Weep No More My Lady (7 page)

“He said that the kind of people I'll be meeting would never think of me as a writer and so I might hear a lot of interesting stuff. Then when I explained I'd been a real fan of movie stars all my life, and know lots about the private lives of the stars, he said he had a hunch I could write a good series of articles and who knows, maybe even a book.”

Alvirah smiled blissfully and smoothed the skirt of her purple-and-pink traveling dress. The skirt tended to hike up.

“A book,” she continued, being careful to speak directly into the microphone. “Me, Alvirah Meehan. But when you think of all the celebrities who write books and how many of them really stink, I believe I just might be able to do that.

“To get to what's happened so far, I rode in a limousine to the Spa with Elizabeth Lange. She is a lovely young woman and I feel so sorry for her. Her eyes are very sad, and you can tell she's under a big strain. She slept practically the whole way from San Francisco. Elizabeth is Leila LaSalle's sister, but very different in looks. Leila was a redhead with green eyes. She could look sexy and queenly at the same time—kind of like a cross between Dolly Parton and Greer Garson. I think a good way to describe Elizabeth is ‘wholesome.'

“She's a little too thin; her shoulders are broad; she has wide blue eyes with dark lashes, and honey-colored hair that falls around her shoulders. She has strong, beautiful teeth, and the one time she smiled she gave off just the warmest glow. She's pretty tall—about five foot nine, I guess. I bet she sings. Her speaking voice is so pleasant, but not that exaggerated actress voice you hear from so many of these young starlets. I guess you don't call them starlets anymore. Maybe if I get friendly with her, she'll tell me some interesting things about her sister and Ted Winters. I wonder if the
Globe
will want me to cover the trial.”

Alvirah paused, pushed the rewind button and then the replay. It was all right. The machine was working. She thought she ought to say something about her surroundings.

“Mrs. von Schreiber escorted me to my bungalow. I almost laughed out loud when she called it a bungalow. We used to rent a bungalow in Rockaway Beach on Ninety-ninth Street right near the amusement park. The place used to shake every time the roller coaster went down the last steep drop, which was every five minutes during the summer.

“This bungalow has a sitting room all done in light blue chintz and Oriental scatter rugs . . . they're handmade—I checked . . . a bedroom with a canopy bed, a small desk, a slipper chair, a bureau, a vanity table filled with cosmetics and lotions, and two huge bathrooms, each with its own Jacuzzi. There's also a room with built-in bookshelves, a real leather couch and chairs and an oval table. Upstairs there are two more bedrooms and baths, which of course I really don't need. Luxury! I keep pinching myself.

“Baroness von Schreiber told me that the day starts at seven A.M. with a brisk walk, which everyone in the Spa is requested to take. After that I will be served a low-calorie breakfast in my own dining room. The maid will also bring my personal daily schedule, which will include things like a facial, a massage, a herbal wrap, a sloofing treatment—whatever
that is—the steam cabinet, a pedicure and a manicure and a hair treatment. Imagine! After I have been checked out by the doctor, they will add my exercise classes.

“Now I'm going to take a little rest, and then it will be time to dress for dinner. I'm going to wear my rainbow caftan, which I bought at Martha's on Park Avenue. I showed it to the Baroness and she said it would be perfect, but not to wear the crystal beads I won at the shooting gallery in Coney Island.”

Alvirah turned off the recorder and beamed in satisfaction. Who ever said writing was hard? With a recorder it was a cinch. Recorder! Quickly, she got up and reached for her pocketbook. From inside a zippered compartment she took out a small box containing a sunburst pin.

But not just
any
sunburst pin, she thought proudly. This one had a microphone, and the editor had told her to wear it to record conversations. “That way,” he had explained, “no one can claim you misquoted them later on.”

“SORRY TO DO THIS TO YOU, TED, BUT WE SIMPLY DON'T have the luxury of time.” Henry Bartlett leaned back in the upholstered armchair at the end of the library table.

Ted was aware that his left temple was throbbing, and shafts of pain were finding a target behind and above his left eye. Deliberately he moved his head to avoid the streams of late-afternoon sun that were coming through the window opposite him.

