Deadline (31 page)

It was Emily Ford who stood on the doorstep. She stepped inside. She followed me into the living-room. I told her the bare bones of what had happened. I skipped the flesh of details. She listened without expression.

She said, ‘So Nardini's dead.'

‘Yes.'

She sighed. I couldn't interpret the sound. Relief? A tiny passing touch of regret? No, she had nothing to regret. Nardini had been her enemy.

I took off my jacket. It smelled of gasoline fumes and dirt. I slung it across the back of a chair.

She said, ‘And Sondra, what about –'

‘No, don't ask,' I said. ‘I don't want to talk about her.'

I felt loss. It was all around me. It would linger in this house a long time.

Restless, I walked into the dining-room. The plates from the dinner we'd shared just before Sondra had announced her ‘pregnancy' were still on the table. Consuela had been interrupted before she'd had time to clean up. The dead candles in their holders were leftovers from an old dinner-party in another era.

I want to be a good mother, Jerry. I want that so badly.

Yes, Sondra. You wanted that. Once upon a time.

I remembered how she'd spoken in her sleep.

My love.

I hadn't been the love she'd addressed in her dream.

I entered my office and sat at my desk.

I gazed at a photograph of Sondra. The light from the lamp glossed the glass and hid her features. She looked innocent, without guile, a lovely young woman of the kind you sometimes see when you're flicking the pages of an old high-school year book and you come across The One Most Likely To Succeed, and you wonder what happened to this promising girl; whether her beauty had taken her anywhere, bit parts in low-budget movies, say, or a repertory theater in a provincial city, or whether she'd been wrecked by the erosions of time, withered by marriage and childhood and bored out of her beauty by barbecues and cocktail parties, and now she was bitter and dried out by life in some dusty place like Amarillo or Las Cruces.

I turned the photograph face down. I didn't want to look at Sondra. It was an immature action, but I wasn't interested in behaving like an adult.

I smelled something burning.

I walked along the corridor to the kitchen. Emily was standing at the counter with a big ashtray in front of her: magnetic tape, which she'd unraveled from its container, burned. It didn't burn easily. It shriveled and twisted, like an organic thing resisting death; it threw up small flames that flickered briefly before they went out. She had to keep applying matches to the pyre.

‘What are you doing?' I asked.

‘Burning a tape I took from your jacket,' she said.

‘You didn't have the right –'

‘Why not? It's as much mine as it is yours, Jerry.'

I didn't like the idea of a small larceny, Emily rummaging through my jacket. I said, ‘That cassette was my property. You didn't have the right to destroy it without my permission.'

‘Did you have the right to record it without mine?' she asked.

I didn't feel like arguing. I had no energy left. She poked the smoldering tape with a fingertip and a small blue-yellow flame rose from the ashtray.

‘This is for the best,' she said. ‘Nothing goes back to normal after all this, does it?'

I agreed. Everything was different now. The whole world had changed. I couldn't see a future. Whatever half-drawn map had guided my life in the past was no longer a reliable document.

I watched Emily. She was enchanted by flame. She stuck the end of a cheap ballpoint pen into the tangle of scorched tape, provoked a few more licks of fire, then drew the pen back. She was miles away. I understood she wanted to be thorough. I thought of an alchemist inclined over an alembic, waiting patiently for the results of a distillation.

She was burning her history. Erasing her past. I wondered if she was thinking of Billy Fear as the tape smoldered. If she was remembering details now. Maybe it had come back to her in bits and pieces: the gun, the way she'd shot Billy in the face, the thick heat in the trailer, the roar of flies.

I looked at the dry bloodstains on my fingers. I went to the bathroom, washed my hands; pink liquid flowed towards the drain. I splashed water on my face, buried my head in a towel. I felt unplugged from myself. The events of the long day had depleted me. I was fading around the margins. I didn't look at my reflection in the mirror.

I heard Emily Ford's voice in the kitchen and I wondered whom she was talking to; my first thought was that she was conversing with herself. Then I realized she was speaking on the telephone.

I walked to the kitchen doorway.

‘I hope I didn't wake you,' she was saying.

Whoever was on the other end of the line said something to make her laugh.

She said, ‘The city that's too paranoid to sleep. I like that.' She noticed me, smiled absently, almost as if I were a passing waiter, a lackey.

She didn't break stride in her conversation. ‘Mort, that pair of dufuses you sent out here. Carrie somebody and Brunton. I have to tell you, they don't project a whole lot of warmth and human understanding …'

Mort Wengler, White House Chief of Staff, Emily's man on the inside. I felt cold. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck shivered as if touched by a passing breeze that had blown from a frozen place a long way off.

I watched Emily. I heard the confidence in her voice. She was self-assured, cheerful, a lift in her voice. ‘You've already heard about the psychiatric treatment? Don't tell me that pissant stuff worries you. God, that was run of the mill, your basic depression. After the tragic murder of my parents, I owed my central nervous system some downtime. Right? Am I right? Don't tell me you haven't had to ingest a Valium now and then?'

I sank deeper into cold.

She'd burned the tape and she'd risen from the ashes reborn. Instead of recognizing the crime in her past and adjusting her world accordingly, instead of sitting in some quiet, cloistered place to analyze her past actions and figure out how they might relate to her future, she'd denied her history. It was something that had never happened, an hallucination, or a bad dream.

A man dies in a trailer-park, and it doesn't matter.

Had she intended this from the beginning? Had this been her aim all along – that she'd get her hands on the evidence somehow and she'd destroy it and she'd be liberated from her past?

No. She hadn't known about the cassette. She'd seized a chance, that was all. She'd jumped on it. She'd played the cards the way they'd fallen, and they'd fallen beautifully for her.

I thought of the tape in Nardini's hand. I fixed on that moment when he'd slid inside his car and reached for the slot of the cassette-player, and how I'd seized the gun from the pocket of his robe and shot him.

I thought:
You protected Emily Ford one time too many.

‘Maybe I'll fly up tomorrow,' Emily said to Mort Wengler. ‘I mean, if that's what you want, Mort …' She glanced at me, but again she wasn't really seeing me. ‘Yeah, OK. We'll talk through some stuff. Clarify anything that's troubling you. Fine, fine.'

She puckered her lips, made a kissy sound, then she put the handset down. I went out on the deck and looked at the city. I felt an unbearable sadness. I imagined lives behind the lit windows of other houses, broken loves and great tragedies; joys too, but even the joys made me sad.

A strong breeze blew out of the darkness and rattled shrubbery. I shut my eyes and remembered the sound I'd heard outside Resick's place – that crack and how it split the air. And I thought of Sondra and how she'd shouted,
You sonofabitch, you killed him!

Emily came out on the deck and placed her hands on my shoulders. She rubbed my muscles lightly. ‘You're tense,' she said.

I felt padlocked, stiff.

‘Somehow Mort's already got a copy of your original file,' she said. She sounded up, buoyant, someone with a life to look forward to. ‘He wouldn't say who sent it to him.'

I didn't speak. I listened to her voice and I thought about the woman who'd thrown a cassette-player and scores of CDs around a room, who'd lost control of herself. And I thought:
She's two people. Emily Ford isn't just one person.

‘I'll fly up to Washington and I'll sit down with him and we'll go through the whole damn file together,' she said. ‘I don't imagine there's anything in it I can't explain, is there?'

I made no answer.

‘Well? Is there anything, uh,
completely
detrimental in the file?' she asked. ‘I know we discussed this before, but I want to be sure I can defend myself if anything
awkward
comes up.'

I still said nothing.

‘Cat got your tongue, Jerry?' she asked. ‘Moody old silence descended on you? Ah, you're angry with me, right?'

‘I'm not angry,' I told her. But I thought:
I've failed her. I haven't fixed her. She isn't complete. She isn't mended. She's broken in two halves. Erratic, volatile here; zealously ambitious there. You flopped on the job, Lomax. You screwed up. You failed to glue Emily Ford back together again.
She belonged in a psychiatric unit, not in high political office.

