Harmony In Flesh and Black (12 page)

“You be back, you know,” Teddy said. “You hear me, Fred?”

“I reckon,” Fred said.

“We all come back, don't we?” Teddy said.

“Drink your coffee while it's hot, Teddy,” Fred said.

“Later,” Teddy said.

Teddy looked more frantic, less focused, than when Fred had last seen him. He stood up. He smelled a great deal when he moved, as anyone would.

“You staying over at the place?” Fred asked, meaning the place in Charlestown. “You doing okay? Need anything?”

Teddy shook his head, not saying. He was looking in the pocket of his desert camouflage pants for money. He couldn't take anything without paying for it. He found a scrap of foil; it looked like something torn off a chewing-gum wrapper. He laid it beside the coffee he hadn't tasted.

“Don't be a stranger,” Fred said as Teddy walked off.

He had some of Teddy's coffee.

He looked up Turbridge Street and speculated. People had been in the apartment. He'd heard a woman's voice. The man with the bike, coming out, letting Fred in—what floor had he been coming from? At 3:30
A.M
.? Smykal had been expecting another person. A him. Whoever had been with him ought to have a useful insight into what had happened.

12

Fred drove back to Arlington again on Sunday afternoon and slowed down in front of the house, and there was Sam. He'd combed his hair and put on clean shorts, shirt, and absolutely the most expensive and up-to-the-minute pump-up sneakers in the known world, which Fred had bought him recently. He wore the sneakers seldom, hoping they would last. Fred had forgotten the date he'd made yesterday to make up for canceling his attendance at Sam's game by spending time alone with him this afternoon. He felt terrible seeing Sam's hopeful face at the screen, trying to look cool and show it didn't make any difference that he'd been forgotten.

Sam didn't comb his hair to go to school or anywhere. It was a big honor that Fred had almost blown.

“Hey, buddy,” Fred shouted. Sam was coming out of the house slowly, the Frisbee behind him in case it wasn't going to happen. “Am I late?”

“Five minutes,” Sam said. He smiled.

“Sorry. I'll go inside and tell your mom we're moving out.”

The plan was to do some serious study of the Frisbee. Fred had promised to teach Sam tricks he'd learned back when he thought he might pitch for the Dodgers, before he started doing something else.

Molly, reading the real-estate section in the backyard, glanced up and said, “I would have killed you if you'd forgotten.”

Fred made the expression that indicated he wasn't someone who would forget, and he thanked Molly's higher power that he hadn't screwed up.

“I called Walter and Dee's house,” Molly said. She was looking worried. “I talked to Dee. I asked them to come by for tea this afternoon. We got talking. She mentioned the murder-robbery in Cambridge yesterday.”

“Murder-robbery.”

“It's what she called it,” Molly said.

Walter was the head librarian at Cambridge Public Library. He'd been at the public high school, in Molly's class, so they were old friends. His wife, Dee, was on the police force in Cambridge—in traffic and parking, but she got around, heard things.

Molly kept track of what was happening in Cambridge, and between her mother (who lived there still), her work, and a large network of friends with telephones, there wasn't much of significance that she missed.

“People who lived in the building said they noticed a painting missing,” Molly said. “I thought it couldn't hurt to get a worm's-eye view of what the thinking is at headquarters.”

Fred nodded. It was a good idea.

“They're coming at five with the kids, and it could turn into supper, if that's good for you, Fred.”

“Thanks. Yes.”

“Dee might know other things that aren't in the paper.”

“It's good thinking, Molly.”

Sam appeared at the side gate, and Fred went to join him.

*   *   *

Fred worked with Sam on the Frisbee in a park near the pond. He liked Sam and wanted his confidence. He'd thought, when he started seeing Molly, that there was one string with him on one end and her on the other, and that she held other strings leading to Sam and Terry. He could keep track of one string, the one between himself and Molly.

But what happened after he moved in was that he noticed one day that he was attached to each of the children, each had a string of his or her own to pull. Fred was surprised at how much he liked that and how lousy it made him feel when something went wrong between them. The kids could just look at you and make you feel like a bastard or a hero.

