Hastings nodded. “That’s right.”
“That’s not to say, however, that if all your financial problems were to be solved, you’d immediately get married.” It was really a question, not a statement. Hastings’ silence was his answer: Yes, there was more than merely money to consider.
“However,” Briscoe said, in the manner of an after-dinner speaker finally coming to the conclusion of a long speech, “however, taking things one point at a time, what I’m building up to is this: Except for a check I gave her when she got married, while that asshole Haywood was still doing his residency—and she was supporting him, incidentally, teaching—I’ve never given Ann a cent. One reason is that she’s never asked. She’s proud, as you know—proud like you’re proud, I suspect. She figures she made a mistake, marrying Haywood, and she feels she has to do penance. And I, for my part, have never believed that money should be thrown at adjustment problems. Not my money, anyhow. Until I was forty years old, as I think you know, I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I was, literally, a starving artist. Or, more precisely, a starving sculptor. Which is to say that I have a deep, abiding respect for the power of money. Or, more precisely, I know what the lack of money can do, how it can shrivel the soul. Which is actually the reason I’m here—” Deliberately, he let a beat pass, for emphasis. Then: “I’m here because I want to buy a house for Ann. I want to buy her a good house, something for say, two hundred fifty thousand. Also, I’m going to offer to pick up the college expenses for her kids. The reason I’ve decided to do it is that I want to give her a little freedom of movement. I don’t want her to have to worry about money, not when I’ve got a lot more than I need. I don’t want her to have to make her decisions based on money—or, more properly, the lack of money. Do you see?”
“Yes,” Hastings answered. “Yes, I see.”
“Do you see why I’m telling you this, Frank?”
“I think so, yes.”
Briscoe turned his eyes from the other man’s face, and they rode for a time in silence, each man looking at the road ahead. Finally, clearing his throat, Briscoe said, “I was forty years old when my wife decided she didn’t want to be married to me any longer. I’m sixty-six now. That’s twenty-six years. There hasn’t been a day during those twenty-six years, not one single day, that I didn’t wish I was married. Not to my wife. I don’t mean that. When she said she was leaving—and taking Ann—she became a stranger to me. Instantly. Irrevocably. I just wanted to be married to someone. Anyone. Do you see?”
“You didn’t want to be alone.”
“That’s right. Exactly. I didn’t want to be alone. But, as you know, there’s more to it than that.” Reflectively, he let the unfinished thought linger. Then: “It’s a lot of things—sex, love, commitment. Maybe they’re all the same. Or maybe they’re all different. To be honest, I’ve never known. I do know, though, that even after you think you’ve made the commitment, there’s still the gamble that’s left.”
“The gamble?”
Briscoe nodded. “The gamble. The simple willingness to take a chance, take the risk of deciding, what the hell, you’ll give it a shot. Which—” Meaningfully, he paused, turning again to face Hastings. “Which is why we’re having this little talk.” A last moment of silence. Then: “Do you see?”
“Yes.” In acknowledgment, Hastings turned briefly, squarely meeting the other man’s gaze. “Yes. I see.”
Twenty
HASTINGS SLIPPED OUT OF his bathrobe and laid it on a chair. He took off his slippers and put them under his side of the bed. He pulled back the window drapery, made sure the window was open a few inches down from the top, as Ann liked it Then, in the darkness, he stepped to the bed. She’d turned the covers, as she always did. Only once, after they’d argued bitterly, had she failed to turn down the bed for him. Standing where he stood now, he’d debated sleeping on the couch in the living room that night. He’d always been glad that he hadn’t done it.
He slid into the bed, arranged the pillow beneath his head, stretched out his legs between the sheets, touching the footboard with his toes. He felt Ann stir, move closer. She’d been asleep—half asleep, drowsing, waiting for him to come to bed. It was Saturday night. Almost always, on Saturday nights, they made love.
He turned toward her, touched her hair with his fingertips, lightly caressed her cheek, her neck.
Hmmm …
Her body was subtly, languorously quickening. She was turning on her side, to face him. A shaft of pale light from the window fell across her face, nestled companionably in the pillow. Her finespun tawny hair was as soft as a halo. Her eyes came open; her lips curved in a small, drowsy smile.
He moved closer, felt her responding. His genitals were tightening, desire was rising, slowly suffusing him.
“It’s Saturday night,” she whispered, touching the line of his jaw. The smile widened mischievously. “I always know when it’s Saturday night.”
“You too?”
Intimately, she nodded. “Me too.”
As she said it, he realized that they hadn’t made love since last Saturday. Had they settled into a schedule, the once-a-week sex schedule that afflicted most married couples?
“Aren’t you tired, though?” she whispered. “You’ve been up since—when—four-thirty this morning.”
“I thought I’d be tired,” he murmured, “but I’m not. We went to bed early last night. Remember?” As he talked, he realized that the urgency of the need he felt for her was slowly subsiding. It always happened, when they talked before they made love. But the urgency could be rekindled with a single caress, a single touch of his body to hers. So, sometimes, talk could become part of their foreplay, allowing passion to linger.
