Torch Song (9 page)

She had told him, and he had dismissed it, he realized. He had seen the disarray, the dirt, the lack of yard care, no help with housework, no help with Nathan except what the state provided… . So, he thought soberly, Pete lost his girlfriend, his son, and the money.

Constance started to say something, then stopped, seeing the look on his face. She sipped her Irish coffee. He had forgotten his, on the table by the side of his chair.

“She observed all the holidays for Nathan,” he said finally. “Put up a Christmas tree in his room, decorated for Halloween, gave him a birthday party every year. Complete with balloons. Roy said they floated around his room for days, until she got tired of them and took them out.”

Constance gazed at him. Balloons, she repeated to herself. Helium balloons? If they floated… “Oh,” she said then. “Mervin's shop. He kept tanks of gas for balloons.”

“Maybe,” he said slowly. “Maybe.” The nagging feeling of having overlooked something was gone, he realized suddenly. “I wonder if Mervin had a butler to go with the maid he kept in his window,” he said softly.

“Charlie,” she said with a touch of exasperation, “where is this going? What are you getting at?”

Gazing at the fire, speaking in a low voice, he said, “Pete called and she made him wait until Roy was there. People got a good look at him; they knew who he was. Roy got a good look at him. What if Pete stayed alive just long enough for her to tape a real fight, and that's what Roy heard the next day? Suppose she had the inflatable butler all ready for the next act, Pete's jacket on it, a cap, and away she went, past the gawkers in Cedar Falls, up the road, nearly to Tuxedo Park, to make the time right, and then she stabbed Jeeves and deflated him and drove back alone. But Mervin knew what she had bought.”

“If she was a regular customer, she probably rented helium tanks now and then, left a deposit, gave her name and address,” Constance said after a moment. “He probably talked to her a lot. She could have known about his allergy medicine.”

They were both silent for a time, considering. “Poor Pete,” Constance said then. “She punished him every time she went to Attica, didn't she? Pictures of Nathan, stories about him, her marriage to Boseman, her car…”

The real bind, Charlie thought then, was sitting on a quarter million dollars and spending it a nickel at a time because otherwise they might haul her in for questioning, put Nathan in a hospital or a home of some kind.

“She's obsessive about Nathan,” Constance said in a low voice. “She'll do whatever she has to to keep him with her, and punish those who hurt him.”

“Crazy,” Charlie said under his breath. He got up to make an omelet, thinking that they had not even a shred of evidence. Chelsky had not taken seriously his suspicion that Pete was carrying out a vendetta. How much less likely was it that he would believe the saintly Marla could entertain evil droughts?

What if he, Charlie, had become obsessive? he thought suddenly, and stopped grating cheese. What if the arsonist was someone else, someone not connected to Pete and Marla? A nut out there with a real or imagined injury, getting revenge. Slowly, he returned to the job of making dinner, more shaken than he would have admitted. He had nothing but a gut feeling about Marla and Pete, he admitted to himself; she could be exactly what she appeared to be—a devoted mother nursing a hopeless invalid child.

They ate the omelet, delicious as it was, without comment. Constance pushed her plate back fractionally, got up for coffee, and then said, “What do you suppose she talks to him about for hours and hours every day?” When Charlie looked blank, she said, “You told me Roy said she talks to him all the time, while she's feeding him, giving him a drink, cleaning him up, and each meal takes about two hours. Up to eight hours a day, more? What can she find to talk about?”

Charlie thought about the things they talked about, trivialities for the most part: spruce needles in the gutter, emerging crocuses, what the cats had been up to, neighbors, their daughter and her future plans…. Trivial, but necessary. The real punishment of solitary confinement was having no one to talk to. People needed to talk.

“Let's think about this,” he said.

She brought coffee for both of them; they pushed their plates aside and thought about it.

The next afternoon at 5:30, Charlie made the turn onto Marla's driveway and slowed to a stop long enough for Constance to get out and vanish into the shrubs. He continued to the house. “If it doesn't work,” he had said, “I'll leave and accidentally tap on the horn, and you hightail it back to the road. In any event, in exactly ten minutes, you be back there. Right?”

