He Huffed and He Puffed

by Barbara Paul

  “Of course I don’t like it. But it is the only specific suggestion that’s been made.”

  Jack looked from me to Richard and back to me again. “Are you people crazy? You’re sitting here calmly discussing murder, for the love of heaven! Is that what Strode has on you? Are you murderers?”

  “I’m a violinist,” I snapped.

  Richard looked surprised. “Violinist?”

  Jack threw his arms up in disgust. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bruce! Castleberry told you she was Joanna Gillespie. You didn’t recognize the name? She’s only the most famous violinist in the world. The world’s best! Jesus.”

  Richard gave me a crooked grin. “Pleased to meet you.”

  I shrugged. “Jack—come up with a better idea if you don’t like that one. Don’t just yell.”

  All the air seemed to go out of him. “Hey, forget all that, will you? I was just running off at the mouth. Look, I don’t seem to be handling this as well as you two. I need a little more time to adjust, okay? Richard, I’m sorry. Jo, I’m sorry.” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “God, I’m sorry. Did I overlook anyone? But I think we’d better forget about killing Strode.” He suddenly grinned. “For one thing, I didn’t have the foresight to bring a loaded gun with me.”

  “I did,” I said. The other two stared at me. I explained how I’d been able to stop Strode’s bullying in Pittsburgh by waving a gun at him. “I thought I might be able to do it again … and maybe scare him into returning the evidence. I never dreamed he wouldn’t even be here.”

  “Where’s the gun now?” Richard asked.

  “Hidden in my room.”

  “When was the last time you saw it? Before dinner or after?”

  Now it was my turn to stare. “You think someone may have taken it?”

  “I think we’d better find out. Somebody had to go into our rooms to leave those envelopes, remember. The security guard, probably.”

  Richard recovered his jacket from where he’d tossed it over the television camera and we all hurried up to my room. The minute I picked up the throw pillow on the window seat I knew the automatic was no longer there, but I unzipped the case and checked anyway; I checked the other three pillows as well. “It’s not here,” I told the men. “That means either our rooms were searched while we were at dinner, or Castleberry lied when he said there were no cameras in the guest rooms. I just took his word for it.”

  “Somebody else’s word we took without question,” Jack pointed out. “The security guard’s, when he said the cameras weren’t sound cameras. He could have been listening to every word we’ve said.”

  Richard turned and started out of the room. “Jack, come with me. Jo, you stay here.” Without waiting for an answer, he was gone.

  Jack gave me a strained smile. “I do believe our Mr. Bruce likes giving orders.” He left, not exactly hurrying.

  Only a few minutes passed before the phone in my room rang; it was Jack. “We have stormed the citadel and all is secure,” he said cheerfully. “The guard was telling the truth, bless his incorruptible little hide. The cameras are video only. The only sound recorder is for the mike in the conference room, like he said. They only watch for burglars in this house, not listen for them.” He lowered his voice. “Whatever you do, Jo, don’t get Richard Bruce mad at you. Jesus, you should have seen the way he put the fear of God into the guard—whew. He had that man trembling in his boots.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Outside in the hallway.” His voice went back up to its normal pitch and volume. “Castleberry did indeed fib about there being no cameras in the guest rooms, the naughty boy. I’m looking at you right now. What we want you to do, Jo, is to go into every room along that hall while I check the monitors. We need an unmonitored room, if there is one.”

  I hung up the phone, walked into the room across the hall, and picked up that phone. “I’m in your room.”

  “I see you. Keep going.”

  I kept going. There wasn’t one unmonitored room on that floor. The cameras were so well concealed I couldn’t spot any of them.

  “Well, well,” Jack’s voice said over the phone in the last room. “It seems our congenial host doesn’t trust any of his—hold on a sec.” I could hear voices in the background. “The security guard took your gun. He says that’s what the cameras in the guest rooms are for, to watch for someone bringing a weapon into the house, and doesn’t that tell you something about our host.”

