Tempting Fate

Six

John Pembroke lay on his back, stark naked, debating whether to answer the door. The knocking had woken him up. It was noon-he’d checked his Timex-and he’d been sound asleep. No one ever visited him.

There was another knock.

A reporter? He hoped not, but it was Friday. Tonight was the annual Chandler lawn party and the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lilli’s disappearance. John wished he could sleep the whole damn day.

His two window air conditioners-one in his small bedroom, one in his all-purpose room-rattled and groaned trying to keep up with the blistering Tucson summer heat. He’d heard the temperature was supposed to climb to a hundred-fifteen today. Might as well be living in hell.

He rubbed one hand across the grizzled gray hairs of his chest, trying to wake up. He’d been dreaming about swimming in the ice-cold stream out behind his nutty mother’s gingerbread cottage, as he had summers as a boy. But he’d never go back, hadn’t since Lilli disappeared. Saratoga was nothing but memories for him. Even Lilli had become just another memory. You couldn’t touch a memory, he’d discovered. You couldn’t live one.

Except once in a while.

Like just now, when he’d opened his eyes, thinking he was in the maple bed in his and Lilli’s old room at the Chandler cottage on North Broadway. He’d heard her breathing beside him. He’d rolled over, knowing she was there. So certain. He’d wanted to hold her, to make love to her.

There was yet another knock.

“I’m coming!”

He heaved himself out of bed and pulled on a pair of wrinkled elastic-waist shorts. He’d developed the habit of working late, often past dawn, and sleeping well into the afternoon. In summer he missed the worst of the blazing heat. And the desert night sky, he’d discovered, was incomparable. He’d head up into the mountains and stare at the sparkling stars and endless dark and imagine Lilli’s spirit in union once more with him, imagine what their life together might have become.

Hell of a romantic he was.

He’d tell her, as he hadn’t often enough in their too-short time together, how much he loved her.

Rubbing his face with his palms, he could feel the rough stubble of a couple of days’ growth of beard. He seldom shaved every day. His neighbors initially had thought he was a do-gooder or gentrifier come to restore one of the street’s old adobe houses and sell it at a profit. Now they pretty much figured he was just an old reprobate. He’d once asked the family next door, eight people crowded into an apartment not much bigger than his place, their advice on identifying and killing-unless there was a damn good reason why he shouldn’t-a giant spider that had taken over his bathroom. Turned out it was just an ordinary desert spider. Nothing to worry about. They’d thought his naïveté and terror great fun and gave him a beer and had Carlos, the baby of the family, go back with him to liberate his bathroom. Meanwhile, of course, the spider had vanished. Now John never took a leak without wondering where the damn thing had gone.

He went through his all-purpose room to the front door. When he’d fallen into bed early that morning, he’d left out the books, photographs, articles and two hundred pages of the manuscript for the biography he was writing of his notorious great-grandfather, Ulysses Pembroke. Dani had commissioned him. John had no idea what she planned to do with it. He hadn’t asked. He knew damn well she hadn’t given him the job out of a sense of charity. He’d used up his daughter’s goodwill a long, long time ago.

He pulled open the door, the dry heat hitting him as if he’d pulled open a furnace running full blast against a subzero chill. “Yeah, what’s up?”

A kid, no more than eighteen, in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, stood red-faced on the landing. He looked parched. John felt a wave of guilt at having kept the poor bastard waiting in the scorching heat. It was hot, even for Tucson in August.

“Mr. Pembroke?” the kid asked tentatively.

John stiffened, immediately thinking of Dani. Something had happened to her. Then he thought of Nick: his father was dead. Ninety years old and finally gone to the great beyond. Or Mattie. But he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his mother yet. He tried to will away the habit of thinking the worst, but couldn’t. The worst had happened often enough.

“Yes,” he said sharply, trying to control his fear.

