Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (17 page)

“That was the worst thing,” said Nina, “I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“You didn’t see it; you slept through it.”

“Yes, but I could hear it in my sleep. They just kept talking and talking and talking…”

“Don’t think about it.”

“Why did you make me do that?”

“Me?
 
You’re the one who suggested it!”

“Did not!”

“Did so!”

“What,” asked Nina, feeling somewhat faint and wishing that the hurricane had struck some two hours ago and abolished the building, “can we do now?”

Margot’s response was immediate.

“Let’s go get drunk.”

“Where?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

And so they went to get drunk.

(This meant, invariably, that they would allow themselves two drinks apiece, and that Nina’s would consist mostly of papayas or strawberries or crème de menthe or apple strudel or whatever needed to be added to mask the unpleasant taste of alcohol, while Margot, sipping a martini or
 
a Scotch on the rocks, would make fun of her.)

But the phrase, ‘Let’s go get drunk!’ was such an enjoyable thing to say that it invariably made her wish she’d been a ‘bad’ girl in high school, and had done more than spend innumerable nights studying, so that she could now be a retired English teacher.

They decided to drive out to McGee’s Landing, which was an improbable place on the ‘Bay’ side of the community.
 
It lay on the far side of a great earthen levee which kept the Bayou Fourche out of the town, and it tripled as a slightly disreputable bar nights, an unhealthy restaurant afternoons, and the Center for Swamp Tours!
 
mornings.

It had very little fame except for its drink menus.

It offered a remarkable variety of alcoholic beverages, a fact which delighted the fruit loving Nina and appalled Margot.
       

It was dimly lit now as they entered it, walking beneath a huge stuffed alligator which had been clamped by massive concrete rods to the wall above the door.

They were taken to a table by a window that overlooked the bay.

The water was placid in the moonlight, and lamps glowed on various platforms or fishing huts that dotted the murky, moss laden, swamp surrounding them.

Menus soon sat before them.

“What are you going to drink?” asked Margot.

“Let’s see what they’ve got.”

Margot ordered a gin, which came immediately, along with a small glass of tonic water.

She splashed a drop or so of the tonic water into the gin and then asked Nina:

“So what are you ordering?”

“I’m investigating the menu.”

“I hate it when you do this.”

“Oh, be quiet.”

“You’re the worst person to drink with I’ve ever known.”

 
“Look. I can get a Bacon Old Fashioned, with either Gran Classico or Curacao as an inversion.”

“Nina, do you even know what an inversion is?”

“Of course I do; it’s when you put one of the things over the other. Or I might want a Green Chartreuse. That’s served with either Strega or Branca Menta. And look, they have Dolin Blanc Vermouth.”

“You may need to sit at a different table.”

“There’s also…”

She was interrupted by Margot, who was gazing across the room, at a corner booth.

“Will you look at that.”

“What?”

“There.
 
Over there.”

She forced herself to look up from the menu which, had she been forced to admit it, had in fact begun to sound like dialogue from the film she’d just slept though.

“What?”

“Look who’s here.”

Then she recognized the couple.

The man was Clifton Barrett.

The woman––blonde-haired and radiant and gorgeously attired, with diamonds or something else sparkly hanging around her neck and over her bosom—was Constance Briarworth.

“His first Queen Gertrude,” whispered Nina, in a kind of awe.

She’d seen the woman at the party in the Reddington’s garden.

But that was from a distance.

The effect was much more intense now.

“How nice,” said Margot, “and they seem to be having such a good time.”

They were in fact, Nina realized, sitting on the same side of the booth.

And laughing.

And laughing louder.

She at whatever he was saying.

He at whatever she was saying.

And then they were holding hands.

Then he had cupped his hands behind her neck.

And pulled her head gently toward his.

And kissed her, lightly on the lips,

After which they began laughing again.

“This is an excellent chance,” Margot said, “to get an autograph.”

Nina stared at her.

“What?”

“Oh, I’m an inveterate autograph hunter.”

“Margot, don’t…”

“Do you have a pen?”

“No.
 
NO! Margot…”

“Come on!
 
I’ll get one for you, too!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Come on; bring your drink! I’m sure they’re going to want us to join them. Oh, that’s right; you don’t have a drink yet, do you?
 
Well, no matter, I’ll take mine over.”

“Margot, sit down!”

For Margot was in fact standing up, her gin and tonic in one hand, a menu in the other.

Worse—much worse—Nina was, inexplicably, standing up too, and now following Margot across the room.

She found herself asking mentally how large the restaurant’s floor was, and how long it would take them, given the length of Margot’s storklike strides, to reach Clifton Barrett’s booth.

Not long at all in fact.

As it turned out, they were there now.

With Margot beaming down and saying:

“What an honor!
 
Mr. Barrett?”

Who looked up, half smiled, and said:

“I’m sorry. I don’t believe I’ve…”

“I’m Margot Gavin.
 
Big fan of yours.”

