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The Lincoln sat alone in the parking lot of the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, its lights off, its engine running to support the air conditioner that provided a minimum insulation from Memorial Park’s swampy humidity. Bill Langer waited, staring out the windshield to the wall of woods that rose up in front of the car, his mind dulled by the day’s shattering events. He was too tired to think, too disheartened.
In the rearview mirror he saw the headlights pan across the tree trunks and then shine directly at him as they approached across the asphalt parking lot. When the car pulled up beside him it illuminated a sign at the edge of the woods that read WILLOW OAK TRAIL. The Porsche’s headlights went out, and the interior light came on as Jennifer Quinn opened the door and got out. A moment of black night, and then she opened the door of the Lincoln, and they caught a brief, harsh glimpse of each other as she slid into the seat and slammed the door. A warm, clammy mass of bayou air came into the car with her, bringing the odors of decaying pine needles and dark mud. The air conditioner labored to expel it.
He turned on the dash lights, which suffused them in a pale jade glow. She wore a silk shirtwaist dress, emerald like her eyes and unbuttoned low enough for him to see the swell of a pale breast. Her hair, parted naturally near the center of her head, was combed simply, and fell over her shoulders. He wanted to take her and hold her, bury his face in the fragrance of her dress, hold her so tight he could feel her heart moving against him. He didn’t want to feel anything but the time less pleasure of making love to her.
“What’s happened?” she asked. She leaned back against the door and looked at him.
He felt a sinking disappointment. He should have known he wasn’t going to be allowed the luxury of indulging his feelings of vulnerability, even if it was only within the confines of his own mind.
“Toy made his pitch today,” he said. “You’re kidding.”
“I took him to Roeg myself.”
“How much does he want?”
“Two million.”
“Christ!” She continued looking at him. “Well, what happened?”
“Nothing. Roeg pretended to be going along with Toy’s elaborate system of checks and balances for the payoff, then I took Toy out of there. I’m supposed to meet him at Inland Trust tomorrow for the exchange.”
“The tapes for the money.”
“More or less.” He turned down the dash lights a little. “It’ll never happen. As we left Roeg’s place one of the choppers lifted off behind the house. They were going to track Toy by air. Two cars on the ground.”
“And?”
“I went back to the office. They were supposed to call me when they found out where he was staying.” He shook his head. “I never heard from them.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think they found him or didn’t find him?”
“I don’t know.”
She crossed one leg over the other and stretched them out toward him, keeping the hem of the dress over her knees.
“Is he cutting you out?”
“I imagine so. I didn’t handle this to his satisfaction. It never should have gone this far.”
“You didn’t learn anything from that black guy, Walker?”
Langer snorted. “No. Toy contacted him. I don’t know how he knew what was going on. Anyway, Walker was no help. Ellis threatened him, beat him up, and let him go.”
“So that’s it? You’re out?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I imagine I’m out, yes.” He put one arm on the back of the seat and one arm over the steering wheel and looked out the windshield to the dark woods. He was half turned toward her. “But that’s the least of my worries. Haydon’s going to take this all the way. I’ve got more to think about than being put out to pasture by Roeg.”
It was quiet a moment.
“He came to see me today,” she said.
“Haydon?” Langer continued to stare out the windshield. Nothing surprised him at this point.
“The old woman next door to Parnas remembered me. He showed her a photograph. He knows I was there before she died.”
“Goddamn. What did he say?”
“Nothing. I insisted she was mistaken, but he wants me to meet her in person. I’ll have to come up with something, an explanation.”
“I wish I knew how much that damn girl told him,” Langer said. “I still can’t believe they were having an affair. There’s no telling how much he knew or how much of it she told Haydon. I’ve got to think of something to explain my involvement with that warehouse business. I’ve got to be ready for him to spring it on me.”
“Maybe you got your hands on the only tape,” Quinn said. “Maybe Haydon still doesn’t know what’s going on with Roeg and Toy. I didn’t find anything in the house, I didn’t find anything in Parnas’ place. Toy’s gone. What can he know? He doesn’t know anything.”
“Alice could have told him everything.”
“You’re assuming she knew something. What makes you think Wayne told her? What makes you think he told her what he was involved with?”
“It’s just the kind of crazy thing that would happen,” Langer said. “Something you can’t anticipate. It comes from your blind side and busts you so hard you can’t even catch your breath.”
“Then what’s he waiting for? Why hasn’t he moved to do something?”
Langer shook his head. He didn’t know, and he could only think about it distractedly in between wondering how Roeg was going to dispose of him. Roeg couldn’t very well retire him at his age. Roeg had never before had to get rid of anyone in the inner circle who was too young to retire. It was going to be nasty. Everything was falling apart, steadily, inexorably, like the towers of wooden blocks he had made as a child. He had constructed them carefully, matching the blocks perfectly, one on top of the other. Eventually, at some point, he would add one too many, and the tower made a slight but fateful list. From that instant he knew they were going to fall. It was irrevocable. He couldn’t stop them from falling with any power on earth, and he was fascinated by the sight of them holding together in the long arc of their falling, their destruction confirmed far in advance of the actual devastation.
That’s the way he felt now. He was, at this moment in the long arc of his falling, intrigued by the fact that he was still holding together, though his ruin was already determined.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’ll think of something.”
There was nothing he could do. It was over. Roeg was going to dump him unceremoniously. Somehow. It didn’t really matter how. His service with Roeg was through, and with it went all the prestige, the money, the power, of the past five years. He didn’t own enough of Langer Media to give him any influence on the board. A seat, maybe. A vice presidency, a silly toy executive, the object of whispered derision. A vice presidency, maybe. Yes, Roeg would do that to him, because not only had Langer failed but in doing so he had also threatened the entire empire. Roeg would strip him of everything. He would humiliate him.
