Necessity (19 page)

Yet he'd fooled her. Perhaps, albeit, with her subconscious connivance.…

After that there was no more ducking the decision. If only for Ellen's sake, the only thing left was separation and divorce.

Of course he wasn't going to like that.

She didn't see any method of approaching the subject by subtle misdirection; the only way to handle things with Bert was to put them out in the open. He wasn't tuned in to subtleties. You couldn't hint around; you couldn't ease up on him. To get his attention you had to hit him over the head.

She made the mistake of confronting him with it the night they returned to the apartment from the Armory benefit where they had shared the head table with the mayor and four Broadway–Hollywood stars and two noted philanthropists and their wives. Bert was in an elevated mood when they came home: his eyes were aglitter with a kind of vengeful satisfaction, for there was in him (she had discovered) a streak of childlike vindictiveness that was rewarded whenever he was treated like an equal by the sort of people who reeked of old money and spoke with Ivy League establishment drawls. Bert carried himself with a forceful kind of panache but there was no disguising the fact that he was a child of New Jersey, descended from lower-class immigrant Corsicans; he never pretended to be otherwise than nouveau riche but still it pleased him to dine not only with celebrities but especially with brahmins and aristocrats.

Seizing the chance to catch him in a good mood she evaded his embrace in the bedroom. “Let's talk.”

“Later.”

“No, Bert. Now.”

“Come on. Let's fool around.”

“I want to take the baby away for a while.”

He tried to absorb that. “Aagh,” he said, dismissing it. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I need a change.”

“For Christ's sake.”

“Don't dismiss it like that. We've got to talk about this.”

“Talk about what? You been smoking something or what?”

“We're going away. The baby and I. We're not staying here any more.”

He watched her very closely. He hardly seemed to be breathing.

She plunged on. “We're just going away for a while, that's all. Call it whatever you want. Say I want to get my act together. Say I need an ocean voyage. Call it a vacation. I need air.”

“Call it leaving me. Call it walking out on me. What the fuck are you talking about? You're my wife. Ellen's my daughter. What's this you need a change, you need air, you want to go away for a while? What's this shit? Who the fuck you think you're talking to?”

“Please don't make a bigger thing out of it than it is. I just need a little space to breathe for a while.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his shoes. He kicked them off and stared at them. Finally he looked up at her and she could see his disbelief and she realized her tentative approach had been cowardly. It would have been better to tell him the truth from the outset.

She tried to make up for it. “All right. Let's have it out in the open. I'm leaving you.”

He looked a little punchdrunk. She'd caught him so badly off balance she nearly felt sorry for him.

She pounded it home: “She's not going to grow up in a dope dealer's home. My daughter's not going to live in that environment. I can't allow that. I'm taking her away from here.”

A deep breath: don't run out of gas now. Keep going.

Finish it. “I'm sorry, Bert. You should have been content with the construction business. I can't go on living with the kind of thing you've turned into. I can't expose my daughter to that.”

He stared at her, his face closing up as she spoke—and then his continuing silence made her break out in a cold sweat.

She felt a growing desperation. “We can do this like civilized people or we can do it the hard way, you know. If that's what you want I'll have to get a lawyer and believe me I'll get the nastiest bastard I can find. I don't imagine any court in the world would grant custody of a baby girl to a dope peddler.”

She gathered up her handbag and the wrap she'd been wearing; still in evening clothes, stalking on high heels, she went toward the door. “We're going now. I'll let you know where to send our things.”

“Like hell you will.”

It wasn't his words; it was the low even rasp of his voice that stopped her.

He said to her back, “Just stay put. I need some time to think about this.”

“Fine. Think about it all you want. I'll let you know where you can reach me when you want to talk about it.”

“You want me to sleep in the other room tonight? Fine. All right. But nobody's leaving right now.”

She turned to face him. “You can stop me from taking her tonight, of course. You're strong enough. But I'll just get a court order. Is that what I have to do?”

He shook his head—more in bafflement than in visible anger. “No divorce. No custody. That's all. Okay? Understand?”

“You're having some kind of Corsican dream. Let's talk about reality.”

“I'll tell you reality. Reality is you don't take my daughter away from me. Reality is you don't walk all over me in a divorce court. You don't like it here any more? I'm sorry about that. But you made a bargain. You took my name, you took my money.”

“You can have them both back. I don't need your money.”

“Yeah. How noble. Okay. Reality, now, reality is you don't walk out on Albert LaCasse. And Ellen stays with her daddy.”

“Jesus, haven't you heard a word I said?”

“Sure I heard you. Let's discuss one simple fact.” He'd gone glacial; his enunciation became angrily precise:

“You file against me, you try to take Ellen away, anything at all along those lines, the whole thing comes to an end for you right then and right there.”

She gaped at him. “Are you actually threatening to kill me?”

“Kill you? What the fuck am I now, some kind of murderer? Christ almighty. Who said anything about killing anybody?” The big shoulders lifted; the expressive hands gesticulated, then subsided. He had control of his alarm now.

He descended into dark weary sadness. It was only partly an act, an aspect of his voluble Corsican theatricality; it was also a manifestation of genuine pain and loss. He brooded; he scowled; he searched for thoughts he could express.

And finally without heat he said: “I don't think you have any idea how many subsidiaries I run, how many people owe me consideration.”

He looked up. She was watching him, puzzled, not able to anticipate where this might be leading.

“I got a truck-leasing lot on Northern Boulevard and twenty percent of a cable TV outfit in Trenton, okay? I got a piece of a resort hotel down in the Bahamas. I got nursing homes in Staten Island I built and I own, you know that?”

He was sitting on the bed, elbows on knees; his hands dangled from the wrists. He wasn't looking at her.

