But no more.
And who was there to think about her now?
Maybe if they’d had children, it would be better for her. But she didn’t think so. Not with what they’d had together. Kids had their own lives. They couldn’t take the place of your man. And her Jimbo was some man. Jesus, they didn’t come any better.
Maybe he’s not really gone, she suddenly thought.
Well, no one had showed her a body.
So maybe the call would come in the morning.
She could imagine herself hearing the ring, picking up the phone, and listening to him say, as always, “Hi, hon. Miss me?”
And she could hear herself answering, as always, “You’d better believe it, love.”
It was all so real and reassuring that she needed only two more pills to put her back to sleep.
Bonnie slept a dreamless sleep under a single bedsheet. A breeze ruffled the curtains at an open window, and a three-quarter moon patterned the floor.
Two shadows briefly blocked the window, then silently approached the bed.
This time they used a shot of sodium pentothal instead of the leather-covered billy.
Bonnie struggled for a few seconds, but it seemed part of a dream, and she wasn’t consciously aware of it as real before the shot cut off all awareness and put her out.
38
THEIR SO-CALLED safe house was an old, half-crumbling ruin set high in the mountains above Ravello. Trees, shrubs, and cliffs made it all but invisible until you came upon it. And to come upon it, you had to know exactly where to look.
Inside the house no one said much of anything.
Gianni saw the fragile looks between Vittorio and his wife and understood that in these exchanges there were touches of panic. He sensed, too, that much of the same condition existed among all four of them. It was as if the boy, Paulie, whom Mary Yung and he had never even met, was a common anchor, draped around their necks and dragging them all down. And they couldn’t as much as talk to each other.
That was what Gianni wanted. To talk. He wanted to tell the boy’s parents again and again what he’d already told them… that he was sorry, that he’d done everything possible to keep from being followed, that it was eating his gut to have been the one to have done this to them. But he knew there was nothing he could say that they would hear.
The silence went on so long that it became unnatural. It made the old house and those in it seem unnatural, too. It made Peggy begin crying again. Then it made her go into the next room and close the door.
The rest of them sat looking at the door.
Vittorio pushed himself up and followed his wife.
Peggy sat in a straight-backed wooden chair facing the door. A small bedside kerosene lamp was on, and it threw a flickering yellow light that left deep shadows on her face and body. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was staring down at them. She had stopped crying, but she didn’t look up as Vittorio came in.
“Please close the door,” she said softly. “I have something to tell you.”
Vittorio did it and sat down on the bed. Peggy was still staring down at her hands. She hadn’t looked up to follow her husband’s movements.
“I think I know who’s behind all this.” Her voice, besides being barely audible, was toneless. “It’s Henry Durning.”
Vittorio felt something flop over in his chest.
“I lied when we first met and I told you I didn’t know who wanted me dead. I knew. I just didn’t want you to know.”
“Why?”
“Because there was too much I’d have to explain. And I was too ashamed.”
“Ashamed?” Vittorio stared at her. “Of what?”
“Of what I was. Of some of the things I’ve done.”
Some part of it caught in her throat then and she had to stop. A single tear appeared in a corner of her eye and slid down her face. Numbly, Vittorio watched it.
“I was afraid I’d lose you if you knew. It was all so stupid. But now they’ve got Paulie and I just want to die. So there’s nothing else I can do but tell you.”
Finally, she thought, and felt it come out in what might have been a clot of tears and blood.
39
My DEVIL’S TALE.
Yet even now, in the telling, Irene Hopper knew she was giving Vittorio no more than the bare bones. To be explicit, to flesh the story out, would be too much for either of them. The bones would be damaging enough. The rest of it, the ugliest of the details, let them bury with her.
Her worst time had always been late at night, when Vittorio was away on one of what he chose to call his “business trips.” It was then that her private bete noire would be let out of its cage to move in with her.
In time it became almost ritualistic.
As though seeking confirmation of her blackest thoughts, she would begin by staring into the big, baroque dressing-table mirror in her bedroom.
More lies.
Even prepared for it, gazing at herself remained a shock. Her once long blond hair was now short and dark. Her nose was lifted, turned up at the tip, instead of running straight. And with the additional magic of contact lenses, she and Vittorio had literally switched the colors of their eyes. Suddenly he had become the one with the cornflower blues, while she gazed less than serenely from her own bogus golden browns.
But her biggest lie to Vittorio was the one she invented to explain why there could have been any number of people… yet none she could specifically accuse… who might have had reason to want her terminated.
She originally told Vittorio that she had stumbled across hard evidence of insider trading in the common stock of a company her law firm was representing in a billion-dollar takeover deal. It was a serious criminal offense, and there was no way for her to conceal the fact that she had seen the evidence. Although she claimed she wasn’t about to blow any whistles, there obviously had to have been at least one among the guilty parties who wasn’t about to take any chances.