She had nodded. And now she was out of sight. He parked and went to lean on the doorbell. Constance ran lightly to the rear of the property, zigzagging in the overgrown brush. There was a board fence separating the front and backyard. She didn't even try to find a gate, test for a lock, but simply pulled herself up and over the fence, then trotted to the first door in the rear. Locked. The next door was locked, and the kitchen door. Without hesitating, she ran to the end of the balcony outside Nathan's room and jumped up a few inches so that her fingers caught the edge, and again she pulled herself up and over the rail and crouched down.

“Look,” Charlie was saying to Marla at the front door, “I know you sent lover boy to booby-trap the cabin. Okay? I mean, that's a given. Let's get on to something else.”

“I told you to get out or I'll scream for the cops.”

“Scream, doll. Scream. But first think about ten percent of six million dollars. Want a calculator?”

Constance felt too exposed on the balcony, even though she was keeping low, hiding behind the rail as much as possible. Too open. If anyone happened to glance this way… The sliding door had a drape closed over it, but light came through; she would be silhouetted. She covered the last few feet and stood against the house at the side of the window. The screen door slid without a sound when she nudged it. The glass door was locked. Charlie had said there was a security bar, but probably it wouldn't be in place this early; if it was, he had said she should leave. They would find another way. She pulled a strip of metal from her pocket and worked it into the tight space between the door and facing. She had practiced at home. Charlie had shown her exactly how to do it. She had to start over when the metal strip jammed. This time, she felt the lock click, and she let her breath out.

“Marla, stop playing dumb,” Charlie was saying harshly. “We're talking big time here. I want a piece of it, and I intend to get it. I'll split with you. I'm generous. But first we agree that Pete's just a little detail that we can dispense with. Right?”

“You're crazy! I told them you're crazy. I don't know what you're talking about!”

The glass door moved; the bar was not down yet. With the door open an inch, Constance stood there listening. Roy's voice sounded very distant; there was the sound of rushing water. Swiftly, she opened the door and slipped inside, hesitated only a moment behind the drape, and then darted across the room to the table where Marla sometimes worked jigsaw puzzles or sat and read. She knew exactly where everything was; Charlie had made her a map. She had the backing off the tiny listening device before she reached the table. She pushed the device into place at the top of a leg, where it joined the tabletop. Roy's voice sounded louder.

“Okay, buckaroo, that's it.”

She ran back to the sliding door and out just as he entered the room, carrying Nathan. Very gently, she pulled the door closed, then the screen door, and in a crouch she retraced her steps across the balcony to the edge. There was the ramp; Charlie had said maybe she should use it, but they had known it would be too exposed; she ignored it again. She swung her legs over the edge of the balcony and dropped to the ground.

“Honey, we do it my way or I'll send you up exactly like I sent Pete up. The kid will be a number in a hospital. I want Pete, doll, and I want him bad. You know where he is. We deal. Sooner or later, we deal. I'll be in touch.”

“I'm calling the FBI. I'll tell them you threatened me, threatened to burn down the house if I don't give you the money. We'll see who goes up.” She slammed the door.

When Charlie stopped at the end of the drive and Constance opened the passenger door and slid inside, he was breathing harder than she was. He put his arm around her and drew her to him for a moment. “Okay?”

“Fine. Done.” She pulled back and stripped off rubber gloves. Her hands were hot “You know, Charlie, if you would work out with me a couple of times a week, you'd be in much better shape.”

He wanted to slug her as much as he wanted to kiss her. He shifted gears and started the drive home. Done, he thought. The tape recorder and receiver were in a waterproof box in a shallow depression at the edge of the driveway, hidden by a log. Every day, Brian would retrieve the tape and put in a new one. Brian didn't want to know more than that; Charlie didn't plan to tell him more. Illegal as hell, he knew, and done.

On Sunday, Brian's colleague delivered the first tape, made on Saturday. After twenty minutes of listening to it in Charlie's office, Constance left the room, looking stricken. Charlie listened for another twenty minutes before he had to turn it off. Prattle of the sort a loving mother mouthed to a two-year-old. “What a good boy you are… . One more bite… . It's chicken breast, your favorite… . Oh, the sun was so good for you today! You're getting a suntan… . Just a sip, that's right. Strawberry milk shake, isn't it yummy?…” Her voice was low and musical, lilting. There was not a trace of impatience in it.

He joined Constance in the living room. “It's going to be tough. She's telling him what they'll do next week, next month.”

“We don't have to listen together,” Constance said. “We can take turns, half an hour at a time, something like that.” She stood up. “I'll go.”

Charlie went out to make himself a drink.

“We'll put in a new flower bed,” Marla's voice was saying happily when Constance turned the tape player on again. “Remember all those catalogs we got last winter? We'll use them and pick the prettiest flowers we can find. One more bite now, a little one. That's good… . I'll tell Roy to take you out every day if the weather's good. He'll do that, and you won't even miss me… . I think there's just a little more of the milk shake, hardly even a mouthful… . You have such an appetite!…” Constance closed her eyes; she felt stiff and rigid as the voice went on and on, rising and falling. Then it was Charlie's turn, and she went to the kitchen, where she found a martini waiting for her. She drank it gratefully. She should start some dinner, but she did not move.

“Honey, come here,” Charlie said from the doorway a few minutes later.

She followed him to the office. He had turned off the tape player and now turned it back on. Marla's sweet voice filled the room.

“I'll just cut off those roses right at the ground and that's where we'll plant our seeds. The roses will go in the trash. No funeral for flowers, you just haul them away if they die. You remember what a funeral is, don't you? That's for people, not plants. Oh, look, no more chicken!… ” Charlie turned it off again.

“Nathan knows what a funeral is,” he said. He sounded remote.

“She could have buried a bird, or a cat or something,” Constance said faintly.

Charlie looked at his watch. “Let's go buy another tape recorder. I want to tape segments like that so we won't have to listen to the whole thing ever again.” He took the tape from the player and put it in a wall safe. “Let's eat while we're out. I sure as hell don't want to cook.”

“Neither do I,” she said.

At dinner, she said, “It's like free association, what she says. One thing reminds her of another and off she goes. Eventually, if she keeps on, she'll tell everything, but we'll never be able to use any of it for any purpose.”

For their purposes, it would do just fine, he thought, but she was right. Legally, it was useless. He said, “I think I goaded her enough yesterday to make her change her timetable. She'll want me off her back sooner rather than later.”

That night, listening, he knew he was right.

“I know you hate it when I have to leave,” Marla said. “And my regular days are coming up next week, but I'm afraid I'll just have to. It won't be for long, I promise, and not tonight. Tonight let's watch
Beauty and the Beast
. I think that must be my very most favorite movie.” The tape went dead momentarily.

It was voice-activated but did not record electronic sounds, Charlie's supplier had told him. “How does it know?” he had asked, and the man had said mysteriously, “Magic.”

He listened to Marla giving Nathan a drink of water. It took fifteen minutes and she prattled, then finally said good night. She would be in later to see if he wanted anything.

The tape went through the morning and into the afternoon, when Brian had lifted it and replaced it with a new one. It took Marla an hour and a half to feed Nathan breakfast and she said nothing worth retaping; then Nathan took a nap, and when she was back, she told him they would go out to the balcony. Charlie cursed when her voice faded out.

Later, feeding Nathan lunch, she said, “You have to eat a little more if you want to grow big and strong like your father. He was over six feet tall, and you're going to be that tall. I can tell.”

Brian brought the new tape the next day and Constance called Charlie to listen to a segment she had retaped. “Time to go to work,” Marla said, laughing. “What do you think? Six hundred? I think I got six hundred for that one. Isn't it ugly? So six hundred. And four hundred for the pin. When that FBI guy asks my clients what kind of business I do, won't they give him an earful! I'm the world's greatest saleswoman! See this? It's tigereye. Isn't that a nice name for a stone? You can see the light in it, just like an eye. I think eight hundred, don't you?… Maybe that's too much. That would be three thousand eighty dollars. My cut… seven hundred seventy… I guess that's okay.”