Fidelity (18 page)

He said, “I hoped.”

After that, she was different-better, really, because she’d had to stop pretending she didn’t know that this wasn’t an accident. The sex was certainly better-spiteful, selfish, greedy. They stayed as late as they dared. On the ride home she told him that she hated him, and that she would do everything possible to be sure she and her husband never saw him again. But it was a long, long ride home, and by the time he turned to go up the driveway to her house, they were agreeing when they should meet again. It lasted a couple of years, and then it ended, by another agreement, when she was pregnant with her first child.

Ted looked at his watch. He could be sure that Caroline’s ordeal would last at least another couple of hours, and probably three. He took out his cell phone and dialed. This time it rang only once.

“Hi,” he said. “I escaped.”

He could hear the sweet young voice say, “I’m so happy. How long can you stay?”

It was good to hear somebody say things like that again.

Jerry Hobart lay on the bed in his hotel room. The lights in the valley below Universal City had come on, and the sky above looked black. He wanted to get back to sleep, but now that Forrest had called him, he couldn’t. It wasn’t the call, but the wave of deep hatred he had allowed himself to feel for Theodore Forrest that had made him alert and restless, and kept him thinking. Why had Forrest even called-to get Hobart’s assurance that he wasn’t goofing off? He must know that if Hobart had already killed Mrs. Kramer, he would have let Forrest know he was ready to get paid. Forrest was just calling because he was impatient, and he imagined that his voice would speed things up.

Rich people thought that telling someone to do something was the same as doing it. And Forrest was a member of the class that wasn’t used to waiting for things. They didn’t wait for anything they wanted to go on sale; they didn’t save up for anything; they didn’t wait in lines. Rich people had a bizarre, unshakable belief in the magical power of their own neediness.

Hobart had been awake all night rummaging through the detective-agency office, tying up the night watchman, and then scaring the shit out of Mrs. Kramer, and he had not yet caught up on his sleep. He resented the fact that Forrest had cut his rest short.

He had wondered why Forrest would worry so much about this detective in Los Angeles that he wanted him killed. Two hundred thousand for having somebody popped was probably not a problem for a man like Forrest. Very rich people had complicated finances, so it was easy for them to pay out money without having anybody else notice it was missing and wonder where it went. But what would induce a man like Forrest to take the risk? Paying a shooter was a risky way to solve a problem. If Hobart was caught or killed, then police would spend the next few months examining every phone call he had made or received, attempting to figure out the source of every dollar he had. They would look at every credit-card transaction to piece together all of his movements for the past year. They would do their best to make a list of everyone Hobart had seen or talked to in that period. Why would a man who didn’t have to take risks accept that one? The only answer Hobart could think of was that Phil Kramer had known something ugly and dangerous about Forrest that he might decide to reveal.

Hobart had assumed that whatever the dirt on Forrest was, it was only in Phil Kramer’s head, not hidden in his house or office or something. Otherwise, killing him would be pointless. But now that it was done, suddenly Forrest wanted Phil Kramer’s widow killed, too. That changed everything. The information Forrest was worried about couldn’t have been destroyed with Phil Kramer. It was still out there. And if it was, then there was no reason why Jerry Hobart couldn’t use it for himself.

Hobart’s impatience was growing. He needed to find out what the secret was. He already regretted that he had committed himself to finding out, but he had. If Hobart had simply stepped into Mrs. Kramer’s bedroom and shot her dead last night, then Hobart would never have a problem. But instead of killing her, he had committed himself to finding out what the hell Theodore Forrest was so anxious to keep secret.

Hobart sat up in bed. When he had broken the lock on the door of the detective agency, he had started a clock. He didn’t find the secret there, so he had to go straight to the Kramer house. He had cut the process short by trying to scare Emily Kramer into telling him, and now he was no longer certain that Emily Kramer even knew what it was.

Hobart had not done well with Mrs. Kramer. Wearing a ski mask wasn’t the same as being unseen. She knew his height and weight, had heard his voice, had seen his eyes and hands. Going to see the widow had seemed necessary to him last night, but it was a misstep. He had learned nothing about Forrest’s secret.

