“Billy?”
“Yes, Billy.”
“Where does this concern him?”
“You don’t know he tried to enlist?” Roy wailed.
For a moment Althea’s narrow, shapely lips twisted, as if in pain; then she said, “I fail to see that a young man serving his country is such a lamentable thing.”
Roy’s heart lurched, then raced furiously. “It turns out he’s 4-F—so he’s gone into Cambodia as a press observer.”
“He’s supposed to be a writer, isn’t he?”
“You fishblood!” Roy shouted, her fingers curving as if to rake the length of that hatefully arrogant face until the blood flowed. “Your son’s safe in Stockholm counting the family’s money, while my nephew’s being defoliated! He’s always loathed this stupid Vietnam mess, he’s done everything he could to stop it!”
“Let’s not knock warfare. Through the ages it’s worked miracles for immature boys.”
At this supercilious contempt for Billy’s plight, rage swept through Roy until her whole body trembled.
“I can’t believe we were ever friends!” she exploded. “You’re right! I ought to pay you back! If Charles discovered he’s not Firelli’s son but my husband’s bastard, you wouldn’t be the saintly, high-toned mother figure, would you? No. He’d see you for what you are! A cheap, lying whore!”
The long, oval face had jelled into impassivity.
And all at once Roy realized that Althea was bathed with sweat. When had this drenching begun? Surely only in the last minute or so; otherwise she would have noticed the soaked crescents under the armholes, the drops on Althea’s forehead and cheeks.
Roy’s rage subsided in a rush of appalled pity.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said quietly, moving a step toward Althea. “God, not at all. Listen, I’ve always been so grateful that you told me. It’s meant a tremendous amount, knowing that Gerry wasn’t cut off from the future. I swear I’d never tell. Never. Althea, that promise I made, it holds. It’ll hold forever.”
“Charles’s respect is everything to me,” Althea pronounced, twirling the camellia leaf so it reflected the sun whitely.
“I had something personal to explain,” Roy mumbled. “That’s why I asked him to phone.”
“I’ll do anything I must. Anything. I don’t suppose I can buy your silence?”
“Stop talking like this! Okay, so I blew my stack just now. But my God, Althea, surely you can’t believe I’d go back on my word?”
Althea’s drenched face did not shift from it’s graven, accusatory stillness.
Roy added, “To tell him—to tell anyone—would be ugly, dishonorable. A really nasty thing to do.” Roy halted. A really nasty thing to do. God, how dumb it sounded. Roy Wace Horak, Miss Priss.
“Charles wouldn’t believe you. Still, you might give him a doubt or two about me. I couldn’t bear him doubting me.”
“Althea, I didn’t mean that. It was my temper talking.”
“All his life, Charles’s been special, a unique person. So far above the clods of the world that even they recognize it. He’s exceptionally strong, he’s brave. He’s always in absolute control. . . .”
Althea was listing her son’s virtues in that queer, abstract tone while rivulets of sweat dripped down her cheeks and jaw onto her sodden collar.
Symptoms that Roy’s commonsensical mind refused to file in the correct slot.
Crazy.
But she had known Althea too many years to accept that her friend had strayed around the bend.
Maybe she’s having an early menopause, Roy thought, embarrassed. Maybe it’s a hot flash. Waiting until Althea fell silent, she said, “Come on, let’s go inside. I’ll fix some ice coffee.”
“I have to protect him, you do understand?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Roy said soothingly. “Come on in the kitchen.”
“My mother never protected me.”
“It won’t take a moment. I don’t boil the water.”
Althea snapped open her envelope purse, reaching inside. Her hand emerged holding a gun.
Roy gaped at the small pearl-handled pistol.
She could not relate to the reality of the smooth, elegantly designed object. Oh, her optic nerves passed on the concept, handgun, but her occipital lobe refused to accept the message. She was as incapable of mentally registering this object as a lethal weapon as she was of accepting Althea’s derangement. How could she?
