I suppose I could have taken this with a certain grain of equanimity in and of itself. Duplicity might simply have been an integral component of Julia’s character, and not the least alluring component at that. Who is ever sexier than a woman on the cusp of a betrayal? But she had betrayed me for a drug-addicted piece of putrefying flesh lost in a haze of posh, romantic, adolescent angst. She had betrayed me for the likes of Terrence Tipton, and that was almost more than I could handle.
Still, amidst all this, I wondered if we had a future. Now who was the sap?
But there was a foundation to my madness. Suddenly it was as if I could peer through Julia’s shields and glimpse her inner life for the first time. She had been twisted around by a twisted love. Something had happened between Julia and Terrence in their desperate youths that had left scars evident in her psyche and upon his flesh. And I now knew what it was. And maybe my love was exactly what she needed to salve the wounds and save herself. The possibilities gleamed. All they required, of course, was to rid ourselves of that murderous piece of human excrement. And right there, sitting on my coffee table, I had the key to his riddance.
“Did you get it?” I said to Derek as soon as we left Terry Tipton’s room.
“Sure thing, bo.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the miniature tape recorder, clicked it off. “I learned my lesson from last time. This time I pressed the damn buttons before we started.”
“Let me have it,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure,” I said.
“You really sure? I mean, how you think she’ll feel about you if you turn that freak in?”
“She’ll never forgive me,” I said.
“So is this tape going to end up in the grip of the police,” he said as he tossed the recorder to me, “or is it going to disappear to keep that girl happy?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said.
And I didn’t, but I intended to find out. So I sat in a dark corner of my living room, staring at the miniature tape recorder glowing dully on the coffee table. I sat there stewing and waiting. Waiting for the knock at the door. Waiting for the ring of truth.
That day I had run from Philly to Washington to Ashland, Virginia, and then back again. I had run around like a fool looking for answers. But I wasn’t running anymore. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen tonight, and it was going to happen here. The players would come to me to figure it all out. How did I know they would come to me? Because I had spent the whole day looking for answers, and now I had them. I knew who had killed Wren Denniston. I knew where the money was. I knew what each player was after, each player but one. All I didn’t know for sure was what my future would bring. But that I would find out with the first knock on the door.
And then it came.
Knock, knock.
“Come on in,” I called out cheerfully. “The door’s open.”
37
“Victor?” said Julia, peering into the glum darkness. “Is that you?”
“It’s me, all right,” I said.
“I’m so relieved,” she said, stepping into the apartment. “Where have you been all day? I was so worried. I wanted to explain.”
“I bet you did.”
“Victor?”
“I’ve been waiting,” I said. “Waiting for your explanation.”
She must have caught something in my voice because she hesitated at that instant, turned her head to see if someone else was hiding in the apartment, which told me all I needed to know about whose room she had come from.
“I didn’t mean to get you into trouble,” she said. “I just told the truth to the police, that’s all. About us. Just like you did the night of the murder.”
“That’s not what I wanted explained,” I said. “I want to know the truth about why you left me. The truth of why you married Wren. The truth, for once, about us.”
“I told you that already. You were pulling away, Wren stepped in, I was feeling vulnerable.”
“But you left out one last player.”
She stepped forward and tried to stare into my eyes through the darkness. Discouraged, she dropped onto the couch, one leg crossed beneath her.
“I knew you’d find him eventually,” she said, her voice carefully calm. “He said he told you a story to get you to leave him alone, a story full of lies.”
“He told me a story, all right, but it wasn’t full of lies. And there it is, right on the coffee table. His story.”
“You taped him?”
“You bet I did.”
She leaned forward, picked up the recorder, pressed play. For an instant, Terry Tipton’s slurry voice filled the room. “ – had been sending me money since before their wedding. That was his agreement with Julia, the way he got her-” She clicked him quiet.
“He’s sick,” she said. “He’s not in his right mind. He’s an addict, addicted to lies as much as to the drugs. And you taped him without his knowing?”
“I taped him without his knowing.”
“That was so unfair.”
“Unfair is the way I play it when my neck is on the line.”
She clutched the tape to her chest, leaned back, let her head loll on the sofa. “Let’s just go away, let’s just go someplace else. Let’s get on a plane and get the hell out of here and start over. Just you and me.”
“And the tape.”
“Stop it.”
“And Terry, too, when he decides to show up again and infect your life.”
“He won’t. I’ll make him promise. That will be the price for leaving him out of it.”
“There’s no leaving him out of it, and there’s no running away. They’ll grab us as soon as we hit the airport. Our attempted escape will be Exhibit One at our trial and add years to our sentences. We have to stay and fight. And the tape is all we have to fight with.”
“We can stonewall.”
“That’s what they want us to do. So they can pile accusations on our heads, one after another, while we sit quietly and take it. Pretty soon the pile will be too high to shovel our way out of.”
“We can find someone else to blame. What about that Miles Cave? I thought we agreed. Why didn’t you tell the police about him? Why can’t he be the one?”
“Because he doesn’t exist.”
“All the better.”
“Except that your lawyer has set up a frame of his own so it looks like I’m Miles Cave.”
“Why would Clarence do that?”
“To get me out of the way. Because he loves you.”
“Oh,” she said, not at all surprised.
“I’d set up Clarence, and enjoy doing it, but he has an alibi. At the moment Wren was killed, he was at an ATM, getting cash to pay off Terry.”
“We have to do something, Victor.”
“Yes, we do. We have to give the tape to the police. On it Terry admits to coming to the house, to demanding money, to being shown the open and empty safe by Wren. He admits to taking the gun and shooting Wren in the head and then dropping the gun on the floor and fleeing. And you know why he did it?”
“Stop this.”
“For you. Because he loves you and he wanted for you to be happy. With me.”
“He’s insane.”
“Yes, he is. And it’s all here, all his insanity, on the tape. You have to give the tape to the police.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
“You don’t understand. I don’t even understand it myself. I loved him so much. With a pure adolescent love that never leaves, that remains like a jagged diamond in the heart. Shakespeare’s poetry seemed to come as naturally to us as our breaths. I would hold him, and he would kiss me, and the words just appeared. ‘My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’ Just to think of him then can still draw out tears. You don’t know what it’s like.”