The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  I stood on the front step in the quiet that cloaked Hans Place and rang the bell and waited. I felt like a kid on his first date. It was absurd. I thought about the novel Gone Glimmering. Had she ever been anything like that? I didn’t think so, but what the hell did I know? I’d been pretty weird myself in those days, wrapped up in the old self. Another head case, one of so many.

  The door was opened by a tall gray-haired woman with a long nose and her glasses on a chain hanging halfway down her cardigan. She regarded me neutrally. “Yes?”

  I told her who I was. “Could you tell Miss DeWinter that Trip would like to see her, please?”

  “I’m sorry. Miss DeWinter is not in London at present.”

  “But I saw her yesterday—”

  “Yes, but she has left the city.”

  “Ah, off to Gurney Slade?”

  “No, I’m sure not.”

  “Listen, it is important, Miss …”

  “I am Willis, Mr. Tripper.”

  “Well, Willis, do you know where I might reach her?”

  “This is not possible, I fear. She has gone north to see Mr. Christopher—”

  “Mr. Christopher?”

  “Her nephew. Mr. Christopher DeWinter. She has gone north.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “I really cannot say, sir. Scotland, you see. Scotland has always been a bit of an abyss as far as I’m concerned.” She smiled thinly. “It might as well be … oh, Tasmania. But if she calls as she sometimes does, I will be pleased to tell her that you called.”

  “When might she return?”

  “She did not say. Tomorrow—or a month hence.”

  I stood alone in the street. It was so empty, so perfect, it might have been a movie set. I imagined I felt eyes on me, eyes behind windows gleaming gold in the sun.

  I’d never been to Scotland, although I’d once been very close to a Scot. MacDonald Gordon by name, known to the world as Thumper.

  Nineteen

  THE COUNTRY ROAD WAS THE standard British narrow, wide enough for a vehicle-and-a-half, with a little grassy ditch on either side, then solid hedgerows high as a semitrailer truck. It—the road—was also made up of twenty-yard straightaways and seventy-five-yard corners around which there was no hope whatsoever of seeing. Every car or truck coming toward you was a complete, shit-inducing surprise, rather like all the very worst aspects of a heart attack. Such were my reflections as we struggled up a hill toward the glowing ball of sun that seemed to rest atop the hedges. A dark green lorry bolted into view, inevitably in the middle of the road, swerving and nearly toppling over as it negotiated the bend in the road, all about a foot and a half in front of us. I only had time to clamp my eyes shut and tell God I hadn’t really meant any harm, at least not most of the time.

  Heidi Dillinger calmly shifted down, kept the English Ford under control as the wheels on my side slid into the little ditch. The hedge’s branches poked at my face through the open window and then the lorry was gone on down the road toward the village and we were trundling on up the hill, blinded by the sun. It was nine o’clock in the evening and high summer. The sun had another couple of hours to go before dark. But we were less than ten minutes from Alec Truman’s country house.

  We had spent an hour at a country pub munching sausage rolls and drinking beer and wondering how to proceed with the plan, such as it was, while maintaining our uneasy truce. I’d lost track of Heidi’s personality, the reality of her, and couldn’t find it. Her face had an emotionally bruised look, her eyes were dimmed by crying. I doubted that she cared all that much for me, but was instead mourning her ego, which had to deal with failing to bring me to heel. My concern was more with my regret at having hit her. Thank God I hadn’t broken either her nose or her jaw, let alone her neck. Her lip’s puffiness was gone. And she didn’t seem to hold it against me. She was no crybaby. She was something special, a high-stakes gambler. All or nothing.

  She was switching her focus—which had gone curiously haywire when she’d gotten jealous, of all things—back to the problems at hand. Her job, first and foremost, was to find JC Tripper if he was still alive. That was why she and I had gone to work together in the first place. Magna’s blackmail problems were something different unless JC had somehow slipped into that mire: then it was all part of the JC problem.

