The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  “Hey, buddy,” Ripley said to him, waving over the investigator with the camera, “you want to do my grunt work, it’s okay by me. Personally, though, I think we’re looking at an open and shut here.”

  “Open and shut,” young McEvoy echoed, nodding enthusiastically.

  Tucker was tempted to head-butt the little parrot right in his obnoxious beak.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mariah was twenty minutes late arriving at Spago. The trendy Beverly Hills establishment was more than a restaurant that prided itself on the quality of its menu and the celebrity quotient of its clientele. It was a cultural experience, a Tinseltown event.

  It took several minutes for her to struggle her way through the crowd of hopeful diners in the lounge and bar, some with reservations, some foolishly without. Working to quell the nervous flutters in her stomach, she tried in vain to catch the ear of the maître d’, while next to her, two young women from Georgia breathlessly recounted the famous people they’d already spotted in the hour and a half they’d been waiting—a group that ran the gamut, apparently, from several TV-sitcom stars and an actress who’d recently written a tell-all biography to a grandmotherly sex counselor who was a regular on the talk-show circuit. It was a clever businessman, Mariah thought wryly, who controlled his overhead by letting the paying customers serve as the floor show. On the other hand, the celebrities knew what they were getting into when they walked through the door. It was no doubt a mutually gratifying experience.

  When she was finally able to get a word in edgewise with a hostess and mention that she was there to meet Paul Chaney—news that brought wide-eyed gasps from the Georgia tourists—the manager suddenly materialized at her side to whisk her off into the restaurant’s inner sanctum. “Oh, yes, indeed, Ms. Bolt!” he said warmly. “They’ve been waiting for you.”

  They?

  Mariah clutched her silk shawl around her as he led her through the bar and past an outdoor garden room, then down the center of two long rows of tables lining a room decorated in warm terra-cotta and wood. At the end, sitting in a corner booth with a commanding view of all the action, she saw Paul’s golden head rising above dried-floral arrangements. A couple was sitting opposite him in the booth, she realized, a man and a woman. Her first thought was that Paul had brought along moral support as he prepared to deliver the bad news that he was giving her the heave-ho. Maybe he thought she’d restrain herself a little better—no crying or pleading or slashing her wrists—if he dumped her in front of witnesses.

  But when he spotted her and got hurriedly to his feet, his glance back at the table was fraught with more nervousness than Mariah would have expected in such a self-assured man. As soon as she recognized his table companions, his unease made perfect sense.

  The manager announced her cheerfully. “Here she is at last!”

  “Mariah, hi,” Paul said, kissing her cheek, his hand cupping her arm and drawing her toward him. “You look beautiful.” Mariah vaguely felt his touch on her skin, but she was so shocked she hardly registered his presence or his words. He turned to the manager. “Thanks, Chuck, I can take it from here.” As the other man nodded and took his leave, Paul turned back to her. “Mariah—”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, facing him at last. “How could you do this?”

  “You mustn’t blame him, Mariah,” Renata said from her corner of the booth, her smile both smug and chilling. If Mariah had felt nervous coming in, it was nothing compared to the abject, unreasoning anxiety she was feeling now—like Gretel, as the old woman from the gingerbread cottage sized her up for the roasting pan. “Paul mentioned when he called this afternoon that the two of you were having dinner here. I decided to horn in, I’m afraid. You remember my son, Nolan?”

  He was already on his feet, hand thrust out toward her. Mariah nodded slowly as she shook it. Blandly handsome, he was obviously trying to blind her with his megawatt smile. Like Paul’s strategy of delivering bad news in crowded places, Nolan’s high-potency charm, she suspected, was meant to put her off her guard, short-circuit her defensive reactions. Her brain was still trying to wrap itself around the news that Paul had called Renata that afternoon.

