A Temporary Ghost (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Series 2) (6 page)

A LETTER

“Carey Howard was a supercilious shit, and the meanest bastard who ever lived,” Vivien said.

We were sitting in the solarium, a tiny glassed-in alcove off her bedroom. (She and Ross, I had noted with interest, had separate rooms.) We had barely enough space for two white rattan chairs and a low table for the tape recorder. In good weather it was probably a cheerful spot, but in good weather we’d have been outside. Today the sky was leaden, the treetops bending in a stiff wind that for all I knew was the mistral. Drops of rain spat on the glass around us. I felt chilled by the weather and the hate in her voice.

Vivien raved on, “He didn’t care about anything—
anything
— except being seen in the right place at the right time. The right shows, the right restaurants, the right parties—do you have any idea how exhausting that can be?”

She didn’t expect or need an answer. I continued to scratch supplementary notes on my yellow legal pad, trying to be unobtrusive.

“He’d never have married me if I hadn’t been Denis McBride’s widow. Not that he ever read Denis’s poetry, but he’d seen a story about Denis in some magazine. That ratified Denis for him.
God!”
She slammed her fists down on the arms of her chair. “Oh, I could go on and on,” she said.

I hoped she would. For the first time since we started taping, she was really loose. She stood up and looked out at the rain, pulling her cream-colored shawl close around her. “Jesus, I hate this weather,” she said. “I thought Provence was supposed to be sunny and warm.”

I didn’t want her to wander from the subject. “Carey was rich, and he was a nice-looking man. You must’ve found him appealing at first,” I said.

She wheeled toward me. “Are you joking? I was a widow with two kids! Take a guess how much of an estate a poet leaves! Sure, Carey was appealing!”

She dropped back into her chair. Watching the tape revolve, not wanting to prod too soon, I waited for her to continue. When she spoke again, her tone had changed from anger to self-pity. “I would’ve been better off on welfare.” She bit at a knuckle, her eyes reddening.

“Do you really think so?”

“Sure. Put Alex and Blanche in foster homes, whatever. Better than how we ended up.” She was sniffling, but that was to be expected. I remembered Blanche’s story of how Carey had refused to pay for the program in Avignon. “What
about
Alexander and Blanche?” I said.

She was immediately wary. “What do you mean?”

“How did they get along with Carey?”

She wound the fringe of her shawl tightly around her index finger and looked away from me. “Not too badly,” she said. “He was a stepfather. There was no love lost. But he was no worse to them than to anybody else.”

That was baloney. I had read in the clips that Vivien’s son Alexander had left home because he and Carey didn’t get along. “I thought Carey and Alexander had problems.”

She nodded, conceding the point. “Alex took off right after high school and went to California. He had things to work out. He’d been through a terrible time.” At the mention of her son, her voice softened.

“His father’s death, you mean?”

“Alex was ten years old when Denis died. It was rough for him. Denis was a scoundrel, but he could be— lovable. The children adored him. Then I remarried, and Carey was so different—” She sighed, leaving me to fill in the rest for myself.

“Where is Alex now?”

“Still in San Francisco.” She was looking at the fringe, which she continued to wind and unwind on her finger.

“Does he— go to school? Have a job?”

“Sometimes one, sometimes the other. He’s had difficulty settling down.”

I got it. Alexander was twenty-five now, and still “working things out.”

I tried a few more ploys but she’d run dry, silenced by the subject of Alexander. I turned off the tape recorder. Vivien sagged in her chair. “I feel sick,” she said. “I have a horrible taste in my mouth.”

“I know this is hard—”

“It’s like my body’s gone sour on me. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think… I can imagine.”

“I wake up in the middle of the night, and I don’t know where the hell I am. I lie there wondering and wondering, until I’m so scared I can’t breathe.”

She looked ashen in the stormy, lowering light. I sat holding my legal pad and recorder thinking, God help me, that I should write her words down, in case they came in handy for the book. I said, “If you don’t feel like going on, I can use the time to talk with the others.”

Her eyes narrowed. “The others?”

“Blanche, Ross, and Pedro.”

I didn’t see her move, but I knew she had stiffened. “Why should you talk with them?”

