Long Shot (23 page)

He could always sit tight and wait, he thought, and by and by she'd have to come to him. But what was the use? The diamond was Vivien's caper. Let her play out the final scene at “Riverbend,” if she liked. Finish it off with a shot of cognac. In point of fact, he was lucky to have the diamond safely out of his hands. With this loose end tied up, perhaps she'd hear him out about the killer.

He set off at a trot through the meadow and up the hill, not stopping to change his clothes or comb his hair. It was next to amazing, how willing he was to go with the turn of events. But he'd come to see that the momentum of the investigation depended on what he could hold in his head at any given moment. The truth was no one final thing. The bits that sprang up in the way were more and more the key to it all. You couldn't seek them, or even deduce them. All you could do was keep up your speed and cover ground, going over and over the paths you made.

The trees at the top of the rise were evergreen. The pad of needles beneath his feet soaked up the wet of the mud, so he lost the dread of sinking. The ruthless view of blasted hills—fungus gray as far as the eye could see—gave way in the heart of the woods to a season of mists. He looked up as he jogged along. The pines were blue and motionless above him, as if listening still for the coming on of rain, even now after two days' false alarm. The moss was full. The ferns were finger-high. So far did the whole thing take him in, he forgot for a moment where he was headed. To reach her clearing, he had to pass two forks, a left and right. He wasn't aware of either.

But he must have got it right by a sort of natural radar—because there it was, across a field of waist-high grass. Its shingles had bleached to white, so it glowed in the mountain dusk. A curl of smoke floated out of a fieldstone chimney, powder-gray on the lead of the sky. As he entered the meadow along the winding path, the feather ends of the grass rushed against him. How long, he wondered, since he'd been entirely in the open, without so much as a surfaced road or a visible neighbor? Perhaps never. He knew it was just this kind of place that Harry would have led him to, if they'd only had the time.

He could tell the dark would fall as he reached her door. Already the night poured over the woods. There was no going back without a light. He broke through the last of the grass and leapt up the steps to her porch. He realized even the dark was safe enough, so long as he wasn't lost. The night had a thousand reasons all its own. It wasn't out for him.

She opened the door before he could lift a hand to knock, and the firelight glowed behind her so that he craned his neck to see.

“You were running so fast,” said Vivien lightly, taking his arm, “I thought there was somebody chasing you.”

She guided him forward toward the hearth, as if she sensed he needed warming up. He fixed his eyes on the crackling fire till he stood so close he could feel the heat on his overalls. Then he looked all around—at the high barn ceiling, the cushy chairs, the cocktail table decked with canapés. Then he looked at her. Hair tied back, in a putty silk dress to the floor, she might have spent the day on skis in St. Moritz. No detail here to connect this place to a public inn. It was more like somebody's private chalet. Even a good hotel seemed slightly vulgar by comparison.

“Nice layout,” Greg remarked. He still hadn't said hello. “But if
I
had money, I'd never put it down for a thing like this. It's like restaurants—the prices are way out of line. When it's over, you don't have shit to show for it.”

“A good hotel is always worth it,” Vivien answered evenly, as she busied herself with drinks. Greg sat down on the hearth stool. “It takes people out of themselves for a while.”

“That's the worst reason I ever heard.”

“Is it?” she said, passing over a vodka gimlet. “Sounds like you're all caught up in your reading. How do you like the book?”

She meant the rare one. He held it tight in his hand, like something saved from a fire.

“I'd just as soon read it in paperback, frankly. Then I don't have to be so careful.”

“Who says you have to be careful?”

The diamond hung around her neck, paler against the gray of the dress than it had seemed in the bright Bermuda sun. He wouldn't give her an inch—wouldn't ask how she tracked him down or found his cache. As for the leather-bound Thoreau, if she really meant it as payment for services, he shouldn't have to be grateful.

“I don't get it,” he said. “If you didn't mind coming this far, why not go all the way.” He loved the rapid-fire investigative mode, where you asked a slew of questions all at once. “Come to think of it,” he went on, “aren't you supposed to be stuck on a yacht? Bored out of your mind?”

“I canceled,” she said, though of course she hadn't. “It's just—I know who did it.”

He stared back at her politely, without any change of expression. She didn't know what she'd expected—“I told you so,” perhaps—but she wondered now if he didn't resent the intrusion. She probably should have waited.

“Who?” he said at last.

“Uh—Carl.”

“Wrong,” he retorted, shaking his head.

“Well,
who?
”

“Artie.”

“Bullshit.”

They took a little break and sipped their gimlets. Greg stared into the fire, and Vivien fiddled at the antipasto. They probably both should have waited. After all, it had less to do with who than how they ought to proceed.

“What did you think you'd find up here?” she asked, not so much to change the subject as to start on firmer ground.

“They closed the place, did you know that?”

“No,” she said. It struck her she'd never heard of Carbon Mountain College, except for the fact that Jasper went there. That was its one distinction, somehow. “It's all boarded up, is it?”

“Not exactly. It's crawling with monks.”

“Catholics?”

“Crazies, more than likely. I didn't ask them what they were into, beliefwise. I guess they keep a few bees. Mostly, they pray for us worldly types.”

He sounded very tired. Clearly, she thought, he'd hit a dead end. But no wonder—the past always covered its tracks. He ought to have known there wouldn't be any concrete data left behind. No relics, no husks, and no abandoned campsites. Time didn't have any patience for the leaving of human artifacts. Everything simply came and went.

“They don't suspect a thing,” she said.

By “they,” she meant to diffuse the issue of who was guilty, parceling it out to Carl and Artie both, as if it were a conspiracy. She went to the mantel and stood above him. The fire made light of the silk.

“You couldn't know there was nothing here till you came and found out for yourself,” she said.

Which was really quite expansive of her, but all he had to do was pick up the phone and call ahead, and they would have told him they weren't in the education business anymore. Vivien persevered on the bright side. She didn't like to see him full of second thoughts.

“Did I say I failed?” he asked in some surprise. “I guess I must project a lousy attitude. You don't have to fret over
me
, you know. I got what I came for.”

Not a word about the cost. How they put him through half a day's runaround, yesterday in the bitter cold. A slack-jawed second-rank priest had grilled him a full two hours to discover if he was worthy to see the joker who ran the show. Greg said he was Jasper Cokes's brother—which elicited several pieties about the wages of dissipation. When at last he was ushered in, the man at the top turned out to be a jelly-eyed fanatic, who talked as if he were training a band of terrorists. Luckily, Greg had learned to filter out the nutcake gods, through years of walking among the messiahs of Hollywood Boulevard.

All for what? An hour and a half in the musty attic where the college records were locked away. Watched by a postulant booby, who picked his nose and sifted through a trunk full of academic hoods. In the end, Greg could come up with nothing more germane than Jasper's transcript. A 2.8 overall average, with remedial work required in French and mathematics. Disciplinary action taken only once, to do with a snowman built on the desk of the freshman dean. Probable career: undecided.

“Like what?” she asked. A little too pugnacious.

“Artie was home that night,” said Greg. “Isn't that right?”

She nodded—for the sake of argument only, since that was what everyone thought. In fact, of course, he'd been miles away, but she was the only one who knew.

“He says he heard Jasper and Harry come in,” said Greg in a methodological way. He stood and put his gimlet down on the mantel next to hers. She saw they were both quite even, having drunk them two-thirds down. “It seems they were falling all over each other to get to bed. Artie let them alone and went away to his room. He never saw Harry before, he says. About two hours later, he went for a walk, and there they were.” These were the barest facts as reported in the papers, minus the tears and hysterics. Greg droned over it now with no editorial comment. “So Artie's the only one who ever saw them together. Nobody else—not even Carl.”

“Maybe they used to meet at Harry's place,” she offered. “Jasper didn't always bring them home.”

