by Lee Harris
“Any reason she might want her husband dead?”
“None that I know. I’m sure she was sitting at the table when Morty found the body.”
“Are you sure of anyone else?”
She shook her head. “There was a lot of moving around. If I was looking to my right and someone on my left left the room for five minutes, I wouldn’t know it.”
“What about Mrs. Greene?”
“Mrs. Greene is also Dr. Greene,” Marilyn said. “She’s a psychiatrist, been practicing as long as we’ve known her. She’s a quiet, intelligent woman, raised three nice kids. It’s a great marriage. You’re too young to remember, but there was a time when doctors married nurses. Nowadays I’m happy to say, doctors marry doctors. Ernie and Kathy were ahead of their time by about thirty years. I’ve always admired him for that.”
“I wonder if Arthur Wien ever saw her as a patient?” I suggested.
“I doubt it,” Bernie said. “Artie often said he wouldn’t trust his head to a shrink. Thought it would ruin him as a writer.”
“When the dinner started, did someone make a fuss about where they were sitting?”
“Robin did,” Marilyn said right away. “An uncharacteristic fuss. She had to sit next to Artie. She moved from wherever she had been and sat next to him.”
“Where had she been?” I asked.
Marilyn shrugged. “The other side of the table, I think. Maybe next to the Koches. But I’m not sure.”
“How often are these reunions?”
“Every so many years when we can schedule one. The last one must have been three years ago at least.”
“Then I guess that’s it.” I thanked them and they said they’d call if they thought of anything that might pinpoint the killer, but it was clear they were just saying what they thought I wanted to hear.
I drove home to read The Lost Boulevard.
17
Alice Wien opened the door for me with a smile. I had arrived before ten that Wednesday morning and parked my car in a garage a few blocks away so I would not have to run out periodically and feed a meter. She offered me coffee but I refused. I just wanted to get to work.
It was an apartment in an old building, one with a foyer big enough to double as a dining area. Alice had pushed aside the centerpiece that decorated the table, a large, heavy cut-crystal vase filled with dried flowers, giving me a work area as far as I could reach. In that space lay two open boxes, each filled to the top with paper. The one on the left had a plastic-covered sheet of lined paper on top with some handwriting in smudged pencil. The other box had a typed sheet that read The Lost Boulevard with the name Arthur A. Wien centered two lines beneath it.
“There’s no title page on the original,” I said.
“Art didn’t think it was necessary. We both knew what the title was and no one but us would ever read it. I’ve covered the acknowledgment page to keep it from smudging and tearing.”
I lifted about half the manuscript carefully out of the box and set it where I could reach it easily. Then I did the same with the typewritten copy. “And there’s no dedication,” I said, finding the first page of chapter one directly below the acknowledgments.
“I have it framed,” she said. “Do you want to see it?”
“That’s OK. Maybe later,” I added, not wanting to hurt her feelings.
“It was very important to me, that he wrote it in his own hand. I wanted to preserve it.”
I was touched by her memory of love. “I understand,” I said. “I think I’ll get started.”
“Let me just show you. On the handwritten manuscript, if Art wanted something deleted, he just crossed it out, like here.” She flipped to a page where the entire page had a huge X across it and the word OMIT scrawled across the top. “Sometimes he inserted a paragraph or more, and he marked the place where it belonged and then used a fresh piece of paper to write the insert itself. Those are usually held together with a paper clip.” She looked at the top of the stack, found a paper clip, and showed me.
“The typewritten copy is a lot thicker than the original because wherever the editor made changes, I retyped the page. We saved the original with the editorial corrections. They’re all at the back in order. Also, where the editor cut a few pages or a chapter, we saved what was cut with the edited sheets. So if it’s in the original and not in the typed copy, it’s because the editor removed it.
“And one thing more. You see these blue pencil marks? That’s from the copy editor. Mostly that’s punctuation and that kind of thing.”
“OK, I think I can find my way now. I’ve brought my copy of The Lost Boulevard with me. I haven’t finished reading it yet but I’m on my way.”
“That should be exactly the same as the typewritten copy with all the copyediting.”
I went to work, aware that Alice Wien was standing nearby, not quite looking over my shoulder. Finally, she walked quietly away and then I heard soft music from another room.
The book felt like an old friend. It was only days since I had read the beginning, hours since I had read the middle. I have to admit I was fascinated with the changes Wien made, substituting one word for another, in many cases replacing what I thought of as a perfect word with one that seemed no better. I didn’t want to get caught up in this aspect of the work; I wanted to find a clue to Wien’s murderer, but as I progressed, it seemed less and less likely that I would. True, there were wholesale omissions, three and four pages at a time crossed out with the huge X that he drew freehand, but on looking through them, I had to agree they added nothing to the book and slowed down the action.
I went through about a hundred handwritten pages, comparing them quickly to the typescript to my right, flipping pencil to the left and type to the right. There was nothing extraordinary, nothing suspicious, no red flags or flashing lights. I stopped and put my head in my hands, closing my eyes. It isn’t easy reading penciled words and I felt drained. I was about to go back to work when Alice appeared from the living room.
