“I didn’t say that,” Frost said. “I didn’t say you should get a job because you’re Puerto Rican. I said that it was one factor that should work in your favor—one out of many.”
“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll go into practice for myself. Did you ever think of doing that?”
“I can truthfully say I never did,” Frost replied.
“Any reason?”
“Well, I got interested in corporate law pretty early. And you really can’t do that by yourself.”
“Got to have a giant firm to beat up on people, right?”
“That’s not really the reason,” Frost explained. “It’s just that a corporation of any size requires a lot of lawyers expert in different things—tax, real estate, securities law, antitrust, you name it. One person simply can’t keep up with developments in all those fields.”
“I don’t know what’s right,” Bautista said. “All I want is a decent, clean life with a little more certainty—and a little more money—than I’ve got in the Police Department. Odd as you might think it sounds, that’s probably criminal law for me.”
“I’ll refer all my criminal cases to you, Luis,” Frost said.
“And I’ll send you all the takeovers that come my way,” Bautista replied.
“Except I might have to re-refer some of that business to you, if you’re going to be the criminal lawyer.”
Frost’s joke brought both of them back to the serious business at hand.
“Reuben, assuming there’s no nut on the loose—which will disappoint the TV crews, but I really think it’s unlikely—aren’t the murders somehow linked to the takeover? I know you said it was improbable that there might be a link between this guy Gruen and anybody on our list, but isn’t it just possible there was such a link? That there was some funny business between Gruen and someone hooked up with the family?”
“I still don’t think so. Or maybe it’s just that I’d like not to think so,” Frost replied. “But look, Luis, after one Andersen has been found boiling in a hot tub and another’s been chewed up by dogs, I’d have to say that almost anything is possible.”
“Any advice?” Bautista asked.
“Yes. It’s a fine thing to say to a policeman, but let me say it anyway: overlook nothing, let no detail go unnoticed. This whole puzzle is so grotesque, so absurd, that its solution will probably depend on some minute scrap of information that is triviality itself.”
CRAZIES
15
Bautista dropped Frost off at the Gotham Club, where the old lawyer wanted nothing more than a quiet hour reading magazines, but he was interrupted soon after his arrival by a telephone call. He went to a private booth off the great hall of the club to find an agitated Casper Robbins on the other end of the line.
“Goddammit, Reuben, where have you been? There’s another note,” Robbins shouted into the telephone. “Delivered to the AFC mail room at lunchtime.”
“Did they catch the person who brought it?” Frost asked.
“No, they didn’t,” Robbins answered. “The mail-room supervisor was out to lunch when someone simply dropped an envelope on the receiving counter. Whoever left it didn’t have it logged in or didn’t get a receipt. No one has the faintest idea who it was.”
“Damn,” Frost said, almost adding, “I thought you were supposed to set up an effective watch for just this occurrence,” but did not.
“I’m sorry, Reuben. My instructions were apparently just too complicated for the geniuses in our mail room.”
“Is the note like the other one?”
“Yes. It’s on brown paper and written in red crayon, the same as before.”
“What does it say?”
“I’ll read it:
“Revenge again—and so soon, too! The wickedness of the Andersens is being punished. First Flemming, now Sorella. Justice is done!”
“Good Lord,” Frost said. “Have you called the police?”
“No, they just brought the thing up here a few minutes ago. What’s the name of your cop friend?”
“Luis Bautista,” Frost replied, giving Robbins Bautista’s direct telephone number as well.
“Nothing’s simple, is it, Reuben?” Robbins said.
“It certainly isn’t. It certainly isn’t.”
Frost felt slightly weak as he left the Club; Robbins’s announcement undid whatever contentment his brief stint of magazine reading had induced. Normally he would have walked home, but he now felt it wiser to take the bus.
At Madison Avenue the buses were, as usual, traveling in packs, like circus elephants. He boarded one that was practically empty, the lead motorized pachyderm having already picked up most of the customers at Fifty-fifth Street.
