Killer, Come Hither

by Louis Begley

  By the way, I asked, where is the rope?

  The police took it, she told me. I don’t know where they keep evidence, I guess it’s evidence, but if you like I can ask my girlfriend to find out. She works at the Southampton station as a dispatcher.

  Have you ever seen a length of rope like that in the house? I asked.

  She hadn’t, she told me, and agreed that it was hard to think of where Harry would have put it away so that she wouldn’t find it. Was it possible that he’d bought it at the hardware store on Saturday, the day before? He was well known there. We agreed that we’d stop by after lunch and inquire. Was there another place he might have gone? The answer was obviously yes: the hardware store in East Hampton, another one in Bridgehampton, and the Kmart at the Bridgehampton mall, and perhaps there were ship-supply stores in East Hampton we didn’t know about. But why would Harry have avoided the store on Main Street, where he’d been going for more than forty years?

  Let’s go to lunch, I said. American Hotel? That’s surely what Harry would have advised.

  The maître d’hôtel had known Harry very well and may have remembered my face from the times I’d come to his establishment with my uncle. I was grateful to him for the silent embrace and the expression of sorrow on his face, which I thought was genuine. I introduced Mary as Harry’s dear friend.

  I hope we’ll go on seeing you often, he answered, leading us to a corner table in the farthest room in back of the bar. This is our quietest table. It’s good if you don’t want to be disturbed while you talk.

  Did the police do any sort of check to see whether there’d been a breakin? I asked Mary after I had thanked him and we had ordered.

  Not really, she said. There wasn’t any sign of one. The windows were all closed and latched, as usual in January. No door had been forced. There wouldn’t have been any need to. Harry didn’t lock the front door while he was in Sag Harbor. He’d lock it before leaving for the city. Or the studio door. In his opinion there was nothing in the house worth the trouble of stealing, not when he was around.

  We fell silent, eating the lobster bisque, which had been Harry’s winter favorite.

  Very strange, I said when I saw that she had finished. Add to that what happened to Plato. Are we supposed to think that Harry, having neatened his bedroom and the kitchen—even though he was going to hang himself—locked the front door, but incompletely? Usually, people want to be found once they’re dead, and they lock the door only if they need time to die, for instance if they’ve taken sleeping pills or cut their wrists. He didn’t have that worry, because if you hang yourself you die.

  God, Jack! she exclaimed, please stop.

  Let me just carry out my thought. Believe me, I’m not some sort of expert on suicides. All right, he knew he’d be found because you were coming in the morning, so he didn’t have to leave the front door open. But if he was going to lock the door as though he was going away, why not do it in the usual way? Both locks. And then something else that has been bothering me since I spoke to Kerry on my way back from Brazil: no letter for me! no letter for you! or for Kerry or his friend Sasha, or for Jeanette who’d been with him almost forty years. Nothing! He was probably good and mad at the law firm….

  She nodded, and said, Yeah, retiring from the law firm and all that.

  But he had no reason to be mad at any of us. So what went through his head?

  Stop, Mary said. There is something you don’t know, that I didn’t tell to that man from Harry’s office or to Kerry, and haven’t told you until now. There is a letter for you. I didn’t want to give it to them or to the police. I wanted to keep it to give it to you when I saw you.

  Her backpack was next to her chair. She rummaged in it and extracted with two fingers a Ziploc bag. Inside was a sealed blue envelope I recognized as part of the stationery Harry had used in Sag Harbor. She reached into the backpack again, got a Kleenex, unzipped the lock, and using the tissue removed the envelope and handed it to me.

  I’ve been careful with it, she said.

  Following her example, I slit Harry’s envelope open and took out the folded sheet. The envelope was addressed to “My beloved nephew Jack.” Both the address and the letter had been written in blue ink, with a ballpoint pen. I had never seen anything, not even a shopping list, written by Harry in blue ink, and he hardly ever used ballpoint pens. Yes, perhaps if he needed to press hard as when he filled out a FedEx shipping label—a rare occurrence, since normally that task was relegated to poor Barbara Diamond—and wanted to make sure that his writing came through on the three or however many carbon copies. For everything else, he used a Waterman fountain pen, so inseparable from him as to seem a part of his anatomy, and the pen was filled with black ink. And to use a blue ballpoint pen to write this letter!

