“Why should he buy it?” PD asked.
“Because you’re a persuasive guy. And also you’re laying the naked truth on him. Tell him that Beth’s fearful for her infant, that you’re fearful for the ten percent empire you’ve built up, that I’m fearful for my life, and that Barry’s fearful period. And not one of us is in love with Alyssia.”
“And that’s your plan?” PD asked. “Dump her?”
“Exactly,” Maxim said hoarsely. “Of course at the same time we’ll also be dumping Hap. We’ll let that Las Vegas prick get away with killing him.”
They avoided one another’s eyes.
The four living members of Our Own Gang had just forged an unspoken pact to ignore the murder of their fifth. With a rustling noise, they rose to their feet, exchanging overhearty farewells. Barry concocted an excuse to avoid returning to Beth’s house. Nobody made any plans to get together in the future.
68
It was late afternoon before she felt calm enough to call Ivanovich.
A raspy-voiced woman answered the phone. “I’m sorry, but he’s temporarily out of town.”
Alyssia, having made up her apparently irrational mind, was primed to tell the detective to go full speed ahead. Stymied, she said on a breathless, questioning note, “Oh?”
“We work very closely,” the woman said. “Can I help you?”
“No, it’s confidential. This is Alyssia del Mar.”
“I thought it sounded like you. When he checks in, I’ll tell him you called, Miss del Mar.”
• • •
He didn’t call back. After five days Alyssia was worn out by impatience, despair and lack of sleep. Her recent pattern of getting fifteen hours was altered drastically, and now she seldom slept as much as three. She lost more weight. Ivanovich was stalling her, avoiding her, and she had no conception how to deal with it. Murder, she would think, swimming urgent laps in the dumb, heart-shaped pool. Murder, and the four of them are willing to let it go. But I won’t—I can’t. Why doesn’t the asthmatic bastard call?
• • •
“What about trying him again?” Juanita asked. They were eating a light dinner on the patio.
“I have.” Six times. “The woman, she’s his partner or something, keeps telling me he’s still out of town.”
“Alice, I don’t like the way you been looking. Maybe we’re the ones who ought to get away.”
• • •
That same evening, the door chimes sounded just as Prime Time programming was making the ten o’clock change. Alyssia and Juanita, who were watching the out-sized built-in screen in the living room, glanced at each other.
“Nobody comes by this late,” Juanita said.
“Maybe it’s Barry with some papers to sign.”
“Or another one of them kooks,” Juanita muttered. Alyssia del Mar’s address and phone numbers were tightly guarded secrets, yet nonetheless in the spate of bad publicity about her following Hap’s death there had been ugly incidents. Twice during the small hours of the night garbage had been carted up the long, steep drive and dumped by the front door. An androgynous voice phoned at random intervals to shriek, “Repent, repent!” until they let the answering service pick up every call. And yesterday, when Juanita had gone down to the mailbox, she found a creased sheet of paper. She couldn’t read the string of words, but she knew from the appearance and smell that they had been scrawled in excrement. Hastily thrusting her feet into her slippers, she said, “I’ll go.”
It was Ivanovich.
Hearing his voice, Alyssia ran to the hall. “John, where’ve you been? I’ve called and called all week!”
“Yes, and I apologize for not getting back to you,” he said, glancing at Juanita.
“I’ll be in my room, Mrs. Cordiner, if you need anything,” Juanita said.
Alyssia led Ivanovich to the low-slung red armchairs grouped around the fireplace.
After a long, wheezy exhalation, he said, “I’ve been told to lay off the case.”
Naturally she had suspected something along these lines. “By Lang?” On Ivanovich’s initial visit she had told him of the bad blood between Hap and Lang.
“No names were mentioned. A woman we sometimes work with, she’s a very expensive call girl, passed on the message that in this particular case I was out of my depth.”
“He, Lang, admitted to our faces that he’d had Hap killed.”
“He did?”
“Not in words, but by implication.”
