by Dick Cluster
“I don’t think that’s what Janice meant.”
“Yeah, okay. But I am planning to. To stick.”
“I believe you. But what Janice meant was, how much should I count on your plans? Do even you know who you’ll be, once you’ve got that far?”
“What did you tell her?”
Meredith smiled but did not face him. “I said you’d probably be yourself, only— for better or for worse— more so.” Then she turned and asked, “Who are you now, that you weren’t a week ago?”
“Somebody that’s seen a lot more death.”
“Yes. How does that make you feel?”
Alex didn’t know how to answer that, so he put his hands in his pockets and faced into the wind, letting it tug at the weakened roots of his black, bushy hair. The wind or something also forced tears out of his eyes. He was tired of tears, so he turned back to Meredith.
“Sadder,” he said. “More determined. More philosophical. And, I guess, sort of at home.”
* * *
It was time to go with the helpful policeman to the plane. Airborne, Alex watched the red light on the end of the wing blink on and off, on and off. He tried to meditate on this, to breathe in and out, neither censoring his thoughts nor holding on to them. His memories of Cynthia Meyer were going to come like the lights, on and off, blinking red, for quite a long time.
At Logan Airport, the INS man’s face grew guarded when his screen responded to Alex’s name. Alex told him not to worry, that a man with a badge was here to meet him. Trevisone accepted delivery, and asked where Mr. Glauberman would like to go for a little talk. Alex suggested Petros’s.
It was about midnight by Alex’s biological clock, but by local timepieces it was almost exactly eight days ago at this hour that he’d last sat at the little Greek shop. This time he was able to drink his own coffee.
“Here’s the way it is,” Trevisone told him. “You concealed evidence from our department, and you possessed narcotics on the turf of the department next door. Meyer’s daughter confesses to shooting him because he got her involved in a securities scam that was coming unraveled. She says she knew in her bones that he’d turn her in. Also, she was temporarily unhinged because he’d just cleaned out the merchandise and sent it to the other daughter, who never did anything to earn it. Plus a lot of other grievances that are nobody’s business but hers till we get into court. But patricide, or parricide, or whatever the hell you call it, was weighing on her soul. So, after she ran away, she caved in and decided to confess.
“The Berlin police say that’s got nothing to do with what happened to the other daughter. They say she died as part of a gang war between the extreme right and the extreme left. They say the perpetrators were members of a small group of Nazi nuts who’ll be in the joint for a good long time. They say witnesses confirm the daughter did pick up an overseas package just before she died, but whatever was in it was destroyed in the explosion.
“Our own investigation told us that Meyer had a daughter who lived in the area, and when we went to talk to her, we found she’d suddenly skipped. Her picture more or less matched the description from the bartender at Logan. Also, it occurred to me to check whether Meyer had a safe-deposit box at any of the banks in Davis Square. If there was anything to your story, there had to be a reason why a guy from New York would pick an outlying post office in Boston to do business in. They had to be keeping the merchandise nearby. In fact, Connor and Meyer had a box in both their names, which wasn’t too smart. And then it turned out some of her neighbors thought the Connors lived better than they had a right to.
“So that more than covers most of the loose ends. My question is, do you want to tie them in a tighter knot?”
Alex considered. The opening threats had been the wrong way to get his cooperation, but he appreciated the information that followed. And he assumed Trevisone needed some way to save face.
“I’ve beaten possession charges before,” he said mildly. “And now it’ll be easier, because I can plead chemotherapy to a jury that knows someday it’ll be three out of the twelve of them. I only concealed evidence long enough to get off the ground, then I called you up. Why did you tell me your suspect was Meyer’s lover, not his daughter?”
The ghost of a smile fluttered under Trevisone’s mustache and through the crow’s feet surrounding his eyes.
“I don’t think so quick on my feet, so that was as good as I could do. I wanted to make sure you didn’t get to her first somehow, and stir up all the shit the wrong way. Now, uh, I wonder how the hell did you find her, and what kind of persuasion did you use?”
So much for face, Alex thought. He drank his coffee until there was only mud at the bottom. He thought of his daughter, the past summer, making mud pies at the beach. Tomorrow he would call Laura and try to explain why the police had been asking about him. Then he’d tell Maria he was back early, and try to have a good reason for that, too.
Alex studied a luminous print of the Acropolis over Trevisone’s right shoulder. The air conditioner wasn’t running now that the weather had cooled, and snatches of other conversations came by while he thought about what he wanted to say, and how. “My tendency is somewhat different…” someone said. Someone else said, “I think that to some extent that is a positive thing.” Cambridge, Massachusetts, early Saturday evening. Plans made, events rehashed, words wasted saying simple things in complicated ways. Alex tried to say what he meant with honesty and without sarcasm.
