An Imperfect Spy (12 page)

But she had no hope that anything would come of this information. You’re off on a wild-goose chase, she told herself; pondering a mare’s nest, grasping at straws. Nellie may have known New York, Kate and many others knew New York, its traffic dangers included, but that didn’t mean that one couldn’t be killed by a truck. Probably Nellie’s fall under the truck’s wheels was as unintended as the truck driver’s crushing her. Your detective whiskers are quivering, Kate told herself, and they are picking up nothing, because nothing is in the wind.

She turned out the light, allowed the door to slam behind her, and headed for home. She had
taken the picture with her, still in its frame that matched the blotter and letter holder, promising Nellie to return it to the storeroom if it proved to lead nowhere.

Once home, she called Blair’s apartment; he had not yet returned; she left a message asking him to call her, and wondered if this was wise. Wise or not, she had to decide either to forget Nellie or to follow up the man in this picture, if Blair knew who he was.

It was some hours later that Blair returned her call. She had wondered how much to tell him about how she had acquired the picture, and ended, as she usually did end, with the truth. He listened to her account of the storage room and its disappointing contents with some amusement, conveyed by the intermittent chuckle.

“It was a characteristic Schuyler cleanup,” Blair said. “As it happens, I was there at my own insistence when the cleaning staff cleared out her office. I was still angry about her death, and in pain. They dumped her belongings into boxes—the ones you found, no doubt—and left everything else that belonged to the school right there—the furniture, the computer, the bookshelves. She had a picture on the wall, and I offered to call her parents to ask if they wanted it. They didn’t; it was a reproduction of Mary Cassatt’s
The Boating Party
.”

“It’s in your office now,” Kate said. “I noticed it.”

“Yes. I’ve pondered it a good deal. It says a great deal about family life, that picture—Nellie mentioned
it to me. The baby’s eyes are on the man, the woman’s eyes are on the man and the baby, the man’s eyes are on his rowing, or perhaps the shore. Nellie was also impressed with the composition; anyway, I kept it as a memento from her.”

“There was a picture on her desk,” Kate said, not mentioning that she had borrowed it. “At least, I assume it was; the frame matches her desk blotter. It’s a picture of her with a man. Do you know who he is, or was?”

“He is, or was, her brother. They were incredibly close all their lives, or so I gathered from Nellie. It quite amazed me, because I have a sister and we are distantly polite with wholly different interests. Why?”

“I’d like to talk to him. Do you know where he lives?”

“Hold on. I have to think. He’s a poet, and gives courses in various universities—that’s how he supports himself. But I seem to remember he had a more or less permanent position teaching somewhere in the Midwest. Damn.”

“Was his name Rosenbusch, too?”

“Yes. And I can’t come up with his first name either. I’ll ask myself tonight when going to sleep, and the answer may be there when I wake up. That sometimes happens. I’ll let you know when it comes to me, but if you know any poets, they may be more help than I can be.”

“Thanks, Blair.”

“You know, Kate, she may not have been more
than distracted when she went under that truck. I don’t think the brother ought to be—”

“Trust me for that,” Kate said. If I ever find him, she reminded herself, hanging up the phone.

Blair’s nighttime directions to his unconscious proved disappointing. Kate had been to graduate school with a couple of male poets, men who had persevered in their craft, not trying to mount the academic ladder but picking up what teaching jobs they could here and there. She called them in the hope that one of them might have heard of poet Rosenbusch. It was, of course, not easy to locate her poet friends, whose lives were peripatetic by definition, and it was some days before she tracked one of them down. He, however, was unexpectedly helpful.

“Of course I know Rosie,” he bellowed happily over the phone, after he and Kate had exchanged the usual questions and answers. “Good poet. He lives in New Hampshire. I’ll try to dig up his address and get back to you. If it’s poetry you want, can’t I help?”

“If it were, you could,” Kate said. “Do try to find the address or the phone number, will you? It’s rather important.”

“I’m off now on the search,” he said. “I suppose you have one of those beastly machines on which I can leave a message?”

“I have.” She gave him the number.

“When I next come to New York, I expect to be given a lavish dinner at one of those snooty restaurants.”

“For you, anything,” Kate promised. “Even a snooty restaurant.”

Later that day Kate’s machine recorded poet Rosenbusch’s address but not his phone number. “I tried information,” the machine repeated, “but it’s unlisted. Smart fellow. I hope you have some powerful pull with the phone company. Is there a restaurant called Luchese?”

Neither the phone company nor Reed, when she recruited him to help, could wrest the phone number of poet Rosenbusch (whose first name was Charles) from the telephone company. Kate was hot on the trail, for no reason she could have logically explained, but even she refused to fabricate a family emergency in order to get his number. He had had enough of a family emergency already.

“I’ll have to go to see him and hope he’s home,” Kate said.

Reed groaned. “He probably won’t be there, and if he is, he probably won’t want to talk to you. I wouldn’t want to talk to you if my sister had recently died that way, if I had a sister.”

“You might,” Kate said. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger about your feelings and troubles.”

“That is a cliché I have always considered spurious,” Reed said.

