Suddenly Dom was shaking him by the shoulder.
‘For Chrissake, wake up, Chris.’
‘What?’
‘Wake up. You’re wanted on the phone. It’s your wife. The one you married yesterday. Remember?’
He shoved away Dom’s arm and managed to sit up rockily. In the blackness of the room the radium dials of the alarm clock showed two o’clock. He lurched to the phone.
‘Elizabeth?’
‘Chris? Oh, God, am I glad to hear your voice. Chris, remember you wanted me to be scared? Well, I am. Stiff. I’m coming over there right now.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘Somebody was in the room here with me. He’s not here now, but he was here.’
‘What was he doing there? Who was it?’
‘I didn’t see him, so I don’t know. He must have been hiding here when I came in around midnight. There’s no way he could have gotten in afterwards because when I came in I locked and bolted the door the way you told me to, and there’s no fire escape outside my window. And the light in that big walk-in closet didn’t work, so that’s where he was, right next to me when I was hanging up my stuff. I suppose he ducked out when I was asleep.’
‘Did he take anything?’
‘No, but he left something. A phonograph record. It doesn’t have any label on it so I don’t know what it’s about. I’ll bring it with me.’
‘Now, wait a second.’ Gratefully, he saw Dom, out of experience, dumping ice cubes into a towel. The chill of them against the back of his neck, the trickling of water down his spine eased some of the pressure in his head, cleared his brain. First things first. The girl was unharmed, even if she was, as she said, scared to death. But she didn’t sound scared to death. Was all this some kind of gag that would allow her to spend her wedding night in traditional style?
‘Chris, are you there?’ Her voice did have an edge of panic in it now. ‘Chris?’
‘I’m here. Look, you sit tight, and I’ll be over right away. There’s nothing –’
‘Not a chance. I’m not staying in this room any longer than it’ll take me to dress and get out. I’ll have them call a cab for me at the desk.’
‘Do you think it’s smart to go wandering around this time of night? Anyhow, what about Prendergast? The cabana’s right here on the grounds. Didn’t you call him?’
‘He’s not at the cabana. They all left this afternoon for one of those three day Bahama cruises. Besides, I wouldn’t call him about this. He’d only say –’ She cut that off abruptly, probably in shocked realization of what was about to come out.
‘Go on,’ Chris said. ‘He’d only say what? That I’m the one behind it? That it’s just a way of scaring you over here so I can finish you off and collect the estate?’
‘Oh, please. He doesn’t know you, that’s all.’
‘And you do?’
‘Yes. That’s why I’ll be over there as soon as I can.’
When he put down the phone he saw Dom eyeing him bleakly.
‘What was that all about?’
Chris told him.
‘It doesn’t make much sense, does it?’ Dom said.
‘It might.’
‘You think so? Anyhow, if she’s coming here, I’ll get out. One of the guys from school will put me up for a couple of days. And don’t tell me no. Nobody needs company on a honeymoon.’
‘I’m not planning on any honeymoon.’
‘Well, it sounds to me like she is, so I’ll pack it in until you two are on the plane. Meanwhile, you better do something about the way you look. Jeez, if papa ever caught you half-stoned and sleeping in your clothes like that.’
‘He’d be smarter than you about all this. The only moving you’ll do is into my room. Elizabeth can use yours the rest of the night, and tomorrow I’ll take her back to Cobia.’
By the time he heard the cab pulling up before the door he was freshly showered and shaved, and fairly presentable in pyjama pants, robe, and slippers. When he looked into the bathroom mirror, however, those swollen, red-rimmed eyes with the dark patches under them were a giveaway as to how he felt.
He and Dom were waiting on the porch when Elizabeth emerged from the cab.
Dom nudged him wisely as the driver opened the trunk of the car and hauled out two bulky valises.
‘Seems like company’s coming to stay,’ he commented.
‘More company than you think. Look down the block.’
