Cobalt

by Aldyne, Nathan

  “Tulips,” she said, poking at one in the design. “Black tulips on a field of red. When I talked to him after we got off the boat, he was wearing this shirt. Bend down.”

  Valentine leaned forward, and Clarisse pulled back the collar. “No name tag, but the label’s period. I’m sure it’s his. I’d bet Richard Nixon’s political future that there’s not another one like it on the eastern seaboard.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Think anything else of his turned up here?”

  “Let’s look! What should we look for?”

  “Underwear,” suggested Valentine. “Drug dealers always wear fancy underwear. Oh, and Jeff King went swimming Saturday afternoon, look for a wet bathing suit.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Of course I am. The only things you saw him wearing were this shirt and the toga on Saturday night.”

  “Chiton,” Clarisse corrected.

  “All right, chiton,” Valentine allowed. “So he probably got buried in the chiton, and now you want to look through an entire clothing store for the rest of his wardrobe, which you never even saw?”

  “This is a clue!” she said, stabbing at another tulip.

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense to ask the people running the shop where they got the shirt?”

  “I suppose,” said Clarisse, reddening a little. “Take it off.” While he did so, she went into the dressing room, and removed the gown. She came out with it over her arm. “Get out your Visa, I don’t have enough money for this.”

  At the counter Valentine surrendered his plastic. Clarisse smiled at the young woman behind the counter. She had a pinched, heavily rouged face, pouting lips outlined in fuchsia lipstick, chopped hair dyed black and streaked above the ear in turquoise. She wore a leather jacket so tight that she probably could not have raised a cigarette to her lips, and whether she would be able to handle the cash register was itself an interesting question.

  “You have wonderful things here,” Clarisse remarked. “Where do most of them come from?”

  “Here and there,” the woman replied without any interest at all.

  “Do you order from Boston and New York, or do you get most of it from around here?”

  “Both,” replied the young woman, snipping the price tags from the shirt and the gown.

  “I mean,” said Clarisse carefully, “do you have buyers who go out looking or do you buy lots of clothing or does some of it get donated?”

  “You looking for a job?” asked the woman behind the register warily. “We don’t need anybody.”

  Valentine sighed and held up the shirt. “This shirt is evidence in a murder case. It belonged to the drug dealer who was strangled on Saturday night. We’re buying it to take to the police. Can you tell us where you got it?”

  The girl brightened, and smiled at Valentine. “Oh, sure, I remember that shirt. A whole bag of stuff got left out on the front steps last night, but that shirt was the only thing decent in it. I went through the bag myself. People leave stuff here sometimes. They sort of think we’re a charity ’cause we handle used clothes.”

  “Do you have the other things here?” asked Valentine.

  The girl shook her head. “Everything else in the bag was new. So was the bag. It all just got dumped.”

  “What else was in the bag?” demanded Clarisse.

  “Oh, just stuff,” replied the girl vaguely.

  “What sort of stuff?” asked Valentine with a smile.

  “Well, there was some underwear and socks, and some black tennis shoes. I would have kept those, except they were too big for me. Combs and brushes and shampoo and all like that. Pair of jeans, button-fly Levis. Oh, yeah, I kept those too. They’re in back, but I don’t remember what size they are. Everything gets washed first—disinfected too—before we put it on the racks,” she added reassuringly.

  Clarisse’s gown was wrapped, but Valentine insisted on wearing the shirt. He winked at the girl behind the counter, and pulled Clarisse out of the store.

  “You’re the worst interrogator I ever saw,” complained Clarisse.

  “No I’m not,” protested Valentine. “You weren’t getting anywhere with that girl.”

  “She was after your body. She would have given away state secrets for a chance to hold your hand. I think you ought to go back and try to find that bag they threw out. There could be a vital clue in that bag.”

  “I am not going to spend a warm summer evening sifting through a dumpster. Besides, everything got picked up today.”

  “All right, all right. I wish you wouldn’t wear the evidence though—I think it’s bad luck.”

  “I like this shirt,” said Valentine. “And it is not evidence. It’s just a shirt.”

