I looked at Susan. 'If you did it for us, Susan, then thank you for trying to save our marriage and our life together. But you didn't have to kill him.' 'Yes, I did. He was evil, John. He seduced us both. Don't take his side. He was always taking your side about something or other and now you're taking his side. Now I'm angry with you both. Men are all alike, aren't they, always sticking up for one another, but he was different from other men, and I was obsessed with him, but I tried to control myself, I really did, but I couldn't keep away from him, even after you asked me to, and he took advantage of me, and he used me, and he promised me he was going to save Stanhope Hall, but he didn't, and he used you, too, John, and you knew what was happening, so don't look at me like that.'
Susan went on like this for a while, and I realized I could enter an insanity plea, but by morning she'd be herself again, which is not to say any less crazy, but at least she'd be quieter about it.
I took her head in my hands and played with her soft red hair. She stopped babbling and looked at me. Those catlike green eyes stared right into me, and with crystal-clear sanity now, she said to me, 'I did this because you couldn't, John. I did this to return your honour to you. You should have done it. You were right not to let him die, but you should have killed him.' Well, if we had been living in another age or another country, she would be right. But not in this age, not in this country. Though perhaps like Frank Bellarosa, and like Susan, I should have acted on my more primitive instincts, on fifty thousand years of past human experience. Instead, I rationalized, philosophized, and intellectualized when I should have listened to my emotions, which had always said to me, 'He is a threat to your survival. Kill him.' I looked at Susan and she said, 'Kiss me,' and pursed those magnificent pouty lips.
I kissed her.
She pressed her head into my chest and cried for a minute, then stepped back. 'Well,' she said in a crisp, cool voice, 'off to jail. I want to be out tomorrow, Counsellor.'
I smiled.
'Tell me you love me,' she demanded.
'I love you.'
'And I've always loved you, John. Forever.'
'I know.'
The policewoman approached and took Susan's arm gently, then led her toward the front door.
I watched until she was gone, but she never looked back at me. I was aware of a lot of quiet people around the palm court and thought it best if I left quickly so they could get back to their business.
I turned toward the rear of the house to go fetch Zanzibar as I had promised. As I walked across the court, I could hear my footsteps echoing on the tile floor, and I saw out of the corner of my eye Bellarosa's body still lying off to my left, uncovered. Frank Bellarosa was surrounded by people who found him interesting: the police photographer, two laboratory women, and the coroner. As I walked past the body, I passed something off to my right. I stopped and turned back to look at it. It was a large brass display easel that held an oil painting framed in a soft green and white lacquered frame, quite a nice frame actually. The painting was of Alhambra's ruined palm court, of course, and I studied it. It was really quite good, perhaps one of the best that I've seen of Susan's works. But what do I know about art?
I stared at the painting of the ruined palm court, the streams of sunlight coming in from the broken glass dome, the decayed stucco walls, the vines twisting around the marble pillars, and the cracked floor sprouting scraggy plant life amid the rubble. And I saw this now not as a whimsical or romantic rendition of physical decay, but as a mirrored image of a ruined and crumbling mind; not a vanished world of past glory, but a vanished world of mental and spiritual health. But what do I know about psychology? I hauled off and put my fist through the canvas, sending it and the easel sprawling across the court. No one seemed to mind.
CHAPTER 38
It was January, and the days were short and cold. It was about four P.M., and already the sunlight was fading, but I didn't need or want much light. The wrought-iron gates of Alhambra had been sold by the developer and replaced with steel security gates that were fastened together with a chain but not tightly enough to prevent me from slipping through.
I walked past the gatehouse, which was now being used as the builder's sales office, but it was Sunday and the small house was dark. I walked up the long drive, bundled in my wool parka. The cobblestones, too, had been sold, and the drive was frozen mud, slippery in places, so I took my time. The flowers that bordered the drive were all gone, of course, but the poplars still stood, bare now, grey and spindly.
In the forecourt at the end of the drive, the ornamental fountain was still there, but someone had forgotten to drain it last autumn, and the marble was cracked and filled with dirty ice. And beyond the forecourt, where Alhambra had once stood, was a great heap of rubble: red roofing tile, white stucco, rafters, and beams. Indeed, they had bulldozed the entire mansion as Bellarosa had said they would. But I had no way of knowing if it was a spiteful act or if the developer simply wanted to be rid of the white elephant. As it was Sunday, the earth-moving equipment was silent, and no one seemed to be around. It was very quiet, that sort of deep winter quiet where you can hear the ground crackle underfoot, and the trees creaking in the cold wind. I could tell you I heard ghostly hoofbeats on the solid earth, too, but I didn't, though I thought about Susan and me on one of our winter rides. I thought, too, of last January, and of the black Cadillac that was here, or wasn't here, and the man whom I saw or didn't see. And it occurred to me that if he hadn't been lost that day and hadn't seen this place, then things would have been different today, most probably better since I couldn't imagine how they could be much worse.
Regarding Bellarosa's death, I still had mixed feelings about that. Initially, I had been relieved, nearly glad, to be honest. I mean, the man had caused me much unhappiness and had seduced my wife (or was it the other way around?), and his death solved a good many problems for me. Even seeing him lying there on the floor, half naked and covered with gore, had not affected me. But now, after some time, I realized that I actually missed him, and that he's gone forever, and that I lost a friend. Well, but as I say, I still have mixed emotions. Anyway, I noticed four long crates lying near the rubble and moved closer to them and saw that they held the four Carthaginian columns, all ready for shipping, though I didn't know where they were headed this time. Not back to Carthage, that was for certain, but maybe to a museum or to another rich man's house, or maybe the government had declared them a saleable asset and they'd sit forgotten in a warehouse forever.
I continued my walk, veering around the heap of rubble toward the rear of the property. All around me were stacks of building materials and earth-moving equipment. I noticed engineer stakes stuck in the ground, connected by string with white strips of cloth hanging from the string, and there were surveyors' stakes as well, and masonry stakes and all sorts of other things stuck in the ground like dissecting pins on the carved-up earth.
As I walked, I could see that most of the fifty or so foundations had been dug and poured, and though many of the trees had been spared, the land was irrevocably altered, suffused with water and gas pipes and cesspools, and crisscrossed with power lines and paved with blacktop and concrete. Another few hundred acres had gone from rural to suburban, from pristine to scarred, and hundreds of people from someplace or another were on their way here, though they didn't know it yet, bringing with them their worries and their future divorces, and their propane barbecue grills and their mailboxes with numbers on them, and their hopes for a new life in a nicer place than the last. The American dream, you know, constantly needs new landscapes.
Stanhope Hall's acreage is gone, too, of course, and a few of the houses there are nearly complete, wood and Thermopane contemporaries with lots of skylights and oversize garages and central air-conditioning; not too bad, I admit, but not too good either.
The big house, the former Stanhope Hall, has indeed been sold intact to a Japanese firm of some sort, but I see no sign of twitchy Nipponese businessmen strolling around the paths or doing callisthenics on the great lawn. In fact, the place looks as deserted as it has been for nearly twenty years. Local rumour at McGlade's Pub, where I spend too much time, has it that the little people are going to dismantle the mansion stone by stone and send it to Japan, though nobody at McGlade's seems to know why.
The love temple, too, has survived, and the developer of the Stanhope acreage has used a picture of it in his ads, promising the splendour and the glory of Gold Coast living to the first hundred people who can come up with the down payments and mortgages on the half-million-dollar tractor sheds he's building. The sacred grove is gone,
