She looked past me to Geraldine. “You have a knack for hovering around my family when you are least wanted, Geraldine. You may leave my granddaughter to me now”
I felt my temper rising. “Renee, I don’t know if you’re insane or just giving a good impersonation, but a high-handed act isn’t going to work tonight. Catherine is in shock because she saw you murder Benjamin Sadawi in cold blood. We will not leave you alone with her.”
Renee looked at me loftily. “I thought you and that terrorist had kidnapped her; I shot him in the belief I was protecting her.”
“I should have hit you harder, Renee,” Geraldine said in her flutey
voice. “It brought me such satisfaction, I should have hit you forty years ago. Perhaps I could have beaten some sense into you. I understand what you’re doing; I understand you believe you can persuade a policeman and a judge of what you are saying, because you have the power and position of the Bayard name behind you. You think Victoria is a servant of no account who can be belittled and discounted the way my mother treated detectives forty years ago. But times have changed; detectives are sophisticated nowadays, and Victoria stands high in my son’s and my estimation. Very high. We are prepared to support her version of tonight’s events.”
“You can’t forgive me for marrying Calvin, can you?” Renee said, amused contempt in her voice. “After all this time, you still don’t understand that he was weary of your posturing and your neediness-and your aging body; he turned to me for relief from all those things.”
Geraldine smiled. “I’m the one he calls for when he’s frightened, Renee. Not you nor Kylie nor any of the others. Your staff may think he means you when he cries `Deenie,’ but I was always Deenie to him, from the time we first tried swimming together in the Larchmont pool when we were four.”
“I’m the one who protected his reputation,” Renee snapped, her composure cracking. “I’m the one who saved him from prison, who helped build up the Bayard Foundation and the press. I’m the one who turned him into an international figure, while you sat withering, turning grayer and grayer in that mausoleum, buried alive by your mother.”
“Until Calvin’s reputation became so important to you that you killed three people to protect it,” I put in. “I’m not going to pretend to weep over Olin Taverner, but Marcus Whitby was a fine young journalist, a fine young man, while Benji Sadawi was a helpless bystander. Do you think your granddaughter will ever want to live with you again, now that she knows you killed these people? You sacrificed their lives, you sacrificed her well-being-“
“Catherine knows me. She knows I love her as deeply as I do Calvin,” Renee said.
“So she’ll stay with you because she knows you’ll kill anyone who threatens your idea of her? I don’t think so. I think nature made something finer than you or Calvin in your granddaughter. She’ll recoil from you the way she would from sewage.”
Renee smiled contemptuously. “You have no children, no home life. I doubt very much you are a judge of family relationships.”
I thought of my mother’s fierce love for me, and my father’s more level affection; the price they demanded in return was not adoration, nor achievement, but integrity. I could not lie or cheat to avoid trouble. I didn’t try to tell Renee that.
“The sad thing is that I liked you, Renee. I admired your husband to the point of hero worship, but I genuinely liked you. You have the kind of energy and competence I’ve always admired.”
She flushed and left us to go into the dining room. Catherine sat motionless on the table, like a small furry Buddha, but when Renee took her good arm and tried to move her, she jerked away and lay down next to Benji, kissing him on the lips.
I could hear the sirens from the emergency crew keening their way up the drive. A moment later, the cars poured into the yard, their strobes staining the night sky red.
CHAPTER 55
A cold sun hung well over Elk Horn Lake before I got into a bed. It took hours to sort things out with the local authorities. I didn’t blame themthe carnage in the house was shocking. Nor did I blame them for first wanting to haul me away-a youth lay dead in the dining room, a teenager and an old woman both had gunshot wounds and I was the one with a gun.
The officer in charge, a raw-faced man named Blodel, ordered a couple of deputies to hold on to me and my gun. When she realized what they were doing, Geraldine put on her grandest dame manner. She commanded Blodel to listen to her before he did anything he might afterwards feel “had been regrettable.” Despite her pain and her loss of blood, she gave a short, fluent account of Renee’s role in the evening’s wreckage. She stayed in the wicker chair, but her air of command was such that Blodel stopped what he was doing to attend to her.
“She shot the boy, she tried to kill Victoria. Victoria, where is Renee’s gun?” I told Blodel he would find the gun in the snow outside the kitchen door. “It will have Ms. Bayard’s fingerprints on it. And you’ll find its bullets will match the one that killed the youth in the dining room.”
Blodel sent a woman out to look for Renee’s gun, but his other officer kept a grip on me. Renee saw this as her opportunity to seize control of the situation. She left Catherine’s side, wearing an air of command like a second jacket, to tell Blodel that Benjamin Sadawi was a terrorist, wanted by the FBI, and that she had shot him to protect her granddaughter. She would appreciate Blodel’s help in getting her granddaughter to an airplane; the child was in shock, was recovering from an injury, and needed to be flown back to Chicago for medical care.
Geraldine and I listened to this with mounting indignation, but we couldn’t edge in a word to contradict her: Blodel kept silencing us when we tried to speak.
Geraldine’s wrath finally pushed her to her feet. “Oh, these lies, Renee, these lies; they fit you like the glove to hand. And you should know, Renee, that Marcus Whitby saw the agreement Calvin and Olin signed together. Whatever was in that agreement, Julius Arnoff has a copy of it.”
Before she could go further, her bad foot gave way and she collapsed, scrabbling at Blodel’s arms on her way down. My deputy let go of me to help get Geraldine back into a chair, and to make sure she hadn’t suffered further hurt. While their attention was on Geraldine-and on Renee, who was saying, “Oh, Geraldine, must you always play the victim to garner attention?”-I retreated to a corner of the living room with my cell phone.
My first call was to Freeman Carter. My lawyer wasn’t happy to hear from me at four in the morning, but he took in a summary of what had happened. He said he knew a lawyer in Rhinelander, the nearest big town, and put me on hold while he looked up the number. When he’d given it to me, he told me to wait half an hour before phoning so he could put the local guy in the picture.
I called Bobby Mallory next. Years of midnight emergencies brought him to the phone grouchy but coherent.
“I’m in Eagle River, Bobby. Renee Bayard just shot Benjamin Sadawi.” “Give it to me fast, Victoria. And straight, no frills.”
I gave it to him straight. Mostly straight. Not too many frills. I told him how Catherine ran away with Benji yesterday afternoon, at which he interrupted: How did I know? It wasn’t because I had known where Benji was and helped him escape?
I sidestepped that issue and told Bobby about the phenobarb, about
Calvin Bayard’s nurse with her seizures. I even told him about Calvin’s secret deal with Olin Taverner, although I choked over the words, hardly able to utter them.
“Renee helped broker that deal fortyfive years ago, Bobby. Marc Whitby stumbled on it and went to ask her about it. She wasn’t going to let Calvin’s secret see the light of day. She’d built her life around making him into the great man; she wasn’t going to let the world see him as lesser. She probably killed Olin, too.”