This was a pleasant Sunday morning in a tract built by Dillon Webber in Beverlywood, this was a small backyard in which the biweekly gardener had planted two flats of zinnias. This woman was her oldest friend from Beverly High days, and an old Beverly High chum wearing Chanel prět-à-porter does not stand in the middle of your dichondra pointing a handgun at your chest.
Handguns belonged on television series. Handguns were worn by Brink’s men picking up the cash deposit. In James Bond and other thrillers, Roy’s preferred reading, handguns were invariably mentioned by make and calibre.
Lay that pistol down, babe, lay that pistol down, Roy thought idiotically.
Then, as if a dam had broken, actuality burst over her.
Althea intended to kill her.
Vital strength flooded to every cell of Roy’s body. The mental capacity endowed by massive bursts of adrenaline informed her: She’s obviously clinical, so go easy, go very easy.
“Althea,” she lulled in the syrupy tone with which she adjudicated the bickerings of her high-strung sales force, “where did you get that?”
“It was my father’s. Mother, the great custodian, stands guard over the care of his sacred possessions. Collies fed, bred and exercised, clocks and watches wound, books dusted, guns oiled.”
“Where does she keep it?”
“Where it belongs. The left-hand corner of the drawer of his bedstand.”
“You should put it back there,” Roy said.
“You’d adore that, wouldn’t you? But you and she are the only ones who know about Charles, and Mother I don’t have to worry about.” As Althea wiped her left hand across her forehead, sunlight dazzled on scattering droplets. “Mrs. Harry Cunningham isn’t about to smear mud on the dear departed’s grandson, his sole male heir.”
“Neither am I. Althea, you know me, exactly the same as your mother. I’ve never forgotten Gerry for a minute. He’s still my everything. My big moments come when he has these retrospectives. You know I’d never harm his son.”
A small click.
Roy, despite her abysmal ignorance of weaponry, was aware that something called the safety catch had been released.
Panic reddened her vision.
Then her mind emptied of all its usual furnishing. She paid no attention to her frenzied fear, the subliminal borders of sounds, the smells, the brightness.
She was conscious only of a single command.
Get the gun away from Althea.
She edged forward, not hearing the lawn mower as it roared on again. Her little, mincing, Chinese-footbound-lady steps were the same as she had used to circle rattlesnakes when she and Althea had hiked in the Santa Monica mountains.
Her total terror held an element of exuberance. In this instant Roy was her truest self, a primeval creature whose mind and body are fused indivisibly, she was vibrantly alive as she had never been before. Her ankle hit a sprinkler head, yet such was her concentration that her body continued its glide and her eyes did not blink from Althea’s oozing face.
They were less than five feet apart.
“Stop!” Althea ordered.
Go! Roy’s command was not a thought but an all enveloping instinct.
Crouching momentarily in her navy patent mid heels, she felt the stress of flexed power in her thighs. She felt blood fill the muscles of her arms. Her pupils were pinpoints and the retina held one brightly sunlit image. The buffed, jaggedly bitten nail of a forefinger pressed to the smooth steel trigger.
Now.
Roy lunged forward. An off-balance yet f
eline spring with her fingers curved like a jaguar’s claws. Her right hand clamped convulsively on Althea’s narrow, slippery right wrist.
Roy pulled, jerking.
Althea held firm to the gun.
Crooking one knee below Roy’s trousered knee, she grappled Roy’s capturing arm with her own left hand.
Thus for a prolonged instant they strained, adversaries stalemated in a clumsy wrestler’s hold. Neither had ever fought physically, neither had ever attempted a contact sport. Althea, the taller, was stronger, Roy plumper and more desperate.
Roy’s muscles strained. Sobbing, she butted with her shoulders.
Althea, with one foot raised, was caught off balance. Her eyes distended. Her mouth opened, white and frantic, as she staggered.
Galvanized, Roy increased her pressure on the slippery wrist, forcing the gun away from herself.
There was a dull, dry roar.
70
Althea heard the gun go off and felt its vibrating kick.
At that instant her body became unbearably cumbersome. Immense heaviness permeated her head and torso, the implacable force of gravity sucked at her legs.
