by D. W. Buffa
“He’s going to be out of town on Wednesday. They want to reset it for Tuesday the following week at two o’clock. Your schedule is clear.”
“Did you tell them my schedule was clear?”
“No, I said I’d have to check with you.”
“Good. Call them back. Tell Pritchard’s clerk that I don’t have anything open for weeks; tell them that this damn thing has been reset twice before; tell them that the defendant has a right to have his motion heard; and then tell them that if the judge wanted to have Wednesdays off, he should have become a goddamn doctor!”
Nothing I did, nothing I said, ever made the slightest impression on her. “Right,” she drawled, making a note to call the clerk and ask very politely whether there might be some way to fit it in anytime at all next week.
“What else do you have?” I asked, gazing out the window.
The telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” Helen said as she got to her feet.
“Take it here,” I said, handing the receiver to her as I pressed the flashing light on the console.
The telephone pressed to her ear, the fingers of her other hand fidgeted with the curled cord. “Law offices of Joseph Antonelli,”
she announced in a voice that managed to be both friendly and pressed for time. “I’m afraid Mr. Antonelli is in conference and can’t be disturbed.” It was the standard all-purpose lie, told so often she could have passed a polygraph each time she told it.
Glancing through the stack of messages she had placed on the desk in front of me, I did not notice at first when she began to scribble on a scrap of paper.
“Yes, I understand,” she said. “Is there any message you’d care to leave?” Reaching across, she waved the paper under my nose.
“Could you hold for just a moment?”
I read the name she had written down. It took me a moment before I was certain who she was. Helen handed me the phone and, shutting the door behind her, left me alone. I sat straight up and plopped both elbows on the desk.
“This is Joseph Antonelli,” I said with all the formality I could summon. “What can I do for you?”
My head moved back and forth with the rhythm of what I heard. “Yes,” I replied, “I’d be glad to do that. Six o’clock would be fine.”
I looked around until I found a pen. “Would you give me that again. Yes, I know where it is,” I said as I wrote down the address. “I’ll see you at six. Thank you for calling, Mrs. Jeffries.”
I do not know why I agreed to see her. Perhaps it was nothing more than the desire to see for myself how she lived and what she was really like. Perhaps it was something else, an instinct that told me there was more to her husband’s death than I knew.
The address she had given me was on the West Side, just minutes from downtown, a tall apartment building constructed sometime before the Second World War. It was something of a landmark and one of the city’s most expensive places to live.
A heavyset man with a pockmarked face and slow-moving eyes was sitting behind a small wooden desk just inside the high-ceilinged lobby. I waited while he lifted a black telephone receiver that looked like it had been in use since the day the building opened and announced, “A Mr. Antonelli is here.” He nodded silently and then hung up. “Sixteenth floor.” He pointed a stubby finger across the gray marble floor to the walnut-paneled wall on the other side. “The elevator is just around the corner.”
There was only one elevator. I pushed the tarnished brass button and heard a buzzer echo high above. The elevator rattled ponderously down the shaft and thudded to a stop. The door creaked open and an old man in a coat that hung off his hollow shoulders and a dress shirt two sizes too large for his shriveled throat stood with his pale white hand on the lever. “Floor?” he gasped. My hands folded in front of me, I leaned against the back of the mirrored, gold-leaf compartment. With a teeth-clenching groan, the ancient elevator began a tedious ascent to the top floor.
Two doors faced each other across the landing. On the wall opposite the elevator, a large blue vase filled with fresh-cut yellow chrysanthemums stood on a narrow, granite-topped table in front of a gilt-edged mirror. The flowers looked too perfect, and I touched one of them to make certain they were real. I started to pull the piece of paper out of my pocket to check the apartment number when the door to 16A swung open.
I had seen her at a distance at the dinner, and I had seen her picture in the newspapers after Jeffries’s murder, but the way she looked now reminded me more of the way I remembered her when she was still a young woman married to her first husband.
She was wearing black tights, a black turtleneck sweater that clung to her ribs and fell halfway down to her knees, and a pair of unremarkable flat shoes. Her shiny brown hair was pulled back around her head and tied in a ponytail.
She extended her hand, stiff-armed, straight out from her shoulder. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Antonelli.” Her voice seemed forced and artificial. As soon as we had shaken hands, she stepped away from the door. “Please come in.”
The apartment was an oriental masterpiece. Hand-knotted rugs, blood red and midnight blue, littered the hardwood floor. Teak and mahogany cabinets, filled with delicate porcelain vases, lined the walls. In the corner of the large living room, a five-foot ivory sculpture of a Mandarin clasped in its tapered fingers a parch-ment scroll.
She gestured toward a light blue sofa opposite the window.
“Can I get you something?” she asked as she removed the stopper from a crystal glass decanter that, along with several others, stood on a silver tray on the coffee table.
“No, nothing, thank you.” Whatever she was drinking, the only thing she mixed it with was a little ice.