  The JC Problem …

  She was worried. I won’t say she was scared exactly. But she was worried about Morris Fleury. She kept coming back to him when we spoke about the job and its problems. Where was he? Was he watching us? What had he discovered about Clive Taillor’s financial benefactor? Wasn’t that the key to it all—who’d been paying Taillor for twenty years?

  There were so many possibilities. It was a challenge to keep them clear and distinct and she had regularly reiterated a further problem. She thought I was a liar. She thought I was withholding information. She thought I knew all about JC. And I kept telling her that she was quite right, that she had my number, that I knew he was dead.

  I’d listened to her on the train ride to Bath and I listened to her in the pub. I listened to her on the subjects of JC and Fleury, Annie and Bechtol and Magna and Whitney, how she’d gotten into computers and information gathering and storage and stockpiling, how she’d worked her way into the lucrative association with Bechtol, Ledbetter, and the rest of them. I was listening, more or less, nodding at the crucial moments, but my mind was elsewhere, thinking about what she’d said about me and the sixties.

  It was all true.

  The pull of the past was overwhelming me. It was my own personal twilight zone. A time warp was swallowing me, and the aspect of the process that had caught my attention was that I was an active accomplice; I wanted the time warp to do its thing, I wanted to go back. I’d spent twenty years denying it, but now I let go, I knew I’d have sold my soul for eternity, in perpetuity and throughout the universe; I’d have done it in an instant for the chance to go back and live forever in those days. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end … But we were wrong, we’d fucked it all up, we’d grown older and the world had slid from our grasp … my God, how the time slipped away … The sixties, they were the best thing that had ever happened to me, and my eternal soul would have been a small price to pay to go back, to stay there, but to do a few things differently. I’d been more alive then than I’d ever been again, but things had all gone so wrong, so terribly wrong … Given another chance, a miracle, a trick of the light and the clock, a trick of some damn kind, and I’d be back and I’d make it turn out all right, all I wanted was a second chance …

  I never said I was profound, that I wasn’t shallow. But I possess some small degree of wisdom. It is the wise man who knows his proper place in time and space. I knew where I belonged.

  The full impact of the realization—you might even call it an epiphany—was the most powerful thing that had happened to me in the twenty years since it all came tumbling down.

  I had outlived my era. If I was lucky, luckier than I had any right to be, there might still be one way back. If not, I would forever be a stranger, an emissary from a lost world.

  We left the car pulled off the road, blocking what looked to be a farmer’s seldom-used gate. We were a few minutes’ walk from the driveway leading to the Cotswold stone farmhouse where Alec Truman was supposed to be in residence, if not actually receiving. We hugged the vine-covered stone wall edging the field and the road. In the distance, the sun casting long shadows across the wet, black, freshly plowed acreage, a lone farmer and his tractor attended to some night work. The silence was devastating, as if the croaking of insects were being cranked up and blown at us through amplifiers. No human sounds; everything else magnified. Even the hawks wheeling against the sky seemed on the verge of deafening us. Yet it was silent.

  At the mouth of the gravel driveway we stopped and Heidi said we should try to get the lay of the land. Good thinking! But what did it mean? She thought it would be ideal if I could see him, study
his appearance, before confronting him personally.

  “You mean window-peeping? Jesus, Heidi.”

  “If the opportunity arises”—she shrugged—“why not? He doesn’t seem to be very security-conscious.” She looked up at the trees in search of hidden television cameras. At the other end of the driveway there were only ordinary residential coach lamps illuminating the forecourt. The house itself might once have been a working farmhouse, but in the latter stages of the twentieth century it was more of a manor house, with gabled roof, heavy timbering, two or three large chimneys topping off the pile of grayish-yellow Cotswold stone. “But we’ll wait for a little more darkness.”

