Still thinking about the size of their inheritance, which, unknown to them, had been increasing with such rapidity, Verity, Jonathan, and Cassandra murmured acquiescence to this speech.
Louise Larner Hawke sat glowering in the wing-backed chair, which, contrary to her cherished expectation, did not belong to her after all.
8
“Eric,” said Verity with weary patience, “please don’t refer to that part of my body again. You haven’t seen it in two and a half years. You couldn’t possibly remember what it looks like.”
Verity was sitting up in bed, resting back into a stack of down pillows, with the bedcovers secured under each arm. She wore nothing but a large black velvet sleep mask. The telephone was cradled between her ear and her shoulder.
“Yes,” she said, “I do want to see you again. For about sixty seconds.”
She listened to her husband without changing expression. “You’re joking,” she said after a moment. “Darling, you don’t expect me to give you money, do you?”
There was a tap at the bedroom door.
“Come in!” Verity called, then sarcastically to Eric: “What happened? Were you fired from the massage parlor? Or did Louise cut you off?”
Cassandra stepped quietly into the room.
“Whatever,” said Verity into the telephone. “Eric, I have no interest whatsoever in the way you live your life.” She pressed the mouthpiece against her neck. “Cara?” she questioned. “Serena?”
Cassandra did not answer.
Verity poked a finger under her sleep mask and raised it a notch. “Oh, Cassandra, good morning.”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,” remarked Cassandra as she went to the windows that overlooked the back gardens. She drew open the draperies, raised the blinds, and then lifted the sash to let in fresh air.
“Yes,” said Verity testily into the telephone, “I believe your mother is here. I heard her prowling about the hallway a little while ago, making clucking noises because I wasn’t out of bed yet.” She put her hand over the telephone and said to her sister, “Is Louise’s car downstairs?”
“Yes,” replied Cassandra.
“Yes, Eric, she’s here. No, I will not tell her anything for you. I am not an answering machine or a message service. And I’d rather you didn’t come over here. . . . Eric, I can’t believe that you’re asking me, your wife, to accompany you to the bar where you pick up all your one-night stands. Make it the Averof at ten. . . . All right, good-bye.”
“Are you thinking of making up with Eric?” asked Cassandra sourly.
“I’m thinking of murdering him in front of a large crowd of strangers. I have to do it myself,” Verity explained, “because hit men don’t take plastic.”
“Honestly, though,” said Cassandra, “are you thinking of a reconciliation?”
Verity shook her head vehemently.
“Verity, I wish you’d take that mask off,” sighed Cassandra.
Verity slowly raised the mask. The full light of the afternoon shone directly in on her face.
“Oh, God,” she moaned, “doesn’t this day have a rheostat?” She rolled sideways in the bed and buried her face in the topmost pillow.
“Verity, you really should make an effort to get up a little earlier in the day. It’s not as if you were working a job on the graveyard shift, you know. Father always said it might be nice someday to see you for breakfast, and I agree.”
“I hate breakfast,” Verity moaned. She rolled onto her back. “Besides, I would have been up earlier if a certain stepmother and mother-in-law rolled into one hadn’t made a concerted effort to disturb me.” She sat up straight, punched the pillows, and then sank back into them again. “Louise has been skulking about since dawn. Has she closed down the agency? Every time I’d doze off, she’d open the door to see if I had gotten up yet. She opened the door of your room twenty times.”
“I didn’t come in last night.”
“Oh, yes? Did you catch his name?”
“Rocco DiRico.”
“That hunky drummer? Oh, Cassandra, I’m so jealous!” She sank down farther, pulling the mask back over her eyes. “Now I’m distraught. Now I don’t think I can get up at all.”
“Verity . . .”
Verity laughed, and pulled off the mask. “Good for you! It’s what I’ve always said: pick out what you like best and then take it down off the shelf.”
