Duplicate Keys (25 page)

“Rya called me. She said you were going over to see him. I told her to come by, but she said she couldn’t make it until after dinner.”

“I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t even see Honey.”

“I’ll make a hollandaise for this.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“No.”

Alice began to be afraid again. “I’ve been terribly depressed all afternoon.” She raised her voice slightly at the end, to encourage Susan to confide the same thing. All Susan said was “Really?”

“Haven’t you?”

“Should I be?”

“Our friend has been arrested!”

“Honestly, that doesn’t depress me. It’s irrelevant. He’ll be out sooner or later. Honey obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing, which rather depresses me, but Noah I’m not worried about. He’s been crazy lately. Something concrete, some kind of action from outside will perk him up. People are always happy when they’re actually being victimized.”

“But what if he did it?”

“Impossible.”

“Rya doesn’t think so.”

“Rya has always attributed a lot of force to Noah’s character that just isn’t there. Here, wash these.” She handed Alice a package of chicken breasts. Alice tore off the wrappings. “He would never have the self-assurance, especially to face down Craig.” She began rolling the washed breasts in flour. Alice’s head was throbbing with pain. She sat down.

Susan went on. “I’ve figured out a lot of things.”

“What?”

“I’ve figured out why they never got big.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, I’m convinced that if they’d ever gotten as successful as Craig wanted to get, they would never have been killed. I’ve thought a lot about it, the relationship of their murder to their exact degree of success. I’m sure it wasn’t random or inevitable, but maybe it was unavoidable.”

“I’m so tired of talking about it and thinking about it.”

“That’s because you’re having only a welter of thoughts. If you—”

“It’s because I can’t bear that it happened!”

Susan looked at her, then went back to sautéing the chicken. It was Alice’s favorite recipe, one Jim Ellis had taught her and she had taught Susan. Boned chicken breasts floured and sautéed in butter, then smothered in a sauce of cream, chicken drippings,
and lemon juice. Very simple. Susan was bribing her. Also in the bag were chocolate pastries from Zabar’s, one of her weaknesses. Alice closed her eyes. In a moment she heard the clink of a glass on the table, and opened them upon a glass of white wine. She took a sip. Susan lifted the last golden piece of meat out of the pan and turned off the flame. Then she turned to Alice and put her hands on her hips. “You seem to think that this means nothing to me.”

“I don’t mean to imply that. I’m sorry if—”

“Denny’s mother calls me nearly every day. Did I send the clothes? The clothes got there. Do I mind who gets what, isn’t there anything else that I want to keep, there are some letters of mine from way back that Denny had at home, every little thing, but mostly she, or one of the sisters or brothers, just wants to hear it again. They can’t believe it. Well, I can’t believe it either. It only sinks in bit by bit, as I think about why it was, and what might have led up to it. Some guy off the street didn’t just come in and blow them away. Whatever happened was the culmination of something.”

“Yes, I—”

“It’s not crazy or senseless, that’s the point! Things led up to it, step by logical step. Every detail is significant. And it’s not just significant in terms of what happened, it’s significant to me, to my peace of mind, to my being able to go on from this. I’m the one who’s got to know why it happened, I’m the one who’s got to think about it. I can’t wait for Honey to file a report!”

“Actually, today when Rya called and told me that they had arrested Noah, I was almost happy. I couldn’t bear being happy, or feeling good that Noah had done it, or at least that they thought Noah had done it. I was so sure that the result of the investigation would be worse. Much worse. And it seemed almost appropriate that Noah should be the one, if you know what I mean. I could survive Noah.”

“Who couldn’t you survive?”

“Well.” Alice looked steadily at her friend. “When, uh, Honey
first talked to me after I found them, I thought it was going to be me. I thought he could convince me of anything.” She laughed, Susan did not. Alice began to eat.

