The bedside stand. It had a single shallow drawer, filled with photographs, a passport, and a well-thumbed guide to restaurants. She pawed through the photos, looking for anything that might show Malcolm with Ingraham, but they were all old—pictures of women with pin curls, wearing floral dresses, and men in shirtsleeves, fly-fishing.
There was a shelf below the drawer, holding more paperbacks—a row of Dungeons and Dragons novelizations. Yuck. She dropped to her knees and then to her belly, stretching out to check under the bed. Under the side closest to her, there was nothing, not even a dust bunny. Under the other side, however, visible as a series of black rectangles, were several suitcases or narrow boxes. They looked promising.
She clambered back up on her high-heeled sandals and circled around the foot of the bed again. She was balanced on two knees and one palm, her hand wrapped around an unseen handle, tugging the heavy suitcase out from under the four-poster, when she heard the faint noise of feet on the stairs. And voices.
She shoved the suitcase back into place and shot to her feet. Where to hide? Where to hide, where to hide, where to hide? She slapped off the light in the closet and stood stock-still, shaking, flushed, her skin hot and prickling, clenching her fists so tightly that her close-clipped nails dug into her palms. Think. Thinkthinkthink. Under the bed? Too obvious. In the closet? There was nothing to hide behind except Malcolm’s suits. All it would take would be a light on in the room and someone to cast one glance inside to notice her legs taking up the space between his jackets and the shoe rack.
The hall light came on. She could hear a mutter of voices, indistinct, male, coming closer. She darted a glance behind her and realized the curtains were still closed. She leaped to one window, jerked the fabric apart, and then ran to the next, almost stumbling over the little chair in front of the desk.
No footsteps now because of the plush thickness of the carpet, just the sound of a voice complaining and another answering shortly. The bathroom was her only hope. She bounded in, shutting the door behind her. It had been shut when she came into the room, hadn’t it? She couldn’t remember. Light from the open window picked out a pedestal sink, a toilet, and a shower stall. She suddenly thought of the crowd around the bathroom downstairs. If she were Malcolm and had to pee, would she wait in line next to the dining room when she had a private john upstairs? Her throat closed and for a second she heard a roaring in her ears.
You’re a pilot, damn it, “Hardball” Wright snarled in her ear. You know what they call pilots who panic? Dead! She drew in her breath, a quick, sharp gasp, and ruthlessly shoved everything except the problem out of her mind. She could hide behind the shower curtain. There was almost no chance he was going to shower, not with someone else accompanying him. Unless, of course, he was planning on a little private party for two.
She could hear the voices, louder now, and then there was a gleam of light beneath the edge of the bathroom door. Her choice was made for her. Slipping out of her heels and clutching them in one hand, she edged her way behind the shower curtain and into the cubicle, gritting her teeth at the quiet rustle and clank of the hooks on the curtain rod.
“I don’t understand how you can be so calm,” a male voice said, muffled slightly by the bathroom door.
“Chill out,” Malcolm said, and suddenly Dave Matthews was singing “Forty-One,” intense and seductive, pure high notes and a wicked bass coming from that suitcase-size CD player. How can his books be so lousy and his music so good? she wondered inanely, and then she heard Malcolm say, “I have to take a leak. Hang on.”
She willed herself into immobility as the door swung open and the bathroom light clicked on. She couldn’t help it—she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, like a child, as if not seeing would make her invisible, too. Her heart was tripping so fast, it was difficult to keep her breathing slow and steady. She fought the urge to hold her breath, knowing that if she did so, she would eventually make even more noise letting it out.
The toilet seat clunked up and Malcolm went about his business, peeing for what seemed like a half hour—did he have the bladder of a racehorse?—before zipping up, a noise like a small guillotine, and flushing. The water racketing down the porcelain bowl gave her enough cover to take a deep, lung-popping breath of air. Then the water was running in the small sink, and she opened her eyes, looking in horror at the half-dissolved bar of soap on the chrome caddy hanging over the showerhead. Please, she thought, please, please, please…Then she heard the sweet sound of a liquid-soap dispenser squirting and knew she had dodged the bullet on that one. When he twisted off the water and reached for the hand towel, she could actually see the tips of his fingers at the edge of the shower curtain as he grabbed the towel and then hung it up again. He clicked off the light and pulled the door behind him, so that it swung nearly—but not quite—closed.
