Crimes of Passion

by Toni Anderson

  She braced her shoulders as she gazed at him in the dimly lighted hall. “Goodnight,” she said softly.

  “Goodnight,” he answered.

  She closed the door with slow care. It was a long time before she heard his footsteps retreating down the hall.

  Her mind was curiously blank, as if in self-protection, to keep her from the pain of examining the things she and Cosmo’s son had just said and done and what it might mean.

  Her bedroom suddenly seemed like a refuge. She moved deeper inside. Somewhere the central air came on, and she shivered a little in the sudden draft of cool air from the vents.

  There was no light on in the room, but she wanted none, needed none. Beyond the window the lightning flickered, then flared up again as if the storm was not quite done after all. As she stood there in the dark, she could hear the sweeping clatter of the wave of returning rain. Wrapping her arms around her and rubbing her forearms with her hands, she moved to the window to stare out.

  This storm came from a different direction from the first and was more violent. It swept over Bonne Vie, waving the heavy arms of the oaks, speckling the water of the swimming pool, drenching the lawns. There was no reason to think she heard the sound of the sea and the clatter of the palms in its fury, no need to make of it a reminder of desire past and present.

  Tonight she and Noel had met as lovers tempered by time and circumstances, two people able to accept the moment and make it theirs without expecting it to be more than it was, more than it could possibly be. That was it; that was all there was to it.

  She had told him she loved him, but he had not spoken words of love in return.

  He had never said he loved her that day on the island, either. He had made love to her, then he had gone away and stayed away for years.

  Desire, that was what lay between them. Noel had never made a secret of the fact that he wanted her. In the same way, she had always been drawn to him. Mutual desire, that was the attraction, the binding force between them. It had been there when they were young and had been revived now.

  It was a powerful thing, desire. If combined with love, it could be used to create something of lasting worth; without love, it could become a weapon of destruction.

  Why had Noel turned to her at the folly? Why had he taken her into his arms? Why?

  Why had she responded, if it came to that? Oh, she could tell herself that it had been reaction to her brush with death and Noel’s rescue or insist that desire was excuse enough in itself. Still the question remained.

  This wouldn’t do. She required a distraction, a calm voice far removed from the storm outside and the turmoil that had been unleashed inside her. She needed to forget the charge Constance had made. Incest was such an ugly word. It hardly applied to her and Noel, not really, and yet the idea of it disturbed her profoundly. The reason was not hard to find. It was the same word she had been hearing over and over in her mind as she thought of Erin with Josh Gallant.

  She had told him she loved him.

  She couldn’t think about it anymore, couldn’t bear it. There must be something else, someone else who could divert her thoughts and help her regain her equilibrium.

  In Colorado it was an hour earlier, not at all late. She moved to the table beside her bed and picked up the phone. In the light from the receiver, she pressed the buttons. The phone began to ring.

  “Hello,” Dante said.

  Before Riva could speak, a background noise came, like the sliding of a glass door, followed by a woman’s voice. “Darling, come out and see. It’s the most spectacular afterglow from the sunset on the—Oh, excuse me.”

  Riva recognized that voice. She was not sure she would have if Constance had not mentioned meeting Dante and Anne Gallant. She had not, after all, heard Edison’s wife speak often or at length.

  She reached in haste to depress the button that would break the connection. For long moments afterward, she stood holding the receiver, staring at nothing.

  NINETEEN

  THE BEECHCRAFT BONANZA WAS A GOOD PLANE, Edison assured himself as it pitched and swung in the gray soup of clouds, but it wasn’t built for flying through a hurricane. Maybe he should have paid more attention to the weather reports. But, hell, he’d had it up to here with waiting around, listening to the newspaper people hem and haw, being put off about this damned endorsement. The bastards didn’t know diddley about politics, couldn’t find their own asses in the dark with both hands, if the truth were known. Why the hell he had to depend on such sanctimonious dimwits to get elected he’d never understand. So there had been an irregularity here and there; anybody with an ounce of savvy knew politicians had to make accommodations. That was how the game was played. The trick was to get the most while giving the least.

