Suspects

by David Thomson

  Then in 1971 she turned thirty, and there were more tricks than parts. One day a man came to her apartment, a John Klute from a small town in Pennsylvania. He was a cop, or an ex-cop, and he was investigating the disappearance of a friend. One of the things this man had left behind was a pornographic letter, never posted, but written to Bree Daniels. Had she known him well?

  Bree told Klute to get lost; he had helpless, still eyes that frightened her. He was so passive it got on her nerves. But he stayed around. He got a room in the same building, and he started to watch her. Bree felt there was someone out there spying. One night she knew there was someone trying to make as little noise as possible on the roof. She screamed, and suddenly Klute appeared from nowhere to protect her. The tread on the roof was still there. Two people had been watching her, Klute and the other.

  Klute said that his friend must have been murdered, and that the killer was sure Bree was a clue. It didn’t help that she had no idea how. So Klute looked after her. Sometimes she thought he was as creepy as any killer could be. But it was better than nothing having him there at night when the house creaked and the water pipes groaned.

  It came to a head. Arlyn Page was murdered; she had been involved, too. Bree became more frightened; whatever Klute expected seemed to occur, but still he looked hurt, helpless and out of it. She said he should see a doctor; it seemed ridiculous in the middle of a crisis, but he took the idea seriously. He told her never to take chances. But Bree was desperate to end the suspense. One day she had to go to the old man’s garment factory. He called for her, he said some pleading words in his strange tongue over the phone. When Bree got there, after dark, there was no one in the place. She waited and she heard sounds. Then the killer arrived and told her he would kill her too now. Bree stifled a laugh. Amid the danger and the terror, she could not shut out the naughty glee that she might be imagining this.

  Is there any crisis or epiphany now that we can take on its own terms? Or do we sidle through life like private eyes, noting the echoes and the similarities, saying, “How like that story this is,” chuckling and comparing, even if it is our death.

  JOHN KLUTE

  Donald Sutherland in Klute, 1971,

  directed by Alan J. Pakula

  “You want to go off on your own on the case?” the chief had said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Klute.

  “Where?” It was always tiring talking to Klute.

  “New York City.”

  “On your vacation?”

  “No, sir. As long as it takes.”

  “John, listen. You’re a fine cop. You have problems with some of the other men, but you do good work. Outstanding. I know you like to work on your own. I know you and Tom Gruneman were friends. I appreciate that. But he’s missing, John. He’s not murdered, not that we know. And he’s been missing five months. Some people prefer to be missing. You with me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can’t afford to send you off on a missing persons until we know more. Now, the family could hire a private operative.”

  “They’ve done that.”

  “And nothing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, that’s how it is. Do you know how many missing people there are, John, in all the U.S.?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s a lot. Plenty. Anyway, John, I can’t let you go.”

  “Then I resign, sir.”

  “Goddamn, John… . I’m sorry.”

  So he traveled to New York City, thirty-two, a psych.-soc. major out of Penn State, a year in the military, eight years a detective, single, independent. He had always wanted to be a private eye; when this case came up he hankered from the start to go it alone. And he wanted to meet the woman to whom Tom Gruneman had written that dirty letter. Klute had never had a secure relationship with a woman, but he was frightened of hookers. On this case he would have to meet one. He could tell himself he had no choice.

  The city horrified him, but he would not let that show. He kept looking straight ahead, he studied maps and guidebooks in his hotel, and he never asked for help. Like everyone else in the city, he thought, he began to be enclosed in his own intense purposes.

  He called on Bree Daniels. She struck him as danger straightaway; it was like running across open ground under fire being with her. Her whole look seemed naked, like a young breast, taut and fragrant. But the danger attracted him. He did not so much want to touch her as watch her being touched.

  Klute took a room in her building. He could see her window from his. He sat there in the dark and watched her come home, put on the amber light and change her clothes. He followed her around the city. The crowds and the straight streets were ideal for pursuit. He wondered if everyone in New York was following someone. She never knew he was tailing her. He watched her go to several clients; he saw her waiting at an advertising agency, in a row of younger women with more amenable faces. He saw her come home, alone, and he noticed another dark shape on the flat roof above her apartment.

  He guessed that she was bait he could take advantage of. Suppose somehow the killer knew that he, John Klute, had come to the city with no other design than to find him, the killer. Then he might realize that Klute was following Bree Daniels—a woman the killer had known? That the killer might have introduced to the killed? She knew many men by their numbers. She might have a book of accounts.

  Klute had seen Bree disrobe for the old man with the clothing factory. He had watched the garments fall away silently and the body, pale and distant in the lamplight. Anyone could have looked at that window at that moment; she and the old man were oblivious in their remote idyll. So he was familiar with the factory, and he knew where to be hiding when the willful Bree ignored his flat advice. The killer’s name was Cable, a partner in Tom Gruneman’s old business, so obvious a possibility Klute had dismissed him long ago, had even discussed the case with him. Klute came in just as Cable was about to murder Bree. He timed it perfectly, like a climax, but he felt no excitement, for he could see that the uneasy relationship with Bree might be over now. She lay there, drained by the imminence of her death, her fierce face looking up at him, trying to work out the story.

