Voices in the Dark (30 page)

“You’re good,” he said. “You’re better than anyone.”

“I’m glad you see that. From now on, you keep your hands off my daughter, and I’ll do what I can to keep Bodine’s off me. Deal?”

“Please,” he said. “Get out of my room.”

• • •

May Hutchins took time doing her face, muting the liner around her eyes, adding peach to her cheeks. Her lips, brightly painted, were a careful flame. Hearing sounds, she gave a final look at herself and stepped out of the bathroom. Downstairs, she gave a little screech and turned on her husband with anger.

“You scared me half out of my wits!”

“Who’d you think it was?” Roland said. “I made plenty of noise.”

“You didn’t make enough.” The anger disguised anxiety. “What are you doing home?”

“Can’t I come home if I want? What are you all fixed up for?”

“I like to look nice. That a crime? I thought you were still on the Stoneham job.”

“Job’s finished.” He washed his hands at the sink. Clean white coveralls gave him the appearance of a milk bottle. May imagined tipping him upside down and pouring him down the drain.

“I suppose you want something to eat.”

“No,” he said. “I’m going to lie down for a while.”

Frustration joined her anxiety. “What’s the matter? You sick?”

“I’m fine. Can’t I take a nap if I want?”

He stretched out on the sofa in the parlor, his shoes off. She waited a few minutes and then hurried upstairs and used the bedroom phone. Her voice was low and peremptory and blew hot and cold while her eyes counted age spots on her arms, too God-damn many. Replacing the receiver, she assigned blame for her personal predicament on the way the world is run.

Her great-grandfather, fumigated and deloused in Liverpool, was thirteen days in steerage coming to America, where he was turned back at Ellis Island. His voice, so the story went, was shrill and one eye rolled, which put off the doctor, who promptly rejected him as a mental defective. A year later, smart bugger that he must’ve been, he entered the States through Canada and found work in an apple orchard in Bensington. And here she was more than a century later, sitting on the edge of a bed like a cow in heat afraid to moo.

She picked up the phone, punched out the same number as before, and said, “Meet me at the library.”

• • •

Regina Smith stood in a wide window and looked out at the pool. Patricia and Anthony, wearing nearly nothing, were lolling on chaises, laughing. Anthony’s laughter was not altogether natural, nor was the expression on his face when he rose from his chaise as if someone had cued him, freed him from a chain.

Regina watched him hover over her daughter and press down with his fingertips. Patricia, responding, opened and bloomed, the merest material holding her tits together.

Fists clenched, Regina saw him insinuate his hands over Patricia the way she had manipulated Bodine’s over herself.

Slowly Anthony looked up and locked eyes with her. He was mocking and challenging her all at once.

An ice pick in her heart, she stood frozen. Her vision blurred.

When she could focus again, Anthony was perched on the diving board and lobbing a kiss to Patricia. Then he seemed to lob one at her, which put a second pick in her heart.

She stepped back. The skirmish was his. She conceded it without a second glance.

• • •

Chief Morgan, beside himself, made a third visit to the Gunner house and came upon a BMW parked in the drive. Harley Bodine was collecting the newspapers from the stone steps. Morgan slipped out of his car and approached him with a casual step, the casualness forced. “How are you doing?” he said.

“I’m doing fine, Morgan. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for them. Where are they?”

“If they wanted you to know, I’m sure they’d have told you.”

Stepping closer to him, Morgan said, “I want to know where Mrs. Gunner is.”

“It’s not my place to tell you.”

“I think you’d better.”

Bodine’s smile was faint and indulgent, that of a man with the upper hand. “Someone seems to have tipped Mrs. Gunner over the edge. We suspect it was you.”

“What are you saying?”

“She had a nervous breakdown, in the course of which she assaulted her husband.”

“I don’t give a damn about him, I want to know about her.”

“Isn’t Kate enough for you?”

Morgan let that pass. He had no choice. “Tell me where Mrs. Gunner is.”

“It’s not a police matter, strictly domestic.”

Morgan grabbed the front of Bodine’s shirt, crushing up the tie with it. “Tell me!” he said, panic rising in him, as if all facts were imperfect and primed to create only confusion.

“Take your hands off me,” Bodine said with utter disdain and cold superiority.

