Bitter Truth (49 page)

“Victor,” says Nat, grandson of Elisha Poole and slayer of Reddmans. “Welcome to Belize. I’ve been expecting you.”

56

Somewhere in the jungle, Cayo, Belize

I
T’S THE FUNGUS in the air that does it,” says Nat, as we walk slowly side by side in an ornamental flower garden around the rear of the cottage. There are potted flowers and flowers growing in between piles of rocks and flowers hanging down from rotting tree limbs placed strategically in the ground. “The specialized fungus that feeds the germinating seeds. It’s everywhere in this jungle, in every breath. It’s the life blood of the orchid. Of course, like everything else, my sweethearts need careful pruning to maintain their splendor, but I’ve never been afraid to prune.”

Nat is showing off his collection of exotic orchids. He had grown some on the Reddman estate, he says, in the garden room, where only the most hardy hybrids prospered. But here, in this tropical fungal-infested garden, he can grow anything. His orchids are the true light of his life now, he says, his children. “My collection is priceless,” he says. I don’t comment on the evident ironies. As I take the tour I continue holding onto my briefcase and sweating into my suit. Canek, still with his cowboy hat and machete, trails ten feet behind us.

“The slipper orchid,” Nat says, pointing to a fragile blossom with three pink drooping petals surrounding what looks to be a white lip.

“Very nice,” I say.

“
Masdevallia,
” he says, indicating a bright red flower with three pointed petals.

“Beautiful.”

“
Rossioglossum,
” he says, brushing his fingers lightly along tiger-striped petals surrounding a bright yellow middle, “and
Cattleya,
” he says, stroking gently a flower with spotted pink petals surrounding a florid burst of purple, “and
Dendrobium nobile,
” he says, leaning his long frame down to smell the obscenely dark center of a perfect violet bloom.

“They’re all amazing,” I say flatly.

“Yes, they are. Here is one of the finest.
Disa uniflora,
the pride of Table Mountain in South Africa.” He caresses a large scarlet flower with a pale yellowish organ in the middle that more than vaguely resembles a penis, complete with hanging testicles.

I murmur something indicating my admiration but I am horrified by his collection. I have seen an orchid before, sure, I was as miserable as any high school kid at my prom, blowing too much money on the tickets and the limo and the plaid tux and, of course, the corsage, all without any hope of getting laid, but the orchid in my prom corsage was as prim as my date and as far removed from Nat’s blooms as a kitty cat from a saber-toothed tiger. The flowers Nat is growing are beastly things rising out of wild unkempt bushes. Gaudy petals, spotted and furry, drooping arrogant postures, pouty lips, sex organs explicit enough for Larry Flynt, the whole garden is pornographic.

“Acid, Victor. They thrive on acid. Look here.” He points to a tender white and pink flower pushing up from a separate plot in the ground. “This is my absolute favorite. Imported from Australia. Notice, Victor, there are no leaves. This plant stays underground, in secret, feeding only on that marvelous fungus, biding its time until the flower bursts into the open for its own reproductive purposes.”

“I think it’s time we got down to business,” I say.

Nat stops his tour and turns to stare at me, as if I interrupted the most important thing in his world, and then he smiles. “Right you are, Victor. Time for business. I’ll have tea set out for us on the veranda. Excuse me, but I should change.” He abruptly turns away from me and heads into the house through a rear door.

As I start to follow, Canek comes up beside me and gently takes hold of my arm. “I’ll take you around to the veranda,” he says and then he guides me back around the house to the front porch. He pulls away the mosquito netting, creating a gap for us to push through. Beneath a slowly spinning fan there is a table set with plates and cookies. Two seats face each other on opposite sides of the table. Canek pulls out one of the seats for me to sit upon and then he goes into the house, leaving me alone on the porch. The breeze from the fan is refreshing. Down the manicured slope of the lawn I see a long and crowded chicken coop.

Ten minutes later, out to the porch comes Nat, looking almost dashing in white pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “The tea will be out shortly. Iced tea. While the generator’s going we can enjoy the comforts of ice and fans.”

“I have some things for you,” I say, opening the lock and reaching into my briefcase.

