Private Screening

by Richard North Patterson

  Stacy was quiet. “John wanted to kill you,” she said finally, “but Jamie was the first, wasn’t he?”

  He seemed to wince. In her confusing mix of hurt and horror and betrayal, Stacy felt both that this was right and that she had said something cruel. Reaching for his snifter, she took one sip, and put it next to him again.

  “When I asked why he’d killed Alexis,” Lord murmured, “all he said was, ‘Because she saw my face.’”

  It made her shiver. Then, in Lord’s silence, she heard Rachel again.

  “We are told that even at this late hour, millions across America are waiting in front of their televisions for their first glimpse of Phoenix, wondering who he really is.…”

  Lord’s eyes were still narrow.

  “All those voices.…” When he turned from the fire, something in his face had changed. “When he said that, Stacy, he didn’t have an accent.”

  “What do you mean …”

  As he stood, turning to the screen, a streak of red split the night surrounding the Hall of Justice.

  Red lights appeared in the distance, flashing without sirens. Moving toward him, they seemed to swirl on their own, suspended in a phalanx over Bryant Street.

  Heart pounding, Parnell stopped at the corner, unsure of where to go.

  As if to mirror this, the cameras and reporters hesitated across the street, torn between the front entrance and the underground garage. And then he saw the dark-haired woman start scrambling toward the alley.

  Parnell clipped the press pass on his coat. The lights kept coming, too fast to stop in front.

  He was running across Bryant, after the woman, when they swept past the main entrance.

  A pack of the others bolted from the doors, scurrying between them. He ran at their backs through the alley, down the ramp to the mouth of the garage.

  As the first lights swirled the corner, he was underground.

  The garage was dim and enormous and dark at the corners, row upon row of cars facing sideways with drive-throughs between them. When the ramp ended, the mob veered sharply left toward a wall of elevators, footsteps echoing off cement. Parnell saw police lining the elevators and then a mop of dark curly hair already behind them with her cameraman, shoulder against the wall. Perfectly angled on the squad cars as they stopped.

  At his back, the red lights flashed down the ramp.

  The pack ahead kept pushing to the elevators, less people than bodies fighting for space, blocking his way.

  Parnell broke from them and started running between two lines of cars, parallel to the wall they rushed toward. Sweating, chest constricted, legs feeling like lead. Torn between panic and elation.

  Looking back, he saw the first squad car swing behind the mob, slowing as they pushed each other.

  Parnell ran faster.

  When he turned toward the woman, they were separated by four rows of cars. Sliding between them, he saw her mouth open, the man thrust his camera overhead with both hands. What she said was lost in shouted echoes.

  He was one row from her now, a few feet at her back.

  The first car stopped.

  Parnell heard her voice above the tumult, speaking to her audience. “In seconds now, we will finally see the face of Phoenix.…”

  As she rose to her toes, three sheriff’s deputies burst from the car to the elevator. And then the second car was there.

  Trembling, Parnell hurried through the final row, behind her. Heads kept moving in front of him: hers, a deputy’s, the cameraman’s. No one saw him.

  A line of vision opened between their shoulders.

  In seeming slow motion, the rear door of the second car opened.

  Moore got out, glancing behind him at the third car as it emptied two more deputies. There were shouts, flashbulbs.

  With the woman, Parnell looked back to the second car.

  Another man waited in the backseat. Only his legs and torso could be seen.

  Moore reached inside to grasp his arm, and then the figure was bending through the door. Parnell saw the manacled hands first, then the muscled forearms and the top of his head. Dark, straight hair.

  Grasping the revolver, Parnell could not take it from his pocket. The camera began to whine.

  Then Damone stood, and Parnell saw his profile.

  Parnell gaped in confusion. The woman thrust out her microphone, shouting to the murderer, “Why …”

  Turning, he saw Parnell behind her.

