Garden of Lies (34 page)

“Well, in a way this whole thing does speak for itself,” he replied. “Sure, most accidents are

due to driver negligence. But do I think
this
was Jorgensen’s fault?” He paused. “No. I don’t.”

He felt better, voicing his suspicions aloud. Even knowing he had no business doing so.

Somehow, he felt he could trust Rose. She had the air of someone who could keep a confidence.

It’s her eyes, he thought. Those great black eyes of hers, they’re full of secrets.

“But you’re not sure.” Rose reached over, straightening one of the piles on his desk. “And if

Quent Jorgensen is telling the truth, that he wasn’t drunk that night, then there might be dozens,

hundreds, of other defective steering columns out there. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“You’d make a good lawyer,” he said and laughed. “Ever thought about law school?”

He could see that he’d hit a nerve, and instantly regretted his idle words. Christ, how could he

have been so thoughtless? Despite the almost excruciating care Rose took with her appearance,

he’d noticed the same two skirts and three or four blouses worn over and over, the same black

shoes carefully resoled each season. Law school? She probably was just scraping by.

[198] A blush had risen in her cheeks, giving her dark olive complexion a burnt sienna glow

that reminded him somehow of the Tuscany hills where he’d once been stationed during the war.

She covered it with a quick laugh. “Who would baby-sit Mrs. Von Hoesling’s Chihuahua then?”

Max chuckled, remembering how Mrs. Von Hoesling had tottered in the other day to discuss

her late husband’s will. In the outer office, she simply had handed over to Rose her snarling

Chihuahua, as if it had been a coat or a hat. And Rose, to his eternal gratitude, had taken it

without comment, her expression carefully blank, simply popping it into a file drawer in her desk

along with half a Danish as soon as the old lady’s back was turned.

“You have a point,” he said.

“If you had some way of knowing for sure about that steering column, would it really make

things easier?” she asked, bending over to gather a few balled-up papers that had missed the

wastebasket. He noticed how she dipped at the knees, swiveling to one side so that her hemline

barely lifted in back. The nuns had taught her good.

He rubbed his chin, scratchy with five o’clock shadow. “No, not necessarily. I can hardly

afford to tell our biggest client I think they’re liars, can I? Anyway, it’s not my job. And maybe

all this righteousness I’m feeling is just plain ego in disguise. ... I like having all the cards on the

table, good and bad, not stumbling around in the dark. The way it stands, if what I suspect is true,

and if Jorgensen’s lawyer should throw me any curve balls in court ... well, without all the facts, I

could wind up looking like the king of idiots.”

“But on the other hand,” Rose quietly pointed out, “if your suspicions were to prove

unfounded, then wouldn’t you feel a whole lot better? At least you wouldn’t have to worry about

some other poor shmuck ending up in a wheelchair, or maybe worse.”

“You have a crystal ball handy?” he asked and smiled.

“No. Something a lot simpler.” She straightened, fixing those remarkable eyes on him. Eyes

both still and bottomless, only a flash here, a glint there, of the emotions that swam in some deep

dark part of her.

“What’s that?”

“The car. Why don’t you take one out on the road? See for yourself.”

[199] He grinned. “I wish it were that easy. This glitch ... whether it’s real or I’m imagining

it ... it couldn’t possibly be in every steering column, or Pace would be deluged with lawsuits by

now. I suspect that’s why they’re not being a hundred percent straight with me. They probably

don’t even want to admit it to
themselves.
The defect might exist only in every hundred Cyclones,

or every thousand. And even then, not something that would manifest itself—I’m guessing at this

—except possibly at very high speeds, and only under certain driving conditions.”

“Who knows,” Rose said, “you might get lucky.” She wasn’t smiling. Goddamn, she was

serious.
What kind of a woman was this, anyway?

Max felt something inside him lift, grow buoyant for a moment. Hell, maybe she was right.

