“Am I?” she whispered in my ear.
“Are you what?”
“A client?”
I thought on it, how she took back her retainer and hadn’t yet signed the contingency fee contract and how our strange business relationship was not so easily described and as I thought on it she bit my lip, my lower lip this time, bit it the same way and teased it from between her teeth the same way and suddenly I didn’t want her hand to leave, just to move, which it did.
“I really don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said.
“Then don’t think.”
“Caroline, stop. Don’t I have any say in this?”
“Not until I sign your contract,” she breathed into my ear. “Until then I’m in control.”
She kissed me lightly and then scooted toward me on the bed, slipped close until our bellies rubbed and her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross dug into my chest. The springs beneath us creaked loudly.
“They’ll hear.”
“Then be sure to be loud,” she said. “I don’t want them to miss a single groan.”
She kissed me again and dragged her tongue across my gums. I tasted her breath and whatever control had stubbornly remained suddenly shifted out from beneath me and I fell.
“You are going to save me, aren’t you?” she said.
It was phrased rhetorically, which was good, because I couldn’t have answered just then, still falling as I was, falling. I tasted her breath and it tasted sweet from the vermouth of her Manhattans and fresh, like a warm wind off a meadow, and full of mint.
No, not peppermint. Government.
18
BREAKFAST WAS WAITING in tarnished silver chafing dishes arrayed on a black marble sideboard in the Garden Room. Consuelo had met me at the base of the stairs and asked, without inflection, how my night had been before directing me to the morning’s regalement. I had been the last to rise that night and I was evidently the first to rise that morning and I had awakened alone.
The Garden Room was an exotic monstrosity, warm, humid, circular, with a grand Victorian glass dome, the panes of which were sallow and sooty and edged dark with fungus. Huge jungle plants, sporting leaves as big as torsos, stood among weedy stalks topped by tiny face-shaped blooms. Behind the jungle plants stooped pale-barked trees, gnarled and stunted. Meat-red flowers drooped from clumps of green sprouting from the crooks of tree trunks, the flowers’ dark mouths yawning in hunger. The place smelled as if fertilizer had been freshly laid in the huge granite pots. I wouldn’t have been surprised if General Sternwood had been there to greet me in his wheelchair, but he wasn’t, nobody was, except for two black cats locked in a large wrought-iron cage. When I approached, one cooed invitingly while another snarled before hurling itself right at me, slamming its face into the iron bars. I guessed they were playing good cat bad cat.
Sunlight glared through the dirty windows. The storm had passed that night just as Nat had predicted. In my suit and day-old shirt and socks and underwear I stepped to the food-laden sideboard. I was ravenous and all too ready to set to, despite the Garden Room’s offal smell. I took a plate and lifted the silver cover off the first of the warming trays.
Eggs, runny and wet like snot, with chips of black mixed in, either chunks of pepper or something else I didn’t want to guess at. In the next were potatoes, wet and hard, swimming in some sort of green-colored oil. In the next, French toast slices with the consistency of cardboard and a reservoir of syrup, slick with the prismatic surface of motor oil. In the last, white slabs of uncooked fat surrounding shivery pink slivers of trichinosis. I put my plate back and looked around for something to drink.
I examined six china cups before I found one crackfree and clean, released a splash of coffee from the urn, and found my way outside to the rear patio and a perfect spring morning. The sun was risen, the damp of the night before was lifting in sheets of fog, the air was filled with the fresh scent of newly soaked loam. A bird heckled. To my right, a large stone wing stretched perpendicular to the rest of the house, its windows covered with white sheets to keep out the sun. An old ballroom, I figured. A few of the windowpanes were cracked and it looked as if it hadn’t been balled in decades. As I examined it I took a sip of the coffee; it spilled into my empty stomach with an acidic hiss. I looked around and found a rusting white cast-iron chair and placed my cup and saucer onto its seat. Then I walked off into the rising fog to explore the grounds.
