Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

PETER STRAUB The Geezers

‘Clyde was a hell of a shock,’ Ray Constantine said to Gus Trayham, the man on the next bike.

‘Shock to us all,’ Gus said. ‘You weren’t shocked, you wouldn’t be breathing.’

‘I mean, besides that,’ Ray said. ‘The whole thing reminds me of Paolo. It brings it all back.’ Nine years earlier, Paolo Constantine, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, had died of a drug overdose. Ray’s wife, Fabiana, whom he had met during his Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, had eventually packed up everything she chose to salvage from their marriage of twenty-five years and returned to Italy.

‘Don’t you think it brought Linc back to me? All that misery when he went upstate? Linc passed three years ago, this April.’

‘I remember,’ Ray said. Neither he nor the other three men who met every weekday to exercise in Dodge Gymnasium at Columbia University and lunch together afterwards had known Lincoln Trayham. Gus’s elder brother, but it was an article of faith with them that although Linc may have done some bad things and made some bad choices, as Gus put it, he had been falsely convicted of second-degree murder and railroaded into a life sentence.

For a time, they continued pedalling furiously, though perhaps a touch less so than the three teenage sylphs beside them. One of the sylphs wore a Philips Exeter T-shirt and Spandex shorts and, Ray noted, had not once lifted her stunning little face from a hypnotic perusal of the book propped on the console before her, Killer Diller by Grant Upward, a onetime friend or semi-friend who by dint of writing the same book over and over had entirely eclipsed Ray’s own, less frequent fictions. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have come today,’ he said.

‘Do us good,’ Gus said. ‘Sweat out some pain before we talk to the Man.’

Dismounting more gracefully than Ray, Gus strode past the sylphs and ejected a panting, long-haired beanpole from the bicep curl machine by the simple mechanism of standing before him, lowering his head, and glowering. After the boy muttered an apology and slipped away, Gus adjusted the weights from 50 to 120 pounds, positioned his upper arms on the pad, settled into the seat, wrapped his fists around the handles and began smoothly raising and lowering the stack of weights. Gus Trayham’s father had coached football and swimming at Fisk, and despite the distinguished appearance given him by the bald head, grizzled white beard, and spreading waistline he had assumed as he approached sixty, Gus was the strongest and most athletic of the four friends.

Ray walked over to the lat pull machine located next to the stationary rower, where blond, still nearly boyish Tommy Whittle was going through his reps while answering the bemused smile of a dark-haired girl moving towards the water fountain. Tommy’s acting career was recovering from the layoff imposed by a three-year-old mugging that had put him in the hospital for a month, but people who had watched a good deal of television during the late eighties and early-to-mid nineties often imagined him to be an acquaintance whose name they had temporarily misplaced. Tommy referred to this sense of baffled recognition on the part of strangers as his ‘infamy’. Now he watched Ray lower the seat of the lat pull and said, ‘How do you think they’ll handle it? One on one, or all at the same time?’

‘One on one,’ Ray said. ‘That captain — what’s his name?’

‘Brannigan,’ Tommy said. ‘Like the John Wayne movie.’

‘What John Wayne movie?’

‘Brannigan,’ Tommy said. ‘He played a Chicago cop who goes to London to bring back a suspect. Mid-seventies. Not bad, not bad at all. But I’m a freak for the Duke.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Ray said. He set the pin for 175 pounds and straightened up to grasp the long bar attached to the weights.

‘One on one, huh?’

Ray let the bar ascend, carrying his arms with it. ‘Brannigan is going to park us in a room somewhere and call us out individually. We’ll tell him whatever we know. Are you nervous, Tommy?’

‘Sure I am. Clyde, that was a hell of a blow. Will you take a look at Leo? There’s a guy who is reallyupset?

Ray agreed with Tommy Whittle’s assessment. Leo Gozzi was executing half-hearted abdominal crunches with long pauses between each one. His olive face had a grey tinge and purple bags drooped beneath his eyes. After Leo’s report of dubious financial practices on the part of his employer, a computer company, had been leaked to the press, first his job, then his marriage had disappeared, and he had moved twenty blocks north into an apartment on West 107th Street, only a block from Clyde Pepper’s two rooms on West End Avenue. It was Leo who had introduced Clyde into their group.

When Ray finished his reps, he moved across the aisle and slid into the back press, the machine next to Leo’s. He had adjusted the weights and begun to push backwards before Leo glanced over his shoulder.

‘Hey, Ray,’ Leo said.

‘I hate to say it,’ Ray said, ‘but you look like shit.’

‘This thing with Clyde has me tied up in knots. I got about ten minutes’ sleep last night. I just lay there, feeling my muscles getting tighter and tighter. It’s amazing I can stand up straight.’

