Bitter Truth

30

Belize City to San Ignacio, Belize

WHAT HAD BEEN MERELY rumors of dark doings in the Reddman past were absolutely confirmed by our finding of the corpse with the gold ring behind Veritas. I was certain when we found it that the root of the evil from which redemption had been sought by Grammy Shaw was buried beneath the dead woman’s garden, but I was wrong. That death was an offshoot of some older, more primal crime, and only when that crime was discovered could we begin to unravel the mystery of what had murdered Jacqueline Shaw and threatened the destruction of all traces of the Reddman line. It was that discovery that led me, ultimately, to Belize, where a killer awaits.

I am sitting with my cases on the steps outside the guest house in Belize City, waiting for Canek Panti to take me to San Ignacio. Before me is a guard of low palms and then the unpaved road and then the Caribbean, turning from gray to a brilliant turquoise in the distance. It is five minutes after nine and already the sun is broiling. I look down both sides of Marine Parade but do not see my guide. Sweat is dripping down my shirt and I am thirsty, even though I drank an entire bottle of water at breakfast.

There is a grinding of gears and a hoot and the shaking sound of doubtful brakes. I look up and see Canek Panti leaping out of a battered brown Isuzu Trooper, rushing to grab hold of my bags. He is hatless today, wearing serious black shoes, a clean shirt, his work clothes, I suppose. His face is solemn. “I am sorry I am late, Victor,” says Canek.

“You’re right on time,” I say as I grab my briefcase and take it into the front seat with me. Canek hauls my suitcase into the rear and then jumps back up into the driver’s seat.

“You have a lot to see today,” he says.

“Well, let’s have at it. San Ignacio or bust.”

“Or bust what?”

“It’s an American expression. It means it’s time to go.”

“San Ignacio or we bust apart, then,” he says, nodding seriously, as he grinds the gears and the engine whines and the car shoots forward. He jerks the wheel to the left and the car takes a sharp leaning turn and we are now heading away from the Caribbean.

Canek honks the horn repeatedly on the narrow roads as he edges our way out of the city. He doesn’t talk, concentrating on his maneuvering, biting his lip as he works past the crowds, children wearing maroon or blue or white school uniforms, women with baskets of laundry on their heads, panhandlers and artisans, Rastafarians striding purposefully, thin men, in short sleeves and ties, riding to work on their too-small bicycles. Finally we reach a long narrow road lined with cemeteries. The ground around us is littered with shallow stone tombs, bleached white or dusty black, covered with crosses, guarded by little dogs staring at us impassively as we pass. Once past the cemeteries we begin to speed through the mangrove swamps that grow like a barrier around Belize City and onward along the Western Highway.

Lonely clapboard houses on stilts rise above the sodden ground. The rusted-out hulks of old American cars are half covered by the swamp. Canek leans on his horn as he passes a bus. The landscape is flat and wet and flat and smells of skunk. A ratty old sign in front of nowhere announces that we have reached the Belize Country Club, another urges us to check our animals to keep Belize screwworm free. Canek keeps his foot firmly on the pedal and soon we pass out of the swamps and onto a vast, sandy heath littered with scrub palmetto.

“This used to be a great pine forest,” shouts Canek over the engine’s uneven whine, “and mahogany too. But they cut all the trees and floated them down the river to the ships.”

We drive a long while, seeing nothing but the occasional shack rising askew out of the flat countryside, until to our left we spot the vague outlines of strange peaks, like great haystacks jutting from the flat ground. As we pass by these toothlike rises I begin to see, in the distance, the jagged outlines of the mountains to the west. At a colorful sign planted in the earth Canek slows the Trooper and turns off the highway, pulling the car into the dusty parking lot of a windowless and doorless shack-bar call JB’s Watering Hole.

The place is studded with wooden placards bearing the names and emblems of British Army squadrons that were once stationed in Belize to protect it from Guatemala: “34 Field Squadron, Royal Engineers”; “1st Battalion, No. 2 Company, Irish Guards”; “The Gloucester Regiment, QMs Platoon-25 Hours a Day.” A few men in ratty clothes are drinking already, a young girl is wiping a table. Canek says he needs some water for the car and so I sit under a spinning fan as he works outside.

After a few moments he comes in grinning and tells me everything is fine. “The car gets thirsty,” he says. “Let’s have lunch.” He orders us both stewed chicken in a brown sauce. It comes with coleslaw and rice and beans and even though it is already spicy hot he covers his with an angry red habanero sauce. As we eat we both have a Belikin and he tells me stories about the place, about the wild ex-pat who owned it and how the British soldiers turned it rowdy and how Harrison Ford drank here while filming Mosquito Coast.

“You’re a good guide, Canek. The good guides know all the best bars.”

“It is my country and there are not many bars.”

“This chicken is wonderful.”

“Outside of Belize City it is best to stick with chicken. You don’t have to store it or refrigerate it. When you are ready to eat you just go outside and twist off the head.”

I stare at the thigh I am working on for a moment and then slice off another piece. “What is San Ignacio like?”

“Small and fun. It used to be wilder when the loggers were there but the loggers have moved on and now it is not as wild.”

“Are there good bars there?”

“Yes, I will show you. And on Saturday nights they have dancing at the ruins above the city.”

“If a man was hiding out, would he hide out in San Ignacio?”

“No, not in San Ignacio. But it is the capital of the Cayo and the Cayo is wild country. There are ranches hidden from the roads and rivers that flow through the jungle and places you can only get to by horseback or by canoe.”

“Is it pretty?”

“It is very pretty. You haven’t told me what is your business there, Victor.”

“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “Someone who owes me money.”

“This is a long way for an American to come to collect on a debt.”

“It’s a hell of a debt.”

Back on the road, the highway starts kinking and slowly the landscape around the road changes to pine-covered hills and rocky pasture lands holding small villages. We pass a two-room schoolhouse, no windows or doors, old men sitting on the railing outside, listening to the lessons. Now and then we begin to pass boys on horseback. Canek shows me the turnoff to Spanish Lookout, where a Mennonite community farms the land in their straw hats and black buggies. He asks me if I want to see and I shake my head. Lancaster is only forty minutes from Philadelphia and I have never had the urge to visit the Pennsylvania Dutch there; I don’t need to see them in Belize.

The land begins to undulate more and more violently and the mountains grow closer and on the mountains we can now see the forests, a dangerous green spilling thickly down the slopes. We pass a horseback rider sitting straight in his saddle, a rifle strapped to his shoulder, the muzzle jutting forward, serving as an armrest. Finally, in the middle of a valley, on the banks of a slow river, ringed with high hills, we find San Ignacio.

We wait at the end of a long one-lane bridge for a rickety red truck to pass before Canek drives us across the Macal River. The metal surface of the bridge rattles loudly beneath us. Canek takes us through the twists and turns of the town, filled with old storefronts and narrow streets, and then we are back on the Western Highway, traveling toward the ruins of the Mayan stronghold of Xunantunich.

“The word means ‘stone maiden,’ ” says Canek as he drives us further on the paved road, alongside a wide shallow river. “The legend is that one of its discoverers saw the ghost of a woman on the ruins. It is set on a level hilltop overlooking the Mopan River and it guarded the route from the great city of Tikal, now in Guatemala, to the sea. It was a ceremonial center, along with Caracol, to the south, when this area had a greater population than the entire country of Belize has now. There was an earthquake in the year nine hundred that caused the abandonment of the city.”

“It’s amazing,” I say, “how the Maya just disappeared.”

“But that’s not right,” says Canek. “We haven’t disappeared at all.”

I turn and stare at him. He is very serious and his broad cheekbones suddenly look sharper than before.

“I didn’t know you were Mayan.”

“We have our own villages here and in Guatemala where we continue the old ways, at least some of the old ways. We don’t go in for human sacrifice anymore.” He smiles. “Except for during festival days. This is San Jose Succotz. The first language here is Mayan.”

He pulls the car off the road onto a gravel shoulder. To our left is a village built into a hillside. A pair of ragged stands flank a small drive that leads straight into the water to our right. On the far shore of the river is a wooden ferry, short and thick and heavy, big enough to hold one car only. We wait in the car for the ferry to make its way to our side of the river. Boys come to the car’s window, offering slate trinkets and carvings with Mayan designs. “You buy here when you come back,” says one of the boys to me. “Don’t believe what they say on the other side, they are escaped from the hospital, you know, the crazy house.” On the other side I see more boys waiting to sell their slate. Further down the river, women are scrubbing laundry against the rocks and children are splashing in the water.

When the ferry arrives, its leading edge of wood coming to rest on the gravel drive, Canek slowly pulls the car down the small drive and onto the ferry. An old ferryman patiently waits for Canek to situate the car in the middle before he begins to twist the crank that winches the wire that drags the ferry back across the river. The water is calm and the ferry barely ripples as the old man draws us forward with each turn of the crank. Canek and the ferryman talk in a language which is decidedly not Spanish. “We were speaking Mopan,” he says. “This village is Mopan Maya. I am Yucatec Maya but I know this dialect as well as my own.”

When the ferry reaches the far bank, Canek drives the Trooper off onto another drive, takes a sharp right, and begins the climb up the rough, rock-strewn road that will take us to the ancient fortress. Canek tells me we are only a mile and a half from the Guatemalan border. After a long uphill drive we reach a parking grove. When Canek steps down from the car he pulls from it a canteen of water and a huge machete, which he slips into a loop off his pants.

“That’s a fancy knife,” I say.

“The jungle overgrows everything in time,” he says.

As we climb the rest of the way, mosquitoes hover about my face and from all around us comes the manic squall of wildlife. The jungle rises along the edges of our path, green and dark and impenetrable. Canek, ever the perfect guide, offers me the canteen he carries and I stop to drink. Finally, out of the dark canopy of jungle we come upon the ceremonial plaza of Xunantunich.

The plaza is bright with sun, verdant with grasses and cohune palms and the encroaching jungle, as flat as a putting green. At the edges of the plaza hummingbirds hover among brilliant tropical flowers, darting from one bright color to another. Rising from the verdant earth in great piles of plant-encrusted rock are the remains of huge Mayan structures. There is something frightening in the immensity and the solidity of these ancient things, once hidden by centuries of jungle growth, like painful truths that have been unearthed. And dominating it all to our left, like the grandest truth of all, is El Castillo, a huge man-made mountain of rock.

Canek gives me the tour, as authoritative as if he had lived here when the plaza was still alive. He shows me a ceremonial stone bench in one of the temples and a frieze of a king and his spiritual midget in the little museum shack. “Midgets are sacred to the Maya,” says Canek. “They are the special ones, touched by God as children, which is why they have stopped growing. They are able to journey back and forth between this world and the underworld. Some still claim to see the sacred little ones walking along the roads.” He takes me to the residential buildings off the plaza, hacking with his machete through the jungle to get us there, and shows me the ball yard, a narrow grassy alley between the sloping sides of two of the temples. “The games were largely ceremonial,” says Canek, “and the ceremony at the end involved the sacrifice of the losers.”

“And I thought hockey was tough,” I say.

We make our way around the grounds until we face the immensity of El Castillo, which towers above us, cragged and steep, stained green with life, banded with a reconstructed frieze of beige.

“Can we climb it?” I ask.

“If you wish.”

“Let’s do it.”

I take a drink of water and we begin to ascend the long wide steps along the north side of El Castillo. The thing we are climbing is a ruin in every sense of the word, churned to crumbling by the jungle, but as we turn from the wide steps and climb off to the left and around, past the huge ornate glyphs of jaguars reconstructed on that side, the structure of the artificial mountain becomes clearer. It is a tower built upon other towers, an agglomeration of buildings perched one atop the next. From the path on the east side the vista is magnificent but Canek doesn’t stop here. He takes me around to the south side, where a set of steps leads to a wide plateau. We scoot around a narrow ledge to a balcony with steep walls on either side and a broad view east, into the jungles of Belize.

“You can go farther up,” says Canek.

“Let’s go then.”

“You should go alone, Victor. It is better alone.”

He gives me a drink of water. I look again down from the balcony and realize I am already over a hundred feet above the plaza. I take another drink and then head back, across the narrow ledge, to the south side. It appears there is no way up but then I spot a narrow set of stairs cut into the stone. I climb them, one hand brushing the wall, to a ledge where I find a similar set of narrow stairs, this set leading up to a high room, stinking incongruously of skunk. There is no way out of that room, but I follow the ledge to the west, to another room, with a set of steep stone stairs spiraling up through a hole cut into the room’s ceiling. I grab the steps above me to keep me steady and begin my climb. Slowly I rise through the ceiling and then step onto a narrow plaza with five great blocks of stone, seated one next to the other, like five jagged teeth. I am so relieved to be again on solid ground that it takes me a moment to calm myself before I look around. When I do my breath halts from the sight.

I can see so far it is as if I can see through time. I trace the indentation of the river as it flows through the jungle. In the distance to the east is San Ignacio and the rest of Belize. But for a slight haze I’m certain I could see the ocean. To the west is the absolute green of the wilds of the Petén region of Guatemala. I am being held aloft by the ruins of a temple thousands of years old and for a moment I feel informed by the ancient wisdom of those who built and worshiped in this edifice. There is more to the universe than what I can see and feel, this ancient knowledge tells me, more than the shallow limits of my own horizons, and this limitlessness, it tells me just as surely, is as much a part of me as my hand and my heart and my soul. It comes to me in an instant, this knowledge of my own infinitude, as solid as any insight I have ever held, and disappears just as quickly, leaving the unattached emotional traces of a forgotten dream.

I wipe the sweat from my neck and wonder what the hell that was all about. I figure I am suffering from dehydration and should quickly get to the hotel in San Ignacio, suck down some water, relax, take it slow for a day or two before continuing my search. But I look around and think again on what it was I thought I understood. The story of the corpse we found beneath the garden behind the great Reddman house twists and turns through love and war and ever more death, but it also contains one man’s understanding of his place in the universe that gave solace and serenity and maybe even something akin to forgiveness. For the first time since I learned of it I have an inkling of what it might have done to him to see the world and his life that way. Jacqueline Shaw, I think, was looking for the same sort of understanding during her time with the Church of the New Life, as was Beth after her. There are truths, I know with all certainty, that I will never grasp, but that doesn’t make them any less true. And some of those truths might be the only antidote to the poison that passed like a plague through the Reddman line.

And as I spin around and look once more at this grand vista I know something else with an absolute certainty. I don’t know how I know it, or why, but I know it, yes I do. What I know for certain is that the man for whom I am searching is somewhere down there, somewhere hiding in the wild green of that jungle.

And I’m going to find the bastard, I know that too.

31

MORRIS KAPUSTIN WAS SITTING at my dining room table with his head in his hands. He had a naturally large head, Morris did, and it seemed even larger due to his long peppered beard and mass of unruly hair, the wide-brimmed black hat he wore even inside my apartment, the way his small pudgy hands barely covered his face. His black suit was ragged, his thin tie was loose about his neck, he leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his tiny feet resting on the strut of his chair, listening with great concentration. Across from him sat Beth, who was explaining her most recent meditative exercises to him. On the table between Beth and Morris was the metal box Caroline and I had disinterred from the garden behind Veritas the night before. Deep ridges slashed through the surface of the metal where I had futilely chopped at the box with the shovel. It sat there, dirty and crusted, still unopened, large with mystery.

“We start with a small seed,” said Beth. “We place it before us and meditate upon it, thinking all the while of the plant that will grow from the seed. We visualize the plant inherent in the seed, make it present to us and in us, and then meditate on that visualization, allow our soul to react to it. Eventually, we begin to see the life force in the seed as a sort of flame.”

“And this flame, what does it look like?” asked Morris.

“It’s close to the color purple in the middle, with something like blue at the edges.”

“And you’ve seen this hallucination?” I said.

Beth looked up at me calmly. “Yes,” she said.

“Fascinating,” said Morris, the final “ng” sounding like a “k.” “Simply fascinating.”

“And then we concentrate on a mature plant and immerse ourselves in the thought that this plant will someday wither and decay before being reborn through its seeds. As we concentrate on the death and rebirth of this plant, banishing all thoughts other than those of the plant, we begin to see the death force inherent in the plant, and it too is like a flame, green-blue in its center and yellow-red at the periphery.”

“I can’t believe you’re buying into this crap, Beth,” I said.

“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Either that or my lentil casserole was spiked.”

“And now, after you’ve seen all this,” said Morris, “what are you supposed to do with all that you are seeing?”

“I don’t know that yet,” said Beth with a sigh. “Right now I’m struggling to develop my spiritual sight so that, when the truth does appear, I’ll be ready to perceive it.”

“When you perceive something a little more than these flamelike colors,” said Morris, “then you come back to me and we’ll talk. The spirit world, it is not unknown to Jews, but these colors, they are no more than shmei drei. Just colors I can see every day on cable.”

Morris Kapustin was my private detective. He didn’t look like a private detective or talk like a private detective or act like a private detective but he thought like the best private detective you’ve ever dreamed of. I liked him and trusted him and, after Beth, the list of those whom I actually liked and trusted was rather short. Like all good things in this life I had first had him rammed down my throat. A group of insurgent clients had thought a settlement offer I had jumped at was less than their case was worth. They ordered me to hire Morris to find a missing witness. Morris found him, which increased the value of the case tremendously, and in the process he sort of saved my life. Since then he had been my private dick, my spiritual adviser, and my friend. I had thought I would do my dance around the Reddman fortune without him but, after discovering that skeleton the night before, I realized that the mysteries were deepening beyond my minimal capacities and that I needed Morris.

“I think,” I said to Beth, “that Morris is pretty firmly entrenched in a spiritual tradition a few thousand years older than your Church of the New Life. I’m sure he’s not interested in your New Age rubbish.”

Morris picked his head up out of his hands. “On the contrary, Victor. It is just such rubbish that interests me so much. Did you ever hear, Victor, of Kabbalah?”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said, though that was about the limit of my knowledge. Kabbalah was an obscure form of Jewish mysticism, neither taught nor even mentioned in the few years I attended religious school before my father quit the synagogue. It was said to be ancient and dangerous and better left untouched.

