Gerald's Game Read online

  "Who did this to you, Jessie?" Jimmy asked. I tried to answer him but couldn't get any words out. Which is probably just as well, considering what I was trying to say. I think it was "My father."

  Jessie snuffed out her cigarette, then looked down at the top newsprint photograph. The narrow, freakish face of Raymond Andrew Joubert gazed raptly back ... just as he had gazed at her from the corner of the bedroom on the first night, and from her recently deceased husband's study on the second. Almost five minutes passed in this silent contemplation. Then, with the air of one who starts awake from a brief doze, Jessie lit a fresh cigarette and turned back to her letter. The copy-minder now announced she was on page seven. She stretched, listened to the minute crackling sounds from her spine, then began to touch the keys again. The cursor resumed its dance.

  Twenty minutes later--twenty minutes during which I discovered how sweet and concerned and amusingly daffy men can be (Lonnie Dakin asked me if I'd like some Midol)--I was in a Rescue Services ambulance, headed for Northern Cumberland Hospital with the flashers flashing and the siren wailing. An hour after that I was lying in a crank-up bed, watching blood run down a tube into my arm and listening to some country music asshole sing about how tough his life had been since his woman left him and his pickup truck broke down.

  That pretty well concludes Part One of my story, Ruth--call it Little Nell Across the Ice, or, How I Escaped Handcuffs and Made My Way to Safety. There are two other parts, which I think of as The Aftermath and The Kicker. I'm going to scamp on The Aftermath, partly because it's only really interesting if you're into skin-grafts and pain, but mostly because I want to get to The Kicker before I get too tired and computer-woozy to tell it the way I need to tell it. And the way you deserve to have it told, come to think of it. That idea just occurred to me, and it's nothing but the bald-assed truth, as we used to say. After all, without The Kicker I probably wouldn't be writing you at all.

  Before I get to it, though, I have to tell you a little more about Brandon Milheron, who really sums up that Aftermath period for me. It was during the first part of my recovery, the really ugly part, that Brandon came along and more or less adopted me. I'd like to call him a sweet man, because he was there for me during one of the most hellacious times of my life, but sweetness isn't really what he's about--seeing things through is what Brandon is about, and keeping all the sightlines clear, and making sure all the right ducks stay in a row. And that isn't right, either--there's more to him than that and he's better than that--but the hour groweth late, and it will have to do. Suffice it to say that for a man whose job it was to look out for a conservative law-firm's interests in the wake of a potentially nasty situation involving one of the senior partners, Brandon did a lot of hand-holding and encouraging. Also, he never gave me hell for crying on the lapels of his natty three-piece suits. If that was all, I probably wouldn't be going on about him, but there's something else, as well. Something he did for me only yesterday. Have faith, kid--we're getting there.

  Brandon and Gerald worked together a lot over the last fourteen months of Gerald's life--a suit involving one of the major supermarket chains up here. They won whatever it was they were supposed to win, and, more important for yours truly, they established a good rapport. I have an idea that when the old sticks that run the firm get around to taking Gerald's name off the letterhead, Brandon's will take its place. In the meantime, he was the perfect person for this assignment, which Brandon himself described as damage control during his first meeting with me in the hospital.

  He does have a kind of sweetness about him--yes, he does--and he was honest with me from the jump, but of course he still had his own agenda from the beginning. Believe me when I say my eyes are wide open on that score, my dear; I was, after all, married to a lawyer for almost two decades, and I know how fiercely they compartmentalize the various aspects of their lives and personalities. It's what allows them to survive without having too many breakdowns, I suppose, but it's also what makes so many of them utterly loathsome.

  Brandon was never loathsome, but he was a man with a mission: keep a lid on any bad publicity that might accrue to the firm. That meant keeping a lid on any bad publicity that might accrue to either Gerald or me, of course. This is the sort of job where the person doing it can wind up getting screwed by a single stroke of bad luck, but Brandon still took it like a shot... and to his further credit, he never once tried to tell me he took the job out of respect for Gerald's memory. He took it because it was what Gerald himself used to call a career-maker--the kind of job that can open a quick shortcut to the next echelon, if it turns out well. It is turning out well for Brandon, and I'm glad. He treated me with a great deal of kindness and compassion, which is reason enough to be happy for him, I guess, but there are two other reasons, as well. He never got hysterical when I told him someone from the press had called or come around, and he never acted as if I were just a job--only that and nothing more. Do you want to know what I really think, Ruth? Although I am seven years older than the man I'm telling you about and I still look folded, stapled, and mutilated, I think Brandon Milheron may have fallen a little bit in love with me ... or with the heroic Little Nell he sees in his mind's eye when he looks at me. I don't think it's a sex thing with him (not yet, anyway; at a hundred and eight pounds, I still look quite a bit like a plucked chicken hanging in a butcher shop window), and that's fine with me; if I never go to bed with another man, I will be absolutely delighted. Still, I'd be lying if I said I didn't like seeing that look in his eyes, the one that says I'm part of his agenda now--me, Jessie Angela Mahout Burlingame, as opposed to an inanimate lump his bosses probably think of as That Unfortunate Burlingame Business. I don't know if I come above the firm on Brandon's agenda, or below it, or right beside it, and I don't care. It is enough to know that I'm on it, and that I'm something more than a

  Jessie paused here, tapping her left forefinger against her teeth and thinking carefully. She took a deep drag on her current cigarette, then went on.

  than a charitable side-effect.

