The Edge of Doom (14 page)

“I’ll ask Laurence about it,” Janice said. And with that Kate left, politely refusing the offer of tea.

Kate needed two drinks before she could bring herself to hold forth about the contents of her mother’s notebooks.

“What did you expect to find?” Reed asked when he had heard her out. “What did you hope to find? A journal recording her passion and its renunciation; the birth of her lover’s child?”

“I can’t believe she’s my mother. That’s the answer. Jay got some other woman with child and dumped it on my mother.”

“If you will calm down and think a minute,” Reed said, “you will recall that we also tested Laurence to be assured that he and you had the same mother. I fear there will be no surprises in ‘the dark backward and abysm of time.’ You better be impressed; that’s one of the three quotations from Shakespeare I know by heart.”

“What are the other two?” Kate could not help asking.

“ ‘Dressed in a little brief authority’; I think of that at least three times a day. Also ‘the readiness is all.’ ” As I was saying, the solution to the problem occupying our maid’s room is not in the ‘dark backward and abysm of time,’ but very much present, now, immediate.”

“For which you have a plan.”

“I do. And you shall hear it. But I’m wrong. I do have another Shakespearean quotation. ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ ”

“You may be wrong about that, when it comes to Jay,” Kate said.

“And so your mother, to keep from dying of love, went on with her scheduled social life as she had always done, to keep regret, longing, misery at bay. Do not be too hard on your mother.”

“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t think she was wrong not to run off with Jay. I’ve told him so; love which is not tested by time and extreme proximity lasts far better. And she was good at the life she led, particularly now that Jay had provided the only thing she had lacked: physical passion. No, I don’t blame her for not abandoning the life she knew and was good at. I don’t know what I’m sad about. I guess I hoped for something written, something testifying to the experience she had had.”

“What you mean,” Reed said, “is that you wish Edith Wharton’s mother had written Edith Wharton’s novels.”

“Touché,” Kate said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Imagination gives to any nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Early the next morning Reed, who usually walked Banny at that time, suggested to Kate that she come along, too. Kate, who drinking coffee and reading the
New York Times
was sunk in her usual and necessary solitude for that time of day, stared at Reed in startled bewilderment.

“Please,” he said. He had put on his Irish hat, as he called it, a brimmed tweed favorite that could be crushed in a pocket, drowned in a storm, and still retain its gentlemanly insouciance.

“Since when have you taken to wearing a hat for Banny’s walks?” Kate asked. “Have you been feeling chilly about the head?”

“The last few days,” Reed said, ignoring the last part of the question. “Are you coming?”

With a sigh, Kate abandoned her coffee and the paper, catching in Reed’s tone a sense of urgency.

When they had reached the park, and released Banny from her leash, as was legal before nine in the morning—although, unlike most dogs, Banny rarely wandered far away from them, or (illegally) pursued squirrels—Reed told Kate his plan.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “this same trio—man, woman, and dog—shall set out on this walk. Only, the man won’t be me. He will be Jay, wearing my hat and a pair of glasses like mine. You and he will walk and talk exactly as we are walking and talking now. The idea, if you haven’t guessed, is that he will be taken for me.”

“I had got that far,” Kate said. “And where will you be? Remember, tomorrow is Tuesday; Clara is coming, since you vetoed my postponing her.”

“Exactly. I shall be in the maid’s room. As we agreed, Clara never goes in there. But if, by some perverse chance, she should go in there, she will find me lying on the cot, ready with a reason for that uncharacteristic exercise.”

“Jay and I, meanwhile, will . . . what?”

“You’ll keep walking and talking, eventually putting the leash on Banny and wandering over to our local precinct.”

“I haven’t a clue where it is.”

“Of course you haven’t. Every citizen should know where her local precinct is, but we’ll take that subject up another time. When you get to the precinct, you will ask for a police officer named Ringley.”

“As in the circus.”

“Not quite. An officer named Ringley who will escort Jay into the interior of the station where he will be locked into and expected to relax in a holding cell. You and Banny will then come home, stopping on your way into the building to mention loudly to the men in the lobby that your husband has had to leave for work.”

“Is someone supposed to overhear me say that?”

“I don’t know if it will be overheard, or if it will be believed if overheard, but we’re doing our best. Have you got it all straight?”

“I suppose it’s no good asking where Jay is going after he leaves the holding cell.”

“The plan is for him to proceed in a police car, some hours later, to a prison upstate where he will be protected for the time being.”

“And what are we, or you, since you seem pretty much to have taken this over without much consultation, going to be doing while Jay is in the cooler?”