‘Do your laps, and we’ll relax over lunch. Everything will be fine.’

Leo performed another desultory crunch. ‘Does Sally know what happened?’

For a little more than a year, Ray had been on-again off-again with an attractive, deeply messed-up editor at Ballantine named Sally Frohman. Currently they were on again, though indications such as the frequent usage of the word ‘relationship’ led Ray to anticipate a period of sexual drought within a matter of weeks, perhaps even days. ‘Why?’

‘I guess I was wondering what you said, and what she thought about it, how she reacted, that’s all.’

‘Is that right?’ Ray asked.

‘Well, you know,’ Leo said.

‘Okay, Leo. Sally was pissed off about something. She was sitting on the sofa, staring at the floor with her hands pushed into her hair, and I was at the kitchen table, doing revisions. The phone rang. That detective, Brannigan, told me about Clyde, probably the exact same way he told you. When I hung up, Sally said, “Am I allowed to know who you’re meeting tomorrow afternoon” “Yes, Sally,” I said. “I have to talk to a detective at the 26th Precinct. About two hours ago, one of my friends from the gym, Clyde Pepper, was found in Riverside Park with his throat cut and his head bashed in. You never met him, but Clyde was a nice guy, and for some reason I’m having trouble believing he was murdered while you and I were sitting here ignoring each other.” “Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m so sorry.” She started to cry. I made a drink for her and a drink for me. Then Gus and Tommy called. Sally and I went to bed, and for some reason we had the best sex we’ve had in months. Afterwards, I began to tell her a few things about Clyde, and I choked up. Pretty soon, we were both crying.’

‘I called Tommy and Gus,’ Leo said. ‘I would have called you, but I figured Sally was spending the night at your place.’

‘Your tact is greatly appreciated,’ Ray said.

The four of them proceeded through their rounds of the exercise machines and returned to the locker room to change into bathing trunks. Four flights below, a utilitarian passage led to a scarred grey door and the labyrinth containing the swimming team’s lockers and two small, green-tiled chambers lined with shower heads. After brief, obligatory showers, they padded up a cement ramp and two by two, goggles swinging from their hands, went down a narrow corridor and through a metal door into an echoing underground vault.

Eight lanes wide, the Columbia University pool was open to the general student population, faculty, staff, and alumni every weekday afternoon from noon to two p.m. Red plastic cones and wall plaques clamed the central lanes for ‘fast’ swimmers, the two at their left for the ‘medium’, and the first two and the eighth, long ago dubbed the ‘geezer lanes’ by Gus Trayham, for slowpokes. Within each lane, a blue stripe at the bottom of the pool divided inbound left from outbound right, and its occupants swam in circles. In the past, unless the presence of too many other swimmers forced them to alter the pattern, Leo and Clyde Pepper had taken lane 1, Tommy Whittle lane 2, and Ray and Gus wider, deeper lane 8.

Composed more of faculty, alums, and staff than students, the fifteen to twenty swimmers who shared the pool with them separated out into the unobjectionable (those who did their laps in a steady, businesslike manner), the tolerable (who swam too slowly but were reasonable about it), and the offensive (people who barely moved at all, strayed out of their lanes, kicked up geysers of spray while mooching along, charged into people instead of detouring around them, and those whose ugly, ungainly strokes made them appear to be crippled). In the latter category were ‘the Monitor’, whose floundering crawl suggested that one of his arms had been amputated; ‘Cruella’, an elderly woman with a permanent sneer who did not actually look too bad until she followed a deliberate blow from a passing foot with a death-ray delivered through her radioactive blue goggles; and ‘Creeping Jesus’, a mournful character thought to be a Professor of Biblical History given to crouching in silent prayer by the end of the pool for fifteen minutes before crawling in and thrashing, apparently in utter panic, from one end to the other.

Ray noticed the Monitor and Cruella making life miserable for the two Japanese girls also in lane 1, so he was not surprised when Leo announced that he would take the far lane today, although he secretly thought that Leo would have done the same had only the Japanese girls, ordinarily a great attraction, occupied the first lane. Tommy slipped into the water and joined two sturdy middle-aged women who were churning back and forth like horses. Ray, Gus, and Leo wandered past the diving boards to the far end, where a crop-headed blond lifeguard whose piglike face always reminded Ray of a dissolute peasant in a Dutch tavern painting looked up from his perch and said, ‘The big guys!’ He glanced at Leo Gozzi, then back at Ray. ‘What happened to your buddy?’

Leo came to an abrupt halt and recoiled, as if he had bounced off a wall.

‘He dropped out,’ Ray said.

‘Suddenly called away,’ said Gus.

‘Sorry to hear it,’ said the boy. ‘For an older guy, he had major pecs. Hey, you’re all in great shape. I hope I look the same at your age.’

‘Be enough to get to our age,’ Gus said. ‘What with putting your life on the line three days a week.’

‘Hah,’ the boy said.

One by one, they lowered themselves into the pool and breast-stroked towards the far end, Gus in the lead, then Ray, Leo behind him, each of the latter two waiting until the man ahead reached the middle of the pool before pushing off. For the first four laps, Gus was rolling into his return just as Leo ducked underwater and started back up to the far end. According to the same custom by which Gus invariably led off, thereby setting the pace, they did not break rhythm to stop and rest until after the tenth lap, but after Ray dipped into the turn for the back half of his sixth, he saw Leo floating down at the other end, one arm over the rope lane-divider, the other propped on the splash ledge. Gus ploughed through the water and executed his turn without saying anything to Leo. When Ray came to the end of the pool, he looked at Leo, who waved him on. Ray spun under and kicked off.

His shoulder muscles stretched to meet the resistance of the water, seeming nearly to take in breath. There was always that moment when you and the resistance locked together and you felt your relationship with the water change from unconscious acceptance into a working partnership in which the resistance became a springy, yielding support. The difference had to do with consciousness, with being awake to your context. This moment of contextual awareness, Ray thought, resembled those periods when, immersing himself for the fiftieth time in a new book’s early scenes, he finally noticed how greatly his conception of certain characters diverged from the selves announced by the actual words they spoke. Supposedly sympathetic characters said things like, ‘Roger acts like he’s cynical and cold-hearted, but down deep he’s a real monster.’ While writing his seventh novel, Ray had learned at last how to listen to his characters; a decade later, consciousness of this other context had come to him only after months of reporting to Columbia’s pool. You had to pay attention to the medium through which you moved: if you did not, you were blind and flailing.

Leo was still clinging to the rope when Ray swam back. He said, ‘Keep dragging your ass, you might as well get in with Cruella and the Monitor.’

‘I needed a rest,’ Leo said.

Ray set off again for the top of the pool. Hallway there, he looked back and was relieved to see Leo swimming towards him.

After Ray’s and Gus’s tenth lap and Leo’s eighth, they took a breather, bobbing in the water and holding onto the ledge. ‘Leo,’ Gus said, ‘I gather you had a rough night.’

‘You didn’t?’ Leo asked.

‘Well,’ Gus said, ‘Thursday is Ruth’s night. We had dinner at Jezebel and went back to my place. I stood on Junior. After Lieutenant Brannigan woke me up, you talked to me for half an hour. Then Tommy called. I sent Ruth home and talked to Ray. I kept thinking about how you brought Clyde in, how we all hooked up with him. I was trying to get my head around what happened. Took me hours to get to sleep, all the crazy shit that was going through my mind. We all had a rough night, and now we got to carry on, hear what I’m saying?’

‘I know, I know,’ Leo said. ‘But I was closer to him than the rest of you.’

‘Then you got to deal with that,’ Gus said, and swam away.

Carrie, their waiter (or ‘waitress’, as the geezers would have put it) at The Heights, said, ‘What happened to your buddy?’

The pig-faced boy who guarded the watery realm of Cruella and the Monitor three days a week had used the same words, and although the question had not been addressed to him, Ray answered as before. ‘He dropped out.’

‘The man took a hike,’ said Gus, putting a more active spin on the concept that Clyde had been called away.

Leo turned his head to the long second-floor window looking down on Broadway and muttered, ‘You could put it that way.’

Carrie awaited farther clarification. She was a slender, small-boned young woman, and her waiting had an open, expectant quality. A couple of seconds passed while the four men at the table examined the silverware, the chalkboard listing the day’s specials, the mixture of Columbia students and neighbourhood funk milling on the sidewalk.

‘Ohh-kay,’ Carrie said. ‘Four spinach salads and two Cokes, coming up.’

They had the same lunch every day, and their regular waiters, Carrie, Troy the Boy and Melissa, had been trained to add extra bacon and blue cheese to the salads. Ray suspected that they just went into the kitchen and said, ‘They’re here.’

‘Leo,’ Gus said, ‘I’m a little concerned about you.’

‘Don’t be,’ Leo said. ‘I’m not supposed to open my mouth?’

‘Open it all you like,’ Gus said. ‘But don’t put your business on the street. Say, Carrie reads about this business in the paper. Say, she sees his picture on the news. Until that happens, and I don’t think it will, because I never heard Carrie indicate she gives a damn about the news unless some movie star gets his tit caught in a wringer, but until it does she’s better off thinking Clyde moved out of town. Why spoil her day?’

‘I get it, I get it,’ Leo said.

‘All of us have to deal with what happened to Clyde, but we don’t have to drag other people into the process.’

‘Gus,’ Leo said, ‘please stop lecturing me.’

