Nemesis

  Quickly, Maggie said, “Of course not. But if Calvin had been somehow involved—in a way or ways we don’t know about—he might know who did kill him, or have some idea. He might.…”

  Maggie’s voice trailed off into ineffectual silence.

  She would not tell Lichtman that Calvin Gould had dedicated one of his books “to R.C.: with infinite thanks”; or that, though Calvin had said he’d been a student at Interlaken the summer following Rolfe Christensen’s position there, in 1967, he had in fact been a student during Christensen’s residence, in 1966; or that, at the end of the season, there had been a fire of mysterious origin in one of the local hotels—suspected arson, though the arsonist was never found. It all seemed so preposterous, suddenly, the very contemplation of it left her dazed and bewildered.

  Maggie rose to leave, and Lichtman hurriedly stubbed out his cigarette and walked her to the door. He said, “Would you like to meet again, Maggie, to discuss this? Shall I call you?” Maggie murmured a vague unencouraging reply, for her colleague had been staring at her rather intently these past several minutes, and she did not, in fact, think he had anything further to tell her. He seemed to understand, for, at the door, he said, with a lightly ironic smile, “I liked you so much better, Maggie, with your hair.”

  23

  And is that too a sign? And, if so, what does it mean?

  His necktie was a handsome pale green with small stylized birds embossed upon it, parrots perhaps, in darker green: it looked like silk, it looked like high fashion, it looked familiar.

  How happily he was chattering about the Bridgeport Nautilus Health Club in which he now worked, in a shopping mall less than ten minutes from his apartment: he was allowed to use the machines himself every day, when the club closed; he was composing music virtually all the time, at least in his head; he felt stronger, healthier, better—so very much better than he’d felt in memory—“More like a human being with a body, than just a kind of vaporous idea inside a body.” He did look strong, and he did look healthy. His color was good. His fair brown hair was brushed back from his forehead in a way flattering to his narrow face; his new glasses, chunky black plastic frames, gave him a look of maturity and intelligence. He smiled often and ate his food hungrily. He stammered infrequently.

  Brendan was wearing a sports shirt and a dull-gray jacket and that splendid silkish necktie. Seated across from him in the restaurant booth, Maggie found herself staring at the necktie as if it were a clue of some kind, there to be decoded.

  They were having dinner together, at Brendan’s invitation, for the first time in weeks: in a small warmly lit Italian restaurant in Brendan’s new neighborhood, in a booth at the rear, sharing a tall bottle of red wine and eating pasta. At least, Brendan was eating. Maggie, who was very tired, made an effort to eat but drank her wine rather gratefully. A sign, amid so many. And, if so, what does it mean?

  Because Maggie had been away for a long weekend, on one of her fact-finding trips, it had not been until the evening of Monday, February 20, that Brendan was able to contact her. His voice over the telephone had been restrained, but Maggie could hear at once a boyish excitement quivering beneath it.

  “Hello, Maggie! I’ve been trying to get you! Where have you been?”

  His words, and their reproachful tone, struck her as unnervingly familiar.

  The news he bore her was, on the face of it at least, very good news: Mr. Cotler had learned on Friday that the district attorney’s office was “dissatisfied” with the case the Forest Park police had thus far assembled against Brendan Bauer and had decided not to present it to the county grand jury for the March session.

  “So—why don’t we celebrate? I’d like to take you out to dinner, Maggie,” Brendan said extravagantly, “a belated Valentine’s Day dinner.”

  Said Maggie doubtfully, “Isn’t it premature to celebrate?”

  Said Brendan, not to be daunted, “‘Better premature than not at all’—that’s my philosophy, now.”

  So they met the following evening at Luigi’s, a neighborhood restaurant within walking distance of Brendan’s new apartment. Throughout the meal the young man’s mood was sunny, even ebullient; Maggie supposed it was a form of mild hysteria, a reaction against so many weeks of suppressed emotion. Such moods swept upon her too, often when she was playing piano or lecturing to her class of eighty students, but, like a spurt of adrenaline, they were short-lived and left her, afterward, with an acute sense of loneliness.

