Guilty Parties Read online

  Guilty Parties

  Dana Clarins

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media

  Ebook

  for Rachel

  Contents

  Prologue

  I Opening Nights

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  II Belinda’s Belindas

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  III Death and the Ruffians

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  IV The Last of the Ruffians

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Prologue

  I DREAMED THAT NIGHT OF THE times we were happiest.

  A long time ago, the four of us piled into Jack’s beat-up old convertible—the sun overhead and the wind in our faces and the radio on loud. Petula Clark going downtown. The Fab Four … God, it was a long time ago.

  But it was fresh in my dreams.

  We were young again and Jack and I had just come back from our honeymoon. Sally and Harry were taking us into the country, antiquing country, to find us the perfect wedding present. The four of us, young and never happier.

  Jack and Belinda. Harry and Sally. Some idiot at Harvard, drunk in the Eliot House courtyard, had called us the Fab Four. Very funny at the time.

  Jack had always laughed at my fascination with fortune cookies. He always told the waiter to skip the fortune cookies, and I’d have to interrupt and make a big deal out of it. Jack told me I might as well live my life by the horoscopes in Cosmo. That struck Sally and me as terribly funny, since Cosmo’s horoscope was one of our main sources of inspiration.

  Sally was very good at decisions. It was her nature, and when thwarted in the execution of her master plans she was not a good sport. Which, there was no denying, made her such an asset to the girls’ field hockey team at Mount Holyoke. Which also made her the best kind of best friend, because she’d die for you or kill for you once she’d stamped you with her approval.

  And when she set out to find the perfect wedding present she wasn’t about to be thwarted. Period.

  She found it all right. That was what my dream was about. We were looking for it again on that weekend excursion to the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

  She found it in the dusty back room of a general store that had once been a livery stable. The wheel-of-fortune had been shrouded under horse blankets for a hundred years, maybe more. Perhaps it had belonged to a traveling medicine show, or a circus, or a Gypsy caravan, along about the time of the Civil War. Maybe livery bills had gone unpaid and maybe a taciturn Dutchman had impounded the wheel as security against the day when the debt would finally be erased. And maybe that day never came and generations had passed and finally no one even knew that the wheel with all its fortunes sat hidden in the junk room.

  But there was no escaping Sally when her antennae were picking up signals. She found it because she thought the back room “looked spooky.” She peeled back the blankets as if they were the decades of the last century … and there it was. Wiping away the dust, she opened the little door in the back of the pyramidal wooden stand and peered into the compartment, where, she firmly believed, a boy or midget had crouched in order to control the spin of the wheel when such trickery was required. She was always full of theories in those days and they always made sense if you thought about them long enough.

  When she had wiped away enough of the caked dust, she had taken a look at the fortune that had been waiting through all the years of darkness. A cackling witch in a pointed black hat, holding a magic wand, giving a haggle-toothed grin, and the faded words:

  Yours will be a long and happy life.

  It was, Sally had declared, an omen.

  For all of us.

  That was what I dreamed about that long sweltering night before everything began to go wrong.

  I

  Opening Nights

  Chapter One

  WHEN I LOOK BACK ON last summer it’s odd that the first thing I remember isn’t the people who died so horribly or the illusions I’d treasured being irrevocably blown away, not the opening of Harry’s Scoundrels All!, not even my own one-woman show at Claude Leverett’s gallery—no, what I remember is the heat. The ungodly, hellish, unbroken procession of dazzling and exhausting weeks at over ninety degrees when all of us in Manhattan got our wagons in a circle and tried to wait it out. The windows dripped with condensation and air conditioners burned out and Con Ed was on a constant alert, buying extra electricity from any grid that would sell. Your clothing stuck to your damp flesh and you felt dizzy if you tried to exercise. They fried an egg on the dugout roof at Yankee Stadium, and when Baltimore beat the locals a headline in the Post read: “O’s Scald Yanks 4–3 in 13 at 100°!”

  The day Sally called with the bad news was a beaut. Air conditioning gives me colds so I was standing at the open window looking down at the sluggish devils wandering along Prince Street like the lost battalion in a French Foreign Legion movie. I was praying for a breeze, sipping iced tea, and absentmindedly spinning the wheel-of-fortune again and again, hearing the click-click-click. It had been a rough several months—getting my work ready for the show I’d wanted all my life, simultaneously watching our marriage of sixteen years pull apart like an old sofa giving way under one too many fat men. Jack had moved out a month or so before, but in spirit the Jack I’d loved and married and made my life with had been running on a kind of personal empty for a long time. Finally he’d gotten so sick of himself, had thrashed himself so thoroughly, that like Rumpelstilskin he’d disappeared. In this case not through the floor but to a tiny flat high on the Upper East Side, where he, like me, must have cried himself to sleep wondering where in the name of God it had all gone so far wrong.