  “It’s great to see you again,” Nolan went on blithely. “I wanted to catch up with you at the Romanov opening, but with all the people there…” His grimace and shrug communicated the weighty burden of noblesse oblige that he’d had to carry as host in his grandfather’s museum. “I’m quite a fan of your father’s work. You must be so very proud of him.”

  “Oh, endlessly,” she replied, wishing he would just sit down and be quiet so she could think. What on earth was Paul doing calling Renata Hunter Carr behind her back? Of all the ways he might have chosen to betray her, surely he had to know this was the only one she’d be hard-pressed to forgive.

  Renata, meantime, prattled on, oblivious. “I’ve known Chuck there forever,” she said, waving a ring-decked hand at the manager. He was doing the rounds of the room, glad-handing his way from table to table, checking the wine and satisfaction levels of patrons who all seemed to know each other and him. Old home week in Beverly Hills. “I prevailed upon him to lay on an extra place setting,” Renata said, adding an indulgent smile at her son, “and then Nolan happened to show up, too.”

  “I was supposed to be meeting some people here,” he explained. “They’d just phoned to say they were running late when I spotted Mother and Paul.”

  “Yes, your mother and Paul,” Mariah said, relieved they were back to the real issue. “What a surprise.”

  “If it makes you uncomfortable having me here, Mariah, I won’t stay long,” Renata said. “I’ll just say my piece, and then we’ll leave you two alone to your quiet dinner, won’t we, Nolan? You can think about what I have to say at your leisure. If you want, we’ll talk again when you get down to Newport. Do you remember where my father’s old summerhouse is? Your father brought you there once when you were a little girl.”

  Mariah had a sudden image of a many-gabled house high on a cliff overlooking water. She had no memory of her father taking her there, but even as Renata mentioned it, she pictured herself standing on a black-and-white-checked floor in a wood-lined entry hall. She remembered looking up to a Tiffany-domed ceiling that, to a little girl, had seemed miles high. And, she recalled suddenly, there were gargoyles atop the stone pilasters on either side of the big front door. Her father had laughed when she recoiled from their gruesome faces. Who else could they have visited in such a grand home?

  “On the Corona del Mar side, overlooking the harbor?” Renata prompted. “You can ask anyone down there, they’ll point it out to you. Paul, did you give her the keys?”

  “Keys?” Mariah felt the pressure of his hand on her arm, trying to steer her toward his side of the banquette, but she shrugged it off. “What keys?”

  “Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll explain,” he suggested.

  She was getting a very bad feeling about this. “What keys, dammit?”

  “Paul mentioned you were looking for a beach house,” Renata said, clearly determined to take charge of the situation. “I have several, including a couple that are vacant at the moment. I told him you and Lindsay would be welcome to use any one you wanted for as long as you liked.”

  “I don’t believe this.” Mariah turned her back on the woman and addressed herself to this man with whom she’d made love only hours earlier, fool that she was. Was this her mother’s legacy? Insidious genetic programming driving her into a relationship with an untrustworthy man, like some horny lemming jumping off the cliff of her own stupidity? “I noticed you moved yourself out of the room,” she muttered.

  “I was afraid you’d react this way,” Paul murmured. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me there afterward.”

  “You got that right. For God’s sake, Paul! You went to her about the stupid beach house? I wasn’t that desperate.”

  “No. The subject just happened to come up when Renata and I were talking a couple of weeks
ago—”

  “‘Renata’? ‘Paul’? A couple of weeks ago?” Mariah echoed. “I had no idea the two of you were so chummy. How odd that all this time you never thought to mention it.”

  “I was only trying to help,” he said. “Renata got in touch with me recently, looking for advice on how to approach you about your father’s papers. When I found out why, I had to help. After all, it was my fault the news leaked out about you finding them. Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered, but now that it’s done, could you let her say her piece? Let’s just get through it, and then you can tell me what a jerk I am.”

  “Let’s us get through it?” Mariah echoed. “Why should I have to get through anything? Why would you imagine you could go behind my back like this and I would blithely accept it? You knew how I felt about her.”

  “Mariah, please,” Renata said in the voice mothers use with unreasonable children winding up for a temper tantrum in a public place, “I prevailed upon Paul’s good offices to help me contact you before I knew you’d be at the Romanov reception. I told you last night that it was important we talk.”

  Mariah turned at last to face her head-on. “And I seem to recall saying we had nothing to discuss.”

  Renata glanced around the room, as if daring anyone to have the temerity to stare. Her son was still standing, wearing that awkward, fixed smile. Renata turned back and locked her bluesteel gaze on Mariah. “You, my dear, are drawing a ridiculous amount of attention to yourself. Would you consent to sit for just five minutes?”

  “Here, Mariah, why don’t you slip in next to me?” Nolan offered, apparently thinking his charms would succeed where Paul’s had failed.

  “I’m not slipping in anywhere.”

  “Please,” Renata said, almost as a weary afterthought. “Let me tell you why I think it’s in your best interest—and in your daughter’s by the way—”

  “You leave my daughter out of this.”

  “Well, I would, but unfortunately, she’s implicated, whether you like it or not. I presume she’s aware she’s Ben’s granddaughter, so this will affect her, too. For Lindsay’s sake, if not your own, take five minutes to hear what I have to say. Then, if that’s your wish, I will go away and never bother you again, let the chips fall where they may. Do you think you could manage at least that?”

  She was a dreadful woman, Mariah decided. But as she glanced around, she noticed that many eyes were, indeed, cast their way. Paul stood beside her, arms dangling at his sides, looking more distressed than she’d even seen him. This was exactly the kind of public scene he hated. Good. Let him squirm, Mariah thought. At that point, she could have happily throttled him.

  But she grabbed an empty chair, set it down in front of the table and dropped into it. No way was she getting herself wedged into a booth between any of them. “Five minutes,” she said, clutching her shawl around her, knuckles white as she gripped her small purse. She glanced at her watch. “Starting now.”

  Paul settled back into the curved, black leather banquette. “Mariah, this is serious, what she has to tell you.”

  “Then she should begin, because the clock is ticking.”

  She leaned back in her chair and waited, but instead of an explanation, the first words out of Renata’s mouth were ones Mariah had often heard before, though rarely accompanied by such a wistful sigh. “You look remarkably like your father,” the older woman said.

  “So I gather. My mother often said the same thing.”

  Renata froze momentarily, then nodded. “Touché, my dear. I imagine she must have found it as disconcerting as I do.”

  Mariah glanced at Nolan, feeling embarrassed for him in spite of her own discomfort. How could he feel, watching his mother pine over the memory of a man who wasn’t his father? But if he was bothered by it, it didn’t show.

  “More so, I would think,” Mariah said, turning back to Renata. “She was his wife, after all, and devoted to him. Loved and supported him for eight long years. Bore his two children, and mourned him with her dying breath, despite the lovers he’d taken over the years they were together.” She looked the other woman dead in the eye. “You do know, of course, that you were only one of many?”

  “Yes. But thank you for reminding me.”

  “And you lasted…what? A few weeks before you abandoned him?”

  “Two months. And touché again,” Renata said. There was a glass on amber liquid in ice on the table in front of her. She lifted it and took a stiff belt. At the precise moment she drained it, a waiter appeared, as if by magic.

  “Can I get you a refill, Mrs. Carr?”

  “Please,” she said, straight-arming the glass.

  “And you, madam?” he asked, turning to Mariah. “A cocktail?”

  “No, nothing. I won’t be staying.”

  “Oh, well, very good. Mr. Chaney?”

  Paul shook his head grimly and waved the fellow away.

  Mariah glanced at her watch. “Three minutes left.”

  “Oh, fine!” Renata snapped. “If that’s the way you insist on being, here it is. You can’t allow Man in the Middle to be published. It’s not Ben’s work. He stole it from another writer.”

