Long Shot (15 page)

“It's very beautiful, what he says here.”

She flipped the cover and read out loud a fragment of Harry's inscription: “You can't pull up a single flower without the whole universe coming up with it.' Don't you think that says a lot about you both?”

He scrambled for words that would prove her wrong, but she lobbed the book to him underhand, and it was all he could do to catch it. It thumped against his chest and he held it clutched as she went on.

“Let me finish,” she said, as if she understood what a low threshold he had for supportive remarks. “If I didn't believe it was good between you, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble to track you down. The moment I saw you, I knew who you were.” She stopped to grope for a way to say it—to tell him how it was she saw right through him. “I mean, you were off on a cloud somewhere. Like you couldn't think straight.”

“It's an endearing little habit of mine,” he said with a snort of irony. “I get bored very easy. Before I know it, I've started to drift. Someday I'm going to have to wear a collar with my name and address on it.”

“I didn't say bored. It was like you were hardly there at all. It reminded me of—me.”

There was more of a trick to things between them than he thought. He'd been gearing up to disabuse her. Right from the first, she'd blown it all out of proportion about the bond between him and Harry. She gave them too much sentimental license—seemed to see them honeymooned in a cabin on Walden Pond. But he didn't really understand the reason until now. She wanted him in as deep as she was. In a marriage that ended up rotten with lies.

“I hate to be technical,” he said, “but I think the nothing
I
was feeling wasn't quite the same as yours.”

“Who's counting?” Vivien scoffed. “It
amounts
to the same. We were both of us left in the lurch.”

“Well, but not
really
,” Greg protested, stubborn in this if nothing else. “I hardly knew him. It was just one night.” He held out his open palm as if there were water running through it. He couldn't think of another thing to say. He snapped his fingers once—but softly, as if they were numb from the cold. “Just like that,” he said quietly.

All along, he'd kept a certain distance from her, in case she proved to be a simp. He was scared there might be a nasty streak of hearts-and-flowers in her. Now he saw it was quite the reverse—she took an even darker view than he did. He felt an urge to fly up the steps and take her hand and apologize. He'd misjudged her very badly. The third path didn't occur to him: to keep his distance all the same, lest her case of the bleaks was contagious. He moved to close the space between them, as if it were up to him to turn the tide of betrayal.

“Oh, Harry and I would have made it, I guess. But I'm very slow on the uptake. It comes from thinking I know all the lines. I'm always waiting for cues.”

“Does it matter how many nights it was?” she asked, with an edge of real disdain. “You loved him, right?”

“Well … yes.”

“Well, Jasper was fucking him too. Now doesn't that make you feel a little—I don't know—
preempted?
”

“It
would
have,” he argued. “I'm sure it would have
killed
me, just thinking about it. But—that's not how it happened.” He would have loved to add her nickname here, to gentle the bluntness of it. “You see, I don't think they ever met. I think somebody made it
look
that way.”

He managed to get it said without actually saying the word, but murder hung in the air from that point on like a film of carbon gas. Vivien drew back. She raised her head and looked out levelly over the roofs of the mission. For that one moment, the feeling she spoke of was on her face—she was hardly there at all. Perhaps no feeling had the guts to rise to the occasion.

“Oh, do you think that's wise?” she asked in a vague and melancholy way. She made it seem like a matter of taste. “I mean, isn't it bad enough the way we have it now? At least we've gotten some of it behind us. Can't you go some other way?”

The truth's the only way
, he thought, but luckily didn't say it. His earnestness could be quite oppressive.

“But don't you see,” he demanded after a pause, pressing on with the greatest care, “if it was murder, then you didn't lose him. Not the way you thought.”

“Really?”

She didn't sound convinced. Didn't sound remotely interested, in fact. When she brought her eyes back to his face again, he saw she'd left the whole idea behind. It didn't mean she wouldn't listen. She was more than glad to let him talk it out. But the concept didn't grab her.

