Fidelity (24 page)

“Sure.”

“Then we can go there. Where did you park?”

“Up the street and around the corner behind the hardware store.”

Her eyes ignited with excitement. “Perfect. I’ll meet you there in, like, five minutes.”

She was there in three. They sat in the car and he poured some vodka into her orange juice, and they talked. Within a half hour, he had heard about how her father had left when she was four, and about her mother’s inept attempt to raise her, which she saw as comical rather than tragic. Her mother was working tonight. She was a secretary at a dentist’s office during the day and a waitress in a bar at night. The more Ted Forrest heard, the better he liked Allison. After an hour of talking, he kissed her. She stared at him for a few seconds as though she were trying to be sure she had not imagined it, then a few more to decide how she ought to feel about it, and then kissed him back.

It seemed to Ted Forrest that it was only a few minutes after that when he began to see small groups of people walking along the street, getting into cars to go home. He said, “I think we ought to get out of here.”

She slouched low, held her hand beside her face and said, “I can’t let those people see me with you like this.”

“Get down and stay low while I drive past them.”

She crouched on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and he drove out of the lot and past a steady stream of pedestrians. “This is so great,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” Forrest said. “There are police cars ahead. Stay low.”

She stayed where she was as he drove past the policemen who were standing beside their cars and watching for people who appeared to be driving under the influence. He drove out onto Route 180 and increased his speed warily. When he was outside of town and had spotted the sheriff’s-department car waiting for speeders beyond the second overpass, he said, “You can sit up now.”

She got up and looked out the window at the dark farmland around her. “Where are we going?”

“Want to go home?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Well, if you’d like to talk some more, the only place I can think of where it’s safe would be my hotel.”

“Fine.”

They stayed at his hotel until just after one, and then he drove her to the small one-story house on the edge of Mendota between the carpet warehouse and the Greek restaurant. She was inside and in bed before her mother came home from work.

After that, Allison Straight was his. At times he wondered if she was the girl he was supposed to have met instead of Caroline. He and Allison each lived two lives. She continued from day to day as one of the poorer girls in the high school, whose mother couldn’t afford to buy her clothes as nice as the ones her classmates wore. But when she was with Ted Forrest, she had a wardrobe that was like an actress’s. She would look in fashion magazines, and he would take her to buy the clothes in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They had to be kept in the closet in the apartment he had rented in San Francisco: There was no place to wear them in Mendota, and no way to explain them if there were.

He also rented a place nearby in Fresno where they could go together without worrying too much about being seen. He told the managers of both of his apartment complexes that he had a teenaged daughter who lived most of the time with her mother, and that he was out of town much of the time. If anyone saw Ted Forrest and Allison at the apartment and wondered, the landlord could satisfy his curiosity. Forrest did everything right. He took her to San Francisco for wonderful weekends. They went to plays and concerts and ate in restaurants, always as an indulgent father and his daughter.

That summer he hired her for an imaginary job in public relations at Forrest Enterprises. She told her mother that she was working during the long, unhurried summer days they spent together. He added her name to the payroll so she received a regular paycheck in the mail that her mother could open and deposit in the bank.

Ted Forrest was in love with Allison Straight, and he built a separate reality that he and she could visit for limited periods of time. He made sure their time together was always exciting and new, and that it included a taste of luxuries she could never have experienced in any way other than being with a rich man. It was a terrible thing-the tragedy of both their lives, really-when the whole affair ended. It had left him changed, he was sure-sadder forever, more guarded and less trusting.

That was nine years ago, and here he was, still trying to recover from it. He drove slowly, moving ahead one yard at a time, then stopping again to wait as he made his way into Los Angeles. He was tired and he had time to kill, but he didn’t want to rent a room and leave a record that he had been here. He parked in the lot of a shopping center and went to a twelve-screen movie theater.

He watched two films. By the time the second was over, he was hungry. Forrest chose to eat dinner at a small Chinese restaurant in a strip mall. He had a theory that Chinese people had trouble distinguishing one average-looking Caucasian from another, but they had always been too polite to admit it in public. He paid for his dinner in cash, then drove around the San Fernando Valley for an hour making sure that he could find the exact addresses that he would need later.

He stopped at a supermarket, bought a box of thumbtacks, a set of writing pads with cardboard covers, and a box of candles. Then he went to another theater and watched his third movie of the day.

When he walked out into the warm night air, it was after midnight at last. He drove to Philip Kramer’s house in Van Nuys. He looked and found there was no car in the garage. He wondered whether Jerry Hobart had succeeded in taking Emily Kramer out to kill her, and simply had not reached him yet because his telephone had been turned off. He thought for a moment and realized it didn’t matter. He still had to do what he had come here to do.

He walked around the house and found a big window in the back that had a glazier’s sticker on it, and a lot of white streaks and dirt that had not been cleaned off it. He felt the edge of the glass and confirmed his theory: The putty was still wet. He had a penknife on his key chain, so he opened it and scraped away as much of the putty as he could reach, then slipped the blade in beside the glass and pried it out carefully. He removed the big pane from the frame and leaned it against the side of the house, then stepped inside.

He was surprised to see that so much furniture had been piled in the living room. The room looked like a warehouse. He set down his bags and went through the house with his flashlight. The upstairs had been stripped, and all of the furniture removed except three beds that had been dismantled and left lying on the floor in one room. He judged that Mrs. Kramer must be in the process of moving away.

Ted Forrest set about assembling his primitive devices. First he would put a thumbtack through a piece of cardboard and into the bottom of a candle so the candle would stand up. Then he placed candles in the corners of all of the rooms. The candles would provide delay. Then he went through the house adding fuel. In most places, he soaked the floors and walls with fire starter, then placed stick matches and crumpled writing paper at strategic places where a candle flame would eventually reach them. In the living room, he poured kerosene on all of the wooden furniture, the walls, and the floor, and then set six of his candles around the room. Next he picked up his bags of equipment and set them outside, took a box of stick matches, and went through the house lighting the candles, one by one. The last ones he lit were in the living room near the piles of furniture. Finally he stepped out of the empty window frame. He leaned the big sheet of glass against the frame so it would keep any breeze from blowing in and extinguishing his candles.

Then Ted Forrest drove to the office building where he had gone to meet Philip Kramer eight years ago. There were only two places he could think of where Kramer might have hidden the file, and in a few hours both would be in ashes.

Emily and Ray had spent the whole day doing hard physical labor, lifting and packing and loading, moving boxes of small things and large pieces of furniture out of upstairs bedrooms and down the staircase to the living room. Working beside Ray made her feel close to him. There was the physical proximity, and the very specific choreography-the “I’ve got this end and you take that end” that built familiarity.

They had also trusted each other enough to let themselves be seen in a sweaty shirt and with tousled hair stuck to a damp forehead, to be unconcerned about appearance for a time because they had to concentrate on the job of clearing the rooms.

And they had talked.

Emily’s private life had stopped being private the moment Phil had been murdered. Even before, the privacy had been an illusion. Ray Hall had already known more about some parts of her life than she did.

In those days, Phil would tell her his version of things and she would listen and wonder fleetingly whether he was telling the truth, and then remind herself that part of what was required of her was that she believe him when he spoke. She didn’t want to be the enemy waiting for him in his own house, the person who was trying to catch him at something.

Today she had moved another step away from those days, and as she did, she realized that Ray had been as deluded as she had. He might not have been fooled about Phil’s cheating, but he was still living by the same rules of conduct that she was. Neither of them could acknowledge the truth without irrefutable evidence. Neither had really known the truth until Phil was dead.

Today she and Ray spent the whole day talking about things that weren’t big or momentous, and so were more intimate than the big things that they had been forced to talk about since the night when Phil had not come home.

Emily talked about the items she was putting into boxes. Almost all of the clothes she kept were outfits that she had bought for special occasions. There were books she had bought but never read. There was a painting of the Santa Monica Mountains that she had never really liked, but had kept on a wall in the hall where it wouldn’t do much damage, like an old pet that was ugly but sweet-tempered.

Ray talked to her about the job he’d had when he was in college, working on a moving van. He found that for the first whole summer the money almost didn’t matter because of his intense curiosity about the hoards of things that people owned. He specialized in the seemingly tedious task of packing delicate or valuable items in boxes, just so he could see them and learn what he could about their owners’ lives and histories. He had pretended that he hated the chore, partly so the other moving men didn’t think he was odd, and shouldn’t keep doing it. But by the second summer he had learned the contents of homes so thoroughly that there were no more surprises. Everybody’s house was full of the same things, with the variations so minor that they revealed little except differences in income. Emily loved the way he laughed at his own curiosity.

They talked for long periods, and then were silent for stretches, and the silence built a kind of intimacy, too, because as they worked together, they were thinking about each other, each of them thinking about what the other had said.

There were times when one of them would stop in the act of moving some item-once, an old suitcase left in the guest-bedroom closet-and they would realize simultaneously that this could be itthe hiding place-and search it together.

When either of them took a book from a shelf, the next move would be to shake it, turn it over and riffle the pages. Each time something fluttered from between the pages to the floor they would both stop, feeling the same excitement at the same instant, then release the held breath in disappointment.

The things in her house-nearly all of them by now-were hers, not Phil’s. When Phil had been dead a few days, she had gone through his clothes. She had decided it was the right thing to do because good clothes should not go to waste. But she had known she could not simply take clothes off hangers and give them away. Phil was perfectly capable of sewing something inside a piece of clothing. When he was in the marines, he had sometimes gone on leave with money sewn into a jacket. So Emily had gone through all of the clothes, felt the seams of the garments, folded them carefully, and taken them to Goodwill.

At ten thirty at night, after they had been working together for fourteen hours, they loaded what Ray referred to as Emily’s “valuables” into the truck Billy had rented. She found that there were things of hers that she had kept for years simply because she expected always to live in this house, but which she didn’t feel as though she wanted to move or pay to store. They ended up taking surprisingly little-her good clothes, a dozen photo albums, a few paintings and prints, and a few things she kept only because she couldn’t give them away-Phil’s guns and ammunition, a collection of gold coins he’d had for years, a small lacquer box of inexpensive jewelry, a couple of clocks, two radios, and two television sets. Ray filled the rest of the bay of the truck with a few favorite pieces of furniture. They drove the truck to the storage building and unloaded it, then drove to Ray’s house.

IT WAS LATE Now, after three, and she was lying in Ray Hall’s bedone of his beds, anyway. It was her second night in his guest bedroom, and she noted that she had begun to have a new relationship with the room. On the first night it felt alien and empty and cold, as guest rooms often did. There wasn’t much furniture. The sheets and bedspread had a subtle smell of detergent that wasn’t the same as hers, and she could tell that nobody had ever slept on the mattress.

On the first night, she had kept her suitcase on a chair, opened it to take out things that she needed, and then closed it again. That changed tonight. Now she had clothes hanging in the closet so the wrinkles would hang out, and the bathroom counter was crowded with bottles of her shampoo and makeup containers and toothbrush and hairbrushes.

When she and Ray had come in this evening, she had been exhausted and dirty. They ate at a diner on the boulevard near Ray’s neighborhood, where the waitress knew Ray’s name and looked at him with a bit too much interest while she leaned close to him to get his order exactly right.