FIFTEEN
I ASSUMED HE’D turn me down, a stranger wanting to talk about his murdered niece. Instead, he invited me to his home. Twenty-two Perry Street, near Bleecker, was one of a row of perfect four-story brownstones from the years before all those wars, when civility counted for something. This was the kind of home that would brighten up one’s worldview just to live there for a few years. The rain had stopped and birds trilled from sidewalk elms as I rang the bell.
Gordon Jainways was in his mid-sixties, dapper, tweedy, with a paisley tie tucked beneath his vest. He didn’t smile, but his handshake felt like a welcome. He led me down a hallway paneled in oiled cherry wood that exuded its own glow like a living thing and into the living room. I stopped short.
“I’m a puppeteer, Mr. Deemer.”
The room was filled with animals. They hung on the walls, stood on stands and on their own legs. Sometimes there was only a head, often the entire animal, always perfectly naturalistic. I approached. There were two hundred of them, maybe more, birds, reptiles, mammals, marsupials, animals from all zones of nature. Their diversity and their colors were dizzying. I wanted to reach out and touch a speckled fawn, but I resisted.
“I saw your name at the morgue, Mr. Deemer. You identified her body.”
The animals unnerved me. As a kid I fantasized a life with animals. Before I slept, they gathered in my room, an aggregation of species just like this one, all eyes on me; and on those nights the world seemed safe and sound. But that was then. Now I sat down in an armchair and looked into an ocelot’s eyes.
“I’m going to take her back to California, unless you can tell me why she should be buried here.”
“No.”
“Has my work upset you in some way?”
“No. It’s exquisite. It’s brilliant. But it reminds me of when—never mind, pardon me.”
He watched with kindly, credulous eyes while I collected myself.
“Mr. Deemer, what exactly is your interest in this?”
I told him I wasn’t exactly certain, but that I had loved his niece and that I called him to learn something about Billie’s past. I told him I didn’t think I even knew her real name.
“It was Eleanor, after her mother.”
I tried it out in my head, Eleanor, and the sound made me sad. A polar bear cub eyed me from the fireplace. I passed Jainways the envelope holding the Family Snaps.
Wordlessly, he looked at each, then up at me. I thought for an instant that he had a flash of gold in his iris, but he did not. It was only a trick of light, or a longing. “Where did you get these pictures?”
“Billie left them.”
“I took these snapshots,” said Gordon Jainways. “I gave her the Christmas puppy.”
“Petey,” I said. “Your sister told me his name. She is your sister, isn’t she, the lady at Bright Bay Nursing Home?”
He nodded.
“And she was married to Danny Beemon, Billie’s father?”
He nodded again, but suddenly tears clouded his eyes.
“Your photos seem to show a happy family.”
“Shattered,” he said.
“By Danny Beemon’s death?”
“By Danny Beemon. And by airplanes. Did Eleanor—Billie—tell you about her baby brother?”
I shook my head. She’d told me nothing.
“He was called Gordon, after me. But he was dead before his second birthday. Gordon’s death was Danny Beemon’s fault.”
Gordon Jainways looked away, into the midst of his animals, but his eyes were fixed on something only he could see.
“In 1952 Billie was three. Danny Beemon was a test pilot; the great war ace was doing the thing he was born to do, and my sister was happy, even though they lived in a shack on the high desert of California. A dreadful place called Muroc Air Force Base. My sister was happy because Danny was happy. He was happy because all the best pilots were there. For them, Muroc was an adolescent’s dream come true, just fly fast airplanes with no supervision. When D.B. was happy, his charm was like a movie star’s. People orbited about him. But he wasn’t happy for long. During a single week, in separate accidents, the entire group of test pilots, except Danny, were killed. Burned beyond recognition. But that’s not what made Danny Beemon sad. He was used to his friends’ immolation. What made him sad was that the Air Force grounded him for publicity reasons. If an unknown boy gets burned up in a crash, that’s too bad, a telegram to loved ones, but if a famous war ace gets fried, that’s bad for their budget. The military mind blanches.”
“But I heard he crashed in a jet test.”
“He did. But first he was grounded. There’s much in between. Do you want a drink?”
“Yes.”
He poured us brandy. “D.B. couldn’t live life on the ground. He began to drink heavily and mix it with amphetamines, yet they stayed on in that foul desert because Danny hoped his flight status would change. It didn’t, and the Ace of Aces, became a figure of pity on the flight line. Drunk, he once told me that even his flyboy chums had started to avoid him, as if grounded were a disease you could catch. Well, tough shit, in my view,” Jainways snarled. “I have little sympathy left for these military freaks. He could have flown for any commercial airline in the world, but airliners weren’t good enough. He had my sister and her son and daughter to love him, but that wasn’t good enough either.” He paused. “I’m still angry, thirty-five years later. Billie told me about the accident. She found Gordon at the bottom of the stairs. His neck was broken. ‘Like Dolly’s neck,’ she said, shaking Raggedy Ann’s floppy head. Danny was supposed to be watching Gordon while I took the ladies to a matinee. But Danny got drunk and passed out, and Gordon fell down the stairs. I took Billie with me back to San Francisco at her mother’s request. She was ruined by Gordon’s death and by her husband.” He paused, looking off into the wall of animals. “One night, I took Billie to see The Wizard of Oz.”
