23

The papers arrived that afternoon, brought by Henry Angeletti. I returned them the next morning, signed, by messenger. I saw Kitty very briefly, late that evening, told her only that I’d worked out a deal with Goldmark that I thought I could live with.

No questions asked; no answers given.

For all I knew, she’d already gotten the details from her brother.

His version.

In point of fact, I no longer had any idea whose version to believe. Like the Marxists, they took turns rewriting history until your head spun like a fortune wheel, and if I remembered, a long time before, Kitty exploding at me for believing her brother over herself (the question of the hundred-dollar bet), there were things he’d said in the limousine that I couldn’t walk away from. Half truths maybe, exaggerations certainly, but had he invented them out of whole cloth?

I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d “ordered” her to kill Thome. Who could order her to do anything? But they might well have talked about it—which was bad enough—since Thome, whom Kitty said she’d recruited and who had then been taken over by Goldmark, knew enough to bring them both down. (If anything, I’d have guessed Goldmark had argued against murdering him. Thorne owed him money. With Thome dead, his chances of ever collecting were nil.) What counted, though, was that Goldmark clearly knew about it! Maybe the investigations into Thorne’s finances had led the police nowhere (or so the Suffolk County detective had indicated), but what would happen if Goldmark were ever put to the wall and the Thorne link discovered? How far might he go to save his own skin?

I already knew Kitty’s answer—very far, indeed—and I was inclined to agree with her. Stark-Thompson’s loan to the Braxton account, however risky, looked to me like the only insurance I could buy.

Then there was the question of Katherine Goldmark Enterprises. That he owned fifty percent of my wife’s business—and it would have been the same had it been twenty percent, or one percent—may have stuck in my craw, but it went a long way to explaining why Kitty, despite her son-of-a-bitch-what-else-is-new line, was locked into him in her business dealings. Whatever they thought of each other personally, they’d used each other constantly, and, I saw clearly, the common denominator was always money. Over and over again: money. I could even explain to myself why Kitty had never told me about it. In this respect, I bought entirely what Goldmark had said: it must have driven her absolutely bananas.

But what I couldn’t swallow, or explain away, or in any sense come to grips with, was the way he’d demolished her story about the pianist. And you believe that bullshit, Tommy? Vividly I remembered the night after Wanda Russell’s party when Kitty had disappeared. I’d hit the roof, and then, while I sat on the Récamier couch in the bedroom, she’d told me the story. I remembered every detail of it, down to how, visibly exhausted, she’d sent me home afterward. And ever since, whenever I’d encountered that imperviousness, that impenetrability, that hard granitic shell which formed such an important part of her personality, I’d thought, well, at least I know where it comes from.

So much for Kitty’s baring of her soul.

So much for my amateur psychologizing.

And you believe that bullshit, Tommy?

Yes, I believed that bullshit. Or: I had.

Unless Goldmark himself were lying?

But why would he? Just to belittle his sister?

And you will say: Any reasonable husband, upon hearing his wife so accused, would have gone home and asked her about it.

I didn’t.

Which, you will say, only goes to show how estranged I had already become from her.

To which I can only reply: Yes, and no.

I know we spent that weekend together, at home, but I’ve no recollection whatsoever of what we did or said, or didn’t do or say. A total blank. Maybe we had guests. Maybe the Buddy Spodes drove over from Scarsdale. Maybe we reviewed the contracts for the licensing of Kitty Goldmark products—I remember her asking my opinion at some point. Maybe we played tennis, listened to Mozart. Possibly we even made love. Undoubtedly I continued my postmortems on this strange creature whose roof I shared, and bed, and table, and whose hand I had indeed taken in holy matrimony on our lawn, even realizing—as I surely must have by that weekend—that I no longer had any idea who she was.

No idea whatsoever.

But it doesn’t matter. Not at all.

The postmortems, anything.

For that Monday—you will remember the date of October nineteenth—the stock market definitively fell apart, collapsed, and we were all in the water, every one of us.