“And poop to you too, my girl,” Franklin said, sinking back into his chair. He looked up at Greg and murmured, “You know, I dislike having people hover over me like this.” He nodded to a chair opposite. “You could just as easily shoot me from there.”
“Greg, for God’s sake!”
“Cut it out, both of you,” Greg said. “Ginny, go see if you can find a shovel and some work gloves.” Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that she hadn’t moved. “Did you hear me?”
She disappeared down the hallway. Greg slipped the gun into his jacket pocket and sat down.
“So,” the old man remarked cheerfully, “you deceived me.”
“I deceived you.”
“And what exactly is your grand scheme at this point?”
When Greg merely stared at him, he said, “Gracious! Am I really to be terminated with extreme prejudice? How thrilling!” Then, suddenly serious, he leaned forward and said more quietly, “Be careful not to let it get out of hand.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“We both understand why you’re here, young man. You’re here to save face, to reestablish yourself as a hero in Ginny’s eyes. I made a mistake, I grant you; I pressed my advantage too forcefully. I should have left you with some graceful way out.”
“Some graceful way out of what?”
“Come now, don’t be dense. Believe me, I’m not sorry you’ve come. Ginny will remember your affair less bitterly if it ends with this gallant little gesture of yours. But if you humiliate yourself by trying to carry the gesture too far, she will be humiliated as well, and that would be unfortunate.”
“I see. And what is it you have in mind?”
“Take a month to bring it to an end any way you like.”
He gave him an incredulous frown. “You really are something.”
“When Ginny comes back, just tell her we’ve come to an understanding. She’ll accept that with relief, believe me.”
Greg shook his head.
A few moments later Ginny appeared to say that the shovel and work gloves were waiting at the backdoor.
He walked over to Franklin’s chair and told him to get up.
Franklin gave him a disgusted look and stood up. “Remember what I told you,” he muttered. “Don’t let the gesture carry you away.
“Let’s go,” Greg said.
Franklin sighed.
Twenty minutes later they fought their way out of the tangled underbrush into a clearing under a massive oak tree, and Greg said, “This’ll do.”
“Idiot,” the old man hissed. He sat down on the grass, leaned back against the trunk of the oak, and closed his eyes.
Greg shed his jacket and slipped the work gloves on over his rubber gloves. Then he picked up the shovel and looked around for some place to begin. Since it all looked equally unpromising, he set the point of the shovel in the ground in front of him, put a foot on the blade, and pushed. The point sank about an inch, and he pushed again. After a third try, he turned the first spadeful.
Behind him, Franklin sighed, bored. Ginny stood awkward-ly nearby, shivering in the deep afternoon shadow.
Forty-five minutes later, he was bruised, stiff, dirty, and blistered, and the hole was three feet wide, three deep, and six long. He straightened up painfully and blotted the sweat on his face with a shirt sleeve.
“That’s good enough,” Ginny said.
He stepped out of the hole and looked at it critically. “Do you think so?”
“Yes.”
He checked the time and winced: 4:50. He stripped off the work gloves and tossed them into the hole, thinking he’d be justified in taking a short break. Just a few minutes to catch his breath. He looked at Ginny and found her watching him doubtfully.
He worked the gun out of his jacket pocket.
“‘I shall despair,’” Franklin cried out in mock agony. “‘There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul will pity me.’” He leered up at them. “Richard the Third. Appropriate, no?”
Greg told him to stand up.
“Poop,” he said, looking away disdainfully.
“Stand up,” Greg repeated.
Franklin sneered at him. “Young man, you are tiresome. Dreary. Boring. Your role models come from comic books.”
Greg hovered over him, the gun pointed down at his forehead. “Get up.”
“‘Get up!’” he screeched. “‘Get up or I’ll plug ya where ya sit, ya varmint!’”
Greg’s hand began to shake.
The old man leaned to one side to look around him. “Ginny, you can’t possibly be in love with this big booby.”
The gun suddenly seemed to weigh twenty pounds, and Greg had to bring up his left hand to steady it.
Pull the trigger, he told himself. Now.
Franklin Winters looked up at him and shook his head in disgust. “Stop making a fool of yourself and go home.”
Now. Greg’s finger refused to move.
Now!
There was a shattering roar and the gun leaped in his hand. Franklin’s head snapped back against the tree, and for a moment Greg thought he’d missed. Then he saw that the bullet had caught him in the crown of the head and had exited through the temple, spattering the tree trunk with blood and brains. He gulped back a wave of nausea, straightened up on wobbly legs, and looked down at the gun in his hand. A thin wisp of smoke curled from the barrel as if to answer his unspoken question: Yes, it was this gun, in your hand, that did it. It wasn’t a lightning bolt. With a convulsive lurch he turned and hurled it into the underbrush. Listening for its crash, he saw Ginny out of the corner of his eye. He wanted her to say something, but he didn’t know what.
He waited for a moment, then reached down, grabbed the old man’s ankles, and started to drag him toward the hole.
They caught their return flight with twenty minutes to spare. They still hadn’t exchanged a word, but the pressure of Ginny’s arm, wrapped around his as they walked to the gate, seemed to convey what he needed to hear.
