Corkscrew

by Donald E. Westlake

  There was a message with a phone number from Detective Johnson on the machine when they arrived. It was a black man's voice, calm and gentle, not tough-sounding at all, which was a surprise. In the morning, before leaving for the funeral, Bryce phoned that number, spoke briefly with Johnson, and agreed to meet with him at the apartment that afternoon.

  Isabelle had stayed with him Saturday night, but she wouldn't come to the funeral. While he was there, she'd go to her apartment way east on Thirty-first Street and pack some things, enough so she could be comfortable in his place.

  Bryce hadn't thought ahead of time about how terrible the funeral would be. Everybody there knew he and Lucie had been going through that endless miserable divorce, so nobody could quite treat him like a grieving husband. On the other hand, nobody could offer him a big smile and a hearty 'Congratulations!' either. Generally, people behaved toward him as though they had a toothache that they vaguely blamed him for.

  Not that there were so many people present, maybe twenty in all. Lucie's parents had flown in from St Louis, and did their best to avoid Bryce entirely, since of course his legal battle with their daughter had made him their enemy, and they couldn't figure out any other way to react to him now.

  His own family was no better. All three of his children were present, but none sat near him. There was twenty-three-year-old Betsy, a postgraduate architecture student at Brown; twenty-one-year-old Tom, studying engineering at MIT; and nineteen-year-old Barry, an English lit major at Rutgers. With them all away, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and New Jersey, he rarely saw them or spoke with them. His accountant paid their bills, and that was the extent of the relationship. They'd sided with their mother, Ellen, in his first divorce, and had never liked Lucie, who had coldly disliked them in return. The estrangement was not deliberate on anybody's part, but by now it was habitual.

  Their mother, Ellen, was there, too, which surprised Bryce, accompanied by Jimmy Branley, the architect she lived with in Connecticut. She solemnly shook Bryce's hand, saying, 'I hope you find happiness, Bryce, after all this.'

  'Well, thank you,' he said, and thought again that he really should have stayed with Ellen, not only because Lucie had been so much worse. There was an honesty in Ellen that could have anchored him, if he'd let it.

  Also at the funeral were ten or so women friends of Lucie's, all her age, all looking more or less like her, women who found it easy to wear black to a funeral because they wore black all the time anyway. Lucie'd always been more comfortable with women than men, and had always had a lot of girlfriends; they'd chat endlessly on the phone and buy little gifts for one another.

  The setting was an upscale funeral parlor on Park Avenue, with quiet efficient dark-suited men moving it all along. The service was muted and nondenominational, vaguely religious without committing anybody to anything. Three people spoke, the first being Lucie's father, who'd written out what he wanted to say on two sheets of lined yellow paper, which trembled like leaves in his hands. He could barely get through it, gulping and weeping and choking up.

  Then one of Lucie's girlfriends, a woman named Janet Higgins, spoke about the last time she'd seen Lucie, which happened to be at the premiere of a play she'd directed, and how supportive Lucie had been then, and had always been, and how hard it was to believe that wonderful friend wouldn't be around any more. Bryce realized with sudden shock and unease that the play must have been Low Fidelity, where Wayne and Lucie had met. He found himself trembling, thinking of what he'd started, what he'd destroyed. Why couldn't the two of them have just gotten it over with?

  His mind drifted, and he thought, why not just leave New York for a while? Leave New York and Connecticut and everything.

  Spain. He could move to Spain for two or three years, take Isabelle with him, maybe he could help her get her children back. At that thought, he couldn't help but look over at his own three, clustered with their mother, isolated from him. No, he was isolated from them, wasn't he?

  He'd never met Isabelle's children. He'd met her father a few times, thought he was stuffy but all right, wouldn't mind being around him for a while.

  But they wouldn't live in Madrid, where her father lived. No, they'd go east, over to Barcelona, find a nice villa outside the city, toward the Med. There were a dozen beaches you could go to there, a different one every day. He could find a story set in Spain, set up an office there in a sunny corner room, do his research in Barcelona. He could see the office, dark wood gleaming in the sunlight, a tiled terrace outside the large office windows. He wished he were there now, instead of here. Seated at his computer writing his Spanish novel, seeing Isabelle on the sunny terrace outside, with her three children.

