New Haven Noir

by Amy Bloom

  And here I was, unarmed and unofficial, ready to chat up Allison and see what conclusions we came to. I didn’t think I could stop her if she decided to Krav Maga me, but I thought a gun could. There’s no martial art better than a gun, which is why I don’t study karate. And it’s why I wish I had gotten around to cleaning and licensing Uncle Luis’s Glock.

  I walked up Whitney and turned down Allison’s street, my favorite in New Haven: Autumn Street. A few blocks of houses, mostly classic New England with a few crazy reminders of seventies architecture. It was quiet but lively. Haimish, if you speak Yiddish. Gemütlich, if you speak German. You would walk your dog and talk to your neighbor. People had block parties there. If you were sick, a neighbor would watch you while your mother went to the store. Our particular neighbor read me Wind in the Willows and brought cookies with her. For a couple of years, when I was small, we lived at 175. Allison rented 236. Slate walkway, unpolished brass mail slot, charming wrought-iron bench.

  She opened the door before I could knock. It wasn’t her usual hunch-and-skulk. Her clothing was a hipster hodgepodge: black-and-white gingham blouse tied above her waist, baggy olive-green corduroys, and her hair was piled on her head in a flattering Brooklyn ballerina updo.

  “Come on in,” she said energetically. “Poor Daniel.”

  Her face was different. She was shining and her rheumy, half-closed eyes were open and bright. Something was very becoming. Clothes were strewn all over the living room.

  “I have to move these papers. I’m sorry, you know, I was in the middle of going to Paris and now I have an offer—associate professor at Iowa. Barbara Hill’s moving to Emory, she got one of those Coca-Cola chairs and she decided, last minute, to take it. I get to go to Paris and take her place in Iowa, if I want. What a lucky break. And poor Daniel. Do you know anything about it?” She almost winked.

  “Word travels fast,” I said. “Iowa. Isn’t that where Jim Fiske is going?”

  He set up Daniel and the payoff is they get married and move to Iowa? She set up Daniel, just because he was so handsome and annoying, and the payoff is Jim helps her get a tenured position at Iowa when the time comes? They always loved each other since they were kids way back when, and they set up Daniel together because once she’d killed Bullfinch, why not rid the world of another asshole? Okay, that would be more like me.

  She glanced down. “Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. It’s very nice that I might end up there. Also, I FedEx-ed my manuscript to the department chair at Iowa. That helped. I was just so blocked until . . . really, just the last few weeks.” She said all of this with a chuckle in her voice, while Amy Winehouse filled the room.

  “Allison, look, you’re out of here. What do you think about this? Do you really think he killed Bullfinch?”

  “I guess so.” Her voice was low and sure. “I mean, who ever really knows another person, but . . . it seems clear that’s what happened. Doesn’t look like the police bungled this one.” She gave a small sigh and smiled in a worldly way. Apparently, murder and Paris were a cure for every single thing that had ailed her.

  “Can I ask, where were you on August 26?”

  “What? What difference does it make?”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Not at all. I was with Daniel for a few hours. It wouldn’t have taken him more than ten minutes to kill poor Oliver. Then I went off to be with Jim. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dell. With Jim and with Marilyn Kozlowitz from history, and Dick Price from astronomy. Jim made dinner for us all and we played bridge until midnight . . . You know, you’re not actually investigating a murder.” She chuckled as if I were such a goofball. She was so much more attractive now.

  “And last night?” I just wondered. She looked so rosy.

  “I wasn’t alone.” She smirked. “Life goes on.”

  “Well, for you, yeah. Congratulations.”

  She grinned a little at my tone, shifted her hips to “You Know I’m No Good,” and asked if there was anything else on my mind.

  “I see you’re packing. Exciting, going to Paris. Your first time?”

  She smiled again and answered in French, which I don’t speak.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, you don’t know a fucking thing about me. All you saw was glamorous Daniel and poor klutzy me. I said, I’ve been to Paris more often than you’ve been to Pepe’s. My mother’s French.” She held up two passports.

  “I don’t speak French. But the head of the Omni Foundation speaks—and writes—excellent English. I was in touch with her. Sandrine Boulanger, director of the Omni. I pretended I was a professor, looking to hire you. She wrote back. All excited about the great reference you got from the estimable Oliver Bullfinch. Shall we look at her e-mail together?”

  She didn’t flinch. “Absolument.”

  We stood close together, in the position of like-minded friends checking out a restaurant review or looking up an old acquaintance on Facebook together. Her eyes slid over the sentences.

  “I don’t think it was right of you to lie to them, professor. Really. But you see what a lovely person she is. I can’t wait to meet her.”

  “You don’t have anything to say about an e-mail from Bullfinch within hours of the time he was murdered?”

  “No, I don’t.” She sighed. “I wish I’d known. I would have thanked him. We had such a hard time with each other. That was very sweet of him.”

  “And odd,” I insisted. “He told everyone that he was going to block you for that big grant.”

