by Jane Haddam
Ryall fixed his bow tie. He never wore ordinary ties, because they made him look even more like Porky Pig than he usually did. He checked his cuff links. He’d learned long ago that only French cuffs would do with the people he cared most about talking to. The self-buttoning kind were for middle managers and people who had jobs teaching in community colleges. He went to the door of his bedroom and looked down the short hall to the woman pacing back and forth across his living room carpet. Then he made a face. God, how he hated these women who pretended not to have money when they did. There was something beyond snobbish about an American upper class that prided itself on looking as if it were sleeping in Dumpsters, or worse. He wondered where she had gotten that stretchy-tunic thing she was wearing: Price Heaven, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Marshall’s. Even when he was flat broke and eating ketchup in hot water for lunch, Ryall Wyndham had bought his ties from Asbury’s and his shoes from John Lobb.
He checked himself out in the mirror one more time. If there had been plastic surgery to make you taller, he would have had it. He considered liposuction. He could get it done, but he would have to be careful not to let it get out. He really did prefer the nouveau riche in some ways. They wouldn’t have given a damn if he’d got himself sucked, and some of them would have sympathized.
He brushed off his jacket—a good tweed, from J. Press—and went out toward the living room. She heard the door open and stopped where she was to wait for him. She had a copy of Town and Country in her hands, one of the ones he kept on the coffee table because they contained stories he had written, or pictures of himself in the parties columns. She put the magazine down and straightened up.
“So sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. “I’m afraid I really do just kick back and pay very little attention when I’m at home. I shouldn’t, really. It gets me in the most difficult situations, and more often than you’d like to know.”
“There’s nothing difficult about this situation,” Anne Ross Wyler said calmly. “I surprised you. That happens. I should have called first.”
“No, no. Drop in any time. Really. I love to have company. And at a time like this, I find it perfectly understandable. You must be awash in grief. I know I am. Charlotte was one of my oldest and dearest friends.”
Ryall caught the sharp uptick of the left eyebrow. He’d been expecting it. Annie Wyler was famous for her eyebrows. He ignored it. He did not ignore the fact that he got a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction from the fact that he’d anticipated it.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said. “You look positively exhausted. And I don’t blame you a bit, of course. Two family funerals in the same week. I don’t know what’s happening to the Main Line. Even a few years ago, it was the safest place on earth. You could go anywhere there, even at night. Of course, Charlotte and Tony had security, but that was because of Tony’s position. He had to worry about international terrorists. I don’t know what I’m going to do if it turns out that international terrorists have begun to target Society. I’ll be scared to death to go out in the evenings, and it’s my life’s work.”
Anne Ross Wyler sat down, without looking behind her to see if a chair was there. Ryall felt his mouth purse up and did what he had to do to straighten it out again. He hated this about these women too. He hated the way they just expected things to be where they needed them to be, and the way the things were always there. Any normal person would have looked around to make sure she wasn’t about to fall on her ass.
“So,” he said. “What can I get for you? Coffee? Tea? I’ve got some excellent Ceylon, just arrived. I order it from a company in Bangkok. It’s the only place on earth you can still get decent Ceylon, I don’t care what anybody says.”
She was staring at him, placidly, waiting. Why didn’t she talk? God, he hated this about them too, the way they never got wound up, the way they just let you go on until you’d made a complete fool of yourself. Somebody ought to be appointed to teach some manners to the women of the old Main Line.
“Well,” he said.
Anne Ross Wyler took her tote bag off the floor and put it down on her lap. She reached inside it and came up with a long manila envelope. She opened the envelope and came out with a small handful of snapshots. Whatever was she going to do? Ryall didn’t think she would be bringing him family snaps of Tony and Charlotte to use in the column. She didn’t like the column, and she hadn’t seen too much of Tony and Charlotte over the last few years. She couldn’t stand Charlotte. There was something else he’d love to tell the world: How these old families stuck together in spite of the fact that they found each other’s company poisonous; the way Charlotte Deacon Ross had alienated even Tony’s long-suffering relatives. Surely, Anne Ross Wyler was long-suffering. She was also that creature he despised most in the world: the victim of social conscience guilt. She probably thought she was so damned holy, running a house for prostitutes, giving up on parties and expensive clothes just so that the rest of the people she knew would feel utterly and irredeemably inadequate.
She took the handful of snapshots and leaned over to put them down, one by one, on the coffee table. Ryall leaned over to look at them and stiffened.
“Do you know what these are?” she asked.
“They’re very murky snaps,” Ryall said. “It’s not possible to see much of anything in them, is it?”
“It is if you blow them up.” She reached into her tote bag again and came up, this time, with an eight-by-eleven glossy.
“It’s still murky,” Ryall said, after he’d had a chance to get a look at it. Still, it wasn’t as murky as the other one. It was just—but not absolutely—identifiable. “Maybe you ought to take lessons on how to operate your camera. You seem to need instructions on using a flash.”
