Dear Olive Oyl and Sir Reginald—
First of all, please allow me to apologize for the pain and heartache that these past twenty-four hours have brought you. I cannot help but feel that everything that has happened in regards to Patrick has been my fault. That if I hadn’t written to you, your lives would not have been torn asunder yet again. I seem to ruin everything I touch. I always have. By reaching out to you, I have managed only to bring you more pain. Please believe that this was never my intention. My heart aches for you right now. And I do have a heart, hard as that is to believe.
Obviously, it was a mistake to think that I could come back into your lives after so many years. Even the mere possibility that I might return has proven to be utterly disastrous. This is the price I pay for being the evil creature that I am. I will not burden you any further. This is the last letter you will receive from me. I will continue to stay far, far away from both of you. That is a promise.
But before I go I do wish to explain myself to you. Or at least try. This old man’s purpose in contacting you was that I was hoping for forgiveness as my own end draws near. Not that I deserve any. Forgiveness for what, you may ask. Your mother, God rest her soul, did not take her own life on that East Village rooftop back in 1970. Eleanor didn’t jump. I pushed her. She had caught me making love to another woman earlier that evening, which was nothing unusual, believe me, but for some reason it set her off and she said some very accurate, painful things to me. She reminded me that if she hadn’t rewritten Not Far from Here for me after Alberta Pryce initially declined to represent it, that Alberta would never have agreed to take me on, never have sent the manuscript out, never have sold it and I would never have become rich and famous.
No one has ever known the ugly truth that it was your mother who rewrote the novel, not me. I was too proud and stubborn to do it. I also didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about it. I was, and still am, a no-talent fraud. No one could ever figure out why I never wrote a second novel. Only your immensely gifted mother understood why. Your mother who loved me and never, ever revealed our secret to anyone. Not even to Alberta. But when she caught me cheating on her that night, Eleanor decided she’d had enough. She told me she was sick of my selfishness, sick of my inflated ego, sick of me. And that she intended to set the world straight, come morning, on who was really responsible for the success of Not Far from Here. I couldn’t allow that. I was Richard Aintree, after all. The Richard Aintree.
So I pushed her off the roof.
The authorities found drugs in her system and concluded it was suicide. I encouraged that conclusion. I told them she’d been despondent. But that was never the truth. The truth is that I murdered your mother because she was going to expose me. The truth is that every awful word she’d said about me was valid and warranted. I was not worthy of her love. Or yours. Or anyone else’s. And so, once the business of her death was completed, I fled.
I should have just killed myself. I did try to jump in front of an oncoming freight train on the trestle in Gaviota, California, one night a long, long time ago. But I lacked the courage to do it. I still lack the courage. So I’ll just keep on keeping on, waiting for time to take care of what needs to be done to me. My health is poor. It won’t be long now.
Please don’t bother to look for me. You’ll never find me.
I apologize to Eleanor for never being willing to acknowledge how much her help meant to the success of Not Far from Here. She was its co-author. Her name should have been on its cover right there next to mine. I apologize to Alberta for deceiving her about Eleanor’s contribution and for lacking the courage to tell her what really happened to her dear friend on that East Village rooftop. I apologize to Stewart Hoag for dragging him into this project, which I now realize was the desperately misguided gesture of a foolish old man.
But, mostly, I apologize to you, my darling daughters, because all I’ve managed to do is make a mess of things yet again. I would ask you to try to forgive me, but I know you never will. I do not deserve your forgiveness. The painful truth is that I am not a very nice man. Feel free to hate me if you wish. I won’t blame you one bit if you do. And now I will say goodbye.
With all my love,
Dad
They wept.
The two sisters stood there in the front hallway with the express mail letter that had been sent from a post office in Teaneck, New Jersey, and hugged each other and wept as Danielle and Joey watched them with curious looks on their faces. Kat and Trish had been escorted out by the tall, tanned cop and were being driven to their respective homes. The medical examiner’s lab rats had evaporated. Boyd and Elliot had stuck around, as had Lamp.
“I—I knew it,” Monette sobbed. “I just . . . I—I knew she’d never abandon us that way. A mother doesn’t do that to her children. They’re our babies. We always take care of them. Always. We never, ever stop.”
“Never, ever,” Reggie sniffled, tears streaming down her cheeks. They were talking about Danielle and Joey now, about what had happened upstairs in the master suite yesterday. “But I feel sorry for Dad, I have to admit.”
Monette gaped at her in disbelief. “How can you? He killed Mom!”
“I know he did. But he’s been out there by himself for all of these years, living with his guilt, suffering . . .”
“We don’t know that,” Monette said. “Maybe he changed his name and started over again with a new wife and kids. For all we know he’s been managing stock portfolios in some posh New Jersey suburb for all of these years.”
“I don’t believe that,” Reggie said. “And neither do you. He’s been alone this whole time. Alone and miserable.”
“Well, shit on a stick,” Boyd grumbled at me. “No Richard Aintree means we have no book. Guess I wasted your time, Hoagster.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I got a free trip to L.A. Rode a terrific bike, reconnected with a dear friend and made a hundred thou.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “You did?”
“My kill fee, remember?”
“Oh, right,” he acknowledged glumly.
“No, I can’t complain one bit.”
“Well, I sure can. I lit a ton of media heat under this. I thought we had a major, major literary event. Instead, all we have is one dead TV star, two dead flunkies and an epic flop. I’m going to look like the putz of the century now. The Times is going to kill me. Publishers Weekly is going to kill me. And Mr. Harmon Wright will probably fire me.”
“There, you see? Some good may come out of this after all.”
Boyd looked at me with a hurt expression. “You really detest me, don’t you?”
“I might if I gave you enough thought. You’re like one of those flesh-eating viruses that can be picked up from any delicatessen counter or public lavatory. I know you’re out there, but I prefer not to dwell on you for fear of going insane.”
“You’re living in the past.”
“Thank you, I try.”
“I’m the future of American publishing,” Boyd proclaimed. “And one of these days, amigo, I am going to win you over.”
“No, you’re not. And I am not your amigo.”
I saw no point in sticking around so I didn’t. Lulu and I caught the red-eye out of there that very evening.
I did call Alberta to let her know that her dear friend Eleanor Aintree hadn’t killed herself that night back in 1970.
The Silver Fox listened to my news about Richard’s confession in silence. And remained silent for a long moment before she said, “Thank you for letting me know. I never dared to say the words out loud, but I always thought that he killed her. In fact, I was positive that he did. Call me when you get home, will you? We’ll toast Eleanor’s memory properly at the Algonquin. Two martinis, very dry. Safe trip, dear boy.”
It took me less than thirty minutes to pack and then I was ready to leave. I didn’t have a whole lot to say to Monette, Joey or Danielle. I’m not big into long goodbyes. Besides, the odds were excellent that I’d be back in a few weeks to testify at Monette’s trial. Joey’s trial, too, if there was one. I did remind Danielle to work in some sprints every day so that her legs wouldn’t get heavy on her. And I thanked Maritza for taking such good care of Lulu and me. I gave her a kiss on the cheek, too. She blushed.
It was no problem to drop the Roadmaster off at Dirk Weir’s vintage car warehouse on a Sunday evening. Dirk was there working on a rush job for a film shoot in the morning. I was sorry to bid the bike goodbye, though not as sorry as Lulu was. Reggie followed us there in Joey’s red Jeep Wrangler with my Olympia and my bags stowed in back.
I joined her out front on La Brea after I’d returned the keys and discovered that Emil Lamp’s white Chevy Caprice was parked there behind her. He and Reggie were standing on the sidewalk chatting. When she spotted me, she got in the Wrangler so that he and I could talk.
“I couldn’t let you leave town without saying a proper goodbye,” he said to me. “And to thank you for your help. When they call you back to testify, I’d love for you to meet Belinda. Bring your lady friend over there. We’ll make a foursome out of it,” he suggested, which prompted Lulu to let out an indignant snuffle. “Fivesome, I mean. Sorry, Lulu.” He bent down, patted her and thanked her, too. Mollified, she got in the Wrangler with Reggie to wait for me.
I stood there watching the traffic go by on La Brea for a moment before I said, “What will happen to these people?”
“As little as possible, if I have anything to say about it.”
“Do you?”
“Not really.” He grinned at me boyishly. “But it sounded good, didn’t it?”
“It absolutely did. I bought it.”
“Joey’s old enough to stand trial as an adult for putting those two bullets into his father. But he does have that history of setting fires and he’s been under a therapist’s care. My guess? He’ll be sentenced to hospitalization in a state mental facility and released within a couple of years. He was trying to protect his sister, after all, and it’s not as if he’s the one who killed his father. His mother is.”
“What will happen to her?”
“She’ll still plead self-defense, only with a different wrinkle. They call it the Mama Bear defense. She was protecting her cubs—which isn’t a legitimate argument in a court of law except for the fact that it is. She has a God-given right to do what she did. No jury will convict her. She’ll win in the court of public opinion, too, I imagine, when the public finds out what sort of a guy Patrick was.” He glanced over at the Wrangler, where Reggie was engaged in a serious conversation with Lulu. For the record, it was Reggie who was doing all of the talking. Lulu was strictly listening. “As to the matter of certain individuals obstructing our investigation and flat out lying to us, I don’t believe there’ll be any appetite to pursue that.”
“I’m glad to hear that. And what will happen to Richard Aintree? He’s confessed to murdering his wife. You have it in writing. And there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
“I expect the NYPD will reopen the case and issue a warrant for his arrest.”
