The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  “He left through that door over there.” Bassinetti pointed to one of the French doors in the long bank of windows. “He’s gone to pay a call on my wife. There’s an outside staircase to her rooms in the west wing—”

  “Oh, shit! He’s gonna kill her!” The conversation he’d overheard was filtering back through his feverish memory and he tried to get out of the chair but was moving slowly at the center of a tilted, spinning room.

  “Now, now,” the Director said soothingly. “Make it easy on yourself. Just let nature take its course. Sooner or later one man or another was bound to kill the woman. It’s her fate, I’m convinced. She’s so immensely killable, but you don’t know her like we do. Ah, your eye patch, your sneezing fit blew it off to one side. …”

  Greco straightened the patch. He felt the flu bugs invading him, calling up reinforcements, out for the kill. His throat was suddenly raw and tender.

  “Well, you got quite an earful, I’m afraid. Sorry to burden you with it, but let me give you a word of advice. If I were you, I wouldn’t let anyone know you heard a word. If certain people found out,” he purred, shrugging his massive shoulders, “you wouldn’t want to be you. See my point? You’re a man who’s survived a great deal in your time. You know how the world works. Now, take this drug business. You couldn’t stop it if you were willing even to forfeit your life to do so. You can see that. So don’t be a silly dead jerk who thought for a minute he could be a hero. This world, this tail end of the century, it’s no place for heroes. Their time has passed.” He sighed at the way the world had gone downhill. “Now,” he brightened, “how about a drink? A brandy?”

  “Yeah, sure, a brandy.”

  “Go ahead. Get it for yourself. Just don’t do anything ill-advised.”

  He went to the drinks table. “A, I’m not a hero, Mr. Bassinetti. And B, I’m too damn tired to make a break for it. And C, what would I do if I did?” He poured brandy into a snifter. “What I need is an antibiotic.”

  “Indeed you do. These colds can turn nasty. Well, this’ll all be over soon enough. Very soon now Mr. Cunningham will have a brief but decisive chat with my wife. Don’t be frightened if you hear a shot.”

  “I’ll try to control myself.”

  “Good man! Then Mr. Cunningham will come down to see me and collect a great deal of money.”

  Greco wondered where Celia was, but he was so tired and felt so wretched that he doubted he was thinking straight. She was out there in the fog with that gigantic horse. She must be wet as hell. The bad guys would never find her in the fog. The brandy was burning his throat but he drank some more and figured the hell with it, at least he couldn’t feel any worse. Dan Rather was long gone. The Director had flicked him out of existence, and the screen was gray as the fog. Somebody was playing violins or cellos on the stereo. “What’s that?”

  “Beethoven’s late quartets. Suits my mood.”

  They heard a very loud bang.

  “What was that?”

  “That was Mr. Cunningham killing my wife.”

  Charlie Cunningham stood at the top of the stairway, feeling the rain plastering his hair to his head and running in thick rivulets down his face. Through the window in the door he saw the white room in which Zoe worked. A creamy white with beige trim. She sat at the desk. She wore a heavy blue sweater, and he knew beneath the desktop were her tight white jeans. He thought about never going to bed with her again. Then he thought about half a million dollars, tax free. He hadn’t planned on having to kill her, but the half million was a great persuader. The Director was right, there was no other way to be rid of her. And if the Director got any clever ideas about what to do with Charlie Cunningham, all Charlie had to do was point out that he’d made himself a copy of the manuscript.

  He opened the door and came in out of the cold and rain.

  Zoe looked up, her sultry face pinched with frustration and impatience.

  “Where have you been? It’s seven-forty. What have you been doing?” The questions came like machine-gun fire.

  Charlie stared at her, couldn’t think of what to say. He was still holding the gun in his right hand. The bandage was heavy and wet, rubbing at his torn ear.