They were in the study of Ted's bungalow in the Meadowcluster area, one of the two most expensive accommodations at Cypress Point Spa. Craig was sitting diagonally across from him, his face grave, his hazel eyes cloudy with worry.

Henry had wanted a conference before dinner. “Time is running out,” he had said, “and until we decide on our final strategy, we can't make any progress.”

Twenty years in prison, Ted thought incredulously. That was the sentence he was facing. He'd be fifty-four years old when he got out. Incongruously, all the old gangster movies he'd used to watch late at night sprang into his mind. Steel bars, tough prison guards, Jimmy Cagney starring as a mad-dog killer. He used to revel in them.

“We have two ways we can go,” Henry Bartlett said. “We can stick to your original story—”

“My
original
story,” Ted snapped.

“Hear me out! You left Leila's apartment at about ten after nine. You went to your own apartment. You tried to phone Craig.” He turned to Craig. “It's a damn shame you didn't pick up the phone.”

“I was watching a program I wanted to see. The telephone recorder was on. I figured I'd call back anyone who left a message. And I can swear the phone rang at nine twenty, just as Ted says.”

“Why
didn't
you leave a message, Ted?”

“Because I hate talking to machines, and especially that one.” His lips tightened. Craig's habit of talking like a Japanese houseboy on his recorder irritated Ted wildly.

“What were you calling Craig about, anyhow?”

“It's blurry. I was drunk. My impression is that I wanted to tell him I was taking off for a while.”

“That doesn't help us. Probably if you had reached him it wouldn't help us. Not unless he can back you up that you were talking to him at precisely nine thirty-one P.M.”

Craig slammed his hand on the table. “Then I'll say it. I'm not in favor of lying under oath, but neither am I in favor of Ted getting railroaded for something he didn't do.”

“It's too late for that. You've already made a statement. You change it now and the situation gets worse.” Bartlett skimmed the papers he had pulled from his briefcase. Ted got up and walked to the window. He had planned to go to the men's spa and work out for a while. But Bartlett had been insistent about this meeting. Already his freedom was being infringed.

How many times had he come to Cypress Point with Leila in their three-year relationship? Eight or ten probably. Leila had loved it here. She'd been amused by Min's bossiness, by the Baron's pretentiousness. She'd enjoyed long hikes along the cliffs. “All right, Falcon, if you won't come with me, play your darn golf and I'll meet you at my pad later.” That mischievous wink, the deliberate leer, her long, slender fingers running along his shoulders. “God, Falcon, you do turn me on.” Lying with her in his arms on the couch watching late-night movies. Her murmured “Min knows better than to give us any of those damn narrow antiques of hers. She knows I like to cuddle with my fellow.” It was here that he had found the Leila he loved; the Leila she herself wanted to be.

What was Bartlett saying? “Either we attempt to flatly contradict Elizabeth Lange and the so-called eyewitness or we try to turn that testimony to our benefit.”

“How does one do that?” God, I hate this man, Ted thought. Look at him sitting there, cool and comfortable. You'd think he was discussing a chess game, not the rest of my life. Irrational fury almost choked him. He had to get out of this spot. Even being in a room with someone he disliked gave him claustrophobia. How could he share a cell with another man for two or three decades? He couldn't. At any price, he couldn't do it.

“You have no memory of hailing the cab, of the ride to Connecticut.”

“Absolutely none.”

“Your last conscious memory of that evening. Tell me again: what was it?”

“I had been with Leila for several hours. She was hysterical. Kept accusing me of cheating on her.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Then why did she accuse you?”

“Leila was—terribly insecure. She'd had bad experiences with men. She had convinced herself she could never trust one. I thought I'd gotten her over that as far as our relationship was concerned, but every once in a while she'd throw a jealous fit.” That scene in the apartment. Leila lunging at him, scratching his face; her wild accusations. His hands on her wrists, restraining her. What had he felt? Anger. Fury. And disgust.

“You tried to give her back the engagement ring?”

“Yes, and she refused it.”

“Then what happened?”

