7
THE CLEAVER
John Glass woke early out of a riot of vivid and disorderly dreams, all detailed recollection of which drained from his mind the moment he opened his eyes. He lay in the half dark feeling paralyzed by dread. What was the matter, what terrible thing was amiss? Then he remembered the murder of Dylan Riley, the black weight of which lay over him like a shroud. How was it he could have been so calm yesterday, so detached, when he heard of the young man’s killing and Captain Ambrose summoned him to Police Headquarters? He marveled, not for the first time, at how the self insulates and protects itself against life’s shocks. He closed his eyes again, tight, and burrowed down into the warmth of the bedclothes and his own familiar fetor. He knew that things would seem different when the sun came up and the ordinary business of the day began. For now, though, he could have done with someone else’s warmth beside him, another’s body to cling on to for solace. But Louise had long ago, and without fuss, banished him from the master bedroom into the box room at the end of the corridor beyond the library. The arrangement suited him; mostly he preferred to sleep alone, if sleep was all that was going to happen, and it was some time since anything else had happened in bed between him and Louise.
He tried to fall back to sleep but could not. His mind was racing. It felt as if he were not so much thinking as being thought. Memories, nameless forebodings, speculations and conjectures, all were jumbled together in the ashen afterglow of the dreams he had forgotten. He turned on his back and lay gazing up at the shadowed ceiling. As so often late at night or in the early-morning hours he asked himself if he had made a mistake in moving from Ireland to America-no, not if he had made a mistake, but how great were the proportions of the mistake he had made. Not that he and Louise had been so very much happier living in Ireland, in Louise’s father’s gloomy gray- stone mansion at Mount Ardagh, and not that they had seen so very much of each other, for that matter. They had both spent the greater part of their time traveling, he on assignments abroad and Louise promoting charities across five continents. He knew he should not but in his heart he despised his wife’s career, so-called, as an ambassador of good works.
Maybe they should have had children.
He shifted, groaning angrily. The pillow was too hot, and his pajama top was damp with sweat and held him fast like a straitjacket. He could hear Clara in the kitchen, getting her mistress’s day started-Louise was an early riser. It made him uneasy, having a live-in servant. His father had died young and his widowed mother had kept house for a rich Dublin lawyer so that her only son could have an education. Coarse, he thought again, coarse as cabbage. He sighed. It was time to get up.
Dylan Riley’s murder was not reported in the Times, or at any rate he could find no mention of it. Louise would not have the Post or the Daily News in the house, so he had to go out and buy them. He took them into his workroom-where he never did any work-and sat on the silk-covered chaise longue that Louise had bought for him as a house-warming gift when they had moved in here six months ago. The Post had a couple of paragraphs on the killing, but the News ran a bigger story, on page five: Computer Wiz’s Mystery Slaying. There was nothing in either report that was new. Captain Ambrose of the NYPD was quoted as saying that he and his team were following a number of definite leads. There was a photograph of Riley’s girlfriend, one Terri Taylor, leaving the premises on Vandam in the company of a policewoman. She wore jeans and had long black hair; she had turned her face away from the cameras.
He switched on the miniature television set that squatted on a corner of his desk. There was an item on Fox 5 News, just a plain reporting of the facts. New York 1 had sent a camera and a reporter, and there was footage of Terri Taylor briefly on the pavement outside the warehouse. She was a pale, waiflike creature with a little pointed face and haunted eyes. She did not seem entirely heartbroken; rather, her look was one of bafflement and dismay, as if she were wondering dazedly how she had come to be involved in this mess. The camera team had managed to corner Captain Ambrose. On screen he looked even more like a tormented saint, in his brown suit and his big black brogues. He talked here also of “definite leads,” and then walked away quickly from the camera at his Indian-scout lope. Common to all the reports of the murder was an underlying note of-not indifference, exactly, but of halfheartedness, and faint impatience, as if everybody felt that time was being wasted here, while matters of far greater import were calling out urgently for attention elsewhere. What this meant, Glass knew, was that no one expected the murder to be solved. Dylan Riley had been a loner, according to the Daily News, so there would be no one to press the police for action. Even Terri Taylor, it was obvious, was leaving the scene as fast as her skinny legs would take her.
Glass went into the kitchen to get himself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, but Clara was there and of course insisted on doing it for him. He stood leaning against the refrigerator pretending to read the sports pages of the Daily News. Louise had already breakfasted and left-she had a meeting at the United Nations with someone from UNESCO. Glass wondered idly if his wife ever met anyone who was not someone. Covertly he watched Clara as she bustled about the windowless room. He knew almost nothing about her life. Her people were from the Caribbean-Puerto Rico, was it, or the Dominican Republic? He could not remember. She had a boyfriend, according to Louise, but so far there had been no sightings of the ghostly lover. What did she do in the evenings, he wondered, in her room off the kitchen? Watched television, he supposed. Did she read, and if so, what? He could not imagine. It struck him that for a journalist he felt very little curiosity about people, how they thought, what they felt. Dylan Riley, for instance: what did he know of him, except that he resembled a lemur and did not wash often enough? Maybe that was why he had given up journalism, he thought, because fundamentally he had scant concern for human beings. It was events that interested him, things happening, not those involved.
Clara handed him his coffee. “Real strong, Mr. Glass, like you like it.” She smiled, flashing her shiny white teeth. The toast had the texture of scorched plaster of paris.
The day outside was fresh and blustery, and there was a lemony cast to the sunlight. He took a taxi to Forty- fourth Street to check his mail. As usual, there was none. He sat with his feet on his desk and his hands behind his head and studied the sky, or what he could spy of it, between the jumbled buildings. He believed he could see the wind, faint striations like scour marks etched on the clear blue. He wished he could feel something solid and real about Dylan Riley’s murder-anger, indignation, an itch of curiosity, even. Yet all he could think was that Riley was dead and what did it matter who had killed him?
Then he remembered something, and he shifted his feet from the desk and reached for the telephone, fishing Captain Ambrose’s card out of his wallet.
When he said his name the policeman betrayed no surprise. Was he looking out at the same sky, that streaked azure?
“Who else did Dylan Riley call?” Glass asked. “Before he called me, I mean.”
There was a breathy sound on the line that might have been a low laugh. “Called lots of people,” the policeman said. “You thinking of anyone in particular?”
“I mean, did you trace all the numbers on his phone? Did you identify them all?”
“Sure, we traced them. His girlfriend, his dental hygienist, his mother in Orange County down in Florida. And you.”
“No one else in my family? Not my father-in-law?”
“Mr. Mulholland? No. You think he might have called him about this research you wanted him to do?”
“I expressly told him not to.”
“You said Mr. Mulholland didn’t know you were bringing in someone to check out his history.”
Glass closed his eyelids briefly and pressed an index finger to his forehead. “I told you, I hadn’t decided finally whether to hire Riley or not.”
“Right. So you did, I remember.” There was a silence; it hummed in Glass’s ear. The policeman said: “You were the one he called-twice. That’s why I asked you to come in. You were the only one we couldn’t account for, the only one who wasn’t his girlfriend or his dentist or his mother.” Another pause. “You got something you want to tell me, Mr. Glass? About Mr. Mulholland, maybe?”
“No,” Glass said, and expelled a breath. “I was just curious.”
“And worried?”
“Worried?”
“That Riley might have let your father-in-law know you had hired-were thinking of hiring-a snoop.”
“No,” Glass said, making his voice go dull. “I wasn’t worried.” He could sense the captain thinking, turning
