The Lemur

by Benjamin Black

  Then he remembered something, and he shifted his feet from the desk and reached for the telephone, fishing Captain Ambrose’s card out of his wallet.

  When he said his name the policeman betrayed no surprise. Was he looking out at the same sky, that streaked azure?

  “Who else did Dylan Riley call?” Glass asked. “Before he called me, I mean.”

  There was a breathy sound on the line that might have been a low laugh. “Called lots of people,” the policeman said. “You thinking of anyone in particular?”

  “I mean, did you trace all the numbers on his phone? Did you identify them all?”

  “Sure, we traced them. His girlfriend, his dental hygienist, his mother in Orange County down in Florida. And you.”

  “No one else in my family? Not my father-in-law?”

  “Mr. Mulholland? No. You think he might have called him about this research you wanted him to do?”

  “I expressly told him not to.”

  “You said Mr. Mulholland didn’t know you were bringing in someone to check out his history.”

  Glass closed his eyelids briefly and pressed an index finger to his forehead. “I told you, I hadn’t decided finally whether to hire Riley or not.”

  “Right. So you did, I remember.” There was a silence; it hummed in Glass’s ear. The policeman said: “You were the one he called-twice. That’s why I asked you to come in. You were the only one we couldn’t account for, the only one who wasn’t his girlfriend or his dentist or his mother.” Another pause. “You got something you want to tell me, Mr. Glass? About Mr. Mulholland, maybe?”

  “No,” Glass said, and expelled a breath. “I was just curious.”

  “And worried?”

  “Worried?”

  “That Riley might have let your father-in-law know you had hired-were thinking of hiring-a snoop.”

  “No,” Glass said, making his voice go dull. “I wasn’t worried.” He could sense the captain thinking, turning over the possibilities. “Mr. Mulholland and I have an understanding. He trusts me.”

  Again there was that snuffle of suppressed amusement. “But you hadn’t told him about Dylan Riley.”

  “I would have,” Glass said, still in that dulled, dogged tone.

  “Sure, Mr. Glass. Sure you would.”

  When he had put down the receiver he sat for a long time drumming his fingers on the desk and gazing unseeing before him, trying to think. His mind was still fogged with the after-traces of last night’s unremembered dreams. He picked up the phone again and called Alison O’Keeffe and asked if she would have an early lunch with him. She said she was in the middle of work but he pressed her and in the end she gave in, as he had known she would. He telephoned for a table at Pisces, a little fish place down at Union Square that had been a favorite haunt of theirs in the early days of their affair. Like Mario’s, it was becoming depressingly fashionable, and Glass worried that someday Louise would come in with one of her someones in tow and find him and Alison all snug and cozy at their accustomed corner table. That would be awkward.

  He had not spoken to Alison since yesterday. He did not like to think of her being involved, however peripherally, in the business of Dylan Riley’s death, and was sorry he had mentioned Riley to her in the first place. He still could not think how Riley might have found out about him and Alison; he supposed he was naive for having imagined that New York was big and impersonal enough to allow him to carry on a love affair without anyone knowing.

  In the restaurant he sat at the table with his back to the wall and watched the door, impatient with himself for his nervousness. So what if Louise should appear and find him with Alison? They were not children, they knew about each other’s lives. Probably if she did come in she would merely sweep the room rapidly in that way she did and let her glance glide over the happy couple and then change her table to one as far from theirs as possible.

  In his honor Alison had exchanged her painter’s smock for a skirt and a blue silk blouse. When she kissed him he caught behind her perfume a faint whiff of acrylics; the smell always reminded him of brand-new toys at Christmastime. He waited for her to mention Dylan Riley but she did not; she must not have seen the news of his death. She wore her hair drawn tightly back from her face and tied at the nape of her neck with an elastic band. She touched his hand, smiling, and asked what it was they were celebrating. “Nothing,” he said. “Us.” She nodded, skeptically, still smiling with lowered eyelashes; she knew about Glass and spontaneity.