  Parnell felt himself raise the gun, still staring at his face, paralyzed by shock and disbelief. Then Moore and Rachel followed the killer’s returning look of terrible recognition. As Rachel screamed, Moore started between them.

  Instinctively, Robert Parnell raised cuffed hands, and covered his eyes.

  A shiver of horror and revulsion ran through Parnell to the trigger.

  The gunshot echoed from her television.

  In its reverberation, the man Stacy knew as John Damone fell back, blood coming from between his fingers.

  “He’s shot,” Rachel cried out. “Oh my God, he’s shot.…”

  Moore was running toward her. Veering wildly to follow him, the camera found Parnell.

  He stared at it, revolver to his temple. Almost shyly, he turned before he pulled the trigger.

  Stacy and Rachel gasped together.

  Facing Moore, Parnell’s head snapped sideways. The agent caught him before he hit the cement, and then more cameras closed in around them.

  There was blood on Rachel’s blouse. “Colby Parnell has shot himself,” she was chanting. “He shot Phoenix right in front of us.…”

  The camera swung toward him.

  Damone lay on his back, not moving. The dark stain beneath his head was like Jamie’s.

  Stacy turned, face pressed against Lord’s chest. She was not sure which one of them was shaking.

  Consequences:

  APRIL–SEPTEMBER

  THEY stayed at Sea Ranch two more days.

  Lord ran a fever, sleeping fitfully. Stacy did the things for him that friends do for each other; seeing what Colby Parnell had done, and knowing who Damone was, drained their desire to talk of it. Neither could turn on the television. They did not make love.

  On the third morning, when Lord was better, they drank coffee in the window seat. He had talked to Moore; they were burying the Parnells that morning, and that Damone was their son had been confirmed from dental records. There was nothing more to do.

  Stacy was quiet; the horror of what they had witnessed still showed in her eyes.

  “It’s not just John,” she said finally. “It’s that Colby and Alexis are dead, and what we did was meaningless.”

  For a while Lord gazed at the ocean. “All of it?” he asked.

  She seemed almost to memorize his face. “There’s such a lot to live with, Tony. One part, we can never really talk about, can we?”

  Lord hesitated, searching for an answer. “That leaves a world of other subjects. I can see myself going through a day, and thinking of something and then wanting to call you.”

  “Sometimes I’m really bad on the phone.” She sipped her coffee, still watching him. “I guess it’s that you have to fill it with words, and when I’m confused, they don’t seem like what I’m thinking.”

  Lord felt awkward. “We can try mental telepathy, I suppose.”

  “Or letters.” For the first time in days, Stacy smiled. “If I can read your writing.”

  When Lord returned to the office, Cass kissed him. Grinning, she said, “That’ll have to hold you for fifty years or so.”

  “That’s why I went to all that trouble.”

  Cameras and reporters still waited outside; his desk was covered with requests for interviews and calls about publishing deals.

  “You’re a hero, Tony.”

  “It didn’t feel like that.”

  He put the phone slips aside, trying to do his normal work; his clients’ demands started making him short-tempered. Then Cass came back to say that Rach
el was on hold, requesting an exclusive interview.

  “Now that I’m still alive,” Lord said. “Hasn’t she had enough?”

  “What should I tell her?”

  “Just ask her that. Even she’ll understand.”

  As she closed the door, Lord knew that part of his anger was that Carson had left him feeling like a fraud.

  Moments later, he dictated a brief statement, saying only that he had nothing to say.

  The statement appeared the next morning, along with speculation that Lord was whetting the public appetite for a prospective book. That evening, at the beach, his son hung close to him; Lord wondered if he could ever hear the surf again and not think of Robert Parnell.

  On Sunday he dropped Christopher with Marcia and Fred, went home, and wrote Stacy.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he told her. “Except me.

  “I want to look at what’s happened, have more time with Christopher. But I’m behind on my cases, still see him every other weekend, and spent part of this last one at the office so I can keep up his support.