  The business with Wayne had to be gotten out of the way first, that's all. Wayne and Two Faces in the Mirror. Next Monday he could send Joe Katz, his editor, the manuscript, maybe call him this Thursday or Friday to say, 'I'm almost done, at long last!' He smiled at the thought, then stopped himself from smiling.

  In the funeral, the worst was saved for last: another Lucie girlfriend, who wanted to tell them all the funny things she remembered Lucie saying, most of which had probably not been that funny in their original context and were just ghastly here. The woman had no sense of her audience, but just prattled on, and Bryce found himself thinking, I should have Wayne kill her, too.

  At last she finished, and the funeral parlor men wheeled the closed casket away for cremation, and it was over. People stood in small hushed murmuring groups, none of which included Bryce. Nobody in this place, he realized, is on my side. Feeling very alone, he left there and hailed a cab.

  •

  The interview with Detective Johnson was brief and easy. He was a tall rangy man, not burly like the cops in Los Angeles, and he seemed to have no suspicion of Bryce at all. He began by going over much the same territory as the two detectives in Los Angeles, Bryce's reason for being out there, but in shorter form, since clearly he'd already talked with Detectives Grasso and Maurice.

  Then he wanted to know what Bryce knew about any men Lucie had been dating since their separation, and he said, 'I'm sorry, I'm probably the last person who could help you on that.'

  'I suppose that's true,' Johnson agreed. 'But we have an Identikit picture that might be the guy. I'd like to show it to you.'

  'Okay,' Bryce said. He was thinking, How can I claim I don't recognize Wayne? But I can't possibly say the killer looks like Wayne Prentice, not even remotely. And how did Wayne manage to get himself seen?

  Taking a tan manila envelope from his coat pocket, Johnson said, 'We potentially have two witnesses, but the truth is, we're not sure they're both identifying the same man.'

  'I don't follow,' Bryce admitted.

  Johnson seemed reluctant to show the picture, but went on holding the envelope in both hands. 'One witness,' he said, 'is the doorman in Ms Proctorr's building. He saw a man come for her, go up to the apartment, come down with her, go out, come back with her later, and then go out again alone.'

  'Saw him four times,' Bryce said. 'That's a lot.'

  'You'd think so,' Johnson said. 'But not everybody's as observant as we'd like.'

  'I suppose that's true.'

  'The man told the doorman his name was Wayland,' Johnson said. 'Does that ring a bell?'

  Oh, clever Wayne, Bryce thought, realizing at once what he must have done. Shaking his head, he said, 'I don't know anybody named Wayland. No first name?'

  'No, unless that is a first name.'

  'I suppose.'

  'Ms Proctorr definitely knew him,' Johnson said. 'She told the doorman to send him up.'

  'Wayland,' Bryce said. He shook his head.

  'It seemed as though they might have gone to dinner,' Johnson said, 'in the neighborhood, given the time they went out and how long they were gone. So we canvassed local restaurants with Ms Proctorr's photo, and we've got a waitress at a place called Salt on Columbus Avenue who thinks she might have seen Ms Proctorr that night. She's not absolutely cert
ain, and she didn't notice the man that much.'

  'But maybe,' Bryce said.

  'The man paid cash, so we don't get a name from a credit card,' Johnson said. 'The witnesses disagree on several points, so this is limited to what they could agree on.' And at last he brought out the artist's drawing.

  Which didn't look at all like Wayne! Astonished, Bryce held the picture and stared at this stranger, trying to see, if not Wayne, someone he knew in there. This was some sort of tough guy, with thinner lips and flatter ears and a higher brow and darker, bushier hair than Wayne. The high forehead could have come from the waitress, seeing him from above.

  Staring, Bryce could finally see Wayne's eyes, they'd got that part right. Wayne's eyes, in a stranger's face. Wayne in a mask. 'No,' he said. 'I'd know if I'd seen this man before.'

  'Well, it was worth a try,' Johnson said.

  Handing back the picture, Bryce said, 'So this is the guy, anyway, you're sure of that much.'

  'Well, no,' Johnson said. 'It looks like a date rape that got out of hand, but it could be something else entirely.'

