“This,” Zinnie was informing the vice-consul, “is American culture. Just make sure that no one steals your base. See, any player from the other team can come and steal it while you’re not looking.”
“But this is not a just system!” he cried.
“Yeah, but you get to voice that opinion and live.”
“Carry on,” the Turkish ambassador poised his mallet.
Claire noticed that Stefan and Carmela were nowhere to be found. Zinnie distributed her evening bag’s supply of sugar-free chewing gum. It was, she assured them, prerequisite. All sorts of fancy shoes were off, tossed into one raucus and plebian heap. By now there was nobody left on the other side of the house. The game simmered into a businesslike seriousness and time flew by like magic. Suddenly it was the fourth inning, and what a job it had become to see that devious ball coming. One by one the lanterns all around the property went on and Carmela and Stefan emerged from the glamorous front door. Stefan’s face fell. Not Carmela’s. She arranged her expression immediately into the appropriate butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth. Claire’s team was up. The Lebanese official’s wife was at bat. Her teammates cheered her on with slurred directions—they were all experts now. The lady swung and missed. A titter went up from Zinnie’s team. She swung again, this time connecting. The ball raced through several hoops and cracked into the Nigerian fellow’s ankle.
“Yow, yow, yow, yow, yow, yow!” He limped hurriedly in a circle.
Everyone trooped over with inebriated concern.
“Hello, stand back, I’m a doctor,” said a handsome young blond man and they all moved aside. Zinnie lowered the wounded player onto the ground and she and the doctor took control. Claire backed off. Zinnie liked that young doctor, she could tell. She grinned to herself. Now let’s just watch and see if he’s married, she warned Zinnie silently. She found her shoes and walked across the lawn. There was a bench behind the tent where she could sit down and study the house. You seldom saw lead-paned windows like that anymore, or mossy stucco with ivy shooting up each corner. Nowadays the locals aluminum-sided any natural surface they could get their hands on. This was really the sort of place you could get used to. Quickly.
The others were wandering back. The wounded man was not badly hurt; Zinnie and the doc had him propped on a chaise lounge and were administering advice. Claire saw Zinnie throw back her head and laugh. Boy, to laugh like that again! Stefan came over and sat down next to her.
“Hello, troublemaker. I take it it was you who got the servants so upset.”
Claire gave a noncommittal frown. She wasn’t sure whether or not it was going to be advantageous to take the credit. “I hope that man isn’t hurt. He was such an excellent shortstop.”
“I suppose you see yourself as having saved the party,” he remarked, amused.
She felt herself redden.
“You have an interesting family. Your sister Carmela. She’s very knowledgeable about art, isn’t she?”
“Is she?”
“Yes, indeed.” He leaned over and removed a baby grasshopper that’d landed on her arm. She liked the way he did that, with fine feeling, not injuring the little fellow’s legs. They watched him spring away. Stefan, charmed at his own kindness, exhaled a wacky, megalomanic chuckle.
Claire wafted in the hurricane of his cologne. Is there no one right for me? she thought. “You have a beautiful place here,” she said.
“I’m so glad you like it,” he said.
“Pretty hard not to like.”
“I suppose not … so close to Manhattan,” he paused. “And such polite neighbors. So very polite.” He gazed into her eyes. Claire turned and watched the other guests. She liked cultivated, hard-drinking people. They were so active. Not like the drug enthusiasts she’d known in New York. Carmela, the prom queen, was hoofing across the dais with an Arabian. They were doing the fox trot. The Nigerian was hobbling now among the other guests. He was very proud of his wound, exhibiting it to anyone who would admire it. Claire looked around for Zinnie. There she was, still down at the chaise lounge, balancing a sandal from one naked toe, listening intently to something the young doctor was saying. Claire’s heart went out to her and she felt something catch in her throat. If anybody hurt Zinnie she’d come after him herself—with an ax, if need be.
“Tell me something, Claire?”
“What?”
“Anything. I do so like to hear the sound of your voice.”
“I was just thinking how easy it would be to murder someone … under the right circumstances.”
