Confess, Fletch Read online

  “Hygiene Department?”

  “I guess he could give a painting to Chicago, if he wanted to. I can’t think why he’d want to.”

  “Ah, the old city still turns a few people on. Rare beef and frequent wind, you know. Gets the blood up.”

  “Maybe Grace had some connection with Chicago. Maybe that’s it. Her family was in the rubber business. Grace Gulkis. Gulkis Rubber.”

  “Not following you.”

  “Ronnie married Grace after the war. When he was back taking his doctorate at Harvard.”

  “And she’s rich?”

  “Was rich. She died after they had been married a few years. One of those terrible diseases. Cancer, leukaemia, something. Ronnie was heartbroken,”

  “And rich.”

  “I suppose be inherited. He started the gallery back about that time. And you don’t start a gallery like that off the pay of a Harvard instructor.”

  “He never married again?”

  “No. I’ve seen him with a lot of women over the years, but he never remarried. Ever hear of the Star of Hunan jade?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a big rock. A famous jewel. Grace used to own it. I’m just wondering now what became of it. I must ask Ronnie.”

  “You’ll ask him what he did with his wife’s jewels?”

  “There’s no such thing as an improper question—just an improper answer.”

  “So Horan has plenty of money.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how much he inherited from Grace, how much went back into her family coffers. These are things you don’t know about people, especially in Boston. You know what’s happened to money since the 1950s.”

  “Heard rumours.”

  “He lives well, in that castle on Newbury street where he has his gallery. The top two floors are his penthouse apartment. He drives a Rolls-Royce. And anyone who drives a Rolls-Royce must be broke.”

  “Doesn’t he have another house somewhere?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I mean, he can’t just live over the shop.”

  “I’ve never heard he has another place.”

  “Was he in the service?”

  “Yes. Navy. Pacific Theatre during World War Two. He was an aide to Admiral Kimberly.”

  “That was before he married La Gulkis?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how did he have enough political muscle to land a cushy Admiral’s aide job?”

  “Well,” Wainright said, “he went to Yale. A very smooth, attractive guy. Very polished.”

  “Where’s he from, originally?”

  “Some place up-country. Maine or Vermont. I forget. There’s no money there. He was broke at Yale.”

  “I see.”

  “He still teaches at Harvard. Some kind of a freshman art survey course. He’s written a couple of turgid books.”

  “Turgid?”

  “Academic. I was never able to get through them. You know the kind of book where the author spends one hundred and fifty thousand words correcting the opinion of someone else who didn’t matter anyway.”

  “Turgid.”

  “Your name is Ralph Locke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What paper?”

  “Chicago Post.”

  “You write on art?”

  “Oh, no,” said Fletch. “I’m a sports writer. Hockey.”

  “Vulgar.”

  “Rough.”

  “Primitive.”

  “Simple.”

  “Violent.”

  “I take it you like writing on the arts.” Fletch looked around the room. “You must have a great visual sense.”

  The filthy man sitting in the filthy room neither confirmed nor denied the assertion.

  Fletch said, “Tell me more about the Horan Gallery. Is it doing well?”

  “Who knows? As an art dealer, Ronnie’s the crème de la crème. Horan is not a walk-in gallery. He’s an international art dealer making deals that are so private even the parties involved aren’t sure what they’re doing. He has to play very close to the chest. He could have made millions. He could be stone broke, for all I know.”

  “Which do you think?”

  “Well, the art market in recent years has had extraordinary ups and downs. First, the Japanese came along and invested heavily. Then, some of them had to dump on the market. Then Arabs came along, trying to bury petrodollars. Many Japanese weren’t deeply schooled in Western art. And Islam has a distinct prejudice against representations of the human or animate figure. So there have been funny, unpredictable distortions in the market. Plus, of course, the art market reflects every distortion in the nature of money itself. Some people have made killings off the market. Others have gotten badly stuck.”

  “And you don’t know which has been Horan’s experience.”

  “No. But I’m interested to hear he might give a painting to Chicago. I might use the item in my column.”

  “By all means, do,” said Fletch. “I’m very grateful to you for all your help.”

  XIX

  F L E T C H led the plainclothesmen through Friday evening commuter traffic back to his apartment house.

  After sharing Charles Wainwright’s critical vision, Fletch felt badly in need of a wash.

  Taking his complimentary copy of the Boston Star with him (a quarter of the front page was devoted to the bathtub murder of the City Councilperson), Fletch walked up the five flights of stairs which squared the lobby elevator shaft and quietly let himself in the front door of his apartment.

  Mignon did not bark.

  After he washed, he went through the front door again, closing it quietly behind him.

  He pushed the button for the elevator. It creaked up to the sixth floor.

  He pulled open the iron-grilled doors. They clanged shut on their own weights.

  After he waited a moment, he rang the bell to apartment 6A.

  It took another moment for Joan Winslow to collect herself and open the door.

  “I’m afraid I’ve locked myself out,” Fletch said. “By any chance do you have a key to 6B?”

  The smell of gin was not stale, but it was mixed with the odour of an air purifier.

  From beside the skirt of Joan’s housecoat, Mignon was looking at him with her usual polite courtesy.

