That theory might go down easier if Lefcourt had been just plain jealous- though I knew just plain greed was at least as popular a motive for murder. Hell, maybe he was greedy and jealous, both.
It was absolute conjecture, but it was irresistible, too. I knew Danes wanted to restore his reputation, and I knew he wanted Sovitch to help him do it. I also knew- because Sovitch had told me- that he was pissed off at her for not giving him airtime on her show. What if their lunch conversation had been a little different from what Sovitch had described? What if Danes had threatened to go public with their affair? From what I knew of him, Danes wasn’t above that kind of threat; it might even be his style. And if he had done that, would Sovitch have run to Lefcourt, as she had when I’d come sniffing around? And what might Lefcourt have done?
“Speculative bullshit,” I said aloud, and of course it was. But Danes had checked his messages every three days for nearly three weeks, and then he had stopped. There was nothing theoretical about that.
I picked up the phone again. The woman in Bermuda had a lovely voice and an odd, mid-ocean accent, and she was so pleasant in her refusal to answer any of my questions about Danes’s stay at her hotel that I was nonetheless glad I called. When I hung up, it was time to go to Brooklyn.
I don’t often sit down to dinner with families- not my own or anye else’s- and I wasn’t sure what to expect at Nina Sachs’s place. Certainly not Ozzie and Harriet, but not, I hoped, something out of Eugene O’Neill either. As it happened, it was an entirely pleasant evening. Right up until the end.
I bought a bunch of irises at a market near the Clark Street subway station, and I walked over to Willow Street and down toward the water. The western sky was drenched in impossible color and the breeze was warm and full of blossoms and the smells of supper on the stove. Laughter and scraps of conversation drifted out of open windows into the darkening air, and the evening streets seemed intimate and somehow full of promise. I took my time walking down.
The I-2 Gallery was closed, and white shades covered its big windows. I looked up and saw that Nina’s windows were opened wide. I pressed the intercom button and the lock buzzed right away. Music tumbled down to meet me as I climbed the stairs: Motown. Nina’s door was ajar.
Billy was sitting cross-legged by the windows, between two stacks of comic books and in front of a pile of plastic bags and cardboard backing sheets. He wore camo pants cut off into shorts and a green T-shirt. His feet were bare and his legs were bony and white. He was bagging comics and bopping to the music, and he waved when I came in. Nina and Ines were in the kitchen, and they put me to work right away.
Ines was at the fancy stove, chopping peppers and onions and fixing them on skewers with cubes of beef. She smiled at me. Her black hair was up in a loose shiny pile, and she wore a long apron over a fuchsia linen shift. Her feet were bare, and her fingers and toes were nicely manicured and painted to match her dress. There was a small silver band on the second toe of her right foot.
“Detective,” she said, and she surprised me by kissing my cheek. “The flowers are lovely.” Her face was warm and she smelled of lavender.
Nina was at one of the steel-topped counters. Her hair was loose and she was wearing gray shorts and a sleeveless black T-shirt. Her legs were pale but firm and nicely shaped. She stood before a cutting board and the mangled remains of a tomato. She had a paring knife in one hand and a stem glass in the other. There was something red and slushy in the glass, and she took a drink of it.
“Can you chop?” she asked me.
“More or less.”
“That’s better than me,” she said. “I’ll trade you.” She handed me the knife, hilt first, and took the flowers. “Do I have something to put these in, Nes?” she asked.
Ines chuckled. “In the cabinet, above the glasses, there is a tall vase.”
I held up the paring knife. “Got something a little bigger?” I asked Ines. She smiled and pulled an eight-inch knife from a wooden block on the counter.
“This should do, detective.”
Nina made a mock scowl. “Everybody’s a fucking critic,” she said. “I’ll stick to driving the blender. It’s better for all concerned. You want a strawberry daiquiri?” I shook my head. “Come on, it’s our Memorial Day warm-up- you’ve got to have one.”
I shook my head again. “I don’t drink.”
Nina tilted an eyebrow at me. “I’ll fix you a virgin, then.”
“That’s all she lets me have,” Billy called from the living room. “They’re not bad.”
“With that kind of testimonial, how can I refuse?” I said. Nina dumped strawberries, sugar, and ice into the blender, capped the steel pitcher, and hit the button. I leaned toward Ines and spoke over the din.
“What am I chopping for?”
“Tomato and onion salad, so not too fine.” I nodded and started slicing. Nina shut down the blender and handed me a drink.
“We’re out of umbrellas,” she said. “I figured we could talk after dinner, and since you two have everything covered, I’m going to sneak into the studio for a while.” Ines nodded and Nina carried her drink away. I watched as she crossed the room and ruffled Billy’s hair as she passed. He looked up at her and smiled.
Ines and I worked side by side. She swayed gently to the music as she chopped and skewered, and she sang along softly and sipped at her daiquiri. Her knife work was fast and precise, and there was something almost hypnotic in the movements of her long, strong fingers. Even with the windows open and the fan running it was warm in the kitchen, and there was a faint sheen on Ines’s forehead. The broad, flat scar on her arm looked slick. Her perfume and the delicate aroma of her sweat mingled pleasantly with the smells of cooking food.
I was slow but managed not to make too much of a mess. I finished with the tomatoes and moved on to the onions, and when I’d hacked those up sufficiently, Ines swept them into a big glass bowl and tossed them with oil and vinegar and some basil leaves.
“What else can I do?”
“Just relax, detective.”
I took my drink to the living room and sat on the edge of the sofa. Billy was just finishing his bagging.
“New stuff?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got the complete run of House of Anxiety now- all mint- and I’m only missing five issues for the full set of Perturbed. I got something that’s up your alley, too.” Billy sorted through the pile and handed me a stack of seven comics. I looked them over. “Detective Comics, issues 437 through 443, from 1974, when DC brought back the Manhunter and brought your buddy Batman into it. All very fine or near-mint condition. Be careful with them; I got them to trade with a guy, for the first three issues of Dreadful Landscape.”
Billy watched me closely as I studied the comics, and I must have shown the right degree of reverence, as he was soon talking me through his whole stack. He expounded on the artists and writers of nearly every issue in the pile and went on at length about the fine points of quality grades- what separated a near-mint-minus, for example, from a very-fine-plus. He had a vast array of facts at his disposal, and he was pleased with his esoteric knowledge. He was as finicky and proud as any collector of stamps or fine wines, but his sense of humorsarcastic and self-deprecating- saved him from pedantry. I thought about Gregory Danes’s record collection and wondered if monomania ran in families. Whatever its source, Billy reveled in it. His thin face lost its usual dour cast, and his blue eyes were lively and sharp. Words tumbled out of him, and his hands danced around. The Motown disc ended and Billy interrupted a pronouncement on pricing to change CDs.
“Can we at least hear something close to this century?” he said. Billy went to one of the tall shelf units, to a messy heap of discs next to the CD player. He picked through it, passing cruel but amusing judgments on his mother’s taste in music, and eventually found something he liked. He loaded the disc and fell into a deep slouch at the other end of the sofa. The music was funky and jazzy, with plenty of horns, a twanging electric guitar, and beefy keyboards. It sounded familiar.