Belinda (29 page)

The limousine picked up speed, seemed to bore through the more sluggish traffic. The ugly car lots and characterless buildings of upper Market gradually gave way to the congestion of porno theaters, cafes, shop fronts crowded with army surplus, blaring stereos. The yellow streetlamps poured a merciless light on the trash4ittered sidewalks.

"What is it exactly you want to talk about, Miss Blanchard?" Couldn't keep silent any longer. Panic rising. Had to keep it out of my voice.

"Well, my daughter, naturally, Mr. Walker," she said, the drawl not as pronounced as it had been years before in the pictures. "I hear she's been living with you now for three months or more."

So the mother doesn't know, Dan? And what would you advise me to do now? Ride this one out in silence? Or jump out of the car?

"Hear you've been taking very good care of her," she said in the same lusterless tone, her eyes obviously fixed on me, though I still didn't turn to look at her.

"Is that really what you've heard?" I asked.

"I know all about you, Mr. Walker," she said gently. "I know you've been taking good care, of her. And I know all about who you are and what you do. I've read/yyo4ar books, used to read them to her."

Of course. When she was a little girl. And she's still a little girl, right? "I always liked your work. I know you're a very nice man."

"I'm glad you think so, Miss Blanchard." The sweat was getting worse. I hated it. I wanted to open the window, but I didn't. I didn't move.

"Everybody thinks that about you, Mr. Walker." She went on with it. "Your publishing friends, your agents down south, all those business people. They all say the same thing."

The car was taking us all the way to the end of Market. I saw the gray tower of the Hyatt Regency rising on the left. Ahead the nighttime emptiness of Justin Herman 'Plaza. Cold, overcast down here.

"They say you're decent, all of them say that. You've never done harm to a living soul. Nobody says anything but that you're sane and you're sober and you're a nice man."

"Nice?"

just slipped out, didn't it?

"So what is this about, Miss Blanchard? You're saying you're not going to call the police and have me arrested? You're not going to have your daughter picked up and brought home?"

"Do you think she'd come with me, Mr. Walker?" she asked. "Do you think she'd stay if I got her all the way back down there?"

"I don't know," I said. Try to sound as calm as she sounds.

The limousine was sliding into the shadowy covered driveway of the Hyatt. Cabs, limos all around us. Bumper to bumper we moved towards the curb. Flocks of people, porters hustling the luggage. "I don't want my daughter back, Mr. Walker."

The car came to a halt. I found myself staring right at her.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

She had taken off her glasses and she looked at me with the vague, musing expression that the nearsighted often have. Then she put on a pair of dark glasses, and her full red mouth came into focus as if I were the one who had been blind.

"I don't want my daughter anywhere near me, Mr. Walker," she said quietly. "That's why I hope you and I can come to a little arrangement so that she'll be all right."

The chauffeur opened the door behind her and she turned away from me and raised a soft shapeless hood from the folds of wool over her shoulders and brought it down carefully around her face.

In shocked silence I followed her into the lobby and towards the glass elevators, heads turning everywhere as she made her way through the summertime tourist swarm. Just like walking with Alex through another lobby only hours earlier. And she had that same nearly preternatural gleam.

The cape flowed beautifully from her shoulders, and the layers of plaited gold at her wrist flashed in the dull light as she pressed the button to bring the elevator down.

Within seconds we were rising over the main lobby.

I stared numbly through the glass at the dazzling expanse of gray tiled floor below. Water shimmering in massive fountains, couples dancing sluggishly to the music of a small orchestra, concrete terraces climbing like the fabled gardens of Babylon to an unreachable enclosed sky above.

And this woman in the glass box with me, as glossy and unnatural as the world around us. The elevator stopped. She moved like a phantom past

"Come on, Mr. Walker," she said.

How like a goddess she was. And how petite and delicate Belinda was compared with her. Every detail of her her long hands, her beautifully turned legs half hidden by the folds of the cloak, her long exquisitely shaped lips-seemed too vivid for real life.

