by M. J. Bosse
“A girl?” I said.
“Ginny smokes pipes this summer. It’s one of those fads of hers. Her father is vice president of Tomkin and Barrini, can you imagine? And his daughter runs around with pipes sticking out of her mouth.”
Virgil got her address too. Then Mrs. Halliday looked directly at me for the first time. “Ginny’s potentially fine, but I just can’t understand what the young are thinking of today.”
“You mean, like my clothes?” I couldn’t help saying, but to my surprise, Mrs. Halliday only smiled. My mother would have picked up the gauntlet, believe me.
Virgil observed that it was getting late and we wanted to make the calls that day. Mrs. Halliday saw us through the patio and the house, which was tastefully filled with lighthearted Italian furniture and good-quality modern abstract paintings. She followed us right to the car and invited us to spend the night, so that we could see David the next day. Virgil accepted the invitation with a show of gratitude that seemed very much overdone, and I intended to tell him so.
“Miss Benton may have the cottage.” Mrs. Halliday gestured toward a pretty little building half shrouded in maple trees by the side of the house. “And you,” she said to Virgil, “may have the guest bedroom.”
Of course, that meant he would be in the house.
“If you don’t mind,” Virgil replied immediately, “we would prefer to share either the guest bedroom or the cottage.”
For a moment, when Mrs. Halliday’s mouth opened and nothing came out, I thought the deal was off. Then she cleared her throat and smiled, even though it hurt her. “Of course. Please take the cottage.” Then and there she handed over the key. “This way you can come in as late as you please. If you find Ginny Vaccaro, I dare say you might come in very late.”
Minutes later, off in our beat-up Renault, I turned and gave Virgil a loud kiss on the cheek.
“What’s that for?”
“That’s for being such a groovy guy. I mean, you bowed and scraped to that woman—to get information, I understand that—but anyway you did it, and yet when it came down to the nitty-gritty—”
“Who sleeps where—”
“Right. I love you for that.”
*
Our first call took us to Vincent and Paco, who lived in a mansion that made Mrs. Halliday’s place look like a walk-up in the East Village. I mean, for instance, the winding road to it through fir trees and cedars had tall cages like lampposts all along the way filled with exotic birds of fantastic shape and color. Most of them were singing, too. The house itself, when in view, had a brilliant red-tiled roof and low walls of white stucco and picture windows you could only catch a glimpse of between clipped bushes. It didn’t look especially big, but that, I soon learned, was because of its many levels, most of them stacked below the main entrance on a steep slope leading to the ocean. We parked on coal-black gravel in front of rows and rows of flowers, not one of which I recognized, probably because they came from China or South America or somewhere like that. The door knocker was a large gold gargoyle and when Virgil lifted it, I thought of that bronzed man who beats the huge gong at the beginning of Rank movies.
The door opened a crack, as if it had a chain on it, and I saw a thin, bony, suntanned face, two large gray eyes, and a spit curl of brown hair on the forehead. The eyes shifted from me to Virgil and stayed on Virgil. Then the great door swung wide open, and before us stood a slim man of forty or so, wearing peacock green shorts, no shirt, thonged sandals, and a long silver pendant in his left ear. Virgil explained rather vaguely that we were Mrs. Halliday’s friends, mumbled something about pipes, and smiled smiled smiled. The man smiled back and with a sweepingly graceful gesture beckoned us in.
I guess when you survive in Harlem you learn damn quickly how to judge people, because in an instant Virgil had judged Paco, for that was the man, and from then on Virgil, like, became a coquette. He called me “a very old acquaintance” and treated me sort of like an appendix—nonfunctional, but there. He came on with a smile and a giggle now and then that I had never heard from him before. It’s the middle-class white world that I come from that allows you the luxury of playing a straight game in new situations. Virgil grooved the way he had to, and within five minutes Paco was rolling those large gray eyes and shaking that silver pendant and escorting us enthusiastically through that incredible house.