“No one’s been able to find him before. Do you think they’ll find him now?”
“They will if they really want to.”
“Would you want to if you were in their shoes?”
Lamp studied me curiously. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Just wondering.”
“Yes, I would, Hoagy. Murder is murder.” Lamp stuck out his hand. “I’ll catch you when you get back.”
I shook it. “Take it slow, Lieutenant.”
Then I got in the Wrangler with Lulu in my lap and Reggie steered us toward LAX. Somehow, I’d forgotten just how truly awful a driver Reggie was. The woman was totally oblivious to such things as speed limits, traffic lights and other vehicles as she sped down La Brea to the Santa Monica Freeway and floored it, squinting out at the road before us as she changed lanes restlessly, her seat shoved so far forward that the steering wheel was practically flush against her chest.
“You could have told me what really happened, Stinker.”
“I was protecting you. I lied to the police. We all lied. I’m not the least bit sorry we did.” She glanced over at me. “But I didn’t want to pull you into it.”
“Please keep your eyes on the road, will you? I’d like to make it to the airport in one piece. And I don’t want you looking at me while I’m saying what I’m about to say.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being the first great love of my life. I’d lost you there for a while, but I feel as if I’ve got you back now.”
“You’re not getting all sloppy and sentimental on me just because we had fabulous sex last night, are you?”
“Just being honest.”
“Well, in that case I want to say something, too, Stewie. I’m sorry.”
“For . . . ?”
“For being so terrified of losing you that I drove you away.”
“You didn’t drive me away. I told you that last night. What happened to us was about me, not you. You’re fine just the way you are.”
“I’m not fine. No one in my whole family is fine. Just take a look at us, will you?”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing, and I think you handled yourselves amazingly well these past two days. You watched out for each other, stuck together. That’s what families are supposed to do, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” she conceded.
“How long are you planning to stick around?”
“For as long as I’m needed. Monette has a major ordeal ahead of her. So does Joey. And Danielle is going to be under a huge emotional strain. Someone has to be here for them.”
“What about the Root Chakra Institute?”
She sped up onto a Toyota’s tail, abruptly changed lanes, got honked at by a guy in an Econoline van, changed lanes one more time and punched it up to eighty-five. “The institute doesn’t need me. My family does.”
“And what about your work? Will you start writing again?”
She shook her head. “The words are gone.”
“They’re not gone. Not yours, not mine. I refuse to buy into that.”
“How come?”
“Because if I’m not writing, then I have no idea why I’m here.”
“You find other things that matter to you. You move on.”
“I’m not going to move on. I call that giving up.”
“Really? I don’t call it that at all.” Reggie shot a glance over at me before she looked back at the freeway and said, “I call it life.”
My overnight flight home was quiet. I spotted no celebrities in first class. Celebrities don’t fly the red-eye. Not if they can help it. I slept most of the way with Lulu curled up in the empty seat next to me.
It was still December in New York. There was a dusting of snow on the pavement. The morning wind had an arctic bite to it. I made it to my crummy old brownstone on West Ninety-Third Street by 8:30 and collected my mail, what little there was of it. I’d only been gone for three days, even though it felt like a month. Then I climbed the five flights up to my drafty apartment and put down some fresh 9Lives mackerel for Lulu.
When I checked my phone messages, I discovered that Merilee had finally checked in while I was somewhere over Iowa: “Hello, darling, it’s me. I’ve just been reading all about you in the International Herald Tribune. I do hope you and Lulu are both okay. How awful for you. Speaking of awful, it snowed nonstop for two days in Budapest and the phone lines were down and then our financing fell through. They’ve sent us home. I’m in London right now to see a Stoppard play that might be a good fit for me when it comes to Broadway. I’m catching the Concorde in the morning. I’ll call you when I get in. Let’s have dinner at Tony’s, okay? We’ll cheer each other up. I love you both.”
I played it twice so that Lulu could hear her mommy’s voice. She was very excited. Also very happy to be home. As much as Lulu likes L.A., she’s still a New Yorker at heart.
I unpacked our bags, pausing to give my old leather flight jacket an affectionate pat after I’d hung it in the back row of my closet. I showered, shaved and dressed in the cheviot wool tweed suit with a burgundy Italian flannel shirt, the powder blue knit tie and my shearling-lined brogans. Then I helped Lulu wriggle into her Fair Isle wool vest, put on my shearling greatcoat and fedora and out the door we went.
We strode briskly over to Amsterdam Avenue in the morning cold, pausing to pick up the papers from the newsstand on Broadway, and made our way up Amsterdam to the Blue Tea Cup Café on West 104th. The Blue Tea Cup is owned by two mountainous black women from South Carolina who make the best buttermilk pancakes in New York City—though I’d appreciate it if you kept that to yourself because they can only seat twenty people at a time. They offer an exotic assortment of sides. I opted for fried chicken livers with my stack of pancakes. Lulu had some fried catfish, minus the pancakes.