So said she to the man she had met, fallen in love with, and married only because he had been sent to carry out a contract on her life.
End of lie.
And the truth?
Irene Hopper would sit staring at the semistranger in the mirror, a new woman named Peggy Walters. She would picture herself as she had once been, yet feel no closer to that person than to the one before her. Maybe neither woman had anything to do with her anymore. Then feeling as though she had caught herself at something, she would abandon both images for the truth as she knew it actually to be.
It all started simply enough, driving back from the Cape one Saturday evening. She and Henry turned off the Connecticut Pike for a late supper at a country inn near Stratford. Seated alongside an attractive young couple, they were soon talking, laughing, buying each other drinks, and exchanging life stories.
The couple’s names were Lucy and Hal Chanin, and they were vacationing at a cottage they had rented at a nearby lake. Near midnight, they were all carrying enough of a glow for the Chanins to invite their new friends back to their place for some brandy and whatever, and Irene and Henry accepted.
The whatever turned out to be several better-than-fair lines of coke. It was no surprise. None of these things were ever really a surprise to those who knew about them, and she and Henry knew about them. There were always subtle code words, glances, faint half-smiles to make sure everything was understood and agreed upon in advance.
By two in the morning there was enough heat in the air for Henry to make the first move. Peggy knew he would be the one to set it off. He always was. When he came to her on one of the room’s two couches, she could feel his pulse as if it were her own, hear his heart like the electronic beat in a microphone. He was pure spark. And she was waiting. Yes, she was. So were the Chanins.
Henry took off her clothes and started on her.
Sensations passed through her body like the friendliest of ghosts. Which wasn’t to say she was free of doubt. She never was. She knew she’d despise and
repel herself on certain far-off nights. But now was now, and adding to her excitement were the flushed faces, hungry eyes, and suddenly stripped down flesh of Lucy and Hal as they began their own run. Until all that damp anxiety that reaches for the brain and deadens joy was brushed aside and she was a burning, two-backed beast.
She was never really aware of the exact moment when it became Hal’s face she was seeing… first, above, and then beneath her. Not that it mattered. By then she was well into her own magnetic field, where forces beyond reason were pulling her to do things whose only purpose was to satisfy an itch that was on the verge of driving her mad if she couldn’t reach it.
There were wild sounds in her head and the sense that the best parts of two men… good, lovely men… were entering her at once. Which, God help her, they were surely doing. And she itched for more of that, too, maybe even another, but was just as pleased, finally, to settle for Lucy herself… pretty, full-lipped Lucy, who offered the sweetest, most knowing of smiles before joining with the men.
Breathing the freshest, most delicate of bouquets, she remember drifting off to whispers that told her she was queen.
She was.
She certainly was queen.
Whatever came later, she was ready to swear to at least that much with her last breath.
But what did come later would make her less certain about ever swearing to anything again, she thought.
They sprawled about the room, half in stupor, sipping what remained of the brandy. Clothes were scattered everywhere. They lay naked… exposed, uncovered, uncaring. Peggy was alone on one couch. Hal and Lucy lay together on the other, her tongue licking idly at his ear. Henry was stretched out on a rug in front of the fireplace, his head on a cushion, his eyes closed.
It was a cool country night and Hal had lit a fire earlier to take the chill from the air. With only embers left burning, he rose now to stir them alive with a poker and toss on another few logs. Then he freshened his drink and settled down on the rug beside Henry.
The new logs crackled. It was the only sound in the room. The odor of heated sex mixed with the aroma of the fire. Lucy was dozing on the couch and Peggy felt herself starting to drift off as well. On the floor, the two men talked softly and drank the brandy in front of the fire.
Peggy slept.
When she opened her eyes it was with a start.
Something had wakened her.
The two men, still naked, seemed to be struggling on the floor. She heard Henry cry out and it was the same sound that had broken through her sleep.
She froze, staring.
Hal appeared to be all over Henry. A big, powerful, heavily muscled man, his knees and body pinned Henry to the floor. His hands stabbed brutally between Henry’s legs, as if seeking to grab and mangle his genitals. Then Hal did have hold of him and Henry screamed and kept screaming until the two women, both fully awake now, began screaming with him.
The room filled with their combined sound, and it was of something so far out of control and human intent, that it might have come from a rent in the earth.
Peggy never saw Henry reach for the fire iron. Maybe he never really did reach for it, but just groped wildly for something, anything, until his fingers happened to make contact with the poker. Then he lifted and swung the full, solid weight of it and kept swinging blindly, fiercely, until the indescribable pain between his legs started to ease and Hal Chanin was lying very still with his eyes open and staring and his head pumping blood.
From that point, Peggy would never be completely sure of the details or sequence of things as they happened next.
What definitely did come out of it was that Hal was dead, and Lucy was still screaming, and suddenly coming at Henry with this small-bore rifle she’d grabbed hold of somewhere in the room. She fired from the hip without aiming and missed, and was working the bolt for a second shot when Henry caught her with the fire iron and knocked her down.
