Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“But you were worried.”

“Wouldn’t you have been, if Dylan Riley had something on you?”

Cleaver chuckled. “Damn right,” he said. “Our deceased friend was a determined and unrelenting man. But not a blackmailer, I would say.”

They passed by the fountain again and cut away across the Park. The sky was clouded over now and although the rain had not started in earnest it soon would. They quickened their pace. “How you like the climate here, Mr. Glass?” Cleaver asked. “Remind you of the Emerald Isle?” They came to the Tavern on the Green and Cleaver said: “I hear you can get a modest drink of something here for as little as thirty or forty bucks. Want to risk it?”

They went upstairs and sat at a low table and a pretty blond waitress came and inquired with a singsong lilt what-all they would like today. Cleaver asked for a spritzer and Glass said he would have the same.

“You know what this place used to be?” Cleaver said, looking about the dark-timbered room. “A sheepfold. I’m not fooling. There was a flock of sheep here in the Park until the middle of the 1930s, and this was the woolly fellows’ fold, until old man Moses-that’s Robert Moses the master builder-ordered them out to Prospect Park. There was a shepherd and all. This city, man, this city.” Their drinks arrived and Cleaver lifted his. “Departed friends,” he said. They drank the dubious toast and Cleaver leaned back on his seat and contemplated Glass with a mirthful eye. “He was real disappointed in you, you know,” he said, with a playful, lopsided grin, “our pal Riley. Thought you were selling out, agreeing to write up your daddy-in-law’s adventures.”

“So he said. He knew nothing about me.”

“Oh, he did, my friend. He knew plenty about you. He made it his business.”

“Facts are just facts. You know that as well as I do.”

“True, brother, I won’t deny it. A fact is a fact is a fact, as the poet said, or something like it. Unless it’s a fact that somebody wants to keep us from learning about. You know what I mean?”

Glass could hear the faint susurrus of rain outside. He pictured an antique greensward and sheep at graze; it might have been a scene by Winslow Homer. Surely Cleaver had invented the shepherd of Central Park and his flock. He did not know quite how to take the man, with his gleaming grin and vestigial beard and black-and-white minstrel getup. He had the distinct, uneasy feeling that this seemingly rambling conversation in which he had become more and more deeply entangled was about everything except what Cleaver really wanted to say, what he wanted to find out, whatever it might be. He asked: “What did you write about Mr. Mulholland?”

“In Slash? Oh, nothing very terrible. His James Bond days of derring-do, the Mulholland millions and how he made them and what he does with them-that sort of thing.”

“And what did you write about the Mulholland Trust?”

Cleaver hesitated, tapping a fingernail against one of his big front teeth. “I know you have a particular interest there, Mr. Glass, what with Mrs. Glass being the head honcho-ess of the Trust and all. And now her son, Sir Youngblood Sinclair, is taking over the controls, so I hear.” He snickered. “My friend,” he said in his Dixieland croon, “you going to find it tough to write dis-passion-ately about all that. Ain’t that so?”

He gulped down the last of his drink; Glass had hardly touched his.

“Tell me,” Glass said, “tell me who you think killed Dylan Riley.”

Cleaver turned on him a stare of mock startlement, making his eyes pop. “Why, if I knew that I’d go straight to Cap’n Ambrose down there at Po-lice Headquarters and tell him, I sure would.”

“Do you think my father-in-law had a hand in it?”

“Why would I think that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you think that what Riley found out was something about him.”

“Maybe it was-you’re the one Riley spoke to, he give you no idea at all what kind of secret thing he had uncovered?”

Glass shook his head. “I told you, I thought at first it was something to do with me, but now I’m not so sure.”

“You got a secret worth killing for, Mr. Glass?” Cleaver grinned teasingly, showing a pointed pink tongue tip. “You don’t seem the violent type, to me.”

Glass pushed his drink aside and stood up. “I’ve got to go. It was interesting talking to you, Mr. Cleaver.”

He offered a handshake but Cleaver ignored it, and sat back on his seat with his legs crossed and jiggled one elegantly shod foot, smiling broadly with his head on one side. “You a cool customer, Glass,” he said. “Guy calls you up to stiff you, so you say, and a few hours later he gets a bullet through the eye. You mention to the po-lice about Dylan trying to blackmail you? ’Cause I bet old Cap’n Ambrose would be real interested in that. Don’t you think?”

“Good-bye, Cleaver,” Glass said.

They had been in bed together all afternoon, Glass and his girl, and now at evening he was sprawled pasha-like in his undershorts against a bank of pillows while at her worktable Alison sat, with her back turned toward him, naked, on a red-plush piano stool, before the glowing and intently silent screen of her laptop. Glass was smoking a cigarette. He was happy, or at least content. There was something so sweetly sad about sex in the afternoon. It was raining outside, and the pearly light falling down through the studio apartment’s big, slanted window was almost Irish. He only ever felt really homesick when it rained. He was thinking in a dreamy vacancy how much the sound that the computer keyboard made reminded him of his long-dead granny clacking her dentures, and how Alison’s shapely back recalled Man Ray’s photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse posing as a violin.

“Jesus,” she said suddenly, “have you seen this blog?”

“This what?”

“For God’s sake, don’t pretend you don’t know what a blog is.”

“Something on the Internet?” He liked to tease her.

She turned to look at him, the rain-light silvering her breasts. “How did you ever manage to be a journalist, with so little experience of the world?”

“The Internet is not the world, my dear.”

“Well, my dear,” she drawled, “everyone in the world uses it, except you.”

Her dark hair reached almost to her bare shoulders, making an oval frame for her sharp-chinned, long, pale face. Without her clothes she looked less like a madonna than one of Modigliani’s pink-and-platinum odalisques. She had put a towel under her bottom to keep what of him was still inside her from leaking onto the plush of the piano seat. He marveled how she had managed to shed so comprehensively the Irish squeamishness before the prospect of being. He had grown up expecting that a girl getting out of bed would immediately wrap a sheet around herself, tucking it deftly under her armpits, as girls in the movies always did.

“It’s this fellow Cleaver,” she said. “The fellow who phoned here for you.”

“What?” He was all attention suddenly. “ What is him?”

“His blog. Cleaver’s Cleaver, he calls it. All the news that’s fit to punt. He’s writing about that researcher you were going to hire-Dylan Riley? The one you were asking me about the other day.” She read on in silence, then said, “ Jesus, ” again. “Did you know he was murdered?”

“Who?”

“This Riley person. He was shot. Someone shot and killed him.” She turned to him again, almost angrily. “Did you know about this?”

He looked at the ceiling. “Umm.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? And don’t give me some smart answer.” She was glaring at him now. “You said he tried to blackmail you. About us.”