I finished my coffee. "I wonder if you'd do me a favor."
"Sure, Jack."
"Let me see the room downstairs where she stayed."
"Of course."
"Thanks."
The basement, like the rest of the house, was furnished in odds and ends, styles and colors that should have clashed, but that Susan's hand had brought together in an uneasy harmony. The basement was five degrees cooler than upstairs. It had red-and-white-tiled flooring, imitation knotty-pine walls, a low white ceiling. There was a furnace to the left, a small bathroom whose open door revealed sink-shower-stool, an overstuffed couch facing a massive relic of other days-a Buddha-like black-and-white 21-inch Motorola console-and finally a new but unpainted door that creaked back to show me a room with a severe little single bed, a bureau covered with expensive perfumes and bottles and jars and vials and vessels of makeup, and then a sturdy piece of rope used as a hanger for more clothes than most department stores would have to offer. The clothes-fawns and pinks and soft blues and yellows, silk and linen and organza and Lamé and velvet-did not belong in the chill rough basement of a working-class family. There was a sense of violation here, a beast holding trapped a fragile beauty.
On the bed lay an old hardback copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's. I went over and picked it up, its burnt-orange cover bright even after all these years, the pen-and-ink sketch of Capote on the back just as calculated now as it was then. I opened the front cover: Karen Lane's name was written in perfect penmanship, but when I flipped to the back I saw that it was a library book checked out the last time on May 3, 1959.
Susan laughed. "I think it was the only book she ever read. She loved it. She'd never give it back."
"Really?"
"They'd send her notices all the time. Virtually threaten her. But she wanted to keep the copy she'd first read. No other copy would do. Finally, she just paid them for it and kept it."
"Mind if I take it?"
"Be my guest."
I looked around. "She was here one month?"
"Just about. But actually she'd been staying overnight here for the past six months." Her mouth tightened. "I suppose if I raise any question about Dr. Evans, I'll sound like a bigot."
"Not to me, you won't."
"Well, I met him twice at lunch with Karen. He has this very calm, polished exterior, but he also has a terrible temper. She came here several times with bruises he'd given her."
I planned to see Dr. Evans tonight. I was fascinated by how easy it would be for a shrink to "accidentally" overdose somebody he lived with.
I studied the front of the book again, as if it were going to tell me something.
She said, "So did I miss anything the other night? I really wish I could have gone."
"You know how you feel about looking in the mirror and seeing this strange old lady there? That's how I felt at the reunion. We're getting to be geezers, Susan. Geezers."
She poked me on the arm girlishly and said, "Speak for yourself, Jack."
Then she walked me up and we exchanged a chaste kiss and I liked the hell out of her all over again the way I had back there in grade school.
Chapter 21
The receptionist wore a gray suit with wide lapels and a frilly white blouse. Her nails appeared to be her pride, they were as red as manicuring and lacquering could make them. Perhaps they were compensation for the fact that she was one of those women who are almost attractive but not quite, a bit too fleshy, a bit too inexplicably sour, a bit too self-conscious that all the time you're watching her you're saying to yourself that she is not quite attractive. She gave the impression that clothes probably interested her more than people. She touched at long hair that had been carefully tipped with a color not unlike silver.
"David Haskins," I said, going up to her desk.
Smythe and Brothers occupied its own floor in a new and grotesquely designed downtown office building. It was all leather and wood and forest-green flocked wallpaper. It exuded the aura of a men's club where the average member is over age seventy-five.
"You have an appointment?"
She knew by looking at my blue windbreaker and open white button-down shirt and faded jeans that it was unlikely I had an appointment.
"I'm afraid I don't."
"May I ask what this is about?"
"Personal matter."
She assessed me once more. She was not impressed. "May I have your name, please?"
"Jack Dwyer."
She stood up. She was taller than I'd thought and her extra pounds were surprisingly attractive. But she wasn't any nicer. She pointed like a grumpy eighth-grade teacher to a leather couch the size of a life raft and said, "Would you take a seat, please?"
So I took a seat and proceeded to look through a stack of magazines, each reverential in different ways about the subject of money.
He came out fifteen minutes later and he didn't look so good. He didn't come all the way over to me. He sort of let her lead the way and he sort of stood behind her and peeked out around the padded shoulders of her jacket.
"Hello," he said, leaning out.
He was maybe five seven and twenty pounds overweight and wearing one of those double-breasted suits only Adolphe Menjou could get away with. He was losing his auburn hair so fast you could almost hear the follicles falling off. He was also slick with sweat and gulping. He gulped, and I mean big comic gulps, as if he could not get enough air, every few seconds.
"Hello," I said.
"How may I help you?"
"Do you remember me?"
"Uh, sure."
"Jack Dwyer."
"Of course." He looked at the receptionist the way a very young boy looks at his mother. For help.
"I saw you at the reunion dance the other night, Dave."
"Right."
She said, "He's very busy."
He said, "She's right, Jack, I am." He gulped. "Very busy."
So I decided to jackpot. I wasn't going to get past his receptionist here if I didn't roll some dice. "I was wondering if you'd tell me why Ted Forester and Larry Price were pushing you into the car the other night."
"What?"
"You seemed to be having a fight with them. I wondered why."
This time his glance at the receptionist was desperate. This time he looked as if he were going to faint. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Aw, Dave." I decided maybe a little folksiness would help.
"Please, Jack, I'm-"
"He's very busy," the receptionist said. She took him by the shoulders and turned him back in the direction of his office. The corridor was lined with stern black-and-white photographs of dour men who'd devoted their lives to money. They'd probably grown up reading Scrooge McDuck comic books and taking them literally.
Then she gave him a shove, as if pushing a boat out to sea on choppy waters.
"Nice to see you, Dave," I called after him.
She snapped her not unappealing body around and said, "Exactly what the hell do you think you're doing?"
"What I was supposed to be doing was talking to Dave Haskins. But you wouldn't let me."
"Get out of here."
"You must get paid a lot of money."
"You heard me."
"You like working around all this money?"
"Get out."
I got out.
I didn't go far. I went down in the parking lot and found a drive-up phone where I could keep watch on the parking-ramp exit where I hoped Dave Haskins would be appearing soon.
I decided to call Dr. Glendon Evans. But first I prepared myself. I'd done Cuckoo's Nest in dinner theater, so I tried to get back in that character-I had played one of the garden-variety loonies-and I did a good enough job that by the time I actually dialed his number, I sounded as if I were standing on a bridge and about to jump off. The nurse put me right through to Dr. Evans.