Bitter Truth (23 page)

“She’s an amazing woman,” said Harrington after she had gone.

“Yes.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t hurt her,” he said, picking up his knife and slicing into a dinner roll.

“I may be wrong,” I said, “but I don’t think she’s in the bathroom crying over me.”

He sighed. “No.”

“What are you, gay?”

Harrington’s face startled, and then he laughed, a warm guttural laugh, charismatic and comforting. I watched him laugh and I couldn’t help but start laughing too. “No,” he said when he finally calmed and had wiped the tears from his eyes. “But that would have been so much easier.”

While we were waiting for Caroline’s return, Harrington, now under the assumption that I was Caroline’s lawyer as well as her lover, explained to me the intricacies of the Reddman demise. The family’s entire share of Reddman stock was in one trust, controlled by Kingsley, Caroline’s father. While the bulk of the dividends remained with the trust, a portion was designated for division to Kingsley’ heirs, the four children. When an heir died, each survivor’s share of the designated division increased proportionally. Upon Kingsley’s death, the shares in the trust were to be divided equally among the surviving heirs.

“How much?” I asked. I knew the general numbers, but I still liked hearing them.

“Right now, with three heirs, each share is worth about one hundred and forty-five million dollars, before taxes, but the share price has been rising so it may be more.”

“Uncle Sam will be happy with his cut.”

“Both Eddie and Bobby are considering moving to Ireland permanently to defray taxes.”

“And they say patriotism is dead. It’s funny though, talking about so much money, but I thought it would be more.”

“Yes, well, over the years many of the shares have been sold, to pay the expenses in maintaining the house and other properties, and a large stake has been put into a different trust, pursuant to the direction of a former trustee.”

“Which trustee?”

“Caroline’s grandmother.”

“And who are the beneficiaries of that trust?”

“I don’t know. It is not being run by our bank and the documents are sealed.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not a one.”

“I heard a rumor that Charity Reddman, Caroline’s grandaunt, ran away after she became pregnant. Any possibility that the trust could be for the benefit of the child or the child’s heirs?”

“Possible, I guess. But you can’t honestly suspect some mysterious heir of Charity Reddman of being responsible for Jacqueline’s death.”

I shrugged. “Tell me about the life insurance policies.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Five million, term, on each heir, premiums paid by the trust. The beneficiary of the policies was designated by the trust as the surviving heirs.”

“So if one killed off another,” I said, “that one would get a third of five million?”

“That’s right.”

“Nice motive,” I said, thinking of Edward Shaw and his gambling debts. “Except I was under the impression the money from Jacqueline’s insurance went to her church.”

“Yes. Jacqueline changed the beneficiary just before her death.”

“Did her brothers and sister know?”

“She wanted me to keep it quiet, so I did.”

“And so when she died her brothers and sister were in for a nasty surprise.”

“Some were none too pleased,” admitted Harrington. “And neither, of course, was the insurance company. It was ready to pay the death benefit but now it’s holding off payment until all questions of Jacqueline’s death are answered.”

I was surprised at that, wondering who had raised the questions with the insurance company, but before I could follow up, Caroline returned. Her eyes were clean of mascara and red, her face was scrubbed. She looked almost wholesome, about as wholesome as you can look with a diamond in your nose. She didn’t sit, instead she placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Take me home, Victor.”

Harrington stood immediately. “Don’t worry about the check,” he said.

Out on Walnut Street, as I raised my hand for a cab, I couldn’t help but ask, “What is going on between you two?”

“Have you ever been in love, Victor?”

I thought about this for a little bit. “Yes.”

“It wasn’t any fun, was it?”

“No, not really.”

“Just take me home and fuck me, Victor, and please please please please please don’t say another word until you do.”

28

H
ER PLACE WAS above an abandoned hardware store on Market Street, just a few blocks west of the Delaware River. It was a huge cavernous space supported by rows of fluted cast-iron pillars, easily more than three thousand square feet. It had been a sweatshop of some sort in its more productive days and must have been a brutal one at that. Plaster scaled from the walls leaving them mottled and psoriatic. The ceiling, warped and darkened by leaks, was a confused configuration of wires and old fluorescent light fixtures and air conduits. Here and there patches of the ceiling’s metal lath showed through where huge chunks of the plaster had fallen to the floor of roughened wood, unfinished, dark, splattered with paint. The windows were yellowed and bare of adornment, staring forlornly out onto the street or the deserted lot next door. The bathroom was doorless, the shower a cast-iron tub with clawed feet, the kitchen one of those stainless steel kitchenettes that looked to have been swiped from a motor home. Piled in one of the corners on the Market Street end were scraps of metal, old bed frames, chairs, evidence of a failed rehab. The loft smelled of wet plaster and dust and sorrow.

There was a couch in the middle, lit by a ceramic lamp on an end table, and there was a love seat that matched the couch and a coffee table to prop up feet and place drinks when entertaining. It looked to have been bought at a place like Seaman’s, the whole setup, and it would have been at home in any suburban split level, but here, in the midst of this desolation, it seemed so out of place it was almost like a work of art, commenting wryly on the easy comfort bought at places like Seaman’s. And then, beneath an industrial light fixture that hovered over it like a spy, there was the bed, a king-sized sleigh bed, massive as a battleship, carved of dark mahogany. Red silk sheets covered the mattress. The comforter, a masculine gold and green paisley, was twisted and mussed atop the silk. Four long pillows, covered in a golden print, were tossed here and there across the bed. And tossed among the pillows and the twists of the comforter were Caroline and I, on our backs, staring up at that spy of a light fixture and the ragged ceiling beyond, following with our gazes the rise of her cigarette smoke, naked, our bodies at right angles one to the other, not touching except for our legs, which were still intertwined.

“Tell me about her,” said Caroline.

I immediately knew which woman she was asking about. “There isn’t much to tell, least not anymore.”

“Was she pretty?”

I knew which woman she was talking about and I knew why she was asking and the reasons were so sad I couldn’t help but answer her. “She was very pretty and very decadent and very vulnerable. When I met her she was with someone else, someone very powerful, which made her wildly attractive to me and so far out of reach she wasn’t even worth fantasizing about.”

“What was her name?’

“Veronica.”

“How did you two get together?”

It was a funny-sounding question, like you would ask about high school sweethearts or an innocent pair of newly-weds, not two depraved lovers like Veronica and me. “I don’t know, exactly. It was a time of my life when I was full of desires. I wanted money and success, I wanted to be accepted and admired by my betters. I wanted to be the guy I saw in the
GQ
ads, the smiling man-about-town in those society photos. I wanted to be everything I could never be. And for a while, most of all, I wanted Veronica. Then, like a dream, I had a chance for everything, the success, the wealth, the entree into a world that had kept me out just for the sheer joy of it. And I had a chance at her too. In the blink of an eye we were sleeping together and she had become more than a desire, she had become an obsession.”

“Was it as marvelous as you had imagined?”

It was, actually, the sex was beyond glorious, overwhelming all my better intentions, and soon nothing had seemed to matter but the sex, except I didn’t want to tell Caroline that, so I answered her question with another question. “Is anything ever as marvelous as we imagined?”

“Never,” she said, “never, never, never.”

I couldn’t help but wince a bit at that.

“And then it all turned bad,” I said. “Everything I thought I was being offered was a lie, everything I thought I wanted was a fraud. Everything I knew for certain was absolutely wrong. And finally, when I put myself on the line, she betrayed me. That was the end. I thought I was in love, and part of it was that, I think, but it was also that for the times I was with her I felt I was on the verge of becoming something else, and that was what I had been most desperately seeking all along. I still am, I guess. I’ve thought about it a lot since she disappeared from my life and it doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, but then I guess obsessions never do.”

“You want her back?”

“Nope. Well, maybe, yes. I don’t know. Yes. Even still. But all that other stuff I wanted, they can blow it out their asses. I don’t want their success, I don’t want their admiration or their acceptance. Last thing I ever want is to slip on my tux and make nice with high society.”

She reached out her arm and slid a finger up my side, from my hip to my armpit. “So what is it that you want now, Victor?”

“Just the money,” I said, rather cruelly, and then it was her turn to wince.

But I was troubled enough about my whole burgeoning extracurricular relationship with Caroline Shaw that I wanted to keep certain things clear, and they were. Absolutely. The reason she was asking about the time I was in love, I was sure, was because while there we were, naked in bed, our legs intertwined, my condom, pendulous with fluid, already tied off and disposed of, the sweat still drying on our overheated bodies, fresh from making whatever it was we had been making, the one thing missing had been love. Its absence was as chillingly palpable as a winter’s fog.

I had brought her home as she had requested, and escorted her upstairs, as propriety required, but I had decided not to take her up on her belligerent invitation to screw. It wasn’t just that I wanted her as a client more than anything else and as a client any coital relationship would be highly suspect in the eyes of the bar, not the corner bar, where my reticence would have been laughed at, but the legal bar. And it wasn’t that it had not gone so well that night at Veritas, because I knew that the first time is often disappointing and no indication of the wonderful fruits to be reaped from regular and intense practice. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of whatever tortured mess lay between her and Harrington because, well, I have to admit that only served to make her all the more attractive. No, the problem here was that there was something venal about my interest in Caroline Shaw and while I didn’t mind that in the usual lawyer-client relationship, where venality properly belonged, having it manifest itself in command performances in the sack, as part of my effort to get her signature on a contingency fee agreement, gave me the unwelcome, though not wholly unfamiliar, sense of being a whore. I had enough of that in my day job, I didn’t need it at night too.

So I had intended to pull away, but she had insisted on pouring me a drink, single malt whisky she had said it was and whatever it was it was pretty damn good and thank you, ma’am, I’ll have another. And as she drew closer to me on the Seaman’s couch I had intended to pull away, but then she took off her boots and tucked her pointed stockinged feet beneath her and curled next to me on the couch in that feline way she had. And I had intended to pull away but she leaned close to me and tilted her face to me and her eyes glistened and her mouth quivered with a sadness so damnably appealing that I couldn’t help but bend close enough to her that our lips almost brushed. Oh I had intended to pull away all right, I had intended intended intended to pull away, and then in the middle of all those good intentions what I found myself pulling was my tie off and my shirt off and her jeans off and my shoes off and her stockings off and my pants off and my socks off, hopping ludicrously around as first one fell and then the other, and the next thing I knew, as if just thinking it had made it so, she was spread-eagled and naked beneath me and I was sucking on a golden ring while I rolled her right nipple between my teeth.

Beside the multiple hoops in her ears and the stud in her nose there were rings on each nipple, there was a ring in her belly button, there was the rose tattoo on her ankle and the butterfly tattoo on her neck and a tattoo of a snake crawling dangerously up her hip. On each shoulder blade were rows of tattooed gashes, as if some giant cat had pounced upon her back with its claws extended. For a moment, as I worked on her breasts, first one nipple, then the other, letting my tongue lick each and caress each and then pull at its ring with a languorous tug, first one then the other and then back again, I could feel a slight tremble rise through the softness of her skin. I pushed her grandfather’s medal to the side and buried my face between her breasts before dragging my lips down, over the belly ring and down, until she arched her back and the magnificent musk of her shortened my breath with involuntary want. And then with the swiftness of a light being clicked off it happened again as it had happened before and I lost her.

“It was strange,” I said to her afterward, when we were lying face up on the bed. “Your friend Harrington. First time I met him I thought he was the biggest prick in the world. But tonight, I sort of liked him.”

She turned away from me, onto her stomach. Her butt was as round and as fresh as a melon. “Franklin’s a charmer.”

“You two have a peculiar engagement,” I said, reaching instinctively out to touch that butt and then thinking better of it and pulling my hand back before I actually did. “He finds out we’re sleeping together and asks, with all sincerity, if he can help. It was the strangest…”

“He’s a real charmer, all right,” she said, reaching over to the night table, smashing out her cigarette, pulling another out of the pack, fiddling with the lighter, holding up a flame.

I waited a beat before I asked, “What is it with you two?”

“Old wounds.”

I stared up at the ceiling and waited as she took a couple drags on her new cigarette. She took a few drags more and I waited still. She didn’t want to tell me, I could feel it, but I lay quietly on my back, certain that eventually she would. And then she did.

She had known Franklin pretty near all her life, she told me. Grandmother Shaw had found him at an orphanage, one of her special charities, and decided to take responsibility for the young foundling and give him a chance in the world. She was very special that way, her grandmother was, said Caroline. Very giving. She couldn’t give enough, especially to Franklin. She gave him clothes, toys, he had his own room in the servants’ section. It was always clear that he was different from the rest of the family, of course. How could that be avoided? He was expected to help Nat in the gardens while the Shaw children and their guests played freely in the house and he always had chores, but he often ate with the family and went on vacations with the family when the family, all but Caroline’s father, left Veritas for the Reddman house by the sea. In almost every way possible, Grandmother Shaw treated him like a member of the clan.

“So long as he helped Nat in the garden,” I said.

“Yes, well everything has its price, doesn’t it? It was a pretty good deal for Franklin, considering Grammy paid his way through Episcopal Academy and then Princeton.”

“He looks like a Princeton man.”

“He’s grown into the part.”

As a boy, she said, he was wild, hyperactive. He seemed to always be angry, charging here and there for no apparent reason, a handsome little towhead bursting with energy. He was the only real friend she had at the house. Her father was never there for her, hiding from the world and his family in his upstairs bedroom; her mother was so preoccupied with being a Reddman she had nothing left to give to her youngest daughter. Brother Edward was too busy looking for trouble to be interested in his little sister. Brother Bobby was shy and bookish and sister Jacqueline moped about melodramatically, wearing long flowing gowns, carrying her dog-eared copy of
The Bell Jar
everywhere. But Franklin was wild and full of some exciting anger that drew her to him. Whenever he wasn’t working they were running off together like wolves, the best of friends.

“How did Grammy feel about that?”

“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wasn’t a snob at all. If anything, she encouraged Franklin and me to play together, at least when we were young.”

They liked the same sports, hated the same people, read the same comic books. They watched
The Love Boat
on television every Saturday night, religiously. They both thought the Beatles were overrated, that Springsteen was the boss. They agreed that
Annie Hall
was the most important movie ever made. They were almost a perfect match, which is why it seemed so natural, so inevitable, when they first started having sex.

“Out there on the ancestral moors. How old were you the first time?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen? That’s statutory.”

“He’s only two years older than me.”

“When I was fifteen I hadn’t even slow-danced with a girl.”

“It was absolutely innocent. We were absolutely in love. We decided we were going to be married, so why not, though we swore not to tell anyone.”

“Grammy wouldn’t have approved you messing with a servant, I guess.”

“She never knew, no one ever knew. It was Franklin who insisted it be an absolute secret, and I understood. He was never quite sure of his place among all us Reddmans.”

They’d hide out together in the old Poole house down by the Pond. They brought in a mattress, sheets and blankets, a radio. They turned that ruin of a house into a love nest and whenever they could get away that’s where they’d run. They read books, poetry, reciting the lines to each other. They listened to the newest songs on WMMR. They made love in cool summer evenings to a cricket serenade. They experimented with each other’s bodies.