Penzler, Otto Ed v2

by Murder For Revenge

  “What had to be done.” How can I say this right? He was trembling from head to foot. Not with fear, but with elation. “I’ve freed her.” He meant Caro, of course. He was not wrong there.

  “For God’s sake, Perse. I have it all worked out. Why did you come up here? I told you I’d take care of everything. You were meant to sleep through it all.”

  I pulled away from him, and went into the bedroom. At first I saw very little. Willie or perhaps Caro had pulled the heavy drapes back so that the city’s lights spangled the raindrops on the windowpanes, sending golden fingers into the darkness. I saw the huge bed with its rucked sheets. I walked slowly around the foot as if drawn by a magnet toward the far side. But then, death is the most powerful kind of magnet, isn’t it?

  “Perse, get out of there!” Willie had followed me into the bedroom. “Dammit, you’ll fuck it all up!”

  “Stay away from me.” I was staring at the lumped shape twisted up in the bedding.

  “Caroline didn’t recognise me.” Willie switched tactics, knowing he needed to placate me to get me the hell out of there now. “It’s so dark in there, as far as she knows, a burglar broke into the room. I bundled her off to the bathroom before she saw my face.” He raised a fist filled with Caro’s jewellery and Eddie’s Rolex watch and rings. “Shit, the less you know the better. What’s done is done, but you being here—you’re going to make it more difficult than it needs to be. Jesus, Perse, you know you’re not strong enough to stand up to the cops. There’ll be a thousand questions I’ll have to answer.”

  The thing about the space around the lumped shape, I saw, was that it was dark as the blackest night. And shiny as an oil slick. The sickly-sweet smell of fresh blood stuck in my nostrils like tar. What I couldn’t figure out was how he’d gotten the best of Eddie.

  “Perse, have you been listening to me?” The urgency in Willie’s voice had risen to fever pitch. “Time to—be careful! For Christ’s sake, don’t touch anything!”

  But it was too late. I’d pulled back the bedcovers, and gasped. There was Eddie, lying on his back with the biggest hard-on I’d ever seen, or it would have been minutes ago when his heart was still pumping. So this is how Willie did it, I thought. For a moment, I felt sorry for Eddie. It must be damn hard to defend yourself when your brain’s dulled by sex.

  “What’s happened here is already ancient history. Put it out of your head. Caroline can start her life over now. We’ll get your fingerprints off the sheet and get the hell out of here.”

  He still doesn’t get it, I thought. But he will. This stupid cow will make sure of that.

  I reached into my purse and drew on a pair of gloves. Then I carefully unwrapped the heavy object from the butcher’s paper. It smelled of machine oil, and a curious masculine scent almost as compelling as musk. My forefinger curled around the trigger. It felt oddly natural, like the ivory of keys beneath my fingertips. I turned and exhaled a long, slow breath. Then I squeezed the trigger of the 9mm gun.

  The sound startled me, but Willie’s body slamming back against the far wall did not. I watched him incuriously, sitting spread legged on the floor like an idiot child. Blood pumped out of his chest, and there was a stunned expression on his face that gave me a good measure of satisfaction. And why not? While it was true that for years I had forgiven him his fear of what made me happy and complete, this forgiveness had, without my knowing, turned to pity. As anyone who has lived a long life will tell you, it’s a short step from pity to contempt. And, then, to hatred as pure as middle C. Still standing across the room, I carefully aimed at his head and squeezed off another shot. Bone and brains fountainhead outward with a great gout of blood. Like something on a movie screen, nothing more, I told myself.

  Except for the stench.

  I closed my mind to everything except what needed to be done. No need to hurry. This suite did not abut any others, and directly downstairs was my own suite. Nobody outside these rooms could have heard a thing.

  I carefully rubbed the spot on the sheet I had touched with my bare fingers. Then I leaned over and placed the gun into Eddie’s left hand. He was left handed, and this was his 9mm. I inserted his forefinger into the trigger guard and, pointing the 9mm toward Willie, I fired the gun so the paraffin test they’d be sure to do on Eddie would be positive.

  Perfect.

