Midnight Voices

CHAPTER 7

Irene Delamond moved to the window of her sister’s bedroom and pulled the drapes open, then started to raise the Venetian blinds to let the afternoon light flood in.

“Don’t, Irene,” Lavinia Delamond pleaded from the bed, covering her face with her hands. “I don’t want you to see me this way!”

Despite her sister’s entreaty, Irene pulled the blinds all the way to the top. “There,” she said. “That’s much nicer, isn’t it?”

“No,” Lavinia wailed. “It hurts my eyes!”

“You mean it hurts your vanity,” Irene replied, perching on the edge of the bed and gently pulling Lavinia’s hands away from her face. Lavinia seemed to have deteriorated just since yesterday. The skin on her hands felt dry and papery, and the backs of them were darkening with liver spots. But it was the condition of her sister’s face that concerned Irene the most. In her prime, Lavinia Delamond’s beauty was breathtaking, far outshining that of Virginia Esterbrook. Not, Irene thought, that Virginia was a great beauty even at her best. It was Virginia’s talent and style that had made her a star, not her looks. By the measure of beauty alone, Lavinia should have been the star. But this afternoon there was little evidence of what Lavinia had once been. The bone structure was still there, of course — nothing seemed to be able to ravage that. But the planes of her face were all but invisible under the folds of sallow skin that seemed to sag more with every passing day. Her head was covered with the turban she habitually wore now to cover the deterioration of her hair, but a few wispy strands had escaped during the night and were hanging limply down Lavinia’s left cheek. Irene reached out and gently tucked them back under the turban. “Maybe I should call Dr. Humphries,” she suggested.

Lavinia shrank back into the pillows. “No!” Her voice rose querulously. “I don’t want to see—”

Irene held an admonishing finger to her sister’s crumpled lips. “Now, Lavinia, you’ve always liked Theodore, and it doesn’t matter how you look.”

Lavinia’s lips pursed. “I don’t want him. It’s too late, anyway — I can feel it.”

“Now don’t talk that way.”

“But it’s true,” Lavinia insisted. She raised her left arm and gestured weakly to the room around her, her shriveled fingers trembling. “Just look. I’m as old and worn out as this room.”

Almost against her will, Irene’s eyes scanned her sister’s bedroom, and though she wished it weren’t true, the faded wallpaper and threadbare upholstery, even the worn oriental carpet on the floor, gave credence to Lavinia’s words. The plaster of the ceiling was cracked, and the finish seemed to have worn off the hardwood floor where it wasn’t covered with the rug.

“Well, we aren’t going to just give up,” Irene said. “I’ve brought you a nice hot cup of broth, and later on this afternoon—”

“Broth?” Lavinia echoed, her voice weak, but her eyes seeming to brighten slightly. “What kind?”

Irene picked up a steaming mug from the bedside table and held it to her sister’s lips. “The kind you need,” she assured Lavinia. “But I’m afraid it’s a bit weak.” For a moment she was afraid Lavinia was going to refuse to take the broth at all, but then her sister’s lips opened slightly, and she sucked in a taste of the hot liquid.

“Good,” she said. Her trembling hands took the mug from Irene, and she drank thirstily. Her eyes brightened a bit more, and Irene thought she saw a little color come into Lavinia’s cheeks. “Is there more?” Lavinia asked, her voice quavering.

“A little,” Irene replied.

“Can I have it?”

“Not right now.” Taking the empty mug, Irene stood up. “I want you to rest, and conserve your strength.”

Lavinia exhaled a rasping sigh. “What’s the use?” she whispered more to herself than to Irene.

“Just hang on, Lavinia,” Irene told her. “Everything is going to be all right. Just hang on a little longer.”

Closing the door as she left Lavinia’s bedroom, she started back toward the kitchen to rinse out the mug, but as she moved slowly through the rooms of the apartment they had shared since they’d first come to New York so many years ago, Irene wondered if perhaps Lavinia wasn’t right. It wasn’t just Lavinia and her room that were looking tired and worn. Paint was peeling from walls wherever she looked, and everything she saw looked old and faded.

But it can be fixed, she told herself. All of it can be fixed. In the kitchen, she put the cup in the sink, then rummaged through her big needlepoint bag in search of the receipt for the vase she’d purchased yesterday. Finding it, she picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Antiques By Claire. Two minutes later, her message delivered, she hung up the phone.

