Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 04/01/11 Page 5

  They were a good match, Marty and Egan. Same generation, same background, same friends, if either of them had any friends left. They were both opinionated, combative, and they both drank far too early and far too long. The difference was that Marty smoked and Egan dressed like a Ralph Lauren country squire.

  And they both wrote vituperative articles for art magazines. More than one of those articles was an attack on the other man, covert or not so covert. Many of the rest were dismissive attacks on artists who produced work—who dared produce work!—that belonged to a style or genre that fell outside the approval of the man writing the diatribe. That was easy to do.

  “There were several people from the press here for the symposium,” said Dolly. “From New York. I wonder what they made of all the rancor.”

  “That’s why they came up here in the dead of winter. Another chance to see two battered pit bulls go at each other.”

  “Then they got what they came for, didn’t they? I met Marty’s wife. She seemed quite pleasant. Angry, I thought, but pleasant.”

  Renee? Pleasant? Nah. Besides, Renee wasn’t his wife.

  “Alice something . . .”

  Ah! Alyse. Alyse really was Marty’s wife. Still. Probably. And she was pleasant when she wasn’t around Marty. Marty has that effect on people. “I’m surprised she was here,” I said.

  “They’re married, aren’t they? But perhaps that’s reason enough for her to stay away.” Dolly laughed quietly.

  “Barely married. They’ve been divorcing longer than they were married, fighting over a property settlement.”

  He and his preceding wife had fought bitterly over support and property as Alyse looked on. Marty threatened to move to the Seychelles Islands, to West Irian, to the moon, anywhere to reduce the support he had to pay and the property he had to relinquish. Maybe Alyse anticipated the same treatment. Maybe Alyse was tailing him to nab his passport when he wasn’t looking.

  She wasn’t going to find him at his retrospective, though. For his own Marty-ish reasons he had decided to forego the opening. His life might have lasted longer if he’d bothered to attend.

  The sound of commotion and voices came from another part of the room, out of our sight, but one of the voices was loud and unmistakable: Egan Swift had bothered to attend, and he’d made his entrance. A moment later he lurched around the corner, holding a half filled glass of white wine, part of which he’d sloshed onto his shirt. Egan was not a small man, and his imposing presence amplified his imposing voice.

  “His career’s in the toilet! Worthless!” he said, more or less to us.

  His timorous wife, dressed in her conventional shades of taupe, followed Egan at a respectful two-step distance. She smiled tentatively and seemed as she always did to be on the verge of flinching.

  “Good evening, Dolly. Hope the museum hasn’t laid out much money for this display! Self-indulgence!” he said loudly and slowly. “Well! We’re not allowed to say that it’s not art these days, but what is it?”

  He downed the last of his wine and gave the plastic glass to his wife. “I can’t bear this without assistance.” She disappeared with the glass. “Toby,” he said, shaking my hand, “and Sanders. I thought you’d be home preparing to explain French literature to an impatient world. Have you enjoyed this display of pointless post-post-modern interior decoration?”

  “You are incorrigible, Egan,” said Dolly. “And quite audible.”

  “Incorrigible? What’s to correct? And everyone here will wind up thanking me for my insight. You’ll see. The museum will receive grateful letters.”

  “I’m certain we’ll receive letters,” said Dolly, “particularly after this afternoon’s festivities.”

  “Art is a serious subject, Dolly. Kitsch, cleverness, fraudulence are themselves not important, but their devastating effect on art is. And those who know the difference need to defend it at every opportunity.” Which he did. He went out hunting for the opportunities when they didn’t show up on their own.

  Sandy and I asked Egan and the mousy missus to come to dinner with us. She wanted to; he didn’t. “Too much work. Make straight the way of the culture. What’s left of it.”

  She seemed disappointed. “But . . .” she said.

  “Margaret! We don’t need your help.” They didn’t come with us.

  We went to the Red Hawk, Sandy and I, unaware that Marty Levin was murdered while we ate. It was a grotesque thought.

