Double Delight Page 32

  Each of these parties deserved death. I did not in fact intend to kill them. Nonetheless, I am the perpetrator. I wish to surrender myself immediately to the proper authorities. I forgo all legal counsel. I plead GUILTY. I will cooperate fully with police. I will not hang myself in the midst of my trial. This, you self-righteous bastards, I promise. So help me God.

  Waking groggy and stubble-jawed, fallen across his bed. Was the telephone ringing? Was it his alarm clock? Terence sat up, wincing from the pain in his head, he’d drunk himself into a virtual coma the night before, but which morning was this?—Sunday, or a weekday?

  He saw, amid the rumpled bedsheets, the handwritten letter he’d composed the night before. I want to confess to several crimes. I am uncertain … Appalled, he snatched up the sheet of paper and crumpled it in his fist.

  Don’t grieve, son. Your secret is safe with us.

  At the Foundation, thank God no one knew (or did they?) of the breakup of Terence Greene’s marriage. In time, he would have to tell Mrs. Riddle, and Marcia. But they were on their vacations now, until Labor Day. The single secretary in the office, seated at Mrs. Riddle’s desk, was a relatively new employee. Smiling shyly, Good morning, Dr. Greene! but her eyes shrewdly watchful.

  The young woman was black, not Haitian like Jamahl the security guard downstairs, yes but black-skinned. By now, the two had very likely become acquainted, what had Jamahl told her of Terence Greene?

  Amid a stack of mail one morning in early September there was a perfumy mauve envelope, Terence’s name and the address of the Foundation neatly printed in oversized block letters in bright purple ink, and on front and back were exclamatory warnings: PERSONAL PLEASE! and CONFIDENTIAL PLEASE!

  Terence stared at this envelope, which was postmarked Trenton, N.J.

  With the unthinking reflexes of a man protecting himself from a venomous snake he flicked it across his desk with the tip of a letter opener, no force on earth could make him open it, yet somehow he’d retrieved it and opened it, his hands shaking so badly whatever it was she’d sent him—petals?—rose petals?—fell to the floor, he squatted picking them up, yes they were rose petals, fragrant dusky-pink petals edged with ivory, and the ivory shading into cream, so exquisitely beautiful his eyes filled with tears even as he whispered, “No. No. No.”

  There was nothing else in the envelope.

  Even now when Phyllis called him, Terence was likely to be vague, affable, polite, off in a world of his own. Thinking of not thinking of her of her who had betrayed him, no force on earth could make him see that woman again unless to demand from her a full explanation, an apology. And even then he would never he would never! forgive her.

  “Terry?” Phyllis’s voice was shrill, as if she were in the room with him. “Is something wrong? Didn’t you hear me? Is there—someone there with you?”

  Terence absentmindedly glanced about the room (a living room, furnished by strangers) before replying. “Here? Of course not.”

  And then, in the end, Terence Greene could not stay away.

  One warm, stagnantly humid afternoon, soon after Labor Day, he decided to drive to Trenton; without telephoning Ava-Rose Renfrew. He told himself, She will be there, and all will be again as it was.

  Would she have summoned him to her, as she had, otherwise?

  The perfumed envelope, with the bruised and wilted rose petals inside, he carried in his shirt pocket close against his heart.

  He thought perhaps it might have pleased Ava-Rose and the other Renfrews, that he’d paid the mortgage on their house even for those months when he hadn’t seen Ava-Rose. He had not cancelled his $500,000 life insurance policy.

  “For of course I love her. I’m not going to give her up.”

  Terence was reluctant to drive to 33 Holyoak immediately. He recalled his last visit there, when, so clearly, his old friend Holly Mae Loomis had tried to deceive him. He recalled that young cousin of Ava-Rose’s, the boy chasing the Pomeranian—there was something about him that had made Terence most uneasy.

  Instead, he drove to the Chimney Point Shopping Center, to see if Ava-Rose was there.

  But Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium was closed, with a look of having been closed for some time. “This can’t be!”—Terence shaded his eyes and peered into the interior of the store, into a vague dreamy dimness that looked coated with dust. The CLOSED sign hung at a tilt inside the window and a faint embalmed odor of incense pricked his nostrils.

  Terence tried the door, rattling it; but of course it was locked.