Cassandra sat on the edge of Verity’s bed, looking out the window at the late afternoon sunlight that shone on the tops of the evergreens. “I know why you’re going to see Eric,” she said unexpectedly.
“Why?”
“To buy coke from him.”
“Do you need some?”
“Coke’s bad for you,” said Cassandra. “It eats away your nose.”
Verity slipped farther under the covers. “Oh, God, lecture time. Coke is better than heroin,” she pointed out.
Cassandra was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It really is about time you got up.”
“I know,” Verity sighed as she pulled back the covers and edged out of the bed.
“I wonder,” said Cassandra at last, “if Louise knows that Eric deals drugs?”
“No,” said Verity definitely.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because,” said Verity, walking toward the bathroom, “if she did know, she’d have demanded a cut of his profits.”
When she returned from the bathroom a few minutes later, wearing a robe and carrying a brush, she sat on the edge of the bed beside Cassandra. Cassandra took the brush, and ran it again and again through Verity’s thick blond hair.
“Just like I used to,” she said, with a small smile.
“Guess what I did yesterday,” said Verity.
“I wouldn’t even begin . . .”
“I went to a hobby shop. I went to two hobby shops, in fact. One at the Chestnut Hill mall, and one downtown.”
“Why on earth?” asked Cassandra.
“To see what the merchandise was like. To try to figure out what it was that Louise was buying at the hobby shop in Atlantic City.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Cassandra. “It could have been anything.”
“No, it couldn’t have. I called Ben James last night, and asked him how big the package was. He said it was very small. Like a bag for candy or something. So that cut out a lot. I just had to look for small things.”
“And what did you find out?” asked Cassandra curiously.
“That Louise was either planning to get high on airplane glue, or else she made a purchase of certain chemicals.”
“In a hobby shop? What kind of chemicals?”
“Little tiny bottles. For teenage chemistry sets. I wasn’t able to figure out what kind she got.”
Cassandra put down the brush. “You think Louise doctored Father’s sleeping pills?”
“I think that’s more likely than that Louise is sniffing airplane glue.”
“Verity, I don’t like this.”
“Of course not. Murder isn’t—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. What I don’t like is your going on about this. You can’t accuse Louise of murder. I mean, that’s completely outrageous. I certainly don’t like her. I’m certainly not glad that Father married her. But I’m absolutely sure that she didn’t kill him.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because there was no reason to kill him.”
“His money,” Verity pointed out.
“Father didn’t have any money. Or not much. He had already made Louise a partner in the business. Why should she kill him?”
“Louise thought she was getting this house. Didn’t you see her face when Eugene Strable told her that the house belonged to us? That’s what she wanted. I’m sure she knew about Mother’s trust fund for us. That was common knowledge down at the realty office. But she may have thought Father had a lot more than he did have. He may have married her, but I bet he didn’t open the account
books on their honeymoon.”
Cassandra shook her head. “I think if you had a job, you wouldn’t let your imagination get carried away like this. You’re brooding!”
“I’m not brooding!” protested Verity. “I think it’s sort of fun. I’d love to pin a murder rap on the world’s most vulgar woman. She deserves the death penalty for those clothes she wears, anyway.”
“See?” said Cassandra. “That’s what I mean. You’re just stirring up trouble because you’re bored.”
“You think we ought to have Father exhumed?”
“No!” cried Cassandra. “I do not! What a horrible idea!”
“You’d rather that Louise get away with it, then?”
“She’s not getting away with anything!” cried Cassandra. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you. You’ve gone off the deep end. It’s all that coke, probably.”
Verity took the brush away from her sister. “You’re the one who’s upset,” she said with a smile. “You think there’s something wrong too. You just won’t admit it.”
To this Cassandra made no reply.
