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Authors: Ellen Pall

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“Your friend got herself brutally murdered in a good neighborhood in Manhattan. Believe me, the department is going to be on this case six ways to sundown,” Murray said, with zestful pride. “Jeff Skelton drives me nuts sometimes, but he's a thorough son of a bitch. He's going to work this sucker till it's done.”
He seemed to have forgotten that, as a suspect herself, Juliet might find his colleague's determination more ominous than reassuring.
Dennis Under the Microscope
The letter in the
Times
the next day ran as follows:
To the Editor:
Your story of Jan. 16 regarding my ancestor, the fourth Viscount Quiddenham, makes the assertion that, as a youth, he engaged in a certain harmless, if mildly eccentric, sexual practice. May I point out that the alleged source of this information is a fragment of manuscript attributed to one of the most notorious women of her day? I would further observe that Dennis Daignault, the single person cited in your article as testifying to having seen this purported manuscript (now mysteriously missing), is a maverick dealer in rare manuscripts who is, as we say on this side of the pond, currently “helping the police” in their inquiries.
Viscount Quiddenham
London.
Juliet, who had not read the editorial page until Dennis handed her his copy that evening in his living room, looked up to find him
slumped in his armchair, arms dangling limply, heavy legs inert, eyes bleakly fixed on nothingness—a picture of the Death of Hope.
“Apparently Michael Hertbrooke called his father after he met with you,” she said, tactfully omitting the observation that the son must have thought he smelled a whiff of extortion in the air. With more conviction than she felt, she added, “Obviously, you must write a letter back.”
“I did,” Dennis said, not bothering to turn his eyes on her. “They'll never run it, of course.”
“They may,” said Juliet, though she knew they would not. A second letter would look like a private argument between two readers. Letters to the Editor were letters
to
the editor.
“Why do you suppose he called me a ‘maverick' dealer?” Dennis asked, without moving.
“I'd read it to mean that you're some sort of renegade or contrarian within the business.” Juliet hesitated, then dared to add, “Are you?”
“Not that I'm aware of.” Finally, he turned his blue eyes on her, though without moving any other part of his body. “I take him to mean that I'm a one-person operation, as opposed to a thriving, centuries-old English firm or something. I take it he was trying to come up with a pejorative vague enough not to be actionable but precise enough to cast doubt on my word.”
There was a silence. Then Juliet said, “Did pretty well, didn't he?”
“Yes, didn't he?”
It was nine-thirty. Dennis still smelled faintly of the canned clam chowder he had, most uncharacteristically, eaten for dinner. His clothes—dark corduroy pants, a flannel shirt, and a red sweater-vest—were rumpled and slightly unclean. Following the shock of this morning's letter in the
Times,
he had had a fresh request from Detectives Skelton and Crowder for another hour of his time. Today, they had come to chat with him in his own living room, a pleasure
(now that he had an attorney in the matter and could not legally be interviewed without his presence) that cost him two hundred dollars.
Today they had chosen to focus on the estimated value he'd set on Ada's manuscript. Evidently, Skelton had dug up some dealer Dennis never heard of to testify that, if the Byron proved genuine, the pages could be worth up to twice as much as the $100,000 maximum Dennis had named. How the Byron could ever be proved genuine, this previously unrecognized genius of the antiquarian world hadn't explained, Dennis bitterly observed. Nor did it mean anything that Dennis had acknowledged expertise as an appraiser. All that seemed to matter to Skelton was that Dennis had told the police the fragment was worth a lot less than someone else thought it might be worth. Despite the detective's elaborate politeness (“I'm still struggling to get a grip on this appraisal thing,” he had apologized, with Columboesque humility, “You gotta forgive me”), it was obvious he thought Dennis had been trying to minimize its importance and, by extension, to downplay the likelihood anyone would kill for it.
Dennis said next to nothing because his lawyer told him to say next to nothing. Instead, he sat and listened while his reputation, motives, and integrity were gently examined and, tacitly, trashed. Now, though he had invited Juliet to come over and talk this evening, it was perhaps inevitable that the press of events—and maybe the matter of the receipt she had retained—was taking a toll on his affection for her. Tonight when she apologized (yet again) for having involved him with Mrs. Caffrey, he did not say (as before), Oh, don't be silly, you couldn't have known. He was silent.