Maybe it was worth a try, even if it was a long shot. He said thoughtfully, “There’s a Pace

dealership not far from here. I know the manager.”

“You could say you wanted to buy one,” she put in, “take it for a test drive.”

Max stood up, pushing away from his desk, feeling better than he had in weeks, and strangely

excited.

“You’re on,” he said, grinning like an idiot. “Yes, you. It was your idea, remember? Get your

coat, and let’s do it.”

They braked through the last toll booth on the Sawmill and then finally hit the Thruway. When

they crossed the Tappan Zee, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and was now just a mellow

Cointreau glow flashing in and out of the dense poplars that lined the berm on either side of the

six-lane highway.

Max couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this jacked-up, like a teenager, high on the new-

car smell of virgin vinyl, stirred by the road unrolling before him.

He looked over at Rose in the driver’s seat, her concentration square on the road, both hands

gripping the crimson wheel, which matched the fire-engine-red exterior, one long bronze leg

stretched to the pedal like a taut steel cable. Then he looked at the red needle of the speedometer,

at seventy now.

She had insisted on driving. No, insisted was wrong. In the dealership lot, she simply had slid

into the low bucket seat behind [200] the steering wheel, looked up at him with the eager smile of

a little kid straddling her first tricycle, and said, “You don’t mind, do you? I’ve always wondered

what it would be like to drive one of these things.”

And drive she had, cautiously and a little nervously at first, then with increasing confidence.

They had not spoken a word in half an hour, there was no need really. It felt oddly

companionable. In fact, Max had almost forgotten their real purpose in doing this.

“I think I’ve just broken the B and B barrier,” Rose said finally, flicking him a sidelong glance,

her full lips curved in a smile. It was unusually warm for April, and Max caught the faint,

strangely seductive smell of her perspiration riding the air current that streamed in her open

window.

“B and B?”

“Short for Brooklyn-Bronx. They say if you’re born in either of those boroughs you never

really leave. You never go any farther than the subway can take you. Even the Long Island

Railroad—the way a lot of people in my neighborhood talk, you’d think it was the Orient

Express.”

Max smiled. “And what about you?”

A green and white sign reading NEW PALTZ 38 MI. flashed by on the right. They had climbed

a low rise, and forests graying with the dusk spread out before them.

“I’ve been making believe this is my car—forget about possible defects for now—and I’m on

my way to ... wait a minute, one second ... oh, I know ... to this fabulous resort in the Catskills.

I’m a famous actress, and sinfully rich, and ... and I’m meeting my secret lover there for a

weekend of mad frivolity. I picked that expression up from a book, mad frivolity. It sounds like

something Clark Gable and Carole Lombard would do, doesn’t it?”

“You’re right, it does. You like old movies?”

She glanced into the rearview mirror, then zipped left into the fast lane, passing a blue Buick

and a yellow Opel Kadet, the last rays of the setting sun skating sideways across the sleek red

hood. The speedometer jumped over the eighty hash mark. Just ahead lay a straight patch with no

exit ramp in sight and, miraculously, no traffic.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “People will think I’m weird, but [201] the truth is, I don’t much

like anything that was made after 1940. Remember the old Shirley Temple movies—she danced

with Bill Robinson in every one. And Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald
in Naughty

Marietta.
I even cried at the end of
Now, Voyager.
You know, when Bette Davis says, ‘Don’t

let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.’ Or was it the other way around?”

Max looked at her, amused and a little surprised. This was the most she’d said all in one breath

since she’d first come to work for him, two years ago. It seemed they’d both fallen under this

sportscar’s spell.

“I don’t remember,” he said and laughed. “Just the two cigarettes. Paul kept lighting up for him

and Bette in nearly every scene. I suppose the Hays office thought lung cancer was preferable to

passionate kissing.”

“Spoken like a cynic. You’ve just given yourself away, you know. I’m like that too. I tend to

dwell on—am I going too fast for you? You look a little green.”

