Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Sam Dowling was always “interested.” When he appeared on that terrible morning, standing with Louis Trotter and his children in the lobby of La Colonne — ground zero — looking so fresh and dapper, and the heiress so disheveled, anyone could see in his eyes how he was sorry-grateful the crazy man had left her at last. He tried to insinuate himself into her life, but it was not to be; soon after, she began the years of flight and exile.

“I’ve been reading about you,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, surprised. “The AA newsletter?”

“Internet — I’ve asked Jeeves all about you.”

“Oh shit. Google’d again.”

“And that piece in House and Garden , about the maze. At Saint-Cloud.”

“You’re pretty well read for a cop.”

The detective was endearingly nervous around her. Physically, his blade-like profile and droll, homespun mouth were reminiscent of Joe DiMaggio’s.

“Do you ever see my brother?”

“Not recently. We talk.”

“And Father?”

“Nominally.” He laughed, almost to himself. “I know it’s incredible, but he still keeps me on retainer. I’ve told him I don’t want the money, but he insists.”

“That’s Dad.”

“A good man. His health?”

“Great.”

“Your mom?”

“Everyone’s fine.”

They spoke with bemused affection of her father’s monumental funerary quest, then Trinnie broached the subject of Samson being shot (one seemed to follow the other). He said it probably hadn’t been the worst thing, because it got him to slow down and reassess priorities. Trinnie thought his response a bit clichéd, then busted herself for being so cynical— she wasn’t the one who had taken a bullet. His humor and humility won out, and held her attention. She asked if he still spoke to his wife, and Samson said no, not in years.

Since she had sat down, a familiar-looking middle-aged man had been stealing glances. Trinnie finally met his gaze; he stood and walked over. He was John Burnham, one of the heads of William Morris. A friend of Marcus Weiner’s from the mail room days, Mr. Burnham politely paid his respects without referring to the debacle, adding that he would love to talk to her about designing a maze for his Hancock Park home.

When he returned to his table, Samson said, “You know, I still have feelers out for Marcus.”

“I would have thought,” said Trinnie, backtracking, “that you’d have stayed more in touch with my brother.”

“That’s not often easy — the world he moves in is a little rarefied. I mean, it’s fun to joyride in his jet to some abandoned mental asylum … once .” She laughed, and it made him cocky. “But twice? A bit epic for my taste. That’s your world.”

“Was that a dig, Detective?”

“Sorry — that didn’t come out quite right. I just meant ‘to the manor born.’ ”

“I’m afraid my world has shrunk.”

“I doubt a shrunken world could hold you, Trinnie.”

He touched her hand, then withdrew it, sipping his drink. He decided to confess what she already knew. He admitted to finding her husband in the Adirondacks, rehashing everything her father had said, ending with the hospitalization and escape. The only detail she hadn’t heard was how, before his capture, Marcus had taken sanctuary on cold nights at St. John’s in the Wilderness, the family parish.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Katrina — I think he wanted more than anything in the world not to hurt you.”

“Didn’t do such a good job, did he?”

Samson started to say something, but she stopped him.

They sat awhile in silence. When she asked if he’d take her to his apartment, he actually got up to flag down the waiter for the bill.

Trinnie had never been inside the El Royale. She always imagined the suites to be rococo in that thirties way, and maybe some were, but not Sam’s. Like the detective himself, the rooms were simple, solid and unprepossessing — with the occasional flair.

They made love without niceties and she felt herself pulled through the maze. He pulled her through. The surgical scar on his chest was like a shadowy imprint of barbed wire. She sobbed and keened as they fucked, but he never stopped advancing and she was glad he didn’t bother with useless questions such as what was the matter and was she OK. She felt the withheld drug of his come, hating the condom and all its second-skin safeties. This was a man she had known as a girl and now he carried her on a litter, on a bier through the bower back to the lake — hallelujah of painted summers at Twig House, Katrina and Dodd taking turns at the Chris-Craft, dizzying bounty of shimmering Saranac space, breaking the godly glass of water surrounding thirty thousand Trotter-owned acres, past great stands of maple and oak steeped in kettle ponds, bogs ringed with hemlock — past Pulpit Rock — past stone chalets and Orientalist sleeping cabins while loons and red-breasted mergansers called from their perches. Louis in black tie and Bluey in Halston sat on the boathouse porch sipping hot buttered rum from an army canteen. At nighttime, the children stormed the gates of heaven: campfires roared amid hullabaloo of square dancing, and the Dowling boy moved as if in a paradisal dream: lanterns led to the darkly dizzying mahogany-clapboard Great Camp with its diamond-fretted windows and white birch bark appliqué—marking pathways past cedar Parthenon replica — past elaborate stickwork of old icehouse to brainstorm siding of breeze-way containing the funicular; they climbed in and ascended — that’s where he first kissed her, smelling girl-breath of cinnamon, spruce and beer. Their destination was the pole-worked bowling alley on the hill where Sinatra and Bobo Rockefeller played. She was twelve, and Samson, fifteen.

One summer, a servant drove them to Tear of the Clouds lake. Dodd was sick, and Sam had her all to himself. She couldn’t have known what that meant; she couldn’t have known anything about it. The detective never forgot the sights and sounds and smells of that day, and years later revisited those sacred waters in his mind while shrapneled body healed. When he flew back to see the jailed Marcus, he took a side trip there — to all the old haunts — but they were lapsed and foreign, without even the familiar desuetude of rooms after party guests have gone.

Enfolded in his arms, she felt her husband near. After all, hadn’t Sam Dowling been the last to see him? Now, she came off the lake and was high up La Colonne, high in the boudoir of the tower before it officially sheared — holding court while their vows still held. At the El Royale, she smelled her obsession again … and later, at home at Saint-Cloud, as she fell asleep she too hovered over Twig House before settling into its game-stuffed den where her father kept his whimsical collection of fungi — everyone at the lake had their fungi. Mr. Trotter had commissioned a villager to inscribe one of the pieces in Latin:

Dive, be not fearful how dark the waves flow;

Sing through the surge, and bring pearls up to me;

Deeper, ay, deeper; the fairest lie low.

Dodd Trotter was excited, and slightly embarrassed. Marcie Millard — and this was something one of his own attorneys subsequently confirmed — Marcie Millard said the general feeling was that the Board was poised to react favorably to the proposal of naming a wholly revamped Beverly Vista School in the benefactor’s honor. There was some opposition, she said, but that was to be expected. Things were looking up, yet the question of how to live it down as far as his sister went (should the new name come to pass) whimsically asserted itself.