  Recalling how, that day, a very long time ago it seemed, he’d surreptitiously turned the sign in the door from OPEN to CLOSED. Had it never been turned back?

  “Excuse me, mister—you looking for somebody?”

  It was a heavyset oily-skinned man of middle age, whom Terence had noticed as he’d approached Tamar’s, lounging in the doorway of Howard’s Discount Shoes next door, chewing on a toothpick. The rudeness of his stare and his drawling question put Terence on the offensive, but he was determined to be polite. “Isn’t this store open any longer? Has something happened?”

  The man shifted his toothpick about, peering at Terence. He took note in particular of Terence’s shoes, which were of good quality, with rawhide laces, but badly worn. As his eyes traveled up to Terence’s face Terence saw that they had a curious yellow tincture, as if stained. “You got any special reason for asking, mister?” The accent was nasal, New Jersey, very like Tamar’s.

  Terence smiled in what he hoped was a disarming way. “I’m acquainted with the young women who work here, and I just wondered what—where they are. I—”

  “You’re not acquainted with them real well, or you’d know, eh?”

  Terence felt his face burn. But he continued to smile. He supposed the man with the toothpick was the proprietor of Howard’s Discount Shoes, and if anyone knew what had happened to Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium it would be “Howard.”

  Terence said, “I hope the store hasn’t gone out of business?”

  “Whosit wants to know?”

  Terence’s face flushed more deeply. “I’m just a—customer, I suppose. I bought several items here, from both Tamar and—the other young woman—some months ago—very striking, lovely things—and I—I’d hoped to buy more. That’s all.”

  Brooding, the shoe store proprietor shifted the toothpick about in his mouth. “Is it.”

  “‘Is it’—what?”

  “Is it all.”

  “Has something happened? Have they relocated their business?”

  (The disagreeable thought had just occurred to Terence that another man might have financed The Craft of Beauty elsewhere, at a more affluent shopping center. What a fool he’d been, nursing his hurt pride these many weeks!)

  The shoe store proprietor said, with a smirking sort of doggedness, “There’s two of ’em, mister, or was. They wasn’t sisters, hardly. Wasn’t in the business together.”

  “What do you mean—‘was’?”

  “You looking for Tamar, or—?”

  Terence said impatiently, “Yes, Tamar. I’m looking for Tamar.”

  “Why yes, mister, I’m sure you are,” the man said, winking, as if Terence’s lie was a sort of link between them, “—except you’re kinda outa luck then. That little gal from Asbury Park, ‘The Bulldog’ I usta call her, just in fun, she was a pretend-Indian, y’know, wearing them ‘sorries’ and some weird red seed in her nose, we got along okay even if she had a dirty mouth for a gal—she’s dead.”

  Terence stared blankly.

  “She’s dead, that’s why the store’s closed. Permanently.”

  “Dead—?”

  “Yeah! ‘Tamar’—what she called herself: That wasn’t never her name, for sure—was found dead in the back of the store, about two months ago. The other one, the hippie fortune-teller ‘Ava-Rose,’ found her next morning, after she’d been dead, like, fifteen hours. There was a wild scene around here, I’m telling you.” The shoe store proprietor watched Terence clos
ely, shifting the toothpick about in his mouth.

  Terence said, stammering, “But—how did she die? Was she—?”

  “Strangled.”

  “Strangled! My God.” Terence heard his voice, hollow-sounding, as if from a distance. He felt sick. And the thought of poor Ava-Rose, discovering her friend’s body, sickened him the more.

  “The cops said they wasn’t sure if it was robbery, or what. There was a little money left in the cash register but they didn’t know if maybe that’s all there was supposed to be, business being kinda slow in the summer.” The man’s white shirt strained across the compact bulk of his stomach; he sighed massively. “Yeah, it was one wild scene around here, everything cordoned off for hours. We got on local TV.”

  “Do the police have any idea who—?”

  “Whadja think, this is Trenton.”

  “But—they must have some idea. Some suspicions. I can’t believe—”

  “This Chimney Point, usta be there wasn’t much crime. Now the nigger crackheads are all over.”

