It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  From the sidelines of the shore drive came a piquant, seedy mix of offers—shellfish, auto parts, tattoos, wicker furniture, artificial limbs. Crossing the bridge into Rumson you immediately felt the difference. The town was set on a bold coastal bluff between the mouths of two rivers, so it had water on three sides, all prime real estate. The roads were hung with branches and edged in cut stone. The houses were immense. They were surrounded by smallish, slightly cramped, stagey-looking versions of gates, horse paddocks, and duck ponds.

  “Do you know how much it costs to plant a full-grown tree?” Pat asked dreamily.

  Rumson was an enclave of wealth. A few of the grander establishments were originally summer residences that dated back to the eighteenth century. But you could detect a dissoluteness even here. This was no Pound-Ridge-by-the-Sea. Sudden, frequent variations in fence style, in grass length, in paving material made it appear as rough as it was prosperous. Many renovations were going on, even a tree house was being given a second story, and because the painters and (Virginia was sure) landscapers were not allowed indoors, Port-A-Sans stood sentinel everywhere. The ramshackle air suggested that what was being grafted onto these huge houses was something shifty and commercial—clam bars, or maybe tattoo parlors from the shore nearby. The other, untouched homes looked like locked-door rehabs or maybe full-blown loony bins.

  The Culp estate, which was set far off from the road, behind an acre of trees, certainly had the right proportions for a rest home: two and a half stories high, and four times wider than it was tall. It was red brick, with variegated gables, a porte cochere at one end, and a pleasing series of high mullioned windows, recessed window frames, and pedimented French doors. Running along the entire length was a terrace with a low balustraded stone wall, just the sort of terrace the killer snuck down in Murder with Mirrors, hoodwinking everyone but Miss Jane Marple. The estate in the book had housed juvenile delinquents.

  Back at Hart Ridge, Virginia had thought it her duty to come. Now she was not sure why. To witness? To denounce? Her heart raced. She couldn’t think of what to say. Numbers as clean and bright and bland as LinkAge’s could not have been true to life, but early investors had made money; she hadn’t objected when the stock price rose. Even if the final layer of buyers was destined to suffer in this pyramid scheme, that was a risk everyone took—everyone except Gibbs and Culp, but they were supplying the opportunity. When a crime was this big and glaring, it didn’t look like a crime anymore. It looked like business. When a crime wasn’t sinister or underhanded or ashamed, it was virtue that felt compelled to skulk and hide.

  Pat said, “I can’t wait to get my hands on this property!”

  Yolande Culp was standing in the porte cochere when Pat pulled up. As a figure of evil, she was a disappointment. She was very thin, not much more substantial than her spiked boots, and she did not look strong enough to cause any direct damage. She was more the sort of person who wore footwear that had poisoned the leather maker and clothes that had blinded the seamstress and gems that had killed off half the miners in a cave-in.

  Pat’s window slid down. “Where do you want me to park?” she asked, her former enthusiasm turning brittle.

  Yolande’s eyes flicked briefly over the car. “Right there’s fine.” She was uninterested, but tense. She had a surprisingly peevish face, dominated by big, black, heavily mascaraed eyes and a cute feathering of blond hair.

  “The back is really the front,” she said through the open car window.

  “You mean that the house faces the river?” said Pat. “I know.” She had her hand on the handle but couldn’t open the car door because Yolande was blocking it.

  “I want you to do a lot out in front where everyone can see.”

  “I guess it is kind of exposed,” said Pat. From where Virginia sat, the lawn seemed to jump into the choppy river.

  “And I want you to start right away.”

  “I’ll just draw up some plans for your approval.”

  “Whatever,” said Yolande. “But get some guys in here right away to start digging beds or something. And all those plants there. Get rid of them. Just rip them up.”

  “Really,” said Pat, her face impassive. “The ground is still pretty hard.”

  “I’ll be back out later,” said Yolande, and disappeared.