‘Did you
honestly
think I'd let this opening pass, Jerry?' she asked. ‘Did you expect me just to walk the hell away from my dream, and blow Washington off? Did you really think obscurity would be enough for me?'

‘With the benefit of hindsight, no. You're an opportunist. Among other things.'

‘Which are?'

‘You're manipulative. Self-centered. Driven. Devious.'

‘Some people might regard those as compliments,' she said.

I gazed back across the lights. The city sparkled. I felt fatigue eat through me like a tapeworm, growing stronger the more it devoured me. I thought of Sondra down there somewhere in the chasms of the night. I thought of her grief.

Emily continued to massage my shoulders. ‘You didn't imagine I'd fade away into the distance, did you? A door opened unexpectedly for me. I heard the fucking
hinge
squeak and it jolted me awake, believe me. You had the tape and Nardini was dead and God was up there saying,
Go for it, Em baby, go for it, this is your moment, and it's not coming your way again.
So I just kicked the door wide open. I just battered it down and stepped into the room and suddenly, wham, I'm back on track again. I'm rolling, dearheart. I'm traveling. Burning up the miles. I'm
this
close to getting what I want. Who was the fool who said there were no second acts in American life? Boy, was he wrong.'

I couldn't take her touch any more. I didn't want to feel her fingers work my muscles. I said, ‘You murdered a man. You shot a man in cold blood, Emily.'

‘Talk to me about killing somebody in cold blood, Jerry.'

‘What I did was different,' I said.

‘How? Explain.'

Where to begin. I wasn't sure there was a starting-point. Or if there was, I couldn't find it at the moment.

She said, ‘Was it justice you were after? Was that why you killed Nardini? Or was it something way less admirable, Jerry, like rage and jealousy and hurt? Were you just responding like a common garden cuckold?'

I felt a weird shifting of balances.

She'd killed for retribution.

And I'd killed for – what? What had I
really
murdered Nardini for? Hatred because he'd bent my world out of shape? Because my wife loved him and not me? Because she'd entered into an abhorrent pact with him and I'd been used and discarded and had no further role to play in her life?

Or was it for the protection of a former patient who certainly didn't merit it?

A single motive, or a tangled skein of them: which? I wondered if I could ever free one string from another, if I was destined to spend the rest of my life trying to cut through this fibrous knot of mystery.

I looked for honor in what I'd done.

I found none.

Emily dropped her hands to her side and said, ‘Tell me I'm a terrible human being, Jerry. Tell me I'm unfit for high office.'

My voice was quiet. I spoke with no real conviction. ‘Unfit. Unstable. You'll crack under pressure. You'll snap and go off the rails.'

‘Unfit and unstable never stopped people in the past from holding high office,' she said. She smiled at me. ‘Prove I'm a killer, Jerry. You know you can't. Even if you wanted to. And I'm not sure you do.'

I said, ‘I should have let Nardini have the tape.'

‘But you didn't,' she said.

‘I should have let him keep it. Then he'd have had power over you. And he'd have known how to use it. My problem is, I don't know what to do with that kind of power.'

She said, ‘You'll get over it. I'll think of you when I'm in Washington.' She chucked me very lightly under the chin. I resented the gesture, the mock playfulness of it. It meant: Take it on the jaw, Jerry. It's not the first mistake you ever made. Is it,
dearheart?

I looked into her eyes, which were as hard and brilliant and baffling as the city itself. I smelled the faint chemical scent of burnt tape drift from the house and out across the night, and I wondered if a second act might be possible in my life, too.

Or when.

Or if this was as far as I was destined to travel, a lonely man on a high redwood deck overlooking a crazy, teeming Californian city whose inhabitants were sick and needed me, a qualified psychiatrist, to guide them back to mental health.

God help them.

‘Well?' she asked. ‘Truce?'

‘Why not,' I said.

And then the thought came to me from nowhere, and I was surprised by the ease with which I considered it: I wondered how much effort it would take to push her with enough force to snap the handrail, so that she'd fall from the deck and go on falling until she lay shattered on the sidewalk.