Puppet

by Joy Fielding

  “Why were you taking them at all?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—”

  “Mrs. Price,” Ben interrupts calmly. “You know that everything you say to us here is confidential.”

  “That’s very reassuring. But I’ve said everything I’m going to say.”

  “Fine.” Amanda throws her hands into the air in a gesture that manages to combine defiance with defeat. “If you won’t talk to us, maybe Hayley Mallins can shed some light on who her husband really was.” She grabs her coat, strides toward the door. “Come on, Ben. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “No,” her mother calls out as Amanda is reaching for the door handle. “Wait.”

  Amanda holds her breath, unable to move or turn around.

  “There’s no need to involve Mrs. Mallins. I doubt she knows anything about her husband’s extracurricular activities.”

  Slowly, Amanda turns to face her mother. “And you do?”

  “I should,” her mother answers. “I was married to the man for more than ten years.”

  Amanda inches back into the room, drops into the empty chair. She doesn’t know what she’d been expecting to hear, but whatever it was, it wasn’t this. “What did you just say?”

  Gwen Price smiles sadly, lowers herself into the other chair. “I believe I just handed you a motive for murder.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AMANDA glances at Ben, who, mercifully, is looking as stunned as she is. “I think you better explain,” Amanda says, reluctantly bringing her eyes back to her mother.

  “Yes, I guess I should,” her mother agrees, although she volunteers nothing further.

  “You were married to John Mallins?” Ben asks quietly, as if leading a reluctant witness.

  “John Mallins, Walter Turofsky, Milton Turlington, George Turgov, Rodney Tureck,” Gwen Price rhymes off listlessly. “Rodney Tureck was his real name. At least I think it was.”

  “So you knew about his various aliases?” Again the person asking the question is Ben. Amanda acknowledges him with a grateful nod, her own voice stuck in the middle of her throat, like a lump of unchewed meat.

  “Not when I first married him, no.”

  “And when was that?” Amanda asks, forcing the question out of her mouth with a harsh clearing of her throat. The voice that emerges is bruised and scratchy.

  “A long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “I was nineteen when I married him.” She smiles at Amanda. The smile says, The same age as when you married Ben.

  Amanda shudders, looks away.

  “I suppose I should have known better,” Gwen says. “But what can I say? He was a very charming, charismatic man, as con artists usually are. They know instinctively what buttons to push, what words to say. I found him enormously appealing. Everyone did. Even my mother thought he was wonderful. Until he cheated my father out of his life savings, of course.”

  Amanda has slowly been zeroing in on her mother’s mouth as she speaks, focusing on the tiny lines that run along her prominent upper lip, like a series of quotation marks. She takes note of the deep creases pulling at the bottom corners of her mouth, giving her pale skin the appearance of parched earth that has cracked under a relentlessly cruel sun. Minuscule blond hairs, like peach fuzz, grow along the underside of her chin, and her flesh is soft and translucent with age. For the first time, Gwen Price looks every one of her almost sixty-two years. Still, there are traces of the beautiful young woman she once was, especially in the ferocious intensity of her light blue eyes. Amanda feels the scrutiny of those eyes even as she keeps her attention riveted to her mother’s mouth. “I don’t remember your parents,” Amanda says, trying to pull their faces out of her distant past.

  “No, you wouldn’t. They died before you were born.”

  “How did Rod Tureck cheat your father out of his life savings?” Ben asks, circling the periphery of Amanda’s vision.

  “The same way he cheated everyone. Phony companies, fake investment schemes. He talked my father into putting up money for a new waterproofing business he claimed to be starting up, said the return on his investment would more than cover my mother’s medical bills. My mother was undergoing chemo at the time, so my father probably wasn’t as prudent or careful as he normally would have been.”

  “How much did he lose?”

  “Pretty much everything. Over a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “The same amount of money that’s in your safety-deposit box,” Amanda states, picturing the neat stacks of $100 bills.

  “That was pretty much the nail in the coffin, as far as our marriage was concerned,” Gwen Price continues, ignoring Amanda’s inference and folding her hands across her chest, chewing angrily on her bottom lip. “He’d been cheating on me for years, of course. Getting more brazen all the time. I learned later that he always had at least two other women on the side, that he seemed to get some sort of sick satisfaction out of taking them to places where we’d been together. He even had an affair with a rather emotionally disturbed young woman who lived in our apartment building. It was her frantic phone calls to him in the middle of the night that finally persuaded me to pack my bags. By then, of course, my mother was dead. And a few months later, so was my father. He just keeled over one afternoon on the street and died before the ambulance arrived.”

  “So you lost a husband and both your parents in a relatively short period of time. That’s a lot to deal with,” Ben says sympathetically. “No wonder you were depressed.”

  “I got through it.”

  “But you blamed Rodney Tureck for your father’s death,” Amanda states rather than asks. “Why didn’t you just put a curse on him, like you did with old Mr. Walsh?”

  “I put a curse on Mr. Walsh?” her mother asks with a smile. “I don’t remember that.”