“I can barely wait,” he cackles, almost joyfully.

“This is a certified copy of the default judgment I gained against you for the wrongful deaths of Jacqueline and Edward Shaw. You’ll notice the amount of the judgment is one hundred million dollars.”

“Well,” he says, taking it and looking it over with mild interest. “What’s a hundred million dollars among friends?”

“And this is a notice of deposition for the ongoing collection action. You should show up in my offices next month on the date listed at ten o’clock.”

“Will you have doughnuts for me, Victor? I like doughnuts.”

“And this is a summons and complaint for the collection action my lawyer in Belize City filed yesterday afternoon. If you’ll notice, in the complaint we’re seeking to levy on all your holdings in Belize, including all real estate and improvements, which would include this property and the house and your orchid garden. I was glad to hear that the collection was priceless.”

“Because it is priceless does not mean it can fetch any price, young man. Just so you know. The land we are on is rented from the Panti family, the house is worth the price of the wood, and the orchids I will of course take with me when I slip over the border, which is just a few kilometers that way, where I have rented another piece of land and have another house.”

“Then we’ll do it all again in Guatemala. I have also notified the FBI of your whereabouts and extradition proceedings are already beginning.”

He stares at me for a moment, the ring around his eye darkening. “Are you after me or my money?”

“Your money,” I say, quickly.

“Glad to hear it’s not personal.”

“Not at all,” I say. “It is only business.”

He cackles in appreciation. “That old bastard Claudius Reddman would be proud as hell of you, Victor.”

Canek Panti comes onto the veranda with a tray holding a bucket of ice, two tall glasses, and a big glass pitcher of tea. He puts a glass before each of us and fills it with tea and ice. As Canek works he has the same considerate manner as when he was guiding. I thank him and he nods and leaves. I lift up the glass and take a long drink. It is minty and marvelous. Nat reaches over and lifts up the pitcher and refills my glass.

“Nothing better than a glass of tea on a hot day,” he says.

“I have something else.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the letter from Christian Shaw, still covered in plastic, and hand it to him. “It was addressed to you.”

He takes it and looks at it for a moment and then tears apart the plastic and opens the envelope and reads the letter inside. He reads it slowly, as if for the first time, and after many quiet minutes I see a tear well. When he finishes reading he carefully puts it back in the envelope and unabashedly wipes the line of wet running down his cheek.

“Thank you, Victor. I am touched. Truly touched. Didn’t have time to take everything with me when I left. I was in an awful hurry. Knew you’d figure it all out soon enough and wanted to be gone before the police came looking. Didn’t even have time to stay for Edward’s funeral, no matter how pleasant that must have been. I would have taken the time, of course, to dig up my box, but you had already beaten me to that.”

“The bank numbers in it were helpful in tracing your funds.”

“I hoped my friend Walter Calvi would have retrieved it for me, but he seems to have disappeared.”

“Things didn’t quite go his way,” I say. “Why did you bury it?”

“It was appropriate for it to rest in the ground there. It contained my most precious things. My legacy really.”

“I figured out who was in the pictures. What was the postcard from Yankee Stadium all about?”

“A little private joke. April 19, 1923, the birth of two great institutions, Yankee Stadium and me.” He laughs his high-pitched laugh.

“Both institutions seemed to have fallen on hard times,” I said. From my briefcase I pull out a photocopy of the diary pages we found in the box. “You might want these too.”

He looks them over and grows pensive once again. “Yes, thank you. You’ve been more than considerate, Victor, for someone hounding me like a wolf. Mrs. Shaw, she ordered me to burn her diary when she felt death approach, to burn everything, but I excised the portions that concerned my father. That, and the letters, were all I really had of him. And, of course, his blood.”

“I found your father’s letter very moving. He seemed to have found an inner peace after all his trials. I would have thought his example of love and spiritual understanding would have convinced you to give up your dreams of revenge.”

“Well, you would have thought wrong. He wasn’t a Poole, was he? And he wrote that letter before he was murdered by a Reddman.”

“Kingsley was his son. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Not Kingsley, that worthless piece of scrap. He pulled the trigger, yes, but it was Mrs. Shaw that did the killing. She was spying on my mother that night and she saw my mother and my father together and she couldn’t help but scream. It was such an inhuman scream that my idiot half-brother mistook it for a cougar that was loose in the countryside. He took out my father’s gun and when Mrs. Shaw saw my father climb the hill she told her son to fire and he did and for the first and last time in his miserable life Kingsley actually hit what he was aiming at.”

I had wondered what that wild scream was that Kingsley had heard the night he killed his father and now I know, it was Faith Reddman Shaw’s agonized cry as she saw her husband embrace the pregnant Poole daughter and realize that it was he who was the girl’s secret lover, the father of her child. How lost she must have been to withhold that fact from her diary, how pathetic to be unable to admit the truths of her life even in her most private world. I wonder if she learned the tools of self-deception from her father just as she learned from him to pursue any and all means to satisfy her ends.

“So your father’s letter didn’t mute your hatred at all?” I ask.

“Not a yard, not an inch. I don’t go in for that spiritual crap. And it is not as if his paeans to love would turn me around. I found my true love and still it paled next to the ecstasies of my family’s revenge. But do you know who those letters actually affected? Mrs. Shaw.”

“Faith Shaw?”

“None other. Changed her life, she said. Took her years to get the courage to go into her husband’s room after his death. Years. But when she finally did, there she discovered the key. Eventually she thought to fit the key into the locked breakfront drawer at the Poole house, where she found the letters. The love letters from my mother and the letter addressed to me from my father. They had an enormous effect on her. They turned her heart inside out. I can’t imagine, Victor, that mere words could have such an effect on a soul. She said she saw the emptiness in all her prior yearnings and crimes and sought to live from then on a life of repentance. I suppose she was ripe for something, still mourning all she had done and all her father had done before her.

“They were a pair, the two of them, two peas in a pod. You know, it wasn’t just the one sister she killed, she killed the other, too. Poisoned her, to be sure that her son would be the only heir to the Reddman fortune. She called him Kingsley, which was a joke in itself, and before his birth made sure to destroy all possible pretenders to his throne. She put the poison in the broth she cooked her dying sister each morning. She had learned her father’s lessons well and so, when it was time for repentance, she had much to be forgiven for. She pursued repentance as devotedly as she pursued her husband and her son’s inheritance. Conciliation, expiation, redemption: that’s what she was after. How unfortunate for her that the only path to what she sought with such desperation led through me.”

“I had wondered how you got onto the estate.”

“Yes, it was Mrs. Shaw who brought me home to Veritas. My mother had a difficult delivery from which she never recovered. She tried to raise me but had no money and no strength and so she sent me off for adoption. She didn’t know where I was when Mrs. Shaw came looking for me shortly after finding the letters. It took her detectives nine years to find me. My adoptive parents were fine people. It was as happy a home as could be expected, but their fortunes had declined and they couldn’t afford to turn down Mrs. Shaw’s blandishments. So I was brought to Veritas to become her ward, her gardener, her servant. That was how she made it up to me, the stealing of my birthright and the killing of my father; she made me her gardener. She thought she was doing good, and I would have thought so too, I suppose, except she made a singular mistake. She also brought back my mother and put her in that apartment on Rittenhouse Square so that I could visit her and learn the truth of what had been done to me and my family.”

“I thought your mother was beyond the hatred.”

“Maybe once, but not after they killed my father. When we were reunited, God bless her, there was nothing left of the woman who had loved Christian Shaw, there was only the pain in her broken body and the bitterness. She was a wicked little thing and I loved her for it. She was the one who told me exactly how to decorate my half-brother’s room. He would have nothing to do with his mother and so it was left to me to be his friend and companion. I was the one who moved in that wonderful painting of his mother. He didn’t have the strength to say no and so she has stared down at him every day of his life. No wonder he jumped. But that wasn’t all my mother wanted; toying with Kingsley was mere sport. She told me over and over how the Poole fortune was stolen, repeating all the stories her mother had told her. About how Claudius Reddman had doctored the books to steal his fortune. About how he had turned his friend Elisha Poole into a drunkard so his treachery would go unnoticed.”