“I’m glad I read it,” I said. “Otherwise I’d never have found out.”
“Found out what?”
“That you didn’t kill Peter Venables. If I hadn’t read it, we’d never have had this talk. You didn’t kill—”
“I still could have. You know how I wanted you back. He wanted to take you away …”
“You didn’t think he could do that. You know me too well. Not Peter Venables—it’s a joke.”
“Not necessarily. There was a time I didn’t think you’d ever want to be rid of me. If you’re wrong once, you can be wrong again.” He was walking away from me. He looked tired but hanging on. “Look how wrong I was about the people in my life. They turned on me with the first whiff of provocation … Well, forget it, Belinda. I still don’t know where I was when he was getting his just deserts—and the gun hasn’t turned up. So it looks like I’m still the man …”
He left me then. I heard the elevator yelling and screaming.
He hadn’t killed anyone. And he’d wanted to win me back and I was the one he thought of when he thought of sex … At just that moment life struck me as even more complicated than usual. But I had learned one thing from my foray into detection.
Jack Stuart hadn’t killed anyone. No one else could be as sure as I was, but that didn’t matter. He hadn’t killed Peter.
Which meant someone else had.
Chapter Thirty-one
PEOPLE WHO DON’T SEEM TO know what’s going on have always driven me nuts.
But one of the things I was learning that summer was that I’d spent most of my adult life being one of them. I’d always made a point of paying attention only to what I thought was my own life, and then mine and Jack’s, but it was turning out that just about everyone had thought I was wholly wrapped up in myself. And now they had Belinda’s Belindas to prove it. The funny thing is, I think they were right.
Even now when I look back on those baking months I wonder what I was really seeing, what I might have been able to understand if I’d been quicker and less wrapped up in my own life. Everything surprised me. I was continually off balance. The last thing that had made sense to me was Jack’s moving out of the loft. Once he was gone, everything came springing out of the box lickety-split and I was always flinching and backing up and trying to get my bearings.
I kept thinking back to the day Sally had summoned me to the gallery and told me Harry was in love with another woman. I think about my reaction and I wonder. That was the first bolt from the blue, the first of my post-Jack assumptions that proved to be without foundation. From then on it was just one thing after another, all summer long.
I was sitting in the dark wondering if I could work up an appetite for dinner. Burgling Jack’s apartment and then getting caught at it were not the kind of events that make you hungry. Hearing Jack’s explanation had left me feeling cruel and useless and drained of both emotion and energy. The whole day amounted to simply the latest of the surprises. Surprises, I reflected, can wear you out.
I was still sitting there, dangling between the twilight zone and a nap, when Hacker called wanting to know what I’d found at Jack’s. I told him and he whistled slowly. I could hear the Yankee game in the background, Phil Rizzuto yelling “Holy Cow!” To be a Ruffian you had to have been a baseball freak. Over the years the Yanks had practically become relatives of ours. I told him how terrified I’d been when Jack saw me outside the building. I had Hacker on the edge of his seat. And then I told him what had happened when Jack had shown up at the loft. I had to tell somebody and Sal was out of the picture and Hacker was left.
He listened patiently while I rambled on. When I’d finished he said: “So Peter actually told him he’d come back for you. Well, what do you know about that?”
“Not much,” I said, wondering why he’d picked that out of the whole recitation.
“Rhetorical question,” he said. “You’d better get some sleep. But tomorrow I think we should get together and solve this sucker. Sound good to you? Antonelli stopped by for a chat today. He wants to arrest Jack so bad he might just go ahead and do it. But you and I know Jack didn’t do it.”
“Are you still thinking about the past?”
“A little.”
“Why do you think Jack didn’t do it? Really.”
“Because he convinced you.”
I was sound asleep when the telephone woke me up. I don’t know how many times it had rung by the time I fumbled it out of the cradle. I didn’t recognize the voice at first because I’d been dreaming about Carlyle Leverett telling me I had to paint more and more pictures of myself and I was crying and cowering while he yelled at me. I wasn’t making much sense when I answered. Eventually I figured out it was Harry, but he sounded even less like himself than he had earlier.
“I’m sorry to wake you up,” he said. “But I need you. I’m at the hospital, NYU Medical Center—”
“What? Where? Are you sick?” I was shaking my head, trying to force myself back up to the surface. I looked at my watch. It was only eleven o’clock. I’d been so tired. Was I still dreaming? “What’s going on, Harry?” All I could think of was surprises. More surprises.
“No, I’m fine. It’s … it’s Sally.”
“Oh no, what? Tell me?”
