by M. E. Kerr
When I met Nina in the reception room that night, I was glad girls couldn’t wear costumes. She was a knockout in an ankle-length white silk dress, hiding the blue-winged dragonfly but leaving her arms and back bare.
She had on white sling-back shoes that made winter seem like June, and made her look like a bride.
She was nervous and excited. I helped her into her coat.
“Let’s not say anything on the way there, Fell. I’m too hyper.”
I said okay with me, slipped the monocle into my pocket, and put on the blue half mask all Sevens wore until intermission.
It was about fourteen degrees out, but we didn’t have far to go. The walk to the gym was clear; so was the weather. There was a slipper moon rising. I wished Mom could see us. I’d called her that morning. She had a job as hostess in a restaurant at the World Trade Center; she wasn’t due there until noon.
“You never told me if you liked the gold 7,” I’d said.
“I called you and got Mrs. Violet. You never called back.”
“You don’t like it, hmmmm?”
“I like it well enough, Johnny. Of course, our apartment number’s seven, and I feel like some old lady who’s wearing something that’ll tell the neighbors where she lives if she’s found running around the neighborhood babbling.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do. I’m going to get some head charms to hang on it — a boy’s head for you and a girl’s for Jazzy. Macy’s will engrave names on them.”
Mom never wore one of anything except her wedding ring.
She said, “People are always asking me what’s 7 mean.”
“Well? Do you tell them?”
“What can I tell them? I’ve got a son in some club I don’t even know how he got into?” She laughed. “I tell them it’s in case I forget how many days there are in the week.”
Jazzy got on the phone to tell me her favorite doll, Georgette, was in love with a doll named Mr. Mysterious, who wore a mask, cost $32.75, and could be purchased at most shopping malls.
In the background I could hear the fashion channel on television. A woman’s voice was describing a polka-dot sundress with a bolero top and spaghetti straps underneath.
“Johnny?” Mom said when she got back on. “Are you meeting any nice girls?”
“I’ve met one named Nina.”
“I hope she’s not your usual type.”
“What’s my usual type, Mom?”
“Someone who can run circles around you. Someone who’s older and wiser, like that Keats person.”
Even Mom knew better than to mention Delia.
“This Nina person isn’t like that Keats person,” I said.
“Watch out, Johnny! You’re a cream puff when it comes to the ladies!”
At the dance I’d nab the photographer and have a picture taken for Mom. One look at Nina in all white, and Mom would start fantasizing the wedding, the house we’d all move into, and the grandchildren she could buy more head charms for at Macy’s.
I spared Mom the news about Creery, just as I had the Lasher story. The Cottersville Compass was already hinting that a suicide on The Hill was purportedly tied into the death earlier of another student. I didn’t know how long it would take the news services to pick it up, or if Mom would even see it when they did. She probably wouldn’t unless it was on the same page announcing a white sale or 50% Off Everything.
On the phone that week, I’d told Nina what I knew.
“Boy, does my shrink have egg on her face!” she’d said, the moment we’d sped away from her house in the BMW Mr. Deem had lent me. “Her groat-hormone theory was shot all to pieces!”
“Did she say anything Thursday?”
“I told you, Fell. I quit. Dad calls it a hiatus, but it’s over. From now on I’m on my own.”
She was, too. Or I was. As soon as we started dancing, the stag line began descending on us.
I lost her to Charlie Chan, Charles Dickens, Charles Bronson, three or four of the Charlie Chaplins who were there in force, and Charlie Chan again.
I began to feel as though I was ready for grief counseling with HEADOC, whose red Maserati had been in the faculty parking lot all week.
There was a seven-piece band playing, blue-and-white 7’s hanging from the ceiling, where seven golden angels swung from fluffy clouds in Seventh Heaven. (It had seemed like a good idea when we were planning the decorations, but there was something slightly macabre about it in view of Creery’s death … or maybe I’d just spent too much time reading Lasher’s writings about heaven.)
The seven chaperones wore white dresses or blue suits.