  Pat slid the window closed and said, “What a weirdo.”

  Virginia bent over, snorting with laughter.

  As they walked the grounds, whipped by the wind, Pat carried a surveyor’s map folded up on a clipboard, to which she added notations. The Culp property was long and narrow, and most of it lay between the house and the road. The area between the house and the river was covered with a thick, expensive-looking, greenish-blue lawn. It was bordered on two sides by trees and on the third by a section of river so close to the sea that it felt like an inlet. The downstream pressure of the river and the tidal sweep of the ocean kept the water churning.

  “What are you going to do to this place?” asked Virginia, hooding her eyes with one hand to keep her hair away.

  Pat smiled. “I will agree to every cheesy thing Yolande suggests, and it will still be gorgeous.” The fierce offshore wind, the blinding sun, the violent changes in temperature—Pat was obviously relishing it all.

  Virginia broke away to contemplate the jagged, heart-stopping drop to the purply-brown water. The sight suggested dominion over the ocean, quite a step up from the dominion over a small town that the upper reaches of Hart Ridge enjoyed. The wind whipped her rusty black clothes around her limbs and threatened to toss her over. She felt the same shiver of attraction to the dark river that she had to the dark woods.

  What she needed was two endings, the way Scorpion Reef wound up. Oblivion was the obvious ending, the unavoidable one, but the novel managed to posit an equally persuasive, equally palpable parallel course. It was the perfect fantasy. Only a mystery writer would wrench events into such preposterous shapes simply to double up the finale. She wondered how far forward she would have to leap in order to clear the vicious-looking rocks below and make it out into oblivion. She’d never succeed. She’d have to be able to fly a little—not full out, like a real bird, but at least a short hop, like a dodo. Even that was beyond her, she thought with a pang. She thought longingly of the moment that the sea swallows Maggie LeFevre of The Silent Siren, and she is both dead and not dead.

  When Virginia loosened her gaze from the river and turned to join Pat, she caught sight of Neil Culp looking at them from a second-story window. Instinctively Virginia kept her movements fluid and her eyes down. She dared not stare. But she would have recognized that smug, jowly face anywhere. Pat was several yards away, standing above a dome-shaped shrub, writing on her clipboard. Virginia ambled up to her without a break in her stride. Keeping her voice low and her eyes innocently unfocused, she said, “Don’t look now, but Neil Culp is watching us.”

  “What?”

  Virginia rolled her eyes upward, miming a request to look up with similar discretion. “Second floor, center right.”

  “Neil!” said Pat. “I wonder what he’s up to.”

  “Nothing good,” said Virginia.

  Pat openly craned her neck at the windows but no one was there now. “They’re all such crooks,” she said airily. “But Neil Culp will get off because he’s who everyone wants to be. No one will touch him.”

  For the first time Virginia was really irked by Pat. Virginia would not have been Neil to save the world. It was as if Pat, a little monster, was transfixed by the glamour of a giant monster while it was eating her: his wonderful sharp teeth, his incredible jaw span, his outsize appetite.

  When Yolande appeared on the terrace chewing gum, Pat cheerily asked her how she’d been.

  “Okay,” said Yolande. “I miss Snowbelle.”

  “Your cat?” said Pat. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “Nothing,” said Yolande, chewing faster. “She’s at the vet’s.”

  “But everything is okay?
” Pat could not make sense of this.

  “Of course,” said Yolande. “She’s having a microchip put in.”

  “Really,” said Pat.

  Her puzzlement was obviously annoying and embarrassing to Yolande, who said, “It’s not that strange. It’s like LoJack.”

  “The things they think of,” said Pat. “So what’s Neil up to these days?”

  Yolande hesitated in her gum chewing for a minute, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Then she said, “Nothing. How’s Frank?”

  “Great,” said Pat. “He’s met such interesting people. Not at all the sort you’d expect.”

  “Do you get to talk to him a lot?”

  “Sure,” said Pat.