Halfway down the block, a car was slowly pulling to a stop, double-parking there, its headlights fixed on the cab. Then the headlights blinked out, but no one appeared from the car. It stood menacingly in the deserted street, somehow suggesting it was poised and waiting.
Elizabeth came up the porch steps.
‘That car,’ she said, pointing. ‘The taxi man thinks it might have been following us.’
‘I know,’ said Chris. ‘It’s all right. Just get inside and make yourself at home.’
He nudged her through the door and made room for Dom to follow with the valises. Then he closed the door behind them and waited there in the shadowy darkness of the porch, his eyes fixed on the car down the block. The taxi pulled away, but still the car remained motionless.
It was nerve-racking being the mouse in a cat-and-mouse game like this. The temptation to take a close look at whoever was in the car rose in him, but that, he had a feeling, might be a little too dangerous. On the other hand, by crossing the street and walking a few steps down the block he could probably make out the licence plate by the light of the street lamp.
He was halfway across the street when the car was suddenly in motion, the sound of its motor a mounting roar. The headlights had not gone on. There was simply an underslung, devouring mass of steel piling straight at him – a black T-bird, he realized when it was almost on top of him – and then he flung himself frantically away from it, landed sprawling across the hood of the station wagon parked across the street with an impact that almost knocked the wind out of him, and twisted around in time to see the Thunderbird’s tail-lights flick on redly as it careened into Collins Avenue and out of sight.
He slid back to the pavement and stood there terrified at his close call, furious at his stupidity. He had guessed that the driver of the car was an enemy and meant business, and yet had walked into his path like an idiot. He was lucky to have gotten off with nothing worse than the familiar pain in the trick knee.
His bedroom slippers were out in the middle of the street, one a long distance away. He recovered them, stepped into them, and limped to the house.
Elizabeth and Dom were in the kitchen. The portable record player had already been placed on the table, and Dom was testing its needle with his thumb.
‘I heard a car take off,’ he said to Chris. ‘Was it that one?’
‘Yes.’
Dom was looking down with a curious expression.
‘Right over your slipper?’
It was easy to see under the fluorescent brightness of the kitchen light. Stamped on one slipper was the sharp imprint of a tyre track.
‘I wasn’t in it when it happened,’ Chris said.
‘They tried to kill you,’ Elizabeth said wonderingly. ‘They did, didn’t they? That’s my fault. I should never have come here. It must have been exactly what they wanted me to do.’
‘No, what they wanted you to do was walk out into that street. This way they had to settle for second best. Lucky for me they did. If you were knocked off in front of the house here, your friend Prendergast would spend the rest of his life making sure I got the electric chair for it.’
‘Chris, I explained to him –’
‘Well, you didn’t convince him. So just make sure from now on that you don’t even catch a cold, much less get run over or shot or anything fatal. Now let’s see that record the mystery man left you,’ he said sharply to cut off her further protestations.
She handed him a small 45 rpm record, unlabelled, and with only a narrow band of grooves on one side.
>
‘Where did he leave it?’ Chris asked.
‘Right on my bed. I saw it first thing when the light from the television set woke me up.’
‘You left the set on?’
‘No. He must have turned it on just before he left to make sure the light would wake me up.’
‘Did you call the desk? Did you ask to have a security man sent up?’
‘The only one I thought of calling was you. Chris, don’t sound like that. Do you think I’m making all of this up?’
‘No, just wondering how come you’re alive to tell about it. Whoever was in that room could have gotten rid of you then and there. Instead, all he did was go to a lot of trouble to leave you a record. What the hell, maybe the record has the answer.’
He placed it on the player and set the needle on it, expecting to hear a voice delivering some kind of message. What he heard were the opening bars of the Mendelssohn Wedding Procession being played, not too well, on a piano. Then suddenly, shockingly, the music was cut short by the loud explosion of a gunshot. Then there was only the hissing of the needle in silent grooves.
‘Is that all there is of it?’ Elizabeth asked in bewilderment.
