Murder At The Mendel (16 page)

“Sounds like Stu’s turned chivalrous now that you’re a lady in distress.”

“Well, it might be something a little less – is the word
altruistic?
– anyway, a little more selfish than chivalry. Stu’s got this book on my art coming out in the spring, and I think he’s worried I’m not going to like it. He’s already puffing out his chest and talking about how art thrives on diverse critical approaches …”

“Which means?” I asked.

“Which means that what he’s written is a crock and he’s terrified I’m going to blow the whistle on him.”

“But you wouldn’t,” I said.

“Jo, this is serious. It isn’t personal. It’s not about me. It’s about what I do. If it’s stupid, I’ll have to say so.”

“Well,” I said, “for everyone’s sake, let’s hope it isn’t stupid.”

“Right,” she said, standing up and pulling on her coat. “Let’s hope it isn’t stupid. And let’s hope that guy who was trying to give me a flat the night of the murder decides he’ll give me an alibi if I give him his tuque back, and let’s hope my terrorists get frostbite or writer’s cramp and leave me alone.” She shrugged. “Hey, let’s go crazy and wish for it all. Maybe for once life will work out.”

I followed her toward the front of the restaurant. Halfway to the cash register Sally stopped and looked up at a picture on the wall. It was an old poster advertising
The Misfits
with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift.

“All dead,” said Sally.

“But we remember them,” I said, “through their movies.”

She gave me the old mocking Sally smile. “That doesn’t make them any less dead,” she said.

I picked up Angus’s skates and headed to Ninth Street and my car. When I looked at the house I’d parked in front of, it seemed familiar. It was a pleasant unexceptional place: two-storey, white clapboard. With a start, I realized it was Izaak Levin’s house. I’d looked him up in the book after I saw him the night of Sally’s opening. I’d even driven by. I told myself I might need to know where he lived for future reference.

There hadn’t been any need for future reference. When I’d spoken to him the morning after Sally’s opening, Izaak Levin had promised to call in the new year, and he had – twice. The first time, I had already arranged to have dinner with an old political friend. The second time Izaak called was after Sally had told me what had happened between them in the months after Des died. It took real restraint to keep from banging the receiver down and blowing out his eardrum.

I was just about to pull away when Izaak’s front door opened and a woman in a black mink coat came hurrying out. She had her head down, but I knew the coat and I knew the woman. It was Nina Love. She didn’t see me. She turned and walked toward a car I recognized immediately as Stu’s Mercedes. I watched the licence plate as she drove up the street.
ARTS 1
it said. So it wasn’t Stu’s car; it was the car that had belonged to Sally when she and Stu were together. His was the twin of this one, but his licence read
ARTS
2. “Grounds enough for divorce in those licence plates alone,” Sally said blandly when she told me about them.

There was no mistaking the car or the woman. I turned off the ignition and walked up the front path to Izaak Levin’s house. He answered the door almost immediately. It was apparent when he opened the door that he had expected to see Nina again. He even looked past me, to see if she was still there.

“She’s gone,” I said, “but I’m here. May I come in?”

Without a word, he stood aside, and I walked past him. He was holding a manila envelope. It was sealed. When he saw me looking at the envelope, he shoved it into the drawer of a little table in the entrance hall. Not very trusting.

“Well,” he said finally, “this is a welcome surprise. The last time we talked, I thought I discerned a chill. Come in and sit down. Can I get you something? A drink perhaps, or there’s fresh coffee.”

“Coffee would be fine,” I said as I followed him into the living room. If I’d known what was waiting for me there, I would have chosen the drink. When I looked around Izaak Levin’s living room, I knew I was at an exhibition curated by an obsessive. I was standing in the middle of a gallery of Sally Love – of art made not by her, but about her. Sally in all her ages, all her moods, seen by different eyes, transmuted into art by a hundred pairs of hands working with differing techniques in different media.

The walls were filled with paintings of her, and the floor was stacked with more. To get my bearings, I sat in the first chair I came to. Propped against the wall beside me, a sepia Sally, all halftones except for the brilliant red of her mouth, licked a sensuous upper lip; next to it, a pastel Sally’s virginal profile glowed in a spring garden; on the coffee table in front of me a ceramic Sally holding a cat sprawled on a rocker. Sally was everywhere in that room, and even I knew the art was wonderful. But the effect was not wonderful; it was eerie, like the rooms you see on
TV
after a psychopath has committed a crime.

When Izaak came in from the kitchen carrying a tray with coffee and a bottle of brandy, I jumped.

He smiled. “Maybe you should have a little of this in your coffee,” he said, holding up the bottle.

“No, thanks,” I said, “I’m just a little overwhelmed by your collection. How did it come about?”

He handed me my coffee. “Sally did the first one herself –that one over the mantelpiece, the one where she’s sitting on the hood of the old Chevy. It was a kind of joke. When she first came to study with me, I called her an academy of one. Someone told her that when artists are admitted to the American Academy in New York, they have to give the academy a self-portrait. Sally painted that picture for my birthday. She was fourteen. The others just came over the years. Sally is such an exceptional subject; people who make art are drawn to her.”

I put down my cup and walked over to look more closely at Sally’s self-portrait. It would have been easy to dismiss that picture because, at first glance, it seemed so stereotypical: a fifties magazine ad for a soft drink or suntan lotion. A pretty girl wearing a halter top and shorts hugged one knee and extended the other leg along the hood of a yellow convertible – a glamorous pose, sex with a ponytail. But Sally had used colour to create light in an odd and disturbing way. The car glowed magically surreal – it was a car to take you anywhere, and the hot pink stucco of the motel behind the girl panted with lurid life. Sally herself was a cutout, a conventional calendar girl without life or dimension, an object in someone else’s world of highways and clandestine sex.

I turned and looked at Izaak Levin. “And what did you make of that picture when she gave it to you?”

He looked at me quizzically. “Do you mean as a piece of art?”

“No,” I said, reaching over and pouring a little brandy into my coffee cup, “as a young girl’s self-assessment. What would you think was going on in the mind and heart of a fourteen-year-old who saw herself like that?” The image of the woman that child had become floated up and lodged in my mind
(“Maybe for once life will work out”), and I was surprised at the rage in my voice. “You understand, I’m not asking you this as an art critic, I’m asking you as a human being.”

He was silent.

“I’m waiting,” I said.

His glass still had a couple of ounces of brandy in it, and he drank them down and shuddered. “How much,” he said finally, “do you know about Sally and me?”

“Everything, I guess.”

“Joanne, no one knows everything.” His voice was so soft I had to lean forward to hear it. A private voice.

“Sally told me you were lovers,” I said, “and that it started when she was thirteen.”

“And you’re appalled.”

“Yes. I’m appalled. Thirteen! My God, Izaak. You were what? Forty? Her father had just died. Didn’t certain patterns suggest themselves to you?”

I thought he was a weakling who would be devastated by someone else knowing the truth about what he had done. He wasn’t. He looked at me steadily.

“The circumstances were unusual. Joanne, don’t judge us yet. How much do you remember about the time after Des Love died?”

“The time immediately after? Everything. I don’t think you remember, but I was there that night. Sally and I were going to a birthday dance across the lake. Nina was going to take us across as soon as you got back with the boat. Anyway, I went back to our cottage to change my shoes, and that made me late getting to the Loves’. But I was there just after you found them. I’ll remember every second of that night till the day I die.”

He pulled a cigarette from a fresh pack of Camels and placed it between his lips. He didn’t light it.

“I remembered a girl being there,” he said. “I didn’t know it was you. So you’ve carried your own burden of memory all these years.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have, and what made it worse was I lost Sally, too. After that night I didn’t see her again for years. They wouldn’t let me see her in the hospital. And then –well, she was supposed to be away at school.”

“But she wasn’t,” Izaak finished for me. He lit his cigarette and splashed more brandy in his glass. He was, I realized, well on his way to being drunk. “And now, Joanne,” he said, “I’m going to try to mute your hostility. Are you mutable?”

“Try me,” I said.

He laughed thinly. “Well, as they say, it was a dark and stormy night – the night after Des’s funeral, to be precise. Owing to circumstances, the funeral had been particularly grisly, and I was sitting in my living room trying to get drunk. I lived not far from the Wellesley Hospital, which, of course, was where they had taken Des’s family. There was a knock at the door, and when I opened it, Sally was there. She was in terrible shape. She hadn’t been discharged. She had just put on her coat and walked out.