She felt it too; she was drawing slightly away. It wasn’t a denial, but instead a confirmation of confidence that, yes, only a touch was required to bring them fast together, straining flesh to flesh.
“Dad likes you,” she said. “When I drove him to his hotel, we talked. He said he told you he wanted to buy a house for me.”
“Are you going to let him do it?”
“I told him I’d think about it, that I’d call him in a few days. What d’you think? Should I let him do it?”
“Would there be any strings? Would he actually give it to you, actually give you the title? Or would he really own it, and give it to you rent-free?”
“It doesn’t make any difference. I’m his only heir.”
“An heiress …” He smiled when he said it. But, immediately, he felt the smile stiffen, then fade.
His second heiress—an ex-wife and a lover, both heiresses. Was it a pattern? Did he unconsciously—?
“What’s wrong?” she asked. But, even as she asked the question, he sensed that, intuitively, she knew.
He felt her move close, felt her breasts on his chest, felt her thighs pressing his thighs. Boldly, her arms circled his waist, urgently drawing his body hard upon hers.
With her lips moving against the hollow of his neck and shoulder she whispered, “You think too much. Especially for a Saturday night.”
Twenty-one
KATHERINE DROPPED A QUARTER into the slot, waited for the tone, then dialed. Wade’s line was busy. She glanced at the clock above the Pan Am counter. She had five minutes before her mother’s plane arrived. She broke the connection, opened the door of the phone booth, leaned against the booth’s glass wall. She would try again in two or three minutes.
She watched the steady Saturday-night stream of humanity passing the bank of telephone booths. Some were walking toward the boarding gates, others walked away, bound for the baggage carousels or the parking lots or the airporter buses. Many of the arriving passengers walked arm-in-arm: parents who had met their children, wives with their husbands, lovers with lovers. As she watched them through the glass partition she remembered another phone booth, in another city, at another time in her life. The place had been Wilshire Boulevard. The time had been Christmas Eve, just before she’d married David. It w
ould be her second marriage, a marriage without passionate love, a marriage without money, a marriage meant to ease the ache of loneliness, dull the cruel edge of a mother’s guilt, raising a child in a home without a husband. She’d just turned thirty, divorced from Richard for three years. On that Christmas Eve, Maxine, age five, had been with her father in Michigan. It had been raining on the day before Christmas. But the passersby had been cheerful, hurrying along Wilshire. Just as, tonight, the faces she saw were cheerful. She’d been trying to call David, who was still working. He’d been filming an “emergency take,” he’d told her later, a commercial for Ritz Crackers. They’d planned to spend Christmas Eve together, and Christmas day.
Poor, vulnerable David. He was so sweet, really—so achingly sweet, so incredibly vulnerable. But, like most actors, there was so little behind the handsome face, so little beneath the surface. He’d never been a really good actor. And he’d never been devious enough or tough enough to conceal a lack of talent, as so many did. David was a loser.
But he’d loved her.
God, how he’d loved her, needed her. At first she’d lied to him, told him that, yes, she loved him. And sometimes she thought that, yes, she really did. But always the truth had returned, disturbing the smooth surface of her easy self-deception, and she realized that it was the touch of him that sometimes excited her, nothing more.
She glanced at the clock again, dialed again, heard the phone ring twice before Jeff answered.
“Hello?”
“Jeff.”
“Yes.” He spoke guardedly, tensely.
“Did they come by?”
“The lieutenant did. Hastings. Can you talk?”
“Yes. I’m at the airport, in a phone booth. What time did he come by?”
“About three, three-thirty.”
“Did he—” She couldn’t say suspect anything, couldn’t say something that sounded so trite, so theatrical. “What’d he say?”
“Just about what we thought he’d say. He asked about—us. Asked about the evening, about when you arrived, when you left.”
“How’d it—it seem to you? Did he—” Instinctively, she lowered her voice, moved her mouth closer to the phone. “Did he believe you, believe what you told him?”
“How should I know?” In his voice, she heard a plaintive note. It was, she realized, the same note she’d heard so often in David’s voice. They were similar, the actor and the real estate man. Her present lover and her past husband were essentially the same, both losers. Except that David was a sweet, sensitive loser. Jeff could be vicious.
“Katherine, I want something for this. You know what I mean.”
“I know. I know you do.” Could he hear the contempt in her voice—the contempt, and the caution, too? She needed him, needed him badly. And he knew it.
“Another one, a detective, has been around here, all evening. He’s been talking to the neighbors.”
“Which one? Do you know his name?”
“No.”
“I’d better hang up. I’ll call you tomorrow, if I can. But you call me tomorrow too. Just to talk. Like you’d be expected to do.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got to meet my mother.”
“Yes.”
Twenty-two
“HAVE THEY CAUGHT HIM YET?”
“Yes,” Katherine answered, braking the Mercedes to let an airporter bus into the on-ramp flow of freeway traffic. “They caught him just a few blocks away, robbing another house. I identified him, this afternoon.”
“What’ll you do now?”
“I’m just taking it one day at a time, Mother—one hour at a time, really. There’s the—the funeral. I’ve got to get through that, first. Then there’s the will. I’ve got to find out about the will.”