“You know what? You need to get away,” she said. “I know
I
do. Saturday morning, I leave for a month in Baja. Sailing.” She didn't sound very interested in that, either. “I know you don't make very much, but I have an idea. You see—I left something behind in Bermuda. That's where I was when—”

She stopped, got up, and started down the stairs. He felt as if she hadn't completed a thought in several minutes. Still, she wasn't trying to get rid of him yet. She hadn't said he couldn't investigate around her. Even so, he was glad that Edna Temple wasn't here. She would have found all manner of unsolved crimes in everything Vivien said. He watched as the widow paused on the step above him. He trusted her, God knew why. Perhaps because she went out of her way to put them on equal footing.

“If you went and picked it up for me,” she said, “I'd gladly pay your way. I'd pay you
twice
as much, if you thought it didn't violate your principles.”

She stepped down onto the floor, and together they strolled across the square. In the cracked squat tower on the other side, he could see the green of a copper bell. He made out a wreath of leaves and berries, cast around the rim.
Real
, he thought—that is, not gum and paint and plaster of Paris. Real like the wrought-iron gate was real.

“I have an old house on the water,” she said. “There's a lot of trees, and a field of lilies. In a way it's like Walden Pond—except it's the middle of the ocean.”

“I have to find out all I can. I can't stop now.”

“Well, that's up to you,” she replied. She wasn't about to engage with him on the moral point. “
I
'll be away, so I can't help you. Maybe Carl and Artie will—unless, of course, they did it. I don't know what your theory is. But listen, Bermuda can wait. You can go when you're finished.”

“When I'm finished, there's going to be hell to pay,” said Greg in an even-tempered voice, for once not trying to hide the forties-gumshoe mimicry. He found he wasn't afraid to say goodbye. They'd had the talk required of them. Till now, he didn't see how he could ever proceed without her. He'd made her the ground of his inquiry. But here he found she was just another outsider like himself. She was better off out of the way.

“Do I have to say I'll do it,” he asked, “before you tell me what it is?”

“Oh, just a diamond,” she said lightly. “Sentimental value, mostly.” But insured, she might have added, for a cool four hundred thou. She rummaged again in the leather bag, till she pulled from the tangle the copy of
Walden
he'd left on her bed last Thursday. With them both thus armed, it looked more and more like a seminar. “There's a map in here,” she said, slipping an envelope out of the book. “The X is where I left it hanging. Also, money for the plane. I'm afraid it's cash, but I didn't know what else you took. You don't need a key. The house you'll figure out as you go. It's built to be very simple.”

He took the envelope out of her hand, briefly weighed its heft, and tucked it in the middle of his book. There was a pause. There ought to have been a pause
before
he took the envelope, giving him time to struggle with the verities. But something had sent his mind racing ahead—the deserted mission itself, perhaps, with the air of a thousand stories buried just beyond the gate. Suddenly, Vivien's errand didn't seem terribly out of the ordinary. In any case, he shrugged the issue of where it all would end. More and more, he seemed to know he would solve this case for no one but himself. It didn't much matter what roundabout ways he took.

“How do you know I'll go?”

“Writers like to travel, don't they?”

As they came in under the shadow of the tower, she took his arm and turned them back the other way. It might have been nothing more than a walk around the courtyard. A couple of stately mission elders, making plans to spread the word. When they drew up close to the fountain again, as if to toss a final coin, Greg realized the cricket had stopped its dry-legged racket. It probably heard a scrap of him and Vivien, he thought—till it knew, with a sudden sinking in its heart, that somehow it was stranded on a set.

“I'll call you when I get back,” she said. “We can meet in some dark alley to make the exchange. I think that's everything, isn't it? Let's go eat.”

“But you haven't told me what it says.”

“What?” she said, for the first time caught off guard. She followed the point of his finger. “Oh, you mean the
gate
. Well, all right. It'll only depress you, but you asked.
Lay me to rest
,” she recited, her voice gone singsong, cool as a breeze, “
among those men I loved so much
.”