  Bryce shook his head, showing bewilderment. He was feeling hollow, more and more hollow, as though a cavern were in his chest. A high cavern, with cold sharp stalactites. He said, 'What else? What else could it be?'

  'Well, it could be robbery,' Johnson said. 'Those buildings over there are pretty secure, all in all, but it's possible someone got in, saw this man leave Ms Proctorr's apartment, waited till he got into the elevator, then went and knocked on the door, pretended to be the man coming back.'

  Save Wayne, Bryce thought. He said, 'You think that's possible?'

  'Possible, yes,' Johnson said. 'Some jewelry was taken, drawers left open, that sort of thing. But it had a kind of stage-set look. And apparently she had a week-at-a-glance type datebook, and that's gone missing, too.'

  'Ah,' Bryce said.

  Johnson smiled at him. 'No burglar's gonna be in the datebook, is he?'

  'No, I guess not,' Bryce said.

  Johnson shook his head. 'But then,' he said, 'you turn it around, let's say the burglar took the datebook so we'd blame the fella she had the date with.'

  'Tricky,' Bryce said.

  Johnson nodded. 'A lot of them look tricky at first,' he said. 'Sooner or later, most of them turn out to be simple.'

  •

  An hour later, Bryce and Isabelle were seated quietly in the living room, both reading magazines, when the phone rang. He answered, and the voice said, 'Hi, it's Wayne.'

  Coldness ran through Bryce's body. How dare you call me? he raged, inside his head. How dare you speak to me, how dare you show your face? He said, 'Oh, hi, Wayne, hold on a second.'

  'Sure.'

  Putting the phone down, standing, he said to Isabelle, 'Business I'll take it in the office. Hang up this one when I pick up, okay?'

  'Of course.'

  He went to his office, sat at the desk, and picked up the phone there. 'Okay, Isabelle.'

  There was a click, and Wayne said, 'Isabelle. That was fast.'

  'You probably want to talk about the book,' Bryce said. He didn't need Wayne to tell him that it was fast to have Isabelle here.

  'I sure do,' Wayne said.

  'I thought I should wait a week,' Bryce told him. 'The funeral was this morning.'

  Wayne said nothing. Bryce waited, then said, 'Next Monday, or maybe this Friday, I'll call Joe Katz, he's my editor, I'll say the book's finally done, then send it over.'

  'That's terrific. Thank you, Bryce.'

  Bryce couldn't help himself, he had to say, 'How are you?' Meaning, how are you now that you've beaten a human being to death?

  'Oh, fine,' Wayne said, but then gave a little laugh and said, 'Shaky for a while there.'

  'I suppose so.'

  'Things don't happen the way you think they're going to happen, you know what I mean?'

  'I guess I do,' Bryce said.

  'Well, I'll be here, Bryce,' Wayne told him. 'I'll wait for your call.'

  'Okay.'

  Bryce hung up, and looked grimly at his computer, silent, unforthcoming. Wayne's there, he thought. He'll be there, right there, from now on. Forever.

  12

  Wayne wished they'd all just leave it alone. The story was as dead as Lucie; why wouldn't they let it die?

  What they had was skimpy enough. Somehow, they'd traced Wayne to Salt, and they had an artist's drawing of the suspect that was ridiculously off. Laughing at it in the paper, Susan said, 'Is that the man I married?'

  But after that, nothing. No new leads, no clues, no suspects, no changes or additions of any kind. But the newspapers and the local television news programs had to rehash the same damn empty details day after day. Even the networks touched on the story in their news broadcasts.

  It was the usual, and Wayne knew it was merely the usual, and that it shouldn't bother him, but it bothered him. The usual was the mix of sex and celebrity, but to Wayne's eye this was a pretty watered-down version of both. It's true Bryce was a best-selling author, a commodity, a name brand, but he wasn't O.J. Simpson, for God's sake. And the police kept saying there was no sign of sexual attack, but the media didn't care, they went with it anyway. If a beautiful blonde has been bludgeoned to death, there's got to be sex involved in it somewhere.