Morgan let go.

Bodine smoothed his shirt, checked buttons, and straightened his tie. His voice unaffected, he said, “Mr. Gunner is recovering from stab wounds at a private clinic. Get the picture, Morgan? Best thing you can do is lie low, though it probably won’t help. I’ll be surprised if Mr. Gunner doesn’t tell me to bring suit against you and the town.”

Morgan watched him shift the newspapers and lift a key from a pocket. The key was to the front door. “You’re his lackey, aren’t you?”

“Gratuitous remarks like that don’t help your cause. Don’t you know the deep shit you’re in?”

“I think you and Gunner have had business with Dudley. You remember Dudley, don’t you?”

“Quite well, and yes, your kind of mind would eat up his garbage.”

“I think you had your son killed. And Gunner his daughter.”

“How criminally stupid you are.”

Morgan watched him key open the door and then looked away. The day was tilting toward evening. A single dark cloud looked as if it had been hammered into the sky. His thoughts were of Beverly Gunner. Where was she? Bodine pushed open the door.

“I’m curious, Morgan. Don’t you have a life of your own? Yours so empty you have to get into others'?”

14

THE SAME AMBULANCE THAT HAD TAKEN PAUL GUNNER AWAY brought him back four days later, though the doctor had wanted him to stay longer. His color was off, his strength lacking, and pain remained throughout his upper body. The same attendants who had lugged him out assisted him in. Harley Bodine greeted him. Two Hispanic women who had worked part-time at the house were now full-time. A male nurse was there to monitor him around the clock. The nurse, who had a serene face and arms like a wrestler’s, shifted him into the hospital bed that had been set up downstairs, a room near his study.

Gunner said, “I want the boys back.”

“This afternoon,” Bodine promised.

“They’ll have to know what their mother did. I don’t want her back in this house. She’s homicidal.”

“She’s comfortable at Hanover House.”

Gunner licked his lips, which were dry, and through a bent glass straw sipped orange juice the nurse had provided. “I’m thinking of moving to California, Palm Springs. Get in touch with a real estate agent there.”

“What about this house?”

“Put it on the market.”

“The market’s soft.”

“Not for a house like this. Not for money people.” Abruptly he lifted an arm, which he shouldn’t have done. The pain was sharp. “No VCR on the TV!”

“We’ll get you one.”

The climate of his body affected his moods. His thumb mashed the button of a buzzer attached to a cord. “Where the hell is he?” The nurse, briefed on his moods, brought him cognac. A taste warmed him. “What the hell was that?” A burst of rain had come while the sun shined. Light foamed the windows. “I’m jittery. Any minute I expect to see her with those fucking scissors.”

“No need to worry about that,” Bodine said quietly as the nurse left.

“Where’s my weapon?” Bodine opened the drawer in the bedside table and showed him. “Give it to me.” Bodine placed it in his hand, and he inspected it with respect and pride. It was a semiautomatic pistol with a ventilated barrel, a gift from the National Rifle Association, to which he was a generous donor. “What do you think?”

“Fine means of defense,” said Bodine.

“She comes at me again, I’ll blow her away.”

“The police chief thinks you already have.”

“Good. Let him make a fool of himself.”

“He’s already that,” Bodine said and returned the pistol to the drawer.

• • •

At Hanover House Beverly Gunner knew long nights, too many wakeful hours, but enjoyed the daytime. On the sun porch she made a path between wheelchairs, walkers, and canes, struck by the seductive way the very old smiled out of their robes for attention. She spent time with each, no more with one than another, for jealousies arose. She read chapters from a storybook to Miss Whittleton, small, sere, and ethereal, who, she was certain, would scatter like pastry crumbs if left unattended too long.

At the indoor pool, in the far wing, she sat with her feet dangling in the heated water beside Mrs. Aldrich, whose body age had given its own idiom of twists and turns. Mrs. Aldrich complained that women far outnumbered men at Hanover House, which made it a hennery.

In the common room, Mr. Skully showed her his pecker.

His voice creaked. “Would you be my girlfriend?”

“I’m spoken for,” she said gently.

She and Isabel strolled near a shower of willows to a listing stand of birches. A squirrel clawing the grass stopped, stood up, and stared. Isabel said, “Some day you must meet my Mary, though I’m not sure you’d get along with her. You’re much more stable than she is.”

