Alone (27 page)

“I was a good chemist,” Rankin said. “I spent two years developing a drug to prevent cardiac arrest, and I was close to a breakthrough when the funding for the experiment was withdrawn. At that point I had a toxin that counterfeited the symptoms of a heart attack, causing death in laboratory animals. The company panicked over the implications; my samples were confiscated for disposal and I was ordered to destroy my notes. But no one could destroy what was in here.” He touched a temple.

“When was this?” Ray Padilla had taken Conroy’s place at his desk. The chief of detectives, deferring to the lieutenant’s interviewing skills, stood in a corner with his hands folded behind his back.

Rankin smiled thinly. “Before you were born. My Horatio Alger story begins many years later, when I met and married Andrea and went to work for her father in the department-store business.” He turned in his chair to look at Valentino, standing among the officers at the back of the room. “I told you Andrea started out as a salesclerk in one of her father’s stores, so she could learn the business from the bottom up; that was the bond that held her to Greta, the shared experience. When I came along the old man was ailing, and he hadn’t time to bring me up through the ranks, so he put me in charge of the chain. He was impressed by my technical knowledge, and was convinced, as I was, that computerizing the operation would reverse the decline brought on by competition from shopping malls.

“Andrea never forgave him for that. She’d been told her whole life that the business would be hers someday, but when push came to shove he bowed to convention and gave it to one of his own sex.”

He returned his attention to Padilla. “After the old man died, she transferred her resentment to me. Nothing takes place overnight: When the profit picture was slow to improve and the malls continued to drain customers from our downtown stores, she blamed me for poor management. I was incompetent, I was a spendthrift, pouring millions of company capital into a computer system that was profligate and unproved. As she saw it, in a few months I’d succeeded in driving a sixty-year-old institution to the brink of ruin.

“She couldn’t break the will that named me chief executive officer, but she owned twice as many shares as I did, and if she could convince enough stockholders that I was a threat to the company, they would vote with her to remove me at the annual meeting. I was just a glorified employee, after all. All the time that campaign was going on, I remembered the frustration and humiliation I’d felt the last time someone in authority pulled the rug out from under me on the verge of triumph. It was a short leap from there to that toxin I’d developed. At the time, no autopsy could prove that whoever ingested it hadn’t died of simple cardiac arrest.

“I put it in her tea,” he said. “You see, we continued the charade of a contented married couple at home. I really think she believed it was possible to separate our public squabbles from our domestic life. If she’d lived a bit longer, she’d have learned that you can’t exist in both worlds. I chose privacy.”

“It seems you did all the choosing for both of you.”

“I’m sorry she didn’t live longer. She’d have seen the computer program I designed drag her father’s company into the twentieth century and reverse its fortunes in spectacular fashion. Of course, that wasn’t possible, because if she had lived, she’d have fired me, and my only satisfaction would have come from witnessing the inevitable collapse.”

“Is that the same program you used to forge the Garbo letter?” Padilla asked.

“Hardly. That program was grammar school beside the business plan I invented. Any dunce can create a font from a model of someone’s handwriting. The trick was to make it look good enough to have fooled me in a distracted state, but not so good it couldn’t be exposed when the time was right.”

“Where’d you get Garbo’s letters? You said your wife burned them.”

“I swiped a bundle when she wasn’t looking. They were worth something, and I’m too practical a businessman to stand by and watch sentiment get the better of profit. At the time I didn’t know just how valuable they’d prove to be.”

“Tell us about Stockholm. That theft was too timely to be a coincidence.”

“I had nothing to do with that. A man approached me in the lobby of my hotel, offering to sell me some letters written by Garbo; he’d heard I was a fan. He showed them to me. I knew right away they were genuine, and that he couldn’t have come by them honestly; for all I knew, it was a trap set by a competitor to arrest and embarrass me. I sent him on his way.

“Later, of course, I saw that the episode could be of use, as the theft was bound to be discovered sooner or later, and there was Roger Akers, in Stockholm with me at just the right time. It’s not always easy to know the precise moment when a plan was conceived, but I can trace it to that encounter.”

“How did you come to tell Akers you’d killed your wife?”

“I actually don’t remember telling him. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time, and I must have been in a confiding mood. He made sure to remind me of the conversation when I was sober. I haven’t had more than one drink in an evening since. I couldn’t take the chance of betraying myself in front of someone else and adding another blackmailer to the list.”

“When did it start?”

“Just before the Swedish trip. I spent most of my time there thinking about how many improvements had been made in criminal science and worrying what a modern toxicologist would find if the body were exhumed. That fellow in the lobby came as a godsend. I couldn’t very well kill Roger and tell the police he was holding me up for murdering Andrea, but if I was protecting her memory from a scandal, it occurred to me I might squeeze by on self-defense, or if not, escape serious punishment because public sympathy would be with me and against a man who exploited a man’s loyalty to his dead wife.

“I almost succeeded. I paid him without protest for months, building up evidence to support my story. I even tricked Roger into putting his fingerprints on the fake letter by pretending I’d mixed it up with some documents I wanted him to file. He gave it right back without guessing what it was. I knew he wouldn’t, because I wrote it in Swedish, a language he didn’t read; but the police would have a hard time proving that.”

“How’d you get his prints on the bust he was supposed to have threatened you with?”

Rankin smiled wanly. “I told him his latest payment was in an envelope under the bust. He thought I was being churlish. When he picked it up, I shot him.”

“What made you choose Valentino as your witness?”

“It could have been anyone. I’d made up my mind to plant the story with him only the night before, there in the study where I carried it out.” He shuddered, and looked again at Valentino. “Lord, that girlfriend of yours gave me a turn when I saw her in that costume. I thought Garbo had come back from the grave to spoil my plan.”

