Random Hearts

by Warren Adler

  "The work will do you good, Eddie," the Congressman had said, wearing the appropriate expression for such an occasion, a look of earnest concern.

  "Yes, I believe it will," Edward had agreed.

  "I know it's rough."

  How the hell would he know? Edward wondered. Before, it had been easy to deal with hypocrisy, the little public lies and dissimulations that were the idiom of the political trade. But now that they had spilled over into his inner life, his real life, he could not bear it. A lie was a lie. There were no little lies.

  "If there's anything I can do..." the Congressman had said, winding up the obligatory hearts and flowers and getting back to business. He rattled off a string of suggestions for press releases and bills, ideas to make public impact—his only real objective. Dutifully, Edward took notes, illegible scrawls, but the activity gave him the look of sincere interest.

  "Exposure, Edward. That's the name of the game. A steady drumbeat. Statewide exposure. Get the name out. As long as we've got the frank, let's use it. It's a tenfold advantage over any challenger. Do you read me?"

  "Of course," Edward answered, offering a smile with, he hoped, the light of devotion in his eyes. Lily would have done it better, he thought bitterly. She had certainly proved her prowess on that score.

  Vivien's deduction offered a stunning revelation. Mornings! Perhaps every morning. It was humiliating. Yet it was odd how these crushing events had sharpened the power of their deductive instincts. Too bad he would have to forego the pleasures of revenge. He could not imagine how he might have reacted to the revelation if Lily were alive. Was he capable of murder? And how could she have lived with him under the same roof and gone through the motions of intimacy, while living in a cocoon of hypocrisy and leading him through a maze of falsehoods and contrivances?

  He wondered if all this discovery would have the desired effect on their lives, their future. Was it like cauterizing a wound? It burned, but it did kill the unwholesome bacteria. The cure is in the knowledge. This was essentially their purpose—to know more. There was no way to stop now.

  But acquiring knowledge demanded ingenuity, resourcefulness, and the kind of guile and cleverness that Orson and Lily had displayed. Think like them! Be them. If the trail cooled, what then? He remembered the keys. What did they unlock? Above all, they needed to know that, needed to find their filthy rat's nest.

  How did one begin? He remembered the police detective and forced his memory to recall his name. Then he picked up the phone and dialed police headquarters. Hadn't McCarthy found the key connection in the first place?

  "You'll have to speak up." The voice at the other end was gruff, impatient, remarkably like Vinnie's.

  "Sergeant McCarthy."

  The voice became muffled, fading, inquiring elsewhere. "Mac here?"

  The pause was short, and the voice returned in force.

  "He's off duty. Want to leave a message?"

  He gave his name and number by rote, regretting it instantly, then rationalizing. It was not as if he would be talking to a stranger.

  He sat in his office and stared at a blank page in his typewriter. His thoughts were disjointed, like flashing lights. He felt lightheaded, slightly foolish. All this is beyond my range of understanding, he decided.

  "Tell me how you feel," Vivien had demanded earlier, just before he got out of the car. The shame of it had released a blush of hot blood, blotching his skin with little red hives.

  "Like a damned fool."

  "Me, too," she had said, as if she knew how much he needed her reassuring echo.

  Jan Peters came in and she sat down.

  "I think you've got lots of courage to start work so soon after..." She paused respectfully. "Shows real class."

  "Thank you," he said, typing "quick brown fox" repetitively, feeling her eyes, watchful, mooning with mothering.

  "I just want you to know you have a friend in old Jan," she said in a throaty whisper.

  "I appreciate that," he said, not looking up.

  "Someone to confide in." She leaned over and touched his arm. "I mean it, Edward."

  He nodded, not wanting to create a scene.

  "Remember that, Edward."

  "I need lots of space now," he said, turning to face her. He knew her offer was sincere.

  "She was everything to you, wasn't she?"

  "Just about."

  It occurred to him that he must dissimulate, live the role of the grieving husband. Only with Viv could he truly be himself.

  "It's dangerous to let someone be everything."

