The Glass Coffin (22 page)

“So you found
The Glass Coffin.”
Felix Schiff’s voice was a shock, but not an unpleasant one.

I glanced over at him. He was still dressed for outdoors. “Take off your jacket and boots and come sit by me,” I said. “I could use some company. How did you know where I was?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was looking for Jill. Your son thought she’d brought Bryn over here.”

“They left,” I said. “They’re probably back at my house by now.”

Felix removed his coat and boots and threw them in the corner of the living room – it was an uncharacteristically thoughtless move, but given the fact that his eyes hadn’t once left the
TV
screen, an understandable one. “I don’t need to see Jill any more,” he said. “I found what I was looking for.”

“
The Glass Coffin,”
I said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt now that this was the film Evan sold
NBC
as the pilot.”

I handed him the box the tape had come in.

“He’s a Judas,” Felix spit the epithet. “What kind of man would betray his mother for a handful of silver and a moment of fame?”

“No one betrayed Caroline MacLeish.” I pointed at the television screen. “Look at her. She knew she was being filmed.”

“Of course she knew she was being filmed,” Felix shouted. “But that movie was never intended to be a commercial property. That film was supposed to be a research tool. It was Caroline’s gift to the world.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he said. “True altruism is rare. You can be forgiven for not recognizing it. Allowing herself to be the subject of a film was excruciating for Caroline. She’s an intensely private person, but she knew the medical community needed to be shown the limitations of its thinking.” Felix threw the empty film box on the table in front of us. “Caroline said psychiatry was still a primitive discipline – in its infancy.”

“And
The Glass Coffin
was supposed to add to the body of knowledge,” I said.

“Exactly. Caroline wanted the doctors who had presented themselves as her saviours to see that she could triumph without them.”

On screen Caroline was staring into the camera. Her eyes were startling – the blue of forget-me-nots. “I used to believe that John Milton was right,” she said. “That ‘the mind is its own place, and in itself/can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ For years I blamed myself for what my life had become. I convinced myself that I had taken heav’n and turned it to hell. The moment I realized that my mind was more complex than anything a seventeenth-century man could have imagined, I was freed – if not into a fully realized life, at least into a life. The mind may be ‘its own place,’ but the superior mind can make accommodations – ensure that it has what it needs to feed it, to keep it from being conquered.”

My stomach clenched. This was beyond hubris; this was insanity.

Felix gripped my hand with excitement. “There,” he said. “Now you can see it. Fate wounded Caroline, but she used her intelligence and spirit to heal herself. She’s incomparable.”

I was dumbfounded. “You’re in love with her,” I said.

“I’ve loved her for twenty-five years. We plan to marry, but we have to wait.”

“For what?” I said.

“For her family to accept us. The health of the household on Walmer Road means everything to Caroline. She was afraid our marriage would introduce an element of instability that would disturb the balance.”

It was an effort to keep my jaw from dropping. “The balance,” I repeated.

Felix’s eyes were glazed, and there was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. “Caroline knew how much every member of that household relied on her. Everything she said or did had to be exquisitely calibrated to maintain the equilibrium.” There had always been a certain boyish athleticism about Felix, but as he leaned forward to stare at the screen he was a shell, like a building that had been gutted by fire. “Are you beginning to understand now, Joanne?” he asked softly. “We wanted nothing more than to be together, but she was prepared to sacrifice her happiness for her family’s sake. And I had to sacrifice too.”

“What have you sacrificed, Felix?” I asked.

He looked at me from unseeing eyes. “Self-respect, friendship, honour.” He drew his hands together as if in prayer. “And now comes the final sacrifice. She said it might come to this. That’s why she gave me the gun.”

Felix took the remote control from my hand and pressed
pause
. On screen, Caroline was frozen in the pool of deep gold light cast by the antique lamp behind her chair. Out of nowhere came a memory of a paperweight from my childhood: a chunk of amber that preserved a lifeless but still perfect wasp.

Suddenly, I was numb with fear. “What are you going to do?” I said.

When Felix pulled out his cellphone, I almost laughed with relief. The cell as a lifeline to the real world was a cliché of the film industry. But as Felix tapped in a number and waited for an answer, he was not a comic figure. He was as tightly wound as a man calling to hear medical test results that he knew would spell his doom.

As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, it seemed the screws were tightening.

“It’s over,” he said. “People have seen the film. The network is committed to showing it. There’s nothing more I can do. Not about
The Glass Coffin –
not about anything. I have the sense that I’m being followed. That can mean only one thing. The police know it was me.” As he listened to the response to his words, Felix hung his head, a schoolboy being chastised. “You have nothing to fear,” he said finally. “There’s no way they can connect you to any of this. They could rip the tongue out of my mouth before I’d tell them anything.” He fell silent again, taking in every word. Then for the first time since he walked into the room, the weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. “Yes,” he said. “I have it with me. You promise it will be that way? That’s more than I could have hoped. A double exit – with our souls leaving our bodies at the same moment.” He smiled to himself. “I’ll wait for your call.”