  Bringing Josh with him had been a master stroke. It paid to have a clean-cut college kid on his side, one who could stand flat-footed and boil with outrage at the innuendos about his father and, what’s more, mean every word. They had made brownie points there, he thought; he should probably thank Riva for putting the idea in his head. Though thanking her wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. It had been more than two whole days and nights since he’d had a piece. He didn’t like going without that long.

  He’d thought about fixing Josh and himself up the night before, making a call to a woman he knew who could supply clean girls. It hadn’t seemed too smart on second thought. Josh took after his mother, had weird ideas about fidelity and all that crap, and that fine outrage of his son’s might not have been so ready next time. Anyway, the kid was done in, sound asleep back there, from a Saturday-night dinner with the guys from headquarters that had included a couple of glasses of wine, then a few beers at the joints on the Bossier Strip. It was all he could do to drag the boy out of bed this morning for the flight home. What would he have been like if he’d gone a round or two with a woman on top of it?

  This was like flying into a wall of water, with small rivers streaming past on the side windows while lightning crackled in all directions. He was a damn good pilot, but conditions like this made him nervous. Instrument landings made him nervous, too; he hated letting any damned machine take over. Still, he’d be lucky if he got a glimpse of runway lights before touching down in this mess. He reached out to pick up the mike. He’d better let somebody know what he had in mind.

  The downward glide of the approach was rough. The slope felt steep, but with the bouncing around it was hard to tell. Anyway, it always felt that way to him. Regardless, he had to fight an impulse to take over, to pull the nose up. The clouds whipped past, gray, white, and gray again. Wheels down. Where the hell was the runway?

  Lower and lower. The dull roar of the engine rose and fell as it struggled. His ears rang with its high-pitched whine. There was a jolt that felt as if it loosened every tooth in his head. He was gritting his teeth, he discovered, and consciously relaxed his jaw. A few minutes more. Just a few minutes. He strained his eyes, reached to wipe at the windshield with the backs of his fingers as if he could remove the cottony haze. It didn’t help. Any second now, any second.

  Breakthrough!

  Holy shit! Too low, too low! The runway was three goddamned miles away. Coming in short. Too short!

  He slapped the automatic pilot off, grabbed the wheel. The engine roared, straining, straining. Static on the radio, telling him something he damned well already knew. Josh awake, yelling. Treetops, every leaf plain and wet. Swampland zipping underneath. Airport fence ahead, low enough. He was going to make it.

  He didn’t see the cypress looming up on the right, taller than the rest. The wing tip scraped the treetop, caught, released. Tipping. Losing it. Runway lights like a pin-wheel. Spinning over the fence. A wing scraping. The spar going, rending, snapping with a booming thud. Metal sheathing crackling like foil on a gum wrapper. Electrical sparks. God! Struts shrieking along the concrete, grinding, dragging, slowing. The crumpled plane slewed sideways, spun around. Stopped.

  Edison sat for long seconds with his ha
nds clenched on the wheel. His seat was cocked up so that all he could see was the gray sky. He tasted blood, knew he had bitten through his lip. But he was alive. Alive. Somewhere he heard the hiss of escaping air and settling metal. He smelled fuel and fluids of different kinds. He was dizzy and his head ached. But he was alive, by damn. And he hadn’t shit in his pants, either, not quite. His luck still held, the famous Gallant luck.

  Josh.

  He tore at his seat belt, yanked it free, fell out of his seat. He had to stand on the side wall to climb back toward the passenger seats. The fuselage was caved in. Josh was lying half under the broken spar, head to the side, unconscious. Running at an angle along the bulkhead was a red trail of blood.

