Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

I had a headache and my eyes were blurry and I hadn’t slept nearly enough. The night before we had opened the box disinterred from the garden behind Veritas and read together, Beth, Caroline, Morris, and I, the self-selected excerpts from the diary of Faith Reddman Shaw. That would have been exhausting enough, but afterward Caroline insisted on spending the whole of the night in my apartment. It was not sex she was after this night, which was too bad, actually. Instead she was after solace. Solacing is up there with having a toothache as the least pleasant way to stay awake through the night. I had to stroke her hair and wipe her tears and comfort her when all I really wanted was to sleep, but some things we suffer for money and some things we suffer for love and some things we suffer because we’re too polite to kick her out of bed.

  Ignore that last crack, it was only my testosterone speaking; besides, I am not that well mannered. It was indisputable that Caroline and I were easing into some sort of relationship, though the exact sort was hard to nail. Maybe it was just that we were both lonely and convenient, maybe it was the twin gravitational pulls of her great fortune and my great wanting, maybe it was that we found ourselves in the middle of an adventure we couldn’t really share with anyone else. Or maybe it was that she saw herself in desperate need of saving and I, inexplicably, found in myself the desire to save. If all there was was love then there wasn’t much to it, that was clear to us both, but life is not so soggy as the Beatles would have had us believe.

  In the middle of our long late night conversation, as we lay in my bed, still clothed, she reached around and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you’re here for me, Victor,” she said, out of nowhere. “There’s no one else I can talk to about this. It has been a long time since anyone’s been there for me.”

  And it had been a long time since I had been there for anyone. I smiled and kissed her lightly on the eye and I wondered if now might be a providential time to mention the fee agreement she still had not signed, but then thought better of it.

  “This is harder than I ever imagined,” she said. “Finding Aunt Charity down there and then that diary, my grandmother’s words, reliving such tragedy. It’s like the entire foundation of my life has shifted. Things that were absolutely true have turned out to be lies. I thought I had my life’s history figured out, organized in a way that made sense, but it doesn’t make as much sense anymore.”

  “Should we stop digging? Should we give it up?”

  She was silent for a moment, a long worrying moment, before she shook her head and said, “No, not yet,” and held me closer.

  Her hair tickled my nose uncomfortably and made me sneeze. I had the urge to roll away, onto my side, to sleep, but I didn’t. While the bounds of the relationship we were easing into were still narrow and unclear, they at least encompassed money and sex and now, I was learning, solace. But it wasn’t as though she was faking her distress. Even as she held me she shook slightly, as if from a cold draft blowing in from the past, and it is no wonder.

  Family histories are a series of myths, embellished and perpetuated through gossamer tales retold over the Thanksgiving turkey. They are blandly reassuring, these myths, they give us the illusion that we know from whence we came without forcing upon us the details that make real life so perfectly vulgar. We know how Grandmom met Grandpop at a John Philip Sousa concert at Willow Grove Park but not how they lived unhappily ever after in a loveless marriage and fought like hyenas every day of their lives. We know how Daddy proposed to Mommy but not how he first plied her with tequila and then conned her into the sack. We’re told by our mother all about that magical night on which we were born but she never mentions how our head ripped apart her vagina or how her blood spurted or the way the placenta slimed out of her and plopped onto the floor like an immolated cat. Well, that night Caroline had seen the cat.

  She had listened to her grandmother’s voice come forth from the grave and she believed she could understand now all the misery her grandmother had suffered, and why she had suffered it. She was certain that her grandfather, the moody and ofttimes soused Christian Shaw, had only agreed to marry Faith to save his family’s fortune. After proposing to Faith, he had started playing around with Charity, seducing the sister of the woman to whom he was engaged without a care in the world, and then, when Charity found herself inconveniently pregnant, had found it more convenient to murder Charity and bury her in the fertile oval beside the statue of Aphrodite than to tell the tale to her father, the man who was poised to save the Shaw Brothers Company from bankruptcy. In his marriage he had been mostly absent, often drunk, primarily abusive, and Caroline couldn’t help but notice how sister Hope’s health took a turn for the worse when Faith was forced to her bed with premature contractions and it was left to Christian to nurse the ill woman. She could figure why the rat poison was in the kitchen cabinet even if her grandmother couldn’t. With Charity and Hope both gone, the whole of the Reddman fortune demised to Christian Shaw and his heirs, another convenience. It seemed to Caroline that the best thing that could have happened to her family was the accident that rainy April night in 1923 when her father shot her grandfather, except for the crippling guilt her father carried from that day forward. That was how Caroline saw it that night in my bed, explaining her version to me through clenched teeth and tears.

  I wasn’t quite sure I bought it. Her interpretation of what we had heard sounded like the plot of a bad feminist novel from the seventies, where the women would all be just fine if it wasn’t for those murderous men who engaged in the foulest of schemes to further their own ends. There was something too calculating, too controlled, in the voice of the woman who spoke to us from the dead that night for her to be so innocent a victim, something peculiar in the way she seemed so easily to absolve those around her of whatever crimes they had committed. As a lawyer I had had enough experience with unreliable narrators, had been one myself in fact, to fail to recognize the signs. But all of us had agreed on one thing, the ghosts that had been unleashed in the terrible events disclosed in the diary we had found in that box were still among us and the death of Jacqueline was quite possibly related.

