Fever City (12 page)

I don't believe her. That's the problem with this kidnapping. Everyone, including the Old Man, insists on how much he loved the kid. But where's the evidence? Where are the photos of father and son crowding the walls and the mantelpieces? Where are the stories of the time they spent together? The trips they took, their outings to the circus, the playground, the movies. Sure the kid was a part of the household, but so was the grandfather clock in the hallway. The alarm the Old Man felt when the kid was snatched? That was definitely genuine. But the love . . . ? It was as if Ronnie were an insurance policy or a bank account, something that had been misplaced or lost. A valuable asset suddenly menaced. There was certainly no sign that Ronnie was a normal, happy child. ‘It was a hit and run, wasn't it?'

‘The horse was clipped by a truck as it crossed the road.'

‘Who do you think wanted to kill your husband?'

‘You think it was intentional?'

‘If the truck didn't stop, it normally means it was.'

‘I think the truck didn't stop because the driver recognised who it was he had hit.'

‘Meaning the driver thought Mr. Bannister had it coming to him?'

‘Meaning . . . he knew that Mr. Bannister doesn't believe in forgiveness.'

‘Something I should note?'

‘Something you should avoid ever testing, Mr. Alston.'

‘That's a warning?'

‘Call it advice.'

M
rs. Rex Bannister sat forward in her seat, staring over the shoulder of the chauffeur, watching the lights of the hospital swelling into the night. Her husband's lawyer, Adam Granston, sat nervously in the back beside her, riffling through papers. He handed her one. ‘We'll need you to sign this.'

‘What is it?'

‘Just a document, for the hospital . . . ' The metal of his fountain pen glinted in the lights of the emergency entrance. She didn't like his tone. She never had. And she didn't like his presumption: that she could trust him. As if she didn't know—she couldn't trust anyone in this world, least of all Rex Bannister's people.

‘Not now . . . '

‘There's no time to discuss . . . '

She pushed the paper away. ‘I said, not now.' She was playing her card; and it was an ace. He was the lawyer. But she was the wife. Her husband was seriously—perhaps fatally—injured. The law was on Granston's side, but the drama . . . that was on her side. That was stronger than any legal document.

The car pulled up. Taylor got out and went around and opened her door. She could feel the flush of Granston's anger giving way to nighttime coolness. ‘I want to see my husband . . . '

There was the stutter of flashes as they passed the shouted questions of the press, and then she was inside, passing a private waiting room full of aging men. Some averted their faces; others stared at her. With alarm. With hostility. With lust. Some of the faces she recognized from the Star Chamber ceremonies.

A big police captain named Schiller gave her a rundown on what was known. Her husband had been riding a great bay gelding called Goliath. A horse her husband hated. Because the horse had a nobility that the man lacked. Goliath had fought bravely to stay upright after they'd been struck, stumbling all the way down the embankment before its mighty hooves struck the concrete lip of a culvert and its pasterns snapped with the impact, her husband's leg crushed between the unforgiving ground and 1100 pounds of muscle, sinew and suffering tension. His left leg. His left hip. His pelvis. Pulverized.

Shattered.

Irreversible.

The richest man in the country; probably the most powerful, and certainly the most hated was now suddenly a cripple. The very day after his scandalous fifth marriage to the younger sister of his fourth wife. All across America, the same phrase was being repeated with satisfaction: serves the bastard right.

When they came for him after the accident, her husband had insisted they end the horse's life before they did anything for him. Not because he had wanted to put it out of its misery, but because he had wanted it dead. He carried the gelding's blood dusted across his face and clothes when they trolleyed him, delirious, into the operating theatre.

That night a vigil was held at the hospital. The governor and both senators were there. The mayor and the police chief too. So were Howard Hughes and Johnny Roselli. There were Texas oilmen, and even some CIA and banker types from the East Coast. She knew who they were: the shadow men of the True Republic. Wizards without their capes. It gave her the creeps, the way they all just showed up. As if they were malevolent Magi following an evil star. But why were they all there? Were they waiting to see if Rex Bannister would die, so they could haggle and gamble over his assets like Roman soldiers with Christ's robe . . . ? Did they believe he might designate a successor before he died? Or impart some terrible secret that would give them access to the enormous powers he had always enjoyed?

Or were they simply waiting to see if he could survive such a terrible accident; proof that he was, as some half-suspected, the devil incarnate?

She was at her husband's bedside when he came to after the operation. The first thing he asked the chief surgeon, Dr. Lowell Everett, an arrogant man with an appreciative smile for her, was how long it would be before he could ride again. The doctor had laughed; the accident had been so traumatic, the damage so acute that he was sure her husband was joking, so he kidded along: a couple of months; a half-year at the most, but he'd be back up relatively soon, doing all the riding he could ever wish for . . . in a wheelchair.

Her husband had reached down beside his bed, where Morris had left his newly-polished riding boots, one of which contained his riding crop. He drew it fast out of the boot, as though unsheathing a sword, and whipped it forwards and backwards, leaving an enormous X-shaped cut across the front of Everett's face. The doctor stood there, stunned, his cheeks slowly falling open as an eyeball rolled lazily out of its socket and hung like a ripe fruit from a gaping black and red hole.

Betty Bannister managed to wait until the blood began to bubble and suck out of the wound where the doctor's nose had been before she passed out.

He husband had struck Dr. Everett so hard that he had dislocated his shoulder on the return blow; the Old Man's suffering—like the doctor's—would not end as easily as his horse's.

Afterwards, she had learnt that Dr. Everett was in a sanatorium; paid for out of the kindness of Mr. Bannister. The official story was that the surgeon had disgraced both himself and his hospital by driving home drunk later that night and hitting a tree. But Truth in the Bannister Estate was, like her husband's domestic staff, unsentimentally replaceable. Rex Bannister made sure the medical board stripped the surgeon of his license to practice medicine. Not that the former Dr. Everett would have been doing much surgery, after having a scalpel taken to his brain by Professor Boris Landis, the ‘Laureate of the Lobotomy.' Her husband would do whatever it took to keep Lowell Everett alive so as to continue his suffering for as long as possible.

The Bannister Way.

The question was, when would her own suffering end?

W
as there any truth in that story about your husband and the doctor?'

Betty Bannister stares at me as though she's just come back from a long way off and hasn't heard the question. She focuses on me; and it's only then that I realize I've been missing those green eyes all morning. ‘You don't know my husband, Mr. Alston. He takes personal slights extremely seriously.'

Does that include sleeping with his wife? I tap the bottom of my cigarette packet, three long, slim tubes dancing up to the beat. It's the only thing I have to offer her. She looks at my extended hand, then selects the longest one with the solemnity of someone drawing lots. Fire flares between us; dies with the shock of my breath. I look at the lighter she is holding. Gunmetal with engraved initials. EB. Well, well . . . It looks like Mrs. Bannister might know where we can find Hastings.

She looks away, exhaling smoke into the vast and empty house.

‘When was the accident?'

She opens a refrigerator door, light shining on her face, then looks at me. ‘It was the day after we were married . . . ' A bloom of cold air rises around her. ‘The hospital was the first time I'd seen him since the wedding reception.'

She slams the Kelvinator shut and stares at me for a long moment, then cracks two eggs into a bowl, breaking the shells with short, hard snaps against the ceramic lip. She looks down into the bowl and laughs. I peer over her shoulder. Both eggs have double yolks. ‘Good luck, so they say . . . Although I was never one for superstition.' She whisks the yolks into oblivion with dour zeal, the noise echoing off the high walls.

‘So that means . . . '

'Well, bravo, Mr. Alston, I believe you've finally figured it out . . . ' There is the hiss of gas and the detonation of combustion.

‘Figured what out?'

‘My nasty little secret. The marriage was never consummated.' Oil protests on a pan. ‘Shocking, isn't it? The young, yearning woman, in her physical prime, wasting away in the bed of an elderly cripple . . .' She sacrifices her mixture to the heat, the eggs puckering in pain. There is the rasp of a spatula and then the omelette is presented to me: golden and burning to the touch. ‘The question is, which one of them is the victim?'

‘Maybe there doesn't have to be a victim?'

She takes a bottle of beer out of the icebox and pours me a glass. ‘Oh, there's always a victim in a loveless marriage. What do you think?'

‘About loveless marriages?'

‘About the omelette.'

‘Very spicy, Mrs. Bannister.'

She takes a long drink from the open bottle, froth clinging to her lips. Our eyes meet. She licks the froth away from her lips and smiles.

Provocation is a dangerous thing. Maybe it's real; teasing reaction like a feather. Or maybe it's just all in your head. There's only ever one way to find out.

I tug her into my arms. We almost kiss but she pulls away at the last instant, opening her eyes with amusement. And something almost like admiration.

She steps close enough to hear my beating heart, her breath fragrant and shallow, her head inclined, hair masking half her face and flowering around her shoulder. ‘Kiss me,' she says.

I am embraced by perfume, languorous and yearning, then by her hair and the warmth of her hand on my cheek, her lips full and moist as we kiss, her tongue eager, knowing.

There is a throb of pain and delight as she takes my lower lip between her teeth and quickly, gently bites. She pulls back, studying my reaction. ‘I thought so,' she whispers, her eyes full of a knowing confidence as she pulls away, then turns, walking out of the kitchen.

I tug her back into my arms . . . And that's when I see it, over her shoulder. She slowly draws away from me. ‘What is it?'

I point to the wall. ‘That dark stain there . . . What's missing from the wall?'

‘Just a wall telephone. They took it down.'

Where else have I seen a wall phone before? ‘The garage.'

‘They took that one away too . . . '

Something's eating at me like a fading dream, the struggle to recall it only making it disappear faster. Then I remember. ‘Jesus Christ . . . ' She's staring at me in amazement. ‘The bomb shelter.'

‘I don't understand.'

'Where are the keys?'

She looks at me for a long moment, her green eyes honeyed with panic and I begin to wonder if she might be in on it. Could she be such a good actress?

She unclips a gold chain from around her neck and hands it to me. On the end of the chain are three keys.

‘Who else has these?'

‘Only Mr. Bannister . . . Why?'

'Don't you get it? There's a phone down there. The call must have come from the shelter.'

She takes a step back, holding onto the doorjamb as though she's about to faint. ‘But that means?'

‘I know. The kid's been here all along.'

J
FK loved sex and he loved it most with blondes. Blondes were not Jackie. Blondes were dumb; Jackie spoke French. Blondes were easygoing; Jackie was controlling. Blondes were loud; Jackie was discreet. Blondes looked the other way; Jackie got even. When Jack did Marilyn, Jackie did Bill Holden. Jackie was vengeful, blondes were not.

Or so JFK thought.

But he'd been a politician so long, he had forgotten how to switch off the stereotypes button, and it turned out to be the blondes who gave him the most trouble. In fact it was an intelligent, highly sensitive, extremely vulnerable blonde who may have helped get him killed. A fun night out slowly segued into the Shot Heard Round the World. Marilyn Monroe, the most famous woman in the country and also the most lonely, became JFK's Sarajevo. Marilyn didn't mean to do it. It was all Jack's fault. He was myopic. He never could see past his dick.

Or that, at least is what Mr. Dwayne Wayne, a man with a stutter for a name, is maintaining.

The Marilyn Did It complot was so delightfully frivolous I had to find a place for it in my book on the murders of the Kennedy brothers. It was like a giant champagne soufflé with a chorus girl stuffed inside, ready to pop just as the snooty guests sit down. Say, waiter, what is that blonde doing in my egg whites? The premise was exactly the kind of light relief the book needed. I was so excited, I even called Monica.

‘I'm meeting this guy who actually believes Marilyn killed JFK.'

‘Is it any more ridiculous than an ass-hat like Lee Harvey Oswald killing the president?'

Only he didn't. Maybe. ‘She died a year before Kennedy!'