The Nicholas Linnear Novels (46 page)

“Well…” He felt a great weight about his body and an inarticulateness that obliged him to clear his throat and begin again. “Well, Gelda, what have you been up to now?”

The sharply delineated profile dissolved into sweeping shadow as she turned her head to look in his direction.

“Who the hell are you?” Even in anger there was a rich luster, a silkiness to her voice that made it seem as if he had spoken to her yesterday instead of several months ago. Even alarm could not diminish its effectiveness.

“Croaker,” he said, moving toward her. “Lieutenant. Remember me?”

“Should I?” The tone had turned aqueous, soft and languid. The air between them seemed to tremble.

“Maybe. I met you once before.” He stood over her now, not seeing anything in the twilight except the pale sheen from the whites of her large eyes. But he felt her presence acutely and it gave him pleasure to stand thus. “I interviewed you at the beginning of the summer regarding the Angela Didion murder; we talked about your father.”

“That shit!” Even though she spit it out, there remained an elegance to it. He heard her take a breath. “Yeah. I remember you. Big dude with a face like Robert Mitchum’s.”

His laugh was a brief bark. “How flattering! Thanks.”

“Don’t get cocky. His face looks like it’s waged World War Three. So does yours.”

He waited for a moment, then said, “Mind if I sit down?”

“You mean I’ve got a choice?” When he didn’t answer, he felt her shrug. “Suit yourself. This isn’t my house.”

“That’d be on Sutton Place, right?” he said, sitting down next to her.

Abruptly her head came away from the wall. “What the hell’s going on, anyway?” she snapped. “Am I going to be booked?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

But his hand, having dipped into his suit jacket pocket, was a blur and he was already moving. His left hand reached across the space between them. He grasped her wrists together, pulled. At the same time, he flicked on the pocket flash, searching the pale flesh on the inside of her elbows. He tried not to think of the softness of the skin here.

He let her go, sat back. “I could check the insides of your thighs, too,” he said softly. “Or you could tell me.” He had used a fair amount of pressure and her wrists must hurt but she made no move to rub them; he liked that. She had a great deal of pride.

“I shoot up through the eyeballs,” she said acidly. “You’ve heard of that, I’m sure. Leaves no tracks.” Her head turned then and her cheek lit up as a grillwork of gray and black fell obliquely across her face. She looked like a heroine out of a fifties’
film noir.
Some of the air seemed to go out of her all at once. “I don’t do anything any of you guys don’t do. Probably a good deal less. I don’t blow coke, for instance.”

He said nothing, sat beside her smelling her scent until she turned her head and she was in absolute darkness again. He felt like a blind man, wanting badly, irrationally to see her again. “Do you believe me?” Her voice had turned small and he wondered how much of an act she was promoting.

He decided to be honest with her; anything less would be useless and potentially dangerous. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I believe you.”

“Then I’m free to go?”

“In a minute.” He didn’t realize how gentle his voice had become. “Why the hell are you involved in all this?”

“What, you mean break my poor old father’s heart?” She laughed sardonically. “Come on, what do you want me for?”

“I’m just talking to you,” he said reasonably.

“Yeah, sure. In a police van, home from a bust.”

“That was your choice, not mine.”

She was silent for a moment and, though he couldn’t see her, he knew that she was studying him. It could all break apart now, he knew, and held his breath.

She laughed again, a bell-like sound, slightly echoey within the confines of the metal van. “All right,” she said softly. “I’ll tell you why I do it. I like it, it’s as simple as that. It’s fun to get paid to fuck. I’m an actress, a model, selling things, just like Angela Didion was. It’s all come-on, there’s no involvement.”

“Never?”

Her head tossed like a bridling horse and he saw a flash of light, across her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said truthfully, “with a woman.” She was thinking of Dare. “Does that shock you?”

“Not really,” he said. “Did you think it would?”

“I don’t know what kind of man you are.”

“I’m just your plain ordinary New York slob.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” She had hurt him and she knew it; she felt he had asked for it.

“What about the booze?” Croaker asked her.

“What about it?” He could hear her voice go hard as her defenses came up.