  He took Bree back to Pennsylvania, away from the scabrous city where men had her number. They were married for four years, from 1972 till 1976. Klute rejoined the force, and Bree prowled the home. She became restless in the marriage. She could never find a way of being in the country town. She tried to see the other cops’ wives, but she was harsh to their small talk, and they began to be disconcerted by her. Nor could she shift the cold stare from John Klute’s face. He smiled, he laughed, he looked down on her with the intensity of a lover, but the chilly gaze came back when he imagined her infinite experience. She noticed him watching her. One afternoon she went for a walk through the town, without shopping, plan or an errand, and she realized he was tracking her, his police car creeping along on its mission.

  She left him, and went back to the city. At thirty-four, there was no further illusion about acting or modeling. She became a whore again, and she had to prove that she was tough and competent enough to make business in the twelve or so years left to her.

  John Klute quit the force again; he returned to New York. Out of money, he lived on the streets. It was a small step down; how easily his plainness became derelict. We are only inches from the gutter; its smell will come as no surprise. He watched Bree as well as he could, but he was losing his quickness. He knows where she lives. He has seen her laughing at a restaurant table, while the flambée flared. He has seen her at the fights in Madison Square Garden, restless in a cheap fur coat as her escort talked with other men. And once, as she slipped from a limousine, he held the car door and got a quarter from the old man in a mohair coat who whisked her into his building. Her perfume stayed behind her on the winter night. But she never noticed the wreck he had become. Bree has given up watching, and lives for the moment.

  Sherlock Holmes would occasionally spring out of the disguise o
f a street tramp to catch a thief, or goose Watson. It had the added effect of seeming to suggest that every bum was in disguise. I have thought of trying it, in a stained coat, with stubble on my face, booze in the eyes and a sack tied up with string, coming to the back door to see if Mary Frances has any old memories to spare. She might ask me in and say, absentmindedly, “My husband seems to have gone away.” I could wear his old clothes, shave with his cutthroat, revive his crushed wife… .

  MARY ANN SIMPSON

  Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, 1981,

  directed by Lawrence Kasdan

  He was the one in the band not sweating. She chose him for that and for his isolation from the others. She could see he was Latin, but she counted on a minimal exchange over this delicate request. And it might be a perverse talent to determine not to sweat. Something thin and lethal in the trombone player made her guess it was his act of will. The way he held the trombone she could see it as a rifle or her own legs draped over his shoulder. On hot nights in Florida she did not stop imagining bodies touching. She craved the breezes of an island.

  “Sometime while you’re playing,” she explained, “a man will come out of that bar over there. He will stop to listen.”

  “He likes this sugar shit?” His English was correct but the slang sounded stilted.

  “He is sentimental.”

  “What’s he look like? There are guys all over.”

  “He’s tall, fair, with a mustache. His hair is combed back, like a …”

  “Like a Latin.”

  “Why not?”

  “And all I do is signal you?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Come up with the slide?”

  She nodded. It was too hot for more assent.

  He laughed. “Like it has a hard-on.”

  “You can manage that?”

  “I try, señora.” Now he sounded like a Cuban hustler from Miami, imitating Speedy Gonzalez to be cute.

  She dropped the limp twenty into the bell of his trombone. It rose to swallow, like a fish.

  “So much?” he said, but then, “Maybe so little?”

  She took her place, six rows from the front on the end chair. In her white skirt and her white blouse the trombone player couldn’t miss her. Mary Ann had learned that if you were very noticeable people never saw anything else about you. So she sat in her own steamy damp listening to one swing classic after another while Ned Racine assembled his frail will to go out in the hot night. To master patience, she recited her other name, Matty, over and over again, under her breath. The old man next to her looked up, as if his worn-out life depended on it. She smiled modestly, to confess that this half-uttered, half-felt Matty was her best beau. But the old man looked stricken because he had revealed himself. Even at the end of their tether, men lost their heads over her.

  The music pushed aside the thick vapor of the Florida night. She felt her brow—hot as a saucepan beneath the skim of perspiration.

  “You what?” Matty had drooled at Wheaton, the first time they met, freshman roommates in the fall of 1965. She knew then and there that Matty had a cavernous weakness: she had to be liked. Whatever she said, there was always that need in it: “Oh, please like me. I’ll do anything for that.” If she told a story it was so her telling would be pleasing. When she asked, “You what?” whiny-eyed and defenseless, it was an offer of servitude.

  “My temperature runs high,” Mary Ann had told her. “A hundred is normal.”

  Matty Tyler came from Santa Barbara. She had been sent to Wheaton because her mother had gone there. Matty had led a gentle life. She said how spoiling it had been and how much less virtuous than Mary Ann’s harder time in Joliet, the southwest end of Joliet, near the canal. Mary Ann was at Wheaton on a scholarship because she was intelligent and because her father was in prison after he had been caught embezzling from the bank where he worked. He had found God in prison, and Mary Ann had stopped visiting him since it was all he ever talked about.