“Anyway,” Kate said. “I’m going. I’ll fly to Boston and rent a car. New Hampshire, at least his part, is quite near. I will get a sense of accomplishment even if I accomplish nothing.”

“I hope your battery dies, you get caught in a
snowdrift, and are only rescued on the point of starvation,” Reed said.

“No, you don’t,” Kate said. “You hope I find him, because you know I want to, however irrational the desire.”

“Okay, then, but be careful,” Reed said when she left that weekend for the airport.

Six

C
HARLES
Rosenbusch lived in a small house that faced on the square of a small New Hampshire village. There was a church, a graveyard, a common, and one or two other houses. Kate knocked at the door of the wrong house before having the right one pointed out to her. Rosenbusch did not respond to a knock on his front door, and Kate finally trailed around to the back to find him, or at least a man, clearing bushes at the edge of his back field.

“I’m looking for Charles Rosenbusch,” Kate called out, after her hello had made him raise his head. He turned back to his bushes. “It’s about your sister, Nellie,” Kate added. She began to feel that she was making a fool of herself, and had come on a mindless excursion; if she had had a rational reason,
it seemed to be escaping her now. Really, she should listen to Reed when contemplating this sort of idiocy.

But Rosenbusch had dropped the tools with which he had been attacking the undergrowth, and walked toward her.

“You knew Nellie?” he asked.

“I’m grappling with her memory and her death,” Kate said. “Could I take a moment to explain?”

“You didn’t know her.” It was a statement.

“Give me ten minutes to explain,” Kate said. “Standing right here. We’ll synchronize our watches. If in ten minutes you say go, I’ll go.”

He took her at her word, literally, glancing at his watch as she glanced at hers. There was no need to synchronize them; ten minutes is ten minutes. I’ve seen too many war movies, Kate told herself. They stood, perhaps three feet apart, his defensive stance daring her to interest him.

“I am teaching at Schuyler Law School this semester; I’m a professor of literature, on leave from my regular job, teaching a course on law and literature with Blair Whitson. He was a friend of Nellie’s. Blair and I have questions about Nellie’s death. There is little chance of proving anything, one way or the other, but we would like to know more about Nellie, for our own sakes, and because something she knew may help us to bring those who tormented her—and she was tormented—to justice, if not for her murder, at least for something. You are the only person who may be able to tell us something about her. I want to know if you
saw her in the months before her death, and if she told you anything that might be of use to us in learning what was on her mind toward the end of her life.”

“Did you talk to our parents? Is that how you heard of me?”

“No. I found a picture of you and Nellie among her belongings. They are in a storeroom, since apparently neither you nor your parents wanted them. Blair knew it was you in the picture. I found out your address from a poet friend of mine.” And Kate named him.

Kate paused, though her ten minutes were not even half used up. Rosenbusch seemed to make up his mind.

“You better come in,” he said. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Kate Fansler.”

“Okay, Kate. Let’s talk awhile. My name’s Charles, but these days everybody calls me Rosie.”

He led the way into the house through the back door; past the mud room, they entered a large sunny kitchen, made to seem even sunnier by the yellow floor and chintz chairs before the fireplace opposite the kitchen’s business end.

I am destined to talk in kitchens, Kate thought.

He sat down in one chair and pointed her to a chair opposite. “How can I help?” he said. Kate remembered that he had been smiling in the picture, laughing even, with his arm around Nellie. Now he seemed somber enough to make that laughter implausible.

“Tell me what Nellie talked about during the time she was at Schuyler Law; anything connected with the school or its inhabitants. Anything, no matter how inconsequential it seems to you.”

“We talked of everything; we always did. I might as well give you the picture of our relationship, our love. I’m glad to see you don’t cringe at the word
love
between a brother and a sister. We’re not talking Wagner here, or youthful familial passions. We simply liked and loved each other. I’ve often thought,” he added, growing pensive—his eyes had never been directly on Kate—“that the brother-and-sister bond has been ignored by psychologists and novelists and others of that ilk. Freud got them so caught up in the damned Oedipus complex that no other attachment seemed equally compelling. Stupid, really.”

“Were you twins?”

“I told you, no Wagner. I was eighteen months older; eighteen months in which I sometimes think I was waiting for her, waiting for her to be my friend and my companion against the parents. Oh, don’t get any idea that they were cruel or mean or other than perfectly good middle-class parents. They were just dull, and full of conventional ideas, and wanting for us what, as they often said, any parents want for their boy and girl. The boy to make a nice living, the girl to marry a nice man. They argued with each other, of course, in a folie à deux that is probably emblematic of most marriages. Nellie and I simply had a different life.”

“Did she call you Rosie?” Kate asked after a longish pause, for something to say.

“She called me Charles. I called her Nellie because the parents called her Elinor, her name. Someone told her that Nellie was short for Elinor, and we latched on to that. So,” he added after a moment, “if you want to know did we talk of everything together, the answer is yes, we did, to the very end.”

Kate waited. He would get to Schuyler. Her mouth was dry, but no drink seemed in the offing. She would have rather liked a cup of tea or, lacking that, a drink of water. But she feared to interrupt his speech and his memories.