The Cold Blue Blood: A Berger and Mitry Mystery Read online

  He frowned at her thoughtfully. “Oskar Werner … ?”

  “Definitely!”

  “Of course,” he pointed out hastily, “for every one of them you’ve got your Michael Saracens and your Richard Beymers. Performers who make you wonder how they ever landed the starring role in a major Hollywood film.”

  “There might be a Sunday piece in that, too,” Lacy suggested, wagging a long, manicured finger at him. “Coupled with a ‘where-are-they-now’ sidebar. I could put a reporter on it.”

  Mitch peered at her for a moment in silence. “We’re not talking about what you came here to talk about.” And when she said nothing to that he said, “Lacy, why are you here?”

  “I have some news for you, Mitch,” Lacy replied, uneasily. “I don’t know whether you’ll be disappointed or relieved, but … I came to tell you that you’re not going to Cannes this year. I’m sending Karen instead.”

  He was relieved, actually. Usually, he looked forward to Cannes. It was France. It was fun. But he hadn’t wanted to go—to Cannes or anywhere else. He did not want to see anyone. He did not want to talk to anyone.

  “It’ll be good experience for her,” he said encouragingly. Karen was the paper’s new second-string critic. Very raw. Her precedessor, an Oxford-trained classical scholar, had left just after Christmas to write the new Jackie Chan movie. “Although I should warn you that it’s a bit of a meat market. You might lose her to another paper.”

  Lacy fell silent. She wasn’t done. Mitch could tell by the determined set of her jaw. “You’re headed somewhere else, Mitch,” she added in a firm, quiet voice.

  A sudden wave of panic washed over him. Here it was—his worst nightmare. She was banishing him to the L.A. bureau. A fate which he regarded as worse than death. Within a week he would become a character straight out of The Day of the Locust. Living in a run-down bungalow court. Hanging around with tormented midgets, broken-down cowboys and baby-faced, brain-dead blondes. He would quit the paper, that’s what he’d do. He would have to quit.

  Yeah, right. And do what?

  Mitch breathed in and out, watching Lacy intently now. And waiting.

  “I’ve wangled you a weekend getaway piece for the Sunday travel section.”

  He heaved a huge, inward sigh of relief. “And where am I getting away to?”

  “Dorset.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s on the Connecticut shoreline, out near Rhode Island.”

  “What am I going to … Wait, isn’t that the place that had the outbreak of killer mosquitoes last summer?” demanded Mitch, whose natural habitat was a darkened movie theater, preferably below Fourteenth Street.

  “It’s the jewel of the Gold Coast,” she said crisply. “Serious old money—more millionaires to the square mile than East Hampton. It’s also charming and unspoiled and way New Englandy. Artists have been drawn to it for years. The Dorset Academy of Fine Arts is there. You’ve heard of it, surely.”

  “Vaguely,” Mitch grunted.

  Lacy managed a tight smile. “Hell, I wish I were going.”

  “So why don’t you? I’ll stay here and work on my Laurence Harvey piece.”

  “It’s a perk, Mitch. A freebie. Only columnists and chief correspondents are supposed to get them.”

  “So how did I get so lucky?”

  “I thought you could stand to get out of the house for a change,” she replied.

  She was right. Mitch knew this. And she was trying to help him the only way she knew how. Mitch knew this, too. He was becoming a recluse. Whole days went by when he spoke to no one. If he didn’t watch out he might turn into Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He needed to take charge of his life again. He needed to heal. He knew this. Healing was right up there near the top of his list of things to do—pick up shirts at cleaners, punch out Oliver Stone, play shooting guard for the Knicks, heal. It was right up there. But knowing it and doing it were two vastly different things. Especially when it was so much more comforting to sit watching old movies for days at a time in wounded, Olestra-free isolation.

  “Go to Dorset,” Lacy commanded him. “Write about what you see. And don’t think about anything else for a couple of days, okay? Look, I don’t do the nurturing mother thing particularly well. I know this about myself …” Like all self-absorbed New York media people, Lacy turned every conversation about somebody else’s feelings into a conversation about her own feelings. “But this is what is known in the trade as a wake-up call. Your work hasn’t been up to your usual high standards lately. In fact, your Adam Sandler review was downright hostile.”

