“Good. And we’ll see you tomorrow anyway, right?”
“That’s right. You know that tomorrow’s performance is a memorial to Clifton Holt, don’t you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“It is. It was just an ordinary performance when Cynthia invited you and Francisca. But now, just think, by traveling with us in the rarefied atmosphere of NatBallet, you and Francisca may just get to meet a murderer.”
11
AN INTERESTING LUNCH
After Bautista’s news, Frost knew it would be useless to continue his preparations for his meeting with Earle Ambler; he could not concentrate on the legal niceties of mergers and acquisitions after what the detective had told him. What he most needed, Frost decided, was a Gotham martini, the specialità della casa of the Gotham Club. (Frost realized that martinis are martinis, and the difference between the good and the superlative is very fine. Yet he clung to the myth that certain bartenders in certain bars—Claudio, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, for example—worked a special magic with gin and vermouth. He was also realist enough to know that the special attraction of the Gotham martini was the discreet dividend that Renato, the head bartender, retained in the mixing pitcher. If pressed under close interrogation by Cynthia—“Reuben, how much did you have to drink?”—he could always answer, honestly, “one martini,” though a Gotham martini would have passed for at least two in any commercial saloon.)
Frost left the office soon after Bautista’s departure, instructing Miss O’Hara that he would be reachable at home after lunch—and after his dreaded confrontation with Andrea Turnbull. He took the Seventh Avenue subway to Fifty-ninth Street and then walked back to the Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth.
As he approached the Club, Frost marveled at how it had stayed out of the clutches of Everett Zacklin or some other developer ready, willing and able to exploit its choice site. The Club, a Beaux-Arts pile designed by Warren & Wetmore at the turn of the century, had been designated a City landmark, but he knew very well that even this protection had a way of dissolving in the face of a large mound of cold cash. But several of the more generous and prosperous early members—the Club had been founded in the palmy 1890s—had contributed a generous endowment that, prudently invested, had enabled the Club to survive with both its independence and its building intact.
Frost enjoyed the Gotham. Before his retirement, he had not been a terribly active member. Coming uptown from Wall Street for lunch had been a chore, creating an unseemly and inconvenient break in the workday. But now that he had more time to spare (more than he cared to admit, if the truth be known) he enjoyed the camaraderie of the Club and, like the other members, discreetly ignored the generally execrable quality of the food.
Given his interest in cultural matters, Frost had been approached, in middle age, about becoming a member of the Century, New York’s legendary men’s club for those connected with, or at least patrons of, the arts. He had declined, in large part because his candidacy for membership in the Gotham was already moving forward, at the behest of a classmate and old friend from Princeton. He had also declined membership in at least two of the more strictly social clubs. A WASP and an establishment figure, Frost nonetheless felt uncomfortable with those whose status rested purely on social position—old money, old St. Paul’s, old Yale; while he never flaunted it, there was still more than a trace in Frost of the barefoot orphan from Upstate New York. He desired more than comfortable superficialities in his associations, and in the Gotham he had found a congenial “tree house” (as Cynthia mockingly called the all-male club). As a fellow Gothamite had once put it, its members were “quiet doers” in their fields, both intellectual (the universities and the foundations) and commercial (though the number of publishing-house executives and editors well outnumbered the oil wildcatters), and in each case had at least some small measure of prestige and influence in their chosen fields. (At any given time, the President of Columbia University would be a member; the shy and drily academic chairman of an obscure department at the University would not.) Flamboyance was the cardinal sin among the members; Everett Zacklin might someday raze the place to erect the City’s tallest building, but he would not be a member.
As he got to the front door of the Club, Frost wondered again at its quaint locked-door custom. Even on the hottest summer day, one had to ring the bell for admittance by John Darmes, the genial old black man who guarded the entrance. No one had ever explained the custom to Frost’s satisfaction, and he knew of no other institution, with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve Bank, that had a comparable practice. Was it to underscore to the members, distracted by other thoughts and busy lives, that they were entering the sanctum of a club and should, while within its precincts, conduct themselves as Gothamites, not as busy men of affairs? Or was the practice meant to recall the speakeasies of Prohibition, giving a small frisson of adventure to those crossing its doorstep?
