Harlot's Moon (27 page)

A new voice came over the horn below — a man's voice, deep and intelligent and full of calculated compassion. This was the negotiator.

I'd heard this spiel many times before, so I didn't pay any attention to the words, just the tone.

The voice was disturbing Father Ryan. He kept looking over his shoulder, as if the negotiator might be scaling the tower all the time he was talking.

I was watching Jenny's face. She was trying to squirm her way out of the priest's grasp, but having no luck.

I said, "Father—"

She moved then. She wasn't trained. She wasn't even very good at it, all awkward, girlish zeal, but she did all the right things. Kicked him hard in the shin and then managed to get her hand around his wrist and push the gun away from pointing at me.

He fired twice, but the bullets disappeared in the tower opening to my left.

Jenny bit his arm and forced him to let go of her just long enough for her to spin away. There wasn't much room for her to run. She took three long steps toward me. I grasped her hand, pulled her over to me, and pushed her behind me.

Father Ryan was frantic. He still held his gun and had it pointed at us, but now he was looking behind him every few minutes.

Did he suspect the police were going to pick him off with a sniper? Did he think there was somewhere to escape to?

"You're tired, Father. You're going to hurt yourself up here," I said. "And there's no reason for that."

I took a step toward him. Then another.

"Stay there!"

"You're not going to shoot me, Father. You only killed Father Daly when he was going to turn you over. And you didn't mean to kill Steve at all."

He glanced behind him again.

I'd noticed that for every step I took, he backed up one. He was now no more than one or two paces from the edge of the tower opening directly behind him.

"You have to be careful, Father. You're going to hurt yourself like I said."

This was my best chance and I wasn't sure if he'd take that final step. I had to be ready to grab him.

"Stay there," he said again.

"Start down the stairs, Jenny," I said.

"I'll stay here with you," Jenny said from behind me.

"The stairs, Jenny," I said. "Now."

"She stays with us," the priest said.

"Go, Jenny."

She walked around me, glancing anxiously at the priest and his weapon.

"He's not going to hurt me?"

"Go."

She finally did what I wanted her to, and started climbing down into the darkness below.

I looked at the night sky in the tower openings. With the searchlights playing against the heavy cloud cover, the night was an eerie and unnatural gray color.

"Are you all right?" I called down to Jenny.

"I'm fine," she shouted up.

I looked at Father Ryan and then prepared myself.

Would he move instinctively, unconsciously, as he had done before?

I started forward.

"Stay right there!' he said.

But this time he didn't take a step back. He stood his ground.

"I want to help you, Father."

"I don't need your help."

I finished the rest of my step. "I might have done the same thing you did, Father. Maybe I wouldn't have been able to handle it, either, hearing those things night after night in the confessional."

I wasn't lying, either. How many stories about beating up black people or Jews or gays could you bear? How many stories of old ladies with crushed skulls, the few pennies of their life-savings taken by drugged-up punks? How many stories of children molested or murdered? Television has made us all witnesses to these acts, day in, day out. And the confessor has the even worse task of hearing of them in person. As a priest he could forgive; but as a man . . . Whether we want to admit it or not, we've all got vigilante impulses, every one of us. The thing is to control them . . .

"Let me help you, Father," I said. "Please."

I slowly put my hand out, in the most unthreatening way I knew how. For a moment, I thought he might take it but then—

He didn't fall out of the tower, but he did lose his balance and start to grab the side of the opening. I lunged for him, getting hold of his shoulder. But, abruptly, in an almost serio-comic way, fat Oliver Hardy doing a pratfall, his left foot slipped off the edge of the tower opening and he started to fall. I grabbed his wrists, concentrating all my strength in my hands, supporting him as best I could. I was afraid he might pull me over with him.

Rain sprayed my face. The searchlights blinded me as they crisscrossed the tower. Meaningless words barked from the speaker horn below.

I could hear the cops pounding up the stairs.

Would they make it before my strength gave out?

"Just let me go, Payne," Father Ryan said. "It'll be better for everybody."

"I can't do that, Father."

Footsteps. Pounding, pounding, pounding up the stairs. "They deserved to die, Payne," he said. "They really did."

"That wasn't your decision to make, Father."

"Maybe it wasn't, Payne. But this is."

He turned his wrists inside my hands. And then he was free.

As I'd feared, his sudden movement jerked me forward. I had to grab onto the rough side of the opening to keep from falling myself.

I didn't want to watch his fall, but something made me.

Some dark voyeuristic impulse, I suppose.

Down, down, down he went, falling through the fog stained red by the emergency lights.

He didn't scream, but they did, the people below.

They screamed a whole lot.

Before I left the church, I stood in the back and said a prayer. For who or what, I wasn't sure. I just kept thinking of what Steve Gray had said to me once. That all great religions have at their center the same tenets: mercy and charity.

I kept thinking about that all the way back to my apartment in the soft, silent rain.

A
fter we got Vic moved into the hospice, the three of us drove out to the small private airport I use.

Like Susan, Vic got the whole treatment — leather helmet, goggles, leather jacket, leather gloves — and he also got nearly an hour in the air on this warm sunny day.

Then we had lunch and did some last-minute shopping for things he'd need, and then we took him back to the hospice.

We walked him to the front door and Felice put her arms out and hugged him.

"You're sure a sweetheart," he said.

Then he looked at me. "Thank you for everything, Robert." In all the years we'd lived together, I'd never once shaken hands with him.

I thought of all those years I'd hated him, seen him as a buffoon who'd stolen my family life.

But I didn't see him as that any more. I didn't like him and never would. But I saw his decency now and his sadness.

I put my hand out. We shook.

"Well," he said, "guess I'll be getting inside."

"Remember," Felice said, "we're taking you out for dinner two nights a week."

He smiled with his store-boughts. "You don't think I'm going to forget that, do you?"

I took Felice's hand as we walked to the car.

"I hear Ellie Wilson is getting a divorce," she said.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"Your secretary."

I smiled. "I guess I should call the office more often."

I performed one of my occasional acts of gallantry and held the door open for her. Then I walked around to my side and slid behind the wheel. I was just firing up the engine when she leaned over and kissed me. "You did good," she said.

I started driving us home.

"Maybe I'm finally growing up," I said. "About Vic, I mean."

"Maybe," she said. Then smiled. "At least a little bit."

Then she reached over and put her hand on my knee and said, "I was really proud of the way you handled yourself back there, Robert."

"Yeah," I said, "I guess I was kind of proud of me, too."

Then I took her hand in mine and squeezed it.

"Thanks," I said.

"For what?"

"You know for what, Felice," I said. "You know for what."

And then we drove on home.

Murder in the Wings – a Jack Dwyer Mystery

B
y the time we reached the second act the audience was well aware of what was going on. Stephen Wade, the television star who was playing the role of the father in this version of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, was so drunk that he was knocking against furniture and quite often forgetting his lines. Between acts he had been given coffee and a quick walk in the cold, damp May night, but neither had seemed to help much.

I wasn't quite sure how to feel. Because this was the first really serious play I'd ever been in, and because my performance as the drunken elder brother, James Tyrone, Sr., depended so much on what Wade did, I was angry most of the time I was on stage. But then I'd look closely at Wade, at the matinee-idol good looks that had slipped into white hair and booze-loosened flesh, and I'd feel sorry for him. There was a grief in his blue eyes that overwhelmed me sometimes and I sensed a man destroyed and left empty.

Among the people at the Bridges Theater, staff and cast alike, there had been a lot of apprehension about how Wade, who had begun his career thirty years earlier in this same theater, would behave when he got here.

Well, for four weeks, he had done fine. From what anybody could tell, he stayed dry, his performances as impressive as anything we'd ever seen him do. On a couple of occasions he had asked Donna and me out to dinner, and we became friends of sorts. He always made her sad, his melancholy aura pulling her in, but he made her laugh, too. He was a great storyteller, and he'd known everybody important in Hollywood for the past twenty-five years. When the play finished its month-long run, I was going to take him fishing, up to a cabin a police officer friend of mine owned.

Then, he got drunk and came on stage that night and things changed.

A lot of it, I don't remember. I was aware of three things simultaneously—how awkwardly Wade was moving around the stage, how nervous I was that I was going to muff my own lines, and the steady undercurrent of whispers and snickers from the audience whenever Wade made a mistake.

Finally, it ended. The curtain came down and we all left the stage.

Michael Reeves, the director, was waiting in the wings. "Wade, I want to see you a minute." From the tremor in his voice, I could hear that Reeves was barely controlling his anger. He was six feet tall and muscular like a dancer. He might have been handsome if his swarthy face hadn't been so petulant. No matter what we did, he always seemed vaguely displeased. He never laughed except at somebody else's embarrassment.

When Reeves spoke, the whole cast stopped its quick flight to the dressing rooms. Much as Wade had embarrassed us, I sensed a protectiveness among the cast. Reeves was going to be very ugly.

Reeves came over and stood in front of Wade. "You realize you're fired."

Wade, still lost in a boozy haze, looked up and said, "I'm sorry about tonight. There's no excuse."

Reeves looked at the rest of us. "You see how he's going to try to get out of this? He's going to play the pathetic."

Wade, who was five-nine at best, tried to draw himself up with dignity, but he didn't have much luck. His shoulders slumped and his gut drooped. He was fifty-three years old and tapped out. He put out his hand for Michael to shake and said, "I embarrassed you tonight and I'm sorry." His voice quavered. I'd worked with enough alcoholics during my years on the force to know that Wade was very near the end. He probably needed hospitalization.

Reeves didn't take Wade's hand. Instead he slapped him.

Even above the noise the stagehands were making closing the theater down for the night, the slap sounded loud and harsh in the small theater.

"You sonofabitch!" Reeves screamed, letting his rage go. "This is an important play for me and you ruined it. Totally fucking ruined it!"

"Hey, Michael, down out a little, all right?" said Richard Keech, the actor who played Edmund. Keech had a suffering, almost pretty face wrapped in curly auburn hair.

"Yes, please, Michael. Let him go to his dressing room." This was Anne Stewart. Regal, slender, still a beauty at fifty, she played the mother with a quiet ferocity that had impressed us all.

"I don't think it's fair to pick on Michael. He isn't the one who's drunk." Evelyn Ashton, who played the maid, was twenty-four and ridiculously beautiful. Really. Since I'd met her I'd been playing a little game—trying to find a bad angle to her face. But there wasn't one. She had the gold silken hair of a storybook princess and gray eyes that were as luminous in their way as precious stones. Aerobics kept her body equally lovely. She had only one failing: she was obviously and painfully in love with Michael Reeves.