  He felt their office relationship disintegrating, and he fought off the attempt at intimacy. Yet she was so utterly, undeniably female, physically, symbolically as well, underscoring his pathetic ignorance about the entire gender. Who are these people? He knew nothing about them, he decided, and had learned nothing. The female as a species might have been Martians for all he understood. Lifting his eyes, he inspected her. Perhaps she could provide him with knowledge, insight. Dispel his ignorance.

  "And you?" he asked. He felt like a babe on her knee, a child to a mother.

  "Me?" Her eyes flashed a predatory look.

  "Have you many..." He paused, uncomfortable. He wanted to say lovers. "Boyfriends?"

  "More than a fair share," she answered, and her brows knit suspiciously.

  "Any of them in love with you?" It was, he knew, unthinkable to ask such a question.

  "I hope most of them." She giggled with girlish pride.

  "And you?"

  "Me?" The attempt at coyness was transparent. Learn from this, he urged himself. Trust nothing.

  "I love them all."

  "I'm serious."

  She looked at him, pondering.

  "You really are."

  "I told you."

  She seemed suddenly confused.

  "All right, then. Nobody special."

  "Ever?"

  "What's come over you?"

  "I want to know."

  "Know what?"

  "About women in love," he said, pressing. "I want to know if there ever was anyone who moved you, moved you so profoundly that your judgment became blind. Hurtful."

  "Hurtful?" Her eyes were big saucers, fierce, guarded, wary. "I never deliberately hurt anybody," she protested.

  He could tell he had gotten to her soft center. She grew silent, tossing her hair with a motion of her head. Then the belligerence ebbed.

  "Yes," she said, "I was moved once. For him I would have done anything. I mean anything. Given myself to him, body and soul. I would have died for him. That's what it's all about."

  She stood up. Her pose of sexuality vanished as she exhibited her vulnerability. Actually, he decided, he liked her better this way.

  "And what happened?"

  She looked at him, her lower lip trembling. She seemed to be gathering the shreds of a flimsy pride. "Why do you want to know?"

  "I've been damned nosy," he said. "You don't have to say. I'm just unstrung."

  That part was true. Turning away, he looked out the window. But, oddly eager to show her wounds, she did not wait the decent interval to recover. They either tell too much or not enough, he observed, wondering if there was some universal truth in that. Lily had deliberately kept him in ignorance.

  "It was the sweetest pain I ever felt. Problem is, it's like fire: very hot when it's going, cold when it runs out of fuel. They say such things can come only once in a lifetime, if ever. At least I had that. I've got no regrets."

  He thought about what she had said. Had he ever been willing to die for anybody? Even Lily? Never. He was sure of that.

  He felt her watching him, dreading any counter inquiries from her. None came. Perhaps she has no need to know about me. Maybe men are no mystery to her.

  She ambled off.

  The Congressman returned to the office in the late afternoon. He was irritable and annoyed. All outward concern for Edward's emotional state had vanished.

  Edward handed the Congressman
Harvey Mills's press release.

  "It stinks," he snapped, frowning.

  "I'll spruce it up before I let it go."

  "There's a lot more that needs sprucing up here," the Congressman said, swiveling back in his chair and picking up the phone.

  I may not be a good judge of women, Edward thought, but I know this son of a bitch.

  As always, he stayed late, lifting his head from his typewriter to say good night to the rest of the staff, who left one by one. Even the Congressman poked his head into his office.

  "It'll do you good," he called, placating him. "Get us back on the track." When he had gone, Edward continued to stare at his typewriter. He had not turned the release back to Harvey Mills for a rewrite and hadn't the faintest idea how to "spruce it up."

  Harvey Mills came in. "All right if I check out?" he asked. He looked neater than before. A haircut, that's it, Edward thought. He wants my job. It wasn't paranoia, merely the recognition of a fact. So, his instincts had sharpened. It was a comforting thought. He seemed to have lost all sense of command over himself, over others. There's insight for you, he told himself.

  "Sure, Harvey," he said.

  "The old man like the release?"

