A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  “I don’t equate the two things,” I said.

  “What things?”

  “Jerry’s accident and Winifred’s death.”

  “Of course, you’re right, in principle. One died. One didn’t. But each is a tragedy.”

  “It’s more than that. One innocent girl was beaten on the head with a baseball bat until she was dead. Jerry’s dick was in some girl’s mouth while he was driving eighty miles an hour with a half dozen beers in him and he crashed into a tree.”

  I think if I had been one of his own children, he would have struck me. The look on his face was frightening.

  “Where did you hear such a vile story as that?”

  “Not from Constant. He plays by the family rules. You have no worries there.”

  “From whom then?” he insisted.

  I shook my head. Sally Steers’s name was not to come from my lips. “May I ask a question?”

  “What?”

  “Have the police questioned Weegie Somerset?”

  “Yes. And she denied that Constant had roughed her up. She said they had an argument and that was all. She said that nothing physical happened. I was able to tell that to Mr. and Mrs. Utley.”

  Then, from outside, came Kitt’s voice. “Harrison, are you in there? Harrison?”

  “I’ll be right out, Kitt,” I called back.

  “Stay away from Kitt,” he said, pointing his finger at me. “She knows nothing.”

  “Who does know?” I asked. “It would be helpful for me to know that. Does Mrs. Bradley know?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “Maureen?”

  “No.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Jerry. Sandro. Desmond. Myself. No one else.”

  “Not Johnny Fuselli?”

  “Yes, Johnny Fuselli. He would never talk. He works for me. I trust him totally.”

  “And Sims Lord?”

  “Yes, Sims. He knows. He is my lawyer.”

  “That’s quite a lot of people to keep a secret, Mr. Bradley.”

  “That’s my worry, not yours.”

  We did not look through the rest of the Bradley Library. It had merely been a place to be alone. We rose to go back to the tent.

  “I want to stop in here a minute,” he said, indicating the men’s room. “Shugrue said the urinals are working.”

  He stood in front of one of the urinals while I waited. Not wanting to part on an unfriendly note, he spoke in a confidential tone. “I’m getting older, Harry,” he said. “When I was a young man and sat on the toilet, my cock used to touch the water. Now my balls do.”

  It was meant to be a joke, to smooth possibly troubled waters between us. I was meant to laugh. Before Easter I would have. That day I didn’t.

  “Sometimes you look like a defrocked priest, Harry,” he said.

  I had things to say. “Liquor does not elate your son, Mr. Bradley. It brings out the dark side in him. You should know that.”

  “You’re making too much of this. Getting drunk is a thing all young men do when they’re seventeen, or eighteen, or nineteen,” said Gerald.

  “Not Constant. There is no exuberance in Constant’s drinking. No sense of wild oats. No fun. It goes straight to the dark part of him.”

  “Oh, please,” said Gerald impatiently.

  “A former mistress of yours pointed it out to me first. I said ‘Oh, please,’ too, at least I said it to myself. But she was right.”

  “What dark part?”

  “He killed a woman when he was drunk, Mr. Bradley. What’s darker than that? What happened could happen again.”

  “Never. It was an accident.”

  “That’s the party line, I know. ‘It was an accident.’ But don’t use it on me. I was there, remember. I saw. And listen to what I’m telling you about Constant. It could happen again.”

  “I thought you were his friend.”

  “I am. Or I was. That’s why I’m telling it to you.”

  He zipped his fly and moved away from the urinal. He brushed some sawdust from the elbow of his blue linen suit. He moved toward the main doors of the library. Then he stopped and returned to where I was standing. He reached into his pocket and brought out two envelopes. In one were airline tickets. In the other was my contract from Sims Lord. He dropped the two envelopes on a board that connected two ladders and then moved outside to rejoin his family. He did not ask me to come along. I did not want to. I felt that I had become another version of the girl in the wheelchair, whoever she was, wherever she was, the one in the car with Jerry. Silenced by big money. My soul was lost, but my future was bought and paid for.

  On the day I was to leave for Europe, business class, I was informed by Sims Lord that the Bradleys’ chauffeur, Charlie, would drive me to JFK and accompany me to the Admirals Club to wait for my flight. It seemed to me an unnecessary inconvenience to have Charlie come from Scarborough Hill to Ansonia, but Sims said that Gerald had insisted. To offset the disapproval of Aunt Gert, who was embarrassed by the luxurious limousine parked in front of her apartment house, another example to her of the Bradleys’ bedazzlement of me, I offered to sit in the front seat next to Charlie, as if I were a friend of the chauffeur, but he would have none of it. “Oh, no, Harrison, Mr. B. wouldn’t approve of that,” said Charlie. “You get right there in back, and I’ll open the door for you.”