  “Who do you suppose left that bag on the doorstep of Maggie Duck’s?”

  “The killer,” shrugged Valentine. “Who else?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “WHERE SHALL I take you to eat?” asked Valentine, pausing to admire his appearance in the dead man’s shirt, as he saw his reflection in the mirror of a shop window.

  “I had wanted to eat outside, but it’s too damp now. The fog’s coming in, so we might try—” She squeezed Daniel’s arm, and whispered, “Well, look who’s back together again.” Coming toward them down Commercial Street were Axel Braun and Scott DeVoto. The two men made an undeniably handsome couple, talking and laughing quietly together, dressed in worn levis and black tank tops—outfits that spelled we’re going dancing.

  “All is forgiven,” said Valentine. “Thank God. Don’t stop to talk,” he warned Clarisse. “I don’t think Scott’s even above jealousy of a woman.”

  The men did not see Valentine and Clarisse until the couples were no more than twenty feet apart; they met just in front of the well-lighted windows of an antique shop.

  Axel’s face registered pleasant surprise, but Scott’s smile withered. As Valentine and Clarisse drew nearer, the two men’s mouths dropped open together. They stopped dead.

  “Hello,” said Valentine, and despite his own injunction paused on the sidewalk.

  Axel nodded a distracted greeting. Scott drew in his breath sharply between clenched teeth: it was an inadvertent hiss.

  Valentine and Clarisse glanced at each other apprehensively.

  “Where did you get that shirt?” demanded Scott.

  “Oh, do you like it?” cried Clarisse. “I just picked it out for him not five minutes ago. We—”

  “I don’t believe you!” cried Scott in livid anger. He turned to his lover. “It’s one trick too many, just one fucking trick too many! And you told me you had never even seen him before!” He stalked off, leaving Clarisse and Valentine paralyzed with wonder.

  Axel turned to them in agitation. “I bought Scott that shirt the first Christmas we spent together. There’s not another one like it.” He grimaced. “It’s one of the shirts that Jeff King stole out of Scott’s closet.”

  With this brief explanation, he hurried off to catch up with Scott. In another moment the voices of the two men were raised loudly and with such vituperation and heat that a number of people paused to listen. Valentine and Clarisse watched as Scott jumped up onto the raised veranda in front of the Throne and Scepter. He was alone on it as on a stage and, as any good actor would, he stood in the spotlight. When he waved his arms, the encroaching evening fog swirled in the bright yellow light.

  “Whore!” Scott screamed. “I could kill you! Tricking in the morning, tricking in the afternoon, tricking every time I go to take a leak! What disease will I get this week? And now you give away my clothes to your fucking tricks! You want this shirt too?”

  Axel Braun had climbed the brick steps at the end of the veranda, and was slowly approaching his lover. Axel said something, but his voice was so soft that Valentine and Clarisse could not hear the words. With an agonized cry, Scott DeVoto ripped off his shirt.

  “Nice chest,” remarked Valentine, “I didn’t realize it was so hairy.”

  “Take it!” shouted
Scott. “Find some fucking trick, and give it to him!”

  “That shirt would look great on me behind the bar,” said Valentine.

  “Val!” cried Clarisse, “have you no compassion for the misery of the betrayed?”

  “Not when misery is staged to such effect,” replied Valentine nodding toward Scott, who was surreptitiously glancing over the street to see how much attention he had garnered.

  “Come down,” said Axel, and took Scott’s arm.

  Scott jerked away, losing his balance and tumbling off the veranda onto the sidewalk. His fall was broken by a passing mob of teenaged girls with ice cream cones; they shrieked and scurried on. Scott sat, weeping convulsively, with his back against a lamppost. Passersby on the street regarded him with more curiosity than pity. Axel stepped down from the veranda, lifted Scott up, and spoke earnestly to him for several moments. Across the street, Valentine and Clarisse lit cigarettes.

  Scott nodded dumbly to whatever it was that Axel was saying, and in a little while he took back his torn shirt and they moved off together toward the A-House. They were quickly swallowed by the mist, which had now grown quite thick.

