William Lashner - Bitter Truth

When I saw who was at the door, I expected a torrent of words, but all I got from Kendall Shaw was a subdued, “Hello, Victor. Caroline told me you’d be coming and that I was to help you any way I could.” When I was inside, she turned around and led me into her family room.

To get there we passed through a formal carpeted foyer. The walls were an eggshell blue, marked with rectangular patches of a slightly darker shade. There were formal chairs and a sofa, but in the center, off to the right, there was a strange open area. As I passed the opening I glanced down at the carpet and saw four indentations in an irregular quadrangular pattern, about the size and the spacing of the feet of a grand piano.

The family room was still intact. Comfortably furnished, it was filled with deep sofas, recliner chairs, framed posters, an exhibition of some of Kendall ’s latest landscapes. In the center of the room, like a shrine, was a gigantic television set. I guess that’s right, take the paintings, take the piano, but Lord please don’t let them take my La-Z-Boy or my big screen Panasonic TV. Kendall gestured me onto the sofa and sat herself on the facing love seat. She was dressed today rather primly, a beige skirt, a white blouse, and her drug-induced mania was somewhat depressed. She was on a different set of pills this week, I figured. Valium anyone?

“I’ve come to see your husband,” I said.

“You’re not really a painter, are you, Victor?” she said.

“No, ma’am. Actually, I’m a lawyer. But I admired your work very much.”

“That was kind of you and Caroline to play such tricks on me.”

“I’m just here to ask your husband a few questions.”

“So Caroline said. He’s out at the moment, but you can wait with me, if you’d like.” She glanced at her watch. “He must be running a little late.”

“When did you expect him back?”

“Two days ago,” she said, and then she almost jumped to her feet. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Fish sticks?”

“Coffee would be fine,” I said, and I watched her walk briskly out of the room.

Well, this had become nicely awkward.

She came back after ten minutes carrying a tray with a teapot and two cups and an arrangement of fancy cookies. As she poured, I told her I liked my coffee black. She handed me the cup and I sipped daintily. It was scalding. I wondered how much I could take her insurance company for if I spilled it on my lap.

“What exactly did you want to ask my husband about?” she said nonchalantly while she poured a cup for herself.

“Are you sure you should be having caffeine, Mrs. Shaw?”

There was a pause. She stirred in some milk and a packet of Sweet’n Low and sat back in her love seat. “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at Veritas that night, Victor. You caught me on a bad evening. I was ovulating. I tend to grow a little overeager during ovulation.”

“Yes, well right there is more than I ever wanted to know, but still, apology accepted.”

“How’s your ear?”

“Healing, thank you. I didn’t mean to disturb your afternoon, I had just a few questions about your husband’s finances.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Maybe I should come back.”

“Maybe you’d have better luck asking me what you want to know. Edward is not forthcoming with or about his money, except to his bookies.”

I took a sip of my coffee and stared at her for a moment. I hadn’t noticed it beneath the hysteria the night she bit my ear but there was about Kendall Shaw, as she bravely sat in her posh townhouse while it disassembled before her eyes, an aura of strength. I had seen in Eddie Shaw’s eyes the weakness of a gambler who, despite all evidence to the contrary, expected to win. Kendall had the eyes of a gambler too, but a gambler who had bet it all and lost and could live with that. She had rolled the dice on Eddie Shaw, a pair of dice she was sure was fixed in her favor, and still, against all laws of probability and physics, had thrown craps.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll ask you what I was going to ask him. The day Jacqueline died, your husband flew to Philadelphia from his beach vacation for some business. That afternoon he stopped in to visit Jacqueline, but she wasn’t home. What was the purpose of that visit?”

She took a sip of coffee and looked to the side. “Edward would tell you he just went over to say hello to his dear sister.”

“But he didn’t just go over to say hello?”

“That would have been a kind and loving gesture on his part, so we can assume the answer is no. Cookie, Victor?”

“No, thank you. So why the visit?”

“Edward needed money to pay off his gambling debts. They had busted up his Porsche and broken his arm. He thought they were going to kill him next. He hoped his sister would give him some of her money to get him out of immediate trouble.”

“Why Jacqueline?”

“Process of elimination. Bobby lost his in wild investments and Caroline wasted most of hers on her film.”

“You mentioned before that Caroline had tried to make a movie.”

“Yes. In a burst of unexpected enthusiasm she lavished great sums of her dividend money on a writer and a director and some actors and a crew and shot a film, a horror film about a crazed plastic surgeon, but then she cut off her financing and closed the picture down before they could complete postproduction. She has the piles of raw stock in a vault somewhere. She said that the end result didn’t satisfy her standards, but that was just her excuse. It was so like her to pull the plug like that, another way of ensuring the continued failure at which she has become so accomplished. All the Reddmans, I’ve learned, are brilliant at failure.”

“But Jacqueline still had her money?”

“Loads. For years she was too depressed to step outside her apartment. Her dividends just piled up. Edward figured two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would get them off his back. She was his last hope.”

“And she wasn’t home when he visited.”

“No, she wasn’t, and by the time he could get free to go see her again she was dead.”

“Which wasn’t so inconvenient for him, actually, at least so he probably thought, since she was insured for five million and he expected he was a beneficiary.”

“Edward would tell you that he knew the beneficiary of her policy had been changed, that Jacqueline had told him so.”

“But that would be another lie, I guess.”

“The day after she was found hanging he had borrowed money on the death benefit to pay off a chunk of his debt. He had promised the borrower that he would repay the loan as soon as the insurance money came in. The night he found out the money was going to those New Age lotus-eaters he literally howled in desperation.”

“Like a werewolf.”

She laughed lightly but not nicely. “My charts had showed that evening to be propitious.”

“Astrology?”

“Temperature. But he was so full of blubbery fear he was useless.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Kendall?”

She stood up and put her now empty cup onto the tray and then walked over to one of her paintings on the wall. It was in a fine oval frame and the oil had also been laid on in an oval, a night scene, with a stream running through spindly bare trees and a huge white mountain peak in the background, all illuminated by a bright moon. “Did you really like my painting?” she asked.

“Well, no, actually. But I’m no critic.”

“And I’m no painter,” she said. “Caroline told me you were looking into Jacqueline’s death for her. That you and she both believe that Jacqueline was murdered.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Victor, don’t you think that I’ve thought what you’re thinking? Don’t you think I’ve stayed up at night, lying beside that snoring shit, wondering with fear of what kinds of beastly things he is capable? Don’t you think?”