Two Women Read online

  ‘What about the other one, Alice Belling?’

  ‘We’ve got to sweat her, until she can’t be sweated any more, to find out what she knows. Which we think is a hell of a lot. We’ve got to get it all, however long it takes and however hard – for her – it has to be.’

  ‘OK,’ accepted Caputo.

  ‘And then she gets whacked,’ ordered Petrie.

  ‘OK,’ agreed Caputo, again. ‘You want to eat something? A drink?’

  Petrie shook his head. ‘I had breakfast.’

  Twenty-Five

  Alice drove as fast as was reasonably possible once they reached the twisting road, manoeuvring her wrist familiarly every so often to check the time. Jane saw the contortion and told her not to worry, that they had plenty of time, but Alice kept doing it, even though she knew the other woman was right. She got stuck behind a truck which looked similar to the one beneath which John had been crushed and wondered if the same impression had occurred to Jane. If it had, she didn’t remark upon it. Instead, as they got closer to West Milford, Jane said: ‘I had a stick shift once. An MG. It was fun.’

  ‘I’ve had this since college. It’s a kind of …’ She hesitated, looking for the word. ‘A souvenir, I guess.’ The Volkswagen was the first thing she’d bought with her own money after her father’s disgrace and suicide. It would have to go, along with everything else, she supposed. Would she be able to drive it back to New York? Probably not. She’d have to remember to take out the already packed IRS and company records printouts of the five Mafia firms. Her overnight case was ready, back at the cabin, the photograph of John protectively wrapped between two sweaters. That was the only souvenir she wanted, nothing more.

  Jane said: ‘You need gas.’

  ‘I’ve got enough to get there and back to the cabin.’

  ‘What about back to New York?’

  ‘I thought we’d probably go in their car.’

  ‘It would be a delay, if that’s not how they plan it. Irritating.’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ agreed Jane, seeing the Shell sign ahead although on the other side of the road. She filled up and had to lean back into the car to take cash from her satchel.

  As she got back into the car Jane said: ‘That bag’s full of money!’

  ‘I left New York in a hurry … didn’t know at first where I was going, what I might need … didn’t want to use credit cards …’

  Jane moved, as if to say something, but didn’t.

  Alice knew the pharmacy, attached to the small supermarket that she and John had used, in a mall on the outskirts of the small township. As Jane paid she said to Alice: ‘I need to go to the restroom right away.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ said Alice, although she didn’t. She’d already isolated the pregnancy-testing kits, picking the first on the shelf at random, and as an afterthought she took up a tube of toothpaste from an adjoining display.

  ‘Bought something?’ queried Jane when she emerged, nodding to the plastic bag in Alice’s hand.

  ‘Toothpaste,’ said Alice, glad she had provided herself with the excuse.

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘What?’

  Jane indicated her own package. ‘False alarm. Just spotting.’

  ‘Probably everything that’s happened.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  They walked back out into the car park side by side. Alice almost automatically checked her watch and Jane said: ‘We’ve been gone exactly thirty-five minutes.’

  ‘OK,’ smiled Alice. That’s how she could think now, she reassured herself. Of everything happening – and being over – in minutes.

  Jane said: ‘You want to do me a favour? Let me drive! That stick shift I had really was fun.’

  ‘It’s a pretty stiff box.’ Still in so much danger it was bizarre standing here in a car park discussing gearboxes!

  ‘Come on! It’s only just up the road.’

  ‘OK,’ shrugged Alice. Just get everything over, that’s all she wanted to do. Just minutes.

  Jane couldn’t get the car into reverse and ground the gears as she followed Alice’s instructions and the Volkswagen shuddered unevenly backwards and then kangarooed forwards when Jane selected first gear. Jane said: ‘Sorry … sorry …’ and got into second and then third much more smoothly. She swung easily out on to the mountain road but almost at once, at the junction, made a left.

  ‘No!’ said Alice. ‘This isn’t the way to the cabin. This is the Stockholm road.’

  ‘I know. I saw the sign on the way down, which is why I’ve taken it,’ said Jane, accelerating, eyes fixedly forward. ‘We’re not going back to the cabin, not yet anyway. I think you and I have got much much more to talk about, don’t you, Alice?’

