by Jane Heller
“Plenty,” I said, dying to wipe my face. The room had to be a hundred degrees, and I was sweating like a pig. But I couldn’t think about my perspiration problem. I was about to bring out the heavy artillery. “If you hadn’t been such a mama’s boy, running and hiding under your mommy’s skirts, you would have learned that it’s not acceptable to depend on women for money.”
Victor slammed his hand against the wall. I had pushed his button all right. “Don’t you dare talk about my mother like that, you tramp. Say what you want about me, but leave her out of it.”
“Fine. I’ll say what I want about you. You married Mary Elizabeth for her money and killed her. Then you married me for my money and tried to kill me, too. But you failed, Victor. I’m alive. I’m so alive that I’m going to make you suffer for what you’ve done.”
With those fighting words, I marched over to him and threw my drink in his face. As anticipated, the gesture provoked an instant replay of the scene Karen had described to Jack and me. Victor became furious, out of control, ballistic. He grabbed me by my hair (fortunately, he didn’t pull the wig off entirely; just caused it to slip a little) and said, “I wish I had killed you like I killed Mary Elizabeth. You’re a lush and a liar and you’ve brought me nothing but misery.”
“Victor!” shouted my mother, who had entered the cottage without our notice, which was not surprising given the decibel level of our voices. I was so relieved to see her that I almost called out “Mom!” but reminded myself to stay in character.
Victor let go of me and rushed over to her. “Cookie, I can explain,” he said frantically. “Don’t believe a word you heard.”
She stared openmouthed, first at him, then at me. She was stunned by his outburst, by his admission—how could she not be?—and must have been trying to figure out who I was on top of it.
“Believe every word you heard,” I said, drawing on my cigarette. “I’m Karen, Victor’s ex-wife, and I assure you it’s all true.”
“You told me you were only married once, to Mary Elizabeth,” Mom said to Vic, her expression a mixture of confusion and hurt and anger.
“I wanted to tell you about Karen, but she wasn’t a happy chapter in my life and I didn’t want to burden you with our sad story,” he had the nerve to reply.
“You burdened me with your sad story about Mary Elizabeth,” Mom pointed out.
“That was different, because I—”
“Don’t lie to me!” she barked. “I just heard you tell this woman you killed Mary Elizabeth.”
“You’re damn right he did,” I said. “He had Rosa poison her the day they went sailing. Didn’t you ever wonder why he didn’t get tossed overboard in that storm like she did?”
My mother shook her head. “My daughter wondered. I was too blind to wonder.”
“Don’t listen to this, Cookie,” Victor pleaded. “She’s a drunk and doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“What about you?” she countered. “What about what you were saying? You admitted that you wanted her dead, too!”
“He sure did,” I said. “He had his chauffeur tamper with the brakes in my car, and I crashed into a tree. That’s his m.o. He marries vulnerable women—vulnerable, wealthy women—and steals their money any way he can, even if it means murder. I hate to break it to you, honey, but you were next. Once he got you to walk down that aisle, you were fair game. It was only a matter of time.”
“I don’t have to listen to any of this,” Victor said as he backed toward the door.
“Oh, yes you do, buster,” my mother said, wagging her finger at him. The truth had set her free of him, free of the spell he’d cast on her, and not a moment too soon. “Even if you didn’t kill Mary Elizabeth, even if you didn’t try to kill Karen, even if you didn’t con both of them out of their money, you didn’t tell me you were married twice and I’ll never forgive you for that. When a man lies about one thing, chances are he’ll he about other things. I’ve had it with you. I never want to see you again as long as I live—and I intend to live a very long time, now that you’re out of the picture.”
“Don’t say that, Cookie. We can work this out,” Victor whimpered.
“Work this out,” my mother retorted, flipping him the bird, a most un-Helen-like gesture. “My daughter tried to tip me off about you. She said you were out to take advantage of me, that you were dangerous even, but I was too gullible, too caught up in all the flattery to believe her. But this courageous woman went out of her way to save me from the same fate she endured.” She approached me then, to shake my hand or hug me or something, but stopped when she got close to me. She pointed at my face. “What’s wrong with you, Karen? You’re… you’re flaking.”