“Well, that’s fine.
 
It’s just that…”

“I wondered if I might have an autograph!”

“I…well, certainly, if you have a …”

“Where’s your wife?”

Silence.

Everyone in the restaurant was looking at them now.

The smile disappeared from Clifton Barrett’s face.

“I think it probably inappropriate to…”

Then Margot threw the drink in his face.

Swoosh.

A small sound.
 
A smattering of ice and liquid.

Which now was oozing from his glasses.

There was a gasp from the people who’d been customers of the restaurant, and now were spectators at the drama.

He breathed very deeply, took off his glasses, and began to dry them with the napkin that had sat in front of him.

Quietly, he said:

“It would be best now if you would…”

Then Margot slapped him three times. WHAP WHAP WHAP,
 
forehanded backhanded and forehanded…

…after which she leaned to within a few inches of his face and hissed:

“You like to hit women?
 
Hit me.”

Silence.

Clifton Barrett’s mouth opened and the tip of his tongue, like a lizard peering out from a cave, showed itself and disappeared.

The restaurant breathed one time—as though it had been
 
transformed into a single creature—then relapsed into silence.

“Hit me.”

More silence.

“Stand up. Stand up and hit me. I’m a woman. You like to hit women,
 
I hear. Okay. Stand up, and hit me. Please. I like to be hit. Show me how much you like to hit women.
 
Right here.”

She pointed to her right cheekbone.

“Right here. You like to hit women. Stand up. Hit me right here.”

Silence.

Clifton Barrett could not stand up, of course, because Margot had effectively trapped him in the booth.

He could only look down at the sodden napkin in front of him.

That, remain silent, and continue to breathe.

“I’ll be outside,” whispered Margot.

Then she wheeled and left.

Nina did nothing.

There was nothing to do.

CHAPTER 10:
 
DOWNTOWN!

The following morning Margot Gavin was taken to court for assault.

Nina learned about it from Moon Rivard, whose squad car pulled up in her driveway at a little after 8, just as she was washing from her skillet the remnants of a small helping of scrambled eggs.

“They asking for you, Ms. Nina.”

“Who is?”

“Just about everybody. Ms. Towler, the District Attorney.
 
Mr. Bennett. I guess he’s gonna be Ms. Gavin’s lawyer.
 
And then there’s the other lawyer.”

“Which other lawyer?”

“The one representing Mr. Barrett. He got in from New York early this morning.”

“All right.
 
Give me a second.”

She put on something or other, not quite certain what to wear to the arraignment of one’s best friend, but remembering her parting words to Margot the previous evening:

“I don’t know what will come of his, Margot. I hope nothing will.”

“Don’t worry about it.
 
What could happen?”

“You can’t go around hitting people and expect not to get in trouble.”

“Actually, my dear, precisely the opposite is true.”

And, so saying, Margot had driven off.

But she had been wrong, of course.

One might go around hitting other people and not get in trouble, but when one began hitting the great Clifton Barrett…

…so now here Nina was, getting into Moon Rivard’s squad car, and wondering what was going to happen, while also noticing with the easy familiarity of a lifelong coast dweller the fact that the pre-storm sky had turned lemon,
 
the sea had changed its texture somehow, and the birds had disappeared.

They pulled out of her driveway.

“Why do they want me down there, Moon?”

“Well.
 
They say you saw it.”

“Yes.
 
I saw it.”

“Mr. Barrett says Ms. Gavin came over to him, asked him for an autograph, threw a drink in his face, and then slapped him three times. What is your version of what really happened?”

“Margot went over to him, asked him for an autograph, threw a drink in his face, and then slapped him three times.”

“All right.
 
Then that means the two versions are pretty close.”

“Pretty.”

A crowd of people had begun to form around city hall.
 
Nina saw the all-purpose beige van belonging to
The Bay St. Lucy Courier,
a young woman she did not recognize who could have been a reporter, and a young man she’d taught when he was in the fourth grade but whose name she’d forgotten because he was such an average student, and who, she was happy to realize, had followed the path set out for completely average people and become a photographer.

“Right through here, ma’am.”

She made her way behind Moon and into the building, noticing as she did so several shiny black automobiles parked almost touching the door.

“Take a right, and then in here. They’re in the courtroom.”

She had rarely been in the courtroom itself, a strange thing for the widow of one of the town’s most respected attorneys to admit, but the place had always made her nervous. She was not absolutely certain why. One possibility was, of course, that Frank was competing here almost every day of his life, and that this staid, immensely high ceilinged chamber with its paintings of dead people and photographs of living ones, was for him little more than a burnished oak boxing ring.

The other possibility was that daily, weekly, monthly, one of several judges whom she’d come to know through the years as party guests or country club bridge partners, sat up there on the ten foot tall ebony chair at the far end of the hall and told people that they had to be put in a cage for the next portion of what had heretofore been their own lives, and now no longer belonged to them.

“Hello, Nina.”

This from Edie Towler the District Attorney.