She sat down, and a moment later sprang back to her feet and began tapping her fingers on the top of a bamboo chair. She was tall, and quite thin, but she had fairly wide shoulders and extremely long fingers with large, misshapen knuckles. They were the hands you would expect to see on a migrant worker, a woman who was bent over all day long in the fields, pulling things out of the ground, or standing on her tiptoes in an orchard, picking fruit out of the trees. They were constantly in motion, closing, opening, grabbing, letting go, or, as she was doing now, drumming them in quick bursts with staccatolike speed, before they suddenly stopped what they were doing and started doing something else.
Staring straight ahead, her fingers still tapping on the hard surface of the chair, she took a quick gulp of whatever she was drinking and then sat down again.
“Are you sure I can’t get you something?” she asked. She held the drink in both hands, while her wrists rested on her knees, which were pressed tight together. Her eyes jumped from side to side and then settled on the squat, black-lacquered Chinese coffee table.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly, looking up. “Did I ask you if you wanted anything?”
“Nothing, thank you.” Leaning forward, I began to draw an invisible figure on the table’s hard gleaming surface. “I was very sorry about what happened to your husband, Mrs. Jeffries,” I began tentatively. “If there’s anything I can do …”
Her eyes flashed with the kind of contempt lavished on fools.
“Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”
Pressing her lips together until they lost what little color they had, she leaped to her feet, and then, after she took another drink, began to walk up and down the room.
“What I want to know is why you’re doing this. I know you hated my husband. And yes, I remember you, Mr. Antonelli, from years ago, when I was married to Elliott and he first joined your firm. I can understand why you might feel sorry for him, locked up the way he is. But Elliott is crazy. He’s insane. Why you would help him try to torment me, after what I’ve had to go through, is really quite beyond me, Mr. Antonelli, and I think you owe me an explanation.”
I started to get up. “Perhaps I should go. I really don’t know what to say.”
She searched my eyes and then low
ered her gaze. “No, don’t go,” she said after she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I jumped to conclusions.”
She sat down again and, though her glass was not even half empty, reached for the decanter. When she finished filling the glass, she looked up at me. “Do you know what was in that letter you sent me?”
“I have no idea what was in it,” I answered. “I sent it to you for the reasons I stated in the cover note I sent with it.”
She began to drum her fingers on the edge of the coffee table, but slowly, easily, without any of the rigid, metallic abruptness of before.
“You really don’t know, then?”
“All I know is that I went to see him. I had been meaning to do it for a long time, years, really, ever since that day …”
“When he tried to kill you.”
“I don’t think he wanted to kill me at all, Mrs. Jeffries. If I hadn’t tried to wrestle the gun away from him, I don’t think he would have pulled the trigger.”
With a shrewd, cold-eyed glance, she assured me I was wrong.
“He would have killed you and never given it a second thought.
I knew Elliott. He was crazy, Mr. Antonelli,” she said, drumming her fingers faster. “After he had the breakdown, after what he did in court that day, he blamed everything on you. It was an obsession with him. He thought you were trying to destroy him. He thought—”
“I was sleeping with his wife.”
The drumming stopped. She raised her chin. “I told you. He had become completely paranoid. You’re lucky you’re alive.”
“Perhaps. But tell me, why would he have thought you were having an affair with me? Why would he have thought you were having an affair at all?”
Her long, crooked fingers stirred back into motion, slowly, noiselessly. “Things were never very good with us, Mr. Antonelli.
Elliott was always difficult, demanding. He was under enormous pressure. He always thought he had something to prove because he had not gone to one of the best schools. He blamed me for that. He was always telling me how much easier things would have been for him if he didn’t have a wife and children slowing him down.”
I did not believe her. “He worshipped those kids, and I must tell you, I always had the impression that he worshipped you as well.”
“Why? Because he had my photograph in his office and every so often he’d bring the kids with him when he went into work on a Saturday or a Sunday? It was about the only time they ever saw him.” A look of disdain passed over her face. “Don’t misun-derstand me. I’m not saying Elliott didn’t love the children. I think he even loved me—for a while. But whenever things didn’t go quite right—and for Elliott everything always had to be exactly right—he had to blame it on someone else.”
She still had not answered my question. “But why did he think you were having an affair with me?”
She stared hard at me for a mornent, and then, reaching for her glass, got back on her feet and began prowling the room. She seemed to grow more agitated with each step she took. The ice was banging against the glass and when the clear gold liquid sloshed over the top and dripped onto her hand, she seemed not to notice.
“Have you ever known anyone who went crazy, Mr. Antonelli?
Have you ever lived with anyone who was completely—and I mean completely—irrational?”
She tried to calm herself. Instead of pacing back and forth, she leaned against the chair, and when that did not help, she stood in the middle of the room, one foot crossed over the other, then, a moment later, one turned out to the side.
“The worst part is trying to hang on to your own sanity. What happened that day in court—when they had to bring him home—
had been building for months. He had already started to talk about conspiracies. He kept telling me how each seemingly innocent thing that happened was really a part of it. Do you know what is really crazy? How much of it makes sense. Elliott would say to me: ‘Just for the moment, assume I’m right.’ He was always asking me to do that. He would wear me down. Then I’d listen to him, and, if you assumed he was right, that there was a conspiracy against him, then everything he said was perfectly logical. A woman pushing her grocery cart behind him when he stopped on his way home to pick up a loaf of bread was following him; a camera he noticed on the back seat of a parked car was put there on purpose to let him know he was under surveil-lance. Everything fit, because, once you agreed that there really was a conspiracy, anything that happened could be explained as being a part of it, and, more importantly, became one more thing that proved he was right.”