‘You’d learn what a lecture was, I ever gave you one,’ Gus said. ‘This here is friendly advice.’

‘Try keeping the friendly advice to yourself for once,’ Leo said.

Gus held up his hands, palms out, and smiled at Leo.

Carrie set their plates before them and went through the routine with the pepper grinder. Ray and Tommy Whittle got the Cokes. All four men ran their knives through the salads half a dozen times, cutting the spinach leaves into smaller and smaller sections, and began eating.

When the silence became unendurable, Gus said, ‘Who saw Clyde last? I guess it must have been you, Leo.’

‘As far as I know,’ Leo said. ‘After the three of you got into a cab, Clyde and I went down Broadway to 107th. He dropped me at my building and kept walking towards West End. That was the last time I saw him.’

‘Anybody call him that evening?’ Gus asked.

‘Not me,’ Leo said. ‘Did you?’

Gus widened his eyes. ‘I don’t think I called Clyde but twice in the past two years. Once when you had to spend all day tinkering with some movie star’s computer, and once when I had an extra Knicks ticket and couldn’t get any of you to go with me. He turned me down too, so I wound up taking Louise, my Tuesday regular.’ Gus Trayham had long ago evolved a complicated system which allocated certain days of the week to the inner core of his sexual partners, most of them married women operating on tight schedules. ‘Did you two talk to Clyde last night?’

‘No,’ Ray said. ‘Outside of this, I never saw Clyde that much. We had dinner a couple of times last year. One day when the gym was closed for Christmas break, we went to a movie together. And about two weeks ago, he called up around nine, ten at night to say he was down the block from my place, and I invited him over. We had a few beers.’

‘The same thing happened with me,’ Tommy said. ‘Last Friday, the phone rang. It was Clyde. He said he was out for a walk, noticed he was in my neighbourhood, and wondered what I was doing. I told him to come up. We shot the breeze, and he started looking though my videotape collection. “I guess you do like John Wayne,” he said. “Have you got She Wore a Yellow Ribbon?” “You bet,” I said, and we watched the whole thing. Great movie.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Gus said, ‘but you didn’t say if you talked to him last night.’

Tommy’s head snapped forward. ‘Last night I didn’t talk to anyone until Brannigan gave me the bad news. He said he got our names from Clyde’s address book. Right away, I called Leo, but I guess he was talking to you, because I tried you next, and both lines were busy.’

‘Clyde should have wandered back to our neighbourhood instead of getting stupid and going to Riverside Park,’ Gus said. ‘Time to settle up and pay a visit to the Man.’

A bored uniform glanced through a pane of bullet-proof glass that looked as though someone had once tried to shatter it with a brick. He listened to Gus’s explanation of why they were there. He asked him to repeat it, then he looked wearily at Ray.

‘Lieutenant Brannigan asked us to come here at 3:00 in connection with the death of Clyde Pepper,’ Ray said.

Although he was wearing a watch, the uniform consulted the wall clock and observed that the time was 2:58. He shook his head and loafed to the door to request, very slowly, that another officer conduct these gentlemen to Lieutenant Brannigan’s office. Without saying a word, the second officer got to his feet and began slouching down the corridor.

At the back of the station, the officer led them into a squad room where prematurely jaded men and women in their early thirties sat at desks crowded with papers and cups of coffee. He flapped a hand at a wooden bench and a row of plastic chairs. Ray and Gus took the bench and Leo and Tommy dropped into the chairs. The officer knocked once at a wooden door, slouched inside, and returned a moment later, followed by a tall, balding ex-fullback wearing a handsome Italian suit, a sparkling white shirt and a lustrous silk necktie. His eyes were the colour of wet cement, and his lipless mouth had all the warmth of a mail slot.

The geezers stood up as the ex-fullback strode towards them and introduced himself as Lieutenant Brannigan. The mail slot lengthened into a deathly smile as Brannigan shook their hands. His mushroom-coloured teeth seemed too numerous and surprisingly small.

‘This is what we’re going to do,’ Brannigan said. ‘You were Clyde Pepper’s only friends in the world, looks like. I want to pick your brains, see what you might be able to tell me. Chances are, his assailant was a mugger, and we’re doing everything we can on that front, but the degree of violence here exceeds ninety per cent of muggings, including those that result in homicide. So we have to keep our minds open. We have to consider other options. I want to find out a few things about you, hear whatever comes into your mind about the deceased. You never know what might give us a lead, no matter how insignificant it seems to you. The procedure shouldn’t take much more than an hour. Are we in agreement?’

Each in his own way, the four men assented.

‘Thank you for your co-operation. Let’s begin with you, Mr Constantine.’

