Brian Freemantle - Two Women

‘We won’t next time,’ promised the Cavalcante lawyer. ‘We got everyone out there, waiting.’

‘We’ve got to move quicker than that,’ insisted Petrie. There was only one way he could think of and he had to know if it had already been set up. When Stanley Burcher immediately answered his Algonquin telephone Petrie knew that it hadn’t.

‘You spoken to Northcote’s lawyers?’ Petrie demanded.

‘I’m still working it out.’

‘What’s to work out?’

‘I’ve got to have every answer ready because they’re going to have a lot of questions,’ said the intermediary lawyer. The tiredness he felt from a long day had nothing to do with the 7.00 a.m. breakfast meeting. All he’d done since then was sit in his hotel room trying – but failing – to evolve an approach that would not bring him into direct, identifiable contact with the Northcote firm’s attorney who had been pointed out to him at the Plaza Hotel.

‘Stan, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call the guy, right now: this minute. You got to get whatever’s in that fucking bank. You do that and you’re going to be a rich and happy man for the rest of your life.’

He was already a rich man, Burcher reminded himself. And what sort of life would he have if he didn’t get what Carver had copied? He could always run, Burcher told himself. It wasn’t that he’d neglected the possible need for an escape route.

Alice tried at the beginning – once briefly breaking down in tears, although of frustration, not collapse, and then in annoyance that she’d broken down at all – but was finally silenced by Jane’s total refusal to respond or acknowledge Alice’s every insistence upon their physical danger, up to and including murder, with tortured interrogation in between. For almost an hour Jane refused to stop despite Alice’s whimpering need for a restroom and by mid-afternoon they were way beyond the Paterson/West Milford arc that Hanlan had stipulated for his road watch. Jane’s eventual halt was at a truck stop, like an oasis in reverse among the verdant pines and firs, a scoured-bald dust bowl of petrol and diesel pumps bordering the road and a stinking, cockroach-infested block of excreta-blocked toilets the stink of which made Alice’s vomiting worse. No water came from the taps when she tried to rinse her mouth or wash her hands.

It was a further hour, close to four in the afternoon, before Jane pulled into another truck stop, although at this one an intermittently dead-bulbed sign boasted of a pay-in-advance, cash-only motel at its rear.

‘Your treat,’ Jane announced. ‘Time to make those calls.’

The motel was a single-storey prefabrication of paint-stripped cabins, theirs a boxed, twin-bedded room with opaquely thin curtains and opaquely thin grey sheets beneath candlewick spreads. Both were patterned by long ago stains, mostly brown although sometimes black to match those on the threadbare, frayed carpeting. The one chair sagged out of any shape, its back black from the grease of a thousand unwashed heads. The bulb was missing over the processed-wood bureau, the mirror of which was whorled with verdigris. There was a urine smell from the open-doored, cockroach-scuttling bathroom.

Alice said: ‘I’m not going to stay here! This is disgusting.’

Jane said: ‘You’ll stay because I say so. Because this is just the place for us to talk about the things we have to talk about. And where no one in their wildest dreams would think of looking for us, finding us. I’m protecting you now, Alice.’

Jane turned dismissively away, concentrating upon the number she was dialling, instinctively smiling at the immediate connection but at once frowning, impatiently talking over the babble from the other end the moment she identified herself.

‘I know…! I know…! I’ve spoken to him… I know… I’m all right. Rosemary! Stop talking, Rosemary! Listen…’ She looked at Alice when the sound stopped from the other end of the line. ‘Do you mind?’

Alice didn’t immediately understand and when she did looked uncertainly around the cramped room. There was a black scurry underfoot when she went into the bathroom and Alice halted just inside the door. It was very thin and although Alice didn’t hear everything she heard enough to understand.

Jane was pregnant. What other reason was there for a woman to speak this long with her gynaecologist?

‘John loved me, very much.’

Alice said nothing. Jane being pregnant didn’t change anything. It wasn’t something they’d ever talked about – it would have been out of bounds – but of course John had made love to her: it was understood – accepted – without needing to be said.

‘And I loved him very much.’ She was smiling, as she’d been smiling when she’d called Alice from the bathroom after her conversation with Rosemary Pritchard.

Still Alice said nothing. What would her test show? She was anxious but at the same time reluctant to find out. Surely she had to be! What other reason was there for her being so sick, so often?

‘I saw the photograph, the one you tried to hide in the cabin. I saw it by the telephone and found where you’d hidden it, when you were in the bath.’ There was no anger in the flat tone.

Alice finally sat on the collapsing, hair-greased chair. ‘I know John loved you. Your marriage was never in any danger.’

‘That’s very generous of you! What did you and he do, just fuck?’

Alice winced. ‘Can I try to explain?’

‘I want you to. I want very much to have it explained to me. All of it.’

‘I loved John, too.’

‘And he loved you!’ There was a jeer in Jane’s voice.

‘Yes.’

Jane made a balancing gesture with both hands. ‘So that’s how it was, he loved us both, fifty-fifty.’

‘Yes, I guess. But you were his wife. Would always have been his wife.’

‘And you would have always been his mistress.’

‘For as long as he wanted me.’

‘Or until he didn’t want me any more!’

‘That would never have happened.’

‘Tell me you talked about it!’

‘We did! He told me he would never leave you, because he loved you, and I said I didn’t want or expect him to.’

‘I’m supposed to believe that?’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘How often, once a week, twice a week? All the time when I was out of town?’

She had the right, Alice accepted, although she didn’t feel there was anything to defend herself against. ‘We were happy.’

‘How about the cabin? How often did you sneak away to the cabin?’ Jane’s face was set, rigid.

Everything she’d told Jane was the truth. There was no guilt. ‘Just three times. The photograph you saw was the first.’ It was back at the cabin, packed in her case, she abruptly realized. Whatever happened she had to go back to the cabin to get it.

Jane jerked her head towards the telephone, upon which she’d made two further calls after that to the gynaecologist. ‘Did he tell you why we were seeing Rosemary?’

Alice shook her head. ‘I didn’t know you were.’

‘Something he didn’t actually tell you?’ It was weak sarcasm.

‘No.’

‘We were going to have a baby.’

Alice felt a physical lurch at the confirmation but didn’t speak.

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘It will be wonderful…’ stumbled Alice. ‘John would have… you will be a wonderful parent…’

The rigid face creased slightly, then cleared. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if John was still alive? You’d have gone on sleeping together?’

‘Yes,’ said Alice at once, holding the other woman’s look. ‘I’m not ashamed. I know it’s difficult for you to believe… I guess you never will… but I was never a threat to you… and I’ve tried to save you, literally save your life, because you don’t know how bad things are.’ She knew that Geoffrey Davis, whom Jane had told in another of her calls to block any legal move against John’s bank, was the firm’s lawyer. Presumably Burt, whose surname Jane had never used and to whom she’d repeated the blocking instructions, was the personal attorney.