“I got half of a little private hospital out in Amityville. What this leads up to, Madeleine, the point I'm trying to make, you've been acting very strange all of a sudden here and I think maybe you're having a little nervous breakdown or something, and if you were to go and see some lawyer or try to steal my daughter out of her home or anything like that, then I guess I wouldn't have any choice but to have you committed to a mental facility for observation and treatment. For however long it might take to straighten out your head.”

Then he looked up and smiled.

It was a warm smile full of bright pleased triumph: it was the most frightening expression she'd ever seen on a human face.

After that it was a question of opportunity and even more of courage.

Neither came easily. She realized belatedly how stupid it had been to forewarn him. Now the baby was always under supervision: there were nurses and nannies around the clock. No one prevented the mother from being with the baby; no one limited the mother's freedom of movement—so long as the baby remained in view of employees—but the unspoken rules were manifest. She never doubted Bert had meant every word he'd said, quite specifically and literally. He was entirely capable of putting her away in a rubber room somewhere and locking it for the rest of her life.

He would grieve, of course. He would be mortally offended. He would be the suffering injured party, filled with pain. As the little girl grew up he would explain to her how her mother had gone mad and tried to break up the family and actually tried to kidnap poor baby Ellen from her loving daddy.…

She moved into the guest bedroom of the condominium. Bert allowed that much. He had enough dignity not to wish to share a bed with a woman who reacted catatonically to his advances; and he had enough concern for appearances to keep his liaisons discreet.

Evidently he convinced himself she was making her way through the confusions of some temporary emotional aberration. Every second or third day they'd cross paths or he'd seek her out; on those occasions he would say, “Come back when you're ready,” and “Maybe you ought to talk to a shrink, what do you think? Might help you straighten yourself out,” and “Must be kind of lonely in that guest bedroom,” and “I'm not putting any pressure on. You let me know now, hey?” He had cast himself as the innocent, waiting for her to recognize her error—waiting her out with humble seraphic patience.

She was free to come and go. With acquaintances like Diane and with the few friends she had left from modeling days she kept up appearances because she didn't know what else she could do; but regardless of outward appearances of unrestricted freedom she was imprisoned—tethered to a chain leash that Bert might yank at any time.

Of course it was intolerable. You could go mad this way in no time at all. Soon if they put her in a mental home it wouldn't be a fiction.

The decision to escape was anticlimactic, really. There were only questions of when and how. She had to find, or design, a way to abduct the baby and to disappear so neatly that Bert could neither follow nor find her.

That was when she went to Newark and pumped Ray Seale about the mechanics of skip-tracing and disappearance.

After that she set out methodically to lay her plans.

They nearly worked.…

He may have forgotten she had a key to the front hall closet; more likely he had forgotten nothing but simply could not credit the idea that even in this estrangement she might steal from him.

The suitcase of cash appeared in the closet on the occasional Thursday or Friday, whence it would be taken to Fort Keene on the weekend. There presumably it would be handed over to a pilot at the airstrip.

Heretofore she had believed these clandestine shipments of cash to be headed for numbered bank accounts in tax-haven countries where they would be deposited in behalf of a union leader or building inspector or zoning-ordinance politician.

Bert had done nothing to disabuse her of the idea. She'd even confronted him with it once and he'd retorted with predictable rationalizations—that if you wanted to do business at all you had to do it this way; when in Rome, etc.

Now she knew better. The pilots were accepting that cash in return for shipments of narcotics.

You can go with the kid. Or you can go with the kid and a suitcase full of cash. It's Ellen's legacy—Bert owes it to her—and besides let's face it, disappearing with a year-old infant is going to be hard enough without having to scratch for a living at the same time.

So it needed to be a Thursday night when he came home from his banking rounds and locked the suitcase in the closet.

She was taken by surprise, therefore, when one Monday afternoon he came back from the office at half-past-three with Jack Sertic. She heard them in the living room; she heard the clink of ice in glasses and Bert's voice: “Here you go. Okay, we can leave about midnight, drive up there easy, no traffic, meet the plane six o'clock in the morning. Get back here by one, two in the afternoon.”

“I think you're right. It's safer than sending errand boys.”

“Aeah. Go on home, take a nap. I'm going to get some sleep myself. Can't keep the kind of hours I did when I was a kid. Meet me back here eleven thirty. I'll tell Quirini to put up a couple Thermoses of coffee.”

She sat in the dining room ostensibly reading the
Times
until she heard Jack take his leave. Bert's footfalls thudded along the carpeted hall. He looked in at her. “How you doing?”

“All right.” She returned his glance stonily, giving him nothing.

He gave her the benediction of a saintly smile—
Take your time, darling, I've got all the patience in the world
—and went away toward his room.

She decided to give it half an hour but the first twenty minutes took forever and that was all she could stand. She put her handbag on the hall table by the front closet, unlocked the door and looked inside. The suitcase was there. Locked—but heavy. No doubt of its contents. And the leather jacket with the diamonds sewn inside.

She hadn't planned it this way. She hadn't packed—not even a diaper in her handbag.

Hell, Matty, you can buy whatever you need. This is the bird in hand. Grab it.

Go. Run.
Now.

She left the closet unlocked, left the handbag on the table, left her coat on its hanger; no point arousing the employees with clues. Unnerved and empty-handed she went back through the apartment toward the nursery.

When she passed the kitchen door she saw Philip Quirini emptying the dishwasher.

The nursery had been a second guest bedroom before Ellen's birth. Now it was brightly wallpapered and stuffed toys were strewn everywhere on the floor and in the crib.

Marjorie was with the baby, feeding her with upended bottle.

Don't hesitate. Look natural. Come
on.

She swept right in. “I'll do that.”

Marjorie surrendered the baby and the formula without remark and retreated into the corner with arms folded.