  The wall beside the driveway was thickly crusted with vines. I sank down and leaned back, feeling the dampness on the seat of my pants. I watched Heidi craning her neck to see up the driveway, across the field, cataloging the property. There were two barns in addition to the main house. The driveway was perhaps a hundred yards long. My back was itching. I ignored it, then felt a leaf brushing my neck. I twitched my head but the leaf couldn’t take the hint. Finally I reached wearily around behind me and there was something behind me but it sure as hell wasn’t a leaf. I let out a yelp and lifted off the ground, grabbing at my back. There were three or four slowly wriggling snails on my neck and shoulders, one inside my collar. Heidi thought it was very amusing. She plucked the snails from my shirt and carefully returned them to the wall. She pulled the vines away. The wall was alive, seething with snails, tens of thousands of snails oozing among the vines, leaving the stones slick, slippery. They weren’t going to hurt anyone and God knows they were minding nobody’s business but their own. Still, you don’t need one inside your shirt. Mother Nature, that old scamp.

  Two men in suits were waiting for us in the forecourt.

  “Security,” I said as they stood watching us approach. Their arms were crossed but their unsmiling faces said We have guns. “The old-fashioned way. With guards.”

  “Hardly the latest technology,” she sniffed.

  “May we assist you in any way?” Words came out of a small round hole in the beefier man’s face.

  “Need to see Alec,” I said.

  “And are you expected, guv’nor?”

  “Let’s just say she’s going to cry and stamp her feet if she can’t see him. Me, I couldn’t care less. I’d just as soon go back down the lane and play with the snails.”

  “I like a bit o’ cabaret, Henry,” the smaller man said to his companion. He was smiling.

  “You should see the snail races,” the large one said. He grinned with the little round mouth. “Now there’s a sight, guv’nor. What do you fink, Brian? Take ’em in or send ’em on their way?”

  “Flip a coin, wot?”

  “Very unprofessional,” Heidi muttered.

  I called the flip and won.

  “You’re not JC Tripper!”

  “I do beg your pardon?”

  “You have disappointed Miss Dillinger,” I explained. “She may pout. Be on your guard.”

  “Oh, Lee, shut up.” Heidi was unhappy and she was well past trying not to show it.

  “I told you he wasn’t going to turn out to be JC. I’ve told you a thousand times JC is dead.”

  “And I’ve told you a thousand times that your saying it doesn’t make it true!”

  “I say, this is all terribly droll, but I’m rather in the dark.” Alec Truman was about the right height, his nose was too long, his ears stuck out, and he wasn’t wearing his hair. The hair was a dead giveaway. Above the gray fringe over his ears he was Mr. Cueball. His head wasn’t the right shape at all, much too long. His teeth were also too long, very equine. He looked as if he might bray at any moment but he never did. So much for the camera never lying. “You, Mr. Tripper,” he said, ticking things off on his fingers to keep them straight, “are the late Mr. Tripper’s brother. Thus, you are an old friend of Annie’s. Dear Annie. I’m on the right track thus far, am I not?” I nodded. We were sitting in a book-lined study. Through the long windows the last of the sun was turning a narrow strip across the field a vivid scarlet, fading, diminishing as I watched. Alec Truman was wearing a dressing gown, Turnbull & Asser. His bare feet were encased in monogrammed slippers.

  “What are those little things?” I pointed to the floor.

  “Ah, those. Summer brings them like a tiny plague.” They were moving, thick black spots on the carpet. “Dung beetles. One of many reasons why Annie pays only brief and very infrequent visits to our little country retreat. I, on the other hand, rise above them.” He was very lean, very fit, and looked like a cabinet minister. “But one must wonder why on earth you should have thought I was the late … well, rock star. It seems on the face of it an unlikely assumption. And why in the world would you be looking for him? Which is to say, the entire world knows he’s dead. Unless memory fails me, Annie showed me a book you wrote, Mr. Tripper, which proved that beyond any reasonable doubt. I do not understand. Could you, Miss Dillinger, find your way clear to enlighten me?”

  Henry had brought us lemonade in a thick crockery pitcher. It was in desperate need of sugar. Presumably our host’s idea of a nightcap.

