Slate (9 page)

Clarisse shrugged. “What I really need is a night off.
That's
what will do me the most good tomorrow morning.”

They walked to Buddies, a bar on Boylston Street near Copley Square, where they alternately danced and downed Black Russians until the lights were brought up at two o'clock. Clarisse, feigning a torn ligament in her right leg, dragged herself in a grotesque limp from the door of the bar to the front of the line waiting for taxis at the curb and commandeered the next cab that swung by. When they had tumbled into the back seat of the taxi, Clarisse hiccupped, looked at Valentine, and whispered, “Oh, God. I feel a confession coming on.”

“I can take it,” said Valentine, reeling slightly against the door.

Clarisse looked at him soulfully, with a frown of anguish. “I haven't given up cigarettes,” she blurted. “I know I promised, but I can't do it. I smoke every chance I get. Out on the fire escape, out the bathroom window. I go into McDonald's and order a Diet Pepsi just so I can sit there and smoke. I
walk
to class so I can smoke on the way. For lunch, I have a peach yogurt and seven cigarettes. Oh, Val, I feel guilty every time I light a match!” In one swallow, she finished off the drink that Valentine had smuggled out of the bar beneath his jacket.

Valentine stared out the window and then back at Clarisse. He stifled a hiccup.

“You're disappointed in me, aren't you?” said Clarisse, despairingly.

Valentine looked out of the window again and said quietly, “While you were leaning out the bathroom window, I was hiding in the cellar…”

“Smoking?” Clarisse shrieked. “You can't smoke. You'll
die
! You'll get pneumonia again! Where are your cigarettes?” she demanded.

He guiltily reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a package of unfiltered Camels.

She snatched them from him, said “
Ugh
!” and flung them out the window. “If I had brought any with me, I'd throw them out too. I promise, I'll stop right now,
for good
”

The taxi pulled up before the building on Warren Avenue. Valentine paid the driver and helped Clarisse out. She would have forgotten her law text and notebook had he not retrieved them for her.

“Oh, God,” she moaned as Valentine fumbled with his keys. “It's two-thirty in the morning, and I'm dead drunk.” She turned around, facing the street, and fell back against the brick wall. “I'm a disgrace to my intended profession. Why don't you just leave me out here in the gutter? That's where I'm going to end up. In Girl Scouts, they taught us how to make a mattress out of old newspapers. I'll be fine.”

Valentine got the proper keys into the proper locks and pushed open the door.

“You need a little sleep, that's all. I'll make you some hot milk—”

“I'll throw up.”

Valentine led her up the stairs. As they passed the two doors on the third-floor landing, Clarisse arched her head and screwed up her face, as if listening intently. “I guess Susie and Julia made up. All's quiet.”

On the top floor, Valentine turned Clarisse's key in the lock, but it wouldn't move. He tried again and then realized that the door was already unlocked. He pushed the door open, sighed, and shook his head. “You've got to be more careful, Lovelace.”

She shook her head. “I am careful,” she said. “I
always
lock my door.” Then she shrugged, as if it were not worth the trouble of arguing the point.

They went into the apartment.

“See?” she said, throwing her fur coat over the back of a chair. “No bur-gu-lars. I don't have any milk,” she added. “I hate milk. Make me a drink.”

“Why not?” said Valentine, going into the kitchen.

Clarisse stumbled toward her bedroom. She first kicked one shoe into the room and then the other. Then she went in.

Valentine poured two snifters of brandy and held them in his hands to warm. He went back to the living room. In a few moments, Clarisse came out of the bedroom.

In a low, weary, and surprisingly steady voice, she announced, “It is now a quarter to three in the morning. In the next seven hours, I have to go to sleep, get up, make breakfast, wash my hair, put on my makeup, pick out a suitable outfit, and get halfway across town.”

There was something in her voice that made Valentine say, “And…?”

“And,” said Clarisse significantly, “there's a strange man in my bed.”

Valentine stared at her.

“I'm pretty sure he's dead,” she added. “I wish you'd go check.”

Valentine swallowed the brandy from both snifters, carefully put down the glasses, and then rushed past Clarisse into her bedroom.

