Bitter Truth (32 page)

April 3, 1923
My Dearest Sisters,
This night, in the strange light of a full moon, I felt compelled to again walk down the sloping hill of our rear yard and around the pond to the house in the woods, despite the danger posed by the predator cat that stalks our county. I have not stopped thinking of my encounter the other day with the Poole daughter and of learning of her shameless pregnancy. The Pooles have been a presence in that house for most of my life, ever since the death of the father, but I had never come to know them, never had a conversation with either woman until our remarks that afternoon. Their whole lives, I had been certain, were devoted entirely to the deep wounding rage they held for our family. It was a shock to imagine that girl filled with another emotion, lost in a passion that, even if for only a moment, cut her off from her angry sense of deprivation. The image of that girl rolling on the ground with another, lost in a world that admitted not the Reddmans, has haunted my mind. I see it as I bathe, as I prune the dying stalks in my garden, as I awake alone and cold in my bed
.
I stood behind the tall thin trunk of an oak and watched the house through the windows. The mother was in a bed on the first floor, weak, white, her face drawn and tired. The room was lit by a harsh bare bulb in the ceiling. The girl sat by her mother, book in lap, and read out loud. Once, while I was there, the girl rose and walked into the kitchen, bringing back a glass of water, and she helped her mother hold it to her thin lips. There passed between them the habitual tenderness of family and I thought of you, dear sisters, as I watched and I wept for what we have lost. After a time the mother’s eyes closed and the girl laid the back of her hand softly upon her mother’s brow. She sat there, the pregnant girl, alone with her sleeping mother, before she rose and turned out the light
.
I walked back up the hill and into our monstrously empty house. Kingsley was asleep in his room and I stood over him and stared as he slept, transfixed by the very rhythm of his breath. In many ways my boy is as foreign to me as those people down the hill, so full of mystery. There was a time when I was his whole world
.
How is it possible to survive in this life when we can never forget all we have destroyed?

April 5, 1923
My Dearest Sisters,
Her movements, as she works about the kitchen, are full of a surprising grace, despite her condition. She was making a soup tonight, and I watched as she chopped the vegetables and placed them into the pot and fed the old wood stove as the water came to a boil. With an almost dainty movement of her wrist she pulled from the pot one ladle full of scum after the other. There was a innocent intentness about her work, as if nothing was in her mind to disturb her preparations other than the necessities of the soup, not her evident poverty, not the failing health of her mother, not the bleak prospects for the bastard child she carries within her. For a short moment she came outside, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and lit for herself a cigarette. I pulled back behind the tree I was leaning against but still I stared. The light from the house was streaming from behind her as she smoked and so I could not see her face, but there was an ease in the way she held herself, even with her bloated belly, a comfort in the way she casually brought the cigarette to her lips. She is a woman who feels secure in the love that surrounds her. There also must be more than I could ever have imagined to the old woman awaiting death in that house, if her love can provide such comfort

April 7, 1923
My Dearest Sisters,
It is a wonder that I had once thought her ugly. It is true that her features are not perfectly regular, and her nose is somewhat long, but there is about her movements and her face a brightness and a beauty that is unmistakable. All day I think about her in that house, hopelessly pregnant but still caring for her mother. I await anxiously for the night so I can see her. When Kingsley is to bed and Father alone and drinking in a vain effort to quell his shaking hands, I slip from the house as quietly as I am able and I glide down the hill to my spot at the oak. This evening I watched as she prepared for bed, watched her disrobe and wipe the sweat from her body with a sponge. Her round belly, her swollen breasts, the areolae thick and dark as wine, the nipples erect from the cold of the water. She must be farther along than I had imagined. Her skin is fresh and taut about the white round of her belly. She carries her burden with a dignity that is remarkable. I feel cleansed just in the watching of her. She prepares for the night as if she were preparing for a lover, which is heartbreaking, knowing that she has only her dying mother to keep her company. We are sisters in our loneliness
.
I have been thinking of that child she is carrying. It may be a chance to make amends with all that has colored our past. When the time is right I will raise the possibility with Father

