A Cast of Killers (7 page)

"Yes, back home in my country I was very,
very good at tracking down people," the driver answered
cryptically. "No one ever got away from me," he added, leaving T.S.
to imagine himself at the mercy of some sort of escaped death-squad
leader.

"Where do they take the bodies?" Auntie Lil
asked. She did not really want an answer from the driver. She was
merely, as usual, thinking out loud. "The medical examiner's
office, that's where. Am I right?"

"Yes, ma'am," the driver assured her. "I saw
it on a 'Kojak' rerun."

"How could we get in there?" Her voice
trailed off and she stared back over the spires of the Upper East
Side with intense concentration. They were passing over the
Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and Manhattan lay behind them, its newer
buildings shining with bright metallic splendor beneath the
sparkling skies of the sunny autumn day. What a shame to die on a
day like this, T.S. thought. Even the New York air smelled clean,
for a change.

Auntie Lil was silent, searching for a
solution. Since T.S. and Auntie Lil had been soul mates for all of
his life, he knew what she was thinking at exactly the same time
the idea came to her.

"No," he said firmly. "I won't ask her."

"Oh, Theodore." She turned to him and
clutched his sleeve, beseeching him for help. He rather enjoyed
seeing her beg.

"Lilah knows everyone," Auntie Lil cooed.
"And you know how fond of you she is. She's probably been dying for
you to telephone her."

"How do you know I haven't been taking her
dancing every single night of the week?" he asked grumpily, annoyed
at her accurate inference.

Auntie Lil did not bother to answer. They
both knew where the truth lay.

T.S. stared out his window and watched a
subway train cross the Manhattan Bridge in the distance. Lilah. She
moved in a different world, a world of money and meaningless titles
and men who owned businesses and women who always looked at least
twenty years younger than their age.

He had always been a confident, prepared man
in control. But around Lilah, T.S. often felt inexplicably inferior
and clumsy. As much as his dreams secretly centered on Lilah, she
made his present reality strange and unsettling. He did not like
being out of control of his heart, his head or his tongue. So, no,
of course he had not been taking Lilah out dancing every night of
the week. In fact, he had not seen her at all in months. And Auntie
Lil knew it.

Auntie Lil always said that he needed to
learn how to live, but just saying so wasn't enough for T.S.
Sometimes, he longed for someone to show him how to live. And
sometimes he longed for the courage to be different from the stiff
and inflexible but capable man that he had been for so many
years.

"I could call her," Auntie Lil offered with
as much humbleness as she could muster. Even she knew that she was
treading on some very thin ice. She liked Lilah almost as much as
T.S. liked Lilah, but she had no desire to hurt her beloved
nephew.

"No, I'm a big boy. I can certainly call
her." There. He'd said it. Now he'd just have to follow
through.

"Tonight?" she demanded. Boy, she never knew
when to stop pushing her luck. That was probably why she was so
damn lucky.

"Okay. Okay. Tonight." He shifted his legs
uncomfortably and sighed. Already his palms were starting to
sweat.

T.S. spent the early part of the evening
devising ways to put off the phone call to Lilah Cheswick. It was
amazing how inventive he could be when desperation drove him to it.
He began by retracing the steps of his cleaning lady earlier that
day, but since she took perverse pleasure in being even cleaner
than him (a near impossibility) there was not a single speck of
dust to discover throughout his ruthlessly organized and sparsely
furnished apartment. Alarmed by his restless activity, Brenda and
Eddie followed him the entire time, meowing ceaselessly for more
food just in case he suffered a temporary lapse of memory and they
got lucky. They didn't—T.S. had put them both on strict diets since
they resembled seals more than cats— but they did each nab an
anchovy-stuffed olive when T.S. finally decided to tackle the
refrigerator.

There wasn't much to do. Like every single
one of the rooms in his six-room apartment, the refrigerator was
spotless and gleaming clean. He wiped out the butter compartment,
just in case the cleaning lady had missed it, then restacked his
frozen dinners according to the main entree.

That done, he took a blow dryer to his
bedroom slippers to restore the nap then checked all of his
paintings and prints with a carpenter's level to ensure they were
hanging properly. After all, it had been at least a month since
he'd performed these all-important tasks.

