Duplicate Keys (6 page)

T
HE
momentum of her daily life had carried Alice through the discovery of the bodies and past it, but when she unlocked her apartment to the ringing of the phone, she realized that the momentum was played out, and the real chaos of such an event as a semi-public double murder was about to crush them. For the time being she didn’t answer the phone, but unplugged it. Ray would be trying to reach her, and Noah or Rya, possibly Jim, certainly Detective Honey, and any number of others wondering where Susan was. Susan turned without speaking and shuffled down the hallway toward the bedroom, visibly fatigued. There would be so much business to attend to—the burials, the services, the parents and other relatives, so much talk on the phone to be gotten through. She followed Susan, and found her flung across the unmade bed. Afraid to push, she said, “What are you going to do?”

“Sleep. Call the Mineharts first. God, I hate to make that call.”

“Funeral home?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“We’ve got to do all that stuff.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“His parents will want a complete funeral with priests in purple, open coffin—”

“They can’t have
that.”

“Oh, Lord. Catholic cemetery, black limousines.”

“What did Denny ever want?”

“The usual. Cremation over a bonfire with only his friends in attendance, then flinging his ashes to the four winds.”

“Was he serious?”

“We only talked about it once, five or six years ago.”

“Is there any will or anything?”

“I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open. I have to call them. Will you dial? If a child answers, then ask for Mrs. Minehart. I couldn’t stand hearing the voice of one of those kids.” Denny’s youngest sister was only six. Alice picked up the bedroom extension, plugged it in, and dialed the numbers Susan dictated. A youthful voice did answer, probably the ten-year-old. Alice asked for Mrs. Minehart, and when she came to the phone, anxious but polite, her voice clear and questioning, Alice gave the phone to Susan and left the room, closing the door.

In the kitchen she put the teakettle on to boil, found her favorite china teapot and her favorite cup, and sat down to wait. After a few minutes, she got up, went into the bedroom where Susan was now asleep, and threw a blanket over the shoeless, prostrate form of her friend. Looking at Susan, she tried not to panic, tried not to imagine the shambles Susan’s affairs were now most certainly in. Of course there would be no wills, no insurance, no agreement on the final disposition of the bodies, of course there were debts, and not just illegal ones, of course there would be suspicion, and possibly trouble, from the police. All of this in addition to grief. Alice pulled the blanket down over Susan’s feet, and Susan’s head turned and her beautiful straight hair that shone like new pennies curved smoothly over her cheek. Grief would hit her hard, Alice thought as she went back to the kitchen,
where, with her pot of tea and her window onto Eighty-fourth Street, she would sit in perfect silence for no less than two hours. Then she would plug in the phones again and answer the buzzer for the downstairs door.

She thought she should make a list of practical matters, things like people to call and arrangements to make, items that had been flooding her mind all morning, each with its attendant mental note that she couldn’t forget that, but when she got up to get paper and to find a sharp pencil, every notion vanished, and she found herself staring out at Eighty-fourth Street, at the happy bustle of New Yorkers in shirt sleeves and backless dresses heading for Riverside Park and a walk in the sun, or for Broadway and a little harmless buying. Across the street and down a ways, an older woman in a bonnet was bedding plants in the three-foot strip of earth in front of her brownstone, and three floors above her another woman, in a bathrobe, was leaning far out of her apartment window, also bedding plants, in a window box, something flame colored, perhaps geraniums. At that height and facing south, she would have the sun for them. It was thought in the neighborhood that the brownstone one up from the corner of Riverside had a large roof garden. At least, trucks with huge redwood troughs had pulled up one day, and another day men had carried giant bags of soil and gravel and composted manure into the building. Alice did not think with envy of the fresh spinach and perfect tomatoes those roof gardeners undoubtedly enjoyed. After all, set like brooches along the sweep of Broadway were vegetable markets that presented to any city dweller with a few dollars the pick of East Coast crops. What she envied, and what she would have paid for those countless home deliveries to have, was the vista of sun-drenched green under the bell of heaven, and the silver plume of the river waving in the distance. On Eighty-ninth Street, some top floor resident had erected a solar collector that Alice felt proud and proprietary about, as, she suspected, did everyone who knew it.