  “Where is it? My gun?”

  More muttering in the background. “Castleberry took it with him when he left.”

  “Oh great.”

  “Yeah. Hang loose, we’re coming up.”

  They brought the security guard up with them and made him show us where the cameras were located in each of our rooms. Mine was concealed behind the ceiling molding directly over my bed. It couldn’t swivel like the cameras in the hallway and downstairs, but the way it was angled it had a perfect view of the window seat. It turned out there were cameras in the bathrooms too. That jerk of a guard had watched me take a shower.

  “Your job must be voyeur’s heaven,” Jack said wonderingly. “Is there anyplace in this house you can’t watch?”

  “Mr. Strode’s bedroom suite,” the guard said, “over in the other wing. And his upstairs library—that’s in the other wing too.”

  “Are you sure there’s only one camera in each of the guest rooms?” Richard asked softly.

  “Yessir, honest to god, Mr. Bruce, only one.” The guard looked scared; what on earth had Richard said to him?

  “Cover them up,” Richard ordered.

  The guard practically ran down the stairs and was soon back with little squares of cardboard that he taped over the various lenses in our rooms. “Is there anything else, Mr. Bruce?”

  “No, go back to your post.” The guard bumped into Jack in his haste to get out.

  We were then in Richard’s room. “Since you seem to have him so well housebroken,” I said, “why not just order him to turn off the cameras?”

  Richard smiled, a little. “Would you trust him not to take a peek now and then? No, that wouldn’t work. And we can’t throw him out. He’d go straight to the police. Right now the thing he’s worrying about most is that Strode will find out how easily intimidated he was. He won’t give us any trouble.”

  We talked until four in the morning. Plan after plan was suggested, examined, discarded. It seemed to me the only way we had of getting Strode off our backs for good was to get something damning on him—make it up, if we had to. But the other two kept saying there wasn’t enough time for that, and the arguments went on. Jack had the annoying habit of drumming with his fingers when he was trying to think. Once when it got especially irritating I started whistling the Poet and Peasant overture to match the rhythm of his drumming and he finally stopped. But it didn’t help; none of us could come up with a feasible plan. Almost everything anyone suggested hinged in some way on Castleberry, and Castleberry wasn’t answering his phone. We’d called at midnight, at one, at two, at three. We left no message.

  When we’d finally talked ourselves into a state of exhaustion, we called it quits for the night. I was reeling with fatigue and ate a little packet of cheese crackers I’d brought with me; I should have eaten more dinner. I barely managed to get my clothes off before collapsing on the bed.

  But I couldn’t fall asleep—surprise, surprise. I was in that condition of mixed exhaustion and anxiety that makes sleep impossible. All the images of the day kept running through my head like a piece of looped film. And hovering over it all like a black shadow was the man in whose house I now lay. Who was this A. J. Strode who’d brought me to this state of affairs? Who’d brought me to my knees.

  Strode was only a year or two older than my father would be if he were still alive; I’d always had trouble with men of that generation. They were so eager to tell me what to do, and they all took it for granted they had the right to do so. I’d fired my first manager when he started t
aking that damned paternalistic attitude toward me; the last thing in the world I needed was another father. In a way, my real father handed me to A. J. Strode on a platter. From the time I was a baby, he was unknowingly setting me up for what was happening now.

  Even if I’d understood what was going on at the time, I still couldn’t have gone to someone and claimed child abuse, not as it was understood at that time. He never beat me in his life. He never touched me where he shouldn’t, and he never asked me to touch him. But on my fifth birthday I learned how boys were different from girls. I learned, because he showed me. He’d had an enormous erection, and he solemnly informed me that what men wanted most in the world was to shove that huge thing up inside little girls like me. I was too scared even to cry. He told me I could never trust any man except himself. He was sick, of course, but a five-year-old doesn’t know that.

  Almost every day he told me I’d never have anybody who loved me as much as he did. The second half of the ritual was for me to tell him how much I loved him, and I found the way to avoid a lecture was to fake an enthusiasm I came to feel less and less. I had to pay for everything I got with a kiss or a hug, good basic training for prostitution. I learned all the nuances of gratitude and when to express which ones. Winning his approval was to be the one and only goal of my life. When I’d go to Mother and try to articulate what was wrong, she’d reply with Do what your father says, dear or You’re lucky to have a father who loves you.

  So I was to be Daddy’s girl all my life; that was his plan for me. It was the music that saved me, the music I heard other people making and that I eventually learned to make myself. He sometimes grew irritated that I spent so much time practicing, but he never seriously interfered with my “little hobby.” My mother never hesitated to interrupt a practice session, though, whenever she felt I needed one of those rest periods she’d long since decided were essential to my health and well-being. Mother was basically a lazy woman, and the role of diabetic invalid suited her. But it wouldn’t do to have a daughter suffering from the same ailment seen to be physically active; that would cast some doubt on the authenticity of her performance. I’m sure Mother never thought any of these things consciously; selfish people are quite gifted at self-deception.

  But enforced quiescence was the order of the day. How I hated those rest periods! I quickly learned to smuggle sheets of music into bed with me; if I couldn’t practice, I could at least memorize. At age ten I started asking them to let me go to the New England Conservatory for advanced instruction. But you’re a sick girl, said Mother. They’ll eat you alive, said Father. It took two years of constant nagging to get them to say yes, two years of my life I still consider wasted. Then when at seventeen I announced I intended to go to Juilliard and pursue a career in music, Father had a heart attack.

  It was a mild attack, but a genuine one. In the hospital he told me I wouldn’t last a month “out there” and, besides, it was my duty to stay home and nurse him now that he was ill. I suggested that was more properly Mother’s role, and he told me straight to my face that I would live longer than my mother and thus would be more useful to him. We had words that quickly escalated into a shouting match until a horrified nurse threw me out of the hospital room.

  I left; I made my break. I worked like a dog, although it seems sinful to call something that exhilarating work. I met people and found I could talk to them. I made mistakes, and recovered from them. I learned there were men in the world who could be trusted in spite of what dear old Dad had told me on my fifth birthday (and repeated endlessly thereafter), and I thoroughly enjoyed that particular learning process. Sometimes I had to wonder whether my father’s sex life had ever known the element of just plain fun; what had happened to him to make him so warped?

  I made my Carnegie Hall début; and when I went out on my first concert tour, I found myself being treated with respect. I started playing with the great orchestras and making records and appearing on television, and then woke up one morning to find myself a full-blown celebrity. I went from almost total isolation to being surrounded by mobs of people—and I loved it.

  My parents were puzzlingly kind during all this, until I found out they looked upon my career as some sort of temporary aberration from the norm and were simply being patient until I came to my senses and returned home. Being patient. Several times Father tried to talk me into donating all my earnings to one charity or another, not out of any eleemosynary instincts of his own but because he wanted to be the source of all I had in the world. Mother became more passive and helpless every year; she’d even ask someone the time rather than exert the effort of turning her head to look at the clock. Still, there was a kind of peace between us; it would do.

  Then everything happened at once. Father developed diabetes, and emphysema on top of it. Mother was diagnosed as nephritic, and her doctor told me she was not a good candidate for a kidney transplant. Mother went to bed and never got up again. Then Father had his second heart attack.

  This one was worse than the first. Father had never been one to deny himself; he’d grown quite stout, he reeked of tobacco, and he always had a drink in his hand. When at last he was able to go home from the hospital, he sat me down and told me what was going to happen. The nurses who were taking care of the two of them were all fine girls, but they weren’t family. It was time for me to stop flitting around all over the world and settle down and do my duty. I could still play my violin at home if I wanted to, so long as neither of them was sleeping at the time. He pointed out that I wouldn’t be playing the violin at all if he hadn’t paid for all those expensive lessons out of his own pocket; I should welcome the opportunity to even things out. But the point was, playtime was over. And if I didn’t face up to my responsibilities, he’d make sure every newspaper in the country learned that the oh-so-wonderful Joanna Gillespie was leaving her fatally ill parents to die alone in neglect while she was out having a good time.

