In the Night Room

The Role of

Tom Hartland

PART THREE

16

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Tom,” Willy said. “I don’t even know if I’m thinking straight. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. The only thing I do know, did know, was that I had to get out of that house, and in a hurry. You know, you’re the only person I swear in front of, but when I talk to you, I swear all the time. I wonder why that is?”

“You’re swearing because you’re angry. You’re not used to that, so you barely know how to act.”

“No, no, no,” she said. “I’m too shook up to be angry.”

Willy had called Tom Hartland as soon as she had locked the door behind the departing bellman. It had been one of those moments when her life felt pathetic and insubstantial, for whom could she have called but Tom? By some dire, remote-control variety of magic, Mitchell Faber seemed to have driven away most of the people she had once thought of as her friends. Her isolation made her feel like locking herself in the bathroom and weeping. What had kept her from giving in to self-pity was the thought that if Tom Hartland was the one person whom she could telephone at such a moment, at least he was one of her oldest and dearest friends.

“It’s more like shock than anger,” she said. “The only way you and Molly went wrong was, you were too easy on him!”

“Are your hands trembling?”

“Like crazy. I don’t know how I managed to drive across the bridge.”

“You’re way past anger, Willy. Sure you’re in shock, but on top of that, you’re furious.”

“I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS! THAT CREEP KILLED MY HUSBAND AND MY DAUGHTER!” She held the phone out at arm’s length and discovered that, by means of tiny internal adjustments, she could graduate from mere yelling to gorgeous, all-stops-out screaming. “HE TALKED ME INTO ALMOST GETTING MARRIED TO HIM! THAT PSYCHO FUCK WAS SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT SAFETY!”

Willy gripped the receiver as if trying to choke it to death. Although she had not known that she was crying, tears covered her face. Her body seemed to be breathing by itself in great ragged inhalations and exhalations. She sagged over, letting it go on. Her hot, sparkly face felt as if it had been electrified. Tom’s voice leaked from the phone, but Willy could not make out his words. In every important sense, her life seemed over. She had nowhere to go. Pretty soon, an evil creep who had been intimate with every part of her body was going to be hunting for her. Willy felt irredeemably contaminated. After a little while she became aware that she was, after all, still breathing. She straightened up and brought the receiver to her ear.

“Okay, you’re right on the money,” she said. “I’d like to kill Mitchell Faber. But the problem is, I think he’ll probably want to do the same to me.”

“Willy, you’re going to have to explain all this stuff about killing people. What makes you think he killed your husband? Why would he want to kill you?”

“God, there’s so much you don’t know.” Willy told him about the storm, and the tree limb crashing through the office window. “When I went inside there, I sort of started to clean things up, and I saw all these photographs lying on the floor. Right next to them was this upside-down ornamental wooden box, like a fancy cigar box, that must have been knocked off a shelf. All those photographs were of dead people, and one of them was Jim. They cut his hands off! He was shot to death, and he was lying next to the car they found him in.”

“Do you still have that picture?”

“Are you crazy? He was dead! Please help me figure out what to do. I’m shaking all over, like I have a fever. I don’t seem to be able to stop. Giles knows I saw the picture, and Mitchell is going to be coming for me as soon as he gets off the plane.”

He asked for her room number.

“Room 1427.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I can sort of tell you what I did.” Willy lay on her king-sized bed, her arms folded in front of her. Tom Hartland’s sweet, serious face stared at her from a nubbly upholstered chair across from the desk.

Tom had been at Haverford when Willy Bryce and Molly Witherspoon were students at Bryn Mawr, and not long after meeting at a mixer the three of them had become close friends. In the summer after their junior year, they had traveled through France in a heady bubble of van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Loire châteaux, Rimbaud and the Tel quel poets, Gauloise smoke, intense conversation, sleepness nights, bistro meals, le fromage du pays, and vin du pays. One night after too much vin rouge they had all piled into a big bed on the third floor of a cheap hotel in Blois, but nothing much had happened except for fumbling and laughter and Willy’s silent observation that Tom Hartland’s kisses tasted of honey and salt. Tom and Willy had been reading each other’s work for years, and they had their first acceptances—he with Scholastic, she with Little, Brown—within the same two-month period.

Now, leaning forward in the ugly hotel chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled before him, he resembled the grown-up version of Teddy Barton, his brave and clever boy detective, steadfast, concerned, ready to be of use.