“She tried to kill herself, Belle. I found her, I thought she was dead …”
He’d given me directions and ten minutes later I was in a cab. On the way there it began to rain and I watched the wipers slapping back and forth. I kept the window open trying to cool off and felt the spray on my face. Sleeping pills, he’d said. No way to tell when she’d taken them. He’d gone into her bedroom—their bedroom—to say good night. She’d asked him to sleep elsewhere and he’d been staying in the study rather than the spare bedroom. So he’d gone in to kiss her good night and she’d been lying on the floor in her nightgown. “Her face was white, Belle,” he said softly, “white as if it were all bone, no skin.” By some miracle Dr. Schein had been at home. An emergency call had brought an ambulance, and Schein was waiting at the hospital when it got there. They were working on her now and Harry didn’t know anything.
I got out at the nearest entrance and of course it was the wrong one. It was pouring outside, thundering, that low cracking rumble of summer storms. You could feel everything shake. I had to go downstairs and wind my way through an endless subterranean passage past kitchens and ominous examination rooms, past orderlies and patients in wheelchairs and other wanderers like myself, all zombies, looking drained and tired and speechless at the fates that had brought them to these corridors.
I found Harry in the lobby looking out at the rain pelting down. He was eating a Mars bar. I touched his arm and he pecked my lips. I tasted chocolate. “I don’t know a damn thing,” he said. “I suppose I’ll be the last to know. I guess they’re pumping her out. … What am I gonna do, Belle? What if she doesn’t come out of it?” He looked as if he wanted to cry but was too tired.
“If they’re doing that it means you got her here in time,” I said. I didn’t know what I was talking about, but it simply had to be true. I couldn’t lose Sally. It just couldn’t happen.
I got a Coke and we sat and waited. Harry dozed and I watched the rain and the cabs whisking past. It seemed important to watch the rain. Harry roused himself in mid-snore and looked around as if he didn’t know where he was. Then he stood up and paced for a while.
“Why do you think she did it?” I imagined a note, some cry for help. But then, Sally had been crying for help ever since that day at the gallery. She’d needed help while Hacker and I floated in the rowboat watching her pain. I’d tried to help but I knew it hadn’t mattered. She’d been coming apart inside where I couldn’t go. I knew why she’d tried to kill herself. Had it dawned on Harry?
He looked at me. “Why do people do things like that? They slip off some high ledge. They’re not themselves anymore, their reason fails them.” He shrugged. “You know Sal. You know there are mysteries inside her.”
“That’s a bit metaphysical,” I said sharply. But it was true. I just didn’t want him to wriggle away from the truth that mattered, the everyday truth. People don’t kill themselves over metaphysics. Or do they? What did I know about it, anyway?
Dr. Schein came down to the lobby about midnight. He was a short man with swarthy, bulbous features, a deeply lined, deeply tanned face, and long wispy gray hair. He threw himself down in a chair opposite us and closed his frog’s eyes.
“Harry,” he said, “that was too close for me. She’ll be okay. We’ll keep her overnight. But, Christ, what’s going on with her? Didn’t she give any hint? Was she acting weird or depressed or what?”
“Nervous, tense,” The good news had turned Harry into a rag doll. He looked at his hands. They were shaking and he grabbed his knees. His knees were shaking too. I felt exactly the same way. “You know the shock she had. But suicidal? No, I didn’t see any signs of that. None.”
“So we’ll call it a wash. I’m saying officially that it was an accident. That saves some reports getting made that you wouldn’t like dealing with at all. But, Harry, I’m telling you to keep an eye on her. She’s got to get free of all this stress. Take her someplace. Go on a trip. And get her thinking about therapy … Ah, hell.” He stood up and flexed his thick, powerful arms over his head. He was wearing a polo shirt tucked into rumpled seersucker slacks. “I’ve known Sally a long time. She’s got a will of iron. She wants to close herself out, she’ll do it. But don’t make it easy for her, okay? I think she’ll be so scared of what she almost succeeded in doing that she’ll never take another sleeping pill as long as she lives, which should be another forty years. But you never know. We’ll keep her here tonight. She’s already sleeping just fine. You go home and have three or four martinis and go to sleep. Come get her in the morning. Bring her flowers or something, be very tender with the lady. Baby her a little. Think about getting her away from the house and thoughts about Venables with no head and all the rest of it. Okay?”
“Okay,” Harry said. “You’re sure I shouldn’t go up and see her?”
“I’m sure. Go home. Just go home. Make him go home, will ya, Mrs. Stuart? Our boy needs some sleep.”
I said I would, and Dr. Schein went away.
Harry looked at me. “Home, James,” he said, and tried to laugh.
I went outside and got a cab for us.
Chapter Thirty-two
THE CITY WAS QUIET IN the way that only rain or snow can make it. It was nearly one o’clock and we were sitting under the awning in the garden. The only light came from the night sky, and I couldn’t see Harry’s face. The tip of a cigarette glowed before him. Rain fell steadily, bouncing and drumming on the flagstones, dripping in the thick foliage. Turtle Bay seemed to have gone to sleep.
