The Lemur by Benjamin Black Page A

and a few hours later he gets a bullet through the eye. You mention to the po-lice about Dylan trying to blackmail you? ’Cause I bet old Cap’n Ambrose would be real interested in that. Don’t you think?”
    “Good-bye, Cleaver,” Glass said.

9
     
    ODALISQUE
     
    They had been in bed together all afternoon, Glass and his girl, and now at evening he was sprawled pasha-like in his undershorts against a bank of pillows while at her worktable Alison sat, with her back turned toward him, naked, on a red-plush piano stool, before the glowing and intently silent screen of her laptop. Glass was smoking a cigarette. He was happy, or at least content. There was something so sweetly sad about sex in the afternoon. It was raining outside, and the pearly light falling down through the studio apartment’s big, slanted window was almost Irish. He only ever felt really homesick when it rained. He was thinking in a dreamy vacancy how much the sound that the computer keyboard made reminded him of his long-dead granny clacking her dentures, and how Alison’s shapely back recalled Man Ray’s photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse posing as a violin.
    “Jesus,” she said suddenly, “have you seen this blog?”
    “This what?”
    “For God’s sake, don’t pretend you don’t know what a blog is.”
    “Something on the Internet?” He liked to tease her.
    She turned to look at him, the rain-light silvering her breasts. “How did you ever manage to be a journalist, with so little experience of the world?”
    “The Internet is not the world, my dear.”
    “Well, my dear ,” she drawled, “everyone in the world uses it, except you.”
    Her dark hair reached almost to her bare shoulders, making an oval frame for her sharp-chinned, long, pale face. Without her clothes she looked less like a madonna than one of Modigliani’s pink-and-platinum odalisques. She had put a towel under her bottom to keep what of him was still inside her from leaking onto the plush of the piano seat. He marveled how she had managed to shed so comprehensively the Irish squeamishness before the prospect of being. He had grown up expecting that a girl getting out of bed would immediately wrap a sheet around herself, tucking it deftly under her armpits, as girls in the movies always did.
    “It’s this fellow Cleaver,” she said. “The fellow who phoned here for you.”
    “What?” He was all attention suddenly. “ What is him?”
    “His blog. Cleaver’s Cleaver , he calls it. All the news that’s fit to punt . He’s writing about that researcher you were going to hire—Dylan Riley? The one you were asking me about the other day.” She read on in silence, then said, “ Jesus, ” again. “Did you know he was murdered?”
    “Who?”
    “This Riley person. He was shot. Someone shot and killed him.” She turned to him again, almost angrily. “Did you know about this?”
    He looked at the ceiling. “Umm.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me? And don’t give me some smart answer.” She was glaring at him now. “You said he tried to blackmail you. About us.”
    He sat upright, dashing cigarette ash in the direction of the Betty Boop plastic ashtray he had bought one winter day on a trip he and Alison had made to Coney Island. “I didn’t say it was about us. I thought it might be about us. He claimed to know something, to have found out something, that’s all.” He did his mime-artist’s shrug, lifting high his shoulders and pulling down the corners of his mouth in a show of helplessness. “He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
    Alison sat without moving, seeming hardly to breathe, watching him steadily. She had gone into her idling mode, waiting for what was to come. Under her blank scrutiny he grew twitchy and irritated, as always. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know anymore about this business than you do. I spoke to Dylan Riley a couple of times, and met him once. The next thing I knew he was dead. Christ knows who killed him. He was a