“Your meditation, Beth, this is not a foreign idea to Jews. The Hassidim, they chant and sing and dance like wild men and they say it works. I always thought it was the way they drank, like shikkers in a desert, but maybe it is something more. And this is what I find, Miss Beth. Every morning, in shachris, when I strap on my tefillin and daven, I find often something strange it happens. Some precious mornings all the mishegaas around my life, it disappears and I find myself floating, surrounded by something bright and divine and infinite. The Kabbalists, they have a term for it, the infinite, they call it the Ein-Sof.”

“But that’s very different,” said Beth. “We’re being trained in our meditation to focus and join with a great emptiness, not a deity of some sort.”

“Yes, of course, that is a difference. But there are those who claim that any true knowledge of the infinite, it is so beyond us that we can only experience the Ein-Sof as a sort of nothingness. The Hebrew word for nothing, it is Ayin, and the similarities in the words are said to be of great significance.”

“How come I never learned any of this?” I asked.

“This is all very powerful, very dangerous. There were people, very devout people, great rabbis even, who were not ready to ascend into certain of the divine rooms and never returned. The rabbis they think maybe you should get off your tuchis and learn more about the bolts and the nuts of our religion before you start to potchkeh with the Kabbalah. Maybe learn first to keep the Shabbos and keep kosher and learn to daven every day. They have a point, Victor, no? These are not games or toys. They take intense commitment. True devotion comes from following all God’s mitzvoth. The righteous, they reach a point where every act in their daily rituals is full of meaning and devotion and life itself, it becomes like a meditation.”

“If this is all so darn terrific, how come I never saw it being hawked on an infomercial?”

“Not everything in this world can be bought, Victor,” said Beth.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but have you seen what the stuff Cher sells can do for your hair? Tell me something, Beth. If your friends are so exclusively devoted to the spirit world, why are they so anxious to get their mitts on Jacqueline’s five-million-dollar death benefit?”

Beth looked at me for a moment. “That’s a good question. I’ve been wondering about that myself.”

“Until we find an answer,” I said, “I think you should be extra careful. They might just be as dangerous as they think they are.”

“That’s exactly why I set it up so you’re the one who’s going to ask Oleanna all about it.”

“Oleanna?”

“Tomorrow night, at the Haven. I told her you had some important questions.”

“And the great seer deigned to meet with me?”

“It’s what you wanted, right?”

“Sure,” I said, suddenly and strangely nervous. “What is she like?”

“I think you’ll be impressed,” said Beth, laughing. “She is a very evolved soul.”

“Her past lives were thrilling, no doubt,” I said. “She was a queen or a great soldier or Nostradamus himself. Why is it no one ever sold insurance in their past lives?”

“You should not be scoffing so quickly,” said Morris. “Someday, when you are ready, I’ll tell you of the gilgul. As Rebbe Elazar ha-Kappar once said, ‘Those who are born are destined to die, those who are dead are destined to be brought to life again.’ Be aware, Victor, there is much to learn in this world, and not all of it can be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

I stared at him. “Did you ever go to college, Morris?”

“Aacht. It’s a shandeh, really. I regret so much in this life but that I regret most of all. No. I had plans, of course, when I was a boy, the Academy of Science at Minsk, they took Jews, they even taught in Yiddish, and the whole of my family we were saving each day zloty for my fee. I was to be an intellectual, to sip slivovitz in the cafés and argue about Moses Mendelssohn and Pushkin, that was my dream. Then of course the war, it came and plans like that they flew like a frying pan out the window. Just surviving was education enough. I won’t go through the whole megillah, but no, Victor. Why do you ask such a thing?”

“Because I could just see you hanging out in the dormitories, eating pizza, drinking beer from cans, talking all night about the cosmic mysteries of life.”

“And Pushkin, we could maybe discuss Pushkin?”

“Sure, Morris. Pushkin.”

“I don’t even like the poetry so much, I must admit, but the sound of the name. Pushkin, Pushkin. I can’t resist it. Pushkin. Sign me up, boychick, I’m in.”

“He is less the skeptic than you, Victor,” said Beth. “At least he listens and takes it seriously.”

“I tried it, Beth, really I did, I sat on the floor and meditated and examined myself and my life like a detached observer, just as you suggested.”

“How did it make you feel?”

“Before or after I threw up?”

“You know, Victor,” said Morris. “A very wise man once said that nausea, it is the first sign of serious trouble in this life. Very serious. Such nausea, it should not be ignored.”

“What, now you’re quoting Sartre?”

“Sartre, Schmatre, I’m talking about my gastroenterologist, Hermie Weisenberg. Maybe what you need is a scope. I’ll set it up for you.”

“Forget the scope.” I gestured at the box. “You sure you can open it?”

“I can try.”

“I thought Sheldon was coming.” Sheldon Kapustin was Morris’s son and a trained locksmith. “I asked for Sheldon.”

“Sheldon, he was busy tonight. He’s of that age now that I want for nothing to get in the way of his social life. A man my age, he should have granddaughters, no? So don’t be disturbing my Sheldon. Besides, who do you think taught him such about locks anyway?”

“You, Morris?”

“No, don’t be silly. A master locksmith named McCardle, but this McCardle he taught me too. Victor, this girl, when is she coming, nu?”

“Any minute now,” I said, and just as I said it my buzzer rang.

Caroline, when she entered the apartment, was nervous and closed. She came right in and sat on the couch, away from the table and the box. She crossed her legs and wrapped her arms around herself. As I introduced Morris and Beth to her, she smiled tightly and lit a cigarette.

After Caroline and I had discovered the bony corpse the night before we pondered what to do with it. We discussed it in tense whispers while we stood over the skeleton hand that pointed skyward from the grave and we both agreed to cover up the pit as best as we could, shoveling back the dirt, stamping it down, replacing as many plants as might survive, leaving the body right there in the ground. It was not like the corpse was going anywhere, and any hot clues as to the perpetrator were already as cold as death. We convinced each other it was to our advantage to not let on to what we had found as we probed further into the Reddman past. So we left it there under the dirt, the bones of that poor dead soul, left it all there except for the gold ring which clung to the bone until, with force and spit, I ripped it free. We took the ring to help us identify the body and once we examined the ring there wasn’t too much doubt about who was there beneath the dirt. The ring had been engraved, in a gloriously florid script, with the initials CCR.

“What’s the word?” I said.

“I checked an old photograph with a magnifying glass,” said Caroline. “It’s her ring, all right.”

“So there’s no doubt,” I said.

“No doubt at all,” she said. “The body we found is of my grandmother’s sister, Charity Chase Reddman.”

32

WITH CAROLINE SITTING on my couch, smoking, her legs crossed, her arms crossed, sitting there like a shore house boarded up for a hurricane, I brought Morris up to speed on the mystery of the Reddmans. I told him about Elisha Poole, about the three fabulous Reddman sisters, about how Charity, the youngest, had apparently found herself pregnant and then disappeared, seeming to wrest the shackles of her oppressive family off her shoulders and be free, only to turn up eighty years later in a hole in the ground behind the Reddman mansion. Morris listened with rapt attention; it was the kind of puzzle he liked most, not of wood or of stone but of flesh and bone and blood.

I showed him the ring. “What’s this on the inside?” he asked. “My eyes such as they are, I can’t read printing so small as this.”

“ ‘You walk in beauty,’ ” I read from the inside of the band, “and then the initials C.S.”

“Any idea who this C.S. fellow is?” asked Beth.

“Could be anyone,” I tried to say, but Caroline, who had remained remarkably silent during my background report to Morris, interrupted me.

“They were my grandfather’s initials,” she said flatly. “Christian Shaw.”

“What about the inscription?” I asked. “Anyone recognize it?”

“ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night,’ ” recited Morris.

“ ‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ ”

I was taken aback a bit by such melodious words coming from Morris’s mouth, where only a jumbled brand of immigrant English normally escaped.

“Byron,” said Morris with a shrug. “You know Pushkin, he was very much influenced by this Byron, especially in his early work.”

“Pushkin again?” I said.

“Yes Pushkin. Victor, you have problem maybe with Pushkin?”

“No, Morris. None at all.”

“This girl,” asked Morris, “this Charity, how old was she again when first she disappeared?”

“Eighteen,” said Caroline.”

“Then that fits then. It is a poem, this, for a young girl. It ends talking of a heart whose love is innocent.”

No one said anything right off, as if there was a moment of silence for the dead girl whose heart was suffused with innocent love.

“Open the box,” said Caroline.

“I’m ready if you’re ready,” said Morris.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked her.

“I told you I want to find out everything I can about my family, all the bitter truths. I won’t stop at a corpse. Open it.”

From his seat Morris bent down and lifted onto the table a leather gym bag. He opened the bag, peered mysteriously inside, reached in, and took out a small leather packet from which he extracted two thin metal picks. I looked at Caroline on the couch, arms still crossed, her front teeth biting her lip. I smiled encouragingly at her but she ignored me, focusing entirely on Morris. Morris turned the box until the front was facing him and then began working on the padlock.

“Are you sure you can’t get hold of Sheldon?” I said, after Morris had tried for ten minutes to work the lock with the picks and failed.

“It’s a tricky, tricky lock. Very clever these old lock makers. I must to try something else.”

He put the picks back in their leather packet and the packet back into the gym bag, reached in, and pulled out a large leather envelope from which he took a jangling ring of skeleton keys. “One of these will work, I think,” he said. He began to try one after the other, one after the other after the other.

“Do you have a number for Sheldon?” I asked after all the keys had failed to fit the lock.

“Enough with the nudging already,” said Morris, anger creeping into his voice. “These locks, they are not such a problem for me, not at all. For this I don’t need Sheldon.”

“I’ve seen Sheldon work,” I said. “He is in and out in seconds.”

“On second-rate locks, yes,” said Morris as he put the skeleton keys back into the bag and rummaged around. “But this is no second-rate lock. I have one special tool in such situations that never fails, a very special tool.”

With a flourish he pulled from the bag a hacksaw.

“This lock it is very clever but the metal is not as strong as they can make now. Is this all right, miss, if I hurt the lock?”

“My grandmother’s dead,” said Caroline. “I don’t think she’ll miss it.”

It took only a few minutes until we heard the ping that signaled he had cut through the metal hoop. He opened the lock and took it off the metal guards soldered into the box. That left only the internal lock, which Morris looked at carefully. “For this again I need the picks.”

“It’s getting late, Morris,” I said.

He took out the picks and began to work the little lock. “This second is not so tricky,” he said as he twisted the picks once and twice and the lock gave way with a satisfying click. Morris beamed. “Sheldon maybe would be a bissel faster, but only a bissel.”

Caroline rose from the couch and sat beside Beth at the table. Morris turned the box to her. She looked around at us. I nodded. She reached down and, slowly, she lifted the metal lid.

Beth let out a “Wow,” as the lid first cracked open and Caroline shut it again.

“What?” I asked.

“I just thought I saw something.”

“One of your flames?” asked Morris.

“I don’t know.”

“What color was it?” asked Morris.

“Yellow-red,” said Beth.

Morris nodded. “The color of the death force.”

“Enough already,” I said. “Just open it.”

Caroline swallowed and then flipped up the top of the metal strongbox. Inside were dust and dirt and a series of old manila envelopes, weathered and faded and torn. Not very encouraging.

“Let’s see what they’re holding,” I said.

One by one Caroline lifted the envelopes out of the box.

The first envelope contained a multitude of documents on long onionskin legal paper of the type no longer used in law offices, each dated in the early fifties. The documents were all signed by Mrs. Christian Shaw, Caroline’s grandmother, and witnessed by a number of illegible signatures, all probably of lawyers now surely either dead or retired. As best as I could tell, as I plowed my way through the legal jargon of the era, replete with Latin and all types of convoluted sentences, the documents created a separate trust to which a portion of the Reddman estate was to be diverted. The trust was named Wergeld and so a person or a family named Wergeld was apparently the intended beneficiary, though nothing more specific was provided in the documents. It wasn’t clear exactly how much was to be transferred, but it appeared to be considerable, and over the past forty or so years the amount in the trust must have grown tremendously.

“This must be the trust Harrington was talking about the other night,” I said to Caroline while I examined the documents. “Ever hear of a family named Wergeld?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? Anyone at all?”

“No, no one,” she said. “Never.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “Why would she set up a trust for someone you never heard of? All right, let’s go on.”

The next envelope contained a series of bank documents, evidencing the opening of accounts all in the name of the Wergeld Trust. The signatory on each account was Mrs. Christian Shaw. The banks to which the money was to flow were in foreign countries, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands. “All tax havens,” I said. “All places where money could arrive and disappear without anyone knowing, and where the banks are all governed by secrecy laws.”

“Why would my grandmother care about secrecy?” asked Caroline. “While she was alive she had control of all the money in the trust, she could have done anything she wanted and no one could have stopped her.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but it appeared she wanted the trust hidden and this Wergeld person to remain anonymous.”

Along with the bank documents was a three-by-five card with a list of long combinations of letters and numbers. The first was X257YRZ26-098. I handed it to Morris and he examined it carefully.

“To my untrained eye these are code numbers for certain bank accounts,” he said. “Some of the banks in these places you need mention only the code numbers and a matching signature or even just a matching phrase to release the funds. This was obviously the way your Mrs. Shaw, she could access the money from that trust you were reading us about, Victor.”

“But why would she bury it?” asked Caroline.

“She knew where it was if she needed it, I suppose,” said Morris with a shrug. “But I would guess the beneficiary person of this trust, or whatever, would have these very same numbers.”

The third envelope contained a packet of old photographs. Caroline looked at them each carefully, one by one, and then went through them again, for our sakes, telling Beth and Morris and me what she could about the people in the pictures. “These are of my family,” she said, “at least most of them. I’ve seen many of them before in albums. Here’s a picture of Grandmother when she was young, with her two sisters.”

The picture was of three young women, arms linked, marching in step toward the camera, dressed as if they were young ladies on the make out of an Edith Wharton novel. The woman in the middle wore a billowing white dress and stared at the photographer with her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face full of a fresh certainty about her future. That woman, full of life and determination, Caroline said, was her grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw. To Faith Reddman’s right was a smaller, frailer woman, her stance less sure, her smile uneasy. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and her dress was a severe and prim black. This was Hope Reddman, the sister who was to die of consumption only a few years later. And to the left, broad-shouldered and big-boned, but with her head tilted shyly down, was Charity Reddman, poor dead Charity Reddman. Her dress was almost sheer enough to see her long legs beneath, she wore a hat, and even with her face cast downward you could see her beauty. She was the pretty one, Caroline had been told, the adventurous one, though that thirst for adventure was not evident in her adolescent shyness. Beautiful Charity Reddman, the belle of the ball, who was destined to disappear beneath the black earth of Veritas.

“That’s your great-grandfather,” I said, pointing to the next photograph, a picture of a fierce, bewhiskered man, his bulging eyes still burning with a strange intensity even as he leaned precariously on a cane, his knees stiff, his back bent. He was leaner than I had remembered from other pictures, his stance more decrepit, but the fierce whiskers, the burning eyes, the wide, nearly lipless mouth were still the stuff of legend. Claudius Reddman, as familiar a figure as all the other icons of great American industrial wealth, as familiar as Rockefeller in his starched collar, as Ford with his lean angularity, as Morgan staring his stare that could maim, as Gould and Carnegie and Frick.

“That was just before he died, I think,” said Caroline. “He lived to be ninety, though in his last years he suffered from palsy and emphysema.”

She flipped to the next photograph and said, “This is my grandfather.” It was a photograph of a handsome young man, tall and blond and mustached, with his nose snootily raised. His suit was dark, his hat nattily creased and cocked over his eye. He had the same arrogant expression I saw in Harrington the first time we met at the bank. There was something about the way he stood, the way his features held their pose, that made me pause and then I realized he held himself in the same careful way I often saw in drunks.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at a photograph of a thin, bald man with a long thin nose and small eyes. He wore a stiff, high collar and spectacles and through the spectacles his tiny eyes were squinted in wariness. Beside him was a handsome woman with a worried mouth. There was something fragile about this couple. There was a sense in the picture that they were under siege.

“I don’t know,” said Caroline.

I turned it over, but there was no description.

The next was another picture she couldn’t identify, a photograph of an unattractive young woman with a dowdy print dress, unruly hair, and a long face with beady eyes. She looked like a young Eleanor Roosevelt with a long thin nose, which was rather sad for her since Eleanor Roosevelt was the ugliest inhabitant ever of the White House, uglier even than Richard Nixon, uglier even than Checkers. The woman in the photograph was just that ugly, and she seemed to know it, looking at the camera with a peculiar passion and intensity that was almost frightening.

“I don’t know who she is,” said Caroline. “I have no idea why my grandmother would save these pictures.”

“Who might know something about them?” I asked.

“These all seem very old, from the time before my father was born, but he might recognize them. Or Nat. They are the only ones who have been around long enough to possibly know.”

There were other photographs, more of the unattractive young woman, more of Christian Shaw, one of which showed him haggard and miserable in a mussed suit. It was taken, Caroline said, shortly before he died. She could tell, she said, because the sleeve of his jacket was loosely pinned to the side. “He lost his arm in the war,” she said. “In France, during the battle in which he won his medal.” There was also a postcard with a picture of Yankee Stadium on its grand opening, a sellout crowd, the Yankees, in pinstripes, at bat. From the distance it was impossible to tell, but maybe it was Ruth at the plate, or Jumping Joe Dugan, or Wally Pipp. There was no message written on the back.

The final picture was more modern, in faded color, a young couple with their arms around each other. The boy was tall and handsome, his hair long, his shirt tie-dyed, his jeans cut into shorts and his shoes sandals. He was laughing at the camera, giddy with life. The girl was wildly young, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, her brown hair as straight and as long as a folk singer’s. She was staring up at the boy with the glow of sated passion on her face. Caroline didn’t say anything and I blinked a bit before I realized who it was: Caroline and Harrington, just a couple of kids crazy in love.

“Who took it?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said softly, “but not Grammy. I don’t remember her ever taking a picture.”

When we had finished with the photographs, Caroline reached again into the box and took out a white business envelope with the words “The Letters” written in script on the outside. The handwriting was narrow and tight, the same as the writing on the trust documents. Inside the envelope was a key, an old key, tarnished, with an ornate head and a long shank and a bit that looked like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle.

“Any idea where the lock is?” I asked Caroline.

“None,” she said.

Morris took hold of the key and examined it. “This key is a key to a Barron tumbler lock of some sort. Such a lock I could open in a minute. Maybe three.”

