Stone 588 (55 page)

Calmly, Wintersgill told her, "The account in Liechtenstein that it went into is mine."

Oh, so that was it, Libby thought. Wintersgill's conscience was chattering and he was there to unload, needing her to forgivingly wipe his most recent misdemeanors from his brow. No doubt this was a result of the way she had laid him bare yesterday. Pity she wasn't in the frame of mind to skin him a bit. He'd caught her at a good time. All she wanted was to be rid of him, not let him spoil her night. Magnanimously, she changed the subject. "Did you by chance look into getting that Whistler portrait from Brooke Edgerton's estate?"

The question passed through Wintersgill. He didn't believe her reaction. It exemplified how devious she was. No matter, he'd get her to cooperate. From his sweater pocket he brought out the red kidskin pouch. He undid its drawstrings and spread its mouth and poured from it into his cupped hand the twelve Russian diamonds. He watched Libby's eyes narrow, heard her breathing catch, knew he had reached her.

During the next few moments Libby realized what, up to now, she'd been too self-involved to see.

The knots behind the composure of Wintersgill's face.

The cinching knots of madness.

She was sure of it. That was his reason for being there. He'd snapped, was deranged, and had chosen her to reveal it to. She would have to be extremely careful with him, not to tighten those psychotic knots more or cause them to become uncontrollably unraveled. She felt fright emptying her stomach, transmitting to her every pore and nerve end. Don't let it show, she warned herself. But what should her attitude be? Could a single wrong word set him off? She believed so. She had to get him out of there somehow. She needed help. The electronic button to summon help was on the side table, but her hand told her it would be unwise to suddenly reach for it.

Wintersgill jiggled and tossed up the diamonds, tauntingly. They clicked together and sent flashes into one another, reciprocally intensifying their brilliance. "As you see," he said in that same calm tone, "your diamonds weren't lost in the Townsend burglary."

"Marvelous!"

He sat forward, held out his hand.

Was he offering her the diamonds? She cupped her hands together to receive them. For a long moment he was ambivalent about what to do, and just when she was sure he was going to drop them into her hands, he curled his fingers around them possessively and stuffed them and the pouch into one of his sweater pockets.

Libby eliminated the awkwardness of her empty hands by having them pour a glass of the wine for him. While doing so she remembered aloud, as though exemplifying her thoughtfulness toward him, that he preferred a high grown white such as this over most reds, and it was he who had introduced her to the Swiss vintages. "Over the years there have been so many things like that," she exaggerated. "I don't think you realize, Thomas, what an influence you've had on me."

When he genteelly accepted the compliment and the glass of wine, smiled softly, and said a credible thank-you, Libby thought perhaps she'd been wrong about his mental state. She'd allowed her imagination to run away with her. This was the same Wintersgill as ever, acting a bit out of pattern, admittedly, but didn't everyone have their spells of that? She raised her glass and with a confident voice from the first syllable recited a toast that he would know from having heard it before as one of the ones she reserved for meaningful intimate occasions. It had to do with the longevity of everything beautiful.

He drank to that.

Over the rim of her glass, careful not to be caught staring, she searched his face and saw the knots still there. If anything, they were tighter, more pronounced, bunched up particularly in the flesh over his cheekbones and along his neck. The sinews of his neck stood out as though he were holding up an extreme weight.

Another wave of fright passed through her. It was all she could do to keep it from transforming into panic.

Wintersgill didn't help with his talk about Townsend. He sat there and, in an almost chatty manner, related why Townsend had been murdered, told how the twenty million in Liechtenstein and the fifteen million in Russian diamonds fit in. He made it sound as if it was an opportunity that only a fool would have let pass. Everything about it, as he saw it, was simply feasible, a good piece of business.

Libby had always felt there was something smelly about Townsend's death. Townsend was too much of a clawer for suicide, and the notion that he'd slipped on the wet marble floor and gone over was, in Libby's opinion, absurd. She hadn't, however, made anything of it except dinner-table talk. After all, Townsend wasn't anyone that she held dear, not a person of quality by any means. He was a merchant, a purveyor, and a procurer as well. Give him a rest in peace, if that was what was called for, and let it go at that. It had never once occurred to her that Wintersgill was connected with the Townsend mess, although now it seemed obvious.

