Benjamin Black - The Lemur

He was wondering at what time Captain Ambrose started work. He needed to talk to the policeman; there were questions he needed to ask him. He had been wrong about Dylan Riley, all wrong. He had a sense of smoldering anger that at any moment might flare into flame.

Later, he was eating a silent breakfast with Louise in the big sunfilled kitchen when David Sinclair arrived from the city. His mother rose from the table and kissed him, and then held him for a moment at arm’s length, scanning his face and touching him lightly here and there with her fingertips, as if to check him for damage. She worried about the places David frequented, the Chelsea clubs and dives where he spent most his nights. “I know so little of what he does,” she would say. “He won’t tell me anything.” Glass had no comment to make; this was territory he did not venture into willingly.

“ Uh- oh,” David said now, lifting his head and pretending to sniff the air. “This at mosphere that I’m getting. Have you two been having a long day’s journey into night? I can almost hear the foghorns.” He was wearing a blazer with brass buttons and a crest on the pocket, and white duck trousers and an open-necked white shirt and a Liberty cravat. All he lacked was a yachting cap. The young man had as many personalities as he had outfits. And he had seen too many movies. Today he was Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, camp lisp and all. When his mother asked how he had managed to arrive so early he said he had driven up, setting out at six while the dawn was still an hour off. “They say the city never sleeps,” he said, “but it does, it does. There wasn’t a soul about, not even a bag lady.” He turned suddenly to Glass. “Anybody else get shot since I saw you last?”

Big Bill appeared then, unshaven, in a terrycloth robe and purple velvet slippers. He looked greatly unwell. The tanned skin of his cheeks still had a grayish tinge, and the stubble on his chin glittered like spilled grains of salt. After her father had gone to bed the night before, Louise had berated her husband yet again for bringing up the painful subject of Charles Varriker and his suicide. “Don’t you think he deserves a bit of peace,” she had said, “after all these years?” Peace, Glass thought, did not come into it; peace was not the point.

“Good morning, Granddad,” David Sinclair said, with exaggerated deference.

Big Bill gave him a sliding glance from under his eyebrows and muttered something and sat down at the table. Glass wondered how Louise had persuaded her father to let her hand over the directorship of the Mulholland Trust to a young man who was the old man’s opposite in every way imaginable. Would he understand it, he wondered, if he had a daughter who herself had a son? The subtleties of familial loves and loyalties baffled him; his own father had died too young.

Big Bill drank the coffee that Louise had poured for him and crumbled a piece of bread in his fingers but did not eat it. Glass noticed the tremor in his hand. He had aged overnight. “Need someone to drive me down to St. Andrew’s,” he said. St. Andrew’s in Sag Harbor was where he heard Mass on Sundays when he was at Silver Barn.

“You can do that, can’t you, darling?” Louise said to her son.

“But of course,” David said, with fake eagerness, and turned to his grandfather. “I’ll come to Mass, too. Simply can’t resist those gorgeous vestments.”

He winked at Glass. Big Bill said nothing.

In the end all four of them climbed into David Sinclair’s vintage open-top gold Mercedes, the old man in the passenger seat and Glass and Louise crowded together in the back. As they drew away from the house and set off down the hill Glass realized he had forgotten to call Captain Ambrose. Was he afraid of what the policeman might have to tell him? And would it be any more than he suspected, any more than he dreaded? Without wanting to, he knew now, he was sure of it, who had shot Dylan Riley. Or who had arranged for him to be shot.

At the church it was apparent that Big Bill expected them to accompany him inside, but Glass said he would take a walk down by the water, and insisted that Louise should come with him. The old man grunted and turned abruptly and set off across the street to the church. David looked at his mother and smiled inquiringly. “Go on,” she said, “go with him. He’ll be pleased.”

There were not many people at the harbor, the season proper not having begun yet. They walked out onto the Long Wharf. The water swayed and wallowed, sluggish as oil in the calm of morning. Across the bay the low hills on Shelter Island, where the last of winter seemed to linger still, were a surly olive green. The sharp air, reeking of iodine and salt, stung their nostrils.

“Tell me about Charles Varriker,” Glass said.

Louise was wearing knee-high black leather boots and a tweed cape over a heavy Aran sweater. She walked with her arms tightly folded against the chill of morning. She was pale, and her eyes had a faintly haunted look. He suspected she, too, had passed a sleepless night. He wondered what she was thinking now; he always wondered what she was thinking.

“Tell you what?” she said. “What can I tell you, that I haven’t already?”

“Why did he kill himself?”

“Why does anybody? No one ever knows.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“Of course not.” She stopped, and turned to him. “Why are you so interested in this?”

“Dylan Riley found out something, something I thought at first had to do with me but now I think had to do with Varriker. And before you ask, I don’t know what it was.”

They walked on.

“I wish,” Louise said, “that you’d start being a journalist again. You need something to occupy you.”

“That’s what the priests used to tell us-an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Good title for a book, don’t you think? The Devil ’ s Workshop. Maybe that’s what I’ll call Big Bill’s biography.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I thought it was.”

“You love to needle me, don’t you? It’s a kind of hobby for you.”

A little white sailing boat with sails furled and its outboard going came weaving through the throngs of millionaires’ yachts, cleaving a clean furrow in the water that, close in here, had a milky shine like the inner lining of an oyster shell. A whiskery fellow in a sailor’s cap and faded blue sailcloth trousers rolled to the knee stood in the prow with one bare foot planted on the topmost strake. It amused Glass that everyone here dressed the part, like hopeful extras waiting for the camera crew to arrive.

They came to a little restaurant adorned with knotted ropes and red-and-white lifebuoys and festoons of fishing net. They took an outside table from where they could watch the Old Man of the Sea tying up his boat to a post of rough-hewn timber. A buxom girl with a big toothy smile came and took their order. Louise sat low in her chair with her hands clasped under her cape and her booted legs thrust out before her, crossed at the ankles. “I don’t want to talk to you about Charlie Varriker,” she said.

“Then I’ll ask your father.” He waited, and she said nothing. “There’s something not right here, Lou. And it’s to do with Varriker, I’m sure of it. I don’t know how, but I’m sure.”

“Since when,” she flashed at him, “did you start to care again about things not being right?” She continued glaring for a moment, then turned aside with her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “Charlie was a good man,” she said. “He didn’t deserve to die. That wasn’t right.”

“Dylan Riley didn’t deserve to die, either.”

“Oh, yes?” she said, and gave him a sardonic look. “And you’re going to avenge his death, are you?”