I read the newspapers while we ate. Lamp was true to his word. Danielle’s name didn’t appear in any of the accounts of the events leading up to Patrick Van Pelt’s murder in the master bedroom suite of Aintree Manor. Neither did Trish Brainard’s, I noticed. Since it was Trish whom Patrick had mistaken Danielle for, it worked out much tidier if Trish’s presence at Joey’s birthday party was erased from the picture. Trish’s brush with fame was a fleeting one. So fleeting it never happened at all. All she had were her memories and her knee abrasions from the Eartha Kitt sofa.
Thanks to a swiftly deployed team of high-priced public relations wizards, Monette was already winning big in the court of public opinion. Just for starters, it turned out that no one who’d worked with Patrick on Malibu High had a nice word to say about him. Executive producer Marjorie Braman went so far as to label him a “ticking time bomb” in the New York Times, adding, “Patrick was a fine actor but he was temperamental and prone to violent outbursts. I was also frightened by the company that he kept.” Meaning his 320-pound personal assistant, the late Lou Riggio who, according to highly placed sources in the LAPD, was a “major” drug trafficker as well as the chief suspect in Kyle Cook’s murder.
Meanwhile, two young actresses had already come forward in the New York Daily News to accuse Patrick of being a “sexual predator.” One of them claimed that he tried to rape her at a pool party in Malibu in October and would have succeeded if two members of the L.A. Lakers hadn’t pulled him off her. The other alleged that after she’d let Patrick buy her a drink at a West Hollywood nightclub last month he’d forced his way into her apartment, demanded she perform oral sex on him and given her a black eye when she refused. She had the photos to prove it. Neither woman had come forward publicly until now because they said that Lou Riggio had threatened to “mess them up” if they did.
And Kat Zachry, who was nothing if not a survivor, already had this to say on page one of the New York Post: “PAT SCARED ME WHEN HE WAS HIGH.” Kat revealed that she’d tried repeatedly to get Patrick to go into rehab for what she described as a “major cocaine problem.” She acknowledged that he’d undergone a vasectomy and that the baby she was carrying wasn’t his but that he’d “forced her” to say it was because he was trying to pressure his wealthy wife into a lucrative divorce settlement.
In the days to come, Boyd Samuels would land the nineteen-year-old bad-girl star of Malibu High a major six-figure deal for a tell-all book about her very public love affair with the late Patrick Van Pelt. I would be offered the job to ghost it for her but would choose to exercise the “life is too short” option.
But that was in the days to come. Right now, my attention was focused on putting away a second stack of buttermilk pancakes.
After that I strolled over to Broadway and started home, Lulu ambling along happily beside me. Burly young men from Maine were out on the sidewalk at West Ninety-Sixth Street with their fragrant, fresh-cut Christmas trees for sale. And the mad scribbler and the jabbering kid were parked in their usual spot on the corner of Broadway and West Ninety-Second, peddling their meager stacks of used paperbacks and LPs. The kid was trying to convince someone walking by, anyone walking by, to show an interest in his priceless collection of Grand Funk Railroad on vinyl. He was getting no takers. Not one. The gaunt, bearded old man was seated in his folding chair wearing my old Harris tweed overcoat and cashmere scarf, eyes glued to his long yellow notepad as he scribbled and scribbled, oblivious to the world around him. I reclaimed my copies of Sneaky People and Giles Goat-Boy and put a five-dollar bill in the cigar box before him.
As usual, he paid me no mind.
As usual, the kid grinned at me and said, “Have a good one.”
As usual, Lulu growled at him as we started to walk away.
That was when something highly unusual happened.
“Thank you for what you did,” a hoarse, rusty voice called out to me. It was the old man. He’d lifted his eyes from his notepad and was staring at me.
“No problem,” I said, trying to keep the look of surprise off my face. Because he’d never spoken to me before. Not once. “You knew there would be trouble, didn’t you? How did you know?”
“A father knows things. It’s in the blood.” He shook a grimy, crooked finger at me. “I want you to stop wasting your time. Just close your fucking eyes and start writing, will you?”
“I’m sorry, did you say close them?”
He didn’t answer me. He’d lowered his gaze and retreated back inside of the lonely prison where he was serving a life sentence, scribbling and scribbling.
I strode back to my drafty apartment and put on the coffee and some Garner. Turned on the electric space heater and positioned it next to my desk. Changed into my Orvis shirt, jeans and mukluks. When the coffee was ready I poured myself a cup and sat down in front of my Olympia, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into it and typed the words A Sweet Season of Madness across the top of it.
I took a sip of my coffee as Lulu curled up contentedly on my feet and the Little Elf had his way with “Body and Soul” like no one else has before or since. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I closed my eyes. I began.