  Amanda thinks, Sure—one of the pivotal events of my childhood, and she has no memory of it.

  Figures, she thinks.

  “And the money in your safety-deposit box?” she hears herself ask. “What about it?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I like to think of it as my divorce settlement.”

  “And was it?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “And what manner would that be exactly?” Amanda presses.

  “Rod Tureck was a crook,” her mother says after a long pause in which she twists her lips, pats her hair, and shifts her position several times. “He stole that money from my father and I simply reclaimed it.”

  “What do you mean, you reclaimed it?”

  Another twist of her lips, another pat of her hair. “Rod was always wheeling and dealing. He insisted on being paid in cash, and we paid for everything the same way. Assuming we actually paid for anything. I don’t know. There were always collection agencies after us. Rod kept assuring me it was all a mistake, that I shouldn’t worry, he’d take care of everything. And he did. Problems would suddenly erupt; just as suddenly they’d go away. We never had bank accounts like normal people. He gave me an allowance every week. He was very generous, and I was very stupid. What can I say? The times, they hadn’t changed yet.”

  “Go on,” Ben prompts as Amanda rolls her eyes in exasperation.

  “Rod had cash stashed all over the city. Obviously we never stayed in one place for any length of time because of creditors and other unsavory characters who occasionally showed up on our doorstep. Rod, of course, had a perfectly plausible explanation for everything. He had a restless nature, he’d say. He’d get antsy if he had to stay too long in one place. What was the matter with me? Had I no sense of adventure? Didn’t I like meeting new people, making new friends? Except every time we made new friends, he’d pull one of his crazy stunts, and we’d have to move. Of course, he claimed nothing was ever his fault. He never did anything wrong; he never cheated anyone. If we didn’t have any friends, it was because they were all envious of his success. The few friends I did
manage to make were few and far between, and I learned to keep them to myself.”

  “The money, Mother,” Amanda says, steering the other woman back on course, refusing to feel sorry for her.

  “Yes. Well, I’m getting to that,” Gwen Price continues reluctantly. “I realized it was only a matter of time before my marriage was over, and I’d better take steps to protect myself. So I opened a bank account of my own and started slowly socking money away. Not a lot, of course. Nothing to make Rod suspicious. Just a couple hundred dollars here and there. Eventually, I had five thousand dollars saved up, and I’d become quite friendly with one of the tellers at the bank, a woman who was having marital problems of her own. She told me Rod kept a safety-deposit box at the bank. So one night when he was out of town, supposedly on business, I did some sneaking around, and I found his cigar box where he kept his various safety-deposit-box keys. It was at the back of his sweater drawer, the keys all neatly labeled, and I simply helped myself to the one I wanted. My friend let me into the vault. I walked out with the money.”

  “You’re saying you stole a hundred thousand dollars from your ex-husband?” Amanda asks, her head starting to spin.

  “It was my father’s money,” Gwen says unapologetically.

  Amanda is almost afraid to ask another question, for fear of what her mother might say.

  “And then what?” Ben asks in her stead.

  “Then I opened my own safety-deposit box in a different bank, put the money inside, and returned the original key to Rod’s cigar box. I never so much as looked at the money again. That wasn’t the point.”

  “Tell me again,” Amanda says. “Exactly what was the point?”

  “The point was getting some of my own back,” her mother says.

  “And how did Rodney Tureck feel about that?”

  Her mother waves a dismissive hand in front of her face. “By the time he discovered the money was missing, it was too late. We were already divorced, my friend at the bank had moved to Chicago, and he couldn’t very well report it to the police, now, could he?”

  “He didn’t confront you?”

  “Of course he confronted me. But I pleaded ignorance. Told him I had no idea what he was talking about. What safety-deposit box? What money? Do I look like I’m living high off the hog? I asked. I was working as a secretary, barely making enough to scrape by. But that didn’t matter. He said he knew I took the money, and that one way or the other, I was going to pay for it.”

  “He threatened you?”

  Gwen looks toward the door, says nothing.

  “Is that why you shot him, Mother?” Amanda asks. “Because you were afraid for your life?”

  “I shot him because he was a miserable son of a bitch who deserved to die for all the misery he’d caused everyone.”

  “No,” Amanda says steadily, the defense attorney in her taking charge of the situation, running with it. “Listen to me. You shot him because the last time you saw him he threatened your life, and when you saw him in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel, you were convinced he’d come back to make good on those threats.” She tries not to look too self-satisfied. “That sounds like a pretty decent argument for self-defense, doesn’t it, Ben?” She looks at Ben for support.

  “That all happened a very long time ago,” her mother says before Ben can formulate a response. “I don’t think a jury is going to be persuaded—”

  “Let Ben worry about persuading a jury,” Amanda says.

