It's a Crime (6 page)

He and three friends had been skiing until dark on Sunday. Then they’d drunk a few beers. It had been snowing, but it had stopped by the time they set out. They were in the fast lane. A Buick going the other way spun out, jumped the divide, and ended up in their path. Frank wrenched the steering wheel toward the fog line, but it was too late. He hit the other car at an angle. Once it became clear to Frank’s mother that everyone was going to live, she pressed for details and kept repeating what she heard. Pat couldn’t keep all the injuries straight. Frank had gotten off lightly; he’d broken his right leg. He asked his parents to leave the room and then asked Pat to marry him. She said, “Wow, what an idea.” Suddenly she could make sense of the past few years: This must have been the direction they were heading in.

Recovering at his parents’ house, Frank declared his intention of reading the Bud Caddy novels. Pat bought him a new copy of
Road Kill.
She didn’t want him reading hers. “It’s really good,” he said later, scratching under his cast with a straightened coat hanger. “Great sex.”

“Sex?” Could he be joking? At this point all she could remember was a lot of shooting and drinking. “Like between a man and a woman?”

“I’m not saying it was with you.”

“Heaven forbid,” said Pat happily.

Shortly before the wedding Lemuel Samuel published
Mallow,
in which all the murder and mayhem, the guns and the gore, revolved around one central female character.

Mallow is the street name of a teenage runaway whose case still haunts Bud Caddy years later. Her father hired him to find her, claiming that the cops wouldn’t take him seriously because he smoked some marijuana now and then. Naturally Bud suggests smoking more. As they go on to other drugs, though, Bud begins to notice peculiarities about the man, who acts as if he’s in a time warp. Mallow turns out to be wary, screwed up, wild. She says her father sexually molested her. After many pharmaceuticals and much tight-lipped agony, Bud does not hand her over. Then he finds out that her story could not be true. The father, who was never the custodial parent, has been living in Mexico and hasn’t even seen her since she was a baby. Fifteen years later, he is dead, and Mallow shows up on Bud Caddy’s doorstep to ask him to solve his murder. This time as events unfold he refuses to be tricked, so he loses her again.

Mallow has eyes “as green as go lights.” She has “fringe” toes. She has a bottom like “jungle fruit.” Once she gets the chance, she talks a blue streak in her “untamed soprano voice.”

“My God, this is me!” Pat exclaimed to Frank as they lay on the beach at Ocean Grove. She recognized these descriptions. Lemuel had used every one while talking to her—more often in bars than in bed. It was as if he’d come up with his own version of her life while she was trying to figure out the real thing.

When Pat married Frank in a very traditional white dress (floor-length satin, lace bodice, oversize bow in back), she walked down the aisle as Mallow. Everyone knew. The book had made the
Times
bestseller list the month before, the first of Lemuel Samuel’s mysteries to do so. Frank told all his friends and family, although none of them had any particular interest in fiction. “Hey, she’s got fringe toes,” he would say. “I’ve seen them.”

Naturally most people had not read the book. But they knew its reputation. They assumed that Pat was as wild as this Mallow. After all, she had rolled around with the ruffian author for years. No one who knew her associated her with the more pathetic aspects of the character, of course; she was too young and fresh and warm. And enthusiastic. She still bubbled over. When a friend of Frank’s asked if she’d really run away, all she did was laugh. She laughed, too, when her mother said she thought the book captured her ex-husband’s sinister qualities. She laughed even when Frank said, jokingly, on their wedding night, “And I’m supposed to trust you?”

Pat had called Ginny’s stepmother to get her address so that she could send her an invitation. That’s when she learned that Ginny had sold a story called “First Funeral” to
Clock
magazine, which was named after the publication in the Nero Wolfe books. So Ginny couldn’t have buried herself too far in the dark woods. She never did send in her response card, but she showed up, anyway. She was all in black, with purple lipstick, black fingernails, and a Celtic cross—not exactly a look that Pat associated with the state of Maine. There were plenty of people in black at the wedding; no one worried about that stuff anymore, but Ginny looked scrawny, pasty-faced, and unhealthy in her black garments. At the reception at the local Marlboro Inn, Pat hugged her, which Ginny never used to let her do, and said, “You must tell me everything that has happened.”

