The Rothman Scandal (69 page)

Alex heard the sound of his tires on the gravel drive that afternoon, and went to the door to greet him.

“Alex,” he said, and he started to take her in his arms, but she pushed him gently away.

“Come in,” she said, and led him into the glass room. “Can I fix you a drink?”

“Okay,” he said. “Vodka on the rocks?”

She fixed his drink at the bar, and then, though she didn't usually have a drink that early in the day, she fixed another for herself, thinking:
liquid courage
. She returned with their filled glasses, and they sat opposite each other on two Chippendale sofas in the great glass room. He lifted his drink, and smiled a little shyly at her. “Well, here's to old times,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“This is quite a place,” he said, looking around. “It's a little like being on the prow of a ship.”

“Yes. I believe that was the architect's intention,” she said, and the words sounded stilted and formal. “In fact, on the plans, it's called the Deck Room.”

“The Deck Room,” he repeated carefully.

He had changed somewhat. His hair was darker than she remembered it, and his nose seemed straighter, but he was, if anything, even better looking than she remembered. And his speech seemed to have lost some of its western twang, but he was still the man she had once thought she would love forever. “Oh, here,” she said quickly, reaching into the breast pocket of the pink Brooks Brothers shirt she had thrown on over white slacks. “Before I forget it—it's the passbook for the savings account I set up with your money. I haven't had the interest posted on it for several years, so the balance is going to be more than what shows there.” She slid the bankbook across the coffee table to him.

“I don't want your money,” he said, pushing it back to her. “That's not what I came for.”

“But it's not my money. It's yours,” she said, and for several moments they pushed the passbook back and forth across the tabletop between them until, with both their fingertips pressing against it, it seemed to become a sort of connective tissue. “It's from your money belt. I put it in a savings bank—even though you said you didn't believe in banks,” she said.

“I left that for you, in case you needed anything while I was—away,” he said.

“But I didn't. Oh, I did use a little of it to buy a small sewing machine, because you'd promised me I could. But otherwise—”

“You saved it for me. All these years.”

“Yes. Because it was your money. You'd earned it. I saved it, even after I'd decided I'd never hear from you again. Please take it, Skipper. I didn't need it then, and I don't need it now.”

He sighed, and picked up the passbook and placed it in his shirt pocket without opening it. “Who'da thunk it,” he said.

Occasionally, she noticed, he still lapsed back into his more countrified way of speaking. But he was certainly better dressed now, with an air of casual elegance she had never noticed before, in gray flannel slacks, an open-collared white button-down shirt, a black V-necked cashmere pullover, and black Gucci loafers. He looked as though he had been doing well. He looked prosperous. The room was silent now, except for the sound of waves lapping against the concrete piers that supported the boat-house.

He sipped his drink. “You still sew?” he asked her.

“Hardly ever anymore. I'm too busy helping my husband edit his magazine.”

“Your husband …”

“My husband, Steven Rothman. And what are you doing these days, Skipper?”

“Right now, I'm sort of between jobs. But I'm doing okay.”

“Good.”

“You know, I almost didn't come,” he said. “I figured, why would you want to see me now? I almost didn't call last Saturday. I figured, why would you want to hear from me? But somehow—the more I thought about it—I had to call you. Alex, I had to come.”

“Why?”

“Just thinking of the great times we had together—even as short as it was. The way I live now—well, it's not the greatest setup. I have a couple of roommates, a couple of gay boys. They're okay, but they bicker a lot, and—well, I guess thinking of the great times we had together, short as it was, I came wondering if you still feel the same.”

She shook her head. “No. As I told you on the phone, I have a whole new life now.”

“I came wondering if you'd ever take me back.”

She shook her head again. “No. Too much time has gone by, Skipper. Perhaps, if you'd ever written to explain what happened. If you'd ever telephoned—”

His eyes widened. “But I wrote you! I wrote you every day! I explained everything. But when I didn't hear from you—”

“I never got any letters from you,” she said.