  “Okay, time out,” Mitch objected defensively. “That movie was total crap.”

  “Everyone else at the paper thought it was hilarious. The scene in the elevator? I wet my pants.”

  “So did he!”

  “Frankly, Mitch,” she shot back scoldingly, “you no longer seem able to comprehend the concept of comedy.”

  Mitch didn’t disagree. He could smile from time to time, but he did not know how to laugh anymore.

  “Naturally, I’ve understood,” Lacy added tactfully. “We all have. But when you get back we need to talk about where your life is headed.”

  The West Coast, if he didn’t watch out. Oblivion.

  “The getaway is for two,” Lacy added gamely. “Why don’t you take someone?”

  “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

  He took his Power Book, in the hope that he might at long last get rolling on his new reference book on Westerns. He had a ton of notes and raw material on floppy disks, but he couldn’t seem to get started on the actual writing. And it was rapidly becoming overdue. The computer rode next to him on the passenger seat, along with a generous bag of goodies from the Cupcake Café, as Mitch reluctantly piloted his rental Toyota out of Manhattan, his hands gripping the wheel tightly. Mitch Berger was a true child of the pavement—a product of Stuyvesant Town, Stuyvesant High and Columbia. Being a native New Yorker, he almost never drove. And driving in Manhattan, with its cab drivers, potholes, delivery trucks, bike messengers and pedestrians, was no easy task. Particularly during rush hour on a muggy Friday afternoon in May.

  He had stowed his weekend bag in the backseat. Maisie had tried in vain to pep up his semi-shlumpy wardrobe, having once described his look as two-parts teddy bear and one-part tornado. Now that she was gone, he had reverted to what he had always worn—wrinkled button-down collar shirts, roomy V-neck sweaters and rumpled khakis. He owned two sport coats: an olive corduroy and a navy blazer. He had brought along the corduroy in case it was required in the dining room of the inn where he was staying. He did not bring a tie. He did not own a tie. He was very proud of this fact.

  As he drove, Mitch’s thoughts drifted back to the last weekend getaway he had taken. They had taken. It had been one year ago almost exactly. They had driven up to Mohonk Mountain House to hike and snuggle and not think about the test results that were due on Monday. Maisie had been incredibly gay and cheerful on the way up. Mostly, she kept going on and on about some damned thing called the Fibonacci Series.

  “For weeks we have been absolutely wracking our brains for the iteration of our planting plan,” she had declared excitedly. The planting plan was for the Hillview Reservoir. The city of New York was capping it against airborne contamination, which was a polite way of saying bird shit. Her firm had been hired to make it look nice. “And guess who thought of the Fibonacci Series—moi!”

  “Congratulations!” he had exclaimed. “Maisie … ?”

  “Yes, my sweet baboo?”

  “What is the Fibonacci Series?” The influence of German Expressionism on the noir films of Robert Siodmak Mitch understood. Maisie’s work he never did.

  “Why, it’s a variation of the Golden Section.”

  “Which is … ?”

  “A basic mathematical system of proportion dating back to the Greek temple structures. Le Corbusier based his Modular system on it. It’s defined geometrically as a line that is
divided such that the lesser portion is to the greater as the greater is to the whole.”

  “And the Fibonacci Series … ?”

  “Is a variation using whole numbers. Each representing the sum of the two preceding numbers. So instead of counting out one, two, three, four, five, you count out one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen and so on. Just imagine it as a planting pattern of grasses spanning some two hundred acres. Imagine it from the air.” Maisie sighed. “If only one were a bird.”

  “If only.”

  Maisie Lawrenson was in a landscape architecture firm down on Duane Street with four other young women, all of them Harvard Graduate School of Design alums. All of them were smart, which was not necessarily synonymous with being a Harvard graduate. All of them were pretty, although in Mitch’s opinion Maisie was far and away the prettiest. She was a tall, slender blonde who dressed in loosely flowing linen and silk things and was in a perpetual hurry.

  He had met her on Fire Island at the Fair Harbor dock. The first words he said to her were, “Are you waiting for the ferry?” The first words she said to him were, “You’re not supposed to call them that anymore—they prefer to be known as alternative water craft.” Within three weeks they had moved in together. They had been married nearly two years when they went away to Mohonk that weekend. They did not believe each other to be perfect. She felt he was among the socially lost, a brooder, a screening-room rat, a slob. He felt she could be impulsive and rash—Polyanna in Arche sandals. But she was his Maisie.

