FALSE PRETENSES
Page 15
“I’m really very tired, Grandmother. I think I’ll go on up to bed now.”
Laurette wanted to shake her, wanted to tell her that all of a sudden she’d wake up and be eighty-four years old and wonder what had become of all those years. She drew on her patience. “Very well, my dear. You do need your sleep. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
An hour later, Catherine had slipped out of her grandmother’s house and was on her way to New York City. Her nose was running again. Thank God her grandmother hadn’t noticed. She reached for a Kleenex.
Her hands were gripping the wheel when she finally entered the city. Where to go? Where to buy cocaine? Chad had always provided all she needed, all very high quality. But Chad was dead.
She forced down the tears. Dammit, she hadn’t loved him. He was a criminal, after all, and she had paid all the bills. She had to have some coke.
Catherine drove down Broadway very slowly, her eyes on the streets. She cut over at Thirteenth Street to Fifth and continued down to Washington Square. She drove more slowly now, alert to the people on the streets. She was drawing attention, her bright red Porsche the focus of the milling men who lounged in the doorways and on the corners. She saw a tall black man with a well-dressed white man speaking in the recessed doorway of a darkened building. She saw something change hands. Her heart speeded up. She slowed the car. The white man nodded, turned, and walked quickly away. She sniffed and jerked the wheel. The black man looked up, and she could feel him studying her, her car. She started to roll down the window; then she saw his eyes. They were cold, terrifying. He waved at her and started toward the car. It was then she saw another man in the shadows. He lifted his arm and she saw a gun.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. He was close now, and she felt frozen.
His hands reached out for the door handle. Catherine gave a small cry and slammed in the clutch and down on the gas. The Porsche jerked and coughed. She heard a shout from the man, and forced herself to ease more carefully on the clutch.
She looked back, seeing him standing in the street. He gave her an obscene gesture, and shouted something she thankfully couldn’t understand. She couldn’t see the other man, the one with the gun.
Catherine was trembling. She grabbed a Kleenex and wiped her nose. It was red. Her blood. She was crying and the blood was mixing with her tears. A pale red drop fell to the white of her cashmere sweater.
She finally pulled the Porsche over on a deserted street. She was somewhere on the East Side, in a residential district. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here. She leaned her head against the steering wheel and sobbed.
The knock against the window glass nearly made her stop breathing. She jerked about, a scream rising in her throat, to see a cop standing beside the Porsche, looking at her with some concern.
She wanted suddenly to laugh. Should she tell him she was trying to buy cocaine but a man had terrified her? Should she tell him about the other man, the one with the gun? Should she tell him that she couldn’t bear herself any longer and she wanted to die?
“Miss? Are you all right?”
Catherine got a hold of herself and tried to swallow her tears. The cop was young, his face fresh. One of New York’s finest, and not too long on the beat, she thought. She rolled down the window. “I’m fine, thank you. I just felt dizzy for a moment.”
Dizzy, hell, he wanted to tell her, but he didn’t, of course. “I suggest you go home. It’s late, and you don’t want the crazies to be all over you.”
At least his lecture was short and to the point, Catherine thought. She said yes, and thank you, and watched him walk back to his squad car. He waited. Catherine sighed, started the Porsche, and drove sedately down the street. Yes, she thought, I’m going home. But not back to Long Island. She’d almost reached her apartment when she realized that her grandmother would be worried. She didn’t want her to know that she’d taken this insane drive into New York. She turned the Porsche around.
As she drove back to Long Island, she played over her grandmother’s words. What did she want to do with her life? Catherine shuddered. She didn’t want her nose to bleed and run until it rotted off. She didn’t want to be driven ever again as she had been tonight. I nearly went to the streets. But the high, the feeling of absolute superiority . . .
She thought of her father, the famous and infamous Timothy Carleton. He’d loved her, shown her attention until Elizabeth came along and seduced him. Then he’d had no time for her, Catherine. No, no, she didn’t want to think of that pain.
Her grandmother was right about another thing. She needed a goal, no more wandering about, doing absolutely nothing. Her last thought was of Elizabeth and her certainty that she had murdered her father. And then she knew what she would do.
Laurette heard the muffled sound of a car and knew it was Catherine’s. She slept so little now, each spurt of sleep a blessing when it came. But awake, she heard every sound, every noise, and her mind had to identify its source. What to do about Catherine? She would speak to her again soon.
Laurette rose from her bed and walked to the long windows. Slowly she pulled back the drapery and stared out over the moonlit grounds. Oddly enough, she thought of Christian Hunter. How she’d wanted to destroy him for what he’d done. She’d tried to get at the man, but his assets were too diversified, his holdings too solid. His reputation was impeccable. For the first time, she allowed herself to wonder if he had told the truth at the trial.
She turned slowly from the windows, and heard the drapery fall softly back into place. The man had to have lied. There was simply no one else who could have killed Timothy. No one except Elizabeth.
Timothy.