Murderer.

Which brought Libby to the terrifying question: Why was he divulging it to her? Surely not because he was in need of a confidante. She would, she knew, have to be more femininely resourceful than she'd ever been in her life, reach down into herself for the precise sort of charm, say every right word, convince him.

She began by getting his eyes with her own, holding them. It was difficult for her to soften her facial expression but she managed, and purposely slow, degree by degree, taking at least a full minute, she increased her smile and the fondness in it. "I was dreadful yesterday, wasn't I?" she said with some contrition.

Wintersgill agreed with a single definite nod.

"When I left the club I kept looking back and feeling sorry. Several times I was on the verge of telling Groat to turn around and take me back ... to you . . . but I thought by then you would probably be gone. So I had to suffer through the evening trying to distract myself. I was a sulk over dinner and so fidgety at the theater that the man seated behind me complained. Imagine."

It seemed to her that he was hanging on her words. She was encouraged.

"It was all my own doing, of course. I couldn't have a thought without it being crowded by the picture of you somewhere, wounded, and I the disconsolate inflicter. Oh, God, if only we could take back into our throats words that should have been left unsaid, unheard. Impetuous defensive words that just come out, by habit more than anything else." She lowered her eyes, slightly quivered her lashes. "Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Do you?"

"Yes."

She contrived a small, self-conscious laugh. "I'm afraid I'm not very good at apologies ... or asking for . . . second chances." As though to mask the nervousness brought on by such an admission she took a cigarette from the bronze and crystal box on the table. She tamped it on the back of her hand, tamped it again and again, pretending that an important thought had drifted her off from what she was doing. No doubt read by Wintersgill as a thought of him. After a moment she simultaneously brought the cigarette to her lips and sat up very straight in the chair. She stretched catlike, bowed her spine, and flexed her shoulders back as though they were wings. There was, she knew, a promise of more active passion in such suppleness and, as well, she was quite aware of the way it caused her breasts to thrust and her nipples to punctuate the fine cotton of her pajama top.

She reached for the table lighter.

The heel of her hand pressed several of the buttons of the signaling device. There! It was done and she was certain Wintersgill hadn't noticed. Soon plenty of strong-armed help would arrive and she'd tell them to throw this idiot out— sans her diamonds. There was always help on duty just down the hall. Fane or Hinch or someone. On the average it took them only thirty seconds to get to her. She'd timed them on occasion and she was certainly timing them now, calculating that an inhale and exhale of her cigarette took seven seconds.

Well over thirty seconds passed, then more than a minute. Where the hell were they? Was it possible the signaling device was on the blink? Unlikely, inasmuch as it had been working less than a half hour ago when she'd ordered dinner. She was almost certain she'd pressed the buttons firmly enough. The help was fucking off. She'd discharge the lot when she got out of this. Automatons such as they were a dollar a dozen. Damn! Why didn't they come? Until they did she'd have to carry on with this ridiculous love-humbled role. Wintersgill seemed to be growing agitated.

"Thomas," she said as though it were pleasant for her to form the name, "do you remember telling me years ago that you believed I resembled the actress Madeleine Carroll?"

"I do."

Actually, the resemblance had been commented upon by numerous people at various times. "It was, as I look back on it now, one of the sweetest compliments anyone ever paid me. I've never forgotten it. But lovelier than Madeleine Carroll, you said, and I was unable to just accept it, had to think it was merely a blandishment. I don't suppose you'll ever say that again or have reason to, just as I suppose you'll never ask me again."

"Ask you what?"

"To marry you."

No response from him.

