‘Jerk?’
‘My brother.’
‘Can you say his name?’
‘Jerk.’
‘And what didn’t he understand?’
Ronald’s hands began to wash over each other. He was breathing through his mouth now. ‘Do you know why the cold room is there in the first place? Were you clever enough to find out?’
‘Actually, that was one of the things I was going to ask you.’ I was encouraged by Ronald’s attitude. He was now volunteering information. ‘Why have a refrigerator that big in a private home?’
‘The cold room is there because in the nineteen twenties, the house was a speakeasy, with an upstairs brothel, owned by Dutch Schultz. In nineteen twenty-eight, two gangsters were killed in the cellar, Blintzy Reznick and Little Moe Cohen. Margaret has newspaper clippings documenting the whole episode. According to the Herald Tribune, Little Moe and Blintzy were refrigerated for three days after the actual murders. I think that’s where Margaret got the idea. Otherwise, who would even think about putting a child in a.?.?.’
‘In a refrigerator?’
Ronald’s laugh was soft and dry. ‘Jerk was a fighter,’ he added, ‘and what did it get him? I was a ball of cheese, and look at me now.’
‘What about your father. Why didn’t he protect you?’
Once he got started, Ronald couldn’t stop, and bit by bit, I assembled a portrait of the Portola household. The only child of a prominent, Brazilian family, Guillermo Portola had used up three wives, along with innumerable mistresses, in an effort to produce an heir. His marriage to the secretary he’d occasionally boffed was motivated solely by the need to legitimize that heir. According to Ronald, aside from impregnating Margaret a second time, Guillermo had very little to do with his wife and children. His life was lived in a suite at the Pierre Hotel, where he passed his nights with the high-end call girls he preferred to his psycho spouse. Nevertheless, Guillermo supported his family in style, which left Margaret to do as she pleased, the absolute master of the house.
And what a master she was, given both to sudden rages and calculated cruelty. Her children were initially cared for by nannies, then privately tutored through high school. Subject to Margaret’s temper, the nannies and tutors came and went, leaving in their wake a montage of faces and names that Ronald chose not to remember. As they, the nannies and the tutors, chose not to remember, or even recognize, the obvious bruises on the frail bodies of the children.
‘What about friends?’ I asked.
‘I went to birthday parties sometimes, and sometime a luckless child would be sentenced to pass an afternoon in my company. Needless to say, they rarely came back. I belonged to clubs, too. A chess club on the East Side and a gem club at the Metropolitan Museum. I have friends now, a collection of oddities who share my interests, but my early years were passed in solitude.’
Ronald paused, gave his head a tiny shake, then abruptly changed the subject. ‘For Margaret,’ he said, partitioning the syllables of his mother’s name as if sounding out a word in a foreign language, ‘Father’s stroke was a stroke of luck.’
I wasn’t expecting much to come from the revelations that followed, though I listened attentively for any mention of the circumstances surrounding Guillermo’s death. But Ronald wasn’t going there. This was all about a will Guillermo had somehow created, despite being completely disabled, a man whose speech was limited to a series of unintelligible gurgles. That the will would eventually be challenged was inevitable; that Margaret would be up to the challenge was also inevitable. At the first hint of a lawsuit, she’d produced an impeccably credentialed attorney named Mason Livingston. A direct descendant of the Livingstons so prominent during the revolution, Mason swore, under oath, that he’d read the document aloud to Guillermo, clause by clause, and that Guillermo had indicated consent with a series of nods confirmed by eye-blinks. Three other witnesses, attorneys all, then leaped forward to confirm Mason’s account. The will was unbreakable.
‘And now she runs your life,’ I said. It was time to make the turn.
‘And now she runs my life.’
I leaned even closer, until my chest brushed Ronald’s back. ‘Remember what my partner said, about you being afraid to stand up to Margaret? I know it isn’t true. I know you stopped being afraid of your mother years ago. Like I know you would have left home years ago.?.?. except for the money. I’m talking about the forty million dollars, and the will, and the trust fund. Margaret knew exactly what she was doing when she made herself executor of a fund that ties you up until you reach the age of forty.’
‘How can a person,’ Ronald asked, ‘be so crazy and so crafty at the same time? Margaret’s fucking Mason Livingston, who administers the trust. If I displease her, Mason will invoke the will’s morality clause. I’ve got a record, which I’m sure you already know, a record that brands me a cocksucker and a pervert. My claim to any part of my father’s estate hangs by a thread.’
‘And Margaret’s standing right there with a pair of scissors?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that you have to take those scissors out of her hand.’
I stared for a moment at the sheen of perspiration on the back of Ronald’s neck, at tiny drops of moisture no bigger than grains of sand that clung to the black hairs fanning out from a natural parting. ‘What would you do, Ronald, if you got control of the estate? How would you live your life?’
Ronald answered without hesitation. ‘My favorite word is debauchery, followed closely by depravity. I want to drown myself in sensation. I want to use every drug there is to use. I want to have sex on three-masted yachts, and in filthy alleyways. I want to keep going until I’m dead.’
I rose to my feet at that point and gripped my side. No more whispering. Time for business. ‘I can’t kneel anymore,’ I told him. ‘My wound is killing me.’ I set a chair in front of him and sat down. ‘Now, the sex part you can keep to yourself, but tell me, is heroin your drug of choice?’
‘It’s that obvious?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid it is, Ronnie, but we can forget about that. For now, anyway.’ I leaned back in the chair. ‘Ya know, there’s a way out for you. A way to make all those fantasies come true.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Mynka Chechowski died in your mother’s kitchen. The cause of death was a blow to the top of her skull with a blunt object, a blow universally associated with an enraged perpetrator. That perpetrator can’t be you, Ronald, because blind rages are beyond you. And it can’t be your brother, either, because he was the father of Mynka’s child and he loved her. That leaves Margaret holding the bag, and her elder son to put her in it.’
Ronald rocked back and forth, his eyes still closed. He was breathing through his nose again. ‘Dreams are the best things about dope,’ he told me. ‘Evil dreams that fly around your mind like cobwebs in a breeze. I believe I’ve dispatched Margaret in every way there is to dispatch a human being. In my dreams, I’ve skinned her alive.’
He bent forward to look into my eyes. ‘You’ve taken the time to know me. That’s an act of respect and I’m thankful. But I can’t give you what you want, as much as I’d like to. That’s because you’ve misread the tea leaves. Margaret didn’t kill Toad. Jerk killed Toad. Margaret wasn’t even there.’
I jumped to my feet, grabbed Ronald’s shirt and ripped him out of the chair. I wasn’t faking anything this time. Ronald had given the wrong answer and I didn’t care whether it was a true answer or not. For those few seconds, until Adele opened the door and I saw the look of utter distress twisting her features, I was out of control. Still shaking, I dropped Ronald into his chair and waved Adele off.
Unlike my partner, Ronald seemed more bemused than afraid. He waited until Adele closed the door behind her, then began to speak.