Greenwich (11 page)

“If you want revenge, sue him.”

“I don't sue people. You know what it costs to sue someone?”

“We'll go to the cops,” Abel assured him. “That's punishment enough. They'll go out to Castle's place and arrest the kid, and Castle will have to post bond. The kid will have a record.”

“He probably has a record already. I'm pissed off. I want to put my hands on that little bastard.”

“Good. Then you'll be arrested, too.”

The arrival of a young intern with Christina and the X rays put an end to their conversation. “Nothing broken or dislocated,” the intern told them cheerfully. “She has a sprained shoulder, and we'll give her a sling. I'll give you a couple of patches to change the ones I put on her face. Just scratches. She'll be fine. Some swelling around the arm, nothing else. She's very beautiful. The scratches won't leave any scars, so she'll be just as beautiful.”

Christina squirmed with the praise. As with any fifteen-year-old, the sling was a sort of status symbol. She had already decided to say nothing to anyone about what had happened. The sling would add to the mystery.

From the hospital, they drove to the police station, down Mason Street almost to the Sound. There is a ridge that runs for miles along the Connecticut coast, at times near the Long Island Sound, at times a mile or two away from it. The business section of Greenwich, where the police station is located, is down from the ridge and closer to the Sound, just a few minutes drive from the hospital at that time of the night.

While Greenwich is considered one of the wealthiest towns in America, to New York City what Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles, it is far larger than Beverly Hills, sixty thousand people, running the gamut from the outrageously rich to the middle class and then to the poor—which gives its police a peculiar problem—ultrarich neighborhoods where they have to tread very carefully. If you think of cops in terms of tarnish, they are by no means untarnished.

Sergeant Yeats was at the desk, and after he listened to Frank and studied the two angry men and the sad-faced girl thoughtfully, he asked her, “How do you feel now, Christina?”

“It hurts. In more ways than one.”

“You state that you were not raped. Was there any attempt at rape?”

“He came on to me …” She hesitated. “I think he wanted to.”

“How do you feel about letting this pass?”

“No way!” Frank exclaimed.

“Has the kid ever been charged?” Abel asked.

“Yes, he's been in trouble. But I'm asking your daughter,” he said to Frank.

“Whatever my dad says,” Christina replied.

“You want him arrested, Mr. Manelli?”

“Damn right.”

“OK. I'll send a couple of officers out there, and they'll bring him in. I have to tell you that the old man is a decent guy. He supports our Silver Shield drive generously. I'm not trying to make an exception; we get a good deal of this here in town, and generally it's simply a fine—as long as the parent cooperates and makes the kid work for it.”

“As long as you arrest him and put the fear of God into him.”

At this point Frank had cooled down considerably, and they left the station house and drove back to Chicka-hominy, dropping Abel off at his house.

Abel's wife, Delia, his son, Joe, and his two daughters, Sarah and Helen, were still up, sitting at the kitchen table and waiting for him. Delia had coffee ready, and there was raisin pound cake on the table.

“How about some ham and eggs?” Abel said. “Sunny-side up. How about that, Delia, my own sweet love?”

“You mean you didn't eat at the party?”

“I am starved.” And turning to his kids, he said, “How about you all get upstairs to bed. Gossip, gossip. You'd all sell your britches for a little juicy gossip.”

“I don't wear britches,” Sarah said.

“And we just wanted to hear how Christie is. See?”

“Christie's just fine.” Delia was already setting up the pan and preparing to slice ham. “You know, Honeybunch,” Abel said, “that I don't eat at a party. I can't eat when I'm doing the cooking. I taste. And you're letting the pan get too hot.”

“Just don't teach me how to cook,” Delia said.

“No way, never,” Abel agreed.

Fifteen

N
ellie, changed into her street clothes, went to the room where David was waiting for her. Harold and Ruth were still there, Ruth crying and Harold with his arm around her. Nellie went to them and asked whether she could help. Rising, Harold took her aside.