With a pensive expression, she sipped on her drink, as she thought about what had happened, or what she wanted me to think had happened.
“I wouldn’t do it,” she said as she looked at me again. “I wouldn’t assume—not even for just a moment—that he was right, that there was this terrible conspiracy against him. I was afraid that if I did that he would never get better and I might go insane right along with him. Because, you see, if I had said yes, it makes perfect sense, it all ties together, then I would not have any ground left to stand on, no way to tell what was real and what was not. Insanity is insidious, Mr. Antonelli. It invites you in, and then it closes the door behind you, and after a while your eyes adjust to the darkness and then you don’t think it’s dark anymore.”
She moved next to the window and stared out across the flickering lights of the city and the great flowing river, toward the mountain where the snow glowed blue and purple and gold as the sun slipped away into the night.
“My refusal was seen as a betrayal, and that betrayal, in Elliott’s diseased mind, could only mean that I was part of the conspiracy as well. Not just part of it, either. No, I was the one who had started it all.”
She turned around, just far enough to see me. There was a sense of weariness about her, as if nothing much mattered anymore, a sense that everything that was going to happen in her life had now taken place.
“I didn’t know then how sick he really was. It all seemed like a bad dream, like something that wasn’t really happening. Sometimes when I went to bed I could almost convince myself that when I woke up in the morning everything would be just the way it had been before. Other times I thought he was having a bad dream, and if I just grabbed him and shook him as hard as I could, he’d wake up and be normal again. I just could not believe it was really happening.”
She sat in the bamboo chair and put the glass down on the table. Folding her arms together, she leaned back, stretched out her legs, and crossed one ankle over the other.
“You could almost hear a clicking noise when he put each piece of the conspiracy together. Once he decided that I was the one who had started it, there had to be a reason. And of course there could be only one reason: There had to be another man.”
Her voice was quiet, controlled, as if she were telling a story about someone else.
“You cannot imagine the depths of his anger and hatred. He was screaming at me like I had never heard anyone scream before. I started screaming back. It was self-defense, that’s the only way I can explain it. He was accusing me of everything imaginable, terrible things, obscene things, and I was screaming back, taunting him with everything he said about me, telling him it was all true, laughing about it. He was hurting me, worse than I’d ever been hurt before, and at that moment I was every bit as crazy as he was. And that’s when I said it, that’s when I told him, that, yes, of course he was right, I was out to destroy him, I had done everything he said I had done, I was having an affair, I was sleeping with another man, I was sleeping with his great good friend, Joseph Antonelli.”
“But why?” I asked, astonished at what she had done.
“Because I wanted to hurt him back. He idolized you. He wanted to be just like you. And because I never thought he’d believe it.
I thought it would show him how insane it all was, that it was all in his mind, and that he needed help. But instead it just convinced him he was right.”
W
atching her tell me with apparent sincerity a story that ex-onerated her of any blame for what had happened to her first husband, I wondered whether it was the truth or whether, after years of subtle reinterpretation, she had gradually come to believe it had happened just the way she said it had. If she was a woman who was perfectly willing to lie, she was also a woman who would never admit, not even, or perhaps especially, to herself, that she was a liar.
“You have no idea how awful I felt when Elliott tried to kill you. I kept telling him it wasn’t true. I had not been having an affair. I didn’t even know you. Despite everything that had happened up till then, I never thought he was capable of anything like that.”
She looked at me with eyes searching for sympathy. If I had never known Elliott, or perhaps if I had never known Calvin Jeffries, I might have given it.
“Elliott still thinks you were having an affair, but with Judge Jeffries.”
Her eyes turned cold. “Did you think I didn’t know that? As soon as Calvin and I were married, Elliott started sending letters, weird, scary letters, accusing me of it and threatening to get even.
After a while I started sending them back, unopened. That’s why he asked you to deliver that letter. It wasn’t because he didn’t have the address. It was because he knew I wouldn’t open it, and because he knew I’d never let the children read it.” She paused, her lips trembling. Slowly and methodically she began to beat her fingers on the arm of the chair. “Do you know what he wrote?
What he wanted the children to read? ‘Your mother is a whore, and now you’re orphans twice.’ That’s what he wrote, Mr. Antonelli. That’s the sort of thing he wants to tell his children.
That’s the reason I never allowed them to see him. That’s the reason why I sent them away to private school: So he wouldn’t have any way of finding them.”
“So it isn’t true?” I asked as I got to my feet. “You weren’t having an affair with him?”
“Of course not,” she said as she walked me to the door. “Calvin was like a father to me. He treated Elliott like a son. He tried to help him every way he could. When Elliott got sick, Calvin did everything he could. He knew what it was like for me. He had gone through something of the same thing with his wife. I don’t know what I would have done without him. If it hadn’t been for him, Elliott would have gone to prison for trying to kill you. Calvin made sure he was sent to the state hospital where he could get help.”