Long Shot (37 page)

“What about
Hamlet?
”

“What
about Hamlet?
”

“Wouldn't you like to try it?”

“Goodness,” said Artie, “aren't we grand?”

He sat sidesaddle on the bentwood chair and turned at last to the mirror. He studied his face in a purely technical way, as if to see what needed touching up for the late show at eleven.

“What
I
like to do,” he said dreamily, more to himself than Greg, “is go to the market. Or the dry cleaner's. I love it when things break down, because then I can run and get them fixed. I figure, if I keep my gear shipshape, it'll last me all my life.”

Greg remembered something Vivien said—that Artie did everyone's errands. It seemed, when she said it, like part of a larger put-down, as if, six million or no, he was mostly a glorified valet. His bodyguarding duties, aside from muscling through the occasional crowd, more often than not involved his going out on rainy nights to score a bottle of aspirin. It had never occurred to Greg he might enjoy it.

“Besides,” said Artie, “you never know where you'll be when the snow starts falling. You gotta be ready.”

They were more alike than not, these two. It was just that Greg preferred to do his errands inside, as he made a circuit of his apartment. Recalling now his endless puttering—day in, day out—he felt the most delicious pang for the way he once got by, before all of this began.

“Carl's dead,” he stated quietly.

“Yes, I know,” the other replied.

But of course he did. Why else was Maxim Brearley here?

The wheels had wheels, and they turned like crazy. Greg leaned a shoulder against the gowns. He knew he had reached this point by sheer deduction. Everything fit. The rightness of it all was such that he literally would have staggered if he'd had to walk away. Yet he couldn't have told you when he'd puzzled it out in a conscious way—or what were the two and two that added up to four.

“I just remembered what I came to ask.”

“What's that?”

“About Max,” said Greg. It was all a lie to act as if he'd known it all along. It was only now, this very minute.

“Well, what?”

“This is going to sound funny,” he said, “but—how many toes does he have?”

chapter 9

ARTIE PICKED THE THREE OF THEM UP
at the Cherokee Nile, at a few minutes after seven. Sid and Edna, quite beside themselves since Monday, had on the sly alerted half the tenants. Dozens leaned out the windows as they left, to try for a glimpse of the powder-blue Rolls. The effect, thought Greg, was rather like a tenement in Naples. He ought to have known Sid and Edna couldn't be trusted to be discreet.

He wedged himself between them on the seat and launched into a course of manners appropriate to a stately home. They nodded and gave their solemn word. They swore they wouldn't speak unless spoken to first. But all the while, they checked out the car—running their fingers over the wood veneers and the calfskin soft as butter. As the sun set far down Sunset, filling the air with the twilight smell of jasmine, Greg could tell he was mostly talking to himself.

“And don't ask to see the hot tub, whatever you do. In general, try to act like bored aristocrats.”

“I'll be the Duchess of Windsor, shall I?” Edna asked, stretching her feet to the built-in footstool. “Sid, can you do a duke?”

“I can do a maharaja,” boasted Sid, by which he seemed to mean he could do them both at once.

“No, no,” insisted Greg. “Just be yourselves. What I'm trying to say is keep it down.”

“Don't worry, Greg,” she said. “We'll dodder around like the Ancient of Days. You can even cut up our food in little pieces if you want.”

At the end of Beverly Hills, they turned off Sunset and made their way up the pass. Greg wasn't sure what made him so fastidious of Steepside, all of a sudden. It certainly wasn't for Vivien's sake, though she probably turned out dinners as finely tuned as Mozart. He knew he could talk till he turned quite blue, warning them not to act overawed, but that was a losing battle. He stood a better chance, just now at least, of turning down the volume.

They had gone about half a mile when Artie called over his shoulder to point out a half-moon rock by the side of the road—the border stone of the ancient Willis parcel.

“He had a whole square mile at one time,” Artie said.

That was all the prodding Sid and Edna needed. In a flash, they asked him twenty questions, doubling up like a pair of overeager journalists. Greg was struck dumb. They knew so much already, with their facts and figures flying, it was a wonder they had anything left to ask. Artie managed to keep up his end, but just barely. Since most of it was news to him, Greg had no choice but to sit it out and listen.