  Mary, I asked, I didn’t see Harry’s fountain pen on the desk in the studio. Have you seen it?

  Yes, she said, it was on the desk, and I’ve put it in the desk drawer.

  I see, I answered, and read the letter aloud.

  Sag Harbor, Sunday, January 8, seven p.m.

  My Beloved Nephew Jack,

  As you know, life has weighed heavily on my shoulders for a long time now. The reasons are many, most of them known to you. I have decided that this is the time to act. Guns are messy, and besides, as you know, I don’t own one. I have thought of opening my veins, but that’s messy too. So this exit seems perfect. For, in the words of Mark Twain—if the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging? He! He! He!

  So goodbye old chap! I wanted to get this done before you returned from Chile. No use in getting you involved in the nitty-gritty of my death.

  I am leaving to you our family Bible. Treat it with reverence, and do not fail to search it for guidance in your perplexity and anguish.

  Your devoted uncle,

  Harry C. Dana

  Jesus! said Mary. That’s one weird letter.

  Our waiter was hovering at the other end of the room. I called him over, told Mary that I wanted a stiff single-malt scotch and asked what she’d like. It turned out to be an Irish whiskey.

  I still have the old country in my bones, she said.

  The letter is a joke full of meaning, I told her, a very clever, a diabolically clever, joke. We’ll have to puzzle it out.

  And then I asked her rapid-fire, because the ideas came crowding at me, what if anything had happened to Harry’s papers, if he had any in the house, and to his computer and cell phone.

  There was that awful lawyer from Harry’s law firm, Piggott or something like that—Minot, I corrected, and she nodded—who came either just before the day of the service or the day after, I can’t remember which, said he was the executor, and went through the house looking for correspondence and stuff like that, he told me. I think he said he found what he wanted. You know, Jack, I wasn’t in good shape. He also took Harry’s BlackBerry, saying it was office property, and Harry’s laptop. I told him the laptop was Harry’s property, and he said that was right, but he had to see whether there were any client materials on it. He turned it on and tried to look for himself, but he didn’t have the password, so he said he was taking it to the technicians at the office who’d figure it out. I told him I wanted the laptop back here as soon as they’d finished. He said he’d FedEx it to my personal address, and that’s what he did. A few days later. I’ve put it back in Harry’s bedroom.

  But didn’t he have an iPhone as well? I asked. He played with it all the time.

  That’s right, she said. I haven’t seen it anywhere. Maybe he left it in the city.

  We had another round with our coffee. Neither of us wanted dessert. I told Mary that I’d be back, either the following weekend or the weekend after, and that I hoped to bring Kerry and perhaps a friend from D.C. with whom I’d been at school and at college and that I saw no reason why I shouldn’t take Harry’s Audi. It would make going back and forth a lot easier, and since we were paying for the garage in the ci
ty we might as well use it. As an afterthought I added that I would just as soon she didn’t do anything about getting the rope back from the Southampton police or even talk to her girlfriend the dispatcher about it. Let’s wait just a bit, I said. There may be other things we’d need her help with. In reality, it had occurred to me that probably the rope was in a plastic bag lying undisturbed in some storage room at the Southampton station and I would rather leave it undisturbed. On our way back to Harry’s house, where she’d left her truck, we stopped at the hardware store. The salesman who more or less ran it greeted Mary exuberantly and offered me condolences after she’d introduced me as Harry’s nephew and now the owner of the house. After he’d told me how much he looked forward to seeing me as a regular customer in the store, I asked whether he sold hemp rope about one inch in diameter. My request presented no problem for the Main Street hardware store. Several brands were available.

  After looking them over, I told the salesman that it had been my impression that my uncle had said he was going to buy several lengths of such a rope, and Mary and I had looked for them in the garage and in the cellar but didn’t find them. Did he remember Harry coming in to make such a purchase?

