The Horse You Came in On Read online

  “No kidding? You know anything about it?”

  “Do I know anything about it? Ha!” Then, “What are you drinking?” he asked.

  “Whatever you aren’t. You sound pretty smashed.”

  “Amstel Light.” He held up the bottle.

  “Bass,” said Ellen. “Or we could get a pitcher. Or do you want bottled?” she asked Jury and Wiggins.

  Wiggins, naturally, wanted a cup of tea, which he couldn’t get, and so was left standing there trying to settle on something else after the others had taken their pitcher and found a table.

  Ellen waved to the fellow at the end of the bar whom Melrose had noticed. Now he also noticed the chap was rather handsome, decidedly so when he smiled.

  “That’s Pat. Patrick Muldare. He was a friend of Beverly Brown. Some say a very, you know, good friend.”

  Jury studied Patrick Muldare for a few moments, then said, “This woman was a student of yours?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “The night of January nineteenth is Poe’s birthday.”

  They all looked at her. Jury asked, “Poe’s birthday? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “A lot. Poe was buried in the churchyard of Westminster Church. Every year, the night of his birthday, someone—no one knows who, except it’s a man—brings cognac and flowers, roses, to his grave. It’s a tradition that’s been going on for years. Some years, a few people have gathered there in hopes of discovering who the person is. No one ever has. Anyway, Beverly is—was—a real Poe fancier. She loved his writing, and he was to be the subject of her doctoral thesis. Just for fun, she’d go to this little birthday party. She did; she was murdered. Strangled. It must have happened, the cops say, just after the crowd—well, not a crowd, really—had dispersed, because no one saw anything.”

  “But why wouldn’t the Brown woman have left with the others?”

  Ellen shrugged. “I have no idea. Unless she thought the man who came wasn’t the real one. See, it was the habit of the curator of the Poe museum, or one of his people, to come in advance of the flower giver, pretend he was him in order to get rid of the little crowd that would collect there. Now, she might have thought the person who’d appeared was a fake, that it was a ruse. She was right. So she hung around. And she got killed.”

  Sergeant Wiggins was making his way back to the table with a glass of fizz. He sat down. Ellen went on:

  “Beverly took a couple of courses from me. Three, to be exact.” Ellen frowned. “I guess she liked me—I don’t know. She was awfully critical of her instructors. One thing I can definitely say about her is that she was very smart. She was clever and she had a lot of imagination. And she was a superior researcher—she had an eye and a mind for detail. She was assistant to Owen Lamb, and he’s pretty demanding.

  “Beverly asked me if she could use these newspaper reports as the subject of a paper I’d assigned.” Ellen dug around in her bag and brought out some clippings. “I said yes, of course. It sounded interesting. I really think she was going to try and—well, not solve, but do some sort of ‘Marie Roget’ thing—you know that story by Poe called ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’?” They nodded, all except for Wiggins, who frowned and continued stirring his fizz with his finger. “So I saw a lot of her notes, because she’d check in with me every once in a while to see what I thought.” Ellen pulled some more papers from her MPTV bag. “Beverly had just been in to see me the day she was killed. And she left all of this stuff with me.” Ellen lined up two of the clippings. “I don’t know exactly what she saw in the newspaper accounts, but she must have thought there was some sort of connection between these two murders.”

  “Which two murders?”

  Ellen pointed to an item, or a paragraph no more than an item, from the Baltimore Sun. “An old guy, a street person called John-Joy. He was found in Cider Alley; that’s a narrow little street off Lexington, near the Market. He was found by another street person, another old guy he used to hang around with. The man who found him was named Milos. No one seems to know his last name, either. Milos hangs out all the time—you know, panhandling—in front of a store run by Patrick Muldare’s brother. Or half-brother, stepbrother—I don’t know which. Milos is blind and deaf. But he’s not dumb. He can speak perfectly plainly. Or yell perfectly plainly, I should say. Like a lot of deaf people, he raises his voice.

