by Tim Willocks
“Where’s your car?” asked Grimes.
Atwater, relieved, jerked his head over his shoulder. Behind the Olds 88 was parked a green Monte Carlo in need of bodywork.
“Give me five minutes,” said Grimes. “I’ll follow you.”
Atwater’s underdeveloped lips twitched with disappointment. He struggled toward his own decision, then said, “Sure. Why not?”
Grimes nodded and closed the door on Atwater and the street. He looked at his father.
“You want me to come with you?” said George.
“You’ve got a bellyache, remember?”
George pulled out the Luger from under his jacket and offered it for a second time.
“Driving out into the country alone, I’d take it.”
Grimes shook his head. “I’m not going to shoot a prosecuting attorney.”
“Attorney my ass.”
This provoked an idea and Grimes seized it: give his father something to do, cool him down.
“I want you to check him out for me while I’m gone. Ring the D.A.’s office. Take his license plate.”
George grunted as if to say he knew a bone when he was thrown one.
“And what are you gonna do?” he asked.
“Play innocent. I don’t know anything about anything. No guns, no fear. Just a psychiatrist called out to see a crazy millionaire.”
“Not so crazy that she can’t run an empire founded on slave labor and greed.”
“You would know something about her, wouldn’t you?”
George’s eyes narrowed. “All I know is her husband was Filmore Eastman Faroe, and that he was a bastard and the son of bastards. Klansmen and fascists to a man, going all the way back to the first burning cross. Only times Filmore Faroe ever paid a decent wage was to thugs with ax handles and riot guns. Thank Christ he left no children. If there ever was a line deserved to end, it was his.”
Grimes was barely listening. He didn’t have time for a politics tutorial.
“I’d better go,” he said.
George stuck out his hand. His face, to Grimes’s surprise, was grave with barely controlled emotion.
“Good luck, son,” said George.
Grimes took the hand, returned its grainy dry squeeze as best he could.
“Hey,” said Grimes. “I’ll be back in two hours. Don’t worry.”
George nodded once. Grimes let go of his hand and went to the door, opened it. Outside, the Monte Carlo’s lights came on and the engine turned over, came to life. Grimes looked back at his father and smiled with more levity than he felt.
“And don’t shoot anyone.”
Grimes climbed into his Olds, the Monte Carlo swung out ahead of him and they pulled away in convoy across the cobblestones. As he turned the corner at the end of the street Grimes looked back and saw his father standing on the doorstep, watching him go. At the last moment George Grimes raised his hand in farewell. And Cicero Grimes had the crazy thought that he would never see George again.
FIVE
BY THE TIME Grimes followed the rear lights of the Monte Carlo through the humming iron gates to Parillaud’s walled estate he had just about managed to beat into his mind the idea that he was a doctor visiting someone who needed a psychiatrist. That and nothing more.
Throughout the journey he’d threatened, bullied and cajoled himself to believe that he’d never heard of Clarence Jefferson or any of his works, great or small. He would give his opinion as best he was able on any other subject under the sun, but of that one he was ignorant and ignorant entire. Grimes concentrated on the road as it swung in a wide curve beneath a canopy of trees. Wide, gnarled trunks flickered by in the swinging beam of his headlights, and the occasional drooping skein of Spanish moss. Live oaks. The road straightened and in the glare of the beams Grimes could see Atwater’s pencilly orange head bobbing around in the Monte Carlo up ahead. He wondered what the prosecutor’s angle was. Some kind of informer. Anyone who could afford trees like this in their front yard had to have connections everywhere. Trust no one, Jefferson had said. That much Grimes would remember of the goddamn letter and no more. Tou know nothing, his mind roared. Not “I may have heard of him” or “We met once at a Birch Society taffy pull” or “I know someone who went to college with his sister.” Nothing. Sustained denial. Controlled paranoia. The flanking trees disappeared abruptly and Grimes felt his eyebrows rise.