  “I guess your conversations are recorded, right?” said Yolande.

  “Yes, we’re quite the celebrities.” Pat had tugged the wedges of hair back off her head. Ostensibly she was trying to keep them out of her face, but she also gave the impression that the subject was driving her to tear out her hair.

  “I lost twenty-five thousand dollars in LinkAge,” said Virginia. In trying to keep her voice steady, she’d clamped down on anger or blame.

  A look of surprise crossed Yolande’s face, as if she’d been addressed by one of the help, and maybe she actually did think Virginia was Pat’s assistant.

  “Neil and I lost twenty-five million,” said Yolande. Her tone was on the surface neutral as well, but it sang like a high-tension wire with individual strands of evasiveness, whiny regret, and suppressed fear.

  “Oh, well,” said Pat brightly. “You can still have a beautiful garden. There’s a famous one nearby. It was put in by Vito Genovese in the thirties. You know, Vito Genovese the gangster. It’s open to the public now, and it’s huge. He had an incredible replica of Mount Vesuvius made. It’s gone, though.” Here her voice dropped like a stone. “Can you imagine? A replica of Mount Vesuvius?” This was pure irony. Her voice started another slow rise. “But he had an eye for rare plants, and a whole bunch of them survived. There’s lily ponds and rock gardens and an azalea walk. He got a lot done, considering he owned the property for only two years. He had to flee to Europe because he was about to be arrested.”

  Leave it to Pat. By the time she’d ended on this high note, Yolande’s face was fully transformed. She’d stepped back, so her features were in shadow, but you could make out the mottled flush in her cheeks and the curl in her upper lip. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, turning on her heel. Then added fiercely, over her shoulder, “Tell Frank about the garden. You have to. Tell him how much it means to me.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  Darkness was gathering by the time Pat and Virginia returned from Rumson. They pushed through the dogs and found Ruby sitting in the gloom of the kitchen, drinking pink vitaminwater and eating potato-like chips so uniform that they stacked neatly in a tube. She let out a cross “Hey!” when her mother flipped on the overhead lights.

  “Don’t you look pretty,” said Pat.

  “I need fifty dollars,” said Ruby. “Maybe a little more.”

  “What for?” asked Pat, dumping her tote bag on the built-in breakfast nook.

  “Stuff.”

  “Well,” said Pat with cheerful doubt. “I just gave you a bunch of money last week. I don’t see why I should give you more without a clue as to what you’re going to spend it on.”

  Ruby scowled. “It’s important,” she said. “It’s for Dad.”

  “Oh, honey, you want to buy him something?” said Pat. “He won’t be able to keep it in his cell, but you can give it to him later. Get the cash out of the sideboard.”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “Nonsense,” said Pat, opening up a cabinet stacked with wicker baskets. “I put in a few hundred just last week.”

  “You never know where anything is,” said Ruby.

  Could that much money really just disappear? Or was Virginia to assume that either Ruby—or Will—took it? Virginia didn’t know what to think. The scale of the Foy household was dizzying. When did people get the idea that this was the norm?

  “I don’t know how I’m going to pay Chef Pete,” said Pat. Chef Pete was a prima donna who cooked one dish a night, and you never knew what it was going to be until you called. As far as Virginia could tell, Pat was on the phone to him every night.

  “And where is my ice bucket?” Pat added.

  “It’s in plain sight on the counter,” said Ruby with disgust, “right where you left it.” Her potato-like chips had shattered oddly, into a fine dust that coated the floor, the table, and her red-striped boatneck jersey.

  “Do you know where Will is?” Virginia asked Ruby mildly.

  “No,” said Ruby. “Why should I know where he is?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Who wants to take the ice into the living room?” said Pat.

  “There is so much ritual associated with the consumption of alcohol,” said Virginia, picking up the brushed-steel bucket.

  Ruby followed her out of the room, trailing her hand around the door frame and across the wall. “Why did you ask me about Will?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Virginia, placing the bucket on the little tile-topped table behind one of the couches. “I was wondering. I like him.”

  “So does Mom,” said Ruby, her black button eyes steady.

  To see the driveway below, Virginia had to move to within a few inches of the panoramic window. “His car is gone,” she said.

  “That’s his father’s,” said Ruby. “Will would never own such an old car.”

  Someone had taken good care of that missing Mustang, but Ruby was right, it was old. Virginia felt a stab of pity for the car and for Will or whoever had lavished it with such hopeful attention.

  “Why do you always wear black clothes?”

  “Because black is very safe,” said Virginia. “I used to think that the only problem was with green. You mix greens, and the results can be toxic. Then I realized that the same is true for blue, only worse. Lots of blues will bleed each other out so much that they get left for dead.”

  Ruby swayed and then scampered out of the room. Virginia followed her more slowly to the door of the kitchen, where she heard Ruby say in her piercing little-girl voice, “But there’s something wrong with her. She’s really scary.”

  Virginia did not wait for Pat’s reply. She retreated back into the living room and stood right up next to the window. Still no car. Then she crossed to the little table and poured herself a couple of inches of Scotch. She sat with a dull thump on the huge green couch and looked first at one end, and then at the other. She seemed to be measuring its absurd length with her eyes. She lifted her glass of Scotch to the light as if to gauge its contents.

  People didn’t used to think there was something wrong with you if you didn’t have lots of money, but nowadays it was your own fault—and you should have seen someone about it ages ago. Frank Foy had glad-handed his way to the top of this new parallel world, but it was an uninteresting one, where moral questions did not exist and all that mattered was risk and style. Virginia poured herself another drink.

  Back in the forties and fifties any regular reader was thought capable of identifying with the poor and the desperate. A noir hero was not expected to be able to buy himself a splendid life. No one assumed that if he could not, it was his fault. His yearning was a given, its object (girl, cash, or serenity) less important than how far he was from achieving it. It was the agony, not the crime, that made the work real.

  Virginia checked the window again—no car.

  Chef Pete’s dinner was on the table by the time Will appeared amid a great yelping and yipping and howling of dogs, who wouldn’t leave him alone. His shirt was disheveled, and Virginia couldn’t help noting that his narrow but evenly triangular chest was like that of a varnished wood figure used in a scientific model. His skin had a similar glow.

  “Hey, Will, you handsome devil,” said Pat, stick
ing a fork into a piece of chicken. “Where have you been?”

  “Mom!” cried Ruby.

  Will dropped his eyes. “I had to go…to the store,” he said. Virginia idly wondered what bad influences Lemuel had wanted to get him away from.

  “God, these dogs,” said Pat. “Down, Winky.”

  Will slouched by the table, his hands in his pockets. Because of his downward gaze, he appeared to be studying the crimson cloth napkins and the centerpiece of glass balls, red pears, and pussy willows.

  “Wait while I put this guy in the basement,” said Pat. She dragged one of the dogs across the bright light wood, his black backside on the floor, his hind legs splayed, his toenails scrambling. Virginia could not see how his behavior had been any worse than at any other time, but she took advantage of the break to get herself another Scotch from the living room. Everyone else was seated when she returned.

  Now Will’s hooded eyes were fixed on Ruby. His shoulder was tilted to one side, and his shirt was askew as if it were about to fall off a hanger. Was Virginia the only person who noticed all this?

  “I cannot believe it’s chicken alla diavola tonight,” said Pat. “Such a treat.”

  Whatever Will was up to, he ate heartily. Young people consume anything put in front of them as if it’s their right—or their duty. Ruby, too, looked capable of consuming Pat without blinking.

  “While you eat,” said Pat, looking around and beaming, “I’m going to read you a wonderful letter I just got from Frank.” She was wearing reading glasses. Reading glasses! Pat Guiney! They were bright pink, peaked in a punkish cat’s-eye design.