  “Well? Is he dead?” Her voice had that familiar scraping, tearing edge. Like salt in a wound. “You idiot! Say something! Is it done? Did you kill him? Or did you chicken out?” Slowly her expression of anger turned to one of disgust. “Oh … you did, you screwed it up!” She spat the words at him, stood up, glaring. “You poor fool!” Her eyes, so soft and liquid in the heat of passion, flashed like laser weaponry, and he thought about how he could dull them forever, put out her lights for good.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said tonelessly.

  “Idiot!” She came toward him like a fourth-rate Lady Macbeth, checked herself, went back to the desk. “All right, now you must go back down there and do it, Charlie.” She took a tiny gun from beside her typewriter. He wondered why she had a gun so close at hand. Then it began to dawn on him. He was supposed to have already killed Bassinetti when, as the prowler, he came to her room…

  “Everybody’s got a gun,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many guns—”

  “Stop babbling, Charlie! Now get out of here. I want you to use that gun. There’s still time to go ahead with the plan.” She bored twin holes in his skull with those eyes.

  He went back to the doorway and the rain. He looked out into the night, felt the rain blowing in on his face.

  “Look at the mess you’ve tracked in here! Charlie, can’t you do anything right? Use your head, think! Don’t be so hopeless, so stupid, such a loser! Are you listening to me, Charlie? Now use that gun!”

  “All right,” he said. He drew a mental picture of the Vuitton bag, saw that it was all he’d ever hoped for, and turned back to Zoe. She was so beautiful. He raised the gun.

  “Now what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Using the gun, Zoe.”

  She realized what was happening at the last second and pulled her own gun up.

  They both pulled their triggers at the same instant.

  It made a hell of a noise.

  Celia heard the crack of the shot, which was carried on the wind blowing rain and fog from the direction of the house, directly into her face. Her ankle was swelling and felt like it had been crushed in a vise. Damn! It was always some damn thing—but the shot roused her from the contemplation of her pain.

  Roger’s ears perked up.

  She saw the lights of the study far away. The fog was either blowing away at last or she’d found a hole in it.

  The sound of the shot echoed like a crack of thunder.

  There were the glowing lights—

  No! They couldn’t have failed, not after all this…

  No! It just couldn’t have come to nothing, not now—

  “Come on, Roger!”

  She was so cold, so wet, so far over her own precipice of fear and frustration…

  Oh, God, what if someone had shot Peter!

  And Roger was running again…

  Chapter Thirty-one

  GRECO SAT SILENTLY, FEELING as if he’d been waiting since just after the Second World War for something to happen once the sound of the gunshot died away. It wasn’t a time for small talk. A woman, however great a bitch she might have been, was lying freshly dead, under the same roof. And the silence bore with it a kind of doom-ridden, oppressive sense of mortality. He was sweating while simultaneously chills shook him. He’d never gotten so sick so fast, but he felt guilty thinking that way, in light of what had just happened in the west wing. He did his best to stifle another sneeze.

  Bassinetti sat like a highly contemplative Buddha in his wheelchair, his face void of emotion, the eyes buried in the dark pouches beneath them, the full mouth set firmly, resolved. It was the face of a man who found himself trapped in a wheelchair that he certainly hadn’t sought, trapped in a sea of treachery and amorality and money as black as midnight, which he certainly had sought. His
face looked as if ideas of right and wrong had been drained from his brain, replaced by craft and cunning and the will to survive, win, in a game without rules. It wasn’t a face that gave away much, but Greco sensed in it a kind of surprise that things kept turning out as oddly as they did.

  His .38 was trained on the doorway.

  He was going to shoot Charlie Cunningham when he came through the door to collect his half million.

  Bassinetti had it all figured out. Nerd Charlie kills the wife, his lover. The Director kills the prowler who, to his amazement, turns out to be the maddened, newly jilted lover who’d just killed his former mistress …

  It was a good story, ironclad. He wouldn’t lose if he just stuck to it. And if Peter Greco kept his mouth shut.

  But poor Charlie, Greco reflected. Stupid, befogged by sexual desire, dominated by an impossible creature … He didn’t really deserve to die, did he? The last time Greco had looked it up, stupidity and lubriciousness were not punishable by death.

