But here he was, in a facility as architecturally stimulating as a septic tank, dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s bumptious reign in the White House, a cage smelling of ammonia and cream com, and the fulsome muskiness of too many unwashed women crammed together in a small space.
He sat in the visitors’ room and stared through the glass at Barbara Gatt, erstwhile tablemate at Cafe des Artistes, the Rainbow Room, and Da Umberto’s, here in the hope that Barbara might tell him Craig’s confession was so much bosh. Here to find not only absolution for his brother, but also contradiction. To rediscover in the hoped-for contradiction his own peace of mind, a way to get on with “Mallards on the Marsh,” a way to finally bring the confounded fowls alive.
“He had the two sides, didn’t he?” said Barbara, speaking of her late husband. She was a wisp, with the tawny color of a woman predisposed to melanoma. Inherited. Her mother was end-stage in Ohio. A bad time for Barbara. “You knew him as a curator. As an authenticator of fifteenth-century religious art. I knew him as a husband. As a brute. As a man who wanted to take my child away from me.”
Neil admitted familiarity with the theme, the sad leitmotif of divorce in modern times, with the melancholy refrains of custody disputes and restraining orders.
“A persistent man,” he said, hoping that would be diplomatic enough. “He took hold of Christine?” he asked.
He dared not enter the forbidden zone of her own culpability.
“Hoisted her like a hundred-pound sack of wheat,” Barbara clarified.
“And Craig took the knife to him?”
Her tawny eyes gazed at him as if he were a specimen. “Anthony’s advised me against casual disclosure,” she said.
Anthony, of course, was her lawyer, a phlegmatic dome-headed man with the complexion of a ghoul and eyes as dark as pitch, the Fuller family lawyer, presented in pinstripes and wingtips to Barbara, by Craig, as the great shining way, the savior who would set her free.
“Craig was a kind boy,” he said, feeling he had to defend his brother. “A gentle boy. Always fooling with gadgets. Helped me with my car when I still had the gall to own one.”
He hoped these words might coax from her the peace of mind he so ardently wished for. But she smiled fondly in that wispy way of hers, like the Queen of the Fairies.
“He’s good with Christine,” she said. “He’s the only one who knows how to calm her down. He soothes her. He doesn’t antagonize her the way Paul did.”
And not long after, the guard came and got him. The doubt remained. Who killed Paul Gatt? His brother’s confession, now twenty-four hours old, struck him as nothing more than a bad dream, something that couldn’t have actually happened, the result of too much jerk sauce on his chicken last night. His brother was made of finer fabric. His brother might argue with Paul Gatt, even lay a diffident hand on Paul’s shoulder, but the visceral outcome of Paul’s three-hundred-pound corpse exsanguinated on the terra cotta tiles, his hound’s-tooth alpaca a ruin, his beard glued and coagulated with blood, struck Neil as so much faulty joinery. The crime didn’t fit Craig, and Craig didn’t fit the crime.
As he eased his own three-hundred-pound figure into the backseat of his hire car, he desperately tried to convince himself of Craig’s finer moral impulses. But doubt made him queasy, and for the first time in years he found he had no appetite.
He sat at one of the back tables in Le Grenouille, his lamb-in-a-mushroom-and-wine-sauce untouched, his Bordeaux unsipped, and his parboiled new potatoes tested only twice. He was an unlikely sleuth. A miserable sleuth. Yet compelled. Desperate for his brother’s exoneration. Anthony Brooks, the Fuller family lawyer, Barbara Gatt’s defense attorney, sat across from him in his usual pinstripes, nibbling an endive-and-olive salad.
“He’s made the same confession to me,” said Brooks, looking up with dark eyes from under the dome of his bald head.
“And do you think it’s true?” asked Neil, unable to hide his apprehension.
Brooks stopped nibbling and considered the question. He put his fork down, dabbed his small bloodless lips with his linen napkin, and stared at his wine, as if hoping to divine from its ruby depths an answer he could decode.
“I’m puzzled,” he said. “We have the blood, the footprints, the gash on Barbara’s hand. We have her daughter’s retrograde amnesia. We have the discord, the acrimonious divorce, and Paul’s latest custody appeal. We even have Paul attempting to kidnap his own daughter.”
This blueprint for murder encouraged Neil. With so much to push Barbara towards that knife, could there be any doubt of her guilt? Why was Brooks so puzzled? Brooks rolled a black olive with his fork, looked underneath it as if he expected to find something there, and put it back in the exact same spot.
“Paul can be exasperating,” said Neil.
“Yes, but exasperating enough to murder?”
“Paul can be infuriating,” offered Neil.
Brooks looked up, his eyes focusing as if through cross hairs. “Can he?” he asked.
“He expects to be obeyed.”
“And he takes what he wants?” suggested Brooks.
Neil nodded. “I’m afraid he does.”
“So he hoists the girl over his shoulder, and Barbara resorts to murder. A sober, university-educated woman with no history of violence, no criminal record, a steward of five years’ standing with the local Pentecostal, a corporate VP who makes dozens of clear cool-headed decisions every day, and she resorts to murder? And not just the murder of anybody, but the murder of her husband, a man she has loved and respected for the last fifteen years? Just because he’s exasperating?”
He was, of course, her defense attorney.
On behalf of Craig, Neil felt compelled to damn Barbara any way he could. “You forget the element of her unfortunate liaison with my brother,” he said. He took a distracted sip of his wine, hoping to rehabilitate his usual craving for lamb. “One iniquity might lead to another. I can’t see Craig lifting a hand against anybody.”
“No, of course not,” Brooks said quickly, as if to placate Neil. “Craig’s not the type. But I find he tried too hard with his confession. I think he might be hoping to protect Barbara with his confession. Or at least attempting to confuse me with it.”
This notion, that Craig might be trying to protect Barbara with his confession, tempted Neil. Yet Craig wasn’t a particularly adroit dissimulator, always told the truth, always spoke honestly, had never fashioned, so far as Neil could recall, the larger falsehoods necessary for something like his dogged and over-rehearsed confession.
“Someone killed Paul,” said Neil, as if that, in itself, were enough to exonerate Craig.
“Barbara’s never confessed,” said Brooks, as if that, in itself, were enough to exonerate Barbara.
“Yes, but Barbara’s a mother,” insisted Neil. “She had to protect her child.”
Wasn’t that motive enough? Might they not consider the unequivocal instinct of a mother, how that instinct might blind a sober, savvy, university-educated woman, how it might let loose the savage impulses that could ultimately lead to a quick grab for the Wiltshire Staysharp?
He conveyed this theory in a jumble of awkward phrases to Brooks, caught himself stuttering a number of times, the old impediment coming back with disquieting suddenness, the bane of his schoolboy years.
“A mother’s instinct,” mused Brooks, drumming his fingers against the linen tablecloth, still looking doubtful.