Jade in Aries (7 page)

I automatically looked to my left, at the wall those windows faced, to see what they were staring (winking? glaring?) at, and saw the entire wall spread with a huge color photograph of a Boeing 747 in flight, coming directly this way.

Behind me, Cary Lane giggled and said, “
Everybody
does that! Everybody looks!”

“I suppose they do,” I said, but I was looking now at the other two young men in the room and realizing that the smell in the air was marijuana.

Which of these would be Jerry Weissman? But it was easy to tell, really. The very young one, no more than twenty, in sneakers and blue jeans and T-shirt; he would be Jerry Weissman. He had an ordinary youthful face, set in an expression of slightly anxious eagerness to please. He was of average height but a bit chunky, with a soft layer of baby-fat that made him look somewhat clumsy, though when he got up from the clear plastic inflated armchair—which I later found it difficult to get out of—he moved with the automatic grace of an athlete.

His voice too was young and soft, like his face and body: “Mr. Tobin. Ronnie said you might come over. I’m Jerry Weissman.” And he extended his hand toward me.

I was surprised at the strength of his handshake. It went more with the eagerness of his expression than with his general appearance. “Cornell told me you might be able to help,” I said.

“If I can,” he said earnestly. “I guess you met Cary already. This is David Poumon.”

“How do you do?”

David Poumon had been standing already when I’d come into the room, leaning against the white wall-space between the windows, frowning thoughtfully at the 747. He seemed older than both Weissman and Lane, but in a strange way. It wasn’t as though many years separated him from them, he was probably no older than Lane, but as though a full generation had somehow elapsed in his life that had not as yet elapsed in theirs.

He had thinning black hair, brushed straight back across a neat small round skull. He wore large glasses with round metal frames, behind which his face seemed slightly shriveled and very pale. A brooding kind of intelligence flickered like St. Elmo’s fire over that face, and I noticed that he seemed to blink much less often than most people. He was wearing ordinary slacks, very like casual slacks back home in my own closet, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Black loafers and black socks were on his feet. When we shook hands, it was like holding a rubber bag full of bones; not strong, but not soft either.

“Sit down, Mr. Tobin,” Jerry Weissman said. “Do you want coffee? Something to drink?”

None of them were smoking now, and I wondered if they’d stubbed out the marijuana cigarette in honor of my appearance here. I didn’t see it in any of the ashtrays, so I couldn’t tell how short the butt was.

I said, “Nothing, thank you. I just want to talk.”

“There’s coffee already made,” Weissman assured me. “Sit down here, I’ll go get some. I want some anyway, it won’t take a minute. Here, sit down.”

He was obviously the kind of person who can’t think about anything else until they’ve had the chance to fulfill some sort of self-imposed requirement as host. It was easier to give in, so I agreed to coffee and settled myself in the bulgy inflated plastic armchair he’d just gotten out of. It was surprisingly comfortable, but a little too lively.

Weissman hurried from the room, continuing to cast assurances over his shoulder that this wouldn’t take but a minute, and I was left with Cary Lane and David Poumon. I looked at them with interest, because both names had been on Cornell’s list.

Poumon had backed into the wall again and returned to his original stance, from which he was now broodingly surveying me instead of the 747. Lane had arranged himself like Jean Harlow on a couple of fur throws on the floor, and was smiling at me with open-hearted happiness.

I said, “Did you believe Cornell about what had happened to Jamie Dearborn? Before Monday, I mean.”

“Oh,
I
did,” Lane said promptly. “I can’t think of anything that man Manzoni could possibly say that wouldn’t be wrong.”

Poumon, more soberly, said, “It seemed to me the police theory didn’t take Jamie’s personality into account.”

“Imagine Jamie picking up rough trade!” Lane announced. “Oh, my
dear,
it isn’t within the
realm.
”

“Did you know Cornell was trying to find the murderer?”

“Wasn’t that exciting?” Lane clasped his hands under his chin and made his shoulders shiver. “He told us all about it. We were on his suspect list and everything!”

“When did he tell you?”

“Oh, ages ago.”

Poumon, smiling thinly to show he’d understood the purpose of the question, said, “Before the attempt on his life.”

“Oh, long before that,” Lane said, still oblivious. “Days and days and days.” Suddenly he sat straighter and pointed a dramatic finger at me. “And now,” he declaimed, “it’s
your
turn. The investigation goes on!” He beamed with pleasure.

Poumon said, “I suppose you’d like to know where Cary and I were Monday night.”

Lane looked baffled. “Good heavens, why?”

Poumon gave him a surprisingly tender smile. “Because, bubblehead, we’re
still
on the suspect list.”

“Oh, mercy, of course!” He laughed, delighted to be on the list. “Mitch,” he said, leaning toward me, “can’t you just see me?
Sneaking
up behind poor unsuspecting Ronnie,
bashing
him a good one with something terribly suggestive and phallic, then
lugging
him up all those stairs. Would I kiss him goodbye, do you suppose? Before the old heave-ho?”

“Would you?” I asked him.

Lane laughed again, and then began to look a little uncertain. “You aren’t having fun, Mitch,” he said.

Poumon told him, “He isn’t playing the game, Cary. He’s very serious.”

“Seriousness makes me nervous,” Lane said. Sitting up straight, he bent his knees, wrapped his arms around his legs, rested his chin on his knees, and looked reproachfully at me. “I never know how to act when people are serious,” he said, pouting a bit. “Like Stew.” And then, precisely like Stewart Remington, “Cary, you
must
shape up.” Because his chin remained stationary on his knees when he talked, his head bobbed with every word; it was strange to hear Remington’s baritone coming out of that bobbing blond head.

He needed to be smiled at, to be told that nothing was serious after all, the way most people need to breathe. He was good at wheedling that sort of response, obviously; the smile I gave him now was small and grudging, but honest, and he smiled back at once, managing to smile through tears without actually having shed any tears.

Weissman came back with a tray loaded with coffee cups and saucers, spoons, sugar, cream and an electric coffeemaker. There was a certain amount of confusion now as he set the tray on the floor between Poumon and me and distributed coffee around to everyone.

I could no longer smell the marijuana, and I suspected they hadn’t smoked much of it before I’d arrived. I know the popular conception of marijuana seriously overrates its powers but, like alcohol, it does begin to show an effect, and these young men might have had no more than a couple of drinks. Lane was being somewhat odd and flamboyant, but I imagined that was his style most of the time.

When we finally got our coffee, and Weissman settled on another inflated chair, I spent a few seconds trying to think how best to bring the conversation back to Monday night. Before I formulated my next question, though, Poumon did it for me, saying, “About our alibis for Monday. Unfortunately, neither of us has one.”

“Well,
I
know where I was,” Lane said. He acted miffed.

“But nobody else knows you were there,” Poumon pointed out.

“Where?” I asked.

“The ballet,” Lane said. He raised his arms over his head and pretended a pirouette. “I love the ballet.”

“You went alone?”

“I always go alone. David won’t come with me”—with a little pout in Poumon’s direction—“and I’m disgustingly faithful. Besides, the ballet is so intensely
personal
an experience, at least I think so.”

I said, “What about your seat? The ballet’s all subscription, isn’t it? We could find the people in the seats on both sides of yours, and they’d surely remember whether your seat was occupied or not.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I couldn’t go like that. So
structured.
”

“I don’t follow you.”

“If I
feel
like going to the ballet,” he said, “I just
go.
”

Poumon explained, “There’s almost always a few people selling their subscription seats outside the door. Cary just goes and buys a ticket.”

“I almost never fail to get a seat,” Lane said happily.

So that was no good. Lane wouldn’t be the type to keep his stubs, nor to remember exactly where he sat. And if he was as much a ballet buff as he sounded, he would not only know which ballets were performed last Monday (whether he’d actually been there or not), but would surely have seen them several times in the past.

I turned to Poumon. “And you?”

“At home,” he said. “Alone, with Cary out. Working.”

“You’d
better
be alone,” Lane told him, with mock ferocity.

I said, “Working? At what?”

“Music,” he said. “I’m learning to be a composer.”

