Jade in Aries (5 page)

“Fifteen percent of the store? For how long?”

“Forever. For as long as the store stays open. If the profit keeps on the same as before, that’s three thousand dollars a year, every year. We could use something like that, Mitch.”

Of course we could. Who couldn’t use extra income every year, with no work done for it?

Except at the beginning, of course. Work would have to be done for it at the beginning.

I said, “To be paid to us if I find the killer?”

“No. Regardless of what happens, just if you’ll agree to try.”

I shook my head. “I won’t do it that way. If I don’t succeed, I don’t want any payment.”

“Well, that would be up to you,” she said, and from the sudden lightening of her expression I saw that she had taken my last statement to mean that I was agreeing to take on the job.

And what else could I do? I remembered Ronald Cornell in this basement, timid and weak and ineffective, but pushing himself to be more, because his friend had been killed. Taking his coat and boots off before finding out if there was anyone at home or not, because he was determined to wait if the house was empty. It had to have been a strain for him to come to me, to come out of himself, to act. Just as it would be a strain for me.

Kate was saying, “I told the police I was his aunt, that’s how they let me in. And I said his uncle might be coming to visit him, too.”

“Did you see Manzoni at all?”

“No, and I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Does he have special visiting hours?”

“Yes. You could see him tonight, if you wanted, between seven-thirty and nine.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go see him tonight.”

“Thank you, Mitch,” she said.

H
E LOOKED LIKE A
cartoon in a magazine. He was as swathed in bandages as a mummy, and his right leg, in a hip-to-toe plaster cast, was held up at an angle by a system of weights and cords.

It was all a cartoon except the face. Lengths of adhesive tape over gauze were crisscrossed over his nose, but other than that, his head and face were clear of bandaging. The frightened, aching expression in his eyes could be read from across the room, and when he opened his mouth to talk—or to breathe—I could see that he was missing several teeth.

At first I thought the deep grayness around his eyes was the result of strain or tiredness, but then I realized he’d had two black eyes which were slowly fading. The result was to intensify his expression of pain and fear.

There was a uniformed policeman in a chair out in the hall, but Cornell and I were alone once inside the room. I walked over to the bed and said the usual inanity: “How are you?”

“Getting better,” he said. He tried to smile at the same time, but his voice and his lips both quavered. He wasn’t very far from tears.

He had the room to himself; the advantage of being under police guard. In addition to his bed and tray, there was a brown metal bureau against the opposite wall, a television set mounted on a high shelf across from the bed, a very large window covered with a shut Venetian blind but no curtains or drapes, and two tubular chrome chairs with green plastic seats and backs, as though parts of a cheap kitchen set.

I had been surprised when I came in that he didn’t have the television going, that boon to the bedridden, but now that I could see the screen, it turned out he
did
have it on, with the sound off. It was a black-and-white set, and the pictures were alternating close-ups of three earnest, intense, handsome and yet somehow artificial faces, one female and two male, apparently in intense discussion with one another. They looked real the way artificial limbs look real.

Cornell fumbled with a small black box in his right hand, and the television picture imploded in on itself and winked out. “Sit down,” he said. “Thank you for coming.” His voice was odd, different from what I’d remembered, more nasal and higher-pitched. That would be because of the bandages across his nose, of course; nature rarely does anything vicious to us without also, in the process, managing somehow to make us look foolish as well.

I pulled one of the chairs over by the bed. “My wife told me your situation,” I said.

“It was very nice of her to come.” She had been good for him, I could see that; his smile almost covered pain and fear completely.

I said, “Has anything else happened since she was here?”

“No. My lawyer is supposed to be here soon. Stewart Remington?”

“He was on the list,” I said. “Your list of suspects.”

He gave now a smile of helplessness; it covered nothing. “But I have to have a lawyer,” he said. “What else am I going to do?”

“I know. Kate explained it to me.”

“Mr. Tobin,” he said earnestly, “I know your wife volunteered you to help me. I won’t hold you to it against your will.”

