Jade in Aries

by Donald E. Westlake

  Since he had undoubtedly volunteered for the job, and since in all likelihood it was unnecessary—there had seemed to be plenty of clean glasses still on the table in the other room—I didn’t waste time sympathizing with him, but said, “I don’t seem to be finding the people I want.”

  “Really?” He frowned, puzzled. “I think they’re all here.”

  “I saw Remington, and Bruce Maundy. And I caught a glimpse of Cary Lane.”

  “The others are here. David is always nearby to Cary. And Leo and Henry have to be around someplace.”

  “Leo was the one who let me in. Actually, Henry Koberberg is the only one I’m not sure of. I don’t know what he looks like.”

  “Do you want me to come point him out?”

  “If you would, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure.” He shook suds from his hands and reached for a towel, then stopped and said, “Hey, I know where he is. Upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Up in the library. He doesn’t really like parties, he comes because of Leo. But then he heads for whatever room has books.”

  “And that would be upstairs?”

  “You know the door you came in? Not the outer door, the one to the living room.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right next to it there’s another door. That leads to the stairs. The library’s to the back.”

  “Second floor?”

  “Yeah, we’ve only got the two. Stew rents out the top two.”

  “Thank you.” I started for the door.

  “He has a beard,” Weissman said.

  “Thanks.”

  11

  I INTERRUPTED A COUPLE necking on the stairs. They weren’t embarrassed, and in fact both made jokes about it while I stepped over them, suddenly all knees. And one of them was so completely in female drag that I was past them before it occurred to me that both were men.

  I thought, I should feel disgusted, but I didn’t, I felt nothing about it at all. I had as much reaction as I would have to seeing an automobile go by in the street. But then, as I neared the top of the stairs, I finally did have a reaction of sorts: surprise. At myself. I had always thought that in eighteen years on the New York police force, I had seen just about everything there was to see, but I had never before in my life seen two homosexuals kiss. And now that I had, the only reaction I could dredge up was surprise at never having seen it happen before.

  At the head of the stairs I was distracted by the sounds of voices. They weren’t screaming, but they were harsh; two men were in an argument together, and there was just something about the voices that sounded as though it was a longterm argument, one that had started long ago and would not be settled now, not here, not tonight.

  They were in the direction I’d been told to go. I went through a doorway, across a rather ordinary bedroom—particularly considering the rooms I’d been seeing the last few days—dominated by a king-size bed with a white spread and several heart-shaped red pillows on it, and opened a door on the other side.

  It was the library. The man standing was Leo Ross, and the man seated in the maroon leather chair, bearded, stout, pedantic-looking, would surely be Henry Koberberg.

  I hadn’t been able to make out any of the words through the closed door, but as I came through the doorway Ross was saying, “—never want to face up to—” at which point he became aware of me, grew very flustered, and stopped his pacing, his speech and his gestures all in mid-flow.

  I said, “Excuse me. Jerry Weissman said I might find Mr. Koberberg in the library.”

  Koberberg looked at me with obvious dislike that he was obviously trying to hide. “I am Henry Koberberg,” he said. He had a surprisingly light frail voice for his size and appearance.

  Leo Ross had the nervousness of someone who wants to maintain the social appearances and is afraid the situation has gone beyond his control. “Henry,” he said now, with false cheeriness, “this is Mitch Tobin.”

  “I know who he is,” Koberberg said. He wasn’t interested in social appearances, not really, which was why he couldn’t hide his dislike for me.

  “If you’d prefer to talk with me another time,” I said, leaving the sentence up in the air, letting it tell him I intended us to have a conversation sooner or later, and waited for his response.

  He considered me without pleasure, and finally nodded. “We might as well talk now. You won’t need Leo, I suppose.”

  It didn’t matter to me one way or the other, since I’d already talked with Ross when I first came in. If Koberberg preferred to converse with me without his partner being present, I didn’t mind at all.

  But Leo did. He took his dismissal poorly, giving Koberberg an angry look before saying to me, silkily, “I’ll probably see you downstairs later.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  Ross left, and a little silence settled down between Koberberg and me, mostly because Koberberg didn’t meet my eye, but sat gazing thoughtfully at the door Ross had just shut behind him. Finally he said, “This is a bad time to be a black man, of course. The first generation with dignity has the most trouble.” He offered me a wintry smile, saying, “Don’t you think so?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Until very recently,” he explained pedantically, “it was impossible for a black man to fail, because nobody expected him to succeed at anything. While the rest of us had the three choices of success or the status quo or failure, the black man only had the choices of success or status quo. Now, very suddenly, that has changed. The black man is expected to join the struggle for success today; success is no longer a bolt from heaven. Since he is expected to struggle, it now becomes possible for him to fail. The first generation to greet the possibility of failure, which means the possibility of success, which means dignity, has the most difficulty of adjustment.”

  I wasn’t sure his reasoning was entirely seamless, but I saw no point in getting lost in a discussion that wasn’t what I was here for, so I angled the topic back by saying, “Is that why Ross was angry just now?”

