Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  “Any other Poole relatives you know about?”

  “None.”

  “Who’s Wergeld?”

  “That’s the name of the trust I told you about.”

  “Who’s the beneficiary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You come back here often?”

  He looked around and shrugged. “Not in over ten years,” he said.

  We stared at each other a moment more, our hands twitching as if we really did have guns on our hips. I nodded my head to the wall above the fireplace where the primitive drawing of Elisha Poole was tacked. “You put that up?”

  He looked at it for a moment. “No,” he said.

  “You know she’s right, of course. If you loved her and let her go just because she was a Reddman and you were a Poole, you’ve given in as badly as your grandmother and your great-grandparents.”

  “What the hell do you know about it?”

  I thought on that for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “Not a thing.”

  On our way to the door I stopped and told Harrington I had left something in the house. He looked at me gratefully, as if it were a cheap ploy to allow him some time alone with Caroline. I nodded and slipped him half a smile and let him think what he was thinking as he walked out to her alone.

  It was a cheap ploy, yes, but not to give him time alone with Caroline. When he left I turned and walked through the kitchen to the dining room and the massive breakfront with the one drawer locked. Under the beam of my flashlight I took out my wallet and extracted the ornate key with the bit like a puzzle piece attached to the shank, the key we had found in the metal box, in the envelope marked “The Letters.” Slowly I inserted the key into the lock in the drawer. It slipped in as though the key and the lock were made one for the other, which they were, because without much effort the key turned, the bolt dropped, the drawer slid open.

  Inside were packets of letters, each yellowed and brittle, tied together with pale ribbons that had once held color but no longer. One by one I stuffed the bundles into my pack. Among the letters was a small book of scaling brown leather. I opened it to the title page. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I took that too. Beneath everything was a heavy old envelope, tied shut with a string. The words on the outside, written with a masculine hand, read: To My Child on the Attainment of Majority.

  I stuffed the envelope into my pack with the rest of the stuff and headed out the door.

  48

  I WANTED TO TALK on the drive home, I was so excited I was bursting with talk. The whole chilling story of the Reddmans and the Pooles was coming clear and more than ever I was certain that the sad entwining of the fates of those two families was at the heart of the plague that was presently afflicting the Reddmans. We were close, so close, to figuring it all out and to taking the first steps toward retribution, as well as toward a lucrative lawsuit. I wanted to talk it out, desperately, but just as desperately Caroline wanted silence.

  “Are you all right?” I asked after three of my conversational gambits had dropped like lead weights in a pool of silent water.

  “No,” she said.

  “What can I do?”

  “Just, just shut up,” she said.

  Well at least she knew what she wanted.

  So, as we drove in silence out of the Main Line and toward the city, I considered to myself what we knew and what we still needed to learn. Claudius Reddman had stolen the company from his friend Elisha Poole, had embezzled sums which he used to buy up a portion of the stock, and then, after reducing the company’s value with his thievery and through production holdbacks, had purchased the balance of the shares for an amount far below their true value. In the process of making his fortune he had ruined his friend, driving him to drink, to poverty, to suicide, and Reddman knew all he had done, too, because right after Poole’s death, either out of guilt or a misplaced magnanimity, he brought Mrs. Poole and her daughter to live in the shadow of his wealth and grandeur, in the shadow of Veritas. Is it only a coincidence that shortly thereafter tragedy began to stalk the Reddmans?

  Charity Reddman was murdered and buried in the plot behind the house, alongside the statue of Aphrodite. Who killed her? Was it Christian Shaw, disposing of his inconvenient lover, as Caroline believed, or was it maybe Mrs. Poole, wreaking her husband’s revenge? And the Reddman tragedies didn’t stop there. Hope Reddman died of consumption, which might have been poisoning instead. Christian Shaw was killed by his son with a shotgun blast to the chest. Claudius Reddman’s lungs filled with tumors and his muscles grew wild with palsy. How much of this tragedy was just the natural order of things and how much was bad karma and how much was directly caused by the Pooles? We as yet had no answer and probably would never find one, but if we only reap what we sow then Claudius Reddman’s harvest was appropriately bountiful. But it hadn’t ended with his death.