  'Beautiful blonde bludgeoned' was the nicely alliterative phrase most of the media had settled on, though Wayne could have told them they'd got that all wrong. It hadn't been like that at all. Bludgeoning a beautiful blonde hadn't in any way been what it was about; more like beheading a snapping turtle.

  He and Susan had started watching the TV news again, once the story went public, but Wayne was regretting that now. Still, he could see Susan was as caught up in the story as if she didn't know what was actually going on. She'd become another spectator among all the spectators of the bludgeoning of the beautiful blonde.

  There was something else also building in Susan, he could tell, but he didn't know what it was. They were having sex more frequently, and during it she was clinging to him more, as though he were a floating timber from the shipwreck and she in a raging sea. But she seemed to like it, whatever was coursing through her mind in those moments, so he knew better than to question it.

  Then, Wednesday night, as they were about, Wayne thought, to go to sleep, she asked him, in a very low, almost little-girl voice, 'Can I ask you a question?'

  Of course, she didn't have to mention the topic. I'm not going to like this, he thought, but there was no way out of it: 'Sure. What do you want to know?'

  'Was it a turn-on?'

  'No!' He was appalled she could ask such a thing. 'How could it?' he cried. But then he realized that the bald denial wasn't enough, it wouldn't quiet her doubts or change her mind or alter whatever picture she'd formed in her head, so, with the disgust he still strongly recalled, he said, 'She shit her pants.'

  'Oh!' A shocked silence from her side of the bed; and then, 'I'm sorry you told me that.'

  'I'm sorry you asked.'

  Another longish silence. Then, in the little-girl voice once more, 'I won't do it again.'

  'It's all right, Susan,' he said, sorry he'd been harsh. 'I know it's natural, you want to know and at the same time you don't want to know.'

  'I don't want to know. Not now. Maybe some day.'

  'Yes, I'd like that,' he said. 'I've been thinking that, hoping when it's, when it's all calmed down and long over, we could sit down someplace and I could tell you the whole thing.'

  'But not yet,' she said.

  'No, not yet.'

  He knew part of the problem, for both of them, was this empty period of waiting. There was always suspense when a novel manuscript was submitted to its editor. Even after years of writing, and however much success, there was always that blank tense period between handing in the manuscript and getting the editor's reaction.

  And this time, it was so much more complicated. It wasn't even his manuscript, not any more, and it wasn't his editor, and he had no
control over the submission. He just had to wait, and wait, and that's why the continuing crime-of-the-moment attention from the media was getting to him so much.

  It was affecting his work, too. He'd done damn little this week on The Shadowed Other. Last week, before they'd gone away for their driving weekend in New England, he'd been racing through the book, but this week it was coming hard. The characters resisted him, refused to let him know how they would act and react, and more important, why they would act this way and not that way. He didn't necessarily have to explain all the motivation to the reader, but he had to know. He had to know them well enough to be absolutely certain how they would react to any possible stimulus, and he was just having trouble, this week, seeing his people clear.

  And then, Thursday afternoon, as he sat glooming at the computer, wondering how this one important character in the book — not the lead, but still important — would behave in response to a piece of bad news he'd just received, the phone rang, and it was Bryce. 'I just wanted you to know,' he said, 'the book's gone in.'

  'Oh, Bryce, that's great!'

  'I phoned Joe Katz this morning and told him it was done, and he sent a messenger up this afternoon, and he'll read it over the weekend.'

  No one had ever sent a messenger to pick up a book of Wayne's before. That detail pinged off him like ironic revelation, and made him smile. 'Oh, I hope he loves it,' he said.

  'Why shouldn't he?' Bryce said. 'We both gave it our best.'

  Wayne beamed from ear to ear. 'Yes, we did, didn't we? Bryce, on Monday, I'll be waiting right here by the phone.'

  'We both will,' Bryce said.

  13

  Joe Katz called just after eleven Monday morning. 'Well, Bryce, it's terrific,' he said.

  Until that instant, Bryce hadn't realized just how worried he'd been. Scenarios had run through his head, and he'd squelched them, in which Joe would call this morning and say, 'What is this crap, Bryce? You didn't write this,' or, worse, 'Bryce, I hate to tell you, buddy, but you're slipping.' It's a cuckoo's egg you've got there, Joe, but which the cuckoo and which the foster parent?