by Greg Herren
As his words washed over me, I realized I had been wrong, so wrong, so many times about so many different things, so many different times. What I thought was love for his dead husband—it must have been guilt.
“And you know, for the first year we were really happy—well, I should say that I was really happy that first year, and of course Timothy was happy—he had access to my fortune, and he loved being master of Spindrift.” He ran his fingers through his hair and refilled his whiskey glass. “Timothy was the one who got me into actual activism—before I would always just write a check—but he convinced me that, with his fame and my money, we should do everything we could to promote gay rights—that we were in a unique position to advance the cause. And so we started doing all the speeches, and talks, and…” He shook his head. “And by the time I found out what he really was…well, it was too late.”
“And what was he?” I leaned forward, almost afraid to hear the answer, but I knew I had to—otherwise there could never be any chance of healing.
Carlo’s face darkened. “A monster. He was a monster wrapped in the most tender and beautiful flesh.” He laughed harshly. “You know that stupid saying about beauty being skin deep? Timothy was the proof of its truth.” He rubbed his eyes. “He had no conscience of any kind. I don’t think he was capable of love, any more than a crocodile is. Nothing mattered to him except himself—he was utterly self-absorbed. It was when that Taylor Hudson came here to stay, at Timothy’s invitation.” He closed his eyes and took some deep breaths. “I never liked Hudson, but tolerated him for Timothy’s sake…they’d grown up together, were childhood friends…Hudson tried to seduce my sister…”
“Joyce?”
“She and Frank were having some problems…Hudson saw his opportunity and tried to take advantage of the situation…he saw an heiress with a rather inconvenient husband…I told Timothy I would not permit it, and Hudson was no longer welcome at Spindrift.”
He swallowed. “I’ll never forget that night as long as I live. He was in the red suite, sitting at his desk and writing thank you notes. He sat there with his back to me and didn’t say a word while I raged about Hudson…and when I finished, he sealed an envelope like I’d said nothing and turned around in his chair and laughed at me. He laughed at me…and then, he told me the truth of who he was…”
He proceeded to tell me of Timothy’s darker desires, the passions that drove him, and what he turned the studio into. “The studio I had built for him, so he could pursue his artistic desires, in privacy away from the hustle and bustle and noise of Spindrift, so he could focus on his work and not be interrupted, he’d turned it into a place for orgies and sexual games of the darkest and most debased kind. I was sickened, horrified and appalled. All I could think as he told me what he’d kept hidden from me the entire first year of our marriage, through the entire year or so we’d dated, was how badly I wanted to kill him. I could feel my hands on his throat as I choked his miserable life out of him, as his oh-so-beautiful body went limp in my hands. The entire time…when I’d drop him off after a date and got a chaste kiss on the cheek—he would go up to his apartment for a night of debauchery, or off to a sex club…and he laughed at me. He laughed at me. The entire time, the entire time I’d been falling in love with him, imagining our future together, the entire time we’d been married, he’d been laughing at me with his lovers, laughing at me…”
I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t respond to the litany of perversions and horrors he’d recited, the things that had gone on in the studio. They sickened me yet at the same time they made me curious; even as they disgusted me I couldn’t get the images out of my mind, the images of Timothy and that beautiful body, a lusty and lascivious look on his face as he played his games of sensuality and sexuality, satisfying his dark desires of dominance and humiliation, always trying to satisfy the lusts that drove him.
“He was smart, so much smarter than the fool he married,” Carlo went on, sipping his whiskey, and giving me a sad look. “I hadn’t made him sign a prenuptial agreement, of course, and in the crazy madness of love I put his name on the deed to Spindrift after we were married. He was smart, so very smart, and he manipulated me very neatly. I was a fool, Mouse, a total fool. If not for Spindrift. I would have done it, I would have gotten rid of him, divorced him no matter how bad it looked for us to split up, in spite of the damage it might have done to the marriage equality cause…”
The house, I thought, of course it was the house.
“When I told him I didn’t care, I wanted to divorce him, I would do it in New York and argue that the Massachusetts marriage law had no bearing on property in New York state, he laughed, oh how he laughed at me. I’ll never forget the contempt and loathing on his face. ‘You’ll never get Spindrift back from me,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll draw this out and make it as ugly and nasty as I possibly can. No prenuptial agreement, remember? By the time I’m finished I may not get a dime of the Romaniello money, but your name will be mud—and gay marriage? Not a chance—every time it comes up the haters will use us as an example of why we can’t be permitted to marry. It will be the ugliest divorce in history. Why not? What do I have to lose? And think about your companies, and how the value of their stock will drop every day some new horror comes out in the press about your private life…are you willing to be that humiliated in public, Carlo?’”
I felt sick to my stomach, hoping it would end. It was horrible, all so horrible, so much worse than I ever could have imagined. Who would have ever thought such evil lived behind that beautiful face? But it wasn’t over. Carlo kept talking.
And awful as it was, I had no choice, I had to listen to it all.
