The Last Hand (9 page)

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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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Salter stood up. “Next week?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Don't eat too many prunes.”
F
lora Lucas was waiting in her office for him at ten o'clock the next morning. She was a rather large, soft woman with a pink-and-white complexion and light-brown hair caught up behind her head in a comb, or combs. She seemed to be wearing no makeup, but Salter wondered if she could have managed so smooth and finished-looking a surface at forty-eight without it. She had spent time on her hands and nails, certainly, and when she stood up he saw she was wearing very pretty shoes made of some kind of embroidered cloth. He found himself attracted to her, struck once more by how, entering his sixties, he had narrowed down the women he liked into two kinds–large, soft ones and small, light ones.
“This is a homicide inquiry, ma'am, but I'll be as quick as I can.”
She stared at him. “What on earth is the matter with you? You called my secretary yesterday to arrange a meeting and fix a time and I accepted the first time you suggested. So here I am. I've cancelled my appointments for the next hour. I know it's a homicide inquiry. My brother is the homicide, remember. Now, why are you taking up this attitude?” Her voice was clear and penetrating.
“I understood you had difficulty finding time for my predecessor.”
“I had difficulty being here. When Jerry was killed I was in Costa Rica, staying at his house, as a matter of fact. That is, I was in the hospital there, where I spent my whole vacation, laid low by a bug I think I caught on the plane.”
“Maybe the water … ?”
“The water in Costa Rica is drinkable. I think it was the plane.”
“I understand we had trouble finding you.”
“My secretary had orders to say I was away at a retreat. The point was to be out of touch. My secretary took me a bit too literally. I should have said, ‘Unless Jerry is killed.'” A tear formed and made its way down her cheek, a tiny leak in the dam. She made no effort to wipe it away.
Salter paused, more moved by that silent tear than if she had broken down. He continued, “So you didn't hear of his death until you returned.”
“I got the news in the hospital, made some phone calls to make sure his partner was looking after things temporarily. My brother had no children; we had no other relatives at all. All I was needed for was to confirm Jerry's identity, and to get back to Toronto immediately I would have had to charter a plane, and I was still pretty weak. So I came back on the regular flight on Friday, and here I am.”
Salter said, “There's a space on the form I have to fill out for the name of someone who could confirm you were in Costa Rica.”
“You can leave it blank for the moment.”
Salter looked at her skeptically.
“Until I trust you,” she added.
“With what?”
“My personal life. They tell me I can, but I'd like to be sure.”
And who are “they,” Salter wondered. Lichtman's lunch club? “I may have to fill in the blank before that.”
“Yes? In the meantime, what else do you want to know?”
“Were you close to your brother?”
“He has always been my closest friend from very early on. We were thrown together by an absentee father and a mother who devoted herself to a moral crusading movement. Nowadays we would say she was a member of a cult. She tried to bring me into the fold when I was in my last year at high school, but Jerry found an excuse to get me into McGill, away from her influence. She had tried to enlist him a few years earlier, but the effect was to cult-proof him.
“We, that is my mother and I, lived in Kingston then, and it would have been natural for me to go to Queen's, where Mother had
a group going. Jerry had just begun work for a Montreal law firm and so I enrolled at McGill, moved into a dorm and spent the weekends with him, in his apartment. My mother wanted me to commute, so she could continue proselytizing, but she wasn't very pressing, because she was more interested in the movement than in me and spent a lot of time at international get-togethers, and as a sort of missionary. So Jerry and I remained very close.
“I'm sorry, this is turning into a speech isn't it? But when someone close to you dies suddenly you tend to think so much about them, going over and over it trying to get things straight for yourself, that it's all ready when someone asks a question.”
“Didn't you get into his hair at all? I mean, swinging bachelor with kid sister underfoot. Look, I can come back. Tell me who his close friends were, and I'll come back later.”
She had begun to cry again, lightly, a few bright tears. She pulled a tissue from a box on her desk and dabbed at her face. “I have to cry sometime,” she said. “I'm actually doing rather well. If you don't mind, I'll be all right in a minute.”
The door behind Salter opened and the secretary started to come in. Flora Lucas waved her away without looking up, and then, as Salter stood up to leave, signaled him to stay. In a minute she was done, her face mopped, and she was ready to face Salter again.
“Where were we? Thanks for sitting still. It makes for less of a fuss. Now. What were we on about? My mother. Yes. Every girl should have one. My brother, though. I think some girls have a relationship with their fathers like I had with Jerry. Extremely unhealthy, I'm sure any psychologist would tell you, but pretty goddamn wonderful all the same. And then I got lucky again when I fell in love with the man who became my husband. Then I got unlucky, because he died three years after we married. But now we are getting personal, aren't we? I want to talk about Jerry. The thing is, Jerry practically raised me; he guided me and counseled me through all that growing-up time until I graduated and knew what I wanted to do. His girlfriends helped-they sort of stood in for sisters, a couple of them. Jerry created a home for me and conducted his own affairs with–what's the word–decorum, when I stayed with him. His girlfriends didn't sleep with him when I was there, and it was a
long time before I realized that they slept with him whenever I wasn't there. I think he felt I should be allowed to grow up without having adult life forced on me before I was quite ready.”
Suddenly she let out a bark of laughter. “Some Sundays we even went to church. At some point, though, I grew up, and he relaxed and I started to find the occasional female at breakfast on Sunday morning. But it was his home, not mine, so I always made my boyfriends go home at night. All of which is totally irrelevant, I would think, but as I said, my head is full of him. What's your next question?”
“You've answered it. Did you know about the woman who was seen around the block the night he was killed?” Salter described her.
“That doesn't sound like Jerry's kind of thing. But … I don't know … you men …” She waited for his response.
“He never married?”
“Oh, yes.
His
marriage lasted five years. Nothing sinister, or even sad. She wanted a home, and he wanted a sexual partner. He shouldn't have married. After that he had a number of partners, but no one for a couple of years now. I assumed he was winding down, and that wouldn't have worried Jerry; he wouldn't rush about trying to reinflate his libido by hiring hookers. For him sex would just be something that had a season, like Old Farts' Hockey.”
“Like what?”
“When he was fifty, he still played hockey with a bunch of men his age, hence the name.”
The door opened again, and the secretary appeared carrying several sets of papers. Flora Lucas waved her away, adding, “Two minutes, Muriel.” She turned to Salter, “Two minutes. Question?”
“Can you make any sense of this woman in silver boots?”
“I find it inconceivable that my brother had developed a taste for that kind of sex. I'm not speaking about the morality of it; Jerry didn't give a damn about private morality, his own or anyone else's, though he was fierce about public morality, behaving ethically in your relationships. As a politician, I felt his eye on me all the time, but he couldn't care less about who I … lived with.
“Now I'm rambling on, again, aren't I? I just had a thought. I think I know why he never married again. I knew one of his partners,
not as a friend, just someone who works in the buildings here, some kind of editor.” She gestured out the window to the legislature. “She told me once, in a drunken confidence, that she was hung up onJerry still, after they split up, but she couldn't stand not being wanted.
Needled,
sure, as a hostess and in bed, but not
wanted.
I think Jerry didn't like women much, but he was normal and he had his needs. It wouldn't surprise me to hear of a discreet mistress, but not one with silver boots.”
“What
was
he interested in?”
“Music. Japanese art. Canoeing. And gambling. Cards mostly, but he like to go to the track in the summer.”
“A heavy bettor?”
“I thought so, but he could afford it. We inherited enough. I don't think he ever bet with bookies, though.”
“Who did he play cards with?”
“Coming, Muriel.” She waved to the opening door and stood up. “Now your two minutes are up. Ask Derek Fury, Jerry's partner. He'll know.” She passed Salter on her way out the door, plucking the papers from her secretary's hand.
“What was the name of that girlfriend?” Salter asked as she was passing him. “Do you know that?”
She stopped, looking concerned, “All right. Jane Rudd. But, please, not from me. I hardly know her, but I don't trust her and I would sooner not have my name connected with her. Can you make her just one of the names on a list the police have compiled?”
“That's what she is. Just the next name on my list.”
“Thanks. Now, I'm available any time you want, except right at this minute.” She strode away down the corridor.
Muriel stood holding the door.
“Busy lady,” Salter said.
“Woman,” Muriel corrected, closing the door and trotting off in pursuit of her boss.
 
