Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (15 page)

"Book? You're a writer, then?"

She nodded, exhaling a bale of smoke that hung in the air between
them as she turned her head to look at him from under lowered lids and
lashes. "I am hot,
wry
hot in New York ['New Yawk'] at the
moment. And you know what it is to be hot in New York ['New Yawk']."
Her face turned away from him as she inhaled deeply.

"As a matter of fact, no."

Her eyes widened as she turned her cheek against the sofa to give
him a splendid, startled-doe look.

"Say again? Do you mean you've never been to
New York
?
God, where else
is
there?"

"Well, speaking of God, there's Rome."

Her nose wrinkled. "Are you kidding? The pope's there."

"Last time I heard, yes. How about London?"

"Too provincial."

"Moscow?"

"Come
on
. Moscow's just a logo and a pose."

That took care of any future summit meeting, at least, so he changed
the subject. "I don't believe I've read anything by an Ellen Taylor;
but I'm not up on hot young New York writers." Quickly, he added, in
case he had sounded offensive, "But that's no reflection on your
hotness. I've just never got much further than Rimbaud."

She considered this. "He's not bad."

"I believe he was quite hot at the time."

"Wouldn't surprise me." Some more exhaled smoke fogged the air.
"Anyway,
Taylor
isn't my writing name. It's Tamara."

" 'Ellen Tamara'? Hmm. Perhaps you've not been published in
Britain?"

"Not
Ellen
, just Tamara. One name. Like Cher or Sting or
Dante." She appeared to be searching the table for a clean glass, and
seeing none chose the Princess's slightly smudged one, which she wiped
out with a napkin.

Melrose stopped in the act of filling the glass she held out to him
and considered. "You left out Michelangelo."

"When I was writing under my own name I couldn't sell a damned
thing. Couldn't even if I wrote like Hemingway.

The which I resemble, incidentally." As she searched up an ashtray,
the chains and bracelets clattered.

"Ernest? Or Mariel?"

Another lungful of smoke billowed out as she laughed.

"Very funny. Fortunately, I can take a joke. Fame hasn't altered me,
nor 'custom staled my infinite variety.' Despite the celebrity, I'm
still a humble person."

So then was Cleopatra
, he did not say.

"No, once you get bitten by fame, you're ruined. My editor said,
'In your case it would take a rabid dog.'" She raised her glass as if
toasting her editor. "He's very supportive like that."

"He sounds brilliant."

She shrugged. "But he thinks I should go back to writing the way I
did before."

"And how was that?"

"Not so experimental—straight narrative, more or less. Gothic type.
A little like Bronte, a little le Fanu, a
soupqon
of James."

Melrose had just then taken a sip of sherry and choked. "
Henry
James?"

Slapping him on the back, she said, "You okay?"

"No." His throat felt grainy, his voice rusty. "No. You'll have to
do an emergency tracheotomy.
Look
, no one writes like Henry
James now, and Lord knows no one
used
to write like Henry
James, except Henry James. And how is it you manage to include him in
your Gothics Unlimited list?"

She turned her head so sharply the metal earrings clinked against
her face. "Say again? What about
The Turn of the Screw
?"

He had to admit that was a bit Gothic.

She studied her nails to see, apparently, if there was anything
else to bite. "And there's
Portrait of a Lady
. You've read
that, surely." Now she was chewing on a morsel of thumb.

"Of course."

"I rest my case."

"On
what
?" He started chewing on his own thumbnail. Was
she mad?

"You must not've understood it," was her oblique answer.

It really was too much. Was this gritty, poorly spoken girl actually
educated, knowledgeable, informed, and—surely not—talented?

She had checked the watch that was far too heavy for her bony wrist
and was saying, "Well, got to vamoose. I thought maybe I'd have a meal
in the village. Maybe at one of those hotels."

She rose quickly and jammed the black helmet over her head. With her
small face peering out from the black dome, she looked a little like an
astronaut who'd been hanging around so long she'd shriveled.

Melrose stood up. "I have to be going myself." He gathered up his
coat and stick and followed her out the door.

