by Chris Wiltz
35
* * *
Deathbed Wish
I slept for about two hours and woke with a start that almost landed me on the floor. I felt vile, but I was in a hurry to do something. I dashed around the apartment shaving, showering, and changing clothes before I realized that I didn't know what I was doing or why I was in such a damn hurry.
I ate lunch and then went up to the office and played around with the heavy assortment of junk mail that Thursdays always bring. I usually throw most of it directly into the trash can, but not that day. That day I went through every piece. If I was pressed hard I might be able to remember what some of it was about, but my mind wasn't on what I was doing. I was using it as a decoy, for something else to concentrate on instead of the small details from the past week that kept cropping up and gaining footholds in my memory. The mail wasn't nearly as stimulating.
I finally sat back with my feet on the desk and let the details swarm. I wasn't seeing the picture in its totality, just isolated vignettes juxtaposed with perfect clarity like they were being reeled off onto a screen in front of me. I saw a seven-year-old child being poisoned by a bitter marriage, helpless, having to hear and absorb all the ruinous details, like it or not. Then the same seven-year-old child, but a woman now, beautiful and withdrawn. One of André's frogs loomed into view and a white hand with large blue veins reached out to pat its head. Two people stood in a darkened room trying to touch each other, frustrated behind a barrier of long-armed demons. One of the arms reached out and clutched at the air. The picture dispersed by fragments, leaving only the arm in a circle of light. The circle broadened, encompassing Lise André as she had been that day in the farmhouse. She faded out of the spotlight and a parade of faces took their turns in it like flashbacks of the cast at the end of a movie: Al the bartender as he leaned on the bar talking to me; Carter Fleming smiling big to show his perfect squared-off teeth; Mrs. Parry with a cigarette growing from her bottom lip; a haughty Lucy as I had imagined her to be but not as I had seen her; the Boy Scout, his bulbous cheeks quaking with fury. The light went out for quite a while before Stanley Garber materialized sitting behind his desk, dead. Mrs. Garber buttoned his coat neatly, but the hand that reached for his glasses jerked back suddenly and she left them on his mouth.
For the second time that day I started. I felt shaky around the stomach. I was sweating. I was beginning to get an idea about what I should do. I wasn't sure I could. All my life I'd had this fixation about being tough. Rather, about not being tough. It was such a cliché to be a tough guy from the Channel. The way the old man talked seemed like a travesty to me. It wasn't realistic. But he would have made his decision about this one, shown his grit, the real stuff. He would have been the all-knowing hero to the end. The consequences be damned. This is what had to be done. I put a call in to Uncle Roddy.
I took him a long time to pick up and when he did it was obvious that my timing was bad.
“What do you want, Neal?” He sounded harassed and tired. “If you got trouble or any bright ideas, call back later.”
“Give me a break, Uncle Roddy. I was just wondering how things are going.”
“Swell. Swell.” He dragged the words out.
“I take it that means Lucy McDermott isn't saying what you'd like her to say.”
“We're working on it,” he said.
“No go on the gun?” The old conversational stall.
“She didn't do it with that one,” he snapped. I nodded like he was sitting across the desk from me. Silence grew like a fungus in the wire. “Do you know something I oughta know?” he demanded.
I was clutching the phone like it was a lifeline. “No,” I said.
“Then I'll talk to you later,” he said and hung up.
The phone stayed glued to my ear for a few seconds and when I put it back in its cradle, it was like I was putting an infant to bed.
The palms of my hands were moist. I wheeled around in the chair and flung open the bottom desk drawer. The bottle of bourbon wasn't there anymore.
The cicadas were out in force as I walked up the familiar path through the treed area. I think I noticed every gnarled branch. Even the dew on the grass stood out glistening in the light from the houses. I saw every crystalline detail.
All the lights in the Garber house seemed to be on. The shades were up and the curtains pulled away from the front windows. The place looked almost cheerful.
When Catherine opened the door I could still see a lot of suffering on her face, but to me she was so beautiful that I involuntarily stopped breathing. There was no gray in her eyes. They were soft and blue like that billowy edgeless blue of the sky right after a spring rain, before the sun gets too bright and turns it into a hard blue ceiling.
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Are you alright?” I asked.
She nodded and smiled weakly at me. “I guess I'm going to make it.”
We went into the living room. I couldn't take my eyes off hen I ran my hand down her arm and put my fingers through hers. I led her over to the sofa. We sat very close to each other.