If he survived that, or even if he didn’t, there would be the criminal charges to battle. He would have the best lawyers. His family would buy them if he couldn’t. They might get him off, or at the very least they could buy him several years. Years of the worst kind of publicity.
Louise would not tolerate it. That didn’t matter. They had long since quit caring for each other. But there was the family: his family, his children. How much did he want to take them through?
He never for a moment believed that Roeg was in any kind of danger at all. He was beyond reach. There were men who were beyond reach. Few people realized that. There were men beyond reach.
“Like what?” she persisted.
For a moment he didn’t know what she had said, and then he didn’t know what she meant. By the time he figured it out he caught another pair of headlights in the rearview mirror as they panned across the trunks of the pines and came into the asphalt lot, creeping slowly around the edges of the parking lot until they came up behind them and stopped.
He turned around and saw the insignia of the park police on the side of the door. No one got out of the car, but it idled behind them for a minute and then moved away, around the other side of the parking lot and out the drive the way it had entered.
He heard her breathe a little heavier.
“Is he going to strip you of everything?” she asked.
He felt a sudden sensation of nausea, a weakening of his muscles. She did not ask: “Are you still going to marry me?” She didn’t say: “Let’s run away together, leave it all behind.” She didn’t say: “Hold me, Bill, I love you no matter what happens.” She didn’t say any of those things, or things like them, or a million variations of them. She said: “Is he going to strip you of everything?”
“Yes, I think so.” He was deliberately bleak about it. He didn’t want to watch her trying to decide how she should play her options. It was best if she knew that disaster was inevitable. She had to decide how she wanted to meet it.
She was quiet.
He looked at her leaning against the door, looking at him. She had pressed him for nearly a year to divorce his wife, but he had put her off, avoiding the discomfort of an expensive divorce, retaining the respect ability of marriage and the eroticism of an illicit affair. She had wanted him so ardently and he took her everywhere in every way, feeling the aphrodisiac of his own importance and power, of her youth and beauty. He imagined it going on forever in just this way, everything the way he wanted it, she wanting him, he wanting her, the incredible energy of their sex together. He was crazy for it, like a satyr, indulging himself as if he were half his age, thinking he was half his age and that she found him as wonderful as he found her. No end, no end in sight.
And then, gradually, he acquired a different perspective, the clouded perspective of a man whose lust and selfishness and sense of power have evolved into emotions quite the opposite. Characteristically, he didn’t see the evolution in progress, that his lust had become something deeper and more enduring, that his selfishness was giving way to the pleasures he found in pleasing her, that his sense of his own importance diminished in light of the value he placed in her. He didn’t see it happening because for the first time in his life his preoccupations were turned away from himself toward someone else. He began to live for her.
She looked at him steadily.
“From what you know, can they charge me with anything?”
The air conditioner wasn’t cooling as it should. It didn’t work as well when the car was idling. He could feel the car getting gummy.
“Probably,” he said. “You know of criminal activities, and you’ve concealed it. That’s a crime somehow. Withholding evidence. Something.”
She ran the fingers of one hand through her blond hair to get it out of her face. It fell back where it was.
“You could save your neck by going to the police,” he said. “You ought to do it.”
She flashed him an angry look, but she didn’t say anything.
“They can’t get you for anything with Alice Parnas. As far as they’re concerned, she committed suicide. It doesn’t matter that they can place you there nearly an hour before she died.” He took off his suitcoat and threw it in the back seat. He loosened his tie. “But you know about Powell, you know about the warehouse business. I shouldn’t have told you. You’d be all right if I hadn’t told you.”
She looked over the back seat, out the rear window. She looked at him. She looked down at her lap where she was nervously turning the rings on one hand.
“So what are you going to do?” she blurted, looking up. “You make it sound like it’s hopeless. You said you’d think of something. I want to hear it. You owe me that.”
There were tears in her voice. If it went too far she would say something he didn’t want to hear. She would hurt him. He could sense it near the surface now, in her throat, crouching behind the first sob she would utter.
“You’re all right,” he said. He would have liked her to go through it with him, to support him, to wait for him. Be there. But deep within he knew the reality of it, and he wanted to spare himself the sight of what he most feared: that she would be unwilling, that she wouldn’t do it . . . that she would leave him.
“They don’t know that you know about the rest of it,” he said. “I’m not going to tell them, so how would they find out? There’s nothing they can do to you. They can’t charge you with anything. You’re all right. If all the other business comes out in the open, just tell the truth. There’s no crime in having tried to discover if there were more tapes.”
“What about the pills?”
“There were just two of you there. I’m not going to tell anyone that you forced her to swallow them. When all this finally winds down, that’ll probably be the only secret to remain intact.”
She continued to look at him, and he could see the mechanism of her thoughts behind her eyes. It wouldn’t be an immediate break, but she would stay well in the background. Would she even let their affair come out in the open? Would she try to conceal it? Would she have anything to do with him at all? What would his family think of his affair? What would his children think? None of it was reconcilable. He would lose it all, and he would lose her first.
She was subdued, but he could tell she was relieved. He had cut her loose from any further obligations. It wasn’t necessary for her to go through it with him. With no real risk she could once again play the part he wanted her to play. Just go through the motions. He wouldn’t think too hard about what she felt inside. He just wanted her to go through the motions with him.
She shifted a little in her seat, not caring too much about the hem of her dress now.
“What are you going to do, Bill?” Her voice was calm, but there was a little edge to it. She really wanted to know. She was concerned. “Bill?”
He looked at her eyes. He thought that in the faded jade fog of the dash lights he could see the deeper green.
“I have an idea,” he said. “I think I have something worked out.”