The surroundings of the house, centers, neighborhoods which I see and where I walk; for years and years.
I have created you in joy and in sorrows: out of so many circumstances, out of so many things.
You have become all feeling for me.
The words had a liturgical cadence, almost a prayer. You have become all feeling for me. I had not come to see Robert Paris buried, but to bury Hugh. And still I was dissatisfied. I put the book down and started up the car.
Terry ran her fingertip around the rim of her glass of wine as I ordered another bourbon and water. The lunchtime crowd at Barney’s had thinned considerably since we’d been seated an hour earlier. The plate of pasta in front of me was mostly uneaten, but I’d refused the waiter’s attempts to clear it away. The presence of food helped me justify the amount of bourbon I was drinking.
Terry wore a satiny cotton dress, white with thin red and blue vertical stripes. A diamond pendant hung from her slim neck. Looking at her I wondered if she had a lover. I didn’t imagine many men could accept her calm self-possession and luminous intelligence without feeling threatened. And, just now, she also looked beautiful to me.
“I should be getting back to work,” she said, making no effort to move. Instead she poured the last of the wine from the bottle into her glass. Continuing our conversation, she asked, “What is it you can’t accept?”
I shrugged. “Robert Paris’s death, I guess. I wanted a confrontation and he ups and dies on me.”
“But you don’t think he was killed?”
“No. Apparently he’s been in bad health for years and he died of natural causes.”
“Then let it rest,” she said. She sipped her wine. “What are you going to do with yourself now?”
“I don’t know. I’m completely unprepared for anything other than the practice of law.”
“That sounds like a good reason to do something else.”
“I agree, but the details of my new life are — elusive.”
The waiter deposited my drink in front of me and made another play for my plate. This time I let him take it.
“Just watch the whiskey intake,” she said.
“I have to get my calories somewhere.”
“You might come to my house for dinner some night.”
“I’d like that.”
We looked at each other.
“I’m offering as a friend,” she said.
“I know. I accept.”
I saw her look away. What did she see when she looked at me, I wondered. An alien or just a lonely man? The latter, I thought. Her dinner invitation came out of compassion, not curiosity.
“We’re both different, Terry. We play against expectation and we’re good at what we do. It’s our competence that makes us outsiders, not the fact that you’re a woman cop or I’m a gay lawyer.”
She nodded, slightly, and made a movement to leave. I rose with her.
“Take care of yourself, Henry. Go away for a few days, meet someone new, and when you get back, call me.”
“I promise,” I said and watched her go.
I should have gone, too, but instead I stayed another hour at the bar. Finally, when the first wave of the office workers from the surrounding business washed in, I asked for the check, paid it and left.
I put the key into the lock, turned it, pushed the door and nothing happened. The dead-bolt was bolted. I fumbled on my key chain for the dead-bolt key and jammed it into the lock. I leaned my shoulder against the door and pushed. It opened. I stood for a moment staring at the door. I didn’t remember bolting it. In fact, I never did.
Stepping into my apartment I suddenly stopped. There was something wrong. I looked around. Everything appeared as it had been when I set off for the university that morning, but was it? Had I closed the book lying on the coffee table? I walked around the room.
The dead-bolt. I knew I hadn’t bolted the door. There was no point. There were so many other ways to break into my apartment that it never occurred to me that someone might try using the front door. But someone had, and he had very carefully turned both locks when he left.
Slowly, starting with my bedroom, I methodically went through every room of the apartment, taking inventory. It took more than an hour to make the search. In the bedroom, I lifted from the wall my framed law school diploma. I opened the wall safe beneath. There I found intact my grandfather’s pocket watch, my birth certificate, my passport, my parents’ wedding rings — optimistically bequeathed to me — and five thousand dollars cash, some of the bills twenty years old, the sum of my father’s estate. Everything was accounted for.
It was the same in the bathroom and the kitchen and in the hall closet. I sat down at my desk and began going through the drawers. Then I discovered what was missing: Hugh’s letters to his grandfather, which Aaron Gold had given me.
I closed the bottom drawer. Robert Paris was dead but someone had stolen the only evidence I had which linked him to the murder of his grandson. The apartment seemed suddenly very quiet. I felt as if I were in the presence of ghosts. As much to get out as to learn whether she’d seen or heard anything I went to my neighbor.
I pushed the doorbell beneath her name, Lisa Marsh. She came to the door in a bathrobe. This was not unusual, since she was a resident at the university medical school and worked odd hours. But her face was flushed, her hair disheveled and her eyes bright; it wasn’t the appearance of sleep.
“Hi,” I began, waiting for recognition to register with her.
She smiled.
“Sorry to get you out of bed but someone broke into my house this afternoon.”
She stepped back. “Oh, no. When?”
“I left at ten this morning and got back an hour ago.” I looked at my watch. It was about six. “I was wondering if you’d seen or heard anything.”
“You better come in,” she said. I did, closing the door behind me. All the curtains were drawn, but a lamp shone in a corner, revealing the remnants of a meal for two people laid out on a long coffee table. “Excuse me for a minute, Henry.”
She went into her bedroom, and I heard her talking to someone. A few minutes later she returned with a man who was stuffing his shirt tails into his jeans.
“I don’t think you’ve met Mark,” she said.
“Um, how do you do?” I said.
He smiled. “Fine.”
“I am really sorry to disturb you,” I said to both of them.
Lisa shrugged. “This is an emergency. Have you called the police?”
“No, not yet. I’m trying to figure out what happened first.”
We went into the living room and sat down. I told them about the dead-bolt, the neatness of the search and the fact that only one thing had been taken. They did not ask, and I did not tell them, exactly what that thing was.
“What I was thinking,” I concluded, “was that you may have heard something or seen someone.”
They looked at each other and then back to me.
“We had lunch at around noon,” Lisa said, “and were done by twelve-thirty. I’m afraid that after that we weren’t paying much attention.”
Mark frowned thoughtfully. “Wait. I heard a phone ringing next door. It woke me, and I looked over at the alarm clock thinking it might be the hospital — I work there, too. It was about three-thirty or a little before. Then I got up to use the bathroom and get a glass of water from the kitchen.”
“Did you hear anything else?”
He shook his head.
The three of us looked at each other. Lisa touched her finger to her lip.
“But I did,” she said. “The sound of silver rattling as someone opened a drawer. But I thought it was Mark.”
“No, I got a glass from the counter. I didn’t open any drawers.”
“All this happened around three-thirty?”
“I’m sure of it,” Mark said, “because I had to check in with the hospital at four.”
I got up to leave. It was five-thirty. The burglar had been in my apartment only two hours earlier.