“He just . . . two days ago . . . showed up at the door.”
“That’s Lacan.”
She nodded.
He waited. She looked at him, her eyes reddening. She couldn’t go on.
“Goddamn it, Céleste, what happened?”
Leda’s head snapped up.
“I killed him,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it . . . not another minute, not another . . . not anymore. I went in there . . . while . . . while . . .”
Céleste turned toward the living room, her back to them, still leaning against the doorway frame.
“And . . . and . . . I hit him . . .” Leda paused. “And I hit him, I hit him, hit him, hit him, hit him . . .” She spoke with the cadence of a metronome, then stopped, her mouth sagging. “Killed him . . . forever.”
He was incredulous. “What did you hit him with?”
“A piece of iron. I don’t know.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know . . . I guess up there. . . .”
He looked at Céleste. She had bent her head forward and was holding her forehead in one hand. He couldn’t see if she was crying. Leda wiped a damp hank of hair out of her face. They must have tried to wash it out, whatever it was. She looked frightening, her hump twisting her body eerily, blood and damp matting her hair.
“Look at me,” Leda said. Her face crumpled as she looked down at herself. She began to cry. “The bastard,” she said, sobbing. “The bastard.”
She began to wail, her face buried in her hands, a pathetic sight. He was numb.
“I’ve got to call the police,” he said. He wasn’t speaking to either of them. He was just thinking out loud.
Leda stopped wailing, looked at him in shock.
“No!” It wasn’t a rebuke, but an expression of disbelief.
Céleste turned around, her face rigid.
He looked at them, both women gaping at him.
“We’ve got to call the police,” he said again as if asking for confirmation. They did know that, didn’t they, that they had to call the police?
“That’s insane,” Leda said.
“Leda, there’s a dead man up there.”
Silence. The two sisters stared.
“You don’t think we’re not going to call the police, do you?” he said.
“It’ll be the end of . . . my life,” Leda said. “He deserved to die. It’s not right.”
“They’ll come to that conclusion, too,” he said, not having thought it through. “There’re mitigating circumstances. . . .”
“‘Mitigating circumstances,’” Leda repeated. “I don’t know . . . he wasn’t threatening me . . . I didn’t . . . I just killed him. I killed him . . . just like that, just did it.”
Céleste hadn’t moved. She was focused on Leda, watching her intently. She looked wild in her blood-splattered gown, her hair disheveled, her dark eyes beautiful in the way they beheld the insanity of her circumstance.
Leda got to her feet. Her hump looked even more freakish as she began to pace about the wide entry, the back of her gown hiked up higher than the front because of the distortion on her back.
“Well,” Leda said, rubbing her arm nervously as she moved this way and that, looking out in front of her at some spot on the floor. “Well, this won’t do . . . God, no, it won’t do. No, it won’t.”
She was in her own world, a vastly different world from his, he suddenly realized. They definitely were not going to see this in the same way, not the deed, not the resolution. Céleste was staring at him, waiting for him to do something.
He understood now that he had been brought here to “fix” this disaster, and the two sisters did not consider calling the police an option.
Leda stopped pacing and stood in front of him, rubbing her arm, looking up at him with an attitude and tilt of her head that reminded him of a panicked cat.
“What about you?” she blurted. “If you call the police . . . what about you?”
He hadn’t thought of what about him.
“No? You don’t know? What do you think this is going to do to you? A murder scandal. You . . . you’ve been having an affair”—she glanced at Céleste, then back to him—“with a woman who was being sadistically abused . . . enslaved by her husband. Yes, right. And you knew it. Uh? Yes. And what did you do about that, Mr. Famous Sculptor? Anything? Anything!? How sick is that? When you think about it. Yeah, think about that. How sick is that? When it all comes out . . . all of it . . . and it will . . . what a mess . . . the magazines . . . the newspapers . . . your haute clientele . . . your media-finicky clients will disappear like . . . roaches.” She rolled open her gorgeous eyes. “Where will they be then? Where will you be then? When it all comes out . . . and it will . . . you know it will.”
He was dumbfounded. Jesus Christ. This . . . Leda was threatening him. It was a horrible moment. He was staggered by her anger, at how clearly and viciously she had stated the brutal reality of her own situation, and his. Worse, he knew she was right. He knew very well how his affair with Céleste would look when it was taken apart and picked over in the media.
Leda moved in to shore up her case.
“My God, Ross, the man was garbage,” she wrangled. “Do I deserve to spend the rest of my life in prison because of that . . . that dead thing up there?”
She was boring into him with her eyes and with the question. She was wound tightly, and it showed in her face, the muscles of which were rigid to a degree that almost transformed her.
“You asked me,” she continued, “how could I go on letting Céleste . . . do this for me . . . for my sake. Well, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t!”
Leda didn’t have to elaborate on her argument for him to see his situation in light of her reasoning. In fact, if she hadn’t brought it to his attention, he would have thought of it himself anyway as reality began to trickle back into his predicament with the passing hours. All the more reason not to decide anything too quickly.
