Cobalt

by Aldyne, Nathan

  “I think he’s mostly kept out of sight. Even though he looks as though the only pencil he ever used was to do his eyebrows, the White Prince is actually pretty good with books.”

  Beyond the front parlor, in the warren of large and small rooms on the first and second floors, from two to seven tables had been set up in each, and in the backyard, made private by an old and vigorously pruned privet hedge, there was garden dining. Presently, the maître d’, wearing a saffron-hued peasant shirt and raw-cotton slacks, seated them in a tiny room overlooking the garden. The breeze through the lace-curtained window was warm and fragrant. Their waiter was tall and sufficiently handsome, clad in a white shirt, knee socks, clogs, and chocolate shorts held up by brightly embroidered suspenders. They settled comfortably into high-backed rush chairs, noted with satisfaction that the only other table in the room was unoccupied, and ordered drinks. The illumination was provided by candles only—on the mantel behind Daniel, in sconces behind Clarisse, and in a yellow glass globe on the table between them.

  “Thank you,” said Clarisse to Valentine when the drinks were brought. She raised her glass. “This is just what I needed after today.”

  “I was thinking about taking you to the Forward Pass, but I wasn’t sure you’d be up for waiters dressed like cheerleaders.”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully, “probably not.” She placed her clutch bag on the table, and cautiously lifted the lid of a small box next to the saltcellar. It played a tinny Viennese waltz. She slammed the lid shut. “Candlelight,” she said. “And a large menu, and a waiter who knows what he’s doing—that’s what I needed, having been so recently subjected to the brutal side of human nature.”

  “Your customers weren’t that bad.”

  “I’m talking about Jeff King.”

  “Are you going into your Witness for the Prosecution routine again?”

  The waiter returned. Clarisse said, “Order for me, Val. I’m in no condition to make minor decisions.”

  Valentine spoke to the waiter for a few moments, and when he was gone, leaned forward and pulled back the lace curtain from the window. The last moments of twilight hovered over the garden. Yellow lamps placed in niches carved in the privet hedge lighted the area softly. The murmur of conversation and the discreet clatter of dishes and cutlery was very pleasant.

  “There’s a cutie,” said Valentine, and pointed to a man seated alone at a table in the corner of the garden.

  Clarisse peered out. “How can you tell? He’s got his back to us. And he’s in almost total shadow.”

  “Sea air sharpens my senses. I can smell a cutie—especially when he’s got shoulders like that.”

  “Maybe if I smashed a window he’d turn around and you could get a look at his face.”

  “I know those shoulders, in fact,” said Valentine.

  “You would. Who is it?”

  Valentine paused for a moment, considering. “It’s Axel Braun,” he said.

  “At the party? Polyphemus?”

  “And where’s Ulysses I wonder,” mused Daniel.

  “I don’t know,” said Clarisse, “but I’ll bet you he’s not out laying flowers on Jeff King’s grave.” She peered out the window again. “Axel looks depressed.”

  “He’s got his back to us. How can you tell he’s depressed?”

  “All good-looking men get depressed on Sunday night, especially if they’re alone. I know it for a fact.”

  At that moment, Axel Braun, holding a glass of wine, turned in his chair and looked toward the doorway to the interior of the restaurant, as if hoping to see someone there. He turned back after a moment, slightly hunching his recognizable shoulders as he did so.

  Through appetizer, salad, and entree, Clarisse caught Valentine up on Boston gossip, detailed her plans to attend the Portia School of Law in the autumn, and then confided her intention of destroying at least one item a day in the Provincetown Crafts Boutique. “The clowns are easy because they’re plaster. You just sort of push one off on your way to the storeroom. It could happen to anybody. When they’re all gone, I’ll start on the fishermen, but they’re a lot harder, because they’re made out of wood. But what I’d really like to get at are the wind chimes, but that’s almost impossible to do ‘accidentally,’ because I have to stand on a chair to reach them.”

  When their dishes were being cleared away, and they were finishing off the Burgundy, Clarisse said, “Oh, I meant to ask you, did you hear anything more about Jeff King? Did you fill in the gaps of his itinerary?”

