Bitter Truth (33 page)

“You sound like a personal ad.”

“I’m a romantic at heart.”

“The bastards tried to kill us.”

“I was never a man of war. It was forced upon me once, I won’t let it be forced upon me again. You will be approached about a meeting.”

“Why would they approach me?”

“You were in the line of fire. You were the last neutral to see me. You will be approached. That is the way these animals work.”

“What do I tell them?”

“You are to tell them that I want peace. Tell them that I will meet them to accept their terms. Tell them if they can guarantee my security and the security of my family then it is over. Tell them we will meet to arrange a truce and then the trophy will be theirs.”

35

T
HE EDWARD Shaws lived in a townhouse on Delancey Place, a very fashionable address on the Schuylkill side of Rittenhouse Square. It wasn’t a through street, so it was quiet, and the cars that sat before the houses seemed to have been parked there for half of eternity, parked in prime, unmetered spots undoubtedly willed from one generation to the next. Of course the Shaws wouldn’t deign to park on the street, their property would include a garage in the back, which I had checked out through the garage-door window before I pressed their doorbell. A two-car garage with only one car inside, a sedate silver BMW. Not the kind of car the worst gambler in the world would tool around in, I figured. He’d want something flashier, something red, something more phallic to make up for the continual humiliation of his certain winners dropping dead of coronaries in the middle of the track. Eddie Shaw, it appeared, had skipped out on our meeting. It was enough to give a guy a complex, the way he was avoiding me.

When I saw who was at the door, I expected a torrent of words, but all I got from Kendall Shaw was a subdued, “Hello, Victor. Caroline told me you’d be coming and that I was to help you any way I could.” When I was inside, she turned around and led me into her family room.

To get there we passed through a formal carpeted foyer. The walls were an eggshell blue, marked with rectangular patches of a slightly darker shade. There were formal chairs and a sofa, but in the center, off to the right, there was a strange open area. As I passed the opening I glanced down at the carpet and saw four indentations in an irregular quadrangular pattern, about the size and the spacing of the feet of a grand piano.

The family room was still intact. Comfortably furnished, it was filled with deep sofas, recliner chairs, framed posters, an exhibition of some of Kendall’s latest landscapes. In the center of the room, like a shrine, was a gigantic television set. I guess that’s right, take the paintings, take the piano, but Lord please don’t let them take my La-Z-Boy or my big screen Panasonic TV. Kendall gestured me onto the sofa and sat herself on the facing love seat. She was dressed today rather primly, a beige skirt, a white blouse, and her drug-induced mania was somewhat depressed. She was on a different set of pills this week, I figured. Valium anyone?

“I’ve come to see your husband,” I said.

“You’re not really a painter, are you, Victor?” she said.

“No, ma’am. Actually, I’m a lawyer. But I admired your work very much.”

“That was kind of you and Caroline to play such tricks on me.”

“I’m just here to ask your husband a few questions.”

“So Caroline said. He’s out at the moment, but you can wait with me, if you’d like.” She glanced at her watch. “He must be running a little late.”

“When did you expect him back?”

“Two days ago,” she said, and then she almost jumped to her feet. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Fish sticks?”

“Coffee would be fine,” I said, and I watched her walk briskly out of the room.

Well, this had become nicely awkward.

She came back after ten minutes carrying a tray with a teapot and two cups and an arrangement of fancy cookies. As she poured, I told her I liked my coffee black. She handed me the cup and I sipped daintily. It was scalding. I wondered how much I could take her insurance company for if I spilled it on my lap.

“What exactly did you want to ask my husband about?” she said nonchalantly while she poured a cup for herself.

“Are you sure you should be having caffeine, Mrs. Shaw?”

There was a pause. She stirred in some milk and a packet of Sweet’n Low and sat back in her love seat. “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at Veritas that night, Victor. You caught me on a bad evening. I was ovulating. I tend to grow a little overeager during ovulation.”

“Yes, well right there is more than I ever wanted to know, but still, apology accepted.”

“How’s your ear?”

“Healing, thank you. I didn’t mean to disturb your afternoon, I had just a few questions about your husband’s finances.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Maybe I should come back.”

“Maybe you’d have better luck asking me what you want to know. Edward is not forthcoming with or about his money, except to his bookies.”

