Duplicate Keys (12 page)

“All of this does make me famished all the time, but I’d better get to work.”

“Shall I drive you before I put the car away again?”

“You don’t want to go to midtown. It would probably gridlock.”

“Then I could abandon the car for good.”

“I wonder if you’d have to. If the whole island of Manhattan would be a pedestrian mall forever after that.”

Susan was smiling. With a start, Alice realized that days had passed since their last smiles. Warmth, banked since the night before, kindled again, as always. “Dinner?” she said.

“I may just be able to afford two cartons of yogurt if you’ll bring the bananas.”

“Your place?”

“Why not?”

Smiling as broadly as she could, Alice said, “About six, then. Bananas. I’ll stop at the Fairway.” She got out at the bus stop and Susan rolled away. On the trip downtown Alice put her purse between her feet, stepping firmly on the strap, and used her hands to count up her friends. With Laura, Sidney, and Howard, to whose homes she had never been, and Janet O’Connor, who had so many children, in Minneapolis, that she never had time to write, Alice still could not fill up two hands. Denny and Craig, of course, could hardly be so soon replaced, and it was hard to tell if Jim Ellis should be called a friend or not. There was no one else, no lover from the years since Jim that she could even telephone. The
fewness of them shocked her, and what shocked her even more was that until now they had seemed plenteous, a wealth of friends. Of course, she had spent her whole childhood with her parents, not understanding the occasional sympathetic query, “Wouldn’t you like to have brothers and sisters?” To share Doreen and Hugh? Wasn’t seven at the table, plus friends, for holidays, an enormous number? Riding downtown on the Fifth Avenue bus, Alice felt for the first time in her life depopulated. She tried to think that Susan’s suspicions of their friends didn’t have to influence her, but posing the unanswerable question, to whom would she go if she had to, she saw that already the influence was felt. Her brief, nearly involuntary mental images of Noah killing Craig out of a jealous passion (and Denny because he entered the apartment at the wrong moment?) and of Ray lending out his key to thugs and of Rya teasing Noah with the rivalry of his best friend distanced her absolutely from them no matter how she regretted it. Of course, there was Susan. Alice smiled at the richness of the friendship: its length, its intimacy, its comfort, at her own deftness in handling Susan’s porcupine periods and at Susan’s skill with her jellyfish periods. There would always be Susan, but still—She jumped off at the library. She rarely came in this late, and when she looked up toward the grand sunlit facade with its rising pigeons and tranquil lions, she thought it beautiful. Susan’s phrase, “A mighty fortress is our library,” recurred to her. Just then it did seem that a dozen acquaintances and one beautiful building might indeed equal a friend.

Nevertheless, when she got inside she was not disappointed that the day’s assignment, to bring the card catalogue in line with losses in preparation for the programming of all materials that was to begin over the summer, paired her with Laura, whom Alice especially liked, perhaps because at thirty Laura was nearly all gray, as Alice’s mother had been as early as Alice could remember. And Laura was a gossip. Her flow of anecdote about her family, her friends, their co-workers, and anyone else who crossed her mind reminded Alice over and over of all the friends there
were to be made. Laura’s gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room for years and was just now discovering the dramatic possibilities of daily life. She sang Alice through the day.

On the bus up Sixth Avenue it seemed to Alice that she had caught her life in its downward plunge, that she held it, although with difficulty, and that with only a little luck she could turn it. What did the lives of her four ancient grandparents prove if not that life itself would go on? Wouldn’t such a crisis as this one appear almost invisible from the perspective of sixty years on? An anecdote like one of Laura’s that she could hardly remember.

On Thursday Roger Jenks sat down with them. Alice barely knew Roger, but he had a strange fame among the librarians, and although he was a nice man, his sitting next to them seemed ill-omened. It was Roger who, the year before, had wrestled a distraught attacker to the floor of the main reading room and held him pinned in a pool of the victim’s blood until the guards and a policeman could get there. Perhaps it was just a minute, but afterward Roger had looked like a walking corpse. None of the library staff ever talked about the incident, and both the victim, stabbed from behind in the neck and shoulder while reading a German grammar, and the attacker had never been heard of again. It was thought the victim had survived. Laura, who knew Roger fairly well, said, “Hey, you two have something in common! Guess what it is.”