There was her name. Glinda the Good. I felt like crying. Billie Burke.
“‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?’ She came to ask it of everyone. Every event in her world was caused by one witch or the other. My shrink friend, who owns this house, says that kind of fantasy is often seen in injured children. Meanwhile, my sister pulled strings and got D.B. reassigned to flight test.”
“What strings?”
“Tight strings, Pentagon strings. You see, I’m the last son in a long line of military men. A Jainways died with McClellan’s men at Malvern Hill, 1862, and my father was also killed in battle. But I am a puppeteer.”
“General Matthew Jainways was your father?”
“You’ve heard of him? Are you a student of war?”
Legend had it that General Jainways, beleaguered with his men in the jungles of Burma and out of ammunition, ordered the company to hurl its own shit at the charging Japanese, who finally overran the defenders at the loss of some face.
“If your sister had that influence all along, why did she wait until then to use it?”
“Because she didn’t want him to fly. What wife would? But a grounded Danny Beemon was impossible to live with. In any case, D.B. crashed fifteen seconds into his first flight. Something broke. When they pulled his crumpled body from the wreckage, no one thought he’d survive, but he did. After that, I don’t know. I washed my hands of Danny Beemon.”
“I heard he was killed in a plane crash en route to a hospital in Miami.”
“Yes, I heard that, too.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Eleanor told me he refused at the last minute to board that airplane. Right on the tarmac, as the other patients were boarding. But I don’t know. By then, I think, Eleanor was losing her mind. I know the press reported Danny on the airplane, and I have no reason to think differently, except that Eleanor told me so. Billie spent most of her childhood with me, but we haven’t spoken in ten years. We had a falling out about Danny Beemon. She seemed to have forgotten everything. For some reason, I took it upon myself to remind her. She despised me for it. I thought one day we’d make up, but...”
“I met your sister at Bright Bay. She said Beemon was alive. She said he was Keith Hernandez.”
“Who?”
“A baseball player.”
“I see. Breaks my heart to see her like that. I don’t think it does her any good to see me. I was in town about a year ago, and she was talking about her reunion with Danny.” He swallowed a sob.
“A year ago?”
The doorbell chimed, and he excused himself. His animals stared at me as a group, three-dimensional memories. A great deal had happened “about a year ago.”
Gordon Jainways returned and pulled the sliding door closed behind him. “There is a man named Watson at my door. He is an agent of the FBI. He wants to ask me questions about my niece. Why the FBI?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you, and I don’t believe you are just curious. You’d better leave by the back way.” He motioned me into the adjoining living room, a sublime wooden place with fifteen-foot-high ceilings. “That door will lead you to the garden. There’s a path to the street on the west side of the building. Mr. Deemer, why are you paying for my sister’s care at Bright Bay?”
“Because Billie used to own the R-r-ruff Dog, but she gave him to me.”
He didn’t say anything.
As I left the house, I slipped on a wet flagstone and fell painfully on my hand. The rain had returned, hard and steady.
She was waiting for me in her original spot on the fire stairs. She wore a tight sweater and skirt, and her black hair was frizzed. There was trouble on her face. I quickly placed us behind double-locked doors.
“The fridge!” Sybel hissed. “Now it’s at Renaissance!”
“Is Freddy—?”
“Yes! I went to work like nothing happened, just like that bastard Pine said. I was alone all day—” She took a gasping breath. “I decided to look around. There’s a temperature-controlled vault on the top floor. He’s still in there, Artie!”
I hugged her. She trembled like a cold little girl at the beach. Somebody had moved Freddy in his crypt. Why? What would you use for a job like that. A dolly? Why move him at all? To dispose of him? Or was it a setup? Pine setting up Jones? Jones Pine? Neither? I suddenly felt exhilarated and clear. Now it would blow up in their faces. Not only that, I could cause it to blow. Just tell the cops, anonymously. Now I had some power. That seemed so clear to me then, and I loved it.
Sybel sat in the Morris chair and hugged her stockinged shins. Jellyroll looked questioningly into my eyes, like a Jainways animal. I hugged him, and he licked my chin. Billie used to roller-skate everywhere she went. The image floated across my memory. Summer, Billie would wear shiny white shorts, and she would undulate her hips to slow herself down on the incline between West End and Riverside.
“What’s the matter with you?” Sybel wanted to know.
“Me? Nothing.”
“You had a funny look on your face.”
“Naw,” I said convincingly.
“You’re obsessed.”
“Obsessed?”
“It’s written all over you. Billie has you by the balls. You’re like her puppet.” She headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the cops. Why didn’t I go there in the first place?”
I stopped her. She gritted her teeth and slugged me in the shoulder. That seemed the rhythm of our relationship. Jellyroll watched, distressed.
“Listen,” I said, “we can’t just tell the cops straight out. We’ve been withholding evidence in a capital crime!”
“You sure you’re not a lawyer?”
“If Cobb chose to press it, we could land in jail.”
“That’s a lot better than a Frigidaire.”
“I have to take Jellyroll to work.”
“What? When? Now?”
“There’s been trouble on the set. I’ve got to go. Come with me. Calabash will be right behind us. Then we’ll come back here and call the police, but first we’ll figure out a story. Please.”
Sybel paused, then nodded. “Do you think she had all this planned?”