The phone in my left hand clicked. A voice I didn’t recognize, tinny and fey, spoke from it: “Hello?” From the way Weissman’s eyes widened, the voice I was hearing had once belonged to Jamie Dearborn.
The other voice I did know: Bruce Maundy’s. It said, with fury and something else, “Who is this?”
“It’s Jamie, sweetness.” The cassette’s tiny tape reels turned, tape feeding through. I had thirty minutes on each side, more than enough.
“I want to know who this is.” Maundy sounded like a man at the end of his rope. He sounded as though he might suddenly begin to pound the telephone against the wall.
“Listen, sweetness, I told you it’s Jamie. Guess who’s gone to Atlanta?” The voice was seductive, arch, comic; a sexy come-on combined with a sexy put-on. I was remembering that Cary Lane had been one of the people Jamie Dearborn had slept with during Cornell’s visits to Atlanta; Lane was like this tape cassette, playing back conversations he’d had with the real Dearborn.
I felt a chill up my back. I knew what the situation was, I’d structured it myself, and still it was getting to me. How could it fail to get to Maundy, who couldn’t know anything about the stage machinery, who had to recognize the voice, and who—even more important than the mere sound of the voice—had to recognize the things it was saying and the way those things were being said?
“I don’t know who you are,” Maundy was saying, gritting the words out, almost swallowing the telephone, he was crowding it so much, “but if I ever get my hands on you, I’ll kill you. I swear I will.”
“Oh, you already did that,” Dearborn’s voice said carelessly. “Tonight, let’s have fun. You know who misses you? Calcutta misses you.”
There was silence, suddenly. I looked at Koberberg, who had come over to stand beside Weissman and listen to the tinny little voices, his head bowed, his expression hooded. He met my eye and shook his head; he didn’t know the reference either.
But it had caused an effect. It would be something sexual, then, some private joke that Dearborn had had with his lovers, something that Maundy would know but would associate with no one other than Dearborn.
“Brucy?” the voice asked plaintively, archly. “Bruty Brucy? Et tu, Brucy?”
“Where did you hear all that? Where do you know that from?” And now it was Maundy’s voice I didn’t recognize; it was hoarse, it trembled, it wasn’t completely under its owner’s control.
“Honey, you forget who you’re talking to. I know my Bruty Brucy.”
Lovers talk to one another in bed. Dearborn had talked, had told them about each other. At least, he’d obviously talked to Lane, with whom he’d probably felt more kinship than with any of the others. I doubted he’d talked about his other lovers with Cornell, and not much with Maundy, either. But he had with Lane, more than enough for Lane to be able now to pin Maundy to the wall and impale him there on memories.
Jamie the Jade, Koberberg had called him, and it was the jade I was hearing now, teasing, taunting, playing with fire.
Maundy said, “Stay there. Whoever you are, stay right there.”
“Oh, I’ll stay here, sweetness. You know what I’d like tonight?” And the teasing lilting voice suddenly got explicit, combining the bluntest of slang terms with arch private endearments, describing acts and positions and attitudes with loving care. And saying, “You know how I can turn you on over the phone. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that, isn’t it?”
“I’m coming there,” Maundy said. His voice was trembling, but he didn’t sound as though he’d been turned on. He sounded desperate, and deadly. “Wait for me, I’m coming there.”
“I’ll be waiting,” the jade said, and there was a click, and the jade said, “Brucy? Sweetness?”
“It’s over,” I said. I stopped the cassette, and Weissman put the book back in the phone cradle, and the receiver became silent. I put it away from me on the bed as though it were unclean, and got to my feet, carrying the cassette. I wanted to walk, and there was nowhere to go.
Cary Lane came up the stairs. He looked as shaken as I felt. He said, “He’s coming over.” No questions about whether he’d done well or not; he knew he’d done well, and it disturbed him as much as the rest of us.
I said, “I know.”
Jerry Weissman said, “That was the scariest thing I ever heard.”
