A Trick of the Eye

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  Finally, I rose out of the tub and plucked a thick white terrycloth robe from its hook nearby. Before putting it on, I stood for a moment and stared at myself in one of the full-length strips of mirror. My face was flushed, my skin soft and moist. The tiny lines, the little sunbursts of age around my mouth and eyes, had miraculously disappeared. My hair hung in wet strings, dripping onto a pinkish body glistening with oil. The figure in the reflection looked like that of a young girl. And yet I wasn’t a young girl, and would never be again, no matter how long I gazed into those magic mirrors.

  I could see how Mrs. Griffin had tried to fill her life with luxury as a substitute for passion, with possessions as substitutes for feelings. Now she was old without having really experienced life, and a terrible anxiety was rising to the surface. What was the secret she was at such pains not to reveal? The secret I knew she wanted me to find out? I discarded the robe and got dressed quickly.

  Leaving The Haven that evening, I wondered for the first time if it were possible that Mrs. Griffin had killed Cassandra herself.

  When I returned home that night there were several anxious messages on my answering machine from Harry Pitt, imploring me to call him back the minute I got in.

  “Harry, it’s me. Where the hell have you been, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Faith? Is that you?” He sounded groggy.

  “Yes. What have you been up to? You never told me you were going away.” There was a pause. “Harry? Are you there? I have so much to tell you.”

  “I was sleeping. Sorry. What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch.

  “About seven,” I said.

  “Morning or night?”

  “Night, for God’s sake. What on earth have you been doing?”

  “Don’t ask. Recapturing my lost youth.”

  I heard him shuffling the phone around.

  “What’s up? I hate when you go away without telling me.”

  “Well,” he said, seeming to revive, “I’ve been with Rodney, and you know what he told me? He said a day hasn’t gone by when he hasn’t thought of me. Can you believe it?”

  “Of course I can. You’re very memorable, Harry.”

  “Thank you, dear, but it’s been over eight years.”

  “A drop in the bucket in matters of the heart.”

  “Do you know what he said? He said sometimes he thought of telling his wife about us just so he could have someone to talk to about me. Isn’t that sweet? He said I’m the one who taught him to appreciate beautiful things. Can you imagine? You should see where he lives, it’s so dreary. I never thought he paid much attention to anything I said. But it’s very nice to hear that, you know, because so often in life one feels one doesn’t leave any impression on people whatsoever.”

  “So you went away with him? That’s where you’ve been?”

  “Yes. To a Holiday Inn, in Montauk. It was both ugly and scenic, heaven and hell, a romantic tour de force,” Harry said.

  “You’ve been gone quite a long time.”

  “Well, then I went on a little buying trip; then I came back; then I saw Rodney again. But, Faith, dear, let me tell you the news.”

  “What?”

  He paused. I knew it was for dramatic effect.

  “I have found Roberto Madi. I have found him!” Harry proclaimed.

  I sat up immediately. Brush cocked his head to one side, looking at me suspiciously.

  “What?!”

  “Actually, I didn’t. Rodney’s nightmare child did it on his computer.”

  “What do you mean you’ve found him? Where is he?” I said, not believing what I was hearing.

  “Someplace called . . . Broken Ridge,” he said with disdain. “In Colorado.”

  American place names always sounded foreign when Harry pronounced them.

  “I can’t believe it! God, Harry, you found him! Are you sure it’s our Roberto Madi?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “There could be more than one.”

  “There is more than one,” Harry drawled. “There are seven—at least that I found. But he’s our man for sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I called them all up on the telephone and said I was a writer doing a book on the Griffin case. The others hadn’t the vaguest idea what I was talking about. But this one said, and I quote, ‘I never talk about that part of my life,’ and hung up.”

  “So it’s him.”

  “Oh, it’s him all right,” Harry said with certainty.

  “Does he speak with an accent?”

  “A slight one, yes.”

  “I’m coming over for dinner,” I announced.

