Bad Desire (6 page)

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Another heart-to-heart.” He backed away in the direction of the pool. Sheila went on, then, unbuttoning her shirt, watching until he had trotted from view. Slowly, she turned her head.

Across the thirty yards of asphalt, parked in a reserved space near the front of the clubhouse, she had seen Mr. Slater's dark blue Cadillac. Just looking at his car and knowing that he was in there drew her like a magnet. From inside the main building, she heard the muted throb of a band playing, and she felt oddly left out. It was impossible not to imagine him dancing with Mrs. Slater, holding her close in his arms. Sheila wanted to do something to let him know that she had been here, too.
I'll
surprise
you
, she thought.

But how?

Mary McPhearson interrupted her reverie. “Doolin's got the nerve, hasn't he?” she said. “Sneaking his old man's keys like this.” The two of them were alone now between the Firebird and the Trans Am. “Sheila, if we get caught, it's my ass.”

“Me, too,” Sheila said. “This's crazy. If it wasn't for Denny …” She shrugged. Peeling off her shirt, she laid it, along with her jeans, on the backseat of the Firebird.

Mary stood appraising her, shaking her head with appreciation. “I love that bathing suit on you. You always look so damned fabulous—it makes me sick.” Mary handed her a towel, which Sheila knotted over the top of her bathing suit.

“You ready?”

“I think so,” Sheila said.

They stepped over the curb, onto the grass. Again, Sheila looked back toward the Cadillac; she had a habit of playing with her necklace when she was preoccupied and now her hand trailed thoughtfully to her throat. My necklace, she thought. “Mary,” she said, “I forgot to take off my necklace. You go ahead. I'll take it back to the car.”

Mary waved and kept on walking.

If Sheila was going to do something, she knew she had only a minute or two to do it in before Denny would come looking for her. As Mary's plump shape disappeared inside the privacy fence, Sheila rushed across the parking lot and slipped in alongside the large polished fender of the Cadillac.

The late evening mist had condensed to dew; it stood in bright, glistening beads on the car's long surfaces. Sheila felt the urge to write something in it with her finger like a child.
HI HENRY
or even something more private, but she knew she shouldn't. She
couldn't
. She didn't want to cause him any trouble. When she came to the door handle, she stopped and touched it, rubbing the wet condensation between her fingers.

When the evening was over, the two of them would come out to the car. His wife would walk ahead of him; Mr. Slater would open the door for her on the passenger side and come around to the driver's door. And … then what? What could she do?

Something should be waiting for him.

Quickly, Sheila lifted the fine, gold chain from around her throat. She pulled it through the press of her fingers until she came to the clasp, which she undid with her fingernails. What would he think? Would he wonder whose it was? She carefully draped the unfastened necklace over his door handle. No, he would realize immediately who had put it there. He had given it to her, once, and now he would give it back to her again.

Turning and glancing at what she had done, Sheila ran across the asphalt with a feeling of elation. The knotted towel came loose and fell; she swooped down and snatched it up, suddenly in a hurry to join the others in the smoky green depths of the pool.

Against the dark flank of Slater's Cadillac, the thread of gold dangled in the moonlight, sparkling, catching and giving off slivers of brilliance, like the loveliest, the most delicate, the tenderest bait.

4

Henry Slater kept to his regular half-day routine on Saturday morning, stopping at the Beachcomber Cafe for a breakfast roll and coffee and arriving at the office shortly before nine. He knew that on this day nothing could seem even slightly out of the ordinary. He told himself he had nothing to fear, but fear continued to gnaw at him when it was least expected. All his senses were heightened and on the alert. Tonight, he thought. Tonight, it's over.

The glass door flashed around him as he strode into the secretarial lair, deserted this morning except for Abigail Giddings, his executive assistant, who was speaking on the telephone. Hard-working and efficient, she was a middle-aged woman who had been with him for the last eight years. Without lifting an eyelash, she held up a thin stack of messages as he headed toward the side door of his office.

