Long Shot (40 page)

She put a hand up to the gate, lifted the dolphin latch, and pushed back half the moon. She stepped over the foot-high threshold, holding the door as she went, so he could follow. As he came out onto the wilder slope, he was shocked by the whip of the wind, blowing ten miles in from the sea like the motive force of another story. The garden hedge had kept the weather moderate and still.

But what was more than that, there was nothing between them, all of a sudden. He found they had to walk single file as she set off up the zigzag path. So he had no clue what she thought of it all. It wouldn't do her a bit of good to protest the act itself. Six minutes was so far gone as to be the distant past. Maxim Brearley was over with. Greg braced himself for a cry of disapproval, even so. In the last few weeks, he'd gotten used to Vivien Cokes the humanist, who lived in a cloud of high ideals. She could afford to, after all.

Yet he had to give her this: She appeared to be a more persistent moralist than he. A force like justice, one could argue, wasn't something done in the dark like a bloody mugging. In theory Greg agreed. But the hunger for revenge was too far gone to settle here for reason. Vivien's air of civilization was doubtless high as ancient Greece. The lilac dress she wore tonight billowed about her like a dream. When she turned to speak, on the spine of the hill, he expected a dose of principles Euclidean in shape.

“Why?” she accused him fiercely. “Why didn't you include me?”

The sting of betrayal was in her voice. He saw with a pang of hindsight how it must have seemed. It was all a complete misunderstanding—but so what? There was nobody giving points for good intentions. Not this late in the game.

“But don't you see,” Greg pleaded, calling through the wind without a word prepared, “we wanted you to be innocent.”

“Why?”

“I don't know,” he said helplessly. Oh, shit, there must be a reason. “I suppose we wanted to do it
for
you.”

“Well, I won't be treated like that,” she bellowed angrily, coming close. She beat with the flat of one hand against his chest, like somebody knocking on a door. He didn't try to duck. The ache was deeper down than all this surface tension. He knew she wasn't out to pitch him off the mountain.

“Like what?” he shouted, when the last blow landed.

“Like a fucking princess!”

Hollering this like a curse, she turned and strode away. He sprinted along in her wake and tried to backtrack all at once—glad for the chance to storm about, but reeling with a sense of vast miscalculation. He had only tried to protect her from the blood-cold will of the others. She didn't have any idea what the nicest people were capable of.

But he saw what she meant, that he had no right. It wouldn't happen again. He'd treat her the same as the rest, if she liked. He stuck close to her heels as they climbed the ridge. For a moment, he seemed about to seize her—as if he would make her stop to hear a proper apology. Except—couldn't she see that a fortune big as a minor Rothschild's led to a certain set of assumptions? The cover of every magazine in the free world didn't pick you up for being the same as everyone else.

It was all well and good to read Thoreau. A man like that was a genuine creature of equals—democratic in all his commerce. Two feet on the ground when he made a deal, and two feet off when he looked at sunsets. But could you really get away with it in the back seat of a Rolls? Where did Vivien ever get the idea she was
plain?

By the time they crested the next rise, they were going so fast it was almost a chase. Then all of a sudden she stopped without warning, right in the path. He collided against her and stepped back shaken. When he saw they'd arrived at the grave, a few feet off on the bare hillside, he felt strangely dizzy and turned around. He hadn't assumed they were
going
somewhere.

It was more of a grave than ever, in fact, on account of the limestone slab. Salt-white, shaped in the classic way—an inverted U—it glowed on the brow of the night country. Poignant by virtue of having been fashioned by hand. Three feet high and half as wide, with lettering etched across it. If it hadn't been set so straight in the earth, if an end had sunken in and pitched it at a tilt, it would have looked as dead and gone as the naked west itself—like a grave in an old churchyard in Yuma. He wondered if she'd ordered it before or since the trip back east. How did she get it up so quick?

“Everyone's always
dying
,” Vivien said. Even here, the oddest sort of irony still played about the edges of her voice.

