“Did Claire ever find out about it?”
“How could she help not hearing about it, in this town? But Claire is a tough girl, Jimmy. She’s a realist. She knows he’s no angel. She has a good life. Why should she mess it up because he did a little roaming when she was out of circulation? Hell, I can talk about it now, but there was a couple of years there when I couldn’t. If I was alone and began to think about it, I’d begin to cry. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? Not sad tears, but the way kids cry when they get mad. What kind of trouble is he getting into now?”
“I can’t talk about it, Chet. Wait and read about it in the paper.”
“What good does it do you to listen to all that old stuff?”
“Background information, Chet.”
“I don’t want it in the paper, by God!”
“It won’t be, believe me. We don’t run a scandal sheet.”
“Is it woman trouble?”
“It could be in that area.”
“I won’t wish him any luck. But how can anybody bruise the man? Name him as corespondent? There’s nobody to fire him, and she won’t divorce him. I’m telling you, pal, I spent at least a year trying to think of some way to mess him up, but short of shooting him, I couldn’t come up with a thing. They don’t give a damn for public opinion. He spends five mornings a week in the brokerage outfit. He’s quick and shrewd and he does very well at it. He’s healthy as a pig. And I’m now willing to admit he probably wouldn’t mess with any woman who wasn’t ready and willing. And Claire certainly doesn’t mess around.”
“And I suppose that when you worked on something for him, he wasn’t trying anything cute?”
Chet Rand looked at Wing narrowly. “Boy, you’re giving me the idea you’re fishing. The more I think about the story you walked in here with, the fishier it sounds.”
“What would I be fishing for? I’m just a newspaper type.”
“His personal financial records are complete and accurate. He’s got fat holdings on tax exempts, a slew of blue chips, and quite a lot of very very nice growth stuff. He doesn’t have to cut any tax corners. At least, that’s the way he was set four years ago. That closes that door. About the only tender spots I can think of would be his kids.”
Wing stared at him. “Four-year-old twins?”
“We keep the Art Center books. There’s a Natalie Sinnat drawing twelve bucks a week teaching a class of kids. Nineteen and cute.”
“I forgot about her. She’s spending the summer down here.”
“Maybe she isn’t as tough-minded as Claire and Di.”
“A man would have to be a thousand percent bastard to get at a man that way, Chet.”
Rand shrugged. “It would depend on what he had to have, and how far he’d have to go to get it. Bastardliness is relative, friend. Two months ago a partner in an old firm died. The business is worth maybe three hundred thousand. The surviving partner is buying out the widow for five thousand, because that’s the figure given in the original partnership agreement drawn up in 1932, and never updated. The partners and their wives have been close for thirty years. Now the widow can’t understand how good old Joe can do this to her. But the law says he can, and he’s doing it. Don’t talk to me about thousand percent bastards.”
“I wasn’t fishing, Chet.”
“Of course you weren’t. This was a private talk, Jimmy. Be at ease.”
“Thanks for... talking about your own bruise, Chet.”
“It doesn’t bother me much any more, I just wonder where she is, sometimes, and how she’s making out. Listen. Whatever you use on Sinnat, don’t try a boat hook. It won’t work.”
On the short ride back to the newspaper in the bake-oven heat of his old station wagon, Jimmy Wing found his sense of unreality slightly enhanced. When a traffic light stopped him, he stared at his own hand resting on the steering wheel, a long hand, veined and freckled, fuzzed with pale fur, grasping the wheel with indifferent simian competence, as apart from him as though he looked over the shoulder of a stranger.
The hand is the animal reality, he thought, for blows and tools and caresses. Morality is an unreal conjecture, for younger men than I am. Morality is the conflict of rationalizations. I am trapped by myself, unable to do more or less than the old limitations permit.
He had a specific visualization of rationalizations, seeing a little apart from the commonplace furniture of his mind, a cave pink and membranous, where the things too easy to believe were like flat leech-creatures which inched up from the dark floor to affix themselves to the soft walls. If they were peeled away quickly they did no harm. But the longer they remained the more difficult they were to dislodge. Eventually they made themselves so much a part of the walls there was no way to find them, or even to know they were there. And so truth, forever out of focus in any case, was prey to these further distortions assembled over the years. They made a comfortable muffling, a padded toughened wall, as opposed to a Calvinist rawness.
The girl lives in the unreal context of wealth, youth and beauty. It would be a favor to her to show her the world has edges and thorns.
Besides, the time to make any decision is after you find out what, if anything, is usable.
And if you don’t do it, somebody else will.
He phoned Kat from the place where he had lunch. She said she was just leaving for Jackie Halley’s house. She said she wanted to talk to him, but she’d be at the Halleys’ all afternoon. She said she had a lot to tell him and ask him. Could he stop by the Halleys’ about six o’clock? He told her that if he couldn’t make it, he’d phone her there and set up something else.
After he had turned in his Sunday edition copy, he drove to the Palm County Art Center building. It was on city-owned land at the foot of Center Street, fronting on the bay. The big tract also contained the Community Auditorium, the Teen House, the public library and the new headquarters for the city police. In the early thirties when the tract had been available for back taxes, the Cable family had purchased it and turned it over to the city for civic uses.
The Art Center was an incongruous piece of architecture for even that tropic coast, red brick Georgian with white pillars and fake shutters, more suitable to a shopping center in Williamsburg. He parked in the wide and empty asphalted area which served all the buildings in the tract. A sign on the front door of the Center announced that it was closed. The door was unlocked.