To corroborate your story, I thought, but I said, “To get additional background. To suggest angles I might want to explore with you.”

She was shaking her head. “No. It’s my book. I can’t let you. Not Blanche—”

If she thought I was going to write the book only on her say-so, she was nuts. At the moment, though, she was upset. I didn’t want to push her into hysterical, nonnegotiable pronouncements. She continued, defiantly, “It’s my book. I’m the only one who should suffer for it.”

When I didn’t answer, she said, “I can’t work any more today.” That was fine with me. Released, I left her.

I wasn’t in the mood to transcribe the interview tape. It was a job I hated in any case. I put the recorder and notes in my room and went downstairs to make a cup of tea. The kitchen had the abandoned air kitchens can get in midafternoon. I put on the kettle and sat down to wait for it to boil.

Steam was starting to escape when I heard running feet outside. In a moment Ross, dressed in a rain-splattered gray sweatsuit, slid open the glass door and came in. He tossed some letters on the table and leaned forward, braced on his arms, breathing heavily. Drops of moisture, sweat or rain, trickled down his face and slid along his chin. His body gave off a smell of healthy exertion. “Mail,” he panted.

I sorted through the envelopes. There were two official-looking documents for Vivien from a New York law firm and two items for me. One was a postcard of the Eiffel Tower with a note from Kitty saying, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” The other was a no-return-address letter from New York.

Even as I tore it open, I didn’t want to touch it. I’d hoped, really hoped, I wouldn’t get another one of these. This time, the message was,
“Helping a killer is wrong! She won’t get away with it, and neither will you. Think about it.”

Ross said, “Hey. Do you want me to get that?” and I realized the kettle was whistling. As I got up to look after it, he said, “Something wrong?”

I handed him the letter. When I poured boiling water in the squatty yellow teapot the kettle seemed terribly heavy. When I faced him again he was staring at me. “What’s this about?”

“It’s the third one I’ve gotten. Somebody doesn’t want Vivien’s book to be written.”

“God
damn
it!” He slapped the counter, and the teapot lid clinked. He looked at the postmark. “New York,” he said grimly.

“All three were mailed from there.”

“That narrows the field down to several million people who think Vivien deserves to suffer.”

“I guess so.” I went on, haltingly, “I don’t suppose you have any idea who might have—”

He barked out a laugh. “Christ! Off the top of my head I could give you a long list, starting with Carey’s family. But it could just as easily be a stranger.”

“It’s somebody who knows about me, who knows where we’re staying.”

“In other words, somebody who reads Liz Smith’s column in the
Daily News.”

I sat down. Rain slid down the windows, turning the landscape into a gray-green blob.

“Have you told Vivien?” Ross asked.

“No.”

“Good. Because I guarantee you this would send her screaming into the night.”

“I didn’t tell her because it’s— so— upsetting—” I was embarrassed and horrified to feel tears welling up.

“Sure it is.”

I sat swallowing, trying hard to breathe and not give in to it. He tore a paper towel off a roll and handed it to me. “You got more than you bargained for when you got mixed up with us, didn’t you?” he said.

I blew my nose on the towel and nodded.

He sat across the table from me. “Somebody should have warned you. Stuff like this letter comes with the territory. There’s a lot of hate out there.”

I felt a little better. Naturally, this book would attract free-floating hostility. Maybe the letters weren’t a serious threat.

“I’ll get the tea,” he said.

He poured a couple of mugs and we drank, listening to the wind. He said, thoughtfully, “It was almost two and a half years ago. Coldest night of the year. Snowing like a bastard. I got a phone call from Vivien. My life changed, and it has never been the same, and it never will be.”

“How long had you and Vivien been—”

“Lovers? Six months. The best, the most magical six months of my life. And I’ve paid for it. The price has been grotesque.”

My tea didn’t taste right. I remembered Vivien saying her body was going sour. “You’re still together, though.”

“We are together. We will be together.”

“Then—”

“Do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Don’t try to cobble this into a happy ending. Put the book across however you can, but don’t do that.”

“It’s hard to know what a happy ending is, these days.”

His smile was brief. “I have a definition.”

“What?”