  To leave the bedroom I was required to step over the exsanguinating body of my husband. I was careful to avoid splotches of blood and gore soaking into the expensive carpet. I took the chair away from the bathroom door and opened it. Caro was huddled on the tiles, clearly in shock. What had Willie done to her? I wondered. Dark blotches had broken out on her forehead and left cheek, and had begun to swell. He had struck her to make the break-in seem more authentic. Of course Willie had had no intention of cutting a deal with Eddie. He’d gone up to the presidential suite to kill him. But then, I had known he would. It was only the eventual outcome that had been in doubt. Men and their dangerously addictive toys, I thought as I gently touched my daughter’s shoulder.

  Caro’s eyes opened wide when she recognised me. She could hardly believe it.

  “My darling...” I gathered my daughter to me, gently supported her against the sink as we embraced.

  “Mom, what happened?” Caro’s voice was that of a sleepwalker, high and thin with unnatural tension. “Someone broke in. I think—“

  “Never you mind. That’s a nightmare best forgotten.” I filled a glass with water. From my bag I shook out a Vallium and placed it on Caro’s tongue. “Your mother’s here now.” I thought of what it was like to be orphaned, alone, in need of a sympathetic breast on which to rest one’s weary head. “Swallow, precious. I’ll take care of you.”

  Caro obediently washed the Valium down with water, and within five minutes I was able to walk her out of the suite, down the stairs, to the floor below. By the time I had tucked her into my own bed I was bathed in sweat.

  I returned to the living room, and called the police. Then I placed Ross Yates’s report on Eddie Bendarenski on the coffee table. It would be the first thing I’d show the police. That was key—the motive for the bad blood between Willie and Eddie.

  Back in the bedroom, quiet as a mouse, I stripped off my gloves, inspected them for oil stains. I washed them, anyway, with leather cleaner, then folded them in half and placed them in the drawer with all the others. Already the spectre of my husband, under whose thumb I had existed for so many years, was fading. He had led me out of the darkness into the light, without a thought that I might at some point examine the quality of that light. How could he possibly understand that the creature he had so painstakingly created had yearned only to be free? To do that he would have had to believe that I was an independent entity, who had grown far beyond the parameters he’d set for me. Sometime when he hadn’t been looking, I had become a whole person, yearning to be a part of the real world. Willie could not conceive of such a thing.

  How is that possible? He was living with me, after all. He saw me each day. But therein lies the answer. He saw what he wanted to see, and crushed beneath his heel any inkling that there might be more than what he himself had fashioned. He’d never had any intention of allowing me my freedom. My ignorance of the real world, as he put it, was what gave him his hold over me. And if I had been foolish enough to confess that I could not survive the prison of our marriage another moment, surely he would have laughed at my naiveté. And deliberately denied me what I wanted most—and now by my own hands had achieved.

  I fixed myself a stiff drink. Slowly sipping it, I went to the stereo and put on the Bach, softly this time, because there was no longer any reason to turn up the volume.

  Dawn brought the inevitable barrage of questions from the police. I was ready for them. I felt light as the air I breathed, and my elation made me want to shout. But of course I did not. It was Willie who had taught me how to act. I had fooled him, and I’d do the same with the police. No sweat.

  I presented my frailness as an
offering they might come upon of their own momentum. As ever, understatement. Tears came easily to me. Why not? I needed only to imagine the years of my indenture, or Caro in drugged sleep in the next room. I showed the handsome detective Caro’s battered face, and assured him he could speak with her as soon as the doctor pronounced her recovered from shock. The potbellied detective was understanding and sympathetic even while he was double- and triple-checking my story. I admit I liked being treated with kid gloves which, I believed, was my due. He had heard me play Scriabin last year at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Centre. He was somewhat awed, but he did his job nonetheless. I was almost as impressed with him as he was with me.

  During a break in my statement, while he was bringing me coffee, I watched light as thin as a veil come into the early morning sky, and thought of something Ross Yates had told me about his work: “Some people who don’t know any better think I’m a piece of shit, rooting through the garbage. But you know what? They’re just scared of me, because everyone’s got secrets and I know how to get to them all. In this world, secrets are more valuable than gold.”