Felix placed the cell carefully on the table in front of him, then he took a small pistol and two bullets from his jacket pocket. His hands were trembling, but he had no trouble inserting the bullets in their chambers.

“There,” he said, looking down at the loaded gun in his hand. “I’m ready. Nothing to do now but wait.”

“She’s not worth it,” I said. Uncensored and unwise, the words tumbled out of my mouth. “Felix, she’s using you. Look at the movie. She uses everybody. She’s evil and manipulative. She’s destroyed so many lives already. Don’t let her destroy yours.” I moved towards him and reached out to touch his hand. “Listen to me,” I said. “You know I’m right.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he said, and his voice was tinged with pity. “My life began the night I met Caroline MacLeish. All I’ve ever wanted was to share my life with her fully, deeply, completely. Her family kept us from sharing our lives. I cannot allow anyone to keep us from sharing our deaths.”

Felix’s face was wax-pale, drained, but his eyes had the zealot’s glow. The metamorphosis of
ein prakiter Mensch
into madman was mesmerizing. When he changed the position of the gun, it took me a moment to realize that, suddenly, the muzzle was pointing at me.

CHAPTER

13

For a few moments, Felix and I sat in silence – both of us staring stupidly at the gun in his hand. I had no idea what he was thinking, but I was running through my options and there weren’t many. Given what I had to work with, even Ken Dryden would have had trouble stopping the action.

For the next twenty minutes, Dan Kasperski would be in his office, in a garage that had studio-quality soundproofing so that he could practise his drums without alienating his neighbours. When he’d advised me to choose an electronic kit for Angus, Dan had demonstrated his acoustic drums. Inside the garage, they were ear-splitting, but outside, even the wildest riff was just a muffled thump. No matter how loud I screamed, there would be no help from that quarter.

And I had no idea how to appeal to the man who was aiming the gun at me. During the time I’d been a political panellist on “Canada Tonight,” Felix and I had a good working relationship, but we had never fraternized outside the show. I had no reservoir of warm feelings to draw upon and no real understanding of what made him tick.

“I can’t let you go.” Felix’s voice was too loud, and he flushed with embarrassment. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to shout. This is difficult for me. I’m not a cruel man, but I can’t take the chance that you’ll send someone in here to stop me.”

Outside, a car alarm began its rhythmic bray. The sound was an irritating staple of the urban soundscape, but Felix started as if it were a threat. The hand holding the gun moved so that the muzzle was less than six inches away from my breastbone. Fear is a powerful stimulus. Suddenly, everything fell away except the problem at hand. “If you kill me, there’ll be no one left to tell your story,” I said. “All there will be is Evan’s film.”

“A distortion,” he said.

“Then you’ve seen it.”

Felix looked stricken. “I didn’t have to. I know that it’s a spiteful, twisted character assassination of a woman who deserves to be venerated. She saved my life, Joanne.”

“How?” I asked.

“By loving me,” he said.

“That’s reason enough for loyalty.”

“My feelings for Caroline go beyond loyalty. I worship her.”

“Then tell me about her. If I’m to be the keeper of your story, I should know everything.”

“The keeper of my story. I like that,” he said, but he didn’t lower the gun. “I was twenty-five when we met. A very young man from a very small town, who’d made a film about a boy who fell in love with a saint.”

“Autobiographical?” I asked.

Felix shrugged, “Aren’t all first films? The movie was crude and naïve, but it seemed to lend itself to interpretation, so it enjoyed a certain success.”

“Is that how you came to Toronto?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And in Toronto, I found Annie Lowell, who introduced me to the concept of life as an extreme sport.”

“I saw
Black Spikes and Slow Waves,”
I said.

“Then you know that I was self-destructing. I would have died the way Annie did, if Caroline hadn’t redeemed me.” He fell silent.

“Another saint in your life,” I said.

Felix smiled. “There are always patterns,” he said. “But Caroline wasn’t an ideal. She was a flesh-and-blood woman. The night I met her I was at my lowest point. Annie and I had been at a party and she told me she was tired of having me hang around like a whipped dog. So of course when she left the party, I followed her to the house on Walmer Road.”

“She and Evan were still living together when you had your affair?”