With every passing moment the old house took on a different reality. The very fact that he hadn’t already picked up the telephone to call the police meant that the events were beginning to swallow him. The very fact that he was even thinking this, that he was equivocating, stalling, meant that the moral light of these moments was changing, taking on hues of doubt and calculation.
“For Christ’s sake!” he blurted to no one. He was anguished, even as a cowardly weakness gained ground within him with embarrassing haste.
“You’ve got to get cleaned up, both of you,” he barked. It wasn’t a solution, he didn’t have a solution.
They just stared at him.
“Another bedroom? Damn it. Can’t you go to another bedroom, clean up?”
The sight of them repulsed him. It wasn’t only a visceral reaction, but a moral one as well, their spattered nightgowns, the blood still in their hair, in the creases of their fingers, on a jaw, a neck, every drop, every smutch of it, was a moral indictment, a harrowing admission of guilt, of complicity, of God knew what else.
Céleste finally seemed to come to her senses.
“Yes, of course.” She turned and went to Leda and took her by the arm, and they started toward the stairs.
He followed them, and they didn’t ask why.
Leda was first, but Céleste was one step behind, her hand on Leda’s back as if to say “I’m here, it’s okay. I’m here.” Leda clung to the banister, snuffling, moving more slowly than he imagined was necessary, her mind not focused on the job of climbing the stairs.
They went into the first bedroom on the right, near the head of the stairs, just past the landing. He followed them in, and again they didn’t question why he was there. Céleste turned on the light in the bathroom, and they went in while he remained a few steps away in the darkened bedroom.
Leda stood with her back to him. When she made no move to undress, Céleste began helping her with her gown, the blood-crusty chemise having to be worked over her hump and her head. For an instant she was nake
d from her high waist down, her upper torso hidden under the gathered gown, and then she was naked, still facing away from him. Céleste tossed the soiled gown into the doorway, knowing what he was waiting for.
Then she began removing her own gown, crossing her arms in front of her and gathering it to her waist, then pulling it over her head. Again, for an instant she too was naked from the waist down, her head shrouded. Why he thought of an angel he could not imagine, but he did, an angel with momentarily shrouded wings, only her earthly beauty showing.
Céleste stood there, looking at him. Then he saw the bruises, fresh ones, and there were places he thought looked like cigarette burns. She refused to hide her wounds or modestly turn to hide her sex. She let him look, and God help him, he did look, hungry for her and ashamed of it. She saw it in his face, and he was abashed. She should have seen something else, a world of other emotions, none of which should have had at their heart the selfishness that she had seen.
As she stood there before him in stunning self-abasement, giving him the opportunity by some as yet unimagined act or word to redeem himself and to give her some reason not to despair, he bent down, picked up the gowns, and turned and walked out of the room.
Chapter 24
He didn’t have a plan. How could he? How the hell could he? He acted by instinct, unaware of any design or objective.
Carrying the gowns, he returned to Céleste’s bedroom and dropped them on the floor near the door. He stood a moment and looked at the body on the bed. The first time he saw it he had been in shock. Now he was offended, angered by the dumb lump of inert flesh. He thought of Céleste’s new bruises, of the burns. He imagined Céleste allowing him to do it. He imagined Leda, alone in another room, knowing what was happening and why.
He stepped up to the bed. Part of the covers were hanging off on the floor. With the tips of his fingers he picked up a fold of the sheet and pulled it, dragging it away from the bed, tugging at it until it wouldn’t come anymore. Then he tugged at another fold, pulling it this way and that, working it away from the body. He kept at this for a while, a kind of dainty fiddling that wasn’t getting him anywhere because the sheets were coiled around Lacan so thoroughly that after a certain amount of give nothing more could be done.
Pissed off, he grabbed Lacan by the ankles and pulled him around straight on the bed, moving him almost completely off the spot where he had been lying. There was a shallow depression the length of the body, sogged with coagulating seepage. How long had he been here? Protruding from under Lacan’s chest, as if coming out of his armpit, was the end of a pipe.
He took a clean section of the sheet and used it like gloves to grab Lacan by his left shoulder. He pulled him back, rolled him over. Lacan’s head remained wrapped in the blackening shroud, a relief, but now that he was on his back his penis was exposed. It was purple with lividity, circumcised, twisted awkwardly because it had been bent when death came. Leda had said that she had come into the bedroom and hit him “while . . . while . . .” Here it was now, twisted and preparing to rot, and probably rot quickly because of the blood that had settled in it, an ironic presence in the absence of arousal.
He threw the sheet over Lacan’s groin and reached down and picked up the pipe. It was common, galvanized plumbing pipe, a section about three feet long with a blunt elbow fitting, the end that Leda had used to pound Lacan’s head.
He walked out of the room with the pipe, down the hall, and down the stairs. In the entry he turned right, guessing that the hall would lead to the back of the house. It did. He passed the large kitchen on his right and went out the back door to the porch. He stepped out on the back porch. In the night he could see a broad yard that fell back to tall hedges. To the right Céleste’s rental car sat in the driveway in front of the garage.
It was an old clapboard garage with a gravel floor and smelled of age and oil and must. He didn’t even look for a light switch because he didn’t want to attract the attention of neighbors. He stood for a few minutes in the middle of the garage, his hands down by his sides, holding the pipe and waiting for his eyes to adjust.