He sat quickly forward. “But I wrote to you,” he said. “I wrote to you that very day they arrested me, and the next day, and the next. Telephoning was harder because, from where I was, they made you call collect. But I did call—more than once. I got a woman's voice, not yours, who refused to accept the charges. And so I wrote more letters. For at least six months, I wrote you letters. But when you never answered them—”

“My mother,” she whispered. “I suppose she—” She left the thought unfinished. She thought: Did my mother also open and read his letters? Probably. “I'm sorry, Skipper,” she said, “but I never got your letters.”

“If you had, would it have made a difference?”

“I don't know. You said your letters explained everything. What was the explanation for what happened that night in Wichita? I've never had a clue.”

“Well, I don't suppose it matters now, but I'll tell you if you want to know.”

“Naturally I'm curious. It isn't every young wife who has her motel room raided in the middle of the night by the police, and sees her husband carried off in handcuffs, and doesn't hear from him again until ten years later.”

He stared at his fingernails, which were smooth and manicured now, not dirty and cracked as they often were when she first knew him, and she noticed beads of sweat on his forehead, though the day was not warm. He took a quick swallow of his drink. “I was set up,” he said. “It was a classic setup—I was accused of a crime I didn't commit. You see, there was this woman I was involved with in Brownsville, Texas, about a year before I met you. She was kind of a possessive type—wanted to run off with me on the rodeo circuit. But she was also married, and I didn't want to get involved any deeper than I already was with a married woman. So I told her that morning that I wanted to break the whole thing off. Well, she got real angry and said she was going to tell her husband all about the two of us—make it sound like I'd raped her, or some cockamamie thing. Now I knew her husband was a real mean son-of-a-bitch. He beat up on her a lot—she was really what you'd call a battered wife. But I figured I was leaving town early the next morning for my next gig, and I figured I'd be safe out of town by the time he got around to doing anything. But late that night I got a phone call from her. She was hysterical. She said, ‘Please come quickly. I need your help. Something terrible has happened,' or something like that. So I got in my car and drove over to her house. Willa—that was her name—and her sister Loretta were in the living room, and they were both hysterical, but, my God, poor Willa was a mess. Her nose was bleeding, and she looked like it was broken, and there was blood coming from one of her eyes. A big hunk of her hair had been yanked out, and a couple of her front teeth had been knocked out. All over her face and arms were more cuts and bruises—he'd really let her have it that night.”

“How awful,” Alex said.

“Yeah. Well, it gets worse. I said, ‘Did that son-of-a-bitch do this to you?' She said yes, and then she handed me this gun—a Smith and Wesson snubnose, I think it was. I said, ‘You want me to kill him for you?' She was crying so hard it was hard to tell what she was saying, but then I heard her say, ‘No, I've already done that.' Then she took me into the bedroom, and there he was. She'd shot him right in the back of his head while he lay there drunk. I've never seen such a godawful sight, and I dropped the gun on the floor. I said, ‘You better call the police, Willa.' She said she was going to, but would I stay there with her till they came? I said, ‘Hell, no—this is your problem, Willa. Just tell them you shot him in self-defense. One look at you, and they won't have any trouble believing you. I'm getting outta here.' And I did. I got outta that crazy house.

“Well, the next day I was in my car, drivin' to my next gig, which was in Waco, and I hear on the radio about this guy that's been murdered in Brownsville. But what I'm hearin' is that his wife is saying that
I
did it—that I did it when he tried to stop me from beatin' up on her. Her sister is sayin' that she saw me do it, and the neighbors, who heard the shots, are sayin' they saw my yellow ‘Vette parked in her driveway. And there's my fingerprints all over the murder weapon!

“When I heard that, I panicked. I figured I had to get out of Texas. I thought of Mexico, but was scared I'd get stopped at the border. So I headed north—up through Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin. I got new plates for the car, and got it registered in a different name. You may have noticed—”

“I remember it well,” she said. “William J. Cassidy, three fourteen Elm Street, Lafayette, Indiana. I wrote to that person.”