“Do you know about it—about the will, about the provisions for you?”
Hearing her mother’s voice more sharply focused, Katherine winced. This was a subject that, as the cliché went, her mother could relate to. Until now, conversation between them had been strained. Matters of grief, or the appearance of grief, had always discomfited her mother. Matters of money were something else.
“Did James adopt Maxine?”
“No. Richard would never have let him do it, even if James had been willing. Which he wasn’t.”
“Where’s Richard now?”
“He’s in England. His company sent him to London, to start an advertising agency there, a branch agency.”
“He’s doing very well, then. He’s just your age, thirty-six.” It was a thoughtful statement, a calculated assessment. Katherine knew, precisely, why her mother had said it. Considering the present situation, and factoring in the possibility that there’d be nothing in James’ will for her, and also considering her first husband’s success in the lucrative field of advertising, her mother was obviously wondering whether Katherine had made a tactical error, divorcing Richard.
“Did you and James have a prenuptial agreement?” her mother was asking.
“Yes. I told you that.”
“And you’ve been married—what—three years?”
“Yes.”
“James had—what—two wives, before you?”
“Mother. God—” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears, blurring the freeway traffic ahead. She fumbled in her purse, finally found a Kleenex. She blinked away the tears, pressed the Kleenex to her nose. “All you’ve been doing is asking me these—these questions. Can’t you see I don’t know about the will? And I don’t care, either. Not about the money. Not now. All day—ever since five o’clock this morning, I’ve been answering questions. While James was still lying there, dead at the bottom of the stairs, the police were questioning me. And I—I—” She shook her head, blew her nose, threw the Kleenex on the floor of the car. Realizing that she’d done it, thrown the dirty tissue on the floor, she knew that she was losing control. Because if she weren’t losing control, she never would have—
“—just trying to help, Katherine,” her mother was saying. “Naturally, I’m concerned.”
Just trying to help …
How long had it taken? How many minutes had it taken for them to sink into this inexorable mother-and-daughter dialogue that inevitably ended in the same petulant phrase: just trying to help? Did her mother realize how clearly, how cruelly, the questions she asked revealed the distance between them?
Now the second phase would begin. Having registered her disapproval, her mother would make a martyr’s fresh start. Her voice, her manner would change. Instead of the querulous, misunderstood mother, she would now play the part of the patient, long-suffering parent, doing her maternal duty:
“I understand, of course, that you’re upset, Katherine. But the point is that there’re arrangements to be made. There’s the funeral. There’ll be expenses, for that—and expenses for other things, too. And you’ve simply got to face up to them. Now. Right now. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. When Gardner died, it took the lawyers a year, to untangle things—one whole year. And the expenses went on. The estate was tied up, but the expenses went on. And you could be faced with the same thing, the very same thing. James was a high roller, one of those larger-than-life types. And I’ll bet you’ll find, Katherine, when you start digging, that he was involved in a lot of things you never knew about, a lot of things that could get very, very tangled up. I always had the feeling that, with James, there were wheels within wheels. And I’ll bet that …”
Concentrating on the task of guiding the Mercedes through the freeway traffic, she let her thoughts slip away.
Wheels within wheels …
Bitterly, secretly, she smiled.
“Yes, Mother,” she should say. “You’re right. Absolutely right. James was a wheels-within-wheels type, no question. Your instincts are right. Absolutely right. With luck, you’ll never know how right you are. For instance, did you know that he was a pervert? Did you know that ordinary sex was never enough for him? Have you got cable TV, mother? Do you watch
the Playboy Channel? If you do, then you know the kinds of games James played. And I played them, too, at first. He’d dream up his little scenarios, and I’d go along. Did you ever have to do that, Mother? You married for money, just like I married for money. Three times, you married for money. Doesn’t that make us whores, Mother? Isn’t that the name for women like us, women who go along, who even use props, sometimes, if that’s what their rich, successful husbands want?
“Maybe, when we get home, Mother, I’ll show you some of the props. Or maybe I won’t. We’re from different generations, you and I. Different things were required from you, from your generation. After all, you didn’t have the Playboy Channel, or dirty movies, downtown. So how could you …”
“… have a lawyer, Katherine?” her mother was asking. “A good lawyer?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Yes, Mother …
It was also part of the echoing and reechoing past: the withdrawn, resentful daughter, barely tolerating an intrusive mother. Would she soon hear the same note in Maxine’s voice? Would she soon see that blankness of withdrawal in Maxine’s eyes?
It was a circle, endlessly turning. It was a merry-go-round of life. Each section of the merry-go-round was marked off, each seat was reserved. There was a section reserved for servants and slaves. And there was another section for …
“… you talked to your lawyer yet?”
“No, Mother. Not yet. I’ve been talking to policemen, most of the day. I told you that. I’ve been down to police headquarters. And they’re still at the house. I forgot to tell you that. There’s police guarding the house.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe they’re worried about the murderer having a gang, or something.” She spoke absently, turning her attention to the traffic, thickening as they came closer to San Francisco.
Night Games (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries) Page 12