“A happy ending is never knowing what hit you.”

I nodded. “Did Carey Howard have a happy ending, then?”

“I hope not,” he said fervently. “I really hope not.”

Rain lashed at the window. “Now, you talk to me,” he said.

A CHAT WITH PEDRO

Undivided attention can be very seductive. Since early in my career at the Bay City
Sun
I’d seen people blossom under my fascinated gaze and end up telling me more than they meant to. Add a few encouraging murmurs, and the family secrets were fodder for the next edition.

So, basking in Ross’s sympathy, I was moved to discuss not only my early failed marriage to my high school sweetheart but the broken romance that, years later, led to my leaving Florida to remake my life in Paris.

“His name is Ray,” I was appalled to hear myself saying. The teapot was cold. What was I doing sitting in a Provencal farmhouse, talking about Ray Brown?

When I wound down, Ross said, “You still feel hurt, don’t you?”

“A little.”

“Was he worth it?”

“Well— he sure could water ski.” I wanted out of the spotlight. “Have you been married?”

He shook his head. “I lived with someone. A nice woman. We’d split up by the time I met Vivien. It was another life, anyway, because back then all I cared about was being an artist.”

He looked bleak, the way he did when he talked about his work. “And now you just— can’t?”

“I can’t. I get ideas. I can
see
myself doing it. Then a barrier drops.”

“It’s because of what happened to Carey?”

He grimaced. “Revenge from beyond the grave because I screwed his wife? Sure, I think so. Don’t you?”

Later, sitting at the table in my room, still reluctant to put on my headphones and get to work, I had trouble putting Ross out of my mind. He’d told me up front he didn’t want Vivien to write the book, yet he hadn’t used the anonymous letters as an excuse to urge me to ditch the project.

Why had he been so nice to me? Maybe he wanted me on his side in some as-yet-undeclared battle; or he himself was behind the letters, and he was averting suspicion; or he was bored, and chatting with me beat listening to French radio.

Maybe he liked me.

I jammed the headphone plug in the tape recorder and hit the “rewind” button. I had plenty to do without worrying about whether or not Ross Santee liked me. I had donned the headphones and was about to get started when there was a tap at my door, and Pedro Ruiz put his head in.

I didn’t have Pedro figured at all. His neck chain and ID bracelet, snappy clothes, crisp gray curls, and handsome, somewhat dissipated look seemed more appropriate to a South American playboy or a Las Vegas high roller than a housekeeper. He was hardly a beloved family retainer allowed to coast on personality, either. I detected little warmth in his dealings with Vivien, Blanche, and Ross. “I’m making cocoa for Vivien. Thought I’d ask if you want some,” he said.

“No, thanks. I had tea a while ago.”

My dismissive answer and polite smile didn’t remove him from the doorway. I was reaching to push the recorder’s “play” button when he slipped inside and stood watching me with apparent interest. “Tapes, huh?” he said.

I took off the headphones, amazed at his unprecedented cordiality. “That’s right.”

He sauntered into the room. “She talks into the machine and you listen and type it out?”

“Yes.”

He was standing over the table now, jingling coins, gazing at my papers, notepad, recorder, typewriter. I got a whiff of spicy cologne mixed with cigars. “Like a secretary?” he said.

“Sort of. But after the interviews are done and the tapes are transcribed, I go back to Paris and write the book.”

“You
write it? I thought Vivien was writing it.”

I wouldn’t have expected Pedro to be so interested. “She’s telling the story. I’m going to make a book out of it.”

“But it’ll say, ‘By Vivien Howard’ on the cover?”

“It’ll say, ‘By Vivien Howard
with
Georgia Lee Maxwell.’ ” This had been a negotiating point.

He nodded and wandered to my window, making himself at home. “Guess you can make a bundle writing a book.”

I didn’t plan to talk figures. “It depends on the book.”

His smile might have been called a leer. “I guess it does. And I guess this one is worth a bundle.”

I smiled tightly and replaced the headphones over my ears. “I hope you’re right.”

He strolled to the door and stood with his hand on the knob. “I expect you’ll give poor old Carey another beating,” he said.

I stared at him. “What do you mean?”