William Lashner - Bitter Truth

I started toward that wing with Consuelo hanging on to me. She should have been yelling at me now, calling me unpronounceable names in her native Spanish, calling for help, but her voice was strangely quiet as she begged me, with an almost fearful tone, to please please stop and not disturb Mr. Shaw.

“I’m going to speak to him today, Consuelo,” I said. “If you want you can go and call the police and they, I’m sure, would be up here in no time at all to kick me out, their sirens blasting, their lights flashing, just, I’m sure, what Mr. Shaw would like to see today. Or, on the other hand, I’m willing to wait here while you go tell him that I’m here to speak to him about the deaths of his son and his daughter and about Caroline.”

She stared at me, her dark features darkening even further, and then she told me to wait right there. She turned and went to the door at the very end of the hallway, glanced at me again, knocked, waited for a moment, slowly opened the door, and disappeared inside.

The next time the door opened it opened for me. Consuelo, without lifting her gaze from the floor, said, “Mr. Shaw will see you now.” I offered her a smile as I passed her, a smile she didn’t accept as she maintained her stare at the floor, and then I stepped through the doorway into the room of Kingsley Shaw, the door closing quietly but firmly behind me.

I FOUND MYSELF ALONEin a massive, high-ceilinged room that spanned the entire width of the house. Luxuriously carpeted, luxuriously outfitted, smelling richly of smoke and seeming to have been set down in this spot from another time, the room shouted the strength of a single overwhelming personality. I spun around to see all of its strange dark grandeur.

Two chandeliers of wrought iron, hanging from an ornately patterned ceiling, sprinkled a dim light on the furnishings, complemented by the uneven glow of savage iron fixtures intermittently cleaving to the walls. There were windows on three sides of the room but they were either shuttered or draped with thick maroon velvet so the daylight that did seep through, thick with spinning motes of dust, appeared uninvited and invasive, like slashing claws. A huge telescope stood forlornly by one of the draped windows and across the room, by another draped and darkened window, was a second, and beside each telescope were astronomical charts held open on wooden racks and star globes suspended in intricate wooden stands with clawed feet. The wall behind me held the head of an antlered deer, of a buffalo, of a large, pale brown cat, and weapons were studded between the taxidermy, swords, battle-axes, a thick and ornate shotgun. Massive bookshelves were filled with leather-bound volumes, one series after another in gold and green and blue and maroon, huge epic tomes, intimidating in their size and mass. One half of the room was furnished with red leather club chairs and a long leather couch, a gentleman’s club for old shipping magnates to hide from their wives and smoke cigars and peruse the papers for that day’s ship arrivals. A huge bed with a wrought-iron canopy stood alone in the other half, seemingly marooned on an oriental carpet of blue. Before the wall directly in front of me was a great stone fireplace, its fire crackling but low, the flame’s heat not reaching across the cold to me, and above the fireplace, dominating the whole of the room, lit by its own overhead brass lamp, was a grand portrait, ten feet high, six feet wide, a portrait of a lady.

The woman in the portrait seemed strangely familiar and I stepped toward her, almost against my will. She stood in a black dress, her hands held delicately before her, a bonnet tied tightly to her head, her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face pretty and composed and absolutely self-contained. Her eyes, of course, followed my movements as I walked toward her but she stared down at me without even the pretense of concern for my presence in that room with her, as if I were no more significant than an insect crawling about the ground beneath her feet. The closer I stepped, the larger and more ominous she became and then I stopped and felt a slight shiver. I recognized her all right, I had seen her picture in the box we had dug up from Charity Reddman’s grave, a picture where she was younger, gayer, oblivious still to all her future devastation. Faith Reddman Shaw. I took one more step forward and for a moment it was as if the self-containment in her face cracked and something ugly and serpentine revealed itself. But that was just the reflection of the overhead light on the painting’s varnish and when I stepped back again her face regained its composure.

I heard a rasp of breath from behind me and turned quickly. In the midst of all that baroque grandeur it took me a moment to spot the source. I had been so overwhelmed by the decor I hadn’t noticed anyone in the room with me but now, focused by the sound, I saw him there in the corner. Hunched, gray, his skin pasty and smoothly pale, seated in a wooden wheelchair, a tartan rug across his legs, he all but disappeared under the power of the interior design. His face was turned away from me.

“Mr. Shaw?” I said, starting to walk toward him.

He cringed, lowering his large chin into his shoulder, preparing himself as if I were wielding a weapon in my advance. I stopped.

“Mr. Shaw?” I repeated, more loudly.

Still cringing, he nodded.

I stepped forward again. “Mr. Shaw.” I raised my voice to near shouting and there was a slight echo in the enormity of the room. “I’m very sorry about your son Edward. I wouldn’t disturb you on a day like this, but I believe it vital that we talk right away. My name is Victor Carl. I’m a friend of Caroline’s. She asked me to look into the death of Jacqueline and now, I believe, somehow, that her death and your son’s death are related. I have just a few questions to ask you. Mr. Shaw?”

He just stared at the floor, his chin remaining in his shoulder.

“Mr. Shaw? Do you understand what I just said, Mr. Shaw?”

Still cringing, he nodded.

“Can we talk?”

He stared at the floor for a moment longer before placing his hands on the wheels of his chair and, his head still tilted, rolling himself slowly across the room until his chair was fronting the fire. He leaned forward, as if to warm his face by it.

One of the leather club chairs was facing the hearth and I sat in it so that I could see his profile. He had been a handsome man once, and large too, I could see, enormous really, with broad shoulders and a huge head, but it was as if he had been crushed into the space he now occupied. There was something weak and slack about his face, a statue weathered to a bland smoothness by time, and his eyes were dull and weary beneath his overgrown eyebrows. I leaned forward and crossed my hands like a schoolmarm and explained to him what I had discovered, how Jacqueline had not killed herself but had been murdered by a professional assassin who had been well paid for his services, how Edward might have been killed by the same man, how it looked as if someone was trying to destroy the heirs to the Reddman fortune toward some, as yet unknown, purpose. As I spoke I noticed that he didn’t seem surprised by what I was saying. It was hard to tell if he was getting it all but I spoke slowly and loudly and he nodded as if in comprehension throughout my little talk.

“I don’t know if whoever is hiring the killers is going for money or just plain blood revenge,” I said, “but I think you might have some of the answers.”

When I was finished I waited for a response. He stared into the fire, remaining silent.

“Mr. Shaw?” I said.

“Sometimes it speaks to me,” he said. His voice was a listless monotone, as gray and pale as his coloring.