The room was dimly lighted by the streetlamp in front of the building. On Clarisse's bed, with the covers turned down beneath him, lay a fully clothed man. Valentine stepped to the edge of the bed. In the man's left temple was a fairly clean hole nearly the size of a quarter. Dark blood crusted on the pulpy rim of the opening and trailed down the side of the face to a small, coagulated pool in a fold of the pillow. Valentine touched his fingers to the man's wrist but jerked instinctively away from the cold flesh. He went out of the room, avoiding looking at the corpse's swollen, purple face.

“Well?” Clarisse prompted.

“You were wrong.”

“He's
not
dead?” Clarisse said with animated relief. “Well, let's call an ambulance. Maybe—”

“He's dead all right,” said Valentine quickly. “But he's not a stranger. That's Sweeney Drysdale II.”

Clarisse took a moment to digest this and then hiccupped. “Oh, damn,” she breathed.

I
T WAS NEARLY NOON on Saturday. Thirty-two hours had passed since Clarisse and Valentine had discovered the corpse of Sweeney Drysdale II. Clarisse felt as if she had aged a month for every one of those hours. Not only had she dealt with the police all the rest of Thursday night, she had gone directly from District D station to her exam at Portia. She had been so flustered with the discovery of the corpse in her bed that she filled five blue books in three-quarters of an hour, and wondered, at the end, what she had written. When she looked back over it, however, the analysis of the case the professor had presented looked pretty good. She made a few minor changes, then handed the blue books in, well satisfied. She returned to Warren Avenue for another bout of questions from the detectives across the street. On Friday afternoon, she was able to nap for a few hours on Valentine's bed. The police had taken over her own apartment. That was just as well, since she had no stomach for going back there yet. She hadn't liked Sweeney Drysdale II. Nobody else had either, apparently. Still, it wasn't pleasant to find even an enemy sprawled across your bed, cold and lifeless.

She now stood at the door of Valentine's apartment, her knuckles raised to rap on the wood. For a few moments, however, she remained still, her head cocked toward Susie and Julia's place across the hall. Beneath the noise of what sounded like a hockey game, she detected the voices of the two women raised in argument. Unable to gauge the severity of the fight, she shrugged, then knocked several times quickly and lightly on Valentine's door. She turned the knob as he called out to her to come inside.

“Val—”

He shushed her to silence. Wearing a white chef's apron over a red T-shirt and jeans, he stood leaning in the kitchen doorway. He was tapping a long wooden spoon against his thigh.

Linc stood on a rumpled drop cloth between the two windows, applying a coat of off-white paint to the walls. Like Valentine, he was staring at the portable black-and-white television angled at the edge of the Mission-style dining table.

It sounded like Julia and Susie's hockey game.

Sighing, Clarisse glanced at the screen. It was wrestling.

“Valentine,” she said, brushing back a wing of black hair from her forehead, “I really am in a rush.”

“In a minute,” he answered excitedly. His eyes didn't leave the flickering screen.

“Shhh!” hissed Linc, his brush still poised in midstroke. Paint dripped to the cloth beneath.

Clarisse plopped down into a platform rocker and, leaning back with a creak of the springs, crossed her legs and smoothed out the dark tawny skirt of her tweed suit. She glanced again at the television.

One of the wrestlers was a squat, dark-complexioned man with a pug face and a body that was like nothing so much as a mailbox with broken legs.

Towering over him was his massive opponent. This rugged giant, with a dark blond beard, lighter, swept-back hair, a wide, muscular, hairy chest, and tight white trunks, had a general presence that would have done credit to Conan the Barbarian.

Clarisse lowered her heel to the carpet, bringing the rocker forward an inch or two. “Who's that?” she asked idly.

“Big John Studd!” replied Valentine in an exaggerated whisper of awe.

“Oh, God,” said Linc, “he could pin me to the canvas any day of the week.”

At that moment, Big John Studd picked up his opponent, twirled him over his head, and flung him into the turnbuckle. The opponent bounced limply back and crashed into the referee who flipped over the ropes and down onto the floor below the ring.