Frost rang the bell and was admitted by the faithful Darmes, who, as always, greeted him by name. Frost proceeded directly to the small mahogany slab in the first-floor bar where Renato presided.
“Hello, Mr. Frost. Haven’t seen you in a while,” the bartender said. “The usual?”
Frost nodded slightly, and Renato began pouring the gin into a pitcher, while Frost greeted his colleagues at the bar: a nervous foundation executive who always seemed to need the comfort of a midday drink; a retired banker slightly older than Frost, who invariably sought conversation and companionship at Renato’s bar; and a young (at least, by Gotham standards) literary agent waiting for his author client.
Only the literary agent, Frank Lewis, had seen the predicted headline in the afternoon Press about Wilson’s murder in prison, and connected it to Frost’s association with NatBallet.
“I guess justice was done,” he said to Frost. “Probably more justice than if he had come to trial.”
“That’s true, I’m afraid,” Frost answered. “I’m told Wilson was a severe drug addict, so he probably would have gotten off on an insanity plea, or a reduced charge of some kind.”
“Shocking, isn’t it?” Miles Trapp, the retired banker, interjected. It was clear he desperately wanted to join the conversation but was rather muddled—he was on his second Gotham martini—about how to do so.
“What’s more shocking,” Lewis said, “is that someone like Clifton Holt can be murdered in cold blood on the streets of this city. There has to be some way the hoodlums can be controlled.”
Frost almost said that Holt’s murder was no ordinary street crime, but checked himself in time.
“It’s the frontier,” the banker said. “People getting killed all around the town. It’s like a Western movie. Don’t you agree, Renato?” He sought support from the bartender, his best friend at the bar.
“Is bad, Mr. Trapp. Is very bad. Little punks everywhere. They should put them all in jail.”
Frost was not uplifted by the conversation, and he was nervous about his own knowledge of the crime. He drained the pitcher, left discreetly in front of him at the bar, drank the dividend to his martini, and headed off for the dining room.
“Anyone else going to eat?” he said. The response was negative; the midday happy hour was not yet over.
Frost entered the dining room and went over to the common table, which seated twenty strays who did not have their own engagements for lunch. Some members ate there regularly, claiming that both the company and the conversation rivaled Dr. Johnson’s circle at the Cheshire Cheese. Others, like Frost, found the table a serviceable way of having lunch when at the Club alone. The conversation could be erudite or witty, but more often than not was small talk of a fairly high order, though perhaps slightly pallid by Dr. Johnson’s standards.
Frost sat down next to a man he did not know and introduced himself. (He had always understood that at the Century the members never did this—it was assumed that each and every one of the members was so eminent that introductions would be superfluous. The Gotham had more
modest pretensions.) His companion turned out to be an amiable enough editor from a large publishing house. As they exchanged pleasantries about the April weather and joked about the day’s special lunch (chipped beef on toast), Frost looked around the room. As usual there were groupings to excite anyone with the vaguest sense of conspiracy: a Time editor and a Newsweek writer; the presidents of three major New York banks (did their lawyers think that the Gotham automatically conferred some sort of immunity from the antitrust laws? Frost wondered); a university president and a local realtor; a major editor with a famous author not on his list. The variety was great, lacking only women. (Frost believed firmly in the tree-house theory—that men should have the right duly to assemble and to keep the ladies out. But was it perhaps unfair to exclude them from the tree-house? He wasn’t sure, though he certainly did not have the rabid antifeminist feelings of many of the Gothamites of his own age. He guessed admitting women would be all right, except that the first applicants would probably be the likes of Andrea Turnbull and Jeanine Saperstein.)
