So I got out of the car, walked across the leaf-strewn street and up to the Belton's front door. A short, middle-aged man answered my knock. He had on brown, horn-rim glasses, which were slipping down his nose. And his thick black hair was salted with dandruff, like a sprinkle of fine confetti. He looked like a thousand other men I'd known. An office-worker, maybe an engineer or a draughtsman—with a face like a fingerprint on an eraser. Eyes all smudged and mouth a dark spot and blue shadows on his cheeks like a day's growth of beard. The only thing that distinguished him from the other bone-weary, middle-management types who put in their forty hours per and come home to drink and to be taken advantage of by their wives and children was the fact that this one had been crying.
I felt hurt for him that he had to be seen like that and suddenly angry at Kate Davis, because that kind of intrusion just wasn't part of anyone's job. He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and asked who I was in a mellow, grieving voice. And I didn't have a choice but to tell him.
“Come in, then, won't you?” he said politely.
It made me madder that the poor son-of-a-bitch felt he had to be polite, when he should have socked both Kate and me in the jaw for muddying up his life for no good reason.
“Harry!” she said brightly when Belton ushered me into the living room, which was smaller than I'd expected from the look of the house but furnished in the usual eclectic fashion of middle-income homes. A chair or a lamp from every good time or bad since the house was purchased. Furniture like the leaves of a family Bible.
I gave Kate a look and she made a funny expression with her mouth—as if to say, what's bothering you? Then she looked up defiantly from behind her tortoiseshell glasses.
I didn't want to have the row that was going to come in front of poor Belton, who, God knew, had enough heartaches of his own. So I let him seat me on a green, sculpted couch that smelled of tobacco and must and listened politely as he picked it up again—the story of his Twyla.
‘‘She didn't have many friends,” the man said. “She was never real popular in school. I mean, Jill and I...” He swallowed hard. “We pushed her. You know? How parents will push? It's just that we'd seen so much loneliness ourselves as kids. Both of us were younger children from big families, where you don't really get the attention you need. That's why we decided to have only the one. Of course, now...”
He sat back on his arm chair, took off his glasses, and began to polish the lenses with his handkerchief, as if he were whetting them on a smooth, round stone.
“She liked to read,” he said absently. “She was a great reader of history. It was one of her best subjects—history. History and art. She was going to the art school, you know. Lon Aamons' school. After she'd finished college, she'd gone out and taught for a year. But...she didn't like it. Frankly, she wasn't built for teaching. She was too shy and the kids took advantage of her. So, we thought the art thing. You know, commercial art...”
Kate said, “Was she going to the school when it happened?”
He nodded. “She'd stay at Lon's place until late on most evenings. And then she had a job painting scenery at the Playhouse. She had some friends, too. Other students. They'd go out for a drink after classes. That night she'd stayed late at the school. We'd thought that she'd gone out to one of the bars in Mt. Adams. I mean that that was why she was so late. It had happened before. So...I mean we weren't worried. We'd gone to sleep when they came to the door.”
I'd had enough. I got up from the chair and said, “Thank you, Mr. Belton. We won't take up any more of your time.” I walked over to Kate and said, “Let's go.”
“There may be other questions I'd like to ask you,” she said to Belton and gave me a disconcertingly wry look.
The man said, “I'd do anything to find out who killed my daughter.” He stared me in the eye and, suddenly, his face quivered as if it were about to fly apart. “Please, mister,” he said in a voice that was not quite sane. “Find that terrible bastard. And when you do,” he whispered, “kill him.”
7
“THAT WAS just swell, Kate,” I said to her, as we walked down the sidewalk to the street. “Real good detective work.”
She gave me another amused look and said, “Don't you trust your partner, Harry?”
But I was too caught up in my angry mood to hear the laughter in her voice. Mostly because I could see myself, or some inchoate version of me, in Twyla Belton's father. In that breadbox of a house, with the furniture like mismatched plates. And it had scared me.
“You don't go stirring up people's lives without a good reason.”
“Oh?” she said mildly. “I thought you did.”
I grabbed her by the arm and spun her around. She was only five-feet six, so I had to bend down a little to look in her pretty face, which was sassier than ever beneath its mop of curls. “Why does your nose always look like it's pressed against a window?”
She snorted with laughter. “I've been made love to in nicer ways.”
“I'm not making love, Kate. I'm angry.”
“If you'd give me a chance, Harry,” she said, “I might be able to explain, but we'll have to go back to the library.”
“This better be good,” I said.
“Or what?” she asked me. “Let's face it. I've got you hooked. Number one, you like the way I look and want to see more of it. Number two, you like the fact that I'm a rookie and make a rookie's mistakes. Number three, my personality prickles you and you see me as a challenge. Should I go on? No, there's no question about it. Sooner or later you're going to fall in love with me, just like Jessie said.”
I gawked at her.
“Just being honest, Harry. I decided to be honest with you this morning. Well, last night, really. You see,” she said as she turned toward the Pinto, “I'm going to fall in love with you, too.”
She got in the passenger side door and said, “Are you coming?”
“I don't know,” I said and meant it.
