William Lashner - Bitter Truth

Ten minutes later, out to the porch comes Nat, looking almost dashing in white pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “The tea will be out shortly. Iced tea. While the generator’s going we can enjoy the comforts of ice and fans.”

“I have some things for you,” I say, opening the lock and reaching into my briefcase.

“I can barely wait,” he cackles, almost joyfully.

“This is a certified copy of the default judgment I gained against you for the wrongful deaths of Jacqueline and Edward Shaw. You’ll notice the amount of the judgment is one hundred million dollars.”

“Well,” he says, taking it and looking it over with mild interest. “What’s a hundred million dollars among friends?”

“And this is a notice of deposition for the ongoing collection action. You should show up in my offices next month on the date listed at ten o’clock.”

“Will you have doughnuts for me, Victor? I like doughnuts.”

“And this is a summons and complaint for the collection action my lawyer in Belize City filed yesterday afternoon. If you’ll notice, in the complaint we’re seeking to levy on all your holdings in Belize, including all real estate and improvements, which would include this property and the house and your orchid garden. I was glad to hear that the collection was priceless.”

“Because it is priceless does not mean it can fetch any price, young man. Just so you know. The land we are on is rented from the Panti family, the house is worth the price of the wood, and the orchids I will of course take with me when I slip over the border, which is just a few kilometers that way, where I have rented another piece of land and have another house.”

“Then we’ll do it all again in Guatemala. I have also notified the FBI of your whereabouts and extradition proceedings are already beginning.”

He stares at me for a moment, the ring around his eye darkening. “Are you after me or my money?”

“Your money,” I say, quickly.

“Glad to hear it’s not personal.”

“Not at all,” I say. “It is only business.”

He cackles in appreciation. “That old bastard Claudius Reddman would be proud as hell of you, Victor.”

Canek Panti comes onto the veranda with a tray holding a bucket of ice, two tall glasses, and a big glass pitcher of tea. He puts a glass before each of us and fills it with tea and ice. As Canek works he has the same considerate manner as when he was guiding. I thank him and he nods and leaves. I lift up the glass and take a long drink. It is minty and marvelous. Nat reaches over and lifts up the pitcher and refills my glass.

“Nothing better than a glass of tea on a hot day,” he says.

“I have something else.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the letter from Christian Shaw, still covered in plastic, and hand it to him. “It was addressed to you.”

He takes it and looks at it for a moment and then tears apart the plastic and opens the envelope and reads the letter inside. He reads it slowly, as if for the first time, and after many quiet minutes I see a tear well. When he finishes reading he carefully puts it back in the envelope and unabashedly wipes the line of wet running down his cheek.

“Thank you, Victor. I am touched. Truly touched. Didn’t have time to take everything with me when I left. I was in an awful hurry. Knew you’d figure it all out soon enough and wanted to be gone before the police came looking. Didn’t even have time to stay for Edward’s funeral, no matter how pleasant that must have been. I would have taken the time, of course, to dig up my box, but you had already beaten me to that.”

“The bank numbers in it were helpful in tracing your funds.”

“I hoped my friend Walter Calvi would have retrieved it for me, but he seems to have disappeared.”

“Things didn’t quite go his way,” I say. “Why did you bury it?”

“It was appropriate for it to rest in the ground there. It contained my most precious things. My legacy really.”

“I figured out who was in the pictures. What was the postcard from Yankee Stadium all about?”

“A little private joke. April 19, 1923, the birth of two great institutions, Yankee Stadium and me.” He laughs his high-pitched laugh.

“Both institutions seemed to have fallen on hard times,” I said. From my briefcase I pull out a photocopy of the diary pages we found in the box. “You might want these too.”

He looks them over and grows pensive once again. “Yes, thank you. You’ve been more than considerate, Victor, for someone hounding me like a wolf. Mrs. Shaw, she ordered me to burn her diary when she felt death approach, to burn everything, but I excised the portions that concerned my father. That, and the letters, were all I really had of him. And, of course, his blood.”

“I found your father’s letter very moving. He seemed to have found an inner peace after all his trials. I would have thought his example of love and spiritual understanding would have convinced you to give up your dreams of revenge.”

“Well, you would have thought wrong. He wasn’t a Poole, was he? And he wrote that letter before he was murdered by a Reddman.”

“Kingsley was his son. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Not Kingsley, that worthless piece of scrap. He pulled the trigger, yes, but it was Mrs. Shaw that did the killing. She was spying on my mother that night and she saw my mother and my father together and she couldn’t help but scream. It was such an inhuman scream that my idiot half-brother mistook it for a cougar that was loose in the countryside. He took out my father’s gun and when Mrs. Shaw saw my father climb the hill she told her son to fire and he did and for the first and last time in his miserable life Kingsley actually hit what he was aiming at.”

I had wondered what that wild scream was that Kingsley had heard the night he killed his father and now I know, it was Faith Reddman Shaw’s agonized cry as she saw her husband embrace the pregnant Poole daughter and realize that it was he who was the girl’s secret lover, the father of her child. How lost she must have been to withhold that fact from her diary, how pathetic to be unable to admit the truths of her life even in her most private world. I wonder if she learned the tools of self-deception from her father just as she learned from him to pursue any and all means to satisfy her ends.

“So your father’s letter didn’t mute your hatred at all?” I ask.

“Not a yard, not an inch. I don’t go in for that spiritual crap. And it is not as if his paeans to love would turn me around. I found my true love and still it paled next to the ecstasies of my family’s revenge. But do you know who those letters actually affected? Mrs. Shaw.”

“Faith Shaw?”

“None other. Changed her life, she said. Took her years to get the courage to go into her husband’s room after his death. Years. But when she finally did, there she discovered the key. Eventually she thought to fit the key into the locked breakfront drawer at the Poole house, where she found the letters. The love letters from my mother and the letter addressed to me from my father. They had an enormous effect on her. They turned her heart inside out. I can’t imagine, Victor, that mere words could have such an effect on a soul. She said she saw the emptiness in all her prior yearnings and crimes and sought to live from then on a life of repentance. I suppose she was ripe for something, still mourning all she had done and all her father had done before her.

“They were a pair, the two of them, two peas in a pod. You know, it wasn’t just the one sister she killed, she killed the other, too. Poisoned her, to be sure that her son would be the only heir to the Reddman fortune. She called him Kingsley, which was a joke in itself, and before his birth made sure to destroy all possible pretenders to his throne. She put the poison in the broth she cooked her dying sister each morning. She had learned her father’s lessons well and so, when it was time for repentance, she had much to be forgiven for. She pursued repentance as devotedly as she pursued her husband and her son’s inheritance. Conciliation, expiation, redemption: that’s what she was after. How unfortunate for her that the only path to what she sought with such desperation led through me.”