  “It’s at the seat, I believe,” he said, “of most of his displays of temper. He is a very petulant boy, really. I would dismiss most of what he says, were I you.”

  I said, “And Jamie Dearborn? Did he suffer from the same thing?”

  Koberberg’s smile hinted at reminiscence, but what he said was, “Not at all. Jamie was a success, and he knew it. The question had been answered, which is to say the transition was complete.”

  I said, “Who hated him?”

  Koberberg beamed, a big happy face. “Almost everybody,” he said.

  “Including you?”

  “He frequently irritated me. His manner was abrasive. The first generation has the most trouble assimilating success, as well. He was a poor winner.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  Koberberg stopped smiling, and looked down at his rather large stomach. “Do? He didn’t do anything. Nothing you could measure, or describe, or copy down in shorthand. He simply contrasted us for his pleasure and my embarrassment.” He raised eyes that looked as though they would have shown pain if they had shown anything. But they didn’t show anything.

  The door behind me opened. I turned my head, and Cary Lane came in, his expression guileless and happy. His expression? How could you tell what his expression was, ever? How could you tell anything about Cary Lane, ever, by looking at the face he’d bought?

  Lane said, “Am I interrupting?” He said it as though he knew he was, didn’t much care, and didn’t believe anyone would take an interruption from him seriously anyway.

  Koberberg said, “Come in, Cary. We were talking about what a pleasant disposition Jamie had.”

  “Oh, you.” Lane went—“flounced” isn’t quite the word—over to the bookshelves and pretended to read the spines.

  “Now, as to Cary,” Koberberg said, “he does have a pleasant disposition. Don’t you, Cary?”

  “I’m sweet clear throu
gh,” Lane told him, and turned his head to wink at me.

  “No, he really is,” Koberberg insisted. “Because he has everything he wants. Don’t you, Cary?”

  “I have my David,” Lane said, this time keeping his back to us and pretending deep absorption in book spines.

  “Yes, you have,” Koberberg said pleasantly. “And you have your career. And you have your good looks.”

  I found myself wondering if Lane’s face would age like an ordinary face, or if it would remain smooth and plastic and unlined forever, while the body around it gradually aged and finally died and eventually rotted. And a graverobber a thousand years from now would find bones and dust and a perfect seamless sunny smiling face.

  I said to Koberberg, “Ross tells me he went to a novena Monday night.”

  Koberberg nodded, pursing his lips. “He tells me the same.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.”

  Lane faced us again, saying, “Oh, I am interrupting.”

  “Not at all,” I said to him. “Did Jamie Dearborn ever do anything unkind to you?”

  “To me?” The perfect face expressed astonishment. “Good heavens, what for?”

  “Weren’t you competitors?”

  “No no no! Because we’re both models? But our styles are entirely different! They would never have sent Jamie out on an assignment that would be right for me.”

  “And vice versa?”

  The perfect face went blank. “I beg your pardon?” He reminded me then of Carol Channing.

  “Would they send you out on an assignment,” I explained, “that would be right for Jamie?”

  “How could they? Do I look like a token black man?”

  Koberberg barked with laughter, clapping his hands together. “Well spoken, Cary! Very good!”

  I said to Lane, “Did Jamie ever go to the ballet with you?”

  “Oh, no. I told you, I prefer to go alone.”

  “Would you say you and Jamie were friends?”

  “Oh, yes!” The face was still guileless, for whatever that was worth.

  Koberberg said, dryly, “You may leave us now, Cary. If we say anything about David, I will let you know.”

  Lane looked flustered. “I was just looking for a book,” he said.

  Koberberg shook his head. “Cary, what on earth would you do with a book?”

  Now Lane did show that he was stung. “Oh, you,” he said, “you think you’re the only one in the world with brains.”

  “Not the only one,” Koberberg said. “But one of the very few.” He gave Lane his wintry smile, and waited.

  Lane couldn’t figure out an exit. He made uncompleted gestures toward the bookshelves, then shrugged awkwardly and said, “Well, I’ll come back later, then. Sorry if I interrupted.” The last said with heavy sarcastic overtones.

  “Maybe we can talk later,” I said to him as he went by me.

  He gave me a surprised smile. “I’d like that,” he said, sounding as though he really would, and left.

  Koberberg, looking at the door, said, “And that’s why Cary’s still alive and Jamie’s dead.”

  “Personality?”

  “Of course.”

  “What was Jamie’s personality?”

  “I understand he was an Aries, but I would say he had the personality of a scorpion. Not Scorpio, scorpion.”

  “Are you involved in astrology, too?”

  “We all are, to an extent. The complexities of the modern world, you know. The search for the authoritarian father figure becomes steadily more baroque. Our Father, Who art in Heaven. Yes? In the heavens, then, in the stars. And He will tell us what to do; all we have to do is listen closely to the music of the celestial spheres.”

  “You don’t take it seriously?”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.”

  “Like Ross’s novena,” I said.