  Brandon was right beside me during all the police interviews, with his little tape-recorder going. He politely but relentlessly pointed out to everyone present at every interview--inctuding stenographers and nurses--that anyone who leaked the admittedly sensational details of the case would face all the nasty reprisals a large New England law-firm with an exceedingly tight ass could think up. Brandon must have been as convincing to them as he was to me, because no one in the know ever talked to the press.

  The worst of the questioning came during the three days I spent in "guarded condition" at Northern Cumberland--mostly sucking up blood, water, and electrolytes through plastic tubes. The police reports that came out of those sessions were so strange they actually looked believable when they showed up in the papers, like those weird man-bites-dog stories they run from time to time. Only this one was actually a dog-bites-man story ... and woman as well, in this version. Want to hear what's going into the record books? Okay, here it is:

  We decided to spend the day at our summer home in western Maine. Following a sexual interlude that was two parts tussle and one part sex, we showered together. Gerald left the shower while I was washing my hair. He was complaining of gas pains, probably from the sub sandwiches we ate on our way from Portland, and asked if there were any Rolaids or Turns in the house. I said I didn't know, but they'd be on top of the bureau or on the bed-shelf if there were. Three or four minutes later, while I was rinsing my hair, I heard Gerald cry out. This cry apparently signalled the onset of a massive coronary. It was followed by a heavy thump--the sound of a body striking the floor. I jumped out of the shower, and when I ran into the bedroom, my feet went out from under me. I hit my head on the side of the bureau as I went down and knocked myself out.

  According to this version, which was put together by Mr. Milheron and Mrs. Burtingame--and endorsed enthusiastically by the police, I might add--I returned to partial consciousness several times, but each time I did, I pass
ed out again. When I came to the last time, the dog had gotten tired of Gerald and was noshing on me. I got up on the bed (according to our story, Gerald and I found it where it was--probably moved there by the guys who came in to wax the floor--and we were so hot to trot we didn't bother to move it back where it belonged) and drove the dog off by throwing Gerald's water-glass and fraternity ashtray at it. Then I passed out again and spent the next few hours unconscious and bleeding all over the bed. Later on I woke up again, got to the car, and finally drove to safety ... after one final bout of unconsciousness, that is. That was when I ran into the tree beside the road.

  I only asked once how Brandon got the police to go along with this piece of nonsense. He said, "It's a State Police investigation now, Jessie, and we--by which I mean the firm--have lots of friends in the S.P. I'm calling in every favor I have to, but in truth I haven't had to call in that many. Cops are human beings, too, you know. These guys had a pretty good idea of what really happened as soon as they saw the cuffs hanging from the bedposts. It's not the first time they've seen handcuffs after someone popped his carburetor, believe me. There wasn't a single one of those cops--state or local--who wanted to see you and your husband turned into a dirty joke as a result of something that was really no more than a grotesque accident."

  At first I didn't say anything even to Brandon about the man I thought I saw, or the footprint, or the pearl earring, or anything else. I was waiting, you see--looking for straws in the wind, I suppose.

  Jessie looked at that last, shook her head, and began to type again.

  No, that's bullshit. I was waiting for some cop to come in with a little plastic evidence bag and hand it to me and ask me to identify the rings-finger-rings, not earrings--inside. "We're pretty sure they must be yours," he'd say, "because they have your initials and those of your husband engraved inside them, and also because we found them on the floor of your husband's study."

  I kept waiting for that because when they showed me my rings, I'd know for sure that Little Nell's Midnight Caller had just been a figment of Little Nell's imagination. I waited and waited, but it didn't happen. Finally, just before the first operation on my hand, I told Brandon about how I'd had the idea that I might not have been alone in the house, at least not all the time. I told him it could have just been my imagination, that was certainly a possibility, but it had seemed very real at the time. I didn't say anything about my own missing rings, but I talked a lot about the footprint and the pearl earring. About the earring I think it would be fair to say I babbled, and I think I know why: it had to stand for everything I didn't dare to talk about, even to Brandon. Do you understand? And all the time I was telling him, I kept saying stuff like "Then I thought I saw" and "I felt almost sure that." I had to tell him, had to tell someone, because the fear was eating me from the inside out like acid, but I tried to show him in every way I could that I wasn't mistaking subjective feelings for objective reality. Above all I tried to keep him from seeing how scared I still was. Because I didn't want him to think I was crazy. I didn't care if he thought I was a little hysterical; that was a price I was willing to pay to keep from getting stuck with another nasty secret like the one about what my father did to me on the day of the eclipse, but I desperately didn't want him to think I was crazy. I didn't want him to even speculate on the possibility.

