Martha Grimes: The Old Silent

"He didn't know. I didn't tell him. I was afraid for him and Aunt Alice. I told him… I didn't know who they were."

"But your aunt didn't know. Your uncle didn't tell her. Why?"

There was a silence. "He was going to, but then he thought, in the long run, it might be easier for her just to think I was dead than that she'd never see me again, probably." He looked at his guitar. "And you've met Aunt Alice. Do you think she'd really have been able to keep it to herself? Uncle Owen was afraid she'd go to the police. She'd hardly have been able to talk to you without telling you. Maybe it was cold-blooded, I don't know."

"None of you strike me as that. Go on."

"Uncle Owen said not to worry. To leave things to him, to lie low-he'd find some way of getting money to me. He did. A lot."

Jury smiled. "Your uncle never did strike me as a gambler."

"What?" The boy frowned.

"Nothing. You went to Ireland?"

"I did. From Stranraer to Larne. And I met Wes." He smiled. "Wes had more than talent. He had contacts-like someone in the U.D.C. who knew someone who knew someone who could forge passports."

Back at the rear of the auditorium, light fanned briefly across the wall as one of the doors swung open and shut. Whoever it was was standing back there or had sat down.

Mary Lee, Jury bet, and smiled. Then the memory of Charlie writing on the clear surface of the shoe came back to him.

"The longer I kept quiet about it, the more guilty I felt," Charlie was saying. "And the more guilty I felt, the harder it was to do anything, to come back, to tell the story. The old vicious circle of guilt. Why didn't I do something to save him?"

The question was rhetorical, but Jury answered it anyway. "Because you knew damned well they'd kill you."

Charlie rested his forehead against the guitar frets, eyes closed. "But not to do anything about it later-"

"You did. You thought if he'd lived, Billy Healey would have gone on to have a highly successful career as a concert pianist-"

"He would have." Charlie brought the guitar back up to his lap.

"I doubt it."

Charlie looked round, sharply. "That was the whole idea."

"His father's idea. Not Billy's. And not necessarily Nell Healey's. Wasn't it hard to get him to practice?"

"Yes. But he was a natural."

"Come on, Toby. You, of all people, would know that even a 'natural' has to practice like hell to get where Roger Healey wanted his son to go. Billy was lazy. Irene Citrine said that. On the other hand you were just the opposite. Determined. Or as your aunt put it, pigheaded."

He had to smile. "I expect I was."

"You 'expect' you were? You weren't a 'natural'; you couldn't play anything. That is, you couldn't play anything until you were so driven by guilt to pick up on a career that Nell's son had lost; there roust have been times when you wished you could have died in his place."

"There were."

"And you did. In a sense you became Billy. It must have been hell. No musical inclination, no background, presumably no talent. I thought you were Billy."

"You thought I was-why?"

Jury told him about the poetry, the picture, and the impression Charlie himself had given him about the Healey case. "Let's say I thought you were Billy because you couldn't possibly have been Toby Holt. And Toby would have been the only other one who knew all of that."

"If you practice twelve, thirteen hours a day, you don't need background. Sometimes the fingers of my left hand would bleed and I'd just wrap gauze round them and put on a surgical glove and keep going. Some martyrdom, right?"

"Which you apparently plan to complete by quitting at the top. You told me you'd got as far as you needed to and I wondered what that could possibly mean. So now you're quitting. And to do what? Live in West Yorkshire and become a shepherd? A groundsman?"

"I have to go back; I have to tell them what really happened; I want to see her."

"Yes, I know. But for God's sakes, don't think of staying there. It's not meant for you, Charlie. This time, it could really kill you."

"That's pretty dramatic. I was thinking about Abby. With her aunt dead, well, she could use some help."

Abby. Yes, she could have used it a long time ago. "Nell Healey will see to that." Jury turned from trying to see into the shadows of the back to look at Charlie. "You've paid up, Charlie. And, anyway, you haven't done what you'd sworn you'd do."

Charlie cut a bleak smile in Jury's direction. "I haven't?"

"No. You haven't quite peaked. Sirocco hasn't played Wembley Stadium." Jury called to the rear of the auditorium, "Isn't that the order, Mary Lee? The Marquise, Town and Country, Odeon, Arena, Stadium?"

A shadow moved and she started down the aisle. "What about the Ritz?"

Jury shaded his eyes and looked back.

"Remember me?" asked Vivian.

Vivian had Marshall Trueblood's Armani coat slung about her shoulders. Underneath was a gown Jury could see as she moved closer to the stage that the Princess would have approved. It was burgundy, fluid, semitransparent and fit her body like a second skin to just below the hips where it flared out. It had a languid, pre-Raphaelite look. Her hair was done up partly on top of her head, partly down, as if the hair had escaped its entrapment on top. She wore long emerald earrings.

The combination of her appearance (which was gorgeous) and the surprise of seeing her here made Jury's mind go blank. "Why in hell are you wearing Trueblood's Armani coat?" That was a sporty question, he thought, cursing himself.

But she took it in stride. "Because I had the coat-check ticket for it in my bag. I'm supposed to have gone to powder my nose during the entree; we started dinner without you, but no one will have finished, not if Agatha had her way about the seven-course meal and Melrose orders one more bottle of wine. He told me you were here." Vivian beamed up at Charlie Raine, whose own smile would have lit up the Embankment. "I was cheated. They got to hear you; I didn't."

"I can always fix that."

"You wouldn't!"

"I would." Charlie strapped the Fender round his neck. "What do you want to hear?"

Vivian thought for a moment. " 'Yesterdays'-not the Beatles' one, the one by Jerome Kern. Do you know it?"

Charlie thought for a moment, shook his head, "I know the Beatles'. Will that do?"

"It'll do," said Jury, sitting down in the front row with Vivian beside him. He wrapped his arm over the back of her seat.

As Charlie, twenty-three years old, sang about a day when his troubles had been far away, here in the building where the last briefing for D-Day had taken place, Jury was drawn back to the flat on the Fulham Road, Elicia Deauville, and the rubble that once had been his and his mother's parlor.

He was just as glad he hadn't been there on the moor to see the black-clad arm of Ann Denholme lying against the white backdrop of snow.

He feared, as the song said, that all his troubles might be here to stay.

"Toby Holt?" said Melrose. "My God, that shows determination equal only to Agatha's trying to knock off every eligible female in sight."

Sitting at a table as far from the small stage as he could, Jury smiled. "Thanks for not beginning with 'So Commander Macalvie was right.'" His head was throbbing from a combination of no sleep, Wiggins's report from the hospital, and the slashing licks of Dickie's rendition of "Deja Vu" (determined, according to Stan, to prove he was as fast as Yngwie).

Melrose squinted through the smoke-filled room. "How did Vivian get here?"

Jury put his hand to his head as Dickie let go with another ravaging chord progression and wished for once he had access to Wiggins's pocket pharmacy. "It was her idea." He waved his hand toward the blue-lit stage of the Nine-One-Nine, where Vivian, pumps off, was churning and applauding. "Have any of those cigars?"