“Yes, indeed. It’s life that’s difficult. What about suicide? Do you ever think about that?” He liked the direction of this conversation. He was enjoying it. He reminded Claire of a fox, the way his little white teeth glittered and poised in the air. She wondered what he’d been up to with Carmela. They’d certainly had time to go the full nine rounds. “No, I’ve given up suicide as a preoccupation. Haven’t thought much about it since I was a teenager infatuated with self-pity. Suicide is always fun to think about until someone you love actually up and dies. You realize abruptly how inevitable your own end is. Shall we dance?”
Claire, Zinnie, and Carmela, arms linked, made their way down the hill. They were singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Carmela had lost one of Zinnie’s shoes but Zinnie didn’t mind. She was filled to the brim with glorious awe for a charming young unmarried doctor who hadn’t left her side even after he’d secured her telephone number … and that after she’d told him she had a son. Carmela, resigned as she’d been to Stefan’s unswerving interest in Claire, had somehow managed to secure more than five separate invitations to God-knows-who-all’s near future parties. She was also very drunk. Zinnie had a firecracker voice. “Tonight you’re mine, completely. You give your love, so sweetly. So tell me now … and I won’t ask again. Will you still love me tomorrow?” Zinnie walloped out her solo and then they jaunted through the last chorus. No kidding, they congratulated themselves as they turned the last corner, they really did sound just like the Shirelles. They stopped short. Parked right in front of their door were three blinking police cars.
“Michaelaen!” Zinnie screamed and the three of them flew down the hill. “Michaelaen!” Zinnie fell on the sidewalk and got up before Claire even saw her go down. She was up on the porch and into the house before any of the cops could stop her. When Claire got there she saw Zinnie, her arms around Michaelaen, choking out loud, violent sobs. Her knee and elbow were trailing blood, but she didn’t seem to notice that.
Several uniformed policemen were standing in the hallway and there were plainclothesmen all over the place.
“What’s going on?” Claire’s heart beat wildly, taking rapid account of both parents seemingly safe and sound on the steps. Her father had his arm around her mother. They both looked strange. Was her father’s hair that white? They looked like old people.
“We were robbed, Claire.”
“What?”
“Yes, robbed.”
“We don’t know what they got yet.”
“Oh my God … and I let the Mayor out.”
“Oh, I knew that was bright,” Carmela slurred from right behind her.
“It might have been,” Stan’s tone was dead-weight lead. “Whoever wanted in that much might have killed him.”
The Mayor heartened at his words. So Stan knew without measure the distance of his loyalty. To go down with the ship …
“I just wish we knew what they took!” Mary held her elbows and looked around creepily. “That’s the thing.” She wasn’t going to go checking around until those fine officers got through going through every room, including the closets. She was past the point of caring what they thought when they found somebody’s galoshes on a dust mop on somebody’s folded shirt. I’ve no reason not to be a nervous wreck she told herself, her face pink as roses.
Claire looked around her at all of the cops. If this had happened to anyone else on the block they never would have sent more than one ca
r. The place was all lit up. Spaces in the house were lit that never had been lit all at one time before. She looked around for the Mayor. There he was, sitting squarely on the porch watching the great to-do with big brown eyes and a broken heart. He’d missed the whole thing. Claire shot bolt upright. “My cameras!” she whispered and ran.
A few moments later she reappeared at the top of the stairs. “They’re gone. All my lenses. Everything. They took my cameras.” She sat down quickly before she fell down.
Now that they knew that something had been stolen, everyone else felt better. Something substantial had happened, a crime of reason, and they could handle that better than an eerie break-in where a small child lived. Detective Ryan came up to her, his little pad and pencil in hand, his blue seersucker puckered, his shoulder holster wetting the line of his white shirt with perspiration. Claire, in her mind’s eye, was following the thief—which was what these cops were supposed to be doing, correct? Out looking for him instead of in here politely taking cider from her accommodating mother, who was, without a shadow of a doubt, enjoying this. She was lit up like a firefly. And the thief most likely comfy in some car on the Van Wyck, heading for the city with a Nikon, a Hasselblat, four lenses, and the rest of the loot.
The Mayor sensed Claire’s misery right away. He came up and stepped on her foot as if to say, Here I am. Don’t you worry, here I am. Your fella.
Carmela was tickled because her jewels were all there: she carried her velvet box down the stairs as though in a procession. This worried the detectives. They wondered why the hell the thief would make off with some “lousy cameras” when there were jewels plain as day on the bureau?
Lousy cameras? Claire staggered back out to the porch. Most of the cops were gone now (“Long as no one was hoit”). The porch boards creaked beneath her. The air stank of urine. Life was an irrevocable mess. On top of it, what if that Johnny Benedetto showed up? Claire rummaged through her purse and came up with her lip gloss, then angrily put it back without using it. Upstairs she could hear Zinnie tucking Michaelaen into bed. Her father had the detectives in his study. Gee, they couldn’t get over those cannons! Mary came up from the cellar brushing her hands on her bowling tournament skirt. The silver was all there, mind you, and the cash, still buried deep in the Brillo box, but … I don’t know … it’s always a mess anyway down there, but … something’s not right …
Claire stood up hastily and went back down the stairs. It couldn’t be. She snapped on the light and a hole dropped from her stomach. The line full of black and whites—the whole lot of them—were gone. Claire blinked. There were color slides scattered all over the floor. Claire turned gray. Detective Ryan, right behind her, put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t touch nuthin’,” he said. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Somebody hadda been watching the house,” the cop was saying. “How else would he know they were all gone? Somebody … who knew all about her.”
“Oh, come on,” Claire said.
Detective Ryan bit his lip. This was a riot. Somebody was actually after this girl and she was telling him to “come on.” He felt like slapping her in the face to wake her up.
“Listen,” Zinnie told him, “Those were the pictures she was taking up in the woods. Somebody didn’t want their picture around, savvy? This was the thing. Whose ever picture that was … was the murderer.”
Ryan winced. No point in scaring the shit out of her.
“I can’t believe it!” Claire was saying. “My best shots. Gone. I think I must have been a thief in another life for this to happen to me again.”
“So this happened before?”
“Mmm. In India.”
“Oh. That lets that out.”
Zinnie stared at her. “God, Claire, at least you’re all right. Anybody crazy enough to come into the house has got to be desperate. We could have walked in at any moment. As it was, Daddy just missed whoever it was. He said he heard the back door slam and thought it was one of us.”
“Miss Breslinsky, think real hard. I want you to try and remember who was in those shots.”
“How am I supposed to know which shots are missing if you won’t let me go through the darkroom? Oh, Lord. I feel as though I’ve been raped.”
“Just let the print guys in there and then you can have your turn.”
“My turn.” Claire nodded her head and sat down. It was going to be a long night.
Next door, Mrs. Dixon peeked out through her clean vinyl blinds.
Captain Furgueson knocked on the screen and walked on in.
“Holy Christmas,” Stan marveled. “If it isn’t the brass.”
Johnny Benedetto, down the block in Pokey Ryan’s car, fought off the urge to go into the house. He knew Pokey would take care of everything and wanted to see what was moving around outside. You never knew. So far nothing but neighbors huddling under the street lamp. The usual. And the old lady in the wild makeup. She scurried back and forth across her lawn like a berserk bumper car.
Johnny was spent. He was yawning five times a minute. He pinched himself hard. He took deep breaths. A whole family of coons came down single file from the woods and gingerly picked their nocturnal route past the mailbox. When they saw all the commotion at the Breslinsky house they stopped, turned around, and marched, just as cool as you please, through the backyard next door. He watched them dine on the contents of three garbage cans, get up one by one onto the birdbath, and wash their hands as though they were human. You had to admit that animals were sometimes more understandable. There was nothing more treacherous than a human out for blood. He fell asleep with his mouth wide open and a deaf ear to the rhododendron bushes rustling.