  Brendan was eating pasta and sipping wine and chattering about one or another experimental composer whose work he’d been studying, and about new work of his own (“pointillist, mathematical, with quotes from Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony”); he told Maggie he was becoming acquainted with some of his neighbors and with the town in general, and it wasn’t nearly so demoralizing as he’d anticipated. “Bridgeport is a real place,” he said, “not like Forest Park, which is, you know, only a sort of rarified idea. Bridgeport is even, with the jets passing overhead, sort of musical.”

  And he liked his apartment well enough, and he liked his job at the health club very well, and—and so on. Maggie gazed at him with a sisterly fondness edged with exasperation. Didn’t he know that the corners of his mouth were stained with tomato sauce and, if he weren’t more careful, he would end up staining his handsome new necktie?

  “Where were you all weekend, Maggie?” Brendan asked. Then, hesitantly, “You look a little tired.”

  Maggie, who was certainly tired yet who certainly did not appreciate being told she looked tired, made an effort to smile; but felt so suddenly sad, so inexpressibly sad, she felt her face stiffen. She said, “Oh, nowhere.”

  “Yes—but where?”

  Brendan Bauer, warmed by wine, was being playfully impetuous.

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Was it about—the case?”

  Oh, everything is about the case! Maggie wanted to exclaim, but said instead, “I’ll tell you another time.”

  “You look as if—well—you lost your best friend, or maybe”—here Brendan paused and seemed about to stammer: Maggie had grown to recognize the almost imperceptible dip of the chin, the zipperish pursing of the mouth—“gosh, I don’t know: your heart is broken, sort of?” He began to blush and pushed his chunky-framed glasses up on his nose. “Not that it’s any of my business, I know it isn’t.”

  Maggie had stopped eating but had not stopped drinking. The wine was going pleasantly to her head. Alcohol stirred in her a warm yet remote, comforting yet ambivalent, erotic sensation that in turn stirred memories she might wish untouched. She was thinking that no man had touched her, no man had kissed her, since Matt Springer of how many months ago, a man whose face she recalled vividly at illogical moments but could not recall when she tried. Yes, she was sad. And yes, her heart was broken. But she said, to placate Brendan and to deflect his line of inquiry, “This certainly is a very nice restaurant: you were right.”

  Brendan said, again with that little dip of his chin, “I … I called Portia MacLeod on Sunday, to see if she knew where you were. She said you’d gone somewhere up in New England but she didn’t know why, exactly; she thought it was some music colloquium. I guess it wasn’t?”

  Maggie said, drawing her fingertips over her eyelids, “I told you, Brendan, I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “But if it’s because of the case, because of me—I feel so damned burdensome.”

  This remark, which might have evoked riotous laughter if Maggie were a little drunker, Maggie let pass.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. Please don’t feel that way. It’s all in the interests of—justice.”

  “But are you actually talking with people, trying to find out things?”

  Maggie shook her head, no; she didn’t care to discuss it.

  She had been asking so many questions lately, some of them of strangers, she had nearly forgotten how unpleasant it is to be interrogated.

  How like being forced to submit to someone draggin
g a comb through your snarled hair.

  Since her conversation with Si Lichtman the previous week, Maggie had pressed forward, with both zeal and a mounting sense of dread, in what she would have been embarrassed to call her investigation. She had indeed flown to Maine: to Bangor, where her ten-passenger plane had landed in a snowstorm and from which it had departed in a blizzard. Am I, Maggie Blackburn, the person who is doing such things? And what will come of it? She recalled her father saying, as, at the nursing home, he’d stooped over one of his intricate jigsaw puzzles, frowning and sucking his teeth noisily, “I won’t be able to sleep if I don’t finish up this damned thing.”

  Brendan saw that Maggie was becoming annoyed with him; thus he retreated to safer topics. He told her that Mr. Cotler had learned that, among Nicholas Reickmann’s possessions, one of his relatives, who’d come to Forest Park to empty out his apartment, had discovered not one but apparently several threatening letters—from men who believed themselves ill-treated by Reickmann or who were provoked to desperation by Reickmann’s real or imagined seduction of lovers of their own. “So the case against me, which is the case they’ve charged me with, doesn’t look so air-tight to the police now,” Brendan said almost complacently.