“Still hitting the bottle hard?”

Perversely, she felt herself wanting to tell him the truth, stopped herself in time. “Not so much anymore,” she said. “I’ve got my work to keep me warm.”

“No men?”

“What is this, twenty questions?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“I don’t want to call it anything,” she said shortly. “I want to get out of here.”

“I can’t detain you any longer.”

“You mean I’m free to go?”

“There are no charges.”

“Now I’m supposed to thank you?”

He knew it was over with; that he might just as well have not begun this at all. He felt tired and depressed. “You’re not guilty of anything. You’re free to go.” He deliberately used her phraseology.

Still she made no move to go.

He sat stiffly with his back against the wall, his buttocks jammed up against the joining of the bench to the wall. His wrists lay loosely on his thighs. He stared at his hands, could barely make out the pale sheen of his nails.

“What do you want from me?”

Her voice was so soft that for a moment he thought it might be a whisper from his own mind.

“Nothing,” he said. His voice sounded dead. “I don’t want anything from you.”

“In a horse’s ass.”

“All right.” His head swung around and he saw that she was staring at him. She blinked once and it seemed that she did so in slow motion. “I can help you, Gelda.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He knew then that he meant what he said, that it was not just his desire to probe her for information about Raphael Tomkin; he knew that he had been dreaming about her for the past two weeks. A current of electricity went through him and he half turned toward her. Her eyes seemed to be searching for something in his face.

“Just what it says.”

“I wouldn’t trust you if I were drowning and you had the only line.”

“But you
are
drowning,” he said softly. And then, after a time, “It doesn’t have to be like that. The booze and the pills and the—work.” He paused. “You could go away somewhere.”

“Go away!” she exploded. “Christ, there’s no place far enough to get away from myself.” She put her head back against the metal wall and he saw her soft throat again. “You want to know how I got my name? Gelda.” She said that last word as if it had a bitter taste. “I got it because my mother hated.” She laughed humorlessly, the first ugly sound he had heard her utter. “Oh, not me personally. She would never stoop to anything so personal. She was far too busy detesting the life which bound her like a jealous lover. Being so powerfully rich had been her one dream in life, her overriding goal…. Yes, I guess you could call it that: her goal. Anyway, she found it with my father. Found, too, that it was not what she’d expected it to be—not by a long shot. Oh, she had all the power she had dreamed of and all the money, but living with my father was pure hell and with every moment of their marriage he ground her down.” She sighed. “I think, in the end, it became a game with him, to try and see how much he could take away from her. Not material things, of course. My God, she had more than enough of those. No, it was in the area that matters most to my father that he denied her: in the mind. I suspect that if she had fought back, she would have eventually emerged bloody but victorious, as they say.

“But she would not. She wanted to hold on to her dream so desperately that she forfeited any kind of courage. She was my father’s slave, a slave, more accurately, to his wealth. She was a weak-willed bitch who must have loved the pain which my father inflicted on her. I mean she put up with it, didn’t she? Even after—” She stopped suddenly, putting the palm of her hand over her mouth for a moment. “Christ, what am I saying? And to a cop of all people.” She stifled a nervous laugh. “I must be out of my mind.”

His heart beat faster as he heard himself say, “What does all this have to do with how you were named?”

“What?” she said almost absently.

“You were going to tell me about your name.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.” She folded her hands one over the other. She rubbed them against her long thighs, back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm. “I really believe that about the last thing my mother wanted was a child. But my father, as always, insisted on what he wanted. And what he wanted was children. Strangely enough—or not so strangely”—here she gave an odd little laugh—“he didn’t care whether they were boys or girls, just as long as he became a sire. He’s old-fashioned that way; he feels it’s a sign of manhood.

“But my mother misunderstood him. She supposed that he wanted sons to carry on the Tomkin line and that anything else would be considered a failure. I suppose it’s a measure of how far she really was from him that she could have been so wrong about him.

“She was naturally ecstatic that she had given birth to a girl. So she named me Gelda. It was a way of getting back at my father without him knowing, you see. Gelda. Gelding. Get it? Sure you do.” She turned away as if from the memory.