XXVIII
FILING INTO THE AIRPORT IN CHICAGO at seven thirty in the evening, they were momentarily bewildered. The corridors seemed a chaos of hurtling bodies and clamorous voices. Feeling like astronauts newly returned from a year on the dark side of the moon, they made their way out to the cab line and took their place alongside weary executives and laughing groups of salesmen. After a few minutes of placid waiting, Ginny began to giggle, and Greg put an arm around her shoulders. Their turn finally came and they headed eastward toward Ginny’s apartment, headlights flaring around them like lasers in a Star Wars battle scene.
When they turned off the expressway into the relative calm of Ontario Street, Greg said, “I think there’s something we have to do before we’re finished.”
“What’s that?”
“We have to celebrate.”
She gawked at him. “You’re joking.”
“No. What you celebrate you don’t grieve over. I want to celebrate.”
“Good lord. But I see what you mean. Okay.”
“I’ll pick you up at ten. Let me be old-fashioned this once.”
“No. You want to celebrate. Okay, that’s a good idea—let’s celebrate at the Casbah. But let me meet you there. Let me make an entrance. Then it’ll be . . . like the curtain going up on the next act, starting a new part of our lives. Okay?”
He put an arm around her and held her till they arrived at Dearborn Street.
* * *
“God, you’re breathtaking,” he said, meeting her just inside the lounge. “In less than two hours I’d forgotten.”
Ginny laughed. “It’s the dim lights—and a lot of expensive makeup carefully applied. Without them I’d look like the strung-out hag that I am.”
After a moment a dark, mustachioed giant in evening wear appeared at their table, and Greg said, “Nuri, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Miss Ginny Winters.”
The waiter bowed gracefully. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Winters.”
>
“You are my fiancée, aren’t you?” Greg asked. “I mean, you are my sunshine, my only sunshine, and the apple of my eye, and my everything, and all that other stuff, so I just took it for granted you were my fiancée.”
Ginny smiled up at the waiter. “He has a knack, hasn’t he? Have you ever heard a more romantic proposal of marriage?”
“Never,” Nuri replied solemnly. “I believe it’s a record for the Casbah.”
Greg and Ginny laughed delightedly. “In celebration, may I bring you something from the bar? With my compliments, of course.” They said he could.
An hour later Ginny said, “There’s something you might be able to reassure me about if you wanted to.”
“I definitely want to.”
“I didn’t let myself think about this beforehand, but I knew it’d have to be thought about sooner or later . . .”
She stared into her drink for a while. “Little Ginny Winters has made the man she loves into a murderer.”
He grunted. “Yes, I can see that’s something you’d have to think about, but you can stop thinking about it now. Because nobody can make me into anything. Not even you. I may not be much, but what I am I make myself. Entirely on my own.”
“Go on.”
“I’m stubborn as hell, Ginny, and you may as well know it. If you think you made me into a murderer, then you’re just deluding yourself. What I am is my own doing, and you’ll never be responsible for that. That’s something you can count on.”
“Okay,” Ginny said. “That sounds like something worth counting on.”
And that was the last time they ever talked about the killing of Franklin Winters.
Two weeks later, Ginny got a call from a deputy at the Saratoga sheriff’s department asking if she had any information about her father’s whereabouts. His whereabouts?, Ginny asked. Wasn’t he at home? She was told that, according to his house-keeper, he’d disappeared. Ginny said that her father was an eccentric and not a very considerate one. If he was gone, she was sure he’d turn up again when it suited him.
When another month had passed, the deputy called back to say that her father was still missing. She asked him what he intended to do about it. “Not much I can do, actually,” he said. “No sign of violence at the house. If someone wants to leave home and go someplace else, it’s none of our business. No reason to think it didn’t happen that way.”
Ginny wondered if she was being a bit too offhand about it.
“I told you he’s an eccentric, but, to be honest, he’s never been this eccentric. He likes the comforts of home too much.”
“Do you want to list him officially as a missing person then?” the deputy asked. She asked what that meant exactly. “It means we put out a description, a photo. These’ll be checked against unknowns who show up at hospitals and morgues.”
“That sounds harmless enough.”
“Harmless?”
“I mean, if he prefers to stay missing, he wouldn’t appreciate being the object of nationwide manhunt.” He assured her there’d be nothing like that. He advised her to find someone to stay in the house, and she said she’d attend to it.
As months passed she received calls from her father’s attorney, stockbroker, and accountant; she told them to do the best they could.
The body in the shallow grave remained undisturbed.
XVIII
BY THE TIME GINNY AND GREG WERE MARRIED the following spring, the harrowing events that had ended with the murder of Franklin Winters had become encysted within plainer and brighter memories. If recalled at all, they were like scenes from a horror movie: frighteningly realistic, but too fantastic to be real. Soon after their return to Chicago, Greg became involved in a new project, one of the silliest in his experience—a book linking the personal computer and fitness. The editors who had bought the idea were sure a book bringing these buzzwords together would be an irresistible piece of merchandise, and to Greg’s surprise (and disgust) they were right. Compute Your Way to Fitness was destined to make slow, steady gains, and even bobbed up into the best-seller lists for a few weeks, and this did Greg’s reputation no harm (even though the names on the cover were those of his consultants).
