He waited for Webley to retaliate. No response. He listened for a sound from Webley’s direction. Nothing. He fought to raise himself, squinting past Gable’s corpse, still seeing no sign of Webley.
What difference does it make? Pittman thought. If I didn’t kill him, I’m finished.
But he had to know. He squirmed higher, clutching a chair, peering over it, seeing Webley lying motionless in a pool of blood.
Pittman’s painful elation lasted only a second as he heard a groan from beyond the shattered window. His chest protesting from the effort, he turned and saw Denning clutch his own chest. The old man’s elated grin had become a scowl. His eyes, which a moment ago had been bright with victory, were now dark with terror and bewilderment. He dropped his pistol. He sagged against the windowsill. He slumped from view.
By the time Pittman staggered to the window, Denning was already dead, collapsed in a flower garden, his eyes and mouth open, his arms and legs trembling, then no longer trembling, assuming a terrible stillness.
Pittman shook his head.
In the distance, he heard a siren. Another siren quickly joined it. The wails became louder, speeding nearer.
Bracing himself against a chair, Pittman peered down, fumbling to open his sport coat. The bullet that had struck his chest protruded partly from his sweater. When Gable had commented that the two garments were the reason Pittman reacted badly to the eighty-degree temperature in the room, Pittman had been afraid that Gable would become suspicious about the sweater. After all, the sweater was the reason Pittman had needed to contact someone else he had once interviewed before he came to the mansion to confront Gable.
The person he’d gone to see was a security expert. The sweater was a bullet-resistant vest whose state-of-the-art design made it look like ordinary clothing.
I’m the sum of all the people I ever interviewed, Pittman thought morosely as he stared again out the shattered window toward Denning’s corpse.
He turned away. The effort of breathing made him wince. The security expert had explained that the woven fibers of the bullet-resistant vest could stop most projectiles but that it offered no protection against the force of their impact. Bruises and injured ribs were sometimes unavoidable.
I believe it, Pittman thought, holding himself. I feel like I’ve been kicked by a horse.
The sirens, joined by others, sped nearer and louder.
Pittman staggered across the living room, passing Gable’s corpse, then Sloane’s, then Webley’s. The stench of cordite and death was cloying. He had to get outside. He had to breathe fresh air. He stumbled along the stone-floored hallway, his legs weak from the effects of fear. As he reached for the main door, he heard tires squealing on the paved driveway outside. He opened the door and lurched onto the terrace, breathing sweet, cool air. Policemen scrambled from cruisers. Weapons drawn, they didn’t bother slamming their car doors. They were too busy racing toward Pittman. He lifted his arms, not wanting them to think he was a threat. But then he saw Jill among them, racing even harder to reach him, shouting his name, and he knew that for now at least he didn’t have to be afraid. He held her, clinging to her, oblivious to the pressure against his injured chest. She was sobbing, and he held her tighter, never wanting to let her go.
“I love you. I was so afraid that I’d lose you,” she said.
“Not today.” Pittman kissed her. “Thank God, not today.”
EPILOGUE
Love is an act of faith, Pittman thought. People get sick and die, or they die in traffic accidents, or they eat food that hasn’t been properly cooked and they get salmonella and they die, or they fall from a ladder and break their necks, or they get tired of you and they don’t want to see you anymore and they don’t answer your phone calls, or they divorce you. There were so many ways to be tortured by love. Indeed, eventually all love, even the truest and most faithful, doomed the lover to agonizing loss-because of death. Love required so much optimism, so much trust in the future. A practical person might say that the possible immediate benefits did not compensate for the ultimate painful result. A cautious person might deny his or her feelings, closet the temptation to love, smother it, and go through life in a safe, emotionless vacuum. But not me, Pittman thought. If love requires faith, I’m a believer.
These thoughts occurred to him as he held Jill’s hand and walked between rows of tombstones toward his beloved son’s grave. It was Thursday again, a week after the events that had taken place at Eustace Gable’s mansion and two weeks after Pittman had tried to save Jonathan Millgate’s life at the Scarsdale estate. Following the arrival of the police and the discovery of the corpses in Gable’s blood-spattered living room, Pittman and Jill had been held in custody. But as Pittman had hoped, the damning conversation that had been broadcast to the police was his salvation. After he and Jill had been questioned at length, after Mrs. Page corroborated those portions of their story about which she had personal experience, after the police in Boston and New York verified other details (with help from the Vermont State Police, who went to Grollier Academy), Pittman and Jill were eventually released.
Now in New York, they stopped before Jeremy’s grave, and the warm sunshine-filled spring afternoon made Pittman’s heart ache worse from love for his absent son. It was terrible that Jeremy would never again see and experience weather so beautiful.
Pittman put his arm around Jill, drawing comfort from her, while he studied the amazingly green grass that covered Jeremy’s grave. As his tear ducts stung his eyes, he was reminded of something that Walt Whitman had written, that grass was the hair of graves. Jeremy’s hair. The only hair he has now. Except that isn’t true, Pittman thought. A hundred years ago maybe, when coffins were made of wood and weren’t surrounded by a concrete sleeve and lid. In the old days, the coffin and the body would decompose, become one with the earth, and generate new life. Now the way bodies are hygienically sealed within the earth, death is truly lifeless, Pittman thought. If his ex-wife had agreed with Pittman’s wishes, their son’s body would have been cremated, his ashes lovingly scattered in a meadow where wildflowers could bloom from him. But Pittman’s ex-wife had insisted so strongly and Pittman had been so emotionally disabled, Jeremy’s body had been disposed of in a traditional manner, and the sterility of it made Pittman want to cry.
The thought of death, which for the past year had preoccupied him, now weighed heavier on his mind. Since his escape from the Scarsdale estate, he had seen his best friend killed, and Father Dandridge, and that didn’t include several men whom he himself had killed, and it certainly didn’t include the slaughter at Gable’s mansion. The more Pittman brooded about it, the more he wondered if the other grand counselors-Anthony Lloyd dead from a stroke, Victor Standish dead from suicide-should also be included. And of course, Jonathan Millgate. I set out to do an obituary on a man who wasn’t dead, Pittman thought. In the process, I inadvertently ended up causing the death of that man and of all his associates.
The grand counselors were evil. Of that, Pittman had no doubt. But they would have died soon anyway, he told himself, and maybe that would have been better than exposing their obscene secret and causing so many other deaths along the way. Would any of this have happened, Pittman wondered, if he hadn’t believed that the public truly had a right to know about the abuses of power? If he’d been less determined, he would never have gone after Jonathan Millgate seven years previously. Burt would never have chosen him to go after Millgate again two weeks ago. Do I bear some responsibility for what happened?