Greg could see that he wasn't keeping up. The statement he'd struggled to find the words for, about who had excluded whom, was already over and done with. She wasn't mad at him anymore. Now that they'd taken to roaming the night, the stakes were a good deal higher. This was death itself out here, black-hearted as a thief. It stood in command of the heights as it always had—cold as ice, its eyes the whole horizon.

“But everyone loses people,” Greg retorted. As if to say the whole world understood a thing like this, because they'd been there.

“No—some don't,” she noted with some dispassion.

Perhaps he had never met up with the type—who wouldn't allow a living soul within ten feet, so as not to have to risk the ending.

“Can you see what it says?” she asked.

“Not from here,” he said. But he made no move to crouch and have a look, assuming she wanted to say it aloud.

“‘Jasper Cokes,'” she recited dryly, “‘Cut down in his 33rd year.' The rest's a quote, but you have to see it written.”

She realized then—with an eye on the wind that riffled the chaparral, the piercing curves of the quiet hills against the ink-dark sky—how the world was perfect in its way. The Buddhist said that happiness was nothing. What you felt was the feel of absence: The engine of human suffering stopped to catch its breath sometimes.

What Vivien felt was nothing so precarious as that. The silence had fallen at last in the upstairs rooms of the clamorous heart. The killer was killed. The curse was off. The hundred different pains that kept a body down—tics, chills, toothache, twinges, gouges, strain—seemed to have vanished on the spot.

In a word, she thought, she was happy. In the Buddhist sense, at least.

Greg leaned forward, peered at the stone, and blocked it with his shadow. He dropped to one knee and squinted close. His pace from word to word, as he read it aloud, was slow. “‘The sun is but a morning star,'” he said. Then he drew back, stood with a sigh, and turned and cocked his head.

“What the hell is
that
supposed to mean?”

“I thought I'd lost you all,” she said, like she hadn't even heard.

“You what?”

“I thought—you might have other things to do.”

Okay, okay. Couldn't she see how sorry he was? He stood between her and the grave and shrugged it off, as if to say he never had much to do. But he saw that he must have left her out of it on purpose. Wanted to get to the killer first. Show who the real Lew Archer was.

“You'll be sorry,” he said to reassure her. “You probably hadn't heard, but once we take somebody up, from that point on they're family. You'll see—we'll buy you stuff for your birthday. We'll borrow all your records. You won't be alone on a Saturday night from now till doomsday.”

“Well, that's a relief,” she replied, and lowered her eyes to the stone.

The silence was not tense. She thought about Sid and Edna, and the way he kept them going. It was wholly unacknowledged, which is why it worked at all, but she heard the sharpened focus in his voice whenever he linked their names. She meant to do much the same for Artie. The difference was, she and Artie had enough to live on coke and caviar. Once they were settled in separate quarters, she planned to keep a watchful eye on the state of his affairs. Make sure he ate three times a day.

“It's from Thoreau,” she said.

“I gathered as much.”

Now she was back on the gravestone—as if she talked mostly in loops and parabolas, rather than straight in a line. Yet he found he had no trouble following her. Perhaps it was purely a matter of acclimation.

“I can't explain it,” Vivien said, and he had the idea she was being honest, with herself as much as anyone. “At least it's not about going to heaven. I mean, you have to do what you can, right here.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you make an improbable mystic?”

Pain in the ass, he might have said. He'd put in ten long years as a writer, after all. Failed or otherwise, he had twenty-six hundred pages of dialogue to prove it. So he ought to know, if anyone did, that a book was just a book. It didn't have to get up in the morning and make the coffee and drive to work, so what could it possibly know about getting along in
this
world? Still, he'd grown accustomed to Vivien's sounding off like a smart-ass Ph.D. He supposed it was little enough to take, next to what she put up with in him, with his endless grumps and privacies.

If you wanted a friend, you took the whole package.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I've put the book away.”

