Lowboy (20 page)

I
n no way was the apartment what Lateef had expected. It was long and pitched and nearly lightless, as hushed and airless as an attic, and its walls were painted a dusty Christmas red. No sound carried in from the street or the other apartments. She asked him in a cautious voice to take off his shoes, as if someone inside were asleep, and he obeyed at once. The separateness of the place was overwhelming. An opium den came to mind, and also a bordello, but no bordello was ever so intimate or so still. The redness and the airlessness and the glow of the black lacquered furniture combined to relieve him of his last sense of purpose. The walls were hung with pictures torn from magazines and books: a greenhouse, an obelisk, a naked arm, a railway tunnel somewhere in the tropics. Yellowed newsprint photographs in cheap unbeveled frames. He drifted from room to room in his unmatched socks, hands clasped behind him like an art collector or a suitor or anyone else out of his depth, waiting to have his role explained to him. The sadness of the rooms was unmistakable, as tangible as the pillows and the scraps of paper littering the floor. It was impossible to imagine them ever containing a child.

“How long have you been here?” Lateef said at last. She was making Turkish coffee in the kitchen. “Did you live here with Will?”

“I’ve been here for seventeen years, if you can believe it.” Her voice lilted slightly, as though she were teasing him. “I could never afford this place now. Do you want milk?”

“Please. And sugar.”

He heard what might have been a laugh. “I thought New York’s Proudest always drank it black.”

“New York’s Finest, Miss Heller. We’re not necessarily that proud.”

She laughed again. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

He stood by himself in the living room and listened to the clatter of saucers and cups, everyday domestic noises, exotic as birdsong in that halflight. She hummed to herself contentedly, disregarding him the way a woman can who has you at her mercy. But how can she know that, Lateef asked himself. How can she be contented. The memory of the schoolgirls in their tartan uniforms returned to him, and of Violet in the middle of them, stoop-shouldered and bleeding, whispering to him to take her home. An answer came to him a moment later: She can feel contented now because I’ve failed. The burden of uncertainty is lifted. She no longer expects a single thing from me.

It was obvious enough, listening to her in the kitchen, that she’d driven the past half hour from her mind. Never had he been more aware of the disadvantage her foreignness put him at than at that moment, waiting in her cave of an apartment for a cup of coffee he felt no desire for. If not for her foreignness he might have gotten her talking, have complimented the coffee or her self-control or her taste in furniture, confident that he was circling her secret. He’d have been certain, at least, that there remained a secret to find. But if the past three hours had educated him on any point it was that her character refused to hold still, refused to fall into a pattern, not out of resentment or contrariness but for some reason as yet unknown to him. There was nothing disingenuous about her, nothing studied, and that in and of itself was baffling. There might be nothing more to her than what he’d seen.

“Here you are, Detective. Strong and sweet. If you’re not used to Turkish coffee it might knock you for a spin.”

“For a loop, you mean,” he managed to reply. She was standing in the doorway with a tiny cup on an enamel tray, smiling at him in a way that he was completely unprepared for. He took the cup from her hurriedly and drank.

“Watch out,” she said, balancing the tray on the tips of her fingers like a waitress. “It’s hot.”

“It’s delicious.” He took another sip, then another. “Jesus Christ.”

“It is good, isn’t it. The Turks laid siege to Vienna for almost a year; we learned how to make coffee from them.” She set the tray down and ran a finger absentmindedly through her hair. “I’m not so sure what they got out of it.”

“You should try to get some sleep,” Lateef said sometime later. They were sitting together on a shapeless rattan couch, cradling their cups with both hands like children at a birthday party. “This might end up being a long night.”

“Who needs sleep, Detective? We’ve got Turkish coffee. Let’s talk instead. Ask me a question.”

“All right, Miss Heller.” He considered her for a moment. “Why did you leave Vienna?”

Her smile tightened slightly. “Why do you think, Detective? I fell in love.”

“With Will’s father?”