He grinned sheepishly, and took another swallow of his drink. “No such person—probably even no such address. I made it up. When I went back on the rodeo circuit—'course I never made it to the gig in Waco—I used a lot of different names. Hell, a lot of guys who ride the circuit do that, keep using different names. Most of 'em are runnin' away from somethin', hidin' from somethin'. Some
thing
…”

“Was that a made-up name you were using when you met me?”

“Hell, no. James Robert Purdy is the name I was born with. I figured a seventeen-year-old girl out hitchhiking on the interstate wouldn't be working for the cops. Anyway, that was how I became what they call a fugitive from justice. I know I was a damn fool. I shouldn't have panicked. I should have gone straight to the police that morning and told them the truth about what happened. But by the time they caught up with me, I was a fugitive from justice, and nobody believed me. If I wasn't guilty, why was I running away all the time? Why was I using all these different names?”

“That night in Wichita, they kept calling you Johnson.”

He nodded. “Yeah. One of the names I used. Willie Johnson.”

“There's only one thing I don't understand,” she said. “Why didn't the police ever contact me? After all, we'd been married—”

“I didn't want to get you involved with my problems, Alex. I didn't tell them anything about you. I told them you were just a girl I'd picked up in a bar that night. I told them I didn't even know your name.”

“And the yellow Corvette? They never tried to—”

He looked at his fingernails again, and grinned. “Now that's a part I'm a little ashamed of,” he said. “That night, when they took me out of the motel, they said, ‘Okay, which is your car?' I pointed to a green Chevvy in the parking lot, and said, ‘That one.' Next thing you know, they had that green Chevvy hitched up to a police wrecker, and hauled it away. I always felt kind of bad about that. Poor guy who owned that car, waking up in the morning, finding his car gone, reporting to the police that it was stolen, and finding out it was stolen by the police!” He chuckled softly. “In a way it's kind of funny,” he said. “But still I keep thinking, maybe that guy had an important appointment the next morning. Or maybe it was a whole family, with kids, heading off on a vacation. Anyway, it was a long time ago, and it's all over now. And by the time the cops found out they had the wrong car, the 'Vette had vanished—vanished in Paradise, I guess, parked by a house with a zoysia lawn.”

“Yes. And here you are,” she said.

“And do you know something? I'm not bitter about anything that happened. I'm not even bitter about old Willa setting me up for a murder charge. My friends say I should be bitter about what Willa did, but I'm not. She probably panicked, too. She and Loretta probably had the whole scheme worked out before I got there. That's why she handed me the gun. Why would
she
want to face a murder rap? Well, I did, even though I didn't murder anybody. But I'm not bitter, because everything that happened was my own damn fault. It was my own damn fault to get involved with a married woman to begin with. So I paid the consequences. And, like I say, I have a whole new life now. Maybe I learned something from the whole experience.”

“Something about the duplicity of women,” she said.

“Something about the duplicity of
one
woman. Not the woman I married.” He rose and sat beside her on the sofa.

“No, no,” she said. “I have another husband now.”

“But you're my wife,” he said. “I even have the marriage license to prove it.”

“I don't think that piece of paper would hold much water now. I was underage. I lied—”

“That doesn't matter,” he said. “You're still the woman I married. In prison, I used my time well. I read, I studied. I took correspondence courses. I even earned a college equivalency degree. I'm a different man now, Alex.”

“And I'm a different woman.”

“Not to me. After I got out, I tried to find you. I went back to Paradise, but your family had moved away, and no one knew where. Even the zoysia lawn was gone. There were ads I'd seen in the Kansas City papers—ads using a model that looked like you. I even traced the model to a modeling agent named Lucille Withers. She was real snippy. Wouldn't tell me your name, or anything. All she said was, ‘I don't run a dating service, mister.'”