Luckily there were several small-paned windows on the left side of the garage over a long workbench about waist high. A pale blue light came in through the windows, bright enough to allow him to distinguish the pots and potting tools on the workbench. At the back of the garage was another set of windows and another workbench, this one with a sink. He went to the sink and turned on the water.
He washed the bloody elbow fitting, running the water through the pipe from the opposite end and putting his fingers inside the elbow to clean the threads. He left the pipe in the sink to drain and returned to the house.
As he came along the sidewalk to the back porch, he saw the lights on in the kitchen window, and when he came in the back door he found Leda and Céleste waiting there for him. They had dressed hastily, their hair still wet. Leda was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs. Céleste stood near the sink, the back of her hips resting against the counter. There was an awkward moment as he stood in the doorway.
“What were you doing out there?” Leda asked, clearly suspicious.
“I found the pipe. I was washing it.”
Silence. There. They knew.
Céleste turned and took a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with water from the sink faucet. He and Leda watched her. No one spoke while Céleste was drinking from the glass, her back to them. Then she turned around, one hand on her stomach, appearing to be nauseated, her eyes on the floor.
“What do we do now?” Leda asked.
He stepped into the room and pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down opposite Leda.
“What happens when he doesn’t show up?” he asked, looking back and forth between the two sisters.
Céleste looked up. “Doesn’t show up? Where?”
“Anywhere. You tell me.”
She realized what he was getting at.
“I don’t know. I don’t know where he might have been going when he left here . . . if anyone was expecting him.”
“You said you never knew when he was coming.”
“Yes. But I don’t know if . . .”
“Well, what’s your guess?”
“He’s rich,” Leda interjected. “Rich people do what they want to do, don’t they?”
“For Christ’s sake,” he snapped. “Tell me who’s going to be the first to miss him.”
“His accountant would be the first to ask questions,” Céleste said. “That’s what I would guess. The hotel, the staff at his home in Antibes, the home in Strasbourg, I think they would just wait for him indefinitely. But his accountant, he’ll want to get in touch with him eventually.”
“Who would know that he came here?”
Leda and Céleste looked at each other.
“No one, probably,” Leda said. “He likes being alone except when . . . he wants something. He has strange friends . . . other women . . .”
Céleste flushed.
“But you’re his wife,” he said to Céleste. “Wouldn’t you miss him first?”
“Eventually . . .” She hesitated. “That’s . . . that’s the way it ought to work, of course. That’s what people would expect . . . but it’s not how it would happen in our situation.”
“Does his accountant know about you? I mean, about the way your marriage works? Not the intimate part of it, but the arrangement.”
“I doubt it. Michel kept his lives separated. People knew him in isolation, only in their own contexts.”
Mentally he took a deep breath before asking the next question.
“Do you inherit any money if he dies?”
Céleste was suddenly rigid, embarrassed.
“The bastard leaves her only a small stipend,” Leda interjected. “A token. The allowance she gets now, that’s all there is. That’s all he’d ever let her have.”
“Nothing?” He looked at Céleste. “You get essentially . . . nothing?”
“That’s right,” Led
a answered for her.
“When he dies, that’s the end of it?” he asked Céleste.
“A pittance,” Leda said with disgust. “Nothing.”
He continued to address Céleste.
“Then . . . financially, you have nothing to gain, everything to lose, by his death.”
Céleste and Leda stared at him. They began to understand the point of his questions.
“If . . . if we do this,” he said, “then . . . we just let happen whatever happens . . . go on as if nothing . . .”
He stopped, his mind stumbling ahead.
“Céleste is right about the accountant,” he continued, “he’s not going to fork over the money indefinitely—to the estates in Antibes and Strasbourg, your allowance, whatever else—without some contact with Lacan at some point.”
“I’m sure Michel sees him on a regular schedule,” Céleste said. “When Michel misses one of those meetings, that’s when the accountant will start asking questions.”
“Okay.” He leaned back and crossed his legs, resting one elbow on the kitchen table as he thought, looking at Céleste. “What you do is, you just go on as always. When they come to you—whoever ‘they’ are, the accountant, the police, whoever—you tell them the truth. You haven’t seen him since the last time you saw him . . . as if this time didn’t happen. You haven’t seen him since the last time. Okay?”
Céleste nodded.
“Explain everything to them about how irregularly you see him. They have to understand that randomness with this guy is the norm. Even . . . even the abuse. Don’t mention the fact that you don’t get anything from Lacan’s will. It’ll be less suspicious if they discover it for themselves. You . . . you’ll be shocked to learn that he’s missing, and that you may eventually lose your allowance.”
There was a visible change in the sisters’ demeanor as they slowly realized that their situation might not be entirely desperate.
“No, on second thought,” he said to Céleste, “don’t tell them of the abuse. That would be a mistake. It would be a motive for wanting him dead. Instead, just let them slowly realize, as they question you, that your marriage is simply a mercenary arrangement on your part. Lacan has other women. You don’t give a damn as long as he keeps providing you with a generous allowance.”
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