She’d been sitting up attentively, a lady-in-waiting, but now she let herself sink back into the cushions. In the light from the Chinese lamp she could have passed for seventeen. “Will’s father was a musician, Detective. A vibraphone player. I’m not sure if I told you that.”

“You didn’t.” He sat with his cup balanced on his right knee, looking at her over his shoulder. For some reason he couldn’t manage to recline.

“Well, he was. Jazz might be second to polka as the deadest music in America—”

“Jazz isn’t dead music.”

She brought a hand up to her mouth. “I think you’ve just revealed your age to me, Detective.”

“Please go on.”

She sighed. “Alive or dead, in Vienna in the eighties it was an exciting thing to us.” He felt the couch move under him as she shifted her weight. “To some of us, at least. Compared to Johann Strauss, Miles Davis still seemed relatively young.”

He laughed at that. “How did you meet Will’s father?”

“I met Alex while I was still at the university. I was working three nights a week at a jazz club called Porgy and Bess. My English was good, and I knew a few things about jazz, so I usually made lots of money. And I had a soft point for American players.”

He cleared his throat primly. “Spot, I think you mean. A soft spot.”

“You like to correct me, don’t you.”

He avoided her look. “Heller was your husband’s name?”

“We weren’t married, Detective. I thought you knew that.”

“You’d be amazed by all the things I don’t know, Miss Heller. Especially today. I apologize if—”

“No need for that, Detective. We were unmarried by choice.” She shrugged. “His name was Alexander Whitham.”

Lateef couldn’t help but give a start. “I know Alex Whitham,” he said.

She seemed unsurprised. “Is that right?”

“Of course. He played with Ornette Coleman for a while.”

“Now you’ve definitely shown your age.”

He set the cup down carefully, turning its handle toward him, giving himself time to find a place for this new fact in his conception of her. Everyone knew Alex Whitham. One of the greats without question. He might have doubted the story if not for her beauty and for the small indifferent voice she used to tell it.

“You met Mr. Whitham at the club where you worked?”

She took in a slow breath and nodded. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw Alex. He was the only white player on a bill full of legends— Ornette, Anthony Braxton, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry—and he dressed to the nines to make up for it. The boys used to call him Vanilla the Pimp.” She smiled to herself. “He walked into the club wearing a three-piece madras suit and silver sneakers. I thought he was the bestdressed man I’d ever seen.” She slid her hand between the cushions and brought out a flattened pack of cigarettes. “A year and a half later I moved into this apartment.”

He hesitated. “You moved in alone?”

“Sometimes Alex lived here.” She found a lighter, tested it, lit a cigarette with it, and set it aside. “Sometimes not.”

“Why the wait? Did you need time to finish your studies?”

The cigarette hissed. “I never finished my studies, Detective.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She nodded. “I was studying to be a neurochemist.”

The irony was too self-evident to acknowledge. “Couldn’t you have gone to school here?” he said finally. “Transferred your credits, done your exams over, that sort of thing?”

“I did that, actually. My parents had some money put aside— retirement money, not very much—and they sent it over as a kind of punishment. I was in the graduate program at Rockefeller for almost seven months.”

“What happened then?”

“What you see is what you get, Detective. I paint eyes and lips on mannequins for stores that I could never afford to shop in. Apparently I’ve got a talent for it.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying—”

“Drink your coffee, please. It’s no good cold.”

He took an obedient sip. “I’m sorry for prying, Miss Heller. It’s a habit with me when I’m working.” He replaced the cup on its chipped and mismatched saucer. “Even when I’m not, to tell the truth. I’m not so good at regular conversation.”

“Why the formality, Detective? A few minutes ago you were calling me Violet. Do we have to start again from the beginning?”

He finished the coffee and passed her his cup and through a great effort of will managed to meet her gaze and hold it. She regarded him steadily, without the least trace of amusement, bracing both her hands against the cushions. He tried and failed to guess at her intention. The directness of her stare was a thing he’d seen only in men about to assault him or in women who expected to be kissed. How laughable, he thought. How pathetic. I can’t seem to think of any other reason.

“I thought I might have been presuming,” he said finally, mortified by the thickness in his voice.