  The guy looked at me queerly. I guess I wasn’t fooling him about the reason for my questions, but he wasn’t going to wade into such a sensitive subject and put his foot in it.

  No, he said, I have no such recollection. Mr. Dana came in several times in December, and I had the pleasure of serving him, but he never made such a purchase. Anyway, I can check.

  He went over to the computer on the counter, went through various maneuvers, and came back shaking his head. Nothing like that in the last twelve months.

  Perhaps I’ll see you next weekend, I told Mary, once we were out in the street. Probably I’ll come out on Friday evening, but I’m not sure. I’ll give you a call. Let’s say goodbye here. I’m not going to walk back to the house with you. I need a breath of fresh air. I think I’ll head toward the harbor.

  Sure, you’ll see me, she answered. I’ll be there on Saturday, around ten, to let you sleep in, just like when Harry was alive and only came out on weekends.

  Then I called out to her, Mary, did Harry have any enemies around here—you know, people who might turn violent?

  She thought for a moment and said no, and then thought some more and said there’d been the Polish carpenter from Springs who’d come last summer and really fucked up the screen doors he was supposed to repair, and Harry had been pretty sarcastic about it. But Harry paid him exactly what the guy wanted and just told him never to show his face around the house again. And an irrigation guy from Hampton Bays. But that was a couple of years ago, and there too Harry paid him. Jack, Harry was a real gent. He paid people on time, and exactly what he’d agreed to pay.

  —

  The cloud cover was heavy. Standing at the edge of the Long Wharf, I looked across the empty gray stretch of Peconic Bay toward Shelter Island and resolved to take Kerry there in the spring for a hike through the Mashomack Preserve. That was something I had done every summer as a boy, with Harry or my mother, graduating from the shortest trail of less than a mile when I was six or seven to the grown-up five-mile stretch by the time I was ten. Harry would bring binoculars, brandy in a hip flask, and dark chocolate for me; my mother contented herself with milk chocolate. I hadn’t been back since. The marina was desolate too. The smaller boats had all migrated or had been pulled out of the water for the winter. Only big tubs registered in Caribbean tax havens, ugly, dirty, and neglected, were left, moored on the east side of the pier, the crews nowhere in sight. What were they? Excursion boats hired for gambling and sex parties or church-sponsored bingo and canasta? I turned around and walked toward the village and had almost reached the traffic circle, where Main Street meets Route 114, when the smell of fried oysters assailed me. I bought a serving at the window counter, which was dished out on one of those ubiquitous cardboard punts on which everything now seems to be served, and ate the greasy stuff on my way home.

  I’d forgotten my cell phone on the table under the mirror in the front hall. There were no messages on it, and there weren’t any on the landline answering machine. Kerry must be working hard. I urinated, washed my hands and face, brushed my teeth, and poured myself a glass of Harry’s Macallan whiskey. A tremendous wave of fatigue and disgust was sweeping over me. I carried my drink to the studio, took my socks off, made a pillow out of the silk-and-velvet cushion on the sofa the way I had so often watched Harry do it, and stretched out under the alpaca throw. I didn’t bother with an alarm clock. Dinner with Sasha wasn’t until eight—Harry’s standard hour in the country, she’d said—and I was sure I’d be awake in plenty of time. In fact, I was up in a couple of hours, needing again to pee. What with the wine, coffee, and whiskeys, I’d taken on too much liquid. Sleep eluded me when I lay down again. Tossing and turning, I ran my hand along the ridge between the sofa’s middle cushion and its back and felt a rectangular metal object. I fished it out and saw that I was holding in my hand Harry’s iPhone. Holy God, I said. And then immediately added, Young Mary doesn’t clean as well as she’d like me to think.

  I got up, called Mary, got her at the pet shop, told her what I’d found, confessed to the shameful truth that I didn’t own an iPhone, and said that the fucking thing wouldn’t turn on.

