Richmond Noir (3 page)

I wrung the washcloth, soaped it again, and resumed on the other side, taking hold of the back of her neck to steady her. This was a task, this was work—or so I told myself as I watched the soapy rivulets streak her skin. I felt her gaze on me, cool and calm now, and I didn’t look up before kissing her. I tasted rose and chalky soap, and saw red behind my eyelids, pulsing in time with my chest.

Rebecca was curled on one end of the couch and asleep. The whiskey had knocked her out. I put a blanket over her and sat on the opposite end, staring into shadows. A breeze moved my hair and disturbed Rebecca’s purse. I saw her keys in the purse. I took them, went barefoot into the Hamlins’ yard, and let myself in.

I did this all as though in one unthinking movement, and only when I heard snoring did I note my own thrashing heart. For Lou, shooting intruders was dinner conversation. I found Rebecca’s bedroom. Clothing was scattered in piles, and the tangled covers upon her bed made a fossilized impression of her body. On a dresser I fingered through a few trinkets, some cash and letters, then opened the top drawer. Here I found the girl’s undergarments, which, perhaps for posterity, were the only items she’d stowed out of sight. I ran my hands through the silky contents, inhaled the scent of fabric soap and rose. Feeling into the corners I came upon a small, smooth object: the red vial with the chipped lip. I crept out of the house, flooded with excitement and pleasure.

That was Saturday; I didn’t see Rebecca again until Monday afternoon, when I came in for a half-day shift. She was reading a magazine in the break room, a mug of tea below her chin.

“Rose hips?” I said, a sparkle in my voice.

“Chamomile.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t smell like rose.”

She gave a small smile but didn’t look up. I left and headed toward the storage room. The glass vial bulged in my pocket. When I arrived, the door was already open and John was inside with several other staff members. They were unpacking boxes. The room was a disaster.

“Ah,” John said. “Just the fellow I was waiting for.”

My stomach dropped. John explained: he’d been working in storage with Rebecca that morning when she noticed a loose placard; when they tried to return it to the item it described—a red perfume bottle, of course—they discovered it missing. Did I remember it? Did I know anything about it? I made a series of noncommittal noises, difficult as it was to think straight, much less be clever. Rebecca’s little smile danced vividly to mind.

“We’re ass-deep in here the rest of the day making sure it’s really missing, not just misplaced.” I offered to help; I could produce the vial from the first box I unpacked and
voila
! Case closed. But John refused. Staff only for now. “You know,” he said, “to avoid any confusion.”

“Why would you
do
that?” I said, nearly shouting.

“Why would
you
creep into my room and steal it?”

I scoffed. “You’re accusing me of stealing!”

We stood facing each other under the magnolias. Rebecca stared off petulantly.

I took a few long breaths. “Do you want to know why ‘Uncle Lou’ doesn’t like me?”

Rebecca’s lips parted as if to speak, but she said nothing. She wanted to see what I’d say first, the crafty girl. I didn’t care at that point, so I told her.

“He thinks I stole a painting.” I laughed. “From a museum, no less.”

“Francis Keeling Valentine Allan,”
Rebecca replied. “The portrait by Thomas Sully. Stolen in 2000 from the Valentine Museum. I know.”

I watched her fixedly. By the end of this revelation, her eyes had drifted down the row of magnolias, her gaze light and airy.

She continued: “Poe said she loved him like her own child. It’s a beautiful painting too, not that I’ve seen it in person.”

“Did Lou also happen to tell you he and a squadron of police burst through my door and tore apart my house eight years ago? That if it wasn’t for John choosing to trust me I’d have been blacklisted from working in any museum in this city again?”

Rebecca returned my stare; she looked ready to play rough. “He told me he saw you with a painting—covered by a sheet. He saw it in your hands the night of the burglary. You were trying to get it from your car to your back door. He
saw
you, Emery.”

I shook my head and laughed. “So, you’re Lou’s little spy? Looking for lost treasure?”

“Lou is a horse’s ass,” she said. “Anyway, would I find it?”

“It was a storm window, for Christ’s sake. Kid put a baseball through the old one a few days before. Once the cops were done demolishing my house, they were kind enough to look into it. Your uncle hates me because he made a fool of himself at the end of his career. He went out a laughingstock.”

Rebecca shrugged. “He thinks you have it. Still.”

“Do
you
think I have it?”

“You have my perfume,” she said. “And I want it back.”

Rebecca avoided me the next few days, which was fine, as the restrictions placed upon the non-staff made my job difficult enough. Gone was my key to the storage rooms and cases; gone the days I could work without staff watching over my shoulder. Rebecca had sealed her own fate too; she was back sanding walls all day. John hadn’t ruled it theft, but neither did he believe the missing perfume an inventory list blunder. He simply called it “Missing.” I could feel the growing weight in his eyes when he looked at me.

Lou found out about the perfume through his museum connections. That’s what Rebecca told me a week later, when she appeared at my door again. She’d heard Lou speaking of it on the phone, invoking my name more than once to John and others she didn’t know. I listened to her, weighing the veracity of what she said. I doubted Rebecca would tell Lou or John about my having the perfume; she wanted it for herself, and ratting me out wouldn’t accomplish that. No, given the opportunity, she would steal back the perfume. Probably it was the only reason she was here now. I told her as much.

“I won’t have to resort to that,” she said, stepping close. “I think you’ll give it back.”

“Why, because John and your uncle are hot on my heels?” I said, cockily.

She considered it. “Maybe because you like me?”

I watched her eyes for sarcasm, but she closed them and burrowed her face into my neck, running me through with chills.

“And because I like you,” she added.

One thing nagged me: if Lou had spoken with John and learned of the perfume, wasn’t it likely he’d also heard of Rebecca working with me in the storage room? Uncle Lou knew plenty of the staff—hadn’t
anyone
put his niece with me? We were careful, but there’s only so much one can do. It’s a small city. By Rebecca’s account, though, Lou was clueless about us.

In bed we made love. She pressed herself close and said, “Smell. Not as nice, is it?”

I smelled rose, but it was sugary and cheap. She wanted the real stuff, just a drop—a molecule.

When I took the perfume from my dresser drawer, she said, “Not much of a hiding spot.”

“That’s what I thought of yours.”

Then she grabbed for it. I held tight and we crashed back onto the bed. She was giving me a good fight, biting my ribs, pulling my hair. When exhaustion wore us down, I tipped the vial onto my finger and applied it to her neck. We lay in bed deep into the night, the perfume high upon the dresser. She was in my arms, and I knew I had to hide the vial before I fell asleep. Then I heard her voice, low and hypnotic.

“I’m going to turn you in.”

I roused, tightened my embrace as though it was lovers’ talk.

“You can’t. I didn’t steal it.”

“But you have it.”

“Darling,” I said, “if you turn me in, I’ll tell them the real story. Then John knows you’re a thief, and your kindly uncle knows you’ve been cavorting with the likes of me. You lose both ways—and you don’t get the perfume.”

“If I turn you in, your life becomes a living hell.”

I pinned her, gripped her neck with my hands. “I could kill you now,” I said. “And that would be the end of this nonsense.”

There was a flash of real fear in her eyes, but only a flash—something had come to her. “I’m at Trina’s tonight,” she said. “When I don’t come home, Lou calls Trina.”

“And?”

“And then Trina tells him about you.”

I was suddenly so pleased with her, with her cunning and forethought, her tenacity. I lowered my head to kiss her, all the while feeling that I was losing myself to her, about to give her something she hadn’t even asked for. I snatched the perfume and took her to the basement, where I pulled boxes away from the wall. When I removed a section of the fake wood paneling with a screwdriver, she laughed and said, “So, you’re going to brick me up back there. I should have figured.”

Then she saw the vault. She stood wide-eyed, the sheets in which she’d wrapped herself slinking down her shoulders. The dial spun swiftly under my fingers, right-left, left-right, and then there was the clean, cold click of the lock giving way. The massive door opened noiselessly. I reached into the darkness and drew out what was inside.

“I knew it!” she screamed. “You sneaky bastard!” She hurled a string of delightful profanity at me, then reached out to touch the painting. She held it while I flicked on a series of mounted spotlights that came together on the opposite wall. I hung the portrait in that pool of radiance—it was alive now, the woman who raised Edgar Allan Poe. She was depicted young, and had a small nose and mouth, large dark eyes and roseate cheeks; her black hair was pulled up, and long strands of it curled past the edges of her eyes down to her jaw. There was a ghostly light about her long neck and her gauzy white dress.

