Confessions of a Murder Suspect (11 page)

My brother.
Sweet, gentle, weepy Harry. I swear he wouldn’t knowingly do anything to hurt anybody. The real Harry wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not even a hideous cockroach. When he was a little boy, he actually caught bugs in his hand and set them free on the fire escape—when Maud wasn’t looking.

So how do I explain the
one
time in his life Harry hurt someone? The day when my twin betrayed the person who loves him the most? Sometimes I’m so glad I’ve been given the gift of control over my emotions, because I just can’t even
imagine
how much it would have hurt me otherwise.

Harry never came to the hospital after my… incident. The most traumatic experience of my life. Malcolm and Maud wouldn’t really say why.

“He’s busy practicing” was Maud’s weak explanation.

“He’s never been good around blood or needles, you know that,” Malcolm said, with a touch of disdain.

Hugo was the one who told me the truth—as usual. He was too young to lie about something like that. “Harry didn’t come because he said you deserved it,” he reported innocently. “Why, Tandy? Why did you deserve it?”

I looked away and didn’t answer.

22

And that’s just what I did
this
time
, too, as Harry’s earlier question echoed in the room:
Have you forgotten, Tandy? Have you?

I looked away and didn’t answer.

I lay next to Harry in his bed, watching the changing light reflect on the painted angels peering down from the ceiling. Harry had been inspired by Michelangelo’s timeless masterpieces in the Sistine Chapel, and had invented his own special effect so that the angels’ wings seemed to shimmer in every color against a lightning-struck pink and gold sky.

My mother found Harry’s work sentimental. Maybe it was, but like his music, I found his paintings evocative,
endearing, and curious. I didn’t really connect to them in the way I think Harry hoped I might, but that was just a genetic issue. He and I had talked about how odd it was that we were called “twins” when we were really nothing more than siblings who happened to grow in the womb together at the same time. Fraternal twins come from two totally separate eggs, and the differences between us were obvious: I got all the scientific genes, and Harry got all the artistic genes.

Which made me wonder: Was Maud or Malcolm really an artist at heart? Were the Angel children their sculptures, their canvases, their creations to be put on display for all the world to see and admire?

Almost any other parents would have been proud of Harry. It was a mystery to both of us why his painting wasn’t valued in this family. Maybe because it represented something missing from our lives. Or at least
my
life. Magic… soul… light?

Or love? Yes, maybe that was it. The experience of true, passionate love that had been snatched away from me just when it had been in my grasp—

Nil satis nisi optimum
, interrupted my father’s voice, booming inside my head. Crushing the thought as if it were vermin.

Nothing but the best is good enough.

He meant
no one
but the best is good enough.

It doesn’t matter anymore
, I reminded myself.
Only one thing matters now.

“I’m going to find out who killed them,” I said to my sleepy twin.

Harry laughed. “I was wondering when you’d decide you were the most qualified person to solve the crime. And that you could do it without a forensics lab.”

“There were detectives before there were crime labs, you know.”

“Fair point.”

“Furthermore, I believe that Maud and Malcolm were poisoned.”

“In your opinion.”

“In my opinion,” I said. “Based on my research.”

Harry sighed and looked at me with his big, searching eyes. “You know, Tandy,” he began. Then he stopped.

“What?”

“Even though you were the last one to get the Big Chop, I don’t think you could have killed Malcolm and Maud. And I don’t think you have to prove it
wasn’t
you by solving the murder.”

Did no one in this family understand me? I wasn’t trying to prove my innocence. I was trying to bring whoever committed this crime to justice,
even if it turned out to be me
.

“The chop wasn’t so bad,” I said. “You just concentrate on the good times, like your Grande Gongos, and get through it.”

I immediately regretted my words.

Harry had never been awarded the Grande Gongo. The rest of us had won it at least once—even Hugo, who was six years younger than Harry and I. He’d won it three times already. Hugo had also gotten one of the biggest chops in the history of the family, but that was another story.

As I was thinking about Hugo, he came into Harry’s room and did a flying leap onto the bed, almost bouncing us out of it.

“You’ve got to get dressed, Harrison Weepyface.”

Harry groaned and turned over, pulling his pillow over his head.

“He’s got to get dressed,” Hugo said to me. “He’s going to be late.”

I went to the closet and took Harry’s tuxedo out of the dry cleaner’s plastic. Then I half coaxed, half badgered him out of his bed and into the shower.

I left Harry in Hugo’s care and called Samantha and Matthew on the intercom. Then I called Virgil, our driver and sometime bodyguard. He was fifty, and he was huge. Almost as big as Matthew. He wore a diamond in his ear.
He was a poet who wrote raps in his spare time. Virgil was also very kind to all of us kids.

“I’m very sorry about the terrible news, Tandy. I’m very, very sorry,” he said when he saw me. He was a big bear of a man who didn’t think twice about offering me a hug in the face of this tragedy. I accepted it awkwardly. Not because I didn’t appreciate Virgil’s gesture, but because hugs were a rather strange and rare phenomenon in our house.

“I’ll bring the car around in about five minutes,” he said.

Only moments later, I was wearing a black dress and heels, and Harry had been transformed from a waif in baggy clothes to the smartly dressed boy prodigy that we knew him to be.

My three brothers and Samantha rode down in the elevator with me. I held Harry’s hand. He could have canceled, but even he knew that he would feel better once he poured himself into his work and was applauded for it.

It was a big day for Harry. He was playing a piano concerto at Lincoln Center.

23

Avery Fisher Hall was packed
with music aficionados—more than
two thousand
of them. Harry was one of Mischa Dubrowsky’s advanced students and was playing two pieces that day. He was the headliner, performing after six other gifted young pianists.

The hall is nothing like what you’d expect from seeing concert halls in the movies. There’s no red velvet or chandeliers; instead, it’s a magnificently simple place, the walls and ceiling paneled in light wood, to showcase the performance and the performer.

My brother Harry, my twin. Even after seeing him play in such magnificent spaces so many times, I still got excited for his moments in the spotlight.

There was an excited whisper in the hall as Maestro Dubrowsky came onto the stage in his tux, with his long mane and mutton chops. I got chills as he introduced my brother and said that he would be playing Bach’s “Partita no. 1 in B-flat.”

Harry strode confidently out from the wings, looking so handsome I could hardly believe he was the same boy who’d been staring up at his ceiling, wracked with grief, only an hour before.

Harry took the bench at the Steinway grand and paused for a moment with his fingers on the keys. Then he started to play. The audience was silent. In awe. Transported. I don’t know very much about music—I’m the only one in the family who can’t sing or play an instrument—but even I knew that what I was listening to was sheer magnificence.

Harry had told me all about Bach. He’d explained that Bach’s music has a measured grace, an inherent tranquility and lightness, and that it is precise, almost mathematical. “That’s why you’d like Bach, Tandy,” he’d said. “He’s not bombastic like Brahms, or romantic like Chopin.” At which point I probably kicked him in the shins. But he was right.

Bach was a kind of expression I could connect with.

Harry had told me that Bach should be played very softly, and very loudly, to exaggerate the phrasing, because
the pieces themselves are so ordered that the emotion needs to come through in the playing.

I listened for these elements as Harry lost himself in the music. I lost myself, too, as the music captured me in the way that only great music can.

I thought I felt a catch in my throat, and I caught myself.

And I thought of Harry as a little boy of three, sitting at the huge piano in the bay window of the living room, his legs too short to reach the pedals and his hands too short to span a chord. And still, he practiced. Four or five hours a day, every single day, without fail.

I was brought back to the moment by the man sitting to my left, who seemed overcome by Harry’s rendition of the piece. His eyes were wet and he tapped his fingers on his knees and moved his head in time to the music.

I looked back to the stage. I knew that the climax of the piece came on with the gigue, the lively, fast-paced finale, and Harry was rendering it perfectly and faithfully, but with the brilliant accenting that the critics had always acclaimed as uniquely his.

As the last notes of Harry’s performance rang through the auditorium, the man to my left turned to me and exclaimed, “That Harrison Angel is a true genius! Perhaps our greatest pianist. And he’s only a young boy!”

I said, “I know. I know.”

I stood up to applaud, along with two thousand other admirers. Harry dipped his head in a bow, and then again when the audience continued clapping.

It’s possible that my twin was the brightest of all the Angel kids. The one of us with the most potential. Why couldn’t my parents see this? What was wrong with them?

And was that why they had been murdered?

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