  So, sure, it had been a rough period. Just when my work should have been making me happier than ever, the rest of my life got run over by a truck. It happens every day. To somebody else. Which keeps the shrinks and the singles bars and the dependency clinics and the expensive boutiques thriving, I suppose. The balance of nature, something dies and something else lives.

  Which is how my mind was running as I felt a big drop of sweat drip off my nose into my glass. You can only stare at people collapsing from the heat for so long, and I was afraid to look at the results obtained from spinning the wheel. The last time I’d given it a try it had stopped at a laughing devil with a three-pronged spade pushing a sailor under the lapping waves. Which I assumed was the wheel’s way of suggesting that ocean travel might be best avoided for the nonce. In any case, I’d had enough of the wheel’s opinion for a
while.

  Turning back to the loft where we’d lived for all of our married life, it struck me as somehow unfamiliar now that I lived there alone. A vast space of brick and wood, painstakingly restored during spasms of home-improvement mania. Plants everywhere, hanging from beams and upright in lots of pots, explosions of airy Boston ferns and lackadaisical date palms and ficus trees and philodendrons and every other growing thing that had enjoyed a vogue during those years. A skylight overhead, a walk-in fireplace in one wall, lots of old wicker furniture dating from the early days of our marriage when we had combed the countryside in a borrowed truck in search of bargains to fill the place we’d bought so cheap with the proceeds of Jack’s first novel. Bookcases filled to overflowing, threadbare rugs thrown haphazardly about, several easels of various sizes, trestle tables cluttered with the bits and pieces of my work. And in the corner, that wheel-of-fortune with its faded painted fates, the symbols and figures and characters so quaint and innocent in their antiquity, and, for the most part, optimism.

  But even with so many accumulated artifacts of our life together it seemed that Jack had been somehow erased, written out of the loft’s history.

  It was the proliferation of huge canvases that had erased Jack Stuart.

  Some days the guilt consumed me. I missed him at times but I should have missed him more and didn’t, simply couldn’t. I felt as if I’d let the work run rampant, as if I’d let it drive him out. I knew that it hadn’t been that way, but some days just knowing didn’t help. It was feeling that mattered and I couldn’t ignore the feeling of guilt. My God, what kind of monster would connive to gain the space at the expense of her husband’s presence? It was the sort of illogical, nonsensical fear that seems absurd once you get your head on straight. I asked myself: What could have been more natural than to unstack the canvases and get them in view once Jack was gone and I had the loft to myself?

  It was the kind of guilt I couldn’t confide even to Sally. We’d been telling each other just about everything for twenty years, but this dark little arabesque of shame I kept to myself. I knew I would always feel love and caring for Jack, no matter what, but I was glad he was gone. Cutting through my own sense of failure and the sixteen years of effort was that glittering blade of relief. And it made me feel like hell.

  Sally had her rock of a marriage. Sally and Harry. Harry and Sally. How could I tell her what I felt? How could I expect her to understand?

  At times the four of us had seemed like a single entity, everyone in sync, four facets of the same multiperson. And it had been the best, the most secure feeling I could ever have imagined.

  And now I had not only let Jack go. I hadn’t given my all to keep him, to hold us together. Jack said all I’d have had to do was ask. He wanted me to ask. And I said, no, it’s best this way, let’s do some hard thinking by ourselves, go ahead …

  I was the one who had smashed the curiously crystalline figure with the four faces. I knew it. I was the guilty one and I was having trouble with it.

  But it remained unspoken. There was no way to talk it over with Sally. So I was alone with it and we danced around the edges refusing to face up to it, which was, of course, the only way I could get clear of it.

  I stood there in the loft, sweating, while the ice melted in the tea, and I let my eyes rove from one canvas to another, trying to inspect them with a hard critical eye. Yet I couldn’t resist them. They cast a spell over me and I couldn’t begin to judge them. Again, they were a part of my most private self—I couldn’t imagine what condition I’d be in when they went on view—and they fascinated me. I didn’t know what the fascination said about me, but I wasn’t very comfortable with it. Still, it was there, inescapable.

  They were, each and every one, self-portraits. Parts of me, pieces of me. Huge canvases, filling the loft in all its dimensions.

  One Belinda Stuart after another.

  I might have been getting a little spaced-out just then. I had that momentary vertigo you sometimes feel in the heat.

  The ringing telephone rescued me.

  Chapter Two

  BECAUSE I’M A PAINTER, SALLY has always thought that asking me to visit a gallery is the surest way of guaranteeing my company. The fact is, I’m not particularly interested in killing time that way. I’m afraid of the sponge effect, I guess, the possibility that I might see something that would stick in my mind and come out again in my own work without my quite realizing it. And, too, it can be so humbling to see really fine work, way beyond my estimate of my own, in some other, unknown painter.