‘Wild,’ said Dom. ‘That was a gun going off for the finale. Or something supposed to sound like it. You can’t get away from symbolism nowadays.’
He reset the needle on the record. There was no mistaking that tune. Dum da di-da. Dum da di-da. Dum da di-da da – Chris was braced for what instantly followed, but still the blast of that gunshot had a sickening impact.
Dom switched off the machine.
‘It’ll never make the top forty,’ he said.
‘Do you know any place around here where you could cut a record like this?’ Chris asked.
‘A couple of places. One here on the Beach, another over in Miami on Flagler Street.’
‘Then do me a favour. Call them up Monday and see if either of them knows anything about this. Don’t visit. Just call.’
‘Sure. And keep my feet out from under the traffic, too.’
‘But what does it mean?’ demanded Elizabeth. ‘What was the sense of making it at all?’
Chris said, ‘I think somebody is trying to tell you that getting married might be dangerous. And that car tailing you was making the same point, only louder and clearer.’
‘Then they don’t know we were married yesterday?’
‘They can’t know it for sure until the J.P. files the certificate Monday.’
‘Knowing it for sure doesn’t seem to matter to them very much,’ Elizabeth said.
‘No, it doesn’t. But all this makes one thing clear now. Sure as hell, the opposition knows exactly what our loony friend Valentine put into his will. Or was he so loony? What if he had really hated your father? The way things are happening because of that will, it almost looks like it.’
Elizabeth shook her head. ‘I never knew anyone who could hate my father.’
‘How about Hilary?’
‘Hilary least of all. She had the wildest kind of crush on him.’
‘Well, well,’ said Chris. ‘Live and learn.’
The night’s events, he suddenly realized, had been too much for him. His body was fast becoming one massive ache, his head was leaden. When Dom proposed putting up coffee he knew it was a case of getting back to bed at once or passing out right there at the table, so he headed for bed without apology, leaving his wife and brother fussing over the percolator. Considering Dom’s dislike for the girl, he felt vaguely uneasy about leaving them alone together, but the uneasiness was nothing compared to his sudden agonizing need for sleep.
He came awake slowly and unwillingly with a feeling he was being stifled to death. And, although he couldn’t seem to drag his eyelids open, he sensed the pallid light of the bed lamp shining on them. It meant that Dom in an access of modesty, now that there was female company in the house, had closed the door behind him when he had come into the bedroom, thus cutting off the cross ventilation in the room. And that he probably intended to spend what was left of the night catching up on his reading.
Chris opened one eye and found himself regarding from a few inches away the fine-veined, milky whiteness of a plump, rounded breast.
He opened both eyes. Elizabeth, wearing eyeglasses and nothing else, was stretched out full length beside him, a hefty volume propped on her naked belly. This was a surprise. Almost as surprising was that swell of breast and roundness of hip which, up to now, he had never suspected. The way she dressed always accentuated her boyish ranginess. There was nothing boyish about her this way.
He tried to speak, but all that came out was a discordant croak.
Elizabeth turned to look at him. ‘What?’ she said placidly.
‘I said, what time is it?’
‘Nearly six.’ When she sat up he saw that her unbound hair spilled almost to her waist. ‘Are you all right? It looked like you were having one nightmare after another.’
‘I don’t remember any. Didn’t Dom make a fuss when you picked this bed?’
‘No, he just gave me this to take along.’
She held up the book and he saw it was the scrapbook Dom had put together so faithfully during his tennis hey-day. Even after he was all washed up Dom would sometimes come across a mention of him as memorable sports history and would paste up the clipping. Then, one day, he told Dom that the sight of the scrapbook made him sick, and it promptly disappeared from sight. This was the first he had seen of it since that day.
He hauled himself upright with an effort. The way he had landed on the hood of the station wagon seemed to have sprung all his ribs. He took the scrapbook out of Elizabeth’s hands and tossed it on the floor. She made no protest. It was disconcerting, the way she just sat there looking at him steadily.
