Murder Times Two

by Haughton Murphy

  Her remarks were brief, stylish and moving. Her chin thrust elegantly forward, she thanked “my old friend Norman” not for honoring her but for the implied recognition of READ and its work.

  “It has been a struggle, raising the public’s consciousness about the terrible curse of illiteracy,” she said. “I salute my colleagues who have made READ what I immodestly say is a force for good in this City. And I salute each and every volunteer who has given time, and energy, and love, to the cause of lifting that scourge for adults and children everywhere, to the cause of bringing the gift of literacy to them.

  “Those of us who founded READ were determined to make better this City that we so much love. Our gift was made joyously and gratefully. And now this afternoon you have given me something back—something that at this moment I badly need. The gift of sustaining love and affection that I know will strengthen my resolve to forget the horror of recent days and go forward with you to making this a better, more civilized New York.”

  Robyn sat down as everyone else in the room rose, giving her another standing round of applause. As the only one seated, she looked vulnerable and alone as she wiped a tear from her eye.

  Reuben and Cynthia looked at each other sympathetically as they stood and applauded. Whatever suspicions they may have harbored about the new widow were forgotten for the moment in the wave of sentiment that swept over the audience.

  When the applause died, the Mayor invited the assemblage for “’refreshments” in the main part of the mansion and, if they chose, to take tours of “the house where your Mayor lives.” Then he led the guest of honor out the side door, the other spectators following in their wake, screened by a watchful aide from the City Hall press office to keep out any reporters.

  An informal receiving line had started in the living room by the time the Frosts got there. They both waited their turn to greet and embrace Robyn, Reuben whispering a “well done” in her ear after kissing her cheek, and a second “well done” into the Mayor’s ear as they shook hands.

  Frost noticed, as predicted, that the liquor bottles had disappeared, replaced by the Empire State plonk. He was ready to leave and go to dinner.

  “You want to take the tour?” he asked Cynthia.

  “Reuben, for heaven’s sake. The only thing to see upstairs, as you well know, is Norman’s exercise bicycle, and I can do without that.”

  “Then let’s go eat.”

  As he nudged Cynthia toward the door, he met the Givenses again.

  “What are you doing for dinner? Want to join us?” Wayne asked.

  “Sure,” Reuben said, looking at Cynthia for confirmation. “Nothing fancy, and not too late.”

  “Should we see if Robyn wants to go, too?” Cynthia asked.

  “She’s going to be stuck here for a good while,” Givens said. “And I’m sure the Mayor must be taking her out.”

  “Let’s make sure. Okay?” Reuben asked.

  “Of course, of course,” Givens answered.

  The Mayor, Bill Kearney and Robyn were standing together in a corner of the living room. Reuben went back and took Robyn aside. They had a brief whispered conversation, ending with Robyn’s poking Reuben with her elbow and laughing.

  “The Mayor is entertaining Robyn and Bill here for dinner,” Frost reported when he returned.

  “What was the big joke?” Givens asked.

  “Oh, I warned Robyn that I’d just read that Norman has a new cook, some stray Hungarian, and I said I hoped she liked goulash. She said she’d be grateful for food of any kind since both her Mr. Obuchi and that Miss Boyle have Tuesday afternoon off.”

  “She may get the Chinese dinner we were joking about, ah, that night, after all,” Givens said.

  “Ycch. A Chinese dinner prepared by a Hungarian chef,” Cynthia said.

  “If Robyn’s taken care of, let’s go,” Givens said.

  No harm in looking over a suspect, Reuben thought, as the foursome went out the front door of Gracie.

  18

  Some History

  The Frosts and the Givenses paused by the police cupola outside Gracie Mansion to consider the early-evening question asked daily by thousands of Manhattanites: Where should we eat?

  “There’s always Elaine’s,” Reuben offered. “It’s the neighborhood restaurant up here.”

  “Can we get in?” Barbara Givens asked.

  “That’s no problem,” Reuben said, having been a customer of Ms. Kaufman’s bistro for almost twenty-five years.

  “How about … No, Elaine’s is fine,” Wayne Givens said.