I took a sip of my coffee and stared at her for a moment. I hadn’t noticed it beneath the hysteria the night she bit my ear but there was about Kendall Shaw, as she bravely sat in her posh townhouse while it disassembled before her eyes, an aura of strength. I had seen in Eddie Shaw’s eyes the weakness of a gambler who, despite all evidence to the contrary, expected to win. Kendall had the eyes of a gambler too, but a gambler who had bet it all and lost and could live with that. She had rolled the dice on Eddie Shaw, a pair of dice she was sure was fixed in her favor, and still, against all laws of probability and physics, had thrown craps.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll ask you what I was going to ask him. The day Jacqueline died, your husband flew to Philadelphia from his beach vacation for some business. That afternoon he stopped in to visit Jacqueline, but she wasn’t home. What was the purpose of that visit?”

She took a sip of coffee and looked to the side. “Edward would tell you he just went over to say hello to his dear sister.”

“But he didn’t just go over to say hello?”

“That would have been a kind and loving gesture on his part, so we can assume the answer is no. Cookie, Victor?”

“No, thank you. So why the visit?”

“Edward needed money to pay off his gambling debts. They had busted up his Porsche and broken his arm. He thought they were going to kill him next. He hoped his sister would give him some of her money to get him out of immediate trouble.”

“Why Jacqueline?”

“Process of elimination. Bobby lost his in wild investments and Caroline wasted most of hers on her film.”

“You mentioned before that Caroline had tried to make a movie.”

“Yes. In a burst of unexpected enthusiasm she lavished great sums of her dividend money on a writer and a director and some actors and a crew and shot a film, a horror film about a crazed plastic surgeon, but then she cut off her financing and closed the picture down before they could complete postproduction. She has the piles of raw stock in a vault somewhere. She said that the end result didn’t satisfy her standards, but that was just her excuse. It was so like her to pull the plug like that, another way of ensuring the continued failure at which she has become so accomplished. All the Reddmans, I’ve learned, are brilliant at failure.”

“But Jacqueline still had her money?”

“Loads. For years she was too depressed to step outside her apartment. Her dividends just piled up. Edward figured two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would get them off his back. She was his last hope.”

“And she wasn’t home when he visited.”

“No, she wasn’t, and by the time he could get free to go see her again she was dead.”

“Which wasn’t so inconvenient for him, actually, at least so he probably thought, since she was insured for five million and he expected he was a beneficiary.”

“Edward would tell you that he knew the beneficiary of her policy had been changed, that Jacqueline had told him so.”

“But that would be another lie, I guess.”

“The day after she was found hanging he had borrowed money on the death benefit to pay off a chunk of his debt. He had promised the borrower that he would repay the loan as soon as the insurance money came in. The night he found out the money was going to those New Age lotus-eaters he literally howled in desperation.”

“Like a werewolf.”

She laughed lightly but not nicely. “My charts had showed that evening to be propitious.”

“Astrology?”

“Temperature. But he was so full of blubbery fear he was useless.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Kendall?”

She stood up and put her now empty cup onto the tray and then walked over to one of her paintings on the wall. It was in a fine oval frame and the oil had also been laid on in an oval, a night scene, with a stream running through spindly bare trees and a huge white mountain peak in the background, all illuminated by a bright moon. “Did you really like my painting?” she asked.

“Well, no, actually. But I’m no critic.”

“And I’m no painter,” she said. “Caroline told me you were looking into Jacqueline’s death for her. That you and she both believe that Jacqueline was murdered.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Victor, don’t you think that I’ve thought what you’re thinking? Don’t you think I’ve stayed up at night, lying beside that snoring shit, wondering with fear of what kinds of beastly things he is capable? Don’t you think?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought.”

“Well think.”

“And if it turns out to be your husband, what will you do?”

“I married him for better or for worse, and unlike the rest of this world I believe in that. I’d move out to wherever they send him and visit him in prison once a week, every week. I’d be the most loyal wife you’ve ever seen until his father dies and his stock shares vest and then I’d divorce the bastard and take my half and move to Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe painted just outside Santa Fe. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“They must have the most erotic flora in Santa Fe. Any other questions, Victor?”

“Just one. This money he found to pay off a piece of the gambling debt. Where did it come from?”

“Edward would tell you he got lucky at the track.”

“I bet that’s exactly what he’d tell me.”