Laurette sighed, and walked to the wall thermostat and turned it up. She was always so cold these days. Even her very bones felt cold. She felt the heat gush out at her legs through the vent, seep through her old, infinitely comfortable robe. It felt so good. She had lied to Catherine, unfortunately. Timothy had no use at all for women except for sex. Had he lived, he would have continued to treat his young daughter as a bit of useless fluff, a beautiful bauble with no particular value save in marriage. And she would have probably done nothing about it, nothing at all.
He’d told her once, laughing and hugging her after she’d given him a very perceptive bit of analysis on a business deal, “Hell, if you weren’t my mother, I’d have married you in a flash. No other woman can touch you.”
Look at what he’d done to Elizabeth. She’d been nothing more than a beautiful bauble, tremendously talented, of course, but that had only been the draw for Timothy. And she’d been ruthless enough to twist him about, to make him change his will. Then she’d killed him.
The blessed heat was warming her blood now, and she was becoming drowsy. She walked back to her bed and slowly lay down, pulling the thick covers over her. But her mind kept wandering back, back to a particularly vicious scene she’d witnessed, but never spoken of.
Timothy, strong, ruthless, mean sometimes. Particularly toward his first wife, Eileen. Gentle, weak Eileen. Of such good family, but of no character at all. No spine. He hadn’t struck Eileen until after she’d given him two sons. When the doctors had told him that there could be no more children, he’d turned on his gentle, weak wife.
“What good are you, you stupid cow?”
Eileen, cowering, wincing, trying to escape his vicious words, and Laurette, standing just outside the door, a dozen red roses in her hands, ready to be placed in the vase in the corridor.
“God, I detest you,” Timothy had shouted. “I’d kill you, you idiot bitch, if I could get away with it!”
No, Laurette thought, closing her eyes, I won’t remember, I won’t think about it. But the images came on, and the awful words.
“Please, Timmy, I—”
“Timmy! God, you nauseating cow! You’re hurting my sons with your mealymouthed stupidity.”
The sound of a hand striking flesh. The awful whimper.
“I want you out, Eileen. I never
want to hear your whining voice again. I never want to have to see that face of yours again!”
“But, Timm . . . Timothy, I—”
The striking hand, the scream.
I’ve got to stop this, Laurette thought. Dear God, I’ve got to stop him. But she didn’t move, for he yelled at that moment, “And one more word out of your stupid mouth about my mother and I’ll flay you, do you understand? You’re not fit to be in the same house with her.”
Pride flowed through her, making her move away down the corridor now, the roses forgotten. Her son, her defender. He was right. Eileen was a useless, stupid woman. She would let Timothy take care of her.
And he had. Eileen had moved to Spain. She’d seen her sons, Brad and Trent, twice a year after that. She’d died five years later. No one had known what she’d died of.
Laurette shuddered now. Timothy had mentioned her death over dinner one evening, between the soup and the main course.
Then Charlotte had come along and he’d married her. And she’d given birth to Catherine. At least Charlotte was still alive, living, the last Laurette knew, in London. She’d heard from Charlotte but once, a telegram received just after Timothy’s death. It had read simply: “Such a pity. stop.” Laurette had clearly pictured the look of malicious glee on Charlotte’s face.
Then Elizabeth. And she’d murdered Timothy.
Elizabeth was tired, so tired that all she wanted to do was fall in bed and sleep for a week. Flanked by Adrian and Coy, she’d paid unannounced visits to three of their largest American-based companies. A textile company in Atlanta, a lumber company in Seattle, and the headquarters of a grocery-store chain in Cleveland.
In her protected, and isolated environment on Park Avenue, she’d never really understood the scope of her power. Now she did. The men they visited had recognized it, but hadn’t known how to handle her. They gave her endless attention, but serious questions, she soon realized, were directed to Adrian or to Coy. At one meeting with the president of the Copperton grocery stores, she’d giggled involuntarily at what she came later to call the good-ole-boys ritual. It had sounded ridiculous at first. Unfortunately, she thought, it soon came to sound very normal.
She realized other things very quickly. There were very few women in positions of responsibility and power. She’d met a woman in Atlanta who was vastly talented and who hadn’t a prayer of becoming anything more than the sales manager. Elizabeth smiled. She would take care of Melissa Graves. She couldn’t wait to send the president packing, the condescending fool.
Suddenly she no longer felt tired. She walked purposefully into her study. Yes, she thought, gazing about, it was hers now. All traces of Timothy were long gone. She’d had the entire room redecorated, made it utterly feminine, knowing deep down with each change she approved that Timothy would have hated it, scorned it and her, calling her a useless idiot.
She sat behind the beautiful Louis XVI desk and picked up the phone. She dialed the special number, waited a moment, then began dictating.
When she’d finished, she sat back in her chair and grew thoughtful. Melissa Graves would realize her hard work and her dreams. All because of me, a woman with power.
She thought of the stream of women she’d seen at the three companies, secretaries mostly, fetching coffee for the men, looking pretty, watching her as if she were some sort of alien. A woman they couldn’t possibly understand. And she’d thought that the women’s movement had accomplished something, that women could do anything they had the talent to do. It was a new millennium.
She’d realized it wasn’t a question of male versus female. It was a matter of power, and very few of the women had any.