  “You’re referring to the unpublished manuscript I found among his papers, I presume? The one that’s supposed to be plagiarized from someone else?”

  Renata seemed surprised. “You know?”

  “I’ve heard there’s such a theory kicking around, but I’ve seen no proof. I have seen the manuscript, however, and I’m virtually certain it was produced on my father’s old typewriter. There was something niggling in the back of my mind, and this afternoon, I finally remembered what it was. His typewriter had a mechanical eccentricity that lifted the letter E a little above the type line. When I was little, he used to tell me it was his lucky typewriter, and that those were his Magical Flying E’s. He took the machine when he moved out. The manuscript is full of flying E’s.”

  Renata waved a well-manicured hand. “He retyped it. But the novel was written by Anatoly Orlov.”

  “The Russian?”

  “That’s right. Ben met him in Paris. Orlov was very old. He’d been struggling against the Communist leadership for years, and he knew it was probably the last time he’d ever be allowed to leave the Soviet Union, so he smuggled out a samizdat novel and gave it to Ben in the hope he could find a publisher for it in the West.”

  Mariah frowned. “I don’t think so. What I read of that manuscript is in perfect, colloquial American English. I don’t know whether Orlov spoke English or not, but even if he did, I doubt any foreigner could have written with that kind of native confidence. Not only that, but I’ve read his work, in the original Russian and in translation—as much of it as was ever published, anyway. This manuscript is nothing like his stuff. Orlov wrote about heroic Russian soldiers and salt-of-the-earth peasants. It’s why he’s such a national hero there—that, and the stirring speeches he made to rally the people during the Nazi siege in World War II. From what I read of it, Man in the Middle is a futuristic allegory along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World. There’s nothing particularly Russian about it at all. The country setting is fictional, and even the names of the characters are a hodgepodge of different languages and cultures.” Mariah shook her head firmly. “I’ve given this plagiarism theory a lot of thought since I first heard it, but it just doesn’t hold water.”

  “It’s not theory, it’s fact,” Renata insisted. “I was there when Orlov gave Ben the manuscript.”

  “Apparently, they met at an international writers’ conference,” Paul added. Mariah glanced at him, irritated. Obviously, he and Renata had discussed this before and at length. Paul leaned toward her. “Ben could have cleaned up the translation. I’m sure he never intended for the work to be taken for his own. It’s all just a big misunderstanding.”

  Mariah shook her head slowly. “No, I can’t buy that. You saw a few pages of the manuscript, but maybe you didn’t see the cover page. Man in the Middle, A Novel by Benjamin Bolt.
That’s what it said. He sent the draft to my mother for safekeeping. She packed it away like it was a talisman. I think that’s why she always thought he was coming home.”

  The waiter breezed back with Renata’s scotch. “Here you go, Mrs. Carr! Now, are you folks ready to order, or would you like a few minutes with the menu?”

  “We need some time,” Paul said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Very good, Mr. Chaney,” he said, backing off again.

  Renata, meantime, was staring into her glass. “He was,” she said quietly.

  “Excuse me?” Mariah said.

  The older woman took a drink, then looked up. “Ben wanted to go back to Andrea…to your mother, and you and the baby. He missed you. I tried, you know. I wanted to be more than just another lover to him. I wanted to be his patron. His muse. Help him develop as an artist. He was a great, great talent, Mariah, but he needed stimulation. To travel and meet people. He was too isolated. Those were momentous times. Great events were happening all around, while Ben surfed and went to beach parties and tried to come up with new ideas for his novels. His confidence started to slip. He thought his life was frivolous, and that it reflected in his writing. The day he told me he wanted to get away, he’d seen a news report about a Buddhist monk who committed suicide by self-immolation to protest the war in Vietnam. Ben felt small and frivolous in the face of that kind of commitment, like he was just frittering his life away in my little cottage.”

  “Your cottage? In Newport?” Mariah asked. Renata nodded. “You mean, you owned that place we lived in?”