  “People did talk,” replied Valentine. “But by the afternoon the rumors were starting to get wild. I wonder if we ought to believe all the things we heard this morning.”

  “Probably not. But still—tell me what you heard at the bar.”

  “Well, that Jeff King not only had the bridal suite—there isn’t one—at the Boatslip, that he had a room at the Casablanca, the Pilgrim House, and the Holiday Inn at Truro. He told five people he thought someone was trying to kill him, had sex with seventeen men in the dunes, danced with at least six dozen people at the Boatslip and at the party later, dealt about one ton of drugs including angel dust and heroin, got drunk, threw up, hallucinated himself into a frenzy, and still managed to get himself killed on the beach—all in about sixteen hours. He OD’d on heroin, had a live grenade shoved in his mouth, he was spiked to death by a drag. But of all the people I talked to, no one seemed very sorry—it was odd.”

  “Why, do you suppose?”

  “Because Jeff King had the bad sense to get murdered in a resort. Nobody knew him, nobody knew who he was. If these people were back in Boston or New Haven or wherever and a gay man had been killed a few blocks away, they’d be up in arms. But down here they figure…” Val shrugged.

  “Figure what?” demanded Clarisse.

  “They figure: Who cares? They come here and they say: Entertain me. Give me a good time. I’m paying enough for it. Well, entertainment doesn’t include worrying yourself sick over a drug dealer who turned the tide red on Sunday morning.”

  Clarisse was silent a moment. Then she said, “That’s a rotten attitude.”

  “‘Who cares?’” repeated Valentine softly.

  Chapter Ten

  “YOOOOODEEElooooowwwdeeelaaayyyyheeehooooo!!!” rippled majestically from outside the door of the dining room where Valentine and Clarisse sat waiting for the dessert menu.

  “That wasn’t recorded,” said Clarisse darkly, and turned in her chair a little.

  A face like a full glimmering summer moon popped into view at the side of the doorframe. Below it Clarisse could see a great flounce of periwinkle blue material supported by stiff white organdy underslips. At the threshold peeked a round white-stockinged foot in a pink satin slipper.

  “Quick, Val,” Clarisse murmured, “pour me the rest of that wine.”

  With a second yodel that was longer than the first and by far louder, the woman backed into the room, hunched over and with mincing little steps, grinning at Valentine and Clarisse over her shoulder. Her face was round and pretty, with wide bright green eyes beneath thick fluttering lashes. Her mouth was bright red and bee-stung, the globes of her cheeks rouged into soft circles of rose. Her hair was honey blond, parted in the center and twined into braids that dangled like mooring ropes below her waist.

  She turned around and cried, “Yah, goot evenink!” She beamed, picking at the puffed sleeves of her white blouse and yanking at the straps of her pinafore.

  Valentine had turned toward the window, leaning an elbow on the table and biting his knuckles to keep from laughing.

  “Good evening,” said Clarisse weakly.

  “Yah, yah!” the woman cried robustly. “You vould like to see de lingunberry tart oder de mousse au chocolat oder the pfeffernüsse oder…” When she moved several steps to the side, Clarisse at last could see the dessert cart that had been hidden behind her. She threw her braids over her shoulders, nearly knocking the breath out of a waiter who was passing through the room, an
d pulled the cart up to the table. “Oder vielleicht,” she went on, “you would like de Heidi Sviss Miss Special?” She pointed to the centerpiece, a small Mont Blanc with the minuscule figure of a little girl—dressed exactly like the woman herself—skiing down the side of the confectionary mountain.

  The woman fluttered her eyes madly at Clarisse and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The cart rolled just a little when she did. “Take de time, yah!”

  “I’m not certain that I’m ready for this,” said Clarisse softly, looking at Valentine and pressing his foot beneath the table.

  “Vat?” cried the woman, “not even yust von?”

  Clarisse shook her head hesitantly. Valentine broke into laughter, stood and kissed the woman on her cheek. “Clarisse,” he said, “this is Angel Smith.”

  Angel Smith grabbed the hand that Clarisse was about to offer to her and shook it frantically. “Nice to meet you,” she said, without a trace of accent.

