Bitter Truth (34 page)

I gasped to myself when I saw her because she might have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, strong yet delicate features, like those on a statue of a Greek goddess, green eyes that literally sparkled. Red hair circled her face like a halo and from her slim ears dangled a shimmering pair of silver and pearl earrings. Looking at her was like looking at a soft shot in a movie. Even from a distance I could smell the scent of her musk. I found myself embarrassed by my reaction to the loveliness of her face and I tore my gaze away from it, down, to her bare feet, slim and gracefully arched, the toes even and slightly curled. They were prettier in person then in bronze and I had to stifle the desire to fall to my knees and bow until my forehead rested on her flesh.

I looked back up at her face and Oleanna smiled at me, a smile I felt viscerally, like an old song that echoes with the sadness of lost love.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Carl,” she said. “I am extremely grateful that you agreed to meet with me.”

I had assumed it was I who had arranged for the meeting but I was too dazzled to care.

“We at the Haven,” she continued, “are in desperate need of your help.”

37

W
HEN I CAME home from the Haven, Caroline was waiting for me in my apartment. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her face was free of makeup, and my first reaction upon seeing her was wondering why I had never considered her dowdy before. It was an unfair thought, really, but it couldn’t be helped, still under the thrall, as I was, of Oleanna.

Caroline was at my apartment because as soon as I learned that Eddie Shaw had borrowed a load of cash from Earl Dante I realized that she was in utter danger. The way I saw it, Eddie had borrowed cash from Dante, the loan shark, to relieve the pressure from Jimmy Vigs and had arranged for his sister’s death at the same time. The Seventh Circle Pawn, your one-stop shop for shark loans and murder-for-hire and mayhem. Dante had gladly lent Shaw the money, at three points a week, with the expectation that he would be repaid by the insurance policy on Jacqueline’s death along with a lucrative bonus for the murder itself. Eddie had visited his sister’s building the day of her death not to ask for money, as Kendall had suggested, but to tape open the lock of the Cambium’s stairwell and wedge the wood in the Cambium’s roof door, opening the passageway for Cressi’s murderous visit. When Dante discovered that the money from the policy was not going to Eddie but instead to some New Age guru he must have turned a pleasant shade of green. Now Eddie Shaw was missing, probably running for his life, and the only way Dante would be getting his loan repaid in the near future was by killing off another Shaw. So I had warned Caroline, told her to make herself scarce and to suggest the same to brother Bobby. Bobby, I figured, had lifted off to some exotic locale but Caroline insisted on staying in Philadelphia. Insisted, in fact, after making a quick trip back to Veritas, on hiding out at my place. I had left a key for her before I visited the Haven. I guess our vague relationship was vaguely entering a new phase.

“What did you find out from the chant-heads?” asked Caroline as soon as I entered my apartment.

I looked at her for a moment and then stepped around her, toward the bedroom. “They didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Did you meet with that Oleanna person?” she asked as she followed me through the bedroom doorway.

I squinted into a mirror as I untied my tie. “Yes.”

“Well, what did she say? How did she explain the life insurance policy?”

“They didn’t do it,” I snapped. “All right?” I sat on the bed and started untying my shoes. “It was someone else. If you want my thinking, I’d bet it was your brother Eddie that hired the killer.”

“But the cult is where the money went,” she said. “Aren’t they the most likely to have hired a hit man to get five million dollars?”

“They’re not a cult and they didn’t do it.” With my shoes off I stood and undid my belt. “Do you mind, Caroline, I’m getting undressed here.”

“Yes, I do mind,” she said. “You suspect my brother of killing my sister, you suspect some deranged descendent of Elisha Poole, you suspect everyone except for the mob bookie, who you represented, and this wacko New Age church, which stood to gain a swift five million dollars from my sister’s death. There is no logic in any of that. So tell me, Victor, how are you so damn certain? How?”

How indeed?

It was hard to remember the whole of my meeting with Oleanna, it still was more like a dream than reality. We had a fairly normal conversation on the surface but it felt the whole time I was with her as if a current of some sort was being passed through her to me. I found it difficult to concentrate, to keep my place in our discussion. Being with her was like I remember reefer to be, without the paranoia or the intense desire to stuff my cheeks with Doritos. She looked at me with a penetration I had never experienced before, as if she was looking at something not connected to my physical body. She wasn’t reading my mind exactly, it was more like she was keeping visually abreast of my emotional state. There was a power to that woman, it was undeniable, and for the time we were together I felt it reaching out to me. And I guess I succumbed, because by the end of our meeting, when she took my hand in hers and I felt the pulsing warmth beneath her skin, by the time she said good-bye I was not only certain that the Church of the New Life was not involved in the murder of Jacqueline Shaw, but I was also pledged to find out exactly who had hired her killer and to prove it to the insurance company so that the death benefit would be promptly paid.

It wasn’t like I didn’t ask the questions I had prepared, because I did. I asked her how she had convinced Jacqueline to change her life insurance policy and she said she hadn’t, that Jacqueline had volunteered to make the church her life insurance beneficiary, as do many of the church’s followers. I asked her how important the five million dollars was to her church and she indicated, with a smile, the architectural drawing of the building on the wall and said the bequest from Jacqueline was the great bulk of the funds that would be used to construct their new ashram in the suburbs. When I remarked on her expensive taste in real estate she shrugged and said simply that they were outgrowing the house in Mount Airy. I asked her if she knew an Earl Dante or a Peter Cressi or a Jimmy Vigs and the answer each time was no. “Ever hear of a man named Poole?” I asked, but still the answer was no. I asked her how she had found out I was looking into Jacqueline’s death in the first place and she said that Detective McDeiss had called the insurance company to ask some further questions and the insurance company had called her lawyers asking why a shady criminal defense attorney would be so interested in a suicide. And then I asked her the most puzzling question: why, if she hadn’t been involved in Jacqueline’s death, had she sent Gaylord and Nicholas to threaten me off the case? She apologized profusely for their behavior, though not as profusely as Gaylord, and explained that at the time the insurance company was on the verge of disbursing the death benefit and she was certain my investigation would raise alarms that might delay still further the payment. “And, of course, I was right,” she said, a sweet smile on her face, “and so we have been forced to sue.” Those were her answers to my questions and they were pretty good answers, not great answers maybe, but good enough, I guess, though to be truthful, it wasn’t the content of the answers that convinced me of her innocence.

What had convinced me was the current I had felt flowing from her to me, a strange nonverbal communication that bypassed the logic centers of my left brain and flowed straight into the emotional centers in my right. I was convinced she was telling the truth because she was telling me so in a way I was ill-equipped to refute. Emotionally I believed every word she said and after my emotions were engaged my logic swiftly followed. Of course the Church of the New Life wouldn’t hurt Jacqueline Shaw. They loved her, they cared for her, she was family, so said my emotions. And she was a sugar tit that they could suck on for the rest of her life, draining, over time, enough of her share of the Reddman fortune to make the five mil look like a pittance, so said my logic, hustling to catch up.

And then, as if she were reading my spirit like a billboard, she convinced me to do all I could to find Jacqueline’s killer, not by pure emotion, not by reason, not by virtue of her rare beauty, but through the one medium most designed to catch my attention. She offered me cash.

“If you can convince the insurance company to stop holding up the payment, Mr. Carl,” she said, “by proving to them that we were in no way responsible for Jacqueline’s death, we will be sure you are rewarded. Generally the rewards we give to our church members are karmic in nature, designed to benefit the soul in future lives. But seeing as you’re not a member of the church, how about a portion of the recovery? Say five percent?”

To give you an idea of my state of mind, I promised to do my best immediately, I didn’t so much as haggle. Had I been thinking more clearly I would have seen the offer for what it obviously was, a bribe to turn the direction of my investigation away from her church. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. In fact I didn’t even do the calculation until I was in the car, on Kelly Drive, on my way back into Center City. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She was offering me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to prove that someone else, and not she, was the killer. It was an obvious bribe, yes, but I was certain that it was no such thing. How was I so certain? How indeed? Because I had felt something flowing from Oleanna, something pure and innocent and irrefutable, something I almost couldn’t recognize because of my pathetic lack of experience. What I had felt flowing from her to me was something close to love.

“So what was going on at Veritas?” I asked Caroline as we sat at my red Formica dining table and ate a pizza I had called out for.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Did you look for the hiding place your grandmother mentioned in her diary?”

“Sort of,” she said.

“Well? Did you find it?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of? What does that mean?”

“Okay, I found it. By the cast-iron fireplace, like my grandmother wrote in her diary. I tapped around with my knuckle until I found a hollow part. There was a piece of wood trim that slipped up.” She shrugged. “So I pushed the panel and it opened.”

“Hell, Caroline, that’s fantastic. What did you find? Another corpse?”

“No, thank God. Nothing important, really, just books, ledgers, different kinds of financial journals. Worthless stuff.”

“I’d bet not. Did you get them for us?”

She nodded slowly.

“Where are they?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where are they, Caroline?”

She waited a moment and then gestured to my hall closet.

Inside I found a cardboard box, sitting on the floor among my loose jackets and assorted balls and racquets. I pulled out the box, kneeled down, and looked through it quickly. Old ledgers with their pages crumbling and the moth-eaten cloth on their frayed bindings seeming to be a step away from complete disintegration. The numbers inside were written in a fading ink, numbers over numbers over numbers, in progressions that meant absolutely nothing to me.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I’d never be able to make head nor tail of it but I’ll have Morris take a look.”

I put the books back and stood up and thought for a moment and then turned to look at her. She was staring at a piece of pizza where the cheese had pulled off and was now in a clump on her paper plate.

“Why didn’t you tell me about what you found right off?” I said.

She shrugged without looking up, staring at the denuded slice of pizza as if it was the most fascinating sight she had ever seen.

“I thought if I lied and told you the hiding place was empty,” said Caroline, finally, after not responding to my question for hours, “what was inside would go away.”

“What do you think is in those books?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t think the truth ever goes away, Caroline. I think it just sometimes lies in wait for us.”

We were now side by side in my bed. It was late. We had made it halfway through Leno before I had retired to the bedroom. I had wanted some time alone that night but I didn’t know how to tell her that, so I stayed up past my bedtime, hoping she’d get the hint to go to sleep by herself, had stayed up watching the local news and Jay’s monologue and an insipid conversation with some long-legged starlet, Jay fawning over her so assiduously that she had to wipe the slobber from her leather dress, and I would have happily slept right there on the couch except that Caroline was sitting right there with me. So I stretched and yawned and said I needed to get some sleep and that was her cue to follow me into the bedroom. I had never lived with a woman before and I wondered if this was what it was like to be married. I could tell right off I didn’t like it.

“I have an idea,” said Caroline. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

“It’s not easy learning the truth, is it?”

“Cancun, just me and you.”

“You don’t really want to stop our search.”

“Oh yes I do.”

“Really?”

She waited a moment before she said, “I thought I could control what we did and what we found, but now I’m not so sure.”

I realized just then how close she was to actually quitting and I felt a twang of fear. I wasn’t ready yet to stop, neither for my sake, nor for hers. I mean, however could I save her if she wasn’t willing to be saved? What I needed to do was to keep everything together for just a little longer.

“What did you think we were going to find,” I asked, “when we started looking into your family’s history?”

“I’m not sure, maybe some good. Is just one good thing too much to ask?”

“You once told me you had a happy childhood. Wasn’t that one good thing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It would have been happy as hell, I guess, if it wasn’t me that was living it.”

I thought on that for a moment. “Perhaps the problem wasn’t yours, Caroline. Perhaps there was something else going on, something dark and cold and rooted in your family’s past.”

“Don’t start telling me about my childhood.”

“We found a corpse. We found your grandaunt buried in your grandmother’s garden. There are secrets at work here that were alive all through your childhood, secrets that affected your entire life, secrets you should know. You are asking the right questions, Caroline.”

“But what happens if I don’t like the answers?”

“Whether you like them or not they manifest themselves every day, in that crumbling house and your deteriorating family, in your father, who never leaves his bedroom, in your dead sister’s sadness, in your situational drinking, in your tattoos and pierced flesh, in your wild fear of cats and your aggressive promiscuity. Maybe it’s time to rethink your past, to incorporate all we’re learning into how you view it and yourself.”

She took a moment to take all that in before saying, “You think I’m a slut?”

“I think you are hurt and scared and don’t know what to do with your life.”

“I’m not a slut.”

“Okay, you’re not a slut.”