  Somewhere along the line, it appeared, Faith Reddman Shaw sought to make amends. We knew that she had examined her father’s old journals and discovered his crime. Was it after this discovery that she found Emma Poole and brought her to the luxury apartment in Philadelphia to live out her life? Was it then that she found Harrington, Emma’s grandchild, lost in an orphanage, and brought him to the estate to be raised as one of her own? Was the purpose of the Wergeld Trust to ease her family’s conscience? Conciliation, expiation, redemption she had said she was seeking, and it appeared she had been seeking it actively. But still all this had failed, somehow, to stem the curse, because someone had hired Cressi to kill Jacqueline and probably Edward too. Their deaths might be all tied up with Edward Shaw’s gambling debts, true, both killings ordered by Dante to collect on his loan, but after visiting the house of Poole I suspected it had more to do with the ugliness of the Reddman past than anything in the present. So who was ordering the killings? Harrington, the only known surviving Poole? Robert Shaw, knocking off his siblings to increase his inheritance with which he could play the market, showing himself as ruthless in matters of business as his great-grandfather? Kingsley Shaw, carrying out the deranged commands of the voice of the fire? Or was it maybe Faith Reddman Shaw herself, coming back from the dead as her son had claimed, sacrificing her grandchildren one by one as bloody final acts of reparation for her father’s crimes?

  Something Caroline had said nagged at me. “Where was Nat tonight?” I asked. “You said he wasn’t there.”

  “He wasn’t. I don’t know where he was.”

  “Was he at Jacqueline’s funeral?”

  “Of course.”

  Nat, the estate’s gardener and caretaker, was missing. It was not like Nat to miss a Reddman funeral. More than anyone he seemed to know the family’s secrets and I wondered if perhaps his knowledge had proved deadly. A shiver crawled through me just then and I had the urge to stop the car and spin it around and return to Veritas. He was there, I would have bet, in Faith Reddman Shaw’s overrun garden, lying there now just as peacefully as Charity Reddman, the two of them stretched before the statue of Aphrodite, with the mingled ashes of Faith and Christian Shaw ensconced in its base. There was a killer on the loose and its thirst knew no bounds and I was certain now that Nat had also suffered its vengeance. I would have stopped the car and turned around and checked on my certainty myself except that whoever had done it was still there, waiting, waiting for us.

  “I want to go someplace where no one has ever heard of the Reddmans,” Caroline said, breaking her long quiet. “Someplace where I can drink wine all day and let my hair grow greasy and no one would ever notice because the whole countryside is full of greasy drunks. France maybe.”

  “Last time it was Mexico.”

  “Well this time I mean it.” She took out a cigarette, lit it with my car’s lighter; the air in my Mazda grew quickly foul. “It’s all gotten way out of control. I’m through.”

  “What about the one good thing in the Reddman past you’ve been looking for? How can you give up before you find it?”

  “It’s not there. Ther
e’s nothing but cold there. All I want is to get as far from it all as I possibly can.”

  “It’s getting worse, Caroline. Whatever is happening to your family is growing more and more brutal.”

  “Let it. I’m getting out.”

  “So that’s your answer, right, run away. Sure, why not? Running is what you’re best at. Quit on our investigation just like you quit on your movie.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Kendall.”

  “She talks too much.”

  “You have your story pat, don’t you? A happy childhood, a loving home. If something went wrong in your life then it could only be because you were a failure, unworthy of the love of your mother, your father, of Harrington. That’s why you trashed your movie before it was finished, why you flit from interest to interest, from bed to bed. You do everything you can to maintain your comfortable self-image of failure. It’s the one thing you truly can control. ‘Look at the way I branded my flesh, Mommy. Aren’t I a screw-up?’ ”

  “France, I think. Definitely France.”

