The Books of Fell (14 page)

Schwartz sat down in the captain’s chair next to my bed.

“Seven,” he said to me. So he was there on Sevens business, following the formalities. This ritual was to seal our conversation as confidential. Probably they did it at The Ritz and Laurent, too. Maybe someday years from then I’d be meeting someone, leaning on my cane, my hair white, starting off “Seven.”

I came up with seven things that went together, as I was expected to do.

“Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth,” I said.

“The Seven Deadly Sins. So be it…. Fell, you’re about to receive an honor.”

“I am?”

“An old member is asking for our help, and you’ve been chosen for the assignment.”

“I see,” I said.

“Were you expecting the Croix de Guerre or something?” he asked. He laughed and swung his legs up on my bed.

“What kind of an assignment?”

“Tutoring. That’s part of it.”

“I just got a D- in English.”

“That’s a fluke, isn’t it, Fell? After all, you won the New Boys Competition last fall for your essay, and you wrote a rather remarkable paper on Agamemnon’s death … Dr. Skinner reminded me of all that when I discussed this with him.”

“I didn’t know Skinner was told Sevens’ business.”

“He wasn’t told very much about the assignment, but I wanted his recommendation because it takes you off campus.”

“And he recommended me?”

“He said you could use the money, which amounts to six dollars an hour … and he thinks you may have overreacted to Lasher’s death, that it would be good for you to be busy.”

“Is that also why I’m on the committee for The Charles Dance?”

Schwartz smiled. “No.
I
chose you for that. You haven’t been on any of our committees.”

Lasher’s manuscripts were in the envelope on my desk. As curious as I was, I hadn’t had a chance to glance at them.

Dib was going to offer Rinaldo three hundred for the word processor, one fifty apiece. I needed money — Skinner was right. I wasn’t sure I needed Skinner telling everyone I needed it.

“This assignment concerns a girl who lives right here in Cottersville,” Schwartz began. “Her father’s a benefactor of Gardner — a very generous one, particularly to Sevens. Her name is Nina Deem.”

“As in Deem Library?”

“Exactly,” said Schwartz. “It was donated by the Deem family.”

“Does she go to school in Cottersville?”

“Yes. She’s a junior at Cottersville High. She’d probably be over in Miss Tyler’s, except two years ago her mother died. There aren’t any other children. She’s all David Deem has…. She’s a good writer, wants to be a professional, plans to go to Kenyon College. They have a whole writing program there.”

“You can’t tutor someone in writing. You mean help her with her grammar and her spelling and stuff like that?”

“Help her get back to writing. She’s lost interest.”

“Because I don’t know anything about grammar and spelling. I need help with that myself.”

“I
said
help her get back to writing…. The hidden agenda is more important than the tutoring, anyway.”

“What does that mean, the hidden agenda?”

“It means there’s another part to the assignment.”

He reached inside his sport coat and took out a photograph. He passed it across to me.

“Edward Dragon,” he said.

Dragon looked about my age, seventeen. He had a certain clean, American-boy quality, the kind models for Ralph Lauren’s clothes have when they’re shown in ads riding around in the family jeep with Dad, Sis, and the dog. He wasn’t in a jeep, though. The backdrop was almost comical, as though he’d posed for it at a carnival or a fair. Behind him was a fake waterfall, an old mill, and a weeping willow tree.

He was seated on a real bench in front: brown suit, white shirt, and maroon-and-white-striped tie. His hair was the same dark brown, short and straight, slicked back. He was holding a Siamese cat on his lap.

I started to hand it back to Schwartz.

“Keep it,” he said. “You’ll need to know that face.”

“What does he have to do with Nina Deem?”

“I’m coming to that. Last summer Nina enrolled in a writers’ workshop held at the Cottersville Community Center. Dragon did, too. The Center isn’t far from the Deems’ house, and Dragon would walk her home nights after class. He told her he was from Doylestown, and that he was a freshman at Penn State. Told her he was nineteen, and told Mr. Deem he was premed. That really appealed to Deem. He never went to college, never had a profession. You know Sun and Surf?”

“The sporting goods store?”

“That’s his.”

“How’d he afford to give us a library then?”

“That store’s a little gold mine, Fell! Apparently he’s a genius when it comes to money. He started from scratch, right out of Gardner. Like a lot of men without a formal education, he’s in awe of doctors, lawyers, et cetera. He thought Dragon was the perfect guy to escort his daughter around.”

Schwartz took his legs off my bed, crossed them, and tipped back in the chair. “Deem really liked him, too. He trusted him like a son. Nina was under a shrink’s care since her mother’s death, shutting herself off from the world, depressed, that sort of thing. Dragon got her out and about: tennis, swimming at the club, the movies. He was her first real boyfriend, too. So….” The Lion shrugged his shoulders.

