The Bohemian Murders

by Dianne Day

  He was trying to provoke me, but I pretended patience. “What is peculiar is that she was wearing a dress of red velvet, a rich fabric, excellently cut. Not the sort of dress one buys off the rack at the local department store. Furthermore, I’d be willing to bet my eyeteeth that her underclothes—camisole, petticoats, and so on—were hand-sewn. You know what that means!”

  “How should I know anything about women’s underclothes? You shock me, Fremont!”

  I made a mock frown. “You know, surely, that now that we have sewing machines and methods of mass manufacture, only the most expensive underthings are made by hand.”

  “Hmm.” Michael rubbed his chin. It is a habit of his when thinking, left over from the time (not too long ago) when he used to have a black beard with silver streaks at the sides.

  “Don’t you see?” I appealed to him, leaning across the table. “A woman of means would not be likely to go walking all by herself along the rocks of Point Pinos wearing such an elegant dress!”

  “You didn’t say she was found near Point Pinos.”

  “Well, she was. I saw her myself from the lighthouse at about four o’clock yesterday afternoon, and gave the alarm.”

  “So you think her drowning—if indeed she did drown—was no accident.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you base this assumption on the clothes she was wearing?”

  “Together with where she was found. If she had washed up on Del Monte Beach, I wouldn’t think it so peculiar.”

  “Because?”

  “Because then she could have been a guest at the Hotel Del Monte, out for an evening stroll, who got careless and turned her back on the water or some such thing. Really, Michael, you’re being extraordinarily dense!”

  He rubbed at his ear and blinked owlishly. “I suppose I’m a little out of practice, but it scarcely matters. Why come to me, Fremont?”

  I sat back, deflated. Yes, why indeed? What had happened to my old friend Michael Archer, a rather bookish older gentleman habitually dressed in a dark suit and white shirt—who used to enjoy playing Dr. Watson to my Sherlock Holmes? He had turned into this new fellow, Misha—what was the last name? Oh yes, Kossoff. I could tell this was Misha by the clothes he wore: pleated fawn trousers, cream-colored cashmere sweater with a gold silk scarf knotted into its open neck, and fringed brown suede vest. This Misha stirred such mixed feelings in me that I wanted to scream.

  But I said reasonably, “There was some suggestion that the woman who drowned may have been known in Carmel. I thought, because of your wide circle of acquaintance, that you might care to attempt to identify her.”

  He tipped his chair back and put one foot up on the table, shod in brown suede that matched his vest. “Let the police handle it, Fremont.”

  “Somehow I have the impression that they are not likely to try very hard.”

  “Maybe that’s wishful thinking on your part.”

  It was a deliberately harsh jibe that I did not dignify with a response.

  Michael reached out, stretching, and took an orange from a basket on the table. He began, slowly and carefully, to peel it. The fragrance of the fruit made my tongue curl. He said, “There is no point in my going with you. I will not be able to identify the woman.”

  “How can you know that, when you haven’t yet seen her?”

  “No one of my acquaintance is missing. She is not from Carmel. We are a very small community here, and as of last night we were all accounted for.” He offered half the orange to me, juice dripping from his fingers.

  I shook my head, refusing to accept either the fruit or his disinterest, which I believed was an act. To what purpose I had no idea. Act or not, he was letting me down. “I was wrong to come here,” I said, rising from the table.

  Michael tipped his head back as I passed behind him, and I felt his eyes follow me to the door. But I did not look back. In the doorway I said without turning, “I am sorry for intruding upon your morning. I did not realize how completely Carmel has changed you.”

  I had set one foot across the threshold when Michael raised his voice ever so slightly. “I had hoped you might have come on business of a more personal nature.”

  My cheeks burned. I swallowed hard, willing the flush to fade, and as it passed off I glanced back over my shoulder. Now both feet were up on the table, and the green-gold light glinting across the Slavic lineaments of his face turned him into a satyr, or a Pan. I could not think of a reply.