  “He did, I know. Maybe he changed his mind. Jim lobbied for me. I guess it worked, at the last moment.” Her eyes widened playfully. “Ohhh. You think it wasn’t Bullfinch. I mean, the time of death can’t be that exact, of course. You know that, right—even though you’re an amateur. But maybe you think someone wrote a recommendation from Bullfinch—meaning it wasn’t really from Bullfinch—after he died.”

  I pocketed my phone. On television, people crumble when you show them evidence or an e-mail that could, conceivably, constitute evidence. “I do think that,” I said.

  “Oh la la. It could be, but it seems unlikely. It’s much more probable and logical to conclude that having been pressed by me and Jim on this very subject, Oliver Bullfinch decided to do the right thing—at what turned out to be the last minute.” She sighed again, prettily. “That’s what I choose to remember. Or it could have been Daniel, crossing the line, like the police think. We had been very close at one time. And he killed poor Oliver in a rage. They had so many differences. Oliver was so insulting about Daniel’s work, about his intelligence, really. He may have been right. We’ll never know. That’s what’s so difficult about all this, right? We’ll never know.”

  She stood a few inches away from me, aglow with her own cleverness.

  “So,” I said. “Off to France. Great food and no extradition treaty?”

  “None at all,” Allison replied. “But why would I care? Bon soir, Dell. D’accord, vas-y alors. That means, do what you have to do. I’ll be around for a while if you have more questions about Paris or Daniel or Iowa or the vagaries of human existence. You know, questions about shit that bothers you.”

  She walked me to the front door.

  “You know what movie we never saw together? Chinatown—Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. Right? So great.”

  She kissed me on both cheeks.

  PART II

  Down and Out in Elm City

  The Secret Societies

  by Roxana Robinson

  Beinecke Library

  The phone rang. It was Jake.

  “It’s Jake,” he said, though I knew that. “Alison Ricks is dead.”

  Jake is my editor. And Alison Ricks was very old. Had been.

  “She’s dead?” I said. “When?”

  “Yesterday,” he said. “Heart failure. At home.”

  “How old was she?” I asked.

  “Ninety-three,” he said.

  “A great writer,” I said. I waited for
him to tell me why he’d called.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” he said.

  “I did,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “She was a great writer,” he said in a serious, slightly hectoring way, as though he wanted to bully me into agreeing, and as though I hadn’t just said the same thing.

  “She was a great writer,” I said.

  “You know, there’s no biography of her.” His tone had changed to airy, as though this was a curious fact he’d just learned.

  I said nothing.

  “So, what would you think about writing it?”

  “Me?” I asked. “I’m not a biographer.”

  “Still,” he said.

  I’m mainly a travel writer. A hack, actually. I write pretty much anything for money, though when I get around to it I’m going to write a novel. Twenty years ago I published a memoir about growing up in Maine, which got some nice reviews but didn’t get me the Pulitzer. Then I published a collection of travel essays which ditto. I still have the novel in mind, but in the meantime I write to pay the rent and Jake makes suggestions. Why don’t you do a cookbook? Why not write a book about your dog? What about a garden book? Why don’t you write a book about Joan of Arc?

  Jake’s full of suggestions, all of them terrible. I’d shoot myself before I’d write a book about food, I know nothing about Joan of Arc, and there are already too many tearjerkers about dogs. I write for a travel magazine funded by a big company, and they send me all over the world and pay me a lot. And I write book reviews and author interviews, and I do the odd ghostwriting or technical gig for a fat check, all while I’m waiting for the big time to come along and clap me on the shoulder and say, Sarah Tennant, this is your moment.

  “I’ve never written anything like that,” I told Jake.

  “Sarah Tennant,” Jake said, “this is your moment. You’d be great. You love her work. You’d have a lot to say about it.”

  I do love her work.

  Ricks became famous in the sixties, when she first started publishing in the New Yorker, and for the next twenty years she stayed famous, and then she disappeared. Her stories were witty and elegant, written in shimmering gold. The early ones were set in Italy, and were a sublime entanglement of art and history and beauty and sex. They were all beautiful, and some were funny, some devastating. The one about the mother and child standing on the cliff, in the evening—you could never forget it.

  Alison Ricks fans were now legion, though for years she’d published nothing. I knew as much as anyone about her, though there was a lot no one knew. There was no biography because she’d never agreed to one. For the last thirty years she’d refused to give interviews. Now the books were being reissued and taught in college. And she had won some big awards, just for being brilliant. Lifetime achievement, that kind of thing.

  I own all her books. Distant Plain, The Winter Beast, Come toward Sunrise, Raking the Field, The Stone Caveat. Some were set in London, some in Italy, and some in New York. She’d grown up in Connecticut and a few were set there.

  I tried to visit her once in London. I’d gone to her house on a whim, knowing I’d be able to sell the interview if I could get it. She lived in a tall house on a dark street in Islington. I went there one afternoon with a note saying I’d come by the next day if it were possible that Miss Ricks was available for a few minutes of conversation. And how much I loved the work.