No sooner had Frost ordered than Arthur Mattison came and sat beside him. Mattison was a regular at the common table and was a firm believer that the traditions of Dr. Johnson were nobly being carried on there, in no small part because of his own verbal contributions. Mattison, almost as round as he was tall, filled not only the chair next to Frost but most of the territory surrounding it. His suits were British, but no one could say he was “impeccably tailored.” The trousers, held up by suspenders decorated with circus acrobats, came almost to his throat, or at least to the middle of what would have been a chest on a man of normal proportions. His tie was too long, extending well down his large poitrine, and one had the impression that there was no way that his jacket, ample as it was, could ever be buttoned across his stomach. Both the tie and jacket were stained with the remnants of meals past.
“Hello, Reuben, how are you?” Mattison asked jovially. “And the dear Cynthia, how is she?”
Frost felt like replying that the dear Cynthia would be a good bit better if Mattison stopped attacking the Brigham Foundation in print. But he did not, acknowledging only that he and his wife were fine. Mattison scarcely heard the reply, having turned to the more serious business of ordering lunch.
“What are you having today?” the fat critic asked.
“My usual, Arthur. Safe, sensible and boring Welsh rarebit.”
“What first?”
“Nothing.”
“Good grief, my good man, you’ll starve to death.” Then, to the waiter standing at his back, Mattison inquired about the oysters.
“Very good bluepoints, sir. Very fresh,” the waiter answered.
“Let’s see. April. An ‘r.’ That means they’re all right. Or does anyone pay attention to that old saw about months with an ‘r’ anymore?”
“I think not, Arthur,” said Mattison’s companion on the other side, a retired surgeon named Willard Stowe.
“I’ll keep that in mind when May comes,” Mattison said. “But Willard, is it because the waters are so polluted you can get hepatitis in any month, or because oyster beds are safer these days?”
“I’d hate to speculate,” Dr. Stowe replied.
“Well whatever, I should be as safe as I’ll ever be in mid-April. So, waiter, bring me a dozen bluepoints, with extra lemon. Then the club steak rare and a half-bottle of that delicious Simard you’ve got on the wine list.”
Priority business finished, Mattison turned to Frost and began questioning him about NatBallet. But only after delivering a paean of praise for Clifton Holt, in which he quoted liberally from his own column on the subject. (Probably stolen from an old obituary of Massine or Fokine, Frost thought scornfully.)
“I wish I’d known Holt better,” Mattison said. “I met him a number of times, of course, but we never did have what you might call an intimate talk—an interview or two, but always very formal and very guarded. He was a very private person, wasn’t he, Reuben?”
“Yes, you could say that.”
“I was really crushed by his death, the circumstances and all that. We don’t have that many certified geniuses in this City and can’t afford to lose any of them.”
Frost observed Mattison, and observed him hard, as he talked. There were no telltale signs, no quavers of voice, that indicated to Frost that the man was lying. But he clearly was—how could Mattison say that he wished he had known Holt better after Holt’s devastating letter to him? Mattison was calculating and clever and, it now became clear to Frost, nerveless. Nerveless enough, at least, to lie about his attitude toward Holt. But nerveless enough to have Holt killed? There was the question.
Conversation ceased as Mattison’s oysters were presented. After dousing them (and Frost and Dr. Stowe) with lemon juice, he attacked them voraciously, loudly sipping the juice from the shells after devouring the oysters themselves.
Frost silently reflected on his luncheon partner during the process. Little was known about Mattison’s past. He had been a theatre critic in Chicago before the Press had made a big splash about stealing him away. He was installed at the Press with great fanfare and given a prominently placed thrice-weekly column in the front of the newspaper as its critic-at-large with, apparently, a brief to say anything he wanted about any subject. He was a clever writer and quick with the amusing phrase—his theatre, movie, and literary commentaries were the delight of those who made up ads containing short, punchy—and favorable—quotations.