Felix’s laugh was bitter. “Our affair meant nothing to Annie, but it meant everything to me. That night I was wasted on booze and drugs – a wreck of a human being abasing himself in every possible way. Annie did what people do with whipped dogs. She gave me a couple of verbal kicks and threw me out. I pounded on the door, begging to be taken back. For once, Fate was kind. Caroline answered the door.” His eyes shone at the memory. “She invited me in. This exquisite woman had created a closed private world, where no one could follow her, but she chose me to be a part of it. I was the only one, and I stayed.”

“You were lovers.”

“Lovers, comrades, friends, confidantes – everything. She had no one.”

“She had a house full of people, Felix – her own children, her granddaughter, Annie, Tracy.”

“None of them measured up. Evan especially was a disappointment.”

“In what way?”

“He needed other women.”

“Women other than whom?”

“Other than Caroline. She didn’t understand it. She said that the only woman Evan ever truly loved was his first wife.”

“Linn Brokenshire?”

“My only knowledge of Linn Brokenshire came from Evan’s movie,” Felix said. “But I understood why Evan was drawn to her. She was a shining presence. After all these years Caroline still loathes her.”

A psychiatrist would have had no difficulty identifying the source of Caroline’s antipathy for the one woman her son ever loved, but I was anxious to know the extent of Felix’s illusions. “Why do you think Caroline hates Linn?” I asked.

He answered without hesitation. “Because Caroline is sufficient unto herself. Walt Whitman says that some people have a need for ‘something unproved, something in a trance, something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.’ Caroline never understood that longing, but Linn did and so did I.”

“Evan did too,” I said. “Felix, why do you think he always came home to his mother?”

“He wanted her love,” Felix said. “He wanted to be the most important person in her life.”

“Is that why you introduced Evan to Jill – so he’d be working on a project that would get him out of the way?”

“That was my hope. ‘The Unblinking Eye’ was going to be an American production that focused on American experiences. Eventually, Evan would have found it impossible to keep his base in Toronto.”

“And with Evan out of the way, you’d have your chance,” I said.

“What I wanted didn’t matter,” Felix said. “Caroline was my concern. The time had come for her to be liberated.”

“From whom?”

“All of them. That’s why when Jill and Evan announced their marriage, I thought my prayers had been answered. Bryn was the lynchpin that kept everyone in place. When she moved out, there’d be no reason for Claudia and Tracy to stay in the house on Walmer Road.”

“And the path would be clear for you and Caroline,” I said. “What went wrong? I know Claudia didn’t object to the marriage. Did Tracy make some kind of threat?”

“She didn’t have to,” Felix said tightly. “Caroline felt the circumstances weren’t right for Bryn to leave.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I, but Caroline always knows what’s best. When it was clear the wedding was inevitable, she sent me out here to convince Evan and Jill to stay in Toronto.”

“And that’s why you and Jill were quarrelling the night of the rehearsal.”

Felix nodded miserably. “I’d assured Caroline that everything would be all right – that Jill and I had become so close, I could make her understand, but Jill had completely bought into Bryn’s dream. She refused to listen to reason. So I went to Evan. I was labouring under the misapprehension that, like me, he would sacrifice anything for Caroline.”

“But he wouldn’t give up his plan to move to New York.”

“Even worse, the night before the wedding, I discovered that it was highly likely Evan’s ticket to New York was the film he’d made about Caroline.”

“How did you find out?”

“A fluke. Remember the luggage mix-up we had at the airport the night we arrived in Regina?”

“Of course, that’s why you were late for dinner.”

Felix nodded. “I thought I’d straightened everything out. But when I was in my hotel room after the rehearsal dinner, I opened what I thought was my suitcase and discovered Evan’s binder. He’d been so secretive about the project he was working on for ‘The Unblinking Eye’ that I couldn’t resist checking his notes about works-in-progress. What I found astounded me. Almost all his notations referred to
The Glass Coffin
. There was only one explanation why he would have been working so intensely on a project that was supposed to be shown only after Caroline’s death.”

“He’d already sold the film to the network,” I said.

“Right. So I went to his room to confront him.” Felix’s laugh was short and bitter. “I had to get in line, Joanne. It seemed another of Evan’s chickens had come home to roost that night. He and Gabe Leventhal were fighting. When Evan opened the door, he was rubbing his jaw, and Gabe was hunched over on the bed. He seemed to be having trouble catching his breath.”

“So Gabe did die from a heart attack,” I said.

Felix looked away. “I wish that were so,” he said. “Gabe was a good man, and he deserved a good death.”

“But he didn’t get one,” I said.

“No,” Felix said. “He didn’t. After I came in, Evan suggested we all have a drink and calm down. Gabe agreed, but he said an odd thing. ‘I’ll drink your liquor, but it’s still Sam Waterston time – time finally to stand at moral attention.’ The reference didn’t mean anything to me, but clearly it did to Evan. The room became even more tense. Evan appeared distracted. He said he’d forgotten he didn’t have any Scotch, and he went down to Claudia’s room for a bottle. When he came back, we had a few drinks, then Gabe slumped in his chair. I was a little drunk myself. I suggested we order some coffee and sober up.

