“But even with all the heat, you’re talking to me.”
“A good meal, Carl, is worth any indignity,” but after he made his little joke he kept looking at me and something sharp emerged from the fleshy bulbs of his face.
“And you think something stinks, don’t you?” I said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Not for the baby arugula. Where’d the heat come from? Who called you off?”
He shrugged and finished his salad, poured another glass of wine, drank from it, holding the stem of the glass daintily in his sausage fingers. “The word on the Reddmans,” he said rather mysteriously, “is that it is a family dark with secrets.”
“Society types?”
“Not at all. Best I could tell they’ve been shunned completely, like lepers. All that money and not even in the Social Register. From what I could figure, you and I, we’d be more welcome in certain social circles than the Reddmans.”
“A Jew and an African-American?”
“Well maybe not you.” He laughed broadly at that and then leaned forward and twisted his voice down to a whisper. “The Reddman house is one strange place, Carl, more a huge stone tomb than anything else, with tilting spires and wild, overrun gardens. Veritas, it’s called. Don’t you love it when they name their houses?”
“Veritas? A bit presumptuous, wouldn’t you say?”
“And they pronounce it wrong.”
“You speak Latin?”
His broad shoulders shrugged. “My mother had this thing about a classical education.”
“My mother thinks classical means an olive in her gin.”
“Well, this Veritas was cold as an Eskimo’s hell,” said McDeiss. “As soon as I got there and started asking questions I could feel the freeze descend. The dead girl’s father, the grandson of the pickle king, the word on him is he’s demented. They lock him up in some upstairs room in that mansion. I had some questions for him but they wouldn’t let me up to see him, they physically barred me from going up the stairs, can you believe that? Then, just when I was about to force my way through to get to his room, a call came in from the Roundhouse. The family, through our friend Harrington, had let it be known that they wanted the case closed and suddenly the heat came down from City Hall. See, Carl, money like that, it is its own power, you understand? Money like that, it wants something, it gets it. I never got a chance to see the old man. My lieutenant told me to check off the case and move on.”
“And so you checked.”
“It was a classic suicide. We’d seen it all before a hundred times. There wasn’t much I could do.”
“No matter how much it stunk. I need you to get me the file.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“I’ll subpoena it.”
“I can’t control what you do.”
“How about the building register for the day of the death?”
He looked down at his salad and speared a lone water chestnut. “There’s nothing there, but okay. And be sure to talk to the boyfriend, Grimes.”
“You think maybe he…”
“All I think is you’ll find him interesting. He lives in that luxury high-rise on Walnut, west of Rittenhouse. You know it?”
I nodded. “By the way, you find any Darvon in her medicine cabinet?”
He looked up from his salad. “Enough to keep a football team mellow.”
“Ever wonder why she didn’t just take the pills?”
Before McDeiss could answer the waiter came and whisked away his plate, with only the remnants of the dry shrimp vinaigrette staining the porcelain. In front of me the waiter placed the restaurant’s cheapest entree, Kung Pao Chicken-Very Spicy ($10.00), thick with roasted peanuts. In front of McDeiss he placed one of the specialties of the house, Sweeter Than Honey Venison with Caramelized Pear, Sun-Dried Tomato and Hot Pepper ($20.00). McDeiss picked off a chunk of venison with his chopsticks, swilled it in the garnish, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, carefully, mashing the meat with Pritikin determination, his shoulders shaking with joy.
While McDeiss chewed and shook, I considered. Through his patina of certainty as to the suicide I had detected something totally unexpected: doubt. For the first time I wondered seriously whether Caroline Shaw might have been right about her sister’s death and it wasn’t just that McDeiss had doubts that got me to wondering. There was money at stake here, huge pots of money, enough to twist the soul of anyone who got too close. Money has its own gravitational pull, stronger than anything Newton imagined, and what it drew, along with fast cars and slim-hipped women, was the worst of anyone who fell within its orbit. Just the amount of money involved was enough to get me thinking, and what I was thinking, suddenly, was of Caroline Shaw and that manipulative little smile of hers. And there was something else too, something that cut its way through the heat of the Kung Pao and slid into the lower depths of my consciousness. Just at that moment I couldn’t shake the strange suspicion that somehow a part of all that Reddman money could rightfully belong to me.
McDeiss had told me I should talk to the boyfriend, this Grimes fellow, and so I would. I could picture him now, handsome, suave, a fortune-hunting rogue in the grandest tradition, who had plucked Jacqueline out of a crowd and was ready to grab his piece of her inheritance. He must be a bitter boy, this Grimes, bitter at the chance for wealth that had been snatched right out of his pocket. I liked the bitter boys, I knew what made them tick, admired their drive, their passions. I had been a bitter boy once myself, before my own calamitous failures transformed my bitterness into something weaker and more pathetic, into deep-seated cynicism and a desperate desire to flee. But though I was no longer bitter, I still knew its language and could still play the part. I figured I’d have no trouble getting Grimes to spill his guts to me, bitter boy to bitter boy.
8
I SAT DOWN AT THE BAR of the Irish Pub with a weary sigh and ordered a beer. As the bartender drew a pint from the keg I reached into my wallet and dropped two twenties onto the bar. I drank the beer while the bartender was still at the register making my change, drank it like I was suffering a profound thirst. I slapped the glass onto the bar and waved to the bartender for another. Generally I didn’t drink much anymore because of my drinking problem. The problem was that when I drank too much I threw up. But that night I had already spent hours searching and asking questions and looking here and there, and now that I had found what I was looking for I was determined to do some drinking.
“You ever feel like the whole world is fixed against you?” I said to the bartender when he brought my second beer.
It was a busy night at the Irish Pub and the bartender didn’t have time to listen. He gave a little laugh and moved on.
“You don’t need to tell me,” said the fellow sitting next to me, the remnants of a scotch in his hand.
“Every time I get close,” I said, “the bastards yank it away like it was one of those joke dollar bills tied to a string.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” said the man. With a quick tilt of his wrist he drank the last of his scotch.
The Irish Pub was a young bar, women dressed in jeans and high heels, men in Polo shirts, boys and girls together, meeting one another, shouting lies in each other’s ears. On weekends there was a line outside, but this wasn’t a weekend and I wasn’t there to find a date and neither, I could tell, was the man next to me. He was tall and dark, in a gaudily bright short-sleeve shirt and tan pants. His features were all of movie-star strength and quality, his nose was straight and thin, his chin jutting, his eyes deep and black, but the package went together with a peculiar weakness. He should have been the handsomest man in the world, but he wasn’t. And the bartender refilled his glass without even asking.