April 8, 1923
My Dearest Sisters,
When I returned from my nightly vigil I was startled to see Kingsley at the twin French doors to the rear portico, waiting for me. He asked me if I had heard it. The light mist of the evening had turned suddenly into a rain and I wiped the wet from my face
.
“
What are you talking about, dear?” I said, fighting to compose myself
.
“
The cougar,” he said. “Daddy told me their mating calls are like a wild scream. I heard it just down the hill.”
“
It must be something else,” I said
.
“
No,” he said, his face revealing a rare certainty. “It’s the cougar, I know it.”
“
Then what are we to do?”
He didn’t answer me, but with all the sureness of his eight years he turned and led me into Father’s library, to the case mounted on the wall in which Christian stores his guns. It was locked but Kingsley reached beneath the case and pulled out the key. He stood on a chair and inserted the key into the lock. The glass door swung wide
.
The gun he pulled off the rack was the largest of the four. It was Christian’s father’s gun. Kingsley cracked the barrel open and checked to be sure the cartridges were inside. Then he smacked it shut again. I shivered at the sound of the gun closing
.
He led me back through the house to the doors leading to the portico and opened them to the night. The rain had grown heavy, drowning whatever light escaped from the house before it could touch beyond the patio. The night was preternaturally dark
.
“
Turn out the hall lights,” my son commanded and I did so
.
“
Shouldn’t we get Grandfather?” I asked when I had returned to my place behind him
.
“
He shakes too much,” he said simply
.
“
What about your father?”
“
He’s out,” he said, and in those two short words there was not a note of judgment against the parent who had more and more absented himself from his family, who had betrayed it, abandoned it to the fearful felines of the night. “But if the cougar comes this way,” he said, his voice suddenly shaky, “Father taught me what to do.”
We waited there together inside the frame of those doors, just inches from the fierce rain, my son with the gun and I behind him, my hand tentatively on his shoulder. It felt wrong to me, being there with him and that gun, as if our positions were terribly reversed. It was I who should be protecting him, but I was too devastated to act on my feelings and was warmed into acquiescence by my son’s evident concern for my safety. We were a team, together, just the two of us, guarding the homestead from intruders, and I couldn’t break myself away from the delicious warmth I felt beside him, even as I could feel a shivering terror pass through his body to my hand. The minutes flicked away, one after another, flicked and died away and I couldn’t even begin to tell how many passed before I saw something crawl upon us in the rain-blanked night
.
“
What’s that?” I whispered
.
A shadow flitted across the edge of the portico
.
“
There,” I said
.
The boy swung the gun to his shoulder
.
“
Now,” I said
.
The explosion tore the night, the light from the barrel blinding for a second before it disappeared, leaving the night darker than before. We were deafened to any sound, even the flat patter of the rain was swallowed by the burst of fire
.
The boy steadied the gun and fired again and once again. The night tore apart. I screamed from the sheer beauty of the power and then a quiet descended
.
The servants scuttled from their rooms and down the stairs and they saw us there, standing in the doorway, Kingsley with the gun. I explained to them what had happened and ordered them back to bed. Father was too sedated, I assume, to have even heard
.
Kingsley wanted to go out and see if he had actually killed the cat but I refused to let him. “It will wait until tomorrow,” I said as I closed the portico doors. “I don’t want you outside in the dark until we’re sure it is dead.”
“
I need to clean the shotgun,” said Kingsley. “Father told me to always clean it before I put it away.”
“
Clean it tomorrow,” I said. “Everything tomorrow.”
I followed him as he went back into Father’s study and replaced the gun. When he locked the cabinet I took the key. It is beside me now as I write this. I can’t explain it, dear sisters, but I feel purged by the sudden explosions of this evening. I have regained my son, regained my power, suffered and survived the betrayals of the last twelve years
.
I can make everything whole, I believe. With our father’s strength and the deep desires of my soul I can heal our world

April 19, 1923
My Love,
It is ten days now since we found you and I still bear the agony of the sight. Our dear Kingsley has not left his bed for a week. I sit with him and feed him broth but he is insensible with longing and pain. How he will survive his misery and guilt I do not know, but he must, he absolutely must, or all our dreams and hopes are for naught. He is your legacy, dear husband, and you will live forever through him
.
You will be warmed to know that the Pooles have left us for good. Mrs. Poole succumbed to the illness that had been plaguing her. Father attended the funeral, I could not. It was a lonely affair, I am told, and at the internment in the gravesite beside her husband only the daughter and my father were in attendance. Father offered, he said, to help the girl in whatever way he could, but she refused his proffer and has now disappeared. Their house is empty, all their possessions crated up and taken or abandoned. Just this morning I walked among the empty rooms, the floorboards creaking beneath my feet. It feels haunted, my love, inhabited by a drove of ghosts
.
I am bereft without you. Every day I visit the statue where we passed our vows. I sit before it for hours at a time and think of you. I have not yet found the courage to enter your room and touch your things, to smell your precious smell as it has lingered on your shirts. For the rest of this life that the Lord has cursed me with, know that I will love you and honor you and do all I can to glorify your name. I pray for you, my darling, as I pray for our son, and I am confident now that the paws of tragedy which have pounced upon our family far too many times will no longer threaten us and that what is left of our future will be full of peace and love and redemption. I will do all in my power to make it so

