The Rothman Scandal (75 page)

38

Lucille Withers sat at the table under the gazebo on Alex Rothman's terrace with her tableau of playing cards spread out in front of her, playing her favorite game of solitaire. Under her long and nimble fingers, order established itself, precedence and sequence, and the little symbols became integrated, correlated. The black seven on the red eight, then both of these on the black nine; aces went to the top of the board, but spaces were more important than aces, and queens were always bad news. Her hands moved back and forth quickly, as though across a keyboard, and the pattern grew.

She had come to New York as a chaperone for her young model named Melissa. She didn't usually perform this sort of service, but Melissa's mother had insisted and, after all, the girl was only sixteen and had never been to the big, wicked city before. It was an unusual assignment. They were going to try to make a hive of honeybees swarm in Melissa's long, blonde hair, and Alex, Melissa, the photographer and his crew, and Bob Shaw, Alex's art director, were all out at a beekeeper's farm on Long Island doing the shoot right now. Understandably, both Melissa and her mother had been apprehensive, but Alex had taken out extra insurance in case of any accident, and both a doctor and a nurse would be standing by. This shoot would be costing
Mode
a lot of money, and Lucille Withers was quite certain that Herbert Rothman knew nothing about it. Still, it would be interesting to see what came out of it.

On the long bus ride from Kansas City—at today's prices, Lulu Withers refused to fly—she had decided that Melissa's rear end wasn't all that bad. Perhaps the girl had begun to lose a little baby fat in that area. But anyway, this was to be essentially a head shot, as Lulu understood it. And the fact that there had been no telephone call from Long Island indicated either that the shoot was going smoothly, or that nothing at all was happening, that the bees had not yet decided to swarm. The black ten covered the red jack, and the two of spades covered the ace, leaving a space for the king.…

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alex's son step through the glass doors of the apartment and come out onto the terrace. He was wearing white pajamas and a blue terry cloth robe. She thought nothing of this, except that the boy should really be dressed by now; it was nearly noon. She continued to build the pattern with her cards.

He had not seen her, and he walked to the edge of the terrace and leaned across the wide stone parapet, looking down, and Lucille Withers had her first faint
frisson
of alarm. Now she watched as he hoisted himself up to the ledge of the parapet, sat straddling the parapet for a moment, then stood to his full height on the ledge. He was a tall young man, easily six feet, and the breeze blew the skirts of his blue bathrobe and ruffled his blond hair. An airplane passed overhead, on its final approach to La Guardia, and Joel looked up. Then he looked down. Lucille Withers put down her cards. There was no telephone in sight. She rose and stepped out of the gazebo. She moved a few steps toward him, then stopped. His back was to her. “May I help you, Joel?” she said in a quiet voice.

He looked, startled, over his shoulder, and saw her. “Get away from me,” he said.

“Come down from there at once,” she said. “You're frightening me.”

“I'm going to jump,” he said.

“No, you are not,” she said firmly. “Now do as I say. Come down from there at once.” She came two steps closer to him.

“Get away from me,” he said again. “Don't come any closer!”

She advanced, deliberately, another step closer to him. “Obey me,” she said. “Do as you're told, Joel. Come down from there this instant.” She advanced another step.

“Don't try to stop me! Don't touch me! If you do, I'll—”

“Do as I say!”
The parapet was at least four feet high, and Joel's head towered above her own. But Lucille Withers was a tall woman and, with a quick forward leap and upward lunge, she seized the cord of his bathrobe and pulled him toward her. He fell, and landed on the flagstone terrace on his hands and knees.

“Are you all right?” she said. “Well, I'll wager you're a damn sight better than if you'd landed in the East River.” She still had him by the bathrobe cord. “Now stand up and explain yourself, young man!” She yanked him to his feet with the cord.

“Why did you stop me?” he sobbed.

“Get over here and sit down,” she said, and led him by the cord to the gazebo and the table where her unfinished card game still lay. “Sit right
there,
” she said, and pushed him by his shoulders into a chair. “Don't you dare make a single move, do you understand? And don't you ever dare try a thing like that again!” She seated herself in a chair opposite him. “Now tell me exactly what is going on with you, young man.”

