To the Manor Dead (16 page)

I headed down River
Road on my way to the Rhinebeck police station to talk to Charlie Dunn. Armed with Ethel’s bourbon-fueled admissions, I thought I might be able to pry some information out of him. Then I remembered it was Wednesday and that the blood Livingstons were meeting with Vince at his lawyer’s office up in the Albany. It couldn’t hurt to take one more look around Daphne’s place.

I turned down the drive and drove through the decrepitude that was Westward Farm—rusting machinery, crumbling outbuildings, overgrown fields. The ruined romance of the place was starting to grow on me. I parked in high weeds behind an old garage uphill from the house, so I could sneak out unseen if I had to. The afternoon had grown more muggy, the sky hazier. Summer was settling in. And summer in the valley brought consuming heat and humidity, transforming the northern landscape into something close to southern gothic, a jungle of green vines and lazy animals, a slow-motion dance, full of languid longing and nameless lurking sorrow.

I headed down through the garden to the summerhouse. I stepped inside and looked around. Nothing had been touched, it was the same—an eccentric folly that had been allowed to slide into Gray Gardens decay. But there was something intangible in the air that I hadn’t noticed before and I was struck by a memory …

When I was twelve, the boozy, defeated, put-upon aunt I was living with out on Long Island cribbed together enough money to send me to this ratty camp somewhere in the Poconos for two weeks. I’d say it was a sweet gesture, but she just wanted me out of the house so she could drink in peace. The camp was full of other screwed-up, farmed-out kids with no interest in archery, braiding lariats, or singing lame-ass songs (though we all dug gorging on the ’smores—especially after sucking down a doobie). The main activity at the place was sex—the counselors all fucked like bunnies, and we ragingly hormonal campers cared only about making out, heavy petting, going
thisclose
to all the way, and then comparing detailed notes on same. The greatest challenge at camp, aside from winning the sack race, was finding safe secretive places for all this hanky-panky. Over the years several tryst spots had obtained near-mystical status, as in “I squeezed Johnny’s dick under the kitchen” (the rickety wooden buildings were all built on lattice-covered platforms, providing commodious crawl spaces easily accessed by horny adolescents) or “Linda let Ricky lick her
down there
out at the pine tree” or “Judy went down on Phil in the dead cabin.” The dead cabin was an abandoned, collapsing hut reached by a serpentine trail through the woods. Summers of teenage bodies writhing, squeezing, and licking had left it littered with cigarette butts, beer cans, used condoms, and with a peculiar pungent smell, a mix of sweat and lust and loss.

Looking around the summerhouse where Daphne had died, I realized it reminded me of the dead cabin. There was a hint of that smell, pulled out of the old wood by the humidity. This was an abandoned place, too, one that had been adopted by Daphne to fulfill
her
secret lusts.

I sat on the flimsy wicker chair and looked out at the river. It was wide and slow and green; on the far bank Sawyerville spilled gently up the hill. I imagined Daphne out here, getting high, looking out at a view that was imprinted on her subconscious—one of the first things she had ever seen, and the last. I thought of her long wild life, of her sympathy and yearning, of the way she had sipped her wine and run her fingertip along the rim of the New Orleans glass.

I got up and began another search of the summerhouse, poring through the piles of leaves and mouse droppings, turning over the wicker furniture. Nothing. I stepped outside and began a widening concentric search of the surrounding lawn. I was on my third circle when I spotted something small and gray and cylindrical. I knelt down—a hypodermic needle. I gingerly picked it up, wrapped it in tissue, and slipped it into a plastic sandwich bag.

I headed up to the house. Downstairs, everything looked the same. Up in Daphne’s bedroom someone had finally taken away the toast and tea, but otherwise things looked untouched. The room was starting to smell ripe—old clothes, old wine, old sweat, and that faint swampy whiff. I began one more methodical search. I opened all her dresser drawers, poked through her lingerie, scarves, sweaters. I cased the closet and bathroom, opening boxes and cabinets. I looked under the furniture and in the desk. Everything was ancient, from exclusive stores, of the highest quality, had a dreamy patina. It was a living museum of a fallen aristocrat.

I knelt down and slid my hand under the mattress. I hit something. I stood up and pulled up one side of the mattress, revealing a stash of photographs. I scooped them up and dropped the mattress. I sat on the edge of the bed and examined the photos.

They were taken with one of those old Polaroids. They were all of Daphne. All black and white. All recent. All riveting.

They showed her in black hose, garter belt, thong panties, bra, heels. Old flesh, fresh lust. There she was leaning over the vanity chair, ass out; standing legs spread with her fists on her hips; sitting wide in the chair with one foot up on the desk. In other shots she was wearing less and less, the poses more and more provocative. In each of them she was staring right into the camera, by turns defiant, seductive, dominant, submissive—but always looking out from another world, an outcast from this one, brave and lost and determined to grab onto some essence of life, sensation, feeling.

I was almost at the bottom of the stack when I came to the pictures taken out in the summerhouse.

