Ski Mask’s command was quite unnecessary; I was already as good as paralyzed. I am as brave as the next man in a fair fight, but a shotgun pointed at my midsection makes the odds against me unfairly high. I obeyed.
“Put your hands against the wall and bend over.”
I didn’t have much choice but to carry out that order as well. I did think, however, that I might be permitted to speak.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Shut up.”
In as much time as it takes to recall the moment, I was patted down and relieved of my wallet. What was this, anyway?
“Nicholas Barlow,” said the voice behind me, obviously reciting from one of my IDs.
“I am.”
“We had a report this office was being burglarized.”
“Not as far as I know.”
I heard a second, muffled voice in the background; obviously Ski Mask had been joined by somebody else. I gathered from the little I could make out that they—whoever they were—were deciding what to do with me. It was clear to me by this time that they were not cops, but baddies.
“Lie down on the floor, Barlow.”
“The floor?”
“You heard me. Lie down on the fucking floor. Facedown.”
This was beginning to get undignified, but I did as I was told.
“Now,” said my bogus policeman, prodding me in the back with the barrel of his gun, “just stay right there until I tell you not to.”
He placed the gun barrel against the back of my neck, and I thought: Is this the way it happens? Is he going to kill me? Images of violent death flooded my mind: bodies lying on bloodstained floors just like this one. Victims of bank robberies and gas station stickups, their flesh mangled and covered with blood. I fought off fear and nausea as best I could. Should I pray? Prayer didn’t seem appropriate in the circumstances; only weddings and funerals ever got me into church, and then, like King Claudius, “my words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
Shakespeare. My comfort on any occasion. How did those lines go? “I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death. He that dies this year is quit for the next.” Henry IV, Part II. Oh God, I’d still rather stick around—and not just for another year, either…
It was a short while later that I realized I no longer felt the pressure of cold metal on my neck; and sometime after that I had the feeling that I was alone in the room. Still, I couldn’t be sure, so I waited perhaps five or six minutes longer, and then, very slowly, turned my head so that my left cheek rested on the floor, and by craning my neck, I could see a small part of the room. No one in sight.
Feeling as foolish as I’m sure I looked, I put my hands flat on the floor and pushed myself up to a kneeling position. Nothing happened, so I got to my feet and looked around. I was alone. My face was damp with sweat, and I could feel my shirt sticking to my back. I leaned against a nearby desk for a moment to clear my head, which was still beset by a morbid band of fancies.
It occurred to me that the police ought to be notified, and I had picked up the phone to call the Thirteenth Precinct station and report a holdup, when I heard a commotion out in the hallway: footsteps pounding down the hall, the sound of male voices, and then, moments later, someone was pounding on my office door.
“Come in,” I shouted.
The door flew open and two uniformed officers appeared, both of them holding police specials aimed at me.
“There’s been a burglary on this floor,” one of them said.
“Oh no—not again.”
“Oh yes, there sure has.”
“You two?” I said. I recognized them at once: the two cops who had been in my office once before, and in my front parlor; it was during my first brush with crime: the Jordan Walker murder. The pair were Artie, a good-looking black patrolman, and his partner Buster, a pint-size patrolwoman.
“Never a dull moment, right, Mr. Barlow?” said Buster.
“Not in this office, I’m afraid.”
I told them what had happened, and they clucked sympathetically during my recital.
“You should have known they weren’t cops,” was Artie’s first comment.
“Don’t you guys sometimes go undercover and dress like hoods?”
“Even so, we have to flash a badge,” said Artie.
“He flashed a shotgun, and that was enough for me.”
“What kind of shotgun?”
“How would I know?”
“Well,” said Artie, “what did it look like?”
“It had a short barrel. That’s about all I remember.”
“How was the guy holding it?”
“In his right hand.”
“A pistol grip? Probably a Remington 870,” said Artie.
I shrugged. “It’s all the same to me—just a shotgun. No matter what it was, I wasn’t about to question it.”
Artie was persistent, just as I remembered him. “Can you describe the perp for me?”
“All I saw was a black ski mask. I don’t even remember the color of his eyes. I believe he was a white male. Sorry. That’s all I can give you.”
Artie put his notebook away, and shrugged.
It was Buster who filled me in on what had happened. Down the hall was the office of a jewelry importer. Burglars had broken in, cracked the safe, and when they got at the jewels and cash that were there, they set off an alarm at police headquarters.
“They didn’t get all that much,” said Buster. “Apparently they grabbed what they could and took off like big-ass birds. There was still quite a bit of stuff in the safe.”
“But why did they break in here?” I asked.