A garden the size of a city block unrolled before him. No wild blooms or unruly bushes here but, rather, a frozen mosaic of perfectly balanced flower beds and sculpted shrubs and symmetrical ambulatories as smooth as satin ribbons. Illuminated fountains threw arcs of golden liquid into the night. White marble statues meditated over lawns trimmed with nail scissors. At the top of the garden, its great facade artfully lit and shadowed by hidden spotlights, loomed an Italian Renaissance palazzo that would have sent Cosimo de Medici to the nearest realtor on his knees. From a dozen or more high arched windows came the glimmer of chandeliers hanging from the eighteen-foot ceilings. The main entrance, centrally placed, was by way of a broad flight of steps narrowing into a classical portico dressed in white stone.
The Monte Carlo stopped with its engine running at the foot of the steps. Grimes pulled in beside it and switched off the ignition. He got out and looked up at the entablature capping the two columns mounted either side of the steps. Engraved on the frieze beneath the cornice was the word ARCADIA. Grimes took it to be the mansion’s name, chosen in a period when irony probably wasn’t in vogue. He looked over as Atwater called from the open window of his Monte Carlo with the forced pallyness that Grimes had already grown to dislike.
“Quite a pile, ain’t it?”
Behind the leering grin the redhead’s face was strained and preoccupied and shiny with sweat. He looked at his watch.
“Listen, Doctor, I’ve got other business to attend to.” An obsequious shrug. “That’s the life, you know? Just go ring the bell. And, hey, don’t let it get to you. Remember, their shit stinks bad as yours and mine.”
Atwater withdrew into the car, backed out and drove away.
The sound of the Monte Carlo faded and died, leaving only the quiet splash of the fountains in the heavy evening air. Grimes stood before the portico of Arcadia feeling curiously abandoned. The squalid teeming of New Orleans—and of the rest of the world itself—seemed infinitely distant from this place. It was more than its geography, miles from any other habitation. It was a distance of heart and spirit too, expertly engineered, and beautifully so, at a time when the City was not thirty minutes away but a full day’s ride. He wondered what kind of mind had conceived and demanded such a distance—had needed it—and what kind of mind needed it now. With a tingle down his spine he realized that from this Olympian remoteness it would be easy to believe oneself capable of anything: not merely in the sense of being able to bring anything about, but of being able to germinate the want of anything, and to believe that anything justified. For all the controlled and geometric precision towering above him—and laid out behind him like the lid of a jeweled casket—this was a receptacle of infinite boundaries, a monument to the paradox of reason and desire. Grimes imagined a human consciousness—any human’s consciousness—sprawled within and groping ever outward toward ever more disparate cravings, cravings to which no one would ever say no but only: “This is how much it will cost.” If that consciousness had been his own, raised and confined here throughout a lifetime, what would it—what would he—have raised his head and bellowed out for in the restless heat of the night?
Perverse desires stirred in Grimes’s subconscious. He shrugged off another tingle. The splash of water on white marble was all the answer the evening gave him.
The question for the moment was irrelevant. He could dwell on it further in Chicago, shivering from the wind instead. Tonight he would say no to whoever waited inside, and no matter what the blandishments he was offered.
Grimes mounted the steps and rang the bell and waited. He buttoned his shirt and str
aightened his tie. His suit was crumpled but it was linen, and black. Thank Christ he’d shaved and smartened himself up for his father. Cicero Grimes, vagrant on call. The door was answered by a lean black man three inches taller than Grimes. That made him over six-four; and maybe a hundred and ninety sinewy pounds. He had planed cheekbones and a scimitar nose, and in his eyes a Moslem hauteur as old as the stone beneath his feet. His suit was loose-fitting and just expensive enough to soften the man’s natural menace into quiet intimidation. Whoever the guy was, he wasn’t the butler.
“Eugene Grimes,” said Grimes.
The black didn’t smile but he held out his hand.
“Bobby Frechette.”
Grimes shook the hand, the fingers surprisingly long and delicate. On the first two knuckles Grimes spotted the raised calluses of someone who trained seriously on the wooden punching board. A karate man, then. Grimes warmed to him a little.
“Come in, please, Doctor.”
Grimes walked into a large hallway, from the center of which a wide staircase splayed upward into a first-floor balustrade. Set into the roof was a dome paned with stained glass. Frechette stepped back a pace from Grimes and opened his hands toward him.