34

I
WAS SITTING at my desk, staring at the message slip as it glowed pink in my hand. My secretary’s handwriting, normally only barely legible, was this morning a series of mystical hieroglyphs. I had to squint to make it out. “Rev. Custer,” it read, atop a phone number. I called out to her from my desk. “Who the hell is this, Ellie?”

She scurried into my office and stood behind me, peering over my shoulder at the slip of paper. “Your reverend.”

“I don’t have a reverend, Ellie, I’m Jewish, remember? We have mothers instead, and mine’s in Arizona.”

“Well he said he was a reverend, he said, Rev. Custer, just like that. You don’t know him? He only left a number.”

What I figured just then was that this Reverend Custer guy was one of the wackos in Beth’s cult, calling about the meeting Beth had set up for me with Oleanna, guiding light, so I called. What I got was not a New Age answer line but instead a soft-voiced little girl of about six.

“Hello,” she said, “you want my mommy?”

“No, sweetheart,” I said, pronouncing my words with utter care in that annoying way all unmarried and childless men seem to have when they talk to strange little girls. “I’m really looking for a Reverend Custer.”

“Mommy’s in the shower.”

“What about the reverend?”

“In the shower.”

“He’s in the shower too?”

“Mommy.”

“No, the reverend.”

“Are you a stranger?”

“I don’t know, am I?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

Click.

I had a headache and my eyes were blurry and I hadn’t slept nearly enough. The night before we had opened the box disinterred from the garden behind Veritas and read together, Beth, Caroline, Morris, and I, the self-selected excerpts from the diary of Faith Reddman Shaw. That would have been exhausting enough, but afterward Caroline insisted on spending the whole of the night in my apartment. It was not sex she was after this night, which was too bad, actually. Instead she was after solace. Solacing is up there with having a toothache as the least pleasant way to stay awake through the night. I had to stroke her hair and wipe her tears and comfort her when all I really wanted was to sleep, but some things we suffer for money and some things we suffer for love and some things we suffer because we’re too polite to kick her out of bed.

Ignore that last crack, it was only my testosterone speaking; besides, I am not that well mannered. It was indisputable that Caroline and I were easing into some sort of relationship, though the exact sort was hard to nail. Maybe it was just that we were both lonely and convenient, maybe it was the twin gravitational pulls of her great fortune and my great wanting, maybe it was that we found ourselves in the middle of an adventure we couldn’t really share with anyone else. Or maybe it was that she saw herself in desperate need of saving and I, inexplicably, found in myself the desire to save. If all there was was love then there wasn’t much to it, that was clear to us both, but life is not so soggy as the Beatles would have had us believe.

In the middle of our long late night conversation, as we lay in my bed, still clothed, she reached around and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you’re here for me, Victor,” she said, out of nowhere. “There’s no one else I can talk to about this. It has been a long time since anyone’s been there for me.”

And it had been a long time since I had been there for anyone. I smiled and kissed her lightly on the eye and I wondered if now might be a providential time to mention the fee agreement she still had not signed, but then thought better of it.

“This is harder than I ever imagined,” she said. “Finding Aunt Charity down there and then that diary, my grandmother’s words, reliving such tragedy. It’s like the entire foundation of my life has shifted. Things that were absolutely true have turned out to be lies. I thought I had my life’s history figured out, organized in a way that made sense, but it doesn’t make as much sense anymore.”

“Should we stop digging? Should we give it up?”

She was silent for a moment, a long worrying moment, before she shook her head and said, “No, not yet,” and held me closer.