  * * *

  On Monday morning the detective captain asked us to visit his office.

  “Should we have a lawyer with us?” Sandy asked me. I didn’t know. It didn’t seem possible to me that anyone could suspect either one of us of anything worse than negligent hospitality. I telephoned Bess Nicholson anyway. Bess was a lawyer, a friend, and a calm voice.

  “He does?” she asked. “I’m not surprised. After all . . .” but she didn’t finish the sentence. “I can’t help you, though. I’m sorry, but I can’t, and I don’t feel comfortable discussing the reasons.”

  She couldn’t talk to us? “Is there someone else we should call?”

  “Toby, really, I can’t. It’s . . . I just can’t.”

  Now what? I couldn’t make sense of her refusal.

  Even though it was still Art Festival Week, it was also Monday, a day when no art gallery is open, especially not in January. We could go to meet the detective captain, a twenty-minute drive from Craftsbury, but we did not leave when we planned to leave. Ranger appeared at the door, looking for a place to stay.

  Ranger. The handful of art galleries around Craftsbury had been asked to hold exhibitions of work by festival participants or by artists who had some local connection. I was asked to make room for an exhibit of work by a young artist, so to speak, named Ranger. Just Ranger. He probably had a longer name, and Sandy knew what it was. I didn’t much care. Ranger had taken a course from Sandy at Crafts College in the year before Ranger dropped out of college, fled to New York City, and became a rebellious force among Brooklyn-based artists.

  He came from Prince Edward Island, making him the only fringe-neo-punk, rebellious, disruptive artist from Prince Edward Island I’d ever heard of and, so far as I could tell, anyone else had ever heard of. He may have been the only person of any description at all I’d met from Prince Edward Island. But who knows? Maybe I’d met a lot of them who kept their origins to themselves.

  He sat on the symposium panel, but his participation scarcely rose to minimal. Between Marty Levin and Egan Swift and their rantings, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise and didn’t seem interested in trying. Finally he stood up, announced that the two of them and everyone else in the room were worthless fools, and stomped out.

  Now he needed a place to stay, and his right arm was in a sling.

  “Dislocated shoulder,” he said. “Happened a long time ago. Just pops out sometimes. Forget about it.”

  The college gave him a place to stay for the symposium. A murder investigation afterwards was a different story, and Ranger was on his own. Yeah, sure, he smoked. Yeah, sure, he’d smoke outside. We said yes. He assumed we would because he had his backpack in his left hand.

  “How long have you known Mr. Levin?” Detective Captain Romano asked us.

  “A long time,” I said.

  “How well did you know him?”

  “How well? Give me some possible answers. I hadn’t seen him much recently.”

  “Previously? Three years ago, for example?”

  “The same, Officer.”

  “And you?” He turned to Sandy.

  “Barely knew him. Met him four or five times when we were in New York. That’s all.”

  “He’s never visited you in Craftsbury before?”

  “Not since I’ve been around.”

  “No romantic relationships?”

  “Romantic relationships? With Marty Levin?” asked Sandy. “Are you kidding?”

  I gathered he wasn’t. He contemplated the answer without saying anything then asked m
e, “Did you know anyone who was angry with him?”

  “Officer, Marty Levin is no longer speaking to more people than I’ve met in my entire life.”

  “Why?”

  “He alienates everyone who disagrees with him.”

  “Did he alienate anyone in Berkshire County?”

  “His ex-wife, Egan Swift. Probably others. I wouldn’t know.” In the summer, when people from New York come up here, the county’s crawling with people Marty’s alienated. In January there are a lot fewer. “Marty has—had—strong views.”