“You remind me of Elvin Jones,” she said, refilling his cup. “Both of you seem too gentle for the kind of work you do. You ought to have been professors of something.” She smiled and let her left arm brush his side. “Philosophy, maybe, or ethnomusicology. Something gentlemanly.”

He returned her smile weakly. “It’s not every day I get compared to a jazz virtuoso.”

She said nothing to that.

“Why did you invite me here, Miss Heller?”

“I didn’t invite you here, Detective. I asked you to drive me home in your little soybean-eating car.” She seemed less fond of him suddenly. “I wanted to take a pill to calm me down, since you ask. That and maybe fix myself a drink.”

That accounts for the change in her, he thought. That explains all of this. “I didn’t notice you taking anything,” he said, keeping his voice as dispassionate as he could. “Did you do it under cover of making me coffee?”

“I made
coffee
under cover of making you coffee, Detective.” She closed her eyes. “I haven’t taken my pick-me-up. Not yet.”

“What were you thinking of taking?”

She fell back with a sigh and held out her crossed wrists. “Goofballs, Detective. Ya-ya pills. Lock me up and throw away the key.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “You’ve spent too much time in jazz clubs, Miss Heller. What the hell are ya-ya pills?”

“Want to split one with me and find out?”

He watched her a moment. “Mind if I take a look at the bottle?”

“I’d have to see a warrant first, Detective.”

“I’m not going to arrest you, Miss Heller. If you’d rather—”

“I’d rather show you this.” She rose from the couch and glided with perfect economy of movement across the narrow room and out of sight. A moment later she was back beside him, hands tucked girlishly beneath her, watching him leaf through a battered photo album. Her breath drew past his right ear, unnaturally cool and even, as though he’d put his head to a screen door. She smelled of unwashed hair and cigarettes.

“I don’t know what kind of picture of Will you have in that folder of yours, but if it came from the
Post
—”

“Is this your son here?”

“Of course.”

An overexposed snapshot of a garden. A boy with his feet planted squarely in the center of the frame, his hair almost colorless, his arms held out like someone caught without a handhold on a train. Four or five at the most. Some quality or detail of the picture was remarkable but it took Lateef a moment to discover what it was, perhaps because it was the last thing he expected. The look on the boy’s face was intelligent, of course—even confident—but it was more than that. It was knowing.

“You see it too,” she said quietly. “Don’t you see it?”

Lateef nodded.

“We were frightened even then, I think. It wasn’t just the way he looked. He moved differently from the other kids, talked differently. It was Alex who decided we should take it as some kind of mark of genius.” She sat back lightly on the couch. “Now I feel as though we both knew what was coming.”

“It always seems that way, thinking back on things.”

“Does it?”

“I don’t see what either of you could have done differently.”

“You see what I mean, Detective? You’re much too generous for your line of work.”

He was still staring down at the picture, still trying to see it as no more than a snapshot, trying to bring it into clearer focus. It took him another few seconds to notice the girl in the background. She was older than the boy, already into her teens, but aside from that she might have been his twin. The boy was too young to be beautiful yet but the girl was no less than a vision. She hovered in the upper lefthand corner of the picture, blurred along her left side, as if caught in the act of escaping from the frame. He found himself hesitating to ask about her for fear of the change in his voice.

“Who’s that in the corner?”

“Who do you think, Detective?”

Of course it was her. Of course it was. Now at last she’d disarmed him completely. He turned and looked at her but she was too close to focus on, blurred about the edges, exactly like the face in the photograph. “How old were you when you came to this country?”

He’d expected a smile from her but she withheld it. “Too young to know better, apparently. Twenty-one.”

“The girl in this picture looks about fourteen.”

She nodded. “I used to hate how young I looked: it made no sense to me. As if I’d been put in someone else’s body.”

“You could have done worse, Miss Heller.”

She frowned. “Alex used to catch me making faces at myself in the mirror—the ugliest faces I could think of. Will picked that up from me. Will makes faces all the time.”

Unwillingly he turned back to the album. “When was it that Will’s father passed away?”