Her hair tickled my nose uncomfortably and made me sneeze. I had the urge to roll away, onto my side, to sleep, but I didn’t. While the bounds of the relationship we were easing into were still narrow and unclear, they at least encompassed money and sex and now, I was learning, solace. But it wasn’t as though she was faking her distress. Even as she held me she shook slightly, as if from a cold draft blowing in from the past, and it is no wonder.

Family histories are a series of myths, embellished and perpetuated through gossamer tales retold over the Thanksgiving turkey. They are blandly reassuring, these myths, they give us the illusion that we know from whence we came without forcing upon us the details that make real life so perfectly vulgar. We know how Grandmom met Grandpop at a John Philip Sousa concert at Willow Grove Park but not how they lived unhappily ever after in a loveless marriage and fought like hyenas every day of their lives. We know how Daddy proposed to Mommy but not how he first plied her with tequila and then conned her into the sack. We’re told by our mother all about that magical night on which we were born but she never mentions how our head ripped apart her vagina or how her blood spurted or the way the placenta slimed out of her and plopped onto the floor like an immolated cat. Well, that night Caroline had seen the cat.

She had listened to her grandmother’s voice come forth from the grave and she believed she could understand now all the misery her grandmother had suffered, and why she had suffered it. She was certain that her grandfather, the moody and ofttimes soused Christian Shaw, had only agreed to marry Faith to save his family’s fortune. After proposing to Faith, he had started playing around with Charity, seducing the sister of the woman to whom he was engaged without a care in the world, and then, when Charity found herself inconveniently pregnant, had found it more convenient to murder Charity and bury her in the fertile oval beside the statue of Aphrodite than to tell the tale to her father, the man who was poised to save the Shaw Brothers Company from bankruptcy. In his marriage he had been mostly absent, often drunk, primarily abusive, and Caroline couldn’t help but notice how sister Hope’s health took a turn for the worse when Faith was forced to her bed with premature contractions and it was left to Christian to nurse the ill woman. She could figure why the rat poison was in the kitchen cabinet even if her grandmother couldn’t. With Charity and Hope both gone, the whole of the Reddman fortune demised to Christian Shaw and his heirs, another convenience. It seemed to Caroline that the best thing that could have happened to her family was the accident that rainy April night in 1923 when her father shot her grandfather, except for the crippling guilt her father carried from that day forward. That was how Caroline saw it that night in my bed, explaining her version to me through clenched teeth and tears.

I wasn’t quite sure I bought it. Her interpretation of what we had heard sounded like the plot of a bad feminist novel from the seventies, where the women would all be just fine if it wasn’t for those murderous men who engaged in the foulest of schemes to further their own ends. There was something too calculating, too controlled, in the voice of the woman who spoke to us from the dead that night for her to be so innocent a victim, something peculiar in the way she seemed so easily to absolve those around her of whatever crimes they had committed. As a lawyer I had had enough experience with unreliable narrators, had been one myself in fact, to fail to recognize the signs. But all of us had agreed on one thing, the ghosts that had been unleashed in the terrible events disclosed in the diary we had found in that box were still among us and the death of Jacqueline was quite possibly related.

“You haven’t by any chance, Miss Caroline,” said Morris as we decided on what to do next, “ever found that secret panel in the library your grandmother in the diary, she talks about?”

“No,” she said. “I never heard of it before.”

“It would be helpful, maybe, if you could spend some time, just like she did, and try to find it. Inside, I think, maybe there is something interesting, don’t you think?”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Caroline.

“But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing,” I said. “No one should know what we’re digging into. What about the numbers on the three-by-five card we found?”

“A banker friend I know,” said Morris, “very upstanding now but he got his start funding
Irgun
when such was not allowed and had to be done in secrecy. This was many years ago, just after the war, but not too far removed from the time of those papers you found. I’ll take them to him. He might know.”

Morris also agreed he would try to discover what had happened to the Poole daughter, who had disappeared, pregnant, just days after her mother’s death. I took for myself certain of the photographs, and the strangely retained receipt from the doctor. I also took the key out of the envelope entitled “Letters” and slipped it into my wallet.

That was what we had done about the box, but I still knew the likelihood was greatest that whoever had paid off Cressi to kill Jacqueline Shaw had done it not as an avenging ghost of the past but for the most basic of all reasons, for the motive that underlies most all of our crimes, for the money. Which was why tonight I was seeing Oleanna, the guiding light of the Church of the New Life, named beneficiary in the five-million-dollar insurance policy taken out on Jacqueline Shaw’s life. And it was why I had asked Caroline to set up a meeting for me that very afternoon with her brother Eddie, the worst gambler in the world, who had somehow, suddenly, upon the untimely murder of his sister, paid off his debt to Jimmy Vigs. In my short career I had discovered that to find a crook you follow the money. But first there was that message from the good Reverend Custer.