  When Alice didn’t reply Jane said: ‘When you next speak to Gene Hanlan you can tell him you were tricked. And that now it’s you who’s been kidnapped.’

  The FBI spotter plane was disappointing. The pilot complained thermal updrafts made it difficult to fly as low as he needed, for a satisfactory search, which was further hampered by thick forest ground cover over wide tracts of the mountain range. Neither he nor the observer had seen a single vehicle resembling a Volkswagen. After two flights Hanlan suspended the aerial search but kept the plane on standby.

  It was not until just after nine thirty that Hanlan was finally able to relay the licence number and specifications of Alice’s light-grey vehicle to Patrick McKinnon, who estimated that they were still thirty minutes short of West Milford. Hanlan duplicated the vehicle details to the relevant Highway Patrol offices and all police forces in a twenty-mile-wide arc between Paterson and West Milford. He also copied everything to Highway Patrol and state police headquarters at Trenton.

  When McKinnon came back on the line Hanlan was telling the Northcote firm’s lawyer Geoffrey Davis of his conversation with Jane Carver, anxious to discover if she had instructed the man to oppose legal access to the Citibank safe deposit, which she hadn’t. Hanlan said he’d call back.

  ‘They were ahead of us again,’ announced McKinnon. ‘They took down the Snelling mailbox marker: we overshot first time. Place has been ransacked. Not as bad as the photographs we saw of Litchfield but close.’

  ‘Any signs of violence … blood …?’

  ‘None. There should be forensics, though. We’ve driven over their car tracks but there should be something left.’

  ‘I’ll send up the guys we brought back from Washington,’ said Hanlan. ‘They’re due to finish what little was left at Litchfield and Brooklyn. What about the Volkswagen?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘It would be there, if they’d been grabbed. They’re still running, together.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said McKinnon. ‘What do you want us to do?’

  Hanlan wished he knew. ‘Leave a couple of guys to see nothing gets touched. Make a base in the town, ready to move. I’ll put the plane up again: hope something comes from the road checks.’ He wished to Christ there was something more practical he could do than sit around hoping.

  Barbara Donnelly said: ‘Why have they done it?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a good job they did,’ said Ginette, when Hanlan recounted his conversation with McKinnon. ‘If they’d been there, we might have found bodies.’

  The forensics team had finished what little was left for them to do. Because of the initial dismissal of both as accidents, the Bureau reinvestigation of the deaths of George Northcote and Janice Snow was largely restricted to autopsies, although by dismantling the lock of Janice’s apartment – as they had in Princes Street – the scientists found unquestionable evidence of the lock having been picked. A Bureau pathologist at Brooklyn also established from the direction of the bone-splintering that it would have been impossible for Janice Snow to have broken her fingers falling from her supposed hanging. The beginning of decomposition made a positive finding difficult but from the detailed medical examination of George Northcote it appeared that the multiple lacerati
ons to the face and head – wounds which were belatedly discovered to have blinded the man – were more likely to have been caused by a blade thinner and sharper than that of the cutting machine into which Northcote was alleged to have fallen.

  ‘Nothing I’d like to go into court with but they weren’t accidents,’ the forensics leader told Hanlan. ‘What are we looking for in the cabin?’

  ‘Anything,’ said Hanlan, exasperated. ‘Anything at all. Just make it something I can work from!’

  The two Mafia consiglieri had been informed of every word exchanged between Gene Hanlan and Patrick McKinnon because the Cavalcante searchers in the Bearfort Mountains were getting perfect scanner reception on McKinnon’s cellphone. It also gave them all the details of Alice Belling’s Volkswagen, which were duplicated within thirty minutes of Hanlan providing them to the Highway Patrol headquarters at Trenton, where the Cavalcante Family had a paid informer in the communications room.

  Tony Caputo said: ‘We can’t have missed them by much.’

  ‘We still missed them,’ said Charlie Petrie. He needed to stay here in Trenton, hear at once what was happening, but he was desperate to get back to Manhattan and convene a conference with the other New York Families. It was obvious what had to be done with the Belling woman. But how – what pressure could they use? – to get Carver’s wife to retrieve what was in the safe-deposit vault?

