The Cold Blue Blood (3 page)

“Congratulations!” he had exclaimed. “Maisie … ?”

“Yes, my sweet baboo?”

“What
is
the Fibonacci Series?” The influence of German Expressionism on the noir films of Robert Siodmak Mitch understood. Maisie’s work he never did.

“Why, it’s a variation of the Golden Section.”

“Which is … ?”

“A basic mathematical system of proportion dating back to the Greek temple structures. Le Corbusier based his Modular system on it. It’s defined geometrically as a line that is divided such that the lesser portion is to the greater as the greater is to the whole.”

“And the Fibonacci Series … ?”

“Is a variation using whole numbers. Each representing the sum of the two preceding numbers. So instead of counting out
one,
two
,
three, four, five,
you count out
one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen
and so on. Just
imagine
it as a planting pattern of grasses spanning some two hundred acres.
Imagine
it from the air.” Maisie sighed. “If only one were a bird.”

“If only.”

Maisie Lawrenson was in a landscape architecture firm down on Duane Street with four other young women, all of them Harvard Graduate School of Design alums. All of them were smart, which was not necessarily synonymous with being a Harvard graduate. All of them were pretty, although in Mitch’s opinion Maisie was far and away the prettiest. She was a tall, slender blonde who dressed in loosely flowing linen and silk things and was in a perpetual hurry.

He had met her on Fire Island at the Fair Harbor dock. The first words he said to her were, “Are you waiting for the ferry?” The first words she said to him were, “You’re not supposed to call them that anymore—they prefer to be known as alternative water craft.” Within three weeks they had moved in together. They had been married nearly two years when they went away to Mohonk that weekend. They did not believe each other to be perfect. She felt he was among the socially lost, a brooder, a screening-room rat, a slob. He felt she could be impulsive and rash—Polyanna in Arche sandals. But she was his Maisie.

Until that Monday morning when they got back from Mohonk and he found out he was going to lose her. It was ovarian cancer. The silent killer, they called it, because there were no early warning signs. First they removed her ovaries. Then they put her on chemo. When her lovely blond hair fell out Mitch bought her a Yankee cap to wear. To this day whenever he saw a kid on the street wearing a Yankee cap he would start crying. She was gone in six months. She was thirty years old.

Mitch had a sister in Denver, parents in Florida, colleagues, pals. He had nobody. It was Maisie who had brought him out of his shell. She was his lifeline. Without her, he was achingly, crushingly alone.

Some mornings, he could barely will himself to get out of bed. The future terrified him. On several occasions, he had awakened with a gasp in the night, his heart racing and fluttering out of control. His doctor had diagnosed it as anxiety. He advised Mitch to seek counseling. Which Mitch had. His counselor had advised Mitch to find some way to relax. That was how he’d ended up with the Stratocaster. He had taken up the guitar in high school, briefly, in the hope that it would enable him to meet girls. Another fervid illusion shattered. But he had enjoyed the playing.

As he inched his way now over the Triborough Bridge onto the Bruckner Expressway, Mitch helped himself to a cupcake and glanced at the travel kit he’d been given. His destination was the historic Frederick House Inn in historic Dorset, which was situated on the Long Island Sound at the mouth of the historic Connecticut River.

It does not take very long, Mitch reflected grumpily, for the word
historic
to get
old.

It started to drizzle when he was crawling along outside of swank Greenwich on I-95. By the time he had made it to Westport he had managed to figure out how to work his windshield wipers, which was a good thing because it was pouring now. And the temperature had dropped markedly. Beyond Fairfield, upscale suburbia gave way to the downscale rust belt of Bridgeport and New Haven, where he ran out of cupcakes. Then Mitch crossed the Quinnipiac River and officially entered Southern New England. The foliage got thicker, the traffic thinner. It was getting dark by the time he reached Exit 69, which was the last exit before the Connecticut River. He wanted Exit 70, but he got in the wrong lane and instead of crossing the river he somehow ended up on Route 9, heading due north toward Hartford. He was halfway to East Haddam before he figured out what he’d done and managed to double back. As a result, it was pitch black by the time he finally set eyes on Dorset.

The town was utterly asleep. Mitch had a funny feeling it would look exactly the same when it was wide awake.

