Corkscrew (11 page)

Susan was home today, it being Saturday, so when Wayne brought the papers back to the apartment they sat together in the living room, she on the sofa, he in his regular chair, and read both pieces, trading back and forth. Then Susan said, 'No one heard anything.'

'I saw that,' Wayne said. 'That's good.'

And it was good they could let the story into their lives now because it wasn't exclusively
their
lives any more; Lucie Proctorr was dead in everybody's life now.

Susan at last put the
News
aside and said, 'We should go out today, somewhere outside.'

'It's cold.'

'We shouldn't just stay in here all day,' she said. 'Cooped up in here.'

They didn't own a car; what did they need a car for in New York? Just another expense, and the constant fuss of moving it from place to place. Those rare times when they went out of town, they'd rent a car. So Wayne said, 'You want to get a car? You want to go away for the weekend?'

'We could do that.' The
News
was open on the sofa beside her, to that page. Looking at it, she said, 'I'd like to see that house.'

'What, Bryce's house? What for?'

'I don't know, I'd just like to. It's a sunny day, even if it is cold, it might be nice to drive around Connecticut, maybe even up to Massachusetts, spend tonight in a bed-and-breakfast up there, drive back tomorrow.'

'I've been working—'

'Too much,' she said.

He smiled at her, comfortable with her. 'Too well, I was going to say. The book is moving along.'

'You can take a day off from it.'

Suddenly his mood changed, he felt lousy, and he flopped back in his chair. 'I could take forever off from it,' he said. 'It isn't going anywhere.'

'Wayne, no,' she said, 'you'll find a publisher.'

'Sure.'

'No, you will,' she insisted. 'You can make Bryce help you.'

'Make him?'

'Of course. He owes you now.'

'I'm getting money from him,' Wayne said. 'If he doesn't stiff me.'

'What do you mean, stiff you?'

'Just take my book and thumb his nose at me. What am I going to do, take him to court? 'I killed this man's wife for him, and now he won't pay me.' Sure. And he could switch the book around so I wouldn't even be able to prove it was mine.'

Susan sat forward on the sofa, leaning toward him. 'Wayne,' she said, 'Bryce doesn't dare cross you. He
owes
you now, and he knows it, and he'll do whatever you want. Don't you know why?'

'No,' he said. 'I don't see what you're getting at.'

'You don't see it because you know who you really are,' she told him. 'And I know who you really are. But
he
thinks you're the person who did…
that,
on Wednesday night. He talked to you in the library in the first place because he thought you were a desperate man, and now he's sure you're a desperate man, and he'll do anything to keep you happy.'

He looked at her, not liking what she was saying. 'Or I'll beat
him
to death, too? Maybe all his children?'

'No.
Wayne. If you're desperate, he can't predict you, and he can't control you. I know who you—'

'Listen, wait a minute,' he said. 'Wait a minute. I don't want to talk about, you know…'

'Of course you don't, and you don't have to.'

'But just one thing,' he said. 'I didn't plan it that way, I
wouldn't
plan a thing like that, it wasn't supposed to happen Wednesday at all, not for who knows how long, and certainly not
brutal,
not, I was as, as, as surprised and scared as she was when it started. I didn't know it was going to start—'

'Wayne, stop.'

' — and then it started, and there was no way—'

'Wayne, please stop, you're crying, Wayne,

' — to stop it, I had to keep on — Oh, Jesus Christ, Susan!'

She came over and knelt and held him for a long while, until the shaking and the crying stopped, until he took a long deep breath and said, 'Okay, now.'

'All right?'

'It's over now,' he said, and he could feel that it really was, that some balled fist inside his chest had finally unclenched itself. 'I'll be all right now,' he said.

She continued to kneel beside his chair, and now she leaned back, still holding his arms, to study his face. 'You're sure?'

'I'm sure.' he said and smiled at her. 'Let's go for a drive.'