I kept examining her as I drove back to the library to see if she was sprouting a tri-cornered hat and battle ribbons. I've never been much of a determinist. It takes all the fun out of meeting someone for the second time. But by God, that girl was a general's great-granddaughter if I'd ever met one. And I wasn't sure I liked some very tender parts of my life being deployed by such a precise hand.
She liked it. No question about that. Every time she looked over at me, she grinned in a new way. And once she threw her blonde head back and smiled at the roof, as if we were just coming home, drunk and festive, from a New Year's Eve party.
“Lighten up, Kate,” I said to her. “People will think I've been beating you.”
She laughed. “You're too tense, Harry. You've got a critical parent on your back. I guess that's my fault for laying it on you all at once. I just don't believe in playing games with people I like. When we get back to the library, I'll get you a copy of Creative Intimacy and you can do a little research on yourself.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don't know? Am I? Greenwald's got a lot of interesting things to say about adult relationships. You know, toxic patterns and toxic individuals?”
“I've had quite a dose of you at this point,” I said. “And I don't believe in making love out of a book.”
“No?” She put a serious look on her face and said, “That's a critical parent comment, Harry, if I've ever heard one. You're letting old tapes destroy your enjoyment of the present. Did your father ever beat you for reading a book?”
“Keep it up, Kate.”
She giggled and said, “We're going to get along, all right. I'll have to whip you into shape. But we're going to get along.”
I wonder, I said to myself.
******
It was four-thirty when we pulled into the library lot. Kate was out of the car before I turned off the ignition. She trotted up the red-brick sidewalk to the big glass-and-chrome doors and glanced back at me over her shoulder before walking inside. It was a lovely look, full of self-depre
cating irony and just a touch of real affection, as if she were letting me know that I shouldn't take all of that hokum she'd been spouting—that rare blend of Jessie Moselle's astrology and Eric Berne's transactionalism and her own brand of liberated sexuality—completely seriously. That look made me feel a little saner. Kate Davis's zany brand of lovemaking was affecting, all right. But I was glad to know, or to think I knew, that the brazen manner and T.A. terminology weren't all there was to the real Kate. Of course, you could be wrong, Harry, I told myself. She might be exactly what she seems to be. And what, pray tell, are you going to do with someone like that?
I trudged up the sidewalk after Kate, as if I'd been thoroughly whipped into shape, and found her parking her butt on the circulation desk inside the door. She winked at me as I came in. And I said, “Damn.” And wondered again which was the real Kate Davis. What they ought to do, I said to myself, is outlaw a sense of humor among women. And then I asked myself who “they” were and began to think that she was right—that that combination of sass and high seriousness was going to do me in.
“All right, lady,” I said. “Where to now?”
“Down, sir,” she said and pointed to a stairwell behind the desk. She swiveled around on her butt, gave me another coy look, and hopped off the counter.
“Damn,” I said again.
We walked down a spiral staircase to a huge basement storeroom, lined with half-filled bookshelves and lit from above by row upon row of naked bulbs.
“The stacks,” she said with a flourish of her hand. “Or the tombs, as we call it around here.”
The place smelled strongly of sere paper and of book rot. I ran a finger along one shelf of books and examined the contents. Stodgy, outsized folios, with marbled covers and leather spines. Books without covers, boxed like candy samplers in yellow cardboard containers. Old numbers of defunct magazines and foreign journals. Huge gazetteers and outdated Census reports. A graveyard of wood pulp and printer's ink and all those words, floating through the semi-dark like a faint babble.
“Why,” I asked her, “are we here?”
Kate gave me a sexy look and said, “I can think of some interesting answers.”
She took my hand and led me up to a dumbwaiter—the kind they used to ship books between floors. Five decrepit volumes were sitting inside. Worn quartos with cracked buckram covers and faint gilded print on the spines.
“Those are five of the books that Twyla Belton withdrew from the library before she was killed. They were brought down here for storage, along with a number of other outdated books. Most of them were given away to charities or sold at book fairs. But for some reason Ringold decided to keep these. Take a look.”
I picked up one of the volumes. It was an illustrated edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Probably turn-of-the-century, judging by the cover. I opened it up and leafed through the Life. There were notes in the margins of the early pages. Little stars and exclamation points and score marks, as if someone had finally found a use for the symbols on the top keys of a typewriter. A few paragraphs had been underlined in faded red ink. And Twyla or somebody had written “Yes!” in big block letters beside several paragraphs. It was typical marginalia, that vehement dialogue we carry on with our books at the top of our voices, as if we were arguing with our grandparents about the new morality. I skipped to the middle of the text, to the glossy section of illustrations, and stopped cold.
She was standing beside me and when I glanced at her face, she nodded slowly, as if she'd come to that same page and had the same reaction. I looked back at the book. It was a photograph of a nude statue of Psyche. “Now in the Louvre in Paris,” the citation beneath it read. And someone had taken a razor blade and a ruler to that photo and cut out the statue's breasts and genitals and the unfinished eyes and the mute stone lips. “Sweet Jesus,” I said under my breath. “We really do have a psychopath on our hands.”