“My wife would like to see him, her father.”

“Yes, I can understand that. They took him into the pathology room, and she can see him if she feels strongly about it.” Nellie spoke in a whisper. “But it wouldn't be good now. Tomorrow, after the undertaker removes the body—well, Dr. Ferguson will look better.”

“What undertaker?” He had no idea how one went about a burial.

“Dr. Ferguson was a Protestant?”

“Yes—if he was anything. He left instructions to be cremated, I believe.”

“Protestants usually use Halley, I mean if you do it here in Greenwich. That's—” She spelled it out, and Harold jotted it down. “You don't have to do anything tonight. I have a couple of sleeping pills here. Try to get her to take them. In the morning, you can call Mr. Halley, and he'll call the hospital and pick up the body.” She gave him a small bottle with two yellow pills in it. “She can take both of them. Mr. Halley will tell you exactly what to do, and when you can both go over there and look at the body. But take your wife home now, if you can talk her out of going to the pathology room.”

Harold told Ruth what Nellie had said, and she agreed; he helped her rise. His manuscript was stuffed into the large purse she carried, and he wondered briefly whether she had even looked at it.

When they had left, Nellie turned to David. “You poor kid. I plucked you out of bed in the middle of good love-making, and now you've been sitting here for hours.”

“It's all right. She had someone to talk to.”

“You didn't mention anything I said to you—about him having flubbed it?”

“Goodness, no.”

“Thank God. There was some bleeding internally, but that didn't do it. His heart stopped, and we couldn't start it again. There was just too much damage. Dr. Loring is sitting in his office now, getting drunk and still in his operating clothes—and, David,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I'll marry you.”

“What? What on earth!”

“If you'll have me?”

He threw his arms around her and kissed her. “Will I have you? Will I ever! But what—?”

“Death. It's as simple as that.” She clung to him.

Sixteen

H
arold drove Ruth home. Sitting beside him, Ruth managed to say, “Don't talk to me, Hal. I just want to be inside of myself and remember.”

“Inside of myself and remember” lodged in Harold's mind, and he looked at his wife as if he had never seen her before. Just as he had been the son Seth Ferguson never had, Seth Ferguson was the father he never had, His father, his own father, had a savage distaste for everything he did, writing, joining the navy, becoming a part of the Vietnam tragedy, his rejection of religion, his contempt for wealth, and in all these things he had found a soul mate in Seth Ferguson. He was not a weeping person and he found it almost impossible to cry; yet now his eyes welled with tears and he wished in his heart that Seth Ferguson still existed somewhere. He remembered one of the many conversations with Seth, when Seth had mentioned that he didn't want to be put in any damn coffin and be food for the worms. “And I don't want any of this nonsense about an afterlife. God Almighty, the sheer boredom of it!” How strange that he had used that expression! “Just incinerate me, and don't keep the ashes.” That was the word he had used,
incinerate.

Yet there had been one conversation where Seth had backed off and said to Harold, “I must admit, Hal, that one thing keeps me from being a card-carrying member of the atheists' society—and that's the damn human liver. The more I study it, the more I'm confounded. It defies every process of evolution and natural selection. Do you realize that the liver performs over five hundred functions that we know about and more that we haven't discovered yet. Liver tissue consists of thousands of tiny lobules, arid these are constructed of hepatic cells, and these are the basic metabolic cells. The liver function involves the digestive system, excretion, detoxification, blood chemistry. It produces bile for the process of fat digestion, it stores glucose—and God only knows what else it does, and I could sit here all evening listing other functions that we have already discovered, and there's just no way, absolutely no way, that I can conceive of this as a result of natural selection.”

“What then?” Harold had asked.

“Damned if I know! I sat for an evening listening to Car-ruthers, the best liver man in the country, and when I put it to him, he brushed it off and said, Don't get into this God business. It's too confusing.”

