In the Night Room (11 page)

The Role of
Tom Hartland

PART THREE

16

“I don’t
know
what I’m going to do, Tom,” Willy said. “I don’t even know if I’m thinking straight. Shit, shit, shit, shit,
shit.
The only thing I do know, did know, was that I had to get out of that house, and in a hurry. You know, you’re the only person I swear in front of, but when I talk to you, I swear all the time. I wonder why that is?”

“You’re swearing because you’re angry. You’re not used to that, so you barely know how to act.”

“No, no, no,” she said. “I’m too shook up to be angry.”

Willy had called Tom Hartland as soon as she had locked the door behind the departing bellman. It had been one of those moments when her life felt pathetic and insubstantial, for whom could she have called but Tom? By some dire, remote-control variety of magic, Mitchell Faber seemed to have driven away most of the people she had once thought of as her friends. Her isolation made her feel like locking herself in the bathroom and weeping. What had kept her from giving in to self-pity was the thought that if Tom Hartland was the one person whom she could telephone at such a moment, at least he was one of her oldest and dearest friends.

“It’s more like shock than anger,” she said. “The only way you and Molly went wrong was, you were too easy on him!”

“Are your hands trembling?”

“Like crazy. I don’t know how I managed to drive across the bridge.”

“You’re way past anger, Willy. Sure you’re in shock, but on top of that, you’re furious.”

“I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS! THAT CREEP KILLED MY HUSBAND AND MY DAUGHTER!” She held the phone out at arm’s length and discovered that, by means of tiny internal adjustments, she could graduate from mere yelling to gorgeous, all-stops-out screaming.
“HE TALKED ME INTO ALMOST GETTING MARRIED TO HIM! THAT PSYCHO FUCK WAS SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT SAFETY!”

Willy gripped the receiver as if trying to choke it to death. Although she had not known that she was crying, tears covered her face. Her body seemed to be breathing by itself in great ragged inhalations and exhalations. She sagged over, letting it go on. Her hot, sparkly face felt as if it had been electrified. Tom’s voice leaked from the phone, but Willy could not make out his words. In every important sense, her life seemed over. She had nowhere to go. Pretty soon, an evil creep who had been intimate with every part of her body was going to be hunting for her. Willy felt irredeemably contaminated. After a little while she became aware that she was, after all, still breathing. She straightened up and brought the receiver to her ear.

“Okay, you’re right on the money,” she said. “I’d like to kill Mitchell Faber. But the problem is, I think he’ll probably want to do the same to me.”

“Willy, you’re going to have to explain all this stuff about killing people. What makes you think he killed your husband? Why would he want to kill you?”

“God, there’s so much you don’t know.” Willy told him about the storm, and the tree limb crashing through the office window. “When I went inside there, I sort of started to clean things up, and I saw all these photographs lying on the floor. Right next to them was this upside-down ornamental wooden box, like a fancy cigar box, that must have been knocked off a shelf. All those photographs were of dead people, and one of them was Jim. They cut his hands off! He was shot to death, and he was lying next to the car they found him in.”

“Do you still have that picture?”

“Are you crazy? He was
dead
! Please help me figure out what to do. I’m shaking all over, like I have a fever. I don’t seem to be able to stop. Giles knows I saw the picture, and Mitchell is going to be coming for me as soon as he gets off the plane.”

He asked for her room number.

“Room 1427.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I can
sort of
tell you what I did.” Willy lay on her king-sized bed, her arms folded in front of her. Tom Hartland’s sweet, serious face stared at her from a nubbly upholstered chair across from the desk.

Tom had been at Haverford when Willy Bryce and Molly Witherspoon were students at Bryn Mawr, and not long after meeting at a mixer the three of them had become close friends. In the summer after their junior year, they had traveled through France in a heady bubble of van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Loire châteaux, Rimbaud and the
Tel quel
poets, Gauloise smoke, intense conversation, sleepness nights, bistro meals,
le fromage du pays,
and
vin du pays.
One night after too much
vin rouge
they had all piled into a big bed on the third floor of a cheap hotel in Blois, but nothing much had happened except for fumbling and laughter and Willy’s silent observation that Tom Hartland’s kisses tasted of honey and salt. Tom and Willy had been reading each other’s work for years, and they had their first acceptances—he with Scholastic, she with Little, Brown—within the same two-month period.

Now, leaning forward in the ugly hotel chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled before him, he resembled the grown-up version of Teddy Barton, his brave and clever boy detective, steadfast, concerned, ready to be of use.

“For example,” Willy said, “I know I spent the rest of the night in my office with the door locked. For a while I couldn’t really
think.
I just paced around the room, scared out of my mind, trying to work out some kind of plan. On their way out the Santolinis yelled through the door that they had to come back the next day. All I really wanted to do was get in my car and run away, but I only had about thirty dollars on me. I needed more cash, because I thought I’d have to be wary about using ATM machines.”

“Good thinking,” Tom said. “If you’re going to run away, never use cash machines and throw away your cell phone. But flight isn’t a solution, it’s a delaying action.”

“You said the Baltic Group was the definition of evil!”

“They line their pockets in corrupt ways; they’re not a cabal of serial killers.”

“You didn’t see those pictures.”

“There could be a lot of explanations for them, Willy.” She turned her head on the pillows to give him a dark look. Tom said, “Of course, one of the explanations would be that he is a sick, homicidal fuck.”

“That’s more like it.”

“Another one would be that he was involved in internal investigations of those incidents.”