  “I’ve finally figured out what my dad surely always knew: that most adults can change their lives only over time, even when they know what they should do.

  “Guess I’m a slow learner.

  “I don’t envy what you must be feeling about Damone. But the success you’ve earned may help now—you’re one of those rare people who’s free to act, at least once you figure things out. In a while, I hope that makes this better.

  “I’ll be thinking of you, all along.”

  On the envelope, Stacy’s headlong scrawl reminded him of her profile, hair falling across her eyes. It made him smile.

  “Being glad you wrote,” she said, “is the only thing I’m sure of. I wish I could send you and Christopher some of the time I have—Jamie’s death remains this terrible blank, a question not quite answered.

  “Because of John, I don’t know if I can ever trust my sense of things or people as they appear to be.

  “One of the things I hate him for is that I don’t always remember to hate him.

  “Another is how angry I am at myself. For ten years, while he was helping my career, it was too convenient not to look inside the person I thought I knew. So I helped bring down who he really was on the people who came close to me.

  “I’m still not sure how many were hurt. Only that the price I paid is cheap.

  “I can never accept that what we saw that night had to be.

  “Sorry to burden you with this. But who else would I say it to?”

  Thoughtful, Lord telephoned Moore.

  “I need some information on Robert,” he began.

  “That depends.” Moore sounded flat. “The money thing’s alive again—how Robert financed the kidnapping. DiPalma’s looking for Carson as an accessory, among other things.”

  Lord rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s a favor I’m asking, Johnny. For Stacy’s sake.”

  They talked for a while. Hanging up, Lord felt the hopelessness of his own situation, caught between Stacy and Carson.

  “What strikes me about Robert Parnell,” he finally wrote her, “is the care he took to hide himself.

  “Moore says he started with the birth certificate of a dead infant—the real John Damone died in a Bronx orphanage—which got him in and out of the Army and then to Berkeley on the GI Bill. In the sixties that was easy enough to do: radicals and drug dealers had a network built on false ID, for anyone who wanted to disappear or simply beat the draft. Robert just reversed the process.

  “Two weeks before he faked his own kidnapping, he enlisted in the Army as John Damone. Moore is certain that his plan was to hide the ransom money, enter the military on his enlistment date, and then pick up the hidden cash two years later—complete with new identity.

  “When his father refused to ransom him, he followed the rest of the plan: Robert was nothing if not adaptable.

  “He was also an actor, and a kind of genius.

  “While they searched the country for him, Robert was in boot camp, a street kid with his hair shaved off. No one thought to look for him there. As far as the authorities were concerned, Robert had utterly vanished, murdered by his kidnappers. And the Army gave John Damone an identity completely his.

  “By the time you met him, he’d been working on his role for seven years. No sane twenty-one-year-old would expect all that. Neither did any cop or lawyer who dealt with him later, as important as he was to all of us.

  “Especially me.”

  Lord put down the pen, wondering what to say about the trial.

  “After James Kilcannon died,” he finally wrote, “it was clear to me that Damone wanted to avoid publicity and, especially, testifying at the trial. I considered all the possible reasons for that except that he was someone else.

  “When he finally did appear, the judge allowed no close-ups of witnesses. On SNI, he was a thirty-four-year-old man with a beard and a Bronx accent. Not even his own mother would have recognized him.

  “I realize how haunting that last sentence is. But the larger point it makes is valid—especially applied to you, who knew him only as Damone, your manager and friend.

  “I know you’re looking at things pretty hard right now. I just hope you’ll be fair to yourself, that’s all.”

  For my sake, too, Lord thought. And then he realized that he could not yet bring himself to visit Harry Carson.

  For several weeks, Lord heard nothing. He kept himself from writing until the evening he went to see Marcia and Fred.

  “We were sitting in what had been our living room,” he wrote later that night. “Christopher was in bed; Fred wasn’t there. When Marcia brought out two glasses of wine, it was jarringly familiar.