Yes, she decided. Everything can be fixed, and I shall fix everything.

“Would it really be too much trouble for you to give me a hand with this?” Caroline asked. The cab had pulled up in front of 10 °Central Park West nearly two minutes ago, but the cabbie had made no move to help her heft the huge Oriental vase from the backseat onto the curb. Instead he sat stoically behind the wheel, staring straight ahead through the windshield, his radio blaring and acting as if she simply didn’t exist. “Or would you like me to call the TLC as well as stiff you on the tip?” The threat to call the Taxi & Limousine Commission finally got his attention, and even though it no longer really mattered, since he’d pretended to be deaf when she’d asked him to turn it down twenty minutes ago, he now shut the radio off and got out of the cab. A moment later the vase was out of the cab and sitting on the lowest of the three steps that bridged the drainage moat separating the sidewalk from the huge front doors of The Rockwell. Wordlessly, Caroline paid the driver, added a tip that was exactly ten percent, then changed her mind. He probably has as many problems as I do, she decided and added two more dollars she really couldn’t afford to the bills she handed him. The cab driver accepted the money as wordlessly as he’d helped her transfer the vase from the cab to the sidewalk and pulled away into traffic as the afternoon foot traffic swirled and eddied around her.

The ornate façade of The Rockwell loomed above her, and as she gazed up at its towers and cupolas and bowed windows and terraces, she couldn’t help but wonder what could have been in the mind of its designer. One of the first apartment buildings to be constructed on the avenue bordering Central Park’s western edge, it had stood alone in its earliest years, surrounded first by farm land, but very quickly by the expanding grid of the city’s streets. No one had ever quite been able to describe its architecture, but Caroline thought the man who had dubbed it “The Grand Old Bastard of Central Park West” hadn’t been far off the mark. There were elements of practically everything in it, at least everything that predated the twentieth century. The highest towers and parapets tended toward the gothic, though there was a gold-leafed minaret soaring above the corner of 70th Street that looked as if it might have been transferred directly from St. Basil’s in Moscow. Beneath the turrets, parapets, and minaret was a jumble of elements, some of them vaguely Norman, others Elizabethan, along with a few touches of the faintly Mediterranean where there were terraces overlooking the park. The whole impression was of some kind of fairy tale fantasy that had somehow been plunked down in the middle of the greatest city in the world, where, despite its overall hideousness, it had settled in to become one of the most rarefied addresses in New York, as well as a source of stories children used to scare themselves half to death.

Now here she was, standing in front of the immense double doors, their heavily etched, beveled, and leaded glass panes framed in oak so weathered it was as gray as the cement of the sidewalk. As Caroline eyed them, wondering just how heavy they might be — and if she could hold one of them open long enough to heave the vase inside, someone behind her spoke.

“Oh, Lord, I think I smell a plot.”

Turning, she saw a familiar-looking man eyeing her, his head cocked to one side, an amused smile playing around the corners of his mouth. His twinkling eyes shifted from Caroline to the vase.

“I’m assuming you are delivering that—” he hesitated, then shrugged helplessly. “—whatever it is, to Irene Delamond?”

As soon as he spoke Irene’s name, Caroline remembered where she’d seen the man before, and in the same instant, she remembered his name.

“Anthony Fleming,” she said. “But I’m not sure what you mean. I’m delivering this to Ms. Delamond, but I’m not sure why you think there’s some kind of plot.”

Anthony Fleming’s smile broadened as he pulled one of the huge doors open. “Hold this, and I’ll haul that thing inside for you.” As Caroline kept the door from swinging shut, he hefted the vase off the step and carried it into the foyer, where another set of glass doors — not quite so heavily etched as the outer ones — blocked their way into the building’s lobby. “And please don’t call me Anthony,” he asked, almost plaintively. “That’s what everyone around here calls me, and I hate it. Tony will do, if you don’t mind.” He signaled to the doorman, who came out from behind a counter and started toward them. “As for the plot, Irene called me and told me to be here at exactly five-thirty. She made it sound like life-and-death.”

Suddenly Caroline began to understand. “She left a message for me at the shop where I work, asking that I deliver the vase at five-thirty. And my boss told me that given the address, I’d better be exactly on time.”

