Cold Blood (41 page)

“Rosie,”

Rooney warned, glancing toward the bathroom.

“I don’t care if she does hear me, I am disgusted, disgusted!”

“Don’t be.”

“Why the hell not? Now she’s going to see his wifewhat if she finds out, what do you think will happen? We’ll lose that bonus. I am through taking orders from that slut.”

^

Rooney opened the door and walked out 9o the corridor.

“Come on, Rosie, she got the information on the trust fund and she might not have if she hadn’t gone through that connecting door.”

He stopped and turned back with a half-smile.

“We don’t have one, do we?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Closing the door with a bang, she caught up with him at the elevator.

“Was that a half-assed come-on, Bill?”

Rosie glowered.

“Hell, no. It was just a joke.”

He stepped into the elevator.

“I wouldn’t make an indecent proposal to you, Rosie, I have more respect.”

The elevator door closed, and he pressed for their floor. They stood in silence as the elevator stopped and they stepped out into the hallway. Rosie’s door was first, and she was determined to open it without even looking at Rooney, but he placed his big hand on the handle.

“Unless you wanted me to?”

She looked at him, refusing to allow herself to smile.

“I haven’t had an indecent or a decent proposal made to me for a long time, Bill, but right now, with Nick gone, I don’t think I am ready for either. See you later.”

She turned the key and entered the room. Not until the door was closed behind her did she allow a small smile to break through. The old buzzard’s really got the hots for me, she said to herself gleefully.

Lorraine dressed with great care, with the fan running overhead so she wouldn’t break out in a sweat before she’d finished admiring herself. She had one of her new suits on, a silk shirt, highheeled sandals and a single strand of cheap but good-looking pearls. She picked up her briefcase, having washed everything inside and just about managed to get rid of the smell of the doll.

In reception, she passed Rooney, who turned and gave her a smile.

“Looking good.”

“Thanks. Was that you or Rosie who slammed the door?”

“Me, getting worried you might have blown our million. Do you know if Mrs. Caley has found out?”

“If she has, I’ll sort it out. You won’t lose because of me, Bill. I know what I did was unethical, but at least I didn’t lie. Saying I’m sorry I did it would be a lie too. I liked him. Liked him a lot.”

Rooney turned away.

“What about Nick? You liked him too?”

“You know I did.”

“Then we split three ways now, huh?”

he said sadly.

“I guess so. What’s that you’ve got there?”

He held a folded sheet of paper.

“A list of Nick’s possessions. His clothes, he had nothing else. His cowboy boots, his wallet and driver’s license were missing.”

Lorraine sighed. Her heart sank, but then she remembered something.

“What about the necklace? That grisgris thing he had around his neck, that listed?”

“Nope, but we don’t know if he was wearing it or if it was also stolen.”

“Well, check his room and I’ll come right back here as soon as I’m done at the Caleys’.”

“They know you’re coming?”

“No, best to keep an element of surprise! Mind you, they might refuse to let me in, but I doubt it. They must know by now about Tilda Brown it was in the papers.”

Lorraine started for the doors, and stopped.

“Bill, the newspaper wrapped around that voodoo doll. It had a date on it, February fifteenth, but no year. Could you check with the newspaper printers and see if they can date it by some of the articles? It’s just too much of a coincidence, the date. Anna Louise disappeared on February fifteenth, so if it was last year’s paper it means Tilda Brown kept that thing for a long time.”

She strode out through the heavy front door to meet her driver. Rooney remained staring at the pitiful list of Nick Bartello’s possessions,

and he couldn’t help hearing his friend’s voice and that smoky laugh he had had.

“No coincidences, Billy Boy. Never believe in them, just good detective work.”

Rooney sighed, a lump in his throat. He couldn’t actually remember if it had been Nick or Jack Lubrinski who’d said that. They had been so alike and now they were both dead. Rooney became aware of his own mortality and was scared; no son, no wife, but maybe, just maybe a future with financial security beyond his meager pension. And maybe there was also Rosie.

Elizabeth hurled the pot of Lancaster neck cream at Caley’s head, but it missed by yards and smashed against the wall of her bedroom in the beautiful Garden District mansion in which she had grown up.

“How could you, how could you fucking do this to me?”

