The Lemur (11 page)

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Authors: Benjamin Black

Tags: #Family Life, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

BOOK: The Lemur
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A voice spoke from the depths of the room: “What about special rendition?” They turned and peered, all three, and David Sinclair came strolling out of the shadows, tossing something small and shiny from one palm to the other. He was smiling. “Surely you could arrange a little thing like that, Granddad.”
 
TERRI WITH AN
I
 
I
n the morning Glass was sitting after breakfast on the little wrought-iron balcony outside the drawing room, savoring in solitude a third cigarette and a fourth cup of coffee, when his stepson reappeared. Glass had to struggle not to show his annoyance. Usually he was the only one who used the balcony, sharing it with rust and spiderwebs and a few moldering remnants of last autumn’s leaves. Below him was a courtyard—a courtyard, in Manhattan!—and a little garden with ailanthus and silver birch and dogwood, and other green and brown things he did not know the names of. On certain days in all seasons a very old man in a leather apron was to be seen down there, scraping at the gravel with a rake, slow and careful as a Japanese monk. Today the sun was shining weakly, like an invalid venturing out after a long, bedridden winter, but spring had arrived at last, and now and then a silken shimmery something would come sprinting through the trees, silvering the new buds and shivering the windowpanes of the apartments opposite and then going suddenly still, like children stopping in the middle of a chasing game. The square of sky above the courtyard was a pale and grainy blue.
Glass thought of Dylan Riley with his eye shot through; there would be no more spring mornings for him.
“So this is where you hide yourself,” David Sinclair said.
Although he had his own duplex over by Columbus Circle the young man often spent the night at what he insisted on referring to as his mother’s apartment, no doubt imagining that he was thereby neatly excising Glass from the domestic circle. He stood in the open French windows now, smiling down on his stepfather with that particular mixture of mockery and self-satisfaction that never failed to set Glass’s teeth on edge and that was so hard to challenge or deflect. This morning he was dressed in cream slacks and a cream silk shirt and two-tone brown-and-cream shoes with perforated toecaps. A cricket sweater with a pale blue stripe along the neck was draped over his shoulders. He was on his way to a squash game. With his slicked-down hair and those protuberant, little black eyes he bore a strong resemblance to a cartoon Cole Porter.
“Good morning,” Glass said coldly.
Sinclair laughed, and stepped onto the balcony and edged around the little metal table and sat down on a wrought-iron chair. He crossed one knee on the other and laced his fingers together in his lap and happily contemplated his stepfather, who was still rumpled from sleep, and also a little hungover from the four or five whiskeys he had drunk sitting alone on the sofa last night after the rest of the household had gone to bed.
“You’ve certainly upset, Granddad,” the young man said lightly. “What were you thinking of?”
Below, a flock of lacquered, dark brown birds came swooping down from somewhere and settled vexatiously among the ailanthus boughs, windmilling their wings and making a raucous, clockwork chattering.
Glass lit another cigarette and put the pack and his lighter on the table before him. “Have you started your new job yet?” he asked, watching the busy birds.
David Sinclair reached out and took Glass’s lighter from the table and sat back and began to lob it from hand to hand, as he had done the night before with whatever it was he had been carrying then. “Not yet. Mother isn’t quite as ready to relinquish the reins as she likes to pretend. You know how she is.” He smiled, arching an eyebrow; his tone and look suggested he did not for a moment believe his stepfather knew how his mother “was” about the presidency of the Mulholland Trust, or about anything much else, for that matter.
“It’s a large thing she’s doing for you,” Glass said heavily. “I hope you realize that. I hope you acknowledge it, too, now and then.”
The young man’s smile broadened in delight; he loved to irritate his stepfather. He played on Glass’s sensibilities with virtuosic skill, tinkling all the right keys and pressing the pedals at just the right intervals.