  “Art’s just blobs of color on paper, pieces of string hanging from a ceiling or strung around a wall,” he told me one night after he’d been drinking, or maybe it was one noontime. It could have been either one. “That’s all it is. Personal expression? Who cares about personal expression? Mark Rothko’s psychiatrist? His mother? Who cares?! Aesthetics? I mean, what an idea, aesthetics! Everything just is what it is. That’s all, and these culture tsars, Egan Swift and his art magazine mafia, trying to tell us what everything means, and how everything has to have meaning . . . I don’t care about meaning! ‘Creating art’ never means creating something. People just have to see! They have to look and know they’re looking and understand that they’re looking and hope that they’re seeing. That’s all any artist does. Everything else is pandering, like the Impressionists. Like the Abstract Expressionists. There’s nothing left to say in art. Nada.”

  Except, apparently, for twine on white panels.

  Marty also attacked Ranger, but I didn’t mention Ranger to Detective Captain Romano. I probably should have.

  “Are you gentlemen missing anything from your house since the death of Mr. Levin?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “The Hope Diamond,” said Sandy.

  Detective Captain Romano didn’t respond. “From the guesthouse?”

  “How would we know?” I asked. “It’s padlocked.”

  He looked at me, expressionless as always. He nodded. “Forensics needs to examine it again.” Did he want to see if we’d slip up and tell him we’d managed to get inside? Maybe to cover our nonexistent tracks?

  “When was Marty shot?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “We were at the college museum in the evening. Several people were there who knew Marty. I thought . . .”

  “Not long before the first troopers arrived at the scene.”

  “Ah.” We were dismissed. He didn’t want to know who was at the art museum. He didn’t want to know about Renee or Alyse. We gentlemen were no use to him.

  As we were leaving, I turned back and asked, “Officer . . . the gun that shot Marty, what caliber was it?”

  “Why do you want to know the caliber?”

  “I don’t, really. Would it have much recoil?”

  He scrutinized me before answering. “Don’t know. Might. Might not.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Nine millimeter,” he said.

  When we arrived back home, Ranger was not in the house. His backpack was, though, and he soon appeared at the back door, his right arm still in its sling. He didn’t have a shirt on. His torn T-shirt was wrapped around his left wrist. It was January. His scrawny body was covered with tattoos, but they probably didn’t keep him warm.

  “Didn’t take long, huh,” he said.

  “What did you do to your wrist?” asked Sandy.

  “I fell on some stones or something. Slate, maybe.” He looked at us without blinking. “I was chasing a rabbit.”

  Which made more sense for Ranger than it would have for most people. Ranger painted rabbits, little fluffy rabbits, some brown, some white, some in psychedelic shades that haven’t evolved yet even in rabbits. He painted the rabbits, except the psychedelic ones, without apparent irony. They were just there, and they were cute.

  He also painted naked young men and women, post-adolescent but just barely, engaged in semi-sexual entwining, all arms and legs. Et cetera. They were not X-rated, but they were not calendar art, either. Unlike the rabbits.

  “I like rabbits,” he said.

  Marty Levin did not like rabbits, and he did not like what Ranger painted and what Ranger’s cohort painted. In Marty’s view, it was all retrogressive, personal, representational art, degraded by introspection and meaning. These qualities were anathema to Marty. He did his best to subvert two major shows in Manhattan by whatever the art movement it was that included Ranger, and the scheduled shows quickly disappeared.

  We bandaged Ranger, which left him with one useless hand and one semi-useless hand. It might have been hard for him to light a cigarette, but at least he could still smoke. He probably couldn’t paint, though, rabbits or lubricious twenty-one-year-olds.

  He may have been chasing a rabbit, but that wasn’t how he cut his wrist. He cut his wrist breaking open a window in the back of the guesthouse. I didn’t figure that out until later.

  That evening the fragile January thaw crept out to sea. Behind it came thin, windblown snow, fine and lasting. I could hear the oil burner groaning in the cellar, using dollar after dollar of fuel oil. Soon snow would cover the dim, brown patch just outside the guesthouse where Marty’s life had bled away.