  “The other murder that Beverly seemed to think is related—I can only guess about this because of these notes she left—is going to surprise you.” She was speaking now directly to Jury as she shoved the other clipping towards him.

  Jury looked from it to her. “Philip Calvert? The same Calvert?”

  “Well, I guess there wouldn’t be two, would there? In Philly?”

  This one was a longer piece than the other and was clipped from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Jury scanned it, passed it to Wiggins.

  Ellen went on. “And there was this piece of paper stuck in with the notes and things—just doodling, really, but there’re these three sets of initials on it. See? Her finger drew a line through the set of initials: P.C.: J.-J.: P.M. “And ‘Barnes Found.’ written here.” She pointed to the slanted handwriting. “That must be the Barnes Foundation, outside of Philadelphia. But the P.C., P.M., and J.-J.—see?”

  Jury, with Wiggins looking over his shoulder, gazed down at the notebook page.

  “I suppose I wouldn’t have thought much about it if that ‘J.-J.’ weren’t hyphenated. I don’t see what it can refer to but John-Joy. And the Barnes Foundation connects up with Philip Calvert.”

  “But who,” asked Melrose, “is P.M.?”

  “Ellen thinks it’s supposed to be me.”

  The voice at Plant’s and Jury’s backs belonged to the handsome, youngish-looking man Ellen had waved to at the end of the bar.

  “Hullo, Ellen.”

  “Patrick Muldare,” said Ellen, and made the introductions. “He teaches with me at Hopkins.”

  Muldare laughed. “I’d hardly say that.”

  His age was difficult to guess, for Patrick Muldare had one of those perennially boyish faces, all the more so because of the flyaway, unruly hair that he had to keep scraping back. He dropped a hand on Ellen’s shoulder and smiled around the table. Equally automatic was Ellen’s hand dropped on his, patting it a little. Both gestures, Jury thought, were all but unconscious; nothing seemed to pass between them. But Plant, Jury saw, was watching this exchange narrowly.

  Ellen invited Muldare to join them. With a nicety of feeling that Jury found unusual, Muldare refused; he seemed to realize that they were newly arrived and probably didn’t need a stranger at their reunion. And he might have picked up on Plant’s reaction. He stood there, drinking from his pint of beer.

  “We were talking about Beverly,” said Ellen.

  “Do you think they’re my initials? God only knows why they would be.” He shook his head, returned the scrap of paper to the clippings.

  Jury smiled at him. “The question is, do you think this set of initials is yours?”

  Muldare shrugged his shoulders. “No. Sure as hell hope not.” He looked around the table. “Seeing what happened to the other two sets.” Despite the comment, he flashed them a smile of supreme unconcern.

  Ellen looked up at him, started to say something, paused and said, “I don’t know why she gave me all of this . . .”

  “Trusted you, I guess. One would.” Muldare smiled again around the table and went back to the bar.

  “He’s a teacher?” asked Jury.

  Ellen laughed. “Only one course, just for fun. He’s one of the richest men in Baltimore. Rolling in it. Old money. Very old money. And the old money’s begotten a lot of new money. Construction, mainly. He’s supposed to be really brilliant at business, but then he comes from a long line of brilliance at making money—real estate, the usual stuff. And he’s not much more than thirty. Thirty-two, I think. But he lives in Fells Point, over on Shakespeare Street. He’s very unassuming, rea
lly. You’d never know he had money, except for the football thing.”

  “ ‘Football thing?’ ” asked Melrose, feeling perhaps now they were into his territory.

  Ellen didn’t seem to agree and ignored him.

  Jury was silent for a moment, thinking and studying his sergeant’s glass of bubbling liquid. He frowned both at his thoughts and at the glass. “And you think Beverly Brown was murdered because of this information she’d gathered, or something she knew?”

  “Not necessarily.” Like a magician with a bag of tricks, Ellen drew from her bag this time some typed pages and one page between plastic covers. “She could have been murdered for this.”