Lane said, “I wasn’t sure I could do it. So I held one thing back, one thing that I would be the only one to know until afterward. To spur me on.” He turned to me. “When I called Bruce’s house and talked to his mother,” he said, “she asked me if I hadn’t called before one time. I was using Jamie’s voice even though I didn’t expect her to know it, just for the practice, and she asked me if I hadn’t called before. And I said I thought maybe I had, and then I started to leave the name and number for her to give Bruce, and when I told her Jamie Dearborn, she said, ‘Oh, of course it’s you, I remember. You called just a few weeks ago, I still have the number you gave me.’ And she gave me this number.” He looked around at us. “That’s why he killed Jamie,” he said. “And David. To keep a silly secret that nobody ever even cared about.” And as he stood there, the expressionless perfect face began to cry.
23
HAD HE BECOME SPOOKED? We waited, the four of us, in the big open top-floor bedroom, talking little, listening for the doorbell, and the time went by, and nothing happened. Even with the traffic, even with the snow still coming down, if he’d left immediately after the phone call he should have been here no later than seven. But then it was seven-thirty, it was eight o’clock, and he still hadn’t showed up.
After his outburst, Lane had quieted down again, and he spent most of his time at the front windows, staring out at the roofs and the snow. Koberberg had delved into the low bookcase and was sitting now in a chair, idly turning the pages of books, but not really reading. He had turned the chair so his back was mostly to me, in order to get light on the pages from the one lamp we had burning, and I could see that his attention was only sporadically on books.
Jerry Weissman suffered the most from inactivity. He didn’t feel right unless he could be actively helpful to somebody, and there was no help right now he could offer to anybody. He paced the floor, this way and that, in erratic random paths around the room, and from time to time attempted to engage one or another of us in conversation, mostly offering hopeful theories as to why Maundy hadn’t as yet showed up. But none of us was very interested in talking, and the conversations all trailed off, and Weissman went back to his pacing.
As for me, I continued to sit on the edge of the bed, facing the rear windows and the snow and the flickering lights of lower Manhattan and the ghostly reflections of this room and us four. Sometimes I looked at the city, sometimes at the snow, sometimes at the stoop-shouldered reflected images in the glass.
I thought about Jock. I thought about him a lot, conversations we’d had, days of our partnership when specific things had happened. There was nothing homosexual between us, but there are other kinds of closeness than can become meaningful and real, and we had one of them. When I started seeing Linda Campbell, I never doubted for a second that Jock would cover for me, even though I knew he liked and admired Kate, and he did cover for me, without question, and thereby died.
And I died with him. When it became public that Jock had died because I had not been with him, and that I had been in bed with Linda at the time—whose husband I had four years earlier picked up on a burglary charge, back before the affair began—the mass of guilts had crushed me beneath their weight and I had simply died. But I had died in a way that had left it possible for me to feel pain, to ache with the memory of what I had done and the results of what I had done, so finally I had started my wall, to deaden the capacity for pain through physical work, to distract my mind from memory by filling it with simple questions of digging and building.
And whenever, in these two years, I had felt a thaw beginning within me—as on occasion I had—I’d always thru
st it away again. My punishment was to feel guilt, to be as dead as Jock forever. Kate, who long ago had forgiven me, had remained sure that some day I would forgive myself, but I hadn’t believed it. I had looked into myself, and I had seen no future at all. Nothing at all.
But suddenly this afternoon something had clicked into a different gear inside my head, and all at once I had found it possible to permit myself reactions that were not colored by guilt. I had found it possible to think and act like a living man, to invite Marty and his wife to come to the house for dinner, to start thinking about tentative futures. And I was spending much of the waiting time now testing that new attitude, the way a man will flex a once-broken arm after the cast has been taken off. I thought of Jock, I consciously thought of him, recalled his face to mind, remembered how his voice used to sound—as Cary Lane had remembered Jamie Dearborn’s voice—brought to the surface again whatever incidents of our partnership I could remember: good times, difficult times, pointless times, the detritus of memory. Checking myself for reactions. As Jock’s surrogate, was I prepared now to forgive me, to declare my sentence completed?
