“Well, do what you’re told, then,” she said.
“Sure.”
She smiled and kissed him again. Definitely not a sisterly kiss.
Or a sisterly clutch at his groin.
“Tonight,” she said.
Oh, what a tangled web, I thought as Brian turned away from her, Cassandra laughing softly.
He knelt beside Max and started to lift him up. Max’s weight was dead, his limbs completely flaccid.
What have they done to him? I wondered.
“I can use that champagne now,” Cassandra said.
She crossed to the bar as Brian, grunting from the effort, managed to lift Max to a standing position and began to half-drag, half-lead him toward the freezer.
He’s still alive, I thought.
But completely helpless.
At the bar, Cassandra twirled the champagne bottle in the bucket, lifted it out and tore off its metallic neck wrapping.
Then she stopped and looked at the bottle.
Made a sound of grim amusement.
“What?” gasped Brian, using every bit of his strength to get Max to the freezer.
“If we could drug his private-stock brandy, chancing that he’d drink it of his own accord—as Harry did with the Scotch—how do we know Max didn’t do the same thing with this bottle of champagne—so conveniently placed in the ice bucket? He could have used a hypo-needle, just as we did.”
She dropped the bottle into the wastebasket.
“Good try, Max,” she said.
The woman has no trust in anyone, I thought.
Opening the doors beneath the bar, she lifted out a new case of champagne and tore it open, removing one of its bottles. Tearing off its metallic seal, she started to thumb out the cork.
“Better to drink safe champagne on the rocks, eh Padre?” she said mockingly to me.
If I could only move, came the thought. I would be able to kill.
Hearing the pop of the cork and the brief gush of escaping liquid from the bottle, Brian looked around.
“Celebration time,” he said glumly.
“Of course, love,” she answered. “We have a lot to celebrate.”
“Of course,” said Brian.
“Oh, cheer up, for Christ’s sake,” Cassandra told him, pouring champagne into a glass of ice cubes.
Lifting the glass, she jiggled it for several moments, then drained it; sighed.
“Not as good as chilled,” she said, “but it’ll do.”
Brian had Max to the freezer now and was putting him inside.
I watched, in pain.
“You really think he poisoned that champagne?” he asked, breathing hard.
“He could have,” she answered, pouring herself a second drink. “He always planned ahead.”
“What a twisted mind you have,” he muttered.
“Twisted, but surviving,” she told him, taking a sip of her second drink.
She raised her glass toastingly toward the freezer.
“You’re right, Max,” she said. “It is my favorite brand. Not the exact bottle of it that you’d planned on. However—as brother Brian put it—all’s well that ends well.”
Oh God, I’d be able to kill! I thought, enraged.
Now Max sagged in the same spot where he’d thought his dead wife had been hanging minutes earlier.
I felt myself grow tense as his lips stirred laboredly.
“The brandy?” he asked in a faint voice.
“Oh, you didn’t hear me, darling?” Cassandra said lightly. “Yes, of course. The brandy.”
“The same stuff she’s been putting in your food for thirteen months,” Brian added.
“Shut up,” Cassandra told him.
“A lot more of it, though,” Brian said.
“Shut up,” she ordered.
I closed my eyes. If I could only vanish from this awful place, I thought. Be an Effect—be gone in a flash. I hated what was going on and what had gone on. All of it was sickening, dismaying. How could it have gone so far?
Finished with Max, Brian bowed toward my son.
“Salud, Great Delacorte,” he said. “You should have given me more credit than you did.”
“Get out of here and change,” Cassandra told him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Turning on his heel, he crossed to the entry hall and left.
I watched Cassandra as she gazed at Max.
Is this the end, then?
Of me as well as Max, it occurred to me. She’d want me out of the house now. Out of her life.
More than likely, out of the world.
What was one less vegetable to her?
Now she spoke. Did it bother her that I could hear—or did she want me to hear?
Maybe my presence didn’t even occur to her as she spoke to Max.
“You should have given him more credit,” she said.
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Did you really think he’d help you murder me?
“Just because you had those forged checks?
“The way he feels about me?”
She drained her glass and sighed with pleasure, smiling.
Lewdly, let me make it clear.
“But then, you never knew about that, did you?” she said. “Never knew it wasn’t only Harry I was ‘bedding,’ as you so slyly put it.”
She made a sound of contempt.
“I had no intention that you’d know, of course,” she told him.
Returning to the bar, she poured her glass full of champagne again. And I began to feel a kind of dark peace, knowing that Max and I would soon be free of this defilement.
chapter 27
Another sound of contempt from Cassandra now, this one more intense.
“You were so certain it was Brian imitating me in order to fool the Sheriff,” she said.
“True, the poison had weakened your eyesight and your hearing.
“But it was more than that. We both know that, don’t we?
“It was your ego.
“Your damned, incredible ego.
“You’d planned it that way. Ergo, it must be happening that way.