Libby believed that if she could get him to again ask her to marry him she would accept enthusiastically and be on safe ground. Why should he ask for a future and then harm it? "Serves me right," she told him, making her lips into a pouty moue, a little artifice that had gotten her her way countless times. Someone, a Frenchman whose name was as forgotten as a meal, had told her that expression on her mouth was like a proposal for oral sex. "I know," she went on, "you're going to make me do penance for all the times I've disappointed you. I beg of you, please, Thomas, don't put me through all those punishing traces."

He stood abruptly.

She believed he would come over to her, to eat from her hand, but he just stood there and again studied the various aspects of the bedroom in a selective manner.

She got up and went to him, taking her wine goblet with her. Standing well within the prospect of an embrace, she told him, "We could be married in Saratoga during the summer meeting. It will be terribly warm there but we won't mind. Everyone who is anyone will want to celebrate us. Think of it. Besides, there's a Secretariat colt going up for sale that I want . . as my wedding gift to you."

She beseeched with her eyes, tried to will him with her eyes, offered the silence into which she expected he would place his compliance. She believed she saw the knots in his face slackening. She heard his breathing and reasoned that the cause of his rapid, shallow breaths was her closeness. She heard him wet the inside of his mouth and swallow. She thought how much she hated him.

She transferred the wine goblet to her other hand. The cabochon sapphire she had on hit the rim of the crystal goblet, causing a resonant little ring.

The sound flung open a gate in him, and immediately his mind was overrun.

The back of his right hand lashed across Libby's face, snapping her head around with such force that the rest of her body had to spin with it. Her balance was lost for a moment, but the hard side of an intricately lacquered armoire standing against the near wall kept her from going down.

She'd never in her life been struck.

The right side of her face felt scorched, but that was not as painful as the abasement of it. Her reflexive impulse was to protract claws and attack.

Instead, she made a dash for the door. Was within inches of reaching the ornate knob when Wintersgill got her from behind by her hair, yanked her back with such suddenness that it felt as though her scalp was torn.

She screamed obscenities.

He flung her across the room.

Her arms, flailing for balance, swept precious possessions from the marble surface of a console. She went sprawling to the floor and at once began a scurrying crawl, like some startled, scuttling sea creature, trying, it seemed, to gain the protection of the crevice beneath the bed. However, what she was really going for was the .32 caliber automatic pistol she kept in one of the encoignures that flanked her bed. She got the elaborate marquetry cupboard door of the encoignure open, got the pistol in her grasp.

Wintersgill's hand clamped around her wrist. He wrenched her slender wrist as he would a branch he was tearing loose. He must have broken it, for her hand flopped useless, unable to hold the pistol, which dropped to the floor.

He clutched and twisted the front of her pajama top, lifted her upright by it. He was surprised how extraordinarily frail she seemed to him, practically weightless.

She heard her own screams. She cowered her face in the crooks of her elbows.

He tightened his right hand into a hard fist. Drove it full force into the pit of her stomach, doubling her over, cutting off her scream.

She could not breathe. Her windpipe felt bound. It was as if the blacks of her pupils expanded beyond the limits of her eyes as she lost consciousness.

Wintersgill continued to beat her. He held her up and smashed her face with his fist again and again, until the silicone implant that had composed her perfect chin showed whiter than bone through the split flesh. Until her splendidly shaped nose was laid open on her cheek.

Even after she was dead he went on beating her, splattering himself with her blood. Finally he stopped, stepped back, and blamed her for his being out of breath.

He tore the pajamas from her and lifted her dead weight to the bed. Pulled on her and arranged her so that she lay face up straddling the comer of the bed, her limp legs falling left and right of the comer. The soft mass of her pubic hair was offered up, floss on a mound. He knelt between her legs, ran a finger through her pubic hair, combed through it, and parted it in several places with his fingers, his face close down to see what he was doing.

From his second sweater pocket he brought out his straight razor, his ancestral razor. He opened the blade to its best angle. Stretching the skin of her mons with the fingers of his free hand, he applied the cutting edge.

There was a crackling that would have been almost inaudible under ordinary circumstances, but was now like loud electric static, as the razor shaved a three-inch-wide swath down the left section of her mons. The shorn skin was whiter from having been protected.