“If I may, Doctor,” said Frechette.
Grimes realized he had to be frisked. He nodded and raised his arms. A moment of vulnerability, primitively felt, but Frechette didn’t take advantage of it as he might have done. Just a man doing his job. As the long hands fluttered over his limbs and flanks Grimes thought about the embarrassment he’d saved himself by refusing his father’s Luger. Frechette straightened up.
“Thank you, Doctor. Will you come this way, please?”
Grimes followed Bobby Frechette down a broad corridor hung with several million dollars’ worth of paintings. Grimes wasn’t too hot on the fine arts but he could recognize a Picasso and a Dali as readily as the next man. He remembered being puzzled by news stories of art treasures being stolen and sold to wealthy collectors who, presumably, would only ever look at them alone. It didn’t square with the theory of art as consumer status symbol. As he walked through Arcadia his puzzlement was answered by the voice of that uninhibited consciousness he’d imagined outside. “Iwant it,” sua the voice and the want was all that was necessary. It justified itself. It was not even necessary that the painting be looked at at all; it had only to be possessed. The words echoed in his mind again, in a different voice: his father’s. “I want it, Gene.” George hadn’t gotten an awful lot of what he’d wanted out of his life, and he’d never been one to complain, but his voice had trembled when he’d said that. Another echo hit him, from Jefferson’s letter: “inexorable and extragavant appetites.” And Rufus Atwater: he wanted too. Exacdy what, Grimes didn’t know. Grimes himself hadn’t wanted anything in what seemed like a long time, other than to lie alone in his hole, but he wasn’t judging anyone. He had known his own appetites “ruinous and vast;” Clarence Jefferson had stretched him on their rack. Now Jefferson’s ghost had him stretched upon another: the letter. Grimes almost stopped midstride.
The letter was still in his pocket.
Suddenly it felt like a slab of radioactive waste strapped to his chest. He should have burned it, eaten it, tossed it away. It just hadn’t occurred to him. If Frechette decided to find and take the letter, Grimes doubted there was much he could do to stop him. A yard in front of him Frechette turned left into a second corridor. Grimes followed, then with a burst of elation thought: Why not? Just hand the letter over, free of all charges, liens or conditions, and let Miss Magdalena Parillaud do whatever she would with the information. Then he could forget the whole damn thing and go back to his want-free life.
As quickly as his spirits had risen, they collapsed. He was already contaminated by what he’d been given. He was doomed to be the keeper of the forbidden truths. The only person he could count on to sustain the secret was himself. If Parillaud used Jefferson’s hoard to make some unsavory people unhappy, they might decide to take it out on Grimes. He’d always be waiting for another knock on the door. And there was the girl, Ella. Look after her, Grimes. He couldn’t dump the girl in this too. If he couldn’t be his sister’s keeper, he could at least not be her executioner. His mind stepped back to the solid ground of his original strategy.
Trust no one. Know nothing.
Frechette stopped and knocked on a heavy door.
“Come in,” said a woman’s voice.
Frechette opened the door, held out his arm to usher Grimes in.
Be cool, Grimes told himself, and went inside.
The room was large and well proportioned, lined and shelved by dark, lustrous hardwoods. Light from concealed sources illuminated the corners of the ceiling. It was furnished with a gloomy antique elegance as a study, or a library. A woman stepped out from behind a desk topped with green leather and walked across the room toward him.
She had blond hair, shoulder-length and wavy; the color may have come from a bottle, Grimes could never tell. On first impression she appeared slight in build, with an almost-shyness in her body language that had to be contrived given her circumstances; or maybe not. People often felt guarded with doctors, especially shrinks. They sometimes had the fantasy, hilarious to Grimes, that psychiatrists were mind readers with the power to penetrate their deepest secrets at a glance. She had a heart-shaped face, unnaturally pale, and a sullen mouth painted with dark red lipstick. The light in the room wasn’t bright enough for him to make out the color of her eyes: as they stared straight into his own as she came across the floor, they appeared quite black, with a shifting light at their center as melancholy as the moon on empty water.