“Fell?” Nina said at one point, when I’d wrenched Charlie Chan’s white-gloved hands from her shoulder a third time. “If I don’t remember to thank you for this, thank you now.”
She put her fingers up on my cheek lightly, and we looked at one another for maybe six seconds. That was all it took for me to see the wisdom and the heartbreak of chaperones and separate quarters for overnight visitors.
Some of Charlie Chan’s greasepaint had come off on Nina’s dress.
“Thank heavens I brought a change, Fell!” she said to me at intermission. “Look at me!”
We were heading to Sevens House for the intermission ceremony. Mrs. Violet presided over the punch bowl there, while dorm boys served their dates from the bowl in the gym.
This was the time when the Sevens unmasked. The lights went off in the reception room, and our faces were illuminated by tiny gold flashlights shaped like 7’s, CHARLES engraved down their sides. Each girl was given a corsage of white roses and blue ribbons, and most kept their dates’ flashlights as souvenirs.
For the first time I saw Lauren and The Lion. He was in seventeenth-century costume as Charles II of England.
“That’s my shrink’s daughter, isn’t it?” said Nina. “She looks enough like her to make me shake! … Let me go up and change before I meet her!”
• • •
“Nina who?” Lauren asked me after I explained my date was “freshening up,” and as The Lion strutted down to the john.
“Deem. Nina Deem.”
“Oh, Fell! How did you get roped into that?”
She passed me an envelope marked Photograph. Paul, sometime last autumn.
“Wait till you see her!” I said.
Lauren was in a red wool dress, her hair pulled up on her head, pearls dangling down the front. Red shoes. The smell of Obsession.
“That’s the smiling picture of Paul,” she said.
I was getting it out of the envelope.
“I know Nina Deem,” said Lauren. “She was mother’s client. Past tense, so I can tell you watch out for her, Fell. She’s needy. And that’s a nice way to put it.”
“I like her. You will, too.”
“Fell, she’d get on my mother’s answering machine and use up all the tape whining about this married dope pusher she had a crush on. Of course, she claimed he’d been framed. She was obsessed with what his wife was like, convinced he didn’t love her. She’d go on and on about him, on the tape! Paul and I called her Screaming Nina. When we were home, we’d tune in to her and howl!”
I pulled Lauren to one side, away from the punch and the girls in the gowns with their Charleses.
“Tell me more, Lauren. She knew he was married?”
“She knew, all right. She was dying to get a look at his wife. I hope you’re not involved, Fell!”
“What else?”
I was holding the photograph of Lasher in my hands while I listened.
“Are you involved with Screaming Nina?”
I hardly heard the question. I was looking at the picture of her brother. Lasher was dressed up in a gay nineties costume, sitting on a bench, the waterfall, the old mill, the weeping willow behind him.
“This was taken at Dragonland,” I said.
“I don’t know where it was taken. It was in a thingamajig and I pulled it out, because look at him smile! Paul n
ever smiled unless he was up to something.”
“Then he knew Eddie Dragon,” I said.
Lauren looked at me. “That’s the name of Screaming Nina’s boyfriend,” she said. “How would Paul have known him?”
I didn’t answer Lauren, not only because I didn’t have an answer but also because of what I saw suddenly across the room.
Charlie Chan was leaving Sevens House, putting on his coat over his costume, his gloves off, and there was something on his wrist I’d seen before. A dragonfly.
I started running, down the hall and up the stairs, the voice of the Sevens shouting after me “Off-limits to males tonight!”
Someone grabbed my coattails to stop me.
Kidder.
“Your date’s not up there, Fell. She just went out the side door.”
Chapter 22
I got out in the parking lot in time to see them take off in a white Isuzu jeep.
Nina hadn’t changed clothes. I could see her pulling her coat around the white dress. She must have used the time to lug her garment bag down to his car.
I didn’t have the BMW keys with me, but I remembered Mr. Deem telling me about the spare in the ashtray.