I couldn’t be sure yet. I only knew I felt the way a man feels after a long illness, just after the crisis point, when he is going to get better and knows it. He isn’t strong yet, he isn’t well yet, but he knows he’s on the right road at last.
What I didn’t know was the crisis point. What had caused this change, what in the last few days had unlocked my head? I had no idea. Eventually I might figure it out, but not yet.
And at twenty to nine the phone rang.
We all jumped. Reaching for the cassette and the phone receiver, I called, “Lane! Take it downstairs! After the fourth ring!”
“Yes!” He was already running for the stairs.
The second ring sounded. In the space between that and the third, I shouted at Lane, disappearing down the stairs, “Stay Dearborn! No matter who it is or what he wants!”
Had he heard me? The third ring sounded, so I couldn’t tell if he’d answered me or not. And Weissman’s hand was hovering anxiously over the book in the phone cradle. “One more,” I said to him, and he nodded, his head movement jerky. Koberberg had gotten up from his chair and was coming over to stand with us, the book forgotten in his right hand, one finger marking a place I knew he cared nothing about.
Ring four. I hadn’t started the cassette! I fumbled with it, agitated, and the fourth ring ended, and Weissman lifted the book.
The phone in my lap clicked, but the tape was moving in the cassette, everything was all right. I held the machines in my two hands, and brought them close together, and we heard that eerie voice again, Cary Lane with the voice of a dead man, saying, “Hello?”
“Hello yourself. Who is that?”
The voice wasn’t Maundy’s, but it was familiar. I looked up at Koberberg and Weissman, and Weissman whispered, “It’s Stew!”
Remington? Dearborn’s voice was saying, “Well, hel-lo, Uncle Stewart. How’s Big Daddy?”
“My Christ, that’s a good imitation. Who is this? Cary, is that you, you little bastard?”
Lane said something, gamely keeping up the Dearborn imitation, but it was no good. I dropped the cassette and yanked adhesive tape off the mouthpiece. I was too frantic, and it took longer than it should have.
Lane was still talking, but I broke in: “Remington, don’t say anything. This is Tobin. Is Maundy on an extension?”
A short silence, and then he said, as though humoring someone, “Not at all.”
“He can’t hear me?”
“Now, you know that isn’t so,” he said, still as though humoring someone.
“Good,” I said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t smart enough to realize he’d go to you. He’s the killer. He fit Ross for the frame, and now the official investigation is turned off. We’re trying to get him in motion.”
“Are you sure it’s me you want to talk to?”
I said, “You mentioned Lane. He’ll remember now that Lane does voices, you’ll have to cool him out on that. Can you dial this number again as though it were Koberberg’s?”
“Yes,” he said, but with some doubt in his voice.
“Remember that Lane’s supposed to be at Koberberg’s. Become confused as to who you’re talking to here, maybe it really is Dearborn. Then tell Maundy you want to call Koberberg to see if Lane is still there. Call here again.”
“Well,” he said, “if you say so. Who is this, really?”
“Lane,” I said, “take over again.”
Lane’s own voice came on the line, frail and frightened: “Oh, God.”
Remington said, “Bruce is here. Why don’t you talk to him, maybe he can figure out who you are?”
There was a little silence. I was holding the receiver down in my lap again, but holding it with two hands now, one palm over the mouthpiece. Koberberg knelt on one knee in front of me and held the cassette near the earpiece.
Maundy’s voice came on, harsh and angry: “So it’s Cary, is it? You’re gonna get a lot less pretty, you son of a bitch.”
“Oh, now, you don’t really like Cary.” It was the Dearborn voice again, effortless and smooth, still with the seductiveness in it, still without a quiver of nervousness. Lane could hide behind a voice as effectively as a face. “It’s me you like, Brucy, and you know it. Except when I call your mama.”
