Eve's Men (12 page)

“You know, you don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know. I’ve quit dozens of times.”

“No, I mean blow the smoke out the window. I’m not that fragile.”

“Well, that’s refreshing. Most nonsmokers make you feel like a leper with AIDS.”

“Is that why you’re sitting way over there?”

“Only partly.” She pulled her jersey blouse away from her neck and fluttered it. “Remember, I’ve been in these clothes since yesterday afternoon.”

“Don’t worry about it. You look clean and fresh. You look great.”

Smiling still, she shook her head at him. “Charley, you’re too much. You better be careful. I’m going to want to take you with us.”

By then they were out of barren rock and chaparral and moving up into the piney area, where the homes were more expensive and isolated. And finally he saw the fork up ahead, its right lane leading down into the copse of scraggly pines while the other climbed straight up to Jolly’s place, towering in the morning light, its wraparound windows reflecting the sun down upon Charley and Eve with blinding accuracy.

Just as they were driving through the fork, taking the left lane, Eve gasped audibly.

“Oh God,” she said. “I think I saw something red down there, in the pines.”

“His truck, you mean?”

“I don’t know. It was just a glimpse. A flash.”

By then, they were well past the fork and Charley decided that stopping and backing up—edging downhill through the heavy road dust—would take longer than going on up the hundred yards to Jolly’s and turning around, coming back. Gunning the engine, he roared up the steep incline and pulled in at the rock-walled gate. And there he stopped. Straight ahead of him a cement-mixer truck was grinding away as workers directed a stream of wet cement down an attached sluice into a board-framed depression located next to the pool and almost directly below the wide second-floor deck of the house. As his eyes read justed from the sun’s assault, Charley saw for the first time that there were two men out on the deck, one of them Rick and the other Damian Jolly, dressed in pajamas and a silk robe. Standing there in the dry blaze of the morning sun, they were looking not at Charley or the great vista behind him but at the workers as they began now to smooth the poured cement with their long-handled bullfloats.

Charley threw open the truck’s door and was starting to jump out, intending to warn the two men to get back into the house, when the director suddenly went flailing backward, a piece of his head spinning off in one direction while the rest of him fell crashing through a large picture window just as the shot rang out, followed by Eve’s breathless, gulping scream. Rick mean-while was still at the balcony railing, just beginning to crouch, looking around in horror at Jolly draped over the sill of the demolished window. Then more glass began to fall as another shot sounded, and Rick tried to vault the railing but caught his foot and fell, belly flopping into the wet cement below and scattering the workers.

By then Charley was back behind the wheel and turning the truck around while Eve kept yelling at him to do just that.

“Let’s go! Let’s go! Come on, let’s get out of here!”

They roared out of the gate and headed back down the dirt road through their own still-unsettled dust. Charley’s mouth was spitless and he could feel his heart jumping in his neck as he maintained a death grip on the steering wheel, as much to keep his hands from shaking as to hold the truck in the roadway. Next to him, Eve beat her fists against the dashboard.

“Goddamn crazy cowboy!” she cried. “Goddamn him to hell!”

Charley passed the fork without even looking toward the stand of pines in which Eve had seen the color red. And not once as he followed the twisting, plunging road down toward the city did he let himself look in the rearview mirror to find out if a red pickup truck was following them. He didn’t want to see Chester Einhorn. He didn’t want to have anything more to do with Brian and his ruinous obsessions.

But even as he was thinking this, even as he tried to distance himself in his mind from what was happening, he could feel a terrible impotence growing in him, the conviction that his own wishes, his own will, simply didn’t matter anymore. Much as the steeply graded road was pulling him down and down toward the city, he felt a kindred force drawing him toward a future fashioned not by himself or chance but by his brother.

Chapter Five

When they got back to the motel, Charley and Eve found Brian stretched out on a beach towel, evidently having just completed another marathon swim. Because his eyes were closed against the sun, he didn’t realize that the two of them were there until Eve spoke.

“Come on, we’ve got to talk. You really did it this time.”

Squinting up at her, he started to say something, but she walked away heading for their room. He looked at Charley then.

“Why? What happened?”

“We’ll see you upstairs.”

Brian came in his own good time, stopping on the way for a drink of water at a fountain. When he finally arrived, closing the door behind him, he repeated his question.

“Well, what’s up? What’s the big deal?”

Across the room, Eve shook her head and turned away, her eyes filling.

“Well?” Brian said to Charley.

“Jolly’s dead,” Charley told him. “Chester shot him.”

At first, Brian just stood there looking at the two of them much as he had after Belinda’s accident, as if he were waiting for some sign that it was all a joke, a put-on.

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

In his mind, Charley still kept seeing Belinda as the car hit her, and now there was Jolly doing his weird back flip, taking the bullet. And Charley found it impossible to square the wrenching violence of those images with the face before him, his brother’s look of slightly amused consternation. Charley came close to hitting him, even bunching his fist and twisting slightly, planting himself. But Brian turned away, looking at Eve now.

“You’re not serious,” he repeated. “You can’t be serious.”

“It happened just as we got there,” Charley told him. “Jolly was out on the deck and Chester hit him from down in the trees somewhere. First shot. Your little cowboy’s quite a marksman.”

“It’s true, then?”

“It’s true.”

“You mean he did it? The little jerk actually did it?”

“That’s what we mean, all right.”

“I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. I mean, that he’d actually do such a thing. The man must be crazy.”

Turning, Eve came straight over to him as if she too were thinking of punching him. Instead she pushed her face right up into his. “Well, he did it, all right! In fact, he fucking blew Jolly’s head off! Do you understand that, Brian? Do you comprehend? Does it begin to dawn on you that this is no longer some kind of game? Jolly’s head went flying right off him, like a goddamn hat or something!”

