Llona met my eyes for the first time in a long time. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were shiny and wet. “I did it for you, you know.”
Every compartment of my mind had a response to that, and they raced for my throat to find expression. Incredulity won.
“You what?” I squeaked.
“I did it for us.”
I exploded. “Four men are dead, Llona! Four human beings! And two of them died because of you!
“There is nothing, Woman, nothing you could do for me that could make me wink at a pile of corpses. Have I made myself clear?”
Llona whispered, “Five million dollars, Matt. Maybe. At least two million. Jim Bevic said in the letter he thought it might be seven, or eight. In a numbered account in...somewhere.”
I had the number. Llona didn’t want to make it too easy to find the bank. I had to smile.
Llona read the smile to be something it wasn’t. She stood up and approached me; put a hand on my chest.
“Come with me, Matt. Really, that’s why I did everything, really. So we could be free. Don’t you know why we came together so quickly? Because we both hate our lives like this, doing trivial things, having to cater to stupid people. We were cut out for something better.”
As deeply as I looked into her eyes, I couldn’t penetrate to a place where she didn’t seem to mean it. I shook my head. “Even if I did hate my life, I’d still want to be able to like me. I won’t live off a corpse. No matter what the wages.”
“Oh, Matt,” she said, as if trying to make a point to a mentally impaired child, “we can’t change the past. Nothing we do can bring any one of them back.”
That’s a wonderful rationale. The Llonas of the world will tell you it’s futile to talk about any wrong they may have done, any harm they may have caused, because “You can’t change the past.” The fallacy of that is, when they did what they did, it wasn’t the past. And an evil in the past won’t stay there—it has a way of trickling down into the present and poisoning the future.
I didn’t bother to tell Llona this. I had a feeling she wouldn’t even understand it.
“Come with me, Matt,” she said again. “We’ll be rich. We’ll be free.” A special light came into her eyes. “We can buy that island, our own island. We’ll lie in the sun all day, and make love all night. It will be beautiful. We can be happy.”
And looking at her face, I could almost believe she would be. I hated her, pitied her, loved her, and wanted to kill her, all at once.
She rested her head against me. “We deserve it, Matt.”
I grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her off me, and held her at arm’s length. My ribs hurt.
“Why?” I snarled. Maybe I would kill her.
She looked scared and bewildered.
“Why do we deserve this stolen money? Does Jerry de Loon deserve to be dead? Does poor little Hildy deserve to bring up her baby alone and broke? Does Wilma Bascombe deserve to have to live in terror her whole life because once she trusted someone who didn’t deserve it? Did Jim Bevic’s parents deserve to lose their son?
“What’s so great about us, Llona? Why do you deserve to move into a murder case and exploit it to your own profit? Why do I deserve a share in the loot?”
I’d been shaking her pretty hard. Spot was barking at me, and Llona was screaming. I got hold of myself and let her go. Llona was crying angry tears, and had both hands clutched in her hair.
“Don’t do this to me! You can’t do this to me! I love you! I love you, Matt, don’t hurt me!”
I was breathing hard and trembling, working diligently to get myself under control. My ribs ached from the exertion. Sometimes I get scared at how close I come to the edge.
When I was in command again, I said. “Love is a trap, Llona. It’s a relationship where you can be used and thrown away after.”
She stopped crying when she recognized her own words.
“God damn you,” she said with a fierce intensity. “God damn you to hell. Who do you think you are, to lecture morals to me? Who?” If she loved me a minute ago, she hated me now.
“All my life,” she started, then choked on her own emotion and started again. “All my life, I’ve made my own way, and I promised myself I’d be free; and when the chance came, I took it, and I don’t care, Matt Cobb, who’s dead or what your altar-boy code makes you think!
“My God, how could I ever have wanted you at all? I’ve just realized you like it! You like being nothing and having nothing. You live with a borrowed dog in a borrowed house, and you eat by picking over the Network’s garbage. And you like it!”
“The top two buttons of my shirt are open. If you’re going to wear it, wear it right.” She had seemed to want me to say something, and I obliged.
The non sequitur made her furious. “What’s the matter, little boy? Afraid you’ll go to hell for sleeping with me? Afraid I contaminated you?” She tried to button the buttons, but her fingers wouldn’t work properly.
She gave up in fury and disgust. “Why don’t you just call the police and have them take me away? Jail will be better than this.”
I smiled. I didn’t want to, but I could feel it taking over my face, and I couldn’t stop it. Llona asked what was so funny.
“You were right, you know,” I told her, “about my having nothing. And one of the many things I don’t have is evidence.”
Emotion, animation, and intelligence all drained from her face. She looked idiotic, practically comatose. It took her five seconds to say, “What?”
“I mean, aside from firing you from the Network, there’s not a single goddam thing I can do to you, Llona. You destroyed the evidence, and there’s no way now to prove it ever existed. You attempted blackmail, but Shelby’s the only one who could testify to that, and he’s dead. You conspired to help a murderer escape, but we’d need Shelby’s testimony for that, too, because all the rest is memories and inferences inside my head, and the courts don’t accept that sort of thing.
“So congratulations, Llona, you’re free at last. Whatever you do now is up to you.”
“You don’t have a tape recording of this? You—you haven’t been to the police?”
“No evidence. An admission isn’t enough. That’s not to say you couldn’t go to the police yourself.”
I might never have said that, for all the attention Llona paid to it. “Then all this was just a joke? What has all this been about, for God’s sake?”
“No joke, Llona,” I said seriously. “I just wanted you to know. I have played the sap for you,” I said with bitter irony, “and I want you to know I realize the full extent of my stupidity. And even though all I could accomplish by denouncing you would be to make myself and the Network look stupid, I wanted you to know that in spite of what I felt, what I wanted, and what I hoped, I finally saw the truth.”
“What does that mean?”
I wasn’t sure what it meant—maybe it meant something I didn’t have the words for. But I said, “It means I’m not the only one with eyes. Shelby stole that money from somebody, and that somebody might be angry. So you’d better be careful.”
Llona looked solemn and nodded.
“And now, I think you’d better get the hell out of here.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And I don’t want to see you again around the Network.”
Llona never moved from the living room—she just stripped off my shirt, and dressed, unhurried and unashamed. I watched her in silence because she wanted me to say something or look away. God, she was beautiful.
When she was dressed, she looked as cool and sweet as she ever had. She gave me a look it was impossible to interpret, and said, simply, “Good-bye, Matt.”
“Good-bye, Llona.” I watched her walk to the door. I felt anger over my powerlessness to stop her, and I felt guilty over a not-quite-crushed desire to go with her, in spite of everything. But I stayed where I was. Virtue triumphant. Hooray for me.
When Llona got to the door, Spot ran to her
, panting happily and wagging his tail. He thought we were going for a walk, and kept looking back at me to see what was keeping me.
I said, “Come, Spot,” and though the Samoyed was torn, he dutifully scampered back to me.
Llona looked over her shoulder at us, opened her mouth, closed it, and left.
Spot protested when he heard the door close. He cocked his head at me, looking puzzled.
I held up the tennis ball for a game of fetch, but he wasn’t in the mood.
“You loved her too, didn’t you, Spot?”
“Woof!” he said soulfully.
I laughed. “We sure can pick them, can’t we?”
CHAPTER 32
“Like a bolt out of the blue...”
—CLIFF EDWABDS “UKULELE IKE,” “DISNEYLAND,” ABC
A LOT OF INTERESTING things have happened since Llona walked through that door, the most important from a personal point of view being that I got over it, more or less. She was gone from New York in less than a day. She told Sal Ritafio and the super at her building that she just wasn’t interested in the kind of life she had any more. That must be a pretty common feeling—her departure raised barely a ripple.
I kept my mouth firmly shut about the real reason she left, and waited for my ribs to heal.
A lot of the other people involved in the Network’s troubles over its fiftieth anniversary have been pretty busy, too. Colonel Coyle got a job at another network, and announced he was beginning work on his autobiography. This caused our own fearless leader to come down with an acute attack of paranoia, and order Special Projects to prevent publication of that book, he didn’t care how. We’re working on it. We’re going to fail, but Falzet doesn’t know that yet. I’m looking forward to what the colonel has to say.
I’m looking forward to another book, too. In a couple of months, Austin, Stoddard & Trapp will bring out Abandoned Empress, the autobiography of Wilma Bascombe. It’ll make a fortune. The grapevine already brings news of movie rights sales.
Alice Brockway will be back in the movies, too. After she got her two men safely buried, she went into hiding somewhere, then emerged after a few weeks to announce that she had been offered a part in Melanie Marliss’s new picture.
The movie, by the way, is not going to be produced by Lorenzo Baker. Lorenzo and Melanie had a Falling Out in the middle of a concert in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Nobody has said anything about drugs, at least not in public, but Shorty Stack and I have our opinions.
Shorty also tells me (“This is the gospel, Matt, baby,”) that not only is Porter Reigels Melanie’s new producer and director, but he’s soon to be her third husband as well. The Hollywood press drools at the prospect.
Hildy had the baby on Thanksgiving day—Gerald Matthew Millard de Loon. The “Millard” is as close as Hildy could come to “Millie” in a boy’s name. Millie Heywood has taken to referring to herself as the kid’s grandma, and woe betide anyone so foolish as to bring up such unnecessary topics as biology and genetics. She and I are pulling strings and lobbying to find a job for Hildy when she decides she wants to go to work.
Nothing much new in Special Projects, except Harris and Shirley asked for their vacations to be at the same time, and I’m considering it.
And a few weeks ago, I was visited by a lawyer. He came to my office. His name was Wesley J. Smythe, but what he looked like was Butch Q. McGurk. His face had been blasted from red sandstone, and his body looked like a barrel made of very hard wood. His voice, though, went with the name. It was disconcerting.
He had a proposition for me, but he took his time getting around to it. We sat there for fifteen minutes, with him waffling, and me nodding my head and wondering how he’d managed an appointment.
“...now, Mr. Cobb,” he said, “I have a client...”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. I tend to forget my manners when I’m bored.
It didn’t bother him at all. “...who has instructed me to make a proposition to you that is quite irregular.”
I sighed. “Irregular propositions are nothing new to this office, Mr. Smythe. Let’s hear it. It’s only fair to warn you, though, that I have a lot of friends in the police department.”
“Heh, heh, heh.” His jowls shook with amusement. “It’s irregular, but I can find nothing in the law to prohibit it. And this is really personal business, Mr. Cobb.
“You see, my client wishes to establish a trust fund, and for certain reasons, which frankly, my client refuses to explain, you and I are to be the trustees.”
“I don’t know much about the law, Mr. Smythe, but that doesn’t seem irregular to me. Surprising, yes, but not irregular. Who’s your client?”
“That is the...er...that is the irregular part. I am not permitted to say. I am to tell you, as I must, that the beneficiary of the trust is Gerald Matthew de Loon, and—”
I had a feeling I knew where the conversation was heading, and I didn’t like it. “You left out Millard,” I interrupted.
Smythe raised a bushy eyebrow. “Beg pardon?”
“It’s Gerald Matthew Millard de Loon. Do you want to upset his grandmother?”
“Heh heh. No, of course not. The trust is intended to provide for the needs of the child and his mother—and quite handsomely, if I may say so—until he attains the age of twenty-one, or until he completes his studies.”
I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to feel. “You can’t tell me anything about your client’s identity?”
“I have the strictest instructions on that point. However, I am empowered to give you this.”
He handed me a note. Envelope and stationery were both pure white. Written inside with a fountain pen were four lines:
It was six million dollars.
The sun shines every day and the water is warm.
No one should have to bring up a child alone and broke.
Don’t hate me.
No signature. I wondered what she had in her mind when she wrote it. A plea for forgiveness? Or was she just rubbing my nose in it?
All I knew was, before I opened that envelope, I wasn’t going to be Smythe’s co-trustee, but after I read it, I was. Maybe that was what she had in mind.
I told Smythe, and he smiled beneficently, and said I could come to his office to sign the necessary papers at my convenience. Which I did.
I still have that note. Sometimes I take it out and look at it, and I think about my six-million-dollar woman; this other Phantom of the Network; this talking shadow I’d held and kissed but never come close to understanding.
And I try again to decide how I’m supposed to feel.
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