The Gate House

by Nelson DeMille

  I said to her, “Would you like to go back to the house?”

  She replied, “No, I’m enjoying this walk.” She added, “Like old times, John.”

  Indeed, if we could erase or forget that half year that ruined all the years before and the decade after, it would be better than old times; it would be just another summer Sunday together.

  So we walked on, like old times, except we weren’t holding hands any longer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We’d covered most of her ten acres, except for the treed area around her stable, and I thought she might be avoiding that. Why? Because the stable brought back memories of Mr. Bellarosa, our new neighbor, insisting that his construction company do the work of moving the old Stanhope stables and carriage house from William’s land, which was for sale, to Susan’s property. It had been truly a Herculean task, disassembling the hundred-year-old structure, brick by brick, and reassembling it near the guest cottage. Plus, we needed a variance because the stable would be close to the Alhambra estate, and Frank Bellarosa had to sign off on that, which he was happy to do for us—or for Susan. And then Bellarosa’s guy, Dominic, gave us an estimate that looked like Mr. Bellarosa was underwriting most of the cost.

  I mean, did I guess that Frank had the hots for Susan? Well, yes. Was I upset? No. Did I think it was amusing? Yes. Did I think Susan Stanhope was actually going to hop into bed with a Mafia guy? Not in a million years. Should I have paid more attention to what was going on? Apparently. Am I stupid? No, but I was preoccupied with my own tax problems, and I was entirely too trusting. Not to mention entirely too egotistical to even contemplate such a thing.

  And little did I suspect that my buddy, Frank Bellarosa, had instigated this potentially ruinous and possibly criminal tax evasion charge against me so that he could pull a few strings and get me off the hook, thereby putting me in his debt, instead of the IRS’s debt. It was bad enough that a tax attorney had a tax problem, but solving the problem with the help of a Mafia guy was not one of my smarter moves. On the other hand, it worked.

  Well, I certainly learned a lesson or two about life, and about myself, and about seduction and survival. Not to mention relearning an old lesson about the power and the mystery of sexual behavior. I mean, who would have thought that don Bellarosa, the head of a Mafia crime family, and Susan Stanhope, from a somewhat more prominent family, would have much to talk about? Actually, they didn’t; it was more You Jane, me Tarzan.

  I could see the stables now, and I asked her, “Are you still riding?”

  She glanced at where I was looking and replied, “Yes, but I don’t own a horse. I ride a little at a horse farm in Old Brookville.”

  I nodded, recalling the night she’d killed Frank Bellarosa. She had saddled her horse, an Arabian stallion named Zanzibar, and announced to me that she was going for a night ride, which I advised her was dangerous, but she’d pointed out that there was a full moon, and the night was bright, and she’d ridden off.

  About two hours later, Mr. Felix Mancuso of the FBI rang my doorbell and politely asked me to come with him to Alhambra. I knew in my guts that Susan had murdered her lover.

  Mancuso’s colleagues had been house-sitting Frank Bellarosa since he’d become a government witness, and they’d done a very nice job of keeping him safe from his former friends and goombahs. Unfortunately, the FBI did not include Mrs. Sutter on their list of people who were not allowed access to don Bellarosa. In fact, Susan was high on the short list of people who had unlimited access to Frank because they’d been instructed, “Frank needs to get laid to keep him happy and talking.” Someone, however, should have remembered that (a) the female of the species is more dangerous than the male, and (b) hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

  Well, guys sometimes forget that, even FBI guys, and to be fair, they probably didn’t know about (b) until they heard the shots.

  Susan, walking beside me now, was apparently thinking of horses, and not Frank Bellarosa or murder, because she said to me, “There are far fewer places where one can ride now. So many of the equestrian rights-of-way have been closed off, and many of the open fields and old estates are now subdivisions.”

  Such as Alhambra. I said, with forced sincerity, “That’s too bad.” I recalled that one of Susan’s concerns, after she’d shot and killed her lover, was that Zanzibar was still tethered behind Frank’s mansion. I had to promise her I’d ride him home that night, which I did. I wasn’t overly fond of her high-strung animal, but I did unsaddle him and water him, though I didn’t brush him down, and if she’d known that, she would have killed me. Well . . . poor choice of words again.

  She said, “The Ganzes turned the carriage house into a garage, and they used the stables to store lawn and gardening equipment, which is what I’m doing.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I really miss Zanzibar. I miss having my own horse. Do you miss Yankee?”

  Yankee was my horse, and I hated him only slightly less than I hated Zanzibar, but I replied, “I think about him often.”

  She glanced at me, then said, “Well, I found good homes for them.”

  I was glad that the horses, at least, had a good home after she left.

  It was a perfect morning, weather-wise at least, and I’d forgotten how magnificent these parklike grounds were. The entire three hundred acres of the original Stanhope estate had been planted with exotic and expensive specimen trees from around the world, and many of these trees were over a hundred years old. The estate had been in decline through the past few decades, but Susan—and the Ganzes—had maintained this ten-acre parcel, and I’d noticed that Amir Nasim had been putting some care into his property as well.

  Coming back here, after so many years, I was struck by the fact that there could still be so many huge estates left on the Gold Coast, barely thirty miles from Manhattan, surrounded by a suburban county of well over a million people. The pressure to develop the remaining land to provide mini-mansions for newly minted millionaires was intense, but a new breed of multimillionaires, including foreigners like Amir Nasim, and people whose fortunes were of dubious origin such as Frank Bellarosa, had arrived with the resources to buy the old estates from the old families and breathe new life into them.

  Before this had happened, however, there were probably a hundred or more magnificent estates whose mansions had been abandoned because of taxes, reversals of fortune, or maintenance costs, and when I was young, these ruins dotted the landscape, giving the appearance, as Anthony Bellarosa would agree, that an army of Vandals had passed through a wide swath of the Empire. Also, when I was a boy, these huge derelict mansions were the ultimate playhouse for games of make- believe. And when I got older, I played a different sort of game, called love among the ruins—some candles, a bottle of wine, a transistor radio, a bedroll, and a newly liberated young lady on birth control pills.

  This all reminded me that one of Susan’s many talents was oil paintings, and her forte was painting these abandoned mansions. She had been locally famous for her romantic representations of these vegetation-covered ruins, which she painted in the spirit, if not the style, of Piranesi’s engravings of Roman ruins. But the architectural diversity of the Gold Coast mansions, as well as their varying states of decay, ranging from salvageable to lost, allowed her more latitude than Piranesi, of course, and she worked in oils and acrylics. If that sounds like I know what I’m talking about, I don’t; I got that straight from the artist. In any case, I was curious, so I asked her, “Are you still painting?”

  She smiled, then looked wistful, I thought, and replied, “Not anymore. But I might.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  She thought about that, then replied, “I tried painting in Hilton Head . . . I did a few seascapes, and a lot of those palmetto trees . . . but somehow I just lost the . . . talent, I guess.”

  “I don’t think you can lose talent.”

  “Well . . . maybe the subjects didn’t interest me. You know, like when an artist m
oves from where he or she was inspired to someplace else.”

  “Right.” I thought, too, perhaps her mental state had changed. If good artists are crazy—and she was a good artist, and crazy—then a return to some degree of mental health might kill that spark of mad genius. That’s good and bad. Mostly, I think, good. I mean, I can live with a bad painting, but it’s not easy living with a crazy wife.

  Anyway, I wondered if this new, improved tranquil personality I was now witnessing was the happy result of successful therapy or very good meds.

  Susan said to me, “Now that I’m back . . . I should see if I’m inspired.”

  “Right.” But don’t stop those meds.

  Ironically, one of the best paintings she’d ever done, and probably the last, was of the ruins of Alhambra. Mrs. Sutter, on the occasion of our first visit to Alhambra for coffee and cannolis, generously offered to paint the Alhambra palm court as a housewarming gift to our new neighbors. Susan had photographs of the magnificent two-tiered atrium palm court as it existed before the Bellarosas restored the mansion, and she explained to them that she was going to paint it as a ruin. This surprised Mrs. Bellarosa, who wondered why anyone would want to paint what she called “a wreck.” But Mr. Bellarosa, recalling some art he’d seen in Rome, thought it was a swell idea. I, too, was surprised at this offer, because this was no small undertaking, and Susan rarely gave away any of her paintings, though she sometimes donated them for charity auctions. Susan had informed the Bellarosas that though she could work mostly from her photographs and from memory, she needed to set up her easel in the palm court, so she could get the right perspective, and take advantage of the shifting sunlight from the glass dome, and so forth. Frank assured her that the door was permanently open to her.

  Thinking back on that evening, as I’d done a few dozen times, there was more going on here than a housewarming gift, or coffee and cannolis.

  It was hard to believe, but Susan Stanhope Sutter and Frank the Bishop Bellarosa had connected like a plug in a socket, and I should have seen the lights going on in their eyes. But I didn’t, and neither did Anna, and we both remained clueless in the dark.

  In any case, the relocation of the stable on Susan’s property, and the painting of the Alhambra palm court, led to frequent contact between Mrs. Sutter and Mr. Bellarosa.

  Meanwhile, I was in the city a lot, and Anna spent a good deal of time being driven back and forth in the black Cadillac to Brooklyn, where she visited her family and stocked up on cannolis and olive oil.

  I still don’t know who made the first move on whom, or where and how it happened, but I’m sure that Mr. Italian Stud thought he was the aggressor.

  Susan continued with her last thought and said, “Most of the abandoned houses are either restored or razed now, but I still have a lot of old photographs that I could paint from.”

  “Or maybe you should paint your parents and call it American Grotesque.” Well, I didn’t say that—I thought it. I said, “Paint the gatehouse before Nasim puts aluminum siding on it.” That may have actually been a Freudian slip—I mean, inviting her to set up her easel outside my house. Amazing how the subconscious mind works.

  She replied, “That’s a good idea . . . with the wrought-iron gates.”

  The subject of Susan’s artistic periods, past and present, seemed closed, and we continued our walk down memory lane. Then she changed subjects completely and asked me, “John, what are they saying in London about 9/11?”

  I recalled my answer to Elizabeth on that question and replied, “They’re saying they’re next.”

  She thought about that and observed, “The world has become a frightening place.”

  I replied, “The world is a fine place, and most of the people in it are good people. I saw that on my sail.”

  “Did you? That’s good.” She then said, “But what happened here . . . it has so changed everything for so many people.”

  “I know.”

  “Some people we knew were killed.”

  “I know that.”

  “Nothing will ever be the same for those families.”

  “No, it won’t be.”

  “What happened . . . it’s made a lot of people I know rethink their lives.”

  “I understand that.”

  “It made me appreciate things . . . I was frantic that day because Carolyn was downtown, and I couldn’t get a call through to her.”

  “I know. Neither could I.”

  She turned toward me as we walked, and said, “I thought you would call me that day.”

  “I almost did . . . I did speak to Edward, and he said he’d gotten through to Carolyn on her cell phone, and she was all right, and he said he had called you and told you that.”

  “He did . . . but I thought I’d hear from you.”

  “I almost called.” I added, “I thought you’d call me.”

  “I did, but when I called, I realized it was three A.M. in London, so I hung up, and the next day . . . I was drained and too . . . I was crying too much . . . so I e-mailed you . . . but I didn’t hear back from you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right . . . but that . . . that horror made me think . . . there are terrible things that can happen to us out of the blue . . . for no reason. Just because we’re there, and something evil has come our way. It made me put a lot of things into perspective, and it was a wake-up call . . . and that’s when I began thinking about moving back here, and being close to people I grew up with, and . . . well, I began thinking about you.”

  I didn’t respond for a while, then I said truthfully, “I had similar thoughts.” I mean, how long can we hold a grudge? Well, in my case, a long time. But 9/11 did get me thinking and possibly started me on the road that led me here, as it had led Susan here.

  Susan continued her thought and asked, “How long can we stay angry at people we once loved in the face of such . . . real hatred and evil?”

  That sounded like a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t, so I answered, “The anger is gone. Even the feeling of betrayal is gone. But what remains is . . . well, a badly wounded ego, and a sense of . . . embarrassment that this happened to me. In public.”

  “And you haven’t gotten over that?”

  “No.”

  “Will you ever?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No.”

  She took a deep breath and said, “He’s dead, John. I killed him. For us.”

  The time had come to confront this, so I replied, “That’s what you said.”

  She stopped walking, and I did, too. We faced each other, and she said to me, “I was ready to go to jail for the rest of my life to give you back your pride and your honor. That was my public penance, and my public humiliation, which I did, hoping you would take me back.”

  I hardly knew what to say, but I tried and said, “Susan . . . murdering a human being is not—”

  “He was evil.”

  Indeed, he was. But I didn’t think she realized that until he scorned her. Right up to that time, I think she was ready to run off with him to Italy, where the government was going to send him under the Witness Protection Program. I said to her, “You need to tell me why you killed him.”

  “I just told you.”

  I was seeing a little of the old Susan again, the bright green eyes, crazy eyes, and the pouty lips that morphed into a thin, pressed mouth, with her chin thrust forward as if to say, “I dare you to contradict me.”

  Well, I needed to do that, and I said, “That’s what you may believe now, ten years later. But that is not why you killed him. Not for me, and not for us.”

  She stared at me, and I stared back. I had confronted her with this once before, in the palm court of Alhambra, with Frank Bellarosa lying dead on the floor, and a dozen FBI agents and county detectives standing off to the side so that Mrs. Sutter, a homicide suspect, and her husband, who was also her attorney, could converse in private. And when I asked her then
why she killed him, she gave me the answer I’d just gotten. I could have accepted that, and from there we could have possibly rebuilt our lives.

  But that wasn’t the correct answer, and you can’t build on lies.

  The correct answer, the truth, actually, was something far different than Susan’s stated motives for killing her lover. In fact, I have to take some blame for that, or some credit, if you look at it differently.

  We continued to stare at each other, and I thought back to my visit to Frank Bellarosa at Alhambra, where he was lying in bed, sick with the flu, not to mention recovering from the after-effects of the shotgun blasts he’d taken some months before at Giulio’s restaurant.

  This had not been my first visit, but it was to be my last, and a few days later, he’d be dead. He’d said to me, then, apropos of his offer on another occasion to do me any favor I wanted in exchange for me saving his life at Giulio’s, “Well, you got me wondering about that favor I owe you.”

  I had thought long and hard about that favor, so I said to him, “Okay, Frank, I’d like you to tell my wife it’s over between you two and that you’re not taking her to Italy, which is what I think she believes, and I want you to tell her that you only used her to get to me.”

  He thought about that, then said, “Done.” But added, “I’ll tell her I used her, if you want, but that wasn’t it. You gotta know that.”

  I did know that. I knew that, as impossible as it was to believe, Frank and Susan were in love, and she was ready to leave me for him. Lust, I understand, from firsthand experience. But the only woman I’ve ever loved, Susan Stanhope Sutter, who actually still loved me, was madly in love with Frank Bellarosa—and Frank, apparently, was in love with her. That was why he’d sold out to the Feds—so he and Susan could be together in Italy, or wherever, and start a new life together. It would probably have lasted a year or two, but people who are obsessed and in high heat don’t think that far into the future.

  In any case, true to his word, he’d obviously told her what I’d asked him to tell her, on the phone or in person prior to that night, and Susan apparently snapped. Hell hath no fury and all that. Ironically, a few weeks before, he’d given her the gun that killed him, to keep the FBI from finding it. The rest is history, and tragedy, and maybe a little comedy, if you weren’t personally involved.