Brian Garfield - Necessity

He continued to stare at her; he endeavored to smile.

“That’s all it is-a couple of union buttons got paid to peddle a bunch of garbage and the reporters ate it up like the pigs they are. You understand?”

Her stubborn silence argued with him. He threw his hands high in a violent gesture of exasperation and now the hoarse voice thundered at her:

“It’s a bunch of fucking lies. I don’t deal dope. You ought to know that. Have you ever seen me dealing dope? Come on. These creeps, I expect this kind of shit from them-but what hurts, what really hurts all the way down, it hurts me to see you believing this swill. That’s what hurts. That’s what I hate the bastards for.”

She was afraid of the violence in him. And it was a good act, full of bombast, almost persuasive.

But she didn’t believe him.

It all fitted too well. She’d spent the past two hours remembering things and putting them together. The suitcases full of cash-for “union payoffs.” The twin-engine planes on the Fort Keene airstrip with their furtive Latin American pilots. The obsessive secrecy that always cloaked his expeditions out of town with Jack Sertic and one or more bodyguards. The guns everywhere-in the apartment, in his Lexington Avenue suite of offices, in the Fort Keene cabin. And the getaway preparations in the leather jacket he always kept in the front hall closet, its lining sewn with a passport in a phony name and God knows how many cut diamonds. She hadn’t been prying; she’d been going through the closet yesterday looking for things to donate to the Armory benefit and she’d felt the hard flat passport in the jacket and its presence had made her examine the jacket more closely.

Strange how careless he could be about things like that when he was so cautious about other aspects of his security. Once a week a man with a heavy briefcase came in to sweep the apartment for electronic bugs. The unlisted phone numbers and the combination of the burglar alarm were changed at irregular intervals. All their cars were equipped with break-in alarm systems.

Yet he’d fooled her. Perhaps, albeit, with her subconscious connivance.…

After that there was no more ducking the decision. If only for Ellen’s sake, the only thing left was separation and divorce.

Of course he wasn’t going to like that.

She didn’t see any method of approaching the subject by subtle misdirection; the only way to handle things with Bert was to put them out in the open. He wasn’t tuned in to subtleties. You couldn’t hint around; you couldn’t ease up on him. To get his attention you had to hit him over the head.

She made the mistake of confronting him with it the night they returned to the apartment from the Armory benefit where they had shared the head table with the mayor and four Broadway-Hollywood stars and two noted philanthropists and their wives. Bert was in an elevated mood when they came home: his eyes were aglitter with a kind of vengeful satisfaction, for there was in him (she had discovered) a streak of childlike vindictiveness that was rewarded whenever he was treated like an equal by the sort of people who reeked of old money and spoke with Ivy League establishment drawls. Bert carried himself with a forceful kind of panache but there was no disguising the fact that he was a child of New Jersey, descended from lower-class immigrant Corsicans; he never pretended to be otherwise than nouveau riche but still it pleased him to dine not only with celebrities but especially with brahmins and aristocrats.

Seizing the chance to catch him in a good mood she evaded his embrace in the bedroom. “Let’s talk.”

“Later.”

“No, Bert. Now.”

“Come on. Let’s fool around.”

“I want to take the baby away for a while.”

He tried to absorb that. “Aagh,” he said, dismissing it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I need a change.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t dismiss it like that. We’ve got to talk about this.”

“Talk about what? You been smoking something or what?”

“We’re going away. The baby and I. We’re not staying here any more.”

He watched her very closely. He hardly seemed to be breathing.

She plunged on. “We’re just going away for a while, that’s all. Call it whatever you want. Say I want to get my act together. Say I need an ocean voyage. Call it a vacation. I need air.”

“Call it leaving me. Call it walking out on me. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re my wife. Ellen’s my daughter. What’s this you need a change, you need air, you want to go away for a while? What’s this shit? Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?”

“Please don’t make a bigger thing out of it than it is. I just need a little space to breathe for a while.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his shoes. He kicked them off and stared at them. Finally he looked up at her and she could see his disbelief and she realized her tentative approach had been cowardly. It would have been better to tell him the truth from the outset.

She tried to make up for it. “All right. Let’s have it out in the open. I’m leaving you.”

He looked a little punchdrunk. She’d caught him so badly off balance she nearly felt sorry for him.

She pounded it home: “She’s not going to grow up in a dope dealer’s home. My daughter’s not going to live in that environment. I can’t allow that. I’m taking her away from here.”

A deep breath: don’t run out of gas now. Keep going.

Finish it. “I’m sorry, Bert. You should have been content with the construction business. I can’t go on living with the kind of thing you’ve turned into. I can’t expose my daughter to that.”

He stared at her, his face closing up as she spoke-and then his continuing silence made her break out in a cold sweat.

She felt a growing desperation. “We can do this like civilized people or we can do it the hard way, you know. If that’s what you want I’ll have to get a lawyer and believe me I’ll get the nastiest bastard I can find. I don’t imagine any court in the world would grant custody of a baby girl to a dope peddler.”

She gathered up her handbag and the wrap she’d been wearing; still in evening clothes, stalking on high heels, she went toward the door. “We’re going now. I’ll let you know where to send our things.”

“Like hell you will.”

It wasn’t his words; it was the low even rasp of his voice that stopped her.

He said to her back, “Just stay put. I need some time to think about this.”

“Fine. Think about it all you want. I’ll let you know where you can reach me when you want to talk about it.”

“You want me to sleep in the other room tonight? Fine. All right. But nobody’s leaving right now.”

She turned to face him. “You can stop me from taking her tonight, of course. You’re strong enough. But I’ll just get a court order. Is that what I have to do?”

He shook his head-more in bafflement than in visible anger. “No divorce. No custody. That’s all. Okay? Understand?”

“You’re having some kind of Corsican dream. Let’s talk about reality.”

“I’ll tell you reality. Reality is you don’t take my daughter away from me. Reality is you don’t walk all over me in a divorce court. You don’t like it here any more? I’m sorry about that. But you made a bargain. You took my name, you took my money.”

“You can have them both back. I don’t need your money.”

“Yeah. How noble. Okay. Reality, now, reality is you don’t walk out on Albert LaCasse. And Ellen stays with her daddy.”

“Jesus, haven’t you heard a word I said?”

“Sure I heard you. Let’s discuss one simple fact.” He’d gone glacial; his enunciation became angrily precise: