Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

She stroked his hair. He seemed so very helpless in that moment. Looking down at his face, she could see the lines radiating from his eyes, the set of his mouth, he was really not a good-looking man, but she loved him very much in that moment, more than she had ever loved him before. And wanted nothing from him. The nights she had lain awake thinking of his kiss, thinking of his hands upon her body, these seemed not to have happened, or possibly to have happened to some child she once had known. She held his head to her breast, and she felt a love new to her, but a love nonetheless, powerful and abiding. He lay against her unmoving. She could hear his gentle breathing. She stroked his hair comfortingly, and she said nothing, holding him to her.

In a little while, she felt his tears on her flesh.

And now there was the will.

Now the shock was done and gone, now that day which had started for him with a telephone call to his New York apartment and the shocking words of Milt Anderson telling him his mother was dead, and the drive to Talmadge, and the body lying cold and lifeless in the mortuary, “Yes, that’s my mother,” he had said, and left the room and driven to the lake, that day was done and gone.

And the night was done and gone, too, the woman who had come to him in the night, not a child he had known, but a woman named Kate Bridges who offered him comfort and solace, who allowed him to cry unashamed, a magnificent woman named Kate Bridges who leaned back into the automobile when he dropped her off at her house and said, “I’ll be worrying about you, David. Call me, please,” and he had nodded and touched her face gently in thanks, the night was done and gone, too, and now there was the will.

The flowers wilting beside the open casket. The relatives and friends who came to express their sorrow. The funeral procession from the old Regan house through the town to the cemetery on the hill where his father was buried. The open grave with the two grave-diggers standing by it silently abused in the presence of a ritual they witnessed over and over again, holding their caps in their hands while the minister read the elegy, and the straps poised over the open earth were pneumatically released and the coffin sank slowly, slowly, into the receptive earth, and he walked homeward silently in the town where he’d been born, in the town where sometimes death came.

And now there was the will.

Now there was the formality of death, now there was only the business of death, the hard transaction of inheritance, and he stood in Elliot Tulley’s office with the window facing the street behind him, and life rushing past below, and he talked to him the way he would to an agent trying to sell a dubious property.

“Who’s Giovanni Fabrizzi?” he asked.

“He’s the person to whom your mother chose to leave half her estate in trust.”

“Don’t give me any double talk, Elliot,” David said. “I understand the will perfectly. Who is he?”

“A man. A person.” Elliot shrugged.

“Look, Elliot, I’m not in the mood for this kind of horse manure, believe me. I’m leaving for Los Angeles on Friday, and I want to settle this before I go, if possible. Either you tell me who this man is and what the separate agreement between them is all about, or I’ll start suit the minute I get back from the Coast.”

“There isn’t a court in the land that can force me to produce that document, David. I think you ought to know that.”

“Who’s Fabrizzi?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that.”

“I’ve gone over my mother’s accounts,” David said, “and settled all her unpaid bills. I had the opportunity of looking through her canceled checks, Elliot. Why’d she give you a check for a hundred and fifty dollars each month?”

“That was something between your mother and me,” Elliot said.

“What kind of something?”

Elliot shrugged. “A retainer.”

“That’s not true. I’ve seen the checks she paid you as retainers. They were all clearly marked as such in her records. These other checks were made out to you in the amount of a hundred and fifty dollars every month since the summer of 1943. Her checkbooks do not indicate why she made those payments. Suppose you just tell me why, Elliot.”

“Suppose I just don’t,” Elliot said.

“I can get rough, Elliot. There are a lot of lawyers around who’d just love to sink their teeth into a portion of such a large settlement. How about it?”

Elliot shrugged again. “You want some advice?” he asked.

“No, I don’t want advice. I want information.”

“I’ll give you the advice, anyway. Free of charge, which is unusual for me. A, you can’t force me to tell you why your mother paid me a hundred and fifty dollars a month or what for. It was a private transaction, and entirely legal, and this is still the United States of America, and you can go straight to hell if you think you’ll find out from me. And B, you can contest this will if you want to, but you’d have to show your mother was incompetent when she wrote it, and that’d be difficult to prove since she was an unusually alert and aware woman right up to the time of her death. And in any case, I wouldn’t have to show the document mentioned in the will. So my advice is to forget all this nonsense and take your half of the estate and be damned happy you got that much. If your mother left the other half in trust, she had a very good reason for it. That should be enough for you.”

“Well, it isn’t.”

“Well, that’s too bad, David.”

“The will gives an address in Rome for Fabrizzi,” David said.

“Yes, that’s true. It does.”

“I can always go to Rome.”

“I suppose you can. I don’t know why you think you’d have more luck with Fabrizzi than you’ve had with me, but you can always go to Rome. That’s true.”

“This is important to me,” David said.

“I imagine it is. Money is always important.”

“It’s not the money!” David said angrily.

“Then what is it?”

“I want to know. I want to know why she left her son only half the estate.” He paused. “I’m her son, Elliot,” he said softly.

Elliot spread his hands wide. “What can I tell you, David? Do you want me to break a trust? Well, I can’t. Go to Rome if you want to. But don’t ask me to be an informer.”

“I’m supposed to leave for Los Angeles on the first of July,” David said.

Elliot did not answer.

“I can get out of it,” David said, almost to himself. “Curt would let me out of it.”

“She’s dead,” Elliot said. “Let her rest in peace.”

“What are you afraid of, Elliot?”

“Nothing.”

“That I’ll find out something terrible in Rome?”

“Only fools go looking for trouble,” Elliot said. “Let it lie, David. There’s nothing for you in Rome.”

The art gallery across the square from the hotel was exhibiting the works of an unknown Sicilian painter, white posters boldly shrieking in huge black letters the single word PANZOLA. A few taxicab stoics nudged the curb in front of the gallery, indifferent to culture, shining, black, impervious to the clinging Roman haze. David cursed their formidability, squinted his eyes against the glare, and then walked swiftly toward the overhanging green canopy of the hotel.

A bellhop idling in the lobby, enwrapped in his dream of a holiday on Lake Como, leaped erect when he saw David approaching, turned on an instant dazzling smile, and rushed to pull open one of the glass doors.

“Thank you,” David said.

“Very hot outside,” the bellhop said, grinning, testing his tourist-trade English.

“Yes,” David answered. He pulled his handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his brow, wondering if the opening of a door warranted a tip. He decided it did not. Nodding briefly to the bellhop, he pocketed the handkerchief and walked into the lobby past Remus and Romulus suckling at the wolverine in bronze, feeling suddenly thirsty and wishing for a Scotch-and-soda.