The Perfect Ghost (31 page)

I heard him lift the receiver and say a smooth hello.

“Yes, delighted to hear from you.” His tone said he was anything but delighted. Such a well-trained voice. “No, not yet. Don’t trouble yourself about it. I can act without Jenna. Of course I can. Don’t be a fool.”

After a long pause, the quality of Garrett’s voice changed, tightened. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I only asked whether it was his screenplay or yours.” Angrily, he bit the end off each word.

The taped silence was punctuated by an occasional grunt, a few muttered noises indicating reluctant agreement. Then Garrett spoke again: “I wouldn’t say inspired, I’d say far-fetched and ridiculous. I’d go so far as to call it sci-fi.”

My hands gripped the steering wheel during another long stretch of silence. The engine purred and the wheels bumped along the potholed roadway.

“Look, this isn’t a good time. I’ve got somebody here, a girl. No, not a tart, and not an actress either; just some homely little dull-as-dirt girl, but I can’t get rid of her. Have to humor the damned publisher or I’ll wind up with a lawsuit on my plate.”

Dead air was followed by laughter, the kind of raucous boys-will-be-boys laughter that set my teeth on edge.

“Hey, cuz, give me a day or two to charm the pants off her first. No, really, I didn’t mean it like that. Oh, come on, it wouldn’t be worth it. Well, if you’re going to issue a direct challenge, I’ll add her to the directory. You want her when I’m done?”

Another long pause. Another comment made, no doubt.

“Oh, please, I’m more than willing to share. She’s earnest and drab as a pigeon. Yes, Teddy Blake’s little girl Friday. Makes you wonder how he managed. Right. Look, we’ll hash it out later, talk it over, work something out.”

On it went, on it played, a one-sided conversation from hell. I clung to the wheel and Garrett’s voice filled the car, squeezing out the air till I could barely breathe. Garrett and the unheard listener on the phone discussed me, dissected me, and stuck their fingers in the bloody ooze of my entrails.

While I, all unaware, had stared eagerly over the smooth and beautiful sea, contemplating from the terrace my new, spring-blossoming career. I was a fool, worse than a fool, ten times a fool.

“Well, don’t worry about me,” Garrett said. “It’ll make a change till the actresses turn up. Yeah, we signed some beauties. Fast and easy.”

Hamlet plays the fool, but it’s a feigned madness, north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, he can tell a hawk from a handsaw. Hamlet only feigns insanity; ironically, it is Ophelia who truly runs mad.

I scrabbled at the recorder with clumsy fingers, snapped it off. But I couldn’t help it, couldn’t help myself. As I pulled into the estate, neared the soaring roof of the Old Barn and turned into the broad driveway of the Big House, I pressed rewind. And listened again, each word a fatal hammer blow resounding in my skull.

I swallowed one Xanax; then another, to no effect. The words stayed etched by acid in the circuitry of my brain. A shiver shook my body, and no wonder: The engine ran, but I hadn’t turned on the heater and I had no idea what time it was, how long I’d sat motionless as a stone. My toes ached with cold. I stared through the windshield and recalled the invisible glass tunnel I’d constructed on my purposeful stroll down Fifth Avenue so long ago. I felt hemmed by the same tunnel now, a wall of glass that shut me out, exiled me forever.

The Prince of Denmark only pretends, pretends ignorance, pretends to turn a blind eye to the ghostly apparition of his poisoned father, pretends he doesn’t know his stepfather murdered the sleeping king, his mother betrayed his father. But I’d believed Garrett implicitly, believed in the promise of his bed.

I sat in the car and replayed the tape again. I patted my eyes with a tissue, tried to pull myself together.

“‘… whether it was his screenplay or yours.’”

There was a pile of screenplays on the corner of Garret’s desk. The corner of Mister Malcolm’s desk. A little snooping might be in order.

Hamlet snoops: He overhears; he lays traps; he pries. And what is it he says?

Act One, scene 2.
A room in the Castle
, the end of the first major soliloquy: “But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.”

CHAPTER

forty-nine

The Black Stone

The Fourth Ben Justice Film

Treatment by Brooklyn Pierce

It’s 1995. During the filming of a taut action thriller set in and around Cape Cod, on the Massachusetts coast, MARKHAM, the film’s director, and CLAUDIA, star of the movie, also husband and wife, argue between scenes.