Sitting on the bus, and reflecting on the latest news Robbins had conveyed, Frost was suddenly aware of a loud cacophony coming from the front. It was the middle-aged black driver, in all other respects a seemingly model citizen, tooting on the horn, manipulating the warning light that went with the STAND BEHIND THE WHITE LINE sign, squeezing the air out of the brakes and performing at least three other procedures Frost could not identify. The result of this multifarious activity was a rhythmic, surrealistic, Spike Jones rhapsody. The sparse collection of passengers reacted in typical New York fashion—impassivity on the faces of some, an occasional smile, here a look of resignation at being in the living asylum that called itself a city.
Frost himself looked around and caught the eye of a well-dressed matron sitting across from him.
“Only in New York,” he said.
“Yes,” the good-looking woman replied, “how true.”
By the time the bus reached Seventieth Street, the driver was playing and humming The Blue Danube, tooting the bus’s horn on the afterbeats.
“I hope you’re not going too much farther,” Frost said to his fellow passenger. “He’ll be doing Ravel’s Bolero soon.”
“You think before Eighty-fourth Street?” the woman asked.
“Maybe not,” Frost answered. “Good luck.” He left the bus by the middle door as the driver launched into the repeat of the Danube’s first theme.
Frost’s involvement that day with the city’s crazies was not yet over. Back home, he received a call from his old friend and Princeton classmate Homer Matthewson, saying that it was “urgent” that he see Frost right away on a matter of “great delicacy.”
He was amused at the melodramatics of his caller. From long experience, he knew that Matthewson operated in a semihysterical state much of the time; he led his life as if it were being conducted on the stage of Princeton’s Theatre Intime, where he had earned a certain notoriety as an undergraduate for his plummy—not to say hammy—performances.
Frost of course agreed to see Matthewson; his old friend’s somber tone gave him little choice. As he waited for his classmate’s arrival—Matthewson was coming to the Frost brownstone from his bachelor digs in the Village—Frost reflected upon his fifty-five-year friendship with him. The two men had been in an English precept together at Princeton—Frost the naïve and rather guarded orphan from upstate New York, Matthewson the theatrically urbane (at least in Chicago terms) sophomore from the Midwest. Both were admirers of the works of their fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald, an enthusiasm not shared at the time by the English Department faculty.
Matthewson and Frost had become friends, although not especially close ones. They enjoyed each other’s company, Matthewson’s flamboyant outrageousness serving as a useful tonic to Frost’s more serious career path: history major at Princeton, Harvard Law School, association with Chase & Ward. Their encounters after college had been infrequent, although Frost usually found them of interest because of the surprising quirks and turns of Matthewson’s life.
Despite his fluty—one less charitable might have said effeminate—voice, Matthewson had been married for a long stretch in his early career and had sired, if Frost remembered correctly, seven children. A wealthy heir to a Chicago heavy-machinery fortune, he had been able, afte
r an amicable divorce, to provide very comfortably for his ex-wife and children. And before, during and after his marriage, he had been able to indulge his ideological infatuation of the moment. Successively, he had given a tight, emotional embrace to moral rearmament, one world-ism, proletarian off-Broadway theater, the Sri Meher Baba, Eugene McCarthy and the return of the Dalai Lama. Most recently, with even his youngest children maturing, he had begun to feel intimations of mortality and, when he looked fate squarely in the eye, had apparently seen reflected there the image of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The result had been countless charitable undertakings for Episcopal churches around New York City, involving not so much Matthewson’s money as his considerable energy.
At their last meeting, some four months earlier, Frost had gotten the impression that Matthewson’s current projects were not at all quixotic, as they had often been in the past, but were practical, and almost saintly, good works involving the city’s poor and homeless.
