Father's Day Murder (18 page)

“Do you think Fred Beller could have resented the use of his mother’s suicide in
The Lost Boulevard
?”

“I can’t see that,” Bernie said. “First of all, Artie made it a father, not a mother. And he was very sensitive in how he portrayed it. I thought he did a great job with that book.”

“And Fred Beller hasn’t been in New York in years,” his wife added.

“Even so,” I said. It had occurred to me that since Fred had married happily, he might be considered off the hook for the murder if it ever came to light that he had been in New York that weekend. But he might have had another motive, one the police might not be aware of. “For the sake of argument, let’s consider Fred Beller among the group of suspects.”

“Which includes me,” Bernie said.

“And everyone else at the dinner.”

“OK, so Fred’s a suspect even if he was a thousand miles away.”

“Did you know that he and Arthur Wien were supposed to get together in Minneapolis once and something happened and it didn’t work out?”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Bernie said. “Artie was a friendly guy and he did a lot of traveling, you know,
promoting his books. If a get-together didn’t jell, well, some of them don’t. Who told you about this? Cindy?”

“I found out another way. Let me ask you about the most mysterious member of the Morris Avenue Boys, George Fried.”

“George? George is dead.”

“I know that.” But I knew, too, that being dead meant no one would ever mention his name as a suspect. Being dead seemed to me like the best cover a killer could have. “I just want to know more about him.”

“He’s a little guy who turned out to be a big guy,” Bernie said. I knew he was referring to the old photo in which George was in the front row and Bernie in the back. “I’m a big guy who turned into a little guy.”

“Did you like him?”

“We liked everybody. We were a great bunch of kids. We all had a mission. We wanted to grow up and be somebody, do something. And thank God, we all did.”

“Who did the best?” I asked, knowing it was an unfair question.

“Bernie and Ernie,” Marilyn said quickly. “Bernie helps kids become good people, and Ernie helps people live when their bodies want them to die.”

“I would pick Artie and Joe,” Bernie said, “a writer and a musician. Think of how many lives they affect. Artie’s books sold in the millions, I heard, and when Joe played before an audience, thousands of people heard him. When you add radio and television, my God, it’s millions.”

“What did George Fried do?”

“He was in business, made toys, I think. His son probably runs the company now.”

“Bruce Kaplan is also a businessman,” I said.

“Bruce Kaplan is a very sad story,” Bernie said, “a very,
very sad story. He went to jail for doing something that’s not so different from what the kids I work with try to do. It’s called stealing.”

If he had been trying to shock me, he succeeded. All the other members of the group had ridiculed the possibility that Bruce had done what he had served time for. This man’s view was the exact opposite: Bruce was guilty as charged. “I was led to believe he had taken the rap, so to speak, for someone else.”

“You can believe that,” Bernie said. “I think a lot of people believe that. The story is that his father-in-law stole the money and Bruce accepted responsibility. I don’t think that’s true. His father-in-law wasn’t even going into the office in those days. Bruce did it. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because it must be very embarrassing to talk about. And if he’s covering for someone, I don’t expect he’d tell me that that person did it. So what I’d hear is that he did it. If he even agreed to talk about it.”

“That doesn’t make him a killer, you know,” Bernie said.

“I know. I’m still looking for a motive. Did Arthur Wien ever borrow money from you?”

Marilyn laughed. “I have to hold Bernie back from giving money to stray dogs and cats. I don’t let him out of the house with more than he needs to get home. How could he lend money to anyone?”

“I was told Mr. Wien borrowed from his friends.”

“Could be,” Bernie said. “But it wasn’t from me.”

“Or me,” his wife added.

“I heard something else,” I said, deciding at that moment to talk about it. “I heard one person who lent him
money kept the manuscript of
The Lost Boulevard
as collateral.”

Bernie smiled and looked at his wife.

“Sounds like a shrewd lender,” she said.

“Must have been some sum of money,” he said.

“Was it either of you?”

They both spoke at once, denying it.

“Who might have done something like that?” I asked.

“Got me,” Bernie said. “But I love it.”