  “I’d come to ask for joint custody. What Marcia wanted to communicate was that she had broken up with Fred—that she ‘just couldn’t relate to his lack of ambition.’ I hope I didn’t look as stupefied as I felt.

  “What I did was offer to ease her new burden by taking Christopher two weeks a month—perhaps she could pick up her education. I saw her face close: since the breakup, Marcia said flatly, she’d ‘learned to value her nurturing side.’

  “One of the unexplained effects of divorce is that it makes people talk funny.

  “What was less funny is that she’s been out three nights this week. But that makes me convenient; we finally worked out one week and unlimited babysitting privileges, to start. It was all very civil.

  “I left before she changed her mind.”

  Lord stopped there. In Stacy’s silence, he was talking to himself.

  When her letter arrived, Lord ran upstairs to read it.

  “I’m sorry not to have answered before this, but glad in a way.

  “When I got to the part about John, I didn’t know what to think, for many reasons. But every few days, I read it again.

  “Yesterday, I realized how much it had helped.

  “I’ve started fooling around with the piano. When I was young, my mom and dad loved Gershwin and Cole Porter, so I did, too. This morning I wondered how it would be to record some. Sure would whip the problem of People mag reading bullshit into my lyrics.

  “But enough about me. I’ve stopped seeing your face on the tube. Does this mean you’re unemployed, or spending all your time at playgrounds?

  “How’s Christopher?”

  It was signed with a large script S.

  Smiling, Lord sat to finish his letter.

  “It means I don’t film well,” he answered, “and don’t like some of the company I’d be keeping. But there’s nothing wrong with Gershwin.”

  He stopped for a moment, thinking.

  “I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but I’ve missed the idea of you. I guess it’s that I came away feeling there are better reasons for being friends than what we went through.

  “I know the problems. But I liked you then and miss you now.”

  Hastily, he mailed it, then started wondering if he had said
too much, for this or any time. Looking at the calendar, he saw that she would get it a day or so before June second.

  For the next two weeks of silence, Lord was certain he had lost her. Then Cass brought in a telegram:

  JUST REREAD YOUR LETTER STOP I GUESS YOU’RE NOT RECONCILING WITH MARCIA STOP OR RACHEL STOP SO MAYBE WE CAN GIVE THIS A WEEKEND HOW’S SEA RANCH STOP JULY TWELFTH

  She stood in the door, smiling at him. For a moment, Lord didn’t know what to do.

  Stacy kissed him.

  Her mouth was full and warm. When her body came against him, the way Lord felt went through them both. Her face fell to his shoulder; what followed was half-shudder, half-sigh.

  Softly, he closed the door behind him.

  Her head drew back with its click, eyes large and serious. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it?”

  They walked together to the window seat and sat in the afternoon sun, shoulders grazing.

  “I don’t know how to start with you, Tony.”

  The tightness in his chest stirred a memory. “Do you remember,” he asked, “the first time you ever kissed someone?”

  “Sure.”

  “I didn’t know what to say or how to do it.” Lord bent his face to hers. “Except like this.”

  He kissed her gently, lightly, with his mouth closed.

  “That was all?” she asked.

  “No,” he said solemnly. “I gained confidence.”

  When he kissed her again, it was exactly the same, but longer.

  Their foreheads touched.

  “What happened next?” she inquired.

  He smiled a little. After a moment, he said quietly, “I’m not sure I can wait that long.”

  The trace of an answering smile came to her eyes. They turned to the window; there was only sea grass, the ocean.

  As they undressed, her look never moved from his.

  When they were naked together, Lord held her. Gently, throat constricted, he stroked her hair and skin.

  Her breasts touched his chest.

  Beneath his fingers, he felt her skin change, then his own heartbeat. Her kiss was deeper. As they slid to the cushion, her hair fell beneath them.

  Her arms went tight around him.