  “I don’t have a morsel of food in the house. Mr. Spencer ate the last brownie.”

  “What do you feel like—Chinese or Italian?”

  “Chinese—from Foo’s, please. Moo shu pork with extra pancakes, shrimp, ginger chicken . . . Never mind, I’ll order. You pick it up. Oh, and make sure they put in plenty of—”

  “I know, I know,” I said, interrupting. “Plenty of fortune cookies.”

  I was so excited that on my way out I almost forgot to feed Brush. I heard him mewing pathetically as I was halfway down the hall. I went back and put down a plate of food for him.

  “Sorry, Brushie, can’t be helped!”

  I took a taxi to Foo’s, a gourmet Chinese restaurant which was right around the corner from Harry. Harry had called up ahead of time and charged a mountain of food on his house account. I lugged the two large shopping bags down the block to Harry’s and took the creaking elevator up to his apartment. It jolted to a halt at the ninth floor. The thick gray door lumbered open. I got out and walked down the corridor, looking affectionately at the harsh yellow block wallpaper about which Harry ceaselessly complained.

  “Turn right and follow the yellow brick wall,” he always joked whenever he gave directions to his apartment to first-time visitors. I remembered back six or seven years ago when he’d tried to persuade his neighbors to chip in with him and change that cell block decor to a stylish burgundy geometric paper. His efforts divided the tenants into two opposing factions which Harry dubbed “the Chic and the Dead.” He seemed to love filling his life with inconsequential conflicts. I suppose they diverted him from graver matters.

  The door to the apartment opened when I was halfway down the corridor. Harry was standing there with a cigarette in one hand, wearing a red velvet smoking jacket over a green silk caftan, a stocking cap, needlepoint slippers embroidered with his initials, and no socks. His jovial expression and ruddy complexion made him look like a macabre version of Santa Claus. He folded his hands and bowed low.

  “Herrow! Good evening,” he said majestically, affecting a mock Chinese accent.

  “Very funny. Thanks for ordering the food,” I said, brushing past him. “There’s enough here for the entire People’s Liberation Army!”

  “You welcome,” he replied, bowing again, closing the door behind me.

  “Are you going to play Charlie Chan all evening?”

  “Sooo serious,” he said, following me through the small dining room into the kitchen.

  I noticed the table was all set for dinner with Harry’s fine blue-and-white Chinese export plates that contrasted so elegantly with the burnt orange walls of the dining room. With Harry, there was no such thing as “the good china.” He used priceless plates and real silver whenever he entertained or ate alone. His kitchen was stocked with chipped armorial porcelain and cracked Sèvres plates from the eighteenth century, which, I knew, he routinely used for bacon and eggs or canned tuna fish.

  I began unpacking the little white cartons of food in the kitchen and scooping them out into blue-and-white bowls and plates from the service in the dining room.

  “I take it back—there’s enough
food here for two armies,” I said, scooping out a third shrimp dish—this one with water chestnuts.

  Suddenly I heard muffled yelps coming from the vicinity of Harry’s bedroom.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve got Spencer locked in the bathroom again?”

  “In the armoire,” Harry said laconically.

  “Harry Pitt!” I ran out of the kitchen to the bedroom. “I’m going to report you to the ASPCA! Poor little Spence!”

  I turned the key of the carved oak armoire in Harry’s bedroom. Mr. Spencer, an imperious, gray miniature schnauzer with a ragged coat and irregular beard, leaped out from the middle of a pile of shoes and started charging around the house, yelping incessantly. I went back into the kitchen and finished preparing the various dishes.

  “Have you walked him today?” I said, trying to ignore Spencer’s barking and snuffling.

  “Five times,” Harry moaned. “That dog is a terrorist.”

  “It’s your own fault. You never trained him, poor little guy.”

  “God knows I tried, but he’s an aristocrat from the cadet branch of a near-defunct ‘Junker’ family—the definition of untrainable.”

