“No.”
“Yes, you’re Polly Paget, aren’t you?” he asked. “No wonder you’re weeping. You’ve been through a great ordeal. Please allow me to help.”
“How can you help?”
Here it is, Withers thought. My make-or-break moment.
“I can offer you half a million dollars.”
Polly wiped her eyes and looked at him. She’d need money to hide from Joey Beans now.
“What do I have to do?” she asked.
“Simply pose for a few photographs,” Withers answered. He tried to think of a delicate way of putting it, then added apologetically, “En dishabille, as the French would say.”
“Huh?” ‘
“Nude,” Withers said, cutting to the point. “For Top Drawer magazine.”
Alone, Polly thought. No friends, no home, nowhere to go, a kid on the way.
“Get away from me,” she said.
“I have twenty-five thousand dollars in cash for you right now,” he said. “As a down payment.”
But I do need money, Polly thought.
“These would be like, tasteful, right?” she asked.
“Your sweet mother would show them to her friends,” Withers assured her.
He gallantly led her into the room.
Carmine Bascaglia watched the interview from his home in Chalmette Oaks. When Candy Landis gushed her revelation about the attempted murder and Polly Paget brushed it off as the act of a lunatic, he placed a call to San Antonio, brooking no nonsense about Joey Foglio’s phone phobia.
“Joseph,” he said when his hotheaded associate came on the line, “I hope you haven’t done anything hasty.”
“Of course not, Carmine,” Joey answered. “What do you mean?”
“I mean this Paget woman has just bought herself some protection,” Carmine said.
“She’s playing with us, Carmine. This is flat-out extortion,” Joey answered. “I don’t think we should stand for it.”
Carmine sighed. “You don’t think at all, Joseph. I think, and then you do what I think. I think we should proceed slowly and with great caution. Don’t do anything. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
There was a long silence before Carmine said, “Joseph, tell me you haven’t done anything stupid. Because if anything should happen to Miss Paget now, we would be subject to considerable unwanted attention.”
Joey felt as if he was kneeling in the street munching on garbage.
He said, “She’s as safe as in her mother’s arms.”
“See that she stays that way,” Carmine said. “At least for the time being.”
“We got any way of contacting Overtime?” Joey asked Harold when Carmine had finished.
“No. You know Overtime. Paranoid.”
“Yeah,” Joey said, praying that numbnuts Overtime didn’t get it right this time.
“So who are you,” Polly asked Overtime, “the photographer?”
Because he just couldn’t resist it, Overtime said, “That’s right. They’ve hired me to shoot you.”
Finally, he thought.
Polly looked around the room. “This is it? No studio? No lights?”
“You’re the photographer?” Withers asked. “Why didn’t you-”
Overtime’s pistol snaked out and clubbed Withers once and then twice against the side of the head. Withers dropped heavily to the floor.
Overtime put the pistol against Polly’s head.
It’s odd, Overtime thought, hearing her on the TV and seeing her live in front of me at the same time. Live, he thought. For a moment anyway.
“That smart son of a bitch,” Ed Levine said. “He beat Jack to death with Polly’s performance, showed us he had Candy on his side, threatened to squeal about the attempted hit, and then made a peace offer by not going through with it.”
“He’s still fired,” Kitteredge said. “How do you think Mr. Bascaglia will react?”
“The Banker will want to go back to the table,” Ed thought out loud, “but he’ll want to deal with Mrs. Landis instead of Jack, because Jack is dead meat now. He’ll also want to roast Neal over a bed of coals.”
You smart little SOB, Ed thought. You might just pull this off. Now, what can I do to help?
“You want me to get Bascaglia’s people on the phone?” Ed asked. “Tell them three million, plus Jack’s confession.”
“Possibly-”
Connie was wrapping it up with, “Now you said you had one announcement you wanted to make.”
Great, Ed thought. Now what?
Jack Landis was trying to get enough breath to get up from the sofa.
All that money, he thought, waiting in the Caymans… warm beach… skin like cocoa butter… and I can’t get up off my ass to go.
He looked at the blurry images of his wife and mistress on television. Hard to hear-what was Polly saying?
“And I’m going to have a baby,” Polly said. “Jack Landis’s baby.”
A baby, Jack thought. Jack Landis-
Then something cracked in his chest, he pitched forward, and landed face-first in the guacamole.
“You’re pregnant?” Overtime said.
He held the gun on Polly, who sat on the bed, her back against the headboard. She was too scared to talk, so she nodded.
“This is a complication,” Overtime said. He held the gun on her while he dialed the phone with the other hand.
“I’m not shooting a pregnant woman,” he told Harold indignantly.
Polly felt a breath come into her lungs.
“Unless you pay me double,” Overtime finished.
Walter Withers could just make out the man’s back. Blood caked one eye and the other didn’t focus terribly well. He felt as if he were listening to someone talk underwater.
But it appears, Withers thought, that this man is actually intending to kill this young lady. And I have led her to this.
“Counts as two people,” he heard the man insist. “Hell, I thought you guys were Catholics. What do you mean, ‘academic’?”
Walter felt as if a cold river were running through his brain as he tried to push himself onto his hands and knees. The man looked over his shoulder at him.
It’s nice, Withers thought, to hear someone play a Hart tune without butchering it, but this unpleasant, amoral young man needed correcting. And the young lady needed rescuing.
“You may want to call it off, but she’s seen me now,” Overtime said. “I’m killing her and you are going to pay me.”
As Overtime aimed the pistol, Withers pushed himself to his feet.
“See here,” he said as he reached into his jacket for the revolver he had left in New York, “the game just isn’t played this way.”
Overtime turned around and shot him in the chest.
Oh dear, Withers thought, I’ve made a mess of this.
Walter Withers’s last act on earth was to lunge forward on Overtime’s arm, stopping him from lifting his pistol as Polly sprang from the bed and ran for the door.
Overtime dropped Walt, put a bullet into his head, and said into the telephone, “Great, now she got away… What do you mean, ‘Thank God’?”
Overtime was long gone by the time Polly banged on Neal’s door, sobbed out her story, and brought him to Withers’s room.
“Oh God,” Neal said when he saw the body.
Polly went to cradle Withers in her arms.
“Don’t touch him,” Neal said. “Don’t touch anything. You’ll screw up the cops.”
“He saved my life,” Polly cried.
Neal looked down at the sad, crumpled corpse of Walter Withers.
“Yeah, well. He was a gentleman,” Neal said.
Then he hustled Polly out of there and went back to his room to phone an anonymous tip.
26
By midafternoon of that day, the court of public opinion had decided that Jack had been a good sport to have his fatal heart attack when he did. It provided a neater ending to Polly Paget’s victory, spared the public the long but titillating ordeal of “The Jack and Candy Family Hour” ending in divorce, and left Jack’s virtuoso “I have betrayed you” performance as a final memory.
By the evening drive time radio shows, the “Name the Baby” contests broke out on several competing stations, each, however, offering the same prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to Candyland.