  The battery’s dead, she pronounced, it figures after all these weeks, and went on to tell me that the power pack for Harry’s MacBook wouldn’t help, since for some reason it wasn’t compatible with the phone. She remembered though that Harry often charged his cell phones in the Audi. The power packs for the BlackBerry and the iPhone might just be there. She was right. The charger was right there, plugged into the cigarette lighter, complete with the USB cable hanging from it. I stuck it into the iPhone and hoped it had started charging. I didn’t think it was at one hundred percent by the time I’d taken my bath and put on clean clothes for dinner with Sasha. Anyway, I realized that I had better restrain my impatience to plumb its secrets. If I started messing with it, I’d keep Sasha waiting, which was something I didn’t want to do. There were two other problems. I needed a password and had to face the fact that even if somehow I succeeded in opening the iPhone I hadn’t the remotest idea about how to get at anything in its bowels that would be of interest. Something told me that I would eventually figure it out, being an inveterate fiddler who habitually puts aside owner’s manuals in favor of feeling his way around a machine. I decided I’d begin by calling Kerry. She was in a conference room, rehearsing the argument she’d be making on Monday. We had to be brief. I told her I had one question: Was there a set number of letters or figures one had to use to unlock an iPhone? It depends, she said. For instance, six if it has access to Jones & Whetstone email. Why?

  I’ve found Harry’s phone, I told her. We’ll talk later. I love you a whole lot.

  Just as I was walking out the door, it came to me what the password would be. “Inca.” No, six letters, therefore, “myinca.” The name of Harry’s adored Olga—or Inca—was part of every password on the list Harry had given me when I came to live with him after Walter Reed. He didn’t have an iPhone at the time, but I didn’t see why this password would be different.

  VII

  Is it possible to rush through a dinner with a beautiful, gifted, and grief-stricken old lady without giving offense? And to keep up a stream of conversation she clearly likes while concentrating on something else? I think I managed that feat with Sasha, although I must confess that to say I rushed through dinner may be somewhat misleading. I’m naturally a fast eater, and once we were at table I made no effort to slow down. Unable to keep my thoughts away from the cold black rectangular gadget that by now must be fully charged, I poured champagne for her, mixed a martini for myself—So like Harry, she told me, it could be he standing there in your place—and drink in hand followed her into her studio and expressed genuine admiration for her precise, meticulously observed paintings of the fast-disappearing Lo
ng Island potato fields and farmhouses, and did justice, both by the speed with which I devoured them and by appreciative comments, to her chicken pot pie and key lime pie, both of which she confessed came from a caterer, and the Bordeaux, which with tears in her eyes she told me was part of a case Harry had given her for Christmas. But long before we got to dessert, she put to me questions that, judging by her diffidence, had been preying on her mind. Was I going to keep the house and Harry’s apartment? I assured her I was. Because, she said, there were so many of her works in both places. Harry had been a generous supporter, such a steady friend, that he probably bought more of them than he really wanted or needed to put on his walls, just to keep her spirits up during a period when painters like her didn’t have an easy time selling. Anyway, she would be happy to buy back from me any paintings I thought I didn’t want. The essential thing from her point of view was to make sure they had a happy home and avoid their being sold at auction. Sometimes the prices are much too low and other collectors are disappointed and offended!

  I assured her that until I went broke I would live in both places, on Fifth Avenue and in Sag Harbor, and that if anything she should think of me as a collector eager to own more of her work. As a matter of fact, I was taking the painting of Harry’s house that’s now in the dining room to New York, in order to hang it in my study, and would need a new landscape to replace it. And I had questions of my own, about Harry. Was she up to talking about him and what happened?

  She nodded and said, We must. Can’t be cowards about it.

  She had a well-organized mind and excellent memory. There was no doubt in her mind that Harry had been in good health and gave no sign of depression—only cold rage, she said, at being pushed out of the firm before normal retirement by that awful man Hobson.

  I happen to know him and that wife of his, who’s a bitch, she said. My late husband and he used to play golf in the same foursome in Boca Raton. Tom couldn’t stand him either. But Harry was getting over being angry, and he really looked forward to your return. He had some idea that if you made good progress on your book, you and he might go to London together in May and see some plays. Plato would stay with me—he didn’t like the idea of his staying at Mary’s because of all the other animals.