  Terence winced, the man spoke with such loathing; his eyes fairly glared yellow. Terence asked, “Do police think it was a drug-related crime? From your description, it doesn’t sound as if it was. If any money at all was left behind—”

  There followed then a furious, spittle-flecked outburst. “Howard’s Shoes has been at this location eighteen years, and I been a resident of Chimney Point since 1957 and I’ll tell you, mister, I could afford it, I’d leave tomorrow. Chris-sake I would.” Harshly, doggedly, the man spoke for several minutes, cursing; the name “Chimney Point” was so repeatedly evoked, Terence could not resist inquiring, like one who had only now thought of it, “Excuse me—why ‘Chimney Point’? What does it mean?” The angry man broke off his diatribe to say, “Hell, it’s the old crematorium, farther out the point—it’s named for that. Big ugly old brick place, on a hill, built in 1900 and shut down maybe forty years, now.”

  Chimney Point—a crematorium!

  A mother with two fretting children who had been looking into the display window of Howard’s Discount Shoes now entered the store; and the proprietor, alert, hurriedly wiped his face with a tissue and followed after. Calling back over his shoulder, fatly smirking—“Well! Hope your luck improves, mister!”

  Terence stared after him.

  He saw, contemplating the façade of Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium, what should have been obvious from the first—the store was empty. It had that bleak, dead look. The dust-coated CLOSED sign in the door meant exactly what it said. It hung at a tilt as if carelessly, or even contemptuously, set that way. Terence was certain that he hadn’t been the one to have hung it like that—had he?

  Forbidden territory. Expelled from the jury.

  Except—who was to know?

  As Terence drove westward on Holyoak Street, through working-class neighborhoods, through a no-man’s-land of small factories, railroad yards, vacant lots, past the fire-damaged Methodist church and the grim-looking Chimney Point Youth Detention Home, he felt a rising sense of anticipation, and dread. He had not seen, nor even spoken with, Ava-Rose Renfrew since that humiliating episode at the Church of the Holy Apocalypse—how would she greet him, now? The rose petals in the perfumed envelope were a sign, but of what, exactly?

  He drove through the intersection of small shops. He saw, flinching, the derelict old cemetery and, atop a wooded hill, an old, gaunt building of soiled buff-colored brick, with tall blackened chimneys—the crematorium.

  He drove on.

  His mild anxiety reminded him of the first time he’d driven into this part of Trenton. So daringly, in the midst of the trial. In flagrant, and uncharacteristic, violation of the judge’s instructions to the jury. How worried Terence had been that he might be discovered, and expelled from the jury—“Publicly exposed.” And how needless that worry, in retrospect. For of course no one knew. Who was there, who is there, to know?

  Terence Greene had lately grown to see that we inhabit a world of ever-shifting façades, panels, mirrors, mirrors reflecting mirrors, in which a violent man might be shot dead fleeing a crime he had in fact committed and in which a woman might hang herself in despair of a fate she did not deserve; it was a world in which a man might disappear, indeed dissolve, into a river, and no one would know, or, perhaps, knowing, greatly care. Another man might plunge to his death in unspeakable terror and this plunge will subsequently be interpreted as the “inevitable trajectory of a poetic destiny” (for so the consensus now seemed to be among the late Quincy Ryder’s friends and admirers, that the poet had not only committed suicide but had prefigured the act in his poetry, from his first book onward); yet another victim might boast, I do what I wanta do, man, just like you—even as his skull is smashed (for hadn’t the flashlight shattered into pieces in Terence’s hand, in that hideous dream, later wrapped up in the carpet with the body and tossed, like trash, into a ravine).

  A world in which a young woman might be strangled by disembodied hands, a strangler’s hands, belonging to no one.

  Yet it was a world in which a lover might be led onward, as one submerged in water over his head will be led by the wayward movement of a straw connecting him with the air above, by a fragrance of rose petals.

  A world in which, in fact, a man might be happy. A man long in search of Justice, very happy.

  Never realizing until now I myself am Justice.

  How relieved Terence was to see that the Renfrews’ old barn of a house had changed so little!—despite the money he’d given the family for repairs over the past year.

  There were still Christmas lights, many of them broken, wound about the rotted posts. On the sagging veranda, the same sofa, chairs, cast-outs. Areas of fresh paint and new repair work jarred with older areas and were equally overgrown with wild rambler rose and raggedy vines. And Holly Mae Loomis’s jungle-garden was spilling over onto the sidewalk, a tangle of color. Terence breathed in its rich, ripe smells.