  It was a nightmare of flashing lights and shouted orders, of smothering chemical foam and hands dragging at him, pulling at him while he screamed and cursed and begged for somebody to get his son out of there. They raced up with a truck carrying acetylene cutting torches. Finally Josh came out on a stretcher. The spar had caught his arm, half severing it. The bleeding had been checked, but he was in shock. It would be touch and go. Edison clamped his fingers on his son’s cold hand, holding it until the last minute, until they shut the ambulance doors.

  A policeman asked for his name and he stared at the man as if he were crazy. Why the hell should he give him his name?

  God, it would be in all of the papers by dark. He would look like an incompetent idiot. He could hear the punsters now. If Candidate Gallant couldn’t keep his plane in the air, how could he expect to make a state fly? How, if he was so inept a pilot? He wasn’t! Something had gone wrong in that plane. Something had gone too damn wrong.

  Right now, however, it paid to be Congressman Gallant. There would be a police escort to the hospital and a place for him in the front seat beside the driver. Before the patrol car door closed on him, he turned to an airport official. “Call my wife,” he said. “Royal Orleans Hotel. Tell her to meet us at the hospital.”

  Five hours later, Josh was out of surgery and in intensive care. He was stable, barely. The team of doctors at Oshner’s Hospital thought they had been able to save the arm, but it would be forty-eight hours at least, maybe longer, before they could be sure. There was nothing the congressman could do to help matters. He might as well go home, get some rest; he looked as if he could use it.

  Edison didn’t want to rest. He wanted to know where the hell Anne was, why she hadn’t answered at the hotel. He wanted to know what had happened to his plane and who was responsible. He didn’t want any damned pills for his nerves. He wanted answers. And answers were what he was going to get.

  The hotel room was empty. Anne’s clothes hung in the closet, but there were one or two things, a pair of slacks and a favorite sweater, that were missing. Also missing was her small overnight case.

  He called their house in Alexandria on the chance that she had gone home. It was not the first time he had tried; after she failed to show up at the hospital and he was told she could not be reached at the Royal Orleans, he had called once or twice with no answer. Still no answer. It was late Sunday afternoon. The house was empty since the maid didn’t come in on the weekends.

  Edison slammed down the receiver on the tenth ring. He thought of calling some of Anne’s family but decided against it. He didn’t want to start a furor if she had simply gone to visit friends. More than that, he had no stomach for repeating the whole rigmarole of the plane crash with Josh’s grandmother or aunts or being forced to listen to their exclamations and intimations that it was all his fault. Let Anne talk to them. As for where his wife was, there must be some simple explanation. There had damned sure better be one.

  He needed a drink. He moved to the credenza and poured a stiff jolt of Jack Daniel’s and swallowed half of it. Holding the glass, he returned to the phone. He positioned a hotel notepad where he could read the numbers written there and punch them out at the same time. When the phone at the airport was answered, he asked for a man he knew in the maintenance department. Edison had called him earlier also. Now he got the report he had asked for before. The automatic pilot of the Beechcraft Bonanza had been out of kilter, just as he thought. Someone had tampered with it.

  Someone had tried to kill him. Few pilots walked away from the kind of crash he had survived. The plane usually went in on its nose, taking out the pilot first. That he was alive and virtually unscathed was a sign of his luck, his incredible, phenomenal luck. He had always been lucky, while Josh, dammit, had nearly bought it. Josh, his only son. When he found out who had done this thing, he would see to it that they would be glad to die.

  There came the sound of a key in the lock. He set his glass down. By the time the door swung open, he was beside it, slamming it shut behind his wife. She whirled to face him, her eyes wide but wary.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. He put his hands on his hips as he waited for an answer.

  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “Oh, no, nothing much. Only your husband’s plane crash-landed and your son had to be rushed to the hospital, and you weren’t here.”

  “Josh? What happened to him? Is he—How is he?”

  “I asked you a question first,” he said in grim satisfaction for the panicky concern he saw in her face.

  “What? You mean-”

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “I—oh, I went home.” She grabbed his arm. “Damn you, Edison, tell me!”