“He told me he found someone to help him,” she said. “He told me he found someone willing to factor the insurance payout for a few points a week. He made me sign something but then said the man would bail him out.”

“Who?”

“Some pawnshop operator from South Philly. His place is on Second Street, I think, a shop called the Seventh Circle Pawn. A cute name, actually, since this man’s name is Dante.”

First thing I did when I left Kendall Shaw was to find a phone and tell Caroline to get the hell out of her apartment, right away, to get the hell out and hide. I had learned enough to figure that her life was in danger and who exactly it was who would want her dead.

36

I
WAITED IN my car outside the large shambling house in Mount Airy, watching the acolytes enter the Haven. I could tell they were acolytes because they wore sandals or colored robes beneath their denim jackets or their hair was long or their heads were shaved or they had the self-righteous carriage of those on the trail of life’s one true answer. They would have looked out of place in every part of the city but Mount Airy, which has long been a refuge for earnest granola eaters and committed activists in long batik skirts. I felt sorry for them as I watched them walk in that house, even as I knew they would feel sorry for me had they crossed my path. I thought they were deluded fools buying into some harebrained promise of enlightenment for a price when all there really was was the price. They would have thought me a materialistic loser who was totally out of touch with the sweet spiritual truths in my life. All we had in common was our mutual scorn, edged with pity, but, hey, I had suffered through long-term romantic relationships that were built on less.

There was five million due to go to the woman in that Mount Airy house. If I could connect her to the killing and get Caroline’s signature on my agreement I figure I’d be able to wheedle my third of the five either from a suit against her or from the insurance company. One million six hundred, sixty-six thousand, six hundred, sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents. It wasn’t all I had hoped to get out of this case in the middle of my most fervently hopeful night sweats, but there was a comforting sibilance to the number. It would do. I slapped on my armor of incredulity, stepped out of the car, and headed to the Haven for my meeting with Oleanna, Guiding Light.

The house was stone, trimmed in dark green. There was a narrow front porch with a painted wood floor, scarred and uneven. Across the porch were some old wicker chairs arrayed in the form of a discussion group, empty now. I stepped around a red tricycle, past a pile of old brown cushions left out to rot, past a stack of lumber. Though it was late spring, the storm windows were still up and green paint was peeling from the window sashes and the door. On the edge of the door frame was an incongruous
mezuzah,
covered with thick layers of paint. I rang the bell and nothing happened. I dropped the knocker and nothing happened. I looked around and twisted the doorknob and stepped into another year: 1968 to be exact.

Incense, Jerry Garcia, the warm nutty smell of a vegetarian casserole baking in the oven, posters of India and Tibet, earnest conversations, bad haircuts, the thick clinging scent of body odor.

We just missed all this, those of my generation, born too late as we were to ever remember a time when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy weren’t dead. The cool kids in our classes didn’t dress in tie-dye and bell bottoms, didn’t sport long straight hair, didn’t march in solidarity with the migrant farm workers; they wore polo shirts and applied to Harvard Business School and crushed beer cans on their heads. We didn’t listen to the young Bobby Dylan warble his warning to Mr. Jones, we had Bruce Springsteen and the Pretenders and the Sex Pistols just for the hell of it. There were plenty, like Beth, who felt they missed out on something, that the best was gone before they got there, but I was just as glad it passed me by. Too much pseudoactivism, too much pressure to try too many drugs, too little antiperspirant, too much godawful earnestness, too much communion with the masses, too much free love. Well, the free love I could have gone for, sure, I was as horny as the next groovester, but the rest you could stuff inside a time capsule and rocket to Aquarius for all I cared. I felt out of place in that house with my suit and tie and I liked that.

A woman without any hair, wearing an orange robe, stepped over to greet me. She put her hands together, fingers pointing up, and bowed slightly.

Yeah, sure. “I’m here to see Oleanna,” I said. “I have an appointment.”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman in a voice that was genuinely sweet, “but Oleanna doesn’t make appointments.”

“Why don’t you check and see,” I said.

Before she had time to apologize again I spotted what looked like a hairy boy walking down the stairs. At first I could just see his sandaled feet beneath the overhang of the ceiling, and then the hem of his yellow robe, and then, as more of his body was revealed, I recognized Gaylord. He surveyed the room as he descended and spotted me.

“Victor Carl, what a pleasure to see you,” he said in his high-pitched voice and the conversations that buzzed around us quieted. A smile burrowed out of his beard as he approached. “Welcome to the Haven. We’ve been so looking forward to your visit.”

The woman in the orange robe clasped her hands together and bowed slightly to Gaylord before she backed away from us. Gaylord grabbed me at the crook of my elbow, his smile still firmly in place.

“Come,” he said. “I’ll take you downstairs.”

He led me to the rear of the house, toward the kitchen. The congregants quieted when we approached and backed away from us. Some were dressed in street clothes, but most were in orange or green robes. Only Gaylord was wearing yellow.

“What’s with the different colors?” I asked.

“How much has your friend Beth told you?” he said.

“Beth?”

“Come now, Victor, we are not fools. We knew from the first who she was when she came and were only too happy to allow her to join our family. You did us a favor bringing her to us. She has a spiritual gift that is very rare. Oleanna thinks she is a very evolved soul.”

“Beth?”

“She has taken the steps faster than any seeker we’ve ever had other than Oleanna. The colors of our robes correspond to the twelve steps through initiation. The first five steps are called preparation, in which the seeker wears orange. Steps six through nine are called illumination, in which the seeker wears green. The final steps are initiation, in which the seeker suffers through three trials, the fire trial, the water trial, and the air trial. Those in the process of initiation wear yellow.”

“You’re the only one I see in yellow.”

“It’s a very advanced state,” said Gaylord.

The kitchen was large and bright, with yellow-and-white linoleum on the floor and avocado Formica counters. A group of acolytes in orange and green were chopping vegetables and stirring pots on an oversized commercial stove. “Only a few live in the house,” said Gaylord, “but all members are invited to share in the preparation and consumption of the evening meal. You’re invited to stay.”

“Very hospitable from someone who had threatened me with severe bodily harm just a few weeks ago.”

Gaylord stopped and turned to face me and then did something that truly shocked me. He put his hands together and fell to his knees and bowed his head low, touching his forehead to my wing tips. The scene felt horribly awkward, but no one in the kitchen seemed to think much of it. One orange-robed acolyte raised an eyebrow as he watched us for a moment before turning back to his work on the counter.

“I apologize to you with all my will, Victor Carl, for my behavior in your office. I felt my family was being threatened and besieged and I responded with anger and violence instead of benevolence and kindness. You should know that the karmic wound from my behavior has yet to heal and my spiritual progress has been halted for the time being as I continue to deal with my transgression.”

“Get up, Gaylord.”

His head still pressed to my shoes, he said, “I plead now for your forgiveness.”

I stepped back and he raised himself to his haunches, his hands still out in front of him.

“Just get the hell up,” I said. “I’d rather you threaten me again than do this penitent bit.”

“Do you forgive me then?”

“Will you get off your knees if I forgive you?”

“If that’s what you want.”

I looked down at him uncertainly. I would have felt worse about the scene had there not been a strange formality to his words, as if he had performed this same act of contrition when he blew up in the supermarket at a shopper with fifteen items in the twelve-item line or at a taxi driver who took the long way around. But even with the formality of his apology, I realized I didn’t like being bowed to like that, which was a surprise. Who among us hasn’t dreamed, at least for a moment, of being a king? But one robed penitent bowing at my feet had steeled my determination that if ever the Sacred College of Cardinals in their secret conclave in Rome decided to make a Jew from Philadelphia the next Pope, I would turn them down flat. Last thing I ever wanted was the huddling masses sucking on my ring. “Rise, Gaylord. I forgive you.”

Gaylord smiled a sly victory smile as he rose.

He took hold again of my arm and led me to the rear of the kitchen to a doorway which opened to a flight of low-ceilinged stairs. I ducked on my way down to what turned out to be a cramped warren of tiny rooms linked to one central hallway. Some of the doors to the rooms were open and small groups were inside, on the floor, in circles or in rows, chanting or bowing forward and back or sitting perfectly still. The walls were cheap drywall, the carpeting was gray and had an industrial nap.

“In the practice rooms,” said Gaylord, “we teach the many different techniques of meditation.”

“More than just crossing your legs and saying ‘Om’?”