“What I was thinking was that perhaps Bruce Kaplan took money from his business to lend to Arthur Wien.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Bernie said. “Bruce isn’t a soft touch, not for a lot of money. There’d have to be one hell of a reason that Artie needed a lot of money for Bruce to do something like that. And I don’t believe it happened.”

It was, of course, possible that Alice Wien had made the whole story up. “Why did you pick Father’s Day as the time for the reunion?”

“Because there wasn’t another weekend on the calendar,” Marilyn said. “You would not believe the phone calls that went back and forth till we got that date. Nobody wanted Father’s Day. But someone had a wedding the weekend before, someone else had a wedding the weekend after, there was a graduation, a convention. You wouldn’t believe what we had to contend with.”

“Who arranged the dinner?” I asked.

“We did, Bernie and I. No one ever wants to do it so we do it.”

“Then you must stay in touch with everyone.”

“We do,” she said. “We keep it all together.”

“Then you probably know more than anyone else the state of Joe Meyer’s health.”

“Terrible,” they said, almost in unison.

“For a wonderful guy, a guy who never hurt anyone in his life, a guy who only made the world a better, happier place, it’s a terrible way to go,” Bernie said.

“Not to mention what happened to their daughter,” Marilyn said.

I looked at her.

“She cracked up her car, and her body. What it did to Joey and Judy, you can’t imagine.” She took a deep breath and looked down at her lap. A tear dropped on her hand. It was as if she were talking about her own child.

“How did it happen?” I asked

She swiped her fingers across her cheeks. “She was in her car, somewhere here in the New York area. I don’t really know the details because they never said and I couldn’t ask, but there were a lot of broken bones and I don’t know if she’ll ever play again. You have no idea how talented she was.”

“They showed me a picture of her bowing onstage, holding a bouquet of roses.”

“At least they have the memories.”

“They never said there’d been an accident,” I said.

“How can you talk about that kind of thing? It breaks your heart. I don’t know how Joe survived it.”

“They’re tough people,” Bernie said. “We’re all tough people. No one’s life is easy. What about yours, Chris? Do you have an easy life?”

“I do now,” I admitted. “I’m very lucky. But when I was fifteen, things were very different.”

Bernie smiled. “I’m glad things are better for you. Are we telling you anything that’s going to help? I have a feeling we haven’t.”

“Actually, you’ve told me a few things I didn’t know. Now I’m going to ask you a hard one. I heard that Arthur
Wien had an affair with the wife of one of the men in the group.”

They looked at each other as though each wanted the other to come up with a name. Then Bernie started to laugh. “Artie and one of the wives?”

“That’s right. The question is, which one?”

“I don’t know. That’s crazy. Was it you, Marilyn? I remember once you came home late from a meeting. Were you having a fling with Artie Wien?”

“God forbid.” She looked at me. “I never heard of such a thing. Who told you this?”

“I’d rather not say. I thought you might have heard a rumor.”

“I wish I had,” Bernie said. “Artie and one of the wives. I’d sell what’s left of my soul to find out who.”

“If it happened,” Marilyn said. “If it happened.”

Which was the way I was starting to think. “I guess you can’t help me there. Do you know if any of the wives might have been a kind of confidante of Mr. Wien? Someone he’d talk to if he had a problem?”

She pursed her lips, he shrugged.

“The only two people connected with the group that I haven’t met yet are Cindy Wien and Dr. Greene’s wife. What can you tell me about them?”

“Cindy’s very sweet,” Marilyn said. “She’s smart. She’s pretty, but that goes without saying. Artie wouldn’t spend time with someone who wasn’t. She dresses beautifully and she has the right figure to show it off.”

“Any reason she might want her husband dead?”

“None that I know. I’m sure she was sitting at the table when Morty found the body.”

“Are you sure of anyone else?”

She shook her head. “There was a lot of moving around.
If I was looking to my right and someone on my left left the room for five minutes, I wouldn’t know it.”

“What about Mrs. Greene?”

“Mrs. Greene is also Dr. Greene,” Marilyn said. “She’s a psychiatrist, been practicing as long as we’ve known her. She’s a quiet, intelligent woman, raised three nice kids. It’s a great marriage. You’re too young to remember, but there was a time when doctors married nurses. Nowadays I’m happy to say, doctors marry doctors. Ernie and Kathy were ahead of their time by about thirty years. I’ve always admired him for that.”

