The Caveman's Valentine (16 page)

“Can’t talk about it now.”

“Hey, why not? I don’t give a shit. You can tell me.”

“No. Can’t. Can’t flee and talk at the same time.”

“OK. But I wouldn’t believe anything
Vlad
told you.”

They came to the end of the corridor. There were stairs going down.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

He stopped. There at the top of the stairs, he hunched over and breathed, and coughed, and said:

“OK. You sure . . . you sure you want to hear this? Vlad. Vlad said. Said you gave him. Um. Manual. Whatever. A hand job. OK? Under the table. When you were having lunch with him. And Scotty and Leppenraub. They were right there. Vlad said.”

“He told you that? That son of a bitch.”

“So it’s a lie.”

“
Yeah,
it’s a lie. All I did was rub him a little. Oh, don’t look at me like that. It seemed like a fun thing at the time. We got to get out of here.”

He followed her down the stairs.

As they descended he asked her, “Did Scotty ever find out about you and Vlad?”

“Oh shit. You going to blame me for Scotty going crazy?”

Then they were out. In the rain, in the long alley between the hotel and the barn-theater.

“Come on,” said Cassandra. “My car’s in the back lot.”

They headed down the alley.

A flaring of headlights nailed them to their shadows.

Romulus looked back. A car was turning in, coming toward them. It drove under the lamp at the end of the alley. The scarlet death car.

“Run!” he cried to Cassandra.

They raced helter-skelter down the alley, Romulus desperately looking for any way out. But no chance. No ditch this time, no friendly grove of sumac. No, this time the assassin had him dead to rights. Except this time there was a witness. But what would that matter to Leppenraub? Leppenraub would gladly run them
both
down. Double his pleasure.

Then Romulus heard the car brake, just behind him. A voice: “Romulus.”

He looked back. It was Moira.

“Romulus, wait! You’re in danger!”

He drew up. So did Cassandra.

Cassandra said, “Jesus, Moira, you scared the shit out of us.”

“Darcy?”

“Long time, huh, Moira?”

“Darcy, what the hell are
you
doing here?”

“Trying to get the hell away from here.”

Said Moira, “Well, thank God I found you. Look, Romulus, I think they—you can’t let Herman—I mean that deputy—you can’t let him catch you again. Come on, get in with me.”

He thought about it.

On the one hand, getting into any car with any Leppenraub struck him as about the stupidest idea imaginable. However, this running was getting old. And there were still a host of questions nagging at him. And he wanted to get out of the rain. And he wanted very much to get another glimpse of that coach house.

And her tone did not seem too unkind.

He said, “Moira, I don’t know.”

“Rom.
Please.”

Cassandra was fidgeting. “Mister, you going with her or what? I got to be somewhere else.”

Romulus decided. No real thought involved, just a tumbling down a slope. He was getting good at tumbling down slopes. He tumbled into the decision to stay with Moira Leppenraub.

He said, “You be OK, Cassandra?”

“Oh yeah. Hey, it’s been fun.”

“Thanks for the drinks.”

“Thanks for the music.”

She gave him a kiss on the cheek. When she did, he smelled all the well-scrubbed kid smells just underneath the grit-smells. Soap, aloe, and cream rinse. The kid core of her. Then she turned and clip-clopped away.

And Romulus got into the death car.

T
hey drove past the theater parking lot and down a steep slope. Romulus could see the lights of a village across the Hudson—misty gold and ruby lights. The river itself was a great belt of utter blackness. The ice, Romulus thought, was probably breaking up out there. Probably making a lovely racket. He wouldn’t mind driving down there right now and stopping to listen. But tonight, he supposed, was not the night for it.

Then they turned onto a country road and sped around curves. He hunkered down low in the leather seat. She looked over at him.

“You OK?”

“Yes, I’m very well, thank you. And you?”

“Rom, you look terrible.”

“Well, it’s past my bedtime. Whatever made you suppose that I’m in any sort of danger?”

“I heard my brother. I was cleaning up and the phone rang and when I picked it up I heard my brother—”

“Hey, is this your car, Moira?”

“Are you kidding? I drive a Civic. In the shop. I’m just borrowing—”

“Will this seat go down? The seat went down in Arnold’s car—will it go down in this one?”