Juliet's own day had not been without incident. Somehow an enterprising reporter from a local television news show had learned it was she who initially identified Ada Caffrey's body. A simple Internet search had no doubt turned up her pen name and, after that, the idea of a story that included the dead old lady, a missing naughty manuscript,
and
a successful New York writer of romance novels was too much for the news show to resist. This reporter, whose name
was Leslie Flent, had worked the publishing and literary networks until she tracked Juliet down. When Juliet advised her, via Ames, that her phone calls would not be returned, Flent came to the building. She and a camera crew spent the entire afternoon on the sidewalk making nuisances of themselves. After trying unsuccessfully to send them away through the doorman's intercom, Juliet dispatched Ames to get rid of them in person.
Instead, they taped the messenger. Ames had returned unprecedentedly flustered, bearing with her a note from the president of Juliet's co-op board begging her to bear in mind that it was very unpleasant for her neighbors to have the media camped out on their doorstep.
As a result, Juliet had spent the day trapped indoors. Theoretically, this might have meant a considerable chunk of Chapter Seven of “A Christian Gentleman” got written. In fact, she had produced a mere two pages—neither of them, she thought, particularly inspired. When she left for Dennis's, she did so with a scarf wrapped around her face up to her eyes and a stocking cap pulled down to the bridge of her nose. She buzzed down and warned the doorman—it was Francisco tonight—not to acknowledge her as she passed the still-waiting camera, only to run smack into a neighbor from the floor below who immediately exclaimed at the top of her lungs, “Juliet? I hardly recognized you under all that!”
A chase ensued, during which Juliet had just enough presence of mind not to lead her pursuers straight to Rara Avis but rather to the pizza parlor at Eighty-second and Amsterdam, which she remembered conveniently had two doors. She went in the front, came right out the side, and hopped into a providentially passing cab. The only good thing she could say for the whole experience was that it had suggested to her an ending to the excursion to the ruined abbey: Catherine Walkingshaw would accidentally disturb a bull, setting off a chase in which Sir James might come to her rescue. The dispensable Catherine could then be laid up with the painful and disfiguring
aftereffects of her scramble across the fields while Selena, picturesquely unblemished, nursed her sister in an attractively Christian fashion.
Dennis shifted in his chair and let out a groan. “‘No worst, there is none,'” he said. “‘Pitched past pitch of grief, / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.'”
Juliet smiled as sympathetically as she could. She recognized the lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins, but did not think the poem an apposite one. Dennis was losing his grip. Gone was the romantic, gone the polymath, gone even the stylish poseur. Two days ago, fortified, perhaps, by his poached raspberries, he had seemed to be holding up pretty well in the face of his troubles. Now he appeared to be falling to shreds before her eyes.
Or maybe, she told herself in fairness, it was not Dennis himself, but rather whatever hopeful, falsely romantic image of Dennis she had built up in her own mind that was crumbling. (“In her first passion Woman loves her lover,” Byron had written. “In all the others all she loves is Love.”)
If so, it wasn't only the apparent cooling of his ardor for her that had caused the change. Watching a man go whiny and helpless in the face of difficulties was—well, it was not very seductive, put it that way. If she were a better person—someone Sir James Clendinning might approve of, for example—Juliet had no doubt she would find herself more drawn than ever to Dennis in his plight. Not being so exemplary, however, she found herself wondering how long he expected her to stay tonight.
“I'm sure that in a day or two the police will come up with evidence to identify the real killer,” she said consolingly, though she was not in the least sure of anything of the sort. “Maybe Fitzjohn will confess. Don't you think he did it?”
Dennis shrugged. “I'd like to. But I don't really see his motive.”
Juliet could not argue. A moment later, she instead said lightly,
“‘If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or—'”
“Are you quoting ‘If' to me?”
“Well, technically, yes.”
Dennis dropped his head again. “Dear God, you know you're in trouble when your friends start quoting Rudyard Kipling. What's next? ‘To thine own self be true?'”
“I was joking. Trying to lighten the mood.” Perhaps it was her annoyance with him tonight, perhaps something less immediately identifiable—for whatever reason, it now, for the first time, flashed through Juliet's mind that Dennis really could be guilty of murder. She shook herself mentally. I'll be suspecting myself in a minute, she thought.
Meantime, “Ha, ha,” Dennis was saying. He shifted in his chair, drawing his knees up so he was almost curled in a ball. He had taken off his shoes, and the malformation of his right foot was unmistakable.
And suddenly Juliet did want to put her arms around him. It wasn't his fault he was immobilized. Trouble took people in different ways. She was scared herself. It was just that, with her, fear usually galvanized rather than paralyzed. She stood, went around behind his chair, and began to massage his shoulders. If she were the cops' favorite suspect, instead of the poor fourth or fifth she reckoned herself to be, she hoped she would go on the offensive to find the real culprit, maybe hire a private eye to investigate the case on her behalf. But of course, she reminded herself with a humility even Sir James Clendinning would have admired, one could not really know what one would do in another person's place until one had walked a mile in his shoes.
It was an advantage she was to have before long.
Juliet Under the Microscope
At nine in the morning of the second Thursday after the discovery
of Mrs. Caffrey's body, that lady's lawyer, whose name was Bert Nilsson, was at last discharged from Nathan Littauer Hospital and went home.
Mr. Nilsson seemed to have made an excellent recovery: By eleven, he was in the disused office where he kept the moldering relics of his once busy practice. By noon, he had informed the police that under a will dated November 5 of last year, his late client (after providing for her own cremation and a memorial service) had left her land, house, furnishings, personal effects, and savings to a small, nonprofit environmental advocacy organization called Free Earth, with a request that most of the land be kept intact and used as a sanctuary for animals and “all those who revered Nature.” Free Earth was based in the town of Speculator, inside the Adirondack Park; Matthew McLaurin, the coexecutor named by testatrix, was a member. To Mr. McLaurin personally she had bequeathed her cats, with the stipulation that he keep them in the house—the only home they had ever known—for as long as possible.
Mr. Nilsson had already told the police the rough outlines of these arrangements as he remembered them from his hospital bed, but Mrs. Caffrey had been in the habit of remaking her will so often that some of the details had escaped him. Now he was able to add
a matter he had forgotten before. Testatrix had left her “books, writings, photographs, letters and papers” to an author who had brought her much pleasure in her late years, despite the lack of “spice” in her novels. Testatrix hoped her legatee would be moved by this bequest to put more sex in. But whether she did or no, the books, writings, etc., were left to the author known to her readers as Angelica Kestrel-Haven, but in private life called Juliet Bodine.
Juliet learned of her inheritance an hour later, Mr. Nilsson having diligently contacted her by phone to convey what he would subsequently document for her more officially by letter. For a moment, she was stupid enough to feel touched. Fans had sent her gifts in the past—afghans, tea sets, ancient etiquette manuals. But no one, fan or otherwise, had ever left her so personal and profoundly trusting a gift as this.
It was only after she hung up the phone that she understood what had happened. Frantically, she called Mr. Nilsson back. Would the very old manuscript and letter Mrs. Caffrey had come to New York to show her—in his opinion, would those be interpreted as belonging to his late client's “books, writings, photographs, letters, and papers”?
Mr. Nilsson was not aware of the particular papers Ms. Bodine had in mind, but yes, if they were papers belonging to Ada Caffrey, they were certainly Juliet's now. Forgive his curiosity, but why did she ask?
 
 
Juliet's second interview with the police—conducted this time in the
company of Zoe B. Grossbardt, the first criminal attorney Juliet had ever had occasion to hire—took place at their request late that afternoon and lasted into the evening. The suspicions Landis had tactfully refrained from mentioning to her—that in order to gain control of the Harriette Wilson manuscript, she and Dennis Daignault had conspired to do away with Ada Caffrey—were made quite clear to her
by the officers' line of questioning, although, thanks to Zoe, they learned very little in return. Had Mrs. Caffrey ever asked her for advice on how to leave her property? Had Mrs. Caffrey ever mentioned her will to her at all? Was Mr. Matthew McLaurin's name known to her? Had she met him? Juliet's answers were terse.