I lost track of how long we stared into it.

Eventually, Rebecca asked, “What’s the point? I mean, it just sits in there. In the dark.”

“What should I do,” I said, “put it up in the living room? Rebecca, having this painting in the vault is dangerous enough. But it’s worth it. It does something to me. Every morning I wake up and remember what’s here, in my house. I’m sitting upon a great secret, and it makes everything … vibrate. But it’s a
crime.”
I brought my fingers to her neck. “And you don’t wear your crime.”

I put the painting back and the perfume in with it—now she couldn’t rat me out without exposing herself as an accomplice who knew where the secret vault was. I swung the door shut and met Rebecca’s contemptuous gaze. She apparently got the point.

“I want to trust you, Rebecca. And you to trust me. This assures that trust.”

“That’s not trust,” she said. “That’s mutually assured destruction.”

The longer the perfume stayed missing, the more my hours diminished. The museum’s auxiliary technicians were increasingly around, assigned to projects that ordinarily would have gone to me. I was not outright expelled, but more like a child faced into the corner. The cloud of suspicion that had loomed over me eight years before was above me again, and it was dark.

When I confronted John, he said, “Emery, there’s just a lot of talk.”

“Since when do you believe talk?”

“Let’s give it some time,” he said, “let it blow over.”

“Is it Hamlin? Are you listening to Lou Hamlin now?”

“Emery,” he said sharply, “you were the last one with the … People are suspicious.”

Christ, I thought, he defends me when I’m guilty, and condemns me when I’m not—not completely, anyway.

The only bright thing in my life was the source of my troubles. I found it strange that Rebecca’s uncle didn’t try leashing her. Was he duped so easily, believing she spent all her nights at Trina’s? In the basement I’d retrieve the perfume from the safe and trace the oil along her curves. We’d sleep upon the daybed with rose and sweat in the air. Rebecca was surprisingly agreeable to the situation, washing off the perfume dutifully before she left my house each morning, not arguing when I put it back in the safe. If we didn’t make love, or study the painting, Rebecca would pose and I’d manipulate the lights so that I’d swear she floated in them, my treasure.

Rebecca’s internship was nearly complete; she’d be leaving for Cincinnati in a matter of days. It struck me hard, and maybe her too, but neither of us spoke about it. Following my first day of work in four days, Rebecca, walking home beside me in the alleys, presented me with an idea.

“Would things be better for you if they found the perfume?”

I supposed they would, but the small red vial had been so long in our possession, and become so important to us, that I couldn’t imagine being without it.

“I want you to give me the perfume,” she said evenly. “I’ll plant it in a box in one of the storage rooms.”

Her face was confident and serene, and I wanted to kiss the little notch upon her lip for her offer. But it was too dangerous—besides, neither of us had access to the rooms. Then she handed me an envelope. Inside was a key she’d stolen, copied, and returned the day before.

I held onto the key. “It’s too dangerous, Rebecca. If they catch you …”

“Then what? They send me home?”

“Or prison.”

There was the Summer Celebration gala the next night, a fund-raising party for members, staff, and interns. I could do it then, slip in and out amidst the crowd.

“Why do you suddenly want to get rid of it?”

“For you.”

I looked all around at the alley we were in, one of a thousand veins through which coursed the blood of our city to its heart, where a great and mysterious history seemed preserved for us.

“Poe should have died here,” I said, “in these alleys. Not on some bench in Baltimore.”

That night was our last with the perfume.

We took my car. At the museum, Memorial Hall was bustling with ritzy summer gowns and tuxedoed bartenders, colorful spreads of hors d’oeuvres, live jazz. Rebecca and I spent only a few minutes together—the Hamlins were expected shortly—and gulped down our wine in a corner. She was especially striking, having spent so long with her compact mirror as we dressed in the basement, painting on her dark eyes, making her face radiant.

“Rebecca …”

“You have to,” she said. “You can’t lose everything because of me.”

“No, I mean, will you still…”