“You’re lucky to have her,” I said.
His eyes sharpened, and he said, his voice pitched a little lower, “My understanding from Lil is that you might have something to do with that. That’s one of the reasons I like you.”
“What are the others?”
“Well, if I remember correctly, last time you were here you not only matched me drink for drink, but you regularly complimented me on my novels. Those are two traits I revere in a houseguest.”
“I’m happy to compliment your novels if you keep providing me with drinks,” I said.
He grinned, showing off his yellow teeth, then asked me if I’d pick a record. I got up from the sofa and went over to the turntable and the large floor speakers. Elaborate shelving had been built around these items, and one of those shelves contained about three hundred records. I picked a Chico Hamilton album because the cover was interesting and dropped the needle on side one.
“Thank you,” David said when I settled back in across from him. “It’s no picnic having to get up every thirty minutes to play new music but I refuse to have my music choices cataloged and recorded by some Chinese aggregating corporation halfway around the world. What I like to do is sit here and listen to pressed wax and read actual fucking books and be secure in my knowledge that unless the satellites now have x-ray vision no one in the world knows what I’m listening to and reading except for me. It’s actually thrilling. Although I do realize that for a whole generation of human beings the thought of anonymity is worse than death.”
Lily returned to the room with a glass of wine and sat down next to her father and across from me. “Is Dad giving you his speech about anonymity?” she said to me.
“He’s right. Plus, vinyl sounds better,” I said at pretty much the same time as David said, “What precisely do you mean, my speech?”
She turned to her father, didn’t answer his question, and said, instead, “Mom’s making the quinoa salad.”
“Good God,” he said. “What is that? Like the third time this week?”
Lily turned to me. “Sharon has become a fan of quinoa salad with cranberries and goat cheese. She makes it a lot.”
“It’s the only fucking thing she makes around here.”
“Beggars and choosers, right, Dad?”
“I suppose. Let’s talk about something else. Henry was gearing up to praise me, I believe.”
“I want to hear more about what you’re doing with the manuscripts,” I said, looking at Lily, who was still wearing the jeans and the sweater she’d been wearing earlier that afternoon. She took a tiny sip of her wine and put the glass down on the hardwood floor by her feet.
“What I’m doing is mostly just collecting everything there is and trying to get it into chronological order. Dad was a saver, so there’s a lot.”
“Do you know where it will all be going eventually?” I said.
“We have an offer in from a college in Arizona and a potential offer from Emory in Atlanta, although”—she turned and looked at her father—“I think they’re wavering a little.”
“I’ve lived long enough to become a pariah,” David said. “Most of that is my own behavior, and some of that is the changing of the tide. I’m a white man who wrote about white men chasing women.”
“Someone’s got to do it, I suppose,” I said.
“Just not me,” he said. “Not any longer, thank God.”
“Dad does have a complete unpublished manuscript that he wrote between Left Over Right and We Met at the End of the Party.”
“Really?” I said. “Between my favorite David Kintner novel and my second favorite one.”
“Oh, you suck-up,” Lily said.
“Don’t listen to her, Henry. Tell me again about your favorite novels of mine, and be specific about what you liked about them.”
Four hours later the three of us were in the same places in the living room, although in the interim we’d all gotten up to eat quinoa salad and roast lamb in the dining room, then, after dinner, gone to Lily’s office, where she showed the piles of notes from her father’s career, along with newspaper clippings, foreign editions of his books, magazines that contained his stories, and even a stack of videotapes of the lecture series he gave at Shepaug University when he first visited the United States.
Lily was drinking tea, and David had allowed himself a small glass of undiluted single malt. Sharon came into the living room for a while with a large glass of red wine, and stood behind the oldest sofa in the room, its fabric worn thin by time and cocktail parties. She stared at the ceiling and told us all twice about the ants that were now permanently taking up residence in the pantry.
“We’ll worry about that tomorrow, Mom,” Lily said. “Why don’t you sit and we can all talk about something else?”
“Oh, no. If I sit, I might never get up. I’ll just take myself off to bed. Lil, where’s Henry sleeping—not in the maroon room, is he?”
“I set up the room on the third floor, Mom.”
After Sharon left, Lily suggested to David he take his drink with him to his room and finish it there. “Good advice,” he said, and came up surprisingly easily off the sunken sofa. Lily stood too, but he waved her off, saying he’d be fine and left the room, turning at the door and saying, “Good show tonight. Good show.”
“He always says that,” Lily said. “One night, Sharon threw a trivet at him and he bled all over the table and afterward he said it had been a good show.”
“Title of his biography,” I said.
“Ha,” Lily said, then was quiet, her eyes unfocused, her tea mug in her hand. “Are you ready to tell me about what happened? I looked it up on my phone while we were getting dinner ready. It’s being declared a murder-slash-suicide.”
“Whoever did it did a good job,” I said. “I was first on the scene. It looked like Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil sat across from one another, like we are right now. He shot her twice, then shot himself with the same gun.”
“So why do you think that isn’t what happened?”
I took a breath and said, “The night before the murder I slept with Pam O’Neil. I’d gotten to know her because I was following her. She was very sweet. I should never have slept with her, obviously. Now I can’t stop thinking that because of that she tried to end her relationship with Richard, which led him to shoot her and then himself.”
Lily paused, thinking, then said, “So the reason you think they were murdered by someone else is because if they weren’t then you are to blame.”
“Yes, that’s one reason. I already don’t particularly like myself, and if I caused Pam’s death I’m going to like myself a whole lot less.”
I thought Lily might say something to try and comfort me, and I was glad when she kept silent.
“But,” I said. “I do have a deep suspicion, or maybe just a gut feeling, that Richard didn’t do it. I didn’t know him at all, but I watched him and followed him. He was a cheating suburbanite with a good job, but he doesn’t make sense as a murderer.”