  Nothing more beautiful.

  He’d parked in the rutted driveway behind the yellow Corvette (which was looking a bit worse for wear—the rear bumper was sharply dented and the tailpipe dangled loose); as he got out of his car, he saw, on the steep-pitched roof of the house, a partly-naked figure clambering about—the young man, Randy Lee Turcoe?—his slender torso bare, and deeply tanned, and his glistening black hair in swaths to his shoulders. He gaped down at Terence as Terence gaped up at him. Then, seeing who it was, he yelled in boyish welcome, “Hey! Hiya! It’s you, eh, Doc?”

  Terence waved a bit diffidently in return. “Hello, Randy Lee.”

  Randy Lee squatted against the slant of the roof, as something white and furry rushed past him; he lunged, and grabbed it, and held it up struggling for Terence to see—a large fluffy dazzling-white angora cat with a remarkable plume of a tail. He called down, “Damn li’l bitch is always climbing up here, but I got her! Pretty, ain’t she, Doc?”

  Terence craned his head back, shading his eyes. Yes, the angora cat was pretty.

  And Randy Lee Turcoe, whom Terence had forgotten entirely, was the most beautiful young man Terence had ever seen in the flesh.

  The screen door banged open, and there stood Holly Mae Loomis in baggy overalls, a T-shirt, and a kerchief around her head. “Lord, if it isn’t Dr. Greene! This is a real nice surprise—just in time for our picnic!” Holly Mae was grinning with unfeigned pleasure. She looked no different than ever except her left arm was in a sling. With a boisterous enthusiasm that could not fail to flatter Terence, she called over her shoulder, “Ava-Rose honey, c’mere! Quick! Somebody to see you!”

  Terence bounded up the rickety steps of the veranda, and shook Holly Mae’s hand. How good it was to see her!—how good, despite her injury, she looked!—her brass-colored hair freshly dyed, her cheeks suffused with color. Terence asked what on earth had happened to her arm, and she sighed, and rolled her eyes, and said it had been an accident, sort of—“An escalator going up at Quaker Bridge Mall kinda jumped and jerked, I
swear, and pitched me right down. Damn ol’ nasty machinery folks my age can’t trust.”

  Terence said, “Why, Holly Mae, that’s terrible. Are you in pain?”

  “Well—not every minute. But my heart’s gotten all fluttery, the least little things sets it off.”

  “Were there any witnesses?”

  “Hell, yes. But I didn’t get any names.”

  There came up behind Holly Mae, with a quizzical smile, hefty blond Chick—who called excitedly into the interior of the house, “Hey Ava-Rose! It’s him!” Chick then burst out onto the veranda, and put out his hand to shake Terence’s, with a masculine directness that was impressive. “Real nice to see you again, Doctor!—it’s been a long time, we thought something’d happened to you.”

  “Chick, it’s real nice to see you.”

  Terence noted that the boy had grown. His voice was a deep baritone and his jaws were blond-stubbly. His hair was cut so short in a shaved-looking crewcut that his head appeared disproportionately small on his shoulders. “Yeah, man, we was worried, kinda—that something’d happened to you.”

  Terence said happily, “In fact, I’m fine.”

  Holly Mae said, “And you do look fine.”

  “A good deal has changed in my life, since I’ve spoken with you last. I’m certainly sorry if I upset Ava-Rose, or any of you. I—”

  But then, rushing out of breath, her hand to her throat and her magnificent brown-glinting hair spilling down her back, was Ava-Rose.

  “How could you stay away so long, Ter-ence!—you near-about broke my heart.”

  “I—didn’t know. I’d thought—”

  “So finally Auntie says to me, one night I’m moping and feeling real sorry for myself, ‘You got a fatal case of pride, that’s your trouble, girl,’ and my eyes opened and I saw it was so. In the Book of the Millennium it is written, ‘Pride is ashes in the mouth,’ yet I had not grasped the taste in my very mouth! So first thing next day, I picked a rose from Auntie’s garden, and sent you—what I did. Oh, Ter-ence, I had near-forgotten how good it is, to be humbled, and purified, and brought low. Emptied of all pride that love may flow in.”