“You look exhausted.”
“I am.”
“I’ve just put some coffee on. I picked up some Danish this morning before you came. Can I entice you?”
“Absolutely. It sounds like just what I need. But I’ll work till it’s ready.”
I went back, turning this page, then that—junior high school, admissions test for high school, the Yankees, the D train, the Grand Concourse.
Alice called and I joined her in the kitchen. Propped on the chair across from mine was a picture frame with a sheet of unlined paper behind the glass. I leaned over and read the dedication, in Wien’s scrawl, signed “Art.”
“That’s very nice,” I said. “It’s a happy memory.”
“It is,” she said, pouring the coffee. “You know, when you start a book, you don’t begin with the dedication and the acknowledgments or even the title. You may not know what the title is at the beginning; you may not know to whom it’s dedicated. You have no idea at that point who the people are who will give you information. That comes later. You just put a one at the top of a sheet of paper and start writing: ‘Once upon a time there were nine boys who lived on Morris Avenue in the Bronx.’ ”
I knew she was speaking metaphorically about the first sentence but I got the idea. “But he always knew this book was for you.”
“Not really. For all the years that he wrote it, I thought he’d dedicate it to the Morris Avenue Boys. When he wrote that,” she pointed to the picture frame, “I was completely overcome.”
We sipped our coffee and nibbled our Danish, which was very good. After a minute she said, “Have you found anything yet?”
“Nothing. Every section that he crossed out seems genuinely irrelevant. And the tightening up improves the book.”
“He was a careful writer. And I followed his directions to a T.”
“I guess what I was hoping was that there would be a section that referred to an event, to a person, to a grudge, something that he decided not to publish.”<
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“If there is such a thing, you’ll find it. It’s either crossed out in the pencil copy or removed to the back of the typed copy.”
I finished my Danish and sipped the rest of my coffee. “I’m looking at every deletion, no matter how small.” I glanced at my watch. “Time to go back to work.”
Ma, you know that building on the concourse you always said was so nice looking? They’ve got an apartment for rent. I’ll go over and look at it with you.
Talk to your father.
He’ll say no. He always says no.
Then let it be.
That was the way it always was. Whenever the narrator talked to his mother about moving, she found an excuse to say no. I never got the impression that where they lived was anything less than acceptable, only that he wanted to ascend the social ladder, taking his parents with him, and the first step was moving to the Concourse.
I thought a moment, then pushed aside the original manuscript and drew the typescript closer. I removed the section that was still in the box and found the place where the book ended and the pages with changes and deletions began. Then I began to work my way through them. I was aware that I was looking at pages that had been created before the advent of Wite-Out and other liquid deleters, that back in the fifties, if you made an error typing, you erased it as well as you could and typed over or you did the page over from scratch. These were small technological developments, to be sure, but the time saved was enormous. And now, with computers and word processors, all these changes could be made in the blink of an eye.
I went through page after page with small and large deletions and corrections, none of them particularly interesting from my point of view. When I reached the last of these pages, I looked at my watch and saw that it was lunchtime. I got up and found Alice.
She seemed pleased that I offered to treat us to lunch and made a few suggestions. I picked the one I thought was most elegant, rejecting Chinese food and pizza as too mundane and, frankly, too cheap. She went to the phone and called in our order. In the half hour it took to be delivered, I returned to my work, thinking that I didn’t have all that much time left, that I had to hurry if I was going to accomplish my mission in one day.
We took our lunch break, eating quite a good meal that Alice insisted on putting out on pretty dishes. I found I liked her and I listened to her stories about her children and grandchildren with interest. All her children had been out of the New York area at the time of the murder; she knew this because she had spoken to each of them on the phone that Sunday evening as she usually did. So much for my theory that Father’s Day had been picked by one or more of Wien’s children as a payback. I knew Alice’s phone number and could have her bill checked, with the help of my husband, if need be.
Finally, just before I went back to work, I said, “I have to ask you this. Where were you on the evening of Father’s Day?”
“Right here,” she said.
“With anyone?”
“No.” She thought a moment. “I talked to my children that night. I may have called my sister too. I didn’t kill Art. I didn’t know where the party was until the next day, and I told you, the anger is gone. I’m my own person.”
I went back to turning pages, reading less and less, just looking at deletions, notes in the margins. It was really a huge manuscript, a long book, too much to do in one day. I knew I would have to come back, finish it another day. It was hard knowing there was a little boy who would wake up in Elsie’s house before I got back.
Page after page. Two o’clock and counting. I was now further along in the manuscript than in the published book I had been reading. The narrator was in college; the boys were on various campuses, although most of them were in the city or the New York area.