Caley sidestepped the brushes and the silver-backed mirror that followed, and waited until she hurled her body down on her velvet daybed, her arm resting against her brow in classical fashion.

“Go away from me, I hate you!”

He applauded.

“Bravo, none of your performances deserved an Oscar more than this one, Elizabeth.”

“Fuck you!”

she screamed. ť

“Why don’t you just calm down? Why work yourself up into such a state that you’re gonna need to call your dealer for something to space yourself out into oblivion? That is what you Mially do, isn’t it?”

She dived across the room and glared,

“dilm down? You have stolen, stolen from your own daughter’s trust fund!”

“Correction, she’s not my daughter.”

“You were paid to treat her as one!”

Her face was red with anger, but even as she said it she wished she hadn’t as she saw the pain on his face. She immediately resorted to tears.

“How could you steal from Anna Louise, Robert, and why? You know if you ever needed anything I always gave in to you in the end, you know that. So why?”

He sat sullenly, hands clasped in front of him.

“Because I was sick and tired of coming to you for handouts. Sick and tired of playing the same charade, of forever needing you to bail me out. I didn’t want to touch one more cent of your fucking money. I just wanted for once to stand on my own two feet, prove that I could do it. Maybe get back my self-respect. That’s all there is to it, I didn’t want to ask you.”

She smiled.

“Why not? You have for the past twenty years, and it’s not that I don’t have enough, for Chrissakes!”

He felt exhausted even trying to explain, but he felt he owed her that much.

“Because I knew it would work. I knew it, and it would have made me independent. Don’t you understand? It would have been my own show, not yours, not even associated with you.”

She smirked.

“But you couldn’t pull it off, could you? Just like you could never have gotten the time of day from any one of your socalled partners without mewithout my being who I am.”

He sighed, shaking his head bitterly, and his voice had an undercurrent of sarcasm.

“True, everything I am is because of you, you’ve given me everything. What do you want me to do, kiss your feet? Jesus God, Elizabeth, I’ve been on my knees too often, taken too much of your shit to do it again.”

“My shit? You think I like being married to a failure? You think I wouldn’t have liked someone I could lean on? Someone who would take responsibility?”

“What? What did you say?”

“I need, I always have needed”

He was hardly able to contain himself.

“You and your needs are all I have been taking care of since the day I agreed to marry you, and that, as you fucking well know, was also part of the deal, taking you on, your drugs, your booze and Lloyd Dulay’s illegitimate child. Don’t you tell me about your needs. When have you ever, ever at any time considered mine? Huh?”

He dragged her toward him, scaring her.

“Yes, look at me, Elizabeth, you look real good, because whatever I was paid to marry you, whatever contract you had me sign to keep my mouth shut, had to do with Anna Louise. Now she’s dead, so that contract is now null and void.”

She tried to wriggle away from him, but he gripped her wrists, pulling her toward him.

“Yes, dead, she is dead, and you just won’t face it.”

“She isn’t, she isn’t, how can you say it? You don’t know for sure.”

He wanted to slap her, but all he did was release her, moving as far away from her as possible.

“It’s been nearly a year, Elizabeth if she’s not dead, where in Christ’s name is she?”

She started to cry, and he began to walk out but she screeched at his back.

“Juda said she felt her presence, she told me.”

He stopped and pointed his finger.

“That goddamned woman is nothing but a leech.”

“Takes one to know one, Robert.”

He took four fast steps toward her and backhanded her across the face. She stumbled, and then he went after her again, this time gripping her by her hair.

“You have spent thousands on that fucking fake bitch. Even when I barred her from the house you still saw her, you even took Anna Louise to

r

LYNDA LA PLANTE 267

her, a fat, stinking pig of a woman who just greases your vanity to get what she wants. Well, how much did she make from you for her socalled psychic feelings on Anna Louise? How much, Elizabeth?”

“Nowhere near as much as you have taken in one week, never mind twenty years. Juda and I

“

“Oh please, not that again, not the old friend from the past, because it makes me puke. She’s a con artist, and what kind of vise she’s gripped you in for twenty years is beyond me, unless it’s blackmail.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?”

He sat down, shaking his head.