“Hello.”

“Can I talk to your mommy, please?”

“She’s in the bafroom.”

“Yes, sweetheart, can I talk to her please? I’m looking for a Reverend Custer and I was given this number.”

“She told me to say she’s not in. Do we owe you money?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Mommy says we owe a lot of money.”

“You know, sweetheart,” I said, “I think I may just have the wrong number.”

I hung up and stared at Ellie’s hieroglyphs for a little while and watched as they rearranged themselves before my eyes. Then a thought slipped through the fog of my mind and I felt myself start to sweat.

“I’m exhausted,” I told Ellie as I stepped out of my office, the phone slip in my pocket. “I’m going to get some coffee. You want anything?”

“Diet soda,” she said, and she started fiddling in her purse before I told her it was on me. Then I thought better of my generosity and took her four bits. I needed change for the phone.

I guess he assumed my line was tapped or my messages somehow not secure, and I couldn’t really blame him. Whoever was coming after him had the audacity to try to make the hit in the middle of the Schuylkill Expressway. To someone that brazen it wouldn’t be a thing to slap a wire on a phone or rifle through a pack of pink slips looking for a number to trace. “You are my scout,” had said Enrico Raffaello. “Like in the old cavalry movies, every general needs a scout to find the savages.” And what beleaguered general was ever more in need of a ferret-eyed scout than George Armstrong Custer. I just wish Raffaello had picked a less-ominous example. He wasn’t at the number I had dialed because that number was absolutely wrong. I took the Rev. literally and reversed the numbers when I made the call in the phone booth. This time it wasn’t a little girl who answered.

“This is a private line,” came a voice over the phone, a dark voice and slow.

“I’m looking for Reverend Custer,” I said.

“Boy, do you ever have the wrong number,” said the voice and then the line went dead.

I puzzled that for a moment, thoroughly confused about everything. When the hell was Calvi going to get off his boat and tell me what to do? Until he did I had no choice but to fake it. I took the second of Ellie’s quarters and dialed again.

“I said this was a private line,” said the same voice.

“I’m calling from a pay phone and this is my last quarter and if you hang up on me it will be your ass in a sling. Tell the man it’s his scout calling. Tell him I need to speak to him now.”

There was a quiet on the line as if my request was being considered by a higher authority and then I heard the scrape of chairs and a rap of knuckles on wood in the distance.

“What do you have for me?” came the familiar voice.

“How are you? How seriously are you hurt?”

There was a grunt.

“Where are you?” I asked.

There was a dangerous pause where I realized I had asked exactly the wrong question. “Tell me what you’ve learned,” he said finally.

“Our friend with the guns, I know how he got the money now. Murder for hire. One of his victims was an heiress name of Shaw.”

“Who paid him?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s nothing to do with you. For our friend it was just a way to finance the war. But he got a little sloppy and there was a witness and that is what’s so damn interesting. Under pressure, the witness changed his story, taking the heat off our guy.”

“Who applied the pressure?”

“Our little buddy who’s moved up so fast, the pawnbroker. He’s in on it, I know it.”

“Is there any other connection between the two of them?”

“Other than your friend was all too happy to get me into the car with you before our incident?”

“Other than that, yes.”

“No. But it’s him.”

“If it is him, or another, it no longer matters,” he said, and then he sighed. “You’re a good friend. You’ve been very loyal. I will remember this after it is over. I have one last favor to ask.”

“I want out.”

“I know that is what you want and I now want the same. I’m tired of it, and these animals have no restraint. It was bad enough going after me, but what they did to Dominic, who was already out, and then to Jimmy Bones was too much. They’ll go after my daughter, I know it, and then I will have no choice but to enter a war in which no one will win and everyone will end up dead. I could send my men out hunting right now, but it won’t solve the problem, and with every murder, every attempt, the case the feds are building grows stronger and more of our own will feel marked and turn. I’m a tired man, I don’t want to spend the last years of my life hiding or in jail or dead. I want to paint. I want to spend a whole month reading one poem. I want to dance naked in the moonlight by the sea.”