The kid took a step back, no doubt wondering if he’d come to the wrong place. John supposed he looked like hell. Although still lean and rawboned, his black eyes as alert as ever, he’d lost weight, both fat and muscle, and his skin had begun to sag on his neck and elbows. He was fast becoming an old man with flabby knees. Lately his grooming amounted to daily teeth cleaning and a weekly shower. Part of his routine came from conviction: the desert wasn’t a place to be profligate with water. Part came from not giving a damn. Twenty-five years ago he’d never have answered the door unshaven, gray hair sticking out, in nothing but a pair of wrinkled turquoise shorts.

“I’m from Tucker’s Office Supply,” the kid said. “A fax came for you.”

John had never received a fax here. He didn’t own a telephone or a computer. He’d given up on as much technology as he could since Eugene Chandler had given him the boot.

“Delivery was included,” the kid said.

“So I don’t owe you anything?”

He shook his head. The air was so hot and dry his sweat evaporated instantly. Or maybe John had left him out there so long he’d stopped sweating. Dehydration and hyperthermia were constant threats in summertime Arizona.

John took the offered envelope. “Wait a second.”

He went back into the cooler gloom of his adobe, walking right over the scattered books and papers in his bare feet, and dug in his small refrigerator for a bottle of Pembroke Springs Natural Orange Soda. Dani had sent him a case-and the bill. His daughter was a barracuda. He handed the soda to the kid, who looked relieved. John heard the fizz of the bottle opening as he shut his door. His good deed for the day. Didn’t want the kid croaking on his drive back to the two-bit office-supply store where he worked.

The fax had been sent from Beverly Hills:

Dear John, What kind of damn fool would live in the desert with no phone? Dani’s been robbed. She’s okay, but I’m not. Call me: I have a phone. Nick

Not, John observed dispassionately, “Love, Dad,” or even the conventional “Your father.” Just Nick. Like they were old pals, which they weren’t. Of course, they weren’t much as father and son, either.

John laid the slippery fax on the counter and got out a Dos Equis, then heated up a leftover quesadilla and lit a cigarette. He’d learned to smoke the night he’d lost his first thousand in a poker game. He hadn’t had a thousand to lose, and gambling had seemed a hell of a way to get rid of his money. Smoking hadn’t helped. He’d known it wouldn’t, but he’d needed something to try to assuage his guilt and self-hate, although why he’d thought a cigarette would do the trick he still couldn’t figure out. Now he smoked whenever he felt particularly guilty or rotten. Usually all someone had to do was mention his daughter.

He sat on the tattered couch he’d picked up from the Salvation Army fifteen years ago. He’d always thought he’d have it recovered but never had. He reread his father’s fax. A fax machine wouldn’t intimidate that old geezer. Nicholas Pembroke was the most selfish and egotistical and totally unreliable man John had ever known, but endearingly honest about his failings, and direct, and unafraid-to a fault-of taking risks. John, on the other hand, seldom told anyone what was on his mind and had learned to avoid risk. To him his gambling wasn’t taking risks. It was avoiding them. Popular media opinion declared that his Pembroke genes-a penchant for gambling and adventure and self-destruction-had led to his downfall. He disagreed. He’d been all over the world, gambling, writing the odd travel article, doing as he damn well pleased. But it was a life he’d chosen not for its risk but for its safety. Staying on at Chandler Hotels and being the only parent to his only child would have required greater courage. Staring in the mirror every morning and wondering if he’d driven Lilli off all those years ago. Wondering if he’d helped make her feel trapped and unhappy. If he’d pushed her into making her deal with his father to act in Casino on the sly.

Give him a hot poker game any day.

He stubbed out his cigarette. He hadn’t seen Nick in months. Despite their many differences, the one thing he and Nick did share-this mismatched father and son-was a deep affection for Dani. Daughter and granddaughter, she was the one person they both loved without condition.

And whom both had failed without reason.

John smoked another cigarette and drank another beer. In his gut he knew what Nick was going to ask him to do.

Twenty-five years ago tonight Lilli had disappeared.

How could Nick ask?

“Damn,” John whispered, smashing his cigarette into an ashtray. He’d only smoked half of it. The other half he’d save for another day.

The minute he’d finished reading his father’s fax, he’d known what he would do.

