The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series)

by Maxim, John R.

  The next two days were the most people-watching fun of Susan's life. Added to her collection of titles were a baron, two baronets, a viscount and two men who had The Honorable in front of their names. There were at least four other people who were entitled to be called Sir this or Lady that but she never heard them addressed formally except by staff. The women were some of the most elegant she'd ever seen, and all of them had names like Pamela, Cornelia and Fiona. Not a Debbie in the bunch. Not even a Susan. She'd expected to meet a Muffy or two and said so to Paul. He pointed out one of the Cornelias, who'd been a Muffy until that name plummeted out of fashion in response to popular ridicule. Also a Chip who became a Charles upon his recent promotion to the presidency of his brokerage firm.

  Most of the men were, as her father would have put it, guys with two last names. Like Prescott Thornton and Hadley Peale. They wore paisley-patterned dinner jackets with Bermuda shorts. Susan tried to imagine her father here. If the other guests saw him wading ashore they would probably evacuate the island.

  Their stay at the club, like most things involving Paul, was almost perfect in every way. They went scuba diving—her first time—and snorkeling. He taught her to sail a Sunfish, which she picked up quickly, and they sailed to a private cove, with boxed lunches and wine, where they swam naked and made love. They played three sets of hard tennis every day. The games were close but Susan had the edge and she took every match but one, which, to Susan's mild surprise, seemed to please Paul very much.

  Almost perfect.

  There was only one odd incident. On the morning of their final day. They were at breakfast, intending to play tennis afterward, when Colin came to their table and told Paul there was a phone call for him. There was something in Colin's eyes. That unspoken communication again. Paul excused himself and followed Colin. Susan got up and returned to the buffet for another sausage. From that angle, she glanced out toward the pool area and saw that Paul and Colin had stopped, nowhere near the office phone, and were talking quietly. She could not see Paul's face but he must have been angry because Colin seemed to be calming him. When Paul returned to the table he said he had a few calls to make, just routine business, and suggested that she go over to the courts by herself where she'd surely find a pick-up game. Whatever was happening, Susan decided not to pry.

  She did find a decent game with one of the Pamelas. Afterward, she changed into her swimsuit, Paul nowhere in sight, then spent another hour by the pool working on her tan. Lunchtime approached, with still no sign of Paul. There was a main lounge on the second floor of the clubhouse, octagonal in shape and offering a 360-degree view of the club grounds. Susan went there, hoping to spot him. On her second pass of picture windows she saw him. He was walking toward her, still in his tennis whites, from the direction of the beach. Another man, much older, was walking with him. The older man was surely not a guest because he wore a dark business suit and street shoes. Whatever they'd been talking about, the discussion seemed to be over as far as Paul was concerned. But the older man was pressing, arguing. They walked nearer. With the sea breeze behind them, Susan could pick up a few words. She heard Paul. And damn it. And tolerate. Yes. Something, something, and he won't tolerate it. It has to stop, Paul. It has to end. Paul ignored him. He kept walking.

  Paul's manner seemed to infuriate the older man. He snatched at Paul's arm. Paul caught his hand, not roughly, and, still holding it aloft, stepped closer so that their faces were only inches apart. Whatever Paul was saying to him, the older man's face turned ashen and his knees began to buckle.

  A sound below her. Susan stepped nearer the window. There was another man there. Another dark suit. This one was much younger, about Paul's age except that his hair was thinning. He was moving toward Paul, one hand unbuttoning his jacket. Paul's head turned at the second man's approach. His eyes flashed…not a warning exactly. It was more of a you can’t be serious. The balding man hesitated. Then he backed away, once more out of sight. Paul took no further notice of him. He released the older man's hand but took his arm and guided him up the path. Susan heard him say, “You won't come here again, will you?”

  “I will go wherever I. . . .”

  “Never again, Palmer. Not even as a paying guest.” Susan stepped back from the window. She wandered through the empty lounge for several minutes, gathering her impressions of what she'd seen and heard. She had, at last, seen Paul angry. All it took, apparently, was a violation of his privacy . . . of the sanctity of his island retreat. She could, she supposed, ask him about it at lunch. He would understand that she didn't mean to eavesdrop. It was probably nothing. Some business rival, some old grudge. Or perhaps she'd better say nothing. Wait for him to bring it up.

  He stood up, smiling, as she approached their table. His face betrayed nothing. Pouring an iced tea into her glass, he asked about her morning. She described her game, then mentioned the panoramic view she'd just enjoyed from the room above them.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Pretty, isn't it?” He left the lure untaken.

  There was movement out toward the office. A group of men walked past the lobby entrance to the dining terrace. Colin and two large Bahamians were escorting the two men in dark suits toward the driveway. After a moment, she heard the slam of station wagon doors.

  “Who was that man?” Susan asked, gesturing with her head.

  Paul shrugged.

  “Didn't I see you talking to him just a while ago?”

  “On the beach, you mean.” Paul didn't hesitate.

  “Yes. He seemed upset.”

  Paul chewed and swallowed. “It wasn't much of a conversation. He wanted to discuss some old business. I didn't.”