“I wonder if Arthur Wien ever saw her as a patient?” I suggested.

“I doubt it,” Bernie said. “Artie often said he wouldn’t trust his head to a shrink. Thought it would ruin him as a writer.”

“When the dinner started, did someone make a fuss about where they were sitting?”

“Robin did,” Marilyn said right away. “An uncharacteristic fuss. She
had
to sit next to Artie. She moved from wherever she had been and sat next to him.”

“Where had she been?” I asked.

Marilyn shrugged. “The other side of the table, I think. Maybe next to the Koches. But I’m not sure.”

“How often are these reunions?”

“Every so many years when we can schedule one. The last one must have been three years ago at least.”

“Then I guess that’s it.” I thanked them and they said they’d call if they thought of anything that might pinpoint the killer, but it was clear they were just saying what they thought I wanted to hear.

I drove home to read
The Lost Boulevard
.

17

Alice Wien opened the door for me with a smile. I had arrived before ten that Wednesday morning and parked my car in a garage a few blocks away so I would not have to run out periodically and feed a meter. She offered me coffee but I refused. I just wanted to get to work.

It was an apartment in an old building, one with a foyer big enough to double as a dining area. Alice had pushed aside the centerpiece that decorated the table, a large, heavy cut-crystal vase filled with dried flowers, giving me a work area as far as I could reach. In that space lay two open boxes, each filled to the top with paper. The one on the left had a plastic-covered sheet of lined paper on top with some handwriting in smudged pencil. The other box had a typed sheet that read
The Lost Boulevard
with the name Arthur A. Wien centered two lines beneath it.

“There’s no title page on the original,” I said.

“Art didn’t think it was necessary. We both knew what the title was and no one but us would ever read it. I’ve covered the acknowledgment page to keep it from smudging and tearing.”

I lifted about half the manuscript carefully out of the box and set it where I could reach it easily. Then I did the same with the typewritten copy. “And there’s no dedication,”
I said, finding the first page of chapter one directly below the acknowledgments.

“I have it framed,” she said. “Do you want to see it?”

“That’s OK. Maybe later,” I added, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

“It was very important to me, that he wrote it in his own hand. I wanted to preserve it.”

I was touched by her memory of love. “I understand,” I said. “I think I’ll get started.”

“Let me just show you. On the handwritten manuscript, if Art wanted something deleted, he just crossed it out, like here.” She flipped to a page where the entire page had a huge
X
across it and the word
OMIT
scrawled across the top. “Sometimes he inserted a paragraph or more, and he marked the place where it belonged and then used a fresh piece of paper to write the insert itself. Those are usually held together with a paper clip.” She looked at the top of the stack, found a paper clip, and showed me.

“The typewritten copy is a lot thicker than the original because wherever the editor made changes, I retyped the page. We saved the original with the editorial corrections. They’re all at the back in order. Also, where the editor cut a few pages or a chapter, we saved what was cut with the edited sheets. So if it’s in the original and not in the typed copy, it’s because the editor removed it.

“And one thing more. You see these blue pencil marks? That’s from the copy editor. Mostly that’s punctuation and that kind of thing.”

“OK, I think I can find my way now. I’ve brought my copy of
The Lost Boulevard
with me. I haven’t finished reading it yet but I’m on my way.”

“That should be exactly the same as the typewritten copy with all the copyediting.”

I went to work, aware that Alice Wien was standing nearby, not quite looking over my shoulder. Finally, she walked quietly away and then I heard soft music from another room.

The book felt like an old friend. It was only days since I had read the beginning, hours since I had read the middle. I have to admit I was fascinated with the changes Wien made, substituting one word for another, in many cases replacing what I thought of as a perfect word with one that seemed no better. I didn’t want to get caught up in this aspect of the work; I wanted to find a clue to Wien’s murderer, but as I progressed, it seemed less and less likely that I would. True, there were wholesale omissions, three and four pages at a time crossed out with the huge
X
that he drew freehand, but on looking through them, I had to agree they added nothing to the book and slowed down the action.