by Lee Harris
“Keep trying. He’ll talk to you. Bernie loves to talk.”
“David Koch drove me through the streets in the Bronx where you all lived,” I said, coming to the end of my questions and not feeling that I’d learned very much.
“David doesn’t drive,” the doctor said.
It struck me as a strange response. “He had someone drive us. He showed me where you played stickball.”
“And touch football. That was my favorite. Then you must have seen the window of his bedroom that looks out on Morris Avenue.”
“I did.”
“Did he tell you how we used to crawl through the window in the summer and drag him out of bed?” He was enjoying the memory.
“You were a happy bunch of boys.”
“We were that, except for Fred Beller.”
“Do you believe it was his mother’s suicide that made him feel the way he does about New York?”
“It takes a lot less than that for many people. I think from that day on Fred wanted to get away, physically as well as spiritually. For Artie it was more a spiritual thing, if that’s the appropriate word. He knew there was a world out there and he wanted to see it, to become part of it. For Fred, he just wanted to get his tail out of there, resettle in some neutral territory, which he did.”
“I gather from the little I’ve read that Arthur Wien wanted to get his parents out of the Bronx. Was he successful?”
“Not that I know of. I think they lived out their lives there and died in the old homestead. And not that long ago.”
“What about your parents?”
“They never gave up their apartment. All our parents were the beneficiaries of rent control. You’re probably too young to know much about it, but the rents were frozen during the Second World War and didn’t rise very much from the fifties on. It cost my folks so little to hang onto their apartment that they kept it although they bought a co-op in Florida and spent most of the year there. But the Bronx was home, even though the neighborhood changed drastically.”
A young woman came over to the table and whispered something in Dr. Greene’s ear.
“That’s all right,” he said gently. “I can take care of things when I get upstairs.”
The young woman dashed away, and I realized that before he came downstairs he had asked someone to call him at this moment, to save him from my questioning. Obviously, our conversation hadn’t been as bad as he had feared.
“I know you’re very busy,” I said. “I’m very grateful that you’ve given me this much time. If you think of anything that might help me, I’d appreciate a call.” I had a slip of paper ready with my name and phone number.
“I promise I’ll think about it,” he said, putting his glasses back on his nose. “You know, there was some kind of fuss about the seating. I didn’t take much notice of it but somebody in the crowd wasn’t happy.”
“A man or a woman?” I asked.
“A woman, I think. It could have been Robin Horowitz, but I’m not sure.”
“I’ll see if I can find out.”
He shook my hand, walked me to the front desk, and then nearly flew to the elevator.
11
I had learned one thing: Dr. Greene had lent Arthur Wien money (and assumed all his friends had too). I tried to think how much the five hundred dollars thirty years ago would be in today’s dollars. I had heard my mother mention the monthly mortgage payments once, perhaps twenty years ago, and they were a little more than a hundred dollars. So five hundred dollars thirty years ago was a substantial amount of money. I wondered how I would feel if a friend of Jack’s, someone who appeared to be making a good living, came to us and asked for two or three thousand dollars. The thought sent shivers through me.
It passed through my mind that Arthur Wien might have blackmailed his friends into lending money to him, money that he failed to repay. But that would assume he had something on all of them. It didn’t seem likely. And no one else I had spoken to had admitted to lending him anything more than pocket money.
I walked up to the restaurant where the Father’s Day dinner had taken place only to find the door locked. There were lights on inside and I tapped on the glass in the door, hoping to attract someone’s attention. Finally, I did.
He opened the locks at the top and bottom of the door, then at the midpoint. “I’m sorry, but we’re—” It was the maitre d’, and he looked at my face and recognized me. “Come in.” He didn’t sound welcoming, but he probably wanted to get me inside where no one would see us talking. “What can I do for you today, Ms. Bennett?”
“I’d like you to check your reservations for the evening of Father’s Day and see if anyone named Fred Beller had one.”
“I just don’t see—”
“Please,” I said. “It’s very important.”
He frowned and got the book, turned back several pages and moved his finger down the page. “No one named Beller,” he said, snapping the book shut.
I took out the photo. “Do you remember seeing this man—this couple—that night?”
He studied the picture carefully, more carefully than I expected. “They look familiar,” he said unhappily. “I’m pretty sure they were here. But that’s not their name.”
“I wonder if you’d check the receipts for that night. Even if he made the reservation in a different name, the waiter wouldn’t know that name and he might have charged the meal using his real name.”
“Are you telling me this man could have committed the murder that night? The police have never asked me about him.”
“The police don’t know he was here.”
“Why don’t you take a seat? I’ll be right back.”
There was a small bar in the front of the restaurant and I sat on a stool with my back to the bar. Sitting on a bar stool is not something I’ve done in my life, ever. Since I dated very few men, and none of them took me to a bar, this was a new experience for me. I didn’t find the stool particularly comfortable, but then, I didn’t have my feet resting on the rail. Instead, they were on a rung of the stool.