A thin envelope taken from the box contained only one piece of paper, a medical bill from a Dr. Wesley Karpas, dated June 9, 1966, charging, for services rendered, $638.90. The services rendered were not specified, nor was the patient. It was addressed, though, to Mrs. Christian Shaw. I asked Caroline whether she had any idea about the medical services referred to in the bill and she had none.

The final envelope was a thick bundle that felt, from the outside, not unlike a bundle of hundred-dollar bills. Caroline opened the envelope and reached in and pulled out a sheaf of papers separated by clips into four separate sections, the whole bundle bound with twine. The papers were old, each about the size of a small envelope, yellowed, covered with the tight narrow handwriting that was already familiar, the handwriting of Faith Reddman Shaw. One edge of each of the papers was slightly ragged, as if it had been cut from a book of some sort.

Caroline looked at the top page, and then the next, and then the next. “These look to be from my grandmother’s diary, but that can’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“She burned them all shortly before she died. She kept volumes and volumes of a diary from when she was a little girl, she would scribble constantly, but she never let anyone see them and a few years back she burned them all. We begged her not to, they were such a precious piece of our history, but she said her past was better forgotten.”

“I guess there were some pages,” I said, “she couldn’t bear to incinerate.”

Caroline, who was scanning through the excerpts, said, “This first one is about meeting my grandfather.”

“Maybe there are clues in these diary pages of who these people in the photographs, they are,” said Morris, “and why your grandmother, she kept this box buried like she did. We should maybe be reading these pages, no?”

“It’s up to Caroline,” I said.

She looked up and shrugged.

We all took seats around the table. The rusted and mangled box sat between us. We leaned forward and listened carefully as Caroline read out loud the surviving sections of her grandmother’s diary, one by one, the sections torn from the bound volumes before they were burned, the sections that her grandmother could not suffer to destroy. Halfway through, Caroline’s voice grew hoarse and Beth took over the reading. It grew still in the room, except for the song of the reader’s voice, as strangely foreign to the two women who shared the reading as if channeled from the dead Faith Reddman herself. At one point, while Beth read, Caroline suppressed a sob, and then waved us away when we offered comfort and told Beth to keep reading. The last line was a fervent wish for peace and love and redemption and after it was over we sat in silence for a long time, still under the spell of that voice from long ago.

“I think,” said Morris, “I know now who are these people in the photographs, but the crucial questions I can’t yet figure out.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like why these pictures are in her box, or who it is that killed the woman you found in the ground,” said Morris.

“Don’t you see?” said Caroline. “Isn’t it clear?”

“No,” said Beth. “Not at all.”

Caroline took the Distinguished Service Cross from around her neck and tossed it into the box, where it clanged, steel on steel. “My grandmother only said the kindest things about him. She worshiped him as if he was the most wonderful, most gentle man in the world. A war hero, she said, and so how could we think otherwise. Even in her diary she could barely say ill of him, but it’s all there, beneath her words of love and devotion, it’s all very clear. How could we ever have known it, how could we ever have imagined that our grandfather, Christian Shaw, was an absolute monster?”

33

34

I WAS SITTING AT MY DESK, staring at the message slip as it glowed pink in my hand. My secretary’s handwriting, normally only barely legible, was this morning a series of mystical hieroglyphs. I had to squint to make it out. “Rev. Custer,” it read, atop a phone number. I called out to her from my desk. “Who the hell is this, Ellie?”

She scurried into my office and stood behind me, peering over my shoulder at the slip of paper. “Your reverend.”

“I don’t have a reverend, Ellie, I’m Jewish, remember? We have mothers instead, and mine’s in Arizona.”

“Well he said he was a reverend, he said, Rev. Custer, just like that. You don’t know him? He only left a number.”

What I figured just then was that this Reverend Custer guy was one of the wackos in Beth’s cult, calling about the meeting Beth had set up for me with Oleanna, guiding light, so I called. What I got was not a New Age answer line but instead a soft-voiced little girl of about six.

“Hello,” she said, “you want my mommy?”

“No, sweetheart,” I said, pronouncing my words with utter care in that annoying way all unmarried and childless men seem to have when they talk to strange little girls. “I’m really looking for a Reverend Custer.”

“Mommy’s in the shower.”

“What about the reverend?”

“In the shower.”

“He’s in the shower too?”

“Mommy.”

“No, the reverend.”

“Are you a stranger?”

“I don’t know, am I?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

Click.

I had a headache and my eyes were blurry and I hadn’t slept nearly enough. The night before we had opened the box disinterred from the garden behind Veritas and read together, Beth, Caroline, Morris, and I, the self-selected excerpts from the diary of Faith Reddman Shaw. That would have been exhausting enough, but afterward Caroline insisted on spending the whole of the night in my apartment. It was not sex she was after this night, which was too bad, actually. Instead she was after solace. Solacing is up there with having a toothache as the least pleasant way to stay awake through the night. I had to stroke her hair and wipe her tears and comfort her when all I really wanted was to sleep, but some things we suffer for money and some things we suffer for love and some things we suffer because we’re too polite to kick her out of bed.

Ignore that last crack, it was only my testosterone speaking; besides, I am not that well mannered. It was indisputable that Caroline and I were easing into some sort of relationship, though the exact sort was hard to nail. Maybe it was just that we were both lonely and convenient, maybe it was the twin gravitational pulls of her great fortune and my great wanting, maybe it was that we found ourselves in the middle of an adventure we couldn’t really share with anyone else. Or maybe it was that she saw herself in desperate need of saving and I, inexplicably, found in myself the desire to save. If all there was was love then there wasn’t much to it, that was clear to us both, but life is not so soggy as the Beatles would have had us believe.

In the middle of our long late night conversation, as we lay in my bed, still clothed, she reached around and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you’re here for me, Victor,” she said, out of nowhere. “There’s no one else I can talk to about this. It has been a long time since anyone’s been there for me.”

And it had been a long time since I had been there for anyone. I smiled and kissed her lightly on the eye and I wondered if now might be a providential time to mention the fee agreement she still had not signed, but then thought better of it.

“This is harder than I ever imagined,” she said. “Finding Aunt Charity down there and then that diary, my grandmother’s words, reliving such tragedy. It’s like the entire foundation of my life has shifted. Things that were absolutely true have turned out to be lies. I thought I had my life’s history figured out, organized in a way that made sense, but it doesn’t make as much sense anymore.”

“Should we stop digging? Should we give it up?”

She was silent for a moment, a long worrying moment, before she shook her head and said, “No, not yet,” and held me closer.

Her hair tickled my nose uncomfortably and made me sneeze. I had the urge to roll away, onto my side, to sleep, but I didn’t. While the bounds of the relationship we were easing into were still narrow and unclear, they at least encompassed money and sex and now, I was learning, solace. But it wasn’t as though she was faking her distress. Even as she held me she shook slightly, as if from a cold draft blowing in from the past, and it is no wonder.

Family histories are a series of myths, embellished and perpetuated through gossamer tales retold over the Thanksgiving turkey. They are blandly reassuring, these myths, they give us the illusion that we know from whence we came without forcing upon us the details that make real life so perfectly vulgar. We know how Grandmom met Grandpop at a John Philip Sousa concert at Willow Grove Park but not how they lived unhappily ever after in a loveless marriage and fought like hyenas every day of their lives. We know how Daddy proposed to Mommy but not how he first plied her with tequila and then conned her into the sack. We’re told by our mother all about that magical night on which we were born but she never mentions how our head ripped apart her vagina or how her blood spurted or the way the placenta slimed out of her and plopped onto the floor like an immolated cat. Well, that night Caroline had seen the cat.

She had listened to her grandmother’s voice come forth from the grave and she believed she could understand now all the misery her grandmother had suffered, and why she had suffered it. She was certain that her grandfather, the moody and ofttimes soused Christian Shaw, had only agreed to marry Faith to save his family’s fortune. After proposing to Faith, he had started playing around with Charity, seducing the sister of the woman to whom he was engaged without a care in the world, and then, when Charity found herself inconveniently pregnant, had found it more convenient to murder Charity and bury her in the fertile oval beside the statue of Aphrodite than to tell the tale to her father, the man who was poised to save the Shaw Brothers Company from bankruptcy. In his marriage he had been mostly absent, often drunk, primarily abusive, and Caroline couldn’t help but notice how sister Hope’s health took a turn for the worse when Faith was forced to her bed with premature contractions and it was left to Christian to nurse the ill woman. She could figure why the rat poison was in the kitchen cabinet even if her grandmother couldn’t. With Charity and Hope both gone, the whole of the Reddman fortune demised to Christian Shaw and his heirs, another convenience. It seemed to Caroline that the best thing that could have happened to her family was the accident that rainy April night in 1923 when her father shot her grandfather, except for the crippling guilt her father carried from that day forward. That was how Caroline saw it that night in my bed, explaining her version to me through clenched teeth and tears.

I wasn’t quite sure I bought it. Her interpretation of what we had heard sounded like the plot of a bad feminist novel from the seventies, where the women would all be just fine if it wasn’t for those murderous men who engaged in the foulest of schemes to further their own ends. There was something too calculating, too controlled, in the voice of the woman who spoke to us from the dead that night for her to be so innocent a victim, something peculiar in the way she seemed so easily to absolve those around her of whatever crimes they had committed. As a lawyer I had had enough experience with unreliable narrators, had been one myself in fact, to fail to recognize the signs. But all of us had agreed on one thing, the ghosts that had been unleashed in the terrible events disclosed in the diary we had found in that box were still among us and the death of Jacqueline was quite possibly related.

“You haven’t by any chance, Miss Caroline,” said Morris as we decided on what to do next, “ever found that secret panel in the library your grandmother in the diary, she talks about?”

“No,” she said. “I never heard of it before.”

“It would be helpful, maybe, if you could spend some time, just like she did, and try to find it. Inside, I think, maybe there is something interesting, don’t you think?”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Caroline.

“But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing,” I said. “No one should know what we’re digging into. What about the numbers on the three-by-five card we found?”

“A banker friend I know,” said Morris, “very upstanding now but he got his start funding Irgun when such was not allowed and had to be done in secrecy. This was many years ago, just after the war, but not too far removed from the time of those papers you found. I’ll take them to him. He might know.”

Morris also agreed he would try to discover what had happened to the Poole daughter, who had disappeared, pregnant, just days after her mother’s death. I took for myself certain of the photographs, and the strangely retained receipt from the doctor. I also took the key out of the envelope entitled “Letters” and slipped it into my wallet.

That was what we had done about the box, but I still knew the likelihood was greatest that whoever had paid off Cressi to kill Jacqueline Shaw had done it not as an avenging ghost of the past but for the most basic of all reasons, for the motive that underlies most all of our crimes, for the money. Which was why tonight I was seeing Oleanna, the guiding light of the Church of the New Life, named beneficiary in the five-million-dollar insurance policy taken out on Jacqueline Shaw’s life. And it was why I had asked Caroline to set up a meeting for me that very afternoon with her brother Eddie, the worst gambler in the world, who had somehow, suddenly, upon the untimely murder of his sister, paid off his debt to Jimmy Vigs. In my short career I had discovered that to find a crook you follow the money. But first there was that message from the good Reverend Custer.

“Hello.”

“Can I talk to your mommy, please?”

“She’s in the bafroom.”

“Yes, sweetheart, can I talk to her please? I’m looking for a Reverend Custer and I was given this number.”

“She told me to say she’s not in. Do we owe you money?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Mommy says we owe a lot of money.”

“You know, sweetheart,” I said, “I think I may just have the wrong number.”

I hung up and stared at Ellie’s hieroglyphs for a little while and watched as they rearranged themselves before my eyes. Then a thought slipped through the fog of my mind and I felt myself start to sweat.

“I’m exhausted,” I told Ellie as I stepped out of my office, the phone slip in my pocket. “I’m going to get some coffee. You want anything?”

“Diet soda,” she said, and she started fiddling in her purse before I told her it was on me. Then I thought better of my generosity and took her four bits. I needed change for the phone.

I guess he assumed my line was tapped or my messages somehow not secure, and I couldn’t really blame him. Whoever was coming after him had the audacity to try to make the hit in the middle of the Schuylkill Expressway. To someone that brazen it wouldn’t be a thing to slap a wire on a phone or rifle through a pack of pink slips looking for a number to trace. “You are my scout,” had said Enrico Raffaello. “Like in the old cavalry movies, every general needs a scout to find the savages.” And what beleaguered general was ever more in need of a ferret-eyed scout than George Armstrong Custer. I just wish Raffaello had picked a less-ominous example. He wasn’t at the number I had dialed because that number was absolutely wrong. I took the Rev. literally and reversed the numbers when I made the call in the phone booth. This time it wasn’t a little girl who answered.

“This is a private line,” came a voice over the phone, a dark voice and slow.

“I’m looking for Reverend Custer,” I said.

“Boy, do you ever have the wrong number,” said the voice and then the line went dead.

I puzzled that for a moment, thoroughly confused about everything. When the hell was Calvi going to get off his boat and tell me what to do? Until he did I had no choice but to fake it. I took the second of Ellie’s quarters and dialed again.

“I said this was a private line,” said the same voice.

“I’m calling from a pay phone and this is my last quarter and if you hang up on me it will be your ass in a sling. Tell the man it’s his scout calling. Tell him I need to speak to him now.”

There was a quiet on the line as if my request was being considered by a higher authority and then I heard the scrape of chairs and a rap of knuckles on wood in the distance.

“What do you have for me?” came the familiar voice.

“How are you? How seriously are you hurt?”

There was a grunt.

“Where are you?” I asked.

There was a dangerous pause where I realized I had asked exactly the wrong question. “Tell me what you’ve learned,” he said finally.

“Our friend with the guns, I know how he got the money now. Murder for hire. One of his victims was an heiress name of Shaw.”

“Who paid him?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s nothing to do with you. For our friend it was just a way to finance the war. But he got a little sloppy and there was a witness and that is what’s so damn interesting. Under pressure, the witness changed his story, taking the heat off our guy.”

“Who applied the pressure?”

“Our little buddy who’s moved up so fast, the pawnbroker. He’s in on it, I know it.”

“Is there any other connection between the two of them?”

“Other than your friend was all too happy to get me into the car with you before our incident?”

“Other than that, yes.”

“No. But it’s him.”

“If it is him, or another, it no longer matters,” he said, and then he sighed. “You’re a good friend. You’ve been very loyal. I will remember this after it is over. I have one last favor to ask.”

“I want out.”

“I know that is what you want and I now want the same. I’m tired of it, and these animals have no restraint. It was bad enough going after me, but what they did to Dominic, who was already out, and then to Jimmy Bones was too much. They’ll go after my daughter, I know it, and then I will have no choice but to enter a war in which no one will win and everyone will end up dead. I could send my men out hunting right now, but it won’t solve the problem, and with every murder, every attempt, the case the feds are building grows stronger and more of our own will feel marked and turn. I’m a tired man, I don’t want to spend the last years of my life hiding or in jail or dead. I want to paint. I want to spend a whole month reading one poem. I want to dance naked in the moonlight by the sea.”

“You sound like a personal ad.”

“I’m a romantic at heart.”

“The bastards tried to kill us.”

“I was never a man of war. It was forced upon me once, I won’t let it be forced upon me again. You will be approached about a meeting.”

“Why would they approach me?”

“You were in the line of fire. You were the last neutral to see me. You will be approached. That is the way these animals work.”

“What do I tell them?”

“You are to tell them that I want peace. Tell them that I will meet them to accept their terms. Tell them if they can guarantee my security and the security of my family then it is over. Tell them we will meet to arrange a truce and then the trophy will be theirs.”

35

THE EDWARD SHAWS LIVED in a townhouse on Delancey Place, a very fashionable address on the Schuylkill side of Rittenhouse Square. It wasn’t a through street, so it was quiet, and the cars that sat before the houses seemed to have been parked there for half of eternity, parked in prime, unmetered spots undoubtedly willed from one generation to the next. Of course the Shaws wouldn’t deign to park on the street, their property would include a garage in the back, which I had checked out through the garage-door window before I pressed their doorbell. A two-car garage with only one car inside, a sedate silver BMW. Not the kind of car the worst gambler in the world would tool around in, I figured. He’d want something flashier, something red, something more phallic to make up for the continual humiliation of his certain winners dropping dead of coronaries in the middle of the track. Eddie Shaw, it appeared, had skipped out on our meeting. It was enough to give a guy a complex, the way he was avoiding me.

When I saw who was at the door, I expected a torrent of words, but all I got from Kendall Shaw was a subdued, “Hello, Victor. Caroline told me you’d be coming and that I was to help you any way I could.” When I was inside, she turned around and led me into her family room.

To get there we passed through a formal carpeted foyer. The walls were an eggshell blue, marked with rectangular patches of a slightly darker shade. There were formal chairs and a sofa, but in the center, off to the right, there was a strange open area. As I passed the opening I glanced down at the carpet and saw four indentations in an irregular quadrangular pattern, about the size and the spacing of the feet of a grand piano.

The family room was still intact. Comfortably furnished, it was filled with deep sofas, recliner chairs, framed posters, an exhibition of some of Kendall ’s latest landscapes. In the center of the room, like a shrine, was a gigantic television set. I guess that’s right, take the paintings, take the piano, but Lord please don’t let them take my La-Z-Boy or my big screen Panasonic TV. Kendall gestured me onto the sofa and sat herself on the facing love seat. She was dressed today rather primly, a beige skirt, a white blouse, and her drug-induced mania was somewhat depressed. She was on a different set of pills this week, I figured. Valium anyone?

“I’ve come to see your husband,” I said.

“You’re not really a painter, are you, Victor?” she said.

“No, ma’am. Actually, I’m a lawyer. But I admired your work very much.”

“That was kind of you and Caroline to play such tricks on me.”

“I’m just here to ask your husband a few questions.”

“So Caroline said. He’s out at the moment, but you can wait with me, if you’d like.” She glanced at her watch. “He must be running a little late.”

“When did you expect him back?”

“Two days ago,” she said, and then she almost jumped to her feet. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Fish sticks?”

“Coffee would be fine,” I said, and I watched her walk briskly out of the room.

Well, this had become nicely awkward.

She came back after ten minutes carrying a tray with a teapot and two cups and an arrangement of fancy cookies. As she poured, I told her I liked my coffee black. She handed me the cup and I sipped daintily. It was scalding. I wondered how much I could take her insurance company for if I spilled it on my lap.