  Maggie tried to smile at this news, even as she dismissed its relevance. She was certain now that Nicholas Reickmann had been murdered solely because he was Rolfe Christensen’s literary executor; he had been murdered because the murderer, one of those blackmailed by Christensen, had wanted the incriminating evidence destroyed and had decided to destroy the luckless executor too, in case he’d discovered it. And how, if one of Nicholas Reickmann’s enemies had wanted to kill him, had the man known Reickmann would be at Christensen’s house that evening?

  Their plates were taken away, and Brendan gallantly began to pour the remainder of the wine into Maggie’s glass, but she put her hand over it to prevent him. She was already dangerously sleepy, and she had to drive home. She wanted suddenly to be gone from Brendan Bauer, to whom she felt bizarrely attracted, at least in her wine-muddled state, and from whom she felt, morally, rather revulsed—for in his childlike relief at being temporarily free of pressure from the police, Brendan seemed not to care, or even to know, that, though charges of first-degree murder against him might be dropped, the true murderer still existed.

  Existed, and might well murder again.

  As they prepared to leave the restaurant, putting on their coats, Maggie said, “Your necktie, Brendan; I’ve been admiring it. It is new?”

  Brendan Bauer glanced down at the tie as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, God, I forgot I was wearing this!” he said, concerned. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s a necktie of Nicholas Reickmann’s, actually. Poor Nicholas! The last time I saw him, he’d taken me out to dinner in Forest Park, at that little Indian restaurant on South Main Street, and for some reason I couldn’t figure out at the time, he suddenly unknotted his necktie—this tie—and gave it to me. I was very surprised of course. Nicholas made a charming joke of it, didn’t want to embarrass me I guess, pretending he wanted to exchange neckties with me—I was wearing that ugly old leather necktie of mine; I can’t imagine why I ever thought it was interesting—so Nicholas gave me his. I’ve never worn it before tonight; I never had any occasion that warranted it.”

  Seeing Maggie’s look of surprise, or more than surprise, Brendan said quickly, “Later, I gave some thought to what Nicholas had meant by the gesture, and I think it was this: he felt guilty, and he damn well should have felt guilty, for, you know, letting Rolfe Christensen drive me home from your party that night—just watching the two of us walk to Christensen’s car and making no move to interfere. Saying not a word. Nicholas never apologized, of course, or even brought up the subject, but I’m sure that was it. He knew he was partly responsible for what happened to me—for the hell I’d been going through, for months—and so he gave me his fancy French necktie: as if that were a just compensation.”

  Brendan Bauer brushed at his eyes; his mouth was trembling. Seeing how Maggie continued to stare at him, and at the necktie, he said, less vehemently, “It is spectacular, isn’t it? Poor Nicholas! The only drawback is, I don’t have anything to wear with it—it makes the rest of me look so shabby and sad.”

  Still Maggie did not respond, still she stood dumbly staring, as if the necktie, the handsome necktie, quite transfixed her. There was a question to be answered, but Maggie could not think what it was until Brendan Bauer repeated with innocent enthusiasm, a little too insistently, “But it is spectacular, isn’t it?” and Maggie Blackburn felt constrained to say, simply, “Yes.”

  24

  Driving home, ascending gradually, then pointedly, to Forest Park and to Acacia Drive, Maggie Blackburn said aloud, to no purpose, “Yes.” By this time her cheeks were streaked frankly with tears.

  Entering her nearly darkened house—there was a light burning in the kitchen at the rear, there was a light burning upstairs in her bedroom, with the hope of discouraging burglars—Maggie imagined, for a moment, she heard a faint happy quizzical chattering: canaries? But there were no canaries of course. And walking through the kitchen, through the darkened living room and to the foot of the stairs, she imagined, for a moment, that someone had just now preceded her, an intruder, male, whose presence had roughly parted the air: but there was no one of course.