 
Salter approached the interview with Jane Rudd with care. She was a permanent civil servant, entitled to a large office with an outside window, but with no secretary to bar the door. She had a red-and-brown
complexion and a weathered look, with large, flat, red cheeks, and a mass of dark, tangled hair messily caught up with a clip above one ear. Her blouse, or dress–she stayed seated behind her desk and it was hard to see–looked unpressed and was held at her throat with a large ornamental safety pin. On top of this she wore a knitted cardigan, the sleeves dangling loose. She looked as if she had dressed straight from her laundry basket. Salter wondered if being an editor gave her the license of the artist. He guessed she was about fifty.
Salter had anticipated that Jane Rudd would not be pleased to be part of the investigation, and that he might expect some hostility. But when he identified himself and told her his mission, she said, “I was intending to get in touch with you myself.”
“Why?”
“When you are as close to someone as I was to Jerry …” She left the sentence in midair.
“Were you his partner once?”
“We were lovers. In the fullest sense.”
You went all the way, Salter thought. Aloud, he asked, “When did your relationship end?”
“Does real love ever end?”
Salter had now established that he was in the presence of some kind of hysteria, perhaps an obsession, and that her answers would be filtered through her need to confirm her love for Lucas. He decided to shelve his questions about the hooker.
“When did you last see him?”
“It seems like only days.”
“In real time ? Weeks? Months? This year?”
She waved the question away. “Some weeks, I suppose,” she said eventually.
“But not recently?”
She shrugged.
Now Salter put the question he would have preferred to avoid. “Were you aware of any other woman in his life, before you, after you, or at the same time?”
“There was no ‘after.' We never separated. I just hadn't seen him lately. And there was no other woman before who mattered. Except his sister, that is.”
Salter heard the suggestion in the remark, and saw it in the bold and sideways glance that accompanied it, but ignored it. What Jane Rudd was implying would make no difference to his investigation, as far as he could see, and he judged that if he even acknowledged that he understood her hint, she was capable of denying any knowledge of what he was talking about and bending her hysteria into an attack on him.
“Do you know of any women who
didn't
matter?” he asked.
She shook her head violently and turned to the window, her hand at her throat.
Salter gave up. The woman was being ridiculous, and he doubted that she had any real information that he could not get elsewhere.

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