Hobart tried out various plans. He could walk away from the job and leave Emily Kramer alive. What she had already told the police by now was all she would ever tell. What was it? She would have told the police what he had asked her for: a piece of information, printed or recorded in some way, that was embarrassing or incriminating to a powerful man. Tonight, telling her even that much struck him as another mistake. She, possibly with their help, would already be searching the house and the office for anything Hobart had missed.

But maybe she was too smart to have told the police about that part of it. If she knew that the information was valuable and illegal, and that her husband had been hiding it, she would have lots of reasons to keep that knowledge to herself. And maybe she had known about it all along. Maybe her husband had let her in on his plans at the beginning. No, he decided. She really had not known what Hobart was talking about when he had demanded she give it to him.

Hobart had created a terrible problem for himself. He had set Emily Kramer-and possibly the police-to looking for the information. If Emily Kramer or the police found it before he did, then they would know that Theodore Forrest was the one who’d had Phil Kramer killed. The police would arrest him, or at least watch him closely and talk to him. At some point, Forrest would learn what had set off the search that led to him. When he did, what were the chances that he would not turn in Jerry Hobart?

Hobart could simply kill Emily Kramer now and collect his fee from Theodore Forrest. That would keep both Emily Kramer and Forrest quiet. But it would still leave Hobart open to an unknown risk. The police and Mrs. Kramer’s detective friends would search even harder for the piece of information.

If only he had walked into Emily Kramer’s room and blown a hole in her head while she slept. She would not have had a chance to describe him or tell anyone he was looking for something. He would have had a couple of hours, at least, to search the house and find the information. He might even have been able to stay in the Kramer house all day searching, then left sometime tonight.

Hobart stood up and dressed quickly. He had set off the search for the secret, and now he had to be the one to find it.

Ted Forrest looked at his watch. It was still early. The night was dark, out here away from the city lights, and stars were visible-bright, glowing blue-white dots on a sky that looked black. At one time, probably even after his great-grandfather had moved the family out to occupy the land along the San Joaquin River, there had been eight thousand stars visible on a clear night. He had read that somewhere, and it had stuck with him. Now that there was light and air pollution in the valley he supposed there were only a few hundred, but they must be the biggest, brightest ones, and they made an incredible sight on a night like this.

He opened the window of his car an inch. The air felt wonderful to him, and he pressed the button again to open the window farther and let the wind blow through his hair as he drove. At home he had felt as though he had a belt tightening around his chest, so he could barely inhale, and every time he exhaled, it tightened another notch. But now he felt free, and each breath made him feel stronger, younger.

Caroline had no feeling about the outdoors. The land was just a vast flatness that had no special shape or character or meaning for her. For their whole marriage she had spent as much time in cities as possible-San Francisco at least once a week, New York maybe four times a year, London and Paris and Rome whenever she could get any of her friends to go with her. He had never been able to understand how a woman who was so devoted to enjoying beauty could ignore what was in front of her nose, above her head and under her feet. She didn’t dislike nature or find it frightening. It didn’t exist for her. Color was the shade of a paint or a fabric.

The land that had come into his stewardship was mainly in the Central Valley south of the San Joaquin between Merced and Fresno, some of it in farms as small as a couple of hundred acres, and some of it bought up in contiguous plots. Lots of chances came up in the Depression or during World War II, or in recent years when farming stopped being something families could do themselves. Some of those pieced-together places were like reassembled Spanish land grants.

It was special land. Three-quarters of the vegetables produced in the whole country were grown in these valleys. The state was a big long animal in repose, the raised spine of the Sierras running down the middle of it. The west wind pushed the clouds from the ocean right into that wall of mountains so it rained, and the water ran back down in a set of rivers arranged at regular intervals like the ribs of the animal: the Yuba, Bear, American, Cosumnes, Calaveras, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Merced, Chowchilla, Fresno, San Joaquin, Kings, Kaweah rivers, one after another. The water made the enormous lowland between the coast and the mountains the most valuable farmland on earth. His family had been part of that for five generations.