Remembering some new purchases from the day
before, T.S. then added a few entries to the computerized
cross-indexed catalog he maintained on his private music
collection, which was heavy on opera and show tunes. There was no
point in checking the shelves of hardback books. He'd spent the
morning before dusting and organizing those. Paperbacks were not
allowed in the apartment, at least not after T.S. had eagerly read
them. They were spirited down the hall and given to a neighbor so
that Auntie Lil would not discover that he read best-selling
thrillers and cheap detective novels by the handful each week.

He was finally reduced to killing another
hour by rearranging his impeccably organized personal files
chronologically instead of alphabetically. Then, realizing the
absurdity of such a system, he moved them back as they were. In
doing so, a small envelope fluttered to the floor from his Personal
Correspondence, 1942-1955 file. He stared at it. The combination of
Auntie Lil's earlier lecture and the letter's familiar handwriting
triggered a flood of memories, as well as curiosity about how his
past would seem to a stranger. People would find it odd, he
supposed, that he had kept a correspondence file beginning with age
seven. But then, not many people had been sent to boarding school
at such a young age. And even fewer had had their letters to home
returned regularly, with grammar and spelling carefully corrected
by a well meaning but rigid schoolteacher mother.

Had T.S. been more sentimental, and less like
his mother, it might have hurt his feelings. He had, instead, made
a game out of trying to send her letters perfect in every way—thus
embarking on a career of perfectionism that, among other
compulsions, drove him to save every personal letter he received
with the reply date noted on the front of each envelope.

He held the childish letter in his hand. It
began with "Dear Mummy and Daddy." How strange. Children never
called their mothers "Mummy" anymore, did they? It was hard for him
to know for sure. Children were as foreign to T.S. as Zulu
warriors, and a great deal more alarming. He noted with
satisfaction that his mother had uncovered a mere three mistakes in
the letter, and picayune ones at that, at a time when he was only
eight years old. Not bad. Of course, by age ten he'd been able to
beat her at her own game and had earned brief laudatory replies at
the bottom of his own letters in return. It was better than nothing
at all and, nearly fifty years later, he still treasured the
perfunctory paragraphs of praise from his emotionally distant
mother.

Replacing the letter into its proper folder,
T.S. ran his fingers over the neat pile of perfectly ordered
correspondence. Each letter— with certain rather spectacular
exceptions—was very thin and very carefully folded. The exceptions
were missives from Auntie Lil, posted from all corners of the world
as she trekked here and there, following the fashion designers she
served as they searched for new styles and new fabrics. He had
awaited each of her letters with an eagerness he felt ashamed to
admit to anyone else. No one else at boarding school, he
remembered, in all those years away from home, could have claimed
more exotic correspondence. Her letters had arrived at his always
well sterilized room with wonderful irregularity, always fat and
crammed with clippings, scraps of fabric, photographs of herself
with strangers and stacks of postcards she'd meant to send earlier.
They literally overflowed with evidence of a world so chaotic it
both frightened and excited his prematurely adult mind.

T.S. knew even then how much his mother
despised Auntie Lil and her unorthodox, sometime scandalous, ways.
But, while struggling to maintain loyalty toward his rigidly
conventional mother, T.S. had always been drawn closer to Auntie
Lil's warm and loving flame, craving her maternal beacon and
carefree, capable spirit. Unlike his mother, who had been "Fondly"
for as long as he could remember, Auntie Lil signed her letters to
T.S. with "Love Always From Your Most Adoring Aunt." After five
decades, he knew she still meant it with all of her heart.

He sighed. Auntie Lil would not be putting
off a phone call like a bashful teenager. In fact, she was probably
out somewhere right now on one of her many dates eating food of
undetermined origin with people whose names were hard to pronounce.
Her taste in friends was every bit as exotic as her taste in
clothing and correspondence.

