Robert Knightly - The cold room

Ronald paused, gave his head a tiny shake, then abruptly changed the subject. ‘For Margaret,’ he said, partitioning the syllables of his mother’s name as if sounding out a word in a foreign language, ‘Father’s stroke was a stroke of luck.’

I wasn’t expecting much to come from the revelations that followed, though I listened attentively for any mention of the circumstances surrounding Guillermo’s death. But Ronald wasn’t going there. This was all about a will Guillermo had somehow created, despite being completely disabled, a man whose speech was limited to a series of unintelligible gurgles. That the will would eventually be challenged was inevitable; that Margaret would be up to the challenge was also inevitable. At the first hint of a lawsuit, she’d produced an impeccably credentialed attorney named Mason Livingston. A direct descendant of the Livingstons so prominent during the revolution, Mason swore, under oath, that he’d read the document aloud to Guillermo, clause by clause, and that Guillermo had indicated consent with a series of nods confirmed by eye-blinks. Three other witnesses, attorneys all, then leaped forward to confirm Mason’s account. The will was unbreakable.

‘And now she runs your life,’ I said. It was time to make the turn.

‘And now she runs my life.’

I leaned even closer, until my chest brushed Ronald’s back. ‘Remember what my partner said, about you being afraid to stand up to Margaret? I know it isn’t true. I know you stopped being afraid of your mother years ago. Like I know you would have left home years ago.?.?. except for the money. I’m talking about the forty million dollars, and the will, and the trust fund. Margaret knew exactly what she was doing when she made herself executor of a fund that ties you up until you reach the age of forty.’

‘How can a person,’ Ronald asked, ‘be so crazy and so crafty at the same time? Margaret’s fucking Mason Livingston, who administers the trust. If I displease her, Mason will invoke the will’s morality clause. I’ve got a record, which I’m sure you already know, a record that brands me a cocksucker and a pervert. My claim to any part of my father’s estate hangs by a thread.’

‘And Margaret’s standing right there with a pair of scissors?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that you have to take those scissors out of her hand.’

I stared for a moment at the sheen of perspiration on the back of Ronald’s neck, at tiny drops of moisture no bigger than grains of sand that clung to the black hairs fanning out from a natural parting. ‘What would you do, Ronald, if you got control of the estate? How would you live your life?’

Ronald answered without hesitation. ‘My favorite word is debauchery, followed closely by depravity. I want to drown myself in sensation. I want to use every drug there is to use. I want to have sex on three-masted yachts, and in filthy alleyways. I want to keep going until I’m dead.’

I rose to my feet at that point and gripped my side. No more whispering. Time for business. ‘I can’t kneel anymore,’ I told him. ‘My wound is killing me.’ I set a chair in front of him and sat down. ‘Now, the sex part you can keep to yourself, but tell me, is heroin your drug of choice?’

‘It’s that obvious?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid it is, Ronnie, but we can forget about that. For now, anyway.’ I leaned back in the chair. ‘Ya know, there’s a way out for you. A way to make all those fantasies come true.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Mynka Chechowski died in your mother’s kitchen. The cause of death was a blow to the top of her skull with a blunt object, a blow universally associated with an enraged perpetrator. That perpetrator can’t be you, Ronald, because blind rages are beyond you. And it can’t be your brother, either, because he was the father of Mynka’s child and he loved her. That leaves Margaret holding the bag, and her elder son to put her in it.’

Ronald rocked back and forth, his eyes still closed. He was breathing through his nose again. ‘Dreams are the best things about dope,’ he told me. ‘Evil dreams that fly around your mind like cobwebs in a breeze. I believe I’ve dispatched Margaret in every way there is to dispatch a human being. In my dreams, I’ve skinned her alive.’

He bent forward to look into my eyes. ‘You’ve taken the time to know me. That’s an act of respect and I’m thankful. But I can’t give you what you want, as much as I’d like to. That’s because you’ve misread the tea leaves. Margaret didn’t kill Toad. Jerk killed Toad. Margaret wasn’t even there.’

I jumped to my feet, grabbed Ronald’s shirt and ripped him out of the chair. I wasn’t faking anything this time. Ronald had given the wrong answer and I didn’t care whether it was a true answer or not. For those few seconds, until Adele opened the door and I saw the look of utter distress twisting her features, I was out of control. Still shaking, I dropped Ronald into his chair and waved Adele off.

Unlike my partner, Ronald seemed more bemused than afraid. He waited until Adele closed the door behind her, then began to speak.

‘Ridding myself of Margaret? Well, the gods are having too much fun to let me off that particular hook. But when you’re talking about tens of millions of dollars, losing a brother is no small thing. For a time, right after Jerk killed Toad, I thought Jerk would commit suicide. But he rallied.’

I re-positioned my chair in front of Ronald’s and sat down. Ronald nodded, then simply continued. He was off and running now. He wouldn’t stop until the tank was empty. This was a phenomenon I’d witnessed many times in the past, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been playing me all along.

‘Margaret approved of Jerk’s relationship with Toad-’

‘Use their real names, Ronald. That would be David and Mynka, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘David and Mynka? It could be the title of a romance novel. The second son of a fabulously wealthy South American aristocrat falls for the Polish maid his mother loves to abuse. Miraculously, the Polish maid responds to the second son’s overtures with a previously unrevealed passion. Desire wells, of course, and juices flow, until they can stand it no longer. Until the second son creeps up to the little maid’s attic room and is not rebuffed.

‘Mother eventually finds out, but, amazingly, she doesn’t object. In fact, she tells her older son, whom she knows to be a practicing homosexual, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”?’

Ronald stopped there, his eyes moving down and to the left as he retrieved a memory. I watched his tongue wash across his lips and his eyes harden, but his voice was almost without inflection when he resumed speaking.

‘The maid is impregnated by the second son a few months later, even though his mother supplies him with boxes of condoms, condoms in a wide variety of colors, textures and flavors. Predictably, the mother becomes enraged when the second son reveals his love’s delicate condition. Predictably, she berates her hapless son. Fade to black. Ho-hum.

‘Enter a new actor, a catalyst, a man to stir the pot, to ratchet up the tension. He is Aslan Khalid, the entrepreneur who supplied the little maid to the Portola family. Initially, Aslan is as outraged as Margaret, insisting that his property has been damaged and compensation is in order. But then, in the course of a single hour, he abruptly switches tactics. Maybe, he tells Margaret, the little maid should be allowed to give birth. The resulting child would carry David Portola’s DNA and be entitled, not only to his support, but to his lifestyle.

‘Much discussion naturally follows, a period of bargaining, of hard, hard bargaining, until both parties agree that abortion, followed by a liberal outflow of capital from the mother to the entrepreneur, is the only rational solution to their mutual problem.