There were white rooms and blue rooms, alcoves and vistas, an Italian bathroom, a Chinese bedroom, an English drawing room, a French dining room, I swear it, and modern paintings everywhere. That was the only time Paco gave me a look—when I would point and exclaim, “Pollock! Rothko! Dubuffet!”
Paco led us finally to one of the lower levels onto a terrace that overlooked the ocean, far, far below and reachable only by a snaky stone path along which were beautiful sculptures, like a Moore, a Marini, a Lipchitz. There was a portable bar on the terrace, so we were soon holding sherry in delicately stemmed glasses and lounging at a glass table with wrought-iron frame. I mean, dig it. And Paco began to explain in a sing-song tone that Vincent had just left for the Venice Biennale and already the household was in a perfect uproar because, among other impossible things, the gardener had threatened to quit and take his assistant with him, the ice-making machine had broken down, and a Ming vase had mysteriously fallen and splintered to smithereens.
“Vincent will kill me for that vase.” Paco’s long brown hand, as it moved through the air, had the absolute rightness of a ballet dancer’s. “You say you haven’t met Vincent?” He paused and glanced coyly at Virgil. “You will. Don’t you think the house has a lovely aura today? Of course, I picked out ninety percent of what’s in it, though he won’t admit it. All he does is bitch, and I tell you if he says one single word about the Ming, I am going to leave.”
“That was hardly your fault,” put in Virgil.
“It certainly was not. He hires these perfectly awful people”—Paco leaned over the glass table toward Virgil—“and expects me to watch them. I have been his personal secretary for twelve years, can you imagine, and—”
“Twelve years!” Virgil exclaimed.
“—thirteen on the twelfth of September, and in all that time he has never once confessed to his own weaknesses. Of course we all have them, but those of us not born into the very wealthiest families soon learn to admit a few things.”
“Of course,” Virgil said.
Paco sat back and sipped his sherry, turning the single curl on his forehead slowly, thoughtfully, with his forefinger.
“I think I told you Mrs. Halliday sent me,” Virgil said during this pause.
“That futsy old woman.” Paco made a face.
The talk meandered for a few minutes, during which Virgil eased into the subject of the pipes. Bit by bit, he intimated that a friend of his had a special interest in one of the pipes given away a few days ago at Mrs. Halliday’s party.
“Who is this friend of yours?” Paco asked.
“A friend. As I say, he has—you could call it a special interest.”
Virgil smiled when he said that. Paco peered seductively over the edge of his sherry glass. “What ever special interest could he have in a pipe?” Paco’s laugh was short, but merry.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Oh, you’re not at liberty to say. Well, I’m intrigued.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I am.” Paco rose abruptly to his feet. “David had them laid out at that boring affair, but then hers always are, and I just decided, Well, why not take one? Vincent’s always complaining about his bedroom—it’s Spanish, you know, in honor of his mother. He thinks it’s much too feminine, and so I thought, Well, why not have a pipe on the dresser when he returns from the Biennale? That would add a special something.”
“Of course,” Virgil agreed, rising.
We followed Paco up two flights to a bedroom that we hadn’t seen on the tour. On an antique chest of drawers burned two candles, illuminating an oil portrait of a rather fat woman in
a plain black dress and pearls. She looked pretty tough. There was incense in the air, and the bed was extravagantly canopied. Paco turned solemnly to us and whispered, as if someone on the canals of Venice could overhear, “No one ever comes in here beside myself, and I come only to see to the candles and the scent. Vincent would kill me if he knew.” Paco walked over to the dresser and with a sudden swooping motion scooped up a pipe and held it high, like the bride’s bouquet at a wedding. “Here is your special interest!”
“Oh, there it is!” Virgil enthused. It was a long, slim Prince—just what Paco would choose if Paco were choosing a pipe.
Paco lowered it and held it in both hands to his chest. “I won’t let you see it unless you tell me exactly what that special interest is,” Paco said.
“Must I tell you?” Virgil said.
“Had you not intrigued me so, I would never have let you see it at all.”
“Must I?”
“You must, you must.”
Virgil sighed in resignation. “Very well, then. This friend of mine had an affair with the former owner of that pipe.”
“Ah ha!”
“And there may be something inside the pipe that belongs to my friend.”
“Inside the pipe?” Paco stared down at it a moment, then quickly handed it over to Virgil, who very slowly—perhaps so as not to alarm our host—unscrewed the stem from the bowl and looked inside the shank. Trying first with his forefinger and then with a pipe cleaner he withdrew from his pocket, Virgil extracted a small coil of microfilm.
“Is that your special interest?” Paco came forward to peer into the pipe channel and then at the film. Virgil nodded and held the microfilm, which was tied at each rolled end with a tiny loop of thread, delicately between thumb and finger. “May I have it?” Virgil asked.
Paco raised his eyebrows. “Well, that depends—”
“Believe me, it’s a rather sticky personal matter.”
“Oh, I gathered that.” Paco put one hand on his hip, the other on the wide leather belt of his green shorts.
“Honestly, it means nothing to anyone but my friend.”
“Yes, this friend of yours,” Paco mocked. And he tapped Virgil lightly on the chest. “That friend couldn’t be you, could it?”
“Of course not,” Virgil laughed.
“Of course not.” For an instant a frown passed over Paco’s face, and I had a vision of a slim fortyish man giggling viciously and pursuing a young boy through the halls with a whip. And then Paco smiled and waved his hand. “Your friend is welcome to it.”
“Thank you,” Virgil said, and he quickly slipped the film into his pocket.
“I suspect it’s a bunch of letters your friend oughtn’t have written,” Paco said, brushing past me into the hall. “Or some snapshots he oughtn’t have let someone take.” He wanted us to go back for another sherry, but Virgil begged off, pleading another engagement. “With that friend?” Paco said, rolling his eyes. He stood in the doorway of the entrance while we walked to the car. At our backs—or rather, at Virgil’s—he called out an invitation to return soon and meet Vincent. “But you mustn’t tell him we were in his bedroom. He would kill me!”
At the car we both waved, and he waved back. Inside, while Virgil was starting the car, I told him that his performance with Paco had been an absolute wonder.
“My mother always said I’d end up with a jive artist.”
“Your mother?” Virgil drove off. “She doesn’t even know the word.”
“She knows an operator when she sees one. And you’re it.”
“Don’t jive me in your middle-class white American way.”
He looked at me; I looked at him. On either side of us, as the car crunched out of the driveway, exotic birds were singing.
“I wonder if all detectives have as much fun,” I said. Virgil reached over, his eyes on the road, and gently but with impressive authority pinched my left nipple.
*
So he had been right about the microfilm. Don Stuart really had cut it up in sections and deposited it in more than one pipe. Of the four pipes Virgil had examined, two had contained microfilm. Now we were on our way to find Pipe Number Five, which should be in the possession of Ralph Salisbury, the same character who had provoked Henry into that scene on the day of the funeral.
Ralph Salisbury lived in the fashionable resort town of Water Mill, where most of the houses are multistoried gray clapboard affairs. When we pulled up in front of his house in the twilight, a group of people, who were sitting around a table on the lawn, turned as one to stare at us like a pack of watchdogs. I felt pretty self-conscious in my Civil War tunic, leather pants, cowboy boots, floppy hat, headband, and granny glasses, but what the hell, you can never wholly shed a Midwestern background. Virgil never told me what to say or do, meaning he trusted me, so I resolved to keep my mouth tightly shut, and for me that’s the height of discretion.
As we approached the people—a half dozen of them—I recognized Ralph Salisbury even without his dinner jacket. Now he was wearing white shorts, white shirt, and a flowing brightly patterned ascot. I recalled how his tall, lean figure had trotted alongside Henry and how his eyes had become big and round when with the delicate but sure touch of a concert pianist Henry had held his wrist and brought him to his knees. He recognized us too, because he began to smile tightly, and when we reached the table spread with hors d’oeuvres, bottles, and glasses, he gave us a formal hello.