“For example,” Willy said, “I know I spent the rest of the night in my office with the door locked. For a while I couldn’t really think. I just paced around the room, scared out of my mind, trying to work out some kind of plan. On their way out the Santolinis yelled through the door that they had to come back the next day. All I really wanted to do was get in my car and run away, but I only had about thirty dollars on me. I needed more cash, because I thought I’d have to be wary about using ATM machines.”

“Good thinking,” Tom said. “If you’re going to run away, never use cash machines and throw away your cell phone. But flight isn’t a solution, it’s a delaying action.”

“You said the Baltic Group was the definition of evil!”

“They line their pockets in corrupt ways; they’re not a cabal of serial killers.”

“You didn’t see those pictures.”

“There could be a lot of explanations for them, Willy.” She turned her head on the pillows to give him a dark look. Tom said, “Of course, one of the explanations would be that he is a sick, homicidal fuck.”

“That’s more like it.”

“Another one would be that he was involved in internal investigations of those incidents.”

“ ‘Incidents’? They were murders, Tom.”

“All the more reason for Baltic to cover itself.” This time the look in Willy’s eye was of a gloomy intensity. He said, “One thing I can do for you is to play devil’s advocate here. But as you must know, basically I’ll do anything you want. However, I do have something to say to you, and you’re going to have to listen to me.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

“It’s important?”

“Yes. It is to me.”

“Tell me now.”

“When you’re through with your story, Willy.”

“Okay, but you’re a jerk. All right. I told you I spent the night in my office, right?”

He nodded.

“Have you ever tried to fall asleep when you’re scared out of your mind? Besides that, I realized that I’d trapped myself in that office, so stupid stupid stupid. I could have run out as soon as I saw the pictures, but after that, Giles would know I’d probably seen them, know what I mean? And he wouldn’t dream of letting me leave the estate until Mitchell got home. So I had to get out early in the morning, when those two creeps might not be waiting for me. Anyhow, at least I had plenty of time to think.

“Mitchell and I had our own checkbooks, naturally, but he had just had me transfer most of my accounts to the little bank in Hendersonia, and I had no idea what kind of cash I had available. What I wanted to do was clean him out, if I could, and take his money with me. I didn’t think I really could do that, but anyhow. It was worth a try, wasn’t it?”

“What did you do?” Tom asked.

“I managed to get out, for one thing. I had a little suitcase with some clothes in it, and this white leather bag, like a duffel bag, that Mitchell gave me once, that I was going to use for the money. It was like five-thirty in the morning. I went downstairs without seeing a soul. Then I got in my car and took off for Hendersonia. They weren’t following me; they weren’t even up yet. I drove into the Pathmark parking lot and fell asleep, out of sheer exhaustion. Just before the bank opened, I called and asked for Mr. Bender, the president. I told him my husband was out of town and I needed a lot of cash in a hurry, so what could he do for me? You have to understand, all this time I am barely keeping myself under control.”

“You were beginning to feel how angry you were.”

“And scared! I was just improvising, I don’t really know what I wanted to do.” She scooted backward on the bed and sat up with her back against the headboard. “So this Bender guy tells me that he’s been thinking of arranging a meeting between us for some time, and he’d like me to come in that morning.”

Willy gave Tom a look he could feel at the base of his spine.

“And the next thing I know, I’m there, in his office. Remember when I said that I knew I locked myself in my office? Well, that’s why I said it.”

“I don’t quite get you.”

“Tom, it’s just like yesterday. Don’t you remember anything? I lost two and a half hours between the Met and the St. Regis! And afterward, the whole trip back to New Jersey disappeared. I’m getting in the car, boom, I’m standing on our lawn in Hendersonia. There’s no transition—East Fifty-fifth Street, Guilderland Road, one right after the other.”

Tom’s gaze deepened.

“Weird, huh? As if I needed any more weird shit in my life. So the same thing happens all over again, and I’m not in my car anymore, I’m in Mr. Bender’s office, and evidently I just got there, because he’s waving me toward a chair and telling me he’s glad I could come in on such short notice.”

“It’s your selective amnesia.”

“It’s more like the in-between stuff never happened. Like it was just left out. Anyhow, here’s this portly guy with glasses and a bald head, and it strikes me that he looks a little nervous. Right away, I know—Mitchell makes him nervous. And the first thing he says to me is that he’s very happy I brought Mitch Faber back to his hometown.”

