William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“And Pushkin, we could maybe discuss Pushkin?”

“Sure, Morris. Pushkin.”

“I don’t even like the poetry so much, I must admit, but the sound of the name. Pushkin, Pushkin. I can’t resist it. Pushkin. Sign me up, boychick, I’m in.”

“He is less the skeptic than you, Victor,” said Beth. “At least he listens and takes it seriously.”

“I tried it, Beth, really I did, I sat on the floor and meditated and examined myself and my life like a detached observer, just as you suggested.”

“How did it make you feel?”

“Before or after I threw up?”

“You know, Victor,” said Morris. “A very wise man once said that nausea, it is the first sign of serious trouble in this life. Very serious. Such nausea, it should not be ignored.”

“What, now you’re quoting Sartre?”

“Sartre, Schmatre, I’m talking about my gastroenterologist, Hermie Weisenberg. Maybe what you need is a scope. I’ll set it up for you.”

“Forget the scope.” I gestured at the box. “You sure you can open it?”

“I can try.”

“I thought Sheldon was coming.” Sheldon Kapustin was Morris’s son and a trained locksmith. “I asked for Sheldon.”

“Sheldon, he was busy tonight. He’s of that age now that I want for nothing to get in the way of his social life. A man my age, he should have granddaughters, no? So don’t be disturbing my Sheldon. Besides, who do you think taught him such about locks anyway?”

“You, Morris?”

“No, don’t be silly. A master locksmith named McCardle, but this McCardle he taught me too. Victor, this girl, when is she coming, nu ?”

“Any minute now,” I said, and just as I said it my buzzer rang.

Caroline, when she entered the apartment, was nervous and closed. She came right in and sat on the couch, away from the table and the box. She crossed her legs and wrapped her arms around herself. As I introduced Morris and Beth to her, she smiled tightly and lit a cigarette.

After Caroline and I had discovered the bony corpse the night before we pondered what to do with it. We discussed it in tense whispers while we stood over the skeleton hand that pointed skyward from the grave and we both agreed to cover up the pit as best as we could, shoveling back the dirt, stamping it down, replacing as many plants as might survive, leaving the body right there in the ground. It was not like the corpse was going anywhere, and any hot clues as to the perpetrator were already as cold as death. We convinced each other it was to our advantage to not let on to what we had found as we probed further into the Reddman past. So we left it there under the dirt, the bones of that poor dead soul, left it all there except for the gold ring which clung to the bone until, with force and spit, I ripped it free. We took the ring to help us identify the body and once we examined the ring there wasn’t too much doubt about who was there beneath the dirt. The ring had been engraved, in a gloriously florid script, with the initials CCR.

“What’s the word?” I said.

“I checked an old photograph with a magnifying glass,” said Caroline. “It’s her ring, all right.”

“So there’s no doubt,” I said.

“No doubt at all,” she said. “The body we found is of my grandmother’s sister, Charity Chase Reddman.”

WITH CAROLINE SITTINGon my couch, smoking, her legs crossed, her arms crossed, sitting there like a shore house boarded up for a hurricane, I brought Morris up to speed on the mystery of the Reddmans. I told him about Elisha Poole, about the three fabulous Reddman sisters, about how Charity, the youngest, had apparently found herself pregnant and then disappeared, seeming to wrest the shackles of her oppressive family off her shoulders and be free, only to turn up eighty years later in a hole in the ground behind the Reddman mansion. Morris listened with rapt attention; it was the kind of puzzle he liked most, not of wood or of stone but of flesh and bone and blood.

I showed him the ring. “What’s this on the inside?” he asked. “My eyes such as they are, I can’t read printing so small as this.”

“ ‘You walk in beauty,’ ” I read from the inside of the band, “and then the initials C.S.”

“Any idea who this C.S. fellow is?” asked Beth.

“Could be anyone,” I tried to say, but Caroline, who had remained remarkably silent during my background report to Morris, interrupted me.

“They were my grandfather’s initials,” she said flatly. “Christian Shaw.”

“What about the inscription?” I asked. “Anyone recognize it?”

“ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night,’ ” recited Morris.

“ ‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ ”

I was taken aback a bit by such melodious words coming from Morris’s mouth, where only a jumbled brand of immigrant English normally escaped.

“Byron,” said Morris with a shrug. “You know Pushkin, he was very much influenced by this Byron, especially in his early work.”

“Pushkin again?” I said.

“Yes Pushkin. Victor, you have problem maybe with Pushkin?”

“No, Morris. None at all.”

“This girl,” asked Morris, “this Charity, how old was she again when first she disappeared?”

“Eighteen,” said Caroline.”

“Then that fits then. It is a poem, this, for a young girl. It ends talking of a heart whose love is innocent.”

No one said anything right off, as if there was a moment of silence for the dead girl whose heart was suffused with innocent love.

“Open the box,” said Caroline.

“I’m ready if you’re ready,” said Morris.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked her.

“I told you I want to find out everything I can about my family, all the bitter truths. I won’t stop at a corpse. Open it.”

From his seat Morris bent down and lifted onto the table a leather gym bag. He opened the bag, peered mysteriously inside, reached in, and took out a small leather packet from which he extracted two thin metal picks. I looked at Caroline on the couch, arms still crossed, her front teeth biting her lip. I smiled encouragingly at her but she ignored me, focusing entirely on Morris. Morris turned the box until the front was facing him and then began working on the padlock.

“Are you sure you can’t get hold of Sheldon?” I said, after Morris had tried for ten minutes to work the lock with the picks and failed.

“It’s a tricky, tricky lock. Very clever these old lock makers. I must to try something else.”

He put the picks back in their leather packet and the packet back into the gym bag, reached in, and pulled out a large leather envelope from which he took a jangling ring of skeleton keys. “One of these will work, I think,” he said. He began to try one after the other, one after the other after the other.

“Do you have a number for Sheldon?” I asked after all the keys had failed to fit the lock.

“Enough with the nudging already,” said Morris, anger creeping into his voice. “These locks, they are not such a problem for me, not at all. For this I don’t need Sheldon.”

“I’ve seen Sheldon work,” I said. “He is in and out in seconds.”

“On second-rate locks, yes,” said Morris as he put the skeleton keys back into the bag and rummaged around. “But this is no second-rate lock. I have one special tool in such situations that never fails, a very special tool.”

With a flourish he pulled from the bag a hacksaw.

“This lock it is very clever but the metal is not as strong as they can make now. Is this all right, miss, if I hurt the lock?”