“To Ry,” she says.
“To Ry.”
We clink glasses.
“He was also afraid people would steal his stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“I don’t know. Whatever junk he had in his apartment.”
“Did he ever tell you about his junk?”
“Huh?”
“As in, what he had in his apartment.”
“No.”
“Did you read about the recovered stolen Vermeer?”
Her eyes are emeralds with yellow specks. She looks at me over the amber liquor in her glass. “Are you saying…?”
“In his bedroom.”
“Holy shit.” She shakes her head. “That explains a lot.”
“Like?”
“Like how he got the money for the apartment. There were other paintings stolen, right?”
“Yes.”
“From someplace in Philadelphia?”
“Right nearby.”
“Ry visited Philly a lot. When he’d run away. Had friends there, I guess, a girlfriend maybe. So yeah, Ry could have done it, sure. Maybe he fenced a painting or two, and that’s how he got all that money.”
It made sense.
“Did you notice any changes in him recently?” I ask.
“Not really, no.” Then thinking more about it, she says, “But, well, come to think of it, yeah, but I don’t think it has anything to do with this.”
“Try me.”
“His bank got robbed. Or at least that’s what Ry told me. He was freaking out about it. I told him not to worry. Banks have to make you whole if they got robbed, I said. That’s true, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“But he wouldn’t calm down.”
I consider this. “Was he imagining it or—?”
“No, no, it was in the Post. Bank of Manhattan on Seventy-Fourth. He even told me—last time I saw him, come to think of it—that the bank had left a message.”
“On his phone?”
“Don’t know, come to think of it.”
“Did he own a phone?”
“Just a burner I bought for him at Duane Reade. It lets you keep the same number for years. I don’t know the details.”
No phone, I knew, had been found at the murder scene. Interesting.
“He never kept it on,” she continues. “He was afraid someone could track him. He’d, like, check for messages once or twice a week.”
“And the bank left him a message?”
“I guess. Or at the front desk. Whatever. They wanted him to come down to the branch or something.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know.”
I consider this. “Ry Strauss left the Beresford during the day on Friday. Less than an hour later, he came back with someone.”
“Back to his apartment? With a guest?”
“A small bald man. They came through the basement.”
“It had to be with the killer.” She shakes her head. “Poor Ry. I’m going to miss him.”
Kathleen throws back the rest of the drink and moves closer to me. Very close. I don’t back up. Her hand rests on my chest. Her blouse is too tight. She looks up at me with the emerald eyes. Then her hand slides slowly down my body, and she cups my balls.
“I don’t think I want to be alone tonight,” she whispers, giving me just a perfect little squeeze.
And so she stays.
CHAPTER 14
I sleep, though “sleep” may be the wrong word choice on this particular night, in an antique, baroque, four-poster canopy bed made of carved mahogany with an embroidered lace topper. The bed is a bit much, I confess, dominating the room in every way, the four posts nearly scraping the ceiling, but it still sets the mood.
At sunrise, Kathleen kisses my cheek and whispers, “Find the bastard who killed him.”
I have no desire to avenge Ry Strauss, especially since it appears likely that he did one or more of the following (in time sequence): Stole my family’s art, murdered my uncle, abducted and assaulted my cousin.
Which begs the question: What exactly am I after here?
I rise and shower. The copter awaits. When it touches down in Lockwood, my father is waiting for me. He is decked out in a blue blazer, khaki trousers, tasseled loafers, and a red ascot. He wears this outfit nearly every day with very few variations. His thinning hair is slicked back against the skull. He stands with his hands behind his back, shoulders pulled up. I see me in thirty years’ time, and I don’t really like that.
We greet with a firm handshake and awkward embrace. My father has piercing blue eyes that seem somehow all-knowing, even now, even when the mind has grown cloudy and erratic.
“It’s good to see you, son.”
“And you,” I say.
We share a name—Windsor Horne Lockwood. He’s the second, I’m the third. He is called Windsor. I, like my beloved grandfather, am Win. I have no son, just a biological daughter, so unless I, to quote my father, “up my game,” the Windsor Horne Lockwood name will end at three. I don’t really see this as any great tragedy.
We start back toward the main estate.
“I understand the Vermeer has been found,” my father says.
“Yes.”
“Will any of this reflect poorly on the family?”
This may seem like an odd opening question, but I’m not surprised by it. “I can’t see how.”
“Marvelous. Have you seen the Vermeer for yourself?”
“I have.”
“And it’s undamaged?” Off my nod, he continues: “This is grand news. Simply grand. No sign of the Picasso?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad.”
The barn is up ahead on the left. My father doesn’t so much as glance at it. You may be wondering why I keep making a big deal of the barn, so I will tell you plainly: I shouldn’t. I was wrong. I blamed my mother, and that was a mistake on my own part. I see that now. To be fair, I was only eight years old.
How to explain this and not seem crass…?
When I was eight years old, not long after Granddad’s funeral, my father and I strolled unsuspectingly into that barn. It was a setup. I know that now. I didn’t then. But I didn’t know a lot of things then.
Cutting to the chase: We walked in on my mother naked on all fours, with another man mounting her from behind.
Just like the horses.
I can see you nodding knowingly. This incident illuminates so much, you think with a tsk. It explains why I can’t get close to a woman, why I only see them in terms of sex, why I am afraid of being hurt. Oddly enough, what I see mostly when I remember that day is not my mother on her hands and knees, her lover’s hand pulling her hair, her eyes rolling back. No, what I remember most clearly is my father’s ashen face, his mouth slightly agape almost as it is now from the stroke, his eyes shattered, staring out at nothing.
As I said, I was eight years old. I never forgave my mother.
That angers me.
I know that my behavior was understandable, but many years later, when I watched my mother die in her sickbed, I realized what a stupid waste it had all been. The cliché applies here—life is indeed short. I think about what she lost and what I lost, how simple forgiveness could have enhanced her short life and mine. Why couldn’t I see that then? I have lived a life of few regrets. This—how I treated my own mother—is my greatest. I never considered the fact that perhaps my mother had her reasons or perhaps she didn’t know better or perhaps she made, as we all do, a terrible, tragic mistake. My mother was so young, only nineteen when she got pregnant and married my father. Perhaps she had wants that she couldn’t express. Perhaps, like her oldest son, monogamy was not for her. Perhaps my father, who ended up getting married twice more, and the trappings of Lockwood Manor were stifling, suffocating, making it impossible for her to breathe. Perhaps my mother didn’t want to break up a family or hurt her children and perhaps she genuinely loved this other man and in the end, who knows the truth, not me, because I never asked, never gave her the chance to explain, refused to listen until it was too late. I was only a child, but I was stubborn.