At last they left the winding boulevard and snaked their way up Willis's hill, as far as the high wire fence that trailed away across the chaparral. With hardly a break in speed, Artie snatched up his electric eye and aimed it at the gates. They parted soundlessly and let the Rolls pass through. The silence fell in the first class lounge as the newcomers took in the reaches of Steepside. Greg, for all his cautionary pose, was happy as a kid for a moment there, to feel them on either side of him grow openmouthed and still.

They reached the gravel turnaround in front of the garages. Greg hadn't said a single word to Artie yet—not so much as hello when he first got in. It was as if he meant to hide whatever bond there was between them. Silly of him, maybe, since Sid and Edna were already wise to what was going on, but in fact, he wasn't the only one who was acting so discreet. They were all quite formal, in their way. They played to type, like a carful of character actors waiting out a plot.

When they came inside, they found the canyon room lit up with firelight and candles only. Vivien seemed to be making sure that the rose of dusk in the bowl of hills would not be lost upon them. Artie left them alone and wandered off to the kitchen. Sid and Edna lost no time. They slipped out onto the narrow balcony, gripped the rail, and gawked at the view. Greg slumped down in a leather sling chair and flipped the pages of a magazine devoted to endangered species.

After a moment, he heard her voice trail in from a few rooms off, giving a final order as to the imminence of dinner. Then the noise of footsteps as she came across the slate-stone floor. He turned to beckon in his fellow musketeers—only to find they'd vanished. Had they leaned out over the rail too far?

“Uh—I don't know where they went,” he said as Vivien reached him. “I probably should have brought a leash.”

“Doesn't matter,” she said. “Saves me having to give a tour.”

“You holding up all right?”

“Oh, sure. It's over now.”

She'd sent the body back to Kansas City, where Carl had a younger sister. If the sister had her doubts about the details, she apparently put them to rest for the sake of the millions she fell heir to. Money didn't talk half so much as it worked to keep things quiet.

“Max here?”

“He's downstairs setting up,” she said, smiling over his shoulder.

A Ping-Pong of voices just behind him told him who was back. Vivien moved to greet them. They flushed with pride to be taken up like guests from out of town. They'd been up to the roof and had a tour of Jasper's private room. They made as if to apologize, but who would have thought they'd find it open?

Open or not, Greg almost said, they didn't have to go in. But he held his temper and left the matter of reprimand to Vivien. From the smile on her face, he knew she didn't mind where they poked about. He wandered off into the bar and poured an amber liquid just as old as he was into a hollowed-out rock of deep-cut crystal. The room was paneled blond, the bar itself a sandstone slab pocked here and there with the print of fossil shells. Above the row of bottles along the wall, twenty feet of Chinese screen accordioned out, in an ink-brown silk overrun by storks.

He'd been in this house just twice before, and then like a common sneak thief. Tonight, like the prince and the pauper, he was due to sit at the head table. For sheer drama, it was more of a movie than any movie
he'd
ever thought of writing. But he dared not moon about any of that. The bar was an empty set just now. Greg turned and beat a hasty retreat, bumping into Artie as the latter came around the corner with a tray of hot hors d'oeuvres. Greg plucked up a puff of pastry, then stepped back to let Artie pass. This moment, he thought, was clearly not an accident.

“You want a drink?” asked Greg, stepping around behind the bar and reaching for the private stock.-

“No, thanks,” said Artie patiently, as he took a seat on one of the stools and spun around once. “I never drink at home.”

“I see. Has it started snowing yet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How much?”

“Oh, it's very hard to say,” said Artie, a trifle disapprovingly. He offered the tray of canapés again, and Greg took a chicken liver wrapped in bacon. “Three, four inches maybe,” Artie went on nonchalantly.

“That much, eh?”

Greg buried his face in a gulp of Scotch, less struck by the fact they were talking in code than he was to hear that “eh.” He sounded like he took his cues from the cutting-room floors of the forties. It was irony made him talk that way—or perhaps it was only nerves. Why else would he walk out saying what he did? With a pat to Artie's shoulder, he said: “Carry on, old boy.” Like a British officer up to his ass in restless natives.

