Clarisse sighed, then looked up. “Oh,” she sighed disappointed, “and I thought it was my first invitation to breakfast with a cop…”
Just before noon, when his shift began at the Throne and Scepter across the way from the Provincetown Crafts Boutique, Valentine came into the shop, bringing a tongue sandwich and a bottle of Saratoga Water for her. “Thank you for the sandwich,” Clarisse said with a lowering glance which Valentine ignored. “And for the position. It’s a shopgirl’s dream.”
“As soon as I saw what Beatrice was stocking, I knew it was for you.”
A woman customer pointed to a small jewelry box completely covered with tiny scallop shells. “How much?”
Clarisse consulted a printed list of prices taped to the counter. “Ninety-four-fifty.”
The woman grabbed her husband’s sleeve and pulled him out of the shop.
“Nothing in this place is over fifteen dollars,” said Valentine. “Let me see that price list.”
Clarisse explained her problems with the register and Valentine, with little difficulty, showed her how it worked. “Well that wasn’t hard,” she said. “I thought you had to have a degree in higher math for these things. Come back on your break and show me how to operate the T-shirt press.”
He leaned on the counter and began to eat a turkey club that he had brought for himself. He occasionally helped himself to a drink from Clarisse’s bottle of Saratoga Water.
“So,” said Clarisse, “is the whole town buzzing with news of the murder? Have people been asking if I’ve recovered from the trauma yet?”
“Well,” said Valentine, “I ran into a couple of people on my way here, and I talked to George while he was making the sandwiches. At least everybody seems to have heard. Nobody mentioned you though.”
“I guess it takes time for these things to get around. By the end of the day this place will be mobbed with people asking me what it felt like to discover a corpse at sunrise. I’ll be the heroine of the hour.”
“Maybe,” said Valentine doubtfully.
“I just wonder if we’ll ever find out anything about Jeff King and what he was doing yesterday—in the last hours of his life I mean.”
Valentine shrugged. “I heard a little about that…”
“Oh?”
“Well, after he left you on the pier, fresh off the ferry from Boston, he went to the Boatslip. In the ladies’ room he changed into a pair of green swim briefs. They were very low-cut in the back. He swam in the pool for about half an hour but didn’t do any diving. He had two drinks—both vodka and tonics. And he was selling drugs by the poolside out of his gym bag. MDA for sixty a gram, Black Beauties for seven a tab, and crystal coke for one-twenty-five a gram. I couldn’t find out how many contacts he made. He went to Ciro and Sal’s for dinner. Jimmy waited on him. He had eggplant parmesan and a glass of wine, house dressing on his salad—not bad for a last meal. He had dessert at the Portuguese bakery across from the candy store. Nobody knows for sure what he bought, but it was probably a cannoli with almond filling. He went back to the Boatslip, changed into his costume—but not in the ladies’ room—and went to the party. He paid the cover charge with a hundred-dollar bill but didn’t leave any tips when he got drinks.”
Clarisse paused a moment. “Did he leave a printed itinerary?”
“People are talking. News got out before most people had gone to bed.”
“I just don’t understand,” moaned Clarisse. “There’s a minute-by-minute account of the corpse’s doings and goings, and nobody mentioned me? I mean, I found him. I even touched him. Maybe I’ll get in the papers.”
“I don’t think so,” said Valentine. “Murder is bad for business. Everything’ll be handled very quietly.”
“Well, the police came to see me again a little while ago,” said Clarisse.
“I thought they got your statement this morning. You were at the station long enough to write your autobiography.”
“No, the cop had only one question to ask.”
“What was that?”
“‘Do you want to go out Wednesday night?’ Wednesday night’s his night off.”
“He came to ask you for a date? I never thought a woman appeared to advantage when she was identifying a corpse.”
“He saw through the superficialities of the situation. Anyway, I said yes.”
Valentine’s eyes widened. “Was he cute?”
“I could spend the rest of my life with that man,” sighed Clarisse. “And he was Portuguese too—you know what that means.”