“Sure.”

She hit a button on the dash and the seat sighed and leaned back, and Romulus sighed and leaned with it.

He said, “This is all right. I mean, seats used to go down in my day, too, just not so far.”

He watched the headlights carving out stun-lit country scenes. Drooping boughs, dripping leaves. A stone church. A rail fence. A fireplug.

Many arrogant eagles on mailboxes.

He asked her, “So what did you hear?”

“I heard David say something like, ‘I don’t want to hear you didn’t. I don’t want to hear about it at all. I just want you to take care of things.’ That’s all. That’s all he said. Then he hung up.”

“Well, maybe he was talking to his agent. Maybe he was talking to the Louvre. What makes you think he was talking about me?”

“He was scared tonight. What you were saying about him scared him. I’ve never seen him like that. He’s scared of dying, I know that, but
you
scared him even worse.”

“So you think he hired a hit man to kill me? Tonight? Kind of short notice for a hit man.”

“I know that. I’m not saying—”

Romulus mused, “It’d have to be somebody close to him. Somebody he relied on. Who might that be?”

“I don’t know. What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking anything. I’m just trying to stay alive. So how did you know I was still in town?”

“There was another call that came in. I made sure I got to this one first. I thought if it was the same caller, I could at least hear the voice.”

“Hey, doesn’t Vlad ever answer the phone?”

“He does when he’s around. He wasn’t around. I don’t know where he was. Anyway, this time it was Archie calling—Archie who does sets at the theater. He’d just been with you at Walter’s bar. He thought we should know you were in there saying bad things about David.”

“All I said was, David Leppenraub’s a murderer.”

“Jesus,” said Moira. “You know . . . that’s . . .”

“What?”

“That’s my brother you’re . . .”

Said Romulus, “Yes. I know. So who sent Herman the deputy to Walter’s bar?”

“David. David says you’re a crazy psycho and you have to be locked up before you hurt somebody.”

“I see. When assassination doesn’t work, call the cops.”

She glanced over at him. “Rom, what
happened
to you? David told me they were just going to put you on a bus for New York.”

“They did. I got off at the wrong stop though. Then somebody tried to kill me.”

“Kill you? Kill you how?”

“Thorns. State of the art.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Makes two of us.”

“Who are you, Rom? You’re not from California. You really still live in that cave?”

“Mm.”

“And you knew Scotty?”

“A friend of mine did.”

“You think my brother killed him?”

“What do
you
think, Moira?”

Another glimpse of the river. The rosary-bead lights of a far-off bridge.

Finally she said, “My brother . . . I don’t know, my brother has a tough streak. But people have been tough on him. He came out when he was sixteen years old. And where we grew up, this little town in Missouri—this was in the late sixties—well you just didn’t do that. But
he
did it. One day some friends of his were ragging on queers, and he said, ‘I’m a queer.’ That was it. That simple.

“I remember the day. I was in second grade, and in that one day the word got all the way down to my class. Some of the girls came up at recess and said, ‘Your brother says he’s a queer. That makes
you
a queer.’ And I came home and I was bawling and I went in David’s room and started hitting him, and calling him everything I’d heard that day. ‘Queer.’ ‘Faggot.’ ‘Homo.’ Not ‘gay,’ we didn’t have that word then. And he held me till I stopped and then he said, ‘Sex is what you do because you love. You have sex with the one you love, not with the one you’re
supposed
to love. It’s not a duty. It’s love.’

“I never forgot that. But I think David did.

“Because they were just so goddamn cruel to him. He used to come home all black and blue and his clothes torn and he wouldn’t say who did it, but he got colder and colder. And that chill, that worked into his art. I don’t know what happened to that pure love. I don’t know where his heart is. Maybe he feels a little love for me, but that’d be just a guess. Really, I think he hardly knows I exist. He won’t even look at my art. He rents me the studio, he lets me run his foundation, his theater and all, but that’s just . . . for form’s sake, I think. So people will say how much David Leppenraub loves his family. But he doesn’t really give a flying shit what I do.”

“You hate him for that?”