******
“Say he found the girl, Twyla, in the library,” I said, thinking it out. “Took out the books he'd seen her reading and defaced the illustrations, as if he were practicing on the pictures what he planned to do to the girl herself.”
“Maybe the photographs were like fetishes to him,” Kate said. “Symbolic representations of Twyla, which he destroyed.”
“I don't know about that,” I said. “We'll have to talk with a psychiatrist to find out what the photographs may or may not have represented. What I do know is that two years ago, our Ripper tore up some books and then, maybe, tore up a girl. Now he's torn up some more books and I think we better get Ringold's list damn quickly and find out just how many young women have been taking books out of the art section.”
“I can do that in the morning,” Kate said pertly. “And follow up on it, too. And you can handle the men on the list.”
She was dividing things up again, like the impetuous general's impetuous great granddaughter. Deploying the troop. Only this time I didn't mind. Kate Davis had earned her wings as far as I was concerned, and if she wanted to revel in it, that was all right, too.
“You did a good job today,” I said to her.
And she grinned triumphantly.
“What would you say to having a drink with me. To celebrate?”
“I'd say yes, Harry.” Kate Davis rolled her blue eyes heavenward and said, “It's in the stars.”
******
We went—where else?—to the Bee. Sat in one of the dark cozy booths on the bar level, where we could look out through the glass louvers at the burghers in the dining room or, when we felt like it, exclusively at each other. And as the night got older, we seemed to feel like it more and more often. Hers was not an easy face to dote on. It was, by turns, too ribald and too studiously intent. Like the girl herself it seemed to be split between sass and seriousness, between jokes and a schoolgirl's culture kit. But then she wasn't much more than a schoolgirl in years. And her sense of humor, her impolite refusal to take her own slogans seriously, made even her preachy side seem winning. And, I thought, a little sad, as if she were almost afraid to believe in anything too deeply. When I asked her, very late, with the cocktail piano playing weltschmerz and crystal tinkling below us like a metronome, why that should be so, she looked at me with one eye full of laughter and the other full of something like cautiousness.
“Do you think we know each other well enough to be so personal?” she said and only made it sound half a joke.
“You're the stargazer,” I said. “You tell me.”
“And what do I get in return? Do we share intimacies? Is it to that stage, yet? Sharing Intimacies Stage?”
I smiled at her and said, “You're a little drunk.”
“I am,” she admitted and rolled in her chair. “But that is de rigueur, is it not, for the Sharing Intimacies Scene? And what makes you so damn clear-headed, anyway? What makes you so sure I've got intimacies to share?”
“You really want to know?”
“I don't know?” she said. “Do I?”
“You have, Kate, a rare talent for making light of the things you like.”
“And you are a pompous chauvinist,” she said. “With an overdeveloped superego. And what I suspect is a tender and embarrassed heart. You also have, if I may say so, a very handsome face.” She leaned forward tipsily and ran a finger down my cheek.
“I'm going to take you home,” I said.
“Whose home?”
“Yours.”
“Coward!” Kate cried. “Jessie will be distraught.”
“And you will be relieved.”
She dropped her finger from my cheek and said, “Why do you say that?” in a hurt voice.
“Because I have the feeling that, in spite of your prognostication, you need more than a day or two to fall in love.”
“And what does love have to do with coming home with me?”
“For me?” I said. “Everything. I'm thirty-seven years old, Kate. Well past the one-nightstand period of my life.”
She put her tortoiseshell gl
asses on her nose and peered at me as if I were out of moral focus. “You are terribly old-fashioned and sentimental. You, sir, are a snob.”
I plucked her up by the arm and said, “Madam, so are you.”
******
It was only a guess. But then Kate Davis was a dicey lady. And I was betting that under that brass and liberated patter was a young woman capable of hating herself in the morning. And of hating me, too. She certainly didn't act that way at her doorstep on Resor Avenue. Which is where I deposited her around midnight.
“Goodnight, Harry,” she said coolly and held out a hand that might have been carved of ice.
I took it and pulled the rest of her to me and kissed her on her full bow of a mouth. It wasn't a passionate kiss. She was too drunk and self-absorbed for that. But it made me feel better. And I think it made her feel a little better, too. Reassured her that she wasn't losing her touch. When she stepped away from my arms, I ran a hand through that coarse mop of golden hair and she purred with content.
“Good night, Kate,” I said.
“Harry?” she said as I turned to go. “Jessie was right.” I turned back to where she was standing and she laughed and said, “Wasn't she?”
8
THE NEXT morning it was Kate Davis who showed up at the library with a big head and a chastened, painted grin on her face. It was nine A.M. and I was sitting at one of the big varnished oak tables with Miss Moselle, sipping coffee from a cardboard cup and listening to a far-fetched but highly entertaining astro-analysis of my character.
“Having been born on the cusp between Scorpio and Sagittarius,” she told me, “makes you a difficult man, Harold. You see, Scorpio is a fire sign and Sagittarius is water. And when you combine fire and water...” Miss Moselle waved her fingers through the air, to indicate smoke rising from a doused flame. “Steam,” she said conclusively.
Final Notice Page 5