“ ‘Incidents’? They were
murders,
Tom.”

“All the more reason for Baltic to cover itself.” This time the look in Willy’s eye was of a gloomy intensity. He said, “One thing I can do for you is to play devil’s advocate here. But as you must know, basically I’ll do anything you want. However, I do have something to say to you, and you’re going to have to listen to me.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

“It’s important?”

“Yes. It is to me.”

“Tell me now.”

“When you’re through with your story, Willy.”

“Okay, but you’re a jerk. All right. I told you I spent the night in my office, right?”

He nodded.

“Have you ever tried to fall asleep when you’re scared out of your mind? Besides that, I realized that I’d trapped myself in that office, so stupid stupid stupid. I could have run out as soon as I saw the pictures, but after that, Giles would know I’d probably seen them, know what I mean? And he wouldn’t
dream
of letting me leave the estate until Mitchell got home. So I had to get out early in the morning, when those two creeps might not be waiting for me. Anyhow, at least I had plenty of time to think.

“Mitchell and I had our own checkbooks, naturally, but he had just had me transfer most of my accounts to the little bank in Hendersonia, and I had no idea what kind of cash I had available. What I wanted to do was clean him out, if I could, and take his money with me. I didn’t think I really
could
do that, but anyhow. It was worth a try, wasn’t it?”

“What did you do?” Tom asked.

“I managed to get out, for one thing. I had a little suitcase with some clothes in it, and this white leather bag, like a duffel bag, that Mitchell gave me once, that I was going to use for the money. It was like five-thirty in the morning. I went downstairs without seeing a soul. Then I got in my car and took off for Hendersonia.
They
weren’t following me; they weren’t even up yet. I drove into the Pathmark parking lot and fell asleep, out of sheer exhaustion. Just before the bank opened, I called and asked for Mr. Bender, the president. I told him my husband was out of town and I needed a lot of cash in a hurry, so what could he do for me? You have to understand, all this time I am barely keeping myself under control.”

“You were beginning to feel how angry you were.”

“And
scared
! I was just improvising, I don’t really know what I wanted to do.” She scooted backward on the bed and sat up with her back against the headboard. “So this Bender guy tells me that he’s been thinking of arranging a meeting between us for some time, and he’d like me to come in that morning.”

Willy gave Tom a look he could feel at the base of his spine.

“And the next thing I know, I’m
there,
in his office. Remember when I said that I knew I locked myself in my office? Well, that’s why I said it.”

“I don’t quite get you.”

“Tom, it’s just like yesterday. Don’t you remember
anything
? I lost two and a half hours between the Met and the St. Regis! And afterward, the whole trip back to New Jersey disappeared. I’m getting in the car, boom, I’m standing on our lawn in Hendersonia. There’s no transition—East Fifty-fifth Street, Guilderland Road, one right after the other.”

Tom’s gaze deepened.

“Weird, huh? As if I needed any more
weird
shit in my life. So the same thing happens all over again, and I’m not in my car anymore, I’m in Mr. Bender’s office, and evidently I just got there, because he’s waving me toward a chair and telling me he’s glad I could come in on such short notice.”

“It’s your selective amnesia.”

“It’s more like the in-between stuff never happened. Like it was just left out. Anyhow, here’s this portly guy with glasses and a bald head, and it strikes me that he looks a little nervous. Right away, I know—
Mitchell
makes him nervous. And the first thing he says to me is that he’s very happy I brought Mitch Faber back to his hometown.”

For it turned out that Mitchell Faber had been born and raised in Hendersonia. He had been on the local high school’s football team, and after graduation he’d gone to Seton Hall, but college had not worked out all that well, and in his second year he had enlisted in the army and qualified for Special Forces. His father, Henderson Faber, one of
the
Hendersons and a very, very important man in not only the town but that whole section of New Jersey, was happy to see him launched in a career in the military. Because Mitch had always been a bit wild. If truth be told, his father’s influence was the reason some of the boy’s escapades never went any farther than they did. Military service channeled his aggression and made a man of him.

What did the father do? Oh, he owned an auto-repair shop, but that didn’t cover half of it. Mr. Faber was a powerful man. He had a hand in almost every business in the county. In fact, Mr. Faber had been instrumental in founding the Continental Trust of New Jersey, the very bank they were in at that moment. Unfortunately, Mitch’s dad had died of a gunshot wound six, seven years back. Unknown assailant.

“His father was murdered?” Tom said. “Was he some kind of gangster?”

“Hang on,” Willy said. “We’re still getting to the good stuff.”

The bank was very grateful for all the business Mr. Faber and Ms. Patrick had brought to it, Mr. Bender said. Of course, with the gentleman’s connections to the institution a great degree of trust came into play, mutual trust he hoped he could say, and excellent customers such as Ms. Patrick, soon to be wed to the son of a sort of “silent partner” at the inception of that institution, could be granted a degree of latitude not permitted the general public. With that said, and Mr. Bender wished most heartily that his concerns should not be taken amiss, it would be less than perfectly responsible if the chief officer of a banking institution did not seek independent verification of financial arrangements said to be established between account-holding couples. For example. Let us say a significant sum of money has been transferred between accounts, and agreements exist to establish similar transfers of funds at regular intervals, said agreement to have been signed right on Mr. Bender’s desk here by one of the parties, then taken away by that party for the secondary signature to be affixed at a separate location. In such a case, Mr. Bender trusted that the question of verification would be seen as a simple formality entered into for the purpose of dotting all the
i
’s and crossing all the
t
’s.