Deceptions (31 page)

But her biggest lie to Vittorio was the one she invented to explain why there could have been any number of people… yet none
she could specifically accuse… who might have had reason to want her terminated.

She originally told Vittorio that she had stumbled across hard evidence of insider trading in the common stock of a company
her law firm was representing in a billion-dollar takeover deal. It was a serious criminal offense, and there was no way for
her to conceal the fact that she had seen the evidence. Although she claimed she wasn’t about to blow any whistles, there
obviously had to have been at least one among the guilty parties who wasn’t about to take any chances.

So said she to the man she had met, fallen in love with, and married only because he had been sent to carry out a contract
on her life.

End of lie.

And the truth?

Irene Hopper would sit staring at the semistranger in the mirror, a new woman named Peggy Walters. She would picture herself
as she had once been, yet feel no closer to that person than to the one before her. Maybe neither woman had anything to do
with her anymore. Then feeling as though she had caught herself at something, she would abandon both images for the truth
as she knew it actually to be.

It all started simply enough, driving back from the Cape one Saturday evening. She and Henry turned off the Connecticut Pike
for a late supper at a country inn near Stratford. Seated alongside an attractive young couple, they were soon talking, laughing,
buying each other drinks, and exchanging life stories.

The couple’s names were Lucy and Hal Chanin, and they were vacationing at a cottage they had rented at a nearby lake. Near
midnight, they were all carrying enough of a glow for the Chanins to invite their new friends back to their place for some
brandy and whatever, and Irene and Henry accepted.

The
whatever
turned out to be several better-than-fair lines of coke. It was no surprise. None of these things were ever really a surprise
to those who knew about them, and she and Henry knew about them. There were always subtle code words, glances, faint half-smiles
to make sure everything was understood and agreed upon in advance.

By two in the morning there was enough heat in the air for Henry to make the first move. Peggy knew he would be the one to
set it off. He always was. When he came to her on one of the room’s two couches, she could feel his pulse as if it were her
own, hear his heart like the electronic beat in a microphone. He was pure spark. And she was waiting. Yes, she was. So were
the Chanins.

Henry took off her clothes and started on her.

Sensations passed through her body like the friendliest of
ghosts. Which wasn’t to say she was free of doubt. She never was. She knew she’d despise and repel herself on certain far-off
nights. But now was now, and adding to her excitement were the flushed faces, hungry eyes, and suddenly stripped down flesh
of Lucy and Hal as they began their own run. Until all that damp anxiety that reaches for the brain and deadens joy was brushed
aside and she was a burning, two-backed beast.

She was never really aware of the exact moment when it became Hal’s face she was seeing… first, above, and then beneath her.
Not that it mattered. By then she was well into her own magnetic field, where forces beyond reason were pulling her to do
things whose only purpose was to satisfy an itch that was on the verge of driving her mad if she couldn’t reach it.

There were wild sounds in her head and the sense that the best parts of two men… good, lovely men… were entering her at once.
Which, God help her, they were surely doing. And she itched for more of that, too, maybe even another, but was just as pleased,
finally, to settle for Lucy herself… pretty, full-lipped Lucy, who offered the sweetest, most knowing of smiles before joining
with the men.

Breathing the freshest, most delicate of bouquets, she remember drifting off to whispers that told her she was queen.

She was.

She certainly was queen.

Whatever came later, she was ready to swear to at least that much with her last breath.

But what did come later would make her less certain about ever swearing to anything again, she thought.

They sprawled about the room, half in stupor, sipping what remained of the brandy. Clothes were scattered everywhere. They
lay naked… exposed, uncovered, uncaring. Peggy was alone on one couch. Hal and Lucy lay together on the other, her tongue
licking idly at his ear. Henry was stretched out on a rug in front of the fireplace, his head on a cushion, his eyes closed.

It was a cool country night and Hal had lit a fire earlier to take the chill from the air. With only embers left burning,
he rose now to stir them alive with a poker and toss on another
few logs. Then he freshened his drink and settled down on the rug beside Henry.

The new logs crackled. It was the only sound in the room. The odor of heated sex mixed with the aroma of the fire. Lucy was
dozing on the couch and Peggy felt herself starting to drift off as well. On the floor, the two men talked softly and drank
the brandy in front of the fire.

Peggy slept.

When she opened her eyes it was with a start.

Something had wakened her.

The two men, still naked, seemed to be struggling on the floor. She heard Henry cry out and it was the same sound that had
broken through her sleep.

She froze, staring.

Hal appeared to be all over Henry. A big, powerful, heavily muscled man, his knees and body pinned Henry to the floor. His
hands stabbed brutally between Henry’s legs, as if seeking to grab and mangle his genitals. Then Hal did have hold of him
and Henry screamed and kept screaming until the two women, both fully awake now, began screaming with him.

The room filled with their combined sound, and it was of something so far out of control and human intent, that it might have
come from a rent in the earth.

Peggy never saw Henry reach for the fire iron. Maybe he never really did reach for it, but just groped wildly for something,
anything, until his fingers happened to make contact with the poker. Then he lifted and swung the full, solid weight of it
and kept swinging blindly, fiercely, until the indescribable pain between his legs started to ease and Hal Chanin was lying
very still with his eyes open and staring and his head pumping blood.

From that point, Peggy would never be completely sure of the details or sequence of things as they happened next.

What definitely did come out of it was that Hal was dead, and Lucy was still screaming, and suddenly coming at Henry with
this small-bore rifle she’d grabbed hold of somewhere in the room. She fired from the hip without aiming and missed, and was
working the bolt for a second shot when Henry caught her with the fire iron and knocked her down.

Then there was Henry picking up the rifle and staring at Lucy where she lay, stunned, but not badly hurt. He looked at her
for a long moment. Then he slowly raised the rifle, aimed, and shot her through the forehead. Dead center.