  Without warning the door to the hallway swung slowly open.

  From the corner of his eye Greco saw the muzzle of a pistol moving forward like the head of a snake, mouth open.

  There really wasn’t much time to think of it in a logical sequence. All of Greco’s training simply took over. He summoned up in a paroxysm of reflexive action his last ragged bits of energy and hurled himself like a beat-up old warrior from a generation long forgotten to hit the Director from the side as he pulled the trigger.

  The gun in the doorway let out a sharp, snotty little bark and Greco felt the bite ripping at the left side of his neck. Hurt like a bitch.

  The wheelchair crashed over sideways, and Bassinetti was shouting something crazy that didn’t make any sense, just a babble of outrage, which was hardly surprising.

  Greco sprawled across the mountainous body, twisted to look up and back at the door to tell Charlie to stop shooting for chrissake—

  But it wasn’t Charlie in the doorway.

  Old Charlie must not have made it out of the west wing, wasn’t going to make it out of this particular nest of vipers … because it was Zoe Bassinetti standing there.

  She was leaning against the wall, trying to point her gun again and keep shooting. It kept wobbling because she was in pretty bad shape.

  One sleeve of her heavy blue sweater was shredded. That arm hung limply. The white hand was red with blood running down the fingers, over the gold and the diamonds.

  Her face was blank and pale, showing shock and dismay. She was giving everything she had to raising that gun only far enough to start blazing away at the bodies on the floor.

  Greco was caught in the Director’s useless legs, and his left hand had gotten wedged in the spokes of the wheel. He kept twisting and turning but only managed to get deeper in debt, getting nowhere, while Zoe just about succeeded in getting both of them in her sights—

  And then the wall of windows exploded in a rain of shattered glass!

  Roger had taken the balustrade at full tilt, unworried about the windows since it was still foggy and blurry and he’d never been here before.

  Celia had dug her heels into his flanks, and the bank of windows had been no match for him. He hardly even noticed them.

  The panes imploded, spraying glass across the Director’s study. Roger stopped just short of the drinks table. He looked around as if to say, Hey, you know this isn’t the barn, right, lady?

  Celia tried to see what she’d interrupted, but all she saw was one hell of a mess.

  Greco and a fat man seemed to be wrestling on the floor at Roger’s feet. They were covered in a snowfall of glass.

  Zoe Bassinetti was dripping blood, holding a gun, staring in open-mouthed amazement at a world gone quite mad. She took a few steps toward the men entangled on the floor. She was weaving, wiped her face with one hand and smeared it with blood like war paint. She started to say something, looking up at Celia … the gun pointed down at Greco’s head …

  Celia kicked out at her hand, caught the wrist with the point of her remaining sneaker and watched the little pistol spin away toward the corner of the room—

  “Zoe!” It was a scream in the night, a shriek, disembodied.

  “Zoe!”

  Zoe turned sluggishly, suddenly disarmed, back toward the doorway.

  Celia looked too.

  Charlie Cunningham stood in the doorway. The front of his windbreaker was soaked with blood. He looked like he was trying to laugh.

  Instead he began shooting.

  Zoe jumped off the floor with the impact of the slugs smashing into her beautiful, bloodied body.

  She hit Roger’s hindquarters and left a sticky smear on his flank as she slid to the floor.

  Charlie made it halfway into the study before he lay down almost gently, a crooked little smile on his face, and died.

  It was quite still.

  Greco slowly got to his knees, kicked free of the spinning wheel of Bassinetti’s chair. He reached up and took Celia’s hand, pulled himself upright.

  “Peter, oh, Peter … are you okay?”

  “Gotta helluva cold, Slats …”

  She felt him squeezing her hand.

  The Director was wheezing and snorting.

  Roger tried to ignore the whole scene.

  Celia looked down into Greco’s face, his weak smile, his runny nose. His neck was bloody.

  She had no idea what was going on. And Linda Thurston wouldn’t have either.

