Duplicate Keys (13 page)

“He’s a nice guy.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Alice lifted her gaze, and shading her eyes against the glare, looked into Honey’s face. He looked merely curious, pleasant. She thought of Noah’s habit of carrying a bag of dope or a few joints with him wherever he went. He had done it for so long that he probably no longer remembered that it was illegal. “He’s very relaxed,” she said, “generous, dependable, loyal.”

“Could you characterize Mrs. Mast?”

“Harmless.”

“Compared to?”

Alice started. For a moment Honey seemed just the least bit predatory, but then he veiled his interest. Alice shrugged. “Not compared to, or maybe, compared to what she seems. She wears a lot of make-up and usually dresses in revealing black clothes.”

“Intelligent?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your friend?”

“Sort of.”

Honey settled himself. “Is Mr. Reschley your friend?”

Alice nodded.

“You’ve known him for a number of years, I believe?”

“Almost sixteen.”

“You’ve known him longer than the others have?”

Alice nodded.

“Was Mr. Reschley ever married?”

“No.”

“Does Mr. Reschley have any unusual habits?”

“Not strictly unusual, no.”

Honey pursed his lips. “Is Mr. Reschley a homosexual?” Alice nodded.

“Completely so?”

“Yes, as far as I know.”

“Any of this sort of involvement with the rest of the band?”

“No!”

“Have you met any of Mr. Reschley’s homosexual associates?”

“Not really, no.”

“But?”

“Once we were in a bar. I saw a guy he later went out with, but I didn’t actually meet him.”

“Named?”

“Lonnie something. I don’t know any others.” Alice looked at her watch.

Honey leaned forward. “Let’s be perfectly clear about this, okay?” he said. “You have never met and know nothing about Mr. Reschley’s present friends and associates?”

“I’ve never met any of them and Ray never talks about them.”

“Does Mr. Reschley take drugs in any form?”

“I’ve never seen him.” But of course she had seen him reach for joints, inhale, pass them on. She had seen herself do the same thing. Lying. She bit her lip.

“Have you seen Mr. Reschley lately?”

“He called me on the phone yesterday, but I didn’t see him. I went to meet him, but he had gone home.”

“You haven’t heard from him since?”

“No.”

“Have you seen more of Mr. Reschley since the incident than you were accustomed to seeing him before the incident?”

“Yes.” Why evade the question? “He’s the most used to the public eye, so he’s been taking care of a lot of things having to do with newspapers and magazines. He’s been very kind.”

“Miss Gabriel and Mr. Reschley and the Masts and yourself have, would you say, sort of drawn together for mutual support?”

“I would say that.” How much did he know? Did he need to be advised of every little angry exchange, every suspicion? Did five minutes of suspicion balance years of trust? Honey stifled a yawn. Alice wondered if the case bored him. An old phrase from the Sherlock Holmes she had once been in the habit of reading occurred to her, “features of interest.” Did this case have any features of interest for Honey? Could she herself be a “feature of interest,” or mistaken for one by someone tired, overworked, underpaid, furnished with a certain moral blindness? Would he
hold lies against her? Alice realized that her fingers in her pocket had shredded the napkin around the remnant of sandwich she had put there and that a red stain of strawberry jam was beginning to spread in the weave of her skirt. She took her hand out of her pocket and placed it inconspicuously over the stain. Honey continued to glance alternately through his notes and out toward Fifth Avenue. A sigh, perhaps a companion to the yawn, escaped him. Alice said, “Detective Honey, is the investigation proceeding pretty quickly?”

When he smiled she resigned herself to being palmed off. “Quickly enough,” he said. Just as she would not confide in him, he would not confide in her.

But there was one more question she had to ask. “Do you think that the deaths were, what, anomalous?”

Perhaps he took her meaning more clearly than she did. “Do I think anyone is in danger, do you mean? Like a plot or a pathological killer? No, I don’t think so at this point.”

The words “killer,” “danger,” and “pathological” startled Alice. She hadn’t been thinking of the peaceful still-life of the previous Saturday in such dynamic terms. Instead of reassuring her, Alice could feel Honey’s words dropping into her like acid, beginning to burn away her Midwestern sense of safety. And, she reflected, he didn’t simply say, No, or Of course not. He said, “I don’t think so at this point.” Alice shivered. Honey said, “We’ve lost the sun, I’m afraid. You’ll be wanting to go back to work.” They stood. “Thank you for your time.”

“Any time,” said Alice, suddenly afraid for him to go, afraid even of the ten or twelve feet of open pavement before she could gain the preserve of the library. Honey shook her hand. She was hard put to release it at the proper moment. That afternoon she hid in the labyrinth of stacks, looking for lost books.

S
INCE
Tuesday she had been even more unsure with Susan, more tentative but more helpful, unable to decide, or rather
to know instinctively, just the right degree of intimacy. It seemed to her that the merest breath of a wish not to have her around would make her vanish, but at the same time, it often seemed to her that Susan had just grimaced at some clumsiness of hers, or just suggested, subtly, that she leave, and she hadn’t understood until it was too late to do anything gracefully. They were spending a lot of time together, each night eating something at one or another’s apartment, doing the dishes, going for a twilight walk at the end of which they stopped for ice cream, coming home, reading or flipping through the channels on the television. It was the sort of intimacy Alice had desired, as co-operative as two feet walking, and yet she was unusually uncomfortable, too, terribly desirous of pleasing.

Sometimes Alice could not help staring at Susan, admiring the liquid copper hair that stopped so abruptly at her shoulders, the strong high cheekbones and wide mouth, the eyes set deeply under great arching brows. Peasant stock, Susan said she came from, and it was true that she would never be thin. Broad shouldered, wide hipped. Alice thought over and over that she was beautiful. On Friday, they were at Alice’s, handing across the salad dressing, and Alice felt everything shift, as a driver feels a long line of stopped cars begin to move before it actually does. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the discomfort drained away, and they were simply two friends eating together at a kitchen table. Alice could not help smiling, but it was Susan who began to talk. “Do you remember when I met Denny?” she asked.