“Yeah,” said Valentine. “All Portuguese men have big—”
“Hearts,” said Clarisse quickly.
“But this cop didn’t mention the murder?”
“No,” said Clarisse. “I wonder if they even know that Mr. King was selling drugs. I wonder if they know any of what you told me.”
“Probably not. The entire FBI doesn’t have the investigative powers of five gossiping queens.”
“There’s something you said that I don’t understand: How do you know Jeff King didn’t change into his costume in the ladies’ room at the Boatslip?”
“Because there was a big contingent of dykes there late yesterday afternoon, and it was off-limits to men. My friend Larry was sitting on the porch of the Casablanca all afternoon—that’s right across the street—and he saw Jeff go in with his bag, and come out later in his costume, but without the bag. So somewhere in the Boatslip he changed his clothes.”
“That means he was probably staying in somebody’s room. Maybe he tricked,” suggested Clarisse.
“If it was only a trick he wouldn’t have left his bag. It was more likely he ran into somebody who agreed to put him up. Somebody he already knew. That also means that his bag is still somewhere in the Boatslip.”
“So at least there’s one person who’s not talking,” said Clarisse ruefully. “I just wish all these people would get the really important part right.”
Valentine looked up from his sandwich curiously.
“The really important part,” said Clarisse, “is that I found him, alerted the police, and provided positive identification.”
“Give up, doll,” said Valentine. “This dead drug dealer isn’t going to make you famous. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but the rumor is that the body was found by an antique dealer from Chicago who was on a bad acid trip, and it sent him over the edge and he had to be flown to the hospital in Hyannis.”
Clarissa was incensed. “Oh,” she cried, “stealing my thunder! Don’t talk to me about the detective abilities of the male homosexual. My one chance to get my picture on the cover of Real Detective and True Police Stories—and the gay community can’t get it straight!”
Chapter Eight
SHORTLY AFTER VALENTINE had left the shop, Beatrice returned to look in on Clarisse.
She opened the door, stuck in her head, pulled her dark glasses down low on the bridge of her nose, and peered at Clarisse over the top of them. “How are you getting along?”
“Just fine,” replied Clarisse with a grin that was as wide as it was insincere.
Beatrice came all the way into the shop. She wore a forest-green linen dress with black trim and a black sash. Her sandals were lacquered black. Her skin was of a leathered toughness that is attained only in women of a certain age who have spent nearly all of their lives in Florida or southern California.
“I’m so glad you’ve come to work for me,” said Beatrice. “I’m so happy that Danny found you for me.”
“Danny?”
“Dan Valentine,” said Beatrice with surprise.
“Oh, Danny,” replied Clarisse. “Yes, well, I needed the job.”
“You’re from Boston?”
Clarisse nodded.
“Did you work in retail there?”
“I was the principal legal consultant for a major advertising firm with offices in Boston, San Juan, and Honolulu.”
“And you gave that up to come work here?”
“I was tired of the grin
d,” said Clarisse with a confiding nod. “The constant travel to Puerto Rico and Hawaii wore me out.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find it very dull in the Provincetown Crafts Boutique then,” said Beatrice, with some concern in her voice. “But I hope you find it exciting enough to stay on for the whole summer. I had a girl in here, hired her on April Fools’ Day—and I was the fool. She robbed me blind.”
“She knew how to work the register, then?”
“No,” said Beatrice with widened eyes, “she was stealing the merchandise.”
Clarisse looked around. “Are you sure?”
“I caught her one day pushing a ceramic toothbrush holder down the front of her pants. Then I went to see her parents, and they showed me her room. It was filled with things from this shop. Her parents were very upset. Judy had told them she got them as commissions for doing so much selling.”
“A wicked girl!”
“I brought everything back,” said Beatrice, “and put it on a markdown table. And do you know that that girl had the effrontery to come back in here and buy the pieces that she liked best?”
“What she did was very wrong,” said Clarisse.