  He shook her off. “Sure you went home. I called and you weren’t there. Besides, if you went home, why didn’t you take that piece of bronze junk you bought for the garden room?”

  “If you called, you must have just missed me; I left early, had lunch on the way. I didn’t think there was any reason to rush. As for the cherub, I meant to take it but forgot. Now, Edison, please!”

  “Your son nearly had his shoulder sliced off. He’s in intensive care, condition guarded. He may lose his arm.”

  The color left her face. She sat down suddenly on the nearest chair, dropping her purse and her overnight bag beside it. Her eyes never leaving his, she said, “You bastard. You knew that, and yet you kept it from me long enough to pry information out of me.”

  “What the hell? I found out what I wanted to know, and it doesn’t make any difference to Josh.”

  She surged to her feet. “It makes a difference to me!”

  “Why? You were off having yourself a good time when he was hurt, weren’t there for him when he needed you. What does a few minutes here and there matter?”

  “Who is with him now?”

  “Nobody. He’s there alone because his mother—”

  “He has a father, too! Why aren’t you there? What are you doing here getting drunk?”

  “I’m having a drink because I needed one. I’m here because I wanted to know where the hell you were.”

  “What does that matter? Josh needs someone there!”

  “Yeah, you. You’re his mother.”

  “I should have known you’d twist it around for your convenience. You never understand any point of view except your own. You’re never interested in anybody’s wants and needs except your own.”

  “Well, pardon me! I was almost killed this afternoon. It makes a man touchy.”

  “You’re always touchy, or worse, but I’ll never forgive you for what you just did.”

  He snorted and moved to pick up his drink, taking a swallow. “There’s nothing wrong with a man finding out what his wife’s been up to.”

  Anne stared at him for long moments. Abruptly she made a sound that might have been an echo of his contemptuous laugh through his nose. “The fact is, you haven’t found out anything. I wasn’t at home. I was in Colorado.”

  She swung away from him, heading toward the door. He caught up with her in three long strides, grabbing her forearm. “What do you mean, Colorado? What in hell were you doing there?”

  “If you must know, I was in bed with my lover. Now let me go! I have to see my son.” />
  “Let you go? I’ll beat the shit out of you, you bitch! What the hell kind of thing is that to say?”

  “The truth. But then I never expected you to recognize it, having so little acquaintance with it.”

  “You mean you—I don’t believe it!”

  “Why?” She gave him a hard stare at close range. “Because it threatens your ego? You thought you were the only one allowed to stray into other beds?”

  “Because you’re a frigid cunt!”

  “Oh, no. If I’ve been frigid, it’s because you’re a rotten lover. I learned that much this weekend.”

  He felt as if he had been kicked in the solar plexus. “You can’t—you don’t—” he began in confusion.

  “I can and I do. I can and I did several times. Now get out of my way.” Anne tugged her arm free.

  He flung his glass away so that it thudded on the carpet and rolled into the bedroom. Then he was upon her, spinning her around, hitting her with his fist so hard that she slammed into the door facing and careened off it again to slide along the wall. He followed her, grabbing her hair to haul her upright. “Who was it?” he asked in grating tones. “Who is your lover boy?”

  There was anguish in her eyes and a place on her jaw that was red with a blue shadow. Still her lips trembled into a smile. “Go to hell.”

  “I’ll find out, and when I do, he’ll be one more sorry bastard.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you. Could be you’re the one who will be sorry.”

  His grasp eased as his features tightened. “He has that kind of influence, does he?”

  “Let’s say he isn’t without friends.”

  “The kind of friends who might not give a shit if they killed your son while they were trying to get to me?”

  He watched the horror invade her eyes, enlarging the pupils, watched her lick her lips before she said, “You don’t mean—”

  “The crash was no accident.”

  “He wouldn’t,” she whispered. “He couldn’t, not Dante.”

  Edison grunted in surprise, then laughed aloud as he pushed her away from him. “He probably wouldn’t, not for you. But he might for Riva Staulet.”