Brian Garfield - Necessity

Doyle and Marian? That’s taken care of, at least for a while. On the phone to them last week she contrived to sound breathless and a bit incoherent: babbling about going back to her ex-husband, a trial reconciliation, a long trip together to the Orient and the South Seas to see if they can’t patch it up and get it working again-got to run now; got to catch the plane.… My investment in the bookstore? Let it ride, good friends, and keep me on the books and if you make any money put my share in an account. I’ll be in touch when we get back-oh, it may be months, six months, eight, hell I don’t know. Love you both. Must absolutely run …

A patchwork solution but it’ll have to do for the moment; at least it’ll keep them from calling out the Missing Persons squad.

And when they repeat the story to Graeme-as Marian inexorably will do-it won’t give him leads to follow. What’s he going to do, hunt all over Asia and the islands?

Must remember tonight or tomorrow to reserve a rental car in Plattsburgh. Have to do it in the name of Jennifer Hartman because it would be suicidal to leave traces of Dorothy Holder that close to the lion’s den. Put it on Jennifer’s Visa card and remember to send in a money order to cover it because you’ll never receive the bill.

The car must be something with four-wheel drive.

Better do it tonight.

What else?

The hardest part has been making sure she wasn’t followed during the three days in Los Angeles when she drove from bank to bank, clearing out Jennifer Hartman’s accounts, taking the money in cash. Every last account emptied-even the retirement account, although the man gave her a look of stern disapproval and warned her of dire consequences from Internal Revenue.

Now the money is redistributed around this new city and its cluster of satellite towns. Jennifer Hartman’s assets are gone: liquidated and untraceable.

It’s so difficult to create a life-and so easy to destroy it. All it takes is a few signatures. Or a bullet.

A bullet …

She flashes on an image: Bert with his gun collection. Unlocking the chain, taking down a revolver, showing it to her, trying to explain its operation. His exasperation when she doesn’t seem to want to understand it.

“What is this-Victorian times or something? It’s not a feminine thing to do? What’s this crap you’re giving me? Come on. Your old man was in the military. What are you going into a swoon for?”

“I just don’t like the damn things, Bert.”

“Fine. Sometimes you need things you don’t like. Suppose some creep breaks in here, comes at you with a knife?”

“I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.”

“I’m talking about the baby now. I’m talking about protecting my kid.”

“Bert, the baby’s not even due yet for nearly six months.”

“People in our position, the world’s full of creeps looking to put the snatch on rich kids. They bury infant babies alive out in the woods someplace and they come after you for two million dollars ransom. You understand? Now pay attention. You get a good grip on the thing and you hold it in both hands-here, like this …”

So she let him teach her how to load it, how to aim it, how to shoot. At Fort Keene, five months pregnant, she was pressed into accompanying Bert and four of his friends on their venison safari. There was Jack Sertic, togged out in professional white-hunter khakis, and the helicopter pilot who was a crack shot, and two guests from Bert’s growing show business coterie of chums. One of them was an actor who three years ago had been modeling in designer jeans commercials and subsequently had become the beefcake star of a hit TV action series; the other was a fat comedian from New York and Las Vegas who had the filthiest mouth she’d ever heard. She’d complained to Bert about it and Bert had agreed with her. “But he’s a funny son of a bitch, you’ve got to admit.”

She did-with reluctance. All the same she found it hard to hide her amusement at the ludicrously grim seriousness with which these presumably grown men crept stealthily through the trees on their sponge-soled boots, stalking in grim slow silence like little boys playing Steal-the-Bacon, behaving remarkably like smirking renegade villains prowling toward their sinister ambush in some horrid silent movie melodrama.

She had a rifle. She knew how to use it. She saw a buck deer-bolt upright and staring right at her-and she just watched it until it wheeled and darted away, the signal spots of alarm showing white on its rump-and Bert came clambering out of the trees to gape in astonishment. “You had him. You let him go. For God’s sake, why?”

She looked him in the eye. “I hate the taste of venison. Didn’t I tell you?” And walked away.

“Jesus H. Christ.” He came after her: gripped her arm and turned her. “Hey,” he said in a different voice.

Then he dropped his rifle and pulled her into the circle of his embrace. “Hey,” he murmured. Then his gentle smile became a sybaritic leer.

It was one of the last times she can recall laughing with him.

An hour or so later she watched him fire a high-powered bullet that tossed a smallish buck right into the air and brought it down in a hideous somersault against the bole of a birch tree with force enough to shake the ground.

She saw the avid excitement in Bert’s face-“Hey, hey guys, you see that? You see that?”-and she turned away.

As she walked off she heard the comedian say, “You sure that ain’t somebody’s cow? Fucker goes hunting, comes up to this dumb-ass farmer, fucker says I’m sorry I killed your cow, man, can I replace it? Dumb-ass farmer goes, I don’t know, fucker, how much milk can you give?”

Male laughter.

She didn’t laugh. She made the excuse of fatigue and made her way back to the cabin, leaning back in that ungainly way to balance her expanding abdomen.

She was changing into another person all the while. It was possible now to look back and see what must have been happening then. Even at the time there was a sense that day by day her life was becoming different but she attributed this to the baby that was growing inside her.

It’s more than that, though. Perhaps it’s a kind of growing up.

From a reasonably strait-laced upbringing she shifted as a young woman, without ever marking the transitions, to a life of self-centered trivialities and meaningless cosmetic surfaces.

Amazing how we fall into traps: how we begin to care-simply because other people, superficial people, purport to care-about so many things that don’t matter. What’s In-what’s Out. Who’s U-who’s non-U. A Triumph? But my dear, that was last year’s car. Wouldn’t be caught dead with a man who drives anything but a Datsun 260Z.

And then she’d gone beyond that into Bert’s world of hedonistic luxury with its power trips and billygoat morality-aspects of which she was only beginning to discover.

In fact, thinking back now, she is distressed by the vastness of her ignorance about Bert in those days. They had been married more than a year. She shared his bed and his life. She didn’t like most of his friends but she knew them-she believed she knew all of them.

She believed she was married to a construction magnate.

It wasn’t until later-less than a year ago-that she found out about the rest of his business operations.

Troubled by her naivete of those days she has tried to reason it out:

I’m not an innocent … I didn’t just parachute in yesterday … How the hell could I remain oblivious for so long? There must have been plenty of evidence. Clues all around …

You don’t see what you want not to see. It’s partly that. And it’s partly that Bert has a compulsive way of compartmentalizing everything in his life. There was always that remoteness in him, right from the beginning: he made you aware that you were only seeing as much of him as he wanted you to see.