I didn’t have much time to think about it because the maitre d’ returned quite soon. He was holding a small piece of paper that I recognized as a credit card receipt. Although I don’t carry plastic, Jack does, and he generally charges our dinners out and often charges the things he buys in the hardware store.
“There you go,” he said. “Fred Beller. Looks like dinner for two. I can tell you what name he used if you give me another minute.” He opened the reservation book again. “Olds. F. Olds. The reservation was for six-thirty. He and his guest sat over there along the banquette.”
The banquette ran almost the length of the restaurant with tables for two and four spread out along it. If Fred Beller had sat with his back to the restaurant, no one would have seen him. Nor, I thought, would he have seen his old friends as they entered the restaurant. But perhaps he could have seen them after they had passed and were on their way to the back room.
“Thank you very much. I’m sorry to have put you to this trouble, but it’s really quite important.”
“Should I tell the police?” he asked.
“I’ll be telling them if it turns out to be important.”
I walked out onto the street. Fred Beller had been there, no doubt about it. Had it been because he wanted to be near his friends or because he wanted to do away with one of them? Surely he would not tell me, and I had no idea who might know. Although these men had varying relationships with other members of the group, it was clear they stuck up for one another.
I found myself in front of a coffee shop and I walked in. This would be as good a place as any to have some lunch before driving to the West Side for my meeting with Alice Wien.
* * *
For me the West Side of Manhattan is principally Broadway and the streets that cross it, numbered streets from the Sixties on up. I had come to know the area a couple of years earlier when an elderly friend of mine was murdered in his apartment in the hig
h Seventies. I spent a week or more talking to his friends, who lived as far north as Columbia University and as far east as Central Park, people who had settled there before and after the Second World War. A divider runs down the center of Broadway; what grass it has is usually weedy. At many corners there are park benches facing the cross street, and mostly elderly people sit there to take the sun and talk to their neighbors.
Alice Wien wasn’t my idea of elderly, and indeed, she turned out to be a good-looking woman in her sixties, her hair professionally set and her clothes well cut and in style. She welcomed me, and we sat in her living room, a comfortable room with a beautiful oriental carpet covering most of the floor.
“Dave Koch told me you might be calling,” she said. “I don’t know what I can tell you because I wasn’t at the restaurant the night it happened.”
“I think I’m interested in hearing some background from you. When you met Mr. Wien, how long you were married, what you know about his books, especially the first one.”
“That sounds pretty easy since I lived through it. Art and I met when I was at City College. We got married after I graduated.”
“Were you from the Bronx?”
“I was from Brooklyn. In those days it was practically an intermarriage.” She smiled. “He used to take the subway all the way to where I lived to pick me up. What a trip that was.”
“The famous D train,” I said.
“Art had a real romance with the D train. He saw his little neighborhood in the Bronx as a village, almost like an English village, with the train running through it. He could imagine kids watching that train taking lucky people to London. In his case, the D took him to New York which was the center of the world, and by extension, he could see it taking him across the ocean, maybe even up to the moon.”
“So I guess you didn’t live in the Bronx after you were married.”
“Oh no. We got a darling little place in the Village. I just loved it. My parents thought it was terrible; Art’s parents thought it was terrible. But it was the most wonderful place to live you can imagine, right where everything was happening. It was one big room with a little bathroom and a little kitchen. We had a bed and a dresser in one corner, a little sofa in another corner, a table for eating, a little desk for Art to write his book at and a typewriter table.”
“Then he was writing his book when you were married.”
“He started—let me see—well, he was talking about it the night I met him. He was making notes back then, trying things out, you know, sketches of people and places. He’d think of a good phrase and he’d make a note of it. He lived that book.”
“Did he work besides writing?”
“Sure he worked. He taught high school English. He wasn’t any slouch. We both worked. But later on, he spent most of his time on the book. And it was worth it. It was a great book. It’s still in print, you know.”
“I know. I was given a copy last night by Mrs. Kaplan. I started reading it before I went to bed and I could hardly put it down.”
“That’s how Art wrote. He couldn’t stop writing and readers couldn’t stop reading.”
I was surprised at her enthusiasm. She was talking about the husband who had left her for another woman, for other women, and still she spoke well of him.
“The boulevard in the title is the Grand Concourse. He describes it like some kind of dream.”
“It was a dream to those boys. If you were rich, you lived on the Concourse. If you were poor or middle class, you aspired to it. The truth is, if you were rich, you probably lived in Manhattan, but he wrote from the boys’ point of view. That was how they perceived the world they lived in.”
“He says right from the start he wanted his parents to move there when they became able to afford it. What happened?”
“Well, I don’t want to spoil the story for you. Eventually, his folks had a nice income and the kids were gone so they could have afforded a more expensive apartment, but they wouldn’t leave the old one. Art was only in his late twenties when he finished writing the book, but the observations he made were sound. He could have said the same things twenty years later.”
“Did you know Fred Beller?” I asked without making any transition from what she had been saying.
“Oh Fred.” She smiled as though he were a happy memory. “I knew Fred.”
