She fled to her bedroom. Adrian retreated to his study in a near frenzy. There would be no sleep tonight or any other foreseeable night. His stomach ached. He gulped antacid pills and poured himself a tumbler of port. For a long time he sat on the terrace watching the planes land at Los Angeles International Airport. He tried to think of a name for his new turboprop.
Starduster. Yes, he liked it. Lockheed named their planes after stars. This claimed the whole galaxy. He poured himself more port and decided maybe the Prince was right. One of Madame George's girls was the way to go. He could
set her up in New York. It would be easy to keep it a secret from everyone, even Victoria.
But it was Amanda's love he wanted. A love he had neglected, denied, abandoned. It was the only way he could ever expiate the enormous echoing guilt that was throbbing in his belly now when he thought of how much unhappiness he had caused Clarissa Ames Van Ness.
An hour or two after midnight, the telephone rang. It was Dan Hanrahan, Buchanan's chief of security. “Adrian?” he said. “I'm at Tama Morris's house. I think you better get out here right away.”
“What's wrong?”
“She's dead. Killed herself.”
A full moon splashed ironic gold on the heaving Pacific as Adrian drove down the boulevards and up the coast highway, his brain clutched in an icy fist.
It's not your fault,
he repeated to himself.
It's not anyone's fault.
Buzz McCall opened Tama's front door. The last person Adrian wanted to see. Buzz looked like a man who had just fallen out of a plane without a parachute. “I found her,” he said. “I called Dan.”
Buzz struggled to control himself. Adrian could not believe it. The ultimate tough guy, bawling. “She's in there.” He pointed to the bathroom.
Hanrahan was taking photographs of Tama. She lay in her big oblong tubâher Roman tub, she used to call it. Her heavy-lidded eyes were open, staring sightlessly at a photograph of her and Adrian which had been taken at the rollout of a Buchanan plane. The water in the tub was dark red.
“Did she cut her wrists?” Adrian asked.
Hanrahan shook his head. “A knitting needle in the heart.”
He handed Adrian a letter. “I found this on her pillow. She left one for Buzz and another one for Cliff.”
Adrian opened the envelope and read the bold scrawl.
I can't prove my love in any other way I guess so here goes. I'm too old to start hopping from bed to bed the way I lived before I met you. If there's another place I hope we meet there so you can say you're sorry. Tama.
“What did she say to Buzz?”
Hanrahan dug the letter out of his pocket.
If you weren't such a louse I'd have come home to you with my broken heart. But I knew there was no point to it. I really loved you in the old days but you ruined it. Good-bye, you bastard
.
“Cliff's still got his,” Hanrahan said.
“He's here?”
“She called them both before she did it.”
“What do we do?”
“Call the cops. But I think you better talk to Cliff first. He said some wild things when I first got here.”
Adrian handed both letters to Hanrahan. “Burn them,” he said.
He walked into the living room to find Buzz and Cliff glaring at each other. Cliff must have been walking on the beach. His shoes were soaked and sandy.
“You're a pair of bastards,” Cliff shouted. “All you ever did was fuck her around.”
“Shut up,” Buzz snarled. “If you were a man instead of a fuckin' crybaby maybe she'd have asked you for help.”
“Prick!” Cliff shouted and hit Buzz with a terrific roundhouse right that sent him hurtling across the living room through the glass doors to the deck. Cliff lunged after him. Buzz struggled to his feet just in time to get another punch in the face that sent him crashing through the deck's bamboo railing onto the beach below. Cliff jumped on top of him screaming, “Prick! Prick!”
Hanrahan started after them. Adrian seized his arm. “Let them fight it out,” he said.
It was no contest. Buzz was almost sixty years old and he was only half Cliff's size. Cliff pounded him to the sand again and again in the ghostly moonlight. In Adrian's eyes each punch was a demolition of Buzz McCall, the swaggering sultan of the assembly line, the man who called him a coward, who had possiblyâno, probablyâkilled Beryl Suydam.
Cliff finally knocked Buzz into the surf, where he seized his stepfather by the throat and began drowning him. “Now,” Adrian said and Hanrahan leaped to the beach and rescued Buzz. The security chief took the battered loser home and Adrian descended the familiar ladder to the beach and put his arm around Cliff, who stood with his back to the house, watching the white combers rumble toward them in the darkness.
“I loved her,” Adrian said. “We had a nasty fight in Paris. It was partly about business. I decided it wasn't working anymore and told her I wanted her to leave the company. With generous severance pay of course. I had no idea anything like this would happen. She never gave a hint, I swear it, Cliff. Not a hint. She was always so independent, proud.”
“Yeah, proud,” Cliff said, rubbing his eyes with a fist like a three-year-old.
“Cliff,” Adrian said. “I'm going to do my best to make this up to youâand to myself. You've always had a great future with this company. But nowâ”
Cliff bowed his head, struggling to control his grief. The surf sent ghostly fingers up the beach toward them. “We're going to build a new commercial airliner. I'm going to make you the project manager. Then I'm going to switch you to sales when we start selling it. So you can get maximum credit for it.”
“Thanks, thanks,” Cliff said.
It was marvelous what you could do with power, Adrian thought. You can triumph over grief, regret, guiltâeven hatred. At least, he hoped he was triumphing.
The next morning, Adrian told Amanda about Tama's death. He did not want her to read it in the newspaper first. He also wanted to find out more about her friendship, relationship, whatever it was, with Tama.
Amanda told him nothing. All she said, over and over, was: “Adrian, the time has finally come. You'll have to pay a price for this. A terrible price.”
“I didn't do anything that a thousand other men haven't done! I did it for
your sake! Because I love you. I've always loved you. I wanted to come back to you.”