  Michael prompted, “A social invitation, for example. I daresay I might feel more welcome in your new home than I did at that rooming house. Of course, if you’d taken the rental cottage I found for you here in Carmel, the rooming house episode would never have happened, nor would we be having these—shall we say—communication problems.”

  I turned fully to face him. “We’ve been through this before, Michael.”

  “Not to my satisfaction.” With a thunk he brought both feet to the floor and stood up to face me, half the room’s length between us.

  “You want to hear it again? Very well: I could not take that cottage because I am first and foremost a businesswoman, and there is not enough business in Carmel for my typewriting service—contrary to what you led me to believe. Apparently it did not occur to you, when you were being so persuasive about my moving here, that your Carmel writer friends cannot afford to pay for having their words typed.”

  “Some can. You were too hasty,” he grumbled.

  “My financial resources are limited. I have to be practical, and Pacific Grove is a more practical place to start my sort of business. It is halfway between Carmel and Monterey, so I can attract customers from both places. I’ve explained all this to you before.”

  Michael took a few steps forward. “So you have. I did not think then, and I do not think now, that business was the real reason you refused the rental cottage.”

  My chin came up and my face ignited; this time I did not try to make the flush fade. He was right, that was not the real reason, but I would sooner have died than admit it. In a warning tone I said, “Michael, if you persist in this you will destroy what is left of our friendship.”

  Eyes glittering, he came forward a few more steps so that we were only some six feet apart. “Why can’t you bring yourself to call me Misha, when everyone else here does?”

  The answer was too complex. Words stuck in my throat.

  He moved within inches. “Why is it so difficult for you to accept the changes I’m making in my life, and in myself? I never dreamed that you, of all people, would react the way you have, or I would not have encouraged you to come to Carmel. Be fair, Fremont. When you left Boston, didn’t you do much the same as I have done? You moved to a new place, took on a new lifestyle, and a new name as well. I have done no more than that.”

  “I suppose, when you put it that way … but you must admit, your new lifestyle is rather extreme.”

  He leaned in to me. I stood my ground, looking up at him, thinking that he must be able to hear the exaggerated thumps of my heart. “No more extreme,” he said, “than yours is, for a woman.”

  “You have me there,” I said. I blinked, swallowing hard. I could see cords of tension in his neck, and hear the harsh sound of his rapid breathing. For long moments neither of us moved; we stood locked in a contentious attraction that neither wished to break. But then simultaneously and as if by mutual agreement we both moved back.

  I stood just across the threshold, wiping the palms of my hands on my skirt, for they had gone all sweaty. “All right,” I said, “a compromise: I will call you Misha if you’ll accept the fact that it will take a long time before I can feel comfortable in Carmel.”

  He did not reply, but stood rubbing his chin with such a strange, faraway look in his eyes that I thought, Ye gods, he is going mad as a hatter!

  Suddenly he smiled and reached for my hand, grasping it in a businesslike handshake. Pumping enthusiastically he said, “I accept the compromise, Fremont!”

  “I am glad,
Misha.” I smiled back at him, but in truth such a huge gulf had developed between us during the past month that I felt more distant from my old friend now than at any time in the past. Smiling and wanting to mean it, wanting the problems to go away, wanting above all for her to go away, I slowly extracted my hand.

  “You’ll see, Fremont,” he said eagerly, looking boyish although he is twenty years older than I, “things will get better. This is only the beginning. A new beginning.”

  I replied by rote, “I suppose you are right.”

  Ever since the earthquake, people keep talking about new beginnings. As for me, I am fairly sick of beginnings—I have begun a few too many of them lately.

  Behind me I heard Bessie softly snuffling and browsing in the brush, reminding me that I had a life apart from Michael—Misha—and demands upon my time. A living to earn. Duties to fulfill. “I must go now,” I said. But as I reached the shay I turned and called out impulsively, “Will you come to dinner at the lighthouse, Misha?”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” he drawled, with a one-sided grin.

  “Sunday evening,” I instructed, gathering the reins, “at seven o’clock. And, Misha, in the meantime you might just ask around Carmel about the drowned woman. Maybe someone will know something; you can’t tell unless you ask.”

  Before I drove away I saw his face cloud over, his expression so darkly glowering that I could almost hear the thunder of his mind.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Misha, Misha, Misha: I said the new name over and over to myself in time with Bessie’s clopping hooves. Perhaps if I repeated it often enough I might get used to it … but I didn’t think so. The truth was that I hated the name, because it meant to me at best a lack of consideration and at worst a betrayal of my most tender feelings.

  “Why,” I had begged of him that night behind the closed door of my boardinghouse room, “why didn’t you tell me before I came down here that you have turned yourself into this totally different person, this Misha Kossoff?”

  And he had answered, “Because I was afraid that if I did, you wouldn’t come. Michael Archer was an experiment that didn’t work, Fremont. Mikhail Arkady Kossoff is who I really am.”

  How could I tell him the truth after that? How could I tell him I had fallen in love with Michael Archer, an experiment that didn’t work? How could I tell him I’d believed he loved me too? Why else would I have uprooted myself from San Francisco, a place so dear to me in spite of the dirt and noise and sky-high prices of post-earthquake reconstruction, except to be near the man I loved?

  I could not possibly tell him these things.

  I could—I did—believe his real name was Mikhail Arkady Kossoff. Early on in our friendship he had told me he was an American of Russian descent, and had taken his American name, Michael Archer, from his first two names in Russian: Mikhail Arkady. I could even believe that something he had been doing while he was going by the name Michael Archer had not worked out, because even though he would not admit it in so many words, I knew that, by whatever name he was called, the man was a spy. Or had been a spy, since he said he was “retired.” Those things were not the point. The point was that I did not, could not, would never believe Michael was really Misha. If I did, I would have just packed up my bags and gone home.

  Except, of course, that right then I did not have a home.

  “Oh, shit!” I yelled at the top of my lungs—it is a word I learned from Father, who would always change it to “shoot” if he knew I was within earshot. Not a word I would ever utter except in moments of direst frustration. At that very moment an automobile tootled its horn and chugged past my horse and carriage. I sincerely hoped the driver had not heard what I’d said.

  I gave the reins a flick, for Bessie was plodding even though the hill is much less steep on its Carmel side. The mare did not speed up much and I let her be, because my thoughts were also plodding. I am forever trying to be fair, and I do feel an affection for the Carmelites, as Carmel’s residents call themselves. Any resemblance to the religious order of the same name is in the spelling only. These Carmelites are a colorful, eccentric bunch, so unconventional that they quite leave me in the shade. I went back in my mind to that December day, my first in Carmel.…

  I had arrived on the Monterey Peninsula via an elegant, fast train called the Del Monte Express. I was in a celebratory mood, due to the satisfactory outcome (I knew the sod was guilty, and the jury agreed) of the trial of one Mickey Morelock. I was the principal witness against Mickey, and in order to appear at the trial I had stayed in San Francisco for three months beyond the time I’d told Michael I would move to Carmel.

  I knew he had found a cottage for me to rent. But I am stubborn, and some people—my father, for instance—would say excessively independent, so I had reserved for myself one of the less expensive rooms at the Hotel Del Monte, for three days, just in case.

  In the middle of the afternoon on the first of those three days, Michael called for me in his Maxwell auto. We were going to have a picnic in Carmel. Everything was beautiful—the weather, the scenery, the company—and I was positively giddy with joy. I wore a smart new suit with one of those tightly fitted, long-sleeved, waist-length jackets that were the latest style. Perhaps the material, an olive silk gabardine, was a bit fine for a picnic but that did not deter me. Especially when Michael said, “You are looking exceptionally well today, Fremont. And well worth waiting for these past three months.”

  I thanked him, feeling as if I glowed from the inside out. He was looking exceptionally well himself, in clothes far more casual than I was accustomed to seeing him wear: a shirt of some loosely woven wool in an interesting teal shade, worn over a black sweater and black trousers, and a black fedora that slouched enticingly over one eye.