“I was there, you know. I took these pictures myself. I stood just three feet from you on the night my brother Tony died and watched you take Patsy Lennon into that car.”
“I don’t know anybody named Patsy Lennon.”
“I’m sure you don’t. God only knows what name she’s using on the street these days. Did you know she was just thirteen?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ryall said. “If you’re insinuating that these are pictures of me, I’ll ask you to leave right this minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been this insulted in all my life.”
“I’m not going to leave,” Anne Ross Wyler said, “and you’re not going to throw me out. I was there. I stood on that stretch of sidewalk and watched you pick up a minor—more than a minor, what’s technically a child—and get her into your car to blow you. I moved in and looked through the windows and saw her.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“You had a rental car. Don’t bother to whine. I checked.”
“You didn’t find my name on a rental agreement,” Ryall said. “I assure you, I did not rent a car.”
“Do you mean you did it under an assumed name? That won’t be hard to unravel. Maybe I’ll ask that Mr. Demarkian to do it for me. Don’t bother to protest, Mr. Wyndham. You’re not James Bond. I’m sure you’ve left traces a backward four-year-old could follow.”
“You’ve got nothing at all but a lot of murky pictures. It’s impossible to identify anybody in them, except of course the girl, who, I’ll admit, looks very young. But if you seriously think you can get me arrested on that kind of evidence—”
“Oh, no,” Anne said. “I don’t want to get you arrested. What would be the point? I followed you afterwards, you know. I followed you right up to the gate of Tony’s house. I know what you saw.”
“What are you trying to do? You know what would happen in books at a time like this, if what you’re alleging is true. I’d kill you now and dump your body in the incinerator.”
“You won’t kill me. And this building doesn’t have an incinerator.”
“Well, Mrs. Wyler, I really don’t see the point to your visit here. You don’t want to get me arrested. You’re not trying to get me to kill you. What do you want
?”
“I want you to keep your mouth shut.”
“About what?”
“About everything that happened on the night Tony died. About who else you saw there. About what was going on at the gate when you arrived. About all of it. I saw it too. And I want you to do the one thing you’ve never been able to do in your life. I want you to shut up. Because if you don’t, I’ll use these pictures.”
“There’s nothing in those pictures to use.”
“Not for the police to use, no,” Anne said. “But I can think of a few other venues where they might be useful. I could, for instance, file suit against you for endangering the safety of a minor. Patsy Lennon has spent quite a lot of time at Adelphos House, did you know that? She’s a very troubled and fragile girl. The court might not grant me standing, or it might, but it wouldn’t matter, because I’d have made the charge a matter of public record. Then all I’d have to do would be to make sure it’s reported.”
“You couldn’t get a charge like that reported. The papers would be afraid of lawsuits. And besides, they’d find it trivial.”
“They’d find it trivial that their new media star and prominent witness to the Tony Ross murder is being sued on charges that he enticed a child into sex?”
“She wasn’t a child,” Ryall said, and bit his lip.
“She was thirteen,” Anne said. “And don’t kid yourself that the newspapers wouldn’t be interested, or the television news shows, either. Even the ones I don’t own significant stock in would be interested. The ones I own significant stock in might see some reason to make the story a priority. Did you know that I still had all that stock?”
“People like you always do, don’t you?” Ryall said. “You make a grand show of being Mother Teresa, but you never let go of the money and you never let go of the power. I ought to do a nice little exposé on you. Just so that the city of Philadelphia can see that you’re not anything at all like a saint.”
“I’ve never pretended to be a saint. Please get me all the publicity you can. Adelphos House can always use donations.”
“For all you know, I’ve already told the police whatever it is you don’t want me to tell them,” Ryall said. “I’ve already been questioned. I spent four hours at the police department the day after your brother was murdered. It was disgusting. But I told them everything I know.”
“Fine. Then it’s possible that you don’t know what I think you do. No harm done. But if you get some bright idea in your head, keep it to yourself. Don’t tell the police. Don’t tell Larry King. Just calm down and shut up. Because if you don’t, I’m going to take these pictures and shred your life, from the bottom up.”
“You’re such a bitch,” Ryall said. “You always were, even when I first started the column. You were probably a bitch in grade school.”
“I make a point of it.” Anne Ross Wyler stood up and took the snapshots off the coffee table. “You can have these, you know. I have the negatives. And I have copies. It doesn’t matter.”
“I want them out of here as fast as you can make them go.”
“Fine. Here’s one more thing. Stay away from Patsy Lennon from now on. And stay away from that street and all the rest of the girls on it. I’m out there almost every night. I’ll be watching for you. If you have to fuck children, take a sex tour to Thailand.”
“What wonderful language. All of you have completely foul mouths, have you ever noticed that? Do they teach that kind of thing in dancing classes?”
Her tote bag was packed up and back over her shoulder. Her coat was in her hands. Ryall didn’t remember her getting either. She was not a tall woman, but she was very trim. He didn’t think she went on diets or worked out to keep herself that way. Why was he thinking about Anne Ross Wyler on a diet? He thought he was losing his mind.