“What exactly did you want to ask my husband about?” she said nonchalantly while she poured a cup for herself.

“Are you sure you should be having caffeine, Mrs. Shaw?”

There was a pause. She stirred in some milk and a packet of Sweet’n Low and sat back in her love seat. “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at Veritas that night, Victor. You caught me on a bad evening. I was ovulating. I tend to grow a little overeager during ovulation.”

“Yes, well right there is more than I ever wanted to know, but still, apology accepted.”

“How’s your ear?”

“Healing, thank you. I didn’t mean to disturb your afternoon, I had just a few questions about your husband’s finances.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Maybe I should come back.”

“Maybe you’d have better luck asking me what you want to know. Edward is not forthcoming with or about his money, except to his bookies.”

I took a sip of my coffee and stared at her for a moment. I hadn’t noticed it beneath the hysteria the night she bit my ear but there was about Kendall Shaw, as she bravely sat in her posh townhouse while it disassembled before her eyes, an aura of strength. I had seen in Eddie Shaw’s eyes the weakness of a gambler who, despite all evidence to the contrary, expected to win. Kendall had the eyes of a gambler too, but a gambler who had bet it all and lost and could live with that. She had rolled the dice on Eddie Shaw, a pair of dice she was sure was fixed in her favor, and still, against all laws of probability and physics, had thrown craps.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll ask you what I was going to ask him. The day Jacqueline died, your husband flew to Philadelphia from his beach vacation for some business. That afternoon he stopped in to visit Jacqueline, but she wasn’t home. What was the purpose of that visit?”

She took a sip of coffee and looked to the side. “Edward would tell you he just went over to say hello to his dear sister.”

“But he didn’t just go over to say hello?”

“That would have been a kind and loving gesture on his part, so we can assume the answer is no. Cookie, Victor?”

“No, thank you. So why the visit?”

“Edward needed money to pay off his gambling debts. They had busted up his Porsche and broken his arm. He thought they were going to kill him next. He hoped his sister would give him some of her money to get him out of immediate trouble.”

“Why Jacqueline?”

“Process of elimination. Bobby lost his in wild investments and Caroline wasted most of hers on her film.”

“You mentioned before that Caroline had tried to make a movie.”

“Yes. In a burst of unexpected enthusiasm she lavished great sums of her dividend money on a writer and a director and some actors and a crew and shot a film, a horror film about a crazed plastic surgeon, but then she cut off her financing and closed the picture down before they could complete postproduction. She has the piles of raw stock in a vault somewhere. She said that the end result didn’t satisfy her standards, but that was just her excuse. It was so like her to pull the plug like that, another way of ensuring the continued failure at which she has become so accomplished. All the Reddmans, I’ve learned, are brilliant at failure.”

“But Jacqueline still had her money?”

“Loads. For years she was too depressed to step outside her apartment. Her dividends just piled up. Edward figured two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would get them off his back. She was his last hope.”

“And she wasn’t home when he visited.”

“No, she wasn’t, and by the time he could get free to go see her again she was dead.”

“Which wasn’t so inconvenient for him, actually, at least so he probably thought, since she was insured for five million and he expected he was a beneficiary.”

“Edward would tell you that he knew the beneficiary of her policy had been changed, that Jacqueline had told him so.”

“But that would be another lie, I guess.”

“The day after she was found hanging he had borrowed money on the death benefit to pay off a chunk of his debt. He had promised the borrower that he would repay the loan as soon as the insurance money came in. The night he found out the money was going to those New Age lotus-eaters he literally howled in desperation.”

“Like a werewolf.”

She laughed lightly but not nicely. “My charts had showed that evening to be propitious.”

“Astrology?”

“Temperature. But he was so full of blubbery fear he was useless.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Kendall?”

She stood up and put her now empty cup onto the tray and then walked over to one of her paintings on the wall. It was in a fine oval frame and the oil had also been laid on in an oval, a night scene, with a stream running through spindly bare trees and a huge white mountain peak in the background, all illuminated by a bright moon. “Did you really like my painting?” she asked.

“Well, no, actually. But I’m no critic.”

“And I’m no painter,” she said. “Caroline told me you were looking into Jacqueline’s death for her. That you and she both believe that Jacqueline was murdered.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Victor, don’t you think that I’ve thought what you’re thinking? Don’t you think I’ve stayed up at night, lying beside that snoring shit, wondering with fear of what kinds of beastly things he is capable? Don’t you think?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought.”

“Well think.”

“And if it turns out to be your husband, what will you do?”

“I married him for better or for worse, and unlike the rest of this world I believe in that. I’d move out to wherever they send him and visit him in prison once a week, every week. I’d be the most loyal wife you’ve ever seen until his father dies and his stock shares vest and then I’d divorce the bastard and take my half and move to Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe painted just outside Santa Fe. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“They must have the most erotic flora in Santa Fe. Any other questions, Victor?”

“Just one. This money he found to pay off a piece of the gambling debt. Where did it come from?”

“Edward would tell you he got lucky at the track.”

“I bet that’s exactly what he’d tell me.”

“He told me he found someone to help him,” she said. “He told me he found someone willing to factor the insurance payout for a few points a week. He made me sign something but then said the man would bail him out.”

“Who?”

“Some pawnshop operator from South Philly. His place is on Second Street, I think, a shop called the Seventh Circle Pawn. A cute name, actually, since this man’s name is Dante.”

First thing I did when I left Kendall Shaw was to find a phone and tell Caroline to get the hell out of her apartment, right away, to get the hell out and hide. I had learned enough to figure that her life was in danger and who exactly it was who would want her dead.

36

I WAITED IN MY CAR outside the large shambling house in Mount Airy, watching the acolytes enter the Haven. I could tell they were acolytes because they wore sandals or colored robes beneath their denim jackets or their hair was long or their heads were shaved or they had the self-righteous carriage of those on the trail of life’s one true answer. They would have looked out of place in every part of the city but Mount Airy, which has long been a refuge for earnest granola eaters and committed activists in long batik skirts. I felt sorry for them as I watched them walk in that house, even as I knew they would feel sorry for me had they crossed my path. I thought they were deluded fools buying into some harebrained promise of enlightenment for a price when all there really was was the price. They would have thought me a materialistic loser who was totally out of touch with the sweet spiritual truths in my life. All we had in common was our mutual scorn, edged with pity, but, hey, I had suffered through long-term romantic relationships that were built on less.

There was five million due to go to the woman in that Mount Airy house. If I could connect her to the killing and get Caroline’s signature on my agreement I figure I’d be able to wheedle my third of the five either from a suit against her or from the insurance company. One million six hundred, sixty-six thousand, six hundred, sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents. It wasn’t all I had hoped to get out of this case in the middle of my most fervently hopeful night sweats, but there was a comforting sibilance to the number. It would do. I slapped on my armor of incredulity, stepped out of the car, and headed to the Haven for my meeting with Oleanna, Guiding Light.

The house was stone, trimmed in dark green. There was a narrow front porch with a painted wood floor, scarred and uneven. Across the porch were some old wicker chairs arrayed in the form of a discussion group, empty now. I stepped around a red tricycle, past a pile of old brown cushions left out to rot, past a stack of lumber. Though it was late spring, the storm windows were still up and green paint was peeling from the window sashes and the door. On the edge of the door frame was an incongruous mezuzah, covered with thick layers of paint. I rang the bell and nothing happened. I dropped the knocker and nothing happened. I looked around and twisted the doorknob and stepped into another year: 1968 to be exact.

Incense, Jerry Garcia, the warm nutty smell of a vegetarian casserole baking in the oven, posters of India and Tibet, earnest conversations, bad haircuts, the thick clinging scent of body odor.

We just missed all this, those of my generation, born too late as we were to ever remember a time when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy weren’t dead. The cool kids in our classes didn’t dress in tie-dye and bell bottoms, didn’t sport long straight hair, didn’t march in solidarity with the migrant farm workers; they wore polo shirts and applied to Harvard Business School and crushed beer cans on their heads. We didn’t listen to the young Bobby Dylan warble his warning to Mr. Jones, we had Bruce Springsteen and the Pretenders and the Sex Pistols just for the hell of it. There were plenty, like Beth, who felt they missed out on something, that the best was gone before they got there, but I was just as glad it passed me by. Too much pseudoactivism, too much pressure to try too many drugs, too little antiperspirant, too much godawful earnestness, too much communion with the masses, too much free love. Well, the free love I could have gone for, sure, I was as horny as the next groovester, but the rest you could stuff inside a time capsule and rocket to Aquarius for all I cared. I felt out of place in that house with my suit and tie and I liked that.

A woman without any hair, wearing an orange robe, stepped over to greet me. She put her hands together, fingers pointing up, and bowed slightly.

Yeah, sure. “I’m here to see Oleanna,” I said. “I have an appointment.”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman in a voice that was genuinely sweet, “but Oleanna doesn’t make appointments.”

“Why don’t you check and see,” I said.

Before she had time to apologize again I spotted what looked like a hairy boy walking down the stairs. At first I could just see his sandaled feet beneath the overhang of the ceiling, and then the hem of his yellow robe, and then, as more of his body was revealed, I recognized Gaylord. He surveyed the room as he descended and spotted me.

“Victor Carl, what a pleasure to see you,” he said in his high-pitched voice and the conversations that buzzed around us quieted. A smile burrowed out of his beard as he approached. “Welcome to the Haven. We’ve been so looking forward to your visit.”

The woman in the orange robe clasped her hands together and bowed slightly to Gaylord before she backed away from us. Gaylord grabbed me at the crook of my elbow, his smile still firmly in place.

“Come,” he said. “I’ll take you downstairs.”

He led me to the rear of the house, toward the kitchen. The congregants quieted when we approached and backed away from us. Some were dressed in street clothes, but most were in orange or green robes. Only Gaylord was wearing yellow.

“What’s with the different colors?” I asked.

“How much has your friend Beth told you?” he said.

“Beth?”

“Come now, Victor, we are not fools. We knew from the first who she was when she came and were only too happy to allow her to join our family. You did us a favor bringing her to us. She has a spiritual gift that is very rare. Oleanna thinks she is a very evolved soul.”

“Beth?”

“She has taken the steps faster than any seeker we’ve ever had other than Oleanna. The colors of our robes correspond to the twelve steps through initiation. The first five steps are called preparation, in which the seeker wears orange. Steps six through nine are called illumination, in which the seeker wears green. The final steps are initiation, in which the seeker suffers through three trials, the fire trial, the water trial, and the air trial. Those in the process of initiation wear yellow.”

“You’re the only one I see in yellow.”

“It’s a very advanced state,” said Gaylord.

The kitchen was large and bright, with yellow-and-white linoleum on the floor and avocado Formica counters. A group of acolytes in orange and green were chopping vegetables and stirring pots on an oversized commercial stove. “Only a few live in the house,” said Gaylord, “but all members are invited to share in the preparation and consumption of the evening meal. You’re invited to stay.”

“Very hospitable from someone who had threatened me with severe bodily harm just a few weeks ago.”

Gaylord stopped and turned to face me and then did something that truly shocked me. He put his hands together and fell to his knees and bowed his head low, touching his forehead to my wing tips. The scene felt horribly awkward, but no one in the kitchen seemed to think much of it. One orange-robed acolyte raised an eyebrow as he watched us for a moment before turning back to his work on the counter.

“I apologize to you with all my will, Victor Carl, for my behavior in your office. I felt my family was being threatened and besieged and I responded with anger and violence instead of benevolence and kindness. You should know that the karmic wound from my behavior has yet to heal and my spiritual progress has been halted for the time being as I continue to deal with my transgression.”

“Get up, Gaylord.”

His head still pressed to my shoes, he said, “I plead now for your forgiveness.”

I stepped back and he raised himself to his haunches, his hands still out in front of him.

“Just get the hell up,” I said. “I’d rather you threaten me again than do this penitent bit.”

“Do you forgive me then?”

“Will you get off your knees if I forgive you?”

“If that’s what you want.”

I looked down at him uncertainly. I would have felt worse about the scene had there not been a strange formality to his words, as if he had performed this same act of contrition when he blew up in the supermarket at a shopper with fifteen items in the twelve-item line or at a taxi driver who took the long way around. But even with the formality of his apology, I realized I didn’t like being bowed to like that, which was a surprise. Who among us hasn’t dreamed, at least for a moment, of being a king? But one robed penitent bowing at my feet had steeled my determination that if ever the Sacred College of Cardinals in their secret conclave in Rome decided to make a Jew from Philadelphia the next Pope, I would turn them down flat. Last thing I ever wanted was the huddling masses sucking on my ring. “Rise, Gaylord. I forgive you.”

Gaylord smiled a sly victory smile as he rose.

He took hold again of my arm and led me to the rear of the kitchen to a doorway which opened to a flight of low-ceilinged stairs. I ducked on my way down to what turned out to be a cramped warren of tiny rooms linked to one central hallway. Some of the doors to the rooms were open and small groups were inside, on the floor, in circles or in rows, chanting or bowing forward and back or sitting perfectly still. The walls were cheap drywall, the carpeting was gray and had an industrial nap.

“In the practice rooms,” said Gaylord, “we teach the many different techniques of meditation.”

“More than just crossing your legs and saying ‘ Om ’?”

He stopped at a room and opened the door. There were five orange-robed followers sitting around a green-robed woman, who knelt before them with a serene, peaceful expression on her face. Three of the orange robes were breathing in and out quickly, as if they were hyperventilating. One man was leaning forward, crying, his eyes still shut. A final woman was shaking as she held herself tightly and screamed like a scared child. No one came to help her as she shook and screamed. Slowly Gaylord closed the door.

“They’re practicing dynamic meditation,” said Gaylord. “It’s the most efficient way to reintegrate the past with the present. This is how many of our followers begin to see the integrity of the inner spirit through its ascendant journey from life to life.”

“You’re talking about past lives?”

“Finding a connection with our pasts is the final step of preparation before we move to illumination. We can’t know where our soul is heading until we know where it has been.”

“Then you weren’t kidding what you said about being a crusader.”

“Dynamic meditation is very powerful,” said Gaylord. He smiled unselfconsciously and led me further down the hallway.

I could feel it all about me, the bustling work of the robed minions searching for that spiritual salvation they know must be there for them, or else why would they ever have been placed on a slag heap such as this. I felt like a stranger in my suit, watching them all hard at their mystical work. I wonder if this was how James Bond felt as Auric Goldfinger led him on a tour of the facilities from which he was planning to detonate an atomic bomb and destroy America’s supply of gold: distant and amused and impressed and appalled all at the same time. I would have gone back to that room and opened the door and hugged the woman who was shaking and crying except that I was certain it was the last thing she would have wanted me to do. She had shaved her head, that woman, and her face was red with her tears and pain. At the end of it they would each tell her how far she had come and she would feel ever so proud, feel ever so much closer to it all. Even Bond would have been at a loss.

Finally Gaylord led me to a room at the end of the basement. He asked me to take off my shoes before entering. I had suspected there might be some shoe discarding so I made sure my socks were without holes that day. Gaylord slipped off his sandals and then opened the door.

The doorway to this room was small, low enough that I had to duck to get inside, and once inside I noticed that the room was very different from the others, more spacious, the floor covered with beige tatami mats, the walls lined entirely with fine wood. On either side and around the back were steplike risers, each also covered with tatami. Flower petals were scattered on the mats and a strong floral incense burned in a bronze pot. In each corner of the room stood columns carved with what appeared to be Sanskrit and on one of the walls was a framed architectural drawing of a futuristic sort of churchlike building looking very Mormonish with its spires and looping curves. There were windows high at the far end and beneath the windows was a niche in which a stone Buddha sat, his belly full and his smile empty, and before the Buddha, resting on a small stone pedestal, were two bronzed feet, a perfect pair, life-sized, cut off at the ankles.

Gaylord walked right up to the wall with the Buddha, dropped to his knees, bent forward until his forehead touched the bronzed feet. Then he stood and gestured to one of the risers and said, “Wait here for a few moments, please.”

I walked around the room for a bit in my stockinged feet, examining the woodwork, the engraved columns, the architectural drawing of what I assumed to be the Church of the New Life building proposed for Gladwyne, the cornerstone to be laid as a result of Jacqueline’s timely death. I stared for a moment at the carved Buddha, it looked to be old and precious, and then at the bronzed feet on the pedestal. I had to admit that the feet were more than passing strange. They were a woman’s feet, slim and gracefully arched, the toes even and slightly curled. They were very attractive for feet, actually. They might have been the prettiest feet I had ever seen. I couldn’t help but reach down and touch one of them, to rub my fingers lightly on the underside of the arch, to place my hand firmly atop of the rise of the tarsal ridge. The bronze beneath my palm was smooth, rubbed shiny over time like on the feet of a statue of a Roman Catholic saint. I let out a long breath, spun around, and then sat on one of the risers, across from the architectural drawing. The risers were wide enough to sit cross-legged, as I assume they were intended, but I just let my legs dangle as though I were sitting in the bleachers for a high school football game.

I waited for about a half an hour, growing steadily more impatient, when I heard a knock at the door. I stood.

The door opened slowly. In came Gaylord, looking unusually somber, his hands pressed one to the other before him as he entered and stepped to the right. Behind Gaylord was our Steven Seagal wannabe friend Nicholas, still wearing his black outfit. No robes for Nicholas, I guessed, while he was in his bodyguard mode. He glared at me as he bent to enter through the low wooden door and stepped to the left, forming a sort of honor guard at the doorway. Then through this guard of honor walked a small white-robed woman.

I gasped to myself when I saw her because she might have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, strong yet delicate features, like those on a statue of a Greek goddess, green eyes that literally sparkled. Red hair circled her face like a halo and from her slim ears dangled a shimmering pair of silver and pearl earrings. Looking at her was like looking at a soft shot in a movie. Even from a distance I could smell the scent of her musk. I found myself embarrassed by my reaction to the loveliness of her face and I tore my gaze away from it, down, to her bare feet, slim and gracefully arched, the toes even and slightly curled. They were prettier in person then in bronze and I had to stifle the desire to fall to my knees and bow until my forehead rested on her flesh.