He was holding a door open for me, and in many ways it was a door I would gladly have gone through. But how could I, with Kate behind me, with Cornell’s face in front of me? I said, “I’m not here against my will. It would have been easy for me not to come.”

“I think you’re a more private man than that,” he said. “But I need you too much to offer twice. Thank you for coming.”

I said, “Is your list of suspects still the same? No additions, no deletions?”

“It’s still the same.” He rested his head back on the pillow and gazed up at the blank television screen. “You know why I had the sound off when you came in? I was looking at those people talking, and they seemed so sure of themselves, so competent, so
able.
Whatever problem would face them, they would talk about it among themselves and
solve
it. Nothing would be too strong for them.” He turned his head to smile sadly at me. “Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

He looked back at the screen again. “I was pretending they were talking about me. They were considering my situation, my past, my future, my personality. They were deciding what to do about me. All I had to do was lie here and wait, and they would come up with the decision. I didn’t have to struggle any more, didn’t have to think. They would decide, and act on the decision, and be very sure of themselves.”

“I’m not them,” I said.

The sad smile again. “You are to me.”

“I need them, too. We all do.”

“You are to me,” he repeated. “That’s why I gave you the chance to walk away. Because I think you feel responsibilities very strongly.”

“I’ll just warn you now that I’m fallible, that the odds are not in my favor, that you may be disappointed.”

He didn’t say anything. He just smiled at me and shook his head. All at once I disliked him so intensely that I couldn’t think of a word to say to him, none of the questions I wanted to ask, none of the suggestions I wanted to make. We just looked at one another, and his expression began to be uncertain, and the door behind me opened.

I saw my own relief mirrored in Cornell’s eyes; the impasse interrupted. “Stew!” he called, and I got to my feet and turned around to take my first look at Stewart Remington, Cornell’s lawyer.

Almost everything about him was a surprise. I’d expected someone more or less like Cornell, perhaps a bit brisker, more down-to-earth, but generally from the same mold. Stewart Remington, though, was from a different mold completely.

In the first place, he was about my age, around forty. And he was huge, over six feet by an inch or two, and fat the way pictures show Henry the Eighth was fat; a lot of flesh padding a large broad frame. I would guess him to be no less than three hundred pounds, and possibly ten or fifteen pounds over.

This huge body was draped in clothing which undoubtedly had come from Cornell’s boutique. It was similar in style to what Cornell had worn the first time I’d seen him, but was more flamboyant in color and line. Looking at him, one knew he was the kind of man who wore a cape, and who wore one whether capes were in vogue that particular year or not, and who surely had at least one cape with a red satin lining.

What he was wearing now, however, was a black velvet topcoat with black fur collar, the coat worn open, flung over his shoulders without his arms in the sleeves, like photos of Italian movie directors.

With all his size, and with all the flamboyance of his clothing, it was still his face which was his dominant feature. He had a large head, with masses of very curly thick black hair sweeping up and back and out above the fur collar. His forehead was broad and high and amazingly unlined, his eyebrows thick and black, his eyes piercing and deep-set and a very dark blue. He had a large lumpy formless nose, rather like W. C. Fields’, but on Remington the effect was of imperial carelessness rather than comedy. His cheeks were very full, almost Santa Claus-like, but saved from that by the permanently sardonic expression of his broad and full-lipped mouth.

He had about him the look of the hedonist, the high-liver, the guzzler and the glutton and yet also the gourmet. He looked like the kind of man who would enjoy the best, but might enjoy it all too much. And when he took his hands from his jacket pockets I saw that he had rings on all his fingers, different styles and stones; they looked like the pudgy blunt-fingered hands of a silly rich widow, not like a man at all. The only sign of what he and Cornell had in common.

Cornell introduced us, and we shook hands; the soft hand, beringed, had no strength. All the strength was in Remington’s eyes, as he studied me with a frankness much greater than the average.

Cornell said, “With you two on my side, I do have a chance.”

Remington gave me a sardonic smile: one professional to another. “What do you think, Tobin? Will we save his pretty round butt for him?”