  Along the way, we talked. Or, rather, Charlie talked, all the time looking at me in the rearview mirror. Like everyone around the Bradleys, his conversation was totally about the doings of the family. Maureen’s wedding was the big family news. The wedding dress was being made in Paris by Mr. Givenchy, which he pronounced Jivinchy. The swimming pool was to be covered over with a dance floor, and the tent, which was going to be almost as long as a football field, was being decorated by Cora Mandell, the great decorator, and lined in French toile. There were to be ten bridesmaids. Mary Pat and Kitt were to be maids of honor. Congressman Sandro, Dr. Desmond, and Constant were to be ushers. Jerry was to be Freddy Tierney’s best man, but he wouldn’t be taking part in the procession up and down the aisle, “because, you know, of his limping like that.” Cardinal was going to say the nuptial Mass in the cathedral, and Cardinal was going to read the papal blessing from His Holiness in Rome.

  We sped on toward the airport. I wanted not to hear any more talk about the Bradley family, from which I was being separated, but at the same time I wanted to know everything about them. I knew in my heart I would never again see Scarborough Hill, which had been more of a home to me than my own home had ever been. I wanted to be far, far away from it, and at the same time I already missed it. Charlie talked on. The Washington crowd was coming, he said. Congressman Sandro was becoming a popular figure down there, and he was bringing a large contingent from the capital. The governor had accepted, with the missus. And the mayor, with the missus. The cardinal’s sister was coming, and a great many of the clergy. The Leverett Somersets were going to be out of town, as were the Thralls, the Frenches, Eve Soby, and Mr. and Mrs. Utley.

  “How are the Utleys?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they moved away in time,” answered Charlie. “A terrible reminder every time they look out the window of their house. It must have happened while she was making all those phone calls to Mrs. Wadsworth and Mrs. B. and the other mothers that night.”

  “Let me ask you something, Charlie,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Were you in your apartment over the garage that night?”

  “I was.”

  “One of your windows looks out toward the tennis court, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “Did you hear or see anything?”

  “No, no. Not a thing. I could sleep through an earthquake. That’s what I told Captain Riordan.”

  We rode on for a bit.

  “The story seems to have dropped out of the papers,” I said.

  “And a good thing.”

  “That reporter, Gus Bailey. You d
on’t hear anything of him.”

  “Terrible, what that man was reportin’,” said Charlie. “Insinuatin’ all kinds of lies.”

  “It was always a surprise to me that nothing ever happened to him,” I said. “That his legs weren’t broken. That he wasn’t beaten up.” I was thinking of Johnny Fuselli. I always imagined that that sort of thing, broken kneecaps, would have been in his line of work.

  “There’s all kinds of ways of taking care of people,” said Charlie.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t hear of Gus Bailey anymore, do you?”

  “No, you don’t, now that I think of it,” I said. “Are you saying—?”

  “All I’m sayin’ is, if you make your livin’ that way, something eventually is going to happen to you. Why should people accept having their lives ruined by a person like that.”

  I stared at him in the mirror.

  “When you do what Gus Bailey was doin’, you put yourself at risk, and I’m sure he knew that,” said Charlie.

  “But certainly Mr. Bradley wouldn’t be party to anything like that,” I said.

  “Good God, no. No possible way.”

  “Who then?”

  “There are people out there only too glad to carry out your wishes for you. For a price, of course. People you never have to meet. People whose names you don’t know, nor do they know yours.”

  “Who puts the deal together?”

  “Brokers, I suppose you call them.”

  “Like Johnny Fuselli?” I asked.

  Then the car pulled up to the front of the airline building, and his attention was diverted. Skycaps, seeing the limousine, gathered around the car. “Here we are,” said Charlie. “I’ll see to your luggage. Don’t worry, I’ll handle all the tipping. That’s the way Mr. B. wants it. You go over there by the counter, and I’ll meet you as soon as I park the car. Have your tickets ready and your passport. And then we’ll go up to the club and wait for your flight. You got plenty of time.”

  “Fine.”

  “Oh, by the way. I almost forgot.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Constant said to tell you good-bye.”

  I turned away from Charlie and walked inside. An hour later I was on the plane for London. I did not see Constant Bradley again for sixteen years. By then his family had moved away from Scarborough Hill.

  PART TWO

  1989

  New York

  6

  It was happenstance, nothing more, that drew the exceedingly private Harrison Burns to public attention. Although he was well known by reputation, he was, by his own choice, unpublicized and only rarely appeared in the sort of social world to which his celebrity entitled him. In the course of his adult life, Harrison Burns had become used to solitude. He lived alone since his estrangement from his wife and often dined without companionship, usually at a corner table of a neighborhood restaurant, Borsalino’s, always with a magazine or book. “It’s not particularly fashionable,” someone had told him about the restaurant. “Literary people and artists go there. But the food is sublime. Northern Italian. No frills.”

  His looks were not at their best in repose. A deep scowl between his eyebrows gave him the appearance of being older than he was, and a faintly pessimistic turn of his lips gave the impression that, when alone, he dwelt on disagreeable thoughts. This impression often deterred people from approaching him. But in conversation, or on encountering a friend, his face came to life, readjusted itself, and became actually inviting. Never handsome, he seemed pleasant enough looking then, and it was this unexpected warmth that made him appear so. Often people would say to him, “I thought you looked familiar, but I was afraid to approach you.” Or, “You’re different from what I thought you were going to be.”