After a few seconds, Susan cleared her throat and said, “I think that the first year after we got here was the worst. I thought it was great then, but now I remember it, and all I can picture is sitting around the living room with these greasy guys from the record company, planning out a strategy. Craig and Denny were horribly enthusiastic. Craig used to sit practically on top of the guy and stare into his face. Denny wasn’t much better. There were the Eagles on the Coast and there were the guys, two bands, dueling it out for national primacy. Even though he’d never met the Eagles, Craig used to call them by their first names. I hated it, and teased him about it, but he couldn’t help it. Once I said, ‘None of the Eagles calls you by your first names!’ but he didn’t bat an eyelid, just said, ‘They will by Christmas.’”

“The record company was very encouraging. How could they help being hopeful?”

Susan scowled. “And then they got booked into smaller and smaller gigs. Oh, yeah, first it was the Bottom Line and all that, with the company making the deals, but then it was supper clubs out in New Rochelle, playing for the country set, and then it was towns in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and the guys were doing their own hustling. By then everyone realized that good old Dinah was off the charts, not even in the top hundred, and that the album had shot only to sixty-nine anyway, before plummeting. Who cared, the next one would burn everybody up. They made up songs around the dinner table. Denny kept a pad for lines of songs by the bed. They got stoned, they didn’t get stoned, they got drunk, they didn’t get drunk, they composed by themselves and they brainstormed with each other and Noah and even Ray. Denny practiced new riffs by the hour, except that he
got them off other people’s records!
He’d practice it and get it right, but it wasn’t new, it wasn’t his. I felt sick all the time. When they walked in the door, my chest would get tight and my heart would
start pounding or I’d want to throw up for fear of what they were going to say. I’ve never seen two people have so much hope about anything! And then the record company was rude to Craig, and he broke the contract, and they didn’t even get to finish recording the second album. But of course they could get something with another company, no problem, all these guys were interested, all these guys had approached them, except it was like magic. There was no one. No matter what they did or how hard they worked, no one was going to record them again. It was like one of those old movies where someone says, I’ll see that you never have a job in this town again. I couldn’t believe it at first. And they never did believe it. Or, they believed it, but they acted like it
was
magic. Craig always thought it could turn around at any moment. Just the right move, something as simple as wearing the right shirt to a gig could turn it around. Going to Studio Midtown on the right afternoon and falling into conversation with the right guy, coming up with the right kind of lyric, just one line, something with real punch. Craig always thought that it was a tiny little thing that was keeping him out, and if he only found it, then he would be in again. And it wasn’t just the music business, it was the cosmos, or luck, or karma. Anything could get him back in, like being a vegetarian, and anything could keep him out, like being a vegetarian.”

“I remember when he was a vegetarian.”

“Shit, we went round and round about that one. He was bad to eat the flesh of animals, evil. His whole system was contaminated and he lived on a polluted plane of being. But then he changed his mind. Rock and roll demanded a certain destructive energy that could only come from eating meat. He thought if he matched his being perfectly to the spirit of rock and roll, they would meld, and he would get another recording contract.”

“He was a little crazy about it.”

“He thought it was just around the corner. Months and years elapsed and still it was just around the corner. Before I left for the Adirondacks, one of the last conversations I heard him have
with Denny was about how giving up their first contract had really been the right thing to do, they couldn’t let those bastards treat him like that, just like it happened the day before, not five years before. Can you believe it? It made my skin creep.”

“Craig was definitely a little monomaniacal.”

Susan went back to dipping artichoke leaves into the hollandaise and scraping them on her teeth. Alice was breathing heavily. Susan was not finished, however. “I don’t blame them any more, though,” she said. “I blamed them all those years for playing the wrong sort of music or learning the wrong riffs or writing bad songs. And of course I blamed them for being so never say die about everything. For caring so much every time they ran into a producer at a party or met someone who might be able to help them. There was a way that Craig said certain names, always first names, that was a sure signal that he was counting on this person, adoring this person. It always ended with the person being a shit after all. I don’t know which was worse, the hope or the disappointment. And even when I vowed to myself not to pay any attention it was like water rising and falling around me. I couldn’t vow not to get wet.”

“You paint this in such vivid colors! I remember that they wanted to get ahead. Jim wanted to have his poems in
The New Yorker
, too—” She trailed off skeptically.

