Tightrope Walker (13 page)

“That word again,” I said indignantly, and left him and went to the telephone. I dropped a dime in the slot, dialed Mrs. Morneau’s number, and after listening to it ring and ring I replaced the receiver. I dug out my spiral notebook and consulted names again and then looked up Daniel Lipton in the directory. There was no Daniel listed but there was a Mrs. Daniel Lipton living at 13½ Pearl Street. I copied the address, stopped at the counter to buy a map of Anglesworth on display there, and went back to the table to tell Joe.

“Okay,” he said after a glance at his watch. “I suggest we wrap up this bacchanalian feast with a couple of hot fudge sundaes and then go and see if she’s related, but first I’ll call my answering service and tell them where I am.”

Joe took his turn at telephoning and when he came back he looked pleased. “Ken says it looks as if the hearing’s been postponed again, so we can relax.”

“Beautiful,” I said, and felt ten pounds lighter despite the enormous sundae on which I was gorging.

Pearl Street was a forgotten dirt road behind a supermarket and a movie house, obviously one of the last stops in Anglesworth on the road down. There were only six houses on the street, but any differences in their architecture had long ago been erased by the erosions of apathy: broken windows stuffed with blankets, sagging porches, peeling paint and loose garbage spilling out of rusting pails and cardboard cartons. When we drew up to number 13½ a rat slunk away from a plastic pail and gave us a sullen look over his shoulder. By the time we reached the front door of 13½ he was back again; I noticed a sizable number of empty wine and gin bottles among the refuse.

The bell wasn’t working; we knocked and then called, and after an interval a woman opened the door and said suspiciously, “Yeah?”

“Mrs. Lipton?” asked Joe. “Mrs. Daniel Lipton?”

She peered at us blurredly. Her face was a circle of desiccated flesh with heavy pouches under her eyes and chin. She was wearing a long flowered cotton skirt, a moth-eaten gray cardigan, a green sweater under that, and a black turtleneck under
that.
She was all layers, it was hard to define a figure behind them. Her hair was a frizzy blond with gray showing at the roots and there was a thick smear of crimson covering her mouth. “Good or bad?” she asked in a hoarse whiskey voice, and looked over Joe admiringly. “Good news, okay. Bad, come tomorrow.”

“We’re trying to trace a Mr. Daniel Lipton,” Joe told her. “Around 1965 he had some connection with Mrs. Hannah Meerloo, and witnessed a will she made in July of that year.”

“Danny?” she said and shrugged. “If you got the price of a bottle I’ll let you in.”

Joe took out a five-dollar bill and she grabbed it. “Tom?” she called over her shoulder and opened the door wider to let us in.

We walked into a cold hallway and then into a dark living room. The reason it was so dark was that venetian blinds had been drawn over each of the two windows, and the only light came from the television tube, which glowed eerily and across which a wagon train was riding at full gallop. Silhouetted against this ghostly illumination sat three men, stiffly upright. I thought at first they might be dead and propped up in their chairs, they sat so still and straight, not even turning at our arrival, but one of them slowly stirred, detached himself, and walked over to Mrs. Lipton. Wordlessly she gave him the five-dollar bill and without any change of expression he glided out of the house, closing the door behind him.

Mrs. Lipton led us to a couch with broken springs in the back of the room and we sat down. “So?” she said, staring at us.

“You’re related to the Daniel Lipton who knew Mrs. Meerloo and witnessed her last will in 1965?”

She moved her eyes from us to the wall, apparently to think about this. “He did yard-work for her sometimes. Not regular-like but when she needed extra help. The big house in Carleton?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “Yep, that’s Danny.” She gave a cackle. “Landscape gardening’s what it said on his truck. Most of it, between you’n me, was grass-cutting. But that was a long time ago. Any money in this for me?” she asked, suddenly staring at us again.

“He was your husband?” I asked.

“Well,” she began, and sniffed, brought a tattered
Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose, “he
was.
” She thought about this, too, her head tilted; appeared to reach some conclusion, opened her mouth to speak, and then sighed and closed it. “Bastard,” she said finally, in a sentimental voice. “He could put it away faster’n anybody I met since.”

“Since what?” asked Joe quickly.