They couldn't find the house. There weren't enough clues in the stories in the newspapers nor in the photo in the
News.
They knew the house was somewhere near Bethel, but all the country roads looked the same, meandering through patches of woodland, charming in the sunlight even with their leaves down. The old low stone walls undulated with the land along the roadside, and Wayne made random turns at the intersections in the little red rental Saturn. There wasn't much other traffic, and the mere fact of driving around was pleasant.

But they couldn't find the house. The large houses and estates around here were mostly set well back from the road, in among trees, hard to see, sometimes impossible, and most of these people didn't put their names on their mailboxes. After a while, they were just looking at attractive houses for their own sake.

He only raised the taboo subject once, when they were on a rare straight stretch, black and white dairy cows in a large open field on their left, tangled brushy woods on their right. 'I'm just glad,' he said, 'I'm not dreaming about it.'

'That's kind of a surprise, really,' she said.

'And a relief. What if I had nightmares?'

'You don't think you will?'

'No. If it hasn't started by now, it won't.'

'Good.'

A little later, Susan said, 'I don't really need to see his house. I just needed to get out of the apartment for a while.'

'I'm glad you talked me into it.'

'So what do you want to do now?' He said, 'We'll go on up to Massachusetts, like we said.'

'We can go antiquing.'

'Why not?' he said. 'We'll be rich soon.'

The funeral was Sunday, so they flew back on the late afternoon plane Saturday, getting into Kennedy at midnight. They traveled together, because there was no reason to hide any more, no more private detectives lurking around. Everything had changed now. The burden was gone.

There was a message with a phone number from Detective Johnson on the machine when they arrived. It was a black man's voice, calm and gentle, not tough-sounding at all, which was a surprise. In the morning, before leaving for the funeral, Bryce phoned that number, spoke briefly with Johnson, and agreed to meet with him at the apartment that afternoon.

Isabelle had stayed with him Saturday night, but she wouldn't come to the funeral. While he was there, she'd go to her apartment way east on Thirty-first Street and pack some things, enough so she could be comfortable in his place.

Bryce hadn't thought ahead of time about how terrible the funeral would be. Everybody there knew he and Lucie had been going through that endless miserable divorce, so nobody could quite treat him like a grieving husband. On the other hand, nobody could offer him a big smile and a hearty 'Congratulations!' either. Generally, people behaved toward him as though they had a toothache that they vaguely blamed him for.

Not that there were so many people present, maybe twenty in all. Lucie's parents had flown in from St Louis, and did their best to avoid Bryce entirely, since of course his legal battle with their daughter had made him their enemy, and they couldn't figure out any other way to react to him now.

His own family was no better. All three of his children were present, but none sat near him. There was twenty-three-year-old Betsy, a postgraduate architecture student at Brown; twenty-one-year-old Tom, studying engineering at MIT; and nineteen-year-old Barry, an English lit major at Rutgers. With them all away, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and New Jersey, he rarely saw them or spoke with them. His accountant paid their bills, and that was the extent of the relationship. They'd sided with their mother, Ellen, in his first divorce, and had never liked Lucie, who had coldly disliked them in return. The estrangement was not deliberate on anybody's part, but by now it was habitual.

Their mother, Ellen, was there, too, which surprised Bryce, accompanied by Jimmy Branley, the architect she lived with in Connecticut. She solemnly shook Bryce's hand, saying, 'I hope you find happiness, Bryce, after all this.'

'Well, thank you,' he said, and thought again that he really should have stayed with Ellen, not only because Lucie had been so much worse. There was an honesty in Ellen that could have anchored him, if he'd let it.

Also at the funeral were ten or so women friends of Lucie's, all her age, all looking more or less like her, women who found it easy to wear black to a funeral because they wore black all the time anyway. Lucie'd always been more comfortable with women than men, and had always had a lot of girlfriends; they'd chat endlessly on the phone and buy little gifts for one another.

The setting was an upscale funeral parlor on Park Avenue, with quiet efficient dark-suited men moving it all along. The service was muted and nondenominational, vaguely religious without committing anybody to anything. Three people spoke, the first being Lucie's father, who'd written out what he wanted to say on two sheets of lined yellow paper, which trembled like leaves in his hands. He could barely get through it, gulping and weeping and choking up.