  Soon Mr. Spencer’s high-pitched aria of barks got on both of our nerves.

  “Can’t you give him a Valium?” I said, carrying the last two platters of food into the dining room and lighting the candles.

  “How about Seconal? Come here, Spencer,” Harry said wearily, laying down a plate of food in one corner of the dining room. “Conquer this bowl of chicken fried rice. There’s a good little soldier.”

  Spencer shut up and began vacuuming up the food Harry had given him.

  “What a relief!” I said, sitting down to enjoy our Chinese feast.

  Harry and I helped ourselves to large quantities of each dish. Harry opened a bottle of an excellent Meursault, and we settled down to the real business at hand.

  Chapter 12

  “Now,” I said to Harry, “how on earth did you manage to locate Madi?”

  “Just a minute.” Harry pointed his index finger in the air as if he were about to scold me. “One thing I cannot bear is eating Chinese food with a knife and fork. Excuse me.”

  Harry got up from the table, went over to a small English sideboard, and opened the middle drawer. He extracted two pairs of chopsticks and handed one to me. I thanked him and begged him to get on with his story.

  “I told you,” Harry said, expertly wielding the chopsticks to snag a shrimp from his plate. “It was that little brat of Rodney’s. He used his computer to track down all the Roberto and Robert and Bob Madis in the country through their credit cards. Ingenious, no? I never would have thought of it. Of course, Rodney says it’s elementary stuff in the gumshoe business. Then I just began calling them all up as I told you. Our Roberto Madi has an American Express Gold Card, if that’s of any interest.”

  I gave up trying to snare a large piece of ginger chicken with my chopsticks and resorted to cutting it into negotiable chunks with my knife and fork.

  “Mrs. Griffin’s in the hospital,” I said, now using my chopsticks to eat the pieces I’d just cut.

  Harry looked up.

  “Really? Serious?” he inquired with his mouth full.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she’s going to die—not just yet anyway.”

  Harry carefully spooned second helpings of everything onto his plate and began whittling away at the individual piles. His expertise in this style of eating fascinated me.

  “Did you spend lots of time in China, Harry?”

  “Hong Kong. Marvelous city. You don’t sound very enthusiastic about my discovery, Faith.”

  “It’s not that,” I replied absently, thinking back to the afternoon I’d spent at The Haven. “Do you know what I did today?”

  “What?” he said, washing down a substantial mouthful of food with a glass of wine.

  “I roamed all around Mrs. Griffin’s house and wound up taking a bath in her very own bathroom.”

  Harry stopped eating and raised his eyebrows.

  “Why? Were you so dirty you couldn’t wait ’til you got home?”

  I chuckled.

  “No, I just did it to see what it would be like. The butler came in and discovered me. I think he was quite horrified, but he’s too well trained to say anything. He walked out. I didn’t care. I felt like I belonged there. Maybe I’ve gotten more brazen in my old age. And before that little incident, I discovered an attic full of clothes, hardly worn, and a huge basement full of antiques and books and objects—all incredibly expensive, all just sitting there for no reason.”

  “Is that unusual? Cluttered attics and basements? I thought that was de rigueur for great houses.”

  “No, Harry, you should see it. It’s beyond clutter. It’s acquisitiveness at its height. You’ve never seen anything like this. Mountains of furniture, a warehouse full of clothes . . . It presents a picture of a woman who can only relate to the world through possessions. This is a cold woman, Harry. This is a woman who can’t feel.”

  “Oh God, modern life with all its feelings. Spare me!” Harry wailed. “We live in the most callous society ever, and all anybody talks about nowadays is getting in touch with their feelings. Isn’t it possible for people to just exist and get on with things as they used to do in my day? The world has become one enormous group therapy session. It’s a terrible bore. My motto is, ‘Thank you for not sharing!’ ”

  “But people who can’t feel are dangerous, Harry. Don’t you know that? And the really dangerous ones are the ones who try to imitate the people who can feel. They’re like that poisonous species of mistletoe.”