  11

  Jury fingered the page that looked, beneath its protective plastic cover, parchment-brown, stained with ink and blurred with age. His and Ellen’s eyes met over the top of the page. Jury looked down, looked up at her, said nothing, and read:

  As he was stumbling over the manuscript, made difficult by the ravagements of age, Ellen pushed some more pages in front of him, these of ordinary typescript. “She typed it over. Beverly, I mean.”

  Melrose and Wiggins looked down at the page Jury put aside, and Jury started again to read:

  Madam

  I cannot tell you with certainty when I first made the acquaintance of the gentleman you refer to as “William Quartermain,” for I knew him only as M. Hilaire P——, and met him only once, in a large, decaying and gloomy house near the Seine. The circumstances of our meeting and our acquaintanceship were most extraordinary.

  M. P—— first appeared before me—an appearance so odd and unearthly, it was as if a wraith or spirit had suddenly formed itself from the drifting ground mist and shaped itself into a living man. This meeting took place on an evening in November, an evening of near-impenetrable fog and rain, in the Tuileries. The gentleman appeared to be in some distress; I could not tell whether this was owing to some physical malady or to the malaise that so often overtakes us when the weather is dreary almost beyond bearing, as this evening rain certainly was.

  “He’s mad,” said Melrose.

  “What?” said Ellen. “Don’t interrupt.”

  “Well, just listen to the way he’s talking.”

  Ellen nudged Jury. “Go on.”

  . . . as this evening rain certainly was. In any event, he stumbled and only managed to prevent himself falling by sinking down onto a bench.

  I was about to pass by, but in the lineaments of his face and posture were that which prevented me. I asked him if I could be of assistance—Was he unwell?—and attempting, however I could, to put myself at his disposal.

  He raised eyes to me that burned in their intensity; he smiled; he made light of the faint into which he had nearly fallen. He rose, but I was loath to leave him in this condition. Finally, after we had talked for a few moments, and as the rain dissipated and the fog dispersed, he suggested that perhaps I would care to accompany him to his rooms in the Rue——and join him in a glass of wine.

  I was happy to do so; I had found, even in the few moments I had been in his company, a strong inclination to keep by his side, so magnetic was his presence.

  But I was ill-prepared for the richness, I might almost say the voluptuousness of M. P——’s surroundings. The delicate lace of the curtains, the lavishness of the wall hangings, the volutes of the draperies, the burnished wood of the heavy chairs whose feet and arms were carved in shapes resembling the wretched faces of the agonized religious, the walls so crowded with paintings framed in gold and umber that the blood red walls themselves were scarcely visible between. And through all of the room wafted mingled scents from a strange glass globe containing an oil constituted of rare herbs.

  We sat in these extraordinary surroundings as the wind coming off the river lifted the curtains and drew the pungent fragrance of the oil across the room, he, perfectly silent with the head slightly downturned, in one of the phantasmagorical chairs.

  “The oils soothe me,” he said, “for I feel at every moment that I am being torn apart.”

  His voice reached a new depth of melancholy and I murmured some fatuous words of hope and comfort of the sort that often serve only to deepen the feelings of oppression in the sufferer, showing as they do that the respondent understands nothing of his pain.

  I remember a shudder passing through my body at the sight of such an excess of woe on the countenance of one who, judging from the luxury of his chamber, was in want of nothing. As he closed his eyes and breathed in the fragrance of the oil, I observed the tall window at his back. Through this window, which opened onto a small iron balcony, I could observe, across the courtyard, another window belonging to the opposite house, another window of almost precisely the same proportions as this one; and through that window, on the opposite side of what appeared to be a very large room, yet another window. So it was that my view through the window at M. P——’s back seemed framed in an ever-diminishing perspective impossible to achieve merely by looking upon some distant low horizon where the only measure is the earth below and the sky above.

  And I have come to believe, in the days and weeks succeeding my visit to M. P——’s apartments, in this PERSPECTIVE, the diminishing view as given by and through that strange series of windows, a view as in a world’s collapsing, that it is Perspective that constitutes what we know of reality and not what generally presents itself in our diurnal round of walks and drives—trees, strangers, gardens, houses—these but the shadowy fancies of the mind—

  For it is that portal, facing on that portal, and again on that and all of its contiguously floating images that stretch endlessly—this alone allows us what we know of reality, this dissolving view of the world.