A stand of trees shielded the Frederick House Inn from the road. A broad circular driveway led to the front door of the three-story house, which had been built in 1756. There were eleven rooms, each furnished with antiques. There was a fireplace in the dining room. Chilled, Mitch warmed himself in front of the fire with a generous jolt of Bushmill. He was too late for dinner. In fact, the dining room was technically closed. But the innkeeper managed to assemble a plate of cold sausages, lentil salad and rolls for him.

Afterward, he went upstairs to his snug little room and drew a bubble bath for himself in the claw-footed tub. As it filled Mitch stripped off his clothes and gazed at himself in the mirror. He was not terrible-looking. He was not bald. He was not short. His weight generally fluctuated between burly and pudgy, depending on his intake of sweets. Right now, pudgy was winning out. Still, he was not in bad shape for someone who spent most of his waking hours sitting in a dark room on his butt. He sucked in his stomach and puffed out his chest and flexed his tattooed right bicep in the mirror. His tattoo said:
Rocky Dies Yellow
. He grinned at his reflection, a brave, jaunty grin reminiscent of Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
. This was something he had taken to doing lately. His way of assuring himself that he was going to be okay.

I am laughing in the face of danger.

After his bath Mitch burrowed into his canopied bed with a collection of Manny Farber’s film columns from the fifties. Briefly, he was absorbed by the cranky iconoclast’s brilliant dissection of the films of Budd Boetticher. But before long Mitch found his mind drifting and he set the volume aside and lay there listening to the rain and thinking the same thing he thought every night as he lay in bed alone:

I am so glad I do not own a gun for my personal protection. Because if I had one I would shoot myself.

CHAPTER 2

SCARY SPICE WOKE UP Des at 3:59 A.M. It had taken the little vixen less than a week to master the subtle complexities of the textbook head-butt technique: First, climb directly onto human target’s chest. Next, knead said human’s chest firmly and insistently with front paws. Purr. Then tickle target’s face with whiskers. And, finally, butt heads until target groans.

Des groaned, feeling as if her own head had only just hit the pillow. It had. She’d worked late and squeezed in only four hours of sleep. Maybe she was too wedded to her job. Maybe there was no maybe about it. Yawning hugely, she fumbled for her horn-rimmed glasses and flicked on the nightstand light, blinking at the rest of the original Spice Girls—Ginger, Sporty, Posh and Baby. Tabby shorthairs, all of them. Predominately gray. Three months old. And maddeningly perky and bright-eyed, considering the hour. She and Bella had rescued them from the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse in Shelton two weeks ago. Within days they had become snug muffins.

There was no man in her bed. No man in her life. Des Mitry was off men right now, having concluded that they were vastly overrated as a species. They required huge outlays of attention, care, feeding and patience and all you got back in return from them was a full laundry hamper, an empty refrigerator and a bladder infection. Nothing good came of them. Not one thing. So Des was going it alone for the foreseeable future. She was not looking for a relationship. In fact, she was the happiest she’d ever been, even though absolutely no one believed her. Single women were not supposed to be happy. That was one of the bedrock myths of modern American society, right up there with the invincibility of four-wheel drive, the great taste of lite beer and the guarantee of equal justice for all.

She did not make the bed. After four years at West Point, Des took great, sinful pleasure in having a sloppy, unmade bed. For her it was a feeling comparable to that of sinking into a hot bubble bath with a flute of cold Moët and Robert Cray crying his heart out on her stereo. She stretched her lower back and touched her toes, her dreadlocks brushing the floor. She stripped off her T-shirt and hung it on the back of the master bathroom door. She dressed in sweatpants and a New York Giants jersey.

Barefoot, she padded downstairs and into the kitchen to put the coffee on, the Spice Girls meowing in harmony as they tripped over her ankles and one another in starved, eager pursuit. The house was a three-bedroom raised ranch on a dead-end road in Woodbridge, a woodsy suburb of New Haven that was popular with Yale mathematicians and lab geeks, many of whom were Asian or Middle Eastern. The assorted cooking smells were unbelievable when Des managed to get in a jog at suppertime. It was a family neighborhood. Other than Bella, her next-door neighbor, Des was the only person on the block who lived alone.

Des also happened to be the only person on the block who was black.