Then there was Henry picking up the rifle and staring at Lucy where she lay, stunned, but not badly hurt. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he slowly raised the rifle, aimed, and shot her through the forehead. Dead center.
Peggy remembers screaming.
She also remembered Henry, gentle and loving as a mother, feeding her brandy and pointing out that there was no other way, that once the police and media were involved, both their lives would have been ruined by the drug and sexual aspects of the scandal. Not to mention the small matter of manslaughter. Christ! Just try to explain the coked-up queer suddenly going wild to sodomize him, and tearing his balls when he tried to fight him off. With his wife as an obviously less-than-friendly witness, Henry said he’d be lucky to get off with ten to twenty years. Remember, too, it was Lucy’s gun, and she who started the shooting. They just got a break when her first shot missed. Her second shot wouldn’t have. Wasn’t it better that she, not he, was the one lying dead?
Dimly, Peggy had to agree it was better. But what a choice.
As a former district attorney, Henry knew enough about such things to do whatever needed doing. He wiped away all fingerprints. He dressed the two bodies and smeared their clothes with their own blood. He packed a bag with whatever cash and jewelry he could find, and smashed a window to make it look like a break-in burglary. The police would assume the Chanins came home unexpectedly, caught the thieves in the act, and were murdered for their trouble.
To lend detail and credence to the staged break-in, Henry Durning added the illusion of rape by stripping Lucy below the waist, ripping her bra and underpants, and bruising her thighs. The required semen, other than her husband’s, had already been deposited during their earlier round-robin.
With the rest of his life on the line, Henry made sure he missed nothing. When they finally drove off, he stopped the car a few miles from the house and buried the rifle and jewelry in a patch of woods. Ever practical, he saw no point in burying unmarked cash.
* * *
It had all worked out pretty much as Henry planned. Since the Chanins were on vacation, their bodies weren’t discovered for more than a week. The break-in theory was picked up by the police, and the evidence of rape was exploited by the media. As for the country inn where they met the Chanins, they were all strangers to the place and not even their waiter ever remembered the two murder victims having dined there.
The only thing that didn’t work out as Henry planned was me, Peggy thought.
Because it stayed with her. She couldn’t forget any part of that night. But most of all, she couldn’t forget Henry picking up the rifle and looking at Lucy for that long, calm, contemplative moment before he coldly dead-centered her.
Yet she functioned normally enough day to day. She went to her office in New York every morning. She did her work in the practice of law. She saw Henry Durning whenever he asked to see her, and behaved without visible panic or hysterics in his presence. But she also kept seeing Lucy Chan-in’s eyes just before their light went out. They told her she was living in a sick void where things far worse than death were waiting.
She guessed it was just about then that she began seeing Vittorio Battaglia.
It was almost like a new strain of peripheral vision, she thought, in which you were only vaguely aware of these brief images. At first he was no more than a nebulous face on a Manhattan street or in an office building or theater lobby. Then it began happening in restaurants and she was able to get a better look at him, liking what she saw but thinking no more of it than that. She was usually with friends or people from her office, but he was always alone and quite unaware of her.
Until one night, leaving an old Fellini movie at an art theater on Second Avenue, she almost walked straight into him. For once, she was by herself and he was smiling at her.
“Don’t you think it’s about time we spoke?” he said.
What she remembered thinking was that up close he looked like some Renaissance prince, by way of Titian. “I never thought you were even aware of me.”
He looked at her
, holding on to the moment. “How could anyone not be aware of you?”
They went to a nearby lounge and sat talking and gazing at each other until two in the morning.
They did the same thing for the next four nights. It was no problem for her. Henry happened to be out of town on a case and would be gone for another two weeks.
On the fifth night she invited him to dinner. To this point, they had not so much as kissed or even held hands. Which was fine with her. Still haunted by the horrors of Stratford, she was content just to be with him. But it did make her wonder a little about Vittorio. What was his problem?
She was about to find out.
He waited until they finished eating and were sipping what remained of the wine. Later, he told her he hadn’t wanted to spoil her beautiful dinner.
What he did first was to put down his wine, take her hand in both of his, and just sit holding it for a moment.
Then he said, “I have to ask you a few questions.”
“Why not?”
“They may sound strange to you, but just give me a chance. Do you have any enemies that you know of? I mean serious enemies, those who might do you harm?”
She thought he was joking, until she saw his eyes. “What kind of harm are we talking about?”
“The worst kind. Like maybe dead?”
She just stared at him.
“I’m not kidding, Irene.”
Suddenly, she was frightened. Those early sightings of him, the strangeness of their meeting, all began falling into place. “My God, what are you? A cop?”
“No.” A cold blankness settled over his face. “I’m the one who was sent to get rid of you.”
Her heart banged against her chest. It might have been trying to escape.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Deceptions Page 24