“I’ll be seeing you, Cary,” Maundy said, his voice heavy and dangerous, and there was a click as he hung up.
Weissman just stood there. I had to say to him, “Put the book back.”
“Oh!”
Lane came up the stairs while I was fixing the tape and cotton back on the mouthpiece. I said to him, “You did fine. You and Koberberg go downstairs. When Remington calls, you’re at Koberberg’s place. Be ready for Maundy to get on the line.”
“All right.”
“Pick up after the second ring again.”
“I will,” Koberberg promised.
They went downstairs, and Weissman said to me, “What’s going to happen now?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping he’d panic. He keeps being on the edge of it, but he just won’t tip. It was bright of him to go to Remington, I hadn’t expected that.”
“Bruce is smart,” Weissman said. “He acts like a hood, but he’s really very smart. He’s had a couple of one-acters Off-Off-Broadway.”
“A playwright,” I said. “That’s right, I’d forgotten about that. Has a job in a ticket office to be near the theater.”
Weissman gave a surprised laugh. “Not exactly,” he said. Then he looked thoughtful, but didn’t say anything else.
The phone hadn’t yet rung. I looked at my watch, and waited, and looked at it again, and two minutes had gone by.
I got to my feet, leaving the phone mouthpiece and the cassette on the bed. “I’ll be right back.”
Weissman said, “You think something’s wrong?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I went downstairs, thinking, I handled this wrong. I don’t want Remington on my conscience, too.
Koberberg and Lane were in the living room, under the 747, both looking worried. Koberberg said, “Do you think something happened?”
I said, “Call him. If he answers, play it that you’re home, no matter what he says. This time Maundy might be on an extension.”
Lane said, “If he answers?”
I didn’t say anything. I kept looking at Koberberg, who stared worriedly back at me for an extra five seconds or so, and then abruptly sat down beside the phone and picked up the receiver and dialed.
Lane and I stood there and watched him. He was sitting there, very attentive, holding the phone to his ear as though it were telling him something fascinating. “It’s ringing,” he said, and that was the last thing he said till, “Ten rings.”
Lane said, “It’s only two blocks from here.”
“Break the connection,” I said.
Koberberg pressed the cradle button down with a finger, and
looked at me.
I said, “Dial 911.”
24
THE POLICE HAD GOTTEN there first. A patrol car was out front, empty, its motor running, its red light looping and looping on the roof, the beam flicking through the descending snow.
The snowfall was getting heavier, denser, but still without wind. That had slowed the four of us, hurrying along sidewalks ankle-deep in wet snow, and it meant now that the patrol car’s beacon hadn’t produced its usual quota of spectators. Except for us, there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. Except for the patrol car, there was no other traffic on the street.
The front door stood open, the yellow corridor was brightly lit, the door leading to the living room at the far end of the corridor was also open. We went through and into the apartment, and I was struck at how large and empty and low-ceilinged it was. The only other time I’d seen it, during the party, it had been full of people and really very difficult to see.
The downstairs was empty. It was becoming weird; the intermittent blood-red light flashing through the front windows, tinging the green and yellow apartment, but no one to be seen. No Remington, no Maundy, no police. Finding nothing was almost the worst possibility of all; at any rate, the most frightening.
But then we found them on the second floor. I was leading the way, Koberberg behind me, Lane and Weissman trailing reluctantly after, and upstairs I saw the library door standing open, and I walked down that way.
Two uniformed cops, both somewhat overweight, both wearing their slick raincoats. They filled the room, and for the moment they were all I saw.
And they both saw me. They frowned, and one said, “Can I help you?”
“I’m the one who called,” I said. “Tobin. I gave my name.” I walked into the room, and the other three waited uncertainly in the doorway. “Those are friends of Mr. Remington,” I said.
“Do you want to tell us what happened here?” They didn’t know the situation, and were going to be polite and circumspect until they got their bearings.
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