“Sometime,” said Ginny with a slow, brow-furrowing smile. She handed her a wedding present—a teakettle for “Lydia Bunting”—and a card with notes on
Mallow.

SHOOTINGS:

three drug dealers

porn peddler

Mallow’s father

street minister with sinister motives

cocaine-sniffing widow of Senator

Bud Caddy (flesh wound only)

an unspecified but large number of dogs at an animal rescue shelter

BEATINGS:

massage parlor owner

mailman

person drinking in bar who refused to give Bud Caddy information in an unpleasant way

bartender

bartender’s brother, filling in for him

Bud Caddy

Vietnam vet friend of Bud Caddy

different bartender

Pat put this away with her paper wedding bells and her (mailed) telegrams and her white satin shoes with their three bows apiece.

CHAPTER
6

F
rank’s voluntary surrender date was in two months. The ensuing time was a bit like one of those exercises: What would you do if you knew the world were going to end tomorrow? You’d act the same, Pat concluded, only much, much more so.

Frank tried to call many people, not just Neil. The morning after the sentencing, as Pat passed by his study, she heard him say, “When did you give him the message?” There were dozens of people he could have been referring to.

Then he started ordering packages from all over the world. Pat had never known before what was available. Premium meats from Colorado, live lobsters from Ogunquit, jams from Devonshire, England, spices from New Orleans. Once a heart locket arrived for her from Tiffany. Soon unopened boxes littered the kitchen (though still not the cavernous living and dining rooms) because Frank rarely had the patience to cook or to wait for Pat. And there were so many restaurants to visit before his incarceration. How could he bear to last a year without having another warm spinach and shrimp salad from Blue Heaven?

They drank a lot. Frank ordered a mixed carton of single malt whiskey and three cases of wine, nearly all red. He and Pat drank wine at lunch and then had another glass with every little snack (even, redundantly, with a handful of grapes once). When Frank was disappointed in a vintage of wine, he simply opened another bottle. Pat lined up all the opened ones on the deep shelf under the row of windows in the kitchen. The sunlight shone through the colored glass, corks sticking up from the necks like sprouted seeds.

Frank never seemed particularly drunk—or sober. One night he said, “There’s no reason not to drink all the time. At least that way you get to be happy for a little while.” His tone indicated that he considered this a devastating indictment of the situation, but Pat could see only its truth; she nodded cheerfully.

The only person Pat went out of her way to call was Brenda, who said, “Instead of going to jail, these guys should have been sentenced to community service. They could go to an Indian reservation where they might do some good.” Though what help a couple of crooked accountants would be on an Indian reservation, Pat wasn’t sure. Maybe one of the casinos could use them.

Pat’s problem was that she was tired a lot of the time. It’s hard to keep drinking in the afternoon. She was hyperalert, however. She felt she had to match Frank’s windup appetites with a semblance of vivaciousness. If she weren’t there to help buoy the moment, who knew what horror would ensue? And if a hangover was particularly acute, it was all the better an excuse to block out any thought at all.

Neither she nor Frank slept much. Pat spent a good deal of the night in her “library,” which was on the third floor and featured two walls of mysteries and one of plant books. (She’d been collecting mysteries longer.) There she would sit in a large leather armchair under a full-spectrum light and either read novels or memorize plant lists. Before his arrest Frank had left for work before six in the morning. Now she would find him in the early hours gazing through his study window at the untidy sweep of Manhattan skyline. Or holding his closet door open and looking at his suits. Or stroking the ears of the Boston terrier, who was the only one of the dogs he really got along with.

Curiously, when Ruby went back to Hart Ridge–Tooner Academy in the fall, her schedule seemed to become more erratic as well. In the morning Pat dropped her off at the park across the street from the school, where the bad kids had always hung out. Then Ruby would show up at odd hours, saying that there weren’t enough computers to go around, or that there had been a fire drill and she’d gotten cold. Once after Pat returned her to school for her last-period class, Frank asked irritably, “How much do we pay for her to go there? I want you to keep an eye on her.” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “I’m going to prison. I still can’t believe it, but I’m really going to prison.”

