Black Money la-13

by Ross Macdonald

  We sat and listened to the dripping silence. "You were going to tell me what happened when you went out to the study early this morning."

  She shrugged. "I hate to think about it. Taps was sitting at his desk with a gun in his hand. He looked so thin and sharp-nosed, the way people look when they're going to die. I was afraid he was going to shoot himself, and I went to him and asked him for the gun. It was almost an exact reversal of what happened the night that little one was conceived. And it was the same gun."

  "I don't understand."

  She said: "I bought the gun to kill myself with four years ago. It was a secondhand revolver I found in a pawnshop. Taps had been out night after night with the girl, pretending to be tutoring, and I just couldn't stand it any longer. I decided to destroy all three of us."

  "With the gun?"

  "The gun was just for myself. Before I used it I called Mrs. Fablon and told her what I was going to do and why. She'd known of the affair, of course, but she didn't know who the man was. She'd assumed that Taps was merely Ginny's tutor, a kind of fatherly figure in the background.

  "Anyway, she got in touch with Taps wherever he was and he rushed home and took the gun away from me. I was glad. I didn't want to use it. I even managed to convince myself that Taps loved me. But all he had in mind was avoiding a scandal - another scandal.

  "Mrs. Fablon didn't want one, either. She made Ginny drop out of college and go to work for some clinic near the hospital. For a while I thought that the affair was over. I was pregnant again, with our third child, and Taps would never leave me, he promised he wouldn't. He said he threw my suicide gun in the ocean.

  "But he was lying. He'd kept it all these years. When I tried to take it away from him this morning, he turned it on me. He said I deserved to die for using a filthy word in Ginny's hearing. She was absolutely pure and beautiful, he said. But I was a filthy toad.

  "I took off my nightgown, I don't know exactly why, I just wanted him to see me. He said my body looked like a man's face, a long lugubrious face with pink accusing eyes and a noseless nose like a congenital syphilitic and a silly little beard."

  Her hands moved from her breast to the region of her navel, then lower to the center of her body.

  "He ordered me out and said he'd shoot me if I ever showed myself in his private room again. I went back into the house. The children were still sleeping. It wasn't light yet. I sat and watched it grow light. Some time after dawn I heard him go out and drive away in the Fiat. I got the children off to school and then I started cleaning. I've been cleaning ever since."

  "You say he isn't at the college?"

  "No. The Dean's office called this morning to see if he was ill. I said he was."

  "Did he take the revolver with him?"

  "I don't know. I haven't been in the study, and I don't intend to go in. It will have to stay dirty."

  I made a quick search of the study. No gun. I did find in a desk drawer about twenty versions of the opening page of Tappinger's "book" about French influences on Stephen Crane. The most recent version, which Tappinger had been working on when I first came here on Monday, was lying on top of the desk.

  "Stephen Crane," it began, "lived like a god in the adamantine city of his mind. Where did he find the prototype of that city? In Athens the marmoreal exemplar of the West, or in the supernal blueprint which Augustine bequeathed to us in his Civitas Dei? Or was it in Paris the City of Art? Perchance he looked on his whore's body in the massive cold pity of Manet's Olympe. Perchance the luminous city of his mind was delved from the mud of Cora's loins."

  It sounded like gibberish to me. And it suggested that Tappinger was breaking up, and had been breaking up when I first walked in on him.

  Besides the hopeless manuscript lay a rough draft of the five questions he had devised for Martel:

  1. Who responsible for Les Liaisons old and new?

  2. `Hypocrite lecteur'

  3. Who believed Dreyfus guilty?

  4. Where Descartes put soul? (pineal gland).

  5. Who got jean Genet out of jail?

  Seeing the questions as they had occurred to Tappinger, I realized their personal significance. He had used them, perhaps unconsciously, to speak of the things that were driving him close to the edge: a dangerous sexual liaison, hypocrisy, guilt and imprisonment, the human soul trapped in a gland.

  If the questions had seemed oddly one-sided to me, it was because they were answers, too, forced out in a kind of code by Tappinger's moral and emotional conflict. I recalled with a slight shock that the answer to the fifth question had been Sartre, and wondered if, in Tappinger's queer complex academic code, it referred to the night at the play seven years before.

  34

  THE ABSENCE of the gun probably meant that Tappinger was carrying it. I went outside and got my own gun and harness out of the trunk of my car. Because there were children in the street, I retreated into the house to put the harness on.

  "You're going to kill him," Bess said. She looked widowed already.

  "I won't use this unless he forces me to. I have to protect myself."

  "What will become of the children?"

