Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_01

by Dead Man's Island

  I sipped the aromatic and sinfully delicious chocolate liqueur and felt the emotional shackles slipping around me again. He had launched so swiftly into his plea that I hadn’t even had a chance to bring up the will and the bequest to me. I would, no fear of that. But first …

  “Chase, you can’t keep treating this like a private problem. Attempted murder is a crime. Contact the police.” This was what I had said at the very beginning; this was what I knew must be done, even as I wondered how to distance myself from public notice.

  “Do you want headlines?” His dark eyes were unreadable.

  Fury flamed through me for an instant. What right had he to drag me back into his life, to make me vulnerable to exposure?

  But I knew the answer to that.

  There are rights and rights, and I had not always accorded Chase what belonged to him.

  “Henrie O”—suddenly he was all warmth and charm, focusing a magnetic smile on me—“you’re wonderful when you’re mad.” His mouth curved in a rueful, forgive-me smile. “I’m sorry. I’m so obsessed with what’s happened to me that I forget that this isn’t your life, that you have work and deadlines and goals that have nothing to do with me.” He rested his arm along the mantel. His fingers absently turned the base of a marble statuette, one of a pair. “The thing about it is, I have to find out. Because it’s poisoning my life. I look at my son—and Roger and I have had our problems. He’s a visionary, like his mother. He wants the world to be good, but he hasn’t learned that you can’t force people to be good. I look at my son, and I wonder, ‘Is it you? Are you the one?’ I reach out for my wife and suddenly the whisper’s there in my mind. ‘Are you the one? Are you trying to kill me?’” He gripped the statuette. “Or I’m talking to Lyle, Lyle. God, I can’t tell you, Henrie O, it’s like being born again. Can you understand that? He’s what I was when I was young. Smart. Fast. Six jumps ahead of the crowd. He knows he’s going to make it. He’s got that desire that won’t be quenched. And he’s going to take Prescott Communications into the next century. He’s going to make Prescott Communications the most important media conglomerate in the world. In the world, Henrie O, not just America or Europe. I’ve felt twenty years younger ever since Lyle came. I look at Lyle, and I think, Was it you? Was it you?” Chase stared at me. “I’ve got to know. And the hell of it is, I know the police won’t figure it. It’s going to take the kind of instinct they don’t teach at police academies. It’s going to take the kind of instinct you’ve got, Henrie O.”

  I looked at him over the rim of the crystal liqueur glass. The poignancy of his cry touched my heart.

  Was it you? Wad it you?

  How terrible and ultimately how destructive of trust and love to look at a familiar face and hear that dreadful question in your mind.

  Chase’s eyes gleamed. “Henrie O, you will stick with it, won’t you?” The relief in his voice laid another burden on me. He couldn’t hide his delight. “God, I knew I could count on you. When we get back on the mainland, you can get your own information on everyone. You’ll have an unlimited expense account, of course, and anything I can do to help, I will.”

  He stood triumphant in front of the fireplace, head high, hands jammed into the pockets of his blazer.

  I stared at him grimly. Was I acquiescing because he needed me? Or was I taking another desperate step to keep this investigation out of the public eye? “If I’m to do it, Chase, I will certainly need your help. More help than you’ve given so far. Why didn’t you tell me about the Lloyd’s of London policy?”

  The eagerness seeped out of his face. Once again he was confronting the reality of murderous intent behind a familiar smile. “Lyle.” That was all he said. “I don’t want it to be Lyle.” He gave me a half-woeful, half-amused look. “But then I don’t want it to be anybody. And I still keep thinking, This is nuts, this is crazy, this can’t be happening. But it is. And I think about Miranda. She’s … she’s so lovely, so young. She thinks I’m wonderful. I can’t help liking that. No one can. It’s better than the most powerful narcotic. But, the truth is, and I guess she knows it, deep down, I don’t love her the way she loves me. I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. I would if I could, but the truth is”—and he paused, searching for words, trying himself to understand—“I guess I’m not a person who’s ever been able to focus on love. I’ve fought and battled and struggled all my life. I’ve tried to be good to everyone. But I’ve never really loved …” Now he did look at me, and the emotion in his eyes was unmistakable. “Except once, Henrie O, once when I was young and the world still held magic.”