Alice didn’t dare. What could it be besides gore? Fixing a smile on her face, she did her best to look intrigued. She had not known Laura knew about her.

“If you’re referring to the L-Two trap,” said Roger, “we have that in common with everyone here.”

“Nope!” said Laura.

“Shoe size?” Roger picked up his feet and looked at the soles of his oxfords. They were at least size fourteen. Alice laughed.

“No. Aren’t you from Minnesota somewhere, Roger?”

“Bemidji.”

“That’s not much in common,” exclaimed Alice.

“Thanks,” said Roger. “You sound relieved.”

“I didn’t mean to. Where did you go to school?”

“Iowa.”

“Oh.”

Roger put his elbows on the table and looked at her. “But maybe we have more in common than that.”

Just then Sidney appeared with the news that Alice had a phone call. Alice got up reluctantly. It was Ray. “Can you come over to Studio Midtown on your lunch hour?” he demanded.

“Half hour. I don’t know. Let me think.”

“You’ve got to.”

Alice was annoyed by his tone. “You come here.”

“I can’t. I’m watching the board for someone. She considers herself a big star. If she were, she’d probably be more easy-going.”

“Ray, I’ve had too much time off this week. Let me come after work.”

“I need you before that.”

“What for?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. I’m in room—”

Alice had a sudden vision of Laura, Sidney, Howard, and now Roger sitting cozily at lunch. Friendly. Funny. Not guilty for sure. “Don’t assume I’m coming!” she barked. “I have a job, too. That’s an hour and a half or two hours with traffic.”

“A half hour each way, tops, and I just have to talk to you for a minute.”

“You want me to walk up there, or pay for a cab, just to talk to me for a minute? I’ve got work to do!”

“It’s important!”

“Then you come here. If you can’t make it, then I’ll meet you there at about five-thirty, all right?” Annoyed by his imperious attitude, she couldn’t help sounding sharp.

“I wish you understood.”

“I’ll be there before you know it. You said you’re stuck there. I’ll come right after work.” After hanging up, she realized that he hadn’t mentioned the room number after all, or the name of the “star.” But the studio would know Ray. Everyone did.

Except the boy in the booth, who was not only gigantically mellow, but new on the job as well. And he didn’t know how not to answer the phone while he was talking to her, and in the middle of the third phone call, when he was running his finger down the schedules looking for an empty room, he knocked everything off his desk, including his cup of coffee. Still, she found out from asking passers-by that he was the only person who even might know something. Everyone else had gone on a delivery or out to dinner. Alice looked at her watch. It was nearly six. Her trip from the library had been a chain of time-consuming mistakes—getting into a cab that got stuck in traffic, getting out of it just before the jam eased, bumping into people, turning down wrong streets. The boy got off the phone again, looked at the mess on the floor, and said, “Oh, shit. Shee-it.”

“If you’d just think a minute,” Alice pleaded, “you might remember who Ray Reschley is. He comes here all the time. He mixes sound and stuff like that.”

“Who’s he working for again?”

“I don’t KNOW. I told you that.”

“Well, it’s all listed under whoever’s playing.”

“Well, read me the names. He said she was a big star.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Point me to where the rooms are, and I’ll just look for myself, okay?”

“Lady!”

“I won’t disturb anyone.”

“If there were windows in the doors, you’d disturb people just by looking into them. That’s why there aren’t any windows on the doors.”

“But even if I disturbed people, I’d only disturb them for a minute.”

“Hey, that’s why people come here. That’s why they
pay
. So they won’t be disturbed for even a minute.”

“This is an emergency.”

“Who says?”

“Do you have a manager?”

Now the kid was beginning to get annoyed. “He doesn’t like to be disturbed, either.”

“Look—” Alice didn’t know quite what to do. The boy’s tentative look of annoyance widened into a smile of victory as Alice stepped back from the booth. Alice smiled herself, pretending to be about to leave, but then she threw back her head and screamed as loudly as she could, “RAY! RAY! RAY!” Her voice broke. The kid in the booth was shocked. No manager, however, came gliding out of any of the closed doors. Nothing at all happened, except that another truck came in and the boy in the booth picked up the phone. Alice felt her throat with her hand, wondering if she would ever speak again. After dialing two or three times, the boy beckoned to her. “I found the people he was with. Mixing sound, right? That band’s gone home.”

