Heart and Soul

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  She didn’t hear the steps at first. She knew the wind was strengthening, and mentally wrote off the overhead noises to the effects of the oncoming storm. But then she saw the crisscrossing beam of a flashlight at the top of the stairs. It seemed to take forever: one slow, steady step after the next. The large shape of a man finally came into view, the flashlight flicking around the room—ceiling, walls, wine racks—as if checking for damage. She held her breath, pulling herself into the corner, cradling the manila envelope in her arms. She thought for sure that the intruder would be able to hear her heart beating—its panicky drumbeat was deafening to her ears. But he didn’t. He hesitated at the bottom of the steps; she could hear the light whistle of his breath. The flashlight made one last slow journey around the room, passing over her head. Missing her!

  And then it flicked back, dropped to her level, and stayed there.

  “Cassie, darling,” Magnus said as he walked toward her, “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He was pointing something at her. At first she thought it was the flashlight. Then she realized it was a gun.

  Thirty-two

  “Get up, please. You look absurd—all curled up in the corner, cowering like that.”

  “There’s a gun pointed at my head,” Cassie replied, anger giving her courage. “One tends to cower.”

  “I need those papers, darling, that’s all. Just hand them over, then we can both go home. Have a nice long chat.”

  “I don’t think so. Miranda left these for me.”

  “Ah, I see. Well then, this will take a bit longer than I’d hoped. In any case, get up, please.” He held the gun in his right hand; he gestured with it toward the stairs. “You go first.”

  She stood shakily, clutching the envelope to her chest with both arms. He moved aside as she passed, guiding her way with the flashlight in his left hand. She hesitated at the first step, fear subsiding long enough for her to ask: “How did you know I was out here?”

  “I believe, my dear, that given the situation I don’t have to answer any of your questions. I also believe that when I ask for something—those papers for instance—you’d really best hand them over.”

  She looked from his face to the gun. She gave him the envelope.

  “Now up the wooden hill.”

  She climbed slowly, upset to find her legs were wobbly, her heart skittering. She’d been warning herself for months now that investigating Miranda’s death could be dangerous, but she’d never seriously believed it. Though ugly and illegal, it had all seemed so abstract, something that existed only on paper: a bank statement, a newspaper article, a death certificate. A gun, however, was a very real thing. And when pointed at one’s back, it tended to bring a situation into crystal-clear focus.

  Magnus. She’d been wrong to challenge him, foolishly asking him questions as though she still had options. He had all the say now, all the power. Quite literally, her life was in his hands. Would he kill her? Had he murdered Miranda? Suddenly the one thing she cared most about—almost as much as staying alive—was knowing the truth. At the top of the stairs, Cassie saw that the storm was upon them: the door to the pool house was slamming against its hinges, tree limbs were tossing in the wind, and leaves flew.

  “It’s started to rain,” Cassie said, hesitating at the door. “I’ve the keys to the main house if you’d like to go in.” She held the key chain up for him to take.

  “You probably think the house has an alarm system that will alert the police,” Magnus replied. “Sorry, my dear. Wrong.”

  She was about to tell him that she knew only the front gate was wired, but changed her mind. Let him think he’d outwitted her. “I could use a little brandy,” Cassie told him. “I’m freezing.”

  “Why not?” Magnus said. “Keep moving, across the lawn. We’ll go in through the kitchen. And we’ll build a fire to warm you up.” He laughed, obviously pleased with himself. “I know just what we’ll burn.”

  He made her find the key to the kitchen door, training the flashlight on her hands, the gun on her back. She was nervous, her fingers slick with sweat, and it took several minutes.

  “That a girl,” he said when the door finally clicked open. “The light switch should be up on your left.”

  “It doesn’t work,” Cassie replied after several tries. “The lights in the pool house were out, too. Do you think the power lines are down because of the storm?”