  Valentine and Clarisse resumed their interrupted progress. “Does Axel like these scenes?” she asked.

  “He says he doesn’t,” said Valentine, shrugging vaguely. “But it’s the third public altercation they’ve had since the party.”

  “You’ve had quite a day,” said Clarisse. “Yesterday Terry O’Sullivan provided the dramatics, and tonight it was Scott DeVoto. What power do you have that induces perfectly reasonable homosexuals to give performances that would reduce Tallulah Bankhead to a rank Method actress?”

  Valentine shrugged again, and they proceeded in silence. Traffic crept along the crowded street at its usual pace. Tourists thronged the shops, and gay men had begun to emerge from their guesthouses for an hour’s stroll and dinner before they went out to the bars. Even underneath the sweet dampness of the fog they could smell frying fish and pizza and cotton candy. On one side of Commercial Street a great crowd blocked the sidewalk in front of the booth of a street artist doing the portrait of identical twins who looked to be about seven or eight years old, and on the other side a long line was forming before the movie house for the opening night of the Diana Dors retrospective. Valentine and Clarisse overheard conversations and arguments, they saw assignations being made, and watched drugs and money changing hands. There were spurts of laughter and petulance. Friends of Valentine grinned and waved to him from shop and restaurant windows. As they passed the Provincetown Crafts Boutique, two women emerged clutching identical wooden fishermen and their vibrant red lobsters. There were noisy crowds on the sidewalks, and indolent crowds at the outdoor restaurants, and distracted crowds in the shops and the cafés—and no one thought of Jeff King, whose corpse lay on ice at the undertaker’s, three doors from the bar where he once scored three thousand dollars in cocaine in a single evening. The fog thickened by the minute, roiling in from the bay, cloaking everything. Every few feet, faces grinning or grim appeared suddenly before them, and then quickly disappeared behind.

  “God,” said Valentine evenly, “this place really is a garden of evil.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  THEY PROCEEDED through the fog to the Café Blasé, but because of the dampness and because the waiters would have been able to find them outside only with the assistance of a flashlight, they ate indoors. From their table beside a second-floor window they could see neither the adjoining house, about seven feet away, nor the ground, about ten feet below. They talked of the relationship between the swimming coach and his untrusting lover, and of the general turbulence that seemed to affect all such pairs spending time in this particular resort.

  “Despite the decals that I sell by the dozen,” said Clarisse, “Provincetown is not ‘For Lovers.’”

  “Maybe you should make one up yourself that says: ‘Provincetown: Trick Heaven.’”

  After dinner, like the blind, they stumbled through the fog to the Back Street Bar, where Clarisse paid Valentine’s dollar cover and pushed him gently down the stairs. “What you need,” she said, “is a stranger who’s never even heard of Terry O’Sullivan, and somebody who doesn’t care that you broke somebody’s heart. Find a man who’s happily married, and only wants you for your body.”

  Clarisse was right, of course, and in Back Street, Valentine was determined to throw off the pall of guilt that he knew Terry O’Sullivan had dexterously and deliberately thrown over him. He ordered a beer and wasn’t displeased to find that he was handed two bottles, it being two-for-one night. He wandered around the bar, not quite as crowded as it would be in another half hour, and was surprised to find, in the darkest corner of the innermost room, Axel Braun. He was without Scott, but he was not alone.

  He was in close smiling conversation with a man Valentine’s age, Valentine’s build, and Valentine’s coloring. Valentine, in fact, knew the man.

  He went over, nodded to both, said, “Hello, Jimmy. Hello, Axel. Axel, could I speak to you for a moment?” Without waiting for a reply from either of the men, he drew Axel aside. Axel didn’t even have time to pick up his beers.

  “I was just about to pop the question,” said Axel, miffed.

  “I know,” said Valentine. “That’s why I got you away from him.”

  Axel stared at Valentine with puzzled eyes and with a little hostility. “Why?”

  “That’s Jimmy the Ripper,” said Valentine.