  “Who are you?” Joan asked.

  “Peter Fletcher. I’m using Bart’s apartment. We met in the elevator yesterday.”

  “Oh, yes.” She lurched heavily on her left foot as she turned to the small hall table. “You’re the man Bart dumped the body on.”

  “Ma’am?”

  The drawer of the hall table held many keys.

  “The police were here. An enormous man. Name of Wynn, or something.”

  “Flynn.”

  “He spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. Came this morning. He showed me a picture of the murdered girl. I forget her name.”

  “Ruth Fryer.”

  “Yes.”

  She stirred her hand through the key drawer.

  Fletch said, “Yes?”

  She pulled out a key with a white tag attached. It read, “Bart’s—6B.”

  “There it is.”

  She lurched towards the doorway, apparently thinking Fletch was still standing in it.

  “Oh,” she said, finding him. “Now use this key and give it right back to me so next time one of you lock yourselves out I’ll have it.”

  Key in hand, Fletch asked, “Did you let anyone into the apartment Tuesday night?”

  “No. Of course not. I’ve never let anyone into that apartment. Except Bart. Lucy. And now you. Anyway, I wasn’t here Tuesday night. I had drinks and dinner with some friends.”

  “Where did you have drinks?”

  “Bullfinch Pub.” She knew she was repeating herself. “Just up the street.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s where I saw Bart. And the girl.”

  Fletch crossed the small hall and opened the door t
o 6B with Joan Winslow’s key.

  Handing it back to her, he asked, “Was the girl you saw with Bart Tuesday night the same girl in the photograph the police showed you?”

  “Yes,” Joan Winslow said. “Of course.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “Certainly. I’d tell anybody that.”

  She whisked Mignon behind her with the long skirt of her houserobe.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s drinks time.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t you want a drink?”

  “I’ll be right with you.”

  Fletch crossed the small elevator landing, closed the door to his apartment, and returned to Joan’s. He closed the door behind him.

  Swaying over a well-stocked bar in the living room, her face was that of a child at a soda counter.

  Her living room was a counterpart of Connors’, in its large size and basic solidity, but far more feminine. Instead of polished leathers and dark woods the upholstery was white and blue and pink, the furniture light and spindly. The paintings on the walls were originals, imitative modern junk.

  “Seeing it’s Friday night, shall we have a martini? Why don’t you make it?” She waved her hand airily at the bar. “Men make martinis so much better than women do.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  She placed the ice bucket centrally on the service table.

  “I’ll make crackers and cheese,” she said.

  She walked flat-footed, placing most of her weight on the heels of her house slippers, prepared at each step to prevent a fall sideways. Joan Winslow was accustomed to being crocked.

  “Well.” On the divan, her legs curled up under her houserobe, she bit into a bare cracker. “Isn’t this nice?”

  Fletch poured.

  “Have you known the Connorses long?”

  “Years. Ever since they were married. The apartment next door was being prepared for them while they were on their honeymoon and I was in Nevada getting a divorce. We all arrived back within a day or two of each other and just fell into each other’s arms.”

  “You hadn’t known each other before?”

  “No, indeed. If I had laid eyes on Bart Connors before Lucy, she wouldn’t have had a chance. He was a darling. And we’d all be much better off.”

  She took the tiniest sip of her martini.

  “Um, good. Men can make better martinis than women.”

  “I used a little vermouth.”

  “You see—what’s your name, Peter? That doesn’t seem right to me, somehow, but I’ll use it—they were just getting used to marriage, and I was just getting used to divorce. My husband, a structural engineer, had accepted a contract in Latin America, in Costa Rica, the year before. The poor, empty-headed boob remarried there. I found out some months later. I mean, I had no choice but to divorce him, did I? Why put a person in jail just because he’s a booby? Don’t you think it was the best thing to do?”

  “Absolutely,” Fletch said firmly.

  “Only the Connorses never did get used to marriage.” She drank half her martini in a single swallow. “And I have never gotten used to divorce.”

  The woman, at the most, was in her early forties. She had probably been attractive, in a petite, helpless, feminine way. She probably could be again, if she would put down her glass.

  “At first,” she continued, “it was great fun. They didn’t know the building, or the district. I got the janitorial service to work for them—there was always something abrasive about Lucy—and found them a string of apartment cleaners. People were doing things for the Connorses because I asked them to. Lucy quite turned people off.”

  She finished her drink. Fletch did not pour her another.

  “After a year or so, it was pretty obvious she turned Bart off, too. When I had a dinner party, I usually had the Connorses as guests. They invited me, with or without escort, when they were throwing a bash. What could we do, really? There are only two apartments on this floor, and we were friends. We had to be.”

  She poured herself a fresh drink.

  “One night, after they had been here for dinner, Bart came back. All the other guests had gone. We had a nightcap. A big one. We both had too much to drink. Lucy was frigid, he said. Always had been. Or so he thought.

