Benjamin Black - The Lemur

The atmosphere in the room had tightened suddenly. From the library they heard the silvery chiming of the Louis Quinze clock that Mulholland had given them for a wedding present.

“I don’t remember telling him anything,” Glass said. “We spoke on the phone, he came to the office, I said what I was writing, what I needed-”

“What you needed?” Mulholland said. He looked suddenly all the more like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, motionless. “See, that’s what I don’t understand, John. Why you needed to bring in someone else. I gave you this commission because you’re family. I told you that at the time, I said, John, I want someone I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Surely you knew that meant you, and not some computer nerd along with you?” He turned to his daughter. “Am I making sense, Lou? Am I being unreasonable?” Louise said nothing, and Mulholland answered for her. “No, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable at all.”

For a while now Glass had felt the room forming an angle behind him, the corner into which he was being backed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It would have been no great thing, to hire a researcher. It’s normal. Historians do it all the time.”

Mulholland opened his little dark eyes as wide as they would go. “But you’re not a historian, John,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.

“I’m not a biographer, either.”

His father-in-law went on gazing at him almost mournfully for a moment, then set down his brandy glass and slapped his palms on his knees and stood up and walked to the fireplace again. “My problem now, you see, John, is how to handle this. We have here what we used to call a fail-int, that is, a failure of intelligence. I don’t know what you told Riley, and I don’t know what Riley told this Cleaver guy. When you have a fail-int, you’ve got to do some creative thinking. That’s something you could help me with. Because I have to decide how to deal with Mr. Wilson Cleaver and his innuendos.”

A voice spoke from the depths of the room: “What about special rendition?” They turned and peered, all three, and David Sinclair came strolling out of the shadows, tossing something small and shiny from one palm to the other. He was smiling. “Surely you could arrange a little thing like that, Granddad.”

I n the morning Glass was sitting after breakfast on the little wrought-iron balcony outside the drawing room, savoring in solitude a third cigarette and a fourth cup of coffee, when his stepson reappeared. Glass had to struggle not to show his annoyance. Usually he was the only one who used the balcony, sharing it with rust and spiderwebs and a few moldering remnants of last autumn’s leaves. Below him was a courtyard-a courtyard, in Manhattan!-and a little garden with ailanthus and silver birch and dogwood, and other green and brown things he did not know the names of. On certain days in all seasons a very old man in a leather apron was to be seen down there, scraping at the gravel with a rake, slow and careful as a Japanese monk. Today the sun was shining weakly, like an invalid venturing out after a long, bedridden winter, but spring had arrived at last, and now and then a silken shimmery something would come sprinting through the trees, silvering the new buds and shivering the windowpanes of the apartments opposite and then going suddenly still, like children stopping in the middle of a chasing game. The square of sky above the courtyard was a pale and grainy blue.

Glass thought of Dylan Riley with his eye shot through; there would be no more spring mornings for him.

“So this is where you hide yourself,” David Sinclair said.

Although he had his own duplex over by Columbus Circle the young man often spent the night at what he insisted on referring to as his mother’s apartment, no doubt imagining that he was thereby neatly excising Glass from the domestic circle. He stood in the open French windows now, smiling down on his stepfather with that particular mixture of mockery and self-satisfaction that never failed to set Glass’s teeth on edge and that was so hard to challenge or deflect. This morning he was dressed in cream slacks and a cream silk shirt and two-tone brown-and-cream shoes with perforated toecaps. A cricket sweater with a pale blue stripe along the neck was draped over his shoulders. He was on his way to a squash game. With his slicked-down hair and those protuberant, little black eyes he bore a strong resemblance to a cartoon Cole Porter.

“Good morning,” Glass said coldly.

Sinclair laughed, and stepped onto the balcony and edged around the little metal table and sat down on a wrought-iron chair. He crossed one knee on the other and laced his fingers together in his lap and happily contemplated his stepfather, who was still rumpled from sleep, and also a little hungover from the four or five whiskeys he had drunk sitting alone on the sofa last night after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

“You’ve certainly upset, Granddad,” the young man said lightly. “What were you thinking of?”

Below, a flock of lacquered, dark brown birds came swooping down from somewhere and settled vexatiously among the ailanthus boughs, windmilling their wings and making a raucous, clockwork chattering.

Glass lit another cigarette and put the pack and his lighter on the table before him. “Have you started your new job yet?” he asked, watching the busy birds.

David Sinclair reached out and took Glass’s lighter from the table and sat back and began to lob it from hand to hand, as he had done the night before with whatever it was he had been carrying then. “Not yet. Mother isn’t quite as ready to relinquish the reins as she likes to pretend. You know how she is.” He smiled, arching an eyebrow; his tone and look suggested he did not for a moment believe his stepfather knew how his mother “was” about the presidency of the Mulholland Trust, or about anything much else, for that matter.

“It’s a large thing she’s doing for you,” Glass said heavily. “I hope you realize that. I hope you acknowledge it, too, now and then.”

The young man’s smile broadened in delight; he loved to irritate his stepfather. He played on Glass’s sensibilities with virtuosic skill, tinkling all the right keys and pressing the pedals at just the right intervals.

“But tell me about this Riley business,” Sinclair said. “A murder, no less, and practically in the family! Do the police know who did it, or why?”

“I don’t know what the police know. They don’t tell me.”

Sinclair was regarding him with malicious glee. “Are you a suspect?”

“Why would I be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. While he was poking around in Billuns’s murky world this Riley might have found out something about you, that you would rather he hadn’t. Hmm?”

Glass gazed at him, and drew on his cigarette and turned away and blew a stream of smoke out over the metal balcony rail with a show of indifference. Once, when he and Louise were not long married, he had hit his stepson. He could not now remember the exact circumstances. He had said something to the boy, reproved him in some way, and David had sworn at him, and before he could stop himself he had struck the little bastard openhanded across the jaw. It had not been a serious blow, but David had never forgiven him for it-understandably, Glass had to admit. He would have liked to hit him again now, not in passion, not in anger, even, but judiciously, flicking out a fist and catching him a quick jab under the eye, or at the side of that fine-boned nose that was so like his mother’s, to knock it out of alignment.

“Do you know my father?” Sinclair asked. “ Mister Sinclair, the pride of Wall Street?” He seemed to find all titles irresistibly funny.