“Of course. You barged into my room at three in the morning and said you’d met the man you were going to marry.”

“Did I say marry? I wasn’t so prescient after all, then. But I’ve been trying for days to remember the name of the guy I was with that night. Jerry something.”

“Jerry McMann.”

“Jerry McMann! Right! It seems to me that he spent the evening talking about all the other girls in the bar, what they looked like, what they were wearing. Anyway, these two guys got up on stage
and sang a lot of folk music. Kingston Trio, the usual. But every set they sang two songs, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me.’ I was entranced. I didn’t even realize that Jerry was boring, and I loved watching Denny and Craig. Those two songs made them seem so mean, and then they’d sing something like ‘Early Morning Rain’ and instead of seeming mean, they’d seem tormented. We sat there for hours. Sometime in the last set, they sang that old Ian and Sylvia thing called ‘Song for Canada’ and I just knew they were Canadians. Denny was completely hairy, as if he’d just gotten in from the Arctic, and Craig simply looked exciting. He could have been from anywhere far away and difficult. Then Jerry said we should buy a pitcher and get the singers, who he knew slightly, and the girls at the next table, who he kept talking about, to join us. It worked like a charm, except that the funny thing was that I angled to sit next to Craig, and then one of the girls just shot in there and grabbed the seat, so I was stuck sitting next to Denny, who looked almost normal rather than in the advanced stages of some Romantic agony. The first thing he said to me was ‘I was watching you from the stage,’ which of course sounded thrilling and sophisticated. These two guys just moved in on Jerry, and it was so graceful and worldly and perfectly cruel that it seemed marvellous to me. There was a teasing sexual innuendo in everything they said that flattered us and made us laugh and made adulthood seem very possible and desirable. I’m sure I was arch and joking and rather distant, I mean, you had to be, but inside I was leaning and melting, and when Denny told me he was from Minnesota after all, and then when he talked affectionately about his family and all the other kids, he somehow didn’t get any less exotic or cruel, he just got exotic and cruel and familiar and kind and desirous and experienced all at the same time. We left Jerry at the bar, which seemed to be what he deserved, and went to their apartment, which was furnished entirely with mattresses on the bare floor and with their record collection, and of course Craig got out
the dope and the unfiltered apple juice, and there was Country Joe and kissing on the Indian bedspreads and discussion of whether marijuana enhanced or dampened sexual desire, and then some friends came over to play music, and that was what really struck me, that friends who rode motorcycles could just walk in at one in the morning. Exotic again! I shook his hand in the doorway, but there seemed such a terrible lack of compromise between never seeing Denny again and becoming his slave.”

“You always seemed much cooler than that, somehow. As if you thought you might allow this guy to take you out.”

“Did I?” She pushed herself away from the table.

“So how come you never got married? It seems irrelevant. I mean, you always seemed married in a way that Jim and I weren’t, as if nothing could hold us together and nothing could drive you apart.”

Susan ran her hands under the back of her hair and lifted it out of her collar. “Really? I always admired you for committing yourselves in public, for not keeping anything in reserve. I always wondered why you and Jim and Noah and Rya were freer than I was, or more grown up, or less suspicious.”

“Or more benighted. I think having gotten married means more in retrospect than it did at the time. I don’t know about Noah and Rya, but I’m willing to admit that my marriage was just a fruitless attempt to have something I couldn’t have, another bent nail in a very ramshackle structure.” She shrugged.

Susan was looking out the window. “Denny would have done it, I think. In spite of his rock and roll image. Something held us back.” She paused, tipping the chair up on two legs. “No, something held him back and something else held me back. Do wives go away by themselves every six months or so? Do husbands come and go unannounced? Everyone thinks beforehand that they’re going to have that kind of free, creative marriage, but does anybody? If I’d ever seen somebody like me who was married, I might have done it.”

“But you’re amazingly domestic. You make good homes where people like to be. I feel like I specialize in The Virgin’s Retreat.”

“Now I wouldn’t say domestic. I wouldn’t say domestic at all. I would say competent, or good at business, never domestic.”

Alice opened her mouth to protest, or at least to exclaim at Susan’s misinterpretation of herself, but the phone rang. Susan, closer, reached for it. After a moment of listening, she looked up at Alice and said, “They can’t find Ray. Ray’s disappeared.”

6

I
T WAS
Alice who called Noah, half expecting to ease into the bad news, but Noah greeted her with, “I just got back from Studio Midtown and I talked with most of the guys who were there yesterday. No one’s seen him since they packed the band up about five—”

“Why didn’t they tell me that!” Alice couldn’t help exclaiming.

“And I called Murray, too. He plays bass in that band. He says Ray didn’t go uptown with them, and the last he saw him, he was going into that Greek place across the street. They’re all pissed, too, because he made a deal to be there today and tomorrow.”

“I thought Ray was the most dependable guy in New York.”

“So did Ray.”

Alice could hear Rya’s faint shout in the background, “Tell her about—” but then it was garbled. Noah ignored her. Alice said, “Tell me about what?” but Noah was already talking. “The police went over to his apartment this afternoon, when he didn’t show up for the job and nobody could reach him. Clean as a whistle.”

“Tell me about what?”

“What?”

“I heard Rya say for you to tell me about something.”

“Did she?”

“Come on, Noah.”

“I’m sure he’s all right.”

“Are you?”

“We don’t have any evidence that anything has happened to him, or that he’s left town on his own, do we? He probably met someone last night. If it weren’t for this other thing, nobody would give it a second thought.”