She tried to make up for it. “All right. Let’s have it out in the open. I’m leaving you.”
He looked a little punchdrunk. She’d caught him so badly off balance she nearly felt sorry for him.
She pounded it home: “She’s not going to grow up in a dope dealer’s home. My daughter’s not going to live in that environment. I can’t allow that. I’m taking her away from here.”
A deep breath: don’t run out of gas now. Keep going.
Finish it. “I’m sorry, Bert. You should have been content with the construction business. I can’t go on living with the kind of thing you’ve turned into. I can’t expose my daughter to that.”
He stared at her, his face closing up as she spoke-and then his continuing silence made her break out in a cold sweat.
She felt a growing desperation. “We can do this like civilized people or we can do it the hard way, you know. If that’s what you want I’ll have to get a lawyer and believe me I’ll get the nastiest bastard I can find. I don’t imagine any court in the world would grant custody of a baby girl to a dope peddler.”
She gathered up her handbag and the wrap she’d been wearing; still in evening clothes, stalking on high heels, she went toward the door. “We’re going now. I’ll let you know where to send our things.”
“Like hell you will.”
It wasn’t his words; it was the low even rasp of his voice that stopped her.
He said to her back, “Just stay put. I need some time to think about this.”
“Fine. Think about it all you want. I’ll let you know where you can reach me when you want to talk about it.”
“You want me to sleep in the other room tonight? Fine. All right. But nobody’s leaving right now.”
She turned to face him. “You can stop me from taking her tonight, of course. You’re strong enough. But I’ll just get a court order. Is that what I have to do?”
He shook his head-more in bafflement than in visible anger. “No divorce. No custody. That’s all. Okay? Understand?”
“You’re having some kind of Corsican dream. Let’s talk about reality.”
“I’ll tell you reality. Reality is you don’t take my daughter away from me. Reality is you don’t walk all over me in a divorce court. You don’t like it here any more? I’m sorry about that. But you made a bargain. You took my name, you took my money.”
“You can have them both back. I don’t need your money.”
“Yeah. How noble. Okay. Reality, now, reality is you don’t walk out on Albert LaCasse. And Ellen stays with her daddy.”
“Jesus, haven’t you heard a word I said?”
“Sure I heard you. Let’s discuss one simple fact.” He’d gone glacial; his enunciation became angrily precise:
“You file against me, you try to take Ellen away, anything at all along those lines, the whole thing comes to an end for you right then and right there.”
She gaped at him. “Are you actually threatening to kill me?”
“Kill you? What the fuck am I now, some kind of murderer? Christ almighty. Who said anything about killing anybody?” The big shoulders lifted; the expressive hands gesticulated, then subsided. He had control of his alarm now.
He descended into dark weary sadness. It was only partly an act, an aspect of his voluble Corsican theatricality; it was also a manifestation of genuine pain and loss. He brooded; he scowled; he searched for thoughts he could express.
And finally without heat he said: “I don’t think you have any idea how many subsidiaries I run, how many people owe me consideration.”
He looked up. She was watching him, puzzled, not able to anticipate where this might be leading.
“I got a truck-leasing lot on Northern Boulevard and twenty percent of a cable TV outfit in Trenton, okay? I got a piece of a resort hotel down in the Bahamas. I got nursing homes in Staten Island I built and I own, you know that?”
He was sitting on the bed, elbows on knees; his hands dangled from the wrists. He wasn’t looking at her.
“I got half of a little private hospital out in Amityville. What this leads up to, Madeleine, the point I’m trying to make, you’ve been acting very strange all of a sudden here and I think maybe you’re having a little nervous breakdown or something, and if you were to go and see some lawyer or try to steal my daughter out of her home or anything like that, then I guess I wouldn’t have any choice but to have you committed to a mental facility for observation and treatment. For however long it might take to straighten out your head.”
Then he looked up and smiled.
It was a warm smile full of bright pleased triumph: it was the most frightening expression she’d ever seen on a human face.
After that it was a question of opportunity and even more of courage.
Neither came easily. She realized belatedly how stupid it had been to forewarn him. Now the baby was always under supervision: there were nurses and nannies around the clock. No one prevented the mother from being with the baby; no one limited the mother’s freedom of movement-so long as the baby remained in view of employees-but the unspoken rules were manifest. She never doubted Bert had meant every word he’d said, quite specifically and literally. He was entirely capable of putting her away in a rubber room somewhere and locking it for the rest of her life.
He would grieve, of course. He would be mortally offended. He would be the suffering injured party, filled with pain. As the little girl grew up he would explain to her how her mother had gone mad and tried to break up the family and actually tried to kidnap poor baby Ellen from her loving daddy.…
She moved into the guest bedroom of the condominium. Bert allowed that much. He had enough dignity not to wish to share a bed with a woman who reacted catatonically to his advances; and he had enough concern for appearances to keep his liaisons discreet.
Evidently he convinced himself she was making her way through the confusions of some temporary emotional aberration. Every second or third day they’d cross paths or he’d seek her out; on those occasions he would say, “Come back when you’re ready,” and “Maybe you ought to talk to a shrink, what do you think? Might help you straighten yourself out,” and “Must be kind of lonely in that guest bedroom,” and “I’m not putting any pressure on. You let me know now, hey?” He had cast himself as the innocent, waiting for her to recognize her error-waiting her out with humble seraphic patience.
She was free to come and go. With acquaintances like Diane and with the few friends she had left from modeling days she kept up appearances because she didn’t know what else she could do; but regardless of outward appearances of unrestricted freedom she was imprisoned-tethered to a chain leash that Bert might yank at any time.
Of course it was intolerable. You could go mad this way in no time at all. Soon if they put her in a mental home it wouldn’t be a fiction.
The decision to escape was anticlimactic, really. There were only questions of when and how. She had to find, or design, a way to abduct the baby and to disappear so neatly that Bert could neither follow nor find her.
That was when she went to Newark and pumped Ray Seale about the mechanics of skip-tracing and disappearance.
After that she set out methodically to lay her plans.
They nearly worked.…
He may have forgotten she had a key to the front hall closet; more likely he had forgotten nothing but simply could not credit the idea that even in this estrangement she might steal from him.
The suitcase of cash appeared in the closet on the occasional Thursday or Friday, whence it would be taken to Fort Keene on the weekend. There presumably it would be handed over to a pilot at the airstrip.
Heretofore she had believed these clandestine shipments of cash to be headed for numbered bank accounts in tax-haven countries where they would be deposited in behalf of a union leader or building inspector or zoning-ordinance politician.