Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  “We talked all night, with him insisting and me refusing to do what he wanted. I asked him a thousand questions, and he gave vague answers. I realized he knew more than he was saying. He supposed that the so-called victim had probably planned the whole thing, probably out of greed. But who would want to do Fleischer any harm? Who could have paid her to do such a thing? I know who—he told me—but I can’t tell you, otherwise you’d think I was mad and it would have dreadful consequences for both of us. I asked him whether Fleischer was capable of blackmailing. He avoided giving me a straightforward answer, but I was convinced that that was the only explanation for Abe’s behavior.

  “I think I caved more from exhaustion. After two hours of pointless arguing on the phone with Matt and another two hours of tense discussion with Abe, I could no longer reason clearly. I got dressed and we went to the police station where Fleischer was being held. We talked to a detective, who told us that the alleged victim, Miss Lucy Sandler, was at a nearby hotel with a psychologist. Fleischer was going to be brought before the judge the next morning and needed an attorney.

  “There followed more nightmarish hours, in a room full of cigarette smoke, bustling with delinquents and police officers. I testified that Fleischer had been at my house, preparing a dissertation. The detective who took my statement kept grinning and asking insinuating questions, and he didn’t appear to believe one jot of what I was saying. I hired a lawyer I knew and he looked at the file. He told me that Miss Sandler claimed that the previous day, at around noon, she’d had sexual relations with the accused, at his temporary residence, after they’d both been to a party the night before, which is where they met. After that, Fleischer had left, saying he had things to do, and she’d gone to bed. Late that evening he’d come back drunk, beaten her, raped her, and then fled.

  “The tale didn’t hold water, as the lawyer pointed out, given that the alleged victim didn’t appear to have been subjected to any violence. He concluded that it was probably a case of blackmail.

  “Abe admitted that he’d been the one who had introduced Miss Lucy Sandler to Fleischer at the party and that he was shocked at how things had turned out. At one point he whispered to me that if Fleischer were convicted, he’d have lost his entire inheritance, without telling me why.

  “In the morning, I went with Fleischer to court, feeling like I was in the middle of a nightmare. The judge agreed to grant him bail, but banned him from leaving town. That same day, at noon, we discovered Miss Sandler had withdrawn the complaint and gone back to New York. Before we parted, Fleischer said, ‘Maybe one day I’ll pay you back for your help.’ I told him that I wasn’t expecting any kind of reward: it was the worst thing I’d ever done and I didn’t want to think about it ever again. But as a kind of strange coincidence, the tragedy with Matt came shortly after that.”

  She paused, as if she’d lost the thread of the story. I asked her where the bathroom was, and while I was in there I looked in her medicine cabinet. She had a whole drugstore in there. I went back to the living room, wondering how much I could trust what she was telling me. After I returned, she continued.

  “As I was saying, I slept for fourteen hours straight that night. I’d taken the phone off the hook, so my husband had tried in vain to call me the entire night. At around six o’clock in the morning he took the train to New Jersey. He was worse than ever before.

  “He ransacked the whole house looking for my supposed lover, convinced that he must be hiding somewhere. In the end, somebody called the police and a patrol car came and took him away to the station, even though I told the two officers that I didn’t want to file a complaint.

  “I called Abe, but he didn’t answer.

  “I had to go to work: I had a lot of things to do, and I couldn’t postpone them any longer. I had the feeling that everybody was looking at me and that my employees were whispering behind my back. I called the police and they told me that Mr. Matt Gregory had been released a few hours before, after receiving a caution. I called Abe again, but he still wasn’t answering.

  “The next morning, the doorbell woke me up. Two police officers had come to inform me that Matt had been murdered—stabbed to death, to be precise.

  “They told me that his body had been found by some passersby at around four a.m. in a back alley near the railroad station in Princeton Junction. The paramedics declared him dead at the scene. The murderer had probably been a professional—there was a single stab wound, straight to the heart. No money or valuables had been found on his person, so it looked like robbery. Would you like more coffee?”