Grimes guessed her age at mid-thirties but it was hard to be sure; she could have been an old thirty or a young forty. She had a quality of frozen youth about her, as if something in her had been prevented from growing up the way it should have. Grimes had observed a similar quality in young old-soldiers, and in a patrolman he’d once treated, who’d been drenched with the brains of his sergeant when they’d pulled up outside the wrong convenience store at the wrong time. The killer had escaped without the shock-paralyzed youngster even calling base for help—a professional failure the shame of which would haunt him forever. It was strange that Grimes should suddenly recall that particular case and for a moment he wondered why, then returned to the present.
Whatever Parillaud’s age she was a fine figure of a woman; not his type, but fine. She wore an ocean-blue dress, calf-length, with a high neckline and long sleeves, smooth contours. It was made of an iridescent material, some kind of silk maybe, and looked very old. Grimes liked it. Somewhat to his disappointment he liked her too, and immediately. Liking people invariably made life more difficult. As she got closer he saw that the wide black pupils were surrounded by a rim of green iris. She held out her hand.
“Lenna Parillaud,” she said.
“Eugene Grimes.”
“Thank you for coming, Doctor. I appreciate it.”
Up close he saw she was much less slight than he’d thought, her body fuller and more densely packed. Her hand was larger and stronger than he’d expected too. The fragility he’d sensed wasn’t in her body then, but in the eyes, in the moon on empty water.
“Would you like to talk here or in the sitting room?” she said.
He liked her voice too. It was soft and pitched low, but with a strand of barbed wire wound through it that he could imagine snapping taut if she ever decided to say “Fuck you.”
Grimes said. “Whichever suits you, Miss Parillaud.”
She tossed her eyes around the room, frowned.
“I’ve been stuck in here for hours. Let’s move.”
“Fine.”
She opened the door and they went into the corridor.
“You can call me Lenna if you want, Doctor,” she said.
Grimes could have said “Call me Gene,” but he didn’t. He wanted to keep a formal distance; and as it happened he liked the way she said Doctor. She gave the sound a sexual
undertow; or so his company-starved brain imagined. They walked back down the corridor, almost side by side but she half a pace ahead, her heels clicking on the marble tiles. She looked at one of the paintings in passing then threw her chin back over one shoulder, glancing up at him across the blue shimmer of her dress.
“Do you like beautiful things, Doctor?”
The word beautiful, as she said it, was clogged with boredom. Or indifference.
Grimes said, “The things I find beautiful, I like. Doesn’t beauty define itself?”
“I want to know your definition,” she said.
“I don’t have the brains to invent one but I can steal someone else’s. The one I like best is ‘aptness to purpose.’ ”
She thought about it. “I like that too.” She shrugged, looked away. “By that score this place doesn’t make the grade.”
For reasons unknown to the part of his mind that he remained in control of, Grimes said, “Et in Arcadia ego.”
Lenna stopped with her fingers on the gilt handles of a double set of doors. She looked at him again.
“What’s that? Virgil?”
She said it casually, as if to show that she could flash a big-balls education too, and Grimes cursed himself. He’d never read Virgil in his life, and certainly not in Latin, but he’d asked for it.
“As far as I know,” he said, “it’s the inscription on an anonymous gravestone, I don’t know, someplace in Europe. But I could be mistaken.”
“A gravestone?”
She smiled and for a moment the sullen melancholy of her face was almost banished.
“You’re funny,” she said.
“Then excuse me,” said Grimes. “I don’t mean to be.”
“It’s okay for a doctor to be funny. In fact it’s good.”
Grimes had no answer for that one. Lenna flung the doors open and they entered one of the rooms he’d seen from the road: high ceiling, a flickering crystal chandelier supplemented by discreetly placed lamps. The room was furnished and decorated in the same late-nineteenth-century style as the rest of what he’d seen of the house. It was immaculately laid out but it didn’t feel as if anyone lived here; it was a room that hadn’t been animated with laughter or conversation in years. It had the feel of a stopover on a package tour of the historic South, or of standing in an antique dealer’s window. Grimes decided it wasn’t his problem.