“And you have no way to prove you were really home all evening.”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Neither do I,” Jerry Weissman said. “Am I a suspect?”

“I understand you were in Atlanta with Cornell when Dearborn was killed.”

“That’s right, I was. So that clears me, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Cornell tells me you’ve been keeping the store running this week.”

“As much as I could,” he said. His unassuming modesty didn’t ring quite true; I thought he was probably very proud of himself for having been such a good Samaritan. Self-congratulation lurked just beneath the surface of his modest smile.

“Could you let me in there this evening?”

“Surely. No trouble at all.”

The color photograph of the 747 was beginning to get to me. It showed nothing but sky and clouds and that huge fat plane. There was nothing solid, nothing to anchor oneself to. The room, with that picture dominating it, with the other walls so totally white (except for the eyes on the window shades), and with all this transparent furniture, gave an atmosphere of spaciousness and floating, but not in a good way. I was almost getting airsick in here, the effect was one of disorientation. I said, “Is this the room where Dearborn was killed?”

“No. That was upstairs. Do you want to see it?”

“Yes.”

I managed to get up from the chair, and put my coffee cup on a nearby transparent lucite cube table. “This way,” Jerry Weissman said.

Between the corridor doorway and the far wall, there was just space for another door, painted completely white, even the knob. Weissman opened this door, and a rather narrow flight of stairs led upward. I motioned for him to go first, which he did reluctantly, and I followed. Poumon and Lane stayed behind in the living room.

The interior walls had been removed on the top floor, which had been turned into a giant bedroom, twenty feet wide and fifty feet long. Only this staircase, some wide closets and a smallish bathroom shared the space up here.

And again it was Dearborn’s taste—or at least I assumed so—that predominated. The long wall opposite the staircase was papered in bold tiger stripes, and the entire ceiling was painted a flat black, so that it virtually disappeared. Both ends of the room were almost totally windows, those in front translucent and those in back of clear glass, and now I could see why Cornell had chosen the top apartment rather than the bottom. The view out the back, over the tops of a few smaller buildings, was of the Manhattan skyline; just about the same view as from the Promenade, but four stories higher. At night like this, with the black ceiling and the dark maroon carpet keeping the room unobtrusive, the strings of lights that were the Manhattan skyscrapers and the necklace of lights that was the Brooklyn Bridge were unbelievably impressive. It was the most beautiful view of New York I’d ever seen.

“None of us had ever seen this place,” Jerry Weissman said. “Isn’t it something?”

“It certainly is. You never saw it before now?”

“Ronnie and Jamie kept the top floor just for themselves. Guests had to stay downstairs. They made a whole thing about it, you know? Their private world.”

“A beautiful world,” I said.

Weissman pointed beyond the bed. “He was found on the floor over here.”

I looked at him. I wanted to ask someone how any human being could commit murder in front of these windows, but Jerry Weissman wasn’t the one to ask.

Perhaps I would get a chance to ask the murderer.

I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t want to see where Jamie Dearborn was found dead. I didn’t want to walk around in anybody else’s private world. “Let’s go to the shop,” I said.

Weissman looked surprised, but made no comment. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just a couple blocks, we can walk it.”

I went first back down the stairs.

D
AVID POUMON AND CARY
Lane walked a block with us. They lived in the neighborhood, and were going home.

After they left us, I said to Weissman, “Tell me about those two.”

He said, “You don’t really think they did it, do you? Either one of them?”

“I don’t know yet. Tell me about them.”

“I don’t know what to tell,” he said. “Cary’s from Los Angeles originally. He’s a model.”

“Like Jamie?”

“Yes, with the same agency.”

“Any jealousy between them?”

“Oh, Lord, no. You saw Cary, he doesn’t worry about anything like that. He bought that face and he’s absolutely happy with it. He isn’t jealous of anybody.”

“He bought the face? How do you mean?”

“Plastic surgery,” Weissman said casually, as though that were all the explanation I would need.

“Was he in an accident?”

“No, nothing like that. He just didn’t like the way he looked, he thought he was too ordinary.” He grinned unselfconsciously and said, “I suppose he used to look something like me. So he did himself all over, top to bottom.”