  ‘We won’t next time,’ promised the Cavalcante lawyer. ‘We got everyone out there, waiting.’

  ‘We’ve got to move quicker than that,’ insisted Petrie. There was only one way he could think of and he had to know if it had already been set up. When Stanley Burcher immediately answered his Algonquin telephone Petrie knew that it hadn’t.

  ‘You spoken to Northcote’s lawyers?’ Petrie demanded.

  ‘I’m still working it out.’

  ‘What’s to work out?’

  ‘I’ve got to have every answer ready because they’re going to have a lot of questions,’ said the intermediary lawyer. The tiredness he felt from a long day had nothing to do with the 7.00 a.m. breakfast meeting. All he’d done since then was sit in his hotel room trying – but failing – to evolve an approach that would not bring him into direct, identifiable contact with the Northcote firm’s attorney who had been pointed out to him at the Plaza Hotel.

  ‘Stan, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call the guy, right now: this minute. You got to get whatever’s in that fucking bank. You do that and you’re going to be a rich and happy man for the rest of your life.’

  He was already a rich man, Burcher reminded himself. And what sort of life would he have if he didn’t get what Carver had copied? He could always run, Burcher told himself. It wasn’t that he’d neglected the possible need for an escape route.

  Alice tried at the beginning – once briefly breaking down in tears, although of frustration, not collapse, and then in annoyance that she’d broken down at all – but was finally silenced by Jane’s total refusal to respond or acknowledge Alice’s every insistence upon their physical danger, up to and including murder, with tortured interrogation in between. For almost an hour Jane refused to stop despite Alice’s whimpering need for a restroom and by mid-afternoon they were way beyond the Paterson/West Milford arc that Hanlan had stipulated for his road watch. Jane’s eventual halt was at a truck stop, like an oasis in reverse among the verdant pines and firs, a scoured-bald dust bowl of petrol and diesel pumps bordering the road and a stinking, cockroach-infested block of excreta-blocked toilets the stink of which made Alice’s vomiting worse. No water came from the taps when she tried to rinse her mouth or wash her hands.

  It was a further hour, close to four in the afternoon, before Jane pulled into another truck stop, although at this one an intermittently dead-bulbed sign boasted of a pay-in-advance, cash-only motel at its rear.

  ‘Your treat,’ Jane announced. ‘Time to make those calls.’

  The motel was a single-storey prefabrication of paint-stripped cabins, theirs a boxed, twin-bedded room with opaquely thin curtains and opaquely thin grey sheets beneath candlewick spreads. Both were patterned by long ago stains, mostly brown although sometimes black to match those on the threadbare, frayed carpeting. The one chair sagged out of any shape, its back black from the grease of a thousand unwashed heads. The bulb was missing over the processed-wood bureau, the mirror of which was whorled with verdigris. There was a urine smell from the open-doored, cockroach-scuttling bathroom.

  Alice said: ‘I’m not going to stay here! This is disgusting.’

  Jane said: ‘You’ll stay because I say so. Because this is just the place for us to talk about the things we have to talk about. And where no one in their wildest dreams would think of looking for us, finding us. I’m protecting you now, Alice.’

  Jane turned dismissively away, concentrating upon the number she was dialling, instinctively smiling at the immediate connection but at once frowning, impatiently talking over the babble from the other end the moment she identified herself.

  ‘I know …! I know …! I’ve spoken to him … I know … I’m all right. Rosemary! Stop talking, Rosemary! Listen …’ She looked at Alice when the sound stopped from the other end of the line. ‘Do you mind?’

  Alice didn’t immediately understand and when she did looked uncertainly around the cramped room. There was a black scurry underfoot when she went into the bathroom and Alice halted just inside the door. It was very thin and although Alice didn’t hear everything she heard enough to understand.

  Jane was pregnant. What other reason was there for a woman to speak this long with her gynaecologist?

  Twenty-Six

  ‘John loved me, very much.’

  Alice said nothing. Jane being pregnant didn’t change anything. It wasn’t something they’d ever talked about – it would have been out of bounds – but of course John had made love to her: it was understood – accepted – without needing to be said.

  ‘And I loved him very much.’ She was smiling, as she’d been smiling when she’d called Alice from the bathroom after her conversation with Rosemary