  On midwinter mornings flooded with sunlight, the world outside her windows brittle and hard-edged with ice, Maggie often thought, waking, How good to be alive!—before the memory of the murders, and her involvement with them, swept over her. But at night, when the house was silent except for the rattling vibrating noises of the old furnace and the wind outside in the trees, she had no such comfort. Here you are, Maggie: and where is here?

  She had brought back with her from Bangor, from, specifically, the drab fluorescent-lit office of the Clerk of Public Records of Brewer County, Maine, a pea-sized throbbing behind the eyes, not migraine but somewhere beyond migraine, a sensation to which no name she knew could be assigned. After her dinner with Brendan in the romantically lit Luigi’s, an episode of about an hour and a half, the sensation began to swell.

  She’d worn, that evening, as she’d worn to the Conservatory that day, a pair of gray tweed trousers that fitted her loosely, a beige cashmere jacket somewhat worn at the elbows, a turtleneck sweater of so etiolated a color it might have been gray, or beige, or off-white: still, she was shivering. She was shivering steadily. The tender nape of her neck felt particularly exposed.

  Mr. Blackburn glanced up sharply as Maggie stood in a doorway blinking away tears. His damp baleful eyes. The fury of his elderly disappointment. Didn’t you suspect everyone, as I told you?—anyone?

  It was 9:35 P.M., not late, but Maggie decided to go to bed.

  It was only 9:35 P.M. of February 20, 1989, an hour and a date to be remembered, perhaps recorded, but Maggie hadn’t the energy; she was going to bed.

  At the foot of the stairs she stood, one hand on the railing, head bowed. Had Brendan Bauer killed both men?—or just one? But which one?

  Neither. He was incapable of such a thing.

  Neither. He was telling the truth and had always told the truth.

  For instance, when Maggie Blackburn had summoned up, out of who knows where, some measure of courage, audacity, impudence, to telephone Precious Blood Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, and to speak with Father Novick, the rector, asking him about one of his former seminarians, Brendan Bauer—had there been incidents associated with the young man, a fire of suspicious origin shortly before he left—she had been assured that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, nothing that Father Novick could recall. Brendan Bauer had simply decided, as a statistically predictable percentage of novices did each year, that he had no true vocation for the priesthood; thus he’d asked to leave, and that was all.

  Perhaps Father Novick was lying.

  But Father Novick was not lying.

  How do you know?

&n
bsp; Because I know.

  But how?

  Because I know.

  If Father Novick was not lying, and Brendan Bauer was not lying, then who was lying?—and why?

  Maggie Blackburn had brought home work, a sheath of student papers to correct, a lecture (“Bartók and Stravinsky”) to complete, but she was too exhausted, she was too confused, too sick at heart; she was going to bed. For after all, no one had broken into her house during her absence; it was deathly silent as always.

  Then, two days later, the confrontation for which she’d been waiting occurred.

  Nine-fifteen, a quiet weekday, Maggie was sitting on her sofa listening to a savagely bright and brilliant recording of Glenn Gould playing Bach, one she’d heard many times before of course and knew well, and when the knocker to her front door sounded—once, twice, a third time—polite but distinct raps—she rose without hesitation to go to the door, to answer it. Her manner suggested that nothing was out of the ordinary, since nothing was out of the ordinary … was it?

  If Father Novick was not lying, and Brendan Bauer was not lying, then who was lying?—and why?

  “Hello, Maggie! Am I … interrupting?”

  “Oh no, Calvin. Certainly not, I—”

  “Is it too late for …?”

  “Please come in.”

  “On my way home … happened to be driving by … saw your light …”

  “Please come in, Calvin, let me take your—”

  “I realized that you and I haven’t spoken together for quite a while.”

  “May I take your coat?”

  “You’re certain it isn’t too …?”

  “Of course not, no.”

  “It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Maggie?”

  “Y-yes. It has.”

  With his usual athletic briskness Calvin Gould removed his topcoat but did not in fact hand it over; he simply laid it, with no fuss, over a chair in the foyer. Since, as he said, he wouldn’t be staying long.