Brannigan pointed Ray to a chair, sat behind his desk, and opened a notebook. For a moment, the wet-cement eyes bored into Ray’s. ‘Are you comfortable about having this conversation, Mr Constantine?’

‘Absolutely,’ Ray said. ‘I guess I was assuming that a mugger must have killed Clyde, so I wasn’t sure how we could help you. I’m happy to tell you everything I can, though.’

‘I appreciate that. Were you aware that before taking retirement your friend was a homicide detective assigned to this precinct?’

‘All I knew was that Clyde was a retired police officer.’ Ray paused, but Brannigan simply sat behind his desk, watching him. ‘Did he work here a long time?’

‘Twelve years,’ Brannigan said. ‘Most of that time, Detective Pepper lived out on the Island. After his divorce, he moved into a high-rise in Riverdale. Right after he retired, he came into the city and took the place on West End.’

‘He must have missed his old neighbourhood,’ Ray said.

Brannigan displayed another deathly smile. ‘What kind of work do you do, Mr Constantine? Most people can’t take two, three hours off in the middle of the day to work out in a gym.’

‘I’m a writer.’

Brannigan tilted back his head and raised his eyebrows. ‘That so? What do you write?’

‘Fiction. Novels.’

‘What kind of novels? Anything I might have heard of?’

‘Thrillers,’ Ray said, steering around the words ‘crime’ and ‘detective’. He named his last three books.

Gentle Death, The Iceman, and Dying Fall seemed to have flown beneath or above Brannigan’s radar. The Lieutenant said, ‘Do you know Grant Upward? I like his stuff, but he writes books so fast I can’t keep up with the guy. Two of my detectives out there, they read Grant Upward’s books as soon as they come out.’

‘Actually,’ Ray said, ‘Grant and I are old friends.’

‘I’m impressed. Now, tell me about this group of yours. How you met, what the other men do, your connections to Columbia, things like that.’

‘We’re all neighbours,’ Ray said. ‘I met Gus Trayham in 1980, ‘81, something like that, when we used to go to the same bar on Columbus Avenue. He works as a grip for companies that film commercials. Gus took some classes at Columbia in the late sixties, I think, and he started using the gym before the rest of us. I got an MA at Columbia in 1966, so one day I went with him and signed up. That was in the spring of 1990.

‘Around that time, my computer started going haywire, and a writer friend of mine, in fact it was Grant Upward, said I should talk to a guy named Leo Gozzi, who helped writers with their computers, setting them up, doing upgrades, hand-holding, whatever they needed. I called Leo. He came to my place and straightened everything out. He was great. After that I called him every time I needed advice. Leo and I spent so much time together we became friends, which was a good thing, because half the writers in the New York area wound up hearing about him. Later on, through Tommy he began getting calls from actors, too. If he didn’t already know you or like your work, you were out of luck. Turns out Leo graduated from Columbia. When he said he wanted to start exercising, I thought, why not? and introduced him to Gus. That’s how he got in.’

‘What about Mr Whittle?’

‘Tommy’s an actor who lives on my block. He grew up in our neighbourhood, and Tommy and Gus are old friends. After I started going to the gym, Gus and I told Tommy all he had to do was say he was an alum, and they’d let him buy a card, because they never check.’

‘Do you work out five days a week?’

‘If we can. I might have to meet a deadline, and Gus sometimes has a string of twelve-hour work days. Leo gets stuck in Westchester or New Jersey with a client who’s flipping out because his system just crashed. The actors Tommy put him in touch with introduced him to some famous actors, and those people are like babies, they want everything right now. Tommy goes to a lot of auditions, so he can’t make it every day, either. Clyde was pretty regular, though.’

‘How did Clyde Pepper come into your group?’

‘He and Leo lived about a block away from each other. After they started hanging out, Leo arranged for us to meet Clyde for dinner one night, and he fit right in. For one thing, Clyde looked like he’d been working out all his life. He certainly wasn’t going to be an embarrassment or slow things down. Besides that, he was an interesting guy. In some ways, Clyde fit in better than Leo.’

‘Oh?’ said Brannigan.

‘Well, Leo’s a friend of mine, and if you need someone to hook you up with an Internet provider or lead you through the ins and outs of a software program, he’s your guy. And by working out with us all these years, he managed to get himself into good condition, but that’s not really where he’s coming from. Leo went to Bronx Science.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘I’m talking about involvement in athletics. Do they even have sports at Bronx Science? Computers are Leo’s whole life. Right out of college, he was hired by one of those outfits where everybody wears jeans and works twelve hours a day. A few years later, the company took off, and Leo did very well until he discovered the owners were screwing their suppliers. When he spoke up, they dumped him. He went freelance because he couldn’t get another job, and then he came into our group. But he didn’t have the same background.’

‘An athletic background?’