“So they fell in love and were miserable ever after,” I said.

Schwartz held up one hand. “Hold your horses, Fell. It’s not really a love story, though she was certainly in love. Whatever
he
felt, he was lying to her. He wasn’t going to Penn State at all. Then one night late last fall the Cottersville police arrested him. The age on his driver’s license was twenty-three…. They picked him up for selling cocaine.”

“Was she with him?”

“No. Fortunately. It was around midnight. He was in a bar down near the train tracks. It was in the papers. That’s how David Deem heard about it … Dragon had a smart lawyer, and supposedly it was a first offense. He got off. But Deem told him he was never to see Nina again.” Schwartz looked at me. “That’s where you come in, Fell. You keep an eye out for him.”

“I’m supposed to go there under false pretenses?”

“What other kind of pretenses are there? … Didn’t your father do something like this for a living?”

“He was a cop and he was a detective. This is different.”

“Not that different,” Schwartz said. “Fell, this is a Sevens assignment. It’s not an unreasonable one. Deem has done a lot for us. Do you think we take and never give back?”

I just sat there.

“This is a nice girl,” Schwartz said. “Suppose you had a sister and — ”

“I have a sister.” She wasn’t in first grade yet.

“And suppose she was hanging out with some pusher who’d lied to her and your family?”

“My sister wouldn’t hang out with a known pusher.” I thought of the day my father’d told me the last thing he ever thought he’d find in his own son’s bureau drawer was shit. When he wasn’t making out reports and calling pot “a controlled substance,” he called it what we did on the street. Shit. He said that was the name for it, all right. He said, What in the name of God are you doing with this, Johnny? … What made me so sure Jazzy’d be invulnerable?

Back to Schwartz. “Suppose she fell in love with someone like Dragon and couldn’t help herself?”

“Is that the case with Nina Deem?”

“It seems to be. She’s promised Deem she won’t see Dragon again, but Deem’s not taking any chances.”

Then he said, “You’ve had all the benefits of Sevens without any responsibility, Fell. You haven’t volunteered once for any service to Sevens.”

I sat there. I hated pushers … It wasn’t that. It was going there as something I wasn’t, suckering some girl into trusting me when all the while she couldn’t if she tried to see this Dragon.

“You’ll be making fifty dollars a week.”

Tiny mind that I admit having, it went to Mom’s birthday and the gold 7. It went to the word processor Dib and I were hoping to buy from Rinaldo.

“Mostly you’ll be a tutor,” Schwartz said. “She really wants help getting into Kenyon.”

“Have you ever met her?”

“Once. She was a sweet kid. After her mother drowned, I was part of the group Sevens sent to the funeral … Let me tell you something, Fell. I think this assignment will be good for you. I think you’ve overreacted to Lasher’s death, too.” I started to say something, but he held his hand up again. “Wait. Listen. I think the Fates arrange exits and entrances for us. When I came to The Hill, we’d just committed my mother to someplace. She’d look out her window through bars, with people around her who cawed like crows. My dad was telling me just get on with my education, but I was going to have to do it on a shoestring, we were so broke because of what she’d cost us. I had a scholarship, but I didn’t have a dime in my pocket … I couldn’t get her out of my head. I even named my tree after her, I was so guilty … Her name is Mildred.”

“Seven letters.”

“Exactly. Exits and entrances, Fell. I have a feeling this is an entrance for you.”

“Enter the two-faced tutor.”

“You’ll be helping her, Fell!”

“Her mother drowned?”

“In their pool. This poor kid needs rescuing.”

Schwartz was getting up. He knew he’d made the assignment without my even telling him. He’d used all his big guns: his mother, my sister, rescuing some innocent female, what I owed Sevens, the extra money I’d make. He’d shot me down.

“Oh, and Fell? She’s a jet crash now, thanks to Dragon. Don’t bring up Lasher’s suicide. She doesn’t need to hear about that sort of thing. You ought to forget it, too.”

He reached out and grabbed my hand. “A week from next Wednesday afternoon at four, Fell. Her address is outside on your coffee table. She’s expecting you.”

The day that I was to go to the Deems’ to meet Nina, two strangers showed up on The Hill.

One came early that morning, after breakfast. He was a grief counselor from Philadelphia, there to meet with any students still reacting to Lasher’s suicide. He parked his car in the faculty lot and went to the student lounge, where he would be available all day.

His car was a red bi-turbo 425 Maserati, with HEADOC on the license plates.

“Where did they find him?” Dib asked me as we walked to lunch.

“He’s a Sevens,” I said. “Class of ‘74.”

“That figures,” Dib said.