“The Great Delacorte never makes a mistake.”
A scoffing laugh.
“Even though I gave myself away a dozen times,” she continued, “lost control completely when I saw that goddam shrine to goddam Adelaide.”
She pointed a shaking finger at him.
“You can bet your dying ass I’ll soon get rid of that,” she told him fiercely.
She shook her head, amused again.
“You didn’t notice it,” she said. “Even though I had to wear a wig over a wig over my hair. My God.
“Even though I had to wear a pair of falsies over my own taped-down tits.”
She glanced at me, grinning. “Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “Didn’t mean to offend.”
She looked back at Max again.
“I couldn’t have been more transparent,” she said. “But you were sure that it was Brian, so you saw Brian, you heard Brian.”
She hissed. “Idiot,” she muttered.
She glanced at me again. “Your son is an idiot!” she cried. “Padre.”
She walked over to the freezer, taking the bottle and glass with her.
“Sorry your little plot didn’t work,” she said. “But, the well-laid plans—” Smiling, she took a long sip of champagne.
“And now the final phase of my scenario,” she went on.
“Maximilian Delacorte—the Great—takes a trip to the Caribbean to recover from an illness which was ruining his career; lots of witnesses to that.
“He charters a yacht, starts drinking heavily, then one night falls overboard and disappears.”
She snickered.
“And Brian swims for a while until I pick him up.”
Another snicker.
“You didn’t know that he can imitate you, too. Not as well as he can imitate me, but good enough to fool some strangers into testifying t
o Maximilian Delacorte’s unhappy demise. Was it suicide? Perhaps.”
She grinned. “The poor man was so depressed about his failing career,” she said.
She chuckled.
“Then, of course, I might not pick up Brian after all,” she said. “I might just let him drown.”
She is a hellhag, I thought. I understood exactly why my son had wanted to kill her.
I would have wanted the same.
“If I do pick him up,” Cassandra was continuing, “I’ll damn well keep him in his place, the same way you were doing it—with those forged checks, that murder contract.”
She chuckled again; again, lewdly.
“Not that he’d ever turn on me,” she said. “I’ve handled him all my life.”
Her eyes hooded sensuously.
“In more ways than one,” she said.
What is Max thinking about all this? I wondered.
Or was he still capable of thought? Had the poison deprived him of all capacity by then?
Cassandra had taken another drink, and she sighed contentedly.
“Anyway, what matters is that I have your effects now,” she said. “I can do what I please with them. Create a new act. A today act. One that will sell.”
She giggled softly. Yes, dear reader, giggled.
“I may even let Harry be my booking agent,” she said.
She bared her teeth.
“And screw him when I feel the urge,” she added.
If only I could move, I thought.
Pathetically.
Max was looking at her, his expression one of (almost gentle!) condemnation.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“This didn’t have to happen.
“We could have worked together. Or, at least, I thought we could have, until I saw that shrine.
“I couldn’t believe the anger it made me feel—the pain.
“Yes, pain! I thought you’d lost the power to hurt me long ago. The power to make me care about anything that had to do with us.”
I felt my body tightening as Max replied.
“I would … hardly … think you cared … at all … when you were … poisoning me for … thirteen months,” he managed to get out.
“You’re right,” she agreed, trying to act as though the sound of his voice had not unnerved her.
“I never cared for you,” she said, “only for your success.
“And now I’ve got it.”
She poured herself another glassful of champagne and held it up.
“To me,” she said. “The New Great Delacorte.”
Never! I thought, absurdly.
Cassandra emptied the glass, then walked over to the desk, set the bottle and glass on top of it, and moving to the fieldstone wall, pushed in the stone. The apparatus began to close.
Cassandra looked at her dying husband.
“See you in hell,” she said.
Max smiled. (How could he?)
“It’s a date,” he responded.
With his remaining strength, he chuckled as the freezer folded in on itself until, once more, I saw only the picture window overlooking the gazebo by the lake.
The storm was decreasing now, moving off, the rain slackening, thunder and lightning almost negligible. A coincidence?
Or had Nature taken notice and reduced its accompanying violence as the violence in the room subsided?
Cassandra looked at me.
“We’ll deal with you anon,” she told me. “Maybe put you in the freezer with your son.”
A dazzling smile. “We’ll see, old man,” she said.
She started toward the entry hall.
She was almost to the doorway when from a corner of her eyes, she saw (as I did) a movement on the surface of the globe.
She stopped and turned around, looking in that direction.
The outer layer of the globe was rolling downward, revealing the glass globe underneath. Harry’s head again? I thought. What would be the point of that?
Max’s.
His lips drawn back in an amiable smile.
“While I realize,” he said, “that the chance of your ever seeing this is small indeed, at the same time, I have taken the precaution, as a good magician should, of preparing an alternative ending.”
Despite my grief, I felt a glow of warmth at that. He’d never forgotten.