  He gave a snort of surprised laughter. “Are we back there again? Oh, I suppose Leo was at his grubby novena, he does do that sort of thing. In any event, he wasn’t killing anybody. Not Jamie, not Ronnie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Leo suffers at the hands of others,” he said. “It would take away some of his pleasure to cut down on the number of hands.”

  “In other words, you say he’s a masochist.”

  “I find labels embarrassing,” he said. “Leo doesn’t like to be whipped, which is the implication I get from that particular label. But his life-style is to be mistreated by other people and to miss opportunities for success because of the distraction and agony of that mistreatment. It’s Leo’s individual answer to the problem of having success thrust upon him as an alternative.”

  “Are you one of the people who mistreat him?”

  A smile with down-turned corners, a shake of the head: “I am Leo’s father figure. I am the one whose task it is to tell him he should succeed anyway, no matter what the bad people do.”

  “What were you arguing about, before I came in?”

  “He wanted me to see you. I didn’t want to see you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I find your line of work distasteful. As bad as psychoanalysis, in its way. I am a very private person, Mr. Tobin, I think of myself as a desk with many small drawers, each containing some small private treasure of value and interest to no one but me. I don’t want you poking about in my drawers, if you’ll forgive an inadvertent sexual remark. Under other circumstances, perhaps we would get along, would have inspiriting conversations together. But when you come to me with one purpose in mind, to peel me open and pluck tiny facts out of me, you make me extremely uncomfortable. I would have preferred to avoid this meeting altogether. Failing which, I notice that my tactic has been to smother you in words.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Ross argued against you?”

  “As you heard. He was afraid you would think me guilty if I refused to talk with you. But I’m on your suspect list anyway, am I not?”

  I said, “Who do you think killed Dearborn?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you agree with Cornell’s list?”

  “I don’t know that I know the list entirely. Leo and I are on it, Cary is on it, David Poumon is on it.”

  “Stewart Remington and Bruce Maundy.”

  His face brightened. “Those two! Both of them? I have nothing to fear!” He looked and sounded as though he were only half-joking.

  I said, “You think it’s one of them?”

  “Either or both,” he said. “Both violent, both bad-tempered, both strong and active. Arrest them both and try them alternately.”

  “I’m not a policeman.”

  “Yes, I know. And I am not really homosexual.” He smiled at me.

  “I mean I’m not on the force.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Do you have an alibi for Monday?”

  “Of course not. Would Leo have been so upset?”

  “What do you think he was doing Monday?”

  “He? Leo?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was at the novena, as he said.”

  “And if he wasn’t?”

  A shadow crossed his face. He contemplated not answering me at all, I could see that, and when he spoke he said, “That’s the sort of thing I meant before. You want to pull all the little facts into the open air.”

  “Do you think he has a lover somewhere, is that it?”

  He laughed aloud, harshly. “A lover! Do you know what the word ‘cruise’ means?”

  “In this context,” I said, gesturing to include the building we were in, “it would mean walking around some specific section of the city trying to pick somebody up. Somebody homosexual.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very good.”

  “Ross cruises?”

  “I have never said so. I have never entirely articulated the thought. Do you wish to force me to?”

  I said, “Where were you Monday night?”
/>   “We have a shop on the first floor,” he said. “In back, we restore old furniture. I was there, working on a Bentwood chair. Alone, naturally.”

  I said, “Did Jamie cruise?”

  “God knows.”

  “You must know,” I said. “You people know almost everything about one another.”

  “Ronnie believes that Jamie was faithful,” he said carefully. “I have never seen anything to lead me to believe he’s wrong.”

  “Why do you say it like that? Why keep a little bit back?”

  “Probably,” he said, “because I can’t really believe the little bastard was true to anybody. Possibly, after Leo, I can’t believe that any black man can be faithful. Probably because I would prefer to think badly of Jamie in every possible way. You see how you have me opening drawers? I hope, once this conversation is over, it will never be necessary for you and me to meet again.”

  “Would you like to end it now?”

  “I would like it to have never begun. But now that it is, let’s make it as encyclopedic as possible, and get it over with forever.”

  I said, “Why does Cary Lane think David Poumon killed Dearborn?”

  He looked surprised. “You noticed that? I wonder what you’ve noticed about me.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I have no idea. I would tell you if I did.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “The only one I can think of,” he said, “who disliked Jamie strongly enough to want to see him dead was me. And I didn’t do it, so I’m at a loss.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Turning away, I put my hand on the doorknob, then looked back at him and said, “You really don’t have to be that cautious. You’re better than you think you are.”

  His smile was bitter. “Next, you’ll be telling me I’m strong enough to go to the party. My Fuehrer, I can walk!”

  If he preferred himself as he was, I’d be wasting my time saying anything more. Besides, that wasn’t what I was here for. “Thank you for your time,” I said, and left him.

  12

  DAVID POUMON WAS AT the bar in the small yellow room downstairs. I went over and stood beside him and made myself a drink. I discovered a long time ago that dry vermouth on ice makes an acceptable drink that can be sipped over a long period of time without having much of any effect, so that’s what I made for myself now.