  AFTER

  THE TINY, DUSTY DRESSING room was crowded to bursting: with flowers, telegrams, popping bottles of champagne, and smiling, shouting, babbling well-wishers and fellow actors and friends. Celia sat on a stool, her back to the mirror and the makeup table, and tried to hear what they were all saying to her.

  The lights had gone down on the opening night of Misconceptions five minutes before, when she and Debbie Macadam had taken their final curtain call as co-stars, Celia’s part having been beefed up in the rewrites. Debbie had insisted that she would take no solo curtain calls just because people has seen her in movies, so they’d come off hand in hand, relieved and happy and bursting with hope, leaving the tight little off-Broadway stage and finding Billy Blumenthal, the director, waiting to kiss and hug them both at the door to the dressing room. The two guys in the cast were there, too, and then everybody started arriving and the chaos began.

  The crowd out front was still milling around in the ninety-degree June night, which had been spent without aid of air-conditioning. Morris Levy came in, mopping his face with a red bandanna, a happy author who’d diligently done his work through the past three weeks. He gave Celia a heartfelt hug and whispered a thank-you for her performance; then Joel Goldman, her agent, was whispering in her ear, telling her he had a feeling about this show. “It’s got it all, kid,” he said. “You’re gonna be doing it for a long time. And you’ll have time to play with Linda Thurston!” He grinned broadly, kissed her cheek again, and somebody handed her a Styrofoam cup of warm, cheap champagne that bubbled nobly and tasted like heaven.

  She was almost afraid to admit it, but Joel was right, it did have that feeling. It had all been out there on the postage-stamp-size stage: all the scary lighting cues had worked to perfection, the rewrites had worked, the gasps and laughs and tense silences had all been right on the money.

  Greco came in after the first wave of first nighters had departed. He stood in the doorway, looking around shyly, self-consciously. Celia had never seen him in a suit before, and he looked unsure of himself, didn’t seem to realize what an imposing figure he was in the dark blue summer suit, his scarred face deeply tanned and the eye patch you couldn’t ignore. A kind of energy seemed to pulsate from him. She felt it even where she sat.

  Celia caught his glance, held it, and watched as he smiled slowly, still hanging back from the crowd that encircled her. She excused herself and stood up. Even in her garish, ghoulish back-from-the-dead costume, covered in stage gore, she looked up at him and was unable to stop
smiling.

  There were some events of which she still knew nothing, would never know. But her mind was crowded with a tumult of images she knew she’d never forget.

  Greco with a bullet wound in his neck and pneumonia in both lungs, and Celia taking a bouquet of tulips to his hospital room and kissing him to wake him up.

  The flurry of people from Washington, from mysterious agencies that were never quite identified, who’d come to New York to speak to her, telling her she had to forget what had happened because the security of the republic was at issue and she didn’t want to let her country down, did she?

  And the prominent account in the Times of the tragic death of mystery novelist Miles Warriner at the hands of a terrified burglar, interrupted while writing at a New Jersey country estate.

  And Admiral Malfaison and General Gates locking the only copy—other than that damn Bassinetti’s—of the Palisades manuscript in a vault so far beneath the Pentagon it was closer to Beijing than Washington.

  And the funeral in Queens of an Italian restaurateur and hit man, Vincenzo Giraldo.

  And the tiny obituary of Mr. Mystery, dead after a West Village street mugging.

  And the note in Publishers Weekly about Jesse Lefferts, newest senior editor at Pegasus House.

  And the blur of rehearsals, going to visit Peter as he recovered and got out of the hospital, began coming to her place with Chinese for dinners with her and Hilary, and began tentatively to get his pool stroke back.

  “Peter, thanks for the beautiful roses—”

  “Listen, Slats, you were wonderful, scared the hell out of me—”

  “And you’re a pretty hard guy to scare.”

  “Medium hard,” he said.

  She felt herself starting to cry, but he put his arms around her and kissed her.

  “Oh, Peter, you’ll get this bloody gunk all over you.”