“This is consultation; I’m consulting you. True, I arranged the police part before I had consulted you, but time was of the essence.”

“You haven’t told Jay about this yet?”

“Certainly not; I wanted your agreement or refusal before going any further.”

“You apparently assume that you and Jay look enough alike to get away with this charade.”

“You’ve never been great at noticing physical characteristics, for which I have long admired you. They aren’t as important as everyone else in our society seems to think. In fact, however, Jay and I are of a height, not dissimilar in coloring or in the way we walk and carry ourselves. If you sign off on this plan, I’ll spend a large part of this evening encouraging him to walk like me. If this doesn’t work, we haven’t lost a great deal. We have to get him out of our apartment, and he’ll be safe for a short while with the police.”

“And if they, whoever they or he are, spot him the moment we leave the house and nab him, what exactly am I to do?”

“Rush back upstairs and we’ll call the police. But I very much hope that won’t happen, and I don’t think it will. They may not even know that he is in our apartment, but for various reasons to do with certain lurking types I’ve spotted, I think they do. Now, take my arm.”

“What?”

“Take my arm. As though we were out together to have an important talk and needed to feel close.”

“We are having an important talk.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean—a private, personal talk; we’re making up because I treated you badly last night. Take my arm.” Kate did so.

“Good,” Reed said, squeezing it to him. “Take Jay’s arm tomorrow. Even if they see through this plan, they are hardly going to try anything with you hanging on to him, a large dog nearby, and many people in the park and on the streets. That, at least, is my hope.”

“Mine, too, Reed,” Kate said, squeezing his arm and resting her head for a moment on his shoulder. “You do realize that Freud and his followers could hardly fail to think Oedipus complex; my husband and my father treated with identical familiarity.”

“We shall have to risk that interpretation, as I hope you agree.”

“But I still want to know the details of who this is who is after Jay, and why, and what sort of person or persons we’re up against.”

“Jay is going to tell us all about it tonight, under threat of immediate exposure. But I don’t think he’ll need the threat to tell us.”

“Be sure to leave enough time for his lessons in walking like you.”

“Remind me, when this is over, if it ever is over,” Reed said, “to tell you again how much I love and admire you.”

“And me with a criminal for a father, and the genes of heaven only knows what else seething about.”

“You’re you. Do try to keep that in mind, will you?”

And they walked on for a bit, Kate’s arm in his.

Reestablished in the maid’s room that evening, they were seated in their by now familiar position of the men perched on either end of the cot and Kate, on the chair, with her feet extended onto the cot between them. Jay began to recount how this deathly relation between him and his enemy had come about.

“I’ve already told you some of it,” he said.

“So you have,” Reed agreed. “But we could do with a bit more elaboration on that part of the story, as well as some description of the man who is determined to kill you.”

“I’ve told you; he became obsessed with me. The FBI told me that, though I hardly needed to be told. He’s shadowed me ever since he got out; it was a while before I noticed. Before he wanted me to notice.”

“I have trouble putting it together,” Reed said. “I mean, the different parts of your life. The architect, partner in a firm famous for its work in restoration, and the young man willing to steal a painting from a gallery, and later, the older man willing to testify against a killer who must have had friends on the outside, even if he was convicted.”

“I didn’t fear his friends. He hadn’t the means to pay enough; he wasn’t part of a gang or an organization. No, he was the only one to fear. I sensed what a sick person he was from the first time I met him.”

“Why did you go on with it?”

“Why did I agree to help my friend commit theft in the first place? Because it was unjust; because his mother ought to have had her picture. It was hers by rights. The theft didn’t seem that terrible, and my friend promised to return the picture one day. And he did.”

By this time he was talking to Kate, not by any means excluding Reed, but there could be no doubt who his chosen audience was or to whom the story needed to be told.

“It all goes back to Louise, to your mother. She refused to come away with me—well, I’ve told you that. There are two bits I neglected to mention. One was that I wanted to take you with me. I had nothing, no one else. Oh, I had fine plans about how it would happen without a scandal. We would pretend you had died, or been kidnapped, or—one mad scheme after another, all impossible, of course. I did see that. But she left me nothing. She had her family, her boys, her damn social life, everything; and what did I have? Well, she offered me money. I knew it wasn’t as though she were buying me off—I never thought that, and neither did she. Her argument was that I needed to get started at some profession, she had the money to give, I could pay it back someday, and so forth. I needed the money; of course I did. But I felt she needed to give it to me, and I wanted a part in nothing that would assuage her guilt at deserting me, at throwing me out, at ending it. I knew and she knew that she could just turn away, hide her bruised heart, and go on with her chosen life. I wasn’t going to make it easier for her if I could help it. But I certainly needed money. So when the chance to make a good sum, at least for those days, came along . . .”