For it turned out that Mitchell Faber had been born and raised in Hendersonia. He had been on the local high school’s football team, and after graduation he’d gone to Seton Hall, but college had not worked out all that well, and in his second year he had enlisted in the army and qualified for Special Forces. His father, Henderson Faber, one of the Hendersons and a very, very important man in not only the town but that whole section of New Jersey, was happy to see him launched in a career in the military. Because Mitch had always been a bit wild. If truth be told, his father’s influence was the reason some of the boy’s escapades never went any farther than they did. Military service channeled his aggression and made a man of him.

What did the father do? Oh, he owned an auto-repair shop, but that didn’t cover half of it. Mr. Faber was a powerful man. He had a hand in almost every business in the county. In fact, Mr. Faber had been instrumental in founding the Continental Trust of New Jersey, the very bank they were in at that moment. Unfortunately, Mitch’s dad had died of a gunshot wound six, seven years back. Unknown assailant.

“His father was murdered?” Tom said. “Was he some kind of gangster?”

“Hang on,” Willy said. “We’re still getting to the good stuff.”

The bank was very grateful for all the business Mr. Faber and Ms. Patrick had brought to it, Mr. Bender said. Of course, with the gentleman’s connections to the institution a great degree of trust came into play, mutual trust he hoped he could say, and excellent customers such as Ms. Patrick, soon to be wed to the son of a sort of “silent partner” at the inception of that institution, could be granted a degree of latitude not permitted the general public. With that said, and Mr. Bender wished most heartily that his concerns should not be taken amiss, it would be less than perfectly responsible if the chief officer of a banking institution did not seek independent verification of financial arrangements said to be established between account-holding couples. For example. Let us say a significant sum of money has been transferred between accounts, and agreements exist to establish similar transfers of funds at regular intervals, said agreement to have been signed right on Mr. Bender’s desk here by one of the parties, then taken away by that party for the secondary signature to be affixed at a separate location. In such a case, Mr. Bender trusted that the question of verification would be seen as a simple formality entered into for the purpose of dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.

And with that verbal flourish, the nervous Mr. Bender withdrew from a file on his desk an agreement that transferred an immediate $200,000 from various of Willy’s shiny new accounts into Mitchell’s savings account, and thereafter moved half that amount from hers to his on the first of each month for the next eight months. This document bore two signatures, Mitchell’s and one that came pretty close to Willy’s hasty scribble.

“I don’t believe it,” Tom said.

“He forged my signature on a document that moved one million dollars from my accounts into his over the next eight months.”

“I mean, I do believe it, but it’s incredible. How did he explain it to the banker?”

“He told him that I was nervous about investing money, and wanted him to do it for me. He said after we were married, we were going to have joint accounts anyhow.”

“Were you?”

“Do you think Mitchell ever discussed finances with me? It was taken for granted that he had tons of money. He certainly acted like a rich man—he bought me a Mercedes! With my money, it looks like. I guess I bought his Mercedes, too.”

“Willy, how much money do you have in that crappy little bank, anyhow?”

“Around three million,” she said. “Most of it was from Jim’s estate. If Baltic paid that kind of money to Jim, I thought Mitchell would earn pretty much the same thing.”

“Mitchell must be a long way down the totem pole. What did the banker do when you told him your signature was forged?”

“I thought he was going to commit hari-kari. You know the funny thing? He always knew there was something fishy about that agreement. He was afraid of Mitchell. Mitchell intimidated him. I bet Mitchell intimidated everyone in Hendersonia. And the arrangement didn’t take any money away from his bank, it just moved it around a little, so he didn’t ask any questions. He apologized for about half an hour and begged me to let him make things right.”

Tom laughed. “He’s been ‘making things right’ all afternoon. I bet his shredder’s seen a lot of use.”

Willy drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. To Tom, in the low light of the bedside lamp, she looked, at first, only a few years older than the mysterious girl he had met in 1985; then he saw the fine lines around her mouth and the faint tracery under her eyes and, although he had never before thought of her in these terms, that she was one of the most distinguished women he knew.

“And of course another way he could make things right was to grease the wheels for your withdrawal. How much money did you walk out with?”

“A hundred thousand.”

“Jesus Christ.” He half-rose from the chair and looked at the floor on the other side of the bed, then at the closet door.

“It’s in the closet. I didn’t know where else to put it. A thousand hundred-dollar bills makes a pretty big stack.”

“I’ve never been in a room with that much money before.”

“Mr. Bender told me I could come back tomorrow and get another hundred thousand, but I don’t think I should do that.”

“No,” Tom said. “What did you do after you left the bank?”