What’s happening? Althea thought wildly at the threshold of her consciousness.
With profound slowness, her body sagged.
And then the eternity of pain began, different from any pain she had ever experienced before, icy and torpid, crushing her chest, creeping interminably and inexorably outward to her extremities.
An endless echo resounded in her ears: “Allllltheeeeaaa . . . Ohhhhhh . . . Go-o-o-o-d. . . .”
Through the immeasurable agony, she felt the resistance, soft yet strong, to the engulfing inertia.
Roy’s holding me up.
I was going to shoot Roy. But why . . . ? Roy’s my friend . . . my only friend, ever. . . .
She tried to say, I didn’t mean it, Roy, friend, other of the Big Two. I’d never hurt you. But the immense pressure on her throat distorted the words into a gasp.
Then the vast, freezing pain drew her eyelids shut and she saw white bolts and flashes.
It might have been centuries later that she heard the infinitely distant rolled out thunderclaps. “Altheeeeaaa, ohhhhh, pleeeease hang on. Pleeeease? Altheeeeeaaa . . .”
Something rested on her chest, an intolerably endless pressure. The torment released her sphincter muscles and she opened her mouth in an eternal shriek of agony that came out as the faintest sigh.
I’m dying, she thought without surprise or sorrow or regret.
And by some merciful dispensation, she was released from the human time frame.
* * *
Althea is in her bed, surrounded by the darkness, the terrifying darkness, the creaking darkness. Something in her room has jerked her awake. In her breathless jitters, she tells herself to be brave. Daddy will protect me—there’s no evil he can’t vanquish.
Another creak.
“Who is it?” she quavers, paralyzed.
The horrible thickness of a heartbeat crowds through her.
The light bursts on.
Not the tepid glow of ordinary electricity, but a shadowless brilliance that illuminates more radiantly than a hundred suns, enabling her to see with wondrous clarity each shading of the rainbow blues in her pretty chintz curtains, the dappling of the sycamore bark outside her windows, the graceful miniature horses in her collection.
Her father’s idolized face, so handsomely ruddy in this unearthly glow, bends over her bed. “I heard you call, toots. What is it?”
“I was scared, so scared. Somebody was in the corner by the door.”
“It was us, dear,” says Althea’s mother. She bends over the other side of the bed, her eyes warmly loving.
“But you’re meant to be at a party.”
“We came home early to be with you at midnight, dear.”
Champagne-scented kisses press warm on both of Althea’s cheeks. “Happy New Year, Happy New Year,” her parents chorus, repeating an old litany from her babyhood. “Our Althea is so happy and good.”
The sweetness of this alternate existence enveloped Althea, and in her last blink in mortality’s embrace, she thought with uncomplicated spontaneity: Yes, that’s really truly true. I am happy and good.
71
The arching fingers unclenched and lay limp on the wet grass.
Roy, gasping from the struggle, her heart racing wildly, knelt beside Althea. There was a small hole in the tucked silk blouse above the left breast, a thin circle of oozing redness.
Althea lay starkly motionless.
Just as a minute earlier it had been an impossibility for Roy’s mind to accept the handgun, so now her thoughts refused to articulate the word “dead.”
Althea’s hurt badly.
She jumped to her feet. Halfway to the kitchen, where emergency numbers were Scotch-taped inside a cabinet, she thought of Dave Corwin, the young pediatrician who lived across the street. She was trapped in a paralysis of indecision (the phone? the neighbor?); then she swerved, barging out the back door, sprinting down the side of the house and across the street, banging both fists on the black paint of the Corwins’ front door.
Dave answered, barefoot, wearing blue checked Bermudas.
“Accident! A bad accident,” she gasped out. Frantic about deserting Althea, she raced back across the narrow, trafficless street to her house.
At the side gate she halted, staring at the body sprawled on the dichondra. Now she was unable to deny the stonelike rigidity. Althea looks so small, she thought, edging toward the still form. In this short time, the flesh of the serenely vacant face had fallen back from the delicate aquiline nose, the refined, narrow lips had assumed an odd, tilted curve.
