The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [59]
“Well, of course I’m dying to go,” Elaine said. “I’d love to see what his place looks like. ‘It’s not terribly grand but it’s quite nice.’ I’ll bet it’s nice. I’ll bet it’s gorgeous.”
“You’ll find out tomorrow.”
“I don’t know. He wants to talk to you, and three might be a crowd for the kind of conversation he wants to have. It wasn’t art theft you arrested him for, was it?”
“No.”
“Did he kill someone?”
“His lover.”
“Well, that’s what each man does, isn’t it? Kills the thing he loves, according to what’shisname.”
“Oscar Wilde.”
“Thanks, Mr. Memory. Actually, I knew that. Sometimes when a person says what’shisname or whatchamacallit it’s not because she can’t remember. It’s just a conversational device.”
“I see.”
She gave me a searching look. “There was something about it,” she said. “What?”
“It was brutal.” My mind filled with a picture of the murder scene, and I blinked it away. “You see a lot on the job, and most of it’s ugly, but this was pretty bad.”
“He seems so gentle. I’d expect any murder he committed to be virtually nonviolent.”
“There aren’t many non-violent murders.”
“Well, bloodless, anyway.”
“This was anything but.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What did he do?”
“He used a knife,” I said.
“And stabbed him?”
“Carved him,” I said. “His lover was younger than Pollard, and I guess he was a good-looking man, but you couldn’t prove it by me. What I saw looked like what’s left of the turkey the day after Thanksgiving.”
“Well, that’s vivid enough,” she said. “I have to say I get the picture.”
“I was first on the scene except for the two uniforms who caught the squeal, and they were young enough to strike a cynical pose.”
“While you were old enough not to. Did you throw up?”
“No, after a few years you just don’t. But it was as bad as anything I’d ever seen.”
Horton Pollard’s villa was north of the city, and if it wasn’t grand it was nevertheless beautiful, a white stuccoed gem set on a hillside with a commanding view of the valley. He showed us through the rooms, answered Elaine’s questions about the paintings and furnishings, and accepted her explanation of why she couldn’t stay for lunch. Or appeared to — as she rode off in the taxi that had brought us, something in his expression suggested for an instant that he felt slighted by her departure
“We’ll dine on the terrace,” he said. “But what’s the matter with me? I haven’t offered you a drink. What will you have, Matthew? The bar’s well stocked, although I don’t know that Paolo has a very extensive repertoire of cocktails.”
I said that any kind of sparkling water would be fine. He said something in Italian to his house boy, then gave me an appraising glance and asked me if I would want wine with our lunch.
I said I wouldn’t. “I’m glad I thought to ask,” he said. “I was going to open a bottle and let it breathe, but now it can just go on holding its breath. You used to drink, if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, I did.”
“The night it all happened,” he said. “It seems to me you told me I looked as though I needed a drink. And I got out a bottle, and you poured drinks for both of us. I remember being surprised you were allowed to drink on duty.”
“I wasn’t,” I said, “but I didn’t always let that stop me.”
“And now you don’t drink at all?”
“I don’t, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have wine with lunch.”
“But I never do,” he said. “I couldn’t while I was locked up, and when I was released I found I didn’t care for it, the taste or the physical sensation. I drank the odd glass of wine anyway, for a while, because I thought one couldn’t be entirely civilized without it. Then I realized I didn’t care. That’s quite the nicest thing about age, perhaps the only good thing to be said for it. Increasingly, one ceases to care about more and more things, particularly the opinions of others. Different for you, though, wasn’t it? You stopped because you had to.”
“Yes.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Now and then.”
“I don’t, but then I was never that fond of it. There was a time when I could distinguish different châteaux