Edie, tall and unassuming, was dressed in soft shades of gray and walked toward her in soft shades of gray and spoke to her in soft shades of gray.

“Nina, thank you for coming.”

“No problem.”

“We have, as you know, a situation.”

“Yes.”

Behind Edie’s shoulder she saw Margot, who was sitting on one side of the room with Jackson Bennett.

Margot, who was dressed in what appeared to be the flag of Norway, waved cheerfully to her and smiled.

Opposite the aisle sat two more people:
 
Clifton Barrett, wearing a dark blue dress shirt and what was almost certainly the only conservative tie that he—or for that matter the New York Shakespeare Company—possessed.

And his attorney, God.

The man, Nina mused, was probably not God, for that would have been unfair.

But he looked like most people wanted God to look. He wore a charcoal gray suit that no one except God could have afforded and that had almost certainly been custom-tailored
 
because God could not go into stores and buy clothes off the rack.
 
He was God’s height, which meant that he was a little larger and taller and more impressive than all other human beings—who had merely been made in his image—but not so big as to be completely unrecognizable or unapproachable.

And he had superb silver hair.

Nina had always preferred to imagine God as having silver hair.

How could God have, say, red hair?

“Come on down front, Nina,” said Edie Towler.

I don’t want to
, thought Nina.

But she followed anyway.

Edie, somewhat improbably in Nina’s view, pulled what seemed little more than a folding chair up facing the front row of seats, so she was sitting just in front of the accused and the accusers.

She cleared her throat, sat, and made her face into something like a smile.

“Thank you all for coming.”

As though, Nina thought, this was a bridge party.

“We have a difficult matter before us here.”

Nina looked at Margot, who seemed completely at ease, sitting there beside Jackson, who seemed completely ill at ease. Then she looked at Clifton Barrett, who, black eyes glinting like diamonds, looked like a snake, and then she looked at God and remembered where snakes came from in the first place.

This was not good.

Edie was speaking to Margot now.

“As I understand the charge here, Ms. Gavin, it appears that you assaulted Mr. Barrett last night.”

Margot said nothing.

“Did you?”

Margot nodded.

“I did.”

Silence for a time.

Then Edie:

“Why?”

God:

“That isn’t really relevant, is it? The fact is that the assault took place.”

Edie breathed deeply and said:

“Strictly speaking, I see your point. But I do think it might be in the best interest of everyone here, if we could just talk this matter out, so that we can find out what really happened and why.”

“Apparently last night the defendant wasn’t in a talking mood.”

“I know,” said Edie. “It’s just––if we can hear from Margot––”

God nodded and sat back in his chair, so that the universe continued to exist.

“Margot, did you hit him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to.”

“Ms. Towler…”

“I know. Margot, you’re going to have to be more forthcoming than this. If this is true, if you assaulted him…you can be fined, or you can go to jail.”

Don’t try to be funny,
Nina found herself mentally yelling at Margot, all the while remembering their conversation in the car last night on the way home from McGee’s Landing:

“Margot—you hit him!”

“Yes, I did.”

“You can go to jail for that!”

And the answer:

“The worst thing about jail is they don’t let you stay there. Just when you’ve started to make real friends they say you have to leave.”

Don’t say that now, Margot.
 
Don’t say that here.

“I hit him,” said Margot, “because he deserved it.”

“He what?”

“He deserved it.”

“Why did he deserve it?”

“Because he likes to hit women. So I thought I’d give him a chance to hit a woman who hits back.”

God rising now, standing, his full wrath poured out upon the Israelites, who had been just plain stupid to disobey him.

“Ms. Towler this is simply absurd! Apart from the fact that it’s the purest nonsense, it also constitutes slander! My client is one of the best known artists in this country, if not the world!”

“We’re aware of that, Mr. Tomlinson.”

Tomlinson?

It wasn’t God?

If this incredible entity standing in front of her––both hands outstretched, voice rumbling like thunder—was only a human being named ‘Tomlinson,’ then God must really be something!

“This man could be performing on the most prestigious stage in London right now!”

“Yes.”

“His services are in demand all over the world. Literally all over the world.”

“We know.”

“And yet he’s come to spend a month in this small community. Why? Because his wife grew up here. He wants to get to know her community. And, in so doing, he’s offering the town a chance at international publicity. Bay St. Lucy, Ms. Towler, can be on the map for decades to come.
 
Some of the world’s top stars and movie makers may well choose to summer here.”

“That’s all true.”

“And now we have to sit and listen to these slanderous fairy tales about him doing harm to his wife? Putting this story out alone would be grounds for a major lawsuit, even if the assault had not happened.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“But the assault did happen! And something must be done about it! As District Attorney, you are responsible for seeing that something is done about it!”

“Well, that’s what we’re here to straighten out.”

“As far as I can tell, this defendant is not even sorry about what she did!”

“She isn’t a defendant yet, Mr. Tomlinson; she hasn’t been formally charged.”