She sat, faint with heat and dignity.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Shaw?”
“I—it’s very warm in here.”
“Get out and stand in the shade. Come on, I’ll help you.”
“I can manage, thank you.”
“Leave the key in the ignition.”
She got out and he took her place behind the wheel. The engine turned over on his second attempt. He liked the sound of it, soft, powerful, steady.
“Here you are, all set to go, Mrs. Shaw.”
“What was wrong?”
“You probably flooded it. If it happens again, push the accelerator to the floorboard and let it up slowly. Or if you’re not in a hurry, wait a few minutes.”
“I’m never in a hurry. I have nothing to do.”
She didn’t know why she said it. Neither did he, obviously. He looked puzzled and a little embarrassed, as though she’d made a very personal remark and he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“I meant nothing important,” she added. “The way you have, with your job.”
“There’s nothing important about my job. I put in time, I get paid. That’s all.”
“You save lives. You saved Frederic’s only half an hour ago.”
“He’d have come around eventually. Don’t blame me for saving his life . . . And as far as the pool is concerned, there hasn’t been a near-drowning, or even a nearly near, since I was hired. Which is fine with me, since I’m not even sure what I’d do if somebody yelled for help. Maybe I’d walk away and let him drown.”
“You mustn’t say that. Someone might take it seriously.”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“I hope you’re a good swimmer.”
They’d been talking above the noise of the engine. He reached over and switched it off. Then he got out, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Okay. It’s all yours, Mrs. Shaw.”
“Why didn’t you leave the engine running?”
“Causes pollution, wastes gas. You can start it again when you’re ready to leave.”
They stood beside the long black car, almost touching but not looking at each other, like strangers at a funeral.
She said, “It’s a very ugly car, don’t you agree? Such a lot of bulk and horsepower merely to take someone like me from the house to the club to the market and back to the house. My husband gave it to me on my last birthday. Did you see the license plate?”
“Not well enough to remember.”
“It’s U R 52. Neville did it as a joke so I couldn’t lie about my age. He didn’t mean to be cruel, he adored me, he would never have been deliberately cruel. He simply considered it funny.”
“Next year when you’re fifty-three the laugh will be on him. Hang on to the car for ten or fifteen years and you can have yourself a real chuckle.”
“No,” she said sharply. “I’m going to get rid of it as soon as they give me permission.”
“They?”
“The lawyers who are handling my husband’s estate. Of course, if something happened to the car they’d have to give me permission, wouldn’t they?”
“Happened like what?”
“I don’t know exactly, but there are lots of stories in the newspapers about people having paint sprayed all over their cars or their windows damaged or their tires slashed.”
“If that’s what you want,” Grady said, “maybe I can arrange it for you. I’ve got some rough pals.”
“Do you? Have rough pals, I mean.”
“I know a lot of crummy people.”
She glanced up at him with an anxious little smile. “You mustn’t take it seriously, what I said about something happening to the car. It was pretty crazy. I can’t understand why I suddenly had such a wild idea. I’m not a violent person.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Honestly I’m not.”
“I believe you, I believe you.”
“Why do you say it twice like that? It makes it sound as if you don’t really believe me.” She crossed her arms over her breasts as if for protection. Her skin was very white, and the veins so close to the surface they looked like routes of rivers on a map. “How can you think I’m a violent person?”
“Oh, come on now, Mrs. Shaw,” Grady said. “You’re having a bad day. Go home and pour yourself a drink.”
“I can’t drink alone.”
“Then take a couple of aspirins. Or don’t you do that alone either?”
She lowered her head as if it had suddenly become too heavy for her neck to support. “That wasn’t a kind thing to say. You may be right about yourself, Grady. Perhaps if someone were drowning, you’d just walk away.”
“Now wait a minute. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“I’m drowning,” she said. “You’re not a very good lifeguard if you can’t tell when people are drowning.”
Little Frederic Quinn was hiding behind a eucalyptus tree in the middle of the parking lot. So far the conversation had been dumb and the action nil, so he decided to liven things up by revealing his presence.
He stepped out from his cover. The burnt-match Deco work had been scrubbed off his face but most of the Mercurochrome remained, leaving his hair streaked pink and his skin interestingly diseased-looking.
“Hey, Grady, how’re you doing?”
“Beat it, you little bastard,” Grady said.
“Using foul language in front of a lady, that’s a misdemeanor.”
“What is it when a kid is hacked to pieces and thrown off the wharf to feed the sharks?”
“Why are you so torqued up? Lost the old macho magic? Wait till I tell the kids, ha ha.”
“You didn’t hear me, Quinn. I said beat it.”
“All right.”
“Now.”
“All right. I’m going, I’m going. I’m on my way. I’m—Help! Police! May Day! May Day!”
Admiral Cooper Young was returning to the club to pick up the handbag Cordelia had left in the snack bar. It was such a pleasant day he’d rolled one window down, though his wife, Iris, would be sure to notice the dust on the dashboard and complain about it. As he passed the parking lot he heard the May Day call.
“I do believe I hear someone crying for help.”
“Then shut the window,” Juliet said.
“Just because a person is crying for help,” Cordelia added reasonably, “is no reason why you should listen. You’re not in the Navy anymore. Besides, we have to hurry. There’s a one-hundred-dollar-bill in my handbag.”
The Admiral’s grip on the steering wheel tightened perceptibly. “Now where did you get a one-hundred-dollar bill, Cordelia?”
“Mrs. Young. Your wife.”
“Why did she give it to you?”
“Bribery.”
“She gave me one, too,” Juliet said, “though I wouldn’t call it bribery exactly, Cordelia.”
“I would. It was. Her instructions were to stay away from the house until the club closed because she was going to take a backgammon lesson.”
The May Day calls had ceased.
“I didn’t know your mother played backgammon,” the Admiral said.
“She doesn’t,” Cordelia said. “Yet. She’s taking a course.”
“I see.”
The Admiral did indeed see. There’d been other courses, dozens, but none of them seemed to satisfy his poor Iris. She’d been cheated and she was unable to think of any way to cheat back.
The crisis in the parking lot was altered by the sudden appearance of Mr. Tolliver, headmaster of the school Frederic more or less attended. Having learned during lunch hour that the surf was up, Mr. Tolliver shrewdly connected this information with the large number of absentees that morning. As a result he was patrolling the beach areas,
armed with a pair of well-used binoculars and an officer’s swagger stick left over from his Canadian army days.
Frederic Quinn was his first trophy. The boy was given a swat on the behind with the swagger stick and the promise of two hundred demerits. He was then locked in what the students called the cop cage, the rear of the school station wagon separated from the driver’s seat by heavy canvas webbing.
Frederic proved a docile prisoner. He was tired, for one thing, and consequently, running short of ideas. For another, the new batch of demerits put him one hundred and fifteen ahead of Bingo Firenze for the current school championship. This was not a paltry achievement, in view of Bingo’s superior age and connections with the Mafia, and Frederic leaned back smiling in anticipation of a hero’s welcome.
Mr. Tolliver peered at his trophy through the canvas webbing. “Well, Quinn, what have you got to say for yourself?”
“Mea culpa.”
“So you are admitting your guilt.”
“Nolo contendere,” Frederic said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve already been punished.”
“That’s what you think, kiddo.”
The hundred-dollar bill was still in Cordelia’s handbag, much to her disappointment. She didn’t need the money as much as she needed the attention she would have gotten if the bill had been missing. She thought of all the excitement, cops arriving at the club with sirens wailing, Henderson rounding up the employees for questioning, newsmen, photographers, maybe even an ambulance if she could have managed to faint . . .
“Oh hell, it’s right where I left it.”
Cordelia climbed into the back seat of the Rolls-Royce for the second time that day while her father said his second courteous farewells to Mr. Henderson and Ellen. He also wished them a Happy Thanksgiving, adding a little joke about turkeys which Ellen didn’t understand and Henderson didn’t hear.
“Thanksgiving is more than a month away,” Henderson said as the Rolls moved majestically into the street. “Was he being sarcastic, do you suppose? If he was, I should have countered with something about Pearl Harbor. ‘Happy Pearl Harbor to you, Admiral.’ That’s what I should have said . . . Speaking of turkeys, which I hadn’t planned on doing and don’t want to, you’d better have the catering manager come to the office to discuss the Thanksgiving menu. Thanksgiving. My God, I’m still recuperating from Labor Day and the Fourth of July. Will I make it to Christmas? Will I, Ellen?”
“I don’t know,” Ellen said.
“And you don’t care, either. I hear it in your voice, that I-don’t-care note. It’s cruel.”
“Sorry. But there’ve been so many managers, Mr. Henderson. I’d have been done in years ago if I’d allowed myself to care. I must maintain the proper emotional distance.”
“Don’t give me that crap.”
“You asked for it.”
Admiral Cooper Young lived with his wife, Iris, and the girls in a massive stone house on what had once been the most fashionable street in town.
The ride home was short and silent. It was only toward the end that Cordelia spoke in an uncharacteristically gloomy voice: “Mrs. Young’s not going to like this. She might even force us to give the money back to her.”
“She can’t if we won’t,” Juliet said. “And let’s not. Let’s stand fast.”
“She’ll think of something. You know the mean way she stops payment on checks.”
“This isn’t like that. It’s hard cash. Good as gold. Coin of the realm. And we can hide it in our bras.”
“Even so . . . Pops, we don’t really have to go home yet, do we?”
“Yes, girls, I think we do.” The Admiral cleared his throat. “You see, your exclusion from the club was intended to teach you a lesson, and you can’t be taught a lesson without suffering a bit.”
“Oh, I hate suffering,” Juliet said passionately. “It makes me throw up. If I throw up in the car, plus we arrive home three hours early, Mrs. Young will be really mad.”
“Now, now, now. Don’t borrow trouble, girls. Your mother will be just as glad to see you as she usually is.”
And she was.
“I told you two to stay at the club until five o’clock,” Iris Young said. “What happened?”