“Evan was very cool. He told me Gabe had been determined to tell Jill something she didn’t need to hear until after the wedding and he’d put something in Gabe’s drink to calm him down till he could listen to reason.”

I could feel the hysteria rising, but my voice was firm. “Felix, it’s important for me to know how Gabe died?”

Felix’s gaze was soft. “You cared for him, Joanne?”

“Yes,” I said. “We didn’t have much time together, but I liked him very much.”

“What I’m about to tell you isn’t pretty.”

“I still want to hear it.”

“I respect your decision,” Felix said. “The moment we picked Gabe up to carry him to his room, I knew something was wrong. He wasn’t moving at all. His jaw had fallen open, and his eyes were glassy.” Felix closed his own eyes as if to shut out the image. “I felt for his pulse. There was none. I told Evan we had to call the police.”

“And he stopped you.”

“He didn’t have to. Evan held up his binder and asked if I’d read it. When I admitted I had, he made me an offer. He said he knew I was in love with his mother and that if I helped him cover up Gabe’s death, he’d refuse to allow the network to use the film of Caroline. I was in a state of shock. There was a dead man in the room. Everything seemed unreal. I didn’t say anything. Evan seemed to interpret my silence as a rejection of his offer. He picked up the phone, handed it to me, and said, ‘Call my mother and ask if she’ll be able to live with your decision to expose her life.’ ”

“And Caroline convinced you to change your mind,” I said.

Felix nodded. “Evan and I took Gabe’s body down in the freight elevator and carried him out into the back alley. It was deserted. It was late, and there was a blizzard – the conditions couldn’t have been more perfect. I’ve had nightmares about what I did every night since I walked away from that alley.”

“Felix, I won’t lie to you. We both know that what you did was terrible, but you were faced with an impossible choice.”

“Since I introduced Jill and Evan, there’ve been nothing but impossible choices,” Felix said. “That’s why I’ve had to rely on Caroline’s guidance.”

“Were you relying on Caroline’s guidance when you killed Evan?”

“She showed me we had no alternative. At the reception, Evan told me the deal was off. He said the network had called earlier that day and they were so high on
The Glass Coffin
they were bumping another program to show it during sweeps week in February.”

“But that was your chance to back out and go to the police,” I said. “If Evan wasn’t going to honour his part of the agreement …”

“Honour,” Felix repeated the word as if were a vestige of ancient language. “Joanne, Evan and I had left a man’s body beside a dumpster behind the hotel. As Evan pointed out when I begged him to reconsider, that made us equally culpable. I was beside myself. Caroline was about to be publicly humiliated, and my stupidity had made it impossible for me to be her champion. I went downstairs and called her. Evan was her son. I thought she might have some insight into how I could appeal to him.”

“But she didn’t.”

Felix shook his head. “She said Evan had never loved her as he should, and that he was a cancer that had to be removed from our lives.”

“So Evan was murdered because he didn’t love his mother enough?” I said. Even to my own ears, my horror was evident, but Felix didn’t pick up on it.

“No, no,” he said impatiently. “Caroline was able, as she always is, to take in the larger picture. She had seen Jill’s commitment to Bryn. She saw that with Evan out of the way, Jill would be the one making the final decisions …”

His eyes searched my face, waiting for me to finish the sentence. “And Jill would make certain Bryn’s grandmother was protected,” I said.

Felix relaxed – grateful that no further explanations were necessary. “It was only a question of waiting for the opportune time. Given Evan’s family, I didn’t have to wait long. When I got back to the party, Bryn and her father were arguing. At one point in their quarrel, she picked up the hunting knife. I suppose she was just being dramatic as the young often are, but unwittingly, she had shown me the way. When Evan left the room, I picked up the knife and followed him.” Felix broke. “Do you know what Evan said when he saw the knife? He said, ‘My mother sent you.’ He was so calm it was as if he’d been waiting for that moment all his life. Then he said, ‘In one way or another, she will murder us all.’ ”

“Evan had come to see the truth about Caroline,” I said. “Making the movie must have opened his eyes.”

Felix scowled. “If his eyes truly had been open, he would have seen what I saw. A woman of infinite strength. The night Evan … died … she was magnificent. After I’d done what I had to do, I was utterly spent. All I wanted was to be in Caroline’s arms. I went to the hotel, showered and changed, and caught the first flight out. I brought the bloody clothes with me and left them in a locker at Pearson. I was certain she would welcome me.”