“ ‘I won’t go back to that house,’ she said, ‘and I won’t go back to her.’ She was soaked to the skin, and I went upstairs to run a hot bath and get her some dry clothes. When I came down, the bottle of whisky on the coffee table – a bottle which, incidentally, I had just nicely started – was just about empty. Fortunately, Sally’s stomach rebelled. I got her upstairs to the bathroom in time, but while she was retching into the toilet bowl, somehow her jaw locked open – I suppose like a hinge that’s pushed back too far.

“At any rate, there I was with a drunken thirteen-year-old, no relation to me, in a hospital gown and in need of help. I started to call a cab so I could get her to an emergency ward somewhere, but the idea of going back to the hospital made
her wild. She started clawing at the phone and at me and making the most godawful sounds. So I slapped her – the movie cure for hysteria.” He dragged gratefully on the Camel. “Luckily, the slap unlocked the jaw. I undressed her, put her in the tub and went out in the hall and sat on the floor outside the bathroom door listening until she came out, and I knew she was safe.” He smiled to himself. “Or as safe as any of us ever are.”

I was stunned. “Sally made it sound like such a lark – an adventure,” I said weakly.

He picked up the ceramic figure of Sally with the cat and ran his forefinger along the curve of Sally’s body. “She was a very wounded girl. That first year was a time of convalescence for her.”

“With you as doctor. Where was Nina in all of this?”

He shrugged. “Where is she ever? Taking care of Nina.” He looked hard at me. “I can see I have just made your hostility less mutable. So be it. To answer your question, Nina was enthusiastically in favour of dumping Sally on my doorstep. Sally and I went to Nina’s hospital room together to ask. It took Nina an excruciating one-tenth of a millisecond to accede to our request.”

He pronounced his words with exaggerated care. I knew the alcohol was beginning to blunt his responses, but I couldn’t let the slur against Nina go unanswered.

“Be fair, Izaak. Nina had just endured a situation that went beyond nightmare.”

“Our nightmares arise out of our deepest fears and longings,” he said gently. “And no matter what, Sally was her daughter.”

“And you,” I said, fighting tears, “were the man Nina chose to act as a father for her child. In loco parentis – isn’t that the phrase? Damn it, Izaak, you can’t shift the blame for what you did to Nina. You were the one who took advantage.

You were the one who violated the trust.” I picked up my coat and started to leave.

He followed me to the front hall. For the first time that day I noticed that he was limping, and at some not very admirable level, I was glad. I was glad he had hurt himself. The phone rang and he went to answer it. I couldn’t hear much of what he said. I heard the phrases, “That won’t be necessary, the need is past,” and then he lowered his voice and I couldn’t make out the words, but I could hear that he was speaking. The drawer to the table in the entrance hall was open a little. I pulled it out and picked up the manila envelope. I could still hear Izaak Levin’s voice in the kitchen, low, indistinct. I shook the envelope the way children do on Christmas morning with their packages and then decided the hell with it. I ripped the flap back a little. Not far, just enough to see that inside was a roll of bills that would choke a horse.

I put the envelope back and carefully shut the drawer. When I got in the car, I was surprised to see I was shaking –coffee or guilt, I didn’t know which. I sat there for a minute, taking deep breaths, calming down. Finally, I put the key in the ignition. But before I pulled out into the street, I took one last look at Izaak Levin’s house. He was standing in the doorway, elegant, worldly as ever in his tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses. In one hand he had the brandy bottle, but he used the other to give me a mocking salute.

CHAPTER

9

As I stopped for the light at Broadway, I was trying to work it all out. What had Nina been doing at Izaak Levin’s? They had known one another for years, but their relationship was hardly cordial. And where had the money come from? Nina had told me that Izaak had chronic money problems, but the roll of bills I had seen in that envelope went well beyond what you kept around in case the paperboy came to collect. Sally had been there earlier, but if she had taken the money over as part of a business transaction, why was it in cash? And why did Izaak still have the envelope in his hand, unopened, half an hour after she left? Questions. I looked at my watch. There was time before Angus came home from school to stop by Nina’s and get some answers.