“Okay, okay.” Backing away from her, Brian sat down on the edge of one of the beds. He shook his head in bewilderment. “Jesus Christ, it was just a joke. At the most, I figured Chester would go up there and hassle the little fag. Shoot out his tires or something. Nothing like this.”

“Well, I’m afraid he did a little more than ‘hassle’ the man,” Charley said. “About all you can do now is turn yourself in and hope for the best.”

Brian looked at him in disbelief. “
Turn myself in?
For what? I didn’t shoot anybody.” He turned to Eve for support. “It was just a joke, for Christ’s sake! Come on. Do you think I should turn myself in?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t think. I’m still in shock.”

“It really isn’t very complicated,” Charley told him. “If someone saw Chester up there, and they catch him, he’ll implicate you. And if he got away, the police won’t even know he’s in the picture. You’ll be their number one suspect. In fact, they’re probably already out looking for you. Your only sensible move is to get a lawyer and surrender yourself. With luck, maybe they’ll only charge you with malicious mischief.”

“Instead of what?”

Charley shrugged. “I don’t know—conspiracy to commit murder. Or accessory before the fact. Who knows—I’m not a lawyer.”

“No? You sure as hell sound like one.”

“One other thing,” Charley said. “Remember what you said to us after Belinda’s accident? That Eve and I were just trying to help you, and that it wasn’t our fault, what happened. You said you’d make sure we weren’t involved.”

Getting up, Brian waved his hands as if he were shooing flies away. “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about that,” he said, Eve and Charley’s problems apparently not all that important at the moment.

“I’m sure we were seen up there,” Charley went on. “So the police will undoubtedly want statements from us. Which means I’m going to have to get a lawyer too.” The thought of all that—appearing with a lawyer and being questioned by the police, probably badgered—so filled him with anger that he suddenly snatched Brian’s wet towel off the bed and sent it flying into the bathroom, where it knocked some plastic bottles off the vanity.

“Christ, what a mess,” he snapped. “What a talent you have, Brian, for fucking up everyone’s life. Especially your own.”

Brian took umbrage. “Hey, big brother, you want to just walk out of here and fly home, be my guest. No one’s begging you to hang around.”

“And if I left—” Charley was about to suggest that he would want to take his forty-thousand bail money with him, but the words stuck in his throat. And he thought, Even now, Charley Poole, the proper little Boy Scout.

“If I left, what would I do for excitement?” he said, settling for sarcasm over honesty.

Brian and Eve looked at him in puzzlement, evidently thinking he was trying to be funny.

“In any case, I’m going back to my room now,” he added. “I’ve got some calls to make.” At the door he looked back at Eve. “The lawyer I get, you want him to represent you too?”

Before answering, she turned to Brian, as if she would first need his approval or forgiveness. But he had moved over to the balcony doors and was staring out at the pool, oblivious of her.

“Maybe,” she said to Charley. “I’ll let you know pretty soon, okay?”

Charley continued to stand there for a moment, looking at this smart, beautiful woman who seemed to have everything, yet was content to consign it all to Brian, not unlike a Hindu widow obediently throwing herself onto her late husband’s funeral pyre. Charley wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, wake her up. Instead, nodding agreement, he left.

Back in his room, Charley put in a call to Donna but was told that she was out with a client.

“A real biggie, Charley,” said Rose Biaggi, who once had been his secretary. “A mansion. The client actually said that. He said he wants a mansion, no less.”

“Well, that’s nice, Rose, but keep after her anyway. I need to talk to her. Also get Ray Henley for me. Him or his son. I need them to recommend a lawyer out here.”

“Will do, boss. But why? Are you okay? Is everything all right out there?”

“I’m fine, Rose. Just a little family matter, that’s all. But keep on it till you get them, okay? I’ll just be sitting here, wondering what to do with my thumb.”

Rose laughed. A bawdy woman, she’d had a hard time adjusting from Charley to Donna, who ran a much tighter, more proper ship. “Well, in that case, I’d better hurry,” she said. “Bye now.”

In actuality, Charley was not sitting but lying back on the bed. And he was feeling sicker by the moment, his adrenaline output evidently having returned to normal. The shooting of Jolly—the fear and worry it induced—had combined with his hangover and lack of sleep to make him feel as if he had a bad case of influenza. His body ached with tension; his head pounded; his mouth and throat were parched; vomiting and diarrhea seemed just around the corner.

His anger at Brian was absolute. Brother or no, at the moment he hated the reckless bastard. And he kept telling himself that if only he had listened to Donna and stayed at home, if only he had wired Brian the final contract payment instead of flying out and playing Big Brother to the Rescue, then he wouldn’t have been lying here in the beastly Goodland Motel, sick with hangover and dread; he wouldn’t have acquired a new forty-thousand-dollar mortgage, nor would he have permanently assigned three-quarters of his brain to the task of woolgathering about Eve Sherman.

Donna’s good sense hadn’t stopped there either.
You can’t help him
, she’d said.
He’s been a screwup all his life
. How right she was. Only now the screwups were matters of life and death. And poor old Charley Poole would soon have to be pleading his innocence to police and prosecutors. At the thought, he shivered and felt his gorge rise, which made him wonder if he might not have the flu after all.

Picking up the remote, he turned on the television and began to surf through the channels, looking for a newscast. He figured that there probably had been a bulletin earlier, as soon as the stations learned of the incident. But now there was nothing except talk shows and soap operas and especially commercials: plump, hairless infants pushing diapers and tall, hairless black men hawking sport shoes and soft drinks while all the beautiful young women peddled everything else.