Customers entered. Beatrice smiled at them, and stepped closer to the counter. She said to Clarisse, “I’m flying up to Boston this afternoon to go to the gift show at Hynes Auditorium.” She sighed happily. “The gift show is like Aladdin’s Cave to me. Can you imagine this place expanded to the size of twenty-five basketball courts?”
“No,” said Clarisse quickly. “I can’t.”
“That’s what the gift show is like. I should be back by seven and I’ll bring you some catalogs to look through. You can help me choose some new stock.”
“I’d love to,” said Clarisse, with a smile that was genuine.
Clarisse liked Beatrice, though she could by no means endorse the woman’s taste in bric-a-brac. Clarisse did her best to wait cheerfully on customers that afternoon and not condemn them as Philistines simply because they wandered in to browse. But her resolution wavered as the crowds grew larger and the hour grew later. When Beatrice returned at the promised time and took over for the rest of the evening, Clarisse staggered across to the Throne and Scepter, where Valentine still had an hour on duty.
“This was the worst day I’ve spent since I heard that Patty P. Hearst had been kidnapped,” she whispered, and groped blindly for the drink he’d prepared for her.
Valentine smiled. “Too bad you had to begin like this, but Sunday’s always the busiest day around here. Probably during the week everything’ll be very quiet and pleasant—”
“The Provincetown Crafts Boutique could never be ‘quiet and pleasant.’ Not with that merchandise. I felt as if I were presiding over an elves’ workshop in there.”
“Well, just relax. After I finish here we’re going home and changing clothes and I’m taking you out to dinner. I even”—he opened the refrigerator behind the bar and took out a small box and held it up to her—“bought you a corsage. Cymbidium.”
Clarisse shook her head slowly. “As bribes go, it falls short of a proposal of marriage or a shoeboxful of diamonds, but I suppose it will have to do.”
The Throne and Scepter was not crowded. Many of the visitors who had come to Provincetown for the day, the weekend, or the previous week were packing up now or had already left; the town seemed quiet. At a table just behind where Clarisse sat at the bar two men in their late forties were fighting, merely for the pleasure of it, it seemed. Their relationship had broken up formally eight years before but they still debated the causes and the blame, and seemed very pleased that Clarisse was attending closely to them.
To her right at the bar were seven men, of greatly varying age and appearance but all Provincetown regulars, engaged in a kind of round-table discussion on who had the biggest tits in Hollywood. The contest had narrowed to Kathryn Grayson and Mamie Van Doren, with Miss Jane Russell contemptuously dismissed as publicity hype. When Valentine placed a second drink before Clarisse, one of the men turned to her and asked, “You ever had a screen test, honey?”
When she went to the ladies’ room, Clarisse passed through a dark corner of the bar, and to her surprise, discovered Ann and Margaret sitting at a tiny table that was nearly hid behind a vast palm in an Art Nouveau pot. Holding hands and gazing intently into each other’s eyes, they did not even notice her until she spoke.
“Good afternoon,” said Clarisse pleasantly.
The two women looked up, grasped for recognition, and then broke into smiles.
“Hi,” said Ann, lifting her drink in a toast.
“Hello, Clarisse,” said Margaret with a smile.
They spoke for a moment about the party, about Noah’s pool, about their plans for the evening, then Clarisse went on into the ladies’ room. When she came out again, Ann said, “Have Daniel bring me another gin and tonic, will you please? He’s been forgetting me.”
“No, he hasn’t,” said Margaret in a low voice. “You’ve had enough. If you have any more, you’re not going to be able to taste your dinner.”
“I want one more!” protested Ann.
Margaret sighed and nodded to Clarisse. “Have Daniel send one over, and a Perrier for me.”
Clarisse walked away, and heard the two women buzzing behind her. When she got to the bar, she said, “The lady who doesn’t need another gin and tonic wants another gin and tonic.”
“That’s six,” said Valentine, shaking his head. “Do you think she’ll try to bust up the place?”