Ivanovich wheezed again. “Well, it figures. Miss del Mar—”
“Alyssia.”
He looked down at his veined hands. “Alyssia, I told you the kind of cases we take. I’m no Mike Hammer or Lew Archer, I’m a housebroken, sedentary, middle-aged man with two kids at UCLA and a wife who works with him. We’ve never taken a homicide of any kind. And Lang’s big-time crime.”
“Is that why you’re here so late? You’re afraid the agency’s being watched?”
“It is.”
She felt a spurt of anger. “You could’ve at least called!”
“My guess is your phones’re bugged.”
“Nobody’s been here.”
“Except the pest-control man, the United Parcel man, Jurgensen’s delivery truck, the two maids, the gardener, the pool man—”
“All right, maybe it is bugged!” she snapped. Then her temper evaporated. “John, don’t you understand? We’re talking about somebody who meant everything to me. He was murdered. Cold-bloodedly murdered.”
“I don’t take homicides, Alyssia, but I know about them. Coverups happen. And with prominent people, you’d be surprised at how often the victim’s family helps with the coverup.”
“Not if they give a damn they don’t.”
“Oh, at first there’s hot thoughts of crime and punishment. Then reality sets in and the family starts considering what a public investigation means. The prying and probing into everyone’s life, including the victim’s. His sexual patterns, his frailties, his toilet habits—but I don’t have to tell you that nothing is sacred at a media circus.”
“Could you recommend another agency?”
He shook his head regretfully. “Sorry.”
“You won’t help me at all?” For a brief moment her spine of pride melted, and she sank waiflike into the deep chair.
Ivanovich said softly, “It hurts to let go, Alyssia, but believe me, it’s best all round.”
Leading him to the door, she recovered. “I’ll have the business manager mail your check. That should be safe, shouldn’t it? How much do I owe you?”
“I’m a fan. This one’s on the house.”
Reaching inside his jacket, he handed her two clipped-together sheets of bond folded lengthwise. They were warm and slightly moist from his body.
Her expression bleak, she slowly returned to her chair and unfolded the papers. The first page was compiled in California by Ivanovich. Scanning the single-spaced typing, she learned that though Hap Cordiner had been a private sort of guy, he had been well liked by his friends and acquaintances. They praised him in every smarmy Hollywood term. Alyssia turned to the second page.
Our African correspondent received mixed reports. The population of Lunda as well as those in surrounding villages appear to have been primed to obscure the facts. For one example, the matter of the subject’s work. Three different informants used the exact same phrasing: he had come “to make plans for a Hollywood movie.” Arthur W. Kleefeld, MD, director of a nearby free health-care facility that he and the subject had founded together, told our investigator emphatically that the subject had no further interest in filmmaking and had intended to make the facility his career.
The Kleefeld report is also muddied. Kleefeld states that the subject left the facility on the morning of April 17, 1980, with the clear understanding that he would spend the night at Lunda, therefore he was not alarmed when subject did not return that evening. Only when subject remained away after lunch the following day did Kleefeld bec
ome concerned enough to search. He found the accident site and brought back the subject’s body. As per request of the subject, Kleefeld arranged for Episcopal burial at the center.
This conflicts with the statements from the two facility employees and the Episcopalian minister, Reverend James Iboe. It should be noted that these statements were taken separately. All three concur that the coffin was already interred when Reverend Iboe arrived to conduct the services. Furthermore, the cook, Mr. Peter Mzelie, states that Kleefeld was highly secretive about the subject’s corpse, not permitting anyone to see it, placing it in the coffin himself.
As to your information re Kenyan visitors in the area. The police emphatically state there were no foreigners. This is substantiated by both local inhabitants and government officials in Kinshasa.
The accident itself is the single issue on which there is no dissension. All those interviewed agreed that a fallen tree blocked the road, and that the subject’s jeep had hit it with damaging force, causing the engine to ignite and—
Alyssia was aware of a well-defined nausea. If she read another typed word, she would vomit. Crumpling the papers in her hand, she knelt on the marble hearth. Her hand shook and she wasted three of the foot-long fireside matches before one caught.