  Eventually, it all blew over, like an evil wind. That was how Willie had described Eddie, but it also could be said of him. I had done everything perfectly. It was the considered opinion of the police that the two men had quarrelled. The quarrel had escalated, and since both men were armed, the altercation had ended most tragically. Another example for the antigun lobby to use.

  In the aftermath, I was reminded of something Willie had told me years ago. He’d come home in a particularly exultant mood, and I’d asked him why. “Dead cat bounce,” he had said, laughing. “Don’t look so appalled, Perse. It’s a Wall Street term. You target a company that looks dead on its feet. The stock’s hovering, say, between one and two because almost everyone’s given up on it. Then somebody like me comes in and starts buying heavily. Word gets around, and the price moves a little, until the greedy people get wind of the price change. There must be a turnaround, they think. The company’s going to be profitable again. So they buy—and others buy—in great quantity. Now the price shoots up to five, six, eight. That’s when I sell, because this company’s as dead as it was the day I bought the stock. The price collapses completely. That blip upward is called a dead cat bounce: the illusion of life.”

  That’s what my life had been up until the moment I killed Willie, I thought: an illusion.

  My pride at outwitting the police was something Willie would have understood, even applauded. My elation at being free gave vent to rehearsals that left me breathless, swimming in another world. Willie had for so long denied me full entry to this world that I felt drunk after almost every practice session. In fact, I left the piano only to take care of Caro.

  How she missed Eddie. How little she understood herself! But there’d be so much time now for self-revelation. For her, nights were the worst. She had terrible bouts of depression, despair, and uncontrollable weeping. At those times, she withdrew completely, and I was once again momentarily reminded of my younger self. I did not pity her, because I knew what hell Eddie would have made of her life. If he’d allowed her to live. But there could be no doubt that the house was stifling her and, itching to get back to performing, I took her to Venice as soon after the investigations were concluded as I dared.

  Venice was my favourite city, a place that pierced me clear to my soul. My God, on this trip the sky was so blue! Caro complained of the smell, but to me the air was pungent with new life!

  I played three nights at the Teatro della Fenice, the small but magnificent concert and opera house. Throughout my career, critics, while praising my impeccable technique, had now and again carped that my playing lacked true passion. These Venetian concerts were markedly different. For the first time, I lost myself completely in the music. Much to my astonishment, I made many in the audience weep. At the end, the packed house would not let me leave the stage, urging me back for encore upon encore. For these, I very shrewdly chose the nocturnes of Chopin, that most emotional of composers, and now the entire audience wept.

  And it was here that Caroline, witness to the flowering of my soul, at last began to return to life. It was as if the complex mathematical patterns of Bach’s music infused her with the innate orderliness of life, banishing the memory of the chaos that had so mercilessly overtaken her. It was as if the florid passion of Chopin had reawakened her heart so that she was reminded what it meant to love and be loved in return.

  This metamorphosis, clearly apparent after the first concert, thrilled me to the tips of my fingers. I clutched her to me and kissed her repeatedly. And fell in love as if for the first time with the music of Bach and Chopin, with the people of Venice who fêted me in the cafés that lined the piazza outside the Fenice until dawn-light strayed like a striped cat through the cobbled streets.

  The day after the last of the concerts dawned bright and clear. The sky was the colour of the sea, and in between lay all of Venice, sun washed, ancient as time. Riding an unceasing wave of bliss, I hired a motoscafo—a private motor launch—which took us first to Burano, the island of fishermen, whose small row houses painted in lovely pastels looked like the set for La Traviata.

  After a leisurely stroll along the narrow, crooked streets, we took the motoscafo farther into the great lagoon to the island of Torcello, where, centuries before, the original Venetians had made their home. I had booked a table for lunch in the flower-strewn garden at the Locanda Cipriani. There, we looked out over a thirteenth-century church whose cracked burnt-sienna facade oozed an aura that seemed barely Christian.

  White, puffy clouds dotted the sky like the sailing vessels on the lagoon, and where the Venetian sunlight struck the trellises and vines, the flowers sang a rich and vibrant oratorio. When Caro excused herself to go inside, the man at the next table turned to me and asked in a deep, raspy baritone whether he could buy “the lady and her sister” a drink.