She wanted to sag against the back of the shower and slide bonelessly to the floor. She realized she had been clutching her shoes so tightly, her hands ached. She took a deep, slow breath in an effort to settle her heart and unstring her muscles. All she had to do was remain still, quiet, and hidden, and eventually Malcolm and the other man would leave to rejoin the party.
Unless this is his new boyfriend and they’ve come up here to have sex. She tried out the idea. There was simply no way she was going to huddle unseen, like a rabbit, and eavesdrop on that. If it sounded like they were getting intimate, she would have to reveal herself and say—what? That she had come upstairs to use the bathroom? And had happened to walk all the way down the hall to the room farthest from the stairs to find one? Even if she had the excuse of being completely potted, that sounded lame.
The noise of the men’s voices brought her attention back to the room beyond the bathroom. She wasn’t hearing murmured sweet nothings. In fact, from the sound of it, she didn’t have to worry about any tryst, unless they were a couple who used arguing as a substitute for foreplay.
“All I’m saying is, I didn’t sign up for anything like this.” She could hear the second man more clearly now that the bathroom door was slightly open. He sounded vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t place a name or face to the voice. Maybe another party guest?
“Anything like what?” Malcolm spoke like someone who was very annoyed and trying not to show it.
“For God’s sake! The man is dead!”
Clare dropped any speculation about lying her way out of the bathroom. The man’s last statement stabbed through her, fixing all her attention to their words.
“So he’s dead. So what? He went cruising in a park in a town where two queers had already been beaten up. He got what he was asking for.”
The other man’s voice was barely a whisper. “You don’t—he wasn’t—that can’t be all there is to it!”
“Do you have any evidence otherwise?”
“No, of course not. I don’t want any evidence otherwise. I just want your assurances that I’m not going to get picked up by the police and questioned about anything.”
In the pause between the CD’s tracks, there was a faint creaking sound, as if one of them had sat on the bed. “Well, if you are questioned, you won’t have anything to tell them, will you?”
“How can you say that? I’m up to my ass in alligators on this thing! I feel like I’m being set up as the fall guy precisely because I don’t know—Jesus Christ! What the hell is that?” The man’s voice had shot up the scale.
“What’s the matter? You’ve never seen one of these? It’s a Lugar Five-fifty. Wicked, huh?” Over the sound of the music, she heard the click of the chamber being drawn back, but she couldn’t tell if a round had gone in.
“I’m not looking for trouble,” the other man said. His voice was thready and light.
“Hey, I know you’re not. You’re a team player. What? You think I brought this out to threaten you? No way, man. I wanted to show you what else is in here.”
Clare oh so slowly and oh so carefully laid her sandals on the shower floor. She could be out of
the shower, throw open the door, and tackle Malcolm in under three seconds, she estimated. She would have to hope Malcolm was a talker, and that he would play with the other man a little before actually shooting him. That would give her time to make her move. Like a pilot reading instrument gauges, she noted that her heart rate had actually slowed down and her limbs were more relaxed at the prospect of hurling herself on a loaded gun. That probably said something terrible about her priorities and fitness for the priesthood, but she couldn’t figure out what at the moment.
“Holy shit. Is that what I think it is?”
“What, you never tried any when you were at school?”
“That’s got to be worth thousands. What are you doing with a stash like that?”
“I’m an independent businessman now. It’s funny. My cousin Diana thinks I’m a hopeless slacker. But really, I’m just as much old Eustace Landry’s descendant as she is. There must be some sort of entrepreneur gene, don’t you think? Unfortunately, I can’t open my books and let the family admire how well I’m doing.”
“Does your aunt know?”
“Leave my aunt out if it.” Malcolm’s voice was cool. “In fact, if I were you, I’d avoid my aunt at all times.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Take it as a warning.” There was a rustling, then a dull thud. Inside the shower stall, Clare tensed. “Here.” Malcolm’s voice was decidedly warmer. “Take this, as well. It’s yours.”
“Are you kidding? What am I supposed to do with this? Throw a party?”
“Sell it. That neatly sealed bag is worth about ten thousand dollars on the open market. You could use ten thousand, couldn’t you?”
“No way. If I got caught with this, I’d be looking at ten years playing girlfriend to some guy in Attica. Look, I really didn’t get into this for the money.”
Malcolm laughed.
“Well, not like that. Not for this. I didn’t think anyone was going to get hurt. I was assured—”
“I know what you were told. And I know what you want. You think I didn’t know?” His voice became caressing, persuasive. “Tell you what. You take this, as a surety. I’ll set up a sale. You return it to me, I get the cash, and the cash goes to you. Then you can go off to Texas or Alaska or something and lie low until this business about Bill blows over.”
“What’s to keep you from calling the cops as soon as I leave this house and having me picked up? With this much, I’d be charged with felony dealing for sure.”
Malcolm sighed. “Oh, for Chrissakes, use your head. If you were to get arrested, the first thing you’d do would be to roll on me. I’m not in any hurry to try to flush my entire stock down the toilet. It’s not going to do me any good to dick you over. It’s profitable for me to keep you happy. Just like it’s profitable for you to keep your head down and your mouth shut. If you don’t panic, we’ll all get out of this with what we want.”
“Except for Bill Ingraham.”
Malcolm’s voice was sharp. “Bill had a lifetime of getting what he wanted. Eventually, you have to roll off the bed and give someone else a turn. Here. Take it.”
Clare strained to hear what was happening, but the horn and floating guitar line of “Lie in Our Graves” masked any sound quieter than a voice.
Eventually, the other man spoke again. “All right.”
“Good. You going back to the party?”
“Are you kidding? I’m going to hide this thing under the seat of my car and drive slowly and carefully home. You?”
“I’m going to work the phones a bit and see if I can set up a sale. Ciao-ciao, man. You don’t have to worry. I’m going to take care of you.”
Clare thought that sounded like reason enough to worry right there. Then the realization struck her: Malcolm wasn’t going back downstairs.
There wasn’t any answering farewell, just a silence filled with quiet music. She pictured Malcolm tossing his jacket on the bed—on top of a suitcase stuffed with a gun and fat bags of heroin. Or maybe it wasn’t heroin. She wasn’t up on current trends in the drug market. She could feel a hysterical laugh waiting to bubble up from her chest, and she pressed both hands on her diaphragm and willed herself to stop.
“Hey, Joe. It’s Mal. Look, man, I’m calling because you had suggested I get in touch with you when I was ready to move a little more product than previously.”
He was getting on the phone and calling people who would be willing to spend ten thousand dollars for illegal drugs. She rubbed her lips hard, taking off what was left of her lipstick. Any guesses as to how he might deal with a woman who overheard his sales pitch? Any guesses as to what his customers might do?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Time to bail out of this plane, Clare told herself. And with Malcolm settling in for an evening of telephone conversation and music, there was only one exit still open to her. She picked up her shoes and, holding them tightly against her stomach, slipped between the edge of the shower curtain and the cool tile wall, all the while thinking to herself, flat, flat, flat.
Several hooks slid along the curtain rod with a scrape that sounded to Clare like a Klaxon. Her breath hitched up in her throat and she forced herself to keep on moving, until she was standing next to the toilet in her stocking feet. She couldn’t see out the crack in the door without getting right in front of it, but there was enough light spilling in from the bedroom to pick out all the details in the bath. The detail she was interested in was the window.
It was larger than the usual bathroom window, the same size as the two in the bedroom. Two stories up, looking out onto mountains, one wouldn’t require much privacy, she guessed. Like one of the bedroom windows, its lower pane had been pulled up almost to the level of the middle sash. She pressed her fingers against the screen’s releasing locks and slid it up as far as she could. It clicked into place on its runner with a noise that sounded as loud as a rifle shot.