  Heidi, protecting our flanks, launched into a description of Magna business that made our travails sound like a model of innocence and business-as-usual. “There are,” she said in an agonizingly calm voice, “those who believe that JC may be alive. Well, we have to make sure, don’t we? Who better than his brother to lead a final expedition to once and for all set the record straight. You see, there are various film, book, and recording projects which are on temporary hold … awaiting final word on the JC situation—”

  “There must be reasons,” Truman said, “to believe JC is alive. Surely Annie will find all this quite riveting—she was a very impressionable young woman when she knew your brother, and you too, of course. It was a very long time ago. But I know her well and I believe JC left his mark on her forever. I don’t mean a bad mark … I just mean she never quite got over him. Or wanted to, if it comes to that. One can hardly blame her, can one? I’ve often thought how large he must have loomed in her life.” He sighed, staring either at the pattern in the carpet or the dung beetles. “But surely, if he were alive, he’d have been in touch with Annie—”

  “Who knows? It’s possible he has been,” Heidi said.

  “Ahhh.” He frowned. “The thought never crossed my mind. But, of course, you’re right. She needn’t have told me.”

  “Well,” I said, “we have to put the whole issue to rest.”

  “Yes, I quite see that. You’re an interested party.” He smiled slightly, rubbed his palm over his smooth, shiny cranium. “And I am, too.” He was thinking aloud, very softly. “If she were to meet JC Tripper now … well, who can predict the consequences?”

  “I’m quite sure my brother has been dead these twenty years.”

  “Yes,” he said abruptly, pulling himself back from the void of speculation. He was switching gears, trying to ease free of his thoughts and fears about Annie. “Yes, that’s certainly the odds-on bet. Well, it all sounds a bit nonsensical, doesn’t it? Comic opera. But you and your masters must know what you’re doing.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “It’s a big assumption.”

  “Well, allow me one more assumption—I take it that Mr. Fleury is a colleague of yours, am I right?”

  Heidi’s bullshit and double-talk trailed off and turned into a puzzled silence. She looked from Truman to me as if I might have caught some hint she’d missed.

  “No kidding? Old Morris is in on this one, too?” I did everything but smite my forehead in amusement over this happy occurrence. “Just goes to show you. Magna’s so huge nowadays, the left hand never knows what the right is doing. Fleury’s been on to you about this?” I shook my head, overdoing it. Next I’d be picking straw out of my hair. “What a character! Really a throwback.” I felt like a graduate with honors from the Monty Python School for Village Idiots.

  “Yes, the ma
n’s a corker! You’ve got him precisely—a character. But an interesting character, one must allow him that. And he talked rather a lot of sense once he got under full sail.”

  “Perhaps you could fill us in.” Had Fleury finished with the bankers in Zurich? Did he know who’d been making all those payments to Clive Taillor? “When did Fleury make contact with you?”

  He rubbed his long nose. “Week ago. The man had very good information. Knew where I was, called me from Gurney Slade, said he’d come all the way from Los Angeles—in short, his bona fides were all very much in order. And—let me be quite candid—I am always in the market for smallish investments. There are tax situations, there are losses and profits, there are cash positions which can be useful, there are stock arrangements—but that’s all quite irrelevant to our discussion, I suppose. At least to you. But Mr. Fleury had an interesting proposition.”

  “He often does,” I said.

  “It was the film you mentioned, Miss Dillinger. The film about JC. He was offering me what amounted to a limited partnership—he knew about the production company I own here in the UK.” He tossed that little gem off in the airy manner of the highly diversified plutocrat who can barely keep track of his affairs. “Film to be made here and he made it clear that it was my firm or it would go to Handmade Films and, frankly, Handmade is getting so many of the goodies these days, I reckoned this might be my turn. Magna could guarantee distribution worldwide, my exposure would amount to fifteen million and I could have another of my companies handling the completion bond. Frankly, I was intrigued. I gave him some first-stage encouragement and we spoke about a few details. He was having the screenplay sent to me—odd how they always believe the money people want to feel included on the creative side.” He laughed quickly. “What do I know or care about screenplays? From what I gather, the more illiterate they are, the greater the chance of success, though I could be wrong. The last film I really liked was The Man Who Would Be King.”