  She pushed the cart out of the way, pulled up a couple of chairs and seated herself at their table. “I’ll confess,” she said, glancing back at the dessert cart, “the pudding is from yesterday and it’s a little rubbery, but the strawberry tarts are great. I whip the cream myself.” She hoisted three of the large tarts onto the table, grabbed three forks and three spoons from a tray beneath, and while Clarisse and Valentine murmured their thanks she began taking birdlike dips of the whipped cream. “Heaven,” she breathed, “just heaven.”

  “How have you been?” asked Valentine politely.

  Angel groaned between bites. “Business is great, but I’d like to bury Heidi.” She looked at Clarisse. “Do you know how humiliating it can be for a thirty-two-year-old woman to dress up like this every night just to flog desserts? With whipped cream like this people would buy them even if it was Nancy Reagan pushing the cart. Oh, well,” she conceded, “got to make a living.” She popped three strawberries into her mouth.

  “Do you work in Provincetown every summer?” Clarisse asked.

  “Like cuckoo-clockwork.”

  “Perhaps you could find a job in a restaurant where you didn’t have to dress in a ludicrous costume.”

  “Ah—Clarisse…” Valentine cautioned.

  “I think of what my mother would say,” said Angel, putting down her fork. “But the fact is, I am the Swiss Miss. And when I’m in P’town, I’m the Swiss Miss in Exile.”

  Clarisse shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Angel and Noah are partners,” said Valentine.

  “See, the Swiss Miss in Exile is an offshoot of our first Swiss Miss, on Harvard Avenue in Brookline next to that all-night bagel palace.”

  “Where is the White Prince?” asked Valentine. “I haven’t seen him framed in any doorways this evening.”

  “One of our dishwashers ran off with a fabulously wealthy nature photographer he met in the dunes, so the Prince is downstairs in the kitchen screaming like Fay Wray.”

  “I was hoping to run into you at the party last night,” said Valentine.

  “Oh, yes! How was the party? I was dying to go—” She shifted her eyes to Clarisse. “I was going as Pat Nixon. Catch the resemblance? I have this thing about First Ladies.” She went back to Valentine. “But I didn’t get into town until this morning, so I missed all the fun.” As she scraped the last of her tart free of the dish, she glanced speculatively back at the dessert cart. “I heard there was some trouble,” she said offhandedly. “Someone got killed?”

  “That’s all you heard?” asked Clarisse. “I thought it was all anybody was talking about.”

  “I’ve had my head in the oven all day.”

  Valentine provided Angel with a brief account of the death of the man whom Clarisse had met getting off the ferry.

  “So,” said Angel, turning to Clarisse at the last, “you found him! That calls for another dessert!” She hauled the Mont Blanc from the cart and placed it before Clarisse, who hadn’t managed even to finish her strawberry tart.

  Clarisse smiled and pushed the Mont Blanc toward Angel, who shrugged and dug in. “Did you try to revive him?” she asked after half a dozen quick bites.

  “It was too late for that,” said Clarisse.

  “Are you sure? Honey, if it had been me finding a man alone on the beach at that hour, I would at least have tried a little mouth-to-crotch resuscitation.”

  “Mr. King was cute,” said Clarisse, “but he was a goner.”

  Angel put down her spoon. “His name was King? And his first name was Jeff?”

  “You knew him?” asked Valentine.

  “Once upon a time,” said Angel, plucking Heidi from off the mountain, “I knew a Jeff King. Describe the corpse, please,” she said to Clarisse.

  “Clone. Cute, but still a clone. Short dark hair, well-trimmed mustache, standard-issue body. Except for his eyes—his eyes were different. They were cobalt blue.”

  Angel shook her head ruefully, but didn’t put down her spoon. “Same one.”

  “You used to know him,” prompted Valentine.

  “Hadn’t seen him in seven years. Not since I lived on Queensbury Street. That was a bad time for me,” she said seriously. “I had no money, no prospects, and a boyfriend whose favorite colors were black and blue. I’d go down to the Haymarket late every Saturday afternoon when they were throwing away all the stuff that they hadn’t sold—and that was my weekly shopping. It was,” she said delicately, “the worst two years of my life.”