  “If you have another suggestion, speak up,” Reuben said.

  “No, no. I’ll go for Elaine’s. Haven’t been there in a while.”

  “I’ve only been there twice in my life,” Barbara added.

  “Let’s go,” Frost said, bringing the inconclusive debate to an end. He led the group down the Gracie Mansion driveway and across toward Second Avenue.

  As they walked, he realized that he had perhaps made a gaffe. The Frosts had seen Dr. Givens at the restaurant several times but, Reuben now realized, always with a female companion other than Barbara. In fact, now he knew where he had seen the Bloemendael’s Dr. Baxter before—at Elaine’s with her boss. (Givens, Reuben guessed, was undoubtedly a subscriber to the New York rake’s old rule: Never take a woman not your wife to a romantic, dimly lit restaurant; always opt for one that is open, notorious and in the public eye.)

  “I hope you can smoke at Elaine’s,” Barbara said as they walked toward their destination.

  “Ha,” Cynthia replied. “Elaine herself is a smoker and the only nonsmoking tables are somewhere down by the furnace.”

  “I thought the security guards were going to arrest me back there when I lit a cigarette on the Mayor’s lawn. I practically had to swallow the butt when I finished.”

  “Poor Norman,” Cynthia said. “He smoked like a chimney when we first knew him. Now he’s one of the fanatical converted.”

  Once seated at the restaurant with drinks in front of them (neither Elaine nor her headwaiter, Jack, having blinked with shock when Givens appeared with his wife), they dissected the Gracie Mansion ceremony.

  “Norman was downright eloquent,” Cynthia said. “That business about ‘Mrs. Literacy’ made poor Robyn sound a little like Miss Liberty. Otherwise it was very gracious and generous. The man can be gracious and generous if he wants to be.”

  “I agree,” Wayne said. “So was Robyn.”

  “I felt so sorry for her,” Barbara said.

  “Sorry? She loved it,” her husband answered. “That woman’s had some trip, from being a bartender at the Blue Heaven to an award from the Mayor at Gracie.”

  “Wayne, what are you talking about?” Cynthia asked.

  The Frosts had both come to life, startled by his statement. Givens enjoyed the reaction he had gotten.

  “Let’s order and I’ll tell you.”

  “What’s good to eat?” Barbara asked.

  “The squid salad and the veal chop are unassailable,” Reuben said.

  Frost spoke with such authority that all the others followed his advice, though he himself ordered a shrimp cocktail and a steak.

  “Surely you know all about Robyn’s past,” Wayne said, once the ordering was completed.

  “I don’t believe we do,” Reuben answered. “We’d never met her till she became involved with Tobias, back in sixty-three or sixty-four. She was the Principessa Montefiore del’Udine then. I just found out the other day there’d been a Chicago period before the Principe, when she was married to someone named Bernie Weldin. She also admitted to me that she had been married in her ‘youth,’ presumably before Weldin, but we don’t know anything more. Or even where she’s from.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Givens said. “I happen to know everything about her early life.”

  “Tell all,” Cynthia said.

  “I don’t see any reason why not to. It’s quite a story. I’m just amazed you don’
t know it.”

  “Robyn’s never dwelt very much on her past.”

  “Well, that’s true. Maybe you’ll see why when I tell you about it.”

  “Will a bottle of wine help the flow?” Reuben asked. Without waiting for an answer, he ordered a bottle of “Riserva,” the house shorthand for a passable Chianti.

  “Okay,” Givens said, sipping from a glass of the wine. “You know, I’m sure, that I’m a Hoosier. Lafayette, Indiana. I lived there until I went down the road to Bloomington to college at I.U. What you obviously don’t know is that Robyn—she was then Robyn Mayes—grew up in Lafayette, too. I didn’t know her then—she’s a good ten years older than I am—but my sister did, and most of what I’m going to tell you I learned from her. They were in high school together, back in the late forties. My sister was a couple of years older, but she and Robyn were good friends. Basketball was the big thing out there—still is—and both my sister and Robyn were cheerleaders, traveling around the state in the winter in one of those orange-colored school buses, first to the regular games, then to the playoffs.

