Private Screening

by Richard North Patterson

  “What about beer?” Lord was asking.

  They were stopping near a delicatessen. “Just not light beer,” she said finally.

  He looked into his wallet, grimacing. Stacy gave him ten dollars.

  Through the window, she saw him call someone from a pay phone. Then he came back with a bag and directed the driver two blocks north.

  They stopped at the garage of a white nineteen-thirtyish apartment building. “Let’s take my car,” Lord said.

  Parked near the exit was a beat-up Datsun. Getting out, Stacy saw that it was equipped with a break-in alarm and lock for the hood.

  Lord watched her hesitation. “It’s okay,” he told her. “The radio still works.”

  “I wouldn’t mind just quiet.”

  Leaving the garage, Lord wound through the Presidio, passing views of water framed by pine boughs, then downhill to a beach at the mouth of the bay. He parked facing the ocean; near them, Stacy saw a police car.

  “Better view than at a restaurant,” Lord remarked, and gave her a beer and sandwich.

  Stacy took a bite, looking out. A trace of fog made the setting sun an orange, hazy disk. A terrier ran at the water’s edge; his owner chased him; a man and woman built a bonfire. To their right, the ocean narrowed to the Golden Gate; on the left was a cypress-covered cliff, dotted with stucco houses whose colors caught the light.

  Lord followed her gaze. “It’s how I imagine an Italian hill town,” he said. “Portofino, maybe.”

  “You’ve never been there?”

  “I come here instead.” He smiled briefly. “Every time I see my son.”

  Glancing across, Stacy realized he no longer wore a ring. “When I was his age,” Lord was saying, “my mother bought a Woolworth’s painting of the Golden Gate. I think that’s when I decided to come here—I didn’t know it was so cold I’d have to look at this through windows. But Christopher loves it.”

  That for once he seemed unguarded made her hesitate. “What did DiPalma mean?” she finally asked. “About connecting Carson to this.”

  Lord’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know—considering that Harry’s a high-security patient in a state mental facility.”

  “It doesn’t sound that simple.” Her voice rose. “My God, remember what Moore said? We’re talking about two people’s lives.”

  Lord glanced at her half-eaten sandwich. “You’ve got the broadcast yet, and we’ve got to decide what you’ll say—”

  “I never asked you to decide what we should talk about.”

  Lord watched as she put down the sandwich. “In that case,” he said evenly, “you should have noticed at the trial that DiPalma goes too far. Always.”

  Stacy felt herself redden. “And you just wait until he does—always. But that doesn’t make him wrong.”

  “Why don’t we just get this out.” Lord’s voice was tighter. “Conspiracy theories are the last resort of people who can’t let go. DiPalma can’t let go because he lost the case. You can’t let go because you lost Kilcannon. About which, believe it or not, I’m very, very sorry.”

  “Sorry.…”

  “Sorry,” Lord shot back. “In spite of all you think it’s done for me. And I was also as sorry about pulling that film on you as anyone with a client to defend could afford to be. But I’d do it again, because that’s my job. Now, which is your reason for hating me—the film, the verdict, or that I once admitted not admiring Kilcannon?”

  Stacy fought for control. “All of them,” she retorted softly. “But what scares me is how smart you are.”

  For an instant Lord looked so stunned that it mingled with her own surprise at quoting his words to Jamie. She felt their taut, trapped emotion, and then Lord smiled without humor. “In other words, you’re afraid I won a case when I knew better.”

  “Yes.”

  “That can happen. But if I tell you I honestly don’t know what DiPalma’s talking about, will you accept that? Because you’re my client now, and I’m as concerned with that as Moore is. Not to mention Alexis and Damone.”

  She turned away—drained, obscurely embarrassed. “Go ahead.”

  “Your immediate problem is whether to do that concert. I’m not sure you should.”

  Distracted from anger, Stacy imagined standing behind a curtain, but the impulse to perform seemed something from another life. “If John’s alive,” she answered, “that’s non-negotiable.”

  “My thought is that Phoenix may release him if there’s nothing to gain. And you won’t become a target again—for him or whoever else.”