She went back to her apartment in a state in which frustrated fury mingled freely with sheer terror. After Skelton's implications, she did not even care to phone Dennis. Though Zoe insisted it was unlikely in the extreme—the police would need a court order—she had conceded it was just barely possible Dennis's phone might be tapped. His and Juliet's movements might also be watched for at least the next few days.
Anyone watching Juliet's movements that particular evening would have seen her hang up her coat and hat, pour herself a stiff scotch, then sit all but motionless next to the bricked-in fireplace in her little library for the better part of an hour. An impulse to call her father (their planned dinner date had been postponed several times and was now scheduled to take place the following Monday) gave way to another to turn to Murray Landis, then to the idea of calling a friend (Suzy, perhaps, or her old friend Molly, or her college friend Ruth Renswick, or half a dozen others) just for the solace and, perhaps, the clarification of going over the situation aloud. She had once, very briefly, dated a criminal lawyer, and it crossed her mind to put her difficulties before him. She even entertained the idea of phoning Rob, who lived in Toronto to be near the child he had had with the woman—now his second ex-wife—for whom he had left Juliet. Rob, who loathed Toronto and gave every sign of thoroughly regretting the loss of his starting wife, would be delighted to have an occasion to rescue her.
On reflection, however, she did not quite see what help a modestly successful director of regional theater could give her just now. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was
that thinking—just thinking—was what she must do. How had she come to be in this situation? What links connected her to the murder of an old lady from upstate New York? And how could she sever them now?
Her instinct was to do just that, to pull away, deny knowledge, insist on the marginality of Ada Caffrey to her life. Close the episode; shake herself free of the incubus. But circumstances—the police, notably—would not allow this. Though she might ignore, deny her ties to Ada, they would not.
Reluctantly, she acknowledged that she was no longer in a position where she could simply turn away. She had known Ada Caffrey, helped her, and now Ada had been killed, leaving Juliet caught in the tangled aftermath. It was a Chinese finger puzzle, one of those tubes of braided straw that constrict more tightly around one's fingers the more one pulls away. The only route of escape was to move into the puzzle, deeper into the trap. Like turning into a skid. Or developing a character. She must think about Ada, learn about Ada, immerse herself in Ada, see what she had seen, know what she had known, think as she had thought. “‘To the destructive element submit yourself,'” as Conrad had it. It was in this very room that she had first talked with Ada Caffrey. Closing her eyes, she tried to summon up that conversation. What had Mrs. Caffrey told her of her past, her home, her life in Espyville? What names had she mentioned? What information that might be of use now still hovered half-forgotten in her own memory?
A line came to her from the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami: “Who can decipher fate's handwriting?” it ran, as she recalled. “However, what at first we are unable to read, we then have to endure later on.”
It was true: The course of life, so ambiguous, so mysterious in advance, was often cruelly plain in retrospect. And yet, could Juliet—could anyone—ever have guessed that Ada Caffrey might be murdered? The woman herself, her habits and thoughts and personality,
had been displayed before Juliet over the course of four days. She must try to read them. Go back to the beginning. In her mind's eye, she saw the old lady come into the library, remembered her clap at the sight of the childish tea table, heard her thrilling voice invoke Noel Coward, saw herself fetching the hard-backed chair to seat her guest …
Juliet had liked Ada personally. But, as often happened with her, she had been distracted at first by Ada's charm, her vivacity, her delightful strangeness. It had taken her a while to see that Ada had been a very stubborn, willful person who saw her convenience, her pleasure, as more important than other people's responsibilities. She enjoyed herself while encouraging others to see to the tiresome administrative work her comfort and entertainment required, to pick up any pieces the gratification of her whims might leave behind. Juliet had introduced her to Dennis Daignault, who spent two full days and three nights working like a dog to determine the value of her manuscript. But when Ada had not liked what he had to say, she had summarily dropped him. Not only dropped him, accused him of dishonesty in front of another client. Had she lived, Juliet was sure she would have offered no apologies for this hard treatment, either to Dennis or to Juliet. On the contrary, Ada had considered herself the injured party.