The sixth-floor mayoral suite was like a pied-à-terre, spacious and austere; entering it always gave him a tremendous sense of power and well being. Windows ran floor to ceiling along two of the walls; his large desk was situated in the crossfire of natural light. From almost any angle, the view of the Pacific was immeasurable. This morning, looking out at the endless gray strata of ocean and sky, he felt as if he had arrived at the end of the world and this office was his home, his last good anchor. He shuffled through the messages, discarding most of them, slipped out of his suit jacket and hung it in the closet. Don't look at the time, he told himself. Just don't do it.

After he had forced himself to sit behind his desk, the morning began to go quickly. He took two calls, back-to-back, and then summarily answered with a note or a call the few remaining messages he'd kept. Abigail brought in the morning mail and pulled the files he asked for. She handed him his fourth cup of coffee from the kitchenette, then corrected her notes while he outlined in final draft the strategic details of his upcoming city council presentation. But Slater was no more aware of her and the world surrounding them than he had to be.

Everything seemed distorted and unreal. It was as though a great bell of glass had descended around him, and life reached him through its warp. All of his actions were conscious and mannered, focused outward, but his mind wandered inexorably back to the thought that an unknown murderer was waiting somewhere out in the streets. Only he knew of the malignancy about to visit their lives. Never before had Slater experienced such a commingling of dread and expectation. Tonight, he thought. After tonight, I'll be all right.

At a quarter to twelve, Abigail came to his office doorway to say she was on her way out. “Don't forget your umbrella,” she told him. “It's going to rain.” Slater nodded, smiling at her solicitude, told her to lock up and waved good-bye as she stepped from sight. Listening to the door close behind her, he rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers. The desk clock sat directly across from him. The second hand hummed in the stillness of the noon hour; the movement of each minute was like a slow, steely step. He couldn't keep his eyes from the clock's face.

At one that Saturday afternoon, he left City Hall. A terrible seizing-up of anxiety gripped him when he walked out on the sidewalk.
Where is he?
Slater thought.
He's around here somewhere; I can feel it
. But he saw no one he didn't know by name.

A paved road called Condor Pass rose steeply into the northern rim of the city. The cliffs on the right had been left uncultivated, tangled with creepers and wildflowers; the other side fell straight to the rocky shore below. High in the hills, the Eldorado dipped over a knoll and turned onto an asphalt driveway that curved like a carriage drive among stately live oaks. Here, the immaculate yard sloped downward for fifty yards and vanished. Far below, the sparkling bay of Rio Del Palmos was revealed as if viewed from the wrong end of a spyglass—the tiny, white city glowing in the lap of green hills, the Pacific black as rumpled satin. At the end of the drive, in front of the shake-roofed house, Slater parked the Eldorado on bricks that were half a century old.

The Slater house was a large, sprawling, rambling ranch built into the side of a hilltop. Once it had been the love nest of an oil speculator from Wyoming, a man who had hobnobbed with Will Rogers and who then lost everything in a scandalous divorce. Slater got out of the car and walked up on the long veranda, which was always, even in the heat of day, as cool and shaded as a springhouse. Wicker rockers and tables were artfully strewn down its length; flowering vines grew up the roof posts.

He entered the house through one of the sets of French doors. No one was home. Many Saturdays he came in late, after Faith was gone, but he had never been so aware of this deep, midday silence. It was unnerving how perfectly still everything was now, as if it had been waiting for him, endlessly waiting. More and more, this empty house had become a reflection of his marriage. On those rare times when he thought about it, he found it strange that Faith could be so oblivious to his feelings.

The living room was large and classically proportioned. He made his way among the sofas and chairs, past the gleaming mahogany side pieces, trod over worn antique Chinese rugs, glimpsed himself in the huge, gilt-framed mirrors. The colors, the textures, all seemed to have aged together, as if from some masterful, loving lifelessness. It was not the air of indulgence that Slater found suffocating but the unyeilding sense of time standing still—of time spent wastefully and going to waste.

On a raised platform, the dining room sat like a separate pavilion inside the house—a Chippendale-style pagoda with its own silk roof. He took the one step up to cross through it and went down the hall.