Behind her, Malcolm was still chatting away and the Dave Matthews CD had looped around to the beginning and was jazzing along with “So Much to Say.” She loved the Crash album, but she wondered if she would ever be able to listen to it again after tonight. She eased the latches into place in the uppermost notches and stuck her head out the window to scope out her escape route.
The good news was that Malcolm’s suite overlooked a six-foot-square porch roof, an easy drop from the window if she were hanging from the bottom of the sill. The bad news was, the porch and its roof were attached to the kitchen. Over the jazzy beat of the Dave Matthews Band, she could hear the clang and clatter and chatter of kitchen staff engaged in a full-scale cleanup. Craning her neck to one side, she could see the outlines of several people clustered in conversation on the flagstone terrace surrounding the pool. All it would take would be someone glancing up at the wrong moment and she would look like a character from a Lawrence Block novel. She could see the title now: The Burglar Who Thought She Was a Priest.
Once she got down to the ground, the view from the pool would be cut off by a wide-planked wind fence that shielded swimmers and sunbathers from the sight of three large trash cans. How long would it take her to climb out of the window, drop, and slide off the porch roof? Thirty seconds? A minute?
She heard the thump-thump of footsteps down a pair of steps and then one of the caterers emerged from beneath the roof, striding to the nearest trash can with a white plastic bag swinging from his fist. He tossed it in and vanished back into the kitchen, never once looking up or about.
A quote from Macbeth bubbled up from the primordial English-lit ooze: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly…” She glanced at the sandals dangling from her hand. Bogatta Veneta. Italian leather. Bought back when she was flush with a captain’s pay. Praying she would be able to find them again, she leaned out the window and tossed them as hard as she could past the light spilling from the kitchen, toward the gravel drive. She wiggled through the opening until she was sitting on the sill, then stood up, clutching the windo
w’s exterior frame. She awkwardly lowered herself to her knees and then, her hands digging into the sill, let her legs slip off the reassuring solidity of the wood and into space.
The edge of the windowsill dug into her abdomen as she slid farther and farther down. Something interrupted her descent for a moment, tugged at her, and then she felt a release as two silk-covered buttons popped off her jacket and pitter-pattered across the roof and into the darkness below. She dangled for a moment by her hands alone and then let go, dropping as limply as she could. She skidded off the side of the porch roof and tumbled to the ground with a blow that knocked the wind out of her.
Inside the kitchen, someone said, “What the hell was that?” Clare staggered upright and lurched backward, bouncing off a rubberized trash can.
A woman in a large white apron appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hello?” she said to the night air in general. Then, as she spotted Clare tottering beside the trash cans, she said, “Excuse me? Can I help you?” The woman glanced doubtfully at Clare’s bare feet and her jacket, which was gaping open over her midsection. Clare grabbed the edges and smiled cheerfully. “Great party!” she said, loosening her southern Virginia drawl to sound drunk. More drunk, she amended.
The caterer squinted at her. “Are you okay?” She looked back into the kitchen. “Look, why don’t you come in and let me get you some coffee?”
Clare clutched the jacket more closely and squeezed her bare toes in the dirt she had recently rolled in. “No, thank you, ma’am. ’M just going out front. Waiting for my ride.”
“You do have a ride.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, ma’am,” Clare said, saluting for full effect. Her jacket swung open, revealing a great deal of skin.
The woman smiled at her uncertainly. “Okay, then. Good night.”
Clare waved, crossed the kitchen yard, and headed toward the drive, walking straight until the woman retreated into the house. Then she cast about the edges of the gravel drive, trying to spot her sandals somewhere amid the grass and dirt and sweep of stones. She failed to turn up anything except a couple more mosquito bites. She let herself curse under her breath. There was no way she could afford to replace those babies on her priest’s salary. She abandoned the search and headed for her car, parked at the other end of the house.
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