Whether it was true or not, Adrian now believed it. He was desperate for some kind of resolution, for relief from emotions that were tearing him to pieces. At the office he dictated a statement about Tama Morris's “tragic death,” expounding on her years of “stellar contributions” to the company.
That night Adrian brought home a huge bouquet of roses for Amanda. She ignored them. She also continued to ignore his questions about her friendship with Tama.
“How did she die?” she asked.
Adrian told her. Amanda smiled. “A true warrior,” she said.
“Warrior?” Adrian said.
Amanda refused to say another word. Adrian began to grow alarmed. But he did not know what to do. He was almost as irrational as Amanda at this point. He spent the night in his study, dictating his conception of the Starduster. It would carry 175 passengers and a crew of six at 450 miles an hour. It would have a cruising range of 2,700 miles, just short of transcontinental. He dictated letters to nineteen airline presidents, all members of the Conquistadores del Cielo, asking their opinion of the profitability of such a plane.
Adrian went to bed at 3 A.M. so exhausted he was sure sleep was only an eyeblink away. But the vision of Tama in the bathtub's crimson water loomed in the darkness. Her husky voice whispered:
Love me, really love me, Adrian.
I'm sorry,
Adrian whispered to the heedless ghost.
A sound in the darkness. Someone had stumbled into a chair a few feet from the bedroom door. Adrian reached for the gun he kept in the drawer of his night table at Dan Hanrahan's suggestion, when Califia started sending him menacing letters. Hanrahan had also taught him how to use it.
Footsteps came toward the bed. A figure was outlined against the starlit window. Adrian rolled out of bed and crouched behind the night table. “Who's that?” he said.
“It's Califia, Adrian, come to avenge her beloved Tama and all the women you've degraded in your vicious clubhouse with its golden face.”
Amanda? Adrian switched on the light and almost dropped the gun. His wife was standing at the foot of the bed, naked, a long carving knife in her hand. Somehow she had cut herself across the top of her right breast, a deep slice that had already coated the breast and half her torso with oozing blood.
“What in Christ are you doing?” Adrian screamed.
“I'm going to kill you, Adrian. In Tama's name. Only then can Califia sleep content in her gold-and-ivory tomb.”
She walked toward him, the knife raised. “I can use this,” Adrian cried, brandishing the gun.
“Bullets can't harm Califia. She's immortal,” Amanda said in the toneless voice that had been irritating Adrian for months.
She rounded the corner of the bed and lunged at him. Adrian thrust the
lamp in front of him for a shield and the knife sank into the green shade. Amanda pulled it out and tried to raise it again for another thrust. With a snarl Adrian shoved the lamp in her face, knocking her onto the bed. He dove for the knife arm and they wrestled wildly across the double bed, Amanda screaming now, a shrill wail worthy of a jet engine.
In the melee Amanda received an ugly slash on the neck below her left ear but she continued to do her utmost to kill Adrian. He finally seized her wrist with both hands and smashed it against the other night table. The knife flew free but he still had a madwoman to contend with. Amanda clawed at his eyes, kicked, kneed, all the while shrilling her war cry.
Cursing, terrified, Adrian wound her into the sheet and shouted for their Mexican housekeeper. She stood in the doorway, bug-eyed at the blood-smeared bed, the wrecked lamp, the knife. “Call Dr. Kirk Willoughby,” he said. He gave her the number from memory. “Tell him it's an emergency.
Emergencia!”
She scampered away and he was left with Amanda raving. “Kill me. Kill me now!” she screamed. “I want to die like a warrior in the service of my queen. I don't want to spend another hour as a prisoner of you loathsome men.”
“Shut up!” Adrian jammed his hand over her mouth and pressed the sheet into the wounds on her neck and breast, stanching the flow of blood.
Kirk Willoughby found him in this position when he arrived. Adrian told him what had happened and begged him to deal with Amanda without calling a hospital ambulance. He dreaded what people in the company and the aircraft business would say if the story got into the newspapers.
“They'll think I attacked her,” he said.
“You'll both be attacked by Califia, Queen of California, the moment I free myself,” Amanda screamed, resuming her wild thrashing.
Amanda kicked and spit and clawed furiously at Willoughby when he tried to approach her. “We'll be glad to submit to your royal whims, your highness, if you'll let us tend to your wounds,” Willoughby said.
“Bring Sarah Morris to me. The mother of Tama's granddaughters. I have a message for her,” Amanda said.
Willoughby's eyes sought Adrian's. He nodded. He was ready to do anything to satisfy this madwoman. He called Cliff Morris and told him to bring Sarah to the house. Thanks to the freeway, they arrived in fifteen minutes. Adrian explained Amanda's delusion and advised Sarah to pretend to be a subject of Queen Califia.
By that time Willoughby had given Amanda an injection of morphine and stitched her wounds. She was propped against the back of the bed, looking weirdly regal with the sheet robed around her. She seemed pleased to see Sarah, who could only stare incomprehensibly at her.
“You must explain to your daughters exactly what happened tonight,” Amanda said. “I was distressed to see that my breasts had grown back and resolved to amputate one, as an example to my followers. I wanted to be sure
none of us would ever be enslaved in their gold-smeared club in Topanga Canyon. The loss of blood weakened me and I was unable to kill the chief scum bearer, Amanda's husband. Will you tell them that?”
“Yes, your majesty,” Sarah said.
“Assure them my followers haven't deserted me. They're out there in the night, waiting to be summoned. But I've failed them with my weakness for male vileness and luxury. I never should have signed even a temporary truce with them. I've paid a terrible price for it. I've lost my dearest truest follower, Tama. You knew her and loved her, didn't you?
“I did, your majesty,” Sarah said. “She was a wonderful woman.”