As if suspended in midair, the master bedroom jutted out from the hillside at the end of the house. In the dressing room, he changed into khakis and an old sweatshirt. From the trouser pocket of his suit, along with the quarters and dimes, he brought out the necklace Sheila had left in the night to surprise him. Only a few more hours, he thought. Slater felt light-headed as he put the necklace into his pocket with his change. He took off his watch, put it into his pocket as well, and went back through the house, outside.

In the third bay of the garage, under a tarpaulin cover, sat a Jaguar XK 140. He untied and peeled off its cover. He had loved it since the moment he first saw it in a neighbor's garage. He had talked the man out of it immediately. A very precise machine, always, it seemed, a little out of tune, the roadster was an ancient dark scarlet with black fenders. Its sharklike hood, its primitive cockpit and tattered leather interior gave the car an air of impoverished elegance that he admired. All right, he thought, let's get you started.

Slater kicked the blocks from the tires and rolled the two-seater out into the sunlight. It positioned him ideally at the topmost crook of the drive. He wanted to know if he had been found out. If a dusty, black Mustang drove by on Condor Pass, he would see it at once. While he immersed himself in working on the car, Slater frequently lifted his head, wiped his hands on a rag and looked to the left, down the long shaded driveway to the main thoroughfare. He didn't know quite what he expected to see. He didn't actually believe that the killer would show up here, but he would've felt vulnerable working on the car anywhere else.

His sense of unreality persisted like a mild intoxication. The day reeled around him and away, irreversibly. Luisa came back in a taxi from her shopping. Half an hour later, Faith drove her car into the garage. She loitered beside him a few minutes, teasing him about the Jaguar. “Poor old accident,” she said, breezily, “looking for a place to happen.”

He grinned. “Oh, you think so?”

The Vietnamese gardener arrived with his basket of tools and attacked the hedge. At times during the afternoon, when the noise of a falling limb or the jarring screech of a neighbor's chainsaw startled him momentarily, Slater straightened and looked carefully about him, took his wristwatch from his pocket, checked the time and put it away, all as if in studied reflection.

At six-thirty, when he cranked the ignition, the dials in the cockpit stood upright, twitching, the engine drinking oil but ready for whatever he asked of it. Behind him, across the lawn, the automatic sprinklers came on with a repetitious chatter. Slater looked at the house, where the setting sun cast the windows bronze. He set the clutch, shifted gears and tore down the driveway for the road.

Hitting eighty-five, he banked into a tight curve, executed a flawless speed shift into second and flew out the other end as if from a slingshot. He pushed the Jaguar up to ninety, backed it down, then wound it up again.

The sun had fallen behind the hills, the moon stood in the indigo East and the curves of the road meandered like quicksilver toward the valley below. Approaching a bridge marker, Slater hit the brakes, cut the wheel. The roadster spun to the side, throwing up gravel, and whipped around as he jammed the stick into first, buried the gas pedal and rocketed back the way he had come. He hadn't felt such freedom since he was a boy.

Night was collapsing all along the western coast; he had no control, whatsoever, over what was going to happen.

Dinner that evening was at the Rod and Gun Club, a few miles north of Rio Del Palmos. On the way there, Faith turned to him and said, “Henry, let's not go, tonight. It's so lovely out. Why don't we drive up the coast like we used to. What's the name of that place you took me to?”

“The Fireside,” Slater said.

“Yes, that's right,” she said, smiling at him. “I wonder if it's still there? Remember that crazy band? Oh, come on, let's do it, Henry. Let's go on a real date again; we'll dance and drink beer and spend the night like we did before. No one needs to know where we are. You'll have a good time, darling; I promise you.”

For a moment, as he drove, he seemed to consider it, but in the end he grinned and shook his head. “Faith,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road, “we can't tonight. And besides … we're not kids anymore.”

She laughed and nestled closer to him. “Oh, shame on you,” she chided, keeping the moment light. “We're not that old.”

In the rustic lodge room of the club, they were seated at the table for twelve, among friends. The lofty, old hall was cozy and dim, the tables made intimate with trailing centerpieces of pine boughs and glimmering candles. Throughout the dinner courses—the chilled green tomato soup, the clams, the rack of lamb—Faith was aware, gradually, of her husband's preoccupation with the time.