  “Robyn and her family were as poor as anybody in Lafayette. Not as bad off as the kind of crack families we see these days, but pretty poor. Robyn’s father was a garage mechanic who was unemployed most of the time. An itinerant French Canadian with some Indian blood, my sister says. Damn good-looking—I did meet him a couple of times. Robyn got her looks from him, her complexion from her mother. Her mother was a waitress around the local restaurants—blond, brassy and blowsy, not at all like the Principessa Montefiore or ‘Mrs. Literacy.’”

  “Who gets the shrimps cocktail?” interrupted the latest addition to Elaine’s polyglot staff of waiters. The “shrimps cocktail” and the squid salads were quickly distributed once Reuben owned up to ordering the shrimp.

  “Anyway,” Givens went on, “I don’t think Robyn was much of a scholar. Most who followed the basketball team weren’t—there wasn’t time. My sister always said there were two kinds of cheerleader, though today there’s probably only one. Type One was the sweet young virgin. Sweet and full of enthusiasm, but not ready to go ‘all the way,’ as they used to put it so elegantly. That’s what my sister was—at least I think she was. Then there were the Type Two girls who cheered the players both on and off the court. Robyn definitely was of the latter persuasion, letting the boys probe around in the back rows of the team bus or ‘giving it away’ in the backseats of secondhand Chevrolets.

  “She ended up ‘going steady’ with the captain of the basketball team, apparently a nice guy but not the smartest one God ever created. I don’t know what it was like where you grew up, but ‘going steady,’ for a Type Two girl, usually meant a prodigious amount of screwing. She and her gallant captain probably knew, or cared, as much about birth control as they did about nuclear physics. They were among the unlucky ones and Robyn got pregnant her senior year in high school. This being 1949 in Lafayette, there was no question of an abortion, and Robyn and her boyfriend were forced by two indignant sets of parents to get married. My sister says the marriage was completely loveless. The only attraction between the two had been sex, and after Robyn’s pregnancy even that was gone.

  “The irony was that Robyn didn’t have the baby after all. She had some kind of infection and had a miscarriage. Rumor had it that it was a complication from venereal disease, but that may have been just gossip. As a high school dropout, she didn’t have much of a future—waitressing like her mother, or maybe hairdressing if she could scrape up the money to go to a school of cosmetology, I believe they call it, in Indianapolis.

  “This is where Denise, my sister, got into the act,” Givens went on. “She was an exception, a Type One girl who always did well in school, had a lot of ambition, and was quite a talented artist. She packed her bags as soon as she finished high school and took the next Greyhound to New York. She was lucky and landed a part-time job at an advertising agency that supported her through a night course at Parsons. She did real well and was soon working full time at the old Benton and Bowles agency.”

  “Wayne, you have to eat,” Barbara Givens admonished, pointing to her husband’s untouched veal chop.

  “Sorry, I got carried away,” he said.

  “Please go on,” Reuben said. “I’m fascinated. But, yes, do eat as well.”

  Dr. Givens continued between bites. “Anyway, Denise came home for the holidays, Thanksgiving or Christmas, I forget which, and ran into Robyn. Robyn Schenk then, though she was about to leave her husband and discard the ‘Schenk.’ Robyn told my sister her tale of woe, and my sister, not realizing how lucky she had been to get the job in New York without any experience or training, urged Robyn to come to the City and invited her to share her apartment.

  “Robyn jumped at the idea and came here about two weeks later. She was all of twenty, I would guess, and had no talent or experience—just her wholesome Hoosier good looks, which turned out not to be enough to get a ‘clean’ job in an office. Somehow she ended up as a bartender—not a waitress, a girl bartender—at the Blue Heaven, on Fifty-second Street.

  “I don’t know whether you remember it. The Blue Heaven was quite a well-known jazz club, even though it was a bit sleazy. Maybe not like the B-girl joints that lined Fifty-second Street then, but I gather it wasn’t all jazz music either—a little hooking and some of the B-girl stuff. It was Tobias Vandermeer’s hangout. He was there all the time and was a good enough customer that they couldn’t turn him down when he wanted to sit in at the piano.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Reuben interrupted. “What year is this?”