“The plan to steal the Shakespeare picture for your friend.”

“Exactly. I don’t know if I mentioned that he offered me money; he’d kept his nose to the grindstone and made a neat packet by then. I needed money badly, as I’ve said, as Louise knew. I hadn’t a penny to my name. I like to think—I certainly persuaded myself then—that if I hadn’t been convinced that my friend had a right to get that picture back, if I hadn’t resented the picture having been sold from under his mother’s nose, I wouldn’t have agreed to the whole caper. Sure, I know what you’re thinking: that I probably identified the loss of that picture with my loss of your mother; all I can say is I was highly motivated to commit a crime. A victimless crime, as I thought of it.”

“Except for the museum that owned the picture,” Reed injected.

“Well, they didn’t trouble too much to find out who really owned the picture, did they? I don’t think museums and galleries and private owners are too particular on that score. Anyway, I didn’t even think about the museum then.”

“And your friend hired this man who helped you to steal the picture.”

“That’s him. That’s the one.”

“And he has found some comrades to help him in his quest for you now, is that it?”

“I don’t really know. I think so, because the one or two times I’ve caught sight of him, there seemed to be others. Helpers, I think; hired help. He intended to kill me himself; they were just for the capture is the way I see it.”

“And he hates you because you testified against him?”

“He was a rough type, even when we met; I’d asked my friend not to use him, but he wouldn’t listen. And, in fact, nothing much went wrong. Not during that theft.”

“But later.”

“Years later. I read about an art theft he was involved in; they were spotted, and he shot one of the security guards. He didn’t need to shoot him; he said when the police spoke to him—eventually it was the FBI—that the guy would have killed him if he hadn’t shot first. But the security man didn’t have a gun. It became obvious that what he feared was that the guard had seen him, could have described him, would have led to his arrest.”

“Surely killing the guard would be as likely to lead to an arrest?” Kate said.

“Not really. He denied being the shooter; he insisted the guy working with him was the one who did the shooting. That seemed unlikely, given the character of his accomplice—no record, and no gun. The bullet from the killer’s gun indicated the kind of gun it was, a kind that I knew the man had; he had had it when we did our theft, which was one of the main reasons I didn’t like or trust him; I don’t like guns. The police couldn’t find the gun; he’d ditched it somewhere.”

“He’d have got off on insufficient evidence without your testimony, is that it?” Reed asked.

“That, and that the other guy, his accomplice, might have been convicted; there was always that chance.”

“So you testified and went into Witness Protection. Why did you take yourself out of it?”

“He’d been given a long enough sentence to assure my safety. After a time, I wanted to get on with my life. I wanted to get back to being an architect.”

“If I’ve got this straight,” Kate said, “the robbery in which this man killed a guard happened twenty years or so after the art theft you took part in.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’d married the woman with the two sons in the meantime.”

“Yes. She and the boys—they were small children then—went into the Witness Protection Program with me. I came out alone; the marriage was over by then. I’d adopted the boys; I still see them occasionally; I always kept up with them; my wife died a few years ago.”

“And we are to gather that the killer was paroled against all expectations,” Reed said.

“When he was convicted, they promised they would fight parole if it came up, appear before the parole board. But it was a different cast of characters twenty years later, I guess. Anyway, he was out, with one aim in mind: to get me.”

“And he found out about Kate being your daughter.”

“Yes. I never guessed that. But before I heard he was out, he’d taken to—what’s the word—stalking me. He knew more about me than I did. I didn’t even know he was out on parole until he let me know he was out. When I discovered that he knew who Kate was, I tried disappearing. But he was always there. So I came here to hide, endangering Kate, endangering both of you. It would be hard to think of a more perfect screwup; I know that. I want to get out of here, and get him off your backs at least.”

The three of them stood up to stretch their legs, not that there was sufficient room to move about, but the relief of standing was for the moment enough.

“You’ve never forgiven my mother,” Kate said. “Everything you’ve done, all that you’ve told us, was about her—was aimed at her. You became a success at your profession, but she had expected that of you; that wasn’t sufficient to pay her back. But going to the bad, committing a theft, testifying against a killer, putting your life in danger, then leaving the Witness Protection Program to become the target of a maniac—all that was to make her sorry, wasn’t it? She had died somewhere along the way, but by that time it hardly mattered. And then there was me.”