“But tell me about this Riley business,” Sinclair said. “A murder, no less, and practically in the family! Do the police know who did it, or why?”
“I don’t know what the police know. They don’t tell me.”
Sinclair was regarding him with malicious glee. “Are you a suspect?”
“Why would I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. While he was poking around in Billuns’s murky world this Riley might have found out something about
you,
that you would rather he hadn’t. Hmm?”
Glass gazed at him, and drew on his cigarette and turned away and blew a stream of smoke out over the metal balcony rail with a show of indifference. Once, when he and Louise were not long married, he had hit his stepson. He could not now remember the exact circumstances. He had said something to the boy, reproved him in some way, and David had sworn at him, and before he could stop himself he had struck the little bastard openhanded across the jaw. It had not been a serious blow, but David had never forgiven him for it—understandably, Glass had to admit. He would have liked to hit him again now, not in passion, not in anger, even, but judiciously, flicking out a fist and catching him a quick jab under the eye, or at the side of that fine-boned nose that was so like his mother’s, to knock it out of alignment.
“Do you know my father?” Sinclair asked. “
Mister
Sinclair, the pride of Wall Street?” He seemed to find all titles irresistibly funny.
“I’ve met him,” Glass said warily. “I wouldn’t say I know him.”
The young man turned his face aside and looked down into the courtyard where the birds had intensified their ransacking of the birches and the dogwood trees, as if they were trying to shake something out of them. He must have been reading Glass’s thoughts, for now he said: “He used to beat my mother.” Glass stared. “Didn’t she tell you? Oh, not badly. Just a slap or a punch, now and then. I think he was hotheaded”—he turned back—“like you. I tried to intervene, once. I was only a kid. I bit his hand and he tried to throw me out the window. We were in the Waldorf=Astoria, on the eighteenth floor. He would have done it, too, only the window didn’t open. It was the day after Clinton was elected the first time, so I suppose he was feeling sore.” He smiled. “He’s not a Democrat, as you probably know.”
Glass cleared his throat and stood up, the metal legs of his chair scraping on the balcony’s concrete floor. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I have work waiting.”
Sinclair was looking up at him, with his insinuating smile, his head on one side. “Of course,” he said softly. “Of course you do.”
Glass had stepped through the French windows into the drawing room when Sinclair called after him: “Oh,
Da
-ad?”
“Yes?”
“Here.” He held out his hand. “You forgot your lighter.”
It was rush hour, and Glass had trouble finding a taxi. The streets were electric with spring’s sudden overnight arrival, and the trees crowding at the edge of the Park looked as if they were preparing to surge over the railings and set off on a march for the East River. Louise had stopped Glass at the elevator to say that she and David and her father were going out to Bridgehampton, and asked if he wanted to come with them. He said perhaps he would, but later; he did not know if he could face being stranded on Long Island and subject to his father-in-law’s steely geniality and his stepson’s smiling contempt.
In the lobby of Mulholland Tower he was about to show his pass to the electronic eye at the turnstile when Harry on the security desk spoke his name and waved him over. “You got a caller, Mr. Glass.” Harry pointed. “She been waiting an hour.” She was sitting on a bench under the brass wall plaque with its portrait in relief of Big Bill Mulholland’s handsome profile. She looked familiar yet Glass could not say for the moment who she was. She seemed tiny and lost in that great echoing marble space. She wore a crooked skirt and a short, flowered blouse, and a man’s rat-colored raincoat three or four sizes too big for her. He walked across to her, and she stood up hurriedly, fumbling her hands out of the pockets of the raincoat. Her midriff was bare, and she had a metal stud in her navel. “I’m Terri,” she said. “Terri Taylor.”
“Ah, yes,” Glass said, remembering—the Lemur’s girlfriend. “Terri with an
i
.”
She gave a forlorn, small smile, gnawing her lip at one side. She had freckles and prominent front teeth, and her long straight hair was dyed black, badly. They stood a moment contemplating each other, both equally at a loss. He asked if she would like to come up to his office, but she shook her head quickly. Maybe they would go out and get a cup of coffee, then? “Let’s just walk,” she said. They went into the street. He was about to put a hand under her elbow but thought better of it. She gave a snuffly laugh. “I seem to have done nothing else but walk, since …” She let her voice trail off.