  But when Sally asked me to a gallery that day I also knew, since she didn’t really give a damn about painting, that there was bound to be something troubling her. I went to the gallery in the East Eighties wondering what the news was going to be, or more exactly, how bad the news was going to be. We were both closing in on forty, and the subject of unidentifiable lumps here and there was becoming more of a fear than it had once been. I suppose that was the news I dreaded most—that Sally was going to tell me she was sick, that there’d been a biopsy, what was coming to be known as the Terms of Endearment Effect. Or it might be Harry’s X rays or God only knew what. I’d managed to make myself fairly nervous by the time I got out of the cab.

  But she was her usual self, waiting for me outside. She had long black hair that hung straight, a very pale complexion with high cheekbones and deeply set dark eyes that as she aged gave her face a slightly skull-like quality when she was tired. She looked tired, or worried, but she smiled and said something that made me laugh and I thought maybe I was wrong, after all. She brushed my cheek with hers and I smelled her Lancôme and we went inside to look at pictures.

  As it turned out, it was a brilliant show—Stanley Spencer’s earnest, bulbous, mystically benighted figures slogging on through their own wild, tortured imaginations. I lost myself among the paintings, soaking them up the best way, wondering at Spencer’s unique vision. I loved his people, obsessed with religion and heaven and sex, alive in an extraordinary way even if they moved in a kind of supernatural fog the rest of us didn’t seem to notice.

  I lost track of Sally and then I saw her at last and I knew I’d been right the first time.

  She’d fetched up against a bay window overlooking the street and somebody’s embassy across the way where the flags were hanging limp, at half-mast for some reason. The sun was hot and bright and a fly was banging at the glass trying to get out before he fried in his own juice. The tears running down Sal’s cheeks refracted the light like a spill of so many diamonds.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said, sniffling and trying to smile. “Harry’s in love with another woman.”

  As we negotiated the narrow curving stairway down to the entry foyer, she said: “Some woman … I don’t know. Harry.” She repeated his name as if it were foreign to her, a word from another language, which, I suppose, was just about how she must have been feeling.

  I led the way to a dark, cool, empty, and trendy little cafe where the lunch crowd was pretty well gone and we could sit inside while looking out at a riot of flowers in the garden. Sally nodded to me when the waiter showed up, sniffled, and I ordered her her usual gin gimlet. Figuring I might need my wits about me, I stuck with iced tea.

  She gave me one of her very Sally looks. She somehow managed to blend her own innate arrogance with a helpless, pleading quality: I’d never known the combination in anyone else. And when you coupled it with the stark black-and-white beauty of her features, you had a kind of aristocratic Madonna of the Sorrows that Harry, for one, had found irresistible. Me, too. I wanted to love and protect her, she seemed that vulnerable, but the fact that you knew she might turn on you and give you a flip of haughty airiness gave any relationship with her a tension that bonded you to her like nothing else could have. Her lower lip quivered and at just that moment I’d have done anything to make the hurt go away.

  “You must have it wrong,” I said. “You’ve jumped to a silly conclusion based on insuf
ficient evidence—”

  “I’m not being silly.” The coal-black eyes flared as if a match had been struck. “Have the grace to treat me like an adult.”

  “Of course, I’m sorry, but we both know Harry. He just doesn’t do things like this … this falling in love. He loves you. He’s always loved you—”

  “Not exactly, Belinda. Think back—”

  “That was in college,” I said, feeling my mouth get dry. “He knew me before he met you and when he met you that was it. You know that.”

  She frowned at me, the narrow lips in a tight little vise. “Come on.” The attempt at lightness in her tone fell flat and broke like china. “You met Jack and dropped Harry and when he stopped whimpering and opened his eyes, there I stood with a willing smile and—as I recall—pigtails. It was my regressive pigtail period, wasn’t it?” She suddenly grinned, the real Sally again.

  I nodded. “It was indeed, and he’s never looked at another woman since. And he isn’t now, I’d bet on it.”

  “He’s not just looking. He’s in love.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “Why do you think so?”

  She told me.

  And it didn’t add up to all that much. A wife’s suspicions, a husband of long standing who wasn’t paying quite the attention he normally did, who wasn’t exactly the same as ever. Flickers of behavior that only a wife would notice. Something going on behind his eyes, a distance in his tone of voice. Harry was so even-tempered, so much a diplomat, so consistent, and now those very qualities which had made him such a good and trustworthy husband were revealing—by their slight rearrangement—his infidelity. Or perhaps it was a contemplated infidelity.

  “The thought is not necessarily father to the deed,” I said.

  She looked up from her gimlet. “Is that actually an aphorism or did you just make it up?”

  “I don’t know. The point is, it’s true. If the thought of illicit sex were the same as the act—well, you figure it out. Remember Jimmy Carter’s heart full of lust? Give Harry a break, Sal. He’s got a show opening in a week. Wouldn’t that alone be enough to throw his behavior off? If tension and nerves can throw me off my menstrual cycle, why can’t the same thing throw Harry off his normal game? I mean, you don’t even have lipstick on a collar—”