Absently he asked Pat to take off her clothes, which she did. Then he brought up his “last supper” as a free man. Frank wanted to make love at all hours of the day, but he often got sidetracked and started to talk instead. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He had to be at Allenwood on the following Tuesday, and Monday evening was not the best time to eat out. “I don’t care how expensive the restaurant is; they’re liable to serve food they couldn’t get rid of over the weekend.”

“How true,” said Pat, lying naked in the same place she would be a week later, alone. Her pillow was unaccountably familiar; it was her head that held the strange future in it.

She offered to cook Julia Child’s chicken in cream and port wine, Marcella Hazen’s pasta with Bolognese sauce, or Eula Mae Dore’s yellow cake, each of which he had declared to be his favorite dish at one time or another. Better not to mention that she would miss the sex: its frequency, yes, its regularity, yes, yes, but also its continuing capacity to surprise. He would not see such a remark as a compliment. He would take it as a criticism of his present inaction or he’d remember it later and worry about her fidelity.

Still startlingly present and palpable, Frank made a face and shook his head so slightly the movement could have been involuntary. Whether this meant “No” or “Don’t bother me, I’m thinking,” Pat couldn’t tell.

It occurred to her that Frank was behaving as he thought a “man” should under the circumstances. This struck her as funny, because she never thought of him as a “man,” just as Frank. She idly wondered if she ever tried to behave like a “woman.” No, she decided, definitely not.

The last weekend was an intense version of the days preceding it. Frank couldn’t have slept at all, except for an occasional hour or two of wine-induced napping. He had always been single-minded, and now his focus seemed to be on consuming as much as possible before the deadline. After a midmorning shower on Saturday, he wandered into their bedroom, slapping the white flesh at his waist and saying, “I think I’ve put on twenty pounds in the last two weeks.”

He was a tallish man, skinny and gangly most of his life, but he’d finally started to thicken through both the shoulders and the stomach. The tension in his voice did not express dissatisfaction over his weight, however. It reflected the intensity of his unconscious goal: to incorporate as much of this life into the only thing he would be allowed to take with him on Tuesday—his body.

He picked up the Chilean wine he’d left on Pat’s dresser. “Veal, maybe,” he said. “They keep veal calves in little cages, so I may not have the stomach for it later.”

Pat wondered if he was serious.

“We could make it all,” she suggested. “Julia, Eula Mae, the works.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s exactly what we’ll do. And there’s no reason to stop. Paella! I want Yorkshire pudding, too, so we’ll have to have a roast. And fresh vegetables, lots of them. They will be scarce inside, I’m sure.”

“Do you want to invite anyone else?” asked Pat.

Frank lay down, full length, on the bed. “The only person who will talk to me is the person who got me into this in the first place,” he said.

“Who’s that?” asked Pat, puzzled. He couldn’t mean Neil, not after Neil had told him to leave him alone.

“Ellen Kloda,” said Frank.

“Oh,” said Pat. “That’s right, the memo.”

Frank closed his eyes. “You know she cried when I called her.”

“Look,” said Pat. “Why don’t we give Oliver a try?” She could not really believe he was avoiding them. The three used to socialize a lot, considering they were grown-ups. They’d had dinner every month or so. Oliver exuded charm. “Why don’t we just see what he says?”

“I have left a dozen messages for that man,” said Frank without opening his eyes. “Do you think maybe his dialing finger is broken?”

“Well,” said Pat. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Right,” said Frank.

“What matters is that your family is going to be gathered around you,” said Pat, deciding on the spot that she’d better get Rose to come back from college. They were the ones who’d bought her that lime green VW Bug. Let her put it to good use.

By Monday evening the dogs had been banished to the basement, and every surface of the kitchen was covered with Cuisinarts, nesting bowls, cutting boards, colanders, and food of every texture and color. On the island alone were veal chops dredged in flour, strips of red, yellow, and green peppers, oysters in their brine, tomato halves inverted on a rack, a small bowl of freshly baked and processed bread crumbs, bunches of watercress, arugula, and parsley—and more, always more.