There were four women and another man, everyone in expensive beach wear of one sort or another. Virgil launched out in a peculiarly Uncle Tom tone of voice, explaining apologetically that we wouldn’t have come had Mrs. Halliday not sent us. I saw immediately that they all ate up this display of humility. Virgil went into an explanation of the pipes; this time he claimed that there had been a mistake, that actually one of the pipes given away by Mrs. Halliday had belonged to him, not to her dead nephew.
“I see, it belonged to you,” Salisbury said in a bantering tone, and he turned to look skeptical for the women’s benefit. “A pipe belonged to you and you think I have it.” The quartet of women, all in their late thirties and forties, seemed amused by what was happening.
Virgil just smiled, Tomming it up.
“Yes, I see. What’s mine is yours.” He glanced again at his admiring audience. “Well, what kind of pipe is it?” He asked, suddenly narrowing his eyes at Virgil. Virgil seemed surprised, and I understood that he hadn’t prepared himself for the question.
“I said, what kind of pipe is it?”
“Actually—I don’t know.”
“But you said it was yours.”
“Yes, I did. And it is.”
The women were exchanging glances.
“How can it belong to you if you don’t know what it looks like?”
“Oh, I know what it looks like, I just don’t know what kind it is. You asked me what kind it is, didn’t you?”
Salisbury was taken aback, but only for a moment. “All right, then. Could you pick it out from a group of pipes?”
“Or could you describe it,” one of the women put in.
“Don’t ask him to describe it verbally,” Salisbury said. “You don’t ask activists to describe things verbally. Activists feel and do.” The woman tittered, and then the others started, like beads knocking into one another. “Well, could you pick it out or couldn’t you?” Salisbury persisted.
“Frankly, I’m not sure. That is, from sight. But I have a way of identifying it.”
“You have a way of identifying it?” Salisbury was not looking at Virgil but at his audience, his face incredulous.
“If it sounds strange, consider the fact that I have very many pipes.”
“You have?” I wanted to kill him, really I wanted to; but dear Virgil, beautiful Virgil, clever Virgil, superb Virgil, just kept on smiling.
“Yes, actually I have more than fifty,” he said. ‘When Don Stuart was learning to smoke a pipe, I lent him one of mine.”
“I neve
r heard of lending pipes,” the other man said with a laugh. And the women laughed, their laughter a kind of rustling under the tinkling sound of ice in their glasses.
“I lent Don the pipe so he could smoke a number of them,” Virgil went on patiently, addressing the man, who had the kind of wet lips that I hate. “If a beginner smokes only one pipe, it tends to get too hot, so he often quits.”
“Now, actually, that is true,” Salisbury said condescendingly. “You are right about that. But why can’t you remember your own pipe?”
I wanted to take his glass away from him and hit him over the head with it. The other man was motioning for me to have a drink. I wanted to say, “You can stuff that drink you know where,” but I tried to imitate Virgil’s control, so I smiled No. “You look like Julie Christie,” the man said with a leer. “Thank you,” I said through clenched teeth.
“But why can’t you remember your own pipe?” Salisbury repeated. “It fascinates me that a man can’t remember his own pipe.”
“I lent it a long time ago,” Virgil said.
“I never heard of lending pipes,” the man with wet lips repeated.
“And after all this time you are taking the trouble to get it back?” Salisbury said to Virgil with a sneer.
“To paraphrase you, Mr. Salisbury—what’s mine is mine.”
Salisbury was opening his mouth to reply—rather angrily, I suspect—when one of the women said, “Oh, give him the pipe, Ralph.”
Salisbury turned to her. “I would, except I haven’t got it.”
“You haven’t got it!” Virgil’s fist thumped down on the table, making the bottles jump.
Salisbury shrugged. “Yesterday while sailing I was smoking the Windproof David gave me, and—I lost it overboard.”
*
We left in a cloud of dust, obscuring the six of them posed on the lawn as if in an Antonioni movie. For a while we drove silently along the highway, past the first lights of evening.
“One thing I will never forget as long as I live,” I said finally. “His face when you said, ‘To paraphrase you, Mr. Salisbury, what’s mine is mine.’ He had swallowed the Uncle Tom humility, and when you hit him with that, I thought he’d have a stroke. I believe his story.”
