“Bo.”
“Don’t worry, Derek. It’s only the usual fees.” I gave him a car salesman’s smile. “I’ll just have Ellie work up the bill.”
And so it all was settled, the whole old-flame thing. It hadn’t worked out so great for Wren Denniston and Margaret and Sandro, I had to admit, but everyone else seemed to have gained something out of that week. I had come through it with my ghost lover finally put to rest, Julia had been freed from her fatal obsession, Derek had found for himself a new profession, Gwen would be living in the lifestyle she had earned all these many years, Sims had found his true calling as a murderous thug, and Hanratty had solved the murder. Even Terrence had finally found the thing he’d been searching for so diligently since his brilliant portrayal of the young, doomed Romeo: his death. All seemed to have come out okay in the end.
All but one.
49
“What do you want?” said Clarence Swift.
“To see how you’re doing,” I said.
“Do you care?”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “I really don’t.”
He was wearing orange prison overalls, which gave his face a green tint. His lips were pinched, his skin taut, his philtrum deep. And yet, without his usual tortured verbal phrasings and ostentatious humility, I sensed some calm within him that hadn’t existed before, as if here, in this place, finally, he could fully express his true inner nature. Prison seemed to agree with him, which was good, because he would be here awhile.
“How’s your mother?” I said.
“Disappointed.”
“I meant physically.”
“She’s recovered from the beating, if that’s what you mean. She’s a stringy old hen. But it’s the disappointment that is going to kill her. I’m her only child, she had such hopes for me. I was going to finance her retirement, cleanse her bony limbs when she was too weak to bathe herself, wipe her buttocks when she lapsed into incontinence. Now she has nothing to fall back upon except the street.”
“You don’t sound sorry.”
“Well, it’s not all bad. She does enjoy visiting. What are you doing here, Victor?”
What indeed? Why had I made a pilgrimage to the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility on the dark edge of the city to talk with a murderer? What was I hoping to glimpse?
A truth about myself, maybe.
It was in that tableau at the poolside, the three figures frozen in their postures just a moment before the bullets and the blood, when it was simply Clarence and Julia and Terry, the latter two in their own little world and Clarence looking on, miserable and shut out. Something resonated in that image for me, something vibrated deep in my bone. When it comes to an old lover, aren’t you always sitting off to the side wringing your hands as the object of your affection and her lover cavort, seemingly oblivious to your devotion? And it doesn’t matter if the two in their own world are you and your old lover at an idyllic moment in your youths. You’re still just as shut out, your hopes to crack that bond and capture that same love just as futile.
“I have a question,” I said. “How did you think it would work? I mean, you’re a smart guy, you knew what you were up against. How on earth did you ever think you’d end up with the money and the girl?”
“Love,” said Clarence.
“Love?”
“The only thing that mattered was that I loved her.”
“So love’s the answer.”
“The night of Wren’s murder, love spoke to me. Finally. When I arrived at the house with the cash to make a last payoff to that vampire and found Wren dead on the floor with the gun by his side, I heard love’s true voice. Now’s your chance, it whispered into my ear. Now. With Wren dead, love told me that Julia could be mine. With Wren dead, I had the money to woo her and win her. With the gun in my hand, I had the power to frame whomever I wanted for the murder.”
“And that meant me,” I said.
“I had seen you two together. I had told Wren about your trysts. And when I found out Julia was in your apartment the night of the murder, there was no other choice. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if the police had arrested you as I demanded. You should be sitting here wearing orange, and I should be on the beach in Rio with Julia.”
“And the money.”
“Why not the money? Didn’t I deserve it, all of it, the love and the money? Was that too much to ask?”
“Evidently. What about Margaret? What did she deserve?”
“Margaret,” he said, his voice spitting with derision. “She had a thick neck and no ankles. I could barely stand to look at her.”
“She loved you.”
“She believed she was the best I could do. Imagine what she must have truly thought of me.”
“She didn’t deserve what you did to her.”
“You weren’t engaged to her, you never felt the press of her muscled fingers in your flesh. The one time I let her dance with me, the bones in my back cracked. She tried to stop me from taking the money, but I opted for love.”
“It almost sounds sweet. Except Julia loved Terrence, always had, always would.”
“It wouldn’t last. He was a nothing, less than a nothing, less than a man. Did you know that? Something went wrong in fetal development. He was totally dickless.”
“It didn’t matter, Clarence.”
“Don’t be a fool. Of course it mattered. What could matter more? In time she would have needed something real. In time she would have turned to the one man who had always been there for her.”
“You.”
“Why not me? Why is love only for pretty boys like Terrence Tipton, or wealthy fools like Wren, with his arrogance and his mistresses? He grew up with everything, a rich father, a big house, a private-school girlfriend. I can still see her, the way she hung on to him, long legs and blond hair, like the world was formed just so she could ignore boys like me. I see her every day, I close my eyes and see her sneer as she turns away from me and reaches her hand into the front pocket of his jeans. Why shouldn’t I get the slim white hand in my pocket? And with Julia I had my chance. She was everything I had ever wanted, beautiful and thin and Wren’s. And there was some lovely sweetness within her that made it all seem possible. That made it seem that her affections could be twisted my way.”
“It wasn’t sweetness,” I said. “It was an emptiness.”
“That I could fill. With my love. That I could pump full. With my love. Whether she wanted it or not, whether she needed it or not, I would give it to her. I. Me. My love, all of it, pure and rich, as clear as a kiss. Love. I killed for it. Who in this world deserves it more than me? Who? No answer to that, Victor?”
“No,” I said, and it was the truth.
For once I was left speechless. But not for lack of understanding. Because I identified with him all too well. Watching Clarence Swift wax earnest on love was like watching myself in one of those funhouse mirrors. Here you’re tall and thin, here you’re short and fat, here you’re a homicidal maniac.
Love is all you need, sure, if it doesn’t drive you mad.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my seventh Victor Carl novel, the latest in a span of stories in which Victor has moved from callow youth to something slightly less callow and slightly less youthful. Writing about Victor has been one of the great joys of my life, and I intend to keep doing it for as long as it’s legal. And yet, in order to keep our relationship fresh, Victor and I have decided to take a short break from each other. It’s nothing serious, it’s just that he’s been reading the paper in the morning instead of talking, and I occasionally have the urge to stick his head in a pasta pot. Before we get into a rut, we both thought it best to start hanging out with different people. For me, that means I’ll be writing novels with different main characters for the next few years.
So this would be a grand time to pause and thank some of those who have been in my and Victor’s corner over the years. Michael Morrison and Lisa Gallagher have been the most supportive publishers a writer could have and I am so grateful to them both. I also want to thank Jane Friedman for taking a personal interest in my work; it’s been more encouraging than she realizes. The entire publicity staff at William Morrow, including Debbie Stier, Sharyn Rosenblum, and Danielle Bartlett, have been tireless campaigners and I thank them all. Thanks also to Wendy Lee and Jennifer Civiletto for keeping me on schedule, and to my mother for maintaining her lifelong passion for the cause of correcting my grammar. Wendy Sherman, my agent, has been an advocate and a friend and I am so appreciative to her for being both. My brilliant editor, Carolyn Marino, has done more than anyone to get Victor in and out of trouble with his spirit, if not his flesh, intact. Whatever strange ideas I come up with – mysterious tattoos, insane dentists, or that most dangerous of entities, old girlfriends – she accepts it without a bat of the eye and then works tirelessly to make sure it all comes together into a Victor Carl kind of novel.