Cordelia answered first. “We got bounced.”
“Dishonorably discharged,” Juliet added.
“For conduct unbecoming.”
Iris banged her cane on the floor. A tall athletic woman in her younger days, she was now stooped and misshapen. Her broad sallow face seldom changed expression and the hump she carried between her shoulder blades was a backpack of resentments that grew heavier each year.
She looked at her husband not in order to see him but to make sure he was seeing her and her displeasure. “You didn’t have to bring them home, Cooper. You could have dropped them off at the zoo.”
“We were at the zoo yesterday,” Juliet said. “What’s so great about being stared at by a bunch of animals?”
“The object of going to a zoo is to stare at the animals.”
“You taught us not to stare because it’s impolite. We never ever stare, do we, Cordelia?”
“Oh God,” Iris said, but as usual He wasn’t paying any attention.
The girls finally went out to the kitchen to make some butterscotch coconut pecan cookies and Iris was left alone with her husband in the small bright room she used both as an office and a refuge.
Here Iris spent most of her time with her books and stereo, a tiny champagne-colored poodle, Alouette, and an assortment of miniature chess sets. She played chess by mail with people she’d met in other parts of the world: a diplomat’s wife in Bogotá, a medical missionary assigned to a hospital in Jakarta, a professor at the University of Tokyo, a petroleum engineer in Tabriz. She wasn’t completely crippled and could have gone places if she’d wanted to, but she’d already been everywhere and her increasing deafness made communication with strangers difficult.
She sat by the window with the elderly poodle in her lap, leaning toward the sun as if its rays could rejuvenate both of them.
“Cooper.”
“Yes, Iris.”
“The girls aren’t improving.”
“I don’t believe they are.”
“Can’t we do something, anything? I’ve been reading in the newspapers and magazines about vitamin E. Do you suppose if we put some in their food—?”
“No.”
“We could give it a try, couldn’t we?”
“No, I think not.”
The little dog began to whimper in his sleep. Iris patted his woolly head and whispered in his ear, “Wake up, Alouette. Nothing’s wrong, it’s only a dream.”
Cooper listened, sighing, wishing nothing was wrong, it was only a dream. Even the dog wasn’t fooled. He woke up with a snort and cast a melancholy look around the room. He had eyes like bitter chocolate.
“Did you say something, Cooper?”
“No.”
“I thought I heard—”
“No.”
“We hardly ever talk these days.”
“It’s difficult to find anything new to say.” And to say it loudly enough and enunciate clearly enough. “Iris, you promised me you’d ask the doctor about a hearing aid. I hate to press the point.”
“Then don’t.”
He didn’t. Besides the fact that he knew further argument would be useless, the Admiral was not combative on a person-to-person level. When his wife and the girls started fighting he got as far away as he could, usually withdrawing to his tiny hideaway in the bell tower, reached by a ladder which Iris couldn’t climb and filled with squeals and scurryings which intimidated the girls. Here, where a century ago there had been a bell to proclaim peace and good will, the Admiral sat and planned wars.
They were not the ordinary kind found in history books.
They were small interesting gentlemen’s wars played under the old rules, captain against captain, plane against plane. And when they ended they left no poverty or desolation or bitterness. Everyone simply rallied round and got ready for the next one. A few people had to die, of course, but when they did, it was bravely, almost apologetically: “Sorry to let you down, old chap. I must—go—now—”
He didn’t tell his wife about these private little wars. She was too serious. A mere look from her could cripple a tank or send a platoon into disorderly retreat or bring down a plane. Iris would be no fun in battle—she would insist on winning.
“Are you paying attention to me, Cooper?”
“Certainly, certainly I am.”
“My brother Charles called to wish you a happy birthday. Is it your birthday?”
“No.”
“Good. I didn’t buy you anything . . . Charles must have had some reason for calling. Perhaps it’s his birthday and this was a subtle way of reminding me. Would you check the birthday book in the top drawer of my desk?”
The desk, like the other furniture in the room, was an antique. Iris had no real interest in antiques. She’d bought the house furnished when Cooper retired because she and Cooper had never lived more than a couple of years in one place and it pleased her to own a house that looked and felt and even smelled ancestral.
Cooper said, “Is Charles listed under Charles or Van Eyck?”
“Van Eyck.”
“Yes. Here it is. His birthday’s next week, he’ll be seventy-five.”
“So I was right. He meant the phone call as a hint. Well, perhaps we should celebrate in some way, since he probably won’t be around much longer. What do you think of a small dinner party?”
Cooper thought nothing at all of it but he didn’t say so. He knew perfectly well that his opinion was not being asked, Iris was merely talking to herself.
“The trouble with a dinner party is that we’ll have to invite some woman for Charles to escort. He’s alienated so many people, I wonder who’s left. Remember Mrs. Roffman who inherited all that meat money? I haven’t heard of her dying, have you?”
“No.”
“Then she’s probably still alive. We could try her.”
“Mrs. Roffman is nearly eighty. Charles prefers younger women.”
The Murder of Miranda Page 4