“For the record,” Padilla said, “here in the presence of your attorney, Clifford Adams, Valentino, a civilian, and officers of the Beverly Hills Police Department, you, Matthew Rankin, confess to planning the murders of your wife, Andrea Rankin, and your assistant, Roger Akers, and carrying out those murders.”

“Yes. If it will spare me from the executioner.”

At a signal from Conroy, Sergeant Stimson came forward and switched off the video camera. The chief then nodded at Padilla, who asked Rankin to rise and present his wrists. He was manacled in a moment.

“Lieutenant,” said Conroy, when Padilla turned his prisoner toward the door behind which the press continued to prowl. The lieutenant looked from his superior’s face to Rankin’s, which was dead white now. Padilla stripped off his suit coat, folded it, and draped it over the tycoon’s shackles.

At the door, Rankin stopped and turned toward Valentino. “Not very sporting, young man. I gave you
How Not to Dress
and lent you my projectionist.”

“Those weren’t the reasons I wanted to help you. I thought you were innocent.”

“What changed your mind?”

“When the police were slow to announce the letter was a fraud, you were in no hurry to set the record straight. I knew then you weren’t as devoted to Andrea’s memory as you pretended. At that point, Padilla’s suspicions started to make sense.”

“How very righteous. That’s the very same attitude that got me where I am.”

“Are you ready?” Padilla asked.

At that moment, Valentino ceased to exist for the man in custody. He stared at the door, behind which the murmur of reporters discussing the case among themselves and over cell phones rumbled like low-grade thunder. He took a deep breath, lifted his chin, and nodded.

Padilla placed his hand on the knob, hesitated, and withdrew it. “Sergeant?”

Stimson presented herself. The lieutenant stepped away. After a pause, the sergeant placed a hand on Rankin’s shoulder and turned the knob.

When the door shut against the jabber and bright lights, Valentino said, “You’re missing your fifteen minutes.”

“I guess whatever Garbo had was contagious.” He held out his hand.

Valentino took it. “You know, you clean up pretty nice.”

“Keep your voice down.” He was whispering. “Conroy wants to put me in for captain. If he gets his way I’ll have to wear a necktie all the time.”

**

He didn’t go from there to the office and he didn’t go home. Instead he went to the campus projection room and watched
How Not to Dress
alone for the first time. He laughed sympathetically at young Greta Lovisa Gustafsson’s first awkward flirtation with a camera that would fall in love with her soon enough, and probably too soon for a peasant girl of sixteen. She’d started out eager for attention, appreciation, and celebrity, even played the Hollywood game, granting interviews, making public appearances, and colluding to invent a past for herself commensurate with the glamorous roles she played; then, without warning, had stopped—the first in her profession to do so, and in so doing made herself more sought after than before. She’d done the same with poor John Gilbert, hurling herself into a romance with all the publicity potential of a Pickfair or, in a later day, a Brangelina, then, abruptly, turning and sprinting in the other direction. Too much had happened too soon, and she had better than sixty years to go. Meanwhile her legend fed upon itself and upon whatever fleeting scraps fell to the public—crossing a street in Midtown Manhattan, bundled in scarves and sweaters and the ubiquitous dark glasses, boarding a plane at JFK bound for Sweden, sunbathing nude on a private beach on the Riviera. No lurid romantic interests fueled the fire, no sordid scandal; not even so much as a scuffle with a reporter. She’d asked to be let alone, and that was one favor the world refused.

**

She looks out upon the East River, a moving picture shot by a stationary camera. Tugs, pleasure craft, stately cargo ships glide past, oblivious to the icon at the window. Today is like yesterday, tomorrow will be like today. Perhaps she will put on a disguise and visit the flea market on Broadway; but, no, she was out yesterday, and a young man in the elevator had recognized her and made bold enough to demand of her the time. She’d replied that he should buy a watch. That was foolish; how much better that she should ignore him, give him not so much as the time of day. Such stories were retold and reshaped, and only added to the compost. No, she will stay home and design a rug, sit cross-legged on her own floor with her colored pencils and butcher’s wrap, drawing and smoking cigarettes, creating a screen They cannot penetrate.

“I am on the lam.” She smiles as she says it aloud: American gangsterisms have always held a fascination. Her earliest attempts at English came from reading pulp magazines with missing-link thugs and naked women on the covers, and she is drawn to movies where the antihero spends the last reel evading platoons of police at the wheel of a powerful automobile; the kind of movies in which she never appeared, because she would have spent too little time on-screen. Invariably she leaves the theater before the end, when the lobby is deserted and the fugitive is still at large. “I am on the lam,” she says again. “You will never take me alive.”

**

When the film finished flapping through the gate, he stirred himself from a doze, removed the take-up reel from the projector, and sealed it in its can. The ancient librarian— shrunken, androgynous, and completely deaf—checked in the material without comment and returned it to its cabinet.

Valentino checked his cell for messages. He had none. Kyle Broadhead and Harriet were working, but always before they’d found time to maintain contact. He called Ruth, but she said the lines had been silent at the office. The rush hour hadn’t started; he drove up to a take-out window without having to wait and took home his order through four lanes of scattered traffic. No one was at work in The Oracle. He went up to the booth, ate, read a chapter in a book, and got up to look down at the rows of seats slumbering under drop cloths in the dark. He wanted to call out, but he was afraid there would be no echo.

His cell rang. He answered without checking the number.

“I don’t want to be alone,” Harriet said. “Do you?”

His heart bumped. It felt as if it were starting again. “Where can we meet?”

“What’s wrong with right here?” And he realized her voice was directly behind him.

**

CLOSING CREDITS

The following sources were instrumental in the writing of
Alone: