“Haven’t they put you back under a rock yet?”
“There wasn’t room,” I said. “Couldn’t squeeze me in. Your poah ole pappy here?”
She quirked a brow coolly at me, thought briefly. Then with the sinewy motion that reminded me of a lean little snake gliding across a warm stone, she turned and led the way into the expanses of the living room.
“Papa dear,” she yelled, “the Cro-Magnon is on the loose again.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m trying hard to like you too.”
“Don’t strain yourself. There are too many things you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you need only a few brush strokes to make a picture.”
On her way toward a table where there were various breeds of liquor, she jerked to a stop. “I didn’t know you were so interested in me.”
“Deeply,” I said.
“But the portrait, you know, depends on the artist and his interpretation, as much as on the subject.”
“I haven’t been talking to the wrong people,” I said, “and I try to see below the tint to the right color.”
“And who are these right people you’ve talked with?”
“Uh-uh,” I said.
Her wide, expressive mouth twisted into a pout. “So keep your stinking little secrets and see if I care!”
She poured a drink, the neck of the bottle chattering against the glass. Without looking at me, she said, “Tell me about this picture you see.”
“I’d rather not get personal.”
“I insist,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re part front.”
“Only part?”
“We all have two faces. A public face — a secret face.”
“And what do you think of my public face, Mr. Rivers?” She slid toward me, a drink in her hand, a spark of interest in her eyes.
“Spoiled. Self-centered. Vicious.”
“And unprincipled?”
“Why not?” I asked.
“My! Do you also read palms? Let’s get to my other face.”
“Maybe it isn’t clear, Elena — even to you.”
The level of the liquid in her glass quivered. An old, hard wisdom came to her eyes. She turned suddenly and spoke toward the far walclass="underline" “You say one thing and mean the opposite, don’t you?”
“If you’d admit what you see, maybe you wouldn’t have to drink so much.”
“Listen,” she said thinly. “Nobody asked for your advice. I drink because I want to.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And I want to drink, drink, drink! I want to be pickled. I want to get drunk and stay that way.”
“It wouldn’t change the image of your father.”
With her back still to me, she said, “I like the image. I like it fine.”
“Sure. You enjoyed being alone in Caracas, receiving news that your grandmother Isabella had died in Tampa. It was just great, going up to a mountain cottage in that moment and finding your father there with Ginny Jameson.”
Her shoulders stiffened. “You do get around, don’t you? What do you know about Ginny Jameson?”
“I gather that she was a call girl operating in the upper crust in Caracas, the latest on your father’s little picnic when you walked in on them.”
“You go to hell, Rivers!”
“It’s too crowded. Too many people trying to get there.”
“Meaning me, I suppose?”
“You’ll have to answer that yourself,” I said. “But there isn’t enough booze in the world to drown certain kinds of memories.”
“How would you know?”
Her question caused the brief eruption of memory of the dark, nightmarish years that had finally burned out in an Ybor City alley and on the docks of Port Tampa, where the labor was hard. “I read about it in a textbook,” I said.
“It must have been a heavy one.”
“It was. It says you inevitably reach a point where you got to do one of two things: die — or take hold of your bootstraps.”
“Who wears boots, you nosy lug?”
“Try them on for size, Elena. You can’t go back and keep the bomb from exploding. You can’t reverse the clock or change the brain that conceived the bomb in Venezuela. Why don’t you admit you’re alone with your father, that the others are gone, your mother and grandfather when a timing device clicked inside a bomb, and finally your grandmother Isabella, who tried very hard to run away?”
The back of her shoulders made a small motion. She turned, and I saw that she was laughing.
“You think that’s what bothers me?” she said, her voice rising with a cold, hard laugh. “You really think it? Man, you don’t know from nothing!”
Eight
“What’s going on?” Keith Sigmon said. He came across the room with plunging, angry strides. Emotion had pulled the dissipated edges of his face tight, restoring briefly his chiseled, classic good looks, in a cold, inhuman casting.
“This amateur psychiatrist,” Elena said, “is trying to analyze me.” She was pale. She looked at him with the laughter dying in her throat.
He gave her a quick but careful examination with his cutting gaze. Then he turned to me. “Rivers, do I have to put you under a peace bond to keep you away from here?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t you realize the police have upset us more than enough in the death of Jean Putnam?”
“Yep.”
“Then what in hell are you after?”
“The continued existence of one Ed Rivers,” I said, “for some years to come in a whole skin.”
“Well...” he said. He thrust his hand in the pockets of his silk dressing gown. “I have no objection to your continued existence.”
“Thanks.”
“So long as you don’t try to tear us to pieces in the process.”
“He’s trying,” Elena said. Her tone was irritating, egging Keith Sigmon. “He’s torn his way back to Ginny Jameson.”
Sigmon’s lips thinned until they just about disappeared. “Go ahead and dig on that score, Rivers. The girl’s death was an accident.”
“Death?” I said. “I didn’t know Ginny Jameson was dead.”
I couldn’t tell how my words reacted inside of Sigmon. This guy had lived by his wits and looks so many years it had become second nature. He shrugged. “Ginny and I had been partying a day or two in the cottage near Caracas. Elena came there with news of her grandmother Isabella’s death in Tampa. Ginny decided the party was over, that father and daughter needs be alone at such a moment.”
He motioned for Elena to get him a drink. “Ginny had been drinking. I tried to talk her out of driving back to Caracas alone. But... well, she and Elena had had words, rather bitter ones. And to be honest, I felt it time for Ginny to leave. Anyhow, she missed a turn on the mountain road. Elena and I spotted the wreckage when we left the cottage shortly afterward that night. I reported the accident to the authorities. The next day Elena and I came on to Tampa. That’s all there was to it.”
Nothing to him, I thought. Like a missing button on an old suit he’s ready to cast off.
But it seemed likely that Elena didn’t share his attitude and lack of feeling. I could imagine the scene in the mountain cottage when Elena had arrived that night. The news of her grandmother’s death must have had her already in an emotional turmoil. To top it, to blow the lid off, she’d found herself crashing her father’s liquor and sex party.
Later, recalling the things she’d said to her father and Ginny Jameson, perhaps Elena had felt responsible for sending the girl out to her accidental death.
Death on every hand for Elena Sigmon, little snake writhing on hot stone... Death by terrorist’s bomb, death by age and decay in faraway Tampa, death by auto for a half-drunken girl on a mountain road at night.
For Elena, a more pleasant death lay in the bottle. Or so it appeared to me, right now, in this instant. How it would appear an hour from now, a day from now, I didn’t know, because I didn’t know what an hour from now might bring.