  “Oh, I’d say 1951, 1952.”

  “And are you going to tell me that Tobias met Robyn then?”

  “Let me finish. The answer is yes. Tobias met the new girl bartender and went utterly gaga, or so my sister says. It didn’t take much for Robyn to figure out that Tobias had a lot of money to spend, and she went after him. My sister was very put out. She didn’t like waking up and finding Tobias and Robyn shacked up in the living room. And she liked the prospect of losing half the rent even less. She was sure they were going to get married. Robyn couldn’t talk about anything or anyone else.

  “Then the ax fell. Tobias took Robyn home to Papa. Henrik was polite enough to Robyn at their one meeting, but afterward he exploded, informing Tobias in no uncertain terms that if he chose to marry a bartender from the Blue Heaven, he would be completely and irrevocably cut off—both his allowance and his inheritance.

  “That didn’t leave Tobias much choice. He threw Robyn over and never went back to the Blue Heaven again.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Reuben pressed. “I know something about their relationship and had always assumed Robyn and Tobias had met in the early sixties for the first time.”

  “Wrong. They met at least ten years before that.”

  “So what did Robyn do?” Cynthia asked.

  “She bounced back, as you might expect. Picked up Bernie Weldin on a night out in New York and was married to him within six weeks of being dumped by Tobias.”

  “Did your sister keep up with her?”

  “No, I don’t believe Denise ever saw Robyn after she left for Chicago. As my sister tells it, the only communication she ever had from her after that was a letter, just before the marriage to Tobias. My sister’d gone back to Lafayette by then. Robyn’s letter said she knew Denise would be interested to hear that she’d landed Tobias at last.”

  “I’ll be damned. She’s even more relentless than even I thought,” Reuben said.

  “She sure as hell is that. No trace of the innkeep in that lofty lady we saw an hour or so ago.”

  “What about Tobias? How did he react after giving in to his father?”

  “He called Denise a couple of times, to cry on her shoulder. Always drunk—more so than he had been when Robyn was around. Then my sister lost track of him, though she says she heard that not only had his drinking gotten worse but that he was wenching as if it were going out of style. T
hen he went off to Paris, and she went back home, and as they say on TV, that’s it for tonight.”

  “Quite a news broadcast,” Reuben said.

  “I had a hunch you’d like it. That’s really why we asked you to dinner.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Cynthia said. “If Hendrik was opposed to the marriage in the fifties, why wasn’t he equally violent when she reappeared a decade later?”

  “I’ve wondered about that,” Givens said. “All I can guess is he never made the connection between the bartender and the Principessa. She’d undergone quite a transformation—look at her today—and, as I was told the story, he’d only met her once when she was in the bartender phase. And he would’ve been really ancient by the time she appeared a second time.”

  “Amazing,” Cynthia said.

  Givens reached for the check, which had arrived, no one having ordered either dessert or coffee.

  “No, no, I should pay this,” Frost said. “With an entertainment charge for you thrown in. At least let’s split it.”

  This finally was the arrangement, and each of the two men sorted out bills to pay his share. While they were doing so, a couple from the “Siberia” (or bridge-and-tunnel) section of the restaurant approached the Frost table, unaware of Elaine’s strict house rule that strangers do not go up to those (especially celebrities) not known to them.

  “Dr. Wayne?” the middle-aged man said, holding his wife’s hand for moral support.

  Givens responded to his television moniker with an expectant smile.

  “I just wanted to tell you how great your show is. We’ve got a teenage boy and a twelve-year-old girl and your advice about drugs has been a big help to us.”

  “So practical,” the woman chimed in. “The kids really relate to you!”

  “Why, thank you very much,” Wayne responded, beaming.

  “Could we …”

  “… have your autograph for the kids?” the woman said, finishing her husband’s sentence.

  Seeing what was going on, a flying squad of waiters appeared to enforce the house rule. Givens magnanimously waved them away.