He snatched a mushroom stuffed with crab and exited back to the canyon room.

Vivien, Sid, and Edna huddled on hassocks drawn up close to the great stone fireplace. Vivien poked the roaring logs with an iron bar. Hell, he thought as he walked across towards them, all they needed now was weenies. It was very hard to maintain his Trevor Howard steeliness in the face of so much woodsy comradeship. But he made his way down to within ten feet, which he thought was near enough to strike a balance. He stood at a long bay window and stared across the ridge. There was still no marker on Jasper's grave, and the dark was so far advanced as to blur the fall of the slope. Yet he seemed to know precisely where it was, by a kind of instinct.

“Okay,” Edna said, cozying closer still to Viv, “but that's just you and the masses. What's it like to be recognized by somebody else as
big
as you?”

Oh, shit
, he thought, they were at it already. Still, he made no move to get out of earshot.

“Well, like who?” asked Vivien curiously.

“Oh, I don't know—Picasso or something. You're walking down the street, and all of a sudden he pops around the corner. You've looked at each other in magazines for years. What happens?”

Vivien paused to think. The fire smacked its teeth in the silence. Greg could no longer see ten feet into the dark. And then she said: “I suppose we'd say hello.”

“I
knew
it,” said Edna fervently. “It's like a little private club. You get to the top, and everyone's got this secret.”

“What secret is that?”

“How would
I
know? I'm not famous.”

Greg recognized the Edna mode of argument, where all roads went in circles. Vivien didn't seem to mind. In fact, she sounded ready to pursue it, as if it were some breakthrough notion. Sid, meanwhile, was ominously silent. Once he and Edna were off and running, they scarcely paid attention to what each other said. When he threw in his two cents, it tended to come from out of left field—as now, for instance.

“Tell me,” he said to Vivien, very confidential, “how much you figure this place is worth?”

“The house?”

“Course, I know it's not for sale. But say it was.”

“Hmm,” she said, as she paused to give it a quick compute.

Greg, who had not asked the price of anything private since he was twelve years old, so as not to get a caning in reply, blushed like the Northern Lights.

“Well,” she said at last, “you have to remember, there's twenty-six acres. Then you've got the view. Ten or twelve million, wouldn't you say?”

“Sounds about right,” Sid allowed, as if he did a fair amount of speculative buying.

And Edna again, without a break: “Who did you used to play with, way up here?”

“When I was little?”

“We
know
who you play with now.”

Greg looked over his shoulder to see what she would say. He'd totally blown his cover—all that studied indifference, as he brooded on the night outside. But he felt the strangest pang of fascination. It wasn't that he thought she had much to add to what he already knew. He'd already got her early life's itinerary down. But of course she hadn't played, in the sense that Edna meant. Her childhood hours had been taken up with skis and sloops and horses. It was all part of a tradition. Zillionaire heiresses darting about the marble halls of stately homes were solo for the first twelve years. Raised on a single fairy tale—themselves.

“Nobody, really,” Vivien said, as if she'd had the cue from him. “I wandered all over, all on my own.” And, lest it seem too lonely, fenced on every side with swirls of raw barbed wire, she went on to talk it up as a desert island. “Oh, but I loved it,” she said. “I poked around the canyon till there wasn't a rock I didn't know. I could tell you the name of every bird that lives out there. It's just—well, nobody ever asks.”

I bet Sid and Edna will
, he thought.

He couldn't think of a thing he'd rather hear just now than a list of all the mockingbirds and swallows. He hoped she'd go on to the wilder game—the jackrabbits, quail, and white-tail deer. But other commitments got in the way. A hand came down on his shoulder, full of a nervous comradeship. He knew it wasn't Artie. Artie never touched.

“I thought you were going to send me one of your screenplays,” Maxim Brearley said. It was the Hollywood form of offensive serve, whereby you accused your opponent of minor lapses right away, to get the guilt in motion.