I looked back up at her face and Oleanna smiled at me, a smile I felt viscerally, like an old song that echoes with the sadness of lost love.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Carl,” she said. “I am extremely grateful that you agreed to meet with me.”

I had assumed it was I who had arranged for the meeting but I was too dazzled to care.

“We at the Haven,” she continued, “are in desperate need of your help.”

37

WHEN I CAME HOME from the Haven, Caroline was waiting for me in my apartment. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her face was free of makeup, and my first reaction upon seeing her was wondering why I had never considered her dowdy before. It was an unfair thought, really, but it couldn’t be helped, still under the thrall, as I was, of Oleanna.

Caroline was at my apartment because as soon as I learned that Eddie Shaw had borrowed a load of cash from Earl Dante I realized that she was in utter danger. The way I saw it, Eddie had borrowed cash from Dante, the loan shark, to relieve the pressure from Jimmy Vigs and had arranged for his sister’s death at the same time. The Seventh Circle Pawn, your one-stop shop for shark loans and murder-for-hire and mayhem. Dante had gladly lent Shaw the money, at three points a week, with the expectation that he would be repaid by the insurance policy on Jacqueline’s death along with a lucrative bonus for the murder itself. Eddie had visited his sister’s building the day of her death not to ask for money, as Kendall had suggested, but to tape open the lock of the Cambium’s stairwell and wedge the wood in the Cambium’s roof door, opening the passageway for Cressi’s murderous visit. When Dante discovered that the money from the policy was not going to Eddie but instead to some New Age guru he must have turned a pleasant shade of green. Now Eddie Shaw was missing, probably running for his life, and the only way Dante would be getting his loan repaid in the near future was by killing off another Shaw. So I had warned Caroline, told her to make herself scarce and to suggest the same to brother Bobby. Bobby, I figured, had lifted off to some exotic locale but Caroline insisted on staying in Philadelphia. Insisted, in fact, after making a quick trip back to Veritas, on hiding out at my place. I had left a key for her before I visited the Haven. I guess our vague relationship was vaguely entering a new phase.

“What did you find out from the chant-heads?” asked Caroline as soon as I entered my apartment.

I looked at her for a moment and then stepped around her, toward the bedroom. “They didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Did you meet with that Oleanna person?” she asked as she followed me through the bedroom doorway.

I squinted into a mirror as I untied my tie. “Yes.”

“Well, what did she say? How did she explain the life insurance policy?”

“They didn’t do it,” I snapped. “All right?” I sat on the bed and started untying my shoes. “It was someone else. If you want my thinking, I’d bet it was your brother Eddie that hired the killer.”

“But the cult is where the money went,” she said. “Aren’t they the most likely to have hired a hit man to get five million dollars?”

“They’re not a cult and they didn’t do it.” With my shoes off I stood and undid my belt. “Do you mind, Caroline, I’m getting undressed here.”

“Yes, I do mind,” she said. “You suspect my brother of killing my sister, you suspect some deranged descendent of Elisha Poole, you suspect everyone except for the mob bookie, who you represented, and this wacko New Age church, which stood to gain a swift five million dollars from my sister’s death. There is no logic in any of that. So tell me, Victor, how are you so damn certain? How?”

How indeed?

It was hard to remember the whole of my meeting with Oleanna, it still was more like a dream than reality. We had a fairly normal conversation on the surface but it felt the whole time I was with her as if a current of some sort was being passed through her to me. I found it difficult to concentrate, to keep my place in our discussion. Being with her was like I remember reefer to be, without the paranoia or the intense desire to stuff my cheeks with Doritos. She looked at me with a penetration I had never experienced before, as if she was looking at something not connected to my physical body. She wasn’t reading my mind exactly, it was more like she was keeping visually abreast of my emotional state. There was a power to that woman, it was undeniable, and for the time we were together I felt it reaching out to me. And I guess I succumbed, because by the end of our meeting, when she took my hand in hers and I felt the pulsing warmth beneath her skin, by the time she said good-bye I was not only certain that the Church of the New Life was not involved in the murder of Jacqueline Shaw, but I was also pledged to find out exactly who had hired her killer and to prove it to the insurance company so that the death benefit would be promptly paid.

It wasn’t like I didn’t ask the questions I had prepared, because I did. I asked her how she had convinced Jacqueline to change her life insurance policy and she said she hadn’t, that Jacqueline had volunteered to make the church her life insurance beneficiary, as do many of the church’s followers. I asked her how important the five million dollars was to her church and she indicated, with a smile, the architectural drawing of the building on the wall and said the bequest from Jacqueline was the great bulk of the funds that would be used to construct their new ashram in the suburbs. When I remarked on her expensive taste in real estate she shrugged and said simply that they were outgrowing the house in Mount Airy. I asked her if she knew an Earl Dante or a Peter Cressi or a Jimmy Vigs and the answer each time was no. “Ever hear of a man named Poole?” I asked, but still the answer was no. I asked her how she had found out I was looking into Jacqueline’s death in the first place and she said that Detective McDeiss had called the insurance company to ask some further questions and the insurance company had called her lawyers asking why a shady criminal defense attorney would be so interested in a suicide. And then I asked her the most puzzling question: why, if she hadn’t been involved in Jacqueline’s death, had she sent Gaylord and Nicholas to threaten me off the case? She apologized profusely for their behavior, though not as profusely as Gaylord, and explained that at the time the insurance company was on the verge of disbursing the death benefit and she was certain my investigation would raise alarms that might delay still further the payment. “And, of course, I was right,” she said, a sweet smile on her face, “and so we have been forced to sue.” Those were her answers to my questions and they were pretty good answers, not great answers maybe, but good enough, I guess, though to be truthful, it wasn’t the content of the answers that convinced me of her innocence.

What had convinced me was the current I had felt flowing from her to me, a strange nonverbal communication that bypassed the logic centers of my left brain and flowed straight into the emotional centers in my right. I was convinced she was telling the truth because she was telling me so in a way I was ill-equipped to refute. Emotionally I believed every word she said and after my emotions were engaged my logic swiftly followed. Of course the Church of the New Life wouldn’t hurt Jacqueline Shaw. They loved her, they cared for her, she was family, so said my emotions. And she was a sugar tit that they could suck on for the rest of her life, draining, over time, enough of her share of the Reddman fortune to make the five mil look like a pittance, so said my logic, hustling to catch up.

And then, as if she were reading my spirit like a billboard, she convinced me to do all I could to find Jacqueline’s killer, not by pure emotion, not by reason, not by virtue of her rare beauty, but through the one medium most designed to catch my attention. She offered me cash.

“If you can convince the insurance company to stop holding up the payment, Mr. Carl,” she said, “by proving to them that we were in no way responsible for Jacqueline’s death, we will be sure you are rewarded. Generally the rewards we give to our church members are karmic in nature, designed to benefit the soul in future lives. But seeing as you’re not a member of the church, how about a portion of the recovery? Say five percent?”

To give you an idea of my state of mind, I promised to do my best immediately, I didn’t so much as haggle. Had I been thinking more clearly I would have seen the offer for what it obviously was, a bribe to turn the direction of my investigation away from her church. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. In fact I didn’t even do the calculation until I was in the car, on Kelly Drive, on my way back into Center City. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She was offering me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to prove that someone else, and not she, was the killer. It was an obvious bribe, yes, but I was certain that it was no such thing. How was I so certain? How indeed? Because I had felt something flowing from Oleanna, something pure and innocent and irrefutable, something I almost couldn’t recognize because of my pathetic lack of experience. What I had felt flowing from her to me was something close to love.

“So what was going on at Veritas?” I asked Caroline as we sat at my red Formica dining table and ate a pizza I had called out for.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Did you look for the hiding place your grandmother mentioned in her diary?”

“Sort of,” she said.

“Well? Did you find it?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of? What does that mean?”

“Okay, I found it. By the cast-iron fireplace, like my grandmother wrote in her diary. I tapped around with my knuckle until I found a hollow part. There was a piece of wood trim that slipped up.” She shrugged. “So I pushed the panel and it opened.”

“Hell, Caroline, that’s fantastic. What did you find? Another corpse?”

“No, thank God. Nothing important, really, just books, ledgers, different kinds of financial journals. Worthless stuff.”

“I’d bet not. Did you get them for us?”

She nodded slowly.

“Where are they?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where are they, Caroline?”

She waited a moment and then gestured to my hall closet.

Inside I found a cardboard box, sitting on the floor among my loose jackets and assorted balls and racquets. I pulled out the box, kneeled down, and looked through it quickly. Old ledgers with their pages crumbling and the moth-eaten cloth on their frayed bindings seeming to be a step away from complete disintegration. The numbers inside were written in a fading ink, numbers over numbers over numbers, in progressions that meant absolutely nothing to me.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I’d never be able to make head nor tail of it but I’ll have Morris take a look.”

I put the books back and stood up and thought for a moment and then turned to look at her. She was staring at a piece of pizza where the cheese had pulled off and was now in a clump on her paper plate.

“Why didn’t you tell me about what you found right off?” I said.

She shrugged without looking up, staring at the denuded slice of pizza as if it was the most fascinating sight she had ever seen.

“I thought if I lied and told you the hiding place was empty,” said Caroline, finally, after not responding to my question for hours, “what was inside would go away.”

“What do you think is in those books?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t think the truth ever goes away, Caroline. I think it just sometimes lies in wait for us.”

We were now side by side in my bed. It was late. We had made it halfway through Leno before I had retired to the bedroom. I had wanted some time alone that night but I didn’t know how to tell her that, so I stayed up past my bedtime, hoping she’d get the hint to go to sleep by herself, had stayed up watching the local news and Jay’s monologue and an insipid conversation with some long-legged starlet, Jay fawning over her so assiduously that she had to wipe the slobber from her leather dress, and I would have happily slept right there on the couch except that Caroline was sitting right there with me. So I stretched and yawned and said I needed to get some sleep and that was her cue to follow me into the bedroom. I had never lived with a woman before and I wondered if this was what it was like to be married. I could tell right off I didn’t like it.

“I have an idea,” said Caroline. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

“It’s not easy learning the truth, is it?”

“ Cancun, just me and you.”

“You don’t really want to stop our search.”

“Oh yes I do.”

“Really?”

She waited a moment before she said, “I thought I could control what we did and what we found, but now I’m not so sure.”

I realized just then how close she was to actually quitting and I felt a twang of fear. I wasn’t ready yet to stop, neither for my sake, nor for hers. I mean, however could I save her if she wasn’t willing to be saved? What I needed to do was to keep everything together for just a little longer.

“What did you think we were going to find,” I asked, “when we started looking into your family’s history?”

“I’m not sure, maybe some good. Is just one good thing too much to ask?”

“You once told me you had a happy childhood. Wasn’t that one good thing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It would have been happy as hell, I guess, if it wasn’t me that was living it.”

I thought on that for a moment. “Perhaps the problem wasn’t yours, Caroline. Perhaps there was something else going on, something dark and cold and rooted in your family’s past.”

“Don’t start telling me about my childhood.”

“We found a corpse. We found your grandaunt buried in your grandmother’s garden. There are secrets at work here that were alive all through your childhood, secrets that affected your entire life, secrets you should know. You are asking the right questions, Caroline.”

“But what happens if I don’t like the answers?”

“Whether you like them or not they manifest themselves every day, in that crumbling house and your deteriorating family, in your father, who never leaves his bedroom, in your dead sister’s sadness, in your situational drinking, in your tattoos and pierced flesh, in your wild fear of cats and your aggressive promiscuity. Maybe it’s time to rethink your past, to incorporate all we’re learning into how you view it and yourself.”

She took a moment to take all that in before saying, “You think I’m a slut?”

“I think you are hurt and scared and don’t know what to do with your life.”

“I’m not a slut.”

“Okay, you’re not a slut.”

She was quiet for another long moment. “It’s just I don’t really believe in love anymore.”

I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say.

“I think love is a trick and when we fall for it we end up less than we were before, that’s what I think. It eats your guts out because you think it’s real and you count on it to save your life and then it turns out it’s only a trick.”

“I don’t know, Caroline.”

“True love is a myth, and if I sleep around it’s only to keep proving it to myself.”

“It’s late. We’ve been through a lot today.”

“And I do, over and over again.”

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“Hold me.”

“I’m too tired.”

“Please just hold me. Please.”

And that’s how it started, simply as my holding her, trying to quiet her so I could get some sleep in my own bed, but that’s not how it ended.

I wasn’t especially interested in sex with Caroline that night. After my meeting with Oleanna, after feeling what I had felt in Oleanna’s presence, the love and the compassion and the warm pulse beneath her skin, after all that, sex with Caroline was not what I wanted at all. I wanted to remember what it was like to be near Oleanna, to hold her hand, to rub her bronzed feet. I wanted to think of Oleanna, not of Caroline, so no, I wasn’t interested. Really. But she turned to me and kissed my unparted lips and kissed my neck and rubbed her hand across my chest. She was persistent and I am admittedly weak when it comes to the carnal in this life; I have a hard time turning down either prime rib or sex.

So that night we screwed once again. She was, as she always was, once the engine started revving, distant, passive, not really there, but I didn’t care, I barely noticed, because it wasn’t her I was thinking of as I pressed my tongue to her body and pounded out that rhythm known only by the blood. I was on top of her and I was pinning her hands above her head and I was taking her breasts into my mouth and I was pressing her legs to the bed with my own, but it wasn’t she I was thinking about. What I sensed beneath me in the darkness was not Caroline’s breast or Caroline’s lips or Caroline’s scent, but instead a halo of red hair and soft green eyes and classical features and warm pink skin and perfect feet and the exhilarating aroma of musk. I was screwing Caroline all right, but I was making love to Oleanna.

When my heart had stopped its throbbing and my breath had subsided to normal, I rolled off her and onto my back. Caroline laid her head on my chest.

“I like it here with you,” she said.

I said what I was supposed to say. “I like it too.”

“We’ll keep looking, all right?”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For just being here with me.”

I felt just then about an inch and a half.

38

“I’VE BEEN TOUCHED BY IT TOO,” said Beth.

“It was fabulous,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s pretty interesting.”

“I mean really fabulous. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“That’s fine, Victor. What are you getting?”

“Anything with caffeine.” I looked up at the board and was assaulted by choices. “How does a double mocha latte sound?”

“Nauseating. Just get me a decaf, black. I’ll grab us seats.”

We were at the Starbucks on Sixteenth Street. I was waiting in a slow line for a fast cup of joe. It wasn’t too long ago when it was enough to walk right up to any street vendor in the city and pick up a coffee. It came in a blue cardboard cup and cost fifty cents and right there you could add a pack of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets to the order and still get change back from a dollar. But that was before Starbucks came to town. Now you waited in line for steamed milk and cutely named brews from exotic lands with more all-natural flavors than nature could have imagined and after the long wait, and the deciphering of the menu, and the condescending smiles from the coffee people who were far cooler than you, what you got back was a fine cup of coffee doctored to taste like something else and maybe change back from a ten. One more reason to hate Seattle.

Beth was waiting for me at a counter which fronted a window onto Sixteenth. She sipped her coffee, a Brazilian decaf mix, while I took a gulp of my latte. Too sweet, too frothy, like a hot chocolate trying to act tough. I should have known better.

“They’re very impressed with you there,” I said. “Gaylord thinks you’re a very evolved soul.”

She didn’t smile at the compliment, she just looked out the window and drank her coffee.

“She has very beautiful feet,” I said. “Have you noticed?”

“Oleanna?”

“And hands too, but it’s the feet that most struck me. Pink and very shapely. And it’s not just me who thinks it. They bronzed them, have you seen that.”

“Yes,” she said, still looking outside. “I’ve been in that room. I think it’s creepy.”

“Is she, like, married or seeing someone?”

“Don’t think too much about Oleanna, Victor.”

“I can’t stop. The rest of your New Age friends can go jump in a lake for all I care but this Oleanna, wow. What I was feeling was very potent. And this isn’t just my normal quantum of lust. It was something else.”

“She has a power,” said Beth, “an ability to consciously project certain emotions. I don’t wholly understand it, but it has something to do with her control over her spiritual sense organs and a way of communicating directly on the spiritual level. I can’t quite tell if it’s a wonderful and advanced gift or a parlor trick.”

“It was pretty fabulous, I must say.”

“Yes, I’m sure it was. But she used it to manipulate you for nonspiritual reasons and that seems all wrong.”

“Was I manipulated?”

“You walked in with serious questions and you came out, after one session, convinced of her innocence and pledged to help her. Yes, Victor, I’d say you were manipulated. There is something very calculating about Oleanna. She is very determined to get her building built. I’m not sure how much I trust her.”

“So you have doubts about their innocence?”

She picked up a plastic stirrer and spun it lazily inside her coffee. “Not really.”

“Doubts about the church itself?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Really?”

“Some things are troubling. After I heard what happened in your meeting I confronted her. I told her I thought it was wrong of her to use her gifts to twist you around like she did.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it was none of my business, that I was still too low on the ladder to understand. I might not yet understand how she did what she did, but I think I understand her motives well enough.”

“So you’re having doubts. Doubts are good. My entire spiritual system is based on doubt. Let’s go to Morton’s tonight, we’ll each get a steak the size of third base and discuss our doubts between mouthfuls.”

“You’re a snake,” she said, smiling. “I’m just confused. It feels half right and half wrong and I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

“Kick the bastards out of your life is what I say.”

“But it feels half right, Victor. They are helping me tap into something real and powerful. At the same time I think they’re dressing it up with all kinds of crap. Those bronzed feet, those robes that they try to make us wear, the cult of personality surrounding Oleanna.”

“Speaking of cults of personality,” I said, rapping on the window.

Morris Kapustin, who had been walking down the street, stopped and turned and waved when he recognized us. He was wearing a dark suit without a tie, his white shirt open to show his silk undershirt, his broad black hat propped back on his head so that the round brim acted as a sort of halo. Four white tzitzit flowed over his belt. Through his mostly gray beard he smiled and there was about Morris’s smile something so genuinely pleased at seeing me that it was almost heartbreaking. I didn’t often draw out that reaction, never, in fact, except from Morris. It was how a father might react upon unexpectedly running into his successful son in the middle of the day in the middle of the city, not my father of course, being as he was not prone to smiles and I was not truly successful, but someone else’s father, a kind, loving father, a father like Morris.