“Probably they saw a light in your office, and thought you might figure out what was going on, so it was best to keep you quiet.”
“You might have been killed,” Artie said. “You run lucky, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”
Yeah. A murder and a holdup in my office—all in a space of two weeks. What next?
“Anyway, thanks for dropping by, guys. I feel much safer knowing you’re on the job.”
Artie gave me a raised-eyebrows, “Are you kidding me?” look.
“No, I’m serious, really.” I spread out my hands. “Look, no irony.”
“Good night, Mr. Barlow,” said Buster. “See you around.”
And so to bed, to an uneasy sleep, punctuated with bad dreams and ghostly thoughts.
The next morning I felt more like staying in bed, nibbling on chocolate candy and watching daytime game shows, instead of going in to the office, but a sense of having been reprieved somehow, or, putting it another way, of having been offered another chance to redeem myself, gave me the impetus I needed to get up and get on with the day.
As usual, I first read through both the Times and the Daily News. Both had brief squibs about the burglary in my office building; neither, thank heaven, made any mention of me. My public relations person, one Georgia Nussbaum, is hired, not to get me in the news, but to keep me out of it if at all possible.
At the office, Hannah beckoned me over to her desk.
“You got a call from the manager at The Players.”
“Oh?”
“She said it was quite urgent, Nick.”
Evelyn Randall is the manager of the Club. She is the very nerve center of the place—also its generator, the engine that runs it, and also its chief communicator. She flutters over the members like a benevolent mother hen.
I rang her up immediately. Randy, as we call her, is always busier than any two or three of us publisher-members, and it is difficult enough sometimes to reach her on the phone; consequently one does not ignore one of her calls.
“What is it, Randy?”
“Fred Drew is in jail, Mr. Barlow.”
“What?”
“He’s in the Tombs. He told me they arrested him on suspicion of murdering your editor—Parker Foxcroft, wasn’t it? He wants you to come and see him—to help him if you can.”
“Good God—Fred Drew?”
“He didn’t sound all that happy about it on the phone, either.”
“Why do you suppose he didn’t call his lawyer?”
“I don’t think he has one.”
“Well—I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for calling me, Randy.”
“Anytime.”
Two hours and a mess of red tape later I was seated at a conference table in the Tombs, facing Frederick Drew, perhaps America’s unluckiest poet. He was too old for the Yale Younger Series of Poets Award, too idiosyncratic for the Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award people; neither Jewish, nor gay, nor a feminist, and thus left out of every poetic cult. And now he was in jail, accused of murder. One thing I felt sure of: he was not François Villon reincarnate.
I had been passed through a metal detector machine, frisked, and subjected to a barrage of questions as to why I was there. I insisted that I was Drew’s publisher, which didn’t seem to mean much to the guardians of the Tombs, who would have preferred that I be a lawyer, God forbid, until I added that Drew and I were also distant relatives, second cousins twice removed. It could be possible; everybody is related somehow to virtually everybody else, in my opinion. Anyhow, I was finally allowed to talk to the prisoner, in the company of a strapping big guard, who hovered near us.
Drew’s head was bowed when I entered; his shoulders hunched. When he saw me, he straightened up and attempted a smile, which somehow fell short of its intention.
“Ah,” he said in a somber voice, “ ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,’ I presume.”
“’Kinch,’ “ I replied, “ ‘you fearful Jesuit.’ Happy Bloomsday.”
“The same to you, brother.”
It was Bloomsday, all right—June 16. On that day in 1904, as the historians tell us, James Joyce met his Nora Barnacle, and when he wrote Ulysses, the saga of a single day in Dublin, that is the day he re-created in the book. It is celebrated in New York literary circles by a marathon reading of the novel at Symphony Space on upper Broadway—a reading by dozens of actors, writers, and assorted publishing folk that lasts all of twenty-four hours or more. I myself read a section of it one year. However…
“What are you doing in here, Fred?” I asked Drew.
“What are you doing out there, Nick?” he said in reply.
“I suggest we skip the small talk, Fred. Also the literary allusions. Let’s talk seriously.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Why do the police suspect you of murdering Parker Foxcroft?”
“I had the motive—which you know—and the opportunity.”
“I understand.”
Drew pulled out a rumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one, then held the pack out to me. I shook my head.
“No thanks.”
He inhaled deeply, blew a perfect blue smoke ring, then put the cigarette down in an ashtray, where it smoked away by itself for the rest of our conversation.
“It was Juan,” he said at last.
“The bartender at The Players?”
He nodded. “The police questioned the staff of the Club. About you apparently, Nick. They wanted to know who you’d spoken to and whether you’d had any phone calls. The concierge told them that Foxcroft had called, and Juan told them that when you went into the phone booth to take your call, I picked up the extension on the bar and listened to your call.”