I got in fast and went after them, picking the jeep up in my headlights near the traffic light at the top of the hill.
They made a left, heading into Cottersville, and I followed a few car lengths behind them.
My mind was spinning like the BMW’s wheels: recalling how Nina’d said she’d begged her father to let her go to The Charles Dance … then how she’d come up soon after with the idea to stay overnight. I thought of Nina telling me she’d brought a lot of changes in her garment bag, and I remembered the way she’d thanked me for the evening right before intermission.
And of course I was remembering the afternoon at Dragonland, the way she’d pretended to be shocked by the idea Eddie was married. She’d known that all along, used me to satisfy her curiosity about Ann Dragon.
Lauren had laughed at the idea Nina’d claimed Eddie didn’t love his wife. But my money was on Nina.
I was learning the hard way: Nina didn’t get surprised as much as she surprised. And calculated. Nina went after what she wanted, even if it involved flirting her way along and giving little innocent-sounding speeches about how she was going to learn to take control of her life.
She didn’t need any lessons in that.
What had Nina said to her father that first night I’d had dinner there? Something about the word “elope,” after Mr. Deem said it was a word we didn’t hear much anymore. Those who have a reason to use it do, Nina had said.
In Cottersville I inched up until I was right behind them.
Dragon wasn’t doing any fancy driving. He was keeping to the forty-mile limit, heading out toward the shopping center.
What I couldn’t figure out was how Lasher fit into the puzzle, what he was doing at Dragonland last fall.
I pushed the heat up all the way. They had coats, I didn’t. I had an idea I wouldn’t be getting out of the BMW for a long time, anyway … and that as soon as we hit the highway past the mall, I’d be in a race.
That was where I was wrong.
The Isuzu pulled into the shopping center’s large lot, almost empty at that hour.
I followed.
Dragon headed toward the only parked car down in front of the Food Basket. It was a black Pontiac, its lights beaming up suddenly as the jeep came near it.
Then Dragon stopped.
When I pulled up, Dragon got out and stood there waiting for me. He’d ripped off his mustache and the rubber skin from his head. His hair was blowing in the wind, face streaked with greasepaint.
As I cut my motor, I saw the gun pointed at me.
That was when the driver of the Pontiac got out too, crossing to the jeep, reaching to help Nina with the garment bag she’d pulled out onto the asphalt.
It was Ann Dragon.
I could see Nina’s face, tears streaming down it, while Ann led her toward the Pontiac.
“Get in the jeep!” said Eddie Dragon.
Chapter 23
He waited while Ann Dragon got Nina into the front seat of the Pontiac and the garment bag into the back.
I could see the dragonfly tattoo very clearly now as his left hand gripped the steering wheel, while his right one kept the gun trained on me.
“Have you moved from dope into kidnapping, now?” I said.
“Just shut up!”
The Pontiac took off.
He turned back to me, swiveling his shoulders so he could look me in the eyes.
“My name is Ted Draggart. I’m an FBI undercover man. You’re who? Somebody Fell?”
“John Fell. And I don’t believe you. FBI men don’t have tattoos.”
“I’m doing the talking right now, John! … Nina is not being kidnapped, and you don’t know shit about FBI men! … Nina is with my partner. We’ve been undercover here for almost a year. Ann will take Nina someplace safe, while you come with me. Do you understand?”
“Why doesn’t Ann just take Nina home?”
“Because that’s where we’re going. I didn’t count on you, but now that you’re here, I’m going to have to! You’re going to have to count on me if you want to save your ass, so start trusting me.”
I didn’t say anything, just watched while he stuck the gun in the top of his pants.
He started the jeep.
“I’ll fill you in as much as I can, so you’ll understand the action. For God’s sake get rid of the handlebars!”
I’d forgotten my mustache, and I tore it off.
“You paid a visit to the base we set up. Dragonland.” He started the jeep. “Everyone paid a visit there but the ones we expected.”
“Nina. Me … Paul Lasher.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Paul Lasher. When you’re dredging, you get the dregs. But he was a bonus, it turned out. Let me tell you a few more things before we come to Lasher.”
