deny the thought though he might, there was that million dollars…
“I read that thing you wrote,” the captain said, “that thing in one of the magazines, about the Menendez brothers.” Glass stared, and the captain rolled his scarecrow’s shoulders in a parody of prideful shyness. “Shucks, yeah, I read, don’t even move my lips.” He stirred his coffee again. “It was a good piece. Lyle and Erik. Sweet guys. You meet them?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Sweet guys.”
The captain chuckled, and pushed aside his cup and stood up. Together they went toward the door. Glass brought out his wallet but the policeman lifted a hand. “We don’t pay here,” he said with stony emphasis. “Graft. Don’t you know about New York cops?” Then he grinned. “Joke. I keep a tab open.”
In the street Glass paused to light a cigarette, and the captain stood with his hands in his pockets and watched him, shaking his head. “You should quit,” he said. “Believe me, it makes a difference. Even in the sack-you got more breath.”
They waited at the lights and then crossed.
“Mr. Mulholland know about you and Dylan Riley?” the policeman asked.
“There wasn’t much to know.”
They were at the door of the station. Glass was unsure if he was free to go; maybe the real questioning had not started yet. He had so far only met the good cop, surely the bad one would be along any minute. The captain stopped, and turned to him. “You know you were the last person Dylan Riley called? That makes you the last one to talk to him alive.”
“You mean, the second-last.”
Captain Ambrose grinned again. “Yeah. Right.”
6
ALL HANDS!
John Glass disliked the sprawling apartment where he and his wife lived, more or less. More or less, in that Louise lived there, while he merely joined her in the evenings, stayed overnight, and left in the mornings. That, at least, was how he thought of it. To an observer-and the wealthy and fashionable Mrs. Glass was always under scrutiny-the Glasses would have seemed a typical Upper East Side couple. Louise made sure that it should stay that way. She was careful to preserve appearances not least for fear of her father and what he would do if she allowed a scandal to develop. William Mulholland’s bitter disapproval of divorce was well known, and he had been heard to accuse his daughter, no more than half jokingly, of being a bigamist. Big Bill had not much liked Rubin Sinclair, Louise’s first husband, but, as she later told Glass one Champagnelit night when they were first together, he had liked it even less when she announced, no doubt with a quaver of terror in her voice, that the marriage had gone hopelessly awry and that she was filing for divorce. Her father had not argued with her, Louise said, in some wonderment, had not shouted or threatened. The mildness of his response had been more frightening to her than any show of rage. “You took a vow, Lou,” he had said gravely. “You took a vow, and now you’re breaking it.”
After the divorce came through Louise had fled with her ten-year-old son to Ireland, to her father’s big old Georgian house in Connemara, to tend her soul’s wounds and figure out how to rebuild her life. In Ireland she had met John Glass-for the first time, as she had thought, for she had forgotten that long-ago windblown afternoon at the nearby Huston place-and something about him, a detached, dreamy something, had seemed the perfect balm for her bruised spirit. John Glass was everything that Rubin Sinclair was not. Or so she had thought. For his part, John Glass was certain, despite all he knew of Fate and her caprices, that the fact of this exquisite creature’s having drifted a second time into his orbit was a circumstance to be seized upon without delay. He proposed on the date that, three months previously, her divorce came through. “Oh, God,” Louise said, a laughing wail, “what will my father say!”
Once again Big Bill’s response had been unexpectedly mild. He liked, it seemed, John Glass. He still had friends in the surveillance world and had got them to look into his past-“Don’t mind it, son, it’s an old habit”-and was satisfied with what was turned up. Glass had never been married, and therefore not divorced, he was admired in his profession, seemed honest, and was probably not a fortune hunter. “Just one thing,” Big Bill had said to his daughter and her prospective husband, with a smile that seemed only mildly pained, “wait to marry until you’re at least a year divorced, Lou, to save what shreds of respectability our poor old family has left.” And Louise had kissed him. Kissing was not a thing they often did, Big Bill and his daughter.
John Glass was remembering that kiss when he entered the lobby of the apartment building after his interview with Captain Ambrose. He could not recall what thoughts had gone through his head as he watched that unwonted moment of intimacy and accord between father and daughter, and this troubled him. But perhaps he had not been thinking anything. His memories of those days were all hazed over happily, as if he were looking back through a pane of glass that had been breathed on by someone who was laughing.
Lincoln, the doorman, tipped his cap and remarked on the weather. “Be getting warmer soon, Mr. Glass, and then we be wishing for the cool days again.” There was a touch of the poet to old Lincoln.
Glass went up in the little elevator. It was a venerable and somewhat rackety contraption, and he was never comfortable in it, feeling constricted and vaguely at peril. He refused to let himself make of this a metaphor for his life in general. He was a free man, no matter how narrow his circumstances might have become recently. Yes, free.
The elevator opened directly onto a private hallway leading into the apartment. The first time he had entered here he had been more impressed, cowed, even, than he would have cared to admit. Now he called out “All hands!” as he always did; he could not remember the origin of this manner of announcing his homecoming. From far inside the apartment he heard Louise’s muted answering call. He found her in the library, seated at her desk, an eighteenth-century escritoire, with a little pile of cards and envelopes, and her fountain pen. She was wearing the gray silk kimono that some Japanese bigwig had presented to her when she visited Kyoto as a UN Special Ambassador for Culture. She gave her husband a glancing, absentminded smile. “There you are,” she said, and went back to her cards.
He stood behind her. He caught her sharp perfume. What was the word? Civet. The same perfume smells differently on every woman. Or so he had been told. He felt curiously unfocused, adrift, somehow. He supposed it was the aftermath of his meeting with Captain Ambrose, and all the adrenaline he had used up. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Invitations for Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?”
“The party for Antonini.”
“Oh. The painter.”
“Yes,” she said, imitating his flat tone. “The painter.”
“I think he has a soft spot for you.”
She did not turn, or lift her head. “Do you?”
“Or a hard spot, more likely.”
“Don’t be coarse.”
“That’s me, coarse as cabbage.”
He admired the way she wrote, in firm, swift strokes, so confidently. He had not used a fountain pen since he was in primary school.
Why did she not ask about the call from Captain Ambrose? Could she have forgotten?
He moved away and sat down on the low white sofa, where he was surrounded on three sides by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. It struck him that he had not lifted a volume from those shelves since… since he could not remember when. They stood there, the books, sorted, ranked, a battalion of rebukes. He had not done that book of his own that he had always planned to do. The unwritten book: another cliche.
“By the way,” Louise said, and still did not turn, “did you speak to that policeman?”