At ten o’clock that evening, Verity stood beneath the tiny canopy before the door of the Averof Restaurant near Porter Square in Cambridge. She was uncharacteristically on time. Eric, characteristically, was not. In habitual lateness, at least, they had been a well-matched couple. It was raining heavily. Verity tried to protect herself from the downpour, as well as from the water that spilled off the roof, by squeezing between a pyramidal evergreen in a redwood bucket and a cold stuccoed wall next to the wooden door of the restaurant. The cool rain spattered in her face and across her calves beneath her leather trench coat. She took off her dark glasses, squinting against the glare of headlights passing along busy Massachusetts Avenue, and wiped away the water from the lenses with a tissue. She leaned forward and peered up and down the sidewalk. She cursed Eric—not under her breath at all. She was jostled by a party of already drunken patrons scurrying in off the sidewalk, and trying to crowd through the narrow doorway at once. In defense Verity plunged the point of her umbrella into the thigh of the most obnoxious member of the party. He snapped about and glared at her, but she was gazing innocently in another direction.
When the offending party had all squeezed inside the restaurant, Verity turned back—and there stood Eric.
“Why the hell didn’t you wait inside?” he asked. “You’re fucking soaked.”
Beneath his raincoat Eric wore a green Izod pullover and tan dress slacks. The protective awning cast a shadow across the upper portion of his face, hiding his dark-blue eyes and accentuating the sharpness of his handsome features. His dark mustache was full and neatly trimmed.
“I waited out here,” Verity continued, “because the smell of Greek food makes me want to throw up. Besides, there’s a belly dancer inside. How people can digest their dinner while some woman sidles up to the table and shakes her stomach in their faces is something I can’t even begin to understand.”
“Then why the hell did you suggest the Averof?”
“I was confused.”
Eric took a deep breath, evidently trying to stifle some shred of annoyance, or some angry remark. “Why don’t we go over to Uno’s?”
“Uno’s? It sounds like a singles bar for people who want to remain that way. It’s not a bar, is it? If you’re going to ask me out to dinner on a rainy night, I’m not going to let you off with a pitcher of beer and a bowl of pretzels.”
“It’s a restaurant. You like Italian, don’t you? There’s a bar downstairs, but it’s quiet. No disco, no belly dancers.”
He took her umbrella, snapped it open, and stepped out into the rain. He motioned her to get under with him. “Where’s your car?” he asked.
“Across the street,” she replied. “Where’s yours?”
“Repossessed.”
They crossed the rainy street together, and climbed into the Lotus.
“We might as well do our business now,” said Verity.
“No,” said Eric.
“Why not?”
“Because as soon as you got your coke, you’d say, ‘Eric, I don’t have any appetite, where do you want me to drop you off?’ ”
“You know me too well.”
“I wanted to see you tonight, Verity. It means a lot to me.”
She turned on the ignition. “I hope you’ll take a check,” she said.
Eric pursed his lips, and exhaled sharply through his nose. He spoke a moment later: “For you, anything . . .”
“Credit?” she asked, pulling out of the parking space.
“Well, no,” he conceded. “Not credit.”
The rain beat against the roof of the car. Verity stopped suddenly before a changing light.
Eric turned to her. “Can you really see, on a night like this, through those glasses?”
“Like a cat.”
Uno’s was actually Pizzeria Uno, right in Harvard Square. Verity groaned at the door, but inside, the place was dark-walled, and dimly lighted, and filled with the substantial odor of good Italian food. After hanging up their coats and leaving the name Larner with the head-waiter, Verity and Eric went downstairs to the bar and picked out a table in a dark corner next to an unplugged Pac-Man machine. She ordered bourbon on the rocks, and he a Heineken. While waiting for their drinks, Verity stood and checked her reflection in one of the mirrors that lined the walls above the wainscoting. She pushed back a strand of wayward blond hair from her forehead and picked at the puffed sleeves of her forties-style white dress, patterned with lines of vivid cherries. When she turned back it was to find Eric’s eyes lingering on her breasts. She sat down again, and pointedly adjusted the low-cut bodice upward.
Eric raised his eyes and met hers. He smiled languidly.