Then one of Lucie's girlfriends, a woman named Janet Higgins, spoke about the last time she'd seen Lucie, which happened to be at the premiere of a play she'd directed, and how supportive Lucie had been then, and had always been, and how hard it was to believe that wonderful friend wouldn't be around any more. Bryce realized with sudden shock and unease that the play must have been
Low Fidelity,
where Wayne and Lucie had met. He found himself trembling, thinking of what he'd started, what he'd destroyed. Why couldn't the two of them have just gotten it over with?

His mind drifted, and he thought, why not just leave New York for a while? Leave New York and Connecticut and everything.

Spain. He could move to Spain for two or three years, take Isabelle with him, maybe he could help her get her children back. At that thought, he couldn't help but look over at his own three, clustered with their mother, isolated from him. No, he was isolated from them, wasn't he?

He'd never met Isabelle's children. He'd met her father a few times, thought he was stuffy but all right, wouldn't mind being around him for a while.

But they wouldn't live in Madrid, where her father lived. No, they'd go east, over to Barcelona, find a nice villa outside the city, toward the Med. There were a dozen beaches you could go to there, a different one every day. He could find a story set in Spain, set up an office there in a sunny corner room, do his research in Barcelona. He could see the office, dark wood gleaming in the sunlight, a tiled terrace outside the large office windows. He wished he were there now, instead of here. Seated at his computer writing his Spanish novel, seeing Isabelle on the sunny terrace outside, with her three children.

The business with Wayne had to be gotten out of the way first, that's all. Wayne and Two
Faces in the Mirror.
Next Monday he could send Joe Katz, his editor, the manuscript, maybe call him this Thursday or Friday to say, 'I'm almost done, at long last!' He smiled at the thought, then stopped himself from smiling.

In the funeral, the worst was saved for last: another Lucie girlfriend, who wanted to tell them all the funny things she remembered Lucie saying, most of which had probably not been that funny in their original context and were just ghastly here. The woman had no sense of her audience, but just prattled on, and Bryce found himself thinking, I should have Wayne kill
her,
too.

At last she finished, and the funeral parlor men wheeled the closed casket away for cremation, and it was over. People stood in small hushed murmuring groups, none of which included Bryce. Nobody in this place, he realized, is on my side. Feeling very alone, he left there and hailed a cab.

The interview with Detective Johnson was brief and easy. He was a tall rangy man, not burly like the cops in Los Angeles, and he seemed to have no suspicion of Bryce at all. He began by going over much the same territory as the two detectives in Los Angeles, Bryce's reason for being out there, but in shorter form, since clearly he'd already talked with Detectives Grasso and Maurice.

Then he wanted to know what Bryce knew about any men Lucie had been dating since their separation, and he said, 'I'm sorry, I'm probably the last person who could help you on that.'

'I suppose that's true,' Johnson agreed. 'But we have an Identikit picture that might be the guy. I'd like to show it to you.'

'Okay,' Bryce said. He was thinking, How can I claim I don't recognize Wayne? But I can't possibly say the killer looks like Wayne Prentice, not even remotely. And how did Wayne manage to get himself seen?

Taking a tan manila envelope from his coat pocket, Johnson said, 'We potentially have two witnesses, but the truth is, we're not sure they're both identifying the same man.'

'I don't follow,' Bryce admitted.

Johnson seemed reluctant to show the picture, but went on holding the envelope in both hands. 'One witness,' he said, 'is the doorman in Ms Proctorr's building. He saw a man come for her, go up to the apartment, come down with her, go out, come back with her later, and then go out again alone.'

'Saw him four times,' Bryce said. 'That's a lot.'

'You'd think so,' Johnson said. 'But not everybody's as observant as we'd like.'

'I suppose that's true.'

'The man told the doorman his name was Wayland,' Johnson said. 'Does that ring a bell?'

Oh, clever Wayne, Bryce thought, realizing at once what he must have done. Shaking his head, he said, 'I don't know anybody named Wayland. No first name?'

'No, unless that is a first name.'

'I suppose.'