I had known Harry so well for so long, trusted him so implicitly, but still I wasn’t sure of saying what I knew I had to say. Sal was an even older, even closer friend and she had just about succeeded in killing herself. The debt to her was the greater and someone had to speak for her. I couldn’t let it rest with what Dr. Schein had said. There was more. There was no one but me. And I had to trust Harry. Still, at that point, if I couldn’t trust Harry I was in pretty bad shape.
“Schein gave you some pretty good advice,” I said. I heard the ice in his gin-and-tonic. I sucked on my piece of lime.
“He’s a bright guy, a very caring guy, as they say.” He puffed the cigarette.
“You’re really going to have to put everything else out of your mind now and get Sal back on her feet. You’ve got to make her feel very safe and secure with you. She’s been through a lot. You know what I’m saying?”
“What are you saying, Belle? Words of one syllable—it’s been a long day.”
“Look, I’m not prying, I’m not asking any questions, I’m not picking on you—”
“Okay, now we know what you’re not doing.”
“But Sal is my best friend and you know how it is with best friends. I worry about her, I want it to be okay, and tonight scared me half to death.”
“I’ll bet.” Clink, clink with the ice.
“So that’s it, I guess,” I said lamely.
“Come on, Belle, that’s not it. What’s on your mind?”
“You’ve got to understand I’m not asking for details, I’m not asking you to deny anything—”
“There you go again—”
“You’ve got to forget the girlfriends,” I blurted.
I felt him smiling at me across the dark space between.
“I know about the girlfriends, Harry. The late Peter Venables told me about that part of your life.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” He didn’t sound angry.
“And Sally told me, too, about the tarts. I can’t figure it out, but she accepts all that. Or she says she does … but she says you’re really in love with someone else now.”
“You know Sal,” he said. “She latches on to an idea and you’re stuck with it.”
“Well, if you are in love with someone, then you are, but right now you’ve got to think of Sally. How much can this other woman mean to you when you put her in the balance with Sal and with Sal’s life—”
“So you think Sally tried to kill herself because I’m in love with another woman.”
“Don’t deny it, Harry, you don’t have to say a word—”
“I’m not denying it, Belle.”
“What?” I heard something scurry in the shrubbery and hoped it was a squirrel. “What did you say?”
“I’m not denying it, Belle. I am in love with another woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s one of those things, it goes back a long time. I’ve fought it for so long it’s part of my everyday life. Like breathing and eating and sleeping. I’m not going to fight it anymore, that’s all. Life’s getting shorter all the time … it’s time to admit the truth and do something about it.” He sighed and I saw the glowing cigarette arc through the darkness and land with a tiny shower of sparks on the flagstones.
“What are you saying? Who is it?”
“It’s you, Belle.”
He left me alone and I heard him moving around the kitchen making fresh drinks. My head ached and I made him bring me four aspirin to have with the second drink. He brought a candle in a hurricane lamp and put it on the table between us. It was still raining and it was still hot and I felt like a character Somerset Maugham would have loved.
He came back out and sprawled in the chair, held the tall cold glass to his forehead. He crossed his long legs. His sneakers were flapping loose, the laces long gone. His little toe was visible through a spot that had worn through.
“I love you, Belle. I’ve always loved you, I’ve never stopped loving you. The problem is, it’s gotten bad, really bad since you and Jack called it a day.”
“Oh, no, Harry,” I said, “no, no, that’s absurd, we’ve been friends all these years, I’d have trusted you with anything. Oh, please don’t tell me this now—I … I can’t quite take any more surprises.”
“It’s been more pronounced this summer. I’ve done everything I could to push it out of my mind, I threw myself into this show, I’ve said the hell with any little girlfriends—and our lamented chum Venables was all wet, anyway. Well, never mind. But you must know from my behavior that I’ve fought it.”
“It’s just not true,” I said. “Why, you tried to get Jack and me to patch it up—”
“I had to, Belle. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had just leapt into the situation gleefully, figuring now was my chance. You and Jack had to have every opportunity to get all the way back together. Now it looks like Jack isn’t going to be doing much patching …” He looked at me for a long time when I didn’t speak. Maybe he was expecting me to cry or laugh or throw a fit. But I just sat there, feeling his eyes on me.
“What’s going on in your noggin?”
“I wonder where there’s a safe place for me to hide,” I whispered. “Nothing’s the way
I’ve thought it was. I feel as if I’ve been living my life all these years with my eyes closed to reality. Oh, it isn’t just you … it’s everything. When Jack used to play football he’d tell me how important it was for a player to keep his head in the game … now I know what he meant. I just didn’t keep my head in the game, I guess. Everything’s an illusion. I guess that’s what Venables was trying to tell me.” I looked at Harry, who was staring at me, unmoving. “Venables tried to make me go to bed with him, he got pretty nasty—it just came out of nowhere and I was shocked, horrified. He was a monster, Harry. He seemed to think he had a right to me. I don’t know.” It was late and I was tired and I bit my lip because of all the things I didn’t want to do just then, crying was first on the list.
Guilty Parties Page 18