He sighed. He owed it to her to call Lilah.
And he owed it to her to help her find out Emily's true identity.
There had been many times in the past when all that lay between
T.S. and a bleak, boring life was his fun-loving Aunt Lil. It was
now his turn to pay her back. She wanted so much to embark on a new
project. And there was a real need beneath her surface sorrow at
the poor woman's death. While his mother was content to spend her
days imperiously ordering about the staff of an elderly care
facility, Auntie Lil was different.

She wanted, T.S. knew, to go down kicking and
screaming. And she truly needed new mysteries to survive.

He held a fat and yellowed envelope from her
in his hand. Sent from Malaysia in 1954, it still held a sliver of
banana frond and a faded newspaper clipping of Auntie Lil flanked
by dozens of dark and smiling faces. T.S. ran a finger across the
crease of the letter then carefully tucked it back in place. It was
time to call Lilah Cheswick.

Lilah was rich enough to afford a houseful of
servants, but hated having them about. T.S. was not surprised when
she answered the phone herself on the third ring.

"Hello?" she asked calmly. "Do please hold
on." Her smoky voice snaked through the telephone wires, sending a
flame shooting down the length of his previously placid
fifty-five-year-old body. He was too old for such nonsense, but too
young not to want it.

He heard a crinkling sound in the background,
then a thump and a muffled ladylike oath followed by more crinkling
and an exasperated sigh. Finally, she returned to the phone with
apologetic politeness. "So sorry to keep you waiting. Who is this,
please?"

"Lilah?" His voice was louder than he'd
expected. He calmed down and continued. "Lilah—it's me. I'm T.S."
What was he saying? His tongue had a life of its own.

"Theodore!" Only two people in the entire
world were allowed to call him by his full name. Lilah Cheswick was
one of them.

"Where have you been, Theodore?" Her voice
swelled and took on a rich warmth that T.S. was too afraid to even
suspect might be for him. Lilah was always a woman to get right to
the point. "Why haven't you been calling me?" she demanded in a
good-humored tone of voice.

Now that was an excellent question. "I don't
know," he confessed. "I thought you'd prefer to be left alone for a
while."

"Theodore, you know me too well to really
believe that. Robert's been dead for months but, to me, he'd been
dead for years."

It was true. T.S. thought back to the murder
of Lilah's husband and to her well-balanced sorrow. She and her
husband had not had a happy life together and she was not the kind
of woman to milk grief for her own benefit. "I don't know why I
haven't called," he finally offered. "I thought you'd probably be
too busy."

"Too busy? Doing what? My daughters are off
at school. I've read every book ever published. My friends bore me
and now I can't even get this stupid frozen dinner open, so I'll
probably starve to death before they can bore me to death." There
was another thump and some more exasperated crinkling.

"Try cutting the plastic with a knife," he
suggested. "There's really no other way."

"Theodore, you're a genius. Deirdre's left me
for a week and I'm helpless. There!" He heard the thump of a
microwave door closing and she was back on the line. "To what do I
owe this honor? You have four minutes to explain and then I'm
tearing into that dinner with my very well-bred teeth. You don't
want to take me out to dinner, I suppose?"

"Yes. Yes, I do." He practically shouted, and
didn't even care. Not even he would pass up such an opening. "Let's
go to dinner tomorrow night."

"That would be lovely. I think I'll survive
until then."

He was so busy admiring her voice and
marveling at her calm and apparent disregard of his own nervousness
that, at first, he neglected to reply. When he realized he'd been
holding the phone silently for nearly half a minute, he panicked
and did what he'd always done with women: he blurted out the first
thing that crossed his mind.

"Could we stop by the morgue first?" he
asked, to his own immediate horror. God, what was he doing? Where
was his finesse? He was acting like a teenage moron.

"You're such a romantic, Theodore," Lilah
teased, seemingly impervious to any faux pas he might produce.
"Have you grown kinky in our months apart?"

"Oh, this is horrible," he forced himself to
confess, unleashing a torrent of words. "I'm making an idiot of
myself and you must think I'm insane. I've been wanting to call you
and I don't know why I haven't. And now I'm calling because I need
a favor or, rather, Auntie Lil and I need a favor, but I'm afraid
you'll think that's the only reason I'm calling you, so now I feel
like a real ass. I think I'd better just hang up."