He dressed in khaki pants and a white cotton shirt he didn’t bother tucking in and his ratty, once-white tennis shoes. All in all, he still looked like a desert rat, brown and wizened, squinty-eyed, a pathetic shadow of the proud, determined man he’d once been. When he got to Saratoga-he knew he’d go-some jackass would take his picture and put it in the paper. Dani wouldn’t be mortified. She’d say, “Yeah, that’s my father, the crook.”

She’d always been one to embrace reality.

After tossing a few things into a battered overnight bag, John headed out into the dry, blistering heat to the convenience store on the corner. He didn’t have a car, either. He used the pay phone to call his father collect. Nick accepted the charges. He always did. Dani paid his phone bill.

“You packed?” Nick asked in his famous gravelly voice.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’d drop dead before the plane got halfway to Chicago. No great loss to you and my charming ex-wife, of course, but I’m uninsured. You’d have to bury me. Think of the expense.”

John ignored his father’s morbid humor. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Mattie called.”

John was more amazed than surprised that his parents continued to tell each other most everything after fifty years apart. Their fights-which they preferred to call “quarrels”-had become the stuff of legend. But each knew exactly what the other was.

“Dani called her after being robbed?” John speculated.

“Naturally. Apparently the son of a bitch was still in the house when she got there. Pushed her around a little, but she’s not seriously hurt.”

“Thank God.”

“Yeah. Happened yesterday afternoon. With all the publicity she’s had lately, people think she’s rolling in money. Probably some bastard finally decided to have a look-see.”

“But you don’t think so,” John said.

“Hell, I don’t know. Mattie’s got a bee in her bonnet over the whole thing. You know that gold key Dani found? It was stolen along with some other stuff.”

“So?”

His father didn’t answer immediately, and John waited. He knew better than to interrupt one of Nick’s dramatic pauses. He’d come to the point only after he’d built the tension to a suitable climax or John yelled at him to get on with it. Nicholas Pembroke’s success as a filmmaker, John had come to believe, stemmed not from any particular artistic or technical genius, but from an innate talent for zeroing in on the essence of drama. He simply knew how to wring every drop of emotion out of a scene.

“So if Mattie’s right, Lilli was wearing the key the night she disappeared.”

John shut his eyes and felt the perspiration sticking his shirt to his back and the tightness in his eyes from the low humidity and insufficient sleep. He could see the Pembroke cliffs on a bright, clear Saratoga August afternoon.

Lilli.

“There’s another little gem,” Nick said.

John was losing patience. “This call’s costing you money-”

“It’s costing Dani. The little shark will demand a written explanation, I’m sure.” Nick inhaled and coughed, suddenly sounding old. “Zeke Cutler is in Saratoga, John.”

Exhaling slowly, John retained his self-control. He knew what his father was talking about. Zeke and Joe Cutler had been in Saratoga twenty-five years ago to tell Mattie her father was dying. They’d left the night Lilli disappeared. As far as John knew, the police had never questioned them. There had seemed to be no reason to. But John had read the book on Joe Cutler. The man who’d died in Beirut and the boy who’d come to Saratoga earlier had seemed like two different people, but who knew?

“Why?” he asked his father.

“Mattie doesn’t know. Apparently Dani found him in her garden after the burglary-she only mentioned him in passing when she talked to Mattie. John, Mattie’s never told her about the Cutler boys. You know she hates talking about Cedar Springs.”

And Dani idolized her grandmother, trusted her and believed in her as she couldn’t believe in anyone else, including her own father.

“Do you have a plane ticket?” Nick asked.

“I’ll get one.”

“If you need money, I can try and peel some off Dani.”

“I don’t need money.” His daughter wasn’t nearly as generous with her father as her grandfather, on the grounds, she claimed, that Nick was unreformable and too old to leave to the streets.

“John…”

He swallowed. “I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I’ve ever asked of you.”

If only, John thought, either of them had asked as much of himself.

In his one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a pink stucco building on one of Beverly Hills’s less exclusive streets, Nicholas Pembroke settled into the leather chair he’d had sent to him in California from his grandfather’s peculiar estate-it seemed like a lifetime ago. Over sixty years. He’d left New York for good after his mother’s death. His father had died when Nick was five. Barely remembered him. He was named Ulysses Jr., but he’d tried hard not to be like his own father-that was a sentiment Nick understood. His own son, likewise, had never wanted to be like him.

“I have only one request to make of you,” his mother said to him on her deathbed. “Promise me you won’t make the same mistakes your grandfather did. Don’t let your good intentions be responsible for trapping anyone else, for inflicting pain on anyone else, especially those you love.”

He’d promised. He’d adored his mother, had been shattered by her illness and premature death. And he’d always been very good at making promises. He just wasn’t very good at keeping them.

He’d leave the chair to Dani in his will.

He couldn’t be thinking about death now. He had to concentrate on the present.

And decide whether he should try to get hold of John at the Tucson airport and tell him the rest.

All of it.

He laid his head back and closed his eyes. His chair had seemed larger in recent years, but he’d finally admitted it was the same size: he had shrunk. He was ancient, for the love of God. He might yet live to a hundred. And what did he have to show for his long life? An unforgiving ex-wife. A son he’d failed. A granddaughter who treated him like a charity case. Hell, he was a charity case. And a few well-regarded movies-The Gamblers, Tiger’s Eye, Casino. He’d lived too long and had too many forgettable movies, too many dry years and too much bad press to be admired the way people admired Mattie Witt.

Yeah, well, what was a reputation? Glorified gossip. Not the sort of thing in which one took great comfort a month before one’s ninetieth birthday.

And he had his mistakes to show, too.

Using his cane, he rose slowly. Twenty years ago the cane had been a dapper affectation, but now it was an unfortunate necessity. He was thin and stooped, and sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he wondered who the hell that scrawny old fart was looking back at him. His black hair had turned completely white, and what was left of it was so thin he seldom had to comb it. His eyes, veined and weak, had a tendency to bulge. He hadn’t asked the doctors why. Didn’t want to know. His crepey skin sagged on his brittle bones. He supposed he ought to be grateful he still had all his faculties: he could recall every asinine thing he’d done and said in the past century.

And yet there were times, especially on quiet, warm nights, when he yearned to be, if only for a moment, the irresistible cocky young man he’d been decades ago, when he’d stumbled upon Mattie on the banks of the Cumberland River.

“God willing, you’ll live a long life,” she’d told him many times, and she’d never meant it kindly.

He crept into the kitchen, pulled open his refrigerator and found a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water. Dani sent him a case every couple of months. With a shaking hand, he unscrewed the cap and drank straight from the bottle, the cold, effervescent water dribbling down the sides of his chin. It tasted as it always had, from the first day he’d tried it as a boy almost a century ago: clean and crystal clear, slightly earthy, as if he were taking in a little of the Adirondack Mountains with every sip. Maybe he could blame his longevity on a boyhood spent drinking this stuff.

He set the empty bottle on the counter and belched.

Consequences, he thought. He’d always hated facing consequences.

If you make a promise to your dying mother you break time and time again, you stand to endure a lifetime of guilt. If you screw another woman while you’re married to someone else-someone who’s a part of your soul-you stand to lose her. If you spirit a sad, tortured young woman away from her abusive father and husband for a summer of freedom, you stand to set into motion a series of events over which you and she have no control.

Nick sagged against the refrigerator, trying not to remember Joe Cutler. If Joe hadn’t come north to fetch Mattie back to Cedar Springs to see her dying father…if he’d understood that Mattie could never go back…

Unlike her younger sister, Naomi Witt Hazen, whom Nick, too, had loved. “I’ll go back home and do what I have to do,” she’d told him after the heat of their long-ago summer affair had expired and they’d known they’d gone as far as they ever would together. “But my father and husband will never have the same hold over me as they once did. I’m free.”

Nick banged his cane against the refrigerator and wished the memories-a century of them-would just go away. Sometimes he’d rather be a drooling old man in a nursing home.

He should have known twenty-five years ago one was never finished with a blackmailer.