‘I told Dom to get rid of that thing long ago,’ he said.
‘I know. Along with all those tennis trophies he has stuck away in his closet.’
‘Well, you two got along fine, didn’t you?’
‘Why not? After all, when a family gets together –’
‘Elizabeth, baby, listen close. You keep making something serious out of this make-believe marriage bit, and you are letting yourself in for an awful lot of grief.’
‘Chris, baby,’ she said in his tone, ‘you keep on with the self-pity bit, you’re just adding to your grief.’
That stung him hard.
‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he demanded.
‘Pretty near everything, I think. What I didn’t know about it up to now, Dom told me. And don’t come down on him for it, Chris. He’s miserably unhappy because he knows you are. And he knows why you are. Sooner or later, he had to spill it all to somebody he knew would understand.’
‘Why to you? A few hours ago he thought you were poison because of this marriage deal.’
‘Yes, he let me know that to start with. It was different once he understood how I felt about you.’
‘Even after you diagnosed the case as acute self-pity?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said defiantly. ‘He didn’t want to hear that any more than you do, but he had to admit it was the truth. Who wouldn’t, if he’s honestly scared about what you’re doing to yourself?’
‘Me, for one, sweetheart. So now why don’t you haul ass out of here and go finish reading my case history on the living-room couch?’
‘Chris, don’t talk like that. Do you think I’d dare be this honest with you if I didn’t love you? I’m only trying to do for you what you did for me.’
‘A repair job on the ailing psyche? That’s never been my line of work.’
‘It was you, Chris. Don’t you remember that morning when we were on the handball court and you were showing me how to play half volleys? You did a real repair job on me then. On my ailing psyche, I mean.’
‘How?’
‘You told me to quit being so damn humble. I could have killed you for it then, it seemed so unfair and it hurt so much. But the more I thought about it, the mo
re I knew you were right. Sure there was a reason for my being like that – I was always the poor one whatever company I was in – but it still didn’t justify my turning into some kind of Uriah Heep. And that’s what I was turning into, because my humility was never the genuine, saintly brand. It was a fake. From the time I was a kid I knew in my heart I was as good as anybody I ever met or even better. But I was a coward. I was for ever putting myself down just so people would like me.
‘Even coming into a lot of money didn’t change that. I don’t think anything ever would if you hadn’t said what you did. You made me take the first brutally honest look at myself I ever did. So that afterwards, even knowing how much I owe Mr Prendergast, I could stand up to him for the first time. And to Hilary for the first time when she was trying to bully me into buying the kind of clothes she’d never buy for her own trousseau –’
‘That’s not the word for it,’ Chris said.
‘Trousseau,’ Elizabeth said stubbornly. ‘And most important, I’m standing up to you right now. I’m scared, but I’m doing it all the same.’
Chris pressed the butt of his palm to his forehead. ‘Frankenstein,’ he said. ‘That’s who I am. There was this nice Miss Jones I was teaching to hit the ball right, then I accidentally switched on the current, and now look what I’ve got on my hands.’
‘Please don’t make a joke of it. I’d rather have you angry at me than that.’
‘All right, then I’ll be serious. I’ll let you in on something about me you ought to know. Last year, I went out to the Coast – to San Francisco – on the bike. When I hit the Texas line I fell in with a motor cycle club heading the same way. Not the Hell’s Angels kind of gang, just a dozen or so guys, some with their girls along, making a big run. I stayed with them all the way out to the Coast until they headed down to L.A. and I went north to Frisco. And that whole distance I never said a word to them and they never said a word to me. I stayed right in the middle of the pack, I stopped where they stopped to eat or get a bed, but never a word. That’s how I wanted it, and they had sense enough to understand it.’
‘But why would you want to be with them at all if that’s how you felt about it?’
‘Because they were making top speed anyhow, and on a long run you can get lonely not having someone around. But having them around is all you need. You don’t have to get involved with them or invite them to get involved with you. And that’s how I like it.’
The Valentine Estate Page 7