“Why didn't you let me do it, Aunt Lulu?” he whispered. “I wanted to.”

“Why? I'll tell you exactly why. Because your mother is my friend, that's why, and that friendship is a very precious thing to me. I don't really give bullets what happens to your life, Joel. There are plenty of easy ways to waste a life. What's a life, after all? We're born. We live a little while. We die. But a friendship like your mother's and mine doesn't happen all that often, and when it does, you'll do anything to keep that friend from being hurt. I'd do anything to keep your mother from being hurt any more than she's been hurt already. By pulling you down from there, I was helping her, and by helping her I was probably also helping to lift up my own life a little. Do you play liar's poker?”

He nodded.

She gathered up the cards with her long, bony fingers, and shuffled them briskly three times. “Cut,” she said.

He cut the deck, and she dealt them five cards apiece. “Any stakes?” she said.

“Whatever you say,” he said.

“How about the winner gets to tell the loser what to do, and the loser has to do what the winner says?”

“Okay,” he muttered.

They picked up their cards. “Well, what've you got?” she said.

“A pair of twos,” he said.

“I have a pair of nines,” she said.

“A pair of twos, and a pair of jacks.”

“A pair of nines and three aces,” she said.

“Liar!”

She laid down her cards: the ace of clubs, the ace of diamonds, and the ace of hearts; the nine of clubs, and the nine of diamonds. “Now tell me exactly how we're going to explain this morning's little episode to your mother,” she said.

“I never want to see my mother again.”

“Bullets. I won the hand. Now you're going to do what I say.”

Lulu had always known how to handle a deck.

“What would make you even think of doing such a thing, Joel?” Alex said, trying to keep her voice calm. “Please tell me what it was. Whatever it was, I'll try to understand.”

He lay on his bed in his darkened bedroom, still in his white pajamas and blue bathrobe. “I don't want to talk about it, Mother,” he said.

“Mother? I used to be Mom, didn't I? We used to be pals, didn't we? Can't we be pals again? What's happened to us, Joel? You used to be my man of the house.”

“I don't want to be the man of this house, Mother.”

“But can't we at least be friends again?”

“I don't want to live here anymore, Mother.”

“Oh, Buster—please—why can't we—?”

“I told you not to call me that!”

“Oh, Buster, Buster, Buster—” Her eyes were streaming now. “Why can't I call you Buster? You were always our little Buster. Why can't I have my Buster back?”

She reached out for him, but he turned his face to the wall.

“But what would make him want to do such a terrible thing, Lenny?” she said to him. “Do you have any sort of clue? I know I've been preoccupied with the situation here, and haven't spent as much time with him lately as I normally would have. I left him alone for an entire weekend when I went out to Sagaponack with Mel, but that was what he insisted he wanted. Could that be it? Or does he resent Mel? Could
that
be it? I always thought he liked Mel, but perhaps—”

“No, I don't think he resents Mel,” Lenny said.

“Then what is it? He seems so angry at me, Lenny. He won't speak to me. He's angry at Lulu, he seems angry at himself. He seems angry at the whole world.” They were sitting in her dark green library at 10 Gracie Square.

“I think it's a good idea to let him spend a few days at my house, until he simmers down,” he said. “Charlie will keep an eye on him. Joel and Charlie have always gotten along. If anyone can get him out of this black mood, it's Charlie.”

“Or did I leave something out of his life when he was growing up? I was always a working mother, and I suppose that might have had something to do with it. I didn't do all the things with him that other mothers did. But I always thought he knew that he was loved. Or maybe I smothered him with too much love. Maybe I was overly protective. Maybe because I grew up without too much in the way of a mother or a father, I hovered over him, fussed over him,
too
much. I just didn't want him to have the kind of childhood I had, and perhaps I gave him too much love. Perhaps that was all a terrible mistake.”

“Don't blame yourself, Alex. You mustn't blame yourself.”