  “Mistletoe,” Harry repeated, nonplussed. “You mean the Christmas stuff?”

  “Well, sort of. But there’s a variety of mistletoe out west that attacks a tree and grows on it, imitating its foliage so perfectly that the tree can’t tell the difference between the mistletoe and its own leaves. Gradually the mistletoe takes over completely and strangles the tree to death. One of my clients once brought me two sprigs from the same tree. One was mistletoe and one was the real branch. At a distance they look identical. But up close, you can see there’s something wrong. The mistletoe leaves are the same exact shape and color as the real leaves, only bigger and more exaggerated. You see, the imitators must exaggerate in order to fool others. Frances Griffin reminds me of that dangerous mistletoe.”

  “You don’t understand, Faith. When you’ve been at it as long and as successfully as she has, you become the real thing. In America there really isn’t any such thing as the real thing because we’re all invented to a degree. Society is simply a question of when we invented ourselves, not how.”

  “I’m not talking about her place in society, Harry. I’m talking about her as a mother.”

  “What do you mean?” Harry said, furrowing his brow, plucking morsels from his plate with his chopsticks and popping them into his mouth.

  “Well, I thought about it afterward, and I began to wonder if it might be possible, just possible—and please don’t dismiss this out of hand, Harry”—I said, warning him—“that Mrs. Griffin killed her own daughter.”

  Harry put down his chopsticks and said nothing. He just stared at me.

  “It would explain why she goes in and out of these schizophrenic trances,” I continued. “That’s happened a couple of times, you know. She sort of makes me into Cassandra, and then she wants to apologize for something. For what? I ask myself. At first I thought it was because she knows who did it and she’s guilty about not bringing the murderer to justice, you know? I thought it was Madi and for some reason she didn’t have him prosecuted. But now I think, maybe, just maybe, she’s apologizing to Cassandra—via me—for having killed her. Who knows? Frances Griffin’s not the real thing, you said so yourself. She’s an exaggeration, an imitation. Imitations want to be perfect, and the
y want to be surrounded by perfection. Cassandra was far from perfect. It must have grated on Mrs. Griffin.”

  “No, no,” Harry said, shaking his head impatiently. “Not possible. I don’t believe it.”

  “You weren’t there. You don’t know how she gets. She’s utterly tormented, I promise you. And yet, I don’t believe it has to do with real feelings. I think it’s guilt.”

  “But, Faith, for a mother to murder her own daughter . . . Now really!” he exclaimed, sounding severely exasperated.

  “But that’s just it. I don’t think she saw Cassandra as a daughter. She saw her as an object. She doesn’t see people, Harry. She only sees things. Things are what matter to this woman because that’s the way she was able to enter society and maintain her position. And that is what really matters to her. The house is a museum, Harry, and she is the curator. There are no knickknacks, no mementos, no photographs—except the one of Cassandra, which is an idealized portrait. So, what if she didn’t see Cassandra as a daughter, but as a possession that disappointed her? An extension of herself that embarrassed her? Here’s the ultimate motive for a murder, Harry: taste. You offend someone’s sensibilities by not being perfect, and they kill you. It’s exquisitely pointless, just like Frances Griffin’s life.”

  “Faith, honestly—” Harry sighed, shaking his head.

  “I can imagine it. I can absolutely imagine it as far as she’s concerned. She’s like ice. I feel sorry for her but she’s like ice. And her life isn’t about people and feelings. It’s about possessions and acquisitions and things. Her daughter was just another thing—and not a first-rate thing at that. I mean it, Harry, I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “You have a twelve-cylinder imagination, Faith. I’m not saying Frances Griffin doesn’t know who killed her daughter, but I’m saying unequivocally that she didn’t do it.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s an interesting idea, isn’t it?”

  “Interesting and highly improbable.”

  “Oh, well,” I said brightly, “I love my little theories.”

  “You don’t like her, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I feel sorry for her.”