As they walked across the stone courtyard, Melrose looked in through
the mullioned window of the dining room where, at one end of the long
table, were seated the Princess and Major Poges; at the other end, the
Braines. Yet the panes were cloudy and the window so ivy-clad that the
faces and forms bathed in the dull gold and rose light were broken into
wavering squares—a blur of turquoise, a wedge of dark wool, a glint of
a lavender sleeve. Having seen them in action, Melrose found it odd
seeing them in this ornamental light. They seemed to dissolve and
reform in the fragmented patterns of a kaleidoscope. Around the table,
fluttering and disappearing and returning was the maid, Ruby, in a
crisp white apron. Ann Denholme appeared in one of the panes and then
fell away.

". . . and only twenty-nine, and I'm a millionaire. Can you believe
that?"

"Why not?"

"I'm too
young
, goddammit," she said, kicking a stone back
toward the pile.

They had come to her "bike," which took Melrose utterly by surprise.
He was expecting some fancy ten-speed; what he was looking at was a BMW
approximately the size of a baby elephant. "You mean you ride
this
?"

She sighed, lit another cigarette, and shook her head. "No, I walk
it on a leash." Then she went on about early fame as she looked up at a
night sky as smooth and black as onyx and just a few cold stars that
looked eons apart and probably were. The moon was full and bright and
luminous. From here the dining room window looked as illusory as a
cascade of rainbow water. From the barn, whose outlines melted into the
sky, came a series of hectic barks, and a dog came out of the darkness
into a patch of moonlit ground. It was the border collie he'd seen
earlier. The dog looked a bit too sharp for Melrose's taste; he
preferred his own dog, Mindy. ("Your Ralph Lauren dog," said Trueblood,
"countrified, under all that tangled nap, true gentrification.")

From behind the fence, in the chicken-duck enclave came an
occasional warm cluck. It had been an eventful day for the wildlife,
thought Melrose. Tomorrow they'd probably want to visit the Tower of
London. Closer now, the dog barked again.

"I believe we're witness to the curious incident of the dog in the
nighttime."

But Ellen was still immersed in disturbed dreams of her own success
as she lit a cigarette with a Zippo and clicked it shut. "I'm a
millionaire
."
She cast a sidewise glance at Melrose to see if he was properly
impressed. "In pounds," she added. "On one book," she added, taking no
chances.

"That is astonishing. What's the book? Was it your first?"

"My second." Ellen appeared to want to bury the first. She leaned
back against the bike, ankles crossed, a model's pose. "It's about New
York City:
Sauvage Savant
it's called. It's very hot in L.A.,
too, incidentally. But, naturally, if you're a hot writer, it's always
going to be New York, isn't it?"

"
Sauvage Savant
," Melrose repeated. What a pretentious
otle. That must be the price one pays for being a hot, young

New York writer. With what he thought was a with-it little grin, he
said, "I expect there are a lot of 'literary savages' in your city?"

"Say again?"

"I'm referring to the title."

"It's a deli in Queens."

The collie, who had stationed himself a few feet away, cocked his
head, in a wondering way. Melrose was trying to sort out the various
New York boroughs. He could not position Queens on his mental map. "I
see."

He was quite sure the dog knew he was lying, given its expression.
It was absolutely still but fully alert. Its silence was impressive;
its stare, rather harrowing. If it couldn't read minds, it could
probably read lips.

"What happened was, the owner's French, and the sign painter is his
cousin, French, too. Don't ask me what they're doing in Queens.
Francois—I call him Frankie—wanted a clever Frenchy sign. It was
supposed to be 'sausage' but his cousin just couldn't make the
connection. Who could? A knowledgeable sausage on your rye with mayo?
Frankie's a real horse's ass, which is why I like him. He knows I'm
really the rage in New York, and he's expecting me to turn his deli
into one of those clubby places, you know, like the Algonquin, where
Dorothy Parker hung out. It was really when I hit it big that he worked
up this 'savant' business. He parts his hair in the middle and wears an
apron up to his armpits and has a straight mustache I think he just
inks in with a ballpoint. Well, there's not much going in Queens by way
of published writers; and I'm not Dorothy Parker."

