Except for the Bones (10 page)

“When I first started working part-time for Dancer Associates,” he said, “I got ten dollars an hour.”

She listened equably, placidly. Paula didn’t gloat. Neither did she anticipate victory prematurely.

“I’ll start you at fifteen.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll bill your time to the client at forty dollars.”

“Naturally.” She rose, smiled, began collecting the breakfast dishes while Bernhardt packed a picnic hamper.

K
ANE’S HAND WENT TO
the control console. He eased back on the power, changed the propeller pitch. They were flying through light turbulence, characteristic of this altitude, at this time of the year. Twenty miles ahead, Cape Cod began to solidify, a familiar shape emerging from the summertime mist.

Was he concentrating?

Could
he concentrate?

It had been almost exactly two weeks since he’d flown this same approach, at this same altitude, at this same speed. Daniels and Carolyn Estes had been in the cabin. They’d been dressed alike, in white slacks and striped boater shirts. She’d been breathtakingly beautiful. When he’d looked at her, touched her, Daniels had come alive, randy as a teenage stud.

But the next day Carolyn Estes had disappeared.

And two days later, in the darkness just east of Carter’s Landing, Jeff Weston had died, killed when his skull had cracked where the pipe had struck him. But he hadn’t died then. He’d still been breathing when—

“King Air Five Zero Sierra Romeo.” It was Cape Cod Approach, ready to hand him off. He pressed the yoke’s “transmit” button with his thumb. “Five Zero Sierra Romeo.”

“Contact the Barnstable tower on one one niner point five.”

“Zero Sierra Romeo.” He changed frequencies, keyed the radio again. “Barnstable tower, this is King Air Five Zero Sierra Romeo. Twelve miles southwest for landing with Delta.” He released the transmit button, adjusted the radio’s volume as the controller responded, “Zero Sierra Romeo, make left traffic for runway two four, report on the forty-five three miles out.”

“Zero Sierra Romeo.” Kane checked the altimeter, checked the airspeed, came back again on the power. As he entered the landing pattern he wanted a thousand feet on the altimeter, a hundred thirty knots airspeed. He glanced at Daniels, sitting beside him in the copilot’s seat. “Harness fastened?”

Staring straight ahead, eyes slightly narrowed, mouth tight, aristocratic chin raised, Daniels grimly nodded. Daniels didn’t mind the takeoffs, and he liked to fly, liked the views, maybe because he could look down on everything, not up. But he was ground-shy. In the boardroom, Daniels was king. But in the right-hand seat, with the ground coming up, Daniels was just another fearful passenger.

Fearful of what could go wrong on landing—

—terrified, probably, of what could be waiting for him on the ground.

But Daniels was right to bluff it out. There were only two choices: bluff it out, or fold the hand. And Daniels, give the bastard his due, was a gambler, a balls-out risk taker.

Eight miles out, two thousand two hundred feet, a hundred fifty knots. Once more, Kane adjusted the power. Then he tripped the intercom switch that connected him with the cabin.

“Ready to land, Mrs. Daniels?”

“All ready, Bruce.”

Double-checking, he twisted, looked back into the cabin. Yes, she’d turned her seat to face the rear. And, yes, he could see the harness tight across her shoulders. Millicent Daniels was a good passenger.

Kane glanced a last time at the rigid line of Daniels’s profile, then began the landing checklist: fuel on fullest tank, gear down and locked, flaps set, propeller pitch coarse. In three minutes, give or take, they would be on the ground.

Win or lose, they’d come back to the Cape. Balls out.

W
ATCHING KANE’S HANDS ON
the controls, confidence incarnate, Daniels felt the airplane bank to the left, turning to make their final approach. Within inches of Daniels’s hands, the dual control yoke moved to Kane’s touch; within inches of Daniels’s feet, kept carefully flat on the floor of the cockpit, the rudder pedals shifted. Ahead, the runway was coming closer—closer, rushing toward them at a hundred miles an hour. Now the wings rocked sharply, the airplane’s nose lifted in light buffeting. The yoke moved, the wings steadied. On the radio’s loudspeaker, the controller’s voice said something unintelligible: their call sign, followed by a short string of numbers. In response, Kane spoke cryptically into the tiny microphone attached to his headset. Suddenly they were over the broad white stripes of the runway’s threshold. The nose was coming up—and up. If anything went wrong now—if a gas truck should come out on the runway, they would surely—

A soft thud, a reassuring squeak of tires on the runway, and the main wheels were down. Slowly, gently, the nose lowered until the third wheel touched. Another perfect landing, right on the runway’s white center line, a Bruce Kane specialty.

“Very nice.”

Kane nodded, smiled briefly, then began flicking switches, adjusting knobs, talking to the ground controller as they rolled down the runway, slowed, turned off onto a taxiway. Over the loudspeaker, the ground controller continued to give instructions and answer questions, many of them impatient. Something, apparently, had gone wrong.

“It’s going to take ten minutes, at least, to get to the goddamn terminal building,” Kane said grimly, braking the airplane to a full stop on the taxiway. “Some asshole collapsed his nose gear when he landed, and they’ve got to—” He interrupted himself, listened briefly to the controller, then advanced the throttles slightly as the airplane moved twenty feet forward before stopping again.

“No problem.”

“Cape Cod on a Saturday in July.” Kane glowered at the corporate jet crossing in front of them on an intersecting taxiway. “It may as well be Coney Island.”

Making no reply, Daniels touched the buckle of his harness, about to release himself. He should, after all, go back and see Millicent, explain the delay.

But instead, in these next few minutes, sitting in this aluminum and steel cocoon, his free will suspended, his minute-to-minute fate in the hands of an anonymous voice on the radio, he would gather himself, prepare himself.

For most—for the vast press of faceless humanity—ten minutes meant nothing. For the masses, these minutes would differ little from the minutes just passed, or the minutes just ahead: lives of quiet desperation, Thoreau had said.

Yet, in minutes—in seconds—a bullet fired into an emperor’s brain could change history. In minutes, a stock market crash could begin.

In seconds, a skull could crash against the corner of a slate coffee table—

—A pipe could crash against the skull of a strutting, slick-haired, Saturday-night stud.

Accidents. Two accidents. Two lives, ended.

The woman—a woman whose name happened to be Carolyn Estes—had kept her date with death because, thirty years ago, she’d been born beautiful. Only that, nothing more.

The man—a man whose name happened to be Jeff Weston—had died because, the night before his death, he’d happened to be at a certain spot on the surface of the earth at a certain time.

But the two of them, dead, could topple an empire. The headlines, the final rap of a black-robed judge’s gavel, and the Wall Street sharks would begin circling.

For two weeks, underlying every thought, shading every movement, every gesture, the images had endlessly, remorselessly rolled: Carolyn, dead on the Persian carpet; Carolyn, wrapped in the blanket, an amorphous, unmanageable burden as he struggled to lift her into the Cherokee.

Followed by the other images: the surreal midnight landscape of the landfill, where he’d labored like a sweating, grunting peasant, conscious only of the sound of the blood in his ears, raging.

Followed by that terrible night, lying sleepless, sweat-drenched, trembling from the inside out, uncontrollable, himself destroying himself.

And, for all the nights since, the image of Carolyn’s decomposing hand protruding from the earth, turned up by the bulldozer’s blade. The image was immutable, a constant that would remain forever just beneath the surface of his consciousness. It was there now, this instant, the terror that never ended, the wound that would never close.

And then, the next day, the letter from Jeff Weston.

Followed, later, by the conversation with Kane, in the bar at Westboro. Kane listening to the proposition, the deal. Kane, eyeing him thoughtfully, the pilot’s face registering a bully-boy’s pleasure at the prospect of violence.

He’d gone from the bar to the waiting car. As he settled into the familiar rear seat, with its phone and worktable and bar and tiny TV, dressed in his pinstripes, with his attaché case open beside him, he’d felt confidence return. On the phone, Jackie reassured him that, yes, the deal with Kent Williams was alive, still on track. During the ride to Manhattan, he’d gone over the details of the deal. Never had he felt more in stride, more cognizant, more creative. And, yes, the meeting with Williams had been a perfectly balanced masterpiece: something for everyone, his specialty. At five o’clock Monday, feeling buoyant, young, confident, he’d whistled as he’d left the office. During the drive home, with plenty of time to change for Millicent’s museum appearance, he’d discussed the baseball standings with Chester. Solemnly, they’d agreed that, yes, New York was in desperate straits. The A’s, they’d agreed, were unbeatable, even without Dave Sanchez.

And then, in the garage, there’d been Diane.

A word, a phrase, a hot-eyed, incoherent torrent of words from a spaced-out, strung-out teenage tramp, and it had all come crashing down. Instantly the image of the body in the landfill, the hand exposed, had flooded his thoughts. Had Diane seen the damage she’d done? Had she realized how wounded he was, momentarily helpless, unable to speak, to react, to defend himself? As he’d watched her drive away, his wild, untethered thoughts had somehow fixated on Hitler, after Dunkirk. If he’d pressed his advantage, crossed the channel, Hitler would have won the war, ruled the world.

Just as Diane, had she stayed to fight, could have ruined him. One word to Millicent, just one word—another word to the police, just one word—and she could have defeated him, left him helpless.

Instead, she’d run. But run to where? To her father, in San Francisco? Had she—?

“Finally,” Kane grated as he released the brakes and advanced the throttles, sending the airplane forward another hundred yards before, once more, ground control ordered them to stop. Causing Kane to swear, say something cryptic to the controller.

Sending him helplessly back to the labyrinth of his thoughts: himself torturing himself as he remembered the confrontation with Diane.

But then, Monday night, there’d been the reprieve: Millicent’s museum party. Millicent on stage. Radiant. Next year, she’d said as they’d driven home, she’d certainly be elected vice president of the museum’s board of directors. And the vice president, she’d said, was always elected president.

Never—never—had he listened to her more indulgently. It had been six hours, altogether, from the time he’d watched Diane drive away until he and his glowing, preening wife had returned home. It had been all the time he’d needed to regain his balance, all the time he’d needed to tap into whatever unique wellspring gave him the gift of power, of dominance. When they’d made love that night, he’d never been better; never had Millicent pleased him more.

But the next morning, on his desk, he’d seen the phone message. The three words had been written in Jackie’s hand, signifying that the call had come on his “private private” line:

“Call Bruce Kane.”

Followed by the phone number of the house on Sycamore Street, on the Cape. Followed by a question mark, also in Jackie’s hand. Why, she was wondering, was Kane calling him on the priority line?

First he’d told her to hold his calls. Then, with a hand that trembled, he’d punched out the number.

Like all fateful pronouncements, the words were succinct:
“That guy,”
Kane had said,
“he—ah—died, last night.”

He couldn’t remember breaking the connection, couldn’t remember returning the telephone to its cradle. He could only remember suddenly feeling as if he were apart from himself, an out-of-body experience. He and the telephone: somehow they were disembodied, cast loose together in the void, aimlessly orbiting. Until that moment, the telephone was his instrument of empire, the magic wand that transmuted his will into reality—ultimately into hard currency. A few words spoken into the telephone, and careers had been ruined, fortunes had been lost.

How ironic, that now that same telephone could be the instrument of his own destruction.

That guy—he, ah, died.

Two bodies, one lying on his Persian rug, one lying in the dark of night beside a two-lane road. Both of them compelling him to return to the Cape, the gracious lord and his enchanting lady, doing exactly what they’d done during the summer for two years, nothing changed.

Anything else would certainly arouse suspicion. Followed by investigation. Followed by certain discovery.

Followed by disaster, the end of everything.

K
ANE SIGNED THE FUEL
chit: a hundred gallons of Jet-A and four quarts of oil, plus landing fee. Behind the counter, Patty Walters smiled at him. It was a mechanical smile, a mannequin’s smile, meant to reassure the airport manager, who always hovered nearby whenever Daniels arrived. The smile barely concealed the hostility. Last summer, it had been different. Patty had been different, and so was her smile. The second day after they met, Kane had taken her out to dinner. Afterward, they’d gone back to her place. They’d had a lot to drink, and he thought she was willing. But something had gone wrong. Badly wrong. The next day, she’d called in sick. The following day, when she’d come to work, her face had been bruised. A bicycle accident, she’d said. Five days later, her brother had been waiting for him when he’d landed. The brother was a football player, a fucking Ivy Leaguer. They’d gone behind a hangar. Five seconds, and it was over. A kick to the crotch, a knee crashing squarely into the pretty-boy face, and the brother had gone down, his nose streaming blood.