  "Loved it. Gets out first thing in the morning."

  It would go as is. The Congressman rarely looked at things again, trusting Edward to get it right.

  Jan came in again, freshly made-up. She was not wearing her coat and had not come in to say good night. He realized suddenly that his earlier conversation had set up an intimacy he had not intended.

  "Buy you a drink?" she asked, reassembled now, her full body puffed to its outer limits. For a moment he contemplated it seriously, assailed by a flash of die old guilt.

  "She's gone, Edward," Jan said.

  "Gone?"

  Actually, he was thinking of Viv, a new ripple for his conscience. It confused him momentarily.

  The phone rang. He picked up the receiver and swiveled away from her. McCarthy's voice crackled over the background noises.

  "There was something I wanted to talk to you about," Edward said.

  "Sure."

  In the pause, the noises grew louder.

  "I'm at The Dubliner, across from Union Station. You know it?"

  It wasn't far. He could cut across the park in front of the Capitol. Pondering, he swiveled and looked at Jan again, still offering herself. No, he decided, she wasn't part of it.

  "I'll be there in fifteen minutes," he said.

  "Maybe sometime." Jan shrugged, unable to conceal her disappointment.

  22

  From a booth in the rear, McCarthy watched Edward squint into layers of smoke and turn his head in a slow arc. The damages were showing now, he thought. The poor bastard had bitten the apple. McCarthy upended his shot glass of Scotch and chased it with a flat beer, just as Edward slid into the booth.

  "What's your poison?"

  He caught the man's indifference to his offer, the indifference of shock. Like a punch-drunk fighter. So the real world had settled back in, but it was not the original reality. Everything had changed.

  "Same as you." Edward shrugged. Another symptom. Decisions were impossible, painful. Judgment had ceased. The man was up shit's creek without a paddle.

  A blowzy waitress brought shot glasses of Scotch and beer chasers. As Edward observed the scene, McCarthy could see it was, for his visitor, a foreign world.

  "The old ethnic tie," McCarthy said. "We Irish always feel uprooted. That's why we need each other."

  Edward followed his gaze. "Like the Italians," he said. "My wife was one."

  "Wops. Kikes. Niggers. Spics. Chinks. The family of man. At least with your own kind you know where you stand."

  "Do you?"

  The man sighed and watched the shot glass, his fingers caressing a metal ashtray. Brooding, McCarthy thought. Understandably. The man's world had closed in on him. Hell, I did what I could for the sad son of a bitch.

  "Make peace with it, man," McCarthy said, knocking back his drink, wiping his lips with his sleeve, then chasing it down with a swallow of beer and wiping again.

  "I'm doing okay," Edward said defensively.

  He didn't look it. McCarthy wondered what the man wanted, but he did not push. It would come. After all, they shared secrets. Not all, but enough to bond them. The Simpson woman was tougher, he decided. Burned the bastard. He liked that. Women were tougher, meaner. They always let men on the ropes. Like Billie. Let your guard down once, and they're all over you, chopping away.

  While waiting, McCarthy had debated a position. He could dispense trite advice which would be utterly worthless, or he could tell him what he had learned, that a woman's betrayal had no known cure. He would find that out. Everything depended on trust. When trust went out, out went the props. The best you could do was, like him, hold yourself together and wait for the ice wagon.

  You should thank me—he looked silently at the brooding man—for easing the pain a bit. Too much knowledge was the enemy. "Timmy's yours," Billie had pleaded on her knees in the motel room, making the sign of the cross across her bare breasts as if that were proof positive. "Timmy's his." Jim sat there on the bed, mute, head in his hands, hunched to hide his obscene nakedness. Yet even then, the real enemy was the woman—Billie. Jim, like him, was just an instrument. A dick. He had been dead certain then about Timmy's ancestry, and although the certainty had faded with time, the doubt lingered, spoiling it all forever. To make it worse, he was her image: blue eyes, fair skin, ginger hair, slight, small-boned. Wasn't a thing about him that hinted of himself. Or Jim. As if he had deliberately played on them both the trick of being created in her image.