“Your secretary,” said Morris after he made his way inside, “Ellie,” as if I didn’t know my secretary’s name, “she said I would find you here. Such a fancy place for a cup of coffee.”

“You want something, Morris?” I asked. “My treat.”

“So generous you are, Victor, but no, thank you. I can’t drink now coffee with my stomach like it is.”

“What’s wrong with your stomach?”

“Other than that it is too big? It’s begun to hurt at night, mine boichik, and the gas. You know what I think it is? The doctor, he tells me to eat fiber, fiber, fiber for my prostrate.”

“Prostate,” said Beth.

“You too are having such problems?”

“No,” said Beth.

“All that fiber,” said Morris with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Our stomachs weren’t made for fiber. Kugel and kreplach and pastrami, yes. Fiber, no. It’s like eating wood and it is probably what’s wrong with everyone now. In my day there was no such thing as the prostrate, now it’s everywhere. Just last week on the cover of Time. That’s what you get from eating wood.”

“Beth was just telling me, Morris, that she is having doubts about her New Age church.”

“Really?” said Morris.

“It seems there is a nugget of truth surrounded by a lot of nonsense,” said Beth.

“A nugget of truth is not so bad,” said Morris. “How easy do you want it to be? Tell me how you eat a piece of corn. You take off the husk, you clean off the silk, you ignore the cob, and then, if it is cooked just right, a few minutes in boiling water, not too much, not too long, just right, there are a few perfect kernels. In the end, that’s a lot of garbage for so few kernels, but they are sweet as sugar, a mechaieh.”

“How do you know what’s real and what’s not?” asked Beth.

“If it was so easy, we would all be tzaddiks. Miss Beth, please, don’t give up. As Rebbe Tarfon, the great colleague of Akiba, said, ‘The day is short, the task is great, the workmen are lazy, the reward is great, and the Master is insistent.’ ”

“Are you calling me lazy?” I said.

“Spiritually, Victor, you are a couch potato, but I come here not to talk of the divine. Quite the opposite. The old books and ledgers your friend, Miss Caroline, she found. I was in your office, Victor, looking through them and I confess they are more ongepotchket than I could ever have thought. Normally with numbers I am pretty good, but these books, it is too much for a Kuni Lemmel like me. I need, I think, an accountant to review them for us. The accounting firm of Pearlman and Rabbinowitz, maybe you heard them? I want to hire Rabbinowitz.”

“Sure,” I said, “but tell him to keep his fees down. Without a contract I’m still springing for expenses and it is starting to add up. Any luck with finding what happened to the Poole daughter?”

“Such a thing is not so easy, Victor. Back then there were special places for pregnant women without husbands to go and I have Sheldon looking into that, but the records, they are either old or destroyed so don’t you now be expecting much.”

“I’ve learned not to,” I said. Morris’s face took on a pained expression and he was about to launch into a ringing defense of his work when he saw my smile. He sighed wearily.

“Sheldon also, I have him searching the whole of the country for persons named Wergeld. They have these computer directories on the Internet, places that have every phone number in all of America, which is astonishing, really. Everyone is in there, Victor. Everyone. Pretty soon they won’t be needing people like me anymore.”

“Isn’t technology grand?”

“Insulting me like you are, Victor, you must be in a very good mood.”

“He’s in love,” said Beth, “with a guiding light.”

I shrugged and ignored her smirk. “What has Sheldon found?”

“A few Wergelds scattered about.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his small notebook, crowded with disparate scraps of paper, the whole thing bound with a rubber band. He slipped off the rubber band and opened the book carefully, licking his thumb as he paged through until he found what he was looking for. “One Wergeld in Phoenix, one in a place called Pittsfield in Massachusetts, one in Milwaukee. Nothing yet about connecting them to your Reddmans. We’re still looking. And I was right about those numbers we found on the card, thank you, they are account numbers, for banks that hold much secret money. My friend he recognized some and verified others. But still, before we can learn any more, we must know the code words and get the proper signatures.”

“Which is unlikely.”

“I am not a miracle worker all the time, Victor, just some of the times.”

“I’m not getting very far myself,” I said. “I’m still looking for that doctor to check the medical invoice we found.”

“Who is the Master?” asked Beth. “In that quote from that rabbi you said the Master is insistent. Who is he?”

“For Victor and me, as Jews, such a question is easy. The master is Ha Shem, the Glorious One, King of the Universe, praised be He.”

“And for me?” asked Beth.

“That, Miss Beth, is for you to discover. But my guess, after all is said and done, after all your searching and questioning, my guess is your answer, it will be exactly the same.”

39

THERE WAS NO DR. KARPAS listed in the Philadelphia white pages, nor in the white pages for Eastern Montgomery County or the Main Line or Delaware County, all of which was not much of a surprise. The Dr. Karpas I was looking for, Dr. Wesley Karpas, performed some sort of procedure on Faith Reddman Shaw in 1966 and thirty years later I didn’t quite expect he’d still be practicing. Faith Reddman Shaw, I was sure, was not the type to let any but the most experienced slip a knife into her. Even in 1966 Dr. Wesley Karpas most likely had a fine gray head of hair and by now was probably long retired to some golf community in Arizona. There wasn’t much hope I’d ever discover for what Grammy Shaw had paid the $638.90. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why an old lady would have retained an invoice for a medical procedure performed on her more than a quarter century before her death.

I had spent an hour calling every Karpas I could find in Philadelphia and the suburbs and getting nowhere. “Hello, Mrs. Karpas? Mrs. Adrian Karpas?” I figured my best chance at finding Dr. Karpas was to grab hold of a son or a cousin or some relative who might be able to give me even a clue as to where he might be. “Hello, is this Mr. Bruce Karpas?” The only problem then would be hoping the doctor remembered the procedure and would somehow be willing to tell me about it, all long shots, for sure. “Hello, I’m looking for a Mrs. Colleen Karpas.” You would have thought Karpas to be a fairly unique name. “Mrs. Kenneth Karpas?” You would have thought that all the different Karpases in the phone book would have belonged to one extended family and known each other well. “Miss Gwenneth Karpas?” You would have thought. “Hello, Mr. Angelo Karpas?”

“Don’t get your hopes up, pally,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “because I’m not buying nothing.”

“That’s good, Mr. Karpas, because I’m not selling anything. I just have a few questions.”

“You want my answers? Here. The country’s going to hell in a hand basket. They’re sticking it to us seniors, cutting our benefits, raising our premiums, just because we’re too old to kick their butts. You want to know who I’m for? I’m for Perot.”

“Perot?”

“That’s right. You got a problem with that?”

“Why Perot?”

“Because he’s rich.”

“Don’t you think he’s a little crazy?”

“Sure, but who cares, he’s rich.”

“You don’t mind that he bailed last election?”

“He’s rich.”

“Don’t you think his solutions are overly simplistic?”

“Rich.”

“Don’t you think he’s a little too funny-looking with those ears and all?”

“Rich, rich, rich, rich, rich.”

“I get the idea, Mr. Karpas, but I didn’t call to ask about politics.”

“No?”

“No.”

Pause.

“Well then what the hell do you want?”

“I’m looking for a Dr. Wesley Karpas. Is he by chance a relative?”

“What do you want with him for?” said Angelo Karpas.

“I just have a few questions.”

“Well, if you got questions you’re better off asking me.”

“Why is that, Mr. Karpas?”

“Because the son-of-a-bitch is dead. Dead, dead, dead. He was my brother. He died five or six years ago.”

“Did he have a son or a daughter by any chance? Someone I could talk to?”

“There’s a son, big-time lawyer somewheres downtown.”

“Karpas?”

“Nah, Wes changed his name a while ago when he started rubbing in better circles. He wanted a name with a little more class. He wanted to swim with society, so he changed it to the name of a fish.”

“A fish?”

“Yeah, Carp, with a ‘C.’ I always got a laugh out of that, trying to move up in class by calling yourself after some bottom-feeding scavenger.”

“Seems appropriate, don’t you think?”

“You got that, pally.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Karpas. Anyone ever actually call you and ask you for your political opinion?”

“Never. But they got to be calling someone, all those polls. Might as well be me.”

“Might as well. Thanks for your help.”

“Hey, you want to know what I watch on television, too?”

“Sure, Mr. Karpas. What do you watch on television?”

“Nothing. It all sucks.”

Angelo Karpas was wrong about one thing, his long-lost nephew wasn’t some big-time lawyer downtown. Oh he was downtown all right, with an office smack in Center City, but he wasn’t big time. I could tell by the office, situated atop a clothing store on Chestnut, with diamond sellers and insurance agents and a gypsy fortune-teller for neighbors, by the secretary with the high hair, by the quiet in the grubby waiting room while I sat and paged through a six-month-old Newsweek. Let’s just say the phone wasn’t ringing off the hook in the law offices of Peter Carp.

“He’ll be with yous in a minute,” said the secretary, flashing the quickest smile I had ever seen, more twitch than anything else, before going back to her nails.

Thanks, doll.

It was the dust, maybe, that got me to ruminating. I remembered when my office was dusty, when the cleaning ladies knew not to care, when the quiet of my phones was loud enough to leave me shaking my head with despair at the future. There was a stretch of time in my life when I wasn’t making any money as a lawyer and it had been a bad stretch. Now, with the steady stream of mob clients coming through my door and dropping on my desk their cash retainers, dirty bills bound with rubber bands, my coffers were filled, my offices were dust free, my phones rang with regularity. But what about the future? Raffaello, my patron, had given up and was selling out. I was designated to set up the meeting with Dante that would, in effect, cut me out of the loop. No more of those fat cash retainers. It was what I wanted, actually, out. The game was getting too damn dangerous for a lightweight like myself but, still, I couldn’t help wondering what would it be like when the game was over. Would it be back to the old life, back to dusty offices and quiet phones and a meek desperation? Or would the grand possibilities that had opened for me in the case of the Reddman demise save me from my past? A million here, a million there, pretty soon I was dust free for life. Maybe I should stop chasing the ghost of dead doctors and get back to work.

I was thinking just that thought when Carp came out of his office to greet me. He was short and square, with a puffy face and small eyes behind his Buddy Holly glasses. He wore gray pants and a camel’s hair blazer. Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: never hire a lawyer in a camel’s hair blazer; all it means is he isn’t billing enough to afford a new suit.

“Mr. Carl?” he asked uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said, popping out of my chair and reaching for his hand. “Thank you for seeing me. Call me Victor.”

“Come this way,” he said and I did.

“If you’ll excuse my office,” said Peter Carp after he was situated in the swivel chair behind his fake wood Formica desk. He indicated the mess that had swallowed his blotter, the files strewn on the floor. “It’s been a killer month.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, and I did, more than he could realize. This was not the desk of a lawyer over-loaded with briefs and motions and trial preparations. There was something too disorderly about its disorder, too offhand in its messiness. My desk was much like this in my less prosperous times, cleared only when I actually had work that needed the space to spread itself out. One brief could take over the whole of a desktop, but the books and copied cases and documents would be in a rough order. Only when I had nothing pressing would my desktop carry the heaping uneven pile of junk paper currently carried by Peter Carp’s. I had put on my sharpest suit for this meeting with what Angelo Karpas had described as a big-time lawyer and now I regretted that decision. Down and out was the way to play it with Peter Carp.

He took his glasses off, wiped them with his tie. Turning his bare and beady eyes to me, he said, “Now, what is it about my father’s medical practice that you’re so interested in, Vic?”

“In a case I am working on I found a receipt for a medical procedure he performed in 1966. I’d like to know what it was all about.”

I reached into my briefcase and pulled out the invoice and handed it to him. He put his glasses back on and examined it.

“Mrs. Christian Shaw. I don’t recognize the name.”

“She recently died,” I said. “I represent her granddaughter.”

While continuing his examination of the receipt he said, “Medical malpractice?”

“Hardly. The old lady was almost a hundred when she died and her body just expired. I expect your father performed noble service in allowing her to live as long as she did.”

“He was quite a good surgeon,” said Carp. “Never once sued in his entire career.” He looked nervously at me and then back at the invoice.

“Did your father sell his practice?” I asked.

“Nope. He worked until the very end, which is exactly how he wanted it.”

“What became of his records, do you know?”

“Tell me what kind of case you’re representing the granddaughter in.”

“Nothing too extravagant.”

“ Lot of money at stake?”

“I wish.”

“Trust and estates?”

“Something like that.”

“Because that is one of my specialties. Trust and estates.”

Wills for widows and orphans at a price, no doubt, with Peter Carp conveniently named as executor. I shook my head. “Nothing too complicated or lucrative, I’m afraid.”

“Because if you need any help on the intricacies of Pennsylvania trusts and estates law, I’d be glad to help.”

“All I really need to know, Mr. Carp, is if your father’s records are still available.”

He looked at me and I looked at him and then he turned his attention to the invoice and flicked it once with his finger. “I’m not sure the records that are available go this far back,” he said, “and even if they did, to find something this far back would take a lot of man hours.”

“I’d be willing to help you look.”

“And then there is the question of confidentiality. Without a waiver it is not really proper to hand over the information. And Mrs. Shaw would appear to be in no condition to grant a waiver.”

Did I have the same clever gleam in my eye, sitting in my office, plotting how to grab a few bucks here and a few bucks there whenever opportunity reared its shapely neck? If I did, I never before realized how transparent it was, and how ugly. Looking at Peter Carp for me was like looking at an unflattering snapshot and wincing. “I’m sure, Mr. Carp, that if the records are available we could work something out.”

“Exactly how much are we talking about?”

“Let’s find the records before we discuss details.”

“I suppose there would be no harm in looking,” he said with a smile. His tongue darted quickly out of his mouth, wetting his thick lower lip. “You wouldn’t have any trouble, would you, in making the check out to cash?”

“None at all,” I said.

“Well then, Vic,” said Peter Carp. “Let’s go for a ride.”

The Carp estate was in Wynnewood, an old suburb not too far from the western border of the city. Old stone houses, wet basements, tall trees growing too close to the sidewalk, planted fifty years before as seedlings and now listing precariously over the street. Carp took me to a decaying dark Tudor on a nice wooded plot of land going now to seed. “This was my father’s house,” he said, “but I live here now.”

The inside was dark and dusty, half empty of furniture. Paint peeled from the wood trim in strips and the wallpaper was faded and oily. It felt like the place had been abandoned years before. Carp’s father had evidently maintained it well but after his death his son had done nothing to the place except sell off the better pieces of furniture. I wondered if this was what Dr. Wesley Karpas had in mind when he changed his name to Carp and sought to rise in society, this decrepit and rundown house, this money-sucking semifailure of a son.

He took me downstairs to a basement area and pushed open a door that was partly cobwebbed over. Inside the doorway was an old doctor’s office, white metal cabinets with glass fronts, an examination table, a desk. Still scattered about were strange metal instruments sitting in stainless steel pans. In the corner were piles of medical journals. The place was full of dust and the leavings of animals and with the pointed metal instruments it looked like a discarded torture chamber.

“My father stopped his surgical practice when he turned sixty,” said Carp, “but he saw patients as a GP in his home office until the final stroke.”

Through the examination room was another room, a waiting room of sorts, with a door to the backyard where the patients would enter. And then, in another room, off from the waiting room, were boxes piled one atop the other and file cabinets lined up like a row of soldiers at attention.

“He kept his files religiously,” said Carp, as he climbed over the boxes, heading for the file cabinets. “Every so often he would clear out the files of patients he no longer saw and put them in boxes, but he made sure to keep everything. I would tell him to throw the stuff out but he said you never know, and look how right he was.”

Carp opened one of the file cabinets and searched it and shook his head.

“It’s not in the cabinets,” he said. “Why don’t we start looking through the boxes together? Each box should be labeled with the letters of the files and year they were taken out of the main cabinets.”

I removed my suit jacket and laid it carefully over a chair and then started at the boxes, shoving cartons here and there in search of the elusive “S.” We found two cartons with “S” files, one cleared from the cabinets in 1986 and one from 1978. Carp, refusing to let me so much as peek inside for what he claimed were reasons of confidentiality, examined each and declared there was no file for Mrs. Christian Shaw in either. After thirty minutes more I found a box labeled “Re-Th, 1973” and Carp told me to stand back as he took a look inside.

“I don’t see anything for a Mrs. Christian Shaw here,” he said.

“How about Faith Reddman Shaw?”

“Reddman, huh.”

“A distant impoverished line from the Pickle baron.”

“No Faith Reddman Shaw, but here’s something.” He took a file out and spread it open atop the box. “When exactly was the date of that invoice?”

“June 9, 1966.”

“Yes that’s it, and the amount?”

“Six hundred, thirty-eight dollars and ninety cents.”

“All right, that’s it exactly, but you had it wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“The patient. It wasn’t this Mrs. Christian Shaw, she was just the party billed for the service. The patient was a Kingsley Shaw.”

“What was the procedure?”

“Nothing too serious,” he said. “Just two minor incisions, a few snips of the vasa deferentia and then a few sutures to clean up.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A vasectomy. My father gave this Kingsley Shaw a vasectomy in June of 1966. Apparently it was a clean operation with no complications. No big deal. Why, is this Kingsley Shaw anybody?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody at all.”

After I had written out the check to cash for a thousand dollars, I asked Carp if I could use the phone. I picked up the receiver, turned my back to the hungry eyes of Peter Carp, and called my apartment.

“Hi,” I said when Caroline answered.

“That cop, McDeiss is looking for you,” she said. “He called your office and he just called here.”

“You didn’t tell him who you were, did you?”

“No, but he says if you get a chance you should show up at Front and Ellsworth, by the hockey rink. Do you know where it is?”

“I can find it. Thanks. Let me ask you something, Caroline. What’s your birthday?”

“You getting me a present?”

“Sure. Just tell me.”

“June 11,” she said.

“What year?”

“Nineteen sixty-eight. Why?”

“Not important. If McDeiss calls back,” I said, “tell him I’m on my way.”

40

WHEN I GOT TO THE Ralph R. Rizzo Sr. Ice Skating Rink at Front and Ellsworth there was already a crowd behind the yellow tape. Across the street from the tape was Interstate 95, which hacks through the eastern edge of Philadelphia like a blunt cleaver. The ice rink, with its facade of blue-and-white tile, was squeezed beneath the elevated highway and beside the tiled building was an outdoor roller rink, this too in the highway’s shadow. Between the two rinks was a wedgelike opening with a solitary bench and in that opening five or six cops mingled around a large black thing that sat squat and smoldering. Parked on Front Street were two fire trucks, lights still flashing. Firemen, in black slickers, huddled with one another, smoking cigarettes.

