A flush of shadows, p.30
A Flush of Shadows, page 30
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."
"She began talking about buying him a cowboy hat then," Constance said. "What in the world was she doing?"
They listened to it again. "I think she's settling for twenty-five cents on the dollar," Charlie said finally. "She sells something for a hundred, says she got five hundred, and pockets twenty-five percent of that. No questions asked about her income; she has records, and happy artist clients, and probably fake receipts for shop owners in New York. My God, she could go through the whole schmear that way." He glowered at the tape.
"The FBI will interview her contacts and they'll all come on like boosters," he said aggrievedly. Then he said, "But that means she has the money within reach, in the house!"
"The figures she was using don't add up," Constance pointed out. Then she said, "Oh, it doesn't really matter when or even if she sells anything, does it? Not if she's making up prices, paying off her clients with stolen money, collecting commissions on sales she might or might not make."
"Twenty-five cents on the dollar," Charlie growled. "God, she is crazy!"
And very smart, Constance added silently.
Marla talked about her mother, on the streets of New York, she said, just where she belonged. She talked about her father, whom she had never seen, about Breckinridge, a fat little toad. She talked about the weather, about Nathan's hair coming back in so thick, just like his father's used to be. Drivel, Charlie thought in disgust, listening to her read the descriptions of flowers from a catalog. Throughout the day, he had retaped no more than a few minutes and had listened to hours of drivel. Constance took his place and he left to do something about dinner; it was his day to cook. It was six o'clock Monday evening, and they were listening to the tape that had been made of Marla starting Sunday at three through Monday afternoon, when Brian had put in a new one. It made Charlie nervous to be a day behind all the time, hearing today what she had said the night before, no clue about what she was doing at the moment.
"Charlie!" Constance called. He hurried back to the office, where she was rewinding the second tape recorder. "She was reading from the catalog and he fell asleep, I guess. She just came back on." Constance pressed the play button.
Marla said gaily, "Oh, I thought you might be awake by now. I can't come too close. I stink like gas. I'll just take a shower and be right back."
There was a pause. Constance held up her hand. Then Marla was back. "Now I'm decent again. Did you have a good little nap? Roy will be here pretty soon and I'll make you turkey. And asparagus. You love asparagus! Tomorrow when I go out, I'll get some new library books, something we've never read… and groceries. We're almost out of ice cream…. And I have to put gas in the Buick, and check the oil and the tires. It would be terrible if I had road trouble, wouldn't it? There are car jackers out there, just waiting for a woman to have trouble in the middle of the night. Did you know that? I wonder which would be worse, a car jacker or a cop. Anyway, it won't happen, because I'll have the Buick checked out. I know what I want to read next."
Constance turned off the machine. "She talked about stories and then Roy came in. Charlie, she serviced the Buick today, and yesterday she smelled of gas."
He rewound the tape and played it again. Hours more on the tape, he thought then, and it was after six now. With few exceptions, they had to listen to it all in real time. They couldn't finish with this one before midnight. Too late? Right now she would be in with Nathan, feeding him, talking, talking. Call Chelsky, tell him everything? He shook his head. He didn't know where Chelsky was, how long it would take him to arrive, or if he could persuade him to come out now, tonight. And for what? He didn't even know if there was a reason to call for help. He went to the door. "I'll rustle us up a sandwich or something. You keep listening. Okay?"
She reached for the on switch. Roy was there; she fast-forwarded the machine until she caught Marla's voice again and listened until Charlie came to the door and motioned for her to turn it off.
"Anything?"
She shook her head.
"Come on out, take a break," he said. He waited and they went back to the kitchen. "What I'm going to do is go down there and grab the new tape the minute she turns off Nathan's light. Eight, eight-thirty, about then. I'll listen to it in the car. Be back around ten. And that's just about all we can do right now." When she started to object, he said, "And I want you to get on the pipe to Chelsky. Run him down if you can and tell him what we think is going on. If he doesn't call back in an hour, go after Bruce Wymouth up in Albany, and if he's not available, as a last resort try to get Pulaski." He put a sandwich in a plastic bag as he talked, and kept a second one on a paper plate. "You know the old saying, Eat and run. 'Fraid I'm going to run and eat. Made a couple for you, too." He glanced around as if checking whether he had forgotten anything, and then he said casually, "Of course, no one's going to believe you."
"Probably not," she said. "But someone might be curious enough to come around. Especially if they realize you're out somewhere."
"Especially," he agreed.
She gave him one of her looks that sometimes made him think he was as transparent as a crystal skull filled with spinning gears in rainbow colors.
"Charlie, when you don't show up again by eleven or twelve, do I tell Chelsky or whoever it is that you're keeping the vigil at Marla's house?"
He was pulling on a heavy jacket and stopped moving for just a moment, then grinned and said, "Honey, Brian has a cell phone. If I decided to do anything like that, I'd call you. Honest." He was ready to leave. On the way out, he said, "Try not to give them the tapes if possible."
"Resist torture to what point?"
"It won't get too serious before I get back. You can hold out."
She walked to the garage with him, watched him back out and leave, and then locked the door and returned to the kitchen. It felt empty and cold. She called the numbers Chelsky had left with them and left a message on a machine with the first call, and left the same message with a man who wanted to know why she wanted Mr. Chelsky. Then she took a sandwich to the office and turned on the tape player again.
She couldn't eat and listen to Marla, she realized after only a minute or two. She put the sandwich down and listened to the sweet voice cajoling, laughing, lilting as Marla fed bite after bite to her son. Then Constance stiffened and turned on the other tape recorder.
"That toad called again. I don't know why he doesn't catch on. But he's dumb, even if he is a teacher. If he knew how much we hate hospitals, he'd never say that word again. I know what's good for you. Just look how you're growing… . Hospital! I know how much you hated it there, how mean they were to you. I won't see him ever again, I promise. I won't go near him again. I put just a little cinnamon on it, exactly the way you like it… ." She began to talk about getting a motor home, a little one, and the vacations they would take.
At ten minutes before eight, Chelsky called. He asked for Charlie.
"He isn't here," Constance said. She drew in a deep breath and then said swiftly, "We have vital information you should have immediately. We think there will be another fire, probably tonight. We prefer to talk to you about it, but if you can't make it, then I'll call Bruce Wymouth in Albany."
He was skeptical and he kept asking where Charlie was, when he would return, where they thought a fire might happen. She cut in sharply. "Mr. Chelsky, those fires never started before three in the morning. There's time for someone to get over here and talk about this and maybe avert a disaster. If you can't or won't come, say so, and I'll call Bruce Wymouth."
"Now, Mrs. Meiklejohn, don't get in an uproar. I didn't say that, now did I? Happens I'm in Albany myself. I could take a run down that way. You expecting Mr. Meiklejohn back soon?"
"Around ten or eleven, or he'll call," she told him, and he said he'd be there at ten, or a little after.
She ate her sandwich; the bread had already gone too dry. Then she ate an apple and drank a cup of coffee and finally started to listen again. How could Marla keep it up? That pleasant, cheerful prattle, on and on and on. Laughing over nothing, pretending he understood, responded. Constance began to pace the office, and she thought suddenly that she simply couldn't stand this any longer. She clenched her fists and after a moment sat down again.
When she took a break later, she made a pot of strong coffee. This would be a long night, she thought despondently. She had copied only two sections of tape since Charlie left; both of them had to do with hospitals, how everyone wanted Nathan in a hospital, how much they hated them. Slowly, she returned to the office and rewound the machine a little and listened again.
"… and there won't be any more talk about that. But they'll think of something different. They just don't give up, do they, honey?" Constance rewound it farther back.