  “What then could be more terrifying than learning that maybe it’s your family that is screwed up to hell, that maybe your home wasn’t so loving, that maybe you’re not to blame for everything after all. What could be more terrifying than realizing that success or even love might actually be possible for you.”

  “Give it a rest, Victor.”

  “Look, I don’t want to find the answers more than you do. I was doing just fine before you came along. You’re the one who says she needs saving. The answers we’re finding could give you what you need to save yourself, but you have to do some of the work too. You tell me it’s hard, well, sweetheart, life is hard. Grow the fuck up.”

  “Hide out in France with me, Victor.”

  I thought about it for a moment, thought about all I had wanted at the start of everything and suddenly I felt a great swelling of bitterness. “It must be nice to have enough money to run from your life.”

  She took a deep drag from her cigarette. “Trust me, Victor, it’s no easy thing being born rich.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s hard work, but the pay is great.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Come to France with me.”

  “What about the lawsuit?”

  “Screw the lawsuit.”

  “We’re so close to figuring it out.”

  “Is that what it’s all been about? The lawsuit? Is everything we’ve gone through together just that?”

  I glanced at her cool face in the green glow of the dashboard’s light. What I noticed just then was how childlike she was. “I like you, Caroline, I care for you and I worry about you, but neither of us ever had any illusions.”

  After ten minutes of silence, which is a heavy load of silence, she simply said, “I have some things to pick up at your place, Victor, and then, please, just take me home.”

  I parked on Spruce, not far from my apartment. I took my pack from the car and Caroline and I walked together up the dark street. In the vestibule, while I was unlocking the front door, I sniffed and raised my head and sniffed again.

  “Do you smell that?”

  “It smells like a garbage dump on fire,” she said.

  Acrid, and deep, like the foul odor of burning tires. I opened the door and stepped inside. The smell grew.

  “What is that?” I said. “It’s like someone forgot to turn off a stovetop.”

  As we climbed the stairs the stench worsened. It was strongest outside my door. I went on a bit and sniffed the next doorway.

  “Dammit, it’s my apartment.”

  With fumbling fingers I tried unsuccessfully to jam the key into my lock, tried again, finally got it in, twisted hard. I felt the bolt slide. I grabbed the knob, turned it, and threw open the door. Smoke billowed, with a fetor that turned my stomach. I flicked on the light. The air was hazy with the noxious smoke and through the haze I could see that my apartment had been trashed, tables overturned, a bureau emptied, cushions from the couch thrown about. I dropped my pack upon the mess and rushed around the room’s bend to search for the fire in the kitchen. When I made it halfway through the living room and finally had a clear view of the dining room table I stopped dead.

  Peter Cressi was sitting at the table, leaning back calmly in the miasma, the metal box we had exhumed from Charity Reddman’s grave in front of him on the red Formica tabletop. Coiled on top of the metal box was a fat black cat. One of Cressi’s hands was casually scratching the fur along the cat’s back, the other was holding an absurdly large gun.

  “We was wondering when you was gonna get back here, Vic. I mean what kind of host are you? No matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find yous liquor.”

  Caroline rushed out from behind me. “Victor,” she said, “What is it? What?” and that’s all she said before she stopped, just behind me, so that Cressi, had he wanted to, with that gun and a half of his, could have taken us both out with one shot.

  “Well, look who’s with Vic,” said Cressi. “Isn’t this convenient? We was looking for you too, sweetheart.”

  The sight of Cressi pointing that gun at me was arresting enough, but it wasn’t he alone that had chilled my blood to viscid. Sitting next to him, elbows on the table, a small pile of ashes resting before him on the Formica like a charred sacrifice, was the source of the nauseating smoke polluting my apartment. It was an old man with clear blue eyes, hairy ears, a stogie the size of a smokestack smoldering between his false teeth.

  Calvi.

  49

  “CALVI,” I SAID.

  “Who was you expecting?” said Calvi, the cigar remaining clamped between his teeth as he spoke. “Herbert Hoover?”