Peggy remembers screaming.

She also remembered Henry, gentle and loving as a mother, feeding her brandy and pointing out that there was no other way,
that once the police and media were involved, both their lives would have been ruined by the drug and sexual aspects of the
scandal. Not to mention the small matter of manslaughter. Christ! Just try to explain the coked-up queer suddenly going wild
to sodomize him, and tearing his balls when he tried to fight him off. With his wife as an obviously less-than-friendly witness,
Henry said he’d be lucky to get off with ten to twenty years. Remember, too, it was Lucy’s gun, and she who started the shooting.
They just got a break when her first shot missed. Her second shot wouldn’t have. Wasn’t it better that she, not he, was the
one lying dead?

Dimly, Peggy had to agree it was better. But what a choice.

As a former district attorney, Henry knew enough about such things to do whatever needed doing. He wiped away all fingerprints.
He dressed the two bodies and smeared their clothes with their own blood. He packed a bag with whatever cash and jewelry he
could find, and smashed a window to make it look like a break-in burglary. The police would assume the Chanins came home unexpectedly,
caught the thieves in the act, and were murdered for their trouble.

To lend detail and credence to the staged break-in, Henry Durning added the illusion of rape by stripping Lucy below the waist,
ripping her bra and underpants, and bruising her thighs. The required semen, other than her husband’s, had already been deposited
during their earlier round-robin.

With the rest of his life on the line, Henry made sure he missed nothing. When they finally drove off, he stopped the car
a few miles from the house and buried the rifle and jewelry in a patch of woods. Ever practical, he saw no point in burying
unmarked cash.

* * *

It had all worked out pretty much as Henry planned. Since the Chanins were on vacation, their bodies weren’t discovered for
more than a week. The break-in theory was picked up by the police, and the evidence of rape was exploited by the media. As
for the country inn where they met the Chanins, they were all strangers to the place and not even their waiter ever remembered
the two murder victims having dined there.

The only thing that didn’t work out as Henry planned was me,
Peggy thought.

Because it stayed with her. She couldn’t forget any part of that night. But most of all, she couldn’t forget Henry picking
up the rifle and looking at Lucy for that long, calm, contemplative moment before he coldly dead-centered her.

Yet she functioned normally enough day to day. She went to her office in New York every morning. She did her work in the practice
of law. She saw Henry Durning whenever he asked to see her, and behaved without visible panic or hysterics in his presence.
But she also kept seeing Lucy Chan-in’s eyes just before their light went out. They told her she was living in a sick void
where things far worse than death were waiting.

She guessed it was just about then that she began seeing Vittorio Battaglia.

It was almost like a new strain of peripheral vision, she thought, in which you were only vaguely aware of these brief images.
At first he was no more than a nebulous face on a Manhattan street or in an office building or theater lobby. Then it began
happening in restaurants and she was able to get a better look at him, liking what she saw but thinking no more of it than
that. She was usually with friends or people from her office, but he was always alone and quite unaware of her.

Until one night, leaving an old Fellini movie at an art theater on Second Avenue, she almost walked straight into him. For
once, she was by herself and he was smiling at her.

“Don’t you think it’s about time we spoke?” he said.

What she remembered thinking was that up close he
looked like some Renaissance prince, by way of Titian. “I never thought you were even aware of me.”

He looked at her, holding on to the moment. “How could anyone not be aware of you?”

They went to a nearby lounge and sat talking and gazing at each other until two in the morning.

They did the same thing for the next four nights. It was no problem for her. Henry happened to be out of town on a case and
would be gone for another two weeks.

On the fifth night she invited him to dinner. To this point, they had not so much as kissed or even held hands. Which was
fine with her. Still haunted by the horrors of Stratford, she was content just to be with him. But it did make her wonder
a little about Vittorio. What was
his
problem?

She was about to find out.

He waited until they finished eating and were sipping what remained of the wine. Later, he told her he hadn’t wanted to spoil
her beautiful dinner.

What he did first was to put down his wine, take her hand in both of his, and just sit holding it for a moment.

Then he said, “I have to ask you a few questions.”

“Why not?”

“They may sound strange to you, but just give me a chance. Do you have any enemies that you know of? I mean serious enemies,
those who might do you harm?”

She thought he was joking, until she saw his eyes. “What kind of harm are we talking about?”

“The worst kind. Like maybe dead?”

She just stared at him.

“I’m not kidding, Irene.”

Suddenly, she was frightened. Those early sightings of him, the strangeness of their meeting, all began falling into place.
“My God, what are you? A cop?”

“No.” A cold blankness settled over his face. “I’m the one who was sent to get rid of you.”

Her heart banged against her chest. It might have been trying to escape.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She had a moment then when the prospect of dying didn’t seem all that bad. This alone softened and cut into her fear.

“This is what you do? You get rid of people?”

Vittorio was silent. Her hand was still in his and he slowly raised it to his lips, then to his cheek and kept it there. The
gentleness of the gesture reached her.

“Who sent you to do this?” she asked.

“A man I do work for. But he’s not the one behind it. He doesn’t even know you. He’s just taking care of it for someone.”

“And you have no idea who that is?”

He shook his head. “I was hoping
you
might know.”

Of course she knew. But that in itself sent a new kind of chill coursing through her.
Henry,
she thought, and gazed deep into the madness of Hal and Lucy’s all too recent deaths, and the prospect of her own somewhere
just ahead.
How could he?
Stupid question. The same way he could have calmly blown away Lucy. To protect himself. Except that in her own case, he had
made the mistake of contracting it out.

But all that was academic. The only thing that really mattered at the moment was this gentle, curiously appealing, if somewhat
crazy killer sitting beside her.