  “That’s what Colby Parnell tried, with his son.” She turned. “Did you see him this afternoon?”

  Watching her, Lord’s expression became one of resignation. “You’re fairly attached to him, aren’t you—Damone.”

  Stacy faced the windshield. A half-sun tinged the fog and dusk pink-gray, making the couple’s bonfire a yellow, flickering shape. It made her feel cold.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “John was at Berkeley on the GI Bill. After a while, he got involved booking concerts with student money. I’d started doing clubs, and he was wondering what to do when he got out. One night he came to see me.”

  The last sun slipped beneath the water. Tentative, Lord asked, “Were you lovers?”

  Stacy turned to him. “You asked me that before,” she said with equal restraint. “About Jamie.”

  Lord expelled an audible breath. “Someone’s blackmailing you, Stacy—in a particularly perverse and intimate way. I want to know what strings he’s found to pull.”

  His face was covered by darkness; like Jamie’s, she thought suddenly, as they’d ridden to the concert. “It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “Not this time. Let’s go now, okay?”

  Lord regarded her a moment, then started the car. Two sets of headlights lit the beach, his and the police car’s. Stacy watched them, silently reliving what she had not said.

  Gazing from her apartment, she’d felt John’s lips on the nape of her neck.

  For that instant, her senses took in everything: nighttime, Berkeley, the smell of fall, the way his beard felt. Then she turned in half-surprise; he had never touched her as a lover.

  As his mouth pressed into hers, she felt his chest and arms, then his hardness. She closed her eyes.

  His hand covered her breast.

  Stacy broke away before she knew it. “No—”

  It seemed to change the meaning of their empty wineglasses, the soft Carly Simon record, her unmade bed. John was breathing hard.

  She tried sounding more controlled. “It’s not right. Not with what we want.”

  His own voice was thick. “We can have both.…”

  “I don’t want a lover-manager.” The hurt dulling his eyes reassured, then disturbed her. “It’s not you,” she tried, “it’s me. I want to know you ten years from now, okay?”

  He gave a bitter, one-sided smile. “Can I quote you when some other guy moves in?”

  Slowly, her tension became disappointment. “Whoever else,” she answered, “is temporary. Please, let’s not change things.”

  He watched her, three feet away. Something in his look seemed so thwarted and then so sad that it was as if he had wanted her for years. It made her feel selfish, and much younger than twenty-one.

  “Stop it, John.”

  The sour smile returned. “I have a problem, as they say, with rejection. You’re paying for it.”

  His hurt and latent anger unsettled her. “I’d feel better if you talked to me instead.”

  After a moment he lay back on the bed, shoulders against the wall, staring up. His Bronx-edged voice was flat and distant, as though he were talking of someone else.

  “When I think about being a kid,” he began, “I remember the light catching my mother’s hair. The same picture every time—black hair, olive skin.

  “She’s listening to a Frank Sinatra record in this walk-up we had, waiting for my father.r />
  “He’d split because he didn’t like having me. I used to hear him—I was a pain in the ass, a millstone, she could have gotten an abortion. I hid in my room, pretending he wasn’t my father, or that I could beat him until he begged me to stop.”

  Stacy turned to him, wondering if he was inventing this to get her into bed. But his eyes had closed as if he were transported.

  “After he left, she used to meet him and stay overnight. When she came back she’d always hug me, like an apology. But each time I got more sure she’d leave.

  “When I was thirteen, he came back. I saw them whispering in the doorway—I can remember the look she gave him, so quiet and cool.” Damone shrugged. “They left me there. I never saw either one of them again.”

  His eyes remained shut. Realizing his story had ended, Stacy was still unsure of what to believe. She sat quite still, confused.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally told him, and felt foolish for it.

  Opening, his eyes glinted. “It’s not all bad,” he said. “Part of me still hates him, and wants her attention. That was what kept me going in Vietnam, getting my high-school equivalency, then through college. It’s like I had a family to make it for.”

  As Stacy looked at him, quiet, his own eyes changed.