‘Yes,’ Ray said. ‘It makes a difference.’

‘Did Clyde Pepper have an athletic background?’

‘Clyde grew up in Inwood, and he played basketball and ran the half-mile in high school.’

‘What about the rest of you?’

‘Gus played football and basketball at Fisk. Tommy was an all-conference guard his senior year at New Trier, in Illinois, and he made the football team his first year at Carleton, before he got interested in theatre. I did varsity football, basketball and track all though high school. The point is, Clyde had worked under coaches, he’d been through a sports programme. He knew about discipline. He set goals for himself.’

‘His death must have come as a shock to you.’

‘It still is a shock,’ Ray said. ‘If he had to take a walk, I wish he’d come down to our neighbourhood, called one of us up, stopped in for a beer or something. Clyde did that, sometimes. Who goes into Riverside Park late at night?’

‘That’s an interesting question,’ Brannigan said. ‘Was it a habit of his, do you know?’

‘You got me,’ Ray said. ‘But you’d think a guy who used to be a homicide detective would know better.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘About an hour after we left the gym. We always have lunch at a place down on Broadway. When we’re done, Gus and Tommy and I get into a cab, and Leo and Clyde walk home. The last time I saw Clyde, we were hailing our cab.’

‘Did you talk to him yesterday evening?’

Ray shook his head. ‘Last night, I was with my girlfriend, Sally Frohman. Around midnight, whenever it was, you called and gave me the news. I talked to my friends for about an hour. We could hardly believe what happened. You don’t expect a friend of yours to get killed.’

‘You were with your girlfriend all night?’

‘Depends what you mean by all night,’ Ray said. ‘Sally rang my buzzer about 11:00, maybe a little later. She was worried about something. Well, she was pissed off at me and wanted to make sure I knew it. Hold on.’ He smiled at Brannigan. ‘Are you checking to see if I have an alibi for the time Clyde was murdered?’

‘I’m asking you what you did last night.’

‘What time was Clyde murdered?’

‘According to the Medical Examiner, sometime between 10:00 and 12:00.’

‘Then I have half an alibi.’ Ray said. ‘But I didn’t do it, if you had any doubts about that. I was fond of Clyde, I liked him a lot. After Sally and I finally got to bed, I cried. I really did, I cried like a baby.’

‘Murderers cry all the time, Mr Constantine. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve seen dozens of people who committed murder break down and weep. Some of them were sitting right in that chair. They cry because they almost always killed a friend, a spouse or a child of theirs. You should put it in one of your books.’

Remembering a scene near the end of Dying Fall, Ray said, ‘Now that you mention it, I already did. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes you write things you weren’t aware of knowing. Grant Upward and I used to talk about that. He said it was one of the reasons he wrote — to discover what he knew.’

‘You get the same thing in police work now and then,’ Brannigan said. ‘If we could bring Clyde Pepper back to life, I think he’d agree with me. The man had one of the best records in this precinct, maybe the best. Not a man who gave up easily. Did he ever talk about his work?’

‘Not that I remember,’ Ray said.

‘He never mentioned a boy named Charles White? Charlie White?’

Ray looked up and brought the tips of his fingers together. ‘If he did, I’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘Three years ago, the case attracted a lot of attention in the press. It wasn’t as big as Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin, but it was almost in that league. I’m surprised you don’t remember it, being in your line of work.’

‘This was something Clyde was working on?’ Ray asked.

‘It was one of his last cases. Around 3:00 one morning, a Barnard student and her boyfriend saw a kid lying on the ground inside the gate to the Columbia campus on 116th Street. He was curled up behind his backpack in the dark, off to one side. If his white polo shirt hadn’t caught her eye, the girl would never have spotted him. They thought he was drunk, and they went in to see if they could help him. After they got a good look, the boyfriend called 911 on his cell phone. The kid had been beaten to death. That was Charlie White. He was in his last year of pre-med at Columbia, and he lived in a fraternity house on the other side of 116th Street, a couple of doors down. Ring any bells?’

‘Maybe,’ Ray said.

‘In one of his pockets, our pre-med frat boy was carrying five grams of cocaine in individual packets. The backpack was even better. A rock the size of a walnut wrapped up in a plastic bag was rammed down next to his books. Turned out Charlie White had a reputation for dealing coke to his fraternity brothers. Plus other interested parties.’

‘Oh, yeah, Charlie White,’ Ray said. ‘Sure. He was from a well-off family in the Midwest, wasn’t he? His father had a big job in the Carter administration.’

‘Missouri,’ Brannigan said. ‘His father was Under-Secretary of the Treasury during Reagan’s first term.’

‘He must have been killed over a drug deal,’ Ray said.

‘Your friend Clyde didn’t buy that theory. I’ve been looking through his records, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was right. In the end, Pepper came up empty-handed. Must have been frustrating for a guy like that.’