• • •

The only meal The Sevens ate in the Gardner dining room was lunch. The other stranger was there, at Dr. Skinner’s table. He was tanned from the Miami sun, so Miami in his appearance that he stood out like a cop at a bikers’ rally. His face was too young for the mop of white hair, thick and silky, a lock falling across his forehead. He had a white mustache curved down around the corners of his mouth, where there was a cheerful smile with even white teeth, and dimples.

He must have come directly from the airport. White suit, brown silk shirt, red-and-tan-patterned silk tie. He looked like Florida’s version of Mark Twain.

Dib passed me the word going around our table.

“He’s Creery’s stepbrother. Lowell something.”

Creery was beside him, wearing his wraparound blue Gargoyle shades, shoveling down tuna melt while Skinner and Lowell something talked.

“They say Creery wants to go back to Florida with him,” Dib said.

“Good!”

“Why is it good? Then the whole thing will be forgotten.”

“We’re not getting anywhere anyway.”

“Because your heart isn’t in it, Fell! Now you’re going to tutor some townie, and that’ll end it.”

I couldn’t tell Dib everything about the Sevens assignment, or even that it
was
an assignment. I’d told him Skinner’d put me on to the job, and Dib decided it was part of the school cover-up.

Dib said, “Even if somebody tells his suspicions to that grief counselor, you don’t think a guy with HEADOC on his license plate is going to take it seriously?”

“Here’s a joke for you, Dib,” I said. “A guy comes into a therapist’s office and he says, Doc, I’m a wigwam. No, I’m a teepee…. No, I’m a wigwam. No, I’m a teepee…. The therapist says to the guy, Relax, you’re two tents.”

“Very funny, Fell,” Dib said. “About as funny as this tuna fish is fresh.”

“The point is,” I said, “you have to relax. You
are
too tense. We’ll just keep our eyes and ears open. We can’t do any more than that.”

“You haven’t even questioned Rinaldo to find out why Lasher’d choose him to give his stuff to.”

“He’s bringing the word processor to my room after lunch. I’ll do it then.”

“Make sure the tutorial’s in it so we know how to work it.”

“I keep it until April, right? Then it’s yours.”

“But I can practice on it in your room, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

Dib said, “They say Creery is afraid of The Sevens Revenge, Fell. Did you hear anything about that?”

“Of course not. I’d tell you if I had.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Dib. “Anyway … why would he be afraid if he didn’t have anything to do with Lasher’s death?”

“Good question, Dib. But The Sevens Revenge is a myth.”

“Sure, Fell, just a myth.”

While we were all eating lunch, Lauren Lasher had come by Sevens House and packed up her brother’s things.

She’d left a note on my desk.

In one snapshot she’d left on my blotter, Lasher looked more like Lauren than he looked like himself. It was a head shot of him in a parka. Without his glasses he was almost beautiful, with thick, coal-black hair and dark, solemn eyes.

In the other photo there was a girl posed beside him in a long evening gown. He was dressed up in aviator’s clothes, goggles covering his eyes, “Lindy” stitched over his pocket. He must have been impersonating Charles Lindbergh at the last Charles Dance.

It had taken me a week to get through his manuscripts.

He reminded me of Jazzy during “the terrible twos.” My father was working nights then on a warehouse theft case on the Brooklyn docks. He was sleeping in the daytime, or trying to. Jazzy was literally screaming for attention: throwing her food at the walls when we’d put it in front of her, dumping in her pants the minute we’d take her off the potty, anything to keep our attention focused on her. She missed playtime with Daddy.

Lasher was doing a number with Death. He had titles like “The Graveyard Calls My Name” and “Death Be My Lover.” His writing had all the organization and lyricism of some little tone-deaf child seated at a piano. He banged and pounded, hit-and-miss.

The only one I liked was one he’d worked and reworked for English. I remembered it from Mr. Wakoski’s class last term. It was a play about a heaven where you were ranked according to the age you died: the younger, the better for you. In Lasher’s paradise the ones who’d lived to grand old ages were called “The Feebles” and denied wings. The top angels were small babies who’d survived only a day or two.

He’d called it “Only the Young Fly Good.”

That one I’d pulled out for the memorial book — grim and ironic as it was, it had humor.

I fastened the photos to it with a paper clip and shoved them in the top drawer.

I had a free study period before I was due down at the Deems’. There was a Latin test coming up, and I got out Cicero and began working my way through one of his senate speeches.

At two o’clock Rinaldo came staggering into my room with the top half of the word processor.

“The typewriter’s out in the hall, Fell.”

I brought it in while Rinaldo set everything up for me.

“You’re getting a bargain,” he said. “If I had time to learn it, I’d keep it for myself.”

“Have you tried it out?”

“How would I try it out when I don’t know how it works? I just know how it’s put together, from taking it apart when Lasher gave it to me.”