“How is that?”
“I met him at City. I knew him before I met Art.”
“Did you go out with him?”
“For quite a while. A year maybe.”
Somewhere in my memory I heard one of the men say that Fred and Art had dated the same girl. It had not occurred to me that the girl was the one Arthur Wien had eventually married. “Was there—did anything happen to make you switch from one man to the other?”
“We’re talking about a pretty long time ago. If my memory isn’t sharp, you’ll understand.”
“I just wondered whether there was some kind of incident that made you break up with one man and start dating the other.”
“You might say there was an incident. I was very fond of Fred. He was such a dear thing, so good, so very kind and thoughtful. I would have married him, I’m sure of that, if things had gone along. But one night—it was in the spring, I think—Fred took me to a party down in the Village. It was a big party in a big apartment—I don’t know whose it was—and Art was there. Fred introduced us—he was surprised to see him there, I remember—and it was like something you read about. Fireworks, chemistry, bells ringing—it was scary and exciting and overwhelming. Art called me in the middle of the night after I got home. I thought my parents would kill him. He wanted to see me again. I broke up with Fred a week later.”
The monologue had deflated her. She seemed exhausted by the memory, by the act of recounting it. I found myself feeling very sorry for her. She had described meeting the great love of her life, a man who had been unfaithful to her, who had left her, who had been murdered only eight days earlier.
“I know this is difficult,” I said.
“It’s hard to remember such happy times after all that’s happened. And an awful lot has happened.”
“It sounds like a wonderful relationship while it lasted.”
“It was. Art wrote about it in the book. You probably haven’t gotten to it yet. It really gave me a great feeling when I read it, knowing what emotions I had stirred in him, and was still stirring.”
She rearranged herself in her chair. “I had to make him swear he wouldn’t write all of it. My parents—” She blushed suddenly and I saw that it still affected her. “You’re quite young. It’s awkward saying these things to you, but people who came of age in the sixties thought they had invented sex. I can assure you it was invented at least twenty years before the sixties.”
It was my turn to smile. “I suppose every generation needs to feel it’s cornered the market on something.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“Did anything happen between Fred Beller and Mr. Wien when you broke up with Fred?”
“I think so. They talked, but I wasn’t there so I can’t tell you what was said. I know that the night I broke up with Fred was one of the toughest nights of my life. He really loved me. And he’d had such a rotten life as a kid. His mother—do you know about that?”
“I’ve been told.”
“Imagine doing that to a kid, knowing he would come home from school and find you.”
“She must have been very depressed, very unhappy.”
“She was. But even so.”
“Do you think Fred Beller could have kept a grudge against Arthur Wien for the next forty years?”
“You think Fred killed Art?” It was clear she found the idea incredible.
“I think anything’s possible.”
“Fred was too good, too kind to hurt anyone. And he never comes to New York so that lets him out.”
“He was in New York when Mr. Wien was murdered.”
It was the same reaction, dis
belief all over her face. “Who told you that?”
“I found out by accident. I had lunch with him and his wife just this past Saturday.”
“It seems impossible, but if you say so, then I have to believe it.”
“Does that change how you feel? About Fred Beller’s being a suspect?”
“Not for a minute.”
“Maybe we can talk about the book,” I said. “Did you read it as your husband was writing it?”
“Oh yes. I was his first editor. He would finish a chapter and hand it to me, or he would leave it on the table so I would find it when I came home from work. At first I was afraid to make corrections, afraid his ego was so involved that he would be angry at my suggestions. But he wasn’t. And I was a gentle editor. I loved the story, I loved the writing, I loved all the people in it.”
“I guess you got to know them pretty well.”
“Very well. I laughed with them; I cried for them. I read that book so many times that after a while, I could almost recite long parts of it from memory.”
“I saw that he dedicated it to you.” The dedication had read: To Alice, my great love.
“That’s quite a dedication, isn’t it? I was almost afraid he would change it after the mess of our divorce.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I knew he was unfaithful. Eventually, I told him I couldn’t take it any more. The kids were very upset, but I couldn’t live with him. So we called our lawyers.”
“That sounds pretty civilized,” I said.
“Take my word for it, it wasn’t. I wanted him to support me. I wanted his estate to support me if he died before I did. I was angry and hurt, and I wanted him to pay. And I also wanted what I believed was mine.”
“Which was?”
“The original manuscript of The Lost Boulevard. That was a problem.”
“He wanted to keep it for himself?”
“Partly that, but the real reason was that he didn’t have it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Art was a man who was always short of funds, or at least he claimed to be. I can tell you I wasn’t a spendthrift, but I think he was in ways that I didn’t see and didn’t always benefit from. Keeping a woman is expensive. Taking people out lavishly costs a lot. And although you hear a lot nowadays about authors’ making millions, I can tell you that wasn’t the case back in the fifties. But Art wanted a home in New York and a home in California; he wanted people to think of him in a certain way. So he borrowed from friends and paid it back when he could.”