  "That will be pretty much up to you."

  "Why should it be up to me?" she said in her little-girl voice. "Why did this have to happen to me?"

  You married the wrong man at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, I told her silently. But there was no use saying it out loud. She already knew it. In fact she had been telling me about it, in her own queer inarticulate way, ever since I met her.

  "At least you've survived. That's something to be thankful for, Bess."

  She raised her fist in an impatient, almost threatening, gesture. "I don't want to survive, not this way."

  "You might as well. The life you live may be your own."

  The prospect frightened her. "Don't leave me by myself."

  "I have to. Why don't you call one of your friends?"

  "We don't have any. They dropped away long ago."

  She seemed to be lost in her own house. I tried to kiss her goodbye. It wasn't a good idea. Her mouth was unresponsive, her body as stiff as a board.

  The thought of her stayed with me, poignant and unsatisfying, as I drove across town toward the Fablon house. Perhaps below the level of consciousness, down where the luminous monsters swam in their cold darkness, Bess was in love with her husband's love affair.

  Ginny was at home, and he was with her. His gray Fiat stood under the oak tree. When I knocked on the front door, they answered it together. He was red-eyed and sallow. She was shivering.

  "Maybe you can make him stop talking," she said. "He's been talking for hours and hours."

  "What about?"

  "I forbid you to say."

  Tappinger's voice was hoarse and unnatural. "Go away," he said to me.

  "Please don't," she said. "I'm afraid of him. He killed Roy and the others. That's what he's been talking about all day all the reasons why he had to kill Roy. And he keeps giving different reasons, like he saw Roy kneeling by the pool trying to wash his bloody face and he felt so sorry for him that he pushed him in. That's the euthanasia reason. Then there's the St.-George-and-the-dragon reason: Roy was delivering me into the hands of Mr. Ketchel and something had to be done to stop Her voice was savage and scornful. Tappinger winced under it. "You mustn't make fun of me."

  "This is making fun?"

  She turned to me. "The real reason was very simple. You guessed it last night. I'd been pregnant by him and Roy found out somehow that Taps was the father."

  "You let me think it was Peter."

  "I know I did. I'm not covering up for Taps any longer."

  He gasped as if he had been holding his breath. "You mustn't talk like that. Someone might hear you. Why don't we go inside?"

  "I like it here." She planted herself more firmly in the doorway. He was afraid to leave her. He had to hear what she might say.

  "What were you doing at the Tennis Club that night, professor?"
>
  His eyes veered and then held steady. "I went there for purely professional reasons. Miss Fablon had been my student since February. I counseled her, and she confided in me."

  "Did I not," she said.

  He went on spinning out his string of words, as if it was his only support in a void: "She confided that her father, with the aid of a scholarship from Mr. Ketchel, was going to send her to a school in Switzerland. I felt that my advice as an educator would be useful to them, and I went to the club to offer it.

  "I got there rather too late to be of use. I saw Mr. Fablon staggering across the lawn, and when I spoke to him he didn't know me. He stumbled into the pool enclosure, apparently with some idea of washing his face, which was bleeding, and before I knew it he had fallen in. I'm not a swimmer myself, but I tried to fish him out with a pole they keep for that purpose, with a paddle hook on the end " "You mean," she said, "you used it to hold him under water."

  "That's a ridiculous accusation. Why do you keep repeating it?"

  "Francis gave me an eyewitness account the other night. I didn't believe him then - I thought he was making it up out of jealousy. But I believe him now. He saw you push Roy in and hold him under with the pole."

  "Why didn't he interfere if he was there?"

  Tappinger said pedantically. "Why didn't he report it?"

  "I don't know."

  She peered up past me at the declining sun, as if it might abandon her, leave her in cold darkness. "There are a lot of things I don't understand."

  "Did you take them up with your mother Monday night?" I said.

  "Some of them. I asked her if it could be true that Taps drowned Roy in the swimming pool. I shouldn't have, I suppose. The idea seemed to throw her."

  "I know it did. I talked to her after you left. And after that she talked to Tappinger on the phone. That was her last talk. He came here and shot her."

  He said without conviction: "I did not."

  "Yes you did, Taps."

  Her voice was grave. "You killed her, and then the next day you came to Brentwood and killed Francis."

  "But I had no reason to kill either of them."

  There was a questioning note in his denial.

  "You had plenty of reasons."

  "What were they?" I said to both of them.

  They turned and looked at each other as if each felt the other possessed the answer, the multiple answer. I was struck by the curious resemblance between them, in spite of their differences in sex and age. They were very nearly the same height and weight, and they had the same fine regular features. They could have been brother and sister. I wished they had been.