  Her tone of voice didn’t change at all when she asked me, so I looked at her in confusion for a few seconds, not understanding what she meant.

  “No, I’m fine, thank you. A terrible story … How did Mr. Hale react when he found out?”

  “Again, Abe seemed very frightened. He didn’t provide me with any plausible explanation about how he’d spent the previous day. He babbled something about helping Fleischer with a paper and that he’d been in the library. It was a lie, because I later checked if they’d signed in on that day and found out that they hadn’t.”

  “Do you suspect either or both of them might have been involved in Matt’s death? Did the police catch the perpetrator?”

  “No, the murderer was never caught. The theory was that it had probably been a drifter, who left town right after the killing.

  “Mr. Cobb, you know how it is when you glimpse something out of the corner of your eye for a fraction of a second and then wonder whether what you saw was real or just a figment of your imagination? I’ve never forgotten the expression on Fleischer’s face when he told me that one day he would pay me back for my help.

  “Later, I realized that I’d thought about such a possibility—that he or Abe or both of them might have been involved in Matt’s murder—from the very first moment. But at the time I was too frightened and overwhelmed by the way my life had suddenly gone off the tracks to be certain of anything. The world I knew had shattered into pieces, becoming a whirlpool that could suck me under at any moment.

  “In any case, I came to an agreement with Abe that it would be better for both of us if we didn’t see each other for a while.

  “Matt’s body had been collected from the morgue by his parents and taken to New York. They didn’t even invite me to the funeral. They behaved as if I didn’t exist.

  “The next few months were confused and I can’t remember anything much about them. Abe kept his promise and didn’t come looking for me. He was no longer my employee and we never even bumped into each other. He called me in late December to wish me Merry Christmas and I told him I’d be spending the holidays with my parents in Florida. In reality, I stayed at home, alone, but I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t turn up at my door. He assured me that his thesis was going well. We didn’t see each other the whole winter. I was the one who looked him up, in the end, around the middle of March.

  “It was only when I looked into his eyes again that I knew the man I once loved was no longer there. For someone in his twenties, a couple of months is a very long time. No, he hadn’t forgotten me and I still meant something to him. But from the very first moment I had the feeling that I’d become a kind of pal, a friend to share memories with.

  “Fleischer seemed different too. His humor had evaporated, his answers to questions were curt and unenthusiastic, and most of the time he seemed lost in his own world. I couldn’t understand why Abe had insisted on bringing him along when we met.

  “Abe had another cause for worry. His exam results had been mediocre and he couldn’t see any prospect of a decent job on the horizon. He was afraid of growing old teaching in some out-of-the-way high school, surrounded by bitter failures in the staffroom and hostile students in the classroom. As I told you before, his relationship with his father was poor and he didn’t want to go back to Louisiana. I promised to try to find him a job, and he told me to forget it. In any case, we saw each other rarely.

  �
��I think it was May, shortly before his graduation, when he came by and told me about Mexico. It was Fleischer’s idea, as far as I could tell. They wanted to go to Mexico—I can’t remember where exactly—to buy a small hotel on the beach and make a living from it. He even showed me a flier with some photographs of the property—a dilapidated two-story mansion, with white walls and brown woodwork, somewhere on the shore.

  “I asked him where he was going to come up with the money and he reminded me that Fleischer was the heir to a large fortune.

  “I decided to do everything I could to prevent him from getting caught up in that adventure. He didn’t know anything about running a hotel business. I pictured him as a puffy-faced alcoholic, old before his time, surrounded by lowlifes, sweating on the porch of a crumbling house, a local laughingstock.

  “By lucky coincidence, a friend from France had asked me to recommend somebody for a temporary job at a cultural foundation called L’Etoile. The money wasn’t great, but for a young man at the start of his career it was an opportunity to work in Europe, and Abe spoke French fluently.