“We finally came to an arrangement—only on rare occasions would we ever be in the same residence at the same time. I bought the penthouse in New York—I’d been wanting to get a residence in the city for years anyway—and we negotiated a compromise about special events and things we’d need to appear at as a couple. He promised he would be discreet—there would be no whispers or talk or hints in the tabloids about his activity, and he even put it into writing that should any scandal ever be attached to his name, he would voluntarily give me a divorce, would take no money, and would surrender any claim to Spindrift. Oh, and I also had to fund his underwear company—but if it failed, it failed—I insisted on that—there would be no more money after my initial investment.” He shook his head. “But of course it was a huge success. Everywhere, it seemed, that I would turn, there he was. Oh, he kept his word, of course—not a whisper of scandal, ever. We kept pretending we were happily married, and once the fund-raiser or the event was over, we went our separate ways. It galled me. I hated him so much, Mouse, you have no idea how much I hated him. We would stand there, at HRC dinners, posing for the cameras and smiling, and all I could think about was wanting to kill him, wishing he were dead. I thought about killing myself, I can’t tell you how many times I thought about suicide, the times I took the Rhiannon out to sea and thought how easy it would be, to tie myself to a weight and jump overboard…”
“Why didn’t you just—” I stopped myself.
“What?”
“Never mind, go on.” Why didn’t you just hire a private detective to follow him, take photos of him doing the unspeakable things he was doing, and threaten to leak them to the tabloids? Use them to get him to leave once and for all? was what I was going to say. But there was no point in saying anything—it was far too late for anything but guilt and recriminations—and even those feelings were pointless.
“The night it happened—well, no one was expecting me out here. I was in the city, and he called me around noon, said he needed to talk to me, in person, and could I come back out to the house? I didn’t like the way his voice sounded—I’d never heard him that way before. He sounded desperate, almost frightened yet still so smug and triumphant. Much as I didn’t want to, I drove out here. When I arrived the house was empty—all the servants were gone. I went up to his rooms, but he wasn’t there
. I looked out the window and I saw him walking out to the studio.
“So I followed him. I don’t know what I was thinking, but with every step I took out there, all seven years of our sham marriage replayed in my mind, all the times I had to pretend to love him, all the things I’d had to do to keep the lie alive, and all the money of mine he’d spent. Of course, the underwear company was making him a lot of money and so he didn’t use much of mine anymore, but I’d paid for that company. I remember asking myself as I walked out there, am I going to spend the rest of my life paying for him? There had to be a way—there had to be a way out somehow. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“He was looking at his prints when I got there, and stood in the door. He smiled at me, and I couldn’t help myself. I asked him, you’ve got the underwear company now, so why can’t we get a divorce? I promised him as much money as he wanted, within reason of course, and all he did was laugh.
“‘But you won’t give me Spindrift, will you?’ he said, still laughing at me. ‘That’s all I really want. The first time I saw it, I knew I would do whatever I had to marry you and make it my home. I fell in love with the house, not with you. I never loved you, Carlo, but you already knew that, didn’t you?’
“‘Why am I here? I asked him. Get to the point. I need to get back to the city.’
“‘I want the house, Carlo,’ he told me. ‘We stayed married long enough—no one will think anything of it now if we end this mistake. But I want the house.’ He laughed at me when I told him I would never let him have Spindrift. He told me he didn’t care about the money—he had enough of his own now…but he wouldn’t have any problem with airing everything, accusing me of physical and mental cruelty…
“I snapped, Mouse. And honestly, I don’t know what happened in the next five minutes, it all happened so quickly…one minute he was laughing at me, the next I was standing there, holding the desk lamp, and he was lying on the floor, his skull smashed. I’d hit him with the lamp, and kept hitting him until the lamp was battered and he was lying on the floor dead. I didn’t know what to do. And then I remembered…I remembered that no one was at the house, no one knew I was here. So I rolled him up in a sheet and carried his body down the dock to the Rhiannon, and took him out to sea. I tied some weights to him and rolled his body overboard. I threw the lamp overboard as well, and weighted the sheet and got rid of it as well. And then I headed back here. I went up to his room and got his robe and a beach towel and the little bag he always took with him down there, and made it look like he’d gone for a swim and hadn’t come back. I went into the studio and cleaned up the blood with bleach. And then, when everything was the way I thought it should look, I drove back into the city. That was a horrible night, let me tell you. It was the next morning that Carson called and told me what they’d found down on the beach, and that he’d already alerted the Coast Guard. I rushed back out here…and you know the rest.” He buried his face in his hands. “A week later, that body washed ashore at Montauk. I decided to identify it as Timothy—the face—the fish had been at it, and he was in good shape and wearing swim trunks…so, God help me, I said it was Timothy. And now…now they’ve found his actual body. And they know he was murdered—his skull… And I’m going to go to jail.”
I sat there for a moment, not saying anything.
He was staring at me, waiting for me to say something. I could tell by the look on his face he was expecting me to reject him, to recoil from him in horror, to get up and run.
The man I loved, the man I married, was a murderer.