  Hesitant, she touched his face. Then, slowly, his forehead came to rest on hers.

  Moments later, without her asking, Damone left.

  He never spoke of this again, or touched her, except as the friend he became. Now, staring at the lights of the SNI building, Stacy wondered what would have happened, or not happened, if she’d made love with him.

  “We’re here,” Lord told her.

  Alexis took one sip of wine.

  He had spread cheese and fruit in front of the television. But she would not eat until he had backed away. She still wore the soiled dress.

  “The Phoenix Countdown,” Rachel said. “Day Two.”

  When Stacy Tarrant appeared, Phoenix leaned forward, tense with hours of waiting for her answer. At the corner of his vision, Alexis glanced toward Stacy’s photograph.

  She faced the camera with the directness which was peculiarly hers. Yet this made her seem more vulnerable, he thought, a woman forced to become tougher than she wished. It moved him.

  “What I have to say is simple,” she began. “I’ll do the concert.”

  Her voice was level but huskier than usual, a little hard to hear. As relief coursed through him, Alexis turned from the photograph with a puzzled, frightened look.

  “You know what John means to me. You know I’ll sing if he’s alive.” Pausing, Stacy’s timbre changed. “All I ask is for you to show me that he is.”

  More than her words, the pause made him regret the cruel thing he had planned for her. For a moment, he wondered if he could truly use the Damone tapes he had made, and then remembered she had gone to Tony Lord.

  “All I want now,” Stacy finished, “is to see him. I’ll be watching at eight o’clock tomorrow.”

  When the picture changed, he saw Alexis wince.

  Parnell sat at a table, a stack of documents in front of him, waiting for a signal. Then he blinked, once.

  Voice raw, he began reading from his tax returns.

  “In nineteen sixty-five,” he said, “we had approximate income of three hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. Our contributions to charity, inclusive of money and other gifts, were nine thousand, two hundred.…”

  He looked down, fumbling with the microphone clipped to his tie. Alexis placed one hand to her chest.

  “Nineteen sixty-six,” Parnell resumed. “Income of three hundred seventy-nine thousand, gifts of eleven thousand.”

  Between each year, he caught his breath. “Nineteen sixty-seven,” he fought on. “Income, three hundred sixty-one thousand … gifts were ten thousand.”

  Alexis stared now. There was sweat on Parnell’s upper lip.

  “In nineteen sixty-eight …” His voice cracked.

  Alexis seemed to stop breathing—as if, Phoenix saw, she and Parnell were alone. He gripped the return in both hands. “Nineteen sixty-eight,” he rasped, “income of four hundred eleven thousand …”

  As Parnell swallowed, Alexis’s lips parted.

  “Gifts …” He coughed, finishing miserably, “Two thousand …”

  The returns slid from his hand.

  He stared at them dumbly, then his head jerked up. “That was the year Robert, our son …”

  Watching, Phoenix saw the pain on Alexis’s face. Parnell’s voice broke. “If you only knew our sorrow.…”

  As he turned from the camera, Alexis’s eyes seemed to harden. Parnell looked back again, mouth open but silent, as if beseeching her.

  He was certain now. He could break Parnell on television, as part of his entertainment. In front of his own wife.

  Phoenix wondered how this ordeal would change her.

  As she watched, mortified yet unable to look away, Parnell slowly picked up another piece of paper. “Nineteen sixty-nine,” he managed. “Income, five hundred thousand …”

  Day Three: Wednesday

  STACY sat upright, and then the scream died in her throat.

  Her heart was pounding. Brushing back her hair, it felt damp. The sheets were kicked off the bed.

  “Damn you,” she murmured.

  She switched on the lamp, fumbling for her glasses. Dawn was a crack of light at the edge of her drapes. She had slept for perhaps two hours.

  Jerking the drapes open, she thought of the last morning she’d awakened with Jamie.

  “You can’t let go,” Lord had said, “because you lost Kilcannon.”

  Morning came blue-gray across the rooftops, bringing the promise of sunlight. She wondered if Damone could see it, and if it looked the same.