Oh, crap. Maura had warned me that the balloon latex would start to peel off if I sweated profusely, which, of course, I was doing.
“It’s a skin condition,” I said quickly. “I think it’s caused by my smoking. Cigarettes are bad for the complexion.”
Good try, right? Well, in an effort to pat down the flaking latex, my hand made contact with the mortician’s wax on my nose and knocked the little lump of it off onto the floor.
“Hey! What is this, anyway?” said Victor.
He and my mother both peered at me. By this time, my wig had slipped a little more and, together with the flaking latex and the vanishing wax, my act was fading fast. But it wasn’t until my sweating caused one of the pieces of tape around my breasts to lose its adhesive that I came apart at the seams, literally.
My mother took one look at me and said, “What is going on? Who in the world—” She took another look, a closer look, and honked, “Stacey! Is that you in there?”
“Yes, it is,” I confessed. I put the glass of scotch down on the table and extinguished the cigarette into it and pulled off the wig. “I didn’t know how else to get you to believe me about Victor, so after I went to see his ex-wife in Milwaukee and heard the story of what he did to her, I decided to play her, because she was too afraid to show up and tell you everything herself. Maura did my makeup and Jack wrote the script and the three of us came to save you. I hope you’re not angry.”
“Angry? Oh, my dear, dear daughter. You went to all that trouble for me and you think I’d be angry?” She threw her arms around me and held me tightly, clung to me as if she never wanted to let go. I could feel her starting to cry, just a little. She wasn’t one for sentimental moments, but she’d been shaken to the core by Victor’s deceit and the extent to which I’d gone to expose it, and she was moved, clearly.
“0f course I did,” I said, tears welling up in my own eyes. “I love you, Mom. I’ve always loved you. Even when we didn’t get along. Even when we stopped speaking altogether. Even when it seemed that we’d never have the kind of mother-daughter relationship both of us wanted, each in our own way. The bottom line is, I’d do anything for you, just as you would do for me.”
She was so choked up she couldn’t utter a single word at first. But then she held me at arm’s length and looked me straight in the eye, and, with her customary honk having been replaced by a soft quiver, she said, “I don’t know what I did to deserve such a wonderful daughter, but I’m so proud of you I could burst.”
“Oh, Mom,” I said, not used to hearing this sort of praise from her. “You’re proud of me?”
“More than you can imagine.” She wiped a tear from her cheek, tried to swallow her emotion. “I realize I’ve been difficult over the years—critical, overbearing, insensitive to your needs, especially when they conflicted with mine—and I’m sorry for that. Deeply sorry. It’s just that you really are the center of my universe, for better or worse. I love you as much as a mother can possibly love a child. I want you to know that, Stacey. Know it now and know it forever, because I won’t always be here to tell you.”
“That’s for sure!” said Victor, who apparently had viewed our warm and fuzzy rapprochment as an opportunity to locate his gun and point it at us.
Yes, just when it appeared that Mom and
I had finally resolved our differences, we had bigger problems.
thirty-four
“Put that thing down, Victor. You’re only making a fool of yourself,” my mother ordered her former fiancé. She was not the least bit intimidated by him now, I was relieved to see, not even with a gun in his hand. The revelations about his character really seemed to have transformed her back into her old feisty self.
“I’m not doing anything until I get you two out of this cottage and into my car,” he said, waving the pistol at us.
“Then what?” she said. “Are you going to drive us to some remote location and shoot us?”
“Not a bad idea,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” I countered. “Everyone will know you did it. Jack will know. Maura will know. Karen will know. You won’t get away with murder this time, Victor.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Everyone also knows how you and Helen are always at each other’s throats. Maybe I’ll set it up so it looks like one of you shot the other. Now. Do as I tell you. You’re going to walk out of this cottage and into my car, and you’re going to do it without making a peep. Got it?”
“What if we don’t?” said my mother. “What if we stay right here and wait for Stacey’s friends to come and check on us?”
“Then I’ll shoot you now, and they can find you riddled with bullets.”
“Victor!” my mother snapped at him. “Listen to me. I want you to give yourself up.”
“You might as well,” I agreed. “You don’t shoot people, Vic. You leave the dirty details to your servants, and they’re not around.”
“That’s enough!” he shouted. “Out of this cottage! Both of you! Right this instant!”
He shoved my mother and me out the door, only to be greeted by Jack and Maura. He was not thrilled.
“Stacey! We got worried when you didn’t come back,” said Jack. He made a move toward me, only to be waved off by Victor, who nevertheless was beginning to panic at his odds. It was four against one now.
In desperation, he yanked my mother’s arm, pulling her closer to him, and pressed the gun against her temple.
“Don’t!” I yelled. “Let her go, Victor. Please!”
“My daughter’s right, Victor. Be a good boy and let me go.” For emphasis, she kicked him in the shins.
“Ouch! Cut it out!” he said. “We’re outta here." He turned to us to issue a threat. “If you value Helen’s safety, you’ll stay put.”
With that, he dragged her out of the cottage.
“My God, we’ve got to call the police now,” I said. “To hell with the bad publicity. My mother’s career won’t mean a thing if she’s dead.”
Dead. There were many times over the years that I had pictured my mother dead, but that had merely been a petulant daughter’s wishful thinking. The possibility that she could actually be dead—at the hands of a stupid little dork like Victor yet—was too gruesome to contemplate.
Jack used his cell phone to call 911. He told the dispatcher everything, including that Victor had already raced to his car to make his getaway and that he had taken the movie and television star Helen Reiser hostage. We were promised that help would be on the way as soon as possible.
“We’ve got to follow them,” I said. “They have a lead on us, but we can catch up.”
“How do we know where Victor’s going?” said Maura.
“My guess is he’s going north, as opposed to back to Beverly Hills,” said Jack. “But let’s hit the road and take it from there.”
The three of us hurried back to our cottage, where Jack’s car was parked in the spot out front. We piled into the car, peeled out, and caught a fleeting glimpse of Victor’s Cadillac as it was pulling out of the hotel’s driveway.
“There they are!” said Maura.
“I’m on them. I’m on them,” said Jack. “They’re probably headed for the 101 north.”
“The police just have to rescue Mom,” I said, clawing at the dashboard. “I can only imagine how freaked out she must be.”
“I gave them a description of Victor’s Caddy,” said Jack. “For all we know, they’re about to arrest him as we speak.”
“Maybe, but I’m really worried about her. Look how she’s stuck there in the passenger’s seat next to him. A sitting duck.”
“She’s a strong woman,” said Jack. “A brave woman. She doesn’t scare easily. Remember that, Stacey.”
We tailed Victor and my mother onto the 101 freeway, believing somehow that we could overtake them, separate them, be heroes.
“Damn,” said Jack, banging his hand on the steering wheel in anger. “I lost them. Victor must have sped up and switched lanes and now he’s hiding between other cars and I can’t see him.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “I just don’t believe it.”
“Try to relax,” Maura said. “It’ll all work out in the end.”.
The end, I thought ominously, visualizing my mother’s funeral and all the celebrity mourners who would turn out for it. I would make a speech, I decided. A touching tribute to the woman who traveled all the way from Cleveland to Hollywood and took the town by storm. The woman who stood for morality and honesty and making the world a safer place for tuna fish eaters. Yes, it would be a lovely event that would make her very proud. Poor, poor Mom.
No! I stopped myself from even entertaining the idea of my mother’s demise. Instead, I bargained with God. Yes, I made a deal in which I said silently, If you let my mother live, I promise I’ll never fight with her again. You heard me. I’ll hold my tongue when she nags me.
I’ll suck it up when she criticizes me. I’ll answer her questions politely, even if the questions are intrusive or insensitive or just plain annoying. Thank you, God. Amen.
We kept driving, the dusk making it difficult to differentiate one car from another. “Maybe we should turn around and go back the other way,” I said, given that Victor had given us the slip. “He may have decided to beat it back to Beverly Hills after all.”
“Look! Up ahead!” said Jack, pointing to the car that was weaving from lane to lane. “That’s his Cadillac, isn’t it?”
I sat up straight and squinted. “Yes! Oh, yes! There they are! But something’s very wrong.”
“Victor seems to have lost control of the car,” said Jack as we watched the Caddy edge dangerously close to other cars.
“Do you think he’s got a bottle of booze with him and taken a few nips too many?” said Maura.
Before I could answer, Victor’s Cadillac suddenly and terrifyingly swerved wildly to the right and veered across the freeway, miraculously avoiding the cars in its path, until it crashed into the guardrail.
“Oh, please no!” I said, fearing the worst. “If he killed her, I’ll rip his heart out, I swear it.”
Traffic on the 101 came to a standstill as some passersby stopped to help at the crash site, others merely to rubberneck. The point is, we were thwarted in our efforts to reach Mom, and it was frustrating to say the least.
“How are we going to—”
“Listen. Do you hear them?” Jack interrupted me. “Sirens.”
I looked in the rearview mirror and, sure enough, the police had finally arrived. Several squad cars snaked their way up the shoulder of the 101 and surrounded Victor’s Caddy.
“I can’t just sit here and wait for the traffic to move,” I said, my hysteria growing. “I’ve got to get to Mom now.”
I jumped out of Jack’s car and ran toward the action, hoping against all hope that my mother was still alive. When I got close to the Cadillac, an officer prevented me from going further.
“This isn’t your run-of-the-mill accident. It’s a crime scene,” he said. “Nobody’s allowed in, especially curiosity seekers.” He stared at my peeling latex, my swollen lips, and my disheveled clothes, and muttered, “Wacko.”
“You don’t understand! I’m the daughter of the woman in there!” I shouted. “I’ve got to go to her. I don’t care what condition she�
��s in. Just let me see her before she lapses into a coma and won’t even recognize me!”
“Hey, hey. Take it easy,” said the cop. “If your mother is the lady we removed from the Cadillac, she’s doing fine. It’s the guy who needs medical attention.”
“What?”
He led me inside the labyrinth of cars and cops until we came upon the Caddy, its hood wrapped around the guardrail like a pretzel. Victor was sprawled across the driver’s seat unconscious, blood spilling out of his forehead. My mother was stretched out in the back of one of the police cars, her eyes closed as if she were…
“Mom!” I said as I ran to her. “Don’t leave me now. I can’t let you go. Not after we had that beautiful talk back at the cottage. Not after we finally mended fences and achieved closure and—”
“What’s all the racket?” she said, coming to.
“It’s Stacey, Mom. You’re okay?”
“Me? You bet I am. I was just dozing.”
“Dozing? From the look of that Cadillac, you could have been a candidate for the morgue.”
“No question about it,” said Jack, who, with Maura in tow, had found his way to us. “Tell us what happened, Helen.”
“I took charge of the situation, that’s what happened,” she said. “I wasn’t about to be some passive little ninny. Not again, anyway. Victor may have gotten the better of me once, but he certainly wasn’t going to get the better of me twice.”
“So what did you do?” I said.
“I stole a page from your script. I saw how nutty he got when Karen—I mean, you, Stacey—taunted him about his mother, so I kept criticizing his mama, over and over, figuring he’d have to take his eyes off the road at some point to shut me up. And I was right. He turned to slap me, and I was ready. I bashed him in the head with the heel of my shoe—several times, in fact. With each blow, he became more and more disoriented and eventually lost complete control of the car. As he was blacking out, I leaned over and grabbed the steering wheel and drove us smack into that guardrail. I figured it was the only way to get the police’s attention, and it worked, although I suppose I nearly killed Victor, never mind myself.” Her expression darkened.