  Until that Monday morning when they got back from Mohonk and he found out he was going to lose her. It was ovarian cancer. The silent killer, they called it, because there were no early warning signs. First they removed her ovaries. Then they put her on chemo. When her lovely blond hair fell out Mitch bought her a Yankee cap to wear. To this day whenever he saw a kid on the street wearing a Yankee cap he would start crying. She was gone in six months. She was thirty years old.

  Mitch had a sister in Denver, parents in Florida, colleagues, pals. He had nobody. It was Maisie who had brought him out of his shell. She was his lifeline. Without her, he was achingly, crushingly alone.

  Some mornings, he could barely will himself to get out of bed. The future terrified him. On several occasions, he had awakened with a gasp in the night, his heart racing and fluttering out of control. His doctor had diagnosed it as anxiety. He advised Mitch to seek counseling. Which Mitch had. His counselor had advised Mitch to find some way to relax. That was how he’d ended up with the Stratocaster. He had taken up the guitar in high school, briefly, in the hope that it would enable him to meet girls. Another fervid illusion shattered. But he had enjoyed the playing.

  As he inched his way now over the Triborough Bridge onto the Bruckner Expressway, Mitch helped himself to a cupcake and glanced at the travel kit he’d been given. His destination was the historic Frederick House Inn in historic Dorset, which was situated on the Long Island Sound at the mouth of the historic Connecticut River.

  It does not take very long, Mitch reflected grumpily, for the word historic to get old.

  It started to drizzle when he was crawling along outside of swank Greenwich on I-95. By the time he had made it to Westport he had managed to figure out how to work his windshield wipers, which was a good thing because it was pouring now. And the temperature had dropped markedly. Beyond Fairfield, upscale suburbia gave way to the downscale rust belt of Bridgeport and New Haven, where he ran out of cupcakes. Then Mitch crossed the Quinnipiac River and officially entered Southern New England. The foliage got thicker, the traffic thinner. It was getting dark by the time he reached Exit 69, which was the last exit before the Connecticut River. He wanted Exit 70, but he got in the wrong lane and instead of crossing the river he somehow ended up on Route 9, heading due north toward Hartford. He was halfway to East Haddam before he figured out what he’d done and managed to double back. As a result, it was pitch black by the time he finally set eyes on Dorset.

  The town was utterly asleep. Mitch had a funny feeling it would look exactly the same when it was wide awake.

  A stand of trees shielded the Frederick House Inn from the road. A broad circular driveway led to the front door of the three-story house, which had been built in 1756. There were eleven rooms, each furnished with antiques. There was a fireplace in the dining room. Chilled, Mitch warmed himself in front of the fire with a generous jolt of Bushmill. He was too late for dinner. In fact, the dining room was technically closed. But the innkeeper managed to assemble a plate of cold sausages, lentil salad and rolls for him.

  Afterward, he went upstairs to his snug little room and drew a bubble bath for himself in the claw-footed tub. As it filled Mitch stripped off his clothes and gazed at himself in the mirror. He was not terrible-looking. He was not bald. He was not short. His weight generally fluctuated between burly and pudgy, depending on his intake of sweets. Right now, pudgy was winning out. Still, he was not in bad shape for someone who spent most of his waking hours sitting in a dark room on his butt. He sucked in his stomach and puffed out his chest and flexed his tattooed right bicep in the mirror. His tattoo said: Rocky Dies Yellow. He grinned at his reflection, a brave, jaunty grin reminiscent of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. This was something he had taken to doing lately. His way of assuring himself that he was going to be okay.

  I am laughing in the face of danger.

  After his bath Mitch burrowed into his canopied bed with a collection of Manny Farber’s film columns from the fifties. Briefly, he was absorbed by the cranky iconoclast’s brilliant dissection of the films of Budd Boetticher. But before long Mitch found his mind drifting and he set the volume aside and lay there listening to the rain and thinking the same thing he thought every night as he lay in bed alone:

  I am so glad I do not own a gun for my personal protection. Because if I had one I would shoot myself.