This wasn't entirely true, in fact. It was right on the table by her bed, not three feet away from where she'd found it fifteen days before. What she meant was, she was done reading.

“You mean you're not moving to Concord?”

“Steepside's near enough,” she said.

They acted as if they had no clue what the normal scene might be beside a dead man's grave. There was something queer at the level of impulse, which urged them to go against the grain of whatever was going on. Before all else, they hated to be predictable. It made her wonder how they would ever get together, when all of this was done. That is, would the borders be open? She supposed they'd both be wary of assuming too much freedom. She saw that he kept no calendar at all. If he never made any plans, who did he ever get to see?

“What you've got to do,” he said, “is call the ambulance when it's time. Nobody's going to hassle you—we're counting on that. Now, this is the story. We're all watching the movie. When it's over, the lights come up, and we find Max slumped in the projection booth. We try to revive him, but it does no good. You got five witnesses.”

He snapped his fingers as if to say the rest was all downhill. Yet he seemed to feel some further self-assurance was required. He stepped down onto the path again and gripped her shoulders to buck her up.

“It shouldn't be hard to bring off,” he said. “He's over weight. He's got lousy nerves. Besides, people die in the middle of things all the time.”

“What if somebody gets suspicious? What if they want an autopsy?”

He shrugged, and his hands fell back to his sides again. “Then I guess we go to jail,” he said, with a curious air of whimsy playing about the apology. “We'll have to pass notes through the guards. We'll get a good lawyer.” He shrugged again.

At first she said nothing at all. She surveyed the surrounding night for signs of life. Perhaps, he thought, as he watched her look off down the canyon, dreamy-eyed and still, a Rolls was as good a place as any to act out Walden Pond. Or to put the matter in landed terms, twenty-six acres of desert green within the city limits was vast enough that its confines didn't show. The Concord original, after all, in the far-off specimen days of 1847, was something close to a staged event itself. Thoreau would doubtless spin in his grave to hear him speak of it quite this way—but then, with one thing and another, Thoreau had probably not stopped spinning in over a hundred years.

“Poor Jasper,” Vivien said at last. “I hardly knew him at all.”

He took it to mean she saw no problem in getting rid of Max. She'd probably thought of a doctor already—someone so greedy for status he'd sign the certificate happily. With the merest flip of the corpse's lids, and without so much as mussing a button on Max's shirt. As for this last remark, about Jasper, he found the sudden surge of melancholy most disarming. If they had to talk death, if that was the break through these last weeks had brought them to, why couldn't they keep it roundabout, and curse the whole condition? The individual dead were too upsetting—thieves and cheats, to leave one so alone. Too much a mirror of who one used to be.

“You mean, because he had a secret?”

“I suppose that's it,” she said.

He noticed the wind had died by the stillness of the lilac dress. She was staring straight at the western sky, but he knew she was looking at something far away in time.

“Is that what it means to survive?” she asked. “You lose everyone twice over?”

Once when they died. Then a second time, when the truth came out.

“But
everyone
doesn't have a secret.”

“Really?” she wondered aloud. She wasn't convinced at all.

“I think it's time we headed back,” he said. The demands of the schedule were more to his taste than the upper reaches of life-and-death. “They only allowed me half an hour to brief you. They don't want you to miss the movie.”

He turned downhill, where the lights of Steepside made it hover above the bowl of slopes like a spaceship. All at once, as he made his way in the dark, the narrow track reminded him of coming down the mountain in Vermont. Yet there it had been wide enough for two to walk abreast. This was like a tightrope.

Still, it suited his present mood just fine, to walk down single file. He'd only start getting curmudgeonly if they kept on talking on mountaintops. He didn't mean to freeze her out. She could be his friend forever if she liked. But in matters of philosophy, they simply had to agree to disagree.

The journey was almost done that demanded all their likenesses. If it meant to stick, this friendship had to go by way of seasons, till it grew like something out in the woods—untended except by the scheme of things, and tough by reason of what it stood. If it needed too much caring for, one or the other was bound to run away.