CHAPTER 6
By Tuesday Claire was seeing truly great shots wherever she looked. That was the way it went, wasn’t it? The minute you didn’t have your camera, everything looked like the potential cover of Life magazine. They finished supper quietly. Everyone was spent from too many avid discussions of the theft, the murder, and, good Lord, the implications. Claire was fed up with being locked indoors—even terror becomes tedious—so she decided to go for a clandestine walk with the Mayor. She had to go out sometime. Her parents’ fierce, well-meaning warnings about solitary ventures made sense, but not to live freely was not to live at all. You might just as well have been murdered yourself. It made Claire boil to think that some vermin could stilt her life-style any more than he already had. She had to think. Get out. They wouldn’t jog, just go for a normal walk. It wasn’t as though she had to wait around the house for a phone call or anything. With one last mournful look at the phone, she left. Johnny Benedetto had no doubt heard about the robbery. Not that he should care. Murder, apparently, was the only subject grand enough for him. Annoyed, she decided to cut across Eighty-fourth to the rim of the woods. The Mayor looked back at her with approval. He’d watch out for them. On a bench right across from White Hill, who should be out watching the sun set but Iris von Lillienfeld. Iris’s face was hidden by a broad-brimmed straw hat, but it was her all right. Natasha, her poodle, posed at her feet. Claire hastened her step. She felt, rather than heard, the car engine pull up alongside her.
“Get in the car.”
“Exactly what do you mean, ‘get in the car’?”
“Just get in. I wanna talk to you.”
Claire fingered her New Delhi bangles. “I can hear you very well.”
“Get the fuck in the car.”
She sat down primly and left the door open. The Mayor jumped in, too.
“Close the door.”
She did. He slipped the stick into gear and took off.
“Where are you going?” For one panic-stricken moment she thought Johnny might be the murderer. He had, she supposed, just as much reason as anyone.
“I’m just takin’ you someplace. To talk. All right? Just to talk.”
“Fine.”
The Mayor watched Natasha’s pretty face grow small in the rearview mirror. It was superb for her to see him whizzing off like
this.
They drove along in silence. Johnny cruised down Cross Bay Boulevard and before you knew it they were heading for Brooklyn on the Belt. Claire looked out the window with studied indifference. It was a beautiful night, calm and hot. Johnny whizzed along, keeping his hands tight on the wheel. Neither of them spoke. The Mayor, afraid of being carsick, had his nose out Claire’s window. With his ears flung back away from his head he looked, he felt certain, like a veritable cocker. Claire wasn’t sure why nobody was talking, but if that was how he wanted it, it was all right with her. She had one mad moment when she felt like asking him what sign he was, but she quickly overcame it. To their right were the lights of the city and to the left the high cliffs of the Rockaway dump run amuck with great seagull.
He turned off at Sheepshead Bay and slowed the car down in the traffic. Wherever you looked there were Italian cafés. The car nudged along between Cadillacs, everywhere Cadillacs. Coming up were the docks and the day-fishing boats, lined up and banging gently into rubber tire moorings. Groups of people promenaded in front of the cafés—Russians mostly, Johnny was telling her, this being the middle of the week. On weekends this place was jammed. You came out from the city just to watch the boats, eat raw clams, feel the breeze around you like a loose suit. There was something about looking at a boat like that on the water—Johnny couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. They mightn’t be his boats but this was his territory now. He was on home ground here, parking the car on the sidewalk, pointing out this joint and that, zipping around the front of the car to open the door for her. She was missing her camera again. Those Russians. Lumbering past the delicate cappuccino tables on thick-stockinged legs landed resolutely on the shores of Brooklyn. Hefty arms propelling second-hand strollers enthroning pudgy Kruschevs. Eighteen to a table, battling even knife-toting waiters for more chairs. Boy, she missed her camera. What on earth was she going to do? She’d never be able to replace them. She’d been too ashamed to tell her family, but she no longer had insurance for them. When the policy had been due for renewal (where had she been, in Ceylon?), Wolfgang had convinced her that they should use that money for something more sensible … like a car. Well, he’d smashed the car and where was she now? Looking pretty damn stupid to herself.
Park Lane South, Queens Page 10