  CHAPTER 2

  SCARY SPICE WOKE UP Des at 3:59 A.M. It had taken the little vixen less than a week to master the subtle complexities of the textbook head-butt technique: First, climb directly onto human target’s chest. Next, knead said human’s chest firmly and insistently with front paws. Purr. Then tickle target’s face with whiskers. And, finally, butt heads until target groans.

  Des groaned, feeling as if her own head had only just hit the pillow. It had. She’d worked late and squeezed in only four hours of sleep. Maybe she was too wedded to her job. Maybe there was no maybe about it. Yawning hugely, she fumbled for her horn-rimmed glasses and flicked on the nightstand light, blinking at the rest of the original Spice Girls—Ginger, Sporty, Posh and Baby. Tabby shorthairs, all of them. Predominately gray. Three months old. And maddeningly perky and bright-eyed, considering the hour. She and Bella had rescued them from the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse in Shelton two weeks ago. Within days they had become snug muffins.

  There was no man in her bed. No man in her life. Des Mitry was off men right now, having concluded that they were vastly overrated as a species. They required huge outlays of attention, care, feeding and patience and all you got back in return from them was a full laundry hamper, an empty refrigerator and a bladder infection. Nothing good came of them. Not one thing. So Des was going it alone for the foreseeable future. She was not looking for a relationship. In fact, she was the happiest she’d ever been, even though absolutely no one believed her. Single women were not supposed to be happy. That was one of the bedrock myths of modern American society, right up there with the invincibility of four-wheel drive, the great taste of lite beer and the guarantee of equal justice for all.

  She did not make the bed. After four years at West Point, Des took great, sinful pleasure in having a sloppy, unmade bed. For her it was a feeling comparable to that of sinking into a hot bubble bath with a flute of cold Moët and Robert Cray crying his heart out on her stereo. She stretched her lower back and touched her toes, her dreadlocks brushing the floor. She stripped off her T-shirt and hung it on the back of the master bathroom door. She dressed in swe
atpants and a New York Giants jersey.

  Barefoot, she padded downstairs and into the kitchen to put the coffee on, the Spice Girls meowing in harmony as they tripped over her ankles and one another in starved, eager pursuit. The house was a three-bedroom raised ranch on a dead-end road in Woodbridge, a woodsy suburb of New Haven that was popular with Yale mathematicians and lab geeks, many of whom were Asian or Middle Eastern. The assorted cooking smells were unbelievable when Des managed to get in a jog at suppertime. It was a family neighborhood. Other than Bella, her next-door neighbor, Des was the only person on the block who lived alone.

  Des also happened to be the only person on the block who was black.

  She and Brandon bought the place right after they got married. They built themselves a redwood deck onto the back, complete with hot tub. Remodeled the kitchen. Refinished the oak floors. Invested in fine furniture of leather and teak. It was a home to be proud of when they were done with it. It was their Love Shack. And Des did think about unloading it after the bust-up, finding someplace smaller. It was certainly more house than she needed. But she’d have to pay a whopping tax bill if she did that, so why not keep it? The overhead was manageable. It was a half-hour drive from work. And she enjoyed taking care of it. Particularly the acre and a half of yard. She did all of the outdoor work herself. Des absolutely loved riding around on her mower. Actually, it was not natural how much Des loved that Toro. She was starting to become convinced that in a previous life she had been an Iowa hog farmer.

  She put down food for the girls while the coffee was brewing. Then she checked on the rest of her guests. Spinderella, Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim and Jam Master Jay were getting along just fine in her basement, one to a padded crate. Milli Vanilli—Fab and Rob—had the garage to themselves since they could only seem to get along with each other. Those two had been full-grown adults when Des rescued them. The adult feral strays were the hardest. It took time to earn their trust. It took patience and gentleness. A lot of her new arrivals had to be kept somewhere solitary and small, like her guest bathroom, for several weeks before they were ready to venture out. Right now, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, a surly black strutter, was decompressing in her mud room. She went in and spent a couple of minutes with him on her knees, her hand stretched out to him, softly cooing, “Your father must be hydrogen, because you da bomb, Daddy.” She said that to him every morning and night, and every morning and night he hissed and swatted at her outstretched hand. He would eat her food and drink her water but he would not let her near him.