  Brandon took my hand and patted it and told me he could understand such an idea; he said that under the circumstances, it was probably tame. Then he added that the important thing to remember was that it was no more real than the shower Gerald and I took after our athletic, bump-and-bruise romp on the bed. The police had gone over the house, and if there had been someone else in there, they almost certainly would have found evidence of him. The fact that the house had undergone a big end-of-summer cleaning not long before made that even more likely.

  "Maybe they did find evidence of him," I said. "Maybe some cop stuck that earring in his own pocket."

  "There are plenty of light-fingered cops in the world, granted," he said, "but it's hard for me to believe that even a stupid one would risk his career for an orphan earring. It would be easier for me to believe that this guy you thought was in the house with you came back later and got it himself."

  "Yes!" I said. "That's possible, isn't it?"

  He started to shake his head, then shrugged instead. "Anything is possible, and that includes either cupidity or human error on the part of the investigating officers, but ..." He paused, then took my left hand and gave me what I think of as Brandon's Dutch Uncle expression. "A lot of your thinking is based on the idea that those investigating officers gave the house a lick and a promise and called it good. That wasn't the case. If there had been a third party in there, it's odds-on that the police would have found evidence of him. And if they'd found evidence of a third party, I'd know."

  "Why?" asked.

  "Because something like that could put you in a very nasty situation--the kind of situation where the police stop being nice guys and start reading you the Miranda warning."

  "I don't understand what you're talking about," I said, but I was beginning to, Ruth; yes indeed. Gerald was something of an insurance freak, and I had been informed by agents of three different carriers that I was going to spend my period of official mourning--and quite a few years after--in comfortable circumstances.

  "John Harrelson in Augusta did a very thorough, very careful autopsy on your husband," Brandon said. "According to his report, Gerald died of what MEs call 'a pure heart attack,' meaning one uncomplicated by food poisoning, undue exertion, or gross physical trauma." He clearly meant to go on--he was in what I've come to think of as Brandon's Teaching Mode--but he saw something on my face that stopped him. "Jessie? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," I said.

  "Yes there is--you look terrible. Is it a cramp?"

  I finally managed to persuade him that I was okay, and by then I almost was. I imagine you know what I was thinking about, Ruth, since I mentioned it earlier in this letter: the double kick I gave Gerald when he wouldn't do the right thing and let me up. One in the gut, one smack in the family jewels. I was thinking how lucky it was I'd said the sex was rough--it explained the bruises. I have an idea they were light, anyway, because the heart attack came right on the heels of the kicks, and the heart attack stopped the bruising process almost before it could get started.

  That leads to another question, of course--did I cause the heart attack by kicking him? None of the medical books I've looked at answer that question conclusively, but let's get real: I probably helped him along. Still, I refuse to take the whole rap. He was overweight, he drank too much, and he smoked like a chimney. The heart attack was coming; if it hadn't been that day, it would have been the next week or the next month. The devil only plays his fiddle for you so long, Ruth. I believe that. If you don't, I cordially invite you to fold it small and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine. I happen to think I've earned the right to believe what I want to believe, at least in this matter. Especially in this matter.

  "If I looked like I swallowed a doorknob," I told Brandon, "it's because I'm trying to get used to the idea that someone thinks I killed Gerald to collect his life insurance."

  He shook his head some more, looking at me earnestly all the while. "They don't think that at all. Harrelson says Gerald had a heart attack which may have been precipitated by sexual excitement, and the State Police accept that because John Harrelson is about the best in the business. At most there may be a few cynics who think you played Salome and led him on deliberately."

  "Do you?" I asked.

  I thought I might shock him with such directness, and part of me was curious as to what a shocked Brandon Milheron might look like, but I should have known better. He only smiled. "Do I think you'd have imagination enough to see a chance of blowing Gerald's thermostat but not enough to see you might end up dying in handcuffs yourself as a result? No. For whatever it's worth, Jess, I think it went down just the way you told me it did. Can I be
honest?"

  "I wouldn't want you to be anything else," I told him.

  "All right. I worked with Gerald, and I got along with him, but there were plenty of people in the firm who didn't. He was the world's biggest control-freak. It doesn't surprise me a bit that the idea of having sex with a woman handcuffed to the bed lit up all his dials."

  I took a quick look at him when he said that. It was night, only the light at the head of my bed was on, and he was sitting in shadow from the shoulders up, but I'm pretty sure that Brandon Milheron, Young Legal Shark About Town, was blushing.

  "If I've offended you, I'm sorry," he said, sounding unexpectedly awkward.

  I almost laughed. It would have been unkind, but just then he sounded about eighteen years old and fresh out of prep school. "You haven't offended me, Brandon," I said.

  "Good. That takes care of me. But it's still the job of the police to at least entertain the possibility of foul ptay--to consider the idea that you could have gone a step further than just hoping your husband might have what is known in the trade as 'a horny coronary.' "

  "I didn't have the slightest idea he had a heart problem!" I said. "Apparently the insurance companies didn't, either. If they'd known, they never would have written those policies, would they?"