She was absolutely right. It was almost more than they could take, such lonely types as they. The mission priests were lucky men, to give it all up so peacefully. They made it out to be something tender, mixing earth to earth with all the men of their kind.

“Sounds great,” said Greg. “Maybe we should all go live in a mission.”

“Or
die
in one, at least.”

There was nothing left to do but go. Arm in arm, they walked away without a backward glance. They seemed to feel the motto wrought in the gate as a sort of reproof. For living in fear of sentiment, perhaps—though here they might have retorted that it read a lot better than it lived. Besides, Greg thought with a dry-mouthed pout, the problem wasn't love. If the two of them had laid out their resumes, it would have been clear what a creditable job they did of loving well when occasion arose. The real trouble lay in
being
loved. With so many mirrors and mug shots hanging about on the walls, a person took care of
that
part all by himself.

“Is there still a Walden Pond?”

“Of course,” he said as he disengaged his arm and reached for the dented metal door. They had to get out of here fast. They'd done enough lagging back and talking it out in the dark. “Why?”

“You mean they didn't pave it over? Well, that's a relief. Ever been there?”

“No.”

The daylight broke upon them, and they froze. They'd have liked to keep their chitchat going like sixty, if only to show they'd each survived the other's grandstand play—he with his verdict of murder one, she with her all-expenses-paid. But they'd surfaced again in the real world now. For all they knew, the match of wits would not sustain in the light of day. Perhaps, like champagne left in the glass too long, they would flatten and go sour. To look at them then—in the glare of the studio sun, and neither one with a deal—they seemed as dwarfed as children. Still, they could not turn back.

She made a sudden beeline to the Rolls, where Artie was slumped in the driver's seat, reading the trades. She handed in her leather bag, retaining only the book. She wasn't the sort who needed liquid assets on her person. She leaned down and murmured some words about matters of scheduling, while Greg checked out the people who were walking back and forth in the street outside the alley. He felt afraid of everyone. Because things were so private now between him and her, people would start to notice. Would doubtless jump to conclusions he hadn't the power to reverse.

When she came his way again, they instinctively kept a foot of space between them. Then they emerged from the alley beside Stage Nine and fell in among the studio workers hurrying back from lunch. Each with a bright green paper back, they looked as out of place as out-of-towners. Only the unconnected needed guidebooks, after all. Greg tried to tell himself it was just a bad attack of being oversensitive. Besides, they weren't looking at him. It was Vivien—strolling along as if it were any old busy street, and she some clear-eyed country girl, having a day in town. They gawked at her from every side, and she didn't miss a step.

“I gather it's smaller than Tahoe,” she said.

“Of course,” he replied, looking into the face of a mogul who tried to catch Vivien's eye as they passed. “It's really very small. I think you can walk around it in an hour.”

“The smaller the better,” said Vivien resolutely. And Greg had a horrible thought: She was going to start waving the book in the air, like a redneck toting a Bible. “You get tired of a view that goes on and on,” she said, her mind on some specific vista Greg could not hope to imagine. “Well,
I
do anyway. Tell me, do you think it's still in private hands?”

“What? You mean Walden?”

She wanted to
buy
it?

He gave her a sidelong look. She honestly seemed to pay no mind to the way they watched her. Unlike him, she didn't come down with the woozies when she found herself in the teeming mass. Perhaps because it parted automatically, just to let her by. Whatever the explanation was—untouchable by dint of royal blood, so rich she could buy and sell the crowds she walked through ten times over—she seemed to have no fear of being overwhelmed.

“I think it's a national park or something,” Greg informed her dryly. “Why don't you make them an offer? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

What he'd always looked for before, he thought, was someone to lead him through the line of fire. He'd come across some fearless type, and right away he'd think:
This is the one
. As an agoraphobe, he tended to live with his back to the wall, armed for all-out war. But the longer he watched her, detached from the melee around her, the more did he wonder if, after all, he couldn't make it on his own. It was a matter of what one paid attention to, it seemed. The others didn't exist unless you let them.