  Valentine and Clarisse were silent.

  “Anyway,” Angel went on, “right under me”—she paused a moment, then began again—“this nice man lived in the apartment right below mine. Gay, handsome, about forty—but he had this kid living with him. And that kid was Jeff King. He didn’t look like a clone then, of course—he had long hair and a beard, your basic student hippie. Also your basic thief. I’d come in in the afternoon—I was working part-time at the Burger King around the corner—and I’d find him hanging around the mailboxes. One month this old lady upstairs didn’t get her Social Security check. I had to steal from Burger King for the entire month just to keep her alive. And then the next month, my welfare check didn’t come. I reported it, of course, but they didn’t believe me, not even when I showed them that the signature on the canceled check wasn’t mine.”

  “And you’re saying it was Jeff King who stole those checks?” asked Clarisse. “How did you know for sure?”

  “I just knew. After that I’d always glare at him in the hall, but he’d never look at me. Sometime after that he skipped out on the man downstairs, stole an emerald ring and eight place settings of Rosenthal china. All that was seven years ago, and I’m doing fine right now, but I’ll tell you something—I’m not sorry he got his. In fact, I wish it had been me who found him. Do you know what it’s like to go without money for a month, I mean to have no money for an entire month? And all the little bastard wanted that money for was to buy drugs! He stole my welfare check and bought a gram and a half of cocaine! I hope he suffered when he died.” She plunged her fork into the middle of Mont Blanc, splitting it open like an earthquake.

  Valentine said nothing. Clarisse fumbled a cigarette out of her bag and lighted it.

  Angel heaved a great sigh and erased the consternation from her face. “Oh, now I’ve ruined your evening,” she sighed.

  “No,” said Clarisse softly. “Not at all.”

  Angel pushed back her chairs and stood. She waved a hand over the table. “This evening’s on the house. No back talk, Daniel, or I’ll clog-dance right here—in double time, with wings and everything.” She turned to Clarisse, and her face was suddenly stern once more. “I feel like an old score has finally been settled. So tonight I’m celebrating.”

  Chapter Eleven

  VALENTINE AND CLARISSE were about to get up from the table, when their waiter suddenly appeared with liqueurs, compliments of their hostess, whose yodel they heard in the garden. Clarisse pulled back the curtain and smiled at Angel Smith, who grin
ned and waved. She dropped the curtain into place, then said in a low voice to Daniel, “Here comes the lost and lonely. Don’t let him get by without finding out what he knows.”

  Axel Braun had entered the house from the garden and would have left without seeing them had not Valentine quickly stood and fetched him from the adjoining room. “Come on in and help us kill this bottle of Drambuie,” he said, and drew Axel into the tiny dining room. Clarisse signaled the waiter for the third glass, and smiled at Axel.

  Valentine introduced them. “I’m Val’s roomie,” said Clarisse complacently. She took a cigarette from her bag and Axel produced a lighter from his pants pocket. His chair was pushed back from the table; he sat with his legs wide apart and his arms stretched out before him. His fingers rested very lightly on his knees, and Clarisse half suspected he was involved in advanced isometrics.

  “Were you at the party last night?” Axel asked.

  Beneath the table Clarisse nudged the toe of her shoe hard against Valentine’s thigh. She exhaled a waft of swirling smoke, and said, “No, I had to do inventory last night. Did you enjoy it?”

  Axel nodded, and flexed his triceps diligently before taking another swallow of Drambuie. “Who was your friend then, Daniel—the Empress Wu?”

  “A friend from Boston. And it was a man under all that paint.”

  Axel snorted approvingly. “Tell him he was pretty good. Fooled me. Is he…”

  “Is he what?” prompted Clarisse when Axel didn’t continue.

  “Is he staying in town?”

  “You want to get set up with a date?” asked Valentine.

  “No. I was just wondering if he were still in town.”

  “No,” said Valentine, not looking at Clarisse. “I put him on the commuter plane this morning. Still in drag.”

  Axel nodded distractedly, but seemed relieved. “Listen,” he said, “you haven’t seen Scott tonight, have you?”

  Valentine shook his head. “Were you waiting for him out there?”