“The way I see it, I wouldn’t say the crimes aren’t connected. One connection is Meyer’s trouble with wives and daughters. What that was about could keep us all busy for a long time. Besides that, there’s history— fascism, Hitler, the war, the occupation, you name it. And then, thanks to all this, like I told you, there’s Jack Moselle. Moselle is in a position to make a lot of things happen, or not happen.
“The problem is, none of that would be in your jurisdiction, would it? None of it would change who could legally be convicted of either murder, in any country’s court. I could tell you the whole story, but none of it would be admissible evidence. If I did have evidence, the best thing for my health would be to bury it deep.”
“Uh-huh,” Trevisone said. “Well, that’s what I thought.” He left Alex looking at his departing back, and he left Alex to pay the bill.
* * *
After the sergeant disappeared, Alex thought— involuntarily— of that dark approaching thundercloud. It gave him a weak and dizzy feeling down where Greek coffee sloshed around in his stomach. Nonetheless, there was something rather wondrous about his treatments. The wondrous thing was that they were so effective. They killed malignant cells as fast as— well, without getting into distasteful comparisons with weapons, they killed them pretty damn fast. A few more rounds, it appeared, and they would kill them down to the point where there wouldn’t be any evidence that anything was wrong with him.
There was just one problem about that. Somewhere inside him would be a last cell, hiding out, still in business. Soon that cell would get back to work at the thing it was best at. Therefore, after who knew how long a while, the tumors would come back. When they came back to the point where they caused significant trouble, then it would be dark thundercloud time again. And so on, and at best there would again be a surviving last cell, and so on. This was a merry-go-round on which Alex’s mind had already amused itself many times.
But murder, he supposed now, was a lot like that. Whatever you felt about the victim, however much you loved or admired or pitied or hated them, the same thing was going to be true. You could put murderers, some of them, out of the picture. You couldn’t really get at murder. That was a truth Trevisone must have known without Alex making speeches at him. Maybe the root was a conspiracy, or a kingpin, or a family, or a war, or something quite different from any of those. You could get close to that root, but you weren’t likely to get rid of it. You couldn’t take it apart and hold it still and fix it, the way you could fix a machine.
Ale
x left payment and tip on the table and crossed the street to deposit Jack Moselle’s check in the automatic teller machine outside the bank. He’d leave the money in the bank while he tried to find a way to use it against the man, effectively and not suicidally. If he couldn’t find one, he’d give the money away someplace appropriate. It was too dirty to keep, and Gerald Meyer had already paid him for his costs and his time.
Still, there was a ghoulish feeling in Alex this night. It wasn’t from the money. He knew he could tear up the check and the ghoulish feeling would still not go away. It had to do with a final thought that came to him— a strange thought that he didn’t even want to put into words. He remembered what he had said to Meredith in their little summit conference on top of the heath. He was troubled by the thought that murder— even more than machines— had a way of making him feel at home.
THE END
DEDICATION
For Nancy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Joan Goldberg has always generously shared her medical knowledge; Jim Campen introduced me to the arcane world of money market instruments; and Nancy Falk pointed me toward Alex. For these contributions, and many readers’ comments on my writing, I am grateful.
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The next Alex Glauberman Mystery is REPULSE MONKEY
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What they said about REPULSE MONKEY:
“…an engaging pace that leads to a strong ending with fine narrative.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Cluster writes supple, engaging prose… It is all cozily hip and I found it to be intelligent amusing company.”
—San Jose Mercury
Also by Dick Cluster:
Alex Glauberman Mysteries
RETURN TO SENDER
REPULSE MONKEY
OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE
Non-fiction:
THEY SHOULD HAVE SERVED THAT CUP OF COFFEE: Seven Radicals Remember the 60s
THE HISTORY OF HAVANA with Rafael Hernandez
Translations from the Spanish:
A CORNER OF THE WORLD by Mylene Fernández Pintado
VITAL SIGNS by Pedro de Jesús
FRIGID TALES by Pedro de Jesús
OPHELIAS by Aida Bahr
HAVANA REVISITED: An Architectural Heritage; Cathryn Griffith, Ed.
THE CUBAN MILE by Alejandro Hernández Díaz
CUBANA: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, with Cindy Schuster; Mirta Yáñez, Ed.