  Michael kept up a running commentary as he drove, telling me interesting little scraps of history, such as how Carmel got its name: from the Río Carmelo, the Carmel River, which was in turn named for some Carmelite monks in the party of an early Spanish explorer. I had scarcely noticed any time pass when we bucketed into Carmel on Ocean Avenue, an unpaved street with the texture of a washboard. Michael identified the largest building on the right, the Pine Inn, then shortly he veered left and said, “This is Monte Verde Avenue, where Oscar Peterson and his wife, Mimi, live. My cottage is on Casanova, one block farther down.” He pointed out, on our left, the Petersons’ cottage and its attendant cabins, all but swallowed up in the surrounding greenery.

  “Where is the ocean?” I asked, as to my surprise he nosed the Maxwell into a bush of marguerites and stopped the motor. “I thought we were going to picnic on this beach of pure white sand that you’ve told me so much about.”

  “We are,” he replied, “but everyone is gathering here at Peterson’s first. We’ll all go down to the beach together. We do this most every night, to watch the sunset. It’s beautiful. A peak experience.”

  I smiled at his enthusiasm but felt bitterly disappointed: I’d thought that Michael and I would be picnicking alone. In my fantasies, our first time together on the white sands of Carmel would be the occasion of his telling me, at last, that he loved me. He would thank me for giving up San Francisco in order to be near him. And I would say something like “Oh, it’s nothing, because I love you too.”

  Oscar Peterson’s place reminded me of a summer camp I used to go to when I was a child: It smelled all woodsy and appeared barely fit for human habitation. A scrawled sign had been tacked on a tree trunk near the graveled turnaround that served for a drive: PETERSON’S PLACE. Not a very novel name considering, if I remembered correctly from the various stories of Carmel Michael had told me, that Oscar was a poet.

  “Here’s Oscar now,” Michael said, taking my elbow. I drew in a deep breath, raised my chin, and assumed a smile.

  The man who approached us was tall and thin and pale, with sparse graying hair that hung limply to his shoulders. He wore round glasses with silver frames and thick lenses that magnified his gray eyes. His clothes look
ed as if they might once have belonged to somebody else, or alternatively, as if he might once have been somebody else: shirt and trousers both so much too big that they hung in folds, gathered in at the waist by a knotted red scarf for a belt. His trousers were chopped off just below the knee, exposing a pair of fish-belly-white shins, and he wore sandals on his long-toed bony feet. In sum, his appearance was rather off-putting, or so I thought until Michael completed his introduction.

  “Fremont, I am charmed,” Oscar said, with a smile so radiant it instantly eclipsed all his oddity.

  “Likewise, Oscar,” I said, meaning it.

  “We’re all back here amongst the trees.” He waved vaguely and started off. Michael and I followed, and soon I was knee-deep, so to speak, in Carmelites.

  One fellow, an artist with an Arabic-sounding name I didn’t quite catch, wore flowing robes of black and white, complete with a burnoose. His companion was a woman who looked older than he—if one could judge his age by his face, since every other part of him was covered. She also looked less exotic, wearing a fashionable auto-travel costume of duster and veiled hat, in a delicate but dull shade of pink called ashes-of-roses. Her name was Irma Fox and her face resembled one, with her small mouth and sharp nose and beady eyes all squinched together in the center of it.

  Just: beyond Irma three fellows sat in a row on a redwood bench. They were all in their shirtsleeves, with collars removed and varicolored vests hanging open. They introduced themselves as Tom, Dick, and Harry and I wondered if they were joshing me. I was just about to ask, when she appeared. All bedecked in flowers, she floated up out of nowhere to hang on Michael’s arm.

  “Dahr-ling,” she said in a voice dripping honey, “you must introduce me to my rival.”

  Before that, I hadn’t even known I had a rival. Another josher, like Tom, Dick, and Harry—that was what I thought at first.

  Michael chuckled and said smoothly, “Artemisia Vaughn, may I present Caroline Fremont Jones, who prefers to be called Fremont.”