Stone 588

by Gerald A. Browne

  There, that should do it. Gate closed.

  On with Madame de Montespan.

  Wintersgill's eyes ran the printed words, but the words never reached destination. In the milliseconds it normally took for his mind to recognize each word and connect it with its meaning . . .

  Libby interposed.

  Came right out the gate.

  Where the hell was his gatekeeper, anyway, his guardian of sanity, the chemical thing that saw to whatever was allowed to get in or come out of him? What a terrible time for his gatekeeper to be remiss. Probably Libby had tricked the gatekeeper, bought off the gatekeeper.

  Wintersgill closed the seventeenth century, the stretched red leather that the animate Madame de Montespan had been reduced to. He placed the book on the side table, straightened it so it symmetrically coincided with the other books there, demonstrating his confidence that he would be reading it again soon.

  He walked the apartment. With Libby. From study to bedroom to living room to study.

  The Bartok sounded somewhat screechy now.

  Who, Wintersgill wondered, had been Libby's source of information on his stolen bond deal with First Industrial of Philadelphia? Only he and Lawrence Vickrey had been involved, and Lawrence wasn't the sort who was easily shaken, surely wouldn't incriminate himself unless, of course, he'd been hopelessly cornered. Had Libby managed that? How? When had she found out about those stolen bonds? Did she know about the others? She'd intimated as much.

  The bitch.

  She'd been looking down his throat all the while. That was the humiliating thing of it. A veritable voyeur of his misdemeanors, she'd overseen his every move while appearing to be distracted with extravagances and vanities.

  The devious bitch.

  How much of him had she exposed? Possibly she knew within a thousand the amount he'd skimmed from the Foundation. He could have been much more clever about it, but her behavior had lulled him. Now it was easy to imagine her keeping tabs on him, a running account of Swiss and Bahamian deposits that, at whim, she'd be able to hold against him.

  But hadn't he known all along that she'd known? He must have sensed it. Surely. That would explain why he'd been so insistent about marrying her. By consenting she would have been forgiving.

  Do you, Elizabeth Hopkins-Hull, forgive this man . . . ?

  That was it. What he'd really been after was neither her social standing nor access to the power of her wealth but, rather, immunity.

  The cunt.

  The way she'd manipulated his conscience, finessed him into doing things he would never have otherwise done. Those many times over the years he'd catered to the libidinal warp of her, been intimidated into playing the part of her erotic stuntman. All those hard-ons had been hers, not his. And the same went for the comings. She was a glutton for comings. Her own, her rare own, were not enough. He'd been only an implement while led to feel the conspirator. Hadn't had a single quality sensation that he could now remember.

  The violin performing the Bartok had become a wounded, beaked thing swooping around. With the flick of a switch, Wintersgill put it out of its misery and out of his own. The silence was such relief that for a full minute he didn't relate it to his being alone.

  He went into the kitchen.

  It wasn't out of singular distrust of Mrs. Donnell that he checked to make sure she'd locked the service door. That door was, after all, where the apartment was most vulnerable, he believed, and he wasn't about to stake his well-being on anyone's competence. Certainly no one cared as much for his safety as he did.

  The door was locked. He saw that. But it didn't matter. He unlocked it and relocked it himself, watching the vertical bolt of the Segal unit snap into place. He inserted the security chain and thought he would unlock and lock the Segal again, but he didn't want to get stuck on it. Not tonight. He wouldn't get stuck on anything tonight.

  From the refrigerator he got a tall glass of buttermilk for his bedside because his hiatal hernia might act up. He checked the lock of the front door twice, and, leaving on certain adequate lights, he went into the master bedroom.

  His bed was turned down as he expected it would be. His extra pillows arranged just so. The bed linens were immaculate, ready to receive him if he undressed completely, not merely took off his shoes as he so often did. He padded into the bathroom. Brushed his teeth with Elgydium, the French toothpaste whose strong fennel flavor he disliked but felt was better for his gums. As he brushed he avoided looking into the mirror because something in him had suggested his reflection would not be there. When he was through brushing he risked it, raised his eyes, and . . there he was!

  To that extent reassured, he returned to the bedroom. There, awaiting him again, were the three doors, the every night doors and their arbitrary dead bolts. Originally there had been only the one door leading from the main hallway, and that one was still most critical. The only access to the master bath and dressing room was through the bedroom they served, so under normal circumstances there would be no need for doors to them. But in Wintersgill's mind those were places where whoever might want to could hide and wait until he was helplessly asleep. So, for the sake of his nights, he'd had the doors put in and the dead bolts installed.

  He looked to see there was water at bedside before closing up. Nothing could more easily set him off than needing something from outside the bedroom once he'd closed up. Beneath the skirt of his bed was an antique English chamber pot hand-painted with roses. Only he knew its purpose was more than decorative. He emptied it first thing each morning.

  In the order that his mind required he closed the doors, listening carefully for the confirming clicks of the tongues of their locksets. His whole night depended on his believing his fingers and the dead bolts. He focused intently on them. He didn't feel the small, brass, half-moon-shaped knobs of the bolts. It was enough to ask his mind to accept what his eyes said they saw. As an aid he'd made a red line on the brass faceplate of the knob which the knob was supposed to correspond to when in a locked position. The red line device had worked for a while, until he couldn't depend on believing it.