“And did you?” Had I been right after all?
“Sure. I knew Foxcroft would be waiting for you in his office. I decided to go there and confront him. Tell him off.”
“To murder him?”
“No, no”
“And?”
“I got as far as your office building but I didn’t go in. Lost my nerve, I guess. Or maybe it was fear. Fear that I hated his guts so much I might do him an injury.”
He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and shut his eyes. “Lost my nerve,” he repeated. “I wish I had killed him, but I didn’t.”
“And the police—”
“Learned from Juan that I left the bar as soon as Parker’s phone call was over. Opportunity, you see, Nick.”
“Yeah, I see.”
“But I didn’t do it, Nick. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Sure, I believe you.” And I did—purely a matter of faith. “I still don’t see why the police are holding you. What evidence could they possibly have?”
“It wasn’t evidence, it was what I said when they questioned me. I was drunk, I suppose. Confused—you know how it is. I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I… oh shit, I…”
His voice trailed off. I could picture the scene. Hatcher and Falco probably badgered the poor bastard until he got angry. Frederick Drew in a drunken, inchoate rage would say almost anything. He would contradict himself right and left.
“Why did you say anything at all?” I demanded. “Why answer any questions? Didn’t they read you your rights?”
Again he nodded. “They read me my rights. Fuck ‘em. Fuck their rights. So they booked me.” Then he smiled, but it was an odd smile, almost sly, crafty, as though he’d put a fast one over on the cops. They’d be sorry, all right. I’ll show ‘em.
I made a face which I hope was commiserative.
“Okay, Fred,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help. The first thing is to find you a lawyer.”
“I don’t have much money, Nick.” He started coughing, rather violently, and wiping his eyes. The smoke from his festering cigarette was beginning to sting my eyes, too. “Rewrite that line. I don’t have any money to speak of.”
“We’ll work something out, Fred. You’re a member of the Authors Guild, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I believe they have a fund of some kind to lend out. So does The Players. The John Drew Fund, appropriately enough. Anyway, let me worry about that for now. Is there anything you need here, Fred?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you’ll be able to provide it for me.”
“What is it?”
He pantomimed lifting a glass to his lips and chugalugging. Typical. It was the sauce that had done him in, and still he wanted more of it. Once an alcoholic…
I knew there was no way I could or even would bring him liquor, but I’ve always thought that if I were in prison, or in a hospital, I would be grateful if some Good Samaritan were to supply me with a martini or two. On that score, I remember visiting a colleague once in North Shore Hospital on Long Island. I brought along a small thermos of martinis, and in turn was given a hospital lunch at the same time my colleague was served—one of the best lunches I have ever enjoyed, in a hospital or out: a small, rare filet mignon, with tiny roasted new potatoes, and asparagus in butter and garlic sauce. Only the proper red wine was lacking.
“I’ll be back when I have news for you, Fred,” I said, and got up. The guard stiffened to attention. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m just leaving.”
“Thanks for coming, Nick,” said the poet.
Poet indeed. Un poète maudit, the French would call him. A poet cursed.
That same day I called my attorney for all seasons, Alex Margolies, and told him about Drew’s plight.
“Sure you want to get involved in this, Nick?”
“Why not? I believe he’s being jobbed. Frederick Drew didn’t kill anybody.”
“I’m only suggesting,” Margolies continued, “that it’s like the Chinese thing—you know, if you save a man’s life in China, you become responsible for him. You want to be responsible for that lush?”
“Not particularly. Anyway, this is not China. I just want to get him out of jail.”
“Well, he needs a lawyer, all right, but not me. I don’t do criminal work myself, or windows. Give me a juicy tax problem to unsnarl, and I’m blissed out.”
“Got any suggestions?”
“I understand that Andrew Svenson is probably available. At least I haven’t seen his name in the papers recently. You remember Svenson—the guy who tied you in knots when you testified at that hood’s trial?”
“He didn’t exactly tie me in knots, Alex. Actually—”
“Made a monkey out of you, no?”
Yes. Svenson had made me appear foolish in court on the occasion of the hearing of one Salvatore Marco, whom I had accused of attempting to mug me—but I wouldn’t hold that against the lawyer; he was only doing his job. If he was the best man around when habeas corpus was the issue, bring him on, by all means.
Which is what I instructed Alex Margolies to do. Posthaste.