With Sam it was especially important since he had been the man of the house until this buffalo with scars and big feet moved in and started sleeping with his mother. Fred told Sam he was proud of a man who was prepared to protect his mom. Sam should tell him if anything felt wrong about his being there, because he didn't want to intrude between him and Terry and their mom. That's what Fred said. But he was the one who crawled in bed with her, whose shirt she was wearing in her backyard, reading the paper.

“We can do similar tricks with your geography homework sometime, if you want,” Fred suggested on the way home. On the subject of geography Sam did not take up the invitation.

*   *   *

From Walter and Dee—from Dee, really, since it was she who had the connection—they learned not much over iced tea that changed to beer and finally was joined by hotdogs and the works.

Walter was from one of the old families of Cambridge. Dee was local, too, but descended from more recent, Italian, immigrants.

Dee was a lot of fun; Walter was more reserved. He and Fred had taken time getting used to one another. Fred had thought at first that the fact that Walter was black was making him expect the normal white patronizing hostility, and that he was hanging back, waiting to be offended. But that was Fred's mistake, not Walter's. After they'd shadow-boxed for a year or so on the occasions when they met, Fred came to what should have been the easiest conclusion from the start: Walter was simply diffident and courtly, almost Old World, more comfortable with books than with people. So they'd talk books.

Walter was large and handsome and dressed, like Fred, in the Sunday leisure uniform of khaki twill and polo shirt. Walter's was pink. Dee was little and fast-moving, with black hair and notable breasts that were covered with flowers in a flimsy dress with ruffles. She'd come barefoot. She was as out of uniform as she could manage without being arrested. She'd kissed Fred, reaching up to do it, when he and Sam arrived.

Molly was good at showing excited interest in the Cambridge killing since it wasn't feigned. She stirred the pot as hard as she could without asking straight out or dropping any hint as to why they needed to know about it. What was known did not go far beyond what Fred had gathered in his own quick survey; it was the working theories of the investigators that he wanted to know.

The initial hypotheses confirmed that Smykal had been killed on purpose, with a hammer, beaten to death. Nobody in the building had reported a man screaming.

Dee put mustard on a hotdog with deliberate care and said, “The man was into pornography something heavy, which I don't like, and the detectives are having trouble holding on to the evidence. My fellow cops keep running away with samples. They just take it off the walls. The people I work with!

“I saw some. To me it looks gloomy,” Dee said. “I guess it's lucky for the female race, but what men see in women's genitalia, I can't for the life of me—” She looked sideways at Walter, who kept his own counsel.

Dee went on. “A downstairs neighbor who was inside once, to talk about a leak from Smykal's toilet, noticed that a big painting was gone. It looked like an Old Master, the neighbor said. A nude woman. Par for the course. Smykal said it was his grandmother or something. Hah! A woman painted with nothing on. That was no grandmother, A, the neighbor said, and, two, that was a masterpiece, mark his words.

“There is a big mark where the painting's missing from the wall—the nude, the so-called grandmother. That should interest you, Fred.”

Molly looked at Fred. A general pause focused on him. The cops had undone the evidence he'd planted.

“I don't know,” Fred said. “There's not much future in stealing a painting, Dee. Art is harder than cars or TV sets, since there's only one of it and it looks only like itself. How do you sell it? You might run off with a painting and then find a picture of it the next day in the paper listed as missing, then where would you be?”

Walter had brought the Japanese beer he favored, and opening another for himself, and one for Fred, he told them, “The theory is that the painting is an important masterpiece, stolen for one of those drug lords, secret collectors, who keep a private collection hidden in the basement.”

“The invisible Dr. No,” Dee said. “The same one who masterminds all the museum thefts they never figure out. Like the one at the Gardner, you recall?”

“Which is a lot of horseshit,” Fred said.

“Which, as I was saying to Dee earlier, is a proposition that has never been justified,” said Walter. “Or, as you would put it, a lot of horseshit.” He smiled at Fred, not born to it but willing and able to speak the language of tea in Arlington when in Arlington.