I came to the place where the narrator met the woman I guessed was the fictional Alice. I could see that he came close to describing their sexual relationship or at least alluding to its existence but avoided it tastefully. It struck me as a bit odd that he did. The book was published long enough ago that such descriptions were much rarer than they are today and might have encouraged sales. Then I remembered Alice had mentioned when we spoke on Monday that she had prevailed on him not to be explicit for the sake of her relationship with her parents.
I looked at my watch. I would have to leave soon, even if I hadn’t reached the end. There were at least a hundred pages to go in the pencil copy and words were starting to blur before my eyes.
I turned a page and something peripheral made me stop. I looked up at the top of the page where the number 418 was written. I flipped back to the previous page. 413. I closed my eyes, opened them and looked again. Four handwritten pages were missing.
I got up and found Alice. “Would you look at something?” I said.
“You look demolished.”
“I feel that way.”
We went back to the dining room table. “Look at this,” I said.
“That’s funny.” She paged forward, looking for the missing sheets. “I don’t understand.”
“Could he have thrown them away?” I asked.
“I guess it’s possible.” She didn’t sound convinced. “But then why didn’t he renumber? I mean, if he read it over and thought it was terrible and threw it away, he could have crossed out these numbers,” she pointed to 418 and 419, “and changed them. Or just erased them. It was pencil, after all.” She looked bewildered.
“You don’t remember typing these pages and finding missing numbers?”
“It’s so long ago. I need a minute to think.”
I opened the paperback that lay near my left hand, found the chapter we were looking at, and located the place that concerned us. The text went smoothly from the material on page 413 to that on page 418 but included paragraphs that must have come from the missing pages. It looked to me as though he had removed the four missing pages from the pencil copy after the manuscript had been typed.
I reached for the typescript and located the chapter, turned pages until I found the equivalent of 413 in the pencil copy. Four pages were missing here too but in a different way. At the top of page 451 in the typescript—the typed copy was about ten percent longer than the original—someone had drawn a dash and then written 454. Four pages had been removed and a blank sheet had been used, most probably to retype part of page 452 and part of page 455, to make a smooth transition to cover up what had been left out. I handed the page marked 451–454, page 455, and page 456 to Alice.
“Well, let’s see what was omitted,” she said, reaching for the material at the back of the typescript while I stood by. She flipped through the pages quickly and I noticed she went beyond the pages numbered in the four hundreds. “It’s not here.”
“Let’s think about this. It’s clear from the numbering that the pages missing in the original were typed before the pencil copy was thrown away. Am I right?”
She nodded. “Right.” She seemed dazed. “It had to be typed.”
“It looks to me as though Mr. Wien made a decision after the book was typed to eliminate something, some event, some character. He threw away the pencil pages and doctored up the typed pages so that it reads smoothly without whatever had been there.”
“And threw those pages away too,” Alice said.
“Why would he do that?”
She moved her shoulders, her hands. “I don’t know. He never said anything to me. If his editor told him to get rid of it, why aren’t the deleted pages in the back of the manuscript with all the others? And why would he go back to the original and pull those pages too? No one was ever going to see them.”
She had asked every question that I had wanted to ask, and if she didn’t have the answers, how could I? “He didn’t want to leave a trace of whatever he pulled. Maybe he thought he’d offend someone or make someone mad.”
“Or get sued. But I don’t think he really worried about that too much.”
“Let me go quickly through the rest of the pencil copy and see if there are any more miss
ing pages. This mysterious character or event may have been mentioned again later.”
“I’ll do the same with the typed copy,” she said. She pulled out the chair next to mine and sat down. Then we both began turning pages, looking only at the numbers at the top.
“Here’s one,” I said. “Two. Pages 445 and 446.”
“They’re missing here too, at least I assume they’re the same pages. The numbers in this copy are larger.”
We laid our pages on the table and inspected them. They corresponded almost exactly. And once again, in the typed copy a single page represented two pages and had only a couple of paragraphs on it.
We kept going and found one more missing page in both copies.
“I am just stunned,” Alice said.
We had finished our quick run-through of the manuscripts. My head was probably spinning as much as Alice’s but with different questions. “Did you type these pages that bridge the gaps?” I asked.
She looked at them carefully and I could see her head shaking as her finger moved down the page. “Not me,” she said. “Not any typist with experience. Look at all these strikeovers, look at the erasures. This is a hunt-and-peck person doing his best, which isn’t very good. I wouldn’t be surprised if Art typed these pages himself.”
“Which means that after you prepared the final manuscript, he removed the missing pages and retyped the inserted pages himself to get rid of something he didn’t want published.”
“Something I must have read,” she said. “I read the whole pencil manuscript. If there had been any omissions or gaps, I would have seen them. And he didn’t want me to know he was doing it.”
“And nothing struck you as harmful or libelous or just plain discourteous to someone in the group?”
“I have to think about it.” She got up and walked away from the table. “My original is ruined now, isn’t it?”
I realized this meant more to her than a missing episode or maligned character. It meant her prized possession had lost some of its value. “Maybe a little,” I said, hoping to diminish the hurt.