“You could change it,” he said reasonably and for the first time she gave a completely natural laugh. It was quite beautiful, he thought. “I guess I’m just perverse,” she said. “I carry it now as a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“What’s it your business?” she snapped. All the warmth that, so soon, had suffused her voice, was abruptly gone.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll tell you the truth.” It was a desperate gamble; one which he had hoped not to make. He had no choice now. “I need your help with an investigation.”

“With what?”

This was it. “I think your father murdered Angela Didion.”

“So?”

It was not what he’d expected and he was momentarily nonplussed.

Gelda seemed pleased. “I see you’re speechless,” she said laughing. “Good for you. Did you think I’d say, ‘I hate his guts, copper, but he’s still my father’? Bullshit. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did kill her.”

“You mean, in your opinion, he’s capable of murder?” His heart hammered in his chest; this seemed like a gift straight from heaven.

“In my opinion?” She laughed. “Yes. In my opinion my father’s quite capable of murder. Laws, I remember, were not things for him to be concerned with.”

She had moved fractionally so that she was facing him in three-quarter profile and he could see her eyes and the hurt within them, deeply buried.

“Did you know about Angela Didion?” he said quietly.

“You mean that he was balling her? Sure. I was there one day when she walked in. She did it so you knew right away it was like she owned the place, you know?”

“Did you talk with her?”

She smiled. “We didn’t exactly get along. There was a kind of instant repulsion, as if we were magnets with the same polarity.”

“I thought you and your old man don’t get along.”

“We don’t.” She seemed quite close to him now, though he had not been aware that any shift had taken place. “But sometimes my father is impossible to ignore. That happens maybe twice a year.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he wants to see if I’ve changed any.”

“Changed in what way?”

“It’s none of—” The fire in her eyes died and she said, quite sweetly, “That I’ve given up girls. He can’t stand that in me. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I like them more than men.” She shrugged. “A shrink said that to me once. I walked out. I didn’t need to pay him fifty dollars an hour to tell me what I already knew.”

“How’d Tomkin come to know at all?”

“About me and girls? Oh, he found me at it one day on the summer estate on Gin Lane out near Southampton. That was after we’d sold the Connecticut estate; after Mother …died.”

“What did he do?”

“My mother was a suicide. He—”

“No, I meant when he found you and the other girl.”

“You know, even my sister Justine doesn’t know this part of it; I’d never tell her and, God knows, my father never would. He treats her like my mother always did. He dotes on her as if she were a cripple. She was the baby, after all. But she was slim and athletic while I was heavy. No matter what kind of diet they put me on and, believe me, they put me on them all, I never could lose weight. My mother never let me forget that; she made me ashamed of it.”

She paused. “I don’t know how I got on to that.” She wasn’t really talking to him anymore. “Anyway, my father found me with this girl. It was about a week before my mother died. Deepest summer. I had met Lisa on the beach—her parents had the estate at the other end of the Lane—her father and stepmother whom she hated. Our hate brought us together, I suppose. But we also loved each other’s bodies. Truly. There was a purity to our love that I’ve never been able to find again.

“It was so hot that day, even so near the water. Everything was lying limp and bedraggled. We were lying at the edge of my estate in the lee of a line of high hedges. We were on the border, clad only in our bathing suits. It was like we were naked, only better. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We took off our suits and made love. It was very beautiful.

“We were still holding each other wetly when I saw my father. I imagine he had been there for a time, perhaps from the very beginning although I have no true way of knowing.

“He saw me looking at him. His face was red and he seemed to be having trouble breathing. He scrambled toward us in a crouch, screaming. His hands flailed the air. Lisa was terrified. She grabbed her suit and ran off down the beach. My father hadn’t even looked at her.

“I lay on the ground, paralyzed. With fear, I thought. Now I know better. That first moment when I had looked in his eyes, I knew what he had been doing while he was watching us—it was as unmistakable as the mark of Cain; he made it that way. I might have been horrified but I was not. The idea made me excited; he had watched me make love and I had turned him on.