“Accordingly, I have injected through the cork and wrapping of the apparently unopened bottle in the ice bucket a tasteless, slow-acting but extremely efficacious poison.”
Cassandra started. Then her lips jerked back in a barking laugh of triumph.
“You really did poison it, you son of a bitch,” she said.
“In addition,” Max’s head went on, “I have also injected the same poison into every champagne bottle under the bar—resealing the cases, of course.
“This in the event that you suspect the bottle in the ice bucket and use another one.”
Cassandra stiffened with dread. While in the heart of the ancient vegetable, a cheer erupted. Bravo, Sonny!
“I know you love your favorite champagne after any kind of personal triumph,” Max’s head continued.
He paused.
“Not that you will ever have the chance to drink it,” he said. “You’ll be hanging in the freezer, dead. Still—”
The head smiled cunningly.
“—who knows?” it said.
It was either a choice coincidence or (more likely) the burst of shock which had flooded her system that caused Cassandra to feel the poison for the first time at that very moment.
She began to weave, one hand pressed against her stomach.
“No,” she said.
She stared in unbelieving shock at Max’s head as it completed its statement.
“If it comes to it, however,” it said, “bon voyage, Cassandra. Despite your wondrous machinations—whatever they have been, and I’m sure they were impressive—you have lost the game, as well as I.”
As Cassandra gaped at the head, the outer layer of the globe rolled back up, and once again it was an antique image of the world.
Cassandra tried to make it to the telephone.
She couldn’t. Her legs began to lose the power to support her.
“Brian!” she called. “Brian!”
She lurched toward the desk, but never reached it, instead pitching forward to the floor.
There she lay gasping, legs drawn up, agony stabbing at her insides. (It seemed apparent by the way she clutched at her stomach.)
I doubt if, in all that pain, she could have summoned a single thought about her husband’s final victory.
And I doubt that I could ever have killed her. I felt too sorry for her.
And her wasted life.
What else could I do?
It was over. Nothing more could possibly take place.
And yet it did.
Both Cassandra’s eyes and mine moved to the desk chair.
It was turning by itself.
It stood there, reversed, for several moments.
Then a curl of white smoke drifted upward from behind its back.
Cassandra gaped at it. I gaped at it.
How could Max possibly be alive?
The chair turned back.
My brain felt numb.
Sitting in it, smoking a cigar, was Sheriff Plum.
Cassandra made a sound of dazed confusion. She could make no sense whatever of the Sheriff’s appearance. Nor could I.
Still, he might save her life!
“Help me,” she asked in a feeble voice.
The Sheriff only stared at her.
“Guess you won’t be going back to Harry Kendal now,” he said, “or letting your brother drown at sea.”
She obviously didn’t comprehend what he was saying. “Please,” she begged.
“Looks like you and the Mister have killed each other off,” he said.
His eyes were like stones.
“Leaving everything to Padre,”
he said. “And to whoever takes care of Padre.”
He rose from the chair and walked around the desk.
Cassandra gasped.
From the waist up, he was wearing Sheriff Plum’s clothes.
From the waist down, Cassandra’s.
Her mouth fell open as she understood.
Too late.
Brian came over and, kneeling, checked for her pulse beat.
There was none; she was gone.
He put her hand back down on the floor and stared at her.
Then sobbed.
“Did you ever care for anyone?” he asked.
He pressed his left hand over his eyes and began to cry harder.
I don’t know how long he wept. It was a good while, though.
Finally, rubbing dry his eyes and cheeks, he drew in a long, bracing breath of air and stood.
Moving to the desk, he picked up the telephone and pressed the Operator button.
As he waited, he began to peel away his Sheriff disguise.
“The Sheriff’s office, please,” he said. “This is an emergency.”
He continued peeling off the disguise while he waited again.
Finally, the Sheriff’s office answered. Brian asked for Plum and was connected.
“Sheriff Plum,” he said. “My name is Brian Crane. I’m calling from the house of Maximilian and Cassandra Delacorte on Medfield Road. Can you come here right away?”
He looked, stricken, at his dead sister.
“There’s been a tragedy,” he said.
chapter 28
Brian sat in silence for at least ten minutes, idly picking at the remainder of his Sheriff Plum facial disguise. He seemed to stare into his thoughts; never had I felt more invisible.
Rising finally, he took off the Sheriff’s shirt, revealing, underneath, Cassandra’s pink blouse, which he also removed, revealing a sweat-laved T-shirt underneath. He took off the skirt he’d worn, the shoes and stockings. Beneath the skirt, he wore the trousers of Sheriff Plum.
Still, he did not look at me, his face expressionless. Whatever thoughts he had were so buried, they were not reflected, even for an instant, on his face.
Barefoot, he moved to where Cassandra lay and looked down at her.
Abruptly, his face revealed all: incredulous sorrow, anguish so complete it appeared as though he might lose control.
He slumped to his knees beside her, taking hold of her limp right hand. The sob that broke in his chest wracked his entire body.