I checked to be sure the tutorial was in it; then I asked Rinaldo, “When did you two become such good friends?”

He gave me an exasperated look. Under his duffel coat he had on his work clothes: the black pants, white shirt, black plastic bow tie.

“We weren’t good friends, Fell, and everyone knows it. We weren’t friends at all. Are you fishing, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Walk down the hall with me,” he said. “I want to show you some things in Lasher’s room.”

I walked with him while he told me the arrangement he’d made with Dib to pay him for the Smith-Corona.

“If it was disc instead of tape, you’d have paid a lot more,” he said. “That model’s out-of-date now. Lasher had a new computer ordered.”

“A Porsche, a new computer. Why would he — ”

Rinaldo didn’t let me finish. “I know what you’re going to say. Lauren Lasher filled me in on all your theories. They’re right up there with her mother’s
mierda
about hormones causing suicide.”

“Lack
of hormones,” I said.

“Either way.”

We were in Lasher’s room then.

“Look around this place,” Rinaldo said.

There was one lone poster left on the wall: Uncle Sam pointing his finger as he did on recruitment billboards. Under him:
Join the Army. Visit strange and exotic places. Meet fascinating people. And kill them.

There were dozens of cartons packed with books marked for the Gardner Library. The closets were open and empty. In one corner there was a leather massager recliner, which Rinaldo kicked gently with one foot. “This has a built-in AM/FM/cassette stereo player,” he said. “It cost about two thousand dollars.”

He pointed to a walnut pants presser by the window. “That’s a Corby Pants Press,” he said. “Around two hundred and fifty dollars…. Want to look in the bedroom a minute?”

“What’s there?”

“A Lifecycle,” he said. “It has a matrix of sixty-four light displays changing terrain as you ride. It gives you pedaling speed, elapsed time, and calories you’re burning. Costs about one thousand five.”

“What’s your point, Rinaldo?”

“There’s no mystery here, Fell,” he said. “You wonder why he gave stuff to me. He felt like it. Who would he give it to? No one liked him. Compared to what he had, he gave me a few little peanuts. He did it on impulse, the same way he bought all this like he could buy his happiness. He
pissed
money away, Fell. His family’s, his own.”

I nodded. “I can see he did.”

“Money didn’t mean anything. He made a pile of it every weekend down on Playwicky Road, playing cards. You know he had an apartment there? Number six Playwicky. That’s where he went weekends he didn’t go home. Ask Kidder.”

The apartment was news to me. I said, “I believe you.”

“Finally they’re believing Rinaldo.” He moved over to the couch and began sorting through jackets and pants piled there. “I told Creery’s stepbrother:
Listen!
Rinaldo does not know zilch about any letter.
Nada!
… Look at these clothes, Fell. Where am I going to wear stuff of this kind? Am I going to strut around at a dance looking like some
blanco
preppy? You want to buy anything here?”

“I have to pay you for the word processor, remember?” I said. “Is that what’s bothering Creery? He thinks you have the copy of the letter he wrote?”

“He thinks. His stepbrother thinks. But not anymore. I set them straight this morning. H
ola,
look at this suit, Fell! All this good cashmere and it’s cut like a tent!”

“Rinaldo, why do they think
you’ve
got the copy of the letter?”

“They
thought.
They don’t think it now…. Because he gave me his things, they thought he gave me his confidences. You ask me, nobody got those.”

“Did you hear the fight between Creery and Lasher?”

“All the way in the kitchen! Sure! Lasher said he had the letter and Creery said, Were you going through my things?
Sweat
it, Lasher shouts, and he tries to whistle ‘Twilight Time.’ Then POW! I heard the smack Creery gave him, too. But they were always at it!”

“Who was in The Tower that afternoon?”

“You think I know? I
said
I was in the kitchen. Most of The Sevens had classes, gym … You sure you don’t want to buy something here, Fell? I’ll give you credit.”

“I don’t want to wear his clothes,” I said. “You wear somebody’s clothes, you get their luck, too.”

“I never heard that,” Rinaldo said. I wasn’t surprised, since I’d just made it up. “Only thing I heard is you give someone shoes, they walk away from you.”

He laughed and gave my shoulder a punch. “I gave a girl some of those stilt-heel pumps with no toes? She danced out of my life like a tornado leaving a Kansas barn on the ground in little pieces.”

I said, “One danced out of my life the same way, and I hadn’t given her anything.”

“Maybe that’s why,” said Rinaldo.

We shut the door behind us, and I went back to put Cicero away and get into my boots and coat.

I checked a Cottersville map to see where Jericho Road was and to figure out my bus route to the Deems’.

I noticed that Playwicky was two streets down from where I was going.