She and Brandon bought the place right after they got married. They built themselves a redwood deck onto the back, complete with hot tub. Remodeled the kitchen. Refinished the oak floors. Invested in fine furniture of leather and teak. It was a home to be proud of when they were done with it. It was their Love Shack. And Des did think about unloading it after the bust-up, finding someplace smaller. It was certainly more house than she needed. But she’d have to pay a whopping tax bill if she did that, so why not keep it? The overhead was manageable. It was a half-hour drive from work. And she enjoyed taking care of it. Particularly the acre and a half of yard. She did all of the outdoor work herself. Des absolutely loved riding around on her mower. Actually, it was not natural how much Des loved that Toro. She was starting to become convinced that in a previous life she had been an Iowa hog farmer.

She put down food for the girls while the coffee was brewing. Then she checked on the rest of her guests. Spinderella, Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim and Jam Master Jay were getting along just fine in her basement, one to a padded crate. Milli Vanilli—Fab and Rob—had the garage to themselves since they could only seem to get along with each other. Those two had been full-grown adults when Des rescued them. The adult feral strays were the hardest. It took time to earn their trust. It took patience and gentleness. A lot of her new arrivals had to be kept somewhere solitary and small, like her guest bathroom, for several weeks before they were ready to venture out. Right now, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, a surly black strutter, was decompressing in her mud room. She went in and spent a couple of minutes with him on her knees, her hand stretched out to him, softly cooing, “Your father must be hydrogen, because you da bomb, Daddy.” She said that to him every morning and night, and every morning and night he hissed and swatted at her outstretched hand. He would eat her food and drink her water but he would not let her near him.

This did not deter Des, who was partial to the ungrateful badasses. She regarded them as a challenge. She loved a challenge.

The average life span of a feral stray was less than two years. They battled starvation, disease, predators and one another. But in spite of this they managed to reproduce at such an appallingly high rate that the animal shelters were unable to keep up. It was a crisis. Crises called for action. And so Des and Bella were taking action. To date, they had rescued over forty feral strays. They took them straight to the local vet, Dr. John, who promptly checked them over for worms and ear mites and vaccinated them against distemper, rabies and feline leukemia. He also neutered them—all this free of charge. Dr. John applauded Des and Bella’s concern. He was also partial to Des’s form, especially when she was in her spandex running tights.

Right now, Des could hear Bella’s garage door opening. It was time to move out. They’d gotten a tip: Donna in produce at the A & P on Amity Road had overheard her manager—a real dick—say that he was going to call the animal shelter people about the half-dozen adult strays that were hanging around the Dumpsters out back. The animal shelter was a kill facility. Consequently, such a pronouncement was akin to genocide.

Consequently, Des and Bella were on Dawn Patrol.

Des grabbed her coffee and headed on out into the predawn darkness with it. Bella was waiting for her behind the wheel of her Jeep Wrangler in her driveway, engine idling, the back crowded with cages, have-a-heart traps and food. The personalized license plate on Bella’s Jeep read
CATS22.

“Hey, girl,” Des said as she hopped in.

“Hey back at you,” Bella exclaimed brightly, her chubby fists gripping the wheel. “Desiree, how is it that you manage to look so gorgeous at five o’clock in the morning?”

“Um, okay, you forgot to put your contact lenses in again, Bella. I’d better drive.”

“I mean it, Desiree,” she insisted, handing her a shopping bag from her lap. “Stuffed cabbage. I made it last night. Just heat it and eat it.”

“Bella, why do you keep feeding me?” Des objected, smiling at her.

“Because you’re a healthy young girl and you need to eat. I don’t want to see you turn into some little wasted thing like that Ally McBeal person.”

“That I would pay to see,” laughed Des, who was six-foot-one in her stockinged feet, broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle.

Bella Tillis, on the other hand, was an inch under five feet tall and totally round, a feisty, silver-haired little bowling ball of a Brooklyn Jewish widow in her early seventies. Her late husband, Morris, had been on the Yale Medical School faculty. Bella had three kids scattered around the Northeast, eight grandchildren and nine million causes. Around Woodbridge she was known as the Queen of Petition drives. Lately, she had been harnessing her considerable energies toward raising money for a No Kill shelter.