This wouldn't do at all, she thought. She was coaxing him farther and farther in, as if she meant to go along. She simply had to tell him. Artie had made it all up about them coming in drunk and horny—to cover the fact that he was somewhere else. What held her back from saying so was wishing not to win.

“Anyway,” Greg continued after a moment, “this is the key, right here.”

When she looked toward him, not entirely sure she'd heard him right, she saw he was tossing an actual prop. A filigreed key, about four inches long. It must have weighed half a pound. He tossed it and caught it, over and over, like somebody bent on a dose of self-hypnosis.

“I'll take you in tomorrow,” he said. “Unless you've got other plans.” For all he knew, she had leads of her own that needed following up.

“Whenever you say.”

She understood the subject to be closed for now. She would have to hold off springing the news of the airline ticket. Still, she couldn't figure why, if he'd broken the case wide open, he seemed so sorry underneath.

“There's all this food,” she said. “You hungry?”

“Sure,” he said gently, and turned with her toward the groaning board.

Where, in these godforsaken mountains, had she found a wedge of brie? She had fifteen kinds of vegetables, razor-thin and raw, circling a bowl of sour cream and curry. He decided she probably had a deal. Some market in Beverly Hills sent along, at a dollar a radish, a chest of dainties wherever she went, packed in a fog of dry ice. He chewed on a couple of pea pods, smiling across at her benignly. Thinking:
I bet we look like quite a pair
. Him in his baggy overalls. Her in her Marc Bohan.

“You still feel nothing?” he asked.

She shrugged, as if to say,
Who knew?
“The last few days,” she said, “I haven't had the time to notice. That usually means it's passed. What about you? You still a loser?”

“Depends on what I'm losing,” he replied. He dipped a carrot and passed it across, since she made no move to feed herself. “Tell me, when did it change for you and Jasper? Did you
used
to get it on? Or was it always to each his own?”

Could they really ask each other questions no one else had ever been allowed? Artie wouldn't have dreamed of putting it to her straight. Even assuming the light was green, could they talk this way without attendant rancor? Perhaps if they had no ulterior motives. None whatsoever. Though how could they ever be sure?

“Never. Not once,” she said precisely, without any trace of regret. “We'd had it with acting out, before we ever met. We didn't have the stomach for charades. How is it you got to know Harry Dawes so
well?
Without sleeping with him, I mean.”

He plucked up a handful of vegetable bits and cut off a two-inch slice of cheese. He bore these back to his seat by the fire, like so many winter provisions.

“You mean, because gay men usually do their fucking first.”

“Oh, I wouldn't say gay,” she said. “These days,
everyone
fucks before they say hello.”

She walked to the hearth, where she reached down into a wide-mouthed basket. She brought up two birch logs. Deftly, she slung them onto the fire, first one and then the other. From a hook in the stone, she produced a crude straw broom and swept the hearth of ashes. Greg took note of her charwoman's skills. No ersatz sawdust firewood in the royal suite, he thought.

“He came on so subtle, it went right by me,” Greg said finally. “I'm used to more explicit propositions.”

“But you see my point,” she said, and though he nodded, he didn't see at all. The nodding was more like a wave of sleep. It took him the whole of the speech she spoke to figure this was the thing she'd been getting at all along. “Officially, we're the two widows,” she said. “Isn't it strange? We never got to first base with either one of them. I don't know how many men
you've
had. Probably more than I, but then, they don't put yours in the papers. Still, it's safe to say we're not exactly virgins. So how is it we've come all this way for the sake of these men we couldn't love?”

Couldn't?

The way
she
put it, it sounded strange enough. She said “widow” the night they met, he remembered, on the hillside by the grave. He'd bridled at it then, and he didn't much care for it now. Why did the woman insist on finding parallels in him and Harry? There was no particular story behind his missed connection. Not the way there was with Vivien and Jasper. It was as if she'd found out only now, with Jasper dead, that she couldn't live with what they added up to. Nothing to show for the last eight years but a lot of coverage. Greg didn't blame her a bit. He'd have felt the same himself, in her position. Which he wasn't.