On a more quotidian level, Suzy had laughed at the idea that Ada might literally clean up after herself. Such a person might make a very entertaining acquaintance but an extremely trying relative. Perhaps it was no wonder Ada's niece would not pay for her burial. Although surely there was something more specific behind Mrs. Caffrey's choosing to leave all her worldly goods to a nonprofit organization (and her sentimental ones to Juliet), ignoring her niece completely. At the very least, Ada must have had family photographs, souvenirs, that Mrs. Lunceford, and no one else, would have valued. Why not leave these to her?
With a sigh, Juliet lifted her glass and drank off the last of the
scotch. Why did people kill? Certainly for money. Sometimes for revenge. In anger. Sexual jealousy. To shut someone up. Iago destroyed Othello from frustrated ambition. Of course, Iago was not your typical killer … but it was interesting that Othello, close as he was to his brother officer, never mistrusted him.
Once more Juliet's thoughts returned to her suspected co-conspirator. How well, in fact, did she know Dennis Daignault? “A wink, a bow, a hand, an eye,” he had written of himself soon after they had first met, in a poem to her titled “Juliet.” “No Romeo, no Casanova either,” he had continued, conjuring various other romantic heroes and disclaiming any right to be compared to them. He had painted himself as “a shadow, a way of putting it.” He was certainly an odd person, Dennis. Secretive. Somehow furtive. But homicidal? Impossible to imagine.
Although … With another sigh, Juliet admitted to herself that people did sometimes kill by accident. And, as Murray had suggested, they were probably later dismayed that they had. Probably, too, like most people, they had been at least one other person's friend.
A friend … Her thoughts returned to Dennis's poems: so like him, wistful, courtly, inventive, veiled, rueful, and, slightly, feminine. But—but what had Ada said about her friend, Matt McLaurin; what had she said about the poems of her friend? So many of them were—What had she said? So angry.
Angry.
And yet it was Matt who'd driven Ada to Albany, who'd brought her a book to read when she was sick. How angry could such a person be? She tried to remember what else Ada had said about this friend. He did office work in an insurance brokerage in Gloversville—Gallop Insurance, hadn't she said? So far as Juliet could remember, Ada never mentioned Matt's little daughter Nina-Tina-Gina's mother. Was he married? Divorced? A widower? Some intemperate poems were not much to go on, but on the whole, Juliet
preferred to think that McLaurin, or Claudia Lunceford, or almost anyone had killed Ada Caffrey rather than Dennis Daignault.
At the end of the hour, she removed a pen and pad of paper from a drawer in the table at her side. Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, she knew, would by now have reasoned their way to some answers. She, alas, had come up only with questions. Still, she had the habit of doing research. And in research, good answers started with good questions.
Who was Ada Caffrey?
she wrote.
World view? Preoccupations?
Who is Matthew McLaurin? Knew about legacy? When? Recog. ms? Where was he on Fri?
What is Free Earth?
Why no legacy to Lunceford? Knew re: this?? Mr. Lunceford? Where were they Fri?
Giddys. Knew reason for NY trip? Hard up for $? Ask them re: Ada.
Ada Caffrey had made Juliet her legatee. Very well, then, she would go and examine her legacy—surely McLaurin and Mr. Nilsson would have to allow her that—and so see where Ada had lived. Reading her poems, too, might be fruitful. She would find an excuse to visit Claudia Lunceford. And the Giddys; that would be easy, since they lived next door. Setting, character, narrative, these were Juliet's strengths. The police knew rules of thumb, but she knew plot, individuals. If she saw where Ada had lived, met the people around her, picked up the plot threads of her life, what might her novelist's instincts tell her?
 
 
Juliet slept like a rock and woke uncommonly early. By nine, when
Ames arrived, she had already learned there was no Matthew or M. or McLaurin of any kind listed in the Espyville-Gloversville phone directory, that a J. Lunceford lived on Partridge Lane in Gloversville, and that the Candlewick was the only inn or bed-and-breakfast open at this season in the immediate area (a B and B or an inn seemed a likelier place to pick up gossip than a motel). She had also gone online to check into Free Earth, but found little more than their own Web page. It appeared to be a small, grass-roots group committed to lobbying politicians on environmental issues. Leaving Ames to arrange for a car rental, reserve a room, call Bert Nilsson (or McLaurin, at Gallop Insurance) for permission to enter the house, and learn where in the Espyville area she might donate Ada's books, she went back into her office.

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