“Since he got—” Whatever it was I didn’t hear because the Indians began attacking the wagon train on the television screen and the room was suddenly filled with war whoops.

Joe was sitting closer to her. “You mean he’s dead?” I heard him say.

“Dead!” Her shriek filled the room, louder than the howling Indians. “Hey boys,” she shouted, “this guy wants to know if Danny’s dead.”

I thought I heard polite titters, but neither of the remaining two heads turned. She said to Joe, “A long time ago, buster, and it ain’t been easy for me since.”

I could bet it hadn’t; I wondered how many bottles lay between then and now. “
How
long?” I asked, pursuing this picture of enough empty bottles to reach Chicago or possibly Denver.

“Nineteen sixty-five it was,” she said. “Christmas Eve when they told me.”

The front door opened and Tom glided back into the room carrying a heavy paper bag; from the weight of it there must have been two or three bottles inside. Mrs. Lipton sprang to her feet, pulled out one of the bottles, wrung it open, took a long drink, shivered, and handed it to Tom. “Party night,” she giggled.

“Mrs. Lipton,” Joe said, and then louder, “Mrs. Lipton—”

She looked at us in surprise. “You still here? I got no more to say. He’s dead.”

We got up from the couch but Joe had apparently
heard her words better than I during the Indian onslaught because he shouted at her, “You said he was
killed
, Mrs. Lipton?”

“Did I?” she said, surprised. “Well, he’s dead, that’s for sure, and there’s the door.” Just to be sure we found it she walked over, opened it and held it for us.

We were already on the porch when she shouted after us angrily, “Got his throat slit from ear to ear down by the river Christmas Eve, that’s what, and they never learnt who did it or tried very hard neither, the bastards.”

When we spun around to look at her the door was shut.

Christmas Eve 1965, I thought. Five months after Hannah’s death, almost to the day.

We walked to the van and climbed in. It was dusk now but the dimming of light didn’t improve the view any. I said quietly, “Let’s get out of here, Joe.”

Joe made no move to start the van. He said grimly, “Amelia—”

“What?”

“It’s not too late, you know. This happened a long time ago, and life has—well, arranged itself around it now. Adjusted itself.”

So it was Joe who was feeling scared now; on the other hand I was beginning to glimpse patterns and whorls, all of them horrible but nevertheless taking on vague shapes behind the nearly impenetrable fog. “I don’t think life has arranged itself around this death very happily,” I pointed out. “And we’re just beginning to get somewhere,” I reminded him.

“Yes, but where, Amelia?”

“Closer to a murder.”

“
And
a murderer,” he pointed out. “A murderer who got away with violence a long time ago, Amelia.”

I said, “You’re thinking what I am, then? That Daniel Lipton may have been murdered because of something he knew about Hannah’s death?”

“And before he could talk,” Joe said, starting the van at last and shifting into gear. “After all, if he drank like his wife—he witnessed that will, Amelia, and everything points now to its being a bogus will.”

“Still to be verified,” I reminded him with a smile, but I considered his words thoughtfully as we bumped over the potholes and left Pearl Street behind. I wondered why they left me unmoved. Since morning, when I’d learned that Hannah was H. M. Gruble all my doubts seemed to have vanished. I remembered Amman Singh saying to me once that the important events of our lives are already laid out for us in a pattern that we can’t see or understand, and that these events are inescapable. I’d always supposed that I would follow this wherever it took me but now I felt that it was inevitable, as if it had been waiting for me all along.

Of course I was forgetting that until recently my hold on life had been very light, very tenuous, and that my judgment might be askew. I forgot that I was still convalescent—comparatively unlived, so to speak—and that Joe might be seeing more clearly than I. But when accosted with decisions—which are frankly hell for me to make—my motto is always “consider the alternative,” and I just couldn’t conceive of what my life would be like if I walked away from this. I no longer had choice; I was already inside of it, I had passed the point of no return.

“I can’t back out, Joe,” I told him flatly. “Even if you do, I can’t now.”

He said darkly, “I thought I’d fall in love with some nice wholesome all-American girl whose idea of a good time was doing crossword puzzles and admiring me.”

“Isn’t life amazing?” I said cheerfully, and we climbed the steps to unit 18, unlocked the door, walked inside, and bolted it behind us.

