Find a Victim

Chapter 22

Kate Kerrigan was waiting in my car.

“I was afraid I’d miss you,” she said when I opened the door. “I took a taxi down. Mr. MacGowan phoned from the powerhouse.”

“For me?”

“Yes, he’s on his way to my house to see you. He wasn’t very specific, but I think it’s something about his granddaughter. He asked me not to mention his call to anyone but you.”

I got in and started the car. High school had let out. A few blocks from the courthouse, an advance guard of hotrods and jalopies stormed the streets, followed by an irregular army of boys in jeans and pretty, barelegged girls. Some of the girls were about the same age as Jo. I wondered what set her apart from them, what made the difference.

Kate changed the direction of my thoughts. “To think,” she said, “that I was one of those children, less than ten years ago. The luckiest one. Father was still alive then, and I was Homecoming queen, and the captain of the football team took me to the prom. I thought that everything was going to be wonderful, all the rest of my life. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Nobody ever does.”

“They let me live in a dream world,” she said bitterly. “They let me believe that I was special, that nothing could ever touch me. You know who I thought I was? The Lady of Shalott, watching the world in a mirror. And then the mirror cracked. Or don’t you know the poem?”

“I read it in high school, too.”

We rode the rest of the way to her house in silence. There was no sigh of MacGowan, and she asked me to come in and wait. Her living-room was chilly in spite of the daylong sun. Echoes of the quarrel I had overheard still twittered in the walls.

She flung her black hat and gloves on a chair and motioned me into another. “It’s even worse than I’d thought. Did Sam Westmore tell you?”

“A little.”

“Don left me with less than nothing. Sam says I may be liable for several years of unpaid income taxes. Something I didn’t even know about.”

“It won’t happen if Westmore has his way. He’s a good friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“I’ve always believed so.”

“But what if it does happen? What if they do take the rest of your property?”

“I’ll be penniless.”

“Is that such a terrible prospect?”

“I hardly know. I haven’t begun to face it.”

“Take a look at it now. What’s to be so afraid of? You’re young and pretty, and smart.”

Her ringles hand moved sideways in an impatient gesture. “I’m afraid I can’t respond to compliments. Not today. Thank you for the good intentions, though.”

“I don’t see what you have to mourn for. He did you a favor by getting himself shot. Maybe he did you another favor by throwing your money away for you.”

She looked at me as if she doubted my sanity. “What can you possibly mean by that?”

“You’ll be getting married again–”

“Never.”

“You will, though. When you do, you’ll stand a better chance of finding an honest husband, not another Kerrigan. This state is crawling with easy-money boys, drones that swarm after money wherever it is. I’ve met a thousand of him.”

“Are there so many?”

“Walk a long block in Beverly Hills or Santa Barbara or Santa Monica and you’ll see two or three of them, driving their Jags and their Caddies.”

“And do they all have – wives?”

“They prey on women. As long as women own three fourths of the property in this country, there will be men trying to take it away from them, and succeeding. You belong to the biggest secret sorority in the United States: the well-heeled girls who married wrong ones and lived to regret it. It’s the ladies’ auxiliary of the alimony fraternity.”

She gave me a long dazed look. “You live in a terrible world, don’t you?”

“The real world.”

“How do you stand it?”

“By not investing my feelings in gold bricks. How do you?”

“I don’t. That should be obvious. I’m a delicate nurtured girl–” she ironized the phrase “–who waited too long to grow up. It’s hard to grow up – no wonder so few people succeed.” The deep worried cleft appeared between her brows, and she said in a different tone: “Don wasn’t as bad as you think. He honestly tried, part of the time at least. It wasn’t entirely his fault that he couldn’t handle money. I should have helped him. I could have, in all sorts of ways. I wasn’t a good wife to him. He needed more than I was able to give him.”

“He needed more than anybody could give him.”

“You’re full of hard sayings this afternoon.”

“Sorry. I’ve met a lot of Kerrigans, as I said. They’re born with a vacuum where the heart should be. Or something happens to them when they’re kids. Anyway, there’s nothing in them but hunger, a hungry hole you can’t fill.”

“Like a woman?”

She blushed, and rose in confusion and went to the big window. After a while she said to me, or to the heedless city: “I couldn’t have done worse, could I? When I think of what my father was – a respected man in this valley. My grandfather founded Las Cruces College, on land he donated himself. And I betrayed them. It isn’t simply their money that I’ve squandered. I’ve squandered their reputations, everything they stood for, the whole past.” She turned and looked around the arctic beautiful room. “It hardly seems fair, it hardly seems possible, that I could destroy so much with a single mistake.”

“It’s not destroyed, and neither are you. Phonies like Kerrigan can’t destroy real people and real things.”

“Can’t they?”

She turned her back on me again. With her bright hair loose on her neck, she might have been a slim young girl. It was hard to believe that she’d gone through seven years of a bad marriage and been widowed by a gun.

I moved up close to her. “Your life isn’t over, it’s only starting.”

“I’m afraid you can’t console me with rustic philosophy. No, forgive me for saying that. You’ve been kind to me, right through from the beginning.”

“It was easy, Katie.”

“He said I wasn’t a woman. I am a woman, aren’t I?”

I turned her by the shoulders and held her. She gave me her mouth. She said with her lips against my bandages: “I’m sorry you’re hurt, Lew. Please don’t take any more chances.”

“I won’t. It’s nothing.”

“Am I a woman, really? Are you – attracted to me?”

I couldn’t answer her question in words.

After a time, she said: “I feel like the widow of Ephesus.”

“I’m full of hard sayings, and you’re loaded with literary allusions. But go ahead. It’s very educational.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Why not?”

She pulled my head into her carved white shoulder and whispered in my ear: “Did I make you feel like a man, Lew? Did I?”

“I felt like a man before. I still do.”

“You’re bragging.”

“All right, I’m bragging. There’s nobody to hear me except you, and you don’t mind.”

She laughed. There were footsteps on the veranda, dragging and uneven. The doorbell chimed.