“I almost killed Roman Richard Spilka, that’s what I did. I got out of the bank, and I was walking toward my car, holding one of my bags and rolling the other one along behind me, and in pulls Mitchell’s car, with Giles driving and Roman Richard sitting beside him. All of a sudden, I felt like this horrible, reeking cloud of villainy was all around me. . . . I couldn’t see, I could barely breathe. . . . Aah!”

Willy threw out her arms and waved them violently in front of her, as if she were trying to shake off spiderwebs or frighten away a bat. Her eyes were wild and out of focus. She kept uttering aah! in a small, stifled voice that went higher and higher. Scattered tears flew from her eyes.

Tom jumped off the chair, stretched out on the bed beside her, and put his arms around her. At first, it was like holding a trapped animal, but after a few terrible seconds in which Tom felt his own self-control begin to waver under her assault, Willy ceased to thrash in his arms and pound her fists against his back. He stroked her head, saying her name over and over. Eventually, she sagged against him, as limp as if she were boneless. She said, “Oooooohh, just hold me for a while, okay?”

“Try and stop me,” he said.

Sometime later, Willy groaned and separated herself from him. “I said something about a cloud of evil, and all of a sudden it was literal, a literal cloud, all sticky and foul. . . .” She chafed her hands together, wiping off imagined gumminess.

“It was ‘villainy,’ not ‘evil,’ ” Tom said. “A ‘reeking cloud of villainy.’ I thought that was pretty good. You know, you have a certain way with words. Ever think about becoming a writer?”

She groaned again, this time with a touch of self-mimicry. “I never got to the part where I almost killed that fat pig, Roman Richard. So they’re in the car, and I’m close to mine, right?”

“Right.”

“Giles puts on his brakes, but I keep going. When I’m tossing my bags into the back seat, Giles and Roman Richard are both getting out of the car. Giles says, ‘You left home pretty early this morning, Willy.’ I say, ‘Isn’t that allowed these days?’ They’re both walking toward me, but slow, like this is just an ordinary conversation on an ordinary day. I didn’t know if Giles had gone in and seen the pictures, and if he did, he doesn’t know if I did. ‘No need to worry about me,’ I said, and I got in behind the wheel. Now they’re walking a little faster. Giles says, ‘Hold on, Willy,’ and we look at each other, and bang, he sees that I know, and I see that he sees, and now we’re not playing games anymore. Giles yells, ‘Stop her!’ to Roman Richard, and they both come running. I got my car started just in time, and I turned the wheel and jammed the pedal, and the car just shot forward. Then Roman Richard was right in front of me, and there was a kind of a soft thump, and off he flew to the side. I hit him, all right.”

“How do you know you didn’t kill him?”

“I don’t even think I hurt him all that much. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him getting up. He sure was mad, though.”

She pushed herself a bit farther away on the bed, picked up his right hand with both of hers, raised it to her mouth, and kissed it. She flattened the palm of his hand against her cheek. “You were wonderful to come here and tend to me. I hope you won’t mind if I tell you I love you.”

“I was just thinking the same,” Tom said.

Willy placed his hand on the bedspread and patted it. “Now I have to go into the bathroom and wash my face.”

He patted her hip as she swiveled sideways to get off the bed. For a second, sexual interest raised its head, and Tom was astonished for the second it took him to imagine that, at one level below consciousness, she had just reminded him of his first lover, slight, brilliant Hiro, who had relieved him of his virginity in his sophomore year. Then he thought, No, it’s Willy, I can’t believe it, she’s turning me on. What’s happening to me?

Sounds of running water came from the bathroom. “Really, Tom, I’m so grateful you’re here,” she called out.

“Me, too. Willy, didn’t they follow you?”

“I got away too fast. The bank is only half a block from the expressway, and by the time they got themselves organized, I could have gone in either direction. They probably guessed that I came to New York, but I don’t see how they could know where I am.” She appeared in the bathroom doorway, wiping her face with a small white towel. “I just hope I’m not getting you into any trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me. I don’t suppose there’s any way he can find out you’re in this hotel, is there?”

“Molly once told me that the Baltic people can find anything out, but after all, we’re talking about Mitchell, not the whole company. And he’s still in France.”

“How did you check in here? Did you use a credit card?”

“As far as the hotel is concerned, I’m W. Bryce. That’s the name on my AmEx card. Jim Patrick told me to do that when I applied for the card. Actually, Jim made out the application, and he told me that was the name he wanted me to use. We hardly ever took the AmEx cards out of our wallets, though. When we paid with plastic, we usually used MasterCard.”

Willy was drawing the towel over first one hand, then the other, staring at the moving towel, as if she expected something to slip out from beneath it. She glanced at Tom.