Minutes later, when the bell rang, Frost pushed the buzzer that unlocked the front door; instantly Matthewson, a mountain of a man, was bounding up the stairs with a speed that belied both his age and his size. Despite the mild weather, he was wearing a wool lumberjack shirt under a sport coat Frost swore he remembered from undergraduate days. Snow-white hair accentuated his healthily ruddy face, or perhaps it was the other way round.
“Reuben!” he fairly shouted in his melodious voice. “Thank you so much for seeing me!”
“Homer, it’s a pleasure, as always,” Frost replied. “What can I do for you?” He motioned Matthewson to the sofa in the living room as he spoke, sitting down himself in the chair beside it.
“You’re still the lawyer for the Andersen family, aren’t you?” his guest asked.
“In a manner of speaking, Homer. I’m pretty much retired from practice, as you know, but I still do some work for them. Why?”
“I don’t quite know how to explain this, but I’ll do the best I can,” Matthewson said. “You remember the last time we talked, I told you I was working with homeless and unemployed men at St. Timothy’s Shelter?”
“Yes, I do. I remember your description very well.”
“I’m sort of a counselor for the men there, which means I get to know a lot about them—often more than I want to,” Matthewson said. “One of them is a fellow named Oscar Brothers—he’s about forty-five, but he’s had a rough enough life for someone twice as old. He’s functioning pretty normally now, but there was a lot of craziness and violence in his past.
“He used to be a cook, then alcohol got the better of him and he lost the last job he ever had, twenty years ago, probably. After that, he wandered the streets and got so violent he was finally committed to one of the state mental hospitals up the Hudson. But then ‘deinstitutionalization’ came along and he was released, along with just about every other psychotic under the state’s care.”
“Ah yes,” Frost said. “That great humane program that put the demented back on the streets, to their great discomfort—and everyone else’s.”
“Exactly. It was a misguided disgrace, thought up by some bureaucratic psychiatrists without a particle of common sense among them,” Matthewson said. “But I’m getting off the track.”
“That’s all right,” Frost interjected.
“One of my jobs is to listen to the men who come to St. Timothy’s when they want to talk. Brothers is one of my best customers. He doesn’t live at the Shelter—he’s got a single room at a hotel downtown paid for by the City—but he does come there to work part-time. And to talk to me.
“Everything had been going pretty well with Brothers until very recently,” Matthewson continued. “He’s no longer drinking and is almost off medication.”
“What does he do all day?” Frost asked.
“Nothing very exciting. He goes to the local branch library near his hotel and reads the magazines. Or, if the weather is nice, he just sits around on the street outside. And he works at the Shelter as a cook three nights a week. But let me get to the point—I’m sorry, Reuben, I simply can’t tell a story in a hurry.”
“You never could, Homer. That’s part of your charm.”
“At any rate, Brothers got all excited when he read about Flemming Andersen’s murder. He brought the paper to show me. Said he knew Andersen well and used to work for him. But there was no remorse—boy, was there no remorse. Brothers hated Andersen with a vehemence that came right through his Thorazine.”
“Any reason given?” Frost asked.
“Oh yes. Andersen is the man who fired him from the last real job he ever had. He didn’t tell me the reasons at first, but he obviously thought a terrible wrong had been done.”
“Mmn.”
“Anyway, he couldn’t stop talking about the dead man. Every time he saw me he recalled new tales to tell. He was determined to convince me that Flemming Andersen deserved what he got. Then, this morning, he got even more frenzied when the papers reported the daughter’s death.”
“I suppose he’d had problems with her, too?”
“Yes, he did. The girl, Sorella, was the one who complained to her father that Brothers had made a pass at her. It was her complaint that led to his being fired.”
“Quite a coincidence.”
“I’d like to think that’s all it is,” Matthewson said. “But this morning, when Brothers came to see me, he was in a manic mood, bragging that justice had been done—and he had done it!”
“You mean he murdered Flemming and his daughter?”
“I don’t know, Reuben. All he would say was that justice had been done, and that he had told the world about the wrongs that had been righted, in notes to the Andersens.”
“What did he tell you about notes?” Frost asked sharply.
“Nothing. He just kept saying he had delivered them. A fact that seemed to please him immensely, by the way.”
“Do you think he could have done the killings?”
“I don’t think so. But who knows?”
“Let me ask you a couple of questions,” Frost said. “Where was your Mr. Brothers Tuesday night?”
“I don’t know, now that you mention it.”
“Was he at St. Timothy’s? Was he cooking there?”
“No. He cooks on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I don’t think I saw him at all on Tuesday.”
“Or Thursday?” Frost pressed.
“No, I didn’t see him on Thursday, either,” Matthewson answered, taken aback.
“Homer, when this man says he worked for Andersen, where was that?”
“In Connecticut.”
“So he knew the house—or I should say the compound—in Greenwich?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Now,” Frost went on, “what did he say about the notes? Where did he leave them?”
“He didn’t tell me. All he talked about was delivering them.”
Frost did not let on that there were four notes in all. Nor did he discuss their contents.
“Homer, it’s obvious that your Mr. Brothers is at least slightly crazy,” Frost said, looking straight at his former classmate. “But is he crazy enough to have killed Flemming and Sorella?”
“I honestly don’t think so,” Matthewson answered. “And that’s really why I’m here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this: Brothers has either committed murder or he’s written some silly notes. If it’s the former, that’s easy. The quicker we get him locked up the better. But if it’s the latter, that’s more complicated. He’ll be thrown right back into the street if the City finds out about it. Human Services will cut off his support so fast it will make your head spin.
“Now you may say that’s exactly what they ought to do,” Matthewson went on. “Writing hate mail to the family of murder victims isn’t very nice. But if Brothers goes back to the street, that means the end of medical care, psychiatric care, stabilizing medicine, everything.”
“What am I supposed to do, Homer?”
<
br /> “I figured you might know the inside situation, or at least could find out about it,” Matthewson said. “The papers said there were notes left by the killer. I need to know whether those were the ones Brothers wrote.”
“As it happens, you may have come to the right place,” Frost said. “I do know about the notes, and I even know what they said.”
“Would you be willing to talk to Brothers?” Matthewson asked.
“The prospect does not fill me with delight,” Frost said. “What if he is the killer and wants to make me victim number three?”
“Don’t worry about that. You can talk to Brothers at St. Timothy’s, where I can keep an eye on what’s going on. And I’ll have a couple of others watching, too. So you’ll be perfectly safe.”
“For you, Homer, I’ll do it,” Frost said, with a deep sigh. “When?”
“Could you come to St. Timothy’s at five-thirty? Brothers will have started work by then.”
Frost looked at his watch. Four o’clock. Just time enough for a short rest. “Fine, I’ll be there at five-thirty. What’s the address?”
Matthewson gave his old friend the street address in Chelsea, shook hands warmly and departed.
Frost took a taxi to Ninth Avenue and Twentieth Street shortly after five o’clock. Both he and the taxi driver had difficulty making out the house numbers, so Frost dismissed the taxi and sought out St. Timothy’s Shelter on foot. Soon he found the somber gray former school building that had become (on the ground floor and in the basement) St. Timothy’s Shelter and (upstairs) a communal art gallery and performance space.
The entrance doors, originally designed to accommodate an onslaught of students, were all locked except one. Frost opened it gingerly and entered a dimly lighted corridor. There was sound coming from a room beyond, so Frost went toward it, finding a lounge with a beat-up television set, several wooden funeral-parlor chairs and some upholstered furniture with the stuffing coming out.
There were half a dozen men sitting in the room, impassively watching a cookbook author being interviewed on “Live at Five.” The Surgeon General had not been to visit recently or, if he had, it had been to no effect; the space was the haziest smoke-filled room Frost had been in since the national antismoking crusade had begun in earnest.
Murders & Acquisitions Page 14