  "What were the reasons for killing Martel?" I said.

  They went on looking into each other's faces, as if each were a dream figure in the other's dream which had to be interpreted.

  "You were jealous of Francis, weren't you?" Ginny finally said.

  "That's nonsensical."

  "Then you're nonsensical, because you're the one who said it in the first place. You wanted me to call the whole thing off:" I said: "What whole thing was that?"

  Neither of them spoke. They looked at me with a kind of dimly comprehended shame, like children caught in forbidden play. I said: "You were going to kill him and inherit his money, weren't you? But it's always the con artist who gets conned. You were so full of your own wild dreams that you believed his stories. You didn't know or care that his money was embezzled from an income-tax evader."

  "That's not true," Ginny said. "Francis told me the whole story of his life last weekend. It's true he started out as a poor boy in Panama. But he was a direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake through his mother, and he had a parchment map, which was handed down in the family, showing the location of Drake's buried treasure. Francis found the treasure, over a million dollars' worth of Peruvian gold, on the coast of Panama near Nombre de Dios."

  I didn't argue with her. It no longer mattered what she believed, or said that she believed.

  "And it isn't true," she went on, "that we planned to kill him, or anybody. The original plan was for me to marry Peter. I was simply to divorce him and get a settlement, so that Taps and I could go away " He shook his head at her in quick short arcs. His hair frizzed out like a woman's.

  "Go away and study in Europe?" I said.

  "Yes. Taps thought if he could get back to France that he could write his book. He'd been trying to get it started for years. I was getting desperate, too. It got so shabby, making love in the backs of cars, or in his office, or in a public motel. Sometimes I felt as if everyone on the campus, everyone in town, must know about us. But nobody ever said a word."

  "You mustn't tell him all this," Tappinger said. "Don't admit anything."

  She shrugged. "What difference does it make now?"

  I said: "You originally planned to marry Peter and divorce him, is that right?"

  "Yes, but I hated to do it to him. I only agreed because we were desperate for money. I've always liked Peter. When Francis came here and asked me to marry him, I switched the plan. I didn't owe Francis anything."

  "You were attracted to him."

  The words seemed to come out of Tappinger's mouth involuntarily, as if a ventriloquist was using him as a dummy.

  "I said you were jealous of him, didn't I?"

  He sputtered. "Jealous? How could I be jealous? I never even saw the man, until-" He shut his mouth, biting back the words.

  "Until you shot him," she said.

  "I tell you I didn't shoot him. How would I know where to find him?"

  "I gave you the address. I shouldn't have. Francis told me after you shot him that it was you. He said it was the same man who killed Roy."

  "He said that because he hated me."

  "Why would that be?" I said.

  "Because Ginny and I were lovers."

  "You admit it, do you?"

  His mouth worked, trying to produce the words that would support him over the void. "We were lovers in the Platonic sense, I mean to say."

  She looked at him scornfully. "You're not even a man. I'm sorry I ever let you touch me."

  He was trembling, as if her shivering chill had infected him. "You mustn't talk like that, Ginny."

  "Because you're so sensitif? You're about as sensitive as a mad dog. I doubt that you know any more about what you're doing than a mad dog does."

  He cried out: "How dare you treat me with disrespect? You were an ignorant girl. I made a woman of you. I admitted you to the intimacy of my mind -"

  "I know, the luminous city. Only it isn't so luminous. The last dim little light went out Monday night, when you shot Marietta."

  His whole body leaned toward her suddenly, as if he was going to attack her. But the movement was inhibited. I was there.

  "I can't stand this." He turned away abruptly and almost ran into the sitting room.

  "Be careful of him," Ginny said. "He has a gun in there. He was trying to talk me into a suicide pact."

  The gun coughed apologetically. We found Tappinger lying on the floor of the room where he had shot Marietta. The revolver he had used on her and Martel had left a dark hole in his own temple. The briefcase of money stood behind the door, as if he hadn't dared to let it out of his sight.

  I took the revolver, which still had three rounds in the chambers, and went next door to telephone the county police. Peter became very excited. He wanted to come back to the Fablon house and look after Ginny. He was the one who needed looking after. I ordered him to stay home.

  I was just as well I did. She was lying on the sitting room floor face to face with Tappinger, their profiles interlocking like complementary shapes cut from a single piece of metal. She lay there with him, silent and unmoving, until the noise of the sirens was heard along the road. Then she got up and washed her face and composed herself.

  -------------------------------

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