William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“Yes.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t hurt her,” he said, picking up his knife and slicing into a dinner roll.

“I may be wrong,” I said, “but I don’t think she’s in the bathroom crying over me.”

He sighed. “No.”

“What are you, gay?”

Harrington’s face startled, and then he laughed, a warm guttural laugh, charismatic and comforting. I watched him laugh and I couldn’t help but start laughing too. “No,” he said when he finally calmed and had wiped the tears from his eyes. “But that would have been so much easier.”

While we were waiting for Caroline’s return, Harrington, now under the assumption that I was Caroline’s lawyer as well as her lover, explained to me the intricacies of the Reddman demise. The family’s entire share of Reddman stock was in one trust, controlled by Kingsley, Caroline’s father. While the bulk of the dividends remained with the trust, a portion was designated for division to Kingsley’ heirs, the four children. When an heir died, each survivor’s share of the designated division increased proportionally. Upon Kingsley’s death, the shares in the trust were to be divided equally among the surviving heirs.

“How much?” I asked. I knew the general numbers, but I still liked hearing them.

“Right now, with three heirs, each share is worth about one hundred and forty-five million dollars, before taxes, but the share price has been rising so it may be more.”

“Uncle Sam will be happy with his cut.”

“Both Eddie and Bobby are considering moving to Ireland permanently to defray taxes.”

“And they say patriotism is dead. It’s funny though, talking about so much money, but I thought it would be more.”

“Yes, well, over the years many of the shares have been sold, to pay the expenses in maintaining the house and other properties, and a large stake has been put into a different trust, pursuant to the direction of a former trustee.”

“Which trustee?”

“Caroline’s grandmother.”

“And who are the beneficiaries of that trust?”

“I don’t know. It is not being run by our bank and the documents are sealed.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not a one.”

“I heard a rumor that Charity Reddman, Caroline’s grandaunt, ran away after she became pregnant. Any possibility that the trust could be for the benefit of the child or the child’s heirs?”

“Possible, I guess. But you can’t honestly suspect some mysterious heir of Charity Reddman of being responsible for Jacqueline’s death.”

I shrugged. “Tell me about the life insurance policies.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Five million, term, on each heir, premiums paid by the trust. The beneficiary of the policies was designated by the trust as the surviving heirs.”

“So if one killed off another,” I said, “that one would get a third of five million?”

“That’s right.”

“Nice motive,” I said, thinking of Edward Shaw and his gambling debts. “Except I was under the impression the money from Jacqueline’s insurance went to her church.”

“Yes. Jacqueline changed the beneficiary just before her death.”

“Did her brothers and sister know?”

“She wanted me to keep it quiet, so I did.”

“And so when she died her brothers and sister were in for a nasty surprise.”

“Some were none too pleased,” admitted Harrington. “And neither, of course, was the insurance company. It was ready to pay the death benefit but now it’s holding off payment until all questions of Jacqueline’s death are answered.”

I was surprised at that, wondering who had raised the questions with the insurance company, but before I could follow up, Caroline returned. Her eyes were clean of mascara and red, her face was scrubbed. She looked almost wholesome, about as wholesome as you can look with a diamond in your nose. She didn’t sit, instead she placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Take me home, Victor.”

Harrington stood immediately. “Don’t worry about the check,” he said.

Out on Walnut Street, as I raised my hand for a cab, I couldn’t help but ask, “What is going on between you two?”

“Have you ever been in love, Victor?”

I thought about this for a little bit. “Yes.”

“It wasn’t any fun, was it?”

“No, not really.”

“Just take me home and fuck me, Victor, and please please please please please don’t say another word until you do.”

HER PLACE WAS ABOVEan abandoned hardware store on Market Street, just a few blocks west of the Delaware River. It was a huge cavernous space supported by rows of fluted cast-iron pillars, easily more than three thousand square feet. It had been a sweatshop of some sort in its more productive days and must have been a brutal one at that. Plaster scaled from the walls leaving them mottled and psoriatic. The ceiling, warped and darkened by leaks, was a confused configuration of wires and old fluorescent light fixtures and air conduits. Here and there patches of the ceiling’s metal lath showed through where huge chunks of the plaster had fallen to the floor of roughened wood, unfinished, dark, splattered with paint. The windows were yellowed and bare of adornment, staring forlornly out onto the street or the deserted lot next door. The bathroom was doorless, the shower a cast-iron tub with clawed feet, the kitchen one of those stainless steel kitchenettes that looked to have been swiped from a motor home. Piled in one of the corners on the Market Street end were scraps of metal, old bed frames, chairs, evidence of a failed rehab. The loft smelled of wet plaster and dust and sorrow.

There was a couch in the middle, lit by a ceramic lamp on an end table, and there was a love seat that matched the couch and a coffee table to prop up feet and place drinks when entertaining. It looked to have been bought at a place like Seaman’s, the whole setup, and it would have been at home in any suburban split level, but here, in the midst of this desolation, it seemed so out of place it was almost like a work of art, commenting wryly on the easy comfort bought at places like Seaman’s. And then, beneath an industrial light fixture that hovered over it like a spy, there was the bed, a king-sized sleigh bed, massive as a battleship, carved of dark mahogany. Red silk sheets covered the mattress. The comforter, a masculine gold and green paisley, was twisted and mussed atop the silk. Four long pillows, covered in a golden print, were tossed here and there across the bed. And tossed among the pillows and the twists of the comforter were Caroline and I, on our backs, staring up at that spy of a light fixture and the ragged ceiling beyond, following with our gazes the rise of her cigarette smoke, naked, our bodies at right angles one to the other, not touching except for our legs, which were still intertwined.

“Tell me about her,” said Caroline.

I immediately knew which woman she was asking about. “There isn’t much to tell, least not anymore.”

“Was she pretty?”

I knew which woman she was talking about and I knew why she was asking and the reasons were so sad I couldn’t help but answer her. “She was very pretty and very decadent and very vulnerable. When I met her she was with someone else, someone very powerful, which made her wildly attractive to me and so far out of reach she wasn’t even worth fantasizing about.”

“What was her name?’

“Veronica.”

“How did you two get together?”

It was a funny-sounding question, like you would ask about high school sweethearts or an innocent pair of newly-weds, not two depraved lovers like Veronica and me. “I don’t know, exactly. It was a time of my life when I was full of desires. I wanted money and success, I wanted to be accepted and admired by my betters. I wanted to be the guy I saw in the GQ ads, the smiling man-about-town in those society photos. I wanted to be everything I could never be. And for a while, most of all, I wanted Veronica. Then, like a dream, I had a chance for everything, the success, the wealth, the entree into a world that had kept me out just for the sheer joy of it. And I had a chance at her too. In the blink of an eye we were sleeping together and she had become more than a desire, she had become an obsession.”