  Ranger was resigned to eating dinner with us, improvising with a knife and fork despite a painful wrist and painful shoulder. Afterwards he clapped headphones to his ears, retired to a guest room occupied two nights earlier by Renee, and slipped into a world beyond the intrusions of people like us. Sandy went back to whatever arcane literary project occupied him, and I paid bills. The doling out of tasks was not necessarily fair.

  In the middle of the evening, knocking at the side door interrupted our off-kilter domesticity. When I opened it, I saw Alyse standing there, a scarf pulled over her hair. She looked like the little match girl who had wandered into the New England cold.

  “Are you alone?” she asked.

  “Sandy’s here . . . What do you mean?”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Ranger.”

  “Ranger? I don’t . . . Can I talk to you?” She spoke very hesitantly.

  “Come on in.”

  She came in. “Hi,” she said finally and managed a faint smile. “I’m sorry . . . I mean, it’s late, isn’t it? I know it’s late. You must . . . I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “Bothering you. And Sandy.”

  She took off her damp scarf. “This is mysterious,” I said.

  “Is it?” she asked. “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that. How can we help you?”

  She looked around and didn’t want to answer. “I’ve never been here before . . . I need something,” she said in a small voice. “Marty . . .” I waited. “He had something of mine. A piece of paper.” She turned toward me and tried to smile. “I really have to have it. Bess said . . .”

  Bess? “What is it?” I asked. “Where is it?”

  “It’s about some things I owned. Jewelry. Other things. He kept them. He’s an awful man. He does anything he wants. He doesn’t care about anyone else! I hate him, hate him!” She stopped abruptly. “The paper just says . . . I don’t know . . . Bess told me on Wednesday about self-help . . .”

  Self-help? What did self-help include? A bullet in the head?

  This conversation was requiring a lot of effort on my part to fill in the blanks. “And you think it’s here?”

  “Maybe not in here. Out back.” I scarcely knew what to make of what she said. “I was going to . . . I mean, try to . . . But there are all those lights on now.” The police asked us to keep the outdoor lights on all night—to keep owls away, I thought. Owls and Alyse. “Will you come with me?”

  “You think it’s in the guesthouse?”

  She nodded again. “Maybe it’s not a paper,” she said. “Not printed—”

  “But the guesthouse is padlocked. By the police.”

  She seemed startled. “Still?” she asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

 
“Can we check?” She was adamant. We checked. It was. “In the back?” she asked. “Is there anything . . . ?” She disappeared around the side of the building. I didn’t know why I was standing in blowing snow watching her try to get into a building the police had sealed.

  She reappeared. “How come that little window is broken?” The only little window was high up in the little bathroom. All the others had storm windows on them. I don’t know what they’re made of, but they don’t break. “Can you help me get up to it?”

  “Self-help’s one thing. Breaking into a sealed building’s another. The police can help find what you’re looking for tomorrow.”

  “No. Just hold the ladder. I’ll climb up.”

  The ladder? What ladder? The ladder that had apparently moved itself to the back of the guesthouse?

  “Alyse,” I said, “Stop. I’m not going to get myself arrested for breaking into my own property like that guy down in Cambridge.”

  “He was black. You’re not black.”

  I’m a “gentleman,” I thought. No telling what gentlemen might do with their unbridled behavior. “Where are you parked?”

  She left, reluctantly. I guess she left. I didn’t see her again that evening and the lights stayed on around the guesthouse. She said she’d be back.

  “Was that Alyse Levin?” Sandy asked when I came inside. “What were you doing?”

  “Trying to break into the guesthouse. We weren’t the first.” I told Sandy about the ladder and the window.

  We went upstairs. Ranger reluctantly took off his headphones and reluctantly talked to us. “Yeah,” he said. “Guy was a douchebag. Total.” He started to put the headphones back on.

  “Wait a minute,” said Sandy.

  “He was a douchebag so you tried to break into the padlocked place he’d been staying? What sense does that make?” I asked.