  My mother never asked me to give up my career to stay home and take care of them. She simply took it for granted that that was what I would do.

  And A. J. Strode thought I killed them for money.

  5

  JACK MCKINSTRY, SATURDAY:

  I tell you, A. J. Strode is some kind of sweetheart, he is. First he grinds you down so there’s not enough left of you to get back up again. Then when you gradually begin to accept ground-downness as a tolerable state of affairs after all and even start to feel a kind of relief that it’s over, that’s when he steps in and really pulverizes you. It ain’t over ’til it’s over, Jack.

  Money money money money, it do indeed make the world go round, yes it do. There was no way I was going to talk the other two into letting me be the one to sell to Strode, so I was quick to propose the three-musketeers routine. Joanna Gillespie likes me; I could tell from the once-over she gave me when we met. But not that much. I suspect Jo’s not exactly the self-sacrificing-female type. And Richard Bruce obviously likes to think of himself as a take-charge kind of guy; he sort of reminds me of A. J. Strode. Nope, the only way I was going to get out of this was to have those two working to save my hide along with their own. One for all and all for whatever.

  About six in the morning I had to get up and pee; I was heading back to bed when I heard voices across the hall. I looked out and saw one of the maids taking a pitcher of orange juice into Jo’s room. I’d forgotten Joanna Gillespie was a diabetic, but her body hadn’t and she’d had some kind of reaction. The maid was hovering over Jo’s bed, not knowing what to do; I went in and shooed her away. Jo wasn’t looking too good, so I sat with her and held her hand. She had long, slender fingers with the filed-down nails that all string players have. Jo was a little twitchy at first but eventually calmed enough to fall asleep. Luckily I can sleep anywhere; I spent what was left of the night in a chair by her bed so I’d be the first thing she saw when she woke up. A couple of hours later she was awake and saying she felt fine. I gave her a quick hug and left her alone. Timing is everything.

&n
bsp; As a result of that little episode in the wee hours, Jo and I both had circles under our eyes when we met for breakfast. She greeted me by reaching out and gently squeezing my forearm. (Progress!) Then Richard Bruce came striding in, marching as if he were leading a military parade. He looked exactly the same as he’d looked at dinner the night before; only the color of his suit was different. Yep, he wore a suit and tie to Saturday morning breakfast, yes he did. I was willing to bet he posed for pictures with his jacket hooked on a thumb over one shoulder to show what a regular fella he was.

  The take-charge guy took charge. “We ought to do a little exploring,” he said over coffee. “The security guard said the only parts of this house not covered by cameras are Strode’s bedroom suite and a private library. We’d better take a look at them.”

  I sighed. “You don’t think he’d keep all that evidence here, Richard, you know you don’t. So why bother?”

  “To look for some indication of where he is. If he owns a weekend house in Connecticut, for instance, that might be a good bet.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Jo said. “But what do we do if we find him? We still don’t have any way to force him to turn the evidence over to us.”

  During our marathon talk session the night before, Jo’s favorite plan had been to manufacture some evidence of our own, something to implicate A. J. Strode in dealings so down and dirty that even he wouldn’t be able to claw his way out. The trouble with that was it’d take too much time; Strode had given us a 9:00 P.M. Sunday deadline. But still Jo stuck to the notion that we needed a bigger stick than Strode’s, so run right out and get one, please, Jack.

  “One step at a time,” Richard said. “Let’s see what we can find out first.”

  What we found out was that A. J. Strode kept his bedroom and library doors locked. “His private turf,” I shrugged. “We should have anticipated it.” You should have anticipated it, Richard Knowitall Bruce. “Now what?”