  Jury stopped, looked beneath the page in his hand as if another might appear underneath, like one of those windows.

  “That’s all, sir?” asked Wiggins, his glass of now-flat foam half-raised and held in midair.

  In the brief silence that hung over the table there came the sounds of tribal chanting from the bar, and Jury had to shake himself free of his sense of dislocation, the fleeting notion that he had wandered into an outpost of the earth. He looked towards the television screen; the fans were cheering on one or other of the teams.

  “It’s rather fascinating,” said Melrose, lighting up a little cigar. “There are four stories going on simultaneously—or very nearly. There’s the narrator and his relationship with Monsieur P. There’s the tale that Monsieur P. is telling. There are the letters pointing to a relationship between Monsieur P. and the woman. Then there’s the narrator’s relationship to the woman.”

  “Is there more?” asked Wiggins of Ellen. He obviously enjoyed being read to.

  “Yes. But I keep it locked up in my filing cabinet. In my office. It makes me uncomfortable carrying the original around. I mean, what if it were . . . ?”

  “Written by Poe himself?” Jury asked. “Has somebody read this who’s capable of judging its authenticity?”

  “Well, there’s Professor Irwin; he’s a Poe authority. There’s Vlasic, who thinks he is. But then he thinks he’s all things to all students. And then there’s the one I mentioned, Owen Lamb, the professor Beverly was assistant to. He’s a genealogist, an historian, a specialist in old documents, that sort of thing.”

  “And?” Jury urged her. “What did they say?”

  “They disagree, somewhat. For the most part they think it’s a fake. Vlasic, naturally, won’t commit himself. He doesn’t want to be wrong. Lamb doesn’t think it’s genuine, but he admits his reasoning is based on things other than textual evidence, since he doesn’t seem to think the actual content of a questionable manuscript is decisive. And Poe didn’t secrete manuscripts.”

  “But if it is one of Poe’s stories—in the last hundred years or so, any number of things could have happened to account for its turning up. How did she find it? Where did she say she found it?”

  “Beverly said she was going through an old trunk at an antique shop near here. T
hat’s where.”

  “A trunk, for God’s sake.” Melrose laughed.

  “A shop in Aliceanna Street. Back there.” Ellen nodded in a direction behind her.

  “And what about the handwriting?”

  “That’s something else again. A document expert is going over that.”

  Jury shook his head. “It’s the sheer magnitude of such a forgery I find staggering. Good lord, even to copy a signature requires a lot of talent. To write an entire story in the hand of another person strikes me as an almost insurmountable task. Was this girl capable of such an undertaking?”

  Ellen thought for a moment as she fingered the plastic sleeve of the original page. “Yes.” She sat back with a sigh. “Beverly was ambitious. She was determined to get what she wanted. What she wanted, after she got her Ph.D., was to teach at Harvard. Not just an Ivy League school, but Harvard. Harvard, period. That was the thing about her. she was never vague about what she wanted.”

  “I imagine jobs at Harvard aren’t too thick on the ground,” said Wiggins.

  “Unless,” said Melrose, “the subject of your doctoral dissertation is the dissection of a freshly discovered manuscript purporting to be the work of none other than Edgar Allan Poe. That ought to land you a job anywhere. I take it she was a good student.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Wiggins had put down his glass, empty now but for a dusty white sediment. “Thing is, though, doesn’t it usually take a very long time to write a doctoral thesis? It wouldn’t do if someone came along and preempted your conclusions, would it? Somebody else might prove it was a fake before you’d got your thesis finished.”

  Melrose said, “You’d just shift gears and incorporate those findings. It wouldn’t be so dramatic as if you’d reached the conclusions by yourself, but look at all the notoriety you’d’ve got by then. And, anyway, at the outset, before you’d started you’d know whether someone was going to come along and knock your position to bits because, after all, the manuscript had undergone the scrutiny of experts.