  “Perhaps,” Magnus said. “Just as well. I don’t particularly want the neighbors seeing the house all ablaze with light. Move in, down this hall, kitchen’s on the left.”

  Did fear sharpen the senses? Despite the lack of light, Cassie found that she could see: the huge, modern kitchen gleamed with glassed-in cabinets and brushed aluminum counters. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of wealth and cleanliness: expensive wood, furniture polish, a ferny herbal bouquet fragrance overlaid with the untamable musk of the sea.

  “You’ll have to do the looking for us,” Magnus said, flicking the flashlight around the room. “The butler’s pantry is over there. I assume you’ll find some candlesticks with the rest of the silver.”

  With Magnus following her closely, it took Cassie around five minutes to assemble fresh candles, candlesticks, and two brandy glasses.

  “Liquor cabinet’s in the dining room,” Magnus told her when she had everything on a tray, “down that hall. You go first. And remember, I’m right behind you. Don’t even think of trying anything.”

  “I won’t,” Cassie replied meekly. Magnus added a bottle of Armagnac to Cassie’s tray, and then directed the way to the living room.

  “How are you at building fires?” he asked as Cassie moved into the living room in front of him. The soaring cathedral ceiling was oak-beamed, the sand-blasted walls hung with Navaho blankets. The fireplace was built into the far stone wall, and Cassie started toward it.

  “I was a pretty good Girl Scout,” Cassie said, determined not to show her fear. She set the tray down on a cedar chest next to the fireplace, put both candlesticks on the mantelpiece, lit them, then knelt on the flagstone hearth and busied herself with arranging the kindling and newspaper on the grate. It felt good to be able to do something with her hands, despite the fact that Magnus stood over her with the gun.

  “Such a charming picture,” he said caustically. “So domestic, so modest. Oh, I had such high hopes for you, Cassie. Whatever possessed you to destroy such a promising career? Surely you knew that’s what you’d be doing when you meddled in all this.”

  “She was my sister. I owed it to her to find out what had happened.”

  “Why? What did she ever do for you? You were nothing to her—nothing—until perhaps the very end when she thought you might be able to help her.”

  “You don’t know that,” Cassie said, surprised at how much his words could still hurt. The hope that Miranda had truly cared about her, but didn’t think to show it, had always secretly sustained her.

  “Yes, I do. I knew everything about Miranda. Everything. I’m a very intelligent and highly motivated man, Cassie dear, and for many years I made your sister my most serious object of study. I took a post-graduate course in Miranda Darin. I knew her inside out. And a great deal of the reason I found her so fascinating was that she was so much like me: consummately selfish.”

  Cassie struck a match against the flagstone, and held it to her carefully arranged bundle of papers and kindling. Fire licked along a rolled piece of newspaper, then flared. Dry branches crackled.

  “You were unselfish enough to love her,” Cassie said, sitting back on her heels and staring into the rapidly spreading blaze.

  “Yes.” Magnus sighed, uncorking the Armagnac. He poured out two glasses and put one down beside her. “You’re quite right, I was. And she wasn’t. What a terrible shame. Do you know—the only things Miranda ever wanted were what she didn’t already have. And once she got something, it no longer mattered to her. Jason, myself, even poor little Heather. The more we
clung, the harder we held on—the less she cared. Jason was the smart one.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He let her go. He dropped her. Oh, he kept up appearances, for Heather’s sake, I assume, but he gave her as much rope as she wanted. If only I’d thought of that, if only I’d known not … to hold on.”

  “But when you’re in love with someone—it’s very hard to be that rational. It’s a kind of madness, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes! Yes. I was crazy. I even knew I was crazy, but I couldn’t do a thing about it. And she knew it. She found it all … very amusing. Titillating. In the end I think I was probably nothing much more than a joke for her. A very fancy plaything. An accessory. About as important to her life as a well-made umbrella.” Magnus laughed and gulped his brandy.

  “Did she have a new lover?”

