Degree of Guilt (12 page)

‘She was great,’ Terri finished. ‘And of course, she’s absolutely beautiful.’

Paget did not answer. Terri paused, wondering how he felt about this woman, whether part of him still loved her. ‘Is Mary all right?’ she finally asked.

‘More or less.’ Paget seemed to hear her first, unspoken question. ‘Forgive me if I sound cold. I’m just trying to see Mary as I would any other client. To me, precisely because of all the things you mention, Mary’s someone a judge or jury might turn on if Sharpe could give them a good enough reason. And if I understand Sharpe at all, she’ll be deeply offended if she thinks that Mary’s using
her
issue as an alibi.’

Terri considered him. ‘How bothered are you with the gaps in Mary’s story? The bullet, for example.’

Paget shrugged. ‘I’m less concerned with whether
her
story is completely right than with what Brooks and Sharpe can prove. Or what they can’t prove, such as that Mary had any other motive than rape.’

Terri hesitated. ‘I can see you have to detach yourself a little.’

Paget nodded. ‘There is one area,’ he said finally, ‘where detachment fails me. Carlo. He knows who his mother is, but almost no one else does. We never wanted to bring any publicity down on him.’

‘I understand.’ Terri paused again. ‘Isn’t that going to be kind of hard now?’

‘It is.’ Paget stared down at the newspaper. ‘I wasn’t expecting to represent her.’

Nor, Terri was suddenly sure, did Paget want to. And if that was true, it made no sense that he
was
representing her.

‘Before,’ she said quietly, ‘I didn’t think you were being cold.’

‘I appreciate that.’ For the first time, Paget sounded tired. ‘I just want to bury this thing. Quickly.’

Confused, Terri searched for something to say next. ‘How do we do that?’

‘First, we hire a detective named Johnny Moore.’ Paget sat, crisp again. ‘When Johnny was an FBI agent in the sixties, he spent three years with the Weather Underground as a double agent, so he’s used to looking strangeness in the eye. The white-collar stuff I do bores him to tears, so it’ll be a relief to Johnny when I ask him to turn Ransom’s sex life upside down.

‘Beyond that, we should at least consider speaking to Dr Steinhardt’s daughter. Find out if she had any idea that Ransom was using Laura Chase’s psychoanalysis as an aphrodisiac.’

Terri looked across at the picture of Mary, imagining what had happened. Her stomach felt tight. ‘Does the media know about that part yet?’

‘No.’

‘That tape gives me the creeps. With or without James Colt.’ Terri folded her arms. ‘Mark Ransom’s little version of “virtual reality.”’

‘That’s why it may be useful, from our point of view.’ Paget considered her. ‘For now, that seems like a place to look.’

Terri nodded. ‘What do you want
me
to do?’

‘Didn’t I tell you?’

‘Not specifically.’

‘Talk to Mark Ransom’s one and only ex-wife. They were divorced five years ago, with an astounding lack of publicity.’ Paget gave a fleeting smile. ‘You might ask if it was just his books she didn’t like.’

Within two hours, Johnny Moore had called Terri with a Manhattan telephone number for Ransom’s ex-wife.

‘Melissa Rappaport,’ Moore said. ‘Took back her name. She’s a free-lance editor, works at home.’

‘How’d you find her?’

‘She was hiding out in the white pages, just like a real person. Maybe she figured divorcing Ransom would buy her a normal life.’

Moore’s voice was less sardonic than matter-of-fact – mild, pleasant, and faintly Irish. Terri trusted him instinctively.

‘How do you think I should approach her?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t wear a mustache or anything like that. The best way is what you’d probably do on your own – call her up, tell her who you are and that you want to talk with her. Just be ready for an answering machine: she’s probably been called by everyone from
The New York Times
to
Women’s Wear Daily
, asking how she feels about the great man dying with his pants off. Keep your message short, clear, and professional.’

‘I keep thinking Chris should do this.’

‘No, he’s right. Chris is hotter than Warren Beatty after being on those TV clips, and if she’s already press shy, a call from him would make things worse. Besides, you’ll be an island of feminine calm in a sea of media maggots whose idea of a story is screwing and death – preferably in that order, although for some publications it’s not a requirement.’

Terri found herself laughing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘this really isn’t funny.’

‘Of course not. That’s why I make jokes about it.’

Terri thanked him and hung up.

She found herself staring at Melissa Rappaport’s number, and then at what little else there was to stare at. Her office began to annoy her – it was half the size of Paget’s, and she’d put nothing in it but a pre-school picture of Elena. Time to stop living like a transient, at work as well as with Richie; maybe she was doing okay here. A couple of posters, something like Picasso or Kandinsky, might make things feel permanent.

Just call the woman, Peralta. Quit stalling. You were always good at talking to people, and at least they’d listen to you.

Anyone but Richie.

Best not to think about that. Richie loved Elena, in his way, and Terri’s job now was to make sure that they raised Elena to be as secure as she was smart. If Terri tried hard enough, she and Richie could make it so.

What would Christopher Paget think, Terri suddenly wondered, if she couldn’t get Mark Ransom’s ex-wife to even return a phone call?

It would help, Terri decided, to have an image of the woman she was calling. But it was hard to picture Mark Ransom’s wife. All she could come up with was that Melissa Rappaport would feel far too shocked to carefully weigh the messages of strangers, distinguishing one from another. And all that she could do, Terri decided, was to say what she herself might respond to.

She composed a speech for the answering machine, committed the basics to memory, and dialed the number Moore had given her.

The telephone began ringing. One ring. Two. Three. Four. Terri was not sure what would happen if a real person answered.

‘Hello,’ the cool voice said. ‘You have reached 501-7216. You may leave a message at the tone.’

Melissa Rappaport, Terri thought, wasn’t one for insincerity, such as that she was glad to hear from whoever called, or for false promises, like that she’d call back soon or ever. The voice had the crisp economy of someone who got to the point: Terri suddenly envisioned a thin woman, restlessly pacing her apartment, and began mentally editing her message.

The beep sounded.

‘This is Teresa Peralta,’ Terri began. ‘I’m an attorney in San Francisco. Our office represents Mary Carelli.’

Terri imagined the woman stopping to listen, surprised at who was calling, poised on the edge of hostility.

‘It feels foolish to tell you how much I hate bothering you about something this painful, and then to ask you to call back anyhow. I’m asking because this is so painful for Mary Carelli. I need to help her make sense of this, emotionally as well as legally.

‘You may think that you can’t help, or just that you don’t want to. All I ask is that you not decide until I’ve told you all I can about what Mary says Mark Ransom did.’

In her mind Terri saw the woman standing over the machine, caught between the wish to know and the desire to be left alone.

‘You can listen,’ she continued, ‘and then not tell me anything. Anything you do choose to tell me will be confidential unless you say otherwise. I’m not the press, and I don’t think people’s lives are entertainment – yours, Mary’s, or Mark Ransom’s.

‘I can be reached at work, (415) 939-2707, or home, (415) 232–5455.

‘Thank you for considering this.’

Slowly, Terri put down the telephone.

She checked her watch, saw that it was eleven-forty-five, and decided not to go to lunch for fear of missing the telephone. She wasn’t hungry anyhow.

No one called. At two-thirty, her stomach felt concave, her blood sugar seemed to have gone into deficit, and she had begun debating whether it was all right to ask her secretary to get her a sandwich.

In Manhattan, Terri realized, night had fallen.

When the telephone rang, Terri was certain it was Richie.

‘Terri Peralta.’

‘Hello.’ It was the cool voice of the tape. ‘This is Melissa Rappaport.’

Terri sat upright. ‘I’m so glad you called me,’ she said. ‘Really, thank you.’

‘Really,’ the voice answered, ‘I’m not sure why I did.’

The voice was cultivated and very cautious. Keep this going, Terri thought, engage her. ‘I promised to tell you what happened,’ she tried.

There was silence.

‘Would it be better,’ Terri asked, ‘if I came to New York?’

‘Just to satisfy my curiosity?’ The voice paused again. ‘What
is
it you want?’

Terri gazed out at the bay, unseeing. She imagined Melissa Rappaport in the darkened bedroom of her apartment, weary from a day’s worth of calls she had not answered, connected to Terri by a thread she could break simply by hanging up.

‘I guess part of what I’m asking,’ Terri responded, ‘is whether the Mark Ransom that Mary describes is anyone you recognize.’

‘And if it were.’

‘Then I could at least tell Mary Carelli she’s not alone – that she’s not the only one who can imagine what your ex-husband did to her.’ Terri’s voice grew softer. ‘It’s awfully lonely to accuse someone of trying to rape you.’

There was silence. ‘In other words,’ Melissa Rappaport finally said, ‘did Mark ever use force.’

‘I was going to ask that, yes.’

‘No.’ The voice was toneless. ‘He never used force.’

Terri tried to replay the words; heard something careful, literal. ‘Was there something else?’

‘Yes.’ The word had a certain edge. ‘You said that you would tell me what happened. Or, more precisely, what Ms Carelli says happened.’

Terri felt deflated. ‘Where would you like me to start?’

‘Perhaps,’ Melissa Rappaport answered, ‘with how Ms Carelli happened to find herself in Mark’s suite.’

Terri stood, striving to remember all that Paget had told her. ‘He said he wanted to talk to her. About an interview.’

‘She knew him, I assume.’

‘No.’

‘Then why did Mark contact her?’

There was a moment’s pause. Terri hesitated, trying to track the careful cross-examination. ‘What he first told Mary,’ she answered, ‘is that he liked watching her on television.’

This time, the silence was much longer, the voice a little flatter. ‘Watching her on television.’

‘Yes.’

‘Really. I’d have thought her a bit dark for Mark’s tastes. But then I hadn’t seen him in several years.’

‘What were his tastes? That is, when you knew him.’

More silence; Terri froze, fearful that she had gone too far. ‘I’m sorry,’ Melissa Rappaport said. ‘That last was a pointless remark. It may take me a couple of days of living with Mark’s death to get the emotional range just right.’

Terri had begun to feel the long-distance voice as if connected to her nerve ends. For the first time, she was certain that the rigid self-control sealed off some well of feeling.

‘
I’m
sorry,’ Terri answered quietly.

‘No matter. The etiquette for this conversation has yet to be written.’ There was another pause. ‘Tell me, how is it that Mark is supposed to have – to put it politely – introduced the subject of sex?’

‘He suggested that she sleep with him in exchange for an intervew.’

‘For an interview?’ Over long distance, Melissa Rappaport’s mirthless laughter was close to eerie. ‘We are
not
discussing Garbo or Howard Hughes. Mark Ransom was hardly a rare commodity. If the price of far too many words from Mark was sleeping with him, then he’s screwed every talk show host but Regis Philbin.’

Terri felt humiliated. ‘What he said, to put it
less
politely, is that he liked to fuck women he’d seen on film.’

She heard the edge in her own voice a moment after she spoke. Perhaps, Terri thought, that had caused Melissa Rappaport’s latest silence; she was about to hang up.

Tonelessly, Melissa Rappaport said, ‘What a very charming story.’

‘Our client didn’t think so.’

‘No. I suppose she wouldn’t have.’ There was another pause. ‘But what makes it so implausible is the idea of Mark offering his face on television as if that gave him sexual leverage.’

Terri hesitated. ‘Not just his face. He was going to talk about a new book.’

‘Less plausible yet. We in what the more precious among us might call the “literary community” may find it rather melancholy, but the publication of a novel is rarely the stuff of prime time television. Even a novel by Mark.’

Again, Terri heard some buried emotion, a faint rueful edge. ‘I think,’ she answered with studied calm, ‘that
this
book might have been different.’

‘Different? I must confess that I don’t even know what
this
one was about. I suppose I’m feeling a little left out.’ Rappaport hesitated, and then spoke more quietly. ‘You see, on top of everything, I used to edit his novels.’

Terri thought she heard the last vestige of widowed intimacy. ‘It wasn’t a novel,’ she said. ‘It was a biography.’

‘Biography?’ Rappaport sounded surprised. ‘Not autobiography? That
is
a departure. Who was it that Mark found so uniquely worthy?’

‘Laura Chase.’

There was silence. Terri waited, heard nothing. Decided to speak again, go for broke. ‘He had a tape. Of Laura Chase talking to her psychiatrist. He asked Mary there to hear it.’

‘I see.’ Rappaport’s voice seemed oddly detached. ‘What is on the tape?’