CLAUDIA flirts with her young and inexperienced costar BRADLEY. MARKHAM objects to her behavior during the twosome’s steamy love scenes and tries in vain to tone them down. CLAUDIA seems to enjoy taunting her older husband.

BRADLEY, after rehearsal, comes across the distraught CLAUDIA, in a cove off a secluded beach. She confesses that all is not right with her marriage, that she believes her marital problems could be cured by bearing a child. CLAUDIA and BRADLEY start by rehearsing one of their movie scenes, but end up making love.

CLAUDIA, serenely pregnant, is gruffly congratulated by her father-in-law, the famous and wealthy RAYMOND MARKHAM, who lectures her on the importance of having a large family with many male heirs, so that the family’s eminence and property will stay secure.

RAYMOND and MARKHAM argue over the older man’s will, the younger man insisting that the older man’s obstinacy could leave the estate to his cousin JEREMY.

It wasn’t
Hamlet
or
Macbeth,
not even a minor or disputed work, a
Love’s Labor’s Lost
. Hurriedly I scanned the six-page document, reading Malcolm for Markham, substituting Claire for Claudia, just as Pierce would have intended the reader to do. It wasn’t
Lear
, but like
Lear
, it concerned wills and inheritance and the stubborn pride of old men. Unlike Shakespeare’s plays, it wasn’t written with performance in mind. Other than his presence in the subtitle, Ben Justice didn’t participate, didn’t enter a single scene. The treatment, as written, was nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at blackmail.

Possibly true; possibly untrue. Facts are like beads. They are what they are, elemental, hard, and unchanging, but they can be strung in a variety of configurations, by any number of hands, linked by thin chain, knotted silk, twisted rope. This sequenced chain was long and circumstantial. I sat at Malcolm’s desk in the Great Room, a single beam from my flashlight illuminating the manuscript, and told the accumulated beads like a rosary:

—At the still center of the photograph-covered wall of the small office, in the place of honor, hung a framed family tree, the genealogical chart of the Malcolm dynasty.

—Garrett Malcolm was an only child.

—Malcolm’s cousin James Foley, reminiscing about their shared boyhood, mentioned that the two boys were so close they caught each other’s diseases. “Mumps. I got a mild case, but he didn’t get them at all, not till way later, and then he got them bad.”

—Malcolm’s father, Ralph, proud of his lineage, eager for grandchildren, delighted in Jenna and proclaimed that the “line was extended” when he recognized her acting talent.

—Malcolm fought the divorce from Claire and then suddenly, overnight, gave up and relinquished his demand for custody of Jenna.

—Malcolm, even when suspected of a hideous crime, refused to give local authorities a DNA sample.

McKenna had given me the photo: Malcolm and Claire, in ’93, ’94, or ’95, according to his Web site notation, a legitimately married couple with apparently nothing to hide, disguised as they headed for the clinic door—he in a trench coat, she in a wig. Had they made an appointment to find out why she hadn’t gotten pregnant yet? Discovered what I thought they’d discovered, that Malcolm, who’d been shattered when Sybilla Jackson’s pregnancy scare proved only a scare, that Malcolm, who’d never inquired whether or not I used birth control, that Malcolm, illustrious heir to acting royalty, had no hope of fathering a child?

The clinic’s records were destroyed. No one had been arrested or charged for the clinic fire. Claire Gregory was dead, ashes scattered to the wind off the California coast. The only sure proof would be DNA, the DNA Malcolm so jealously guarded, his own DNA and Jenna’s. And Jenna was conveniently kept far from home; she’d been out of the country for years.

What if Jenna were not Malcolm’s child, not the heralded HMB, the Heir of my Body, the heiress of Cranberry Hill? If you’d discovered that, Teddy, what might you have done with the information? More to the point, who would you have told? If not me?

Not McKenna. If McKenna had known, the world would have known. He’d have plastered it all over his gossip site. He’d have sold it to Gawker, to any site that would post it. He’d be pontificating on celebrity immorality via cable TV and talk radio.