  “You haven’t by any chance, Miss Caroline,” said Morris as we decided on what to do next, “ever found that secret panel in the library your grandmother in the diary, she talks about?”

  “No,” she said. “I never heard of it before.”

  “It would be helpful, maybe, if you could spend some time, just like she did, and try to find it. Inside, I think, maybe there is something interesting, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Caroline.

  “But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing,” I said. “No one should know what we’re digging into. What about the numbers on the three-by-five card we found?”

  “A banker friend I know,” said Morris, “very upstanding now but he got his start funding Irgun when such was not allowed and had to be done in secrecy. This was many years ago, just after the war, but not too far removed from the time of those papers you found. I’ll take them to him. He might know.”

  Morris also agreed he would try to discover what had happened to the Poole daughter, who had disappeared, pregnant, just days after her mother’s death. I took for myself certain of the photographs, and the strangely retained receipt from the doctor. I also took the key out of the envelope entitled “Letters” and slipped it into my wallet.

  That was what we had done about the box, but I still knew the likelihood was greatest that whoever had paid off Cressi to kill Jacqueline Shaw had done it not as an avenging ghost of the past but for the most basic of all reasons, for the motive that underlies most all of our crimes, for the money. Which was why tonight I was seeing Oleanna, the guiding light of the Church of the New Life, named beneficiary in the five-million-dollar insurance policy taken out on Jacqueline Shaw’s life. And it was why I had asked Caroline to set up a meeting for me that very afternoon with her brother Eddie, the worst gambler in the world, who had somehow, suddenly, upon the untimely murder of his s
ister, paid off his debt to Jimmy Vigs. In my short career I had discovered that to find a crook you follow the money. But first there was that message from the good Reverend Custer.

  “Hello.”

  “Can I talk to your mommy, please?”

  “She’s in the bafroom.”

  “Yes, sweetheart, can I talk to her please? I’m looking for a Reverend Custer and I was given this number.”

  “She told me to say she’s not in. Do we owe you money?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Mommy says we owe a lot of money.”

  “You know, sweetheart,” I said, “I think I may just have the wrong number.”

  I hung up and stared at Ellie’s hieroglyphs for a little while and watched as they rearranged themselves before my eyes. Then a thought slipped through the fog of my mind and I felt myself start to sweat.

  “I’m exhausted,” I told Ellie as I stepped out of my office, the phone slip in my pocket. “I’m going to get some coffee. You want anything?”

  “Diet soda,” she said, and she started fiddling in her purse before I told her it was on me. Then I thought better of my generosity and took her four bits. I needed change for the phone.

  I guess he assumed my line was tapped or my messages somehow not secure, and I couldn’t really blame him. Whoever was coming after him had the audacity to try to make the hit in the middle of the Schuylkill Expressway. To someone that brazen it wouldn’t be a thing to slap a wire on a phone or rifle through a pack of pink slips looking for a number to trace. “You are my scout,” had said Enrico Raffaello. “Like in the old cavalry movies, every general needs a scout to find the savages.” And what beleaguered general was ever more in need of a ferret-eyed scout than George Armstrong Custer. I just wish Raffaello had picked a less-ominous example. He wasn’t at the number I had dialed because that number was absolutely wrong. I took the Rev. literally and reversed the numbers when I made the call in the phone booth. This time it wasn’t a little girl who answered.

  “This is a private line,” came a voice over the phone, a dark voice and slow.

  “I’m looking for Reverend Custer,” I said.

  “Boy, do you ever have the wrong number,” said the voice and then the line went dead.

  I puzzled that for a moment, thoroughly confused about everything. When the hell was Calvi going to get off his boat and tell me what to do? Until he did I had no choice but to fake it. I took the second of Ellie’s quarters and dialed again.

  “I said this was a private line,” said the same voice.

  “I’m calling from a pay phone and this is my last quarter and if you hang up on me it will be your ass in a sling. Tell the man it’s his scout calling. Tell him I need to speak to him now.”

  There was a quiet on the line as if my request was being considered by a higher authority and then I heard the scrape of chairs and a rap of knuckles on wood in the distance.

  “What do you have for me?” came the familiar voice.

  “How are you? How seriously are you hurt?”

  There was a grunt.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  There was a dangerous pause where I realized I had asked exactly the wrong question. “Tell me what you’ve learned,” he said finally.

  “Our friend with the guns, I know how he got the money now. Murder for hire. One of his victims was an heiress name of Shaw.”

  “Who paid him?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but it’s nothing to do with you. For our friend it was just a way to finance the war. But he got a little sloppy and there was a witness and that is what’s so damn interesting. Under pressure, the witness changed his story, taking the heat off our guy.”

  “Who applied the pressure?”

  “Our little buddy who’s moved up so fast, the pawnbroker. He’s in on it, I know it.”

  “Is there any other connection between the two of them?”

  “Other than your friend was all too happy to get me into the car with you before our incident?”

  “Other than that, yes.”