We were heading back to Cottersville.
He said, “Ann and I were given a name.”
“She’s your wife.”
“She’s my partner. Let me talk, John…. The name was David Deem. We got it from a fairly reliable source, if you want to call someone with dope connections and convictions reliable. But he wanted to make a deal, get himself out of serving twenty years. Deem was the bite. Our informer knew there was a sporting-goods setup involved too, but nothing else…. Ann and I set ourselves up in Point Pleasant after we got a read on Deem. Our case agent had nothing to incriminate Deem, so we came in blind.”
We were making all the right turns that would take us to Jericho Road.
“I angled to meet Nina,” Dragon said. “We’d found out she was the only one he had left to care about. She was my ‘in’ to Deem. I met him, and I found out all I could, which wasn’t much…. Later we fixed my arrest for selling cocaine and arranged to get me off, with the newspapers picking up the story…. We didn’t figure Deem himself would come after me. Everything we knew about him was clouded over, anyway, but we figured him as a guy who wouldn’t want anyone muscling in on his territory … and particularly his daughter. We thought he’d send someone to Dragonland to threaten me, someone who’d lead us to his operation by some zigzag route.”
“Deem sells drugs?”
“Not exactly. Not at all what we thought. Deem doesn’t have a territory. He’s a facilitator. He doesn’t sell anything; he helps it get sold. He has this mail-order deal called DOT. Short for Deem Out There. Advertises: Out There You’ll Need Us. All-weather equipment. Let me finish, John,” he said, as I started to tell him I’d heard Nina mention DOT. “There isn’t time now.” He looked at his watch and picked up some speed.
“Your friend Lasher — ”
“He wasn’t my friend.”
“This Lasher came to Dragonland last fall. He’d read the newspaper write-up of my arrest. He was sniffing around, trying to see if I knew this Creery. There was a point when I even thought he w
as trying to frame Creery, or get him killed. I didn’t have time for it, didn’t want him around, but while he was there he said he knew a lot about my girlfriend, Nina Deem.
“I paid attention suddenly. I asked him how the hell he knew her name. He told me his mother was her shrink. Then he began playing the bigshot, telling me a lot of stuff about Nina, like the fact I’d told her I was married. I finally told her that after my arrest. She’d gotten herself a tattoo like mine over in Lambertville. That’s the first I realized she’d made this thing into a big romance.”
“She fell in love with you. Didn’t you angle for that?”
“She was a kid! I thought she had a crush on me, sure, but I never encouraged it, never even held her hand — nothing! I didn’t count on this flood of emotion. She’d call Dragonland even after I told her not to, to let me get in touch with her. Then she appeared with you. And after that she called to apologize for bringing you there. I couldn’t discourage the contact with her altogether, because I needed that.”
We were passing Main Pharmacy and Playwicky Road.
Dragon said, “You see, Lasher let something drop that got my ears pricking. He said his mother told him Nina was going away at Easter. It was going to be a surprise. Her father was planning to take her to Europe…. Lasher said maybe I could use that information … and maybe he could get me more if I’d help him get this Creery…. I wanted him to go because he was just in the way. I told him I didn’t want to run off with Nina, thanks anyway, I was happily married. I had a hell of a time getting him out of there that day. He hung around, had his picture taken…. But he’d given me the tip: Deem was going to run in March. We had to work fast!”
We were a block from Jericho.
Dragon was slowing up. He said, “A few months later Lasher was killed…. I sent in for information on this Creery. Routine, not my province, but Lasher’d said Creery used drugs, so you never know…. I asked for anything the computer had on Creery, and lo and behold, we found a connection to DOT. It was there all along, but we hadn’t been looking for it, and it still isn’t too clear. I tried to get a court order to tap Deem’s phone. It never came through, and we found out Deem was booked to go this Sunday…. We’re going to park a few doors away. My backup’s there somewhere. John, I don’t want you to leave this car, okay?”