“I figured it was about some accounting rigamarole, because we got the American Express cards through a service division of his company. It was like we got reduced rates, or something like that.”

“Did the bills come through the company, or directly to you?”

“They came straight to us. I used to write the checks. But like I said, we almost never used those cards.” She stopped moving the towel across her hands. “That wasn’t an idle question, was it?”

Tom shook his head.

“You think he was trying to protect me.”

“I think he was probably covering his ass.”

“My ass, you mean.” Willy flipped the towel into the bathroom. “He knew something was wrong. Damn him. What kind of company are they, anyhow? Oh, as if that hasn’t become transparently clear. But Jim was such a nice man, and such a smart man, too—he was kind, you know? Do you suppose he had Holly with him to keep her safe? To protect her from being kidnapped?”

Tom was looking straight at her, giving nothing away.

“All this stuff is going through my head! Did I tell you that I almost broke into a produce warehouse because I was sure Holly was imprisoned inside it? I could hear her calling for me! I knew my daughter was dead, but I couldn’t stop myself—I got out of the car, fully intending to break a window and climb in. I swear to you, Tom, sometimes it feels as though I am being made to do things. Like I’m a marionette, and someone else is pulling the strings.”

Wild-eyed again, she held her arms straight up and wiggled them as though they were controlled by puppet strings. Tom stood up, hesitated, then saw from the tragic expression on her face that she was close to losing herself again. He moved across the room and pulled her to his chest.

“I think you should have a little vodka,” he said. “While you’re at it, I’ll have one, too.”

He opened the minibar, removed two miniature bottles of Absolut, took two lowball glasses from the top of the cabinet, set them down on the table, and told Willy he would be back in a minute with some ice. “You’re like Superman,” she said. “No, I think you are Superman.”

He returned almost as quickly as he had promised, and in another minute they were seated across from each other, Willy on the side of the bed and Tom back in the nubbly chair, raising glasses filled with ice cubes and a clear liquid.

“To you,” Willy said. “My anchorage, my port in the storm.”

“To us,” Tom said. “We’ll go crazy together.”

Willy took a sip of the vodka, winced, and shook her head. “My port in the storm has a terrible effect on my character. I hardly ever drink, except for when I’m with you. Then there’s the swearing. What’s next, we take up smoking?”

He took a swallow. “What’s next is, we figure out a way to go to the police. What would Teddy Barton do? We need proof that you’re being followed, assuming that you are. Good old Teddy would round up a little band of boys, and some of them would create a diversion while another one takes a picture of the bad guys. We can’t organize the little band, but there’s a cheap little camera in the minibar. If someone’s following you, I could take a photograph of them and we could take it to the police. And just to be safe, you ought to leave this hotel in the morning and check in somewhere else. Somewhere a little obscure, like the Mayflower.”

“The Mayflower?”

“It’s a nice little hotel near the foot of Central Park West. What time did you get here, anyhow?”

“About nine-thirty.”

“And when did you leave Hendersonia?”

“Something like ten in the morning. You know, I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. This vodka is going to do me in.” She placed her glass on the bedside table.

“And the time in between ten in the morning and nine at night?”

“Gone, mainly. I can remember driving across the G.W. bridge, but that’s it. It was daytime, and then it was night. I was on the bridge, I was parked in front of this hotel. It’s not that I forgot the time in between, it’s that it never happened. Those hours happened in your life, but they didn’t in mine.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Then don’t say anything. I want to order some room service. Are you hungry? Could you eat anything?”

“No, but please order something, Willy. You have to eat.”

She called room service and ordered a hamburger without French fries and a Diet Coke. “I guess I can start to relax now, sort of. It’s strange, I don’t have the faintest beginning of a plan of what to do next, but for some reason I’m not really worried about it. I think the next thing will happen, and then the thing after that, and I’ll find out where I’m going when I get there.”

She collapsed back on the bed and gave him a look of flat inquiry. “Didn’t you have something you were going to say to me?”

“I did, yes,” Tom said. “But I’m going to hold off. This isn’t the time to bring it up.”

“ ‘Bring it up’? Uh-oh. This is pretty serious, isn’t it, pretty grim.”

“Well, it’s serious. Tomorrow, maybe. If you want to see me tomorrow, that is.”

“Want to see you tomorrow? I don’t want you to leave, Tom. I want you to spend the night here. With me. Please.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“No, you won’t,” Willy said. “You’re going to sleep in this bed, right alongside me. That way, if time gets taken away again, it’ll happen to you, too.”