The shot must have killed her instantly. Maybe she was dead before she hit the ground.
Dead. . . .
Roy’s knees buckled and she sank over her friend. All of their later ruinous jealousies and divisions were purged from her heart and she was drenched by excruciatingly poignant memories of those distant days when they had formed a united front against the other adolescents at Beverly High. Their secret jargon . . . the station-wagon door blazoned “The Big Two” . . . the long happy dithering over a lipstick shade at Newberry’s or Thrifty Drugs, the dark enchanted hours shared at the Fox Beverly . . . club sandwiches at Simon’s . . . the hot sands of summer, interminable hours talking on the phone—about what?
Roy bent, pressing a tender kiss on the still-warm forehead.
She was kneeling there, rocking back and forth, when Dave Corwin, barefoot, carrying his bag, rushed through the gate.
* * *
The pleasant sounds of Sabbath leisure and chores were drowned by sirens. Motorcycle police arrived, then black-and-white squad cars, an ambulance, a hook and ladder.
The immediate neighbors already milled on the sidewalk in front of Roy’s picket fence. Two members of the LAPD, one black, one Mexican-American, barred further encroaching. At the front door a thickset sergeant tapped his billy club into his palm. The doctor’s wife, feeding her baby his bottle, was surrounded by eddying groups as she repeated over and over what she knew of the dire goings-on at Mrs. Horak’s. “She banged on the door and my husband rushed over—he’s still inside.”
Revolving lights pulsated atop squad cars, police calls barked in a constant staccato.
The sense of high drama peaked with the arrival of a genuine star, Rain Fairburn.
Joshua, his sagging, furrowed face grimly set, double-parked and wrapped a thick arm around Marylin, propelling them through knots of onlookers and reporters—a CBS station wagon had pulled up just ahead of them.
In Roy’s living room, Marylin’s steps faltered. She stared out the window. Roy’s tidy little backyard seemed jammed to overflowing. Jauntily short-sleeved cops, plainclothesmen, photographers flashing vivid light, a couple of medical types in white jackets lounging in the patio chairs drinking Tabs, neighbors gawking from their sides of the six-foot redwood fence.
One of the conferring plainclothesmen moved.
Marylin had a sudden clear view of green grass marked with a drawing, a white figure of a woman that might have been drawn by a child. Inside this outline lay Althea. It was difficult to believe she was dead. She wore a blouse that seemed to be embroidered by peasant hands, a reminder of the adolescent Althea who (with Roy) had outfitted herself in odd costumes.
Then Marylin realized her mistake. The blouse’s rusty pattern was not embroidery but life’s blood.
“Don’t look at it,” Joshua said, pulling her away from the window.
The den was filled with cigarette smoke. A slight, narrow-jawed man, a Tareyton dangling from the corner of his mouth, leaned against the wall as he interrogated Roy. A youngish, balding man clad only in blue check Bermudas sat on the couch next to her.
With her pallor and the streak of blood marking her tan blazer, Roy looked a shaken wreck. As Marylin and Joshua came in, she clutched the hand of the man in shorts as if to introduce him. “This is . . .” Her voice dwindled.
“Dr. David Corwin,” he said.
“God, Dave, I’ve only known you ten years!” Roy said.
The doctor said to Joshua, “I’m the neighbor who phoned you.”
Roy released his hand. “Thank you for hanging in here until they came, Dave,” she said.
“Don’t be silly,” he said, getting to his feet. “If you need me for anything, no matter what, holler across the street. I’ll be there.”
Marylin took his place next to Roy, gripping her sister’s shaking hand in her own trembling one.
Joshua stood over the couch, blocking the two women from the narrow-jawed detective. “You shouldn’t be answering questions, Roy,” he said, the deep, rumbling voice concerned. “I’ve called Sidney Sutherland. Don’t say another word until he gets here.”
The detective nervously took the cigarette from his mouth. “I read Mrs. Horak her rights before she gave her statement.”
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