She did.
She fell asleep, her mind filled with plans.
The following Wednesday morning at precisely ten o’clock, she was sitting at the circular conference table in her office, Coy and Adrian facing her. She’d made her announcement some fifteen minutes into the meeting.
“Come, Elizabeth, surely, you can’t mean to . . .”
Elizabeth merely looked at Coy patiently, wanting now to hear his opinions. “Yes?” she prodded.
“Look, Elizabeth, this woman, what’s her name? Graves? She doesn’t know what to do, she hasn’t the ability to see beyond the next meal for her husband, for God’s sake.”
“But isn’t she the sales manager?” Elizabeth asked, her voice mild.
“Yes, but what with appearances, Pierson couldn’t leave her where she belonged.”
“And where was that?”
“A sales rep! Sure, she did just fine. From the looks of it, she’s doing passably well as sales manager, but to promote her to vice-president of sales. It’s ludicrous.”
Elizabeth smiled at him. What poor Coy didn’t know. She’d flown Melissa Graves to New York and met with her privately. What an earful she’d gotten after the woman had finally realized she could trust her. “I agree, Coy.”
“Good. Now, we can go on to other matters. This situation at the Paris headquarters—”
“Actually,” Elizabeth interrupted him smoothly, “I do agree that a vice-presidency for Melissa Graves isn’t at all appropriate. Adrian, please check into Pierson’s contract. I want him out by the end of the month. Melissa Graves will take his place.”
Coy stared at her. His mouth worked, but nothing came out.
Elizabeth said very gently, “Coy, the woman is so talented it’s frightening. She’s been kept down because of that good-ole-boy network that’s so alive and well, particularly in the South.”
“You can’t do that.”
Elizabeth merely smiled at him, then said very pleasantly, “I beg your pardon, Coy, but I can do just as I please. Don’t you understand that yet?”
He didn’t, obviously, and he shot an agonized look toward Adrian.
Adrian, wisely, just shrugged.
“Why don’t you study her personnel file, Coy. I think you’ll be quite surprised when you do, if, that is, you’re willing to look at it objectively. And study Pierson’s performance for the past year. I believe it was you who said the man was about as innovative as a cabbage. You said that to Adrian, but I overheard you say it. Then come back and give me your opinion.”
Coy rose a bit unsteadily. He couldn’t meet her eyes; he was too stunned, or perhaps he was too angry.
“I’ll read the personnel files,” he said, turned on his heel, and stalked toward the office door.
“Do also study the productivity records, Coy.”
Adrian whistled, then waited silently until Coy was out of the office.
“Coy’s older, Elizabeth. He’s been, shall we say, insulated from everyday workings and progress. He’s unused to dealing with women in business.”
“Except for secretaries who bring him his coffee?”
“Don’t be so rough on him. You’ve thrown him.”
“I should hate to lose him, Adrian.”
“I don’t think it will come to that. And now, Elizabeth, would you like to go over the organization charts for the three companies we visited? See what level the women are at?”
“Yes, I would.”
Jonathan Harley stared hard at his lawyer and longtime friend, Josh Simpson. “They want a meeting,” he said.
“No harm in hearing what they have to say,” Josh said.
“It’s not really a they,” Jonathan said, bitterness filling his voice. “It’s a damned woman. Elizabeth Carleton. The one who murdered her husband.”
“I recall she was acquitted, nearly a year ago, in fact.”
Jonathan snorted.
“That means not guilty, Jonathan, decided by twelve men and women. Jury trial and all that.”
“I don’t care if she killed ten men. I just don’t want her killing what’s mine.”
“You could lose everything,” Josh said gently. “Have you any idea of the wealth and power of ACI?”
“Yes. This woman—what is her role, exactly? I’ve heard rumors that she’s well-ensconced.”
“The place will fold in six months,” said Jonathan.
“Jonathan, you’re only thirty-five years old. For heaven’s sake, my boy, you were born during the women’s movement. You went to Yale with women. You shouldn’t be spouting neolithic attitudes. We’re in a new millennium for God’s sake.”
Jonathan set down his coffee cup. He felt so angry he wanted to hurl the cup against the wall. “I know,” he said finally. “I don’t really mean it. What I don’t know is why they’re coming after me.”
“I can answer that easily enough. You’re a success. They want to buy you out and keep you on as president. If that is your wish. You’ll make so much money from the sale—if you decide to sell, that is—you could even go to California and start up another computer company.”
“No.”
Josh thumped his pencil up and down on the desk. “All right, then. I would recommend that at this initial meeting, you keep your anger to yourself. You know as well as I do that a poker face is more important in business than it is at five-card stud. The pot’s much bigger.”
“Do you think that woman will come?”
“Could be. You’d best play it very cool, Jonathan.”
Jonathan cursed.
“Best moderate your language, old son.”
13
Catherine Carleton pushed the buzzer. Her hands were sweaty.
On the second buzz, the door opened and an older woman, dressed in severe black, looked out at her.
“Yes, miss?”
“I’d like to see Mr. Chalmers.”