‘Well, yeah,’ Ray said. ‘But what makes you think he was right?’

‘A couple of things. To beat someone to death, you have to keep coming at him, keep putting in the effort. Drug-related murders are like executions. Turning a guy’s face into mush takes anger, it takes passion. It’s personal.’

‘Maybe the kid burned one of his customers,’ Ray said.

‘Could be. But I suppose it would be the first time in history that a guy killed his dealer and didn’t rip off his stash.’

‘Uh huh. That makes sense.’

‘Do you see what I’m thinking, Mr Constantine? Clyde didn’t want to give up that case. Who knows, maybe he moved out of Riverdale to keep working on it. So I was interested if he ever talked about this to any of you. Anything he might have said could be useful to us.’

‘No, he never did,’ Ray said. ‘Not to me, at least.’

‘Well, I had to ask,’ Brannigan said. ‘Thank you for your cooperation. Would you send in Mr Gozzi, please?’

Ray left the office, closed the door behind him, and went over to the side of the room. ‘Your turn in the barrel,’ he said to Leo, and when Leo stood up, Ray said, ‘Did any of you ever hear Clyde mention an unsolved case he was still working on?’ None of them had. ‘Too bad,’ Ray said. ‘We might have been able to give them some help.’

Ray watched Leo Gozzi enter Brannigan’s office, then sat down beside Gus to wait until the last man came out.

‘I’m sorry, but I think we’re at a dead end,’ said Sally Frohman. ‘I really wish I didn’t, because I like you a lot, Ray, and I thought we had a relationship that was going somewhere. You’re a good writer, too — I never had any doubts about that. When I got my first job, some of the women told me never to get involved with writers, it didn’t take me long to learn why, but I always thought it could be different if you respected the guy’s work. I guess I was wrong. Or there might be some other problem, one that has nothing to do with your being a writer, I don’t know, at this point everything seems connected to everything else, but what I do know is, this thing isn’t working, and I think it would be better if we stopped seeing each other.’

She had left two messages on Ray’s machine, arrived at his door toting a manuscript-laden briefcase, shared take-out Thai food and a bottle of Beaulieu Vineyards chardonnay at the kitchen table, adventurously and with a hint of desperation observable only to an experienced Sally Frohman-watcher strewn her clothes here and there on both floors of his brownstone apartment, and concluded her farewell performance in abravura trifecta, most of which, Ray hoped, had been genuine. Presently, which is to say at 10:35 p.m., they lay recumbent between daisy-printed sheets. The fragrantly chromatic harmonies of Faure’s Second Quartet for Piano and Strings drifted about them, courtesy of WNYC.

‘Gee,’ Ray said, ‘you respect my work?’

Sally gave him a dark, deeply reproving look. Her hair fuzzed out electrically around her head, and the distance between her eyes seemed about an inch wider than usual. ‘Is that your final comment?’

‘No, sorry. Just an ill-advised attempt at levity. You never told me anything like that before.’

‘Didn’t I?’ For a moment, she seemed stricken. ‘Well, maybe not in so many words. But you’re changing the subject. Tonight was lovely, and I’m going to miss you, but we’re not going anywhere, are we? This is as much as there’s ever going to be, and it isn’t enough.’

‘Sally,’ he said, ‘your timing is incredibly bad. One of my closest friends was killed yesterday. Clyde didn’t have a heart attack, he wasn’t wasting away from some disease, he wasknifed. Some creep cut his throat. The guy smashed in Clyde’sskull. I don’t see how you can… Aaah, hell.’ He flattened his palms over his eyes, then dropped his hands at his sides. ‘If you want to know the truth, Sally, in a way — and take this however you like — it’s like my son died all over again. This is not the moment to start whining about our relationship, all right?’

‘No,’ Sally said. ‘It isn’t all right. I’ll overlook the part about whining, because I know none of this is easy for you. Ray, I am very, very sorry about your friend.’ She sat up straight and wrapped the sheet around her. ‘Do you know why I came here tonight? I wanted to do whatever I could for you — I wanted to help you get through this. I thought you might need me, Ray.’

‘I’m glad,’ he said.

‘But did you talk to me about your friend? Did you let me know what you were feeling? Ray, you completely shut me out. Before dinner, I asked you about what happened at the police station, and you said it was nothing. During dinner, you said that your friend Leo looked distressed at the gym today, and I gathered you were concerned about him, but when I asked, you clammed up. You wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t forced the issue. You’re like this glassy, frozen surface — you never open up. In the entire time we have been together, you never told me any more about your son than that his name was Paolo and he died of an overdose. I don’t know how old he was, or where he was when it happened.’