He might not be raising crops, but he was part of the tradition, and leaving the land fallow, giving it a rest for a couple of genera tions, was almost an act of patriotism. He was protecting and preserving it. He was also keeping the level of air pollution in the Central Valley down, not contributing to the chemical runoff into the rivers, and even keeping the prices up for other agricultural corporations. And of course, the water the Forrests didn’t use had been going to cities while they had grown, and without it they wouldn’t survive. The southern half of the state was all and savanna and desert.

He drove into the downtown area of Merced, along a block of small shops. It was after nine, so the stores that sold china and women’s clothes and the hairstylists were closed, but the restaurants were just filling up. Forrest let his BMW coast into the turn at the corner beside Marlene’s Coffee and Sympathy, and found a parking space at the curb down the street just past a tall sycamore. He was far from a streetlamp, and the tree’s broad canopy threw the car into deeper shadow. As he got out he looked up into the night sky anxiously. In hot weather old trees sometimes dropped limbs, but he didn’t plan to be here long.

He took a couple of steps and saw the back door of Marlene’s open, and a small, thin creature appear. She stood under the light near the door for a couple of seconds, looking for him. He could see the shining honey-blond hair as she shaded her eyes and looked up the street. She began to walk toward him, but as soon as she was well away from the building, allowed herself to break into a run.

When she came into the deep shadows away from the glow of the commercial street, he heard her voice, a half-suppressed, delighted laugh. She took a little hop and threw her arms around his neck. She spoke into his ear. “What a treat! Come on and get me out of here.”

Forrest turned his head as he opened the car door for her, trying to be sure nobody was watching. There were still people walking on the commercial street, but none of them seemed to be able to pay any attention to one more couple getting into a black car on the side street past Marlene’s. Forrest started the engine and then pulled out.

Kylie said, “God, Ted. You are so sweet to sneak out of a dinner just to rescue me from barista servitude.” He felt her soft, wet lips on his cheek, then her left hand playing with the hair at the back of his neck.

He moved his head slightly to get rid of the tickle. “Put your seat belt on.”

She turned to face forward and slid back into the seat, then pulled the belt across her chest and clicked the buckle. “Don’t worry. There aren’t any cops to give us a ticket. Terry and Dan just came into Marlene’s for their coffee ten minutes ago. From here they go out to prowl those new streets up by the freeway entrance.”

“You know that?”

“Of course. They come in the same time every night.”

“If you know there are no cops, then the speeders and drunk drivers probably know it, too. You’re even more likely to need a seat belt.”

She laughed, untroubled, but Ted Forrest felt slightly uncomfortable. His voice sounded old to him, like a father or even a grandfather. The similarity wasn’t a coincidence. Her father was six years younger than Forrest, and her mother at least fifteen years younger. He glanced at Kylie as they passed under a streetlamp, and saw a remnant of a smile on her lips. Kylie. Even the name reminded him. When he had been young, there were no names like that. Girls had familiar names, like their mothers. Most had names from the Bible, like their grandmothers.

As long as he thought about Kylie instead of himself, he would preserve his good mood. Even in the scarce light pulled from the glow of the dashboard and the reflected lights from windows her hair shone, long and thick and alive, and her skin was milky-smooth. This generation of girls seemed to be different, physically. They had more muscle and bone, and no fat at all except rounded breasts and buttocks-shapes that made fourteen-year-olds look like designers’ drawings of idealized women. Just looking at girls on the street gave him hope for the future of the species, and Kylie was a prize, a grand champion, without even knowing it. That ingenuousness, the apparent unawareness of her beauty was one of the things about her that he loved. He knew that teenaged girls were not unconscious of themselves. Their most arduous study was given over to their own waistseyes-chins-cheeks-necks-hair-fingers-toes-legs-feet. But Kylie had already outgrown part of that and learned to take her looks as she took everything else, as a gift that she’d received years ago and never thought about anymore.