“I’m not expecting any other company.”
The moment of ultimate transgression came upon him in a hazy, dreamlike way. He remembered lying on Bailey’s hot, clinging body, raising himself on his arms in hesitation. Bailey’s eyes were opened wide, but focused on some inner joyous vision. He came down upon her again, but seemed to float, the last fulfilling burst of passion eluding him. He pressed his face into the softness of the pillow and Bailey’s fragrant hair, but she seemed to drift away. In her place, in his weary, drink-wet mind, he saw the haunting, beckoning face of Camilla Santee, felt her long legs and arms around him, heard her voice murmur his name. When fulfillment came, the love that swept over him was all for her. In the final instant, he held Bailey fiercely close, but possessed Camilla.
Afterward, he lay still, then reached to touch Bailey’s shoulder as he had Camilla’s that afternoon. He remembered Camilla’s tears.
He rolled onto his side and sat up, fulfilled, yet wretched—guilty. Now he’d been twice unfaithful—to his wife, and in the same instant, to Bailey.
She sat up as well, and lit a cigarette. “What a fool I was in Cannes to put you off.”
The telephone rang. Startled, A.C. reflexively snapped on the light. He picked up the receiver anxiously, the ridiculous notion crossing his mind somehow that it might be Kitty, that she knew.
“Hello?” he said.
There was only a silence, but he sensed the presence of someone on the line.
“Hello?” he repeated.
“Is this United Airlines?” The man’s voice was hurried.
“No.” A.C. hung up. He knew the airline’s number. It was nothing at all like his.
“I’ll presume that’s not my husband,” Bailey said.
“No. I think it was a wrong number.” He turned out the light. “Go to sleep now.”
He left the bedroom and went out onto the terrace, sitting down naked in one of the wrought iron chairs. The street was empty. Nothing moved on the rooftops opposite, or in any of the windows he could see.
He heard Bailey in the room behind him, pouring herself a drink. She did not join him.
He sat back against the cold metal and closed his eyes. Camilla came back to him, walking toward him down the fashion show runway, her eyes staring, full of murder.
All at once he was beset by a startling and awful realization. It made him feel stupid and foolish—and a little afraid.
Camilla Santee had not been looking at him in that extraordinary electric moment at the fashion show. She’d been looking at the man in the row of seats behind him, the big man with dark hair and glasses, who’d been drinking.
The man in the limousine—the limousine Molly Wickham had been walking toward.
CHAPTER 4
Lanham went home with his briefcase full of the Wickham case and worked at his kitchen table beyond any care for the hour. The fatigue he felt was the kind he remembered from the war—leaden body and mind pushed along only by habit and a sense of duty and a hatred born of frustration. Like the enemy, any enemy, the murders kept coming. There was always another.
This was a case that downtown and the news media would goad them to solve—the media by keeping it in the headlines and on the nightly news, downtown by screaming every time the story made news. But it was a case they would likely never close. The perpetrator had taken a great risk, but he had done so very shrewdly. His biggest chance of getting caught was in the first seconds and minutes after the shooting, but he had survived them and vanished. Their only real hope of finding him lay in the possibility of his striking again.
It was that very real possibility that kept Lanham laboring over reports and witness statements at his kitchen table. It was not Molly Wickham he was doing this for. It was the next one.
Wickham had already been dead when she’d come into his life. Nothing he could do would change that. She was as long gone as Abraham Lincoln or Cleopatra. In searching through all these reports, he was performing a job little different from a historian’s—except that Molly Wickham’s killer was still alive.
Sometimes he felt like giving it all up and walking away. Or giving it up and not walking away—just putting in his time and getting his twenty, the way so many in Vietnam had put in their time, shuffling along, just trying to stay alive and get their ticket home. He’d seen detectives who had cashed themselves in early that way, trying to drift through the days remaining until retirement. Mostly they were drunks like Pat Cassidy. A few were dead.
After making a second pot of coffee, he started in on all the fives and unusuals, taking notes where necessary and looking—wishing—for something significant to jump out at him. Nothing had, really. There were no eyewitnesses other than those he’d already talked to, and no description of the assailant better than the vague one given by the newspaper columnist A.C. James.
The man had mentioned two limousines outside the hotel, but at least a dozen had been sighted near the Plaza at the time of the shooting. Someone else had noticed a pickup truck with a horse trailer attached parked just off the roadway in Central Park. Someone else had noticed a parked van.
The horse trailer had had out-of-state plates—Virginia. The van was from New Jersey. He noted this and went on.
“Write that down, it’s very important,” the King of Hearts had said in Through the Looking Glass, when the dormouse sneezed.
They could find absolutely no one who had seen the motorcyclist after he had entered the park. A van like that could hold a motorcycle. So could a horse trailer.
It was too late to look for them now. Whoever he was, this man from Mars, he now had a big head start.
There would be many more such dumb, frustrating, fruitless nights. Lanham’s mind and body would grow ever more leaden. His son had once asked him what he did to solve a murder. He’d thought carefully on the answer, and finally replied with one word: “Everything.”