‘He was twenty,’ Ray said. ‘It happened, as you put it, in his apartment, during his third year at RISDE. RISDE is an acronym for the Rhode Island School of Design, located in Providence, Rhode Island. Is that what you wanted to hear? Do you feel more informed?’

‘You’re never going to let anyone in,’ Sally said. ‘I feel sorry for you. Even more than that, you make me sad. You have nothing but those guys at the gym and your work.’

‘You’d be surprised at what I have,’ Ray said.

The telephone rang. Sally did not take her gaze from him, and the telephone kept ringing.

‘What happened to your answering machine?’

‘I turned it off,’ he said, and leaned sideways and picked up the receiver. After a short time, he said, ‘No, I haven’t heard from him.’ Ray listened to his caller some more and said, ‘Okay, yeah. I’ll be right there.’ He hung up.

‘Don’t take this personally, but I have to leave. That was Gus Trayham. He’s been trying to talk to Leo all night, but Leo isn’t answering, and Gus is worried. He and Tommy are up on 107th Street, trying to convince the super to let them into Leo’s apartment. I should be there when they get in.’

‘Why? What do you think is wrong?’

‘I don’t even want to say.’ Ray got out of bed and began hunting for his clothes. ‘Talk about lousy timing. What do you want to do, stay here?’

‘I’ll wait for you to get back,’ Sally said. ‘Unless you want me to come with you.’

‘No, no,’ Ray said. ‘With luck. I won’t be gone more than half an hour. If it’s going to be later, I’ll call.’

A few minutes after midnight, Ray let himself back into his apartment. Fully dressed, Sally was seated on his sofa, dividing her attention between the stack of pages on her lap and Channel One, the 24-hour local news station.

‘Well?’ she said.

Ray shook his head and walked into the kitchen. He took a glass from a shelf, dropped in ice cubes from a bowl in the freezer, and half-filled the glass with whiskey. When he turned around, Sally was leaning against the counter just inside the entrance, part of the manuscript still in her hands.

‘I see you need a drink,’ she said.

‘That’s nice,’ Ray said. ‘I appreciate your support.’ He sat at his table and swallowed whiskey without taking his eyes from her.

Sally took a step towards him, then stopped moving and tucked the pages under one arm. ‘I assume you got into Leo’s apartment.’

‘Yes,’ Ray said. ‘That we did. It took a little heavy-duty persuasion, but the super finally opened the door to Leo’s disgusting pigpen. The results were unsatisfying. They lacked a certain resolution. The pigpen was empty. In the sense of its tenant being nowhere in sight. Looked at another way, the place wasn’t empty at all, since garbage was piled up everywhere you looked. We waited around until we were about to pass out from the stench, and then we gave up.’

‘Do you think he killed himself? Is that what you were worried about?’

Ray leaned back in his chair and gazed at a spot on the wall five or six feet to her right, pretending to consider her words. He appeared to be mildly amused. ‘I would say… I would say that your question is too narrowly framed. Our anxieties are free-floating and essentially undefined. They are of an inclusive nature.’

‘That’s not — ’

He interrupted her, still contemplating the spot on the wall. ‘I will say this, however. If I had to live in that filthy dump, thoughts of suicide would never be far from my mind. Seeing his apartment puts Leo in an entirely different light. I had no understanding, none whatsoever. Of the way he lived.’

She looked at him in silence for a suspended moment. ‘Have you had any new thoughts about us?’

‘Now?’ Ray took another swallow of whiskey. After a few seconds, he shifted his gaze to Sally. ‘Do you know how ridiculous that question is? That doesn’t mean you can’t spend the night here, by the way.’

‘Here’s another ridiculous question,’ she said. ‘How would you describe the way you’re feeling at this moment? Or, if you are uncertain about your feelings, what are you thinking?’

‘Oh, I’m completely clear about my emotional condition,’ Ray said. ‘It’s as though a huge explosion just went off a yard or so away from me. Chunks of metal and parts of bodies are flying all over the place. People have begun to scream, and the screaming is going to continue for a long time. I’m still on my feet, but as yet I don’t know if I have been injured. I almost have to be injured, but I’m afraid to look. That’s how I feel.’

Sally quivered.

Ray tilted the last of the whiskey into his mouth and thumped the glass on the table. ‘And what I’m thinking is this. Betrayal is the ugliest, most repulsive thing I can imagine. I hate being betrayed.’

Sally wavered backward. ‘We have nothing more to say to each other. Stay there, don’t walk me to the door.’ She spun around and left the kitchen.

‘For God’s sake, Sally,’ Ray said. ‘I wasn’t talking about you.’ He stood up and poured more whiskey into his glass. From the living room came the rustle of papers being stuffed into a briefcase. ‘Sally?’ The next sound he heard was the closing of the door.