I sat down on a bench facing her and she resumed her playing. I was uncertain as to whether to continue with small talk or drop my bomb. She took the decision out of my hands: “You were right about Dvorak,” she said. “The cello concerto is his masterpiece. I wish I were equal to it.”
“Maybe you will be someday.”
“Maybe. You never know.”
“Am I distracting you from your practice?”
“Not really, yet. Are you a musician? You don’t look like one.”
“I’m not. But I love great music more than anything in the world. I think it’s the closest we’ll ever get to pure truth.”
Jane Baker was measuring my words with a hard-edged light in her eyes. “I agree, more or less,” she said, “but I think maybe you are distracting me. This whole thing has the air of being rehearsed, on your part. I’m not afraid of you, but you’re trying to manipulate me, and I don’t like being manipulated through my music.”
“Shall I cut the rebop, and get to the point?”
“Please do. I’ll give you five minutes, then I have to practice.”
“Fair enough. My name is Brown. I’m a private investigator. Your name is Jane Baker, cellist and nonconjugal roommate of Sol Kupferman, late of the fur business. Earlier this week I was hired to investigate you and Kupferman. I did. I didn’t discover anything damaging or incriminating. About you two, that is. However, in the course of my investigation, I gathered a great deal of evidence that indicates that your brother Frederick, AKA Fat Dog, is a psychotic arsonist and is determined to wrest you away from Sol Kupferman, even if it means killing him. I’m sure he doesn’t want to hurt you — you’re his obsessive love object — but yesterday he burned Kupferman’s warehouse to the ground. Tomorrow he might torch Kupferman’s house and you may end up reduced to a pile of French-fried guacamole in the process. I don’t want that to happen. I want to find your brother and get him put away before he hurts anyone else. You can help me by getting Kupferman to talk to me, and by telling me everything you can about your brother.”
During the course of my monologue Jane Baker had gone white. She put her cello and bow on the bench beside her and wrenched her hands. There was a vein in her forehead pulsing with tension. I stared at the ground to make it easier for her to regain her composure. When I looked up she was staring at me. “Freddy,” she said, her voice quavering, “Jesus Christ. I always knew he was sick. But this. Oh, God! Can you prove what you’ve told me?”
“No.”
“But you’re certain?”
“Yes, I’m positive.”
“How did you find all this out?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You said someone hired you to investigate Sol and me. Who was it?”
“I can’t tell you that, either. I’m sorry.”
“Why can’t you?! You make all kinds of accusations against my brother, say that my best friend and I are in danger, and you won’t tell me a goddamn thing!”
I resisted the impulse to move to her bench and put my arm around her. “Do you believe what I’ve told you, Miss Baker?”
“Yes. Somehow I do.”
“Good. Will you help me then?”
She hesitated a moment. “I think so. How?”
“Tell me about your brother.”
“What about him?”
“A moment ago you said you always knew he was sick. You could start by elaborating on that.”
Jane Baker was silent for a long moment. When she finally spoke her voice was steady. “Freddy and I were orphans. Our parents died when we were children. An auto wreck. I was four, which would have made Freddy twelve. There were no relatives to take us in, so we were shuffled around to various foster homes, always together. I was too young to really remember my parents, but Freddy remembered them and was convinced they had been killed by some sort of monster. He had terrible nightmares about this monster. We used to share the same bedroom in most of the foster homes, and Freddy was always waking up screaming about the monster. Once I asked him what it looked like, and he showed me a giant octopus in a horror comic book. Another time he showed me a photograph of a wolf and said it looked like that.
“He was a frightened and hateful boy, from the beginning. A sadist. We lived together for six years, until Freddy turned eighteen. I saw him torture animals many times, and it frightened me, but I shrugged it off. Burning ants with a magnifying glass, things like that. He was a very sullen boy and very fat, with terrible oily skin and acne. None of the foster parents we had could get close to him. His ugliness and meanness alienated the nicest of them, until they wanted to get rid of him. The childcare people wanted to keep us together, so I had to go where Freddy did. When he turned eighteen, he went off and lived by himself. He got worse. He used to come and visit me and tell me ugly stories about killing dogs and cats. Once he told me he shoved a whole litter of live kittens down a garbage disposal. It was true, too; I found out later from someone who saw it.
“When I was about fifteen, I went through a wild period and ended up in a Catholic orphanage. As I got older, Freddy started acting strange, sexually. Asking me all sorts of intimate questions. He was caddying at Hillcrest then and he would pester me to come out and look around, telling me how beautiful it was. So I did. Freddy was right. It was beautiful, especially after St. Vibiana’s. So I started hanging out there. Hiding out with a book in the trees while the people played golf and taking long walks around the course at sunset. I was kind of a crazy, lonely, searching young girl and I felt at peace there. I hated to have to go back to the orphanage. I loved the golf course and the dreams I dreamed there too much.
“So I ran away. Freddy got me a sleazy room in Culver City and I spent all my spare time at Hillcrest, working in the caddy shack and roaming the course. There I met Sol, who is the kindest, most decent and compassionate person I’ve ever met. Genuinely altruistic. He took an interest in me. I had recently become interested in music — I would take my little portable radio with me out on the course for long concerts at night. I told Sol that I was an orphan, that I lived in a crummy room and picked up a few dollars cooking and cleaning out the caddy shack. I told him I wanted to learn to play the cello more than anything in the world. I remember his exact reply when I told him that. He said, ‘So be it.’ So I went to live with Sol. He had a big house and no family. I had my own room, my own tutor to help me with my education, and the best cello lessons money could buy. That was eleven years ago. I’m still there. Sol has never asked anything of me except that I seek beauty. This cello is a Stradivarius and almost priceless. Sol bought it for me. In no way am I equal to it, but Sol thinks I will be someday. That’s an example of how unqualified his love and respect for me is.
“But Freddy has hated Sol from the beginning, and it compounded the sickness that was already festering in him. While I was living in that crummy room in Culver City he used to come over and expose himself to me. Erect. It was sickening. I was frightened, but afraid to tell anyone for fear I’d get sent back to the orphanage. He was obsessed with me sexually then and I’m sure he still is. He writes me letters about how I’m his family and we should live together in Mexico and raise greyhounds, and about how Sol is an Israeli-Communist agent. I always read the letters out of hope that he’s changed, somehow developed some degree of humanity; but there’s no change, just hate and ugliness. I haven’t seen my brother in four or five years. I want nothing to do with him, now or ever. And now you tell me he’s an arsonist and he wants to kill Sol! Oh God, oh Christ.”