“You weren’t there, you weren’t around. You had your own life. Besides, this was for inside the house only. Do you think our Craig Shellady would have admitted failure on the street? Especially when Jim did get a poem in
The New Yorker
and Ray did start to get a lot of work with better-known bands?” She pushed the bowl of spent artichoke leaves away from her and went on. “But now I see it wasn’t their fault! They couldn’t have done anything. They were behind the tip of the wave for their style of music, and the time had passed, even before we got here, when every good band was going to be recorded. It all shrank, and they were left out. It was a historical force! Inflation! Oil! Changing
tastes! So what that they were good and wanted success more than life itself!”

“How did that kill them?”

“You can’t understand it. The very air of the apartment was thick. It was like walking through mayonnaise, trying to breathe mayonnaise. Craig was there incessantly. I’d make Denny promise not to talk about it for one night, or one morning, but Craig would just hammer at him until he fell apart. Talking to Denny was like talking to himself, and I’d been around so long that I wasn’t even there.” The sound of the downstairs buzzer startled them and the bustle of Rya’s overwrought arrival prevented Susan from going on, rather to Alice’s relief. Rya was carrying a suitcase. “I can’t stay,” she said. “I have a late plane to Houston.” She thrust out her chin. “I’ve just got to get away. Noah won’t talk to me. I can’t stand it. Anyway, Detective Honey said I could go see my parents for a week, and I got on the plane. It was the last seat until Saturday, so I thought I’d better take it. Noah’s being arraigned or indicted or one of those tomorrow afternoon. Do you hate me?”

Susan stood up and began taking the dishes to the sink. Alice said, “I thought you hadn’t spoken to your parents in six months.”

“I called them this morning. My daddy would rather have me home, anyway.”

“What about work?” Susan spoke coolly, as if she disapproved. Alice didn’t disapprove.

“They gave me time off. David’s been wonderful. He even offered to get Noah a lawyer.”

“Well, why not go?” said Susan. “Why the hell not?”

“The weather’s going to be awful, and under normal circumstances, of course, I’d rather be with Noah, but he won’t see me. I don’t see what good staying around would do.”

Alice shrugged.

“Well, I’ve got to catch the plane. There should be a cab on West End.”

“What airport?”

“Kennedy, but I’ll be glad to drop you. It’s late.”

Susan wiped her hands on a dish towel and then they were gone.

T
HE
first time Alice let herself think about the possible visitor of the night before was when she woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t help it. It was then, when she was trying to recall the exact shape and character of the whiteness she thought she had detected through the window—the laundry room window—that the full realization that Susan had done the murders floated into her thoughts. It was not Denny who had been murdered with Craig, but Craig who had been murdered with Denny. In Denny’s apartment, Denny was the intended victim. The knowledge came so smoothly, so much like old business, that Alice stretched, turned over, and rearranged the blanket before beginning to react, to feel sick, to tremble and fidget, to perspire. She pushed back the covers and went into the bathroom.

Getting it down was like swallowing a whole boiled egg, extra large, with the shell on. She would do anything, think of anything (Hugh and Doreen, each of her four grandparents, Henry, Noah, her obscure poets, whether there was enough on her Master Charge to buy a lot of new clothes) rather than choke it down. She stood by the bathroom window, looking down on the empty street.

The insane thing was that it didn’t make her admire Susan less. It was not like discovering some new friend had supported the Vietnam War to the end, or really believed that black people were inferior. And it seemed that nothing about her revelation could impel her to extricate herself from the friendship. Could a tree of its own volition pull itself up, root hair by root hair? What did Susan say, that Noah didn’t have the force of character to confront Craig? And did Susan?

The hard-boiled egg only half swallowed, she turned on the light and got into the shower. It was not even dawn yet. She
longed to be at the library. As the water poured over her, she imagined herself a little house in the inner court, two little rooms, one on top of the other with a ladder between them that could be pulled after herself when she was upstairs. Thick carpets the color of grass on the floors and bright flowered wallpaper, stacks of yam for knitting and fabric for sewing and books for reading and symphonies, string quartets, concertos, sonatas, cantatas, oratorios to listen to, something mindless to work at like making license plates and the library rising around her, cutting off her view like a thorny thick forest.