“No,” he lied. He
was
beginning to feel pretty soggy in the armpits. Jesus. They were really

moving. And how experienced a driver was she, anyhow?

A picture flashed across his mind of Quent Jorgensen. In an exhibit he had prepared for the

trial, Jorgensen’s lawyer had cleverly juxtaposed a photo of his client in midair clearing a hurdle

at the Olympics with a later shot of the now-crippled man slumped in his wheelchair. While Max

had every reason to expect the judge would keep the photo from the jury, he nevertheless found

himself hoping fervently that the alcohol found in his bloodstream after the accident meant that

he
had been out of control.

She glanced at the speedometer. “I suppose this is what you’d call
malum prohibitum.
”

“Breaking the law without evil intent,” Max interpreted. “Yes, I think speeding would fall

under that heading. That’s if you get pulled over. Under different circumstances, a doctor might

have another term for it.”

“What’s that?”

“D.O.A. Look, maybe you had better slow down a bit. And what’s with the legalese anyway?”

“I have a confession to make. I’ve been taking home a few of [202] your law books.” She

glanced over at him, as if expecting him to be angry. “Only one at a time, and I always bring

them back. I’m very careful. Honest.”

She was blushing again. So he had been right about her having more than a passing interest in

law. “I don’t mind. But you may be opening a Pandora’s box. Is that really what you want?”

“I don’t know what I want,” she said. Her eyes clouded over. “I used to think ... oh, never

mind, I’ve probably said too much as it is.”

“No. Please. I ...” He couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound like a line from a bad movie,

so he ended lamely with “Maybe I can help.”

She bit her lip, as if to keep from crying. “No, I don’t think so. It’s ... sort of personal.”

“As in ‘boyfriend’?”

The burnt-sienna flush in her cheeks deepened, and Max felt a prick of jealousy which was

completely unreasonable.
Right again. You’re a regular two-gun Sam, old boy.

“He’s in the army. In Vietnam for almost four months. Three months and twenty-one days. I ...

we, that is ... plan to get married when he gets home. But the thing is ... .” Her voice rose on a

sharp tinny note, then cracked. “Oh God, I knew this would happen, I always cry when I talk

about him. ...” She brushed angrily at her eyes with the heel of her left hand. “You see, I haven’t

heard from him in a while. Three months, to be exact. Only one letter ...” She sounded as if she

might start to cry again.

“You really love him, don’t you?” Dumb question. That much was obvious. And what of it?

Just because he didn’t exactly have the market cornered on marital bliss didn’t mean it was a lost

cause for everyone else.

She nodded, not taking her eyes from the road. There was a hurt, angry look in them now, and

a new pinched hardness to her mouth. He saw the muscles in her calf tense as her foot eased

imperceptibly downward on the gas pedal. The roar of the engine turned to a high-pitched whine

reminiscent of a jet airliner taxiing out for takeoff.

Then she said: “I would die without him. I know that’s an expression they use a lot in movies.

But I mean it. Literally. Did you ever love anyone that much?”

[203] Max thought of Bernice. No. Even when they were first married he couldn’t honestly say

he had loved her enough to die for her.

He stared at this dark windblown young woman by his side. That deep and secret intensity he

had sensed on other occasions now stood revealed to him, like a deer frozen on the edge of a

clearing, and he was afraid that if he made any sudden moves, or spoke too quickly, it would be

gone.

And then something happened. He could see somehow through the ruby-dark prism she held

up to him. Suddenly he
could
imagine what it might be like to love a woman enough to die for

her.

Max found himself envying this man, whoever he was.

“I feel that way about my daughter,” he said. “When we first brought her home from the

hospital, I remember standing over her crib thinking for the first time, yes, a reasonable man

could commit murder. If anyone ever tried to hurt Mandy, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him.”

“She’s lucky she has you.” Rose was silent a moment; there was just the high whine of the