Who Killed Blanche DuBois?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  Right now his shoulder was relatively calm as he sat concentrating on ingesting large amounts of mutton chop. Claire managed to get through the meal without letting Willard prey on her nerves too much, and she promised to tell Peter of their conversation about the proposed book.

  “Send me an outline,” she said as they parted, and Willard seemed satisfied with that. His eyes had the glazed expression of a man with a very full stomach.

  Claire had had a little too much to drink and a lot too much to eat, so she decided to walk back to the office. She passed a bookstore on Sixth Avenue with a mystery display featuring the very book Willard had mentioned, Death Pays a House Call. She stood looking at the display and wondered exactly what Wallace Jackson had seen in that book which caught his eye.

  That night on the phone, Claire asked Meredith if she had read the book.

  “Oh, sure, I read that one.”

  “Willard said that Jackson told him he got some ideas from it.”

  “Really?” Meredith sounded immediately intrigued. “Do you have a copy?”

  “Somewhere, I think.”

  “Or you could just ask the good detective himself,” Meredith suggested slyly.

  “Yes, I could, but I’m probably not going to.”

  “Suit yourself. Sounds like a perfect pretext for a phone call to me.”

  “Oh, come on, Meredith. Why would I want to call Detective Jackson?”

  “Beats me,” said Meredith, “but do you have to have a reason?”

  Claire insisted on playing dumb. “I have no reason. I’m not a part of his investigation.”

  “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Meredith. “We’re both a part of it, whether we want to be or not. May I remind you that it ain’t over till the fat lady sings?”

  Meredith’s comment made Claire think of Amelia—not exactly fat, and not exactly a singer, but the closest person she knew who fit the bill.

  Chapter 15

  When Amelia arrived at Blanche’s apartment on East Fourth Street that Saturday afternoon, Marshall was waiting in the lobby. With him was a young, round-faced policeman who introduced himself as Officer Gubbins. As next of kin, Sarah had contacted the police about unsealing the apartment, and they sent Officer Gubbins to do it. The three of them rode the elevator up together in silence, and after Officer Gubbins had broken the bright yellow seal, he withdrew, leaving Amelia and Marshall to enter the apartment alone.

  Amelia went in first, pushing the door open as far as it would go. A stack of newspapers in the entry hall prevented the door from opening all the way, so Amelia was just able to fit through the opening. Turning sideways, she slipped through, followed by Marshall, into the foyer of Blanche’s apartment.

  Blanche DuBois had been a pack rat. Stacks of newspapers and magazines leaned at precipitous angles from every wall of the front hall; heaps of clothes lay piled upon chairs in the living room; books and tapes and papers littered every surface of the bedroom. Take-out menus were everywhere—on top of the television, stuffed in between the radiators and the walls, on top of the refrigerator. Marshall walked with delicate, carefully chosen steps, as though he were afraid he might step in something. The phone rang, a startling sound in the forlorn, deserted apartment. Amelia picked it up.

  “Hello, this is Amelia Moore speaking,” she said, and then there was a pause. She held the receiver away from her ear for a second and then replaced it.

  “Who was it?” said Marshall.

  “I don’t know; they hung up as soon as I answered.”

  “I’m going to start by looking in the bedroom,” he said, and disappeared into the back of the apartment.

  Amelia stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. Even the disorder of Blanche’s apartment had a distinctly genteel quality, a kind of well-bred delicacy: there was virtually no dust, and the stacks of papers were neatly ordered. There were several years’ worth of The New Yorker, and other piles consisted of back issues of Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Town and Country. Knickknacks were everywhere: china angels, crystal decanters, Chinese fans and figurines. Amelia tried to imagine Blanche—elaborately coiffed, impeccably turned-out Blanche—emerging from this ocean of objects. Standing there, looking at the leftovers of a life suddenly and brutally ended, Amelia felt sad, so sad that she needed to sit down. Carefully moving a stack of Gourmet magazines, she sat on an upholstered burgundy satin chair. Next to her was Blanche’s writing desk, and Amelia ran her hand over its mahogany lid. As she did so her hand brushed against something hard protruding from the side of the desk. She craned her head around and looked at it: it was small and round, and appeared to be a knob, though she couldn’t imagine its function. It looked like a lever of some kind. Idly, she pushed on it. Nothing happened. Then she tried pulling on it, and the instant she did a small drawer shot open from the side of the desk. Startled, Amelia jumped back, and then she looked in the drawer.

  The lone object in the drawer was a slim, silk-bound volume, and before Amelia even picked it up she knew it was Blanche’s diary.

  Marshall had rummaged through more stacks of papers than he cared to think about when he finally came across a stack of letters, bound by a red ribbon. He sat on the bed and began looking through the letters, amused by Blanche’s adherence to certain clichés: tying her letters with a red ribbon, for example. He soon found what he had come for. He recognized his own handwriting, and, reading through the letter quickly to make sure it was the right one, he stuffed it into his jacket pocket and went back down the hall to find Amelia. He thought he heard the sound of her voice, and when he reached the living room he saw her, sitting next to Blanche’s writing desk, a perplexed look on her face.

  Manny Alvarez was on duty in the lobby when Marshall and Amelia left, and he noticed them because they were such an odd couple: the short, round woman with the tall, angular man walking just slightly in front of her. The woman, he noticed, looked preoccupied, even troubled. They did not speak, but the man nodded to him as they went by. If asked, he would have said they reminded him of a couple who had just had a fight.

  Consuela Rodriguez had been a teller at Apple Bank on Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue for ten years, and did not think it particularly unusual when the small plump woman with the delicate features asked for a safe-deposit box. The neighborhood, while not particularly dangerous, had its share of burglaries, and some of the local residents, many of whom were immigrants, preferred to keep their valuables locked up in bank vaults instead of in their apartments. Consuela did her best not to stare at what the woman put in the box, but she did think it was strange that the only item she placed in the box was a single torn sheet of handwritten paper. It took all kinds in this city, she thought; but she had seen stranger things, much stranger, in her ten years at the bank. The woman was well dressed and soft-spoken, not obviously loca, and Consuela assumed she had her reasons. Consuela’s grandmother in Ecuador used to say, “People all have their reasons, you can be sure of that—even thieves and murderers; they all have their reasons.” And so when the woman returned the box to her, Consuela shrugged and handed her the receipt and box number.

  Amelia Moore stepped out into the bright November sunshine and hailed a cab. She knew it was dangerous to deliver her message to Claire by hand, but she mistrusted answering machines. A Luddite by nature, she disliked most technology; and besides, when she called from Blanche’s apartment, Claire’s machine had delivered such a long beep that she was afraid the tape was full. She had left a somewhat confused message on the machine, but then decided to take the chance of coming over to deliver the note by hand.

  Vasily Kronja did not like his job as doorman at 346 West 102nd Street. He knew he was destined for greater things, and was impatient to get on with his life. He ignored his mother’s suggestion that he was at least better off than the poor souls back in his native country, the former Yugoslavia; he did not even remember Yugoslavia, and could not concern himself with the lives of people halfway across the worl
d. What Vasily knew was that his job as doorman was boring and demeaning, opening doors for people no better than himself, people who did not have the blood of counts running through their veins as he did.

  Vasily’s claim to noble blood was based on a story his uncle Nicolai had once told him, a story that had something to do with being the illegitimate descendant of a Slavic count. The fact that his uncle was very drunk at the time did not matter; Vasily at once recognized the ring of truth in the story. And so, unsubstantiated as the rumor was, Vasily had pinned it to the center of his identity, and wore it like a crest. He knew it was true, because he felt different from other people; he could feel the stirrings of his noble destiny within him. He did not know what that destiny was to be, only that it was great and that someday he would be admired by all the people who now barely glanced at him as he opened the door for them, day after dismal day.