  "I've got some ideas that are bothering me," Edward said, clearing his throat.

  Who hasn't? McCarthy chuckled to himself. "I did you a favor, pal. Leave it alone," McCarthy said.

  "You don't really think about these things until later."

  "That's the way it is."

  "Things keep coming up."

  "I kept it between us, didn't I?" Edward nodded, but McCarthy could not detect real gratitude. "That lawyer would have blown it out of all proportion. Wouldn't have done anyone any good. Fucking lawyers. Then the newspapers would have had it. Better for everyone. For her, too. And the kid."

  McCarthy looked around for the waitress and held up two fingers, scowling at Edward who had not touched his drink.

  "Do you good," McCarthy ordered, motioning with his eyes.

  Obeying, Edward lifted his drink with shaking fingers. He took it in one gulp, gagged, and washed it down quickly with the beer, leaving a foamy mustache. You'd be taking doubles if I had told you the rest, McCarthy thought.

  "I buried her yesterday," Edward said when he had caught his breath.

  "Best place for 'em," McCarthy said, hearing his speech slur and feeling the cold grip of anger tighten. Drink could make him cruel. What in hell did this bastard want?

  "We've been comparing notes, Mrs. Simpson and I," Davis blurted.

  "Have you?"

  "We have the keys. All we need is the place."

  "Need?"

  "Well, we believe," Edward stammered, "that it's important to know as much as we can."

  "What will that prove?"

  Edward ignored the question. "The point is, how does one go about matching keys to locks?"

  McCarthy smiled. "They don't. Unless they're registered like Medeco. Or there's an army out there sticking keys in locks—say battalion-size. There are hundreds of thousands of doors."

  The waitress brought two more shots. McCarthy stared at them in their wet circles, resisting. This time it was Edward who reached first for the shot glass, knocking it back, not gagging. He did not chase it down with the beer.

  "Loose ends gnaw at you," Edward said.

  "Is the Pope a Catholic? That's my bag."

  "We've been discussing it a lot. Putting it together. They're only theories, only speculations, you understand." The color had risen in his cheeks, a
nd his eyes were no longer shifting but were probing now. The man barely took a breath. "Look, we're both in the same boat, Mrs. Simpson and I. It hit us right in our guts. I mean, how do you explain it to yourself, no less to each other? We didn't know it was happening. We really didn't know. You can't blame us for trying to figure it out. There are things we should know. We must know."

  McCarthy, saying nothing, looked at his drink, salivated, but held back, sitting on his hands. He began to perspire under his arms. He watched Edward swallow with difficulty, the Adam's apple bobbing in his neck. It'll only bring more worthless pain, McCarthy thought.

  "So the two of you are piecing it all together," McCarthy said, knowing now that his warnings were for naught.

  "Just trying to understand," Edward said. "Now, about the keys."

  "Narrow the options. Look for accessibility, convenience. Time frame."

  "We think they met in the mornings."

  "Do you?"

  "Someplace convenient to both our places."

  "In between."

  Despite himself, McCarthy was warming to the idea. "Never could resist a mystery." He reached for the shot glass, upended it, chased it with the beer, and ordered two more. Then he took out a pen and opened a cocktail napkin.

  "Draw a circle. Say, fifteen minutes from both places. Then ten minutes. Then five. Divide the circles into manageable segments. Then work your way through the segments lock by lock. Look for Yales. Reject the others."

  "This could take weeks, months."

  "You asked me how. What the fuck's the difference? You got a lifetime."

  "No other way?"

  "You could find the damned address among their effects."

  "We've looked."

  "Then you missed it."

  "We were very thorough."

  "There's always something."

  "We're not professionals." Edward hesitated. "They were the hares. We are just dumb foxes."

  "You can say that again."

  The waitress came again with two more drinks. Edward declined his, and McCarthy drank them both.

  "And when you find it?"

  "We'll take it as it comes."

  "You don't know nothin', do you?" McCarthy felt his anger swelling.

  "If it happened to you, you'd understand," Edward said.