“Oh, yes,” Tony Fleming agreed as the elderly doorman, clad in a maroon blazer with gold braided epaulets, pulled the inner door open. “We denizens of The Rockwell are a pretty demanding bunch. Cross us, and we have you beheaded! The streets are littered with people who dared—”

But Caroline was no longer listening. Instead she was gazing around the cavernous lobby, which was perfectly in keeping with the exterior of the building. The chamber rose two full floors, and was surmounted by a ceiling painted with a trompe l’oeil so dark that at first Caroline saw nothing but what appeared to be a forest at night. But then she saw strange figures lurking in the forest’s depths — horned men clad in fur, seated around a table scattered with the torn and bloody remains of whatever beast it was upon which they’d fed. Huge black birds with curved beaks perched in the branches of the trees surrounding the feasting men, their talons almost seeming to flex as they anticipated the scraps from the feast below. A sliver of moon hung in a sky scudding with dark clouds, and as Caroline gazed at the strange scene she felt a shiver pass through her as if the coldness of the scene overhead had penetrated directly into her bones.

The walls, paneled in an oddly lusterless oak, were hung with gilt-framed oil paintings that seemed to have come from the same era as the building itself, and were perfectly in keeping with their surroundings: landscapes and still lifes that, though darkened with age, appeared never to have been any less gloomy than the odd sylvan scene depicted overhead. Directly ahead was an ornate staircase that rose in a squared spiral, with an old-fashioned cage-style elevator sitting at the bottom of its well. Above the cage, supporting cables disappeared into the upper reaches of the shaft. To the left of the stairs was the doorman’s booth, and to the right, set into the wall, was a fireplace with a pile of logs burning defiantly, as if to spite the warmth of the spring afternoon. The only light in the cavernous lobby came from a series of brass sconces set high on the walls, but the glow they cast couldn’t dispel the gloom that hung over the entire space.

“I call the décor ‘Rockwell Macabre,’ ” Tony Fleming observed sardonically as he watched Caroline take it all in. “Now, before we go up to face Irene in her lair, I think we need a strategy. But first, a question.” His eyes went to the vase Caroline was delivering. “What is your honest opinion of that?”

Just repeat what Claire would say, Caroline told herself. But she couldn’t, not with Tony Fleming’s cool blue eyes fixed on her, and the strange sensation they were causing in the pit of her stomach. “I think it’s one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, and I know Ms. Delamond got ripped off. Saturday morning it was priced at ninety dollars, but my boss had me mark it up to nine hundred just a few minutes before she came in. I tried to tell her, but—”

“But she didn’t care,” Tony finished for her. “Don’t worry about it — Irene can afford it, and I suspect she wasn’t in there for the vase anyway.” His eyes met hers, and Caroline felt herself blushing. What is this? she thought. This is nuts! I don’t even know this man! “So the question is, how would you like to handle this?” He was wrestling the vase into the elevator cage now. “We can let Irene have her fun and go our separate ways, or we can really let her think she’s pulled off a coup, and I can take you out for dinner.”

As he closed the gate and the cage began rattling slowly upward, Caroline asked the one question that popped into her mind. “Why did you ask me about the vase?”

“Simple. If you liked it — or even claimed you did — I’d have been polite, let Irene feed me a martini, then gotten out fast. But since you seem to share my reaction to it, why not play along with Irene and see what happens?”

The car clattered to a stop, and Caroline reached for the handle on the door, but before she could open it, Tony Fleming’s hand covered her own. “So what do you say?” he asked. “Do I make an excuse, or do we go out for dinner?”

“Go out for dinner,” Caroline heard herself say, feeling the heat of his hand on hers. A second later she tried to backtrack. “Oh, God, what am I saying? I can’t go out for dinner — my kids are waiting at home.”

“Do they like Chinese?”

Caroline stared at him. “You’re kidding. You want to take me and my kids out for dinner?”

Tony Fleming shrugged. “I like kids. So sue me.”

“We’ll see if you still like them by the time dinner is over.”

They manhandled the vase out of the elevator and down the hall to Irene Delamond’s door, which opened just as they arrived. Irene, dressed in a floor-length dress, her gray hair swirled into an elegant twist, held it wide. “Right on time,” she observed. “I do appreciate punctuality. Come in, both of you!”

She turned and swept through her entry hall into a cavernous living room, obviously expecting Caroline and Tony to follow. Tony picked up the vase to carry it inside, and as he passed she heard him whisper, “Act like you hate me. It’ll drive her crazy.”

But even having spent only five minutes with Tony Fleming, Caroline knew acting like she hated him would be utterly impossible.