The thought of meeting someone from the outside did not engage her. Isabel did. Isabel’s face, brimming with blush, apricot makeup, cerise lipstick, and magenta eye shadow was a baroque ornament. Most of the time Isabel looked angry, but it was possible she was not. Beverly said simply, “I like it here.”

When they turned back, Isabel said, “We must do something with your hair.”

Evenings she spent with her mother-in-law, who was a trial, a voice too much in her ear, a pressure on her sensibilities. Lolling in the consoling heat of a bath, old Mrs. Gunner demanded explanations. “Tell me why you’re here.”

“It’s for the best,” she said, waiting with a towel.

Later, bundled in a robe and sunk in a club chair, Mrs. Gunner wanted her hair brushed, her feet massaged. “The others don’t do it as well as you,” she said, her voice heavy with presumptions. Her potty needed emptying. There was a stool in it. Beverly, drawing the line, told her she would have to do that herself.

They watched Home Box Office until Mrs. Gunner indignantly changed channels. “I don’t like all those sex scenes in today’s movies,” she said with a snort. “You never saw Greer Garson tearing at Clark Gable’s fly.”

Beverly’s eyes were closed. She had not been watching.

“You asleep?”

Her eyes opened. She sat in the fixed glow of a lamp that had the effect of confining her, isolating her. Her voice was clear. “I think Paul was responsible for Fay’s death.”

Mrs. Gunner reached into a dish of hard candy. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“I think he paid a man to do it.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him.” Candy rattled against Mrs. Gunner’s dentures. “Time you went to bed.”

• • •

Dick English spotted Kate Bodine sitting alone at the country club bar and lavished on her the same look he gave to fine automobiles. Altering his course, he approached her with a pampered abundance of silvery hair, a brilliant smile, and a fine baritone voice. “May I?” Waving away the bartender, he perched beside her. She was a bold figure in tennis whites. “True you’re back in television?”

“Radio,” she said, unprepared for his company, which she had never encouraged. He was a repeat, a rerun of too many other men she had known in the business.

“That a step down?”

His voice was resonant in her ear. He’d be splendid reading news. She gave him a dig. “When are you getting a job?”

He motioned to the bartender. He decided to have a drink after all, a martini, two olives. “I’m allergic to hard work, makes me break out in a sweat.”

He had no money, but his wife did. “How’s Germaine?” she asked.

“In New York for a few days. Theater, museums, that sort of thing. Did you hear that stuff about Phoebe Yar — ”

“I don’t believe any of it,” she said swiftly. He was full of gossip, another thing she didn’t like about him.

“Have you seen the Gunners?”

“Not lately,” she said.

“Something’s happening between them,” he said mysteriously.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I thought Harley might.” He had his martini. He lifted up an olive. “One’s for you.”

“I’ll pass.” His attention was stifling, his knee touched hers. This was what she despised about him, his drive to reduce a woman to her cunt.

“How is it between you and Harley?” he asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Things I’ve heard.”

“Something I should tell you, Dick.” She finished off her drink, a small Chablis. “I’m not looking for action. Nor am I one of those women who can’t bear to be alone. What I want is a companion who’ll spring for dinner at a good restaurant, a sensitive and undemanding fellow who can lighten a mood, knows when to hold my hand, and can lie quiet when a presence is all I need.”

He was quiet for a dramatic moment. “I could be that.”

“You’re full of shit,” she said. “Besides, I have a true love.”

“Don’t tell me it’s Harley.”

She slid off the chair. “Our police chief,” she said.

• • •

May Hutchins and Fred Fossey were in the sheets, tearing at each other as if Death were at the door. Their bodies ran with sweat and at times slipped away from each other. “It came out,” she said. He thrust it back in, but she pulled away. “Did you hear that?” He heard nothing. She pushed him, and he went up on his knees, his head bent back. They each listened hard. “Christ, he’s home!” she gasped.

In the instant she was on her feet. She didn’t bother with underwear, simply threw her dress on, dug her toes into flat shoes, and gave short shrift to the state of her hair. The state of Fossey enraged her. He had a foot in the wrong leg of his pants.