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We hope you enjoyed Return to Sender and wonder if you’d consider reviewing it on Goodreads, Amazon (http://amzn.to/1Gn9Akl), or wherever you purchased it. The author would be most grateful.
About the Author
Dick Cluster is the author of the novels Return to Sender, Repulse Monkey, and Obligations of the Bone. He has written both crime novels and history books, as well as popular economics (another mystery, for sure). Some of these have been translated into Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian.
He landed in Havana’s José Martí airport for the first time in 1969 and has been fascinated by that city ever since, exploring it by foot, bicycle, bus, car and other means. He is co-author of The History of Havana and a translator of Cuban literature. Previous nonfiction books include They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, about U.S. radical movements of the ’60s and ’70s, and Shrinking Dollars, Vanishing Jobs, about the U.S. economy. He taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he was Associate Director of the University Honors Program.
Praise for the first Alex Glauberman mystery, RETURN TO SENDER:
“Alex Glauberman is not your everyday hero. Cluster’s evident knowledge of the locales (Boston, London, Berlin) and his engagingly offbeat characters mark him as a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
“While never forgetting it is a thriller, Return to Sender adroitly works on the primal concerns that make up life’s real intrigues, and in so doing provides thoughtful and satisfying entertainment.”
—Boston Phoenix
“Return to Sender is a funhouse of scary twists and turns and misdirections. Dick Cluster can flat out write. I hope he grants Alex Glauberman many remissions.”
—William G. Tapply
REPULSE MONKEY
An Alex Glauberman Mystery
Book Two
BY
DICK CLUSTER
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Repulse Monkey
Copyright 1989 by Dick Cluster
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9904543-8-0
Originally published by E.P. Dutton
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
www.booksbnimble.com
First booksBnimble electronic publication: April, 2015
PROLOGUE
The winter twilight made everything fuzzy. It smoothed the hard edges left by the passage of the big plow. It rendered physical details, which might recur with frightening intensity, mercifully indistinct. In this twilight the driver did not switch on his headlamps. He knew the road. He knew what would be on it. He did not want to illuminate the enormity of what he was going to do. It was bad enough in his imagination: the brute, machine-powered mangling of flesh and bone.
What would happen reminded him of the slaughterhouse that girl had described. It reminded him of bits and pieces Paul had coughed up about Vietnam. He accelerated around the curve, the car an extension of his hands, his feet, his will. Except his will wasn’t his own. That was what was worst about it. He felt he was not so much driving as being driven over the edge of a cliff, being hurled off a high cornice of snow. He didn’t think it was going to work. He doubted there was much of a future for him after this.
He didn’t know how right he was.
1. MOTION IN STILLNESS
“…too many changes at once,” Alex was saying. He recognized this for a rationalization, and an old, barnacle-encrusted one to boot. He wondered how many other times it had been enunciated, sotto voce, over this same slippery table, by men or women whose fingertips traced, as his did, circles of diluted bourbon on the black Formica top. He envied the piano player, whose dry fingers glided brilliantly over shiny keys.
The pianist, Meredith had said, was playing a song cycle by Franz Peter Schubert. Alex hadn’
t been able to identify the composer, though he could have said it was a European who worked after Bach and before Stravinsky. He did happen to know one surprising fact about Schubert— at least it had been surprising to him— which was that he had died even younger than Mozart, at the age of thirty-one. “Hey, listen,” Alex had said more than once since coming upon this fact, “I’ve already outlived Schubert by nine years, and Che Guevara by one.”
Tonight Alex had expected jazz piano, not classical. And why not, when he had watched the pianist amble in from his break: a dapper man, rimless glasses and well-shaped mustache, a sort of older Herbie Hancock, though then Alex had realized that Herbie Hancock himself wasn’t so young anymore. The musician had sat down, flexed his long brown fingers, and conjured these august Germanic rhythms out of the machine.
It was okay, though, finding classical rather than jazz tunes in the piano bar tonight. This was a night of celebration, during which Alex was not inclined to be critical of things. Besides, this was a town whose ear had always been more attuned to Europe than to Africa or New Orleans. This was Cambridge, Massachusetts, after all.
Meredith, Alex thought, ought to be happy about the music. She had been brought up to play the classics on a spinet for the amusement of visitors, but she enjoyed them nonetheless. He stopped drawing circles and let his hand rest on hers, smoothing his fingertips over her knuckles, feeling for barnacles there. The pair of them had come to this dark and spacious piano bar to celebrate a one-year milestone. They were happy in this, though the words Happy Anniversary were not going to be formed by either partner’s once-married lips.