“Big John Studd is a great athlete,” said Valentine. “Big John fights fair. Big John is not afraid of anyone or anything. Big John is a credit to wrestling. Last week Big John Studd pounded Samoan Number Two right into the ground using the old Polish screwdriver.”

Big John Studd climbed out of the ring to the wild cheers of the audience.

With a sigh, Valentine went over to the television and lowered the volume. Linc went back to swabbing the wall.

“What's up?” Valentine asked.

“The cops have finally given me permission to go back into my apartment. I'm glad, because I certainly didn't want to have to spend another night on your sofa. It has all the gentle contours of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh.”

Clarisse followed Valentine as he went back into the kitchen. He picked up a large red ceramic bowl from a short wooden counter between the refrigerator and the stove and resumed stirring a thick, lumpy mixture swirled with hues of orange, green, purple, and salmon. Clarisse peered cautiously into the bowl.

“Miss America calls this Mr. Fred's Favorite,” Valentine explained. “She gave me the recipe yesterday.”

“What's in it?” she asked, then went on hurriedly, “no, wait, I don't want to know. Just tell me it tastes better than it looks.”

“I hope it does,” said Valentine ruefully, and went on with his stirring. “So, how much of a mess did the boys leave upstairs?”

“My apartment,” said Clarisse, “looks like a remake of the Great Dust Bowl. They scattered that damn red fingerprint powder everywhere—on everything that was flat, round, or had more than two square inches of surface area.
All
my makeup.
Every
brush, comb, and nail file. They dusted my soap. They dusted my toilet seat. My closets, my drawers, my cabinets, and the insides of the lids of the shoe boxes at the back of my closet. Every time I open a book, a red cloud puffs up out of it. I'm going to have to devote all of November's budget to A-One Cleaners. They even opened the refrigerator and dusted my
broccoli
!”

Valentine stopped stirring for a moment. “They dusted your vegetables? Did they think that the murderer lured Sweeney with the promise of a green salad?”

Clarisse sighed. “They were just being thorough, I guess. Anyway, if you'll let me borrow your Hoover, maybe I can be out of your hair by tonight.”

Valentine stabbed a thumb toward the narrow broom closet next to the refrigerator. Clarisse opened it and struggled to pull out the bulky, old-fashioned upright vacuum. Leaning it against a counter, she dropped to her knees and began rummaging for the attachments. In the process, several things she couldn't quite identify in the darkness of the closet fell from their hooks above. Something sharp fell on the crown of her head. “The attachments are under the sink,” said Valentine suddenly.

Clarisse pulled out of the closet and glowered at him.

“The bags are under there, too,” he said. “Sorry. It always takes time to get used to a new apartment.”

Clarisse began to rummage beneath the sink.

“While I'm at it,” she said, her voice echoing in the cabinet, “do you have any spot remover down here?” She thrust out one hand and splayed her fingers. The day before, all the occupants of the building had been fingerprinted by the police and Clarisse's fingertips were still lightly stained with blue-black ink. “I've tried fingernail polish remover, Lava soap, and Bon Ami, and I still can't get it off.”

Valentine looked at his own smudged fingers and said, “Nothing works.”

Linc poked his head into the kitchen, holding up a perfectly clean open palm toward them. “Williams Lectric Shave,” he said. “Takes it right off!” He lowered his hand. “Also good for removing gummed price labels from birthday presents, especially off of plastic.”

“Thank you for that hint, Heloise,” said Valentine.

Linc smiled and retreated into the living room. He dragged the drop cloth around to another section of wall.

Carefully following Miss America's recipe, printed in block letters on a sheet of ruled pink paper, Valentine took several jars of spices from the cabinet and sprinkled generous amounts into the mixture.

Clarisse stood up and looked into the mixture again. It had turned a uniform puce.

“I have to do my clothes later,” said Valentine. “Want to keep me company over at the lesbian laundromat?”

“Not today,” said Clarisse as she piled the attachments into a small shopping bag, “I won't be able to think about anything until I've cleaned up the scene of the crime. Besides, I have a paper due day after tomorrow, and I intend to use my Hoover-time thinking out the principal arguments.”