  “What has to stop?” She asked it less casually than she'd intended.

  He hesitated for the briefest moment but his expression gave away nothing. But in that moment she had a sense that his mind had traveled to the upstairs lounge and was replaying whatever words might have been heard from there.

  “Susan,” he put his fork down. “What you saw was an intrusion that I'm trying to forget. If it's important to you, we'll discuss it. But this has been such a great weekend that I'd. . . .”

  “It has,” she told him, “and it isn't.”

  Not the intrusion, anyway. She was less curious about those two men and why they'd come than about this new Paul Bannerman she'd seen. This new Paul could, with a few words, make one of the men turn pale and, with a look, the other back away. But that aside, Paul was right. The weekend had been wonderful. She was not about to let a single minor blemish drop a cloud over it.

  Another time.

  CHAPTER 5

  In Westport later that evening, as the PAN AM flight from Nassau was passing the Carolina coast, Dr. Stanley Gelman stepped out onto the second floor veranda of the New Englander Motor Inn. There was no movement in the parking area below him, only a cold, windblown rain that swept across it in silvery waves. Still, he wished there had been a side exit.

  Pulling his tweed hat lower over his brow and bunching his coat collar over his cheeks, he stepped from the veranda's cover and hurried down the exposed fire stairs toward the dark Buick Regal that he'd parked rear-end in, so his license plate would be concealed. Keys in his left hand, he unlocked the door, then paused for a moment to cool the palm of his right- hand by holding it flat against the Buick's roof. The palm, still hot and tingling from the spankings he'd administered, was soothed at once. But he held it there a few moments longer. He could still hear the woman's cries, muffled by the pillow in which he'd told her to bury her face. He could hear the odd hooting sound she made as he'd entered her savagely from the rear. And the agonized gasps as he seized her tightly bound wrists and jammed them up high between her shoulder blades. Mrs. Kitsy Sweetzer. A ridiculous name. An absurd woman. His breath was coming fast again.

  Dr. Stanley Gelman dried the hand against his coat and slipped behind the wheel. He scanned the parking area one more time before starting the engine. Still no one. Putting the Buick into gear, he
coasted quickly to the nearest exit and blended into the traffic of the Post Road. His face was glowing. He could feel it.

  Gelman was home in five minutes. His house, a red-, wood contemporary set on a wooded lot off Bayberry. Road, suited the twice-divorced psychiatrist nicely. It was private, not easily seen from any neighbor's window, it contained every personal comfort he desired, and it was not unduly ostentatious. His income, even after the amount his ex-wives extorted from jt, would have permitted a considerably grander home. But let those two greedy bitches see any show of affluence and they'd be on the phone to their lawyers. His patients were another problem. The patients of a psychiatrist, unlike the clientele of an investment counselor, consider it unseemly if he appears to profit too greatly from their incapacity to manage their lives.

  Stanley Gelman reached to his car visor and touched the remote unit of his automatic garage-door opener. His headlights washed over a Mercedes 380SL that he used when driving anywhere outside Westport. He tapped the unit once more and the door slid down behind him. On the doorway leading to his kitchen was a small box resembling the face of a Touch-Tone telephone. He tapped out the digital code that disengaged his security system and unlocked the door. He pushed it open, his mind already on a long, hot soak in his Jacuzzi and wrapping his still-smarting hand around a tall, cold vodka tonic. His body was beginning to itch from the touch and smell of Kitsy Sweetzer.

  Outside, in a cul-de-sac almost directly across Bayberry Road from Stanley Gelman's driveway, a man and a woman sat watching his movements through the streaked windshield of a Subaru station wagon. The woman was small, no more than five feet two, and weighing less than a hundred pounds. Her hair was brown, with a reddish tint, worn in an elfin cut that made her seem even tinier. She was dressed in jeans and a sheepskin jacket trimmed with fur. Her skin was pale but unlined. She could pass for thirty in an advantageous light, although she was well into her forties. Her face might have been called pretty except that her eyes were so quick, so intelligent and direct that superficial observations tended to be discouraged.

  “Well?” She shot a glance at the man with the curly gray hair who sat at the wheel. “What do you think?”

  “He seems to be alone in there,” he answered. Dr. Gary Russo, M.D., surgeon, Johns Hopkins class of 1955, saw that Gelman had passed through what looked like a living room, dark except for the spill of light from the kitchen, and flipped on the lights of a bedroom or bathroom. He lowered his binoculars to wipe away some condensation from the inside of the windshield. He raised them once more. Gelman was returning to the kitchen. He was reaching into a cabinet and now he was pausing at the door of a copper-colored refrigerator. “Looks like he's making a nightcap. How long do you think we should sit here?”

  “Until Billy shows up.” Carla Benedict gestured toward his mobile phone. “Or until Molly calls to say he's back at Mario's.”

  Gary Russo smacked his lips irritably. It could be a long night, and he was already feeling pressure from his bladder. The reference to Mario's, a bar directly across from the Westport commuter station, seemed to make it worse. He could always get out and step behind a tree, he supposed. But if old Billy McHugh was anywhere close by, he just might pick that moment to make his move.

