When we arrived at the Red Lion, Guy was still in no condition to talk, so I left him in the 928 under a shaded portico and used my own AmEx card to check him in. I explained to the big-eyed young desk clerkette that Mr. Lewis had lost his wife and that the remainder of the check-in procedures would have to be handled when he was better able to deal with them.
As soon as we made it into the room, Guy disappeared into the bathroom for a much-needed shower, while I called room service to order coffee and sandwiches. I know enough about the internal workings of hospitals to realize that they routinely plug you full of decaf and call it the real thing. It's no wonder people come out of hospitals feeling worse than when they went in. They're all suffering from severe caffeine withdrawal.
When Guy Lewis emerged from the shower, he may have felt better, but his looks hadn't improved. The room-service food was already waiting on the table. He sat down in front of one of the two cracked-pepper meat-loaf sandwiches. He looked at it distractedly, making no move to pick it up. I poured a cup of coffee and bodily placed it in his hand.
"Drink some of this," I said. "It'll do you good."
Mechanically, like a child doing as it's been told, he took a sip and swallowed it. The steaming brown liquid could have scalded his tongue with second-degree burns, and he wouldn't have noticed. He slammed the cup back into the saucer with such force I was surprised it didn't shatter into a million pieces. Coffee slopped in all directions.
"That's part of what's killing me," he said hoarsely. "It's going to come out now, isn't it?"
"What's going to come out?" I asked.
"All the rumors."
If ever there was a time for feigned innocence, this was it. "What rumors?" I asked.
"There are all kinds of stories about Daphne's past. Some of them are true. But no matter what they say, she wasn't a gold digger who was only after me for my money. She liked the money fine. Who wouldn't? And she may have had her little flings now and again, but Daphne loved me, dammit! I know she did."
"I'm sure she did," I agreed.
"I don't want to talk about it," he continued as though I hadn't spoken. "I hate the very idea but I have to. I need to talk to someone. Whatever I tell you is in confidence, isn't it, the same as if I said it in a meeting?"
That was putting it to me. "Yes," I said.
"Years ago, when Daphne was a struggling young woman, she got her start making movies. I guess you could call them naughty movies."
Calling child pornography "naughty" is like calling television "intellectual." The two words don't belong in the same sentence. I would term the coupling of a middle-aged man and a prepubescent girl vile or repulsive, to say nothing of illegal. I wouldn't say it was naughty. I wondered if Guy Lewis had ever seen any of the movies in question. And I questioned whether or not he knew about Daphne's role in the forced servitude of Tanya Dunseth and the production of Dinky Holloway's videotape. If he didn't yet know any of those awful details, he would shortly.
"It must have been at least fifteen years ago now," he continued. "Daphne and I have been together for ten. This was long before that."
I added up the numbers in my head. They didn't exactly tally with what Tanya had told us, but I let it pass.
"Now, according to Detective Fraymore, it's all going to come out in the open. He as good as told me there's nothing I can do to stop it. That young woman in jail-the one who played Juliet, as a matter of fact-was in some of those same kinds of movies. According to Fraymore, there was a connection of some sort between Daphne and this Tanya person. Fraymore says Tanya just all of a sudden freaked out and started killing people."
"What about the man who was killed? Was he involved in the movies, too?"
Guy Lewis' eyes darkened. "I don't want to talk about him. You're a police officer, Mr. Beaumont, so I'm sure you'll understand this if I tell you. I believe that man was somehow black-mailing Daphne. Maybe he and that Tanya did it together. I don't know. I just know that when I saw them together…"
His voice trailed off. By sheer force of will, he bit back another sob.
"When you saw who together?"
"Daphne and Martin Shore, talking together, when we first went to the party at the Bowmer. I just flat lost it. They were off in the dark theater, sitting with their heads so close they must have been necking. They didn't think I saw them. I knew about Shore, of course. Daphne had told me all about him long ago. They started out as partners and were even married for a short time. But that was all in the past. At least, I thought it was. Then, when I saw them together like that, acting so cozy, I don't know what got into me. I went crazy. That's when I hit the sauce.
"You saw the bar at the party. There was plenty of booze to choose from, and I chose it all. When we left the party to walk back to the Mark Anthony, I was already drunk and plenty pissed. Daphne and I ended up in a terrible fight. For a while, we walked on opposite sides of the alley, screaming insults, but I don't think anyone noticed because of all the sirens and fire trucks down on the street."
"That must have been when the accident happened, and when Martin Shore got killed."
"That's right," Guy agreed. "I suppose it was, but I didn't know that at the time. By then I was too drunk to know anything, and I probably wasn't much fun to be around, either. There was a message waiting for Daphne at the hotel. When she told me she was going for a walk, I accused her of all kinds of terrible things. I told her she was probably going to meet with Martin Shore up in the park, that they'd go off in the bushes and fuck like a pair of dogs."
He blushed then, recalling those awful words. For a moment, with the ruddy color back in his cheeks, he looked more like himself-the way he'd been on Saturday night when the two of us crossed the street together before the plays. The color faded, almost as fast as it had appeared, leaving him washed-out and sallow.
"I'm sorry I said those things now," Guy said softly. "It hurts like hell that the very last thing I ever said to her was so hateful and mean. I'd take it back if I could, but right then, more than anything, I wanted to hurt her. I said if she walked out of the lobby not to bother coming back, that I'd leave Ashland and go home without her. She probably thought I was bluffing-that I was too drunk to try it-and she was right. I was too drunk, but I did it anyway. That's how I ended up here."
He paused, tracing shapeless forms in the splotches of spilled coffee on the tabletop, connecting the dots with streaks of brown.
"I really did leave her," he went on distractedly. "In my mind, I was leaving for good, but I had no idea I was abandoning her to a murderer. Jesus! What a creep I am! What an incredibly worthless, no-good creep! Where was I when she needed me? I'll tell you where I was-being arrested and carried into a hospital because I was too goddamned drunk to walk!"
Guy Lewis' deep voice quavered, shaken by the intensity of his own self-loathing. "If she's not alive," he added softly, "I don't much care if I am, either."
Veiled threats of suicide are fairly common in those kinds of circumstances. When someone says they don't want to go on living after some unforseen tragedy, it's always easy to stand outside the circle of their pain and give worthy advice. "You don't mean that," and "You'll get over it," and, worse, "Life goes on," are only a few of a thousand empty-minded statements that devalue the shattered treasures of someone else's heart.
Daphne Lewis might have been a consummate scam artist and an unfaithful wife to boot. The things she did might have been reprehensible and criminal both, but she had been the single light in Guy Lewis' life. Without her, he was virtually incapable of continued existence. The rest of the world might have mocked him and called Daphne his "trophy wife," but to Guy Lewis, she had been a rare jewel, a prize worthy of the game at whatever price it cost him.