"What the hell do you mean you don't want her near you?" I said suddenly. I was still standing in the empty elevator. "How can you say this to me about her?"

"Come on, Mr. Walker."

She reached for my arm, closed her fingers around my sleeve, and I fol lowed her out and along the railing of the terrace. "Tell me what the hell this is about!"

"All right, Mr. Walker," she said, as she put the key in the lock.

She moved slowly in the large low-ceiling living room of the suite, with the cloak flaring gracefully around her. The hood had slipped down, and her voluminous hair was frozen in the illusion of free-fall. Not a strand was out of place.

Expensive emptiness. Formless new hotel furniture, rough new hotel carpet. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling window an overgrown thicket of downtown buildings without grace or design.

She let the cloak drop on a chair. Breasts beneath the pale-beige wool truly unbelievable, not just in size but in proportion to the tiny waist. Hips that swung from side to side with almost arrogant glamour under the plain narrow skirt.

What must it be like to live night and day with this much woman? How could there be any room for anyone else? Ah, but Belinda's was such a different brand of beauty. How to explain it? Comparisons of nymph to goddess, bud to rose, just did not come close.

She had taken off the dark glasses, and for a moment her eyes swept the room slowly, as if they wanted to drink in the muted light before the assault of sharp edges. Then the clear glasses came up again. And as she looked at me, I was startled to see the resemblance to her daughter. Same cheekbones, yes, same spacing of the large eyes, something vaguely similar even in the expression. But age would never give Belinda this chiseled nose and mouth, this Technicolor lushness.

"! can see why she likes you, Mr. Walker," she said with the same maddening politeness. Almost sweetness. "You're not just nice, you're a real good4ooking man."

She took a cigarette from her purse, and instinctively I picked up the hotel matchbook from the table and offered her a light. Ever see Belinda's match trick? I thought. It's priceless.

"You're much nicer looking than you are in your pictures," she said exhaling. "Kind of old-fashioned sort of man."

"I know," I said coldly.

She had the same flawless tan skin I'd noticed that first moment in Belinda, positively shining white teeth. Not a line to indicate either age or the character that often comes with it. Now that, Alex did have.

"Come on, Miss Blanchard. I love your daughter, and you know it. Now tell me what this is all about?"

"I love her, too, Mr. Walker. Or I wouldn't have come. And I want you to take care of her till she's old enough to take care of herself."

She sat down on the small red sofa and I took the chair opposite. I lit a cigarette of my own, and then realized it was one of Belinda's. Must have picked up the pack instinctively when I left the house.

"You want me to take care of her," I repeated dully.

I was getting over the shock, and the panic was going with it. But the anger was getting worse.

She looked tired suddenly. Something played at the edges of her eyes revealing strain. I might never have seen it without the magnification of the glasses. No laugh lines there. Positively unearthly. But again I was struck by her irrepressible voluptuousness. The wool dress was positively spartan, the gold jewelry as severe as it was brilliant, yet she was almost monstrous.

To make love to her, what would it-?"You want a drink, Mr. Walker?"

Bottles on the tray on the nameless piece of trash furniture, that might have been a sideboard.

"No. I'd like to get this straight. What you want, what you're talking about. You're playing some kind of strange game."

"Mr. Walker, I'm one of the bluntest people I know. I just told you everything. I don't want my daughter near me. I can't live with her anymore. And as long as you keep her and take care of her and see that she's safe and not out somewhere on the streets, I'll leave you alone."

"And what if I don't?" I asked. "What if I hurt her? Or she decides to walk out?"

She studied me for a moment, her eyes absolutely without expression, and then she looked down. Her head dipped just a little. And then she remained that way, so still that it was slightly unnerving. For a moment I thought she might actually be sick.

"Then I'll go to the police," she said, her voice more hushed than before. "And I'll give them the pictures you've taken of her, of you and her in bed together, the pictures I have from your house."

Artist and Model. The pictures taken with the timer.

"That you have from my house!"

