and stood up. “What’s his last name and where does he live?”
“You’re going to call Nigel’s father, now?”
“Now,” she said.
I nursed my enchilada and slugged down a Dos Equis while I waited. She came back quickly.
“This amazing thing happened. I got the number from information, then dialed the number in Connecticut, and Nigel’s father’s office answered the phone in New York.”
“How about that?”
“He’s very busy. But he’ll see us.” She began gathering up her things.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” I had just drunk my third Dos Equis and needed a nap before work. Besides, I didn’t want to talk to Nigel’s father. Since I was a kid, I never got along with anyone’s parents. On top of this, it was invading Nigel’s privacy. It violated whatever friendship or acquaintanceship we had. Already, I’d dug into Reuben’s life. Whatever happened to Do Unto Others? I certainly wouldn’t want anyone digging into my life.
***
Edwin Barthelme occupied an office-living suite in the Olympia Towers, neighbor across one street to Rockefeller Center and across another to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. After a concierge announced us—this concierge assisted by two subalterns, who, were they dressed differently, might easily be mistaken for goons—we took an elevator to the twenty-ninth floor.
When the elevator door slid open, we stepped out into Mr. Barthelme’s plushly carpeted, elegantly appointed tax write-off. Himself, giving the impression of tallness, grayness, suaveness, and indifference, looked up from the far end of the suite, where he stood gazing over the city from his floor to ceiling window. He’d left the door between his office and the anteroom open and now walked across the room—about a quarter mile—stretching out his hand toward me when he got within hailing distance. All of this, given the expensive cut of his gray suit, the contrasting grays of the sky and buildings beyond the window, the gray blue of the carpet, and the wide, gray expanse of the room, was an event in itself. I watched raptly; it was better than any number of movie entrances I’d seen. Janet caught her breath. I expected I’d have to peel her off the double pile carpet.
In those few seconds, Barthelme took us both in. His eyes, though shining brightly enough in greeting, gave us to know, distinctly and beyond a shadow of doubt, that our relative wealth, social standing, and, more importantly, the amount of claim we might have on his time and interest had been measured. The results had been announced too, for those discerning enough to recognize them. We would not be taking up much of Mr. Barthelme’s time.
“Edwin Barthelme.” The man grasped my hand firmly, his steady gray eyes meeting my undoubtedly bloodshot ones. In spite of myself, I looked away, and my self-esteem immediately dropped nine stories. Janet, though, I was happy to see, held up our end of the contract, going after him handshake to handshake, steady gaze to steady gaze.
He was one of those people not comfortable with being tall who tried too hard to get down close to the people smaller than him. It had left him with a permanent stoop to his shoulders. He also had that drastic thinness of the rich that suggests overbreeding, but his face was etched with lines of the toughness that comes from the hard hustle and that you don’t see in those born to wealth, while the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes suggested he might have a sense of humor about the whole chase for a buck.
When we’d seated ourselves on chairs and couches grouped around a clear glass coffee table, Mr. Barthelme looked expectantly at me and, when I looked somewhat sheepishly back at him, at Janet. It was clear he was in charge. He would define the conversation, set the mood, establish the permissible. How the hell were we going to ask him where his son was that night, the question bringing with it the implication that we suspected Nigel of murder?
Janet knew how. “It is very unpleasant to have to ask you these questions,” she said. “And of course, you’re under no obligation to answer.” Her voice wavered a little here, and her eyes began to mist over. “I could never even bring myself to do this, except I have to do everything I can, no matter how unpleasant, to find out what happened to my sister.” And there on the brink of accomplishment, she lost her composure. Her voice cracked; she stopped in mid sentence. Her faltering might have been forgivable if it hadn’t put me on the spot. Sure enough, Barthleme turned to me, as if now that this woman was out of the way, we men could get to the point.
“I’ll tell you what we’re doing, Mr. Barthelme,” I said, stiffening my upper lip. “We’re trying to find out everything we can about Angelina and everyone who knew her. Your son Nigel knew her.”
“I understand,” said Barthelme, “that a young woman with whom my son was acquainted was killed. I gather that her sister is distraught and understandably so. I don’t know why you brought her here. I don’t know what your role might be. Or mine. Or my son’s.”
“Me neither,” I said, letting the “you brought her here” crack go.
Realizing I wasn’t getting us anywhere, Janet regrouped. “We’re asking about every single per
son that Angelina knew, not just Nigel. Can you understand how important it is for me to know what really happened to my sister?” Janet’s face was appealing, showing that vulnerability in it again that on her was so fleeting.
“I understand sorrow far better than you could ever imagine… as does my son,” said Mr. Barthelme. “I understand your concern for your sister, but it’s difficult for me not to resent your maligning my son.” His face didn’t show anger exactly; it was more indignation. The rich have cornered the indignation market.
“Nigel said he was with you. We just want to make sure he was,” I said.
“If he told you, that should be sufficient. It would be for me.”
We stared at each other. One stare too many from Mr. Barthelme. I’d had enough of his superciliousness. “I’m sure it would be.…Would you mind telling us why you hadn’t seen your son in ten years?”
A momentary start, an involuntary movement of his eyes. The overmatched challenger landed a surprising left hook and jarred the champ. Barthelme recovered quickly. But some of the arrogance was gone. Like the champ, he was more careful now, keeping his guard up, protecting himself while his head cleared. “It would be impertinent,” he said, but his voice held echoes of sadness. No longer imperious, he became a man. It was like a moment on the stage when real emotion breaks through, and you’re held spellbound, audience and actors alike.
“I do understand sadness,” he said to Janet. “I wish there were some way to undo what happened to your sister, and I should understand that asking these questions gives you some satisfaction. And if you understood my life…but we all know there’s not nearly enough understanding to go around.”
She looked at him gratefully. Now that we’d brought him down from his high horse, I was a little unsteady myself.
“My son came to see me that night a little over a week ago for the first time since he left home ten years before. It was the end of much bitterness and a long misunderstanding, a happy event for both of us, one of the few….”
Beware the Solitary Drinker Page 13