Verity twitched the corner of her mouth. She said, in a voice that parodied Eric’s, “ ‘Oh, Verity, even after all this time, even after all that’s happened, you still turn me on.’ ”
“You do!” Eric exclaimed sincerely. “You really do still turn me on! God, you’re beautiful, Verity. I don’t know how I could have let you go out of my life.”
Verity groaned softly. “Who writes your dialogue?”
“Why can’t you ever accept a compliment about yourself?”
“I can, when it comes from a stranger.”
“I want this to be a pleasant evening for us. But you get so fucking defensive, just like when we used to have fights. You always had to pretend you were right, even when you knew you were wrong. I just want you to know you don’t have to be defensive with me.”
Their drinks were brought, and, as the waitress put them down, Verity said, with some softness in her voice, “You’re right, I was being defensive, and I apologize.”
They talked about what they had been doing during the past two years. Verity told of Kansas City and terminal boredom. Eric had lost his job as a CETA office manager when the program was dismantled. Unable to find anything similar—a good salary and very little work—he had made do with temporary positions obtained through an agency. He had, for instance, been a cutting operator at a postcard factory, and had wrapped packages at Jordan Marsh during the Christmas season.
“But mostly,” said Verity, after Eric’s recitation, “you deal.”
“Some,” he admitted.
“Enough that you’re not really looking for anything else. Just don’t get busted,” added Verity earnestly.
“Wha, Miz Verity, ah’m touched deeply,” he said, tilting his head, and touching the brim of an imaginary cap.
Verity took a deep breath. “Don’t be,” she said. “I don’t want a husband in jail, even if he’s an estranged husband. Besides, it’s too much trouble finding a good dealer. I was always getting burned in Kansas City. Jesus, some of those bastards mixed in everything from cornstarch to Dutch Cleanser. If you’d had enough of it, you could have made biscuits. As far as dope goes, you were always faithful to me. Speaking of which, how is Barbara?”
Eric blinked innoce
ntly. “Didn’t Mother tell you? We broke up some time ago.”
“That’s a surprise. For a while there I thought you’d developed a Siamese twin.”
“I haven’t seen Barbara for months,” said Eric. He paused thoughtfully. “I think she joined the Peace Corps.”
“So you’re living alone?”
“After you . . . ,” he said gallantly.
Verity rolled her eyes.
“I have some deals going,” he added, seriously. “You don’t have to worry about me. There are irons in the fire.”
“Well,” said Verity, “I’ll say this in all sincerity, Eric: I hope one of those irons gets hot this time.”
They were called upstairs, seated at a table in the corner and given menus. After they had ordered, Eric said, “I really was sorry about your father, you know.”
“Thank you,” said Verity, as she scanned the menu. “Now let’s allow that subject to rest for the evening.”
The waiter brought a carafe of red wine. In the conversation that followed, Verity saw flashes—as she might have seen flashes of lightning on a summer night, out of the corner of her eye—of the Eric she had fallen in love with, and the Eric she had married. He was very good-looking, and—she had to admit—still very sexy. He had hardly changed in three years. His hair was cut shorter, he was thinner, and his face had more character. She was almost certain that he could not have fabricated that gaze, which revealed in him a melancholy mixture of regret and longing. At the same time, though, she saw other flashes—and these were brighter—of his cheap sarcasms, his laziness that outdistanced even her own, his inability and unwillingness to give any sort of direction to his life. Eric’s basic fault was that he always took the easy way, without regard to even obvious consequences.
When the check was brought, and laid face-down upon the table, Eric said, “Verity, I need to ask you something—”
Interrupting him forcibly, Verity cried, “No! Don’t even mention a reconciliation! There have been times, I admit, when I’ve thought it might be possible, but it wouldn’t work out any better a second time around. I’m not going to push for a divorce, not for a while anyway. The separation is fine, and besides, we’re going to be seeing one another—after all, you’re my dealer again.”
Wicked Stepmother Page 8