He stopped at a room and opened the door. There were five orange-robed followers sitting around a green-robed woman, who knelt before them with a serene, peaceful expression on her face. Three of the orange robes were breathing in and out quickly, as if they were hyperventilating. One man was leaning forward, crying, his eyes still shut. A final woman was shaking as she held herself tightly and screamed like a scared child. No one came to help her as she shook and screamed. Slowly Gaylord closed the door.

“They’re practicing dynamic meditation,” said Gaylord. “It’s the most efficient way to reintegrate the past with the present. This is how many of our followers begin to see the integrity of the inner spirit through its ascendant journey from life to life.”

“You’re talking about past lives?”

“Finding a connection with our pasts is the final step of preparation before we move to illumination. We can’t know where our soul is heading until we know where it has been.”

“Then you weren’t kidding what you said about being a crusader.”

“Dynamic meditation is very powerful,” said Gaylord. He smiled unselfconsciously and led me further down the hallway.

I could feel it all about me, the bustling work of the robed minions searching for that spiritual salvation they know must be there for them, or else why would they ever have been placed on a slag heap such as this. I felt like a stranger in my suit, watching them all hard at their mystical work. I wonder if this was how James Bond felt as Auric Goldfinger led him on a tour of the facilities from which he was planning to detonate an atomic bomb and destroy America’s supply of gold: distant and amused and impressed and appalled all at the same time. I would have gone back to that room and opened the door and hugged the woman who was shaking and crying except that I was certain it was the last thing she would have wanted me to do. She had shaved her head, that woman, and her face was red with her tears and pain. At the end of it they would each tell her how far she had come and she would feel ever so proud, feel ever so much closer to it all. Even Bond would have been at a loss.

Finally Gaylord led me to a room at the end of the basement. He asked me to take off my shoes before entering. I had suspected there might be some shoe discarding so I made sure my socks were without holes that day. Gaylord slipped off his sandals and then opened the door.

The doorway to this room was small, low enough that I had to duck to get inside, and once inside I noticed that the room was very different from the others, more spacious, the floor covered with beige tatami mats, the walls lined entirely with fine wood. On either side and around the back were steplike risers, each also covered with tatami. Flower petals were scattered on the mats and a strong floral incense burned in a bronze pot. In each corner of the room stood columns carved with what appeared to be Sanskrit and on one of the walls was a framed architectural drawing of a futuristic sort of churchlike building looking very Mormonish with its spires and looping curves. There were windows high at the far end and beneath the windows was a niche in which a stone Buddha sat, his belly full and his smile empty, and before the Buddha, resting on a small stone pedestal, were two bronzed feet, a perfect pair, life-sized, cut off at the ankles.

Gaylord walked right up to the wall with the Buddha, dropped to his knees, bent forward until his forehead touched the bronzed feet. Then he stood and gestured to one of the risers and said, “Wait here for a few moments, please.”

I walked around the room for a bit in my stockinged feet, examining the woodwork, the engraved columns, the architectural drawing of what I assumed to be the Church of the New Life building proposed for Gladwyne, the cornerstone to be laid as a result of Jacqueline’s timely death. I stared for a moment at the carved Buddha, it looked to be old and precious, and then at the bronzed feet on the pedestal. I had to admit that the feet were more than passing strange. They were a woman’s feet, slim and gracefully arched, the toes even and slightly curled. They were very attractive for feet, actually. They might have been the prettiest feet I had ever seen. I couldn’t help but reach down and touch one of them, to rub my fingers lightly on the underside of the arch, to place my hand firmly atop of the rise of the tarsal ridge. The bronze beneath my palm was smooth, rubbed shiny over time like on the feet of a statue of a Roman Catholic saint. I let out a long breath, spun around, and then sat on one of the risers, across from the architectural drawing. The risers were wide enough to sit cross-legged, as I assume they were intended, but I just let my legs dangle as though I were sitting in the bleachers for a high school football game.

I waited for about a half an hour, growing steadily more impatient, when I heard a knock at the door. I stood.

The door opened slowly. In came Gaylord, looking unusually somber, his hands pressed one to the other before him as he entered and stepped to the right. Behind Gaylord was our Steven Seagal wannabe friend Nicholas, still wearing his black outfit. No robes for Nicholas, I guessed, while he was in his bodyguard mode. He glared at me as he bent to enter through the low wooden door and stepped to the left, forming a sort of honor guard at the doorway. Then through this guard of honor walked a small white-robed woman.