If Saint Mattie hadn’t told Dani about the Cutler boys’ trip to Saratoga the summer her mother went missing, Nick hadn’t told anyone about the nasty, pathetic blackmail letters he’d received while filming Casino. Someone-he’d never known who-had found out about his secret deal with Lilli to let her play the minor role of the singer. He’d never expected that one scene, his daughter-in-law’s one performance, would take over the movie the way it had, to set its tone, deepen its meaning, make itself not just accessible to its audience, but a part of them. But he’d promised her he would keep her identity a secret. If she wanted the world-her family-to know, she could be the one to tell them. It was one promise he’d kept, until it became moot when Casino was previewed and a critic recognized Lilli Chandler Pembroke. Nick admitted everything.

But he’d never mentioned the blackmail.

The scheme had been pitiful, inept. A few hundred dollars here, a thousand there. He’d received a letter threatening to expose Lilli’s role if he didn’t pay up. So he’d paid up. He hadn’t told Lilli what was going on; she’d had enough on her mind. And a couple of days before her disappearance, the blackmail had stopped.

He supposed he should have gone to the police, at least after Lilli disappeared. But he’d wanted to protect her, wanted to keep the notoriety and nastiness, the cheapness, of blackmail from being tied to her. The blackmailer had never threatened her-the letters had never even hinted that any harm would come to her-and had been directed to Nick, not to Lilli. As far as he knew, she had no idea he was being blackmailed over her role in Casino.

As far as he knew.

What if she had known? What if she had been blackmailed herself? She’d had a hell of a lot more money than Nick ever did.

And what if the blackmailer had been Joe Cutler? Or his then thirteen-year-old brother, Zeke? Or both of them?

The doorbell was ringing. Nick couldn’t have said for how long. As he shuffled back to the front room, he considered that the one thing-the only thing-he could reliably do these days was to die. Just drop dead like an old dog. And yet his death would accomplish nothing.

He would still have sent his son to Saratoga without all the facts.

When he opened the door, a strongly built black man nodded to him. “Mr. Pembroke? Sorry to bother you. My name’s Sam Lincoln Jones. I’m an independent security consultant.”

“You work with Zeke Cutler,” Nick said. Over the years he’d kept track of Joe Cutler’s little brother.

Jones hid any surprise. “I’d like to talk with you, if I may.”

“About what?”

“About what you’ve been up to lately.”

Nick grinned. “Nice try, my friend. Zeke Cutler sent you to find out what I know about a certain gold key my daughter-in-law was wearing the night she disappeared.”

“Which is?”

“Not a damn thing.”

John hitched a ride to the Tucson airport from a skinny kid who’d stopped in the convenience store and mentioned he was headed in that direction and paid for his ticket to Albany, New York, with the emergency traveler’s checks he kept on hand. With elderly parents, he felt compelled to have airfare available at all times-something that would only disgust Nick and Mattie, who apparently thought they’d never die. Or didn’t give a damn if they did. John had given up on ever truly understanding his famous mother and father.

In Albany he’d rent a car or get a cab for the thirty-mile drive to Saratoga Springs. After that, he didn’t know what he’d do.

He had no trouble getting a flight east and, slinging his beat-up old bag onto his shoulder, he boarded the plane.

Saratoga, he thought. It had been so long.

Did the gold key mean Lilli had been on the rocks on the Pembroke estate the night she disappeared? Was it stolen to keep that from coming out?

John suddenly felt colder than he’d felt in weeks.

Don’t jump ahead. One step at a time.

Settling back in his seat, he shut his eyes and tried not to think about how different he was from the corporate executive he’d once been, from the optimistic boy determined not to repeat the mistakes the Pembroke men always seemed to make. Who’d wanted desperately to be something other than Nicholas Pembroke and Mattie Witt’s son. He’d loved being the cog in the wheel at Chandler Hotels his wife had accused him of being. He’d loved that anonymity.

Oh, Lilli…

He hadn’t made the same mistakes as the Pembroke scoundrels who’d come before him. He’d made his own mistakes, more egregious, more unforgivable.

Dani, however, was different.

She had to be.

And this time John was determined not to fail her.