  “No. But it’s him.”

  “If it is him, or another, it no longer matters,” he said, and then he sighed. “You’re a good friend. You’ve been very loyal. I will remember this after it is over. I have one last favor to ask.”

  “I want out.”

  “I know that is what you want and I now want the same. I’m tired of it, and these animals have no restraint. It was bad enough going after me, but what they did to Dominic, who was already out, and then to Jimmy Bones was too much. They’ll go after my daughter, I know it, and then I will have no choice but to enter a war in which no one will win and everyone will end up dead. I could send my men out hunting right now, but it won’t solve the problem, and with every murder, every attempt, the case the feds are building grows stronger and more of our own will feel marked and turn. I’m a tired man, I don’t want to spend the last years of my life hiding or in jail or dead. I want to paint. I want to spend a whole month reading one poem. I want to dance naked in the moonlight by the sea.”

  “You sound like a personal ad.”

  “I’m a romantic at heart.”

  “The bastards tried to kill us.”

  “I was never a man of war. It was forced upon me once, I won’t let it be forced upon me again. You will be approached about a meeting.”

  “Why would they approach me?”

  “You were in the line of fire. You were the last neutral to see me. You will be approached. That is the way these animals work.”

  “What do I tell them?”

  “You are to tell them that I want peace. Tell them that I will meet them to accept their terms. Tell them if they can guarantee my security and the security of my family then it is over. Tell them we will meet to arrange a truce and then the trophy will be theirs.”

  35

  THE EDWARD SHAWS LIVED in a townhouse on Delancey Place, a very fashionable address on the Schuylkill side of Rittenhouse Square. It wasn’t a through street, so it was quiet, and the cars that sat before the houses seemed to have been parked there for half of eternity, parked in prime, unmetered spots undoubtedly willed from one generation to the next. Of course the Shaws wouldn’t deign to park on the street, their property would include a garage in the back, which I had checked out through the garage-door window before I pressed their doorbell. A two-car garage with only one car inside, a sedate silver BMW. Not the kind of car the worst gambler in the world would tool around in, I figured. He’d want something flashier, something red, something more phallic to make up for the continual humiliation of his certain winners dropping dead of coronaries in the middle of the track. Eddie Shaw, it appeared, had skipped out on our meeting. It was enough to give a guy a complex, the way he was avoiding me.

  When I saw who was at the door, I expected a torrent of words, but all I got from Kendall Shaw was a subdued, “Hello, Victor. Caroline told me you’d be coming and that I was to help you any way I could.” When I was inside, she turned around and led me into her family room.

  To get there we passed through a formal carpeted foyer. The walls were an eggshell blue, marked with rectangular patches of a slightly darker shade. There were formal chairs and a sofa, but in the center, off to the right, there was a strange open area. As I passed the opening I glanced down at the carpet and saw four indentations in an irregular quadrangular pattern, about the size and the spacing of the feet of a grand piano.

  The family room was still intact. Comfortably furnished, it was filled with deep sofas, recliner chairs, framed posters, an exhibition of some of Kendall’s latest landscapes. In the center of the room, like a shrine, was a gigantic television set. I guess that’s right, take the paintings, take the piano, but Lord please don’t let them take my La-Z-Boy or my big screen Panasonic TV. Kendall gestured me onto the sofa and sat herself on the facing love seat. She was dressed today rather primly, a beige skirt, a white blouse, and her drug-induced mania was somewhat depressed. She was on a di
fferent set of pills this week, I figured. Valium anyone?

  “I’ve come to see your husband,” I said.

  “You’re not really a painter, are you, Victor?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. Actually, I’m a lawyer. But I admired your work very much.”

  “That was kind of you and Caroline to play such tricks on me.”

  “I’m just here to ask your husband a few questions.”

  “So Caroline said. He’s out at the moment, but you can wait with me, if you’d like.” She glanced at her watch. “He must be running a little late.”

  “When did you expect him back?”

  “Two days ago,” she said, and then she almost jumped to her feet. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Fish sticks?”

  “Coffee would be fine,” I said, and I watched her walk briskly out of the room.

  Well, this had become nicely awkward.

  She came back after ten minutes carrying a tray with a teapot and two cups and an arrangement of fancy cookies. As she poured, I told her I liked my coffee black. She handed me the cup and I sipped daintily. It was scalding. I wondered how much I could take her insurance company for if I spilled it on my lap.

  “What exactly did you want to ask my husband about?” she said nonchalantly while she poured a cup for herself.

  “Are you sure you should be having caffeine, Mrs. Shaw?”

  There was a pause. She stirred in some milk and a packet of Sweet’n Low and sat back in her love seat. “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at Veritas that night, Victor. You caught me on a bad evening. I was ovulating. I tend to grow a little overeager during ovulation.”

  “Yes, well right there is more than I ever wanted to know, but still, apology accepted.”

  “How’s your ear?”

  “Healing, thank you. I didn’t mean to disturb your afternoon, I had just a few questions about your husband’s finances.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “Maybe I should come back.”

  “Maybe you’d have better luck asking me what you want to know. Edward is not forthcoming with or about his money, except to his bookies.”