The Bizarre project went forward in the fall, and he managed to train three clipping services to recognize the sort of stories he wanted for it. The publisher wanted someone’s name on the cover, and he reluctantly agreed to let them use his. It was a decision he regretted when, four months after publication, the book began appearing on the remainder tables. To everyone’s annoyance, Ted Owens—who had denounced it as a turkey even as he sold it—did a lot of jocular gloating over its failure.
Bored with writing for hire, Greg took out a few weeks to work up a proposal for a mass-market series, Time-Life style, called The Genius of America, a celebration of American daring, defiance of tradition, ingenuity, and resourcefulness, and sent it to Ted. The next time Greg talked to him, he asked what he thought of it.
“Not bad,” Ted said without enthusiasm. “I was wondering why you sent it to me.”
“Well . . . can’t you do something with it?”
“Like what?”
“Like sell it.”
“No way.”
Greg asked why.
“Because, if you were an editor at Time-Life, you might talk your boss into spending a hundred grand to test the idea. But from the outside, forget it. Hopeless.”
“You couldn’t sell just the idea itself?”
“Don’t be such an innocent, Greg. If they buy an idea to test from an outsider, this is like admitting they don’t have any ideas of their own to test. Which they’re not about to do even if they don’t, which they do. If you see what I mean.”
Greg said he saw what he meant. Ted gave him a verbal pat on the head and told him to stick to writing.
Ginny’s star, already well above the horizon when Greg met her, continued to rise, attracting bigger jobs and bigger budgets. Within a year of their marriage, she was working with two assistants in a Michigan Avenue office. The following year, when one of the city’s best-known designers retired, she was invited to become one of the prestigious Chicago 27, which placed her near the top of her profession nationwide.
At the next annual design awards show, she collected an impressive number of prizes—and was noticeably pregnant. When the baby was born in July, they named her Anne, after Ginny’s mother, and began to plan a “Coming Out” party for the Labor Day weekend—as much to celebrate their new Gold Coast apartment as the baby’s arrival. Greg was ecstatic over all three—his wife, their sumptuous apartment, and the baby (though Anne seemed so minute and delicate that he was afraid to touch her).
August they declared a holiday from work, and so they nearly worked themselves into a shared nervous breakdown over preparations for the party. The invitation—their first collaboration—had to be a masterpiece not only of wit but of graphic brilliance, and they began by disagreeing fundamentally on its concept. An hour’s conversation over it finally degenerated into a shouting match, which so startled them that they reversed themselves completely, each insisting it be done the way the other had originally wanted—so that they nearly had another shouting match advocating each other’s idea. In the end Greg found a third approach they both liked better anyway.
The guest list, originally planned for a hundred, grew uncontrollably, on the grounds that if you invite A, you certainly have to invite B, and if you invite B, you really should invite C—and then won’t D wonder at being left out? When it grew to three hundred, they eliminated the C’s and D’s. That left them with a hundred and eighty, and they decided to make it an open house starting at four in the afternoon.
One name hadn’t appeared on any list: Agnes Tillford’s. After dealing with her as Agnes Jakes, psychiatrist of Glenhaven Oaks Sanatorium, Greg had never felt like renewing contact with her—and still suffered an occasional twinge of guilt over it.
The party was so meticulously planned that, by three o’clock on
the day, there was nothing for them to do but sit around wondering whether anyone would show up. At Greg’s insistence, a nurse had been hired for the day to attend to the baby. At Ginny’s insistence, drinks would be served in real glasses, food on real plates, and one of the caterer’s assistants was unpacking them while another was installing a special dishwasher in the kitchen. The caterer himself was fussing over the food arrangements and table decorations. Ginny and Greg, feeling superfluous, were sipping Virgin Marys, having resolved to stay more sober than their guests. They figured the last stragglers would leave by ten-thirty or eleven and planned to slip off to the Drake for a nightcap while the caterer restored order to the place.
At 3:59 Greg suggested they run off to Kankakee for a romantic weekend. “When we get back, we can call someone and find out how the party went.”
At 4:20 the first guests arrived, and for half an hour it was a small, intimate affair. Then the flood began, and Ginny and Greg became full-time hosts, greeting new arrivals, making introductions, starting conversations, pulling loners into groups, spending a little time with everyone and almost none with each other.
By eight o’clock the early arrivers had departed, and most of the people who were going to come at all were already there and settled in to make an evening of it. The party was under way and self-sustaining, and Greg and Ginny could have left without being missed. Feeling relieved and happily exhausted, they found an unoccupied corner of a sofa and allowed themselves the luxury of being guests at their own party for a few minutes.
“Not bad,” Greg observed. “Everyone seems to be having a good time.”
“You can hardly miss if you have enough good people, booze, and food together in one place,” Ginny said.
“Did you meet the guy over there?” He nodded toward a tall, carelessly dressed man in animated conversation with one of Ginny’s assistants.
“I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”
“He’s the head of Britannica’s mail order division. I’ve done a few things for him. He just offered me a job on the editorial staff.”