  They ate Chilean sea bass and green salad, and Glass ordered a bottle of Tocai from Friuli, even though Alison had said she wanted to work in the afternoon and would drink only water. He downed the first glass of wine in two long draughts and poured another before the bossy waiter had time to wrest the bottle out of his hand. Alison, watching him, frowned. “Why are you so edgy?” she asked. “You’ll be drunk in a minute, and I’ll have to carry you home to your wife.”

  She was right: the wine had gone straight to his head already. As he looked at her, seated there before him with the crowded room at her back, she appeared to shine, in her blue blouse, a living, bloodwarm creature. It seemed to him he had never noticed her ears before, these intricate, whorled, funny and lovable things attached at either side of her dear face. He wanted to reach across the table and touch her. He wanted to hold her head, that frail and delicate egg, between his palms and kiss her and tell her he loved her. Tears were welling in his eyes and the back of his throat was swollen. He felt ridiculous and happy. He was alive, and here, with his girl, in the midst of the cheerful clamor of midday, and it was spring, and he would live forever.

  “By the way,” she said, “do you know someone called Cleaver?”

  He blinked. “What? No. Who?”

  She gave him a frowning smile that made her nose wrinkle at the bridge. “Cleaver,” she said. “Wilson Cleaver.” She shook her head. “What a name.”

  He was having some difficulty with his breathing. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “He’s a journalist, I think. A reporter. He telephoned me yesterday, just after you did. He wanted to talk to you. I thought it was odd.”

  He stared at her. The tipsy euphoria of a minute ago had evaporated entirely. “How did he get your number?”

  “I think he knows that fellow you were talking about yesterday. What’s his name? Someone Dylan? No-Dylan someone.”

  “Riley.”

  “That’s it. Dylan Riley. What was it you called him?”

  “The Lemur.”

  8

  THE SHEEPFOLD

  They had arranged to meet by the Boathouse in the Park. On the telephone Glass had listened intently to Wilson Cleaver’s voice but had not learned a great deal from it. Black, he thought, from the jivey bounce in the tone and the way he dealt with certain sibilants. Self-confident, too, with an overlay of easy, almost languid, amusement. If he had been a friend of Dylan Riley’s he certainly did not seem to be in mourning. “Good of you to call, Mr. Glass,” he had said, with a lordly, laughing air. “I know your stuff, of course. Been a fan of yours for years.” There had been no mention of Riley or his death. All very businesslike. The Boathouse, noon. “See you there, Mr. Glass. Look forward to it.”

  At twelve on the stroke he came striding along by the water, smiling and with a hand thrust out while he was still five yards off. “Mr. Glass, I presume?” he said. “Cleaver. Howdy do?” He was a young man, thin and tall with a sharp face and a big, exaggerated smile. His hair was cut close and he sported a sort of beard that was just two narrow black lines running down past his ears and along the jawline to meet underneath the notched chin. He wore a striped seersucker jacket tightly buttoned and a blue bow tie with red polka dots. Glass noticed his shoes, impossibly long and narrow patent-leather sheaths, the laces knotted into stiff and perfectly formed figure eights. There was something about him of the professional performer, but one from anot
her age, a sixties stand-up comedian, maybe, or even one of those old-time zootsuited jazzmen with a horn in one hand and a reefer in the other. He was all movement, flexing his knees and shooting his cuffs and tugging at his tie, as if he were controlled by an internal clockwork mechanism, oiled and intricate. Having shaken hands with Glass he smoothed the wings of his sleek pencil moustache rapidly downward with the tips of a thumb and forefinger. “Let’s walk,” he said.

  The day had a bluey-green tinge and the coming of spring was everywhere in evidence. The trees quivered and there were fresh gusts of wind among the budding boughs, and the lake water shone like a knife blade. Glass loved this park, so grand, so generous, and so unexpected. Today, as always, there were joggers everywhere, and young mothers airing their children, or perhaps they were not mothers but minders, and the usual complement of crazy people and shuffling down-and-outs.

  “How that book of yours coming along?” Cleaver asked.

  “What book?”