Behind the house, halfway down the backside of the hill, was a long rectangular pool, surrounded by what looked like a swamp. The water in the pool was a dark algae green and it appeared to be spring-fed because the water had risen in the storm to flow over the top of the pool, flooding the ground beside it. There was no cement or wooden platform around the pool for sunbathing or relaxing with a tall drink of lemonade, just the swamped grass.
I walked around the pool and headed still farther down, to a small pond almost at the base of the hill. This was the pond, I assumed, where Caroline’s grandfather had thrown his Distinguished Service Cross. Why had he ditched it? I wondered. Caroline had offhandedly promised that if I found out she’d sign my fee agreement and I intended to hold her to the promise. The pond was murky, overgrown with weeds and lily pads. As I approached, the ground grew quaggy beneath my shoes and a swarm of gnats flew into my face and hovered. I heard a sucking sound as I lifted my foot and I stopped walking and searched the water for any sign of life beneath its surface. Other than some water boatmen skimming over the top on their long legs, I saw nothing.
I moved around the pond until I reached a tree that had died and fallen into the edge of the water directly opposite the house, and it was by the tree that I noticed, with a small shock, a thousand eyes.
Frogs. The water around the branches of that tree teemed with them, hundreds and hundreds of them. They climbed one atop the other, forming layers of frogs, feet resting on heads, heads beneath bellies, all breathing their dangerous quiet breaths, their eyes open and staring, hundreds and hundreds of them, layers of them, piles of them, a plague of frogs. Slick green, the color lightening about their lower jaws, they were not large frogs, some still had tails and each of their bodies was no bigger than a thumb, but the eyes that stared at me were a malevolent yellow and they climbed one atop the other to get a better look at me, hundreds and hundreds of them, piles of them, slick green silent thumbs with eyes.
Above them, atop the hill, stood Veritas, broad-shouldered and arrogant even in its decrepitude, the mist still rising about it. I had the fanciful notion that each of the frogs was spawned by a sin transgressed by those who had once occupied that house. A thumb on the scale to cheat a customer, a thumb licked as money is counted falsely, a thumb in a competitor’s eye, a thumb atop a secretary’s breast, a thumb to cap a handshake to seal an agreement to cheat a partner of his fair share, a thumb jerked to the door to fire the sole support of a family of seven, a thumb rubbed gently across the subject’s lip at the end game of a seduction, a thumb that cocks the hammer of a shotgun or grasps the last nail to be driven through the lid of a coffin. Which of those frogs, I wondered, was sired by Claudius Reddman’s buyout of Elisha Poole before he introduced the pressure-flavored pickle that was to make him a rich and much-honored man? Which of those frogs was fathered by whichever sin it was that caused Caroline’s grandfather to toss away his decoration for exceptional gallantry? Which of those frogs was begot by Kingsley Shaw’s patricide? Which of those frogs was engendered by the murder of Jacqueline Shaw?
And which of those frogs, I also wondered, sprang to life as a result of my midnight fornication with a situationally drunken Caroline Shaw, youngest heir to the Reddman fortune? I had been fantasizing about screwing her all that night, admittedly, but sexual fantasies are the natural segues between my more practical thoughts, delirium over that secretary or that lawyer or that middle-aged judge wearing whatever she is wearing beneath that hot black robe, no more meaningful than the sluice of chemicals and flash of electricity in the brain that generated the imaginary idyll in the first place. There is no harm in fantasizing, no awkward moments after, no fluids to deal with, no vicious little microbes to wonder incessantly about, no ethical rules to consider. But what had started as a run-of-the-mill fantasy had twisted its way into reality and though I had not actively sought it, I had participated with a canine eagerness that seemed free and vibrant in the darkness of that bed but seemed now like nothing more than a crass exploitation of a young drunken women in a fragile emotional state for purposes of my own pleasure and enrichment. And it hadn’t even been any good.