  “At first he categorically refused, and I think it was Fleischer who finally persuaded him to take the job. I didn’t know at the time that they’d agreed that Fleischer would join him in France almost immediately.

  “In July, I took him to the airport and he left. Looking at him, I had the feeling that I would never see him again.”

  The sun had broken through the clouds and was blazing. She stood up and gestured for me to follow her. She took a coat from the rack in the hallway, threw it over her shoulders, and we went outside.

  On the porch there was a table and a wooden bench, and she invited me to sit. A sparrow landed on the edge of the table and gazed at us with its beady black eyes and then took flight, vanishing into the undergrowth.

  “In the first two weeks he called me almost every day. He was happy and enthusiastic. Then he stopped calling. I tried to contact Fleischer and found out he’d gone to Paris too. I had Abe’s address and phone number, which he’d given me when he first got to Paris, so I wrote to him and tried to get hold of him, but without success.

  “In the end, I went out there. I’d been to Paris before, about fifteen years previously, in the summer after I finished high school, in the days when trips to Europe had started to be a middle-class requisite, along with a three-bed house in the suburbs, two cars in the garage, and a color TV.”

  “Did you meet Simone?”

  She nodded.

  “Not directly … In a rare letter, Abe had told me he’d met a woman by that name, who had bowled him over with her beauty and culture, and helped him to acclimatize to Parisian life. He’d talked about her the way you tell something to a mere friend and that made me angry. He probably thought he was doing the decent thing by keeping me up to date with such details, but for me it came like a punch in the face. The presence of that woman in his life was the reason I dropped everything and went there to find him. Have you ever abandoned a woman who was in love with you, Dr. Cobb?”

  “Yes, I think so …”

  “Well, I don’t know what she did or how she reacted, but believe me, she won’t have done even a quarter of what she fantasized about doing. I dreamed up all kinds of plans for revenge, each more terrible than the next. I thought about destroying his reputation, accusing him of the death of my husband, telling the foundation that I withdrew my recommendation, finding Simone and telling her Abe was a dangerous maniac and that there was more between him and Fleischer than friendship, if you get my meaning.

  “By the time I arrived in Paris, I didn’t even know what I wanted anymore. I felt like a middle-aged abandoned mistress, capable of making a scene and humiliating herself in the vain hope of getting back her younger lover. I was aware of being in that regrettable position, but I couldn’t stop myself from doing what I had to do.

  “I booked a room in a hotel near the street he was living on. The next morning I went to the first beauty salon I found and tidied myself up as best as I could. Trying to look happy and self-confident, I went to the foundation to find him. He wasn’t there, so I went to his address, praying to god I wouldn’t find him with that woman. He wasn’t alone, but he was with Joshua.

  “The concierge had called up to say a woman was looking for him, without giving a name, and when he saw me in the entrance hall he froze. He told me that Fleischer was in the apartment, and we left for a nearby café.

  “All my self-confidence was gone and I pleaded with him. He’d never been in a situation like that before and was embarrassed and didn’t know what to do. He kept asking me to understand, claiming that he thought our relationship had ended before he left for Europe.

  “In short, I made a scene. In the end, I managed to calm down and I realized yet again how happy I felt being with him, even under those circumstances. I asked him whether he was in love with that girl, whether they were lovers. He neither denied it nor admitted it, so I still didn’t know the nature of their relationship.

  “There’s no point in my boring you with the details … He continued with his explanations and excuses, I insisted that our separation would be a huge mistake. I lied to him about having some business to settle in Paris, so I stayed there for a few more days and followed him. He met Simone and I was already sure they were head over heels in love with one another. I can’t have been in my right mind. I was terribly ashamed of what I was doing, but like I said, I couldn’t help myself.