“Neal,” she said, “there is something I want to say to you.” She paused. “This week—I really may not have made it through this week, you know,” her eyes filled with tears, “without you ...”
“I know. It's okay. You don't have to say those things.”
She rubbed her eyes. “But I want you to know.”
“I do. Really.”
I didn't want that kind of talk between us. Not yet. I had some important things to say to her first, and I didn't want the issue clouded like that. I didn't want to be diverted.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked.
“No. I'm fine.”
She put her arm across me and leaned her head on me. It felt heavy, the hair up against the side of my face smooth and thick. The lights in the room seemed to dim. I closed my eyes. I thought I could feel every movement of her body against my own. I opened my eyes for a second, but closed them again because the room seemed to be leaning precariously. I felt curiously removed, like part of me had become dislodged and was far away or was viewing everything from far away. I was strangely suspended, floating, but quiet, the only still thing in a noiselessly loud flurry of movement around me. There was what seemed to be a fractional moment in which there was nothing, and then everything slipped together and Catherine and I were kissing each other. One hand was in her hair, pulling her to me so that her lips would press harder against mine. She took my hand that was straying at her waist and moved it up her satiny-feeling lounging dress to her breast. All hell broke loose in my head. I moved my hands to her shoulders and pushed away from her. Her eyes opened slowly.
“I'll take that drink now,” I said.
She got up, wrapping the dress tightly across her breasts where it had gaped open. I pulled myself together and lit a cigarette. The hand that shook it from the pack was none too steady. She handed me the drink and grazed me softly as she sat back down.
“Were you in Florida looking for Lucy McDermott?” she asked. I nodded. “Did you find her?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me sadly. “I guess it was all for nothing.”
“No, I wouldn't say that. It satisfied my curiosity.” I told her briefly what had happened, and that the police were questioning Lucy now about her father's murder.
She got nervous while I talked. “Look, Neal, I don't think I want to talk about all this right now. Let's forget about it for tonight.”
“I can't,” I said. I got up. “Your mother hung by a thread waiting to get rid of her guilt before she died. And she wanted to make sure that someone would take care of you when she was gone. She chose me for both those purposes.”
Her eyes slitted. “You're being cruel.”
“No, no I'm not, Catherine. I'm trying to handle what she told me the best way I know how.”
“Have you told the police?”
“No. And I'm not going to.”
“But what
about Lucy McDermott? It sounds like they're trying to hang her.”
“Let them try. They'll get her for blackmail. That's all.”
She seemed confused. “Why aren't you just going to tell them?”
“I'd rather let them figure it out for themselves.”
“But will they?” she asked quietly.
“I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe not the whole thing. I have to get it clear in my mind first.” I stopped, not knowing how to go on. I took a deep breath.
“Your mother went to the bookstore, Catherine, but I don't think someone in her state of health could kill like that. Also, I don't understand why she would wait twenty years after the fact. Because Lucy McDermott was blackmailing your father? I don't think so. She took care of Lucy in her own way. What she was trying to tell me was that she symbolically pulled the trigger. She felt as guilty as if she had. But she was at the bookstore, alright. She buttoned his coat.”
Catherine stared at me, frozen to her spot on the sofa. “I don't understand, Neal. What are you trying to say?”
I clenched and unclenched my hands to release some of the tension. “When we were talking the other night in the restaurant about Carter Fleming's son taking the books, I expected you to ask me how he had managed to get them. But you didn't. You didn't because you already knew. You went to the shop that morning and you heard them arguing outside in the alley. You already knew Lucy had been blackmailing your father. You had that note and a year to figure it out. And you were still angry about the quarrel you walked in on the day before, but it probably enraged you that your father would allow the son of a man who had cheated him to blackmail him with those books. You were so enraged that it never occurred to you that he was getting back at that man by allowing his own son to walk off with ninety thousand dollars’ worth of his property.” I stopped for breath. “Don't you see, Catherine? I didn't pick up on it the other night in the restaurant because I didn't want to.”
Her face drained. The tawny, golden skin got sallow. Her eyes were huge, gray and smoky looking. “Why are you doing this?” Her voice was a thin whisper.
I went over to her. “Because this has to be straight between us.” I took the fists she had balled her hands into and held them tightly. “It's very important. Do you understand?”
Her face looked like it was ready to fall apart, but she nodded and spoke haltingly, like she was forcing herself to speak. “He always pushed me away like he pushed Mother away, like he detested us both. I didn't want him to detest me. I wanted him to love me, but he always turned away. He always withdrew. He wouldn't let me in.” An edge of hysteria crept into her voice. “I hated him. I hated him for it.” She started to cry. “I didn't realize until he was dead how much like him I am.”
She sat there and cried and I held on to her while she did. I was glad she was crying. I pushed her head down on my shoulder and I rocked her back and forth, and I was glad that she was letting it all go. I didn't stay glad for very long. As her crying subsided I felt her body, that had been relaxed up against me, get taut. I tried to keep rocking her, but she was rigid against the movement. I lifted her head. Her face was no longer torn by the deep, tugging tragedy. Composure latched onto her features and her eyes, tears drying underneath them, were blackening. I tried to get her to respond to me, but she continued to withdraw until the light froze like hard slivers of ice deep down in the bottomless pits which were no longer seeing. If there had been any choice, I would have preferred the creepy feeling I had as I stood in front of Lucy McDermott's beach house.
I watched her until I couldn't take it any longer. I got up and turned all the lights off, then went back and sat beside her. I sat there and waited. I knew then I was going to wait for a long time. I dimly heard the cicadas outside in the picture-book forest, and I thought that the moon seemed to be struggling to send its light through the trees and into the dark room, but that was no doubt a projection of my own misery. If I was having any other thought at that moment it was that I still wanted her very much.
36
* * *
Epilogue
Just to show you how funny things will turn out—I learned sometime later that Lucy McDermott managed to convince the police that those sums of money from Garber had been bonuses, gifts for, as she put it, extra services. She presented the check for ten grand to Rankin and asked that it be returned, that she just couldn't have accepted that kind of money as a gift. Actually the money had never really left the family—either Catherine or Mrs. Garber had put a stop on it at the bank. Or had Garber himself?
When I called Chase Manhattan Jones to tell him that now was as good a time as any for Carter the Third to break out of hiding, he told me that Carter had served two days in purgatory at the farmhouse and then returned to New Orleans for the final judgment. Dante's hell probably looked tame compared to the scene that must have followed in the Audubon Place mansion. Chase, one of the last of the Renaissance men, was out to make his fortune in the contracting-promoting business: He would contract anything for a slice of change and in that way promoted himself. He gave me seven phone numbers where I could reach him if I ever required any service short of surgery. He was still with Lise André at the Broome Street loft. And Robert André not only finished his memoirs but got them published. I'm waiting for the movie.
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Chris Wiltz
Title
Copyright
Contents
1 Fathers and Sons
2 The Luck of the Irish—I Play Pool and Get a Case
3 One for the Books
4 The Question of Class
5 A Different Kind of Luck
6 Hands Off
7 A Liar Will Steal, a Thief Will Murder
8 Rafferty on Location
9 Family Connections
10 My Son, My Son
11 Old Friends Getting Together
12 The Man with the Mallet
13 Gumshoeing
14 Chase Manhattan Jones
15 More About Fathers and Sons
16 What Was Stanley Garber Thinking?
17 Still on My Case
18 Another Try with the Old Man
19 William Blake Finds a Good Home
20 Somebody Don't Like Me
21 Lucy
22 I Want to See Catherine
23 We Have Dinner
24 After Dinner
25 The Scam
26 A Bourbon Drinker
27 What Murphy Said
28 Getting Warm
29 The Milton McDermotts
30 The Dead Aunt
31 The Bartender
32 Lights Out
33 One Way to Convince Louie
34 How to Take a Life
35 Deathbed Wish
36 Epilogue
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Chris Wiltz
Title
Copyright
Contents
1 Fathers and Sons
2 The Luck of the Irish—I Play Pool and Get a Case
3 One for the Books
4 The Question of Class
5 A Different Kind of Luck
6 Hands Off
7 A Liar Will Steal, a Thief Will Murder
8 Rafferty on Location
9 Family Connections
10 My Son, My Son
11 Old Friends Getting Together
12 The Man with the Mallet
13 Gumshoeing
14 Chase Manhattan Jones
15 More About Fathers and Sons
16 What Was Stanley Garber Thinking?
17 Still on My Case
18 Another Try with the Old Man
19 William Blake Finds a Good Home
20 Somebody Don't Like Me
21 Lucy
22 I Want to See Catherine
23 We Have Dinner
24 After Dinner
25 The Scam
26 A Bourbon Drinker
27 What Murphy Said
28 Getting Warm
29 The Milton McDermotts
30 The Dead Aunt
31 The Bartender
32 Lights Out
33 One Way to Convince Louie
34 How to Take a Life
35 Deathbed Wish
36 Epilogue