  Tonight he wouldn't need red lines or anything, he told himself. He felt all right about the dead bolts. The bedroom was definitely locked. No one could get to him.

  On the surface of his bedside table, next to his glass of water and his glass of buttermilk, he lined up a two-milligram white, a five-milligram yellow, and a ten-milligram blue. At this point he never knew what strength Valium a night might be. This one had the temperate climate of a yellow night, he thought, but in any case he was prepared.

  Into bed.

  On his back.

  The top sheet gently molded against him. His head indented the down-filled pillow with its shape. He would dry-read himself to sleep with the original French version of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste.

  The book was in his hand and he was readying his eyes for it when his mind told him he should wonder about Libby. Where was she? He'd damn well put her in her place. Hadn't he so precisely pegged her for the self-centered manipulator she was that she'd retreated and closed the gate behind her?

  Not entirely.

  The gate of his mind that was supposed to keep her confined—she was swinging on it. Back and forth, away and diminishing, then forward and dominant. The gatekeeper was fucking off again.

  If Libby was motivated and resourceful enough to uncover that piece of Philadelphia business, as close to the vest as it had been, Wintersgill thought, she might very well get to the truth of the twenty million Townsend thing he'd just pulled off. It was conceivable that nothing, no one, was beyond her reach, certainly not some bank officer in Liechtenstein with all the secrets in his head. Libby would have someone have that bank officer open and spilling out in no time.

  Wintersgill recalled the smug way she'd folded that bank transfer receipt and put it in her handbag. Obvious to him now that she intended to do something with it, use it to check up on the transaction. And when she found out the tw
enty million had been deposited into an account that was his, how much deeper would she delve? Might she just recover the money, reprimand or dismiss him, and let it go at that? Fuck, no. She of all people would smell the more that was behind it. It would be hard for him to sell Townsend's death as a coincidence. Surely Libby wouldn't buy it. She'd pry around and pay off until she had him tied to it, and then she'd enjoy having it be up to her whether or not she preferred to make a stink of it.

  A Wintersgill indicted for murder.

  A Wintersgill in prison.

  For him, almost as much hell would be Libby forever holding that possibility over his head. She would thoroughly document the mess with records: facts to substantiate facts, depositions. She'd put it all in a sealed dossier that the Hull lawyers would be instructed to get into whenever she gave them the nod.

  Gone then, rendered ineffective, would be the ledger on her that Wintersgill had been compiling over the years, the privacies he knew about her, had done for her. All those things he'd never brought out but that they both understood were there, keeping them more or less in balance. She'd have him groveling. She'd have him fucking collies on a treadmill twice a week.

  The slut.

  The pretentious slut. Elle pete plus haute qu 'elle a le cul, as the French so aptly say of her sort: She farts higher than her asshole.

  For the next two hours Wintersgill lay there, his rage ripening. The Libby in him kept at him, and as if she wasn't enough, now there were also Audrey and Springer to contend with. Audrey and Springer came out from another of his mental gates to side with Libby. They ganged up on him, the three of them. Every accusation, every threat from Libby was also from Audrey, and she was inseparable from Springer.

  Wintersgill lay there festering.

  With too much of a grip on himself. His legs and arms tensed, drawn up as though their tendons were thongs of leather going dry.

  The promising bed linens had betrayed him, were now confused, wilted. Every pillow had given up its comforting puflF.

  He had swallowed the yellow five and the blue ten, but they didn't help with the gatekeeping.

  Brillat-Savarin had been dropped spine first to the floor.

  Wintersgill, self-sorry, was resigned to having to get up and check the dead bolts. His confidence that they were locked was long lost. The bedroom bolts would only be the start of it, he knew. Once he was up and concerned with those he would also have to do the service door and the front door again, and there was no telling how many lockings and relockings it would take for him to convince himself before he could get back to the bedroom to cope with the locking and relocking there, the fixing of his eyes upon the crack between the door and the doorjamb, anticipating the horizontal movement of the brass bolt as it slid into place, trying to put stock in it.

  By that time he would be in such a rising spiral of disbelief and fear he would have to look the room. Down on his belly to look beneath the bed and see only floor there but not believe that and have no choice except to continue looking, lifting and lowering the bedskirt time after time. It wouldn't matter that the bed frame was only seven inches from the floor and that it would be impossible for anyone to squeeze under. So caught up in it, he would have lost his sense of proportion.

  He would have to look it all—under the commode, the chest, the chaise. Behind the portiere drapes. Such a traditional hiding place they always gave him trouble, those drapes.

  And when, exhausted, he was finally convinced that he believed he had everything locked and looked enough, he would get into bed and try to keep himself believing until he fell asleep.

  This would be that kind of night, Wintersgill thought.

  Unless therapy helped him.

  More often than not after therapy he was able to lock right up and go straight to sleep.

  At quarter to one he dialed the number.

  An hour later he answered the front door.

  "I'm Millicent," she said, smiling impressively and stepping in before she was invited.

  Not her true name but conscientiously appropriate, Wintersgill thought. She looked Millicent. Tall and brunette with the good bones of a well-bred. More beautiful than pretty. If she'd been gamine or ingenue or horse-faced he would have refused her.

  He led her into the living room.

  She walked well, he noticed, and he also noticed that she sat nicely in the large armed chair, not up on the edge of it but deep in it as though such luxury was commonplace for her. Everything about her that he took in was important to him, every little thing. She was wearing a knee-length dress of crepe de chine, a dark blue that was just a bit livelier than navy. At the least a good designer copy. It was long-sleeved, ample at the upper arm, tapering to the wrist. The large square-cut stone of the ring on the third finger of her right hand blazed enough to be imagined a diamond, as did the stones of her ear clips.

  "May I offer you something to drink?"

  "What are you having?"

  "Evian." He'd drunk two glasses while awaiting her.

  "All right," she said and stipulated, "Evian sans gaz."

  "Ice?"

  "No," she said, purposely leaving off the thank-you.

  While he was getting her Evian she found the money. Where she'd been told it would be: beneath the most recent issue of Connoisseur on the table beside her chair. New hundred-dollar bills, twenty of them. She counted them before putting them into her evening bag.

  He returned with her Evian in a crystal goblet so fine she felt, as she sipped, it might shatter on her lips.

  His gaze was on her.

  She met it for a moment with her strong gray eyes and then glanced about the room. "Quite charming," she said as though she almost approved.

  Wintersgill tried not to think that she was probably a passe fashion model who hadn't married well but intended to, who was in the throes of that interim stage of having to depend on what she'd saved, which was only herself, and that barely in the nick of time. Keeping herself above the milieu with wardrobe, with address, was vital to her ends. He tried not to think there was nothing more pathetic and more easily compromised to extremes than beauty desperate for money. He studied her nose, decided it hadn't been pared. There was nothing he detested more than a face overly reliant on a revised nose, a peasant looking to pass.

  He gulped his Evian and gave her the conversational openings.

  Millicent said, rather credibly, that she'd just returned from the Algarve, adored Portugal, adored the people, their eager humility, so different from the French and Italians and especially the Greeks in that respect.

  Millicent said, and it seemed entirely possible, that she'd spent most of last winter being shared by Eleuthera and Steamboat Springs. Had he ever skied Steamboat or Crested Butte? Marvelous snow, and not nearly as stuffy as St. Moritz. Although, of course, the accommodations were not adequately seasoned, never would be.

  Wintersgill accepted the quality of her voice, its typical affectations, the way it handled vowels. Only once did she give herself away with an error of speech. He was also grateful for her presumptuous and condescending airs. Yes, he concluded, if anyone would do, it was this Millicent.

  Without his verbally suggesting it, they went into his bedroom, through, and on into the bath area.

  He relaxed on one of the chaises while she undressed. She had on expensive underwear.

  He waited until she was nude before he removed his dressing robe to also be nude. He had the start of an erection, just enough tumescence to make him hang heavier. From anticipation rather than from wanting her.

  Using both hands she gathered her dark hair back, glanced at him questioningly. He gestured no and she released her hair, got it more or less back into place by tossing and shaking her head haughtily. "I went to an exhibition of jewelry at Christie's yesterday," she said with characteristic ennui. "Only a few pieces were worthwhile: a Schlumberger emerald-and-sapphire choker, for one. The rest were the usual leftovers, things various people we know have, with good reason, tired
of."

  She stepped down into the elongated, sunken bathtub. No water in it. She stretched out, languorously.

  Wintersgill gave the situation a moment to register sufficiently. He went to the tub, straddled it, stood with one foot on each side of it.

  From her point of view he loomed like a colossus, his genitals dominant. He controlled the intention of his huge limp cock with his fingers.

  She had been instructed not to close her eyes while he urinated on her. She was to cower and protest, express how repelled she was by it, scream out, flail to almost fend it off, writhe evasively.

  Her face was cringing ugly with distaste, as Wintersgill shook his cock and the final few drips fell on her. He put on his dressing robe and left her there. She had only five minutes to cleanse, dress, and be gone, because he needed the experience to be as fresh as possible in his mind.

  It was two thirty when Wintersgill heard the front door closing behind her.

  At four o'clock he was in his bedroom. On the floor behind a bergere. Rivulets of perspiration running down his neck and back and sides, his heart pounding like some separate creature trying to burst out. He had been looking that corner for nearly half an hour, just that empty corner.

  And there was still most of the room to do.

  Chapter 37

  Dance, diamonds, dance.

  So glittery and gleeful looking.

  It doesn't matter; 47th Street is still a way of woe, habitually heartsick. Even its most prosperous days are enjoyed with characteristic despondency. Ask a 47th Street dealer how business is, and although it's been only an hour since he made the deal of his dreams, he will hunker his head into the shrug of his shoulders, make a glum mouth, and say things could be a lot better. That's how most 47th Street people are. Wouldn't think of passing up a chance to commiserate, to wail at least a little, to find fault. That faultfinding disposition might very well have a lot to do with the way they're forever looking down into diamonds with their magnifying loupes and nearly always coming up with something wrong.