Watching Claire Bunter enter the Grill Room of The Players at exactly six-fifteen, not a minute more or less, I understood immediately why Parker Foxcroft had taken her under his capacious wing. If she didn’t exactly walk in beauty like the night, she did shine in her own way. She was exceptionally tall, but her proportions would have pleased any sculptor from Praxiteles to Rodin. Auburn hair caught back in a barrette, and high, finely cut cheekbones. Kirghiz eyes, the kind Hans Castorp found in Frau Chauchat in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The only flaw in an otherwise cinematic face was her nose, which was a shade too long and too thin.
I had told Claire that dress in the Club between Memorial Day and Labor Day was always casual. She was wearing a skirt short enough to advertise her splendid brown legs and part of her equally well-tanned thighs, and a light cotton vee-neck sweater, blue and white stripes, with short sleeves.
I set my martin, glass down on the table and rose from my banquette to greet her.
“Claire, your latest jacket photograph doesn’t do you justice.”
She smiled and sat down in the armchair facing me. “Maybe next time you ought to hire Annie Leibovitz.”
“Ouch.”
“Never mind, Nick. I’m much more concerned with what’s inside my books than how they’re packaged.”
“You don’t believe that a book can be judged by its cover?”
“I only know that your books never look cheap.”
“Thank you.”
“Even if they are.”
Zing. We were sparring with each other, but to what purpose I could not tell. I decided I’d better ease off. “What are you drinking, Claire?”
“Rum and Diet Coke.”
Cuba Libre. I wonder if anyone calls it that anymore. Only in Miami, perhaps.
After I fetched her drink and a small plate of crackers and cheese, I raised my glass, touched hers lightly, and said: “Confusion to the enemy.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“Claire,” I said, “I appreciate your coming down here on such short notice—”
“I’m not exactly fighting off engagements, Nick.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know, I know. Don’t look so injured. Like a little boy whose game is going badly.”
“Well, I’m sorry as hell about that. However, now that you’re here, I’d like to talk book. As in your next one.”
“Talking business? Here in these sacred precincts?”
I pursed my lips but said nothing. She took several rapid swallows of her drink and then brought it down on the table with an audible clunk.
“I know how you men adore this place. Your playpen, your little nineteenth-century hideaway.”
“We have women members now, too,” I protested. “Quite a few of them, and they also seem to enjoy these sacred precincts, as you put it.”
“Nick, Nick… let’s not argue the point. I’m too tired to argue. I’ve been slaving over a hot computer all day.”
“I have no desire to argue, Claire, really. I mean it. Look, let’s clear the air if we can. You were Parker’s author—”
She looked as though I had struck her. Her face turned an angry red, her eyes glittered, her jaws tightened, and I thought for a moment she was going to hiss at me like a snake.
“—but he wasn’t the only editor in town,” I said, plowing on anyway, against all odds.
“There’s something you ought to know, Nick.” Her voice was not exactly filled with venom, but there was a frightening calmness about her manner, a deadly sincerity.
“I decided several months ago that I would never—never in this lifetime—ever publish another book with Parker Foxcroft, or any company he worked for. Even if it meant I would never be in print again.”
“You disliked him that much?”
“I loathed him, I detested him, I’m glad he’s dead. Is that strong enough for you?”
“Yeah—more than strong enough.” Then I fell silent. Where was I going to go from here? How in hell was I going to turn this conversation around? “Claire,” I said, “I ran into Harry last weekend on a Metro North train.”
“How did he look?” Her voice, which had been harsh before, in an intense and quiet way, softened.
“Terrible.”
Drawing a deep breath, she leaned back in her chair and shook her head back and forth slowly.
“It was his idea to move out, not mine,” she said, speaking as though I wasn’t there at all. “I didn’t kick him out. He could have stayed. It was over. All over…”
“I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say.
She brightened, or at least she managed to manufacture a smile of sorts. “Anyhow, I’m discovering what it’s like to be alone again in the big bad city.”
“And how is it? In the big bad city?”
“Not so big—and not so bad. Do you believe that?”
“Not really.”
“Good. Because it ain’t so. I rather miss Harry, the lovable slob. Would you tell him that?”
“Sure. Another rum and Coke?”
“I’ll pass. No, I’ll take a rain check.”
“Good. And, Claire—”
“Yes?”
“I’ll get in touch with your agent. Is it still Bruno Wiley?”
“Still. And thanks for the drink, Nick.”
After she had left, I sat there thinking. Thinking—and drinking. More thinking than drinking. What had Harry Bunter said on the train about his wife? Claire is capable of anything. “Anything” was the word he stressed. Did that include murder? One thing was clear: she hated Parker Foxcroft with a crystal-pure passion.
And I thought I knew why. He had dumped her. Frankie and Johnny all over again? It could well be.