The crowd behind the yellow tape held the usual crew of wide-eyed onlookers who congregate with a sort of muted glee at the situs of a tragedy. They shook their heads and cracked wise out of the sides of their mouths and shucked their weight from one foot to the other and fought to keep from laughing because it wasn’t them this time. Along with the onlookers were a few parasitic reporters, asking questions, and the inevitable television cameras readying the live feed for their insatiable news machines.

“What happened?” I asked one of the onlookers, an old man, thin and grizzled with suspenders and a black beret.

“Cain’t you smell it?” said the old man.

I took a sniff. The dirty stink of burned gasoline and something sickly sweet beneath it. “I’m not sure.”

“They burned a car, is what they did,” he said, “and they was some fool still in it when they did it. Now he ain’t but bar-be-cue.”

“Pleasant,” I said over the quiet guffaws that rose around us. I edged past him toward the yellow tape and called a uniformed cop over.

“I’m here to see McDeiss,” I said. “He asked me to come on down.”

The cop gestured his head to the group of cops under the highway and lifted the tape. Like a boxer sliding into the ring I slipped beneath the yellow ribbon and headed across Front Street.

It was clammy and cool beneath the highway and the stink I had smelled from across the street hung heavy as a fog. The smoldering shape was a car, dark and wet, with its trunk unlatched, and I could make out some red beneath the carbon black. It had been a convertible and the fire had devoured the canvas top so it looked a sporty thing, that flame-savaged car. A Porsche, a red Porsche, and I started getting some idea of who it was who might have been bar-be-cued.

McDeiss was off to the side, in front of the skating rink, interviewing a kid, taking notes as the kid talked. I waited for him to finish. When he sent the kid running off down Front Street, he turned and saw me standing there. “Carl,” he said with a smile. “Glad you could make it. Welcome to the party.”

“A real hot spot,” I said.

“We got the call about an hour and a half ago,” said McDeiss, walking back to the burned-out hulk of the Porsche. I trailed hesitantly behind him. “A car was burning underneath the highway. The uniform guys showed up and called the fire guys. The fire guys showed up and sprayed down the flames. When they popped open the trunk to make sure everything was out the fire guys saw what was inside and called us.”

“And since you guys are the homicide guys, I guess we know what was in the trunk.”

“You want to see?”

“I think not.”

“Come on, Carl, take a look. It’ll do you good.”

He reached back and took hold of my arm and started pulling me toward the burned Porsche, toward the rear, with the trunk lid ominously open, toward whatever lay singed and dead inside.

“I really don’t think so,” I said.

“I know a great restaurant just a block up on Front,” said McDeiss, pulling me ever closer. The open trunk loomed now not ten feet away. “ La Vigna. Maybe after our visit you can take me out for lunch.”

“I’m quickly losing my appetite.”

“You should know what you’re dealing with here, Carl, before we talk,” said McDeiss.

We were slipping around the side of the car now, McDeiss moving quickly, yanking me along. “I get the idea.”

“Take a look,” he said, and then he spun me around so that I almost fell into whatever it was that was in that trunk.

“Arrgh,” I let out softly, closing my eyes as my stomach heaved.

A few of the cops standing around the car laughed among themselves.

“Take a good look,” said McDeiss.

I took a breath and smelled that nauseating smell and my eyes gagged open, ready to spy whatever was there in the trunk.

It was empty. Well not exactly empty. There was the charred remains of the carpet, and strange pools of incinerated liquid, and miscellaneous car-type tools lying around, and the smell, sickening and strangely sweet, like a marinated beef rib left way too long on the grill, but the main event, the body, was gone. In its place was an outline drawn in chalk, an outline of a man on his side, a somewhat corpulent man, with his arms bound behind his body and his knees drawn tight to his chest.

“The ambulance guys already took him to the morgue,” said McDeiss.

“You’re a bastard,” I said, stepping away from the car.

He opened his pad and started reading. “Male, mid-thirties, average height, mildly obese, hair dark brown, eyes indeterminate because they burst in the heat. His hands were tied behind him, his legs were bound together, a gag was stuffed in his mouth. There were no evident wounds, so he apparently burned to death, though the coroner will be more specific. His pants were pulled down and we found the remnants of legal tender deep inside his asshole, specifically a five, a ten, and two ones.” McDeiss closed his pad and looked at me. “That’s seventeen dollars, Carl, a paltry sum, denoting a notable lack of respect for the victim.”

“What am I doing here?”

“You ever see this Porsche before?”

I shook my head.

“It’s registered to an Edward Shaw. It was Mr. Shaw who was in the trunk. And the funny thing is, this Edward Shaw is the brother of Jacqueline Shaw, the woman whose death you were asking me about just a few weeks ago. So what I want to know, Carl, is what the hell is going on here?”

I looked at McDeiss and then back at the burned wreck of a German luxury sports car. “It looks,” I said slowly, “like someone is killing Reddmans.”

“Who exactly?”

“If I knew that I’d already be rich.”

“We notified the house but we’re still looking for the other two siblings, Robert and Caroline. Any idea where they are?”

“None.”

“So, if you don’t know who’s going after the Shaws, what do you know?”

Normally, in my position as a criminal defense attorney, I preferred to share absolutely nothing more than I was forced to share with the cops. We’re on opposite sides, with the exact opposite goals, and since knowledge is power I tried to keep as much power as I could for myself. But I wasn’t facing McDeiss now as a criminal defense attorney. I was looking for a third of any recovery for wrongful death against the person responsible for Jacqueline’s murder and now, most likely, for Eddie Shaw’s murder too. Nothing would be better than to have the cops find the guy and convict him and leave his assets dangling for me to snatch down with my teeth. There were things he couldn’t know, things about my client Peter Cressi and his boss Earl Dante, about my role as innocent bystander in the hit attempt on the Schuylkill Expressway, about Raffaello’s plan to turn over the city’s underworld to his nemesis. But anything I learned in my investigation of Jacqueline’s death, I figured, I could turn over to him, including what I had learned from Eddie’s wife. Telling all I knew to McDeiss might just make my job of getting what I could out of the Reddman fortune that much easier.

“You said that place La Vigna is pretty good,” I said.

“Sure,” said McDeiss, “if you like Northern Italian.”

“They have veal?”

“Scallopini pounded thin as my paycheck, drenched with the first pressings of virgin olives and fresh lemon.”

I wasn’t really hungry for veal. In reality, at that moment, surrounded by that saccharine fog of death, I feared I couldn’t keep down even a swallow of Pepto-Bismol. But McDeiss, I figured, was one to sharpen his appetite even as the fresh scent of death lingered in his nostrils. I took him for the type to eat a hoagie in the morgue while an autopsy of an old and bloated corpse was being performed and enjoy every mouthful, so long as the prosciutto was imported and the provolone fresh. It was to my advantage to talk to McDeiss and there was no better enticement for McDeiss to listen, I had learned, than a good meal. Except this time, it had to seem like he was pumping me.

“Well then, why don’t we try it out?” I said. “I could go for a little veal. But if you want to hear what I’ve found out, let’s say this time you spring for the check.”

McDeiss sent me across Front Street, to the other side of the yellow tape, to wait while he delegated the remainder of the crime scene work to his partner and the uniforms. I was watching him go about his business, listening to reports, talking with other witnesses, examining the car with the forensics guys. In the middle of it all he lifted up a finger to me, telling me he’d be there in a minute, and then went on with his work. For a heavy guy he was pretty limber and I watched with growing admiration as he stretched around and under the car, picking out whatever clues remained. As I watched I felt something grab hold of the crotch of my pants.

“What the…” I said as I tried to whirl around and found I couldn’t. A block of stone was behind my back and a steel cable was now wrapped around my chest, squeezing whatever air was left out of my lungs.

I tried to swing around again but found myself only being pulled back, away from the crowd.

“Get the hell off of me,” I tried to shout, my gasping voice actually loud enough for a few of the people in front of me to turn around to see what was happening. One of them was a short gray-haired man in a black suit and as soon as he turned around I stopped shouting.

“Funny seeing you here, Victor,” hissed Earl Dante through his small, even set of teeth.

It was the first time I had seen him since he had started his war. The sight of him there, that close in front of me, with some monster holding me from behind, set my knees to shaking and I sagged down for an instant before I recovered. This was exactly what Raffaello had talked about. The bastard was going through me to set up the meeting.

“Funny seeing you under the highway talking to that homicide dick,” continued Dante. “Funny as hell but for some reason I’m not laughing.”

Dante nodded at whoever it was who was holding me from behind. The arm around my chest loosened and the hand released its hold on my crotch. My knees sagged again but I stopped myself from falling, stood straight as I could and shucked my shoulders. The mere gesture made me feel a little harder until the reality of the situation impressed itself once again upon my nerves. I looked behind me. It was the weightlifting lug who always seemed to be around when Dante appeared. The lug nodded at me and then looked away, as if there was something more important to look at down the street.

“What were you and the dick talking about like such buddy-buddies under the highway?” said Dante.

“The weather,” I said.

“I hear there was a body in the trunk. It’s a shame to go like that. A tragedy.”

“You talking about the body or the car,” I said, “’cause if you ask me, it might be a bigger shame about the car.”

The lug behind me chuckled and even Dante smiled. Over Dante’s head I could see McDeiss making his way out from under the highway, walking toward us. The sight of him approaching gave me a shot of courage.

“Tell me something, Earl,” I said. “Who’s paying you to kill Reddmans?”

The smile disappeared and his composed mortician’s face startled for an instant. Then the smile returned, but there was an ugly darkness to it now. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, Earl. Is it a Poole? Did a person named Poole pay for the hits?”

“Ahh, now I get it. You dumb shit, you think I flamed that bastard over there?”

“That’s exactly what I think. And I think you killed his sister in the luxury apartment and left her hanging like a coat on a rack, which is why you convinced that freak Peckworth to change his story for the cops.”

“You talked to Peckworth?”

“You bet I did.”

“You’re a dumb shit, you know that, Carl? I would have thought your little misadventure on the expressway would have wised you up enough to keep you out of the business, but no. If you weren’t such a dumb shit you wouldn’t think what you’re thinking.”

“You mean the fact that Eddie Shaw owed you a quarter of a million dollars and it looks now like he won’t ever pay?” I shook my head and looked up again. McDeiss was now in the middle of the road, about twenty yards away. “I figure you got that covered. His wife told me she had to sign something before he could get his little three-point-a-week loan from you. I figure you have a note in the full amount, for a legal rate of interest, signed by the dead man and his widow. With Eddie being the fuck-up he was, you have a better shot now at getting paid from the wife with her insurance money than you ever did from Eddie.”

“You’re a smart guy, Victor, oh yes you are,” said Dante. “You’d think a guy as smart as you wouldn’t be a lowlife shyster trying to hustle an angle into someone else’s game. You would think a guy as smart as you would be rich already.”

“I’m working on it.”

“The cop,” said the lug behind me. “He’s coming right this way, chief.”

“There’s going to be a meeting,” said Dante, talking low now, suddenly in a hurry, his words hissing out. “You’ve gotten the word already. Play it straight, Victor, all the way. Pretend for once you’re not a dumb shit and play it straight. You try to smart it out and play it on an angle and you’ll end up playing it dead.”

He put his hand up to my cheek and squeezed it between his fingers, like a dowager aunt showing affection to her nephew, before he spun to his right and walked off, his bodyguard in tow. He left just as McDeiss made his way through the crowd to get to me.

“Who are your friends?” said McDeiss, nodding at the two men walking away from us.

“One’s a pawnbroker I know from up on Two Street.”

“Anybody I should worry about?”

“Not really,” I said. “He’s just a guy that the dead man owed a quarter of a million dollars.”

McDeiss looked at me and then turned his head to look back at Dante, but the little man and his musclebound shadow had by now turned a corner and disappeared.

“What else do you know about this case?”

“You buying me lunch?”

“I’m buying if you’re talking.”

“Well then,” I said as we turned in the opposite direction and started walking together up the block to La Vigna, “let me ask you. Ever hear of a man named Poole?”

41

I DIDN’T RUSH RIGHT FROM THE LUNCH with McDeiss to tell Caroline about her brother. You can’t just tell a girl her brother is dead and then leave to grab a super-sized extra-value meal at McDonald’s. You have to hug her tightly when you tell her and let her cry on you and stroke her hair and feed her soup and rub her leg as she keens, bending forward and back, arms crossed at the waist. You tell a girl her brother is dead you better be ready to stick around and comfort her through the long sleepless night as she shivers and sobs in bed. The whole rigmarole could chew up a lot of time and there was still something I had to do that day. So I didn’t tell Caroline about her dead brother right off. What I did was ask McDeiss to refrain from announcing the name of the victim to the press and instead drove back out of the city, up from the river, into the deep dark depths of the Main Line. Along the narrow road with the bending archway of trees, down to the bridge that forded the stream, up through the gate and across the wide-open field on the long winding drive that rose to Veritas.

I parked on the part of the drive that circled the front portico. Nat was working on the hedges in front of the house, pruning off defiant shoots of green. He stood on a small stepladder. He was wearing overalls, his wide straw hat, long yellow rubber gloves that gripped a set of giant silver clippers shining in the sun. When I climbed out of the car he watched me for a moment and then stepped down the ladder. The sun was bright and the air was surprisingly clear. I imagined it was always fogged or rainy or wet at Veritas, but this was a brassy spring day.

“Howdy, Mr. Carl,” said Nat. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Up close I could see the sweat dripping from his temples. The red ring around his eye was bright and proud in the sun. “Miss Caroline’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”

“I’m not here for Caroline,” I said. “I’m here to see her mother.”

“Also not here, I’m afraid. Still out of the country.”

“Then I’ll talk to Caroline’s father.”

He looked at me and then turned his head to stare up at the second floor and its shuttered windows. “Not a good day for a visit, I would guess. You’ve heard about Master Edward?”

“I heard.”

“We reached Master Robert in Mexico with the news, but we can’t find Miss Caroline. Any idea where she might be, Mr. Carl?”

“I’ll tell her what happened,” I said, “just as soon as I talk to her father.”

He lifted the long shiny shears and laid their pointed tips on his shoulder. “Like I said, not a good day for a visit.”

“We all have work to do,” I said, “just like you and your pruning.”

He nodded at the hedges. “Mrs. Shaw wants the grounds in shape for the guests. She’s arriving from Greece tonight, cutting short her vacation. It seems the brightest social occasions we have around here now are funerals.”

“That’s about to end.”

He raised his eyebrows when I said that and smiled. There was something charismatic in Nat’s smile. He didn’t smile often or easily, but when he did it was bright and inviting. It bespoke something shared instead of something hostile.

“Sit down a spell with me,” he said. He walked over to one of the stone benches that flanked the steps leading to the front door. I sat beside him. His head was turned to the left while he talked, as if examining the uneven hedges still to be pruned on that side of the house. I looked down the long wide expanse of green, large enough to plop in an entire housing development, and wondered, silently, at the price of real estate in that part of the Main Line.

“Mrs. Shaw, the younger Mrs. Shaw,” said Nat, “she named her children after the Kennedys. Edward and Robert and Jacqueline and Caroline. She wanted the glamour, I suppose.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“This was before all the scandals erupted, all the truths emerged about their crimes and infidelities. But still, you would have thought she’d pick a less tragic family to emulate.”

“Like the Pooles?”

He reached down with his clippers and snipped at an errant leaf of grass. “Hardly less tragic.”

“What’s your last name, Nat?” I asked.

“You know, Mr. Carl, the strangest thing happened. I was in the elder Mrs. Shaw’s garden and I couldn’t help but notice that the oval plot before the statue was dug up and put back down again.

“Is that a fact?”

“I wouldn’t have minded so much, but the plants were replanted poorly. You have to almost drown them in water when you put them back. If you don’t the roots won’t properly take. It’s a damn shame to kill a good plant.”

“Among other things.”

“Find anything interesting down there, Mr. Carl?”

“Just some ancient history,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose that’s right. For your generation ancient is anything before Reagan. And what is history, really, but the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind?”

“Shakespeare?”

“Gibbon. Have you read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”

“No, actually.”

“You should. Very encouraging.”

“Why, Nat, I didn’t know you were a closet Communist.”

“What do gardeners know of politics? How’d Miss Caroline take to learning all that ancient history?”

“Not so well.”

“Yep. That’s what I figured. Remember what I said about some things ought to being left buried?”

“But isn’t it better to know the truth, no matter how vile?”

He lifted up his head and cackled. “Whoever told you such nonsense? One kind lie is worth a thousand truths.”

“How much do you know about everything that has gone on with this family?”

“I’m just the gardener.”

“Who killed her, Nat? Who killed Charity?”

“Oh, Mr. Carl, you said it yourself. Ancient history. I didn’t show up here until years and years after Miss Charity Reddman disappeared. How could I know a thing like that?”

“But you do, don’t you?”

“I’m just the gardener,” he said, standing up, putting on his hat. “I’ve got work still to do.”

“Ever hear of a family called Wergeld?”

“Never.”

“Any idea why the elder Mrs. Shaw would leave a fortune in a trust entitled Wergeld?”

“We all have our secrets, I suppose.”

“You haven’t told me yet your family name.”

“Not too much call around here to know the last name of servants.”

“I’m just a servant too, I guess. No different than you.”

“Oh there’s a difference,” said Nat. “I may just be a servant, yes, but I care about this family and its fate more deeply than you can guess, Mr. Carl. What about you? Who are you here for? You here for Caroline or are you just here for yourself?”

“Mr. Shaw’s in, I suppose.”

“Always,” said Nat, taking his clippers back to the ladder by the hedges and climbing the steps wearily, one after the other.

I watched him for a bit and then pushed myself off the bench and started for the steps leading to the door of the Reddman mansion.

“You don’t need to drag it all up to Mr. Shaw today,” said Nat as he started in again with his clipping, the blades sliding one across the other with a small shivery screech. “It’s a hard enough day for him as it is.”

I stopped and turned around to look at him. He was still working, still clipping the offending branches one by one.

“What’s your last name, Nat?”