  “No one is going to buy—”

  “Buy what? That you were married to a man so amoral he thought nothing of stealing from his own father-in-law? That the theft of your father’s life savings led directly to his premature death? That you spent years on antidepressants as a result of Rod Tureck’s emotionally abusive behavior, both during your marriage and after your divorce? That he threatened you? That you spent your life looking over your shoulder, always afraid one day he’d return to make good on his threats? Why wouldn’t a jury believe that you panicked when you saw him again? That you shot him with the gun you’d been keeping all these years for your own protection? Don’t tell me a jury wouldn’t buy it,” Amanda says with a sudden rush of exhilaration. “They’ll buy it all right.”

  “Do you?” her mother asks.

  Amanda leans back in her chair, her exhilaration rapidly dissipating. “Why not? It makes sense.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I buy it or not,” Amanda says finally. “All that matters is whether we can convince a jury to buy it.”

  Her mother shakes her head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean I won’t go along with it.”

  “What do you mean, you won’t go along with it?”

  “It’s not entirely truthful.”

  “What the hell is?” Amanda snaps.

  “Amanda …,” Ben interjects.

  “Let me get this straight: you have no problem with stealing or killing, but you’re squeamish about not telling the truth. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “Look, we now have something we can take to the crown attorney,” Ben argues calmly. “There are enough mitigating circumstances here to make them think twice about going to trial. At least they may be willing to talk to us about a deal.”

  “You’d have to tell them the things I just told you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The things you assured me were confidential.”

  “They have to know the facts, Mother.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “As far as the police are concerned, I’m a crazy woman who shot a stranger in a hotel lobby. That suits me fine.” Her mother looks toward the door, as if she is considering calling for the guard.

  “Well, at least the police have it half-right,” Amanda says. “You’re crazy all right.”

  “Amanda …”

  “Will you please talk some sense into this lunatic?” Amanda jumps out of her chair and resumes her earlier pacing.

  “Mrs. Price,” Ben begins, sliding into Amanda’s now-vacant seat. “Do you mind telling us why you’re so adamant about not letting us mount any kind of defense?”

  Gwen smiles sweetly at her former son-in-law. “Because I’m guilty,” she says. “I shot a man. Not because of any mitigating circumstances. Not because I was abusing antidepressant drugs. Not because I feared for my life. But because I wanted to shoot him. Because he was a bad man who deserved to die. It’s as simple as that.”

  “There’s nothing simple about any of this,” Amanda says.

  “Only because you insist on complicating everything.”

  “I complicate everything?”

  “I know you mean well, sweetheart—”

  “Sweetheart?”

  “Amanda …”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “That’s probably true,” her mother admits, managing to sound genuinely contrite. “But I do know I shot a man in cold blood and I should go to prison. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling us,” Amanda says, swooping toward her mother, like an eagle chasing its prey.

  Her mother shakes her head. “I’ve told you everything.”

  “How long after your divorce until you met my father?” Amanda asks, trying a different tack.

  “About a year. Why? What does it matter?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About my father,” Amanda says, leaning against the wall of the small room, hoping it will keep her upright, prevent her from sliding to the floor.

  “I’m not sure I understand the point.”

  “Please,” Amanda says, unable to say more.

  Her mother sighs her acquiescence, as her lips tremble into a smile. “Your father was a wonderful man. I loved him very much.”

  “He knew you’d been married before?”

  “Of course.
I would never have kept that from him.”

  “Did he know about the money?”

  “No.”

  “So he didn’t know about Rod Tureck’s threats?”

  “He knew I was afraid of Rod.”

  “And where was I during all this?”

  “You? You were just a toddler. Not more than two years old.”

  “Is that when you started taking antidepressants?”

  Again her mother looks away, says nothing.

  “Mother?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why were you so depressed, Mother?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Suppose I tell you what I remember,” Amanda says, once again shifting gears. “I remember laughing.” She pauses, allowing the memory to unfold, the irony to sink in. “That’s the first memory I have. I’m actually laughing. Amazing, isn’t it? We’re playing, and you’re waving some sort of finger puppet in my face, tapping on my nose. And we’re laughing.” Amanda stops, wondering for an instant if this memory is real or something she only imagined. “And another time, I remember you holding my hands above my head and making me dance, calling me your little puppet. ‘Who’s my little puppet?’ you’d tease, and I’d laugh and say, ‘I am. I am.’ And we were happy. I know we were happy. And then suddenly, everything changed. And the only memories I have after that are of people crying. Why is that, Mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The hell you don’t.”

  “Amanda …,” Ben cautions.

  “What happened, Mother?”

  “What can I say?” Gwen Price asks. “The laughter stopped.”

  “Why did it stop?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Why did it stop?”

  Her mother sighs, looks toward Ben for help, but his gaze is focused on Amanda, and he says nothing. “I was on those damn pills,” she says after a long pause. “They turned me into a goddamned zombie. When I tried to go off them, it only made things worse. I alternated between stupor and rage. It was a nightmare.”

  “Why were you on antidepressants, Mother?”

  Another sigh. Another lengthy pause. “It was like you said. I’d been through a lot. I’d lost both my parents, divorced my husband …”