That made her think of Ray Reschley’s father, who, Ray said,
was building a pair of windmills, one on top of the house and the other on top of the garage. He had gotten rid of the second car and filled half the garage with batteries to store the excess power. Average wind speed in Rochester, said Ray, was 12.8 miles per hour. Ray was a tinkerer, too, and as long as Alice had known him, he had been refining some project. Now he talked about selling his apartment and finding himself a top floor place. Average wind speed on the West Side was nearly ten miles per hour. He could find himself something with three bedrooms and have plenty of space to store the batteries. Alice wondered if he had the money for it, and then she wondered how much money he had. In that sense, Ray had obviously done better than any of them, no Hamlet, but a technical Horatio whom Craig, the very image of a Hamlet-to-be, had convinced to drop out of optometrist school. Now one of the most dependable sound men in New York, Ray earned more outfitting studios and working for record companies than any number of handsome guitar players. So what if his life was a confusing round of sexual passion and frustration, no domestic homosexual bliss but repeated cravings for men who didn’t crave him. In a world of beauties, Ray, with his pink skin, pointed fingers, tiny feet, and swelling middle, was not even pretty. For the past year or eighteen months, he had found himself a new crowd, or so he said. Unlike most peer groups, this one carried knives, razor blades, even guns. Ray did not introduce them to any of his old friends, and Alice didn’t often think of them. Once, angry, Craig had called them Ray’s “imaginary playmates.” Craig, in fact, had teased Ray a lot over the years, even after Ray’s work for him had become a kind of noblesse oblige. Alice thought of Ray’s remark that he had loved Denny and “even Craig, most of the time.” He probably did.

They had all known each other for so long! Julie Zimansky had first whispered to her that this guy Ray Reschley kept calling her up all the time almost sixteen years before. Two years after that, Susan had lived down the corridor from Alice her first semester in college, and Christmas of that year, Susan had introduced her
to Denny and his adopted brother, Craig. During her junior year, she had met Jim Ellis on her own, but he rapidly joined the group, and that summer the band had formed, stretching to include Noah Mast and his dog, Fred, both already graduates, since Fred accompanied Noah to classes and even into restaurants. When Fred was hit by a car, the whole group mourned, and when Rya came along, the whole group groaned, but eventually expanded to include her, like any family with marriageable children. When Jim ran off with Mariana, he lost all his friends as well as his wife, and Alice sometimes wondered if that might not have been his hidden purpose all along. He called them on Christmas and said everything was just great, like a dutiful prodigal son, but they only heard third or fourth hand about the stillbirth of Mariana’s baby. Alice looked out the window to where the woman in the bonnet was tramping down her flower bed—
Impatiens
—and began again to panic. How was it that they had jogged along from day to day, from dinner to dinner and gig to gig and apartment to apartment never comprehending the dangers around them? Why did Denny hand out keys to his apartment, why did Craig sleep with Rya and sample speed and heroin on the Coast, why did Ray flirt with wielders of knives, how did ten thousand dollars become so debased a sum that Craig and Denny didn’t even worry about owing it, and how was it that this life seemed still continuous with the rest of their lives, and the lives of their mothers and fathers on the slow, spacious northern plains? Even Craig spoke of the death of his parents as a strange anomaly, not a symptom of some evil reality. Yes, they died, but numerous aunts, uncles, and friends flowed into the breach, and that kindly, God-loving and Godfearing, happily populous family, the Mineharts, enveloped him, adored him, admired his edgy difference from themselves. “Oh, that Craig!” was what Mrs. Minehart said ten times a day when Alice spent the weekend there once. It was as if they had rolled into Minneapolis and then into New York without ever losing the sublime Midwestern confidence that if you left the doors unlocked while you slept, the neighbors down the road might
stop by and drop off the tools you needed to borrow. If they had grown up in New York, would they have been more wary of the dangers or more tempted by them? The drop from the middle class that was a little slope in Rochester was a precipice in New York City. How had they not known that? Unlike some of the others, Alice had never spoken contemptuously of the middle class. A job, an apartment, a washing machine, some money to spend, these were goods, not evils.