  So Harrison Burns was not surprised when a well-dressed lady, past middle age, who had been staring at him throughout his meal with a questioning look, suddenly approached him and asked, “Are you who I think you are?”

  There was a time, in the beginning of his celebrity, when he would have answered, “Who do you think I am?” But now, ten years later, he had learned to reply to such a question by simply offering his name. “My name is Harrison Burns,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, of course. I knew I recognized you. It was driving me mad. I’ve read all your books.”

  He nodded in an agreeable manner. It was not an unpleasant sensation, being acknowledged, but then came the awkward moment that Harrison had come to know when strangers approached him. The silence. The slight embarrassment. How to continue, or how to withdraw. Sometimes there was a book to sign. He liked that better than forced conversation. There was a finality to the ceremony. “Tell me your name once more,” he would say, before writing. “Catherine? Do you spell Catherine with a K or a C?” Then a brief message. Then the signature, with the oversized S at the end of Burns. And then it was over. Thanks and farewell. But this woman did not move on. An instinct told him her interest in him was something other than literary.

  “There’s no reason you should recognize me,” she said. “It’s been so many years.”

  He looked at her more closely. “Actually, I don’t,” he said, even while he realized there was a remote familiarity to her face. Women at his lectures sometimes came up to speak to him and told him intimate things in conversation and then were disappointed two years later on a subsequent visit to their city when he did not remember either their faces or where their conversations had left off. “Help me,” he said.

  “I’m Luanne Utley,” she said.

  “Good heavens, Mrs. Utley.” He jumped to his feet. “Please forgive me for not recognizing you. It was inexcusable of me.”

  “Well, our acquaintance was brief, and traumatic, and sixteen years ago. I’ve had the advantage of seeing you on television or your picture in the papers. Please don’t stand.”

  “Are you alone? Is Mr. Utley with you?”

  “No. Ray died three years after Winifred’s death.”

  “I didn’t know that. I hadn’t heard. I’m very sorry. That’s all I ever seem to have said to you: ‘I’m very sorry.’ ”

  She nodded. “I moved away from Scarborough Hill. Too many memories.”

  “Of course. Have you married again?”

  “No. I saw someone for a while a few years back, but I ended it. It wouldn’t have been fair to him. There is still unfinished business in my life.”

  “Please sit down. Please join me.”

  “Just for a minute. I’m on my way out. I asked my friend to wait for me outside.”

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, no, nothing,” she said. “How are the Bradleys? One never stops reading about them. There are so many of them, one or the other is always being written about. Now, of course, they’re everywhere, but in those Scarborough Hill days they were never really accepted.”

  “I suppose.”

  “They were certainly the toast of Paris when Gerald was the ambassador there. Mary Pat marrying the count, and all that. It was the talk of Scarborough Hill. I suppose you were in Paris during all that.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Actually, I haven’t seen any of the Bradleys in years.”

  “Really?” She seemed surprised. “Not even Constant?”

  “No.”

  “But you were such good friends. You were at Yale together, weren’t you?”

  “I didn’t go to Yale, after all. I stayed in Europe for a year after Milford, and when I came back I went to Brown.”

  “I see. Have you married?”

  “I have. I am separated at the moment.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We are trying to work it out. Marriage counselors, that sort of thing.”

  “Are there children?”

  “Twin boys. Age two.”

  “I hope you do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ve done awfully well in life.”

  “Lucky, I guess.”

  “So law-abiding in ev
erything you write. That fascinating thirst-for-justice theme of yours running through everything.” Their eyes met. “If you weren’t a writer, I bet you would be in law enforcement. I think that’s why so many people like reading you.”

  “Well, I am the child of murdered parents, after all. Did you ever know that?”

  “Good heavens, no. We have something in common.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they catch the person who killed your parents?”

  “Persons. There were two of them. Dropouts. Druggies. It was apparently a random thing, looking for money, being surprised, panicking, shooting, killing.”

  “Did you go to the trial?”

  “No. That was the year I stayed in Europe. That was why I stayed in Europe. I didn’t come back until it was over.”

  She looked at him for a moment before she spoke. “I can’t imagine staying away from the trial. I would want to be there. Every day. I would want to look the killer right in the face. I would want to make him meet my eye.” She had begun to become impassioned. Then she caught herself and shook her head. “Well, at least they caught your killers. There is a finality to that. They’re away, I assume.”

  Harrison nodded. “Twenty years.”

  She rose. “I should go. I hope I haven’t ruined your dinner with this morbid talk.”

  “Oh, no. I’m delighted to have seen you, Mrs. Utley. I have thought of you often.”

  “And I you. Do you remember Captain Riordan?”

  “Of course.”

  “I keep in touch with him. He’s a nice man.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “He’s about to retire. I’ll miss him. He never gave up hope that he would solve it. I never did, either.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. Somebody knows. One day somebody will come forward.”

  “But it’s been years.”

  “Whoever it was had to have had help carrying her. She wasn’t dragged, you see. She was carried. Someone at her head. Someone at her feet.”

  Harrison stared at her, without replying.

  She met his gaze. “It was in the police report,” she said.