Deadline (30 page)

I looked at Nardini. ‘I don't have a goddam thing you want,' I said.

Nardini smiled. It was a smile you might imagine at the end of a chic cigarette holder. It was a smile made for tossing aside elegant witticisms; and to conceal ruthlessness.

‘You know the price if you don't produce,' he said.

‘I used to know,' I said. But it was a half-hearted remark.

I'd never really grasped what it was that made the human heart work the way it did, the modulations, the upheavals. I'd dispensed advice and pills in equal measures, but truth had always eluded me. My life had been misguided, my work a fiction.

I took a few steps down the corridor. I was aware of Tod Resick watching me with an expectant look.

Nardini said, ‘So now you don't want to produce, Jerry?'

‘I don't care,' I said.

Resick had a gun. I'd been expecting this. The last examination. The final test. He gave the gun, small and black and lethal, to Nardini.

‘This is what I'll use,' Nardini said.

I said nothing. I wondered if he was serious. I couldn't tell. The inside of my head felt like a bar of rusted iron.

‘This is the gun I'll kill her with,' he said. ‘Look at it.'

I said, ‘I see it.'

‘You want me to use it on her?'

I moved a few steps away from him.

‘She thinks you love her,' I said.

‘I'm not responsible for what people think,' he said.

Sondra appeared in the bedroom doorway. She wore a man's robe, dark-blue terry cloth, bulky. She looked both beautiful and vulnerable. I had a sense of a volatile device ticking under the floorboards, inside a closet, or down in the shadows where the steel supports held the house in mid-air. I imagined an explosion and the whole structure thrown from the cliff's edge.

Nardini studied the gun in his hand.
Use it, don't use it. Heads or tails.
He seemed to be deliberating.

Sondra laughed a nervous laugh. ‘What's with the weapon, Dennis?'

I said, ‘He's wondering if he has to shoot you.'

‘Bullshit,' she said. She looked at Nardini. ‘Put the gun away, Dennis.'

‘I think he's committed to the gun, Sondra,' I said. ‘I think it's part of the master plan.'

Nardini's stare was as hard as a diamond. ‘We can finish this cleanly if you give me the stuff, Jerry,' he said.

‘I say shoot her,' I said. ‘Shoot her.'

Did I mean it? Or had I become so engrossed in the charade that I no longer understood the role I'd been assigned to play – the sucker, the cuckold, a man wrecked and wronged and twisted out of shape?

‘Hey,' Sondra said. ‘Shoot who?'

‘Give me what you've got, Lomax,' Nardini said to me.

‘What if I told you the safe-deposit box was fucking empty?' I said.

‘You'd be lying,' he said.

‘You don't know that.'

‘Your wife said it contained records, important records.'

‘Well, she was wrong,' I said, and I gave the last word a bell-like resonance. ‘She was guessing and she guessed plain fucking wrong.'

Sondra laughed a little derisive laugh, one I'd never heard from her before, one I didn't like. ‘The box had material about Emily Ford in it,' she said. ‘Don't let him tell you anything different, Dennis.'

Nardini stepped towards me. ‘Why do I believe your wife and not you, Jerry?'

‘Because she's a damn good liar.'

Nardini smiled and said, ‘Are you bluffing?' He looked at Resick. ‘Does this man play poker, Tod?'

‘He doesn't have the cards,' Resick said.

‘Maybe, maybe not,' I said. I had a fluttery sensation in my chest.

‘We'll see what he's got,' and Nardini grabbed Sondra and held the gun to her head.

She twisted her face, looked at her lover. ‘Dennis, what is this?'

‘This is how I get what I want,' he said.

I walked away, kept walking.

I heard Sondra say, ‘This is a joke, right? This is, like, some kind of prank, Dennis?'

‘Say goodbye to your wife,' Nardini called out.

‘Goodbye,' I said without looking back.

No turning around.

Keep moving.

‘For God's sake,' Sondra said. ‘Dennis, put the gun away!'

‘It's no joke, Lomax,' Nardini shouted at me.

But I wasn't turning back. I'd be damned if I did.

‘It's no goddam
joke
,' Nardini said again. ‘It was always serious.'

Sondra said, ‘Dennis, get that gun out of my face.'

I kept moving. But slower now.

I heard a metallic click. And then I couldn't go any further.

This was the place where I walked into the boundary of myself. This was where I ran into pity and mercy, the benign sisters of the soul who turned up when I didn't want them. I wanted to be as hard and cruel as everyone else in this house. But I didn't have all that inside me.

Not even now.

I turned to look at Nardini. ‘What you want is outside,' I said.

Resick said, ‘Well, well. The man folded his hand.'

Nardini lowered the gun. He pushed Sondra towards me. She swung round and looked at him, and although she uttered a kind of half-laugh, she was baffled and scared by this turn of events, this new current on which she was swept along. She'd mismanaged her heart. She'd counted on love, but she'd strung the beads all wrong on the devotional abacus. Her valentine card was defaced with ugly graffiti.

We went outside. We descended by the bizarre arrangement of wooden walkways. I heard the hum of the city again. The night was tinted orange-yellow. Nardini and Resick and Sondra walked after me towards the eucalyptus trees. A straggle of four.

You don't have to do this
, I thought.

But I did.

I stopped at the third tree from the house and fumbled around in the half-dark until I found the envelope. I gave it to Nardini. He opened it and took out the cassette.

‘This has everything I want?' he asked.

I nodded.

‘This one small tape has it all?' he said.

‘Yes,' and I looked at the cassette in his hand.

‘I suggest we listen to it,' he said.

‘I've heard it before,' I said.

‘You don't understand, Jerry. I
insist
we listen,' he said, and he smiled. We moved back towards the house, where Nardini opened the door of a scarlet Porsche, and slid into the passenger seat. He turned the key that dangled from the ignition and the panel lights came on. He slotted the tape into the cassette-player.

I didn't want to hear Emily's voice. I didn't want Nardini to hear it either.

I thought:
Nardini's scum. Pure scum. Numb and unfeeling. A cold-hearted monster.
It didn't matter that he'd been my wife's lover, that he'd enjoyed her body, or that he'd created an intimate world with her, one I was barred from. None of it mattered. I was beyond narrow considerations of self and jealousy. I was thrown into another place, a blood-red place where I remembered the hatred I'd felt before, the rush of it, the consuming intensity. I couldn't avoid doing what I did next; I was compelled, gripped by a force outside my experience, and the opportunity was presented to me, everything came together: the sight of the gun in the pocket of Nardini's robe, a moment when it was unguarded and I could reach for it and pluck it out without interference. I projected my hand through space, across the short distance between the attorney and myself, and I pulled the gun from the pocket and I raised it and – just as Emily Ford had done on a hot afternoon in the trailer where Billy Fear lived – I shot Nardini in the head once, twice, I wasn't counting, and he slumped, half-in, half-out of the car, and then I turned the gun on Resick and I shot him in the chest. He was whipped back against the side of the Porsche, and his blood ran down the glass of the window.

I took the cassette from the deck and pocketed it. My hand didn't tremble. I'd never killed before, and yet I felt strangely whole, collected. I wiped the small gun clean in the folds of Nardini's robe. I dropped the weapon at Sondra's feet.

‘What have you done, Jerry? Jesus Christ, what have you
done
?'

She looked at Nardini. She went down on her knees beside the car and cried. Her crying changed in intensity. I stared at her. She and Nardini had given me a child, and then they'd taken it away again. There was no baby, no future of the kind I'd imagined.

They'd vandalized my dreams. They'd crippled me.

‘I was never here,' I said.

She placed a hand under Nardini's head, a gesture so sad and tender I thought I'd break.

I said, ‘You can call the cops and explain all this. It shouldn't be beyond you to come up with something convincing.'

She put her face close to Nardini's, and when she raised her eyes to look at me her forehead and cheeks were colored with his blood.

‘You killed him,' she said.

I began to walk.

I heard her scream after me.

‘You sonofabitch, you killed him!'

When I reached the end of the driveway, I heard a sound from the house. It was like stone struck and cracked by a sledgehammer, or dynamite exploding in the distance, or the faraway backfire of a car, or a gunshot. It was all of these things.

I hesitated. I wondered if Sondra had fired a shot in my direction, wild and desperate and hopeful.

I heard her cry out again, and her voice was animal-like with grief, a keening.
You fucking bastard, Lomax. You miserable, heartless, fucking bastard.

I wasn't listening.

I reached the car and drove through the canyons. A chill lay suddenly on the night air. I shivered and rolled the windows up. I traveled in a dazed state, like a man burning out after days of speed and sleeplessness, crashing through the surface of one reality and into another. I wanted neither.

I parked outside my house and remained in the car for a time, hands on the wheel, mind nowhere. The street had changed. It had become unfamiliar. I didn't like the place. I stepped from the car.

She was standing under a shade tree. She came out of the shadows as I approached.

Saturday, 12.01 a.m.

I put an arm around her shoulder because she looked sad and contrite. ‘Have you been waiting out here long?' I asked.

‘I wasn't keeping track,' she said.

‘I know what you did,' I said.

‘How?'

‘A process of elimination, I guess.'

‘They pressured me, Jerry. As soon as you got that phone call and flew out of the office, they said they'd give my name to Immigration. I was desperate. They backed me into a corner. They said I'd be deported. I didn't want that. I like it here, I enjoy working for you.'

‘Jane, it doesn't matter,' I said. ‘It's OK.'

‘I stole a file, Jerry. That matters to me. I gave it to people who had no right to it. I broke the rules of confidentiality. Trust.'

Oh, Jane
, I thought.
You're not alone.
Trust was powder, ashes blown away and scattered.

I said, ‘Take next week off. Let's cancel all the appointments and close the office.'

‘Is that what you want?'

‘You don't know how much,' I said.

‘Will you go out of town for a while?'

‘Probably.'

She turned her face so that lamplight fell against it. I thought how young she looked in this merciful orange light.

She said, ‘Allardyce – that was more poor judgment on my part.'

‘You like the guy?'

‘Not in a way that suggests we have a future,' she said. ‘I feel sorry for him. He has that kind of face.'

‘Go home, Jane,' I said. ‘It's late.'

She said, ‘You'll be OK?'

‘Sure I will.'

She turned away. I called her back. ‘One thing,' I said. ‘How did you know the floor-safe combination?'

‘Jerry, you entrust me with bills, petty-cash, banking, correspondence, so there's very little I don't know about what goes on inside the office. And very little I don't know about your personal habits and preferences … I figured there was a good chance you'd use the same number for the safe combination as for your bank PIN. Because you're a creature of habit, Jerry. Why remember two sets of numbers when one will do?'

‘Predictable,' I said. ‘Is that what I am?'

She nodded. ‘Much of the time.'

‘Is that good or bad?'

She smiled and moved slightly, and her face passed out of the lamplight and back into shadow. ‘Both,' she said.

12.10 a.m.

I entered the house, switching on lights as I moved. The place was familiar and yet not familiar: a dream environment. Strangers might have lived here – Jerry and Sondra Lomax, married couple, future uncertain. I tried to relate to the everyday things around me: the brown leather sofa, the low-slung coffee table a few yards from the TV, the books stacked on shelves; I wasn't comfortable with any of this stuff. I knew it all, but it had changed in my absence. I looked at the bound journals,
American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychology.
I couldn't remember ever having read them.

And the photographs on the wall above the fireplace – the pictures were unarguably shots of myself and Sondra, but the man looked less like me and more like a distant cousin, someone with a mild family resemblance, someone who lived far away, and every now and then mailed a photograph of himself to me in California.

Sondra, the soul of the house, was gone.

I walked into the bathroom. The floor was still damp from where Consuela had lain. Wet towels lay in a pile. In the tub was a single strand of her hair. I stared at it for a time.

I went into my office. I checked my answering-machine. No messages. I sat at my desk and placed my hands, palms down, on the plain wood surface. I was very still. I thought back to the dream of people falling out of the sky, but it had faded to the point where it was no longer mine; it was distant, it was as far removed as everything else in this house. The doorbell rang; my first thought was Sondra. She'd come home. She wanted a fresh start. She wanted to mend the damage.
We'll talk
, I thought.
We'll talk everything through.
Maybe we could make believe none of this had ever happened. This was California, and dreams came true in the land where nothing was real, didn't they?