“I don’t want the band. I want Ray Reschley.”

“Hey, they’ve gone home. They’ve all gone home. Now you go home.”

“See if they went out somewhere.”

His hand didn’t even touch the receiver. “He’s gone home.”

“Okay,” said Alice, turning away. When the boy bent his head to pick up the rest of his papers, she scurried around the booth and ran toward the closed doors and the stairwell. “Hey!” shouted the boy, but only once. He probably didn’t dare leave his booth, especially since he was new on the job.

Alice stood between two doors, with her eye on a third, waiting for someone to come out. No one did. At last, she opened the door to her right and saw that the room, cavernous and completely insulated, was empty. So was the room to her left. Across the hall, a man with a guitar looked up and scowled before she could get the door shut. She crept toward the stairs. Her own
behavior was making her afraid. Surely it hadn’t really been an emergency. Ray hadn’t called it an emergency. He had wanted her, but he hadn’t needed her. If he needed someone, wouldn’t he call Noah, or some friend that Alice didn’t know, someone who’d seen him more frequently over the last year? Thinking of how they had drifted apart rather reassured Alice. At the top of the stairs she stood up straight. A face she recognized came out of one room and went into another, but she barely had time to remember the name, much less ask him if he knew Ray Reschley. The emptiness of the high-ceilinged corridor made her jumpy. She looked at her watch. It was six thirty-three. She opened the door next to her. Inside, someone very famous, judging by his resplendent clothing and his entourage, was practicing. No Ray. Five chords boomed over her before she got the door closed. After that she knew that she couldn’t open any more doors. Shortly after that, she began to view favorably the notion that Ray had gone home. Why should the kid lie? Ray was probably in his apartment right now, wondering what had happened to her. She should go home, too, and wait for his call. Call him, even. The door in her distracted gaze opened, startling her. A Rastafarian sauntered out. Alice squeaked, as she had planned, “Do you know Ray Reschley?”

“Shit, man,” said the Rastafarian.

“Thanks, anyway,” said Alice.

But Ray wasn’t at home, or else his phone was unplugged. When at last the answering service picked up, they wouldn’t give Alice any information. She could not help thinking of Roger Jenks, thinking he had been ill-omened, for now she was a little worried, and felt a little like she had betrayed an old friend in order to make a new one. And Roger Jenks hadn’t even sat with them at lunch.

D
ETECTIVE
Honey was waiting for her on the sunlit steps when she came outside with her peanut butter sandwich
on Friday. She had never expected to see him outdoors, somehow, and she didn’t recognize him. He hardly looked imposing at all. When he saw her, he took off his sunglasses. Alice dropped her sandwich while opening it, and he picked it up for her. “Another beautiful day,” he said.

“Almost two weeks, now.” She smiled as well as she could.

“Mind if I take up a few minutes of your lunch hour?”

“May I?”

“May you?”

“May I mind?”

He smiled politely. “No,” he said. He flipped back the cover of his notebook and gestured for her to sit down. He was dressed in plain clothes, but he looked very coplike; Alice prayed that Laura wouldn’t come out.

“How’ve you been?” said Honey.

Alice shrugged.

“I saw you at the funeral.”

Alice hadn’t seen Honey. “I didn’t expect it to fill the church, but it seemed to.”

“More friends than you thought?”

“I suppose.”

“Would you say that either of the victims was closer to Mr. Mast, say, than to Mr. Reschley? Or vice versa?”

“Noah would have been with them more, I suppose, because they all played together, but Ray might have been around more in off hours, except that he’s a pretty busy person.”

“You would say that Mr. Reschley is successful in his job, sought after?”

“I’ve gotten that impression.”

“And Mr. Mast?”

“He’s probably a fair bass player. No one has ever lured him away, but I wouldn’t know if anyone ever tried.”

“How would you characterize Mr. Mast?”