  Cleaver had a high-pitched, hiccuppy laugh. “Oo, you so coy!” he crowed.

  “How do you know me?” Glass asked coldly. “How did you come to have Alison O’Keeffe’s number?”

  “I thought it was your number, man. Old Dylan, he liked to think he was real organized but he sure could get his data mixed up.”

  “You knew him, then, Dylan Riley?”

  “Yeah, I knew him, the poor cracker.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Cleaver?”

  “I do what you do, Mr. Glass.”

  “You’re a journalist?”

  “Paid up and bona fidee.”

  Glass had understood from the start that the Dixie slang and the cornpone accent were put on. Cleaver was making fun of him.

  “You know Riley is dead.”

  Cleaver made a gun of a thumb and forefinger and pointed it at his eye. “No great surprise, and he can’t claim he wasn’t warned. Riley, I’d say to him, you not careful, you going to get yourself whacked someday, boy. But would he listen? No sir.”

  They came in sight of the Bethesda Fountain with its gilded angel striding aloft. Two little boys were wrestling by the parapet of the fountain, each trying to topple the other into the water, while a bored young woman with an Eastern European pallor looked on listlessly.

  “See, what it is,” Cleaver said, as if continuing a topic already opened, “I wrote some things about your Mr. Mulholland for Slash- ” He broke off. “You know that magazine, man, that Slash? No? It’s good. Small, sure, but it’s sharp, like you might guess from the name. Anyways, I got leaned on pretty hard for those things I wrote. Yeah, pretty hard.”

  A large dark bird flew down swiftly from the trees on their right and skimmed the footpath with wings outspread.

  “What do you mean, leaned on?” Glass asked.

  “Oh, you know. Silence all of a sudden from certain quarters that used to be real noisy. Commissions canceled with no reason given. Phone calls at four in the morning with nobody saying anything, only breathing real heavy. You get my drift?”

  “And you think Mr. Mulholland was behind these things?”

  “It’s a fair bet, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Cleaver found this funny and did his hee-haw laugh. “Fact,” he said, “I was planning to write a book about him. Ain’t that a coincidence, you and me both on the same track? ’Cept my book would have been different from yours, I’m guessing.”

  “You were going to write a biography of Mr. Mulholland?”

  “Not exactly. More a expose, you might say. I been real interested in him for a long time. And in Charles Varriker, his guy that died all those years ago. Dylan Riley, he was helping me. I hired him, like you did.” So, Glass thought, that’s how Riley happened to have all those facts at his fingertips about Big Bill. “Yeah, he was in on it with me for a while, until I gave it up, under all that pressure from persons unknown. And now he’s dead. There’s another coincidence.”

  They came to the Bow Bridge and set off across it, toward the Ramble.

  “What’s your interest in Charles Varriker?” Glass asked.

  “Well, he’s the main man in the story of Big Bill’s financial recovery way back then in the bad old eighties, ain’t he? He was the one Big Bill brought in to save Mulholland Cable when Mr. Bankruptcy began to beckon. Now Varriker, what I know of him, wasn’t the kind of man who’d let himself get so low there wasn’t nothing for it but to eat a gun.”

  “You think his death wasn’t suicide?”

  “What you think?”

  They had come to the middle of the bridge, and Cleaver stopped and turned his head to look both ways along the water. “Handsomest spot in all Manhattan,” he said. “You know this bridge was built by the same company that made the dome of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.? That’s the kind of thing I know, see. Useless information that one day suddenly becomes useful. Like knowing, for instance, that on the day before the day that Charles Varriker died-May 17th, 1984, which was a Thursday, case you’re interested-he bought a first-class round-trip ticket to Paris, France. Kind of a odd thing to do for a man contemplating offing himself, don’t you think, Mr. Glass?”

  They walked on. A wind was rising and the trees on the bank before them swayed and hissed, swayed and hissed. A bundle of cloud was swelling slowly over the pinnacles of Fifth Avenue.

  “Why Bill Mulholland?” Glass asked.

  “How’s that?”