“I’m a little sick of being David Leppenraub’s little sister. I mean are they going to put on my tombstone, ‘She Was a Loving Sister to David Leppenraub’? Christ. I’m just as . . . Jesus fucking Christ! I’m a goddamn better artist than he is.”

A few seconds slipped by. Then she said, “Whoops. That was dumb. That was stupid, competitive—”

Romulus, with nothing useful to say, said, “No, but I bet you are. Better, I mean.” And instantly regretted it.

Moira shot back, “How the fuck would
you
know? You’ve never seen my stuff.”

“I . . . I saw some things in
Artforum.
”

“Jesus, why did I say that? I’ve never said that to anyone. Why did I say that to
you?”

Romulus shrugged.

Moira said, “Well, forgive me, would you? I didn’t mean it. I think my brother’s a
great
artist.”

They sat in silence for a long while. Then she said: “Look, the only thing my brother’s got now is
esteem,
and now that’s in jeopardy. And he’s sick, he’s so sick, Rom, he’s not thinking straight, and he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. So yeah, I guess . . . I guess he might be capable . . . of having someone . . . killed. Yes. Though it makes me . . . to even
say
it, it makes me . . .”

“What are you going to do, Moira?”

“Me?”

“You’re in there. You’re with him. You tell this sad story. It is sad, but he’s still a murderer. You’re still living with a murderer.”

She thought about it.

“Maybe I could go live in a cave?”

She tried to laugh but couldn’t. She said, “I can’t just walk away. Everything in my life is connected to my brother. And I still love him.”

She kept thinking.

“Do you have any evidence, Rom? I mean any hard evidence that he killed Scotty?”

“No, not yet.”

“Oh, God, what if this is all craziness? You
are
a crazy man, for Christ’s sake. I mean, I saw you. Tonight, when you went into that—”

“Fit. Right. I did that. I am nuts.”

She said, “And I could be nuts, too. This could all be . . . just delusion. Paranoia—”

“You heard him tell his hit man to kill me.”

“No I didn’t—I heard him tell
someone
to
take care of things.”

“That li’l someone tried to run me over. Then tried to gun me down.”

He glanced at her and she glanced back. She was crying. She said, “Romulus, I don’t want anyone to hurt you.”

She tried to focus on her driving.

“But that’s my
brother
you’re talking about for Christ’s sake.”

W
ell.”

Romulus said only that.

Then he was quiet. His lids sank. They nearly shut. He saw only the green undersea lights of the dash. And now and then the white silk of Moira’s forearm as she moved the shift. He made up these lines and sang them silently to himself:

Way down here, where the seahorse czar,

And his briny ballerinas brew barnacle beer . . .

He felt the car brake slowly. He lifted his lids high enough to see that they had come to a dark crossroads.

“Romulus. Where do I take you now?”

Sleepiness in his murmur. “I don’t know. Your studio is in the coach house, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well. Your work then. I’d love to see your work, Moira. Would you show me your work?”

And a few minutes later, sweeping up the drive around the old farmhouse—here was the barn, here was Elon’s little chicken-coop house, here was the great field and the road under tulip trees—why, it was a little like returning after a long absence to some favorite old haunt.

Remember the wild party when David called the police on me? And
whatever happened to that strange guy Vlad?

Still, Romulus scooched down very low in the seat, in case someone happened to be still about. No one was. All windows dark.

They cruised on up to the coach house.

“Sure David won’t come back here? Or Vlad?”

“This is
my
place, Rom. All Leppenraubs are sticklers for privacy. They’d know better than to bother me when I’m working.”

“Pretty late to be working.”

“Lots of times I work till dawn. You’re OK here. Come on in.”

First, the big room that had once been stables and was now storage. A ’52 MG-TD, up on cinder blocks. An old horse-drawn plough. Saddles on the walls.

The golden gondola of a hot-air balloon.

Said Moira, “It was one of David’s hobbies. A few years ago. He got about two rides out of it, me in the chase car. Then he nearly ditched in the Hudson, and I found him and his balloonist friend on the shore, drinking champagne with a fisherman, and they were already drunk to the gills and the champagne was gone and I didn’t get any, and that was that. He got some good pictures out of it though. I thought the fisherman was kind of . . . interesting. Happier days. Or wilder days, anyway.”