  Vasily was at his post when Amelia entered the building, and he opened the door for her politely. He recognized her— she was a nice lady. She always smiled at him sweetly, and once she had given him a box of Christmas cookies. Vasily smiled at her and even tipped his hat, but she seemed distracted, and hurried by with barely a nod, her face set and worried. Vasily would remember this later as being unusual. Shortly after Amelia entered the building, Vasily began to feel very sleepy. He had been up late talking to his girlfriend about all the great things he would accomplish someday, and now he was afraid he might fall asleep on his feet. He glanced around the lobby. It was a quiet day, with nothing much happening, so he stepped out to the deli across the street for a cup of coffee. Vasily’s timing was unfortunate, because that was when the murderer, in disguise, entered the building, slipping a credit card over the door lock.

  Chapter 16

  Meredith was performing in a school play Saturday night and so wouldn’t visit Claire until the following week. Claire spent Saturday afternoon at the Met, wandering from room to room. She felt vaguely restless, unrooted, as though there were something she should be thinking about, but she couldn’t remember what it might be. She hung around the Impressionists, staring at Monet’s haystacks until the museum guard began to look at her suspiciously. When the museum closing announcement came, she filed out behind a group of Dutch tourists, their straw-blond hair white in the dying evening sun. She walked across Central Park, taking the horse trail along the reservoir, hoping to see a rider. Today she was in luck: a woman on a little bay mare cantered by, the horse’s hooves kicking up clods of dirt behind her. Watching the horse recede, Claire felt happier, a sudden rush of affection for the city filling her heart. How many cities could boast of such beautiful riding venues as New York, with its leafy trails winding through Central Park?

  As Amelia rode the elevator up to Claire’s apartment she hoped Claire was home, but was not surprised when her ring received no answer except Ralph’s hoarse, lonesome meow. She waited a moment, her heart thumping, and then fished around in her bag for her notepad. At least I remembered the notepad, she thought. Amelia was absentminded, as everyone knew; most of her friends had received late-night phone calls from her when she locked herself out of her apartment. Amelia had distributed keys to a half dozen of them just for such emergencies. Now she wished she had a key to Claire’s apartment so she could wait for her here—she didn’t feel safe on the street—but Claire was a private person who didn’t give her keys to anyone. Amelia dug in her bag for the notepad, leaning against the wall to steady herself, and wrote a note to Claire.

  Dear Claire, I have some very urgent information—I must see you—I don’t feel safe at home, so when you get this please come immediately to the Life Café at Avenue B and Tenth Street.

  She looked at her watch: it was four-thirty. She hoped Claire would return soon. She slipped the note under the door and walked rapidly to the elevator. The car was on its way up to the twelfth floor, where it paused for a long time. Amelia leaned wearily against the wall and closed her eyes.

  In the stairwell, the murderer waited for the sound of the arriving elevator and then, after the door had closed and Amelia was on her way back down to the lobby, stole out and went up to Claire’s apartment. In her haste, Amelia had not slid the note very far under the door, and Ralph, bored with being alone, amused himself by batting the slip of paper around, so that now a corner of it protruded from under the door. The murderer slid the note out, quickly read it, then shoved it into a coat pocket.

  Amelia, short and round, moved slowly, and the murderer easily caught up with her as she left the building. Unfortunately for her, Vasily had wandered down to the basement to chat with the night porter and so was still not at his post when she walked through the foyer. Perhaps it would have made no difference; perhaps Vasily would not have seen the murderer lurking behind a marble column in the lobby as Amelia left the building, unaware that she was being followed. But now there was no witness as the murderer trailed Amelia out into the street, keeping a safe distance and blending in with the crowd of people on Broadway. She had no way of knowing the murderer was among the group of people who followed her down the stairs to the IRT subway. Perhaps if Amelia had taken a cab instead of the subway, she would have been safe—but it was rush hour and she figured the subway would be at least as fast as a cab, and being in a crowd of people just then was comforting.

  There was no safety in numbers for Amelia, though, and as the Broadway local came screeching into the station and the crowd pressed forward expectantly, no one saw the hand that pushed her toward the gaping chasm of track. In fact, only a few people saw her clutch the air and fall into the blackness in front of the oncoming train, a scream caught in her throat. These same people turned away immediately, instinctively closing their eyes in horror at the sight in front of them. No one saw the slip of paper she clutched in her hand which fluttered loose and was caught up in the wind created by the oncoming train. By the time anyone knew what had happened, the murderer was up the stairs and back out into the street, walking rapidly away in the gathering twilight.

  When Claire arrived home the machine was blinking six times. There was a message from Robert, and then four messages from Meredith—long, rambling monologues about how boring Connecticut was and how anxious she was to return to New York. Then, after the beep, and a long pause came Amelia’s voice, sounding frightened and shaky. “Claire, it’s Amelia. I—I hope you get this message. I’m scared, Claire—I need to talk to you. I’m afraid to stay here, so I want to meet you—come to the Life Café in the East Village as soon as you get this—I’ll be waiting there for you.” There was a pause, and then she continued, “I . . . please hurry.” Then there was a click and the tape machine rewound. Claire sat on the bed and looked out the window. Ralph came in and wound himself around her feet, and Claire stroked him absently. Amelia really sounded distraught on the phone; even though Amelia was excitable, the tone of her voice shot a tingle of fear through Claire’s stomach. Claire put her coat back on and left. As she rang for the elevator Ralph’s peevish protest could be heard behind her.

  When Claire got out of her cab at the corner of Avenue B and Tenth Street, night was falling. The Life Café faced Tompkins Square Park, and had all the offbeat atmosphere an East Village restaurant should have. Small tables were scattered around the colorful inlaid tile floor; the tops of the tables were covered with lacquered newspaper clippings from the fifties and sixties; and the thin, sallow staff members had hair dyed in colors you might see in a box of Crayolas. The sun had sunk behind the buildings and the waiters appeared with candles for each table. Outside in the park basketball games continued into dusk, the hard punct sound of the balls hitting the concrete court mingling with the hoarse yells of the players.

  “Yo, Edward, here, man!”

  “Oh, foul me, why don’t you—”

  “Hey, hey—I’m clear!”

  “Nice shot, man.”

  A man walked by with a tatty black collie. A woman jogged by pushing a stroller. A Labrador retriever, leashed to the stroller, trotted
along next to her. Killing three birds with one stone, Claire thought: walk the baby, exercise the dog, stay fit. Robert would approve of that kind of efficiency.

  The café stereo was playing a Bach concerto, one of the Brandenburgs. A girl with hair dyed the color of a new penny walked by the window. Claire sipped her coffee, which was strong and bitter. To her disgust the man behind her was smoking. At the table in front of her a young woman with blond hair as smooth as glass picked at a health food salad. Was it her imagination, or was everyone in this neighborhood impossibly young?

  As dusk fell outside, inside the café it was dark and cozy. The candles on the tables, reflected in the window, became dozens of candles extending out into the gathering night. Claire thought about Robert, and wondered if they would make it as a couple. He was so tightly wound, so kinetic and compulsively active. He only seemed happy when he was at work, doing “something constructive.” Claire, on the other hand, had fantasies of complete and total rest; she longed to give in to the pull of inertia. Sometimes she wanted nothing more in life than to have a place where she could sit, read, and watch the sun go down. It was down now, with only a few thin pink clouds hanging above the trees.

  Claire needed so much time to think, to reflect; she had often thought of Robert’s constant activity as a dodge, a distraction to keep him from thinking too much about things. She had never dared to suggest this to him, however—their relationship was not a mutually analytical one. After several relationships with men with whom she had taken turns playing therapist—it was a particularly New York thing to do—Robert’s private nature was something of a relief. Eventually, she thought, too many mutual revelations of the soul can become a bit cloying. No fear of that with Robert, with his English heritage. He didn’t make her feel responsible for his feelings all the time, which she appreciated. And yet . . . you could get only so close to Robert, and then a wall went up . . .