  “There was a year of psychiatry for her. During that time, I sort of played psychiatrist for Bart. He’d come over late at night. We’d have a drink, and talk. As you can imagine, Lucy became a little cool with me. I could never make out whether it was because I was intimate with the family secrets, or because I was getting too much attention from Bart. I can tell you one thing. During all that time, and it went on for a long time, Bart was completely faithful to Lucy. He couldn’t have been otherwise, without his telling me. I was his good friend. His drinking buddy.

  “Lucy dropped psychiatry after a while. Bart found her another shrink, but she refused to go. You see, I think she had discovered what the so-called problem was.

  “Then I noticed a young woman coming in and out of the apartment house, and it sort of puzzled me, as I knew no one had moved in. I saw her during the daytime. Then I realized she was going to 6B. I assumed it was some old friend of Lucy’s. Then I met her at a cocktail party at the Connorses. Her name is Marsha Hauptmann. It was announced she and Lucy were starting a boutique together. How nice. All very reasonable.

  “Until the servant we had in common in those days—that was before Mrs. Sawyer, who now comes to me on Tuesdays and Fridays, she just left, and you on Wednesdays and Saturdays—told me Lucy and Marsha were taking showers together! How else can I say it? They were using the bed together.

  “Incidentally, I fired the person who told me that. Servants must not be allowed to gossip in the neighbourhood. And, in truth, I had not wanted to know any such thing. Do you believe that?”

  “Of course,” Fletch said.

  “Then I did rather a stupid thing. I thought it was right at the time. I never told Bart. We had always been strictly honest with each other, but I just couldn’t tell him that. I thought the news coming from me would destroy his faith in his own manliness, his own perceptions, if you see what I mean. He had to find out by himself. Instead, I encouraged infidelity.”

  “With you?”

  “I was in love with Bart. Please, would you pour me another touch more?”

  Fletch poured into her glass.

  “I’m ashamed to say I did,” she said. “I had never been a seductress before, although I had been seduced enough. I’m afraid I was rather clumsy at it. Bart couldn’t understand. He thought of me as a friend of Lucy’s. I was his old drinking buddy. Suddenly, I turn all hot and passionate. I should say, I let him see how hot and passionate I always had been towards him.

  “He rejected me. There’s no other way to say that, either.

  “Months went by. No more mutual dinner parties. No more drinking with Bart.

  “I guess finally she told him she was leaving him for another woman. The poor jerk still hadn’t caught on.”

  Fletch said, “After Lucy accepted her lesbianism, why did she wait so long before divorcing Bart?”

  “Those adjustments take time, I expect. Maybe she thought it was a momentary thing. She had been told she was frigid enough times, by Bart and Bart’s psychiatrists. I knew that. Here was a person who turned her on. It happened to be another girl.

  “Anyway,” Joan continued, “Lucy had nothing and Bart is rich. His father built Wardor-Rand, you know. Bart inherited most of it. Haven’t you noticed the paintings in his apartment? You can’t buy those with cheesecake. His father ended his days being our ambassador to Australia.”

  “I see,” Fletch said. “But ultimately, she did tell him, and she told him the truth.”

  “I guess so. Can you realize what that must do to a man? Realize he’s been married to a girl who doesn’t, who can’t have the slightest interest in him, sexually?”

  “She could have.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t seem t
hat way to Bart. Every man wants to believe he’s married to a red-hot mama, who loves him sexually. My husband did. Twice, apparently. To discover your wife prefers girls—to the point where she is leaving you for a girl—can’t do much for your ego, no matter how modern you are.”

  “I guess not.”

  “And I’m sure Bart tried to be understanding. He would.”

  “Were the facts of this affair public?”

  “Everyone knew about it. Everyone in our circle. That’s how I knew the great moment of revelation had come. By that time, you see, neither one of them was talking to me.”

  “He must have felt a little foolish.”

  “Innocent, anyway. Bart, despite his age, was a very innocent man. He went to one of the up-country colleges. Was never in the service. Worked like hell through law school and during his first years at the firm, having to work with Wardor-Rand simultaneously. His father was dead. When he married Lucy, he was very naive.”

  “He isn’t now.”

  She offered the plate of bare crackers to Fletch. There was no cheese anywhere in sight.

  He refused them.

  “So why do you still hate Bart?” he asked.

  “Hate him? Did I say I hate him? I suppose I do.

  “After the incident, the revelation, he didn’t come to me. I waited, politely.

  “Then one day I heard him on the landing. I opened my door and put my arms out to him. I guess I was crying. It was morning. I said, ‘Oh, Bart, I’m so sorry’. I tried to hug him. He took my arms away from around his neck.”

  “He rejected you again.”

  “He even said something rather cutting about my drinking habits. After all the drinks I had poured nursing him. Something unforgiveable.”

  Fletch said, “I expect the poor guy was feeling a little sour on all womanhood at that moment.”

  “It’s not that.” Her tears were as big as drops of gin. “He not only rejected me as a woman. That I could understand, at the moment. What hurts is that he rejected me as a friend.”

  “I see.”

  Unabashed, Joan continued talking through her tears, her whole mouth working to get the words out comprehensibly.

  “Then there was that endless stream of girls who poured through here. Pony tails. Frizzy hair. Blue jeans. Little skirts. It’s been going on for months.”