Murder in the Wings (14 page)

I nodded, understanding, and set off for the street. Another car had come along. In its headlights I could see Lockhart clearly. He reminded me of a dead dog in the road. You want to look away but something terrible in you—something that recognizes your own eventual death—holds your eyes there. I thought of how I'd stepped on his hand, the pain I'd given him, and the wild sad look of him then. I felt like shit. I bent and took his pulse. I looked up into the broad face of a sixtyish black man in a plastic raincoat and shook my
head. Behind him more headlights appeared. I was surprised to see that it was the pink pimpmobile. A swarthy white man got out. He wore a tatty gray three-piece suit, a very white shirt, and a very red tie. He had a business card held out. The black man looked at me and shrugged. Which one of us was supposed to take the card, and why?

"I didn't see him, mon," the swarthy man said in a Jamaican
 
accent. "I did'na see him." He was so bombed the black man had to help him back to his car. I found Lockhart's wallet in his coat and put it in my pocket. I went back to Donna and said, "We need to get out of here. Fast."

On the way to the car, she said, "God, look at your hands." I held them out in the dim streetlight. They were covered with Lockhart's blood.

T
he huge church looked like a fortress put up against the night itself. Lightning cracked the sky as we ran up the broad stone steps through the brutal and relentless rain.

Inside there were huge shadows thrown by the votive candles of blue and green and yellow and red, and incense that smelled holy and exotic at the same time. Statues of the inscrutable Virgin and the weary Joseph looked down on us as we moved up the wide center aisle, past the empty pews and the Stations of the Cross carved in stone. Where Jesus crumpled beneath the cross He carried, Donna shook her head and said, "I really should start going to mass again, Dwyer."

At the east side of the long communion rail, a squat man in a dark coat knelt, head bowed. Donna and I
looked at each other. Wade? I went up close enough to get a look. The man, curious as I was, glanced up at me. He had a pugged Irish face whose shape was lost somewhat in bulldog jowls. He appeared to be a spry seventy. "Are you Mr. Dwyer?"

I nodded. For the first time I realized that he was wearing a priest's collar.

"Then you'll be wanting the sacristy," he said in the middle of my old neighborhood.

Donna came up next to me.

He looked at us both and smiled briefly. "It's all right. He's waiting for you." He indicated the sacristy with a thick hand. "But you, Mr. Dwyer, would you mind returning to speak to me?"

"Not at all, Father."

"Good, then. Go. He needs to see you. Badly, I'm afraid."

"Thank you, Father."

"Yes," Donna, sounding young, said, "thank you, Father." We went up the steps leading to the altar. "What a neat old priest," Donna whispered. "I really do have to start going to mass again, Dwyer. Really. Will you go with me?"

"Sure," I said.

She squeezed my hand.

The sacristy, which was where priests prepared themselves for mass, was in more deep candle shadows when we reached it. I looked in. The long, wide room smelled of communion wine and rain from an open window at the opposite end. It smelled of cold air, too. We went in and found a man sitting in a big chair, which probably belonged to the monsignor. He had black hair and a beard and wore a flowered shirt and a double-breasted sport jacket, both of which were at
least ten years out of date. In the candle gloom, his white plastic shoes were a dirty joke. A pint of whiskey lay at a casual angle in his left hand.

Donna gripped my arm. She wasn't sure and I wasn't sure either, and it was damned eerie, looking at him and not being sure.

"Stephen?" I said.

He said, "Thanks for coming. Christ almighty, I really appreciate it."

"Oh, Stephen," Donna said and went to him. She hugged him tight. He hugged her back. In the light I could see that as he hugged her he clung tight and kept his eyes closed.

When they parted, Donna came back to stand by me. I said, "You need food or anything?"

He shook his head. "Father Ryan took care of me. Isn't he a sweet old bastard?"

"He sure is," I said.

"Gosh, Stephen, you shouldn't call him a bastard," Donna said.

He laughed. "I guess you're right, kid. Strike 'bastard.' Let's say he's a sweet old guy."

"There," she laughed back, "that's much better."

"This was my parish when I was a boy. He gave me my first communion."

"They're looking for you everywhere," I said.

"Don't I know it. A couple of times on the street, I figured they came pretty close to nabbing me. One traffic cop took a long, hard look at me, let me tell you."

"I've got to be honest, Stephen."

"What's that?"

"I'm a little surprised you're still on the sauce."

"It's my only comfort, m'boy."

"Bullshit."

"Dwyer," Donna said. "C'mon. Gosh. He's our friend."

I didn't know why I was angry, exactly, but I was. I reached out and waggled my fingers at the bottle. He started to hand me the bottle and then took it back. He killed what was left in a single, noisy, vulgar gulp. Then he handed me the bottle.

"Cute," I said.

"Don't go sanctimonious on me, Dwyer. It doesn't become you, believe me."

Donna stepped between us. "God, you two, come on."

I took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Stephen."

He stood up and came over to me and we kind of half-embraced and slapped each other several times on the back.

"You all right?" I said.

"Pretty fucked up, actually." He looked up at the ceiling. "It feels kind of weird to swear in a place like this."

"Yeah."

"I saw a newscast tonight. I don't think the cops are even considering anybody else for the murder."

"I'm afraid that's true."

He looked at me. He didn't look like Stephen Wade at all. "I didn't kill him."

"I know."

"God, Dwyer, thanks for saying that. I mean, after I slept off the drunk, I reconstructed the night. I really didn't kill him."

"Yeah," I said. "Now all we've got to do is prove it."

He laughed. He didn't sound happy. "So are you developing any leads?"

"Maybe too many." I described our day—our visit to the halfway house where Lockhart was missing, the cabin where we saw Evelyn Ashton and Keech and then Anne Stewart and her husband and where we found the old playbills, and the letterhead from Mrs. Bridges in Reeves's apartment.

His first response was, "Oh, yeah, the cabin. That's quite a place."

"You've been out there?"

"Sure. Many times. If Donna wasn't here I'd tell you about all the women I took out there."

"I'll plug my ears," she said.

"When did all this happen?" I asked.

He leaned back against a counter where crystal wine cruets shone like silver in the slow, silent flashes of lightning. "The old days. Back when David Ashton and Sylvia Bridges and I were sort of like the Three Musketeers."

"Back in your twenties?"

"Very early twenties. Hell, Dwyer, you forget that I was on Broadway when I was twenty-four." Even in these circumstances, he couldn't quite let go of his ego. Maybe that was why I liked him so much. He was a bit of an asshole, but he pulled it off with great style. Most of us don't pull it off at all.

"Did you know a Dr. Kern?"

"Ah, yes. The great doctor. Actually, we tried to cast him as a bad guy, but on balance he was probably pretty decent. He took great care of Sylvia during all her problems."

"What problems?"

"Well, as I think you know, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic very early on. You know how her mother is —I think she always blamed Sylvia herself for not having a strong enough constitution to overcome her problems. Mrs. Bridges isn't one of my favorite people. Anyway, when Sylvia and her mother had the falling out over David, Dr. Kern stepped in and really took control of Sylvia's life. He asked Mrs. Bridges for
permission to keep Sylvia out at the cabin, and asked
that the entire Bridges family stay away. This went on for three or four months, I guess, and finally Sylvia came around. She'd been hanging right on the edge, believe me. Right on the edge." He looked at his empty hand. He obviously wished that there were something liquid in it.

"You mentioned a falling out over David. What was that all about?"

He snorted. "Mrs. Bridges always wanted Sylvia to fall in love with me. You know, Sylvia's a very good
actress, and when she was involved in a play, she man
aged to keep her head screwed on relatively straight. So Mrs. Bridges encouraged her to be in plays and to
spend time with me, because, frankly, I was always a much better actor than David. He was better looking, but the poor guy just never had much talent, I'm afraid."

"But Sylvia fell in love with David?"

He nodded. "More than fell in love with him—she almost adopted him. Almost. David had a terrible back
ground. Grew up with a drunken uncle, was on the
streets when he was fourteen. There was always a waif side to him, and a sad side, too. I suppose that's what

Sylvia loved about him so much. She saw some of herself in him. Things might have been different for them if they hadn't had to get married."

"That's what set Mrs. Bridges off?"

"Yes. She's an arch-conservative, and this was back in
the early sixties. She saw it all as nothing more than a way for David to wile his way into the family riches."

"He seems to have done very well for the theater."

"Of course he has. He's made it into a first-rate regional theater. But you'll never catch that old bitch admitting it."

"So you don't think he got her pregnant on purpose?"

"What if he did? He's been a good husband, believe me. He took damn good care of her after the affair at the cabin that night."

"What affair?"

"One of Kern's assistants—she didn't like him. You know how you just inexplicably don't care for some people? Well, it was like that with her and this fellow. And one night, when David was on one of his road tours, she got very incensed with the assistant and stabbed him."

"Stabbed him?" The image of Michael Reeves came immediately to mind. So did Sylvia's mysterious visit to him on the night of his death.

"Uh-huh."

"Did he die?"

"No. She just grazed him in the arm. The family paid him a great deal of money. No charges were ever pressed. I should have stopped it, but I was out in the living room—" He paused. "I was getting drunk."

"You were there that night?"

"It was a weekend. They have several guest rooms. Sometimes when David was on the road, Dr. Kern would call and ask me if I'd stay over. He always said it was good for her spirits. So I'd come out. Hell, man, I cared a great deal for Sylvia and, face it, I didn't mind spending my time in surroundings as posh as those.
My old man worked in a foundry, pal. That was the lap of luxury."

I took the playbills from my coat and handed them to him. He took them over to the candelabra and held them up to the light. A smile brightened his face. Even with his disguise you could suddenly see that he was Stephen Wade. He looked much younger.

The first playbill he waved at me showed the three of them together. "We were really brats back then. Even Sylvia. Really filled with ourselves. Did you ever see the Truffaut film
Jules and Jim?
You
know, the two men who love the same woman? We saw that and took it deadly seriously. We were inseparable after it—the film gave us permission, I guess." He shook his head. "Then David started going on the road." He held up the other playbill. "It sure didn't do Sylvia any good. Hell, it didn't do him any good, either."

"Where did he go on the road?"

He shrugged. "Oh, those were the days when packaged tours were still big, when a fading movie star could get lot of money to put a musical together and play the smaller markets. They were a real grind, and I never knew anybody who really got anywhere doing them. But David wanted to be a successful actor more desperately than anybody I've ever known. So he'd go on these long tours and Sylvia would come apart. I'll give him one thing, though. He changed after Evelyn was born. He's been a hell of a good father to her. He gave up his acting ambitions and has been a damn good husband and a damn good father." He handed me back the playbills. "That's a lot of years ago." There was awe in his voice. Contemplating time does that to us
.

"I need you to think about something. Hard."

"What?"

"Sylvia."

"What about her?"

"Can you remember her ever getting violent again?"

He stared at me through the flickering shadows. "God, are you trying to say you think Sylvia stabbed Reeves?"