Her head remained lowered, but she was looking up at me now, and it created a suggestion of timidity, which maddened me as much as her subdued voice.

"You had somebody break into my house?"

It seemed she swallowed, took a deep breath.

"Only the negatives were taken, Mr. Walker. And there are thirty-three of them to be exact. None of your paintings of her has been touched. What are you so mad about, Mr. Walker? You have my little girl in your house."

"The little girl you don't want back, Miss Blanchard. And it is my house."

"I'll give you three of the negatives now. And then another batch when she's eighteen. I believe that is a year and a couple of months from now. I haven't figured it with a pencil. But you get the idea. You keep her till she's nineteen, I'll give you more of them. If you can take care of her till she's twenty-one, you can have the rest. Course, you can't show those paintings of her either. But then you'd be cutting your own throat if you did that."

"And suppose I tell you to go to hell, Miss Blanchard."

"You won't do that, Mr. Walker. Not with the pictures I've got." Her eyes moved off again, the lower lids puckering slightly. "And all the other information I have about you, too."

"I don't believe you have those negatives. If someone had broken into my house, I'd know it, I'd sense it. You're lying to me."

She didn't answer right away. She sat frighteningly still, as before, like a mechanical doll that had wound down, like some kind of beautiful computer processing the question.

Then she got up slowly and went to the chair where she had dropped her purse. She opened it and I could see the top edge of a manila envelope as she reached inside. My writing on it, I could see that, my notation in the upper right-hand corner. She was taking a little strip of negatives out.

"Three negatives, Mr. Walker," she said. She put them in my hand. "And, by the way, I'm real familiar with the subject matter of those paintings you've done. I know all those things the police would find if they came to get her. I know what the press would do with the story, too. But no one else will ever know, not if we make our little agreement, like I said."

I held the strip of negatives up to the lamp. They were the most incriminating ones, all right. Belinda and I embracing. Belinda and I in bed. Me on top of Belinda.

And a stranger had walked through my house to get these, a stranger had broken into the darkroom and into the attic, gone through my things. But when had this happened? What was the precise date of the violation? How long ago had we lived with this false sense of security, Belinda and I both, while this other watched her, waited for his chance to break in?

I put the negatives in my inside pocket. I sat back making all those nervous little gestures you make when you are about to blow. I was rubbing the fingers of my left hand together, rubbing my chin with the back of my hand.

I tried to remember everything Dan had told me. OK, they weren't covering it up for Bonnie. But they had covered it up nevertheless.

She had returned to the couch, and I was glad she wasn't close to me. I did not want her to touch me. I didn't like it that our hands might have touched when she gave me the negatives.

"Mr. Walker, you can have money from me in any reasonable amount that you need to take care of her-"

"I don't need money. If you investigated me, you know I don't need money."

"Yes, that's true. Nevertheless I want to give it to you, because she is my child and it's my wish to provide for her, of course."

"And what is the bottom line on time with this blackmail, this little sales arrangement, this-"

"It's not blackmail," she said, frowning slightly. But at once the few lines created by the frown disappeared. Her face was bland again, as devitalized as her voice. "And I told you, till she's twenty-one is best. Until she's eighteen, well, that is kind of imperative. She's a child till she's eighteen. No matter what she might think, she can't take care of herself."

"She's been with me three months, Miss Blanchard."

"Just a year and two months till she's eighteen, Mr. Walker. You can do that much. You can keep her and those paintings of yours where no one will find them, no one will make a big fuss about it all-"

She stopped. The inner switch had been thrown again. But something was different. I thought maybe she was going to cry. I had seen Belinda's face change suddenly, crumple almost magically into tears. But that didn't happen. Instead her face remained listless, blank. And her eyes appeared to fog over. She was looking at me, but I could have sworn she didn't see me. And the tears that did come were so slow that they were only a film. The light seemed to have gone out inside her.

"You're a sane man," she murmured, the words slower. "You're rich, you're steady, you're good. You'll never hurt her. You'll look out for her. And you don't want to hurt yourself."