“Possibly,” I said.

Remington laughed, a single boom, and said, “Confidence tempered with caution. The perfect note. Sit down, sit down, let’s work out our fallen brother’s salvation.” He had the right voice to go with that kind of speech, a round baritone, loud without harshness. I wondered if he did much trial work, and if so, what sort of reaction his appearance and manner and voice got from the average jury.

We sat down, and Remington, overflowing the other tubular chair, said to me, “Have you met your opposite number yet?”

“Opposite number?”

“Manzoni, the scourge of the ungodly.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“What a treat you have coming! A man blighted in his childhood by organized religion. After fifteen years surrounded by nuns, of
course
the rest of us look queer to him. Do you have influence anywhere on the force?”

“None.”

“A pity,” he said, and pursed his lips. He had shrugged his coat off his shoulders so that it hung backward now over the top of the chair, and he was sitting with his feet planted solidly on the floor, feet and knees spread wide apart as though he were prepared for the hospital to veer suddenly into heavy seas. Tucking his hands back into his side jacket pockets, he leaned against the back of the chair, and said, “That’s what we need, you know. Someone from on high to sit with a great weight upon Manzoni’s head. I’m doing all the expected legal waltz moves, but with the court calendars around this town, it takes six months to get permission to leave the room. By then, Manzoni can have our unfortunate friend committed, castrated, lobotomized and deported.”

There was a question I had to ask, and there was no sense trying to find a roundabout diplomatic way to ask it, so I simply stated it direct: “Do you think it might help to bring in another lawyer?”

He closed one eye, glittered the other one at me, and smiled like the Cheshire Cat. “Someone’s told you I sleep with boys,” he said.

“That’s part of it,” I said.

“Happily,” he said, “Detective Second Grade Aldo Manzoni may represent the Rheingold drinkers of our fair city, but once you get much above the level of the lip-readers, you’ll find a fair degree of tolerance around and about. I expect I can do an attorney’s job approximately as well as most heterosexual members of the Bar.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I don’t know what your regular field is—”

“The world is my regular field,” he announced. He was prepared to be stern with me. We might both be working on the same task, but only one of us was going to be boss. “My practice has been varied,” he said, and then winked broadly.

I was finding him tiresome. I said, “Cornell is satisfied anyway, and that’s the main thing.”

“Ronald’s safety is the main thing,” he corrected me. “And now, if we’re finished studying
my
role in all this, would you mind terribly explaining yours? I had hoped Ronnie was presenting you as a man with some sort of clout on the police force.”

Suddenly my job here seemed ridiculous. I described it in a monotone: “Cornell thinks his partner, Dearborn, was killed—”

“Dear Jamie. A loss. You never knew him, you’ll have to take my word for it.”

“Yes. Cornell thinks he was killed by someone he knew, some member of your circle. He was doing some investigating.”

“Yes, he told me,” Remington said. “And I found it very intriguing. Solving a murder astrologically. Has anyone ever done it before?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

Cornell said, “Stew is interested, too. In astrology.”

“More critically, perhaps, than some of the others in our little circle,” Remington said, “but I do find it fascinating. And in this instance, of course, ultimately dangerous.”

I said, “You don’t doubt it was the same man who tried to kill Cornell.”

“Not for a moment. Unfortunately, I am Remington and not Manzoni. Unfortunate in this instance only, I hasten to add.”

“Cornell asked me to take over his investigation. If I turn up the guilty party, there won’t be any more question of committing Cornell as an attempted suicide.”

“Roundabout,” Remington commented. “Be simpler to offer Manzoni a bribe, if he were bribable. Do you think he is?”

Cornell said, weakly, “I’m sure he isn’t. I’m sure he wouldn’t take a million dollars to lose the pleasure of doing me dirty.”

Remington nodded judiciously. “My own estimate, exactly. But you yourself have been a policeman, have you not?”

“I have,” I said. I wondered what he knew about me. I hoped it was no more than what he’d just said.