  “Why were you so interested in him in the first place? Have you met him?”

  “Never had that pleasure, no.”

  “Probably you’d find he’s not what you think he is.”

  “Which would be?”

  They turned south, walking under the unquiet trees. The sunlight was fading, and the air had taken on a chill.

  “Do you suspect,” Glass asked, “that Mr. Mulholland had a hand in Dylan Riley’s murder?”

  Cleaver put on a shocked look and lifted his hands and wagged them from side to side. “Lordy, Mr. Glass,” he said, hamming it up shamelessly, “the things you do ask! And I thought I was bad-minded.”

  “But do you?”

  Cleaver squinted at the clouding sky. “Well now, let’s consider. I write some less than warm opinions of your Mr. Mulholland, and in particular the much-acclaimed Mulholland Trust, and all sorts of shit starts happening to my professional life. Then you come along and ask my late, lamented colleague Dylan Riley to do a little snooping into your father-in-law’s interesting and highly colorful life, and before you can say ‘dirty linen’ he gets a cap put in his eye. I’d call that suspicious, Mr. Glass, yes, I surely would.”

  Glass felt cold suddenly, and buttoned up his jacket and shoved his hands into the pockets. Cleaver, beside him, was humming a tune lightly under his breath and clicking his tongue at intervals.

  “Dylan Riley telephoned me,” Glass said, “the day he was killed. He had found out something. He wouldn’t say what it was. He tried to blackmail me.”

  Cleaver threw back his head and hooted. “That Riley!” he said delightedly. “He sure was some tease. What did he try to hit you for?”

  “Half a million dollars.”

  “Whee! You can’t fault him for lack of daring. Half a million bucks! Whatever it was he found out it must have been something. He give you no clue what it was?”

  “No.” Glass paused, and then said: “I thought you might know.”

  “Me?” Cleaver looked at him wide-eyed, seeming genuinely startled. “How would I know? Dylan and me, we weren’t that close. He was kind of tightfisted on the information front.”

  There was a light spatter of rain and they turned back toward the bridge.

  “Whatever it was he stumbled on may not have been about Bill Mulholland,” Glass said carefully.

  “No?”

  “No. It might have been about me.”

  Cleaver smoothed his moustache again, drawing down the corners of his mouth. “Well,” he said, “ain’t none of us without a secret of so
me kind. And Dylan sure was good at rooting out secrets. What you say to him when he tried to shake you down?”

  “I said nothing. I haven’t got half a million dollars, and if I had I wouldn’t have given it to him.”

  “But you were worried.”

  “Wouldn’t you have been, if Dylan Riley had something on you?”

  Cleaver chuckled. “Damn right,” he said. “Our deceased friend was a determined and unrelenting man. But not a blackmailer, I would say.”

  They passed by the fountain again and cut away across the Park. The sky was clouded over now and although the rain had not started in earnest it soon would. They quickened their pace. “How you like the climate here, Mr. Glass?” Cleaver asked. “Remind you of the Emerald Isle?” They came to the Tavern on the Green and Cleaver said: “I hear you can get a modest drink of something here for as little as thirty or forty bucks. Want to risk it?”

  They went upstairs and sat at a low table and a pretty blond waitress came and inquired with a singsong lilt what-all they would like today. Cleaver asked for a spritzer and Glass said he would have the same.

  “You know what this place used to be?” Cleaver said, looking about the dark-timbered room. “A sheepfold. I’m not fooling. There was a flock of sheep here in the Park until the middle of the 1930s, and this was the woolly fellows’ fold, until old man Moses-that’s Robert Moses the master builder-ordered them out to Prospect Park. There was a shepherd and all. This city, man, this city.” Their drinks arrived and Cleaver lifted his. “Departed friends,” he said. They drank the dubious toast and Cleaver leaned back on his seat and contemplated Glass with a mirthful eye. “He was real disappointed in you, you know,” he said, with a playful, lopsided grin, “our pal Riley. Thought you were selling out, agreeing to write up your daddy-in-law’s adventures.”