“Elizabeth phoned. Leila began sobbing into the phone and shouting at me to get out. I told her to put the phone down. I wanted to get to the bottom of what had brought all this on.

“I saw it was hopeless and left. I went to my own apartment. I think I changed my shirt. I tried to call Craig. I remember leaving the apartment. I don't remember anything else until the next day when I woke up in Connecticut.”

“Teddy, do you realize what the prosecutor will do to that story? Do you know how many cases are on record of people who kill in a fit of rage and then have a psychotic episode where they block it out? As your lawyer I have to tell you something:
That story stinks!
It's no defense. Sure, if it weren't for Elizabeth Lange there wouldn't be a problem. . . . Hell, there wouldn't even be a case. I could make mincemeat of that socalled eyewitness. She's a nut, a real off-the-wall nut. But with Elizabeth swearing you were in the apartment fighting with Leila at nine thirty, the nut becomes believable when she says you shoved Leila off the terrace at nine thirty-one.”

“Then what do we do about it?” Craig asked.

“We gamble,” Bartlett said. “Ted agrees with Elizabeth's story. He
now remembers going back upstairs. Leila was still hysterical. She slammed the phone down and ran to the terrace. Everybody who was in Elaine's the night before can testify to her emotional state. Her sister admits she had been drinking. She was despondent about her career. She had decided to break off her relationship with you. She felt washed up. She wouldn't be the first one to take a dive in that situation.”

Ted winced.
A dive.
Christ, were all lawyers so insensitive? And then the image came of Leila's broken body; the garish police pictures. He felt perspiration break out over his entire body.

But Craig looked hopeful. “It might work. What that eyewitness saw was Ted struggling to
save
Leila, and when Leila fell, he blacked out. That's when he had the psychotic episode.
That
explains why he was almost incoherent in the cab.”

Ted stared through the window at the ocean. It was unusually calm now, but he knew the tide would soon be roaring in. The calm before the storm, he thought. Right now we're having a clinical discussion. In nine days I'll be in the courtroom.
The People of the State of New York
v.
Andrew Edward Winters III.
“There's one big hole in your theory,” he said flatly. “If I admit I went back to that apartment and was on the terrace with Leila, I'm putting my head in a noose. If the jury decides I was in the process of killing her, I'll be found guilty of Murder Two.”

“It's a chance you may have to take.”

Ted came back to the table and began to stuff the open files into Bartlett's briefcase. His smile was not pleasant. “I'm not sure I can take that chance. There has to be a better solution, and at any cost I intend to find it.
I will not go to prison!”

MIN SIGHED GUSTILY. “THAT FEELS GOOD. I SWEAR, you've got better hands than any masseuse in this place.”

Helmut leaned down and kissed her cheek.
“Liebchen,
I love touching you, even if it's only to ease your shoulders.”

They were in their apartment, which covered the entire third floor of the main house. Min was seated at her dressing table wearing a loose kimono. She had unpinned her heavy raven-colored hair, and it fell below her shoulders. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. Today she was no ad for this place. Shadows under her eyes—how long since she'd had her eyes done? Five years? Something hard to accept was happening. She was fifty-nine years old. Until this last year she could have passed for ten years younger. No more.

Helmut was smiling at her in the mirror. Deliberately, he rested his chin on her head. His eyes were a shade of blue that always reminded her of the waters in the Adriatic Sea around Dubrovnik, where she had been born. The long, distinguished face with its picture-perfect tan was unlined, the dark brown sideburns untouched by gray. Helmut was fifteen years her junior. For the first years of their marriage it hadn't mattered. But now?

She had met him at the spa in Baden-Baden, after Samuel died. Five years of catering to that fussy old man had paid off. He'd left her twelve million dollars and this property.

She hadn't been stupid about Helmut's sudden attentiveness to her. No man becomes enamored of a woman fifteen years his senior unless there's something he wants. At first she had accepted his attentions cynically, but by the end of two weeks she had realized that she was becoming deeply interested in him and in his suggestion that she convert the Cypress Point Hotel into a spa. . . . The cost had been staggering, but Helmut had urged her to consider it an investment, not an expenditure. The day the Spa opened, he had asked her to marry him.