  “But we are no longer young.” I made it crisp. “Looking back is an exercise in futility. The mistakes we’ve made—all of us—are written in stone, Chase. We have to live and die with them—and forgive ourselves, if we can. The point, my dear, is not to make mistakes now, if we can help it. So I’ll try to help you find who’s behind the false face. But from this moment on I want you to be absolutely honest with me.”

  He regarded me for a long moment, then gave an abrupt nod. He pulled a straight chair close to me and sat. “All right. What do you want to know?”

  “A lot. Let’s start with the book, The Man Who Picks Presidents. You hired a private detective. Who did he investigate?”

  There was a flash of appreciation in his eyes. “Burton. Valerie. Haskell. Roger. Enrique.”

  What a revealing list.

  “Not Miranda?” The liqueur rolled so easily, so deliciously over my tongue.

  “Miranda?” His voice rose in sheer surprise. “She wouldn’t.” His confidence was total. “Besides, most of it she couldn’t have known about—the stuff about Elizabeth and Carrie and Roger.”

  “That stuff. How much of it is true?”

  “It’s twisted, Henrie O, twisted. Sure, I was gone a lot. Dammit, I was working. Elizabeth understood that. The bastard took true things and made them look ugly.”

  That was a start on what I needed to know. How did Chase view the biography? What stung the most?

  “Okay, Chase. Hubbard goes after you in all arenas. Family relationships. Work ethics. Business practices.” I didn’t spare him. “What made you mad enough to file a lawsuit?”

  He found his pack of cigarettes, lit one. His voice was hard. “The damnable part was about my family, an outright claim that I married Elizabeth for her money, that I stayed away from her when she was sick because I … because I couldn’t stand to be around anyone seriously ill, that I never had anything to do with Roger.” His face was rigid with anger. “Dammit, I had work to do. That was a tough period, very tough. We were fighting for survival, an antitrust suit, the editor of our Atlanta paper had a fatal heart attack, the guild struck for six months. It was a hell of a time.”

  I gave him a minute to calm down. But his answer made it clear. He knew that the leaks came from someone who knew him well, someone very close to home.

  “What did your investigator find out?” I looked regretfully into my glass. Almost empty.

  Chase’s anger fled, supplanted by genuine amusement. “The damnedest things. Would you believe old Val has a live-in boyfriend, emphasis on boy, a twenty-three-year-old guy named Billy with long blond hair? And Burton had a formal burial with a granite stone for his cat, Cherie, when she died?” He took a last drag on his cigarette, stubbed it out. “Haskell serves dinner at a soup kitchen twice a week, then drops at least a hundred bucks on Saturdays at the races. Roger’s on every liberal mailing list in the country—if not the world.” He shook his head. “The bottom line is that nobody’s got a fat new bank account here or in Switzerland, nobody’s rented a safe-deposit box, nobody looks to have pocketed a penny from any unknown source, and this guy I hired is one of the new brand of computer dicks who specializes in finding stray bonds or hidden assets.”

  I could see how Chase had figured it: damaging insinuations had been traded for money.

  But perhaps money hadn’t been the motive.

  “Burton could be the one. He’s what
we used to call maladjusted.” Every decade has its pseudo—social science lingo. I knew Chase would remember the gray-flannel-suit days when the epitome of success was to be well-rounded, a figure of speech as revealing of its times as any I’ve ever heard.

  Here at least Chase and Haskell were in strong agreement. “Burton’s a wimp.” Chase’s tone was dismissive. “He would p—” He paused, and I was amused when I realized he was rephrasing to avoid offense. “He’s scared to death of me. He’s so afraid hell be blamed for anything that goes wrong that it’s pathetic. Sure, I know he’s resentful. He looks at me and thinks I’m a rich bastard who gets to do anything he wants to do while he has to work his guts out for pennies. That’s true. It’s the difference between talent and mediocrity. And I know he’s tickled when something like that damned book comes out. He loves to see me squirm. But he’d never take the risk himself.”

  I took the last sip of liqueur. “Enrique takes risks.”

  Chase looked at me warily. “So you’ve picked up on that.”

  “Yes. Feeding information to a writer wouldn’t bother him a trifle. After all, a man who beats his wife wouldn’t stick at selling information about his employer.”

  There was a strained silence.

  Chase’s eyes shifted away from mine.

  I felt very tired. “Chase, you know how that man treats Rosalia, and you haven’t done a damn thing about it.”

  He shrugged. “All right, sometimes I’m a bastard. I never said I was perfect. But why the hell does she put up with it?”

  It didn’t surprise me. He had the arrogant confidence of a rich white male who had never been dependent, never in his life. No one had ever physically hurt him or threatened him. The world belonged to him and to men like him. They had a trigger-quick disdain for anyone who wouldn’t fight back. They didn’t believe in a victim’s resigned acceptance of abuse, the victim’s pitiful sense of punishment deserved.

  “She puts up with it …” I began. Then I shook my head. “She’s scared and cowed and emotionally crippled. But you aren’t, and you’ve got the chips. You’ll remedy it?”

  He shot me an exasperated glance, then quickly said, “Oh, hell, yes. I understand—you’re making that a condition. I’ll see to it.”

  I didn’t leave it at that. “What will you do?”

  “Oh, she has a sister. I’ll send her to visit and arrange for some counseling. I’ll talk to Enrique, make it clear he’s out on his ass if it ever happens again.”

  “I will talk to Enrique, too.” And he’d listen. If he wanted to keep his job, he’d listen. Hating every minute of it, fingers itching to strike out at me, Enrique would listen.

  “Enrique.” Chase fumbled for another cigarette. “Frankly, I’d be delighted if it was Enrique. He’s a hired hand. He’s not my wife or son or stepson. But I can’t see why the hell he’d do it. He likes money, sure, but would he take a chance on losing his job? I pay handsomely, more than he’d ever make anywhere else. No, I don’t see him as the source for that garbage in the book. I had him looked over because I don’t trust him. He’d do anything that would advance himself, but he’s not stupid.”

  “Maybe he’d like to get his hands on what you’ve left him and Rosalia.” I reached up and unclasped an earring that was beginning to pinch.

  Chase’s face was fully illuminated by the bronze floor lamp behind his chair. I studied the dark hollows beneath his eyes, the straight, patrician nose, the firm jaw and determined mouth. I saw the swift appraisal in his eyes, followed by almost instant negation.

  “If I were fool enough to broadcast the contents of my will, yes, Enrique might be tempted. But no one knows what’s in that will, Henrie O, except my attorney, myself—and now you.”

  “But that isn’t true of the infamous insurance policy, is it?”

  “No.”

  “As for the will itself, family members have no reason to assume they aren’t included, right?”

  “I guess that’s right.” It was a grudging assent.

  He knew it was right.

  Any rich man’s will can provide a motive for murder if there is a legatee greedy enough to trade a human life for money or power. Chase’s will was no different. Under it, every person on the island—including myself—might have good and sufficient reason from the police’s point of view to commit murder. And Chase’s statement to the contrary, none of us could prove we were unaware of its provisions or, at the very least, unaware of the likelihood of receiving some kind of bequest. Especially the family members.

  Chase had certainly put me in the soup—if anything happened to him—along with all the other legatees.

  Now was as good a time as any to bring that up.

  “I wish to be removed from your will, Chase. Immediately.”

  The stubborn resolve in his face answered me.

  “No.” His answer couldn’t have been simpler or less equivocal.

  I tried to keep my temper. “I don’t want your damn money.”

  “I know that. But I shall decide who receives a part of my estate—a part of me, Henrie O. I have that right.”

  I didn’t want to talk about rights.

  Chase knew that.

  He regarded me steadily. “Henrie O, now, after all these years, I want an answer. Why did you run away?”

  I didn’t want to look back. It reopened wounds that I had thought long since healed.

  “Whenever I see an Indian summer day, Henrie O, I think of you and what you took away from me.” There wasn’t so much anger as great sadness in his voice.

  I clasped my hands together and stared down at them, but I was seeing the office, jammed with desks, typewriters, a teletype. We had worked for a news bureau for a midwestern daily, and we had covered Capitol Hill. It had been the most exciting, demanding, exhilarating, passionate year of my life, and the most heartbreaking.

  “The House Un-American Activities Committee. That college professor from Connecticut. A Hollywood actor claimed he was a Communist. It was the height of the witch-hunt. Before McCarthy took on the army—and lost. The professor’s wife came in.” I could see her as if it were yesterday, a woman in her early thirties with anxious eyes and a shaking voice. “She begged you not to run the story, said it would ruin her husband. He was up for tenure. She said he’d only gone to a couple of meetings when he was in college, that it didn’t amount to anything. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  I looked at Chase, at his intelligent, determined, puzzled face.

  He didn’t remember.

  But I’d never forgotten.

  “Agnes Moran, Chase. Her husband was Thomas Moran.”

  The name kindled no recognition.

  “She was terribly upset.” How paltry the words were. Even now—more than forty years later—I remembered so vividly the desperate fear in her eyes, the slight, musical voice ravaged by urgency. “She’d found out that you were going to break a story on her husband. She begged me to help persuade you not to do it. She said his career would be ruined. She swore that he’d never done anything to hurt his country. I asked you to talk to Moran, get his side of it.”

  Chase squinted, then smacked his fist against his palm. “Oh, yeah, Moran. He was one of those saps that got mixed up with the Reds when he was in college. Hell, I had letters he’d written to some Russian official. I don’t remember the details now, but he was so glowing about the new world order, that kind of thing. Oh, God, that was hot stuff then. That was the series I did that first caught Elizabeth’s dad’s attention. That series set me up.”

  The series had resulted in a subpoena to Thomas Moran. That had gotten lots of headlines. His college had refused him tenure. The day Moran was to answer the subpoena, he had driven to Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and put a bullet in his brain.

  Chase didn’t remember that part of it.

  When I reminded him, he merely looked surprised.

  “I covered the funeral.” The maples had blazed like fire, the oaks ha
d been as brilliant as dollops of gold. “His widow saw me. She pulled away from the family, and she told me that you and I had killed him. She said she hoped we were satisfied to see a good man destroyed for no reason.”

  “I wrote a story. The facts were true.” There wasn’t an iota of regret in Chase’s voice.

  “Moran was served up like a fatted calf to satisfy the paranoia fanned by the malevolent senator from Wisconsin.” Even after all this time I was angry, angry at the warping of freedom, the mind-jacketing the McCarthy years had begun.

  Chase shrugged. “Moran should have had the guts to defend himself.”

  “But you didn’t care whether he was innocent,” I continued steadily. “All you cared about was a big story—no matter what it did to him or to his family.”

  “Big stories.” He smiled faintly, and his eyes challenged me. “That’s my business, Henrie O. I thought it was yours.”

  Big stories. Yes, I’d had more than a few. And so had my husband, Richard. But neither of us had ever—knowingly—broken a story for our own advancement or broken a story when we knew the official attack was politically motivated. Yes, we had had to cover those kinds of stories when they became news, but we had never originated them. I had no Willie Horton stories on my conscience.

  I’d left the cemetery that long-ago morning and gone to my apartment and packed. I had made up my mind. I couldn’t love a man who sacrificed human lives for his own advancement.

  Chase sighed. “I suppose I should have known. You’ve always had a quixotic streak, Henrietta. But I thought—hell, I thought you’d been seeing Richard, decided he was the man for you. And I wasn’t going to come after you—if that’s the way you felt.”

  I shook my head. “No. That’s not what happened. I went back to Kansas, to my mother’s sister. Richard followed me. He tracked me down—and he asked me to marry him.”