  He was a thin wiry man with bristly gray hair and hollowed cheeks and a bitter reputation for violence. The word on Calvi was he talked too damn much, even with that voice scarred painful and rough by decades of rancid tobacco, but Calvi didn’t only talk when there was a more efficient way to communicate. Once, so the story went, he had drilled a man who was skimming off the skim, drilled him literally, with a Black & Decker and a three-quarter-inch bit, drilled him in the skull until the blood spurted and the dumb chuck admitted all and pled for mercy. The downtown boys, they laughed for weeks about that one, but after that one no one dared again to skim the skim from Calvi.

  “I heard you called,” said Calvi. “What was it that you wanted, Vic?”

  I glanced at Cressi, pointing his gun now at my face, and realized in a flash that I had been all wrong about everything, had trusted wrong and suspected wrong and now was face to face with the man who was behind all the violence that had been unleashed in the past few weeks. Calvi had returned to Philadelphia to wrest control of the city from Raffaello and the one man who could pull me out of what it was I had fallen into, Earl Dante, knew exactly how wrong I had been.

  “I just called to say hello,” I said. “See how the weather was down there.”

  “Hot,” said Calvi. “Hot as hell but hotter.”

  “So I guess you’re up just to enjoy the beautiful Philadelphia spring?”

  “I always liked you, Vic,” said Calvi. “I could always trust you, and you want to know why? Because I always understood your motives. You’re a simple man with a simple plan. Go for the dough. The world, it belongs to simple men. I send a guy to you I know he stays stand up and does his time with his mouth shut. No question about it because you know who is paying and it ain’t him, it’s me. And you know what, Vic? You done never let me down.”

  “How’s my case going?” asked Cressi. “You got it dismissed yet?”

  “That was a lot of guns you were buying, Pete,” I said. “And the flamethrower doesn’t help. But I’m moving to suppress the tapes and whatever else I can.”

  “Atta boy,” said Peter.

  “You know why I’m here, don’t you, Vic?” said Calvi.

  “I think I do.”

  “I want to apol
ogize about you being in the car with that thing on the expressway. It couldn’t be helped. But you understand it was only business. No hard feelings, right?”

  “Could I afford hard feelings right now?”

  “No,” said Calvi.

  A gay, friendly smile spread across my face. “Then no hard feelings.”

  “You’re exactly what the man, he meant when he said the simple will inherit the earth,” said Calvi. “Let me tell you, when my turn comes, it will be very very profitable. And you, my friend, will share in those profits. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So I can count on you?”

  I looked at Cressi with his gun and smiled again. “It sounds like a lucrative arrangement.”

  “Exactly what I thought you’d say. And I’m taking that as a commitment, so there’s no going back. Now I understand you’ve been in touch with that snake Raffaello.”

  “It was only because he was checking up on me after the thing with the car,” I blurted. “I don’t know where he is or what he is…”

  “Shut up, Vic,” said Cressi with a wave of his gun and I shut right up.

  “We need to meet, Raffaello and me,” said Calvi. “We need to meet and figure this whole thing out. Can you set up this meeting for us, Vic?”

  “I can try.”

  “Good boy, Vic,” said Calvi. “We’re not animals. If we can avoid a war all the better.”

  “I think that’s what he wants too,” I said. “He told me he’s ready to step aside as long as there’s no war and his family is guaranteed safety.”

  “He’ll turn over everything?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Everything?”

  “So long as you give the guarantees.”

  Calvi took the cigar out of his mouth for a moment and stared at it and for the first time a smile cracked his face. “You hear that, Peter,” he said. “It’s done.”

  “It’s too easy,” said Cressi, shaking his head.

  “I told you it would be easy,” said Calvi. “This never was his business. He was a cookie baker before he came into it. He never had the stomach for the rough stuff. He had the stomach he would have killed me rather then let me slink off to Florida like he did. I ain’t surprised he’s on his knees now. You’ll set up the meeting, Vic.”