I said I thought I probably could.
“You’re such a charming boy, you know. And terribly attractive, and I’ve been wanting to take you to bed ever since our lunch together.” She stretched like a waking cat. “And it’s so deadly dull out here. There’s Seamus, of course, but when one has sex with one’s servants one is limited to the more conventional approaches. It is considered terribly déclassé to perform fellatio upon the domestic help. Now if only I were Jewish, I could blow my chauffeur all I wanted.”
That’s a pun. Maybe you already knew that. I didn’t, and so I didn’t laugh, which must have annoyed Caitlin a little. The idea is that Jews have a trumpet made out of a ram’s horn which they blow in synagogue on certain holy days, and it’s called a shofar.
We talked about various things, most of them at least slightly sexual, and I had another Dr. Pepper while she had another Martini, and then I remembered that I had an appointment to see Kim around six. I mentioned this and Caitlin glanced at her watch.
“Hell,” she said. “I’d planned on driving you back to the city myself.”
“I can take a train.”
“No, you wouldn’t want to do that. One trip on the Long Island is as much as should be required of anyone. I wanted to drive you, but Gregory’s due home soon and he likes me to be here when he arrives. I can’t imagine why. I’ll have Seamus drive you.”
“You really don’t have to bother.”
“It’s no bother,” she said. “I’ve no use for him around here at the moment.” She picked up the telephone and made a bell ring in another part of the house. When Seamus answered, she told him to bring the car around in a few minutes.
I kissed her a few times and told her not to worry about the murderer, which was silly in view of the fact that she could not have been worrying less about the murderer.
Then we went out and stood on the porch and watched Seamus drive the car almost fifteen feet before it exploded.
I was going to write that it was like nothing I had ever seen before, but of course I’d seen it a hundred times in a hundred movies. That’s just what it looked like. All of a sudden the car went up into the air and came down in pieces. Most of the pieces were metal, but some of them were Seamus, and they were raining down all over the lawn. One hunk of metal actually landed within a few yards of us, and we were standing half a football field away from the car when it blew up.
“Oh Christ,” Caitlin kept saying. “Oh Christ.”
I didn’t know what to do first. The police would have to be called, obviously, but the most immediate problem was Caitlin. She was shaking and all the color was gone from her face and she looked ready to pass out. I got her inside and tried to make her sit down, but her body went rigid.
“You have to fuck me,” she said.
I stared at her, but she was already getting out of her clothes. “I have to have it right now, right now. I have to, you have to do it for me, that could have been me in that car, somebody planted a bomb to kill me, somebody wants to murder me. It’s true, it’s really true. Christ, you have to fuck me, you just have to.”
I was positive I wouldn’t be able to. I mean, watching a car blow up isn’t normally my idea of a turn-on. But they say that a close escape from death makes you want to reaffirm the fact that you’re alive in a sexual way, and it had crossed my mind that it could have been me in the car when it blew up, too, and I guess that made the difference. I got out of my clothes in a hurry, got down on the white shag rug with her, and we began screwing like minks, which is a vulgar way to put it, I guess, but that’s what we were doing.
I never heard the door open. I may have left it open, as far as that goes. I don’t think I would have heard an earthquake at that point. It was very basic and intense and without frills, and I don’t suppose much time elapsed from start to finish, but the finish was a good one and I lay there on top of her wondering if my heart would ever go back to beating at its usual rate, and a man’s voice said, “Caitlin, I believe I’m entitled to an explanation.”
“He has always had an instinct for disastrous timing,” she said in my ear. “Always.”
“Caitlin—”
“At least he refrained from speaking until we finished,” she went on. “Breeding tells, after all. That’s something.”
“I come home from work,” Gregory Vandiver said reasonably. “I return to my house at my usual hour. I find my car blown to bits all over my lawn; I find my manservant dead in the wreckage and I find my wife copulating with some strange young man on the middle of the drawing room floor. Now wait a minute. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? Yes, I daresay I have. Don’t tell me, it’ll come to me in a minute.”
Twelve
Between the Sands Point police and the Long Island Rail Road, it was almost ten o’clock before I got back to the city. I did manage to call Kim before that, from the station in Port Washington, but it probably would have been better if I hadn’t called her at all. I didn’t manage to say three sentences to her before Gordie took the phone away from her.
“You take a lot of telling,” he said. “I don’t want you coming here, I don’t want you calling here, I don’t want you sticking your nose in where it ain’t wanted.” Then he told me to do something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had wanted to, which I didn’t in the first place, and then he slammed the phone down.
I walked from Penn Station to Haig’s house. I had given him a little of it earlier over the phone and now I gave him the whole thing in detail. (I left out the sex part, at least as far as going into details was concerned. I mean, I had to let him know that Gregory Vandiver walked in and found me screwing his wife. That was the kind of thing that might turn out to be pertinent. So I told him what I had done, you might say, without telling him how much I had enjoyed it.)
“The timing,” he said, “is very critical here.
“Right. The killer had about an hour and a half to plant the bomb. The car was all right when Seamus picked me up at the station.”
“Indeed.”
“She usually did her own driving. Anybody who knew her well would probably know that.”
“Do the police know that?”
“No. The police think that the killer did what he was trying to do. It seems that Seamus was involved with some faction of the I.R.A. The police had a sheet on him because he was suspected of playing a role in a gun-running operation. So they think Seamus was the intended victim, and they also think they have several leads.”
“I take it you and the Vandivers permitted them to continue thinking this.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure that was wise.”
“Neither am I, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was passed off as a friend of Mrs. Vandiver’s who happened to be visiting at the time. Her husband could have confirmed that we were friendly.”
“Indeed.”
“Gordie McLeod was back in the Village by eight-fifteen. Because I talked to him on the phone, and no, it wasn’t my idea. I wanted to talk to Kim, but he included himself in. Of course he didn’t have to stick around while a batch of Long Island public employees asked dumb questions and took pictures of everything, but I’m sure he was at work all day.”
“He was not.”
“Oh?”
“Mr. LiCastro called. The fungicide he wants to use will render the discus spawn infertile. I so informed him and gave him some suggestions. Gordon McLeod did not show up today for what I believe is called a shape-up. Mr. McLeod has been betting on quite a few horses lately. With little success.”
“That’s interesting.”