At twenty-five minutes past eight the next morning I left Joe curled up in the van again with
Astronomy for the Layman
—he was certainly having trouble making headway in it—and walked into the offices of Mason, Gerard and Tuttle. There was a nice waiting room, white walls with seascapes that hadn’t been reproduced by an office supply house but selected with care and expense from art shows: one was an original Marin. When I told the secretary who I was, she said I was expected and pointed to one of the four doors opening on to the waiting room. I walked into an office that was wall-to-wall books, except for one space over Mr.
Mason’s desk in which there hung a really fine Buffet print of a sailboat with the wind lifting its sails.

Mr. Mason glanced up at my entrance, and then rose to shake hands. He looked far beyond retirement age, eighty at least, but there was nothing frail about him: his face was weatherbeaten, he was bald except for a thatch of white hair encircling his skull and his eyes were an unbleached vivid blue, narrowed now in their appraisal of me. I had the feeling that I was being weighed, measured and dissected with uncanny penetration and I felt sorry for anyone who faced him with a guilty conscience. Yet I liked him at once; he was, to use a very old-fashioned word, a gentleman. He had presence. It was obvious in the soft, courteous voice that suggested I sit down, Miss Jones, and in the way he remained standing until I did so; in the reserved but kindly smile that put me at ease and the courtly manner in which he asked what he could do for me.

“I’m writing a biography of Hannah Gruble,” I said firmly. “Or Mrs. Meerloo, of course, and in my research I’ve come to the facts of her death.” I placed the Xeroxed copy of her will on his desk, and added, “Your name is mentioned in the will, and so it occurred to me … that is, there are a few questions left unanswered about her death.”

“And in what way can I be of help, Miss Jones?” he asked. He reached for a pair of glasses, put them on, glanced at the will, removed his glasses and restored his gaze to me.

I said innocently, “This will was, of course, drawn up by you personally?”

There was an edge to his voice when he said, “No, it was
not.
”

“I see,” I said, my heart beating faster at this acknowledgement. “But surely where it mentions you as
her attorney, and you were appointed co-executor of the will—”

He interrupted me. “The will was not written in this office, Miss Jones. I can assure you that as a graduate of the Harvard Law School no will constructed in my office would read as this one does.”

I said with all the ingenuousness I could summon, “You’ve written other wills for her, of course.”

He gave me a sharp glance. “Yes.”

“You had been her attorney then for many years?”

His voice was dry. “Yes, Miss Jones.”

“May I ask why she didn’t have you write this one for her, sir? I mean, were you away, perhaps, on—” I took a moment to examine the date, as if I didn’t already know it by heart. “On July 2, 1965?”

“No, Miss Jones, I was in my office. Just as I am today.”

“Then didn’t you—er—wonder, sir, at her not contacting you? You must surely have felt rather—well, surprised?”

“Is this a court of law, Miss Jones?” he inquired with humor.

I looked at him, and I realized that something had changed in the atmosphere since I’d begun asking my questions, but where I would have supposed there would be tension—a reaction of anger or disapproval—it was quite the opposite: Mr. Mason had relaxed. He was wary but he was relaxed and waiting. But waiting for what, I wondered.

So I went at once to the point. “Mr. Mason,” I said, meeting his eyes directly, “I would like very much to know—I realize it’s confidential information but I would like to ask—and after all, so much time has elapsed and your client is dead—”

“Yes, Miss Jones?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “I would like to ask how this
will differs from previous wills you drew up for her in your office.”

“Ah …” It was like a sigh, a long expelling of breath that seemed to fill and haunt the room before it reached an end. He sat looking at me, and those ancient eyes—still so blue—seemed to go through and through me. He said, “It
is
confidential information you’re asking for, Miss Jones, you are quite correct in that.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You seem an oddly determined young woman,” he added with a twisted little smile. “You are not from these parts, Miss Jones?”

“From Trafton, Pennsylvania.”

He nodded. “This is a curious corner of Maine, Miss Jones. I have lived here for over fifty years and yet I am still an outsider. They will say of me that I’m ‘from away.’ Hannah, too, was ‘from away.’ We live here surrounded by Liptons, Tuttles, Pritchetts, and Gerards.”