“I like to drink,” said Clarisse. “But I think it’s undignified for a woman with an appearance to maintain to fall on her face before eight o’clock. Barroom floors always smudge your makeup.”
“If I had Terry O’Sullivan for a boss, I’d get sloshed on my vacation too.”
“Margaret is trying to keep her in line, that’s something. Is this summer love or is it a real affair, do you think?”
“Summer love. Unfortunately, they’re involved in a four-sided triangle.” Clarisse turned to him inquiringly. “Ann will have to go back to Miriam in Boston. Miriam has a lot of money and an ugly temper.”
“And Margaret?”
“Is married to Joyce, in Toronto. Joyce is thin, and supports her mother in a nursing home.”
“How do you know all this?”
Valentine shrugged. “A good bartender learns a little something about every one of his customers.”
“You eavesdrop, you mean.”
Valentine held up his hands in protest. “I draw the line at mechanical listening devices. I scorn hidden microphones. All my information is obtained legally. This information came from Mr. Terry O’Sullivan.” He moved away to wait on Mamie Van Doren’s most fervent partisan. In the dark corner of the bar, Ann burst into tears and fled into the ladies’ room.
Margaret came to the bar. “Tell Daniel to forget about the reorder, Clarisse. Ann and I are leaving. You don’t happen to know where I could pick up a home Detox Unit, do you?”
Chapter Nine
ALITTLE LATER Valentine and Clarisse were walking back up Commercial Street from Kiley Court. Valentine wore a loose-fitting white summer suit circa 1940 with a black shirt printed with a single line of enormous long-stemmed yellow roses. Clarisse wore a white dress of the same period with the spray of cymbidium pinned to her bodice. She’d fashioned her hair into a style in imitation of one worn by Eva Perón. Their appearance as a sterling couple of fashion and consequence was undermined only by Valentine’s winking at every good-looking man that passed.
After the madness of Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, the streets seemed almost deserted. The day’s blasting heat had abated beneath a balmy salt breeze that wafted across Commercial Street from the bay.
The Swiss Miss in Exile was a small two-story Victorian house, set well back from the street which had been renovated into a fair likeness of a Swiss chalet, with pierced shutters and a great deal of gingerbread. It was painted raw sienna and canary yellow, and
its window boxes were filled with red geraniums. Daniel led Clarisse up the evergreen-lined path toward the entrance.
She paused at the threshold and glanced at a couple of grinning stone dwarfs that stood bowing at either side of the door. “I’ve never eaten here before,” she remarked meaningfully. “Swear to God that the food will make up for the decor?”
“Food’s good,” said Valentine, stepping into the front parlor. In this room was the maître d’s desk, the reservation book open on it, and several comfortable chairs for guests waiting to be seated. “But don’t you know why I brought you here?”
“You’re meeting a boyfriend who’s into dirndls?”
Valentine shook his head, and lit cigarettes for them. The maître d’ hadn’t yet appeared. “Your uncle owns this restaurant.”
“What!”
“He bought it last January, and then had it fixed up. I forget what it was before—a guesthouse I think. It wasn’t gay so of course it went under.”
“You mean to tell me that Noah authorized those charming architectural details on the facade of this building?”
Valentine pointed to the bright red-and-green stenciled walls in the reception room: “And the interior decoration as well.”
“Why? Noah keeps his business dealings pretty much secret, but I didn’t think he knew anything about restaurants—or does he?”
Valentine leaned forward and whispered, “Maybe not, but the White Prince does…”
Clarisse nodded with sudden understanding. “And that’s why he’s never mentioned it to me, I’ll bet. So Noah invested let’s say fifty thousand dollars to keep the White Prince happy. I might have known. Why doesn’t Noah want to make me happy? For only twenty-five dollars he could buy me a sledgehammer for the Provincetown Crafts Boutique.” She looked around her with increased interest. “It’s probably doing all right, too. Noah’s never lost money at anything he did.”
“And the White Prince has never made any,” Valentine reminded her.
“God. At least he’s not the maître d’. If he were, straight customers would never get seated.”
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