He was also the delight of producers, museum directors and publishers, for he was an appreciator. His pieces nearly always boosted the institution or individuals responsible for an event; if he could not praise, he remained silent in print. However, in order to balance the ledger somewhat, and probably to assist the Press’s publisher in his naked appeal to lower-class (and non-Manhattan) readers, he occasionally launched populist and basically anti-intellectual attacks—always on lesser-known organizations like the Brigham Foundation, which he accused of being elitist and unreceptive to the needs of “little” projects—attacks he would never make on the Metropolitan Museum, or the Nederlanders or the Shuberts.
The arts establishment of the City quoted him widely and professed pleasure at his unashamed boosterism, though in private the more discerning recognized the shallowness of his criticism. A prolific writer, he not only turned out his three newspaper columns each week, but articles for the Press’s Sunday magazine and free-lance pieces for a half-dozen other magazines as well. Frost had often thought that a bitchy observation about another acquaintance, a prolific but hardly profound literary critic, to the effect that he had written more books than he had read, applied equally well to Mattison.
Frost had once been curious enough about Mattison to look him up in Who’s Who. What he found was that Mattison, born in Chicago, had attended the University of Iowa and, after two years as an enlisted man in the Army, had gone to work for one of the Chicago dailies. But then the Press attempted to make him New York’s preeminent critic, whether discussing Robert Redford, Robert Motherwell, Robert Venturi or Robert Merrill. Not to mention Robert Browning, Robert Burns or Robert Benchley.
The prominence given Mattison’s prose by the Press, and the grateful acceptance of his boosting praise by those who mattered, had achieved the Press’s aim of making his name known not only to its readers but also to the public at large, and better known than any of the critics and culture writers at the City’s other newspapers.
But did this make him a critic who really could relate a new production of Hamlet to those that had gone before? No, it did not, and the man’s reviews seldom went beyond describing what he had seen on stage or in the gallery; there was little or no linkage of the present event to past history.
Frost also recalled that his companion, now attacking his steak, had started writing about the dance only fairly late on, and well after it had become an established part of the City’s cultural life. But by then Mattison was supposed to be an omnicompetent expert, and rather than l
et his deficient knowledge of the dance show, he had evidently resorted to the plagiarizing tactics uncovered by Holt.
Frost had finished his Welsh rarebit and a cup of coffee and was about to leave when a new conversation drew his interest. Donald Jeffries, another book editor sitting across the table and down two places from Frost, asked Mattison about writing a book.
“I understand you’ve signed up with Darnall & Chapman,” Jeffries said.
“That’s old news, Donald. Did that a month ago,” Mattison replied.
“And a pretty healthy advance, I hear,” Jeffries said.
“I guess, for a bunch of recycled columns,” Mattison answered. “Let’s just say a quite comfortable five figures.”
Five figures, Frost thought. At least ten thousand dollars. Quite comfortable five figures. At least twenty-four thousand dollars, and enough to pay Mr. Jimmy Wilson?
Frost got up from the table quickly, mumbling his goodbyes to those around him and trying not to show his inner turmoil at the discovery that Arthur Mattison not only had a motive for hiring Holt’s killer, but probably had the money to pay him as well.
12
A BOLD DEMAND
As he left the Gotham Club, Frost looked at his watch and realized that he was running slightly late for his three-o’clock appointment with Andrea Turnbull. He sighed to himself—he was in no way eager for the meeting—and hailed a cab heading crosstown. In minutes he was standing inside the lobby of her Beekman Place apartment house, where he was directed to the fifth floor.
There was no response when Frost first rang the bell of her apartment, though there was the pulsing sound of rock music coming from inside. After the second ring, a tall, sullen teen-aged boy opened the door. He towered over Frost by a good six inches, his spiky hair dyed punk-yellow and a small gold earring piercing one ear.
“Yeah?” the hulk said.
“I was looking for Mrs. Turnbull,” Frost replied. He introduced himself and put out his hand.
Murder Takes a Partner Page 11
