Oh Lord...it is time...

thank you to azerty140, and ladystxrk for the favorite and follows.

Laxus asked Magnus to dine with him that night.

"But I thought you were displeased with me."

"Why?"

"I failed you at the funeral."

"I know how you felt." His hand lay for a moment upon Magnus's coat sleeve.

"Then why didn't you help me get my vase away from that she-vulture?"

"I was being petty-official," he teased. "I'd like to take you to dinner, Mr. Lydecker. Will you come?"

He carried a book in his coat pocket. Magnus saw only the top inch of the binding, but unless he was mistaken, it was the work of a not unfamiliar author.

"I am flattered," he remarked with a jocular nod toward the bulging pocket.

Laxus fingered the book, with some affection, he fancied.

"Have you read it yet, Dreyar?" He nodded. "And do you still consider me smooth but trivial?"

"Sometimes you're not bad," Laxus conceded.

"Your flattery overwhelms me," Magnus retorted. "And where shall we dine?"

Laxus grabbed the man's shoulder. "Excuse you!" He exclaimed until he noticed an odd feeling in his bones and muscles. It was a unpleasant feeling being rearranged and traveling like this. It happened so quickly, one minute he was in his place holding his black Homburg. Then he was in the slums. Magnus wondered why he chose the narrowest streets in the slums until he saw the red neon above Montagnino's door. Montagnino himself met them and to Magnus's surprise greeted Laxus as an honored customer. Magnus saw then that it would take little effort to guide him along the road of good taste. They passed through a corridor steamy with the odors of tomato paste, peppers, and oregano to the garden, which was, on this incredible night, only a few degrees cooler than the kitchen; with the air of a Caesar conferring honor upon pet commoners, Montagnino led them to a table beside a trellis twined with artificial lilac. Through the dusty wooden lattice and weary cotton vines they witnessed a battle between the hordes of angry clouds and a fierce copper moon. The leaves of the one living tree in the neighborhood, a skinny catalpa, hung like the black bones of skeleton hands, as dead as the cotton lilac. With the flavors of Montagnino's kitchen and the slum smells was mingled the sulphurous odor of the rising storm.

We dined on mussels cooked with mustard greens in Chianti and a chicken, fried in olive oil, laid upon a bed of yellow taglierini and garlanded with mushrooms and red peppers. At Magnus's suggestion they drank that pale still wine with the magic name, Lacrymae Christi. Laxus had never tasted it, but once his tongue had tested and approved the golden flavor, he tossed it off like Scotch whiskey. He came of a race of drinkers who look contemptuously upon an alcoholic content of twelve percent, unaware that the fermented grape works its enchantments more subtly than the distilled spirits of grain. Magnus would not imply that he was drunk; let us say, rather, that the Tears of Christ opened his heart. He became more boyish; less the professional and more the youth in need of a confidant.

Magnus remarked that he had dined here with Lucy.

"You don't say." Laxus said, he knew he ate here with Lucy. Laxus knew everything at this point that Lucy had at least left behind.

"We had eaten the same food at this very table. The same weary cotton leaves had hung above her head. The place had been one of her favorites."

Laxus nodded, he was surprised this was one of his favorites too. When he called Montagnino to ask about Lucy, the man told him everything. What she ordered, what she drank. Everything.

A mechanical contrivance filled the restaurant with music and sent faint melody into the garden. Noel Coward wrote an unforgettable line (whose precise wording I have forgotten) upon the ineluctable charm of old popular songs. That is why, Magnus ventured to say, a nation sways to George Gershwin while the good works of Calvin Coolidge have become arid words in unread volumes. Old tunes had been as much a part of Lucy as her laughter. Her mind had been a fulsome catalogue of musical trivia. A hearty and unashamed lowbrow, she had listened to Brahms but had heard Kern. Her one great had been Bach, whom she learned to cherish, believe it or not, by listening to a Benny Goodman record.

When Magnus mentioned this to Laxus, he nodded gravely and said, "Yep, I know."

"What do you know and how do you know so much?" Magnus demanded, suddenly outraged by his superior airs. "You act as though you'd been Lucy's friend for years."

"I looked at her records," he said. "I even played some of them. Make what you want of that, Mr. Lydecker. Especially her classic rock records."

Magnus poured him another glass of wine. His belligerency dwindled and it was not long afterward that he poured forth the revelations recorded in foregoing chapters: the scene with Bessie; his annoyance at the clumsy flattery of the girl reporter; the sudden interest in the painting which had caused him to discover Lancaster Corey and ask the price of the Jacoby portrait; and finally, with the second bottle of wine, of Vincent Sawarr.

Magnus would confess that he was not without guilt in plying him with liquor and provocative questions. They discussed the the key, her missing celestial keys, the alibi, and, at Magnus's subtle instigation, Vincent's familiarity with firearms.

"He's quite the sporting type, you know. Hunting, shooting, and all that. Once had a collection of guns, I believe."

Laxus nodded knowingly.

"Have you checked on them? How do you go about getting all these items of information? Or did Vincent confess that, too?"

"I'm the detective. What do you think I do with my time? It was a simple matter of two and two on the guns. Photographs in her album and storage receipts in his room at the Framingham. He went up to the warehouse with me himself after yesterday and we looked over the arsenal. His father used to hunt foxes in a red coat, he told me."

"Well?" Magnus awaited revelation.

"According to the records in the warehouse, nothing had been touched for over a year. Most of the stuff showed rust and the dust was an inch thick."

"Of course a man might have guns that he didn't put into a warehouse for safekeeping."

"He's not the type to use a sawed-off shotgun."

"A sawed-off shotgun!" Magnus exclaimed. "Do you know positively?"

"We know nothing positively." He underscored the adverb brusquely. "But where do you use BB shot?"

"I'm no sportsman," Magnus confessed.

"Imagine anyone trying to carry a shotgun around the streets of this town. How could he get away with it?"

"Sawed-off shotguns are carried by gangsters," Magnus observed. "At least according to the education I've received at that fount of popular learning, the movies."

Laxus wanted to snort. Lucy and gangsters. How hilarious. But he indulged the idea a little.

"Did Lucy know any gangsters?"

"In a way, Dreyar, we're all gangsters. We all have our confederates and our sworn foes, our loyalties and our enmities. We have our pasts to shed and our futures to protect. If a man were desperate, might he not sacrifice sportsmanship for the nonce and step out of his class? And tell me, Dreyar, just how does one saw off a sawed-off shotgun?"

Magnus's plea for practical information was disregarded. Laxus became guarded again. The music changed. Magnus's hand, held a wine glass, it stayed on its journey to his lips. Magnus's face was drained of color. In the bewildered countenance of his companion he caught a reflection of his pallor.

Yellow hands slid coffee cups across the table. At the next table a woman laughed. The moon had lost its battle with the clouds and retreated, leaving no trace of copper brilliance in the ominous sky. The air had grown heavier. In the window of a tenement a slim girl stood, her angular dark silhouette sharpened by a naked electric bulb.

At the table on our left a woman was singing:

"So I smile and say,

When a lovely flame dies,

Smoke gets in your eyes."

Fixing offended eyes upon her face, Magnus spoke in his courtliest tones. "Madame, if you would spare the eardrums of one who heard Tamara introduce that enchanting song, you will restrain your clumsy efforts at imitation."

She made a remark and a flipped of Magnus. Laxus's eyes were fixed on Magnus's face with the squinting attentiveness of a scientist at a microscope.

Magnus laughed and said hastily: "That melody is significant. Common as it has become, it has never lost a peculiarly individual flavor. Jerry Kern has never surpassed it, you know."

"The first time you heard it you were with Lucy," Laxus said.

"How astute of you!"

"I'm getting used to your ways, Mr. Lydecker."

"You shall be rewarded," Magnus promised, "by the story of that night."

"Go on."

"It was in the fall of her 14th year, that Max Gordon put on the show, Roberta, book by Hammerstein Junior after a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Trivia, of course, but, as we know, there is no lack of sustenance in whipped cream. It was Lucy's first opening night. She was excited to no end, her eyes burning like a child's, her voice rising in adolescent squeaks as I pointed out this and that human creature who had been there, until that night, magic names to the little girl. She wore a gown of champagne-colored chiffon and jade-colored heels. Extraordinarily effective with her eyes and hair. Lucy, my precious babe,' I said to her, 'we shall drink to your frock in champagne.' Her pleasure gave me the sensation that God must know when He transforms the blasts of March into the melting winds of April. Add to this mood a show which is all glitter and chic, and top it with the bittersweet froth of song, throatily sung by a Russian girl with a guitar. I felt a small warmth upon my hand, and then, as the song continued, a pressure that filled me with swelling ecstasy. Do you think this a shameful confession? A man of my sort has many easy emotions—I have been known to shout with equal fervor over the Beethoven Ninth or a penny lolly pop—but few great moments. But I swear to you, Dreyar, in this simple sharing of melody we had attained something which few achieve in the more conventional attitudes of affection. Here eyes were swimming. Later she told me that she had recently been rejected in love—imagine anyone rejecting Lucy. The fellow, I take it, was rather insensitive. She had, alas, a low taste in love. Through the confession I clung to her hand tightly, that small, tender hand which held such extraordinary firmness that she used to say it was slightly masculine. But the elements are so mixed in us, Dreyar, that Nature must blush to quote Shakespeare when she stands and says to the world, 'This was a man!'"

The music flowed between the white dusty boards of the trellis, through vines of artificial lilac. Magnus had never before spoken aloud nor written of the reverie which had filled him since that night with Lucy at the theatre, yet Magnus felt certain security in entrusting it to a man whose nostalgia was concerned with a woman he barely seen.

At long last the song ceased. Freed from pensive memories, Magnus drained his glass and returned to the less oppressive topic of murder. He had by this time sufficient command of himself to speak of the scene they had witnessed in Lucy's room and of Vincent's pallor at the sight of the Bourbon bottle.

Laxus said that the evidence gathered thus far was too circumstantial and frail to give substance to a case against the bridegroom.

"Do tell me this, Dreyar. In your opinion is he guilty?"

Magnus had given himself freely. In return he expected frankness. Laxus answered with an insolent smile.

Magnus set to work on his emotions. "Poor Lucy," he sighed. "How ironic for her if it actually was Vincent! After running away, then to be begged back into the marriage... Those last hideous moments before she died!"

"Death was almost instantaneous. Within a few seconds she was unconscious."

"You're pleased, Laxus, aren't you? You're glad to know she had no time to regret the love she had given?"

Laxus said icily, "I've expressed no such opinion."

"Don't be ashamed. Your heart's no softer than any other anyone else's. Sir Walter and Sir James would have been delighted with you. A nature rocky as the hills, a tombstone and a wee bit o' heather."

Bony hands gripped the table. "Let's have another drink."

Magnus suggested Courvoisier.

"You order. I can't pronounce it."

After a short pause, he said: "Listen, Mr. Lydecker, there's one thing I want to know. Why did she call off the wedding? And then say she would think about putting the wedding back on?"

"The familiar curse of gold."

He shook his head. "Sawarr and I have gone into that. The guy's fairly decent about it, if a man can be decent and take money from a woman. But this is what gets me.. What changed her mind now? What was holding her back then?"

"She was unsure of she wanted. She tried to runaway before you know. It was never successful."

"When everyone says the same thing, it's the easiest answer." There were diaries missing. Missing specifically from when she called it off, and her planning to run away. He never found out why. Missing keys and missing diaries.

"Strange," Magnus sighed. "Incredibly strange and tragic for us to be sitting here, at this very table, under these same weary lilacs, listening to her favorite tunes and stewing over our jealousy. She's dead, man, dead!"

Nervous hands toyed with the stem of the brandy snifter. Then, with his dark eyes piercing the gossamer of Magnus's defenses, he asked, "If you were so crazy about her, why didn't you do something about Vincent?"

Magnus met this scrutiny contemptuously.

"Why?"

"Lucy was a grown woman. Her freedom was dear to her and jealously guarded. She knew her own heart. Or thought she did."

"If I had known her . . ." he began in a voice of masculine omnipotence, but paused, leaving the rest unsaid.

"What a contradictory person you are, Dreyar!"

"Contradictory!" He tossed the word into the very center of the garden. Several diners stared at them. "I'm contradictory. Well, what about the rest of you? And what about her? Wherever you turn, a contradiction."

"It's the contradictions that make her seem alive to you. Life itself is contradictory. Only death is consistent."

With a great sigh he unburdened himself of another weighty question. "Did she ever talk to you about Gulliver?"

Magnus's mind leaped nimbly in pursuit. "It's one of your favorites, too, I take it."

"How do you know that?" He challenged.

"Your boasted powers of observation are failing sadly, my dear fellow, if you failed to notice that I took care to see what volume it was that you examined so scrupulously in her apartment. I knew that book well. It was an old copy and I had it rebound for her in red morocco."

He smiled shyly. "I knew you were spying on me."

"You said nothing, because you wished to let me think it was a murder clue you sought among the Lilliputians. If it gives you pleasure, young man, I'll confirm the hope that she shared your literary enthusiasms."

His gratitude was charming. Magnus counted the days that had passed since he had spoken of Lucy as a two-timing dame. Had Magnus reminded him tonight, he would dare say Laxus would have punched his face.

The genial combination of good food, wine, music, brandy, and sympathy had corrupted his defenses. He spoke with touching frankness. "We lived within half a mile of each other for little over a year. Must have taken the same trains, passed each other on the street hundreds of times. She went to Schwartz's for her drugs, too."

"Remarkable coincidence," Magnus said.

The irony was lost. Laxus had surrendered.

"We must have passed each other on the street often."

It was a slender morsel of consolation he had found among all the grim facts. Magnus resolved then and there to write about this frustrated romance, so fragile and so typical of Fiore. It was the perfect O. Henry story. Magnus could hear old Sydney Porter coughing himself into a fever over it.

"Wonderful tits," he muttered, half-aloud. "The first thing I look at is a womans boobs. Wonderful. Her figure was womanly."

Magnus blanched at hearing Lucy described that way.

They had turned off the music and most of the diners had left the garden. A couple passed their table. The girl, Magnus noted, had remarkable set of boobs. Laxus did not turn his head. He dwelt, for that brief moment, in the fancy of a meeting at Schwartz's. A meeting that would have undid his previous offenses. It would somehow make up for how terribly he treated her. He could say he was sorry. He would be buying cigars and she would have put a dime into the postage-stamp machine. She might have dropped her purse. Or perhaps there had been a cinder in her eye. She had uttered but a single word, "Thanks," but for him sweet bells jangled and the harps of heaven were joined in mighty paean. A meeting of their eyes, and it was as simple as with Charles Boyer and Margaret Sullavan.

"Have you ever read my story of Conrad?" Magnus inquired.

His question interrupted the schoolboy reverie. He regarded me with a desolate glance.

"It is a legend told over port and cigars at Philadelphia dining tables some seventy-five years ago, and whispered in softer tones over tapestry frames and macramé work. The story has of late been attributed to me, but I take no credit. What I am telling is a tale whose only basis of truth lies in its power over stolid folk celebrated for their honest and lack of imagination. I refer to the Amish of Pennsylvania. Conrad was one of these. A stalwart, earthy lad more given to the cultivation of rutabagas than to flights of superstitious fancy. One day as he worked in the field, he heard a great crash upon the road. Running, hoe in hand, he came upon the confusion attendant upon an accident. A vegetable cart had collided with a smart carriage. To his great surprise Conrad found a woman in his arms in the place of his hoe. Among the Amish, who boasted that they were known as plain, buttons were considered ungodly ornament. To this moment in his life Conrad had seen only girls in faded ginghams hooked tight across their chests and with hair stretched from their temples into wiry pigtails. He wore a blue work shirt fastened severely to the throat and upon his chin a fringe, like monkey fur, of thin whiskers affected by his people as a mark of piety. The injury to the lady's carriage was repaired sooner than the damage to Conrad's heart. Never could he close his eyes without beholding a vision of this creature with her powdered skin, her wanton lips, and mischievous eyes, as black as the ebony stick of her lilac-silk parasol. From that day on, Conrad was no longer content with his pigtailed neighbors and his rutabagas. He must find Troy and seek Helen. He sold his farm, walked dusty roads to Philadelphia, and being canny as the pious always are, invested his small capital in a lucrative business whose proprietor was willing to teach him the trade. "Without money, without access to the society frequented by the elegant creature, Conrad was actually no closer to her than he had been at Lebanon. Yet his faith never flagged. He believed, as he believed in evil and sin, that he would again hold her in his arms. And the miracle occurred. Before so many years had passed that he was too old to know the joy of fulfillment, he held her close to his breast, his heart pounding with such a savage beat that its vigor gave life to every inanimate thing around him. And once again, as on the hot noon when he first beheld her, the lids lifted like curtains over those dark eyes . . ."

"How did he make it?" Laxus inquired. "How did he get to know her?"

Magnus waved aside the interruption. "She had never seemed so lovely as now, and though he had heard her name whispered in the city and knew her reputation to be unsavory, he felt that his eyes had never met such purity as he saw in that marble brow, nor such chastity as was encased in those immobile lips. Let us forgive Conrad his confusion. At such moments a man's mind does not achieve its highest point of logic. Remember, the lady was clothed all in white from the tips of her satin slippers to the crown of blossoms in her dark hair. And the shadows, lilac-tinted, in the shroud . . ."

At the word Laxus recoiled.

Magnus fixed his eyes upon him innocently. "Shroud. In those days it was still the custom."

"Was she," he asked, biting down slowly as if each word were poisoned fruit, "dead?"

"Perhaps I neglected to mention that he had become apprenticed to an undertaker. And while the surgeon had declared her dead before Conrad was called to the dwelling, he afterward . . ."

Laxus's eyes were dark holes burning through the white fabric of a mask. His lips puckered as if the poisoned fruit were bitter.

"I cannot tell if the story is true," Magnus said, sensing his unrest and hastening the moral, "but since Conrad came of a people who never encouraged fantasy, one cannot help but pay him the respect of credence. He returned to Lebanon, but the folk around reported that women were forevermore destroyed for him. Had he known and lost a living love, he would never have been so marked as by this short excursion into necrophilia."

Thunder rumbled closer. The sky had become sulphurous. As they left the garden, Magnus touched his arm gently.

"Tell me, Dreyar, how much were you prepared to pay for the portrait?"

He turned on me a look of dark malevolence. "Tell me, Lydecker, did you walk past Lucy's apartment every night after you found her before she was killed, or is it a habit you've developed since her death?"

Thunder crashed above us. The storm was coming closer.

End of Part One

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