“And of course after Steven—died—I tried to be both a mother and a father to him. Took him to ball games. Took him to museums. Talked business with him. Tried to treat him as a peer. Asked his advice on things. But perhaps that was all, all wrong.”

“I don't think so, Alex.”

“But I did worry over him, I know. Perhaps I worried too much. But he was all I had—my only real family, my only real flesh and blood. But I really thought he was growing up so well. I thought I was doing such a
good
job. Maybe I was so pleased with myself at the way he was growing up that I didn't look out for little signs, little signals, that I should have caught, but didn't. But he always did so well in school. He always seemed just a normal, bright, happy little boy. His teachers said so. But obviously something dark and terrible was going on with him that I had absolutely no idea about.”

“Obviously,” Lenny said.

“Or—I've been thinking about this—could it perhaps be some sort of genetic thing? My mother, you know, was a manic-depressive. She was later diagnosed a schizophrenic. Could some bad gene from her have popped out in him?”

“Don't blame your mother, either,” he said.

“But what could have caused him even to
consider
doing such a terrible thing? If Lulu hadn't just happened to be there, he could have—”

“Look,” he said, “I think there may be a quite obvious explanation for all this.”

“Really?” she said. “Please Lenny, please tell me what it is.”

“There's a certain letter that was written years ago, at ‘Rothmere.' Herbert Rothman would very much like to get his hands on that letter. So would Miss Fiona Fenton. They have both tried certain, ah, avenues of approach to obtain that letter. I happened to run into Fiona in a coffee shop the other day. She mentioned that she and Joel have become ‘very close,' as she put it. I suspect that Fiona may have been trying to use Joel to learn the whereabouts of that letter. I suspect that Fiona may be the Afro-American in the woodpile.”

“Letter? What sort of letter, Lenny?”

“The man who was shot in the boathouse years ago.”

“Yes,” she said with a little gasp.

“‘The intruder,' as he was described in nineteen seventy-three, in the press. It seems you wrote a letter prior to the, ah, intruder's visit, inviting him to ‘Rothmere,' mentioning a specific date, time, and place for your meeting. Your intruder was expected, it would seem.”

She touched her triple strand of pearls, and her eyes widened in a kind of fear, but she said nothing.

“If Herb and Fiona could gain possession of that letter, it would prove that your intruder was not an intruder, and that what happened that afternoon of September twentieth was not a self-defense shooting. It was murder, and, as you may know, there is no statute of limitations on murder cases. The case could be reopened at any time. If so, Herbert could presumably destroy your career forever, which, of course, Herbert and Fiona would very much like to do.”

“He knocked me down,” she whispered. “He had the heel of his shoe on my throat. He was going to break my neck.…”

“I happen to have that letter,” he said. “Herb Rothman has already offered me a lot of money for it. But not enough.”

“
You?
But how?”

“Do you remember a friend of ours named Adam Amado?”

“Some sort of actor, wasn't he, whom you were trying to promote? I remember you mentioning him, but I never met him.”

“Actually, you did,” he said. “Adam Amado was a stage name Charlie and I created for him. But Adam Amado was the same man you knew as James—Skipper—Purdy.”

She covered her mouth with her hand.

“And so, you see, I bear a certain amount of responsibility for bringing Skipper Purdy back into your life. If I hadn't plucked him off the street one day, he might never have found out who and where you were. And my responsibility for what happened at the boathouse that afternoon goes even deeper, I'm afraid. In the months prior to what happened, Adam had become a considerable trial to Charlie and me. He wouldn't look for work, and he'd become a considerable financial drain on us. I gave him an ultimatum. I told him he had six months to find work or bring some money into the house. I gave him until September twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-three. If he didn't come up with money by then, I told him I'd throw him out on the street, which was where, alas, I had originally found him. That was obviously when he concocted his scheme of trying to blackmail you—which, of course, I knew nothing about. If I had, I would certainly have tried to stop him. I even bear responsibility for what happened in a third area. I paid for his lessons in karate, which, I gathered, he used when he threw you to the floor.”