“I don’t understand how you can live the way you do,” she said, looking around the living room. Then she turned her back to him and walked off, out of the living room, into the foyer so tiny it wasn’t much more than a breathing space shoved against the door. He didn’t think she’d been talking about the living room, but he couldn’t be sure.
What he could be sure of was that he was sick. If he didn’t get up and get to the bathroom immediately, he would soil himself. All his muscles felt completely out of control. Everything was twitching. And the worst thing was, he had no idea what she was talking about. He really could have told the police already. He couldn’t remember what he had told them. He’d talked and talked and talked. He’d said whatever had come into his head. The same was true with what he’d been doing on television. He’d just talked.
He thought of himself, just through the gates when all hell had broken loose, the shouts of the security guards, the running of men in dark clothes. It had been like watching a movie. If there had been some secret there that he was supposed to have witnessed, he couldn’t begin to imagine what it was.
2
David Alden was getting extremely tired of the game. It wasn’t that he wanted to stop playing it, exactly. No matter what Annie Ross said, he was not, at heart, an emotional dropout from hypercapitalism. He’d always liked his job when Tony was alive. He’d liked being the one who knew everything, all the projections, all the risks, all the secrets. He’d liked being the one who made the decisions. Tony was supposed to make them, but in nine cases out of ten Tony left it to him, and they were both satisfied. Being Tony Ross’s second in command was like being the chief clerk to a justice of the Supreme Court. You were the one who had the expertise, who did the work, who made the change happen. You weren’t the one who got the blame for it when things went wrong. Well, David thought, not quite. If things went wrong enough, you could end up with plenty of blame, but it would be private blame, meted out in secret, not the kind that appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, when things went right, you didn’t get quite as much of the credit as you deserved, but David was finding he minded that less than he thought he had. Nobody in the bank seemed to know what to make of him anymore. They couldn’t get along without him. He was the only one who knew what Tony had known and who could explain it to them. They didn’t want to have to get along with him at all. Two murders had made him seem more than a little jinxed, and he could tell that some of them were beginning to wonder if he had committed them, or if he had somehow brought them on. Maybe there was a jealous husband out there aiming for his back. Maybe the jealous husband had less-than-perfect aim. Maybe the nuts had found out who he was and were using him as a pilot fish. Maybe he was a pilot fish by choice.
Now he looked out at the early morning downtown New York traffic and felt almost infinitely tired. He hated staying overnight in Philadelphia in the middle of the work week. He hated the morning commute, even on the Amtrak express. He hated not being able to get to his own things in his own closet in the only place he’d ever called home without ambiguity, the apartment he kept on Riverside Drive that had exactly one bedroom, no room for guests, no room for family, no room for expansion. Mostly, he hated the feeling of disorientation it gave him, so that his timing was off for the rest of the day. Maybe that was his problem. Some part of him was back there with Charlotte dying in her own driveway and Marianne shrieking like a gored pig and the police sirens in the distance, all of it seeming so familiar that he thought he would never be able to think of Tony’s place again without those sirens. He was, he decided, going slowly crazy. He looked up and down the street, which still seemed tense and cramped to him in the wake of September 11. He went into the building and across the high-ceilinged prewar lobby and into the ornate elevator. There were too many people in the halls, rushing in late to work, rushing around trying to get set up for the day. He rode the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor and got out again. He went down the hall to his own office and put his attaché case on his desk. He seemed to be the first one here besides the secretaries. He usually was. The secretaries were all hushed and agitated, and he didn’t blame them.
He unbuttoned his coat, but didn’t take it off. He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out on the financial district. He’d always liked this view. He still liked it, in spite of the fact that it had been … altered … somewhat in the destruction last year. He heard the door open behind him but didn’t turn around to see who it was.
“I saw you come in,” Adele said. “You didn’t have to come in. God, David, we’d all have understood if you’d wanted to take a day off.”
“I’ve still got Price Heaven up the wazoo,” he said. The view was altered, but not altered enough, that was the problem. He couldn’t see enough. “Get a coat on and come for a walk with me. Just for ten minutes.”
“A walk? Where are we going? The office just opened—”
“There are other people to handle the phones. You don’t do much of that anyway. Come take a walk with me. I want to go see it.”
“See what?”
“Ground Zero.”
“Good God, David, why?”
“I haven’t seen it yet, did you know that? Everybody else has been over there to take a look, but I never have. On the day it happened, the first I knew that there was something going on was when the windows blew out. All these windows. They just popped, suddenly. I was sitting at my desk going over the risk cost figures for the loan to the government of Peru, and suddenly snap snap snap. It was the oddest thing.”
“I think you should have stayed home,” Adele said. “I don’t think you’ve got your head on straight this morning. I know you didn’t like her much, none of us did, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by the way she died. You knew her a long time.”