  I rang the bell and waited. For a long time nothing happened. I rang again, and this time the door opened, just a narrow sliver. The housekeeper stood inside, peering out. She was small and old, very erect, with white hair pulled back in a bun. She had strange dark eyes, nearly black, that seemed to have no pupils.

  “Hello,” I said, “my name is Sarah Tennant. I have a note for Miss Ricks. Would you be kind enough to give it to her?”

  The woman nodded, looking at me with those black eyes. She took the note and shut the door.

  When I came back the next day she opened the door again, but only the same sliver. As soon as she saw me she shook her head.

  I smiled hopefully. “I came yesterday,” I said, but she was already closing the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s not possible.” She had leaned in toward the door to shut it, so her head was very close to me. I could see her thin silvery hair, held close to her head with a fine hairnet, and an odd nick in her earlobe. As she shut the door she lowered her gaze, refusing mine.

  I stood on the step for a moment. I had the feeling that she was peering at me through the peephole, to make sure I walked away.

  That had been—eight years ago? Twelve?

  She was now even more famous, because last year a new book of hers had been published. It made a sensation because of all the rumors. Her old editor had died, and the new one swore that this manuscript had been discovered in a closet, but the rumors were that it was really just the original draft of her first novel, Distant Plain. The rumors were that Ricks had had a stroke, and didn’t know what was going on. But the editor claimed that the book was new, that Ricks was fine and everything was good. I hadn’t read the book. I hadn’t wanted to—the reviews had been bad, and it felt disloyal.

  * * *

  “Jake,” I said, “I’m not a biographer.”

  “You write about writers,” he said. “You write reviews of their books. You write interviews with them. You love her work.”

  All this was true.

  “I’ve never done a biography,” I said, but I said it in a different tone of voice.

  “Come in and let’s talk it over,” he said.

  Jake used to be head of the trade division, but his publishing house had been taken over by an international conglomerate that was—big news—more interested in profit margins than literary merit. Jake no longer had the corner office, but a small one in the middle of a corridor. One wall was full of books, and I always checked to see that mine were there, tucked in modestly on the third shelf down, reassuring me that I existed.

  I sat down across from him. Jake was tall and gangly, as though his arms and legs had outgrown him. He had a long head and sleepy eyes and a big grin.

  “I think you’re the right person for this,” he said, “because you love her work.”

  “And?” I said. Lots of people loved her work.

  “Because you write fast,” Jake said.

  “She’s been around for nearly a century,” I said. “Why does this have to get written fast?”

  “Because there are three other people writing biographies of her,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “A woman called Jeanetta Wareham, for Jeeves and Wooster, someone called Lafferty, for Saki and Saki—she’s just a novelist, she won’t do much—and I can’t remember the name of the third. She’s an academic, working with a university press. Wareham’s the problem.”

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “A features writer from LA. She writes celebrity profiles. And she’s having an affair with her editor, who’s the head of the trade division. So her book will get a lot of support, and she’ll write it fast. And it will be full of scandal.”

  “A celebrity journalist?” I drew my head back in distaste. “My book would be better.”

  “Your book will have to come out first or it won’t be reviewed,” he said. “That will mean that hers will stand as the biography.”

  I was holding my cup of coffee in both hands, as though it was hot, but it was cold. I looked out the window: a tall building, full of windows, reflected this one. I didn’t want someone to write a scandalous biography of Ricks.

  “Mine will come out first,” I said.

  Jake cocked his hand like a gun, his index finger pointed up into the air like the starter at a racetrack. “Go,” he said.

  * * *

  The Alison Ricks archive is at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It’s a couple of hours from New York, and on the way up the Merritt Parkway I went over what I knew.

  Alison Ricks h
ad been born in 1924, in Cornwall, Connecticut. She’d gone to college but hadn’t finished. She went to Italy after the war, worked in Naples for NATO, and began writing fiction. She moved back to New York, worked for another government organization, and kept on writing fiction. At some point she left New York for London, where she’d spent the last forty years of her life. What had she done? She’d stopped writing for the New Yorker around 1980. What had happened after that?

  I figured this would take two years to write. My agent and Jake had worked out a pretty good contract, with an advance that would be big enough to live on if I didn’t eat. The commute to New Haven wasn’t bad, and I figured I could get my magazine to send me on a story to London, where I could do some more research. Jake had heard that Jeanetta had gotten a huge advance, but I put that out of my head. Mine would be first and best.

  I got off the highway in New Haven, and almost at once I was in quiet, tree-lined academe. The buildings were neo-Gothic, made of gray stone with small mullioned windows, as though we were suddenly in fifteenth-century England. I found the Beinecke, then began looking for a parking lot. I drove around through the maddeningly one-way streets, farther and farther from the library, until I found a small private lot on Trumbull Street.

  Walking back, I passed a one-story brownstone building, massive and closed, built like a tomb. It had a flat facade with three blank arches, a Latin motto inscribed over them. There were no windows, and the door was sealed shut. I thought it was one of the student secret societies; it felt like a reminder of all the things I didn’t know.