“You don’t have a life, Elizabeth, you spend your days and nights in a drunken or drug-induced haze, and Lorraine Page …”

He hesitated. Just saying her name hit him hard.

“Mrs. Page told me you were now injecting a drug that could give you a thrombosis. Do you even remember me getting you in the ambulance, this time, to save your life? How many more clinics, Elizabeth? How much more punishment can that body take, how many more times can it be surgically put back together again? Well, it’s no longer any concern of mine.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked scared.

“It’s over, I quit. I want a divorce,”

he said calmly and matter-of-factly.

“I’ll have you arrested for using Anna’s trustLloyd will call the police.”

Robert Caley laughed. Deep inside, he felt good for the first time in days, perhaps years.

“Really? Well, go ahead, and you know what I will do? I will tell everyone you lied to me, that Anna ťuise was not my child. I’ll demand they give Dulay blood tests, and that means the very thing you are so terrified of, Elizabeth, your blood will be tested too. The gloves will come off, and if you want it dirty, it will be dirtier than you ever believed. I will expose your drug addiction and your freak friendship with that fat bitch.”

“Stop it!”

He smiled, now ticking off on his fingers.

“I will give details of your plastic surgery, the face-lift, the body tucks, the liposuction. So much for your big-star status! The only place you are still a star is here. Out in the real world you were forgotten fifteen years ago.”

“Stop this!”

“No, Elizabeth, you stop this sham right here and now because there’s no need for it to continue. Without Anna Louise, there’s nothing. Consult your lawyers, but there will be no contest.”

“Don’t do this, Robert. I mean it, don’t do this or you will be sorry. I’ll make you so sorry.” “Will you?”

He was walking out now, smiling all the while.

“You’ve made me sorry, Elizabeth, from the day we married. Now I’m going to make you pay for it and you will pay for those twenty years. Believe me, that megafortune is going to be sliced right down the middle.”

“I’m warning you,”

she said furiously.

“No, I am warning you, because this time I mean it!”

She glared, her mouth a thin tight line.

“You do, and I will fight you, tell them you even had sex with your daughter!”

“That deserved a punch in the face, Elizabeth, but I will never strike you again. You will never hold that against me, and as you know, she was not my daughter.”

“You adopted her.”

“I gave her my name. I also loved her like a daughter, and she loved me. You can’t take that away. There’s nothing you can do to harm me. It’s over. Goodbye.”

“She was a cheap slut, you didn’t know that, did^youTjT-he precious daughter you loved so dearly was a cheap whore.”

“Don’t do this, leave her alone.”

Elizabeth smirked.

“Ask Mrs. Page, get her to show you the photograph of your beloved sweet daughter.”

He walked out, closing the door quietly behind him, and she stood in a blind fury, wanting to scream after him, kick him, punch him, scratch his eyes out. But she walked to the window and looked out, her arms and hands clenched around herself. Her voice was hardly audible.

“I will make you bleed, Robert Caley. So help me God, I will make your life a living hell, just like mine.”

Lorraine stared out of the car window at the rows of gracious colonnaded houses that the new American arrivals in New Orleans had built for themselves in the Garden District when cotton, sugar and slaves had begun to make them rich: street after street offered the same vista of dazzling white columns, black ironwork fences and the dark green of shade trees and glossy clipped shrubs. Much of the area dated from the decades before the Civil War when the natural wealth of the whole region had poured into New Orleans, and it was as though the magnificent Italianate and neoclassical houses had been erected to show the world that the South was an empire to rival any that had been seen on earth.

“Nice area,”

said the driver. He was slowly warming to Lorraine; he liked the fact that she never felt the need to patronize him because of his race or involve him in some inane conversation, and that she didn’t hide

LYIMDA LA PLAMTE

her moods. He liked it that sometimes she was really attractive as a woman and sometimes she was not. Tonight she was. She looked sexy and classy, and it made him straighten up in his seat. When they arrived at the tall, double-galleried mansion on one of the most exclusive streets in the district, he was out of his seat fast to hold open the passenger door. Lorraine held her hand up for a moment, took a swig from a can of Coke, which she had brought with her, then tucked it back against the seat. The soft drink was laced with vodka, and she had already bought another bottle back at the hotel.