But I felt strangely calm.
And finally, I looked him right in the eyes and said, “But no one saw you, right? No one knew you were here that night, right?”
He gave me an odd look. “Yes.”
I exhaled. “And they didn’t find the lamp—and even if they did, it’s been in the water so long they’d never be able to lift prints from it. So the only thing the police know for sure is that Timothy was actually murdered and you incorrectly identified the wrong body.” I shrugged. “That’s not even enough evidence for an arrest—even if you weren’t an incredibly wealthy and powerful man.”
He stared at me, his face shocked, like he couldn’t believe what I was saying. “What are you saying, Mouse?” he asked, his voice strangely quiet and confused.
“I’m telling you any decent lawyer would get any charges dismissed on such flimsy evidence.” I shook my head and laughed harshly. “Haven’t you ever read Maureen Drury’s articles in Street Talk magazine? There’s a different justice for the rich than there is for everyone else, Carlo. And you certainly can afford the best criminal attorneys in the country. All you did was wrongly identify a body. And who could blame you, under the circumstances?” I stood up. My hands were shaking, so I shoved them in my pants pocket. I couldn’t believe my voice wasn’t shaking. “You were traumatized by the unexpected death of your husband. The body’d been in the water for a week…any lawyer could make a jury understand you made a mistake, you weren’t in your right mind.”
He just kept staring at me as I talked, his mouth open, and when I finished, his expression changed to one I’d never seen before from him—wonder. “You—you don’t hate me, Mouse?”
“Hate you?” I couldn’t help it—I started laughing and within seconds it turned into sobbing, tears running down my face, my nose running. I wiped feverishly at my face with both hands as I managed to choke out, “Oh, Carlo—all this time—it’s just—I thought you still loved him, that you were always comparing me to him…but all this time…”
“Oh, my poor Mouse.” He crossed the room in a few strides and swept me up into his arms, kissing my neck and holding me so tightly I could barely breathe—but I didn’t mind, I didn’t want him to ever let me go. “I love you so much. Almost from the moment I saw you in that café—all I could do was think about you, and how kind you were, and how you were everything Timothy wasn’t. I thought, after all the guilt and nightmares since the night I—I killed him, I thought, maybe he can make me forget, maybe I can be happy again.” He was shaking, and I realized he was crying. I started stroking his head. “And I thought for sure—I thought for sure once you knew the truth, you’d hate me.”
“I could never hate you, Carlo,” I whispered, and I knew it was true. Now that I knew for sure that he loved me, I knew I would do anything I could to protect him. “I love you.”
“And when I saw you last night—wearing something he would have worn—it was so horrifying—I thought—I thought you were turning into him, if you can believe that. That’s—that’s why I was so upset.”
I bit my lip and blinked my eyes to clear the tears that were welling up in them. “We can be happy, my darling, we can start over—we can be like we were back in Miami, would you like that?” I whispered. “We just have to get through this somehow.”
He nodded, and kissed me again. “I do love you, Mouse.”
As he held on to me, I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been for so long. What I’d mistaken for obsessive love had been guilt, Carlo punishing himself. He’d kept Timothy’s rooms and studio and office the way they’d always been, preserved like a shrine, as a reminder to himself of what he’d done.
And now, now it was time to exorcise Timothy’s ghost and his malevolent presence from Spindrift once and for all.
We sat down together on the couch and talked for what seemed like hours, in low voices so no one could hear us. We talked about our future and what we had to do to make sure that Timothy couldn’t hurt us any longer.
And when the sheriff arrived, we were ready for him.
Sheriff Tate was an older man, either in his late fifties or early sixties. His hairline was receding, and what was left was iron gray. His eyes were a dark brown, and his face was lined. His teeth were yellowed from nicotine, and he smelled slightly of cigarette smoke. He was still in pretty decent shape, maybe carrying some extra weight around the middle. He was wearing his brown uniform and was clearly uncomfortable.
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He sat down in a chair on the other side of a coffee table from where we sat on the couch. We rose and shook hands, and Carlo offered him coffee or something to drink.
“No thank you, gentlemen,” he said, pulling out a small spiral notebook out of a pocket as he sat down. “I don’t want to take up too much of your time.” He took a deep breath. “A commercial fisherman from over in East Patchogue was doing some net fishing, and his net caught on something. He had to get help to haul it up, and of course, when he and his men got the net up, there was the, um, corpse. They immediately radioed the Coast Guard, and long and short of it, the body was brought in on Wednesday. There was nothing on it to identify it—all that was really left was the skeleton, and some rusted weights that had been tied to the feet—that’s why it was so hard for the net to come up, the weights were still chained to the ankles. The skull had been cracked—and the coroner pretty much determined that was the cause of death. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Romaniello, everyone pretty much thought it was a mob hit of some sort. So, they did some dental impressions…and it took a few days for the identification to come back—it just came back this morning and they called me.” He swallowed. “You can imagine, Mr. Romaniello, how horrified I was to hear that it was positively Mr. Burke’s body.”