Playful gusts of wind swooped along the street. A DHL delivery man, talking rapidly to himself, wheeled a loaded pallet into an open doorway. A dreadlocked derelict in a St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt was arguing with a fat policeman. Beside a storm drain three ragged sparrows were fighting over a lump of bagel as big as themselves. Glass smiled to himself. New York.
“How are you managing?” he asked. He was wondering why she had come to him, what she might want. “It must be tough.”
“Oh, I’m all right, I guess,” she said. She had wrapped the raincoat tight around herself; it must have been Riley’s. She was pigeon-toed, and her legs were bare, and mottled a little, from the cold. “Dylan and I hadn’t been together long. Just since Christmas. We met on Christmas Eve, at a party at Wino’s.” She looked up at him sideways. “You know it, Wino’s? Cool place.” She nodded, swallowing hard. “Dylan liked it there.” Now she sniffed. He hoped she was not going to cry.
“Have you got people here?” he asked. “Family?”
“No. I’m from Des Moines. Des Moines, Iowa?” She laughed. “Insurance capital of the world. You should see it, the buildings, every one of them owned by an insurance company. Jeez.”
They sidestepped a jumbo dog turd—must have been a Great Dane, at least, Glass estimated—and arrived at Madison Avenue. He had never got used to the surprise of turning off tranquil little side streets onto these great boulevards surging with mad-eyed shoppers and herds of taxis and bawling police cars.
“He liked you, you know,” Terri Taylor said. “Dylan, I mean—he liked you.”
“Did he?” Glass said, trying not to sound incredulous.
“He said you were one of his heroes. He had cuttings of things you wrote, a whole file of them. He was just thrilled you had asked him to work for you—he was like a kid.
John Glass
, he kept saying,
just imagine it, John Glass!”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Was he? He was not sure. “I’m flattered.”
“That’s how he was. He was an
enthusiast
, Mr. Glass. A real
enthusiast.
”
Glass was recalling the Lemur sprawled in the leather chair in his office that day up there on the thirty-ninth floor, smirking, and working his jaws on an imaginary wad of gum and clawing at the fork of his drooping jeans; women see their men as other men never see them.
“Have you any idea who … who might have … ?”
She shook her head vehemently, pressing her lips so tightly together they went white. “It’s crazy,” she said. “Just crazy. Who would have wanted to do such a terrible thing? He didn’t harm anybody. He was just a big kid, playing his computer games, surfing the Web and gathering things.” She laughed. “You know, my granddad still has the baseball cards he collected when he was a school kid? He has them all there, in a shoe box, under his bed, shows them to anyone who’ll listen to him. Baseball cards! I threw my Barbies in the trash can when I was ten.”
Glass hesitated. “Any idea,” he ventured, the pavement turning to eggshells under his feet, “any idea what sort of things Dylan gathered about
me
?”
They had come to the corner of Forty-fifth. A squat little woman in an outsized fur coat leading a dachshund on a jeweled leash walked forward against a red light and a taxi screeched to a halt and the driver, another Rastafarian—dreadlocks again—lifted his hands from the wheel and threw back his head and laughed furiously, his teeth gleaming. Terri Taylor smiled, watching the scene. “What?” she said, turning to Glass. The light turned to WALK, and they walked.
“Only he phoned me, you see,” Glass said. “Apparently he had stumbled on something, I don’t know what it was, though he seemed to think it was … significant.”
“What sort of thing?”
“That’s the point—I don’t know.”
She pondered. They were passing by a bookshop, and a man inside turned to the young woman who was with him and pointed at Glass and said something to her, and the young woman gazed out at Glass with blank interest. There were still people who remembered him, from the days, so far off now, when he had been briefly, mildly, famous.
“I thought,” Terri Taylor said, “you hired him to do research on your father-in-law, not on you?” She was puzzled; she did not know what he was asking her.

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