  Matty and Mary Ann were inseparable: Mary Ann let the light-weight Californian stick to her, and let her pick up the checks. In return, Mary Ann figured the tip, as soon as she saw the total, without the tax; she never tipped on the tax. Matty was bothered by all calculations, preferring to pay with a flourish. “All set then?” she’d ask. And every time Mary Ann overrode the sly wish to answer, “No, bitch, just sit there until I say so.”

  Mary Ann had carried Matty through Wheaton. She had rewritten her papers, told her what to think and guided her into a lady’s B. She had the time. Mary Ann had straight A’s until her junior year, when she realized she was too obtrusive. So she worked for a B and a C. It was hard for her. The comparative religion teacher, a wistful campus guru named Rosenthal, watched her sink, suspiciously. He called her to his office one day and said he couldn’t understand what was wrong. On the spur of the moment Mary Ann said it was because she was in love with him. Then and there she gave him an expert blow-job. He was demoralized at having allowed it—he had been like a man looking at an X-ray of himself—so he gave her a grim, castigating C and moved on to higher things.

  Afraid to lose her, Wheaton hired Mary Ann as a West Coast fundraiser. She went to California with Matty, and she took an office for the job in Santa Barbara. They kept in touch as much as possible while Matty helped her mother plan parties. At one of those affairs, Mary Ann met J. J. Cord. He owned parts of Santa Barbara, and he sorted things and people into those he possessed and those that belonged to others. It was simple and direct, the way California had been carved up a hundred years before. He made Mary Ann his mistress. He got her an apartment near the water, visiting her two evenings a week, parking one of his old, dowdy cars in the alley. Mary Ann watched how he dithered over her body, happier to look and own than become enmeshed.

  “What does the name Noah Cross mean to you?” he asked one night.

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “How would you like to be at his hundredth birthday party?”

  “When?” she said, wrinkling her nose at the prospect of a hundred.

  “He’ll surprise you,” said Cord, his voice like a banker’s speaking of a great ballplayer.

  “That’ll be nice,” she agreed, twirling Cord’s soft, sticky rope around her finger.

  “Careful, sweetie, with your nails.”

  “Sweetie!” She reproached herself, dipped her head and kissed it better in the fall of her auburn hair.

  The party was in Ireland, at Noah Cross’s estate, with chestnut horses in the meadow in front of the gray-stone house. Black limousines went between the house and Shannon all weekend, carrying pretty celebrities—Adolph Zukor, Picasso, Jacqueline Onassis, Norman Mailer, Barbara Hutton, Hugh Harkness, old European monarchs, Cher, Pélé and Bricktop, whores, dukes and poets, Giancanas, Gores and Windsors, with their entourages, all expedited by Michael O’Hara, Cross’s ebullient majordomo.

  Cross was borne around the house by two rugby-playing farmers, sitting on a carved Indonesian throne, sipping champagne and conversation and then nodding suddenly asleep, only to wake and be as quick as a boy for two or three minutes. Gifts rolled off him like wrong answers. He dismissed them all, searching for the rare thing a man of one hundred might want or taste.

  In the early hours of the next day, Mary Ann explored the house. She walked into a drawing room awash with moonlight, like a room in a black-and-white movie. She took off her shoes and pit-patted across a marble floor toward the French windows. They eased open at her touch, and she stepped onto the warm stone terrace. There was an odor of jasmine in the mild air and horses snuffling in the dark. She caught the whiff of hot hay where the sun had beaten on a field; a half-cooked grassiness was hanging in the night air. Then Mary Ann smelled man, ancient, close and musky.

  “Well now, Mary Ann,” the voice creaked. He had picked up every name that entered his house. “Mary Ann?—that’s a smaller girl’s name.”

  She did not answer; it was heaven to have him prowl around her with talk.


  “Sit here on the stone.” She did as Cross told her, leaning her back against his sparse legs.

  “I fancy I’ve worked it out.”

  There was no need to prompt him or ask for his walnut hand to play in her hair. She felt like a treasured great-granddaughter.

  “Cord did not come with a gift?”

  She shook her head; it tangled his hand.

  “Yet Cord is not, would you say, inclined to forget?”

  “Oh no.” Cord would know what was expected, and what would be a golden treat.

  “I’m sure of that. Can you see the horses?”

  She could. The longer she looked, the easier it was to pick out the phantoms strolling in the night, like Stubbs horses slowly composing themselves.

  “So I have decided,” said Noah Cross. “You must be my present.”

  She guessed this man had been prepared to die for eighty years or so. He had nothing left but life and candid pleasure. There had been little else for years. People were afraid of him but she was attracted to the tranquil practicality.

  He wore a white suit of Indian linen. It picked up every drop of moonlight and was easy to unbutton. She let the top of her dress fall down and she pressed her breasts against his soft dick. Neither of them spoke. Perhaps an hour passed, an hour of the gentlest caressing, before it rose as far as it would go and pushed out its thin but still wicked juice on her breasts.

  “Excellent,” said the old man, and the respect in his voice fell on her like a cloak.

  “I love you, Mr. Cross,” she said, so wanting to convince him. She bent down with her mouth so that his thing would not disappear in the night. She kissed it and put it back to bed.