“Nothing currently. At least nothing on record. Until fifteen years ago he was a Hollywood actor on the come. TV commercials, couple of movies.” Hardwick was in arch storyteller mode, with a dramatic pause after each sentence. “Then he had a little problem.”
“Jack, can we move this along? What little problem?”
“Accused of raping an underage girl. Once that hit the media, other victims started coming out of the woodwork. Saul-Paul was indicted on a bunch of rape and molestation charges. Fond of drugging fourteen-year-old girls. Took a lot of very explicit pictures. Ended his acting career. Could have gone to prison for the rest of his life. Too bad he didn’t. Best place for the little scumbag. However, family money bought enough expert medical testimony to get him committed to a psych hospital, from which he was quietly released five years ago. Dropped off the radar screen. Current address unknown. Except maybe by you? I mean, you got that cute little glass somewhere, right?”
Chapter 49
Gurney stood at the French doors facing the lavender remnants of a spectacular sunset that he hadn’t really noticed, trying to assimilate the latest aftershock of the Jykynstyl earthquake.
Information. He needed information. What did he need to find out first? He should grab a pad and start listing the questions, prioritizing. An obvious one came immediately to mind: Who owned the brownstone?
How to pursue the question was not so obvious.
The old catch-22 again. To disentangle himself from the snare, he needed to know whose snare it was. But pursuing that question naively, without any idea what the answer might be, could get him more deeply entangled. Unanswered questions were threatening to make other questions unanswerable.
“Hello!”
It was Madeleine’s voice. Like a voice that awakens you in the morning, jarring you into the room, into the specific day of the week.
He turned toward the little hall that led from the kitchen to the mudroom. “Is that you?” he asked. Of course it was. An inane question. When she didn’t answer, he asked it again, louder.
She responded by appearing in the kitchen doorway, frowning at him.
“Did you just come in?” he asked.
“No, I’ve been standing in the mudroom all afternoon. What kind of question is that?”
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“And yet,” she said cheerily, “here I am.”
“Yes,” he said. “Here you are.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m fine. Maybe a little hungry.”
She glanced at a bowl on the sideboard. “The scallops should be defrosted by now. Do you want to saute them while I get the water on for the rice?”
“Sure.” He was hoping that the simple task might provide at least a partial escape from the Saul-Paul whirlpool that was engulfing his mind.
He sauteed the scallops in olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, and capers. Madeleine boiled some basmati rice and made a salad of oranges, avocados, and diced red onions. He was having a hell of a time staying focused, staying in the room, staying in the present.
Halfway through dinner he realized that Madeleine had been describing a hike she’d taken that afternoon through the meandering trails that linked their 50 acres with their neighbor’s 350. Hardly a word had registered with him. He smiled gamely and made a belated effort to listen.
“… amazingly intense green, even in the shade. And underneath the blanket of ferns there were the smallest purple flowers you can imagine.” As she spoke, there was a light in her eyes brighter than any light in the room. “Almost microscopic. Like the teeniest blue-and-purple snowflakes.”
His encounter with the devil?
The answer only darkened the pit and greased the walls.
He sat in a kind of emotional paralysis through the rest of dinner, trying to eat enough to conceal the fact that he wasn’t really eating, pretending to appreciate Madeleine’s descriptions of her outing. But the more she enthused over the beauty of the black-eyed Susans, the perfume in the air, the azure of the wild asters, the more isolated, dislocated, and crazy he felt. He became aware that Madeleine had stopped talking. She was watching him with concern. He wondered if she’d asked him something and was waiting for an answer. He didn’t want to admit how distracted he was, or why.
“Have you spoken to Kyle?” Her question seemed to arise out of nothing. Or had she already asked it? Or segued to it while he was immersed in himself?
“Kyle?”
“Your son.”
He hadn’t actually been asking a question, just repeating the word, the name, as a way of stepping ashore, of being present. Too tangled a thing to explain. “I’ve tried. We’ve traded calls, left messages. A few times.”
“You should try harder. Keep at it until you get him.”
He nodded, didn’t want to argue, didn’t know what to say.
She smiled. “It would be good for him. Good for both of you.”
He nodded again.
“You’re his father.”
“I know.”
“Well, then.” It was a conclusive statement. She began to clear the dishes.
He watched her make two trips to the sink. When she came back with a damp sponge and paper towel to wipe the table, he said, “He’s very focused on money.”
She lifted the tray that held the napkins so she could wipe under it. “So what?”
“He wants to be a trial lawyer.”
“Not necessarily a bad thing.”
“It seems to be all about the big money, big house, big car.”
“Maybe he wants to be noticed.”
“Noticed?”
“Little boys like to be noticed by their fathers,” she said.
“Kyle is hardly a little boy.”
“But that’s exactly what he is,” she insisted. “And if you refuse to notice him, then he’ll have to settle for impressing the rest of the world.”
“I’m not
“Maybe you’re right. Who knows?” Madeleine had perfected the art of sidestepping an attack, of remaining untouched. It left him lurching into empty space.
He continued to sit at the table as she washed the dishes. His eyes began to close. As he’d discovered many times before, the by-product of intense anxiety is exhaustion. He drifted into a kind of half sleep.