  “In any case, I’d dropped everything at my company, handing them some preposterous excuses, and I was wandering through a large foreign city like a ghost, constantly asking myself what I was doing there. I’m not even sure whether I deduced certain things afterwards or whether I merely imagined them. My entire life I’d been a cerebral creature who had obeyed her reason, and all of a sudden I’d turned myself into a lost woman who was behaving in a way demeaning to her status.”

  I had a strange sense of déjà vu. It was as if I were in Maine again, on Joshua Fleischer’s estate, listening once again to that long-gone story, told this time from a different angle, by a different character.

  “The man who had asked me to recommend somebody for the foundation was Pierre Zolner. He taught at the Polytechnic. I was sure that if Abe lost the foundation job, he would come back to the States. So I wrote a slanderous letter, denouncing Abe and Fleischer, and sent it to Zolner anonymously. Later Zolner called me and informed me that despite his respect and friendship for me, the foundation had been forced to withdraw the initial offer.

  “I went home and resumed my life. I refused to think about Abe for a while. He never contacted me again, and I didn’t try to get in touch with him. By chance, although the details aren’t important, in the late eighties I met somebody from Baton Rouge who knew the Hales well. He told me that Abraham’s father had been overcome with grief when he’d happened to see his son walking down the street, in Los Angeles. When he’d called out to him, Abe pretended not to hear. I knew that he’d never loved his father, so I wasn’t really surprised that he’d broken off all contact with him.

  “What you told me today is very sad, Dr. Cobb. I realize now that out of pure spite, I may have ruined everything and destroyed Abe’s life. If I hadn’t sent that letter, maybe he’d have lived happily with that woman, instead of coming back here to die alone in a mental hospital.”

  I understood that she’d come to the end of her story. For a while we just sat there saying nothing. She looked exhausted, and I had the unpleasant feeling that I’d upended an old lady’s dresser drawers, rummaging through her lingerie. Then she asked me, “Well, Dr. Cobb, have you found the answers you were looking for?”

  “To be honest, no,” I said. “I don’t know what the nature of the relationship between those two men and Miss Duchamp was, because Mr. Fleischer told me something completely different. And I didn’t find out what exactly happened after Mr. Hale lost his job. Mr. Fleischer was adamant that he couldn’t remember anything about what happened
one particular night. That’s why he came to me. And the circumstances surrounding Miss Simone Duchamp’s disappearance are still unclear.”

  “Fleischer probably lied,” she said calmly. “Would it be any wonder? That man was a murderer. As time has gone by, I’ve become more and more convinced that he killed my husband.”

  “But why then did he hire me and risk everything coming out under hypnosis?”

  “Perhaps for credibility, Dr. Cobb. He probably faked the trance. I don’t know what conclusion you came to with him, but it was probably one that completely exculpates him. Or else maybe he was looking for a way to confess his sins and ease his conscience before he died. But it was all so predictable, wasn’t it? The rich boy, who gets even richer, becomes a respectable member of society, despite his past transgressions. And the poor boy ended up resigned to being a nonentity, forgotten, even insane.

  “Abe had a vast mind, which he was hesitant to use because of the thick layer of prejudices and frustrations he carried with him. He was almost a genius but, unlike Fleischer, his self-esteem had been completely destroyed since childhood, probably because of his father’s behavior. Abe and that girl paid the price, while Fleischer blithely went on with his life. But it’s always the weakest and the kindest who take the fall, isn’t it so? I’d have liked to see Abraham happy and fulfilled. Instead, I was as cruel to him as everyone else he met.”

  We stood up.

  The sun had been smothered again by heavy, basalt-colored clouds. I pictured the woman in front of me being eaten away year after year by questions, obsessions, and regrets, frozen in a particular time and place.

  “I’m not sure why I agreed to speak to you and tell you what I told you,” she said, without looking at me. “As someone once put it, the past is another country. But to be honest, I’ve always been confused about what really happened back then. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. In this case, I can understand and accept the beginning and even the middle, but the ending has never made sense to me. So probably I was hoping that you’d be able to offer me that ending that I’ve missed.”