  “No,” Magnus said thoughtfully. “That’s where I was so foolish. She’d clearly lost interest in me. Even the social life I’d helped create for her—she’d begun to see what I’ve known for years: it’s fundamentally vacuous. No, darling, it wasn’t anybody new. It took me such a long time to figure it out, because she pretended to loathe him so. Would say such terrible things about him, about their life together. But she spent so much time bitterly complaining about him. Hours on end, pacing my apartment. It was obsessive, almost deranged. I finally realized that the way she acted about him was very much the way I acted about her.”

  “She fell in love with Jason—all over again?”

  Magnus looked down at Cassie with a sad smile. “You’re really so naive, my dear. That’s one of the things I find refreshing about you. And so different from Miranda.” He sipped his Armagnac and gazed into the fire. “No, it was far more complicated than that. You see, the thing that came closest to love in Miranda’s lexicon was—control. When she came up against people who resisted her, who wouldn’t let her dominate or manipulate them, she couldn’t stand it. She’d have people fired from the show—an editor, one of the writers—if they disagreed too vigorously with her. But she couldn’t fire Jason.”

  “She could have divorced him.”

  “We talked about it. Idiotically, I urged her to. I wanted to marry her. I offered her everything. But as I said before, that wasn’t what she wanted: she longed for what she couldn’t have. And that was to dominate Jason—to get him back under her spell.”

  “But Jason himself told me that he was faithful to her, in spite of everything.”

  “Oh, I know, but that only made it that much worse. She had nothing substantial to hold over his head. In actuality she was the unfaithful one. But emotionally—he’d stopped loving her years before—and so she’d lost all her power over him. That’s what ate into her so: she couldn’t force someone to love her. So in the end, I suppose as something of a last resort, she decided she would have to destroy him.”

  “With the help of Senator Anthony Haas,” Cassie murmured, putting a log on the fire. “How did she find out about that?”

  “I told her.” Cassie turned and stared up at him. He was twirling his empty snifter, seemingly entranced by the way the crystal refracted the firelight. He walked over to the cedar chest and refilled his glass, saying: “Yes, it is ironic, isn’t it? I told her because I wanted her to stop obsessing about him—to see he was human, frail, like all of us. Like me. We were having dinner at the Four Seasons—it was in early January to celebrate the new year—and all she could talk about was Jason: how he’d acted the part of the model father over Christmas, how much she despised his holier-than-thou approach to their marriage. And I simply said that he might pretend to be righteous, but he’d not been above getting his hands dirty when he’d needed to. I knew from the esteemed Senator himself about the money Jason had given Haas when he was first starting out. You should have seen the gleam in her eyes—the look of near rapture on her face—when she heard this. She could talk of nothing else all evening. I realized, even then, of course, I’d made a fatal mistake.”

  “Because she would eventually find out about your own dealings with Haas?”

  “Yes, of course,” Magnus said, picking up the envelope that he’d left on the couch behind him. “She was out to hurt Jason, but she was going to hang me in the process.”

  “But that’s what I really don’t understand, Vance. Why you? Why did you need to give Haas any money? Surely you’ve always had enough power—and wealth of your own—to buy your own way in Washington.”

  “Darling girl, you really haven’t been thinking this thing through at all, have you? I’m somewhat surprised, actually, that with your investigative skills you haven’t come to the obvious conclusion. Miranda didn’t either, but then, quite honestly, I rather think you have the sharper mind. Let’s just see if these papers”—he flicked open the envelope—“might be of some help.”

  Thirty-three

  “Ah yes, this does bring back memories.” Magnus held up a yellowing newspaper article titled “MEDIA MOGUL MAKES BID FOR MAYOR.”

  “Happy ones?” Cassie asked, noticing his smile. She sat cross-legged beside the fire while he leaned against the back of the couch a few feet away.