  “His name’s Jimmy—”

  “He’ll take you home, and he’ll rip all your clothes off—you won’t have any buttons left. He’s the only man in Provincetown who can tear a hole in new denim with his fingernails.”

  “Could be hot,” mused Axel, and glanced back at the corner where Jimmy sat scowling.

  Valentine gave Axel his second beer. “He rips all your clothes apart, and then he throws you out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now, if you want to go back, you can. I don’t want to rescue a man who prefers to drown.”

  “I guess he’s not a cuddle-bunny then,” said Axel with a sigh.

  Valentine shook his head.

  Axel grimaced. “I didn’t want to be alone tonight.”

  “The making-up with Scott didn’t last very long.”

  “No,” replied Axel, “we didn’t even make it to the door of the A-House. He’s there, I’m here. And an hour from now he’ll come over here—or I’ll go over there—and we’ll glare at each other across the dance floor. Then one of us will go over, and then the other one will apologize, and then we’ll go home together—and we’ll have another fight before we get to the front door. Then Scott will cruise the beach for the rest of the night and I’ll have the double bed all to myself. So I was in here trying to pick somebody up so that when Scott came over here he wouldn’t find me.”

  “I’ll hide you,” said Valentine.

  “Would you?” said Axel, winking solemnly.

  After seeing Valentine through the basement door of Back Street, Clarisse had sat down on the brick balustrade and smoked a cigarette until a taxi stopped before the bar to discharge someone. She commandeered it and returned to Kiley Court. The taxi inched through the fog, and Clarisse sighed in the back seat with a delicious melancholy that she intended to enjoy, deepen, and prolong.

  Ann and Margaret were once again in the pool, but she would not have known that except for the sound of their splashing.

  “Only the hopelessly in love,” remarked Clarisse to the women cloaked by the fog, “would be out swimming on a night like this.”

  “It’s so romantic,” said Margaret, bobbing up through the mist into sudden visibility.

  “And I’m so stoned,” said Ann, invisibly.

  Clarisse went inside, climbed to her bedroom, and sat at her vanity. By candlelight she set just the front of her hair in the smallest perm rods she could find. She then climbed into bed and read a few chapters of a paperback reprint of Laura, then fell gently asle
ep, lulled by the distant splashing and soft voices of Ann and Margaret in the pool below.

  Her sleep was disrupted once during the night, when she dreamed of money and brown sugar. She rose from bed without turning on the light, stepped on Laura, and groped her way down the hall to the bathroom. She drew a glass of water, and as she drank looked out the window into the courtyard. The fog was there, but not as thick as it had been earlier. She still could not see the ground, and Noah’s wing of the house looked like the Giant’s castle, built in the clouds; the ivy and roses were the beanstalk that Jack the Giant-Killer would climb. Clarisse was pleased with this simile, which she thought rather good for the middle of the night.

  But the glass trembled in her hand, and water spilled over her nightgown when she saw that very figure of Jack the Giant-Killer appear suddenly in the middle of the courtyard. A naked man—at least his chest was bare, in the misty shadows she could see nothing below his waist—looked quickly around and up at each of the three parts of the house, then strode toward the alley gate.

  Without hesitation, Clarisse ran back to her room—tripping over only one object, an ottoman—to the window that looked out over the alley. She heard nothing, saw nothing.

  She had stood watch for several moments trying to puzzle out the man’s identity, when a movement in the bushes across the way caught her attention. The man had evidently hidden himself in the hedge around the garden of Poor Richard’s Buttery. But Clarisse gasped, for in no more than ten seconds, he apparently had dressed himself—and as he departed, his boots sounded angrily on the gravel.

  Clarisse returned to bed, and awakening in the morning she recalled the incident only vaguely. She reflected how many men were on the streets late at night in Provincetown, and how easily one or another of them might have wandered down Kiley Court.

  Having had little to drink the night before, and having gone to bed earlier than was usual, she awoke before her alarm, and made a happy resolution that she would never take another drink or see the other side of midnight again in her life. This she forthwith emended to exclude the coming evening, that of her date with Matteo Montalvo. She wondered if policemen were like firemen—she had handled a couple of those.