All too often, “everything” wasn’t enough. No matter how good a case he built against a perpetrator, sooner or later he’d have to turn it over to lawyers. In the end, the almighty law was reduced to a tired jury locked in a room trying to decide between opposing sets of witnesses and lawyers so its members could go home. The best police work in the history of crime wasn’t worth a damn if it was put in the hands of a bad lawyer.
He could have been a lawyer, but he’d become a policeman. Sometimes he dreamed that he was a lawyer. The dreams were almost always born out of intense periods of frustration.
He didn’t dream the lawyer’s dream that night, though. Lanham fell instantly asleep, and awoke too soon.
It was a little after six A.M. He shut off his alarm and put the case out of his mind before it could again take root. He’d start the day with his garden. He’d given over his entire backyard to it, leaving space only for a path that circled between the rosebushes, flower beds, and shrubbery. Lanham had won a third place in the New York Garden Club show with one of his roses, which he’d named the Kathleen Mary, after his mother.
A.C. James had seemed surprised when he’d mentioned his roses during the previous day’s interrogation. Lanham wondered if that was because he was black, or because he was middle class—a mere cop. Or both. Maybe black cops shouldn’t grow roses. He should have fucking watermelons in his garden.
Lanham had the best-kept house in his section of Queens, which had irritated his neighbors as much as it had surprised them. He was the only black man in that neighborhood. It hadn’t helped that he was also a black man who had a white wife.
The house had formerly belonged to his mother, who had been white—Irish white. Except for her peculiar choice of a husband, she was a woman like all the others who lived in the neat bungalows that lined the street. While she was alive, the trouble had been confined to verbal abuse, but after her death it had gotten grim. Windows had been broken and Lanham’s garden had been repeatedly vandalized. He’d tried handling matters himself, to the point of punching out a heckler who’d taunted his wife, but that had
only increased the hostility of the locals. Finally, he’d given in to the urgings of his captain at the time, and filed charges. Four youths were arrested and one of them did a few weeks’ time at a correctional facility for juveniles. Lanham had been let alone after that, and could now even claim a few friends in the neighborhood. They were all cops. His wife, Janice, an arts major and schoolteacher who disliked Queens no matter who lived there, begged him to move, but he stubbornly refused. He wasn’t going to give up his mother’s house.
He carefully sprayed the rosebushes, covering each of the dew-moist flowers with the thin white powder. Nowadays the only vandals were Japanese beetles, but they were menace enough.
He watched their little bodies drop as they succumbed to the poison and fell—more of nature’s infinite multitude of daily homicides. Most creatures died as victims of another. Only man tried to be different.
Lanham was showered, dressed, and ready to leave his house by 7:10 A.M. His wife, barefoot and wearing only an old robe, caught him in the front hall before he went out the door. She wasn’t angry, only sleepy. Her red hair was over her eyes. He hugged her and kissed her cheek.
“Gotta go, babe.”
“You want some coffee?”
“I had coffee all night.”
She stepped out of his reach and looked at him, brushing her hair away from her face. He could hear his two sons upstairs.
“How much sleep did you get?”
He shrugged. “I’ll catch up on the weekend.”
“This murder is what you would call a big deal, right?”
“It’s like one out of the movies.”
“In the movies the cops always get the killer.”
“Some movies are better than others.”
She smiled. He’d keep that in his mind all day. With that smile, she’d let him be a cop another day.
“Call me,” she said, and she went off to the kitchen.
A.C. awoke to hear Bailey talking in the next room, apparently on the telephone. When she was finished, she came back into the bedroom, fully dressed, as much as her simple little summer shift and shoes could be called that. She was carrying a glass of juice. From its pale color, he guessed there was gin or vodka in it—not a small amount.
She seemed upset about something, but smiled for him—an aristocratic little girl’s smile, not the Hollywood wanton’s he remembered from the night before—and sat down on the edge of the bed, patting his chest. She was still too young and too pretty to look really bad from her night’s carouse. Still, she did not look well.
“I’m glad we did that, A.C. I’ve wanted to do that with you for the longest time.”
A.C. did not feel glad. He felt completely rotten, convinced he had just committed the worst act of his life. Adultery had always tantalized him. He’d considered the old laws against it as primitive and as excessive as capital punishment for theft. Now he wondered.
These were not thoughts he wanted to share with Bailey. For all the sordidness he felt, she seemed particularly dear to him on this morning after—someone to be protected, someone he must be responsible for now. Somehow he must care for her with all the pity he could muster. It would keep him from pitying himself.
“You were always a fantasy of mine.”
“You were better than a fantasy,” she said. She lit a cigarette. “I’ve got a problem.”
Money? Husband? Venereal disease? He pushed the thought away.
“I’ve got a friend who’s in a bad way,” she continued. “Drugs. Down in Philly. I’ve got to get him through it, or into one of those places. He doesn’t have anyone else. His wife left him and his family’s all dead. I’ll be gone a couple of days or more. Maybe until next week.”
Before their chance encounter in Mortimer’s the night before, A.C. had never really expected to see Bailey ever again. Now he was sad that she was leaving him.
“How did you find this out?”
“I called my answering machine in L.A. He was trying to reach me.”
“Can I help?”
“Thanks but no thanks,” she said. “This is the proverbial bad scene.” She paused. “There’s one thing, A.C. Things are really going badly with my husband. If they get out of hand, can I come back here for a couple of days?”
“Yes. Of course. I’ll get you a key. I’ll be up in Westchester over the weekend. Maybe longer. If you need me, just leave a message at my office.”
He rose and fetched a spare from an expensive Russian lacquered Palakh box on the dresser. She held it carefully, studying it as though he had given her something magical. She smiled, but there was much sadness in her eyes.
“Bailey, why did you ever marry that bastard?”
“I’m not really sure. I suppose it was the sex at first. He’s rather good at that. And it truly pissed off Mother. She’s such an anti-Semite.”
“Come back whenever you want. I’ll tell the doorman. Just call before you come. Kitty owns the place, you know.”
“It’s not so good with you two, right?”
He shrugged sadly. “Women. She can’t stand all the women in my life, even though they’re just part of the job she gave me. I think she’s convinced I’ve been unfaithful.”
Bailey smiled. “And so you have.”
“Bailey, this was the first time.”
“Really? I’m flattered.”
“I’m afraid I’m feeling a little guilty.”
“You’ve no reason to. Not because of Kitty.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
“I do mind. Tell me.”
“My brother told me he saw Kitty with a man in a hotel once. In London. You were off at the war in Northern Ireland or someplace.”
A.C. recalled the time. It was six years before. He’d spent two weeks in Belfast, leaving Kitty to wait for him at the Park Lane. He remembered that she had seemed very cold and distant on his return.
He stared at Bailey.
“What wonderful lives we create for ourselves, don’t we, A.C.?”
She kissed him, finished her drink, stubbed out her cigarette, and got shakily to her feet.
“I’ll be late for the train,” she said. “I hate taking the train. You’ve got to go through fucking New Jersey. Goodbye, A.C. If you do end up needing a new wife, maybe I’ll divorce my husband.”
When she was gone, he made coffee and sat numbly sipping it in the living room. He had a sudden urge to call Kitty, as if a chatty, normal conversation with her might help expiate his sin. But he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound foolish. He didn’t know what she would think.
Finally, he began thumbing idly through one of his magazines—a month-old issue of Town and Country. On one of the fashion pages, there was a picture of Camilla Santee. He’d paid no attention to it when he’d first seen it. Just another model. She was wearing a sporty summer outfit that looked a little young for her. It showed off her long legs wonderfully, though. And her expression was demure enough to match the clothes. In his brief encounter with her, he hadn’t seen such a look on her face.
What if it had been her he’d been with that night? Would he be feeling guilt now, or some sort of rapture? A reckless sense of freedom. To fall in love with Camilla Santee would be like sailing away from his life. He wasn’t ready for that.
He stared at the picture for a long time, then tore it from the page and set it carefully on the table.
He had a hangover, but he couldn’t bring himself to treat it the way Bailey had hers, the way she probably ministered to herself every morning.
Hung over or not, there was something he had to do, and soon. He looked over at the telephone. He didn’t know the nonemergency number for the police department, so he called information.
Lanham’s first stop upon reaching Manhattan was Molly Wickham’s apartment building. The canvass team had been through the building the afternoon and evening before, and the evidence technicians had finished. Two uniformed police officers had r
emained behind. Lanham would see the reports when he got to the division, but first he wanted a look for himself.
It was a huge, and thereby enormously expensive apartment. When he’d looked up at the building from the sidewalk below, he’d wondered which side the apartment faced. Inside, he discovered it looked east, north, and west as well. It also had a large balcony. Molly Wickham had not been a big-time model for very long, and the movie she’d made sounded like a cheap one. How she’d been able to afford a place like this was a question he wanted answered.
Whatever the apartment had cost her, she apparently hadn’t much left over for furniture. There was an antique brass bed in the largest bedroom, accompanied only by a small night table and a not very expensive chest of drawers. A full-length mirror was propped, rather than hung, against one wall. The other two bedrooms were empty. The long and spacious living room had only a couch, coffee table, stereo, television, and armchair in it, plus some African masks and a few museum prints on the wall. A pile of cushions in one corner did for another place to sit. There were faint marks in the thick carpeting indicating that the room had once held considerably more furniture.
In the dining room, there was a small table, the kind that more properly belonged in a kitchen, and four chairs. The kitchen itself had only three counter stools. There were few dishes in the cabinets—no crystal or expensive china. One cabinet, however, was filled with liquor, mostly whiskey and expensive liqueurs.
He could find no books anywhere in the apartment. In the back of a drawer in the bathroom adjoining the master bedroom was a Polaroid photograph. It was of Molly Wickham and another woman—white. Neither was wearing any clothes. They were very busy. Not too many years before, such a photo could have gotten them both arrested.
Lanham looked closely at the picture, his eyes following the curve of body and sheen of flesh to the juxtaposition of Molly Wickham’s thigh and a glimpse of profile of the other woman’s face. He went out to the living room couch and the full flood of morning light from the window. Taking off his glasses, he cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief and then studied the photograph one more time.
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