Harold was not too concerned with fate or faith or his past, and he had lost his last shred of faith—if he ever had any—when he was ashore in Vietnam right in the middle of the Tet offensive. Like many others who had been in Vietnam, he was terrified of his dreams, and each night when he went to bed, he instructed his mind not to dream. Sometimes it worked, mostly it did not.

The manuscript, now stuffed into Ruth's purse, had come in large part out of the Vietnam experience and out of his talks with Seth Ferguson, and while Seth lay dying and Ruth sat her lonely vigil in the waiting room, he had been at the Castles', stuffing himself with rich food. They were home now and in the garage. He turned off the motor, dropped his head against the wheel, and began to cry like a child, sobs that wracked his entire body.

“Baby, baby,” Ruth said. “It's all right. Baby, don't.”

Things had been reversed.

Seventeen

H
ugh Drummond met Larry in his room at the Waldorf. Larry had checked in a few hours before and had made himself comfortable in a spacious room, large enough to accommodate a couch and a couple of easy chairs. He had a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice ready, and he poured half a tumbler of the whiskey for Drummond.

“I don't have too much time,” Drummond said. “I'm on a midnight flight, destination Bermuda.”

“Bermuda?”

“They're sending out subpoenas tomorrow. Curtis says I'm not on the list, but I need a vacation—and they can't serve a subpoena in Bermuda.”

“That stinks. How do you know?”

Drummond took a full swallow of the bourbon, licked his lips, took out a cigar, cut the end, and lit it. “Curtis finds out such things.” He knew the question that was on Larry's tongue.

“Will they subpoena me?”

“No, according to Curtis.” Drummond smiled. “But they will subpoena Castle.”

“I don't have a gun,” Larry said. “Curtis told me to meet you here. You told him you would take care of it.”

“Of course. You know, Larry”—blowing a ring of smoke—“Curtis is an extraordinary man. He's eighty-two years old.”

“No. You're kidding.”

“Scout's honor, eighty-two, and he has a mind like a steel trap. All these years I've been telling you to keep clean—well, it's paid off. When I come back and all this has blown over, you can be a congressman again, if that's what you want.”

“I have a source here in New York—for the gun, I mean—but he knows me.”

“You don't need it,” Drummond said. “Clean is clean.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a gun and a silencer. “I have my own source, a few things I keep in a small apartment here. Clean is clean, Larry. This is a thirty-eight automatic with a silencer, a new gun.” He was wiping it as he spoke. “Be sure it's a head shot—no mistakes. I presume you'll rent a car?”

“Yes. But I need ID.”

“You do indeed.” Again, he took a moment to blow a ring of smoke. “I used to do that for my grandsons, Larry. They loved it. Nothing I did fascinated them as much. About the ID.” He reached into his breast pocket and took out two cards, which he handed to Larry. “Driver's license and American Express. Curtis obtained them. They were stolen from the home of a CIA man who is in Mexico with another set of IDs. So there will be no notification that they were stolen until next week, when he returns. If you're curious, the young man who stole them is having an affair with the CIA man's wife. He sold them to Curtis for five hundred dollars. Money will buy anything, if you know where to look for it. I would impress on you that you should have no other identification on your person. Use the American Express card, and then destroy both the card and the license. Leave your wallet in the hotel safe.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Larry said. “Some kid fucking a CIA man's wife. You can't trust anyone.”

“That's a thought, Larry.” Drummond permitted himself another smile.

“How long will you be in Bermuda?”

“I have no idea, Larry. Talk to Curtis if you want to reach me. I have some other plans, but this isn't the time to talk about them.”

Eighteen

A
fter the monsignor and Sister Brody had departed, Sally asked Richard, somewhat tentatively, whether he had enjoyed the evening. She had no idea what his response would be and no idea of what had passed between him and the monsignor.

Looking at her rather strangely, as if her question was totally unexpected, he didn't answer immediately. She imagined she had offended him by inviting the priest and the nun, but she didn't understand why, if their presence was offensive, he had not put his foot down when she first asked whether she could invite them.