I gathered the pages, straightened their edges, and replaced them on the desktop. Then, my hands under my chin, I blew out a long breath that warmed my chilled fingers. If I’d been onstage, it might have looked like I was praying.

CHAPTER

fifty

“You seem preoccupied this morning.”

The pink and gold wallpaper faded to gray, like an empty sky after the last vanishing trace of sunset. Malcolm shifted beneath the comforter and yanked at the back of my right knee so that my leg came to rest against his hardening penis.

“Is it the book? Because we can cancel the whole deal. I really don’t care, one way or the other.”

“I do.” I wrestled with the top edge of the sheet, trying to slip it out from under my back so I could sit up.

“Come on, relax.”

He kneaded my spine with one hand, cupped my rump in the other and roughly hauled me on top to straddle him. I participated in the action, but with markedly less enthusiasm than previously displayed. I’m not sure he noticed, one way or the other.

I was brushing the tangles out of my hair when the phone rang. He picked it up eagerly, then grimaced and held it out to me.

“Who is it?”

“I’m not your secretary.”

“The police?”

“It’s your editor, dammit. Are you going to take it?”

I couldn’t very well refuse since he hadn’t bothered to cover the mouthpiece. There was a time to hold my tongue, yes, but also a time to speak. I reached out my hand, grasped the phone, and willed cheerfulness into my voice.

“Jonathan, how lovely to hear from you. No, no, I did mean to call,” I said. “Yes, I did call him. Right away. And I’m so sorry, but you must have misunderstood. Amory Russell is definitely not planning any kind of memoir. Yes, Teddy did call him, but with a legal question, that’s all. They were old friends. Nothing important. No. Absolutely. Yes, I’m sorry, too. It would have been a terrific project. No, we’ll never know. Yes, I’m almost done, just the finishing touches now.”

As I hung up, Malcolm said, “What was that about, pet?”

How I used to relish his casual endearments, the way he called me “pet,” “angel,” “darling.” Now I could only imagine he’d forgotten my name. I watched as he buttoned one of his crisp blue Turnbull & Asser shirts. “Nothing. Will you be busy all day?”

“And all night, too. Don’t pout. The lighting designer’s an ass, so I don’t know when or if I’ll get back. We might wind up eating sandwiches on stage.”

We
, I thought. Meaning he and which of the wanton actresses? Which new addition to the directory? Ophelia, perhaps? An eager extra? A serving wench?

“Well, don’t worry about me; I’ve got plenty to do,” I said. “Tell me, do you remember the fire?”

“What are you babbling about? What fire?”

“The fire here on the estate. When you were a kid.”

“Vaguely. Lots of fuss.”

“Did they ever find out what caused it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Your cousin, James, he wouldn’t know, would he?”

“Listen, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve got other things on my mind.”

I smiled. “Of course you do. Sorry. So is it okay if I work in the Great Room today? Or the little office? Since you won’t be here?”

“You are hereby granted the freedom of the castle.”

“My lord.” I bent my knee in an awkward curtsey. “And it’s okay if I scan your photo wall?”

“As long as you know I’m not sticking a bunch of photos in my book.”

I didn’t flinch when he said “my book,” but as soon as he’d dressed and gone, I did likewise and hurriedly made my way downstairs into the room with the mechanized shades, more interested in the old-fashioned leather-bound calendar on his desk than the photos of his triumphs. I traced the list of dates marked “Teddy” or simply “T.” A blank square marked the date of your death. No alibi. I took stock of the bottles of booze on the bookshelf.

Seated at Malcolm’s writing table in the Great Room, I reviewed pages, editing in a blaze of concentrated energy, ignoring the PA when he inquired if I wanted food, ignoring even the bleat of my cell phone. My string of beads was practically completed. If I could have discovered exactly which beads Detective Snow possessed without answering any more of his questions or trading any of my beads for his, I might have returned his calls.

When I finally typed THE END and lifted my head, the light was almost gone from the sky. Ignoring the gaudy sunset, I appropriated a dark green binder, arranged and inserted pages, closed the metal clasps, and inserted the manuscript carefully into the pile of screenplays on the corner of Malcolm’s desk where it blended into its surroundings, fell into place like the missing piece of a jigsaw.