Briefly, as the papers fluttered and stirred, glowing poisonously, she saw a burning jeep. What’s the point of endangering Maxim, Barry, Beth, PD?
He’s dead.
• • •
The following day, she and Juanita left the country.
69
Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Malibu reverberated with Industry condemnations of Alyssia del Mar, who had not given a single interview, had not appeared on early-morning news or late-night talk shows—who had totally abdicated her promotional duties to Hap Cordiner’s last film. It wasn’t even as if she were in depression after the stillbirth. People returning from holiday or location reported that she was seen water-skiing at Puerto Vallarta, buying out Mary Quant’s in London, gambling for high stakes at the casino in Monte Carlo, dining on lobster bisque and prune soufflé at Baumanière in Provence, selecting sapphires at the Paris Van Cleef’s, bidding on antique jewels at Sotheby’s, sipping Dom Pérignon with Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, perching on the edge of her gilt chair at the Ungaro collection.
In actuality she was at Lake Como.
She had taken another lease on the nineteenth-century villa with the peaked roof where she and Hap had shared three sun-drenched Italian autumns. The place was now her jail and her refuge. She had not left the grounds once.
• • •
Alyssia sat facing the view of the lake, which today was the ugly grayish-brown of an elephant’s hide. She held War and Remembrance open on her lap, but she was reading about the wartime escapades of the Henry family. Alone, she inhabited a dim, underwater world. When she was with Juanita or the married couple who came with the villa, she revved herself up, conversing, smiling when it seemed appropriate, eating at least part of the meals set before her, strolling down the villa’s raked dirt path to the lake.
Her eyes moved to the desk. She saw with a dulled surprise that there was a heap of the fat, outsize quilted envelopes in which Magnum, the business manager and PD’s office forwarded her letters. She hadn’t opened any of those big folders in—how long was it? Accumulations of unopened mail were a sign of poor mental health.
Putting aside the Wouk novel, she moved to the desk.
She had been dispatched the usual assortment. Fan letters with the sender’s return address, and hate mail, which was always anonymous. The polite or peremptory requests for her appearance at benefits, the solicitations from those charities to which she previously had been generous. The queries from the business manager about credit card charges as well as a note inquiring whether he should send her annual check to Zaire, adding a punctilious reminder—as he did every year—that since the medical center was not an accredited nonprofit organization, her donation would not be tax deductible.
Taking out a sheet of stationery, she wrote: Quadruple what I sent to the Zaire center last year.
Staring at her heavily underlined writing, she thought of Art Kleefeld. Ivanovich’s report that Kleefeld hadn’t been totally candid about Hap’s funeral was a constant hangnail irritation. For some incomprehensible reason nothing fretted her as much as those mismatched stories about the burial time. And now, for the first time, it occurred to her that Kleefeld, like the Cordiner cousins, had been frightened off by Lang.
Taking out another folded notecard, she wrote, Lake Como is very lovely, Art, and it would be super if you would visit—the ticket is on me.
• • •
She determined not to invest overmuch emotional capital in his response. Despite her resolution, the next week she threw herself sobbing on the mattress she once had shared with Hap an inordinate number of times.
• • •
Rain threatened that morning. At the villa, she always breakfasted in bed: she had finished her first cup of coffee and was nibbling the buttered crust of a roll that had emerged from the baker’s oven less than an hour earlier.
The door opened and Juanita said, “Telegram.”
Shoving aside the tray, Alyssia jumped from the bed to snatch the yellow envelope. One glance at its window and her animation faded. “It’s for you.”
“I know my own name,” Juanita said. “It’s just I don’t have my specs with me.”
Alyssia, long accustomed to this sadly transparent deception, slit the envelope to read the contents to her sister.
“Alice, you’re white as a sheet. What does it say?”