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Caroline’s my daughter. We’d be delighted to accept the offer of a fellow American, but only if you join us for lunch. Are you alone?”

  “As it happens, I am. Thank you,” he said, as he came and sat opposite Caro’s chair, at my left elbow.

  “Are you here on business?” I asked.

  “No, pleasure. You know, sightseeing, the usual.” Under his breath, he said, “Right on time.”

  “What’s the matter, Ross?” I said in the same hushed tone. “Didn’t you think I’d make it?”

  “After the way you put VanDam to sleep, I had no doubt,” Ross Yates whispered. “But last night I dreamt you didn’t come. Christ Almighty, this was the toughest month of my life. The longer I stayed away from you, the more I wanted you.”

  He was tall and rangy, like a cowboy, with windblown hair the colour of flax. His face reminded me of a soldier’s: tough, vigilant, competent. Seemingly not the kind of man to make such an admission. I very much liked that he had. That bastard Willie never would have opened up like that.

  “You certainly know how to make a woman’s head spin.”

  He laughed. “That isn’t all I can make spin.” His gray eyes appeared screwed into the bone of their sockets. They sparked with licentious memory. When I say I’ll do something, they seemed to say, it’s as good as done. “Those early mornings when VanDam was upstairs...” He chuckled. “I bet your kitchen table never saw that kind of action before or since. VanDam may have been a genius at business, but he sure was short on imagination. No way he ever made you sing like I do.”

  God, how right he was! And he laughed, seeing it in my eyes.

  “It was my lucky day when I showed you the report on Eddie.”

  “And even luckier for both of us I made you sit on it until the wedding reception.”

  “You really do have a deliciously evil mind.”

  “Hush,” I whispered. “Caro’s coming back.” I was flushed and excited and terrified all at once.

  As he turned his most brilliant smile on Caroline, Ross said to me out
of the corner of his mouth, “What a quick study you were, practicing with the gun you had me steal from Eddie. I told you everything would come out fine as long as you didn’t jerk the trigger. You did just like I taught you: exhale and slowly squeeze it.”

  I was so pleased I put my hand on his thigh underneath the table.

  Lunch at the Locanda was just as I had imagined it would be. Ross was gentle and funny with Caro, and she seemed to take an instant liking to him almost from the moment I introduced them. Good thing. He was going to be in our lives for a long time to come.

  Still, Caro insisted on going out alone in the small hours of the night. I asked Ross to watch over her from a distance when she went, and prayed that time would heal her wounds.

  Gradually, she grew calmer. Truth to tell, Ross was a good and comforting companion to us both.

  “All my life,” he told me one day in Venice, “I’ve settled for things. I was an Army brat, so I had to settle for making new friends almost every year. I didn’t really want to be a PI, but I could never get my detective’s shield in the NYPD; written tests were never my thing. The girl I fell in love with didn’t love me, so I settled for someone I liked but didn’t love. That lasted a half-dozen miserable years. Then, my luck changed.” He smiled at me and my heart lifted. “I was hired by VanDam.”

  By the time we arrived in London it appeared that Caroline had returned to her old, sunny self. I was desperate to renew the sexual part of my affair with Ross, but with Caro around there never seemed to be a good time. Besides, as Ross pointed out, we’d be far better off in the long run if we waited awhile longer. He was right, but being discreet was playing havoc with my hormones. Killing Willie, being set free, had made me as randy as a rabbit.

  My agent had booked a two-night engagement at the Royal Albert Hall. I was to play with the Royal Philharmonic, so there was a full week of rehearsals at the hall, more than was necessary for a solo recital. Also, there were egos other than mine to contend with. The conductor, a man whom I had always admired but had never before met, turned out to be a prima donna of the worst sort. Temper tantrums were not uncommon, and my own temper grew increasingly short. I’d work all day and then have difficulty sleeping at night. Ross was wonderful during this time. He sat in the dark, deserted theatre with Caro until the tightness of my expression forced him to mount the stage and calm me down. He did this so many times that the musicians, generally a jealous lot, soon grew used to his presence on their exalted pulpit.