  “In the beginning, quite,” Magnus said. “By the early seventies, I’d been running the network for over a decade, Cassie. Those days were such a high-water mark for television, it seemed that everything I touched turned to gold: sitcoms, talk shows, sports. I, the whole network, could do no wrong. Naturally I became a bit bored. There’s no fun, my dear, in always succeeding.”

  “So you decided to move into a more public arena?”

  “Arena is the word exactly. As in Ancient Roman. And tossing good Christians to the lions. Politics is a dirty business, as I’ve told you before, though at first it seemed simple enough. Throw parties, pull together a platform, build a coalition. The business community liked me because I was one of their own. Thanks to Millie, I had the backing of the old money crowd. And, of course, with all my network connections, I had plenty of Broadway and Hollywood support.”

  “I know,” Cassie said, “I read up on your bid for the nomination. It looked to me like you had everything going for you, Vance. Why did you back out … really?”

  “I didn’t back out, Cassie,” he retorted, gulping his brandy. “I was pushed.”

  “You sound very bitter,” Cassie said softly, “whatever it was. I can tell it still hurts, as though it took place yesterday.”

  “It hasn’t stopped haunting me—in one way or another—since it happened.”

  “What was it, Vance? What happened?”

  “Ah, but surely you’ve guessed?” he said, looking down at her. “I know you too well, my dear, not to realize you probably figured it out the moment you first saw me tonight. Yes, I think so.”

  He walked to the fire, leaned over, and threw the newspaper article in. It caught fire and disappeared in seconds.

  “For one thing, you have to understand that those were such different times—socially, sexually, whatever you want to call it. These days, you order a martini at lunch and people start saying behind your back that you’re an alcoholic. In those years, right after the sixties, it was ‘anything goes’—and it did. Booze, drugs, sex, sex, sex—it became so routine in a way, just something you expected.”

  He poured himself more brandy and leaned back against the couch again, his gaze lost in the fire.

  “It was the biggest fund-raiser yet. I mean everyone was there: Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., put on a concert after dinner. The place was absolutely packed. Hopping. Cops up and down Broadway, just to keep people out.”

  “This was at the Savoy? Jason’s hotel?”

  “Yes. He’d opened up the ballrooms for us. He believed in what he thought I believed in. Well, he was young and foolish enough to still think he could hold on to his ideals—and survive. That night helped to cure him of that, all right. I don’t remember a great deal of what happened after my speech. I’m not a terrific public sp
eaker, I get a bit nervous, and I was so relieved when it was over that I probably drank more than I should have. Vodka, I was drinking then. I hazily remember the concert. Minnelli was stunning—those long, gorgeous legs. I remember feeling quite turned on—and then suddenly there was this girl.”

  “The newspapers never gave her name,” Cassie said, not adding that the death certificate had.

  “Felice Ruhl,” Magnus said. “She was underage—that’s one of the reasons the papers hushed it up—but how was I to know that then? She was an aide to Haas, after all, and looked to be in her mid-twenties, at least. I made some assumptions that I shouldn’t have. She was only a volunteer, poor stupid girl, one of those wide-eyed suburban kids who was just out looking for a good time. Some action. Well, she got that, all right…”

  Magnus looked down at the gun he was holding in his right hand as though seeing it for the first time. He turned it over slowly, the metal nozzle glinting in the firelight.

  “As I said, I don’t remember a whole lot. I wasn’t in the greatest shape. Someone had cocaine, and after the concert we all went up to the suite that Tony had taken and did some lines. I remember ordering room service, as well. Felice wanted a Coke—’to go with her coke’—she’d said. And then … we were alone. I remember she’d fallen asleep on this huge king-size bed; she looked so sexy, her tight little miniskirt all bunched up around her waist, exposing those long, young legs. These big tits—just about bursting out of this skimpy halter top. I didn’t rape her. She woke up, urged me on. She wasn’t a virgin, by any manner or means. When I suggested a little something more innovative than the usual, she seemed interested, eager…”