Okay, so Daphne was
still getting it on—quite spectacularly—at age seventy-something. Good for her. A lot of women have it happening well into old age. I had a client named Sadie who was in her eighties and picked up men at senior-citizen centers all over Brooklyn. The question here was: who took these pictures? And did he (or she) have something to do with Daphne’s murder?

I pocketed the photos and headed downstairs. I walked into the parlor to find Maggie, with Rodent cradled on her naked hip, standing in front of an enormous portrait.

“See, baby girl, that’s your great-grandma,” Maggie was saying. The woman in the painting was imperious and patrician, standing beside the fireplace in this same parlor, looking out with a gaze that said, “Don’t even
think
about messing with me.”

“Hi,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Howdy,” Maggie said with a big goofy smile, seeming not at all surprised to see me. She had a huge joint dangling from her free hand. Say what you will about potheads, they
are
mellow. “I’m giving Rodent a tour of this side of the house.”

Rodent had wide blue eyes, was pudgy and pinchable, and looked like she hadn’t seen soap and water in weeks.

“So that’s Daphne’s mother?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s the old bitch,” Maggie said, taking a deep suck on her joint. “She treated God like shit … By the way, who are you?”

“I’m Janet, we met a few weeks ago, I’m a friend of Daphne’s.”

“Oh … Daphne’s dead.”

“I know. I’m trying to find out how she died.”

Maggie gave me a significant look. Then she put Rodent down. The tyke immediately ran into the middle of a priceless Oriental carpet, squatted down, and proudly peed. “I think she likes to mark her turf,” Maggie confided. “Now, where were we?”

“We were talking about Daphne’s death, how she died.”

“She killed herself, she strung herself up from a beam down in the summerhouse.” Maggie tilted her head and examined me for a second. “Shit, that’s right!
You
found her.”

“Yes.”

“So why are you trying to figure out how she died?”

“I’m not sure she killed herself.”

“You mean … somebody else killed her?”

I nodded.

“But isn’t that murder?”

And the seasons, they go round and round …

“Do you remember that morning?” I asked.

“I don’t remember
this
morning.” She laughed and took another big toke. Rodent had climbed up into a priceless wing-backed chair and was bouncing up and down. I heard wood crack. “’Course all my mornings are the same. Me and Godfrey make woo-woo.”

“Okay.”

“He says he can’t work on his map without his morning muff.” She laughed uproariously. In fact she couldn’t stop laughing. Her flesh jiggled, every last roll. Rodent picked up a priceless figurine and flung it down to the floor, where it smashed into a million little pieces. She started laughing too, which only added to Maggie’s merriment. Encouraged, Rodent smashed another priceless figurine. I just stood there, waiting for the hilarity to subside.

It took a while—and a few more figurines.

Maggie finally wound down, but she was left tuckered out, so she plotzed down to the floor, her legs splayed out in front of her. Rodent ran over and leapt into her arms.

“You know what, actually?” she said finally, looking up at me. “There was something weird that day … at least I think it was that day … after me and God were done, I was down in the kitchen cutting myself a slice of Entenmann’s … damn, I could use a slice of Entenmann’s right now … what’s your favorite Entenmann’s?”

“Raspberry cheese Danish.”

“No, shit!! I fuckin’
love
raspberry cheese Danish.” She looked at me like we’d just discovered we were long-lost sisters. “
Wow
… we made a connection … intense.” Rodent was climbing up Maggie’s body, using the fleshy crevices for toeholds.

“So you were saying about that day … ?”

“What day?”

“The day Daphne died.”

“Oh yeah. I looked out the kitchen window and I saw like
a
man
come out of the woods and go into the summerhouse.” Rodent had clambered onto Maggie’s shoulders and her chubby hands were wrapped around her forehead.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“What did who look like?”

“The man you saw go into the summerhouse.”

“He looked like … a man.”

“That’s great, but was he white, black, Asian? Old, young? Tall, short, fat, thin, blond, bald, redhead?”

“
Whoa, sista!
You just asked like forty questions at one time,” Maggie said, and then she giggled. “That’s weird.”

“I want ride, I want ride, I want ride!” Rodent chanted, grabbing hanks of Maggie’s hair and pulling.

“Seriously, Maggie, can you remember anything about his looks?”

“I want ride, I want ride!”

“Just a second, Rodent, aunt Maggie is thinking … hmmm, let’s see—he had legs and arms and a head …”

“What was he wearing?”

“He was wearing … clothes.”

“What kind of clothes?”

“Shit, my joint went out, gotta light?”

“I want ride, I want ride!”

“Maggie, this is important, please try and remember something about what the man looked like.”

She looked at me and opened her eyes wide. “This is heavy, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Okay, I’d say he was … kinda young … yeah, kinda young … I think maybe he had a hat on so I couldn’t see his face or tell for sure how old he was. ”

“Gimme ride!!”

Maggie lumbered to her feet with Rodent on board.

“I gotta go find a light.”

“You can’t remember anything else?”

“I’m pretty sure he was solid, like muscles, and tall … but he might have been short.”

“Giddyup!”

“Isn’t she the cutest little tidbit?” Maggie said, trotting out of the room shouting, “Hold on there, pard’ner, hold on!”