  “Imagination,” Jamie had once told her, “is a curse.”

  In thirteen hours, she would know if John still lived.

  She went to the stereo, turned on a New Wave station, and sat at the edge of the bed. Her breathing had eased; when she repeated “Damn you,” almost as if practicing, her voice was close to normal.

  Her dream had started out the same.

  She was singing at the Arena; as before, the crowd held Carson aloft with his revolver aimed at her face, setting off a sequence she could never stop. Glancing backstage, Carson fired past her; she turned to find Jamie dying; he asked her what it meant. But this time the dream did not end there. At the moment Carson shot her, she awakened, calling out for Damone.

  He was the only one she’d ever told about the dream.

  “What it means,” he had answered after a time, “is that you’ll have it till you sing again.”

  She wished that she could tell him how scared she was.

  Lord ran faster.

  In front of him, Pacific Avenue rose between gabled Victorians and stone mansions, shade trees, manicured gardens. The street was quiet—a few cars, birds calling, some kids walking to private schools. Ahead the same old woman with flinty eyes peered over one shoulder as her poodle decorated a bush. Lord’s Nikes kept pounding the sidewalk. Turning left up the steep grade that was Pierce Street, he glanced behind him at a mile of houses, slanting toward the blue circle of the bay. Then he started up the hill.

  Above, Pierce stopped at a knoll of grass and trees overlooking the view to Lord’s back. Reaching the top, Lord saw a bearded man on a park bench, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. Steam rose from his thermos cup.

  As Lord ran into the park, the man put down his paper. Stopping next to him, Lord pressed the timer button on his wristwatch and said, “Twenty-nine minutes.”

  “What distance?” Moore asked.

  “Five miles—I’m getting faster.”

  “You’ll need it to outrun the cameras.” Moore glanced toward the front page; beneath “Tarrant and Parnell Say Yes,” the photograph of Lord and Stacy entering the Federal Building was captioned, “A Stunning Pair.”

  Lord sat down. “They just d
on’t have her sense of humor.”

  Moore looked at him keenly. “Why’d she want you, Tony? Bullshit aside.”

  “You mean aside from what she tells me?” Lord paused. “My theory is that she thinks I know something about Carson no one else does.”

  Squinting, Moore blew on his cup. “Do you?”

  “Nothing I can relate to this.” Lord noticed there was dew on the grass, glistening in the sunlight. “Not, seeing how I am his lawyer, that I could tell you if I did.”

  “In which case, you’d have what they used to call a moral dilemma. Seeing how you might be able help us stop this guy from killing two more people.”

  Silent, Lord stared across the rooftops at a destroyer heading into port. “How do you suppose,” he finally said, “that he got that broadcasting equipment without stealing it.”

  “With cash.” Moore gave him a sideways glance. “We don’t know from where.”

  Lord turned. “What’s DiPalma have, Johnny?”

  “Outrage.” Moore’s smile didn’t change his eyes. “He thinks you fucked him—and consider how you’d like to be the jerk that lost the Carson case. Phoenix is his last chance to bring you down in public and keep from losing reelection.”

  “If that’s all it is, the bureau wouldn’t play along.”

  Moore shrugged. “What if he’s right, Johnson keeps asking, how will we look—the pressure from Washington’s unbelievable. Me, I’m never happy with questions I can’t answer.”

  Lord kept watching his eyes. Quietly, he asked, “Is Damone part of his own kidnapping?”

  Unscrewing the thermos, Moore poured some coffee. “Is that what she thinks?”

  “I doubt it’s occurred to her.” Lord’s tone sharpened. “Come off it, Johnny.”

  The faint smile returned. “There’s no preparation for flight, odd financial transactions, or association with known crazies. In fact, nothing strange since that charming little stint in the Army.” Moore’s eyes remained a blank. “But maybe you know why Damone would abandon a good career and considerable personal assets to become a fugitive, or what his motive might be. Considering that he’s close friends with one extortion victim and never met the other.”

  Lord had no answer. “If it’s real,” he finally asked, “how did Phoenix take him?”