Benjamin Black - The Lemur

He sat upright, dashing cigarette ash in the direction of the Betty Boop plastic ashtray he had bought one winter day on a trip he and Alison had made to Coney Island. “I didn’t say it was about us. I thought it might be about us. He claimed to know something, to have found out something, that’s all.” He did his mime-artist’s shrug, lifting high his shoulders and pulling down the corners of his mouth in a show of helplessness. “He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

Alison sat without moving, seeming hardly to breathe, watching him steadily. She had gone into her idling mode, waiting for what was to come. Under her blank scrutiny he grew twitchy and irritated, as always. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know anymore about this business than you do. I spoke to Dylan Riley a couple of times, and met him once. The next thing I knew he was dead. Christ knows who killed him. He was a professional busybody, he had a lot of enemies.”

Angrily she pushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. “He had it coming to him, is that what you mean?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. What do you want me to say?”

“What do I want you to say? Sometimes I think you think you’re living in a play, spouting cliches someone else has written for you. I want you to say what you know. I want you to tell me the truth. ”

He climbed off the wide, low mattress-the bed was a bare wood frame resting on four squat pillars of bricks-and strode off to the bathroom. This was a cramped space, not much bigger than a closet, with an angled ceiling and an unshiftable dank smell. He locked the door behind him and sat down on the lavatory lid and held his face in his hands. He felt harried, and almost comically hampered, like a clown who has got something stuck to the sole of his big, floppy shoe and cannot shake it off.

He heard the sound of Alison’s impatient barefoot step approaching. “Come on,” she said through the door, “don’t hide in there.”

“I’m not hiding.” He stood up, and caught his reflection in the mirror on the wall above the sink. He had a desperate, querulous look, like that of an escaped convict who has heard the first faint baying of bloodhounds in the distance. He put his fingers under his eyes and pulled down the lower lids, making a lizard face. He stuck out his tongue; it had an unpleasant gray coating. For a second he seemed to see, superimposed on his own face, that of Captain Ambrose, dark skinned and saintly, smiling at him with mournful compassion. “What do you want me to tell you?” he called back over his shoulder.

Alison struck her knuckles angrily on the door. “Stop saying that.”

“But I don’t know what you expect me to say!”

He yanked open the door. She was leaning against the jamb, still naked, with her arms folded under her breasts. The hair at her lap was glossy and tightly curled. How lovely she is, he thought, with a stab of sorrow, how lovely.

She spoke in a low voice, evenly, showing him what an effort she was making to be forbearing and reasonable. “For a start,” she said, “tell me what that Cleaver fellow talked to you about.”

“He asked if I had spoken to the po-lice.”

“He’s black?”

“As the ace of spades.”

“Don’t let them hear you speak like that over here.”

“He put on an Uncle Remus act for me, all hominy grits and natural rhythm. It seemed to amuse him.”

She was not listening; she was frowning; she was, he could see, worried; he did not know what he could do about that. “And did you?” she asked.

“Did I what?”

“Speak to the police.”

“They spoke to me, or one of them did, anyway. A Captain Ambrose. Melancholy type. Wanted to know about the Menendez brothers.”

“The who? ”

“It doesn’t matter. He’d read a piece I wrote.”

He walked past her, back into the big studio room. It was growing chill as the twilight densened, and voluminous shadows, gray like watered ink, were gathering under the raked ceiling. He always felt that he should duck when he came in here, under all these slants and angles, and the big grimed window leaning over like that gave him the impression of constantly falling backward very, very slowly. Alison followed after him. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked. He wished she would put on her clothes. He had to think carefully here-what should he tell her and, more important, what not-and her nakedness was distracting. When he was growing up in Dublin the glimpse of a nipple would set a young boy’s gonads going like the tumblers in a fruit machine. “What did Cleaver say, in this blog of his?” he asked.

Alison went and stood at the table and clicked a key on the laptop. “What did Dylan Riley know,” she read, “that someone felt the need to put a bullet through his eye? Riley, a well-known private researcher, was found at his Vandam workshop on Tuesday, slumped lifeless over his MacBook Pro-”

“He wasn’t slumped over anything,” Glass said.

“-with half his brains splattered across the screen, which in the circumstances is surely symbolic of something. As usual, New York’s Finest are scratching their heads for a who and a why. Riley’s girlfriend Terri -with an i-Taylor told police that yadda yadda yadda. The Cleaver is reliably informed-i.e. the cops told us-that Riley’s last phone call was to internationally renowned bleeding-heart journo Mr. John Glass, who, as unhappy chance would have it, is at present working on a biography-nay, the biography-of his daddy-in-law, electronics mogul and former Company spook Mr. William ‘Big Bill’ Mulholland. The Cleaver asks: have we stumbled into a wilderness of mirrors here? ” She turned from the screen. Glass was standing by the bed, buttoning his shirt. She crossed to her side of the bed and took a printed silk wrap from the closet and put it on, all the while studying Glass out of a narrowed eye. “What did Cleaver say when you met him?”

He stooped to put on his trousers, lifting a shoulder defensively against her. “Nothing much. He was just fishing for information, looking for a story.”

“And did he know about”-she made a sardonic grimace-“us?”

“Probably. He called you because he thought your number was mine-he got it from Riley, whose filing system seems to have left a lot to be desired.”

“Then Riley did know about us.”

“Obviously.”

She made a brief laughing sound. “You think there’s anything obvious about any of this?”

He sighed. He felt weary. He wished he had never heard the name Dylan Riley, and silently cursed his contacts who had recommended him. He began to light another cigarette, but Alison said: “Would you mind not? The place reeks already.” She never smoked in the studio.

He fitted the cigarette back into the pack, deliberately, resentfully. “Let’s go out and eat,” he said.

“It’s early.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Don’t snap.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

This was how it was between them now, so often, the sudden lunge and whip of irritation, followed by a fuming silence. He took a long breath. “Where do you want to go?”

“Where do we ever go?” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “You find a table, I’ll get dressed and follow you.”

He turned. “Alison.”

She looked at him. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

She would not look at him. Something like embarrassment, like shame, almost, sat heavily in the space that separated them.

“This fellow getting killed,” she said, “do you think it had something to do with your father-in-law?”

“I don’t know.” He needed that cigarette. “I hope not.”

“Have you talked to… have you talked to Louise about it?”

“Not really. Louise doesn’t take much interest in things like that.”