“It’s from Zaire,” Alyssia said, reading in a hollow whisper. “‘Château Neuchâtel stop Proximity of Davos.’”
“That’s all? No name, no nothing?”
“It’s signed Peter Mzelie, but it’s got to be from Art. He’s being super-cautious.” Alyssia snatched up the phone. Dialing, she asked a question in rapid Italian, nodding at the reply. Hanging up, she cried, “I’ll have to rush! I must be in Como by noon—the Milan-Zurich Express stops there at twelve eleven. If I can make the train, I’ll be in Davos by six thirty-eight.”
“Alice, say Art did send the telegram, he sent it from Africa. There’s no way in the world he can be in Switzerland already.”
“You’re right!” Alyssia flung open the elaborately carved doors of the armoire. “I better pack a few things.”
“I’ll get my stuff.”
“No!” Alyssia tugged at a sweater with such vehemence that two others toppled from the shelf. “I have to go alone.”
“That’s silly, Alice.”
“If Art sees you he might never open up.”
It made no sense to Juanita, but her sister, after all this time, again had that lively stubborn look, so instead of arguing, she picked up the sweaters, asking, “Which ones do you want?”
Ten minutes later they were pulling out of the garage—Juanita insisted on seeing Alyssia off at the Como station. The cook’s husband, delighted to at last have an opportunity to display his driving expertise, swerved them maniacally around hairpin turns. They reached the depot on time. The Express, though, had as usual departed late from Milan. The sisters sat in the barnlike ristorante drinking caffelatte for a half hour before the engine chugged into the open terminal.
As they hurried through the rain to the platform, Juanita said, “Don’t go getting your hopes up, baby. Art’s not going to say one more word than he done before in Nairobi.”
70
The steepness of the path forced him to traverse, so he was making slow progress up the hill.
Concentrating on his maneuvers back and forth over the configuration of ruts and puddles, he had no opportunity to notice the majestic conifers, the quaint Alpine village nestled into the opposing mountain, the jagged peaks covered with snow—yesterday’s autumnal rain had melted the snow at this lower altitude. His world was filled with his own harsh breathing, the slithering sound his white and si
lver nylon ski jacket made against his crutches, the clink of the tips hitting small stones.
Halting, resting the crutch handles under his armpits, he took out a handkerchief, wiping the sweat from his forehead, dabbing his neck below the beard. As his breathing slowed, he could hear the cowbells, each cow with her own individual musical note.
About a quarter of a mile above him loomed Château Neuchâtel. The smaller buildings appeared to be paying fealty to the massive ugliness of the sanitorium proper. The verandas that encircled each of its four stories were railed with battleship-gray wood, and at precisely every twelve feet the mustard-colored walls extruded outward. Each room, as the colored brochure promised, came with its own private sun porch. On this gloomy afternoon, less than a dozen of these were occupied. Like the porches, the solitary figures bundled in their heavy gray blankets were indistinguishable.
The block of penitentiary architecture pointed up the postcard charms of the surrounding chalets, which had whitewashed walls, steep gables and red shutters with cutout patterns. The sanitorium’s venerable chief of staff lived in the chalet with garlands of onions looped below the peaked rooftop.
As he watched, its red-painted door opened and a scarfed woman in a green loden cape emerged, stepping with slow care down the steps. Her head was bent and her shoulders were pulled inward. Correct posture for any new inmate who isn’t wheeled into Magic Mountain, he thought.
In the early part of the century, when it was built, the sanitorium had served only tuberculars, and for this reason he called it Magic Mountain, although he was well aware that the current patient roster included no TB cases. Sufferers from cancer and degenerative diseases came for cures that sometimes resulted in remission, and the remainder of the rooms were kept continuously occupied by those desirous of either the so-called sleep treatment for obesity or the rejuvenation process that involved both cosmetic surgery and injections made from the ovaries of newborn lambs.
Dreams Are Not Enough Page 44