Without looking away from the dark green hedges that surrounded the house, without slowing the pace of his shivery clips, he said, “It’s not Poole, Mr. Carl, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

I took that in and nodded to myself. Nat kept working on the hedges, as steadily and as focused as if I weren’t there watching. I spun around and headed for the house.

My shoes scraped at the granite steps as I climbed toward the heavy wooden door and pulled the knob announcing my presence. I waited a bit before the door squealed open and Consuelo, dressed all in black, faced me.

“I’m here to see Mr. Shaw,” I said.

She squinted her eyes at me and gave me an up-and-down examination. “No. Mr. Shaw is not seeing anyone today.”

“It’s very important I talk to him,” I said, sweeping past her and into the decrepit front hallway of Veritas. Even though the sun was bright outside it was still dark and damp in here, the heavy riblike beams overhead catching so little of the reflected light they seemed lost in darkness. The floor of the front hallway creaked as I passed over it and made my way around the strange circular couch and toward the formal hanging stairwell.

I could hear the slap of rubber soles as Consuelo ran to catch up. She rushed in front of me just as I started up the stairway. “Stop, please, Mr. Carl. Mr. Shaw has requested to be alone all day.”

“I need to see him,” I said. “Today.”

“If you wait down here I will see if he will make an appointment for after the funeral.”

“I can’t wait that long,” I said, “and I’m afraid if I don’t find out what’s happening as soon as possible there will be another funeral and then another.”

As lightly as I could I brushed her aside and started up the steps. As she almost caught up to me I climbed faster, keeping her a few steps below. I spun around the landing and continued on until I reached the second floor. Which way was Kingsley Shaw’s room? I waited for Consuelo to tell me, and she did, coming up around my side and grabbing hold of my arm, standing between me and the wing on the right.

I started toward that wing with Consuelo hanging on to me. She should have been yelling at me now, calling me unpronounceable names in her native Spanish, calling for help, but her voice was strangely quiet as she begged me, with an almost fearful tone, to please please stop and not disturb Mr. Shaw.

“I’m going to speak to him today, Consuelo,” I said. “If you want you can go and call the police and they, I’m sure, would be up here in no time at all to kick me out, their sirens blasting, their lights flashing, just, I’m sure, what Mr. Shaw would like to see today. Or, on the other hand, I’m willing to wait here while you go tell him that I’m here to speak to him about the deaths of his son and his daughter and about Caroline.”

She stared at me, her dark features darkening even further, and then she told me to wait right there. She turned and went to the door at the very end of the hallway, glanced at me again, knocked, waited for a moment, slowly opened the door, and disappeared inside.

The next time the door opened it opened for me. Consuelo, without lifting her gaze from the floor, said, “Mr. Shaw will see you now.” I offered her a smile as I passed her, a smile she didn’t accept as she maintained her stare at the floor, and then I stepped through the doorway into the room of Kingsley Shaw, the door closing quietly but firmly behind me.

42

I FOUND MYSELF ALONE in a massive, high-ceilinged room that spanned the entire width of the house. Luxuriously carpeted, luxuriously outfitted, smelling richly of smoke and seeming to have been set down in this spot from another time, the room shouted the strength of a single overwhelming personality. I spun around to see all of its strange dark grandeur.

Two chandeliers of wrought iron, hanging from an ornately patterned ceiling, sprinkled a dim light on the furnishings, complemented by the uneven glow of savage iron fixtures intermittently cleaving to the walls. There were windows on three sides of the room but they were either shuttered or draped with thick maroon velvet so the daylight that did seep through, thick with spinning motes of dust, appeared uninvited and invasive, like slashing claws. A huge telescope stood forlornly by one of the draped windows and across the room, by another draped and darkened window, was a second, and beside each telescope were astronomical charts held open on wooden racks and star globes suspended in intricate wooden stands with clawed feet. The wall behind me held the head of an antlered deer, of a buffalo, of a large, pale brown cat, and weapons were studded between the taxidermy, swords, battle-axes, a thick and ornate shotgun. Massive bookshelves were filled with leather-bound volumes, one series after another in gold and green and blue and maroon, huge epic tomes, intimidating in their size and mass. One half of the room was furnished with red leather club chairs and a long leather couch, a gentleman’s club for old shipping magnates to hide from their wives and smoke cigars and peruse the papers for that day’s ship arrivals. A huge bed with a wrought-iron canopy stood alone in the other half, seemingly marooned on an oriental carpet of blue. Before the wall directly in front of me was a great stone fireplace, its fire crackling but low, the flame’s heat not reaching across the cold to me, and above the fireplace, dominating the whole of the room, lit by its own overhead brass lamp, was a grand portrait, ten feet high, six feet wide, a portrait of a lady.

The woman in the portrait seemed strangely familiar and I stepped toward her, almost against my will. She stood in a black dress, her hands held delicately before her, a bonnet tied tightly to her head, her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face pretty and composed and absolutely self-contained. Her eyes, of course, followed my movements as I walked toward her but she stared down at me without even the pretense of concern for my presence in that room with her, as if I were no more significant than an insect crawling about the ground beneath her feet. The closer I stepped, the larger and more ominous she became and then I stopped and felt a slight shiver. I recognized her all right, I had seen her picture in the box we had dug up from Charity Reddman’s grave, a picture where she was younger, gayer, oblivious still to all her future devastation. Faith Reddman Shaw. I took one more step forward and for a moment it was as if the self-containment in her face cracked and something ugly and serpentine revealed itself. But that was just the reflection of the overhead light on the painting’s varnish and when I stepped back again her face regained its composure.

I heard a rasp of breath from behind me and turned quickly. In the midst of all that baroque grandeur it took me a moment to spot the source. I had been so overwhelmed by the decor I hadn’t noticed anyone in the room with me but now, focused by the sound, I saw him there in the corner. Hunched, gray, his skin pasty and smoothly pale, seated in a wooden wheelchair, a tartan rug across his legs, he all but disappeared under the power of the interior design. His face was turned away from me.

“Mr. Shaw?” I said, starting to walk toward him.

He cringed, lowering his large chin into his shoulder, preparing himself as if I were wielding a weapon in my advance. I stopped.

“Mr. Shaw?” I repeated, more loudly.

Still cringing, he nodded.

I stepped forward again. “Mr. Shaw.” I raised my voice to near shouting and there was a slight echo in the enormity of the room. “I’m very sorry about your son Edward. I wouldn’t disturb you on a day like this, but I believe it vital that we talk right away. My name is Victor Carl. I’m a friend of Caroline’s. She asked me to look into the death of Jacqueline and now, I believe, somehow, that her death and your son’s death are related. I have just a few questions to ask you. Mr. Shaw?”

He just stared at the floor, his chin remaining in his shoulder.

“Mr. Shaw? Do you understand what I just said, Mr. Shaw?”

Still cringing, he nodded.

“Can we talk?”

He stared at the floor for a moment longer before placing his hands on the wheels of his chair and, his head still tilted, rolling himself slowly across the room until his chair was fronting the fire. He leaned forward, as if to warm his face by it.

One of the leather club chairs was facing the hearth and I sat in it so that I could see his profile. He had been a handsome man once, and large too, I could see, enormous really, with broad shoulders and a huge head, but it was as if he had been crushed into the space he now occupied. There was something weak and slack about his face, a statue weathered to a bland smoothness by time, and his eyes were dull and weary beneath his overgrown eyebrows. I leaned forward and crossed my hands like a schoolmarm and explained to him what I had discovered, how Jacqueline had not killed herself but had been murdered by a professional assassin who had been well paid for his services, how Edward might have been killed by the same man, how it looked as if someone was trying to destroy the heirs to the Reddman fortune toward some, as yet unknown, purpose. As I spoke I noticed that he didn’t seem surprised by what I was saying. It was hard to tell if he was getting it all but I spoke slowly and loudly and he nodded as if in comprehension throughout my little talk.

“I don’t know if whoever is hiring the killers is going for money or just plain blood revenge,” I said, “but I think you might have some of the answers.”

When I was finished I waited for a response. He stared into the fire, remaining silent.

“Mr. Shaw?” I said.

“Sometimes it speaks to me,” he said. His voice was a listless monotone, as gray and pale as his coloring.

“Who?” I asked.

He pointed at the fire. “It speaks single words directly to my thoughts. Sometimes I listen to it for hours.”

All right, I thought, I’ll hitch a ride on his downtown train. “What does it say?”

For the first time he turned his head and looked at me. His eyes were watery and weary. It was tiring just to look at him. “It says ‘cut’ or ‘hammer’ or ‘blood’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘fly’ or ‘escape,’ just single words over and over.”

“What’s it saying now?” I asked, realizing he had been nodding not at my explanation but at the voice of the fire.

“It’s saying, ‘Alive,’ ” he said. “ ‘Alive. Alive. Alive.’ ”

“Who’s alive, Mr. Shaw?”

“She is. Alive. Again.”

“Who, Mr. Shaw?”

“My mother. Alive.”

I suddenly leaned back in my chair. I couldn’t help but look up at the portrait staring down at me. From this angle it almost seemed as if she were smiling.

“I thought she died just over a year ago,” I said.

“No, no, she’s alive,” he said, his voice growing suddenly more agitated. He reached out from his chair and grabbed my sleeve. “She’s alive, I know it. I’ve seen her.”

“You’ve seen her? When?”

He tugged at my sleeve harder. “A week ago. Outside. Come, I’ll show you.”

He let go of me and spun his wheelchair away from the fire, rolling it toward one of the windows with a telescope beside it. I followed behind him. When he reached the curtain he opened it with a strong pull. An invasion of light streamed in, so bright and unhindered I had to turn my face away until my eyes adjusted. When I turned back I could see through the window’s bars to the rear yard of the house, straight down the hill to the pond.

“Less than a week ago I saw her in her garden,” he said.

From the window there was a clear view to the overgrown hedges and wild flowers of Faith Reddman’s garden. From here the mazelike pattern was much clearer and in the center clearing I could see the shape of the bench that had been devoured by the orange flowering vines.

“I saw the light,” he said. “She was there. She was digging in her garden in the middle of the night. I saw the light, I heard the clang of her shovel. I swear it.”

“I believe you saw the light, Mr. Shaw.”

“She’s come back.”

“Why has she come back, Mr. Shaw?”

“She’s come back to take me away, to save me. That’s why she’s waiting in the house, waiting for me.”

“What house is she waiting in, Mr. Shaw?”

“The old house, the old Poole house. I’ve seen her there, at night. I’ve seen the lights through the trees.”

“In the house by the pond?”

“Yes, she’s there, waiting.” He suddenly looked away from the window and stared at me with his watery eyes. “Will you take me there? Will you? I can’t go myself because of my legs. But I’m light now. You can carry me.”

He reached out and gripped again at my sleeve. It was frightening to see the yearning work its way beneath his slack face. This is a man worth half a billion dollars, I thought. What happiness has it bought him? I turned my face away and looked at the garden once more and then altered my focus.

“Why are there bars on your windows, Mr. Shaw?”

He dropped his head and let go of my arm. Slowly he spun his wheelchair around and rolled back to the fire. He leaned toward the glowing heat, listening. I stared at him, his color washed completely away by the sunlight now flooding through the window.

I looked around once more. This room reeked of a single personality, yes, but if the personality that had created and maintained it once belonged to this man it had clearly fled. Nothing was left but a shell. I had intended to ask him about Caroline’s paternity, about the Wergeld Trust, about the Pooles, but I would get no answers from what remained of this man. I walked over to the bookshelves and their heavy tomes. Leather-bound volumes of the great works of literature, Dickens and Hugo and Balzac and Cervantes, each spine perfectly smooth. I took out volume one of Don Quixote. It was a beautifully made book, the boards thick, the leather hand-tooled and leafed in gold. The binding cracked when I opened it. I remembered that Selma Shaw had told me she had been brought to Veritas because her future husband had difficulty reading. I remembered the disappointment in Faith Shaw’s diary over young Kingsley’s failures in his studies.

“Do you read much?” I asked.

He responded as if I were merely an inconvenient distraction pulling him away from the voice of the fire. “No.”

“Don’t you like books?”

“The letters mix themselves up on the page.”

Dyslexia? Is that why he had so much trouble learning to read as a boy? Then why are there so many books in his room? I wondered. Why would a problem reader surround himself with such potent reminders of his failings? Was it pretension? Was it merely a facade, like Gatsby’s library with its uncut pages, or was it something else? I closed the book and put it away and then looked around the room with newly opened eyes and a growing sense of horror.

“Do you hunt, Mr. Shaw?” I asked while I looked at the wall full of dead animal heads.

“Once I did,” he said.

“Are these your trophies?”

“No. They were my father’s.”

“Even the cat?”

“It’s a cougar,” he said in his distracted monotone.

“Is that your father’s too?”

“No,” he said. “Everything but the cougar.”

I stepped slowly toward the cougar head, its eyes dazed, its yellow teeth bared. There was a brass plate beneath the ruffed fur of its neck. It said something I couldn’t read for the tarnish, but I could make out the date: 1923. I felt colder than before. This wasn’t just any cougar, I was certain, this was the cougar that had slipped down from the mountains to terrorize the farms around Veritas in 1923. The same cougar Kingsley Shaw was aiming for in that dark rain-swept night when, with his mother by his side, he fired into his father’s chest. How could he live with that cat staring at him every day of his life, taunting him with that grin? And the ornate shotgun beside it, that gun, I realized, must be the gun.

I took a photograph out of my suit pocket and walked it to the fireplace to show to the man in the wheelchair. It was a photograph, removed from the metal box, of the unattractive young woman with the long face, the beady eyes, the unruly hair. “Do you know her?” I asked.

He took the photograph into his shaking hands and examined it closely. I wondered if he recognized her at all and then realized, when I saw a tear, that he did.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Why are you here?” he said, still staring at the photograph.

“I am trying to find out who is killing your children.”

“This is Miss Poole,” he said. “She was my friend from long ago. She read to me.”

“Do you know where she is or where her child is?”

“Why? Do you know her?” He smiled up at me with a hope that was at odds with everything he had shown me before. “Is she alive too?”

“I don’t know. Her father believed that your grandfather stole his company from him. Do you believe she could be responsible for hiring the man who killed your children?”

“She was my friend,” he said. “She was lovely. She could never have hurt a soul.”

“Then who do you think is killing your children?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said, staring up at me. “She’s alive. Didn’t I tell you? She’s alive.” He turned his face back to the photograph. “Can I keep this?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr. Shaw, and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

With a wan smile he waved the photograph. “She used to read to me about a pond. Such a beautiful pond it was. I forget the name of it now.”

“Walden Pond,” I said.

“No, that’s not it, but it was so beautiful.”

On my way out I stopped for a moment and stared at the cougar head mounted above the door. I turned around.

“Mr. Shaw, why are there bars on your windows?”

From across the room, still staring at the photograph, he said, “Because of the first time I heard the fire speak.”

“When was that?”

“Years and years ago. When I could still walk.”

“What was the word it repeated the first time?”

“ ‘Jump,’ ” he said. “ ‘Jump. Jump. Jump.’ ”

I think all of us in this world carry our own individual hells, like a turtle shell on our backs, hauling it about from place to place, the burden so constant we often forget how its weight is twisting our bodies and spirits into grotesquery. This hell is the cost, I believe, of being human and humane, and better that, I figure, than the oblivious, spaced-out bliss promised by places like the Church of the New Life. But never have I seen an individual’s personal hell so objectively and oppressively rendered in his surroundings as I saw in the room of Kingsley Reddman Shaw. Wherever he was jumping to when he ruined his legs, he was jumping to a better place than this.

I blinked into the sunlight outside Veritas. Nat had progressed in his work to the hedges on the other side of the doorway. He saw me standing on the steps and without climbing from his ladder he shouted out, “Had a pleasant meeting, Mr. Carl?”

“How long has he been like that, Nat?”

“For as long as I’ve been here. But it’s gotten worse over the years.”

“How old was he when he jumped from the window?”

“Twenty-five or thereabouts, but by then he had not been out of the room for six or seven years.”

“I’ve never seen such a horrible place in my life.”

“N’aren’t too many like it. That was his grandfather’s room until the elder Mrs. Shaw moved her son into it. Much of the furnishings were left over from Mr. Reddman’s time.”

“Even the cougar.”

“Mr. Reddman bought it from the farmer who killed it. We’ve tried to remove it but Mr. Shaw won’t allow us.”

“And the painting of Faith Reddman Shaw?”

“Mr. Reddman commissioned it, a portrait of his only surviving daughter.”

“What was he like, this Claudius Reddman?”

“A hard man, Mr. Carl. Even in his last years, when he dedicated himself fully to philanthropy, he was hard. Do you know what his last words were?”

“No.”

“At the end it was his lungs that rotted out. Tumors the size of frogs, I was told. The doctors kept him delirious on morphine to hide the pain. That last night, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she made sure I was there, to run for whatever the nurses needed. He was crying and shouting out and had to be restrained with leather straps. And the final thing he said before he shivered into death was, ‘It was only business.’ ”

Nat laughed at that, and turned back to his hedges, opening the shears and clipping off two shoots of green at once.

It was only business. I wondered if that would satisfy the Pooles for whatever injustices by Claudius Reddman they believed shattered their world. Well, whatever price was paid by the Pooles, it was being paid by the Reddmans too. After what had happened to Kingsley, it seemed like overkill to go after the heirs.

I had an uneasy feeling driving down out of the Main Line, back to the city along the expressway. Kingsley Shaw had said his mother was still alive and it was she who was killing his children, but as he said it he seemed to show no overt sadness over the death of his son, or of his daughter six months before, and he seemed to have no worries for Caroline or Bobby. He said his mother was alive and killing his children and still he was begging me to take him to her. Was her spirit still alive? Could she somehow be responsible? I remembered the way I bounced off the walls when I had first seen Hitchcock’s Psycho and I wondered if somehow Kingsley was bringing this tragedy down around himself, all in the name of his mother. I could see him in that room, in his wheelchair, wearing a black dress and black bonnet, a knife in his hand, screeching music in the background. I resolved on the Schuylkill Expressway, passing the very spot where Raffaello’s Cadillac had been ambushed with me inside, I resolved then and there to never ever take a shower at Veritas.

It was late afternoon already when I parked my car on Spruce Street and walked up the stairs to my apartment and found Caroline Shaw waiting for me. I went to her and put my arms around her and told her that her brother Edward had been murdered.