“I would have thought, with a thing like that killing,” Fred suggested, “the pornography—there might be drugs involved somewhere, you know?”

“I guess,” Dee said. “Right now our people like the painting as the motive, though.”

“It adds romance,” Walter said. “Everyone likes romance, even detectives.”

Molly turned the conversation in another direction. “It's what I say: a man living alone, he has a shorter life expectancy. Poor fellow. Did he have family?”

Not that Dee had heard of. Nor friends. Only certain people in the building who were used to seeing him.

“Someone to clean for him?” Molly asked.

Fred exploded with an involuntary guffaw that became a cough.

“It's only the day after, and I haven't heard anything since yesterday evening, when some of the officers were talking in the hall,” Dee said. “Mostly about what they had taken for themselves, showing each other stuff under their uniform jackets, like seven-year-old kids with a
Playboy.
What do I know? One officer said the victim's apartment made him think of his teenager's bedroom, but with a lot more blood.”

*   *   *

Walter and Dee had brought their three children, two girls and a boy who fit right around and between Molly's two, so things went well. Fred and Dee tossed the Frisbee with Sam in the street, and it was late by the time everyone acknowledged that the kids had school in the morning.

Fred put a call in to Clay and failed to get a response. He had tried late in the afternoon also, thinking it prudent that they keep in touch in case of developments on Turbridge Street. Evidently Clayton's North Shore wedding was progressing. Fred hadn't been happy to hear of the police detectives' concentration on Smykal's missing painting, but there wasn't much to do about that beyond sleeping on it …

*   *   *

… with Molly's knees and feet and elbows getting into the act, her curly hair smelling of smoky hotdog and marshmallow, the clock ticking in this strange woman's bedroom, and birds too smart to sleep making consultative noises outside. The birds were agreeing with Fred that you can't always think and sleep at the same time.

At about four in the morning Fred was thinking of the gun he kept with his few possessions in Charlestown. He had begun to sweat, visiting with old deaths and terrors not related to his present predicament, and so he slipped out of Molly's bed and went to stand by her window, looking through her gauze curtains across the pear blossoms.

The air was cold on his naked body, and Arlington's black dark threatened to shift into swamp and jungle. His gut wrenched at the thought of allowing the man he was, if that included carrying his gun, into the place where Molly and the children slept.

“Wake up, Fred,” Molly whispered urgently from the bed behind him, frightened and barely coming out of sleep. “There's a man in the room.”

“It's me,” Fred said.

“You all right? You want me to wake up and be with you?”

“No.”

“Jesus, is this you sweating the bed?”

“Sorry,” Fred said.

“I'm just impressed,” Molly said, rolling over to sleep again.

13

By the time Fred was up and moving, having fallen asleep just as the birds were getting seriously into their new day, it was noon. Molly had gone to work. He called Clay and got no answer. Molly had left the paper on the table with the second-day article about Smykal marked. It was on the fourth page and added nothing to the piece of the day before, except to say that leads were being followed.

Being someone who preferred the direct approach, Fred was not happy that his own tangential involvement in Smykal's murder made it essential for him to lie low while he gathered information. What he couldn't do was bull into the apartment building on Turbridge Street, stand people in corners, and ask questions.

He made a breakfast of the picnic leftovers, then put on his working clothes—khakis, white shirt and tie, and tweed jacket—and went into Cambridge. The lunch crowd had been replaced by the afternoon coffee contingent when Fred settled in again at his sidewalk table. The clientele included kids coming out of the public high school next to Molly's library. Up Turbridge Street a cruiser was still dozing in front of Smykal's building, but there seemed to be no other relevant activity.

Fred tried Clay's number a few times and failed to get any answer. Clayton could be such a nitwit that he might take a notion to spend the night somewhere else. He might have taken a trip to the Grand Canyon. The man could be so upset that he wouldn't answer his own phone. It was unusual, though, for him not to let Fred know where he was. His was an organized soul. Fred wasn't happy about the prolonged silence at Clayton's end; it put a strain even on Clay's usual version of security. Because it was silence, it could be read as ominous.