Pat tried to write down the various cooking times on a pad of paper by the phone, but when she asked Frank how long the paella would take, he said, “Who knows?” So she abandoned the idea of coordinating the dishes and simply carted them whenever they were finished to the huge trestle table in the dining room.

Ruby, who’d been shaking up her brain on the rides at Six Flags (she really was fearless), eventually showed up, saying, “Where’s Rose?”

She was late, but Pat didn’t care. “She’ll be here soon.”

Ruby’s black eyes slid silently over the heaps of food.

Frank carried a crock of soup from the kitchen. “You’ve got to taste this,” he said, his voice overloud for the room.

Pat dipped her spoon and made exaggerated slurping noises. (She didn’t know when he’d added soup to the mix.)

“Tasty, isn’t it,” he bellowed. “A mob boss couldn’t have a better send-off.”

“Oh, Frank,” said Pat, feeling the dishes to see which were still warm.

Rose at last showed up with a backseat full of impatiens that her class had just finished experimenting on.

“Isn’t that nice,” said Pat, although what she was going to do with a load of supermarket flowers like impatiens, she did not know. Maybe she could think of some experiments of her own.

The four of them sat as they always had, at the center of the very long dining room table. Frank and Pat were on one side, and Rose and Ruby on the other.

“How’s school?” Pat asked Rose.

“Fine,” said Rose, who used to be as chatty in her own way as Pat.

“You like your classes this semester?”

“Yes.”

“The teachers are nice?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong with her?” demanded Frank. The words were somewhat loose, because of his drinking.

“Are you still getting along with your roommate?” asked Pat.

“Mom.”

“For some reason my roommates kept freaking out on me,” said Pat. “One tried to kill herself, and another left school and became a topless dancer.”

“What?”
said Frank.

“It wasn’t my suggestion,” said Pat.

There was a silence.

“Ruby seems to have a lot of assemblies this year,” said Pat.

“Really,” said Rose, with a long look at Ruby.

“Yup,” said Ruby.

“I’m really going to miss you guys,” said Frank, putting his head in his hands.

“I’ve got to tell you,” said Pat. “I’ve been reading this suspense novel, and you wouldn’t believe what happens. It’s about this guy who manipulates the stock market out of revenge but ends up making a lot of money for himself. And he’s a good guy. He’s not a good bad guy among bad bad guys, who are all tricking each other. He’s a
plain old
good guy, up against a
plain old
bad guy.” She spoke faster and faster, and details started to fly: newspaper leaks, a change of clothes, a masked courier. “Don’t you see!” she cried, her voice soaring. “This guy is a hero! You did something not so different, and they’re sending you to prison for it!”

“People don’t mind if the fix is in—as long as they’re in on it,” said Frank gloomily.

“It’s not like you really hurt anyone,” said Pat.

Ruby was staring at them with her silent and unblinking button eyes.

“You’re going to be fine financially,” said Frank. “Unless we’re socked with a big civil judgment. Just don’t go wild when I’m gone.”

“I have to have my cellphone,” said Ruby in a self-righteous, aggrieved tone.

“That’s fine, just no castles in Spain.” He popped the cork on another bottle of Montrachet. “Do you know that one out of every eleven American men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives? It’s unbelievable. It’s emasculating. What kind of society puts that many of its men in jail? The government may end up indicting everyone in the telecommunications industry. We may not have made the best business decisions at LinkAge, but we didn’t do anything that unusual. I’m wondering how the American people will communicate once we’re all in prison. The
post office
?” He laughed.

“I have to get back,” said Rose, standing up.

“Don’t you want some dessert?” asked Pat.

“No.”

“No dessert?” said Frank.

Rose was adamant. “I’ve got a lab due tomorrow,” she said, as if nothing they did could compare. On her way out, she said to Ruby, “Watch yourself, kid.”

“I will,” Ruby replied with uncharacteristic anxiety, leaning forward to stress her seriousness. Then she ran upstairs, the sound as quick and regular as the shuffling of cards.

When they were alone, Frank said to Pat, “I have to talk to you.”

She tried to think of excuses for the girls. “About what?” she said, starting to clear the table.

“Whatever you do,” said Frank, grabbing her arm, “don’t sleep with that detective writer when I’m gone.”