He was a little taken aback by this modest assessment of her own
writing skill. "Who is?"

As she pulled the strap of her helmet tight, she said, "See, I
wanted to do something different; I couldn't stand one more book about
Manhattan. I will personally vomit outside Doubleday if I see a window
display of one more book about Manhattan. I'm doing all the others:
it's to be a sort of trilogy, no, a quartet, I guess. . . ." She
pondered this as she studied the night sky.

Why was the dog looking up there too? Melrose wondered. Had the
collie and Ellen some affinity?

"The Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens. Maybe I'll toss in the
Jersey shore."

"That's not New York." Melrose touched the collie's paw with his
cane, to see if he could get a reaction. He didn't.

"Who can tell anymore?"

Melrose shifted his walking stick from one hand to another,
thinking of this exotic city, so huge that part of it was an island
surrounded by other islands and boroughs, each a kind of city in
itself. He was wondering if perhaps he shouldn't take some sort of
inventory of himself: was he spending too much time with his port and
paper before the fireplace? Shuffling about his village until he would
drop dead of a stroke across Miss Crisp's chamber pots? Or in Agatha's
cottage in Plague Alley . . . ?
Pull yourself together
, he
told himself. Then he smiled. It was time to rewrite his will. He did
this every half-dozen years or so to drive Agatha to distraction. He
was holding back that wonderful nugget involving primogeniture until
she got totally out of hand—

"You all right?" asked Ellen, whose gloved hands were rubbing the
handlebars. The noise of the engine ripped through the frosty air.
"Your face looks funny." She squinted. "You've got great eyes,
incidentally. Really green."

Melrose knew his eyes were green. But great? He opened his mouth to
thank her—

"Like scarab beetles."

He closed his mouth. As she gunned the accelerator again, he said,
"I'd be happy to offer you a lift"—he pointed toward the Bentley,
moonraked and glimmering, with the reservoir shining off in the
distance—"only I'm not going into the village. I'm meeting a friend at
a place down the road."

"Was it the inn I passed?"

"Probably; it's called the Old Silent."

"Well, maybe I could get a bite there."

Melrose cursed himself for mentioning the inn. "Ah, I . . . don't
think so. It's more or less off limits; it's a crime scene, you see."

The noise stopped. "Say again?"

He wished he hadn't said once.

"So how come you're going there? If it's closed to the public?"

"I, ah, I'm only meeting someone."

"What happened? What crime?"

"A man was killed there a couple of days ago."

"Killed? You mean
murdered
, don't you?" She frowned, as if
the culprit stood here in the moonlight before her.

"Well, yes, I expect you could say that." He had the lunatic notion
he was including the collie in his answers. The dog's ears had pricked
up; he certainly looked as eager for details as did the girl.

She shook her head, muttering some imprecation to the skies or the
gods. "Jeeeezzz. Well, you're obviously not going to talk." Suddenly,
her head swung round. "You're a cop, aren't you?"

"No, absolutely not—"

"Hell, all this time I've been hanging around talking to the cops."

The collie yapped when the motor roared again.

"Look, I'm
not
—"

"Stranger!"

The call came from the direction of the barn; Melrose looked around
quickly to see the dull glow of a lamp, one of those ancient oil lamps,
upraised, casting only a blur of light along the ground.

He could not have been more astonished if suddenly a highwayman,
masked and cloaked, had stopped Melrose's coach. There was no threat in
this voice: it was clearly pitched enough to cut through the noise of
the motor Ellen kept revving up.

As the dog whipped round and streaked like a swimmer through the
ground mist toward the lamp, she asked, "
Who
is that?"

"A little girl. Her name is Abigail, I believe."

"She lives here?"

Melrose nodded. His eye followed the lamp that looked disembodied,
hanging on an invisible arm.

Ellen kicked the motorcycle into action, said
See you
, and
streaked away much as had the dog, each going in the opposite
direction.

He watched her down the drive until she and her BMW were swallowed
up by the corridor of trees. Through their trunks he could see a skin
of moonlight on the reservoir.