  “How well do you know this Gelman?” Carla Benedict asked.

  “Just by reputation. A real sleaze ball.” He'd heard stories about Dr. Stanley Gelman almost from the day he'd opened his own cosmetic surgery practice three years earlier. All of them from other doctors, none for attribution. God knows Gelman wasn't the only shrink around who went beyond supportive hugs and hand-holding. But Gelman was much worse than most because the line on him was that he fundamentally despised women. Dried-out Barbie dolls, he called his Westport patients. Self-absorbed whiners. Whenever he had a patient who was at all attractive, and at all unsure of it, sooner or later he'd plant the notion that the acid test of her sexual allure would be a private evaluation by her therapist. How else could he offer remedial advice? Perversely, there were stories of marriages he'd destroyed by advising female patients to cut off sexual contact entirely. There were worse stories. He would suggest to certain of his patients that the key to sexual liberation was to go and seek sexual adventure wherever they could find it. Try the delivery boy. The meter reader. A black man. Try two, even three men at a time. Then try a woman.

  The urgent call from Molly Farrell, once she mentioned Gelman's name, had not surprised Dr. Russo in the least. A woman, a regular at Mario's off the 5:44 from Grand Central, divorced, fairly attractive, normally well-behaved if she stayed within her limit of three whiskey sours, had suddenly and most awkwardly begun propositioning some of the male commuters at the bar. Uncle Billy, which was what nearly all the Mario's regulars called the popular bartender, gently took her drink from her hand and led her back to the office for some strong coffee and a good talking-to.

  There, to his horror, the woman made a pathetic and near-hysterical attempt to seduce him as well. He ran back into the restaurant, where Molly Farrell was in the process of serving a table of six, and nearly wrenched her arm dragging her back to the woman in the office. The woman, by this time, was sobbing out of control. It took a full twenty minutes, with both Molly and Billy sitting with her, holding and stroking her, for the halting details of her treatment at the hands of Dr. Stanley Gelman to emerge. Billy McHugh listened, his own eyes moist. He stood up, kissed her lightly on the forehead, then turned and left the office. Because Billy had been better these past three or four months, Molly assumed that he'd returned to his place at the bar. She made the woman stretch out on the office couch and covered her with a coat. By the time she turned out the light and stepped back into the restaurant, Billy McHugh was gone. She hurried out the door and, seeing nothing of Billy, crossed to the public phone on the Westport station platform.

  Three hours had passed since then. It was more than enough time for Billy McHugh to have picked up his tools, get into his working clothes, and locate Stanley Gelman. Russo had very mixed feelings about trying to stop him this time. If anyone ever deserved Billy, it was Gelman. But Russo had made a promise and he'd do his best to keepit.He owed at least that much to Paul Bannerman. ·

  “Where would you look for Gelman?” Carla Benedict touched his arm. “If you were Billy, I mean.”

  “I'd have to start right here.”

  “Then what? What if he wasn't home?”

  “I'd stay right over there.” He pointed through the windshield. “Back in those trees. Sooner or later Gelman would pop that garage door and I'd go right in behind him.”

  “But Gelman just popped it. Why wouldn't Billy have done that, too?”

  “I don't . . . shit!'* Gary Russo ran a hand across his mouth. “Because he's better than that, that's why.”

  “You think he's already inside.”

  ”Let’s go.” He snatched his medical bag and stepped into the slanting rain.

  Stay calm, Gelman told himself.

  Easy.

  He could see his bare chest heaving and he willed it to slow down. He willed the terror he felt to ease to a level he could manage, so that reason and then control could follow.

  He sat rigidly in the swirling waters of his gleaming brown Jacuzzi, naked, utterly helpless. Where the man came from, how long he'd been there, Gelman could not know. There had been no sound, not even a shadow. Only a stinging tug at his scalp and a black blur as a powerful arm slipped under his chin and tightened against his carotid arteries. The arm tensed when he struggled, it relaxed when he did not. The man said nothing, did nothing else. Gelman did not understand. It was a submission hold and the man was expert at it. He would be unconscious in seconds if that was what the man intended. Or his neck could be snapped. Oh, God. But the man didn't seem angry. Not even excited. He was breathing softly, naturally, against Gelman's ear, his fingers twined tightly in Gelman's thick brown hair.

  “Take anything,” he said. “Take whatever you want. You don't have to hurt me.”
/>   “Finish your drink.” It was a gravelly voice. A mature voice. Chillingly calm. Something in the way he spoke suggested to Gelman that the man had made a decision.

  Slowly, carefully, Stanley Gelman reached for the vodka tonic he'd set on the Jacuzzi's edge. There was a bottle there, too. He didn't remember bringing in the bottle. He was sure he hadn't. Hard to think.

  Burglars. That's all they are. This one is just holding me here while another goes through the house. Okay. Okay, that's fine.

  “Finish it,” the voice said. The arm tightened against his neck. Gelman drained the glass and set it down.

  “Pour from the bottle. Pour a lot,” the voice said. Gelman poured two inches over the ice. The arm tightened. He poured two inches more.