“Never! Here’s all I know about that trip. He was feeling better. He’d been-regaining lost ground for a month. He had picked up some of the weight he had lost, and his color was better. He was talking about being strong enough to fly out to Los Angeles to see Romola and talk to Josie and the doctors. He wanted to see Romola, but at the same time he dreaded it. He had talked to the doctors on the phone. They said there was no hope at all for her. I was a terrible thing for him. I think he really loved Romola. I don’t think there was ever any other person in his life he had loved. Not me. Not anyone. So, okay, when I came back from shopping on Monday, the day before he was killed, he was talking on the phone. Mostly he was just saying ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ I had the feeling it was a long distance call. They checked the phone records afterward, and if it was long distance, it wasn’t an outgoing call. He, seemed thoughtful that afternoon and evening, and before we went to bed he told me he was going up to Citrus City the next day. He said he would go alone. He wouldn’t tell me why he was going. He told me to stop asking questions.”
“Do you have any idea why he didn’t want to tell you?”
“It wasn’t like him not to. Not that he was so very open with me. It was just that he didn’t care what I knew about him. I wasn’t in any position to disapprove of anything he might do. I don’t know why I didn’t walk out. It just didn’t occur to me that I could. Does that make any sense? I was in a cage with the door open, and I never even noticed the door. Now here is the only dumb guess I could come up with. He had a scientific mind. He started as a research chemist, you know. The one thing he hated above all else was doing something ridiculous and being found out. He knew how sick he was. We told each other that the remission was holding, and maybe he had licked the cancer. But he knew better than that. It had metastasized before it was first diagnosed. Chemotherapy had knocked it down for a little while, long enough for him to recover from most of the effects of the therapy, but when the remission ended, the next series of chemotherapy treatments would, if they suppressed the cancer at all, knock him back further than the previous set. And the pain would be back too. The only thing I can think of that would make him keep a secret from me was the idea I might ridicule him. Hope can be a dreadful thing, I guess. If he was going off to track down some sort of a quack cure, I don’t think he would have told me.”
“Is there some kind of miracle cure available in Citrus City?”
“I never tried to find out. But I would think that if there was, the police up there would have checked to see if he made contact, once they knew of his condition.”
Meyer cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. We looked at him and he said, “There’s always the remote possibility that he didn’t tell you because he thought you would try any means of stopping him if you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That he knew exactly what was in store for him with what was left of his life, and he had been arranging to get himself killed.”
She stared at him wide-eyed. “No,” she said firmly. “No, Meyer. Not Ellis. Not like that. This might sound sick, but I think he was enjoying the battle too much. He was a very gutsy man. All man. Cancer was challenging him. It pushed and he pushed back. He would delay taking pain pills, and keep track of how bad the pain was. No. To him it would have been like some kind of dirty surrender. He was building himself up to give it another battle.”
“Suggestion withdrawn,” Meyer said.
“Would it have had anything to do with Romola?” I asked.
“If that was so, he would have told me.”
“Could he have been going to buy a present of sorne kind?”
“He wasn’t much for presents and surprises. On my birthdays he would give me money to go out and shop for myself.”
“Was there any clue as to what he was going to do in what he picked to wear?” I asked.
“Not really. He wore gray slacks and a pale blue knit sports shirt with short sleeves. He took a seersucker jacket along to wear if he was in very cold air conditioning. I think he wore it in that hotel, from what the police said. But he wasn’t wearing it when he… when they killed him.”
She hitched her chair forward and hooked her bare heels over the porch railing. Her legs were well-formed and slender. The skin, moderately tan, looked flawless as plastic.
“I’ve been over it ten thousand times. It seems so pointless, dying like that. I wouldn’t admit it to myself at the time, but I did later: I was relieved. I’d been bracing myself to go all the way with him. Through all the pain. Caring for him when he became helpless. I was getting myself charged up to really do a job. But at the same time I dreaded it. Which is natural. He didn’t love me. He sort of liked me. I had good lines and I was obedient, like a show dog. And I sort of loved him.
“There can be a habit of love, I think. You justify the way you are living by telling yourself that love leaves you no other choice. And so you are into love. Women stay with dreadful men. You see it all the time. You wonder why. You know they are wasting their lives. You know they are worth far more than what they have. But they stay on and on. They grow old staying on and on. They say it is love so often to themselves, it does. become love. I can’t understand the Anne Renzetti I was then. I look back and I don’t understand her at all. We’re all lots of people, I guess. We become different people in response to different limes and places, different duties. Maybe in a lifetime we become a very limited bunch of people when, in fact, we could become many many more-if life moved us around more. ”Well, it moved me here and I know who I am now, and I will stay with this life for as long as I can. I never even suspected who I might really be. If it hadn’t been for that new manager falling asleep at the wheel, I might never have known about this Anne. You can’t miss what you don’t know, can you? Maybe that’s why we all have that funny little streak of sadness from time to time. We are missing something and don’t even know what it is, or whether it will ever be revealed to us.“
Meyer looked approvingly at her. “When you know who you really are, you fit more comfortably into your skin. You give less of a damn what kind of impression you make on people. My friend McGee here has never been at all certain of his identity.”
She gave me a quick, tilt-eyed, searching glance. It had an unexpected impact. “Thinking of himself as some kind of rebel?” she asked.
“Something like that,” Meyer agreed. “A reluctance to expend emotion, and a necessity to experience it. Cool and hot. Hard and soft. Rattling around in his life, bouncing off the walls.”
“Would it make you two any more comfortable if I went for a walk?” I asked. “Then you can really dig Into my psyche. Meyer, for God’s sake, what kind of friendship and loyalty are you showing me?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I keep thinking of Anne as an old friend of both of us. As a matter of fact, we only really talked one time, didn’t we?”
“For a couple of hours one night, aboard the Caper, after Ellis went to bed. But it made me feel as if I’d always known you. All the way back to childhood.”
“The way he can do that,” I said, “could have made him one of the world’s greatest con men. But he has scruples. And they get in the way of the con.”
“So you are sort of a team of con men, conning me?” she asked.
“Let’s say we share your interest in finding out more about how Ellis Esterland died,” I told her.
“Perhaps I haven’t got a hell of a lot of real interest left? No. That’s unfair. He was an important part of my life. I worked for him for six years. I can say I never really understood the man.”
“Did any of his wives?” I asked her.
“I don’t know about the first one, Ron’s mother. Her name was Connie, and I’ve heard she was a real beauty. I’ve never seen a picture of her. Ellis didn’t keep pictures of people around. Of course Judy Prisco and Josie Laurant were-are-both handsome. He liked to be seen in the company of women who make heads turn. I would suspect I was low on the list. But in the right light I’ve had my moments. Whenever we went out together he would look me over first. Very critical of the color and design of clothes, the shape of a hairdo, the right jewelry: The marriage to Judy ended very quickly. And she did very well; she walked away with a bundle. Of course, at his death; he was still married to Josie, even though they were legally separated. Maybe she understood him, I don’t really know. I like her.”