I stood across the street, trying to appraise my chances of making some headway. I was still armed and wide awake in spite of only having had a single fifteen-minute catnap in the previous thirty hours.
I didn’t know who was in the house at the time. If Bryant was there I could tell him that his father tried to kill me, or maybe I should say that Norman Fell recommended me. I could tell him that I was a private detective looking into the deaths of three young men, including an old case concerning a certain Thom Paxton.
If Roman was there I could say that I was a friend of Timothy Moore and that I had an urgent message from him.
If the river were whiskey and I was a diving duck . . .
It never hurts to bide your time when there’s an opportunity to do so.
Standing out there in the shadow of Hull’s house, making peace with the fact that I had no idea what to say or why the crimes had been committed, I was still better off knowing that I didn’t know than I would have been otherwise.
Understanding my ignorance, I crossed the street and pressed the cracked plastic button to the rich man’s home.
I smiled up at the camera that watched me from a lens hole in the white, cast-iron gate. I was ready to argue, wrangle, wheedle, and whine at whoever challenged my admittance.
Instead a buzzer sounded and a voice ejaculated, “Come on in! I’ve been waiting for you for two days!”
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I pushed and the heavy gate swung in on well-oiled hinges. After taking three steps I heard the portal slam shut behind me.
Inside I found a surprisingly large bright-green lawn that grew around a few dozen well-manicured rosebushes. The flowering shrubs had big generous blossoms of every color imaginable. Soon-to-be-extinct honeybees drifted lazily from one bloom to another, narcotized by the heavy aromas and rich pollen.
The stone pathway passed thirty feet or so through the unlikely Manhattan yard, bringing me to a marble stairway. This ascended eighteen steps to a very old, coffin-lid-like door.
I was looking for the dark barrier’s buzzer when it swung open, with Hannah hanging on the doorknob, laughing for me.
“I bet you didn’t expect me,” she said.
Today she was barefoot in tight blue jeans and a dark-blue halter, with bits of glitter here and there, covering her small breasts.
“No,” I agreed.
“But I knew that you’d be coming.”
“Did you tell your father I’d be here?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Are you going to come in, Mr. McGill?” The multiple personalities of her upbringing and education were gone. She was just a sweet young girl, both vulnerable and fearless. I could see in her eyes that she now saw us as good friends that had passed through the gauntlet of her brother’s episode.
She had marked my hesitation correctly. There was something about the ebullience exuding from Hannah that made me want to hang back, or maybe leave. Most guys when they see a damsel in her lonely tower want to ride up and save her—but I knew better. My kind of help shorted out the circuit board, or stripped the gears in your transmission.
She grabbed a couple of my fingers and pulled.
“Come on.”
I allowed her to drag me into the palatial entrance hall. You couldn’t call it an antechamber or foyer. It was a circular room, twenty feet in diameter, with a wide staircase that crawled up the walls for all six floors, ending at a skylight that sprinkled diffuse sunbeams down on this otherworld. The continuous banister made the spiral seem like the lofty box seats of a theater, with the floor as the stage.
In the center of the room was a round mahogany table with a magnificent bouquet of at least a hundred freshly cut flowers arranged in a way that made you feel you were peering into a rain forest or jungle. The florist had to be some kind of genius.
My awe surpassed itself when a hu‹€€o bge, pure-yellow parrot of some kind shrieked and flew out from the tangle of foliage. The bird flew up to the sixth floor and perched on the rail under the glass roof.
“That’s Bernard,” Hannah said, using proper English pronunciation. “He’s my mother’s pet. Daddy wants him in a cage but she says that he has to fly free. The staff is always cleaning up after him.”
Bernard screamed again and then flew somewhere else in his private multimillion-dollar aviary.
“Come on,” the woman-child said.
She led me down a wide hallway that was more like a gallery in an art museum. The paintings here were Impressionist and Post-impressionist masterpieces. There was a Cézanne that I had never seen before, also a Modigliani that was new to me.
I’d spent a lot of my adolescence in art museums—there and the boxing gym with Gordo. I couldn’t draw to save my life but I appreciated the stylized chaos that artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wrought.
At the end of the hall, in a little recessed area on the left, was a very small painting by Paul Klee. It was composed of red and yellow and gold boxes, with defining lines of cobalt here and there. On the right side, in the lower corner, there was a scribble done in a slightly lighter blue that might have been a squiggle becoming a man, or vice versa, and on the upper-left-hand side there was an oval, bisected face that maybe the squiggle-man had lost, or maybe it was the sun. It was the most arresting painting I had ever seen. While I stopped and stared, Hannah waited patiently.
“It’s beautiful, huh?” she said after a minute or so of appreciative silence.
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you want it?”
Yes, I did, but I didn’t say so.
“You can have it,” she offered in an offhanded way.
“It’s priceless.”
“No. My mother bought it for me for my twelfth birthday. I’d be happy to give it to you.”
I believe that her slamming me in the head with a Louisville Slugger would have made less of an impact.
Material things never mattered much to me. My Communist father had made sure of that. Even though I was not a Marxist or an adherent of anarcho-syndicalism, I simply never gave much thought to possessions. Money paid the rent but it didn’t drive my desires like it did for so many other property-hungry people in the West. I didn’t have a favorite ring or watch. There was nothing that I saved up for that didn’t have a practical use. I had been like that my entire life, but there I was in that hallway, on the outskirts of old age, and Hannah’s offer made me feel like a child who still had everything to learn.
“Wow,” I said. “You know, that might be the best offer I’ve ever had.”
“So you want it?”
“Can we go sit down now, Hannah?”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging lightly as if her responsibilities and that mausoleum of a house did not weigh on her at all.
Ê€„
49
Three Hispanic women in black-and-white maid uniforms were working in the big kitchen that we traveled through. The women were different shades of brown and of various ages, heights, and sizes. The only thing that they had in common was that they all spoke Spanish. If I were more sensitive to foreign intonations I might have discerned different accents among them because they certainly were not all from the same country.
The ladies shot worried glances at us, obviously wondering if I was some kind of threat to the child or them. I have that effect on people often.
Hannah was oblivious to the servants’ concerns. She brought us to a swinging aluminum door and ushered me through. This led to a short hallway, which ended at a small, lavender-colored oval room that had a bay window looking out over a small vegetable garden, another anomaly for a Manhattan home.
The room was furnished with two stuffed chairs covered in well-worn and cracked brown leather. The floor was pine, pitted, and somehow fitting for a room where the masters were never meant to be. I sat in one chair while Hannah settled across from me, in half-lotus.
It took me a moment or two to get my head back into the investigation. I had taken the past few minutes for myself. I was very happy in the presence of the child bearing precious gifts, in that small room, under the only sun that any one of my ancestors had ever known.
“How’s Fritz?” I asked.
“He stayed upstate.”
“Did he recover okay from that spell?”
“He’s walking and talking again, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t remember what happened. He didn’t remember you. And no, I didn’t tell anyone that you had been to the house. I thought that you wanted to talk to my father and I didn’t want to get in the way. Though I would like to know more about what it is that you want.”
“Do you really own that painting?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever offered to give away anything like that before?”
“You mean something so valuable?”
I nodded.
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Hannah’s face was long and pretty in its youth, but when she concentrated, it took on a more handsome cast. I liked her in spite of all my upbringing.
“No,” she said finally. “Never. But what does that have to do with my question?”
“A guy from Albany hired me to find four men,” I said. “I found them. One was dead, another one was in prison, one was awaiting trial for burglary, and the last guy was living the life of an honest citizen. I turned over the information and the three survivors were attacked. Two are dead and the other might be soon. After that, somebody, or maybe two different somebodies, tried to kill me.
“I don’t want to be used in that manner. I don’t want people to die because of me, and I myself do not wish to be killed. And so I have been investigating, trying to find out who was using me. The detective who hired me doesn’t seem to exist, but I’m good at what I do, and I came up with a name.”
“What name?” Hannah asked.
“Roman Hull.”
“My grandfather?”
I nodded again.
“I’m telling you this because you offered me that painting, and also because it’s true. I may have left out a detail or two but you have the gist of why I’m here.”
Hannah brought her fingers to her temples and traced little circles there.
“Are you going to kill my grandfather?”
“People like me don’t kill people like him,” I said. “I just want to get to the truth. I want to know what happened and I want it to stop.”
“Grandfather Roman used to pinch me and Fritzie when we wouldn’t do what he told us to,” she said. “It got so bad that Dad wouldn’t let him see us until we were teenagers.
“They say he murdered this race car driver a long time ago and then he married the driver’s widow. They didn’t stay together long, though.”
“I’ve heard the stories.”
“He’s upstairs,” she said.
“Right now?”
It was her turn to nod.
“Can I go see him?”
“I will take you,” she said solemnly, as if the words were a vow.
WE MADE OUR way back through the kitchen. The domestics were gone.
I glanced at the painting I coveted as we passed through the hall of masterpieces. The yellow parrot screeched somewhere when we came into the grand entrance hall but I didn’t see it.
“He’s on the third floor,” Hannah told me as we mounted the stairs.
Upon reaching the second floor we had to walk around the outer hall to get to the next stairway up. There were doors and other entrances along the hallway leading into rooms and down corridors. At the door closest to the next set of stairs a woman wandered out.
“Wandered” is the right word. She stepped from the doorway, moving at an odd angle with her head turned as if she were looking behind. It seemed as though she had gotten lost in her own home.
“Mother,” Hannah said.
Startled, the woman turned to regard us. She was a creature of exceptional beauty. From the form of her face to the deep blue in her eyes this woman, who was my age, would always be plagued by the petty desires and jealousies of others. Her form was slender and graceful. The pastel violet of her diaphanous robe struggled to match such beauty. Her hair was blond, becoming ethereally light with the white that had begun its encroachment there. When she gazed into my eyes I felt the need to swallow.
“This is Mr. McGill,” Hannah was saying. “He’s here to see Granddad.”
Hannah’s mother rested three fingers on the back of my left hand.
“Are you a friend of Roman’s?”
“No, ma’am. A guy I know said he wanted to talk to me. A guy named Timothy Moore. Do you know him?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied.
Hers was the only smile I’d ever seen that I would call resplendent.
“I hear you once had a servant named Sanderson,” I said, looking for answers haphazardly like a child searching for seashells by the shore.
“Yes. Lita was her name.”
“Did she have a son named Willie?”
“She had children,” Mrs. Hull said. “I never met them, though. Bryant didn’t like it when the staff used our house for day care.”
“But didn’t your husband help Lita’s son get into the Sunset Sanatorium?”
All those words seemed to confuse the lady. She sniffed at the air but didn’t answer.
“I met Mr. McGill up at the house in Albany, Mom,” Hannah said to break the silence.
“Oh?” She had“€€ban a mild interest. “Did you also meet my son, Mr. Mac? Mick?”
“McGill,” I said, wondering when she would remove her fingers. “And yes, I did meet him.”
“What did you think?”
“Nice young man. Serious.”
“He’s sullen and ungrateful,” she said, her lightness suddenly shot through with storm. “But blood is blood.”
“I have a son like that,” I said. “He doesn’t know how to talk to people even though he’s twenty-one. I figure it’s just because his feelings are so deep down inside him.”
My words seemed to have an impact on her. Her face organized itself so that she almost saw me.