Alice stood up and stretched, thinking of her job, her apartment, her washing machine, her spending money. Of course they were secure, of course they were. Ray and Susan and Noah and Rya and all the rest of them had no claim on her tight little life. Whatever the police did or Ray’s friends did, the library would go on, employing her to catalogue and do reference. But as she thought of them one by one she loved them one by one, yearned to embrace them, to take each on into her tight little life and divvy up the library proceeds, share out the rooms, feed and embrace and reassure. Briefly she fantasized some fending off of the police with weapons, but then she looked down on Eighty-fourth Street, at people walking around, going in and out of apartment buildings, people she had seen so often in the last five years that she almost knew them; wanting to stay a part of that bustle, too, she did not know what to think. That was her usual frame of mind now, not knowing what to think. She picked up the phone jack, flipped it a few times with her index finger, then plugged it in. It rang at once.

P
AUSING
outside the police station on Eighty-second Street, Susan ran her hands down the front of her dress and said, “How do I look?”

“Respectable. Neat. Tired.”

“Still?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Beat.”

“Don’t worry. You might even like him.”

“I might.”

“He ought to love you.” Alice kissed Susan on the cheek for confidence and followed her into the station.

Detective Honey, whom they had called beforehand, came out to meet them, extending his hand congenially. He reminded Alice of a farmer, a friend of her father who was now dead. As a gesture of affection, he had been in the habit of putting his big hands on Alice’s eleven-year-old shoulders and cracking her back. His hands were like rocks from years of farming, and the pain of his affection hadn’t been eased by his cheery, teasing words.

As Honey placed the chairs and offered them coffee, as she herself smiled warmly in response to his inquiries, she assumed that he suspected them, innocent as they were, and that if he could get evidence on them of any kind, even the most circumstantial, he would use it against them rather than pursue further investigation. Wasn’t it well known that the police were simply overwhelmed with work?

“You’ve been in the Adirondacks, Miss Gabriel?”

“I got back last night.”

“How was the weather up there? Isn’t this rather early in the season for the Adirondacks?” He looked up at a wall calendar and Alice’s gaze followed his. May 11.

“The weather was quite good, actually. I can’t afford to go during the season.” Susan finished with a smile, and set her purse on the floor beside her chair.

“You are employed at?”

“I manage Chops, on Broadway.”

“Chops?”

“It’s a boutique specializing in imported clothing, mostly from France and Italy.”

“Expensive?”

“Very.”

“And you can’t afford to go to the Adirondacks during the season?”

“I don’t buy my clothes at Chops, either.”

Alice smiled and bit her lip. Honey chuckled, then settled more deeply, more intimately into his seat and tried again. “You are aware that Miss Ellis here found the bodies?” He smiled at Alice.

“Mrs.” This time Susan said it. “Yes, she told me all the details. I was hoping that you would have something more to tell me.”

Alice marvelled that Susan was hardly susceptible to Honey at all, that his very presence didn’t call from her a stream of talk, as it had from Alice, as it did even now, when he attended Susan, and remarks, questions, conciliatory observations piled up behind Alice’s teeth. Honey said, “Let me just get a few facts down here, then I can let you go.” He coughed. “Your name is Susan Gabriel, you live at 523 West Seventy-fourth Street, you manage the clothing store ‘Chops’ at where on Broadway?”

“Seventy-eighth Street. I’ve been the manager there for about four years.”

“Before that?”

“I managed a housewares shop on Seventy-second, near Amsterdam.”

“Your duties?”

“Hiring and firing, watching over, but not doing, the books, helping the owners decide what to buy, making daily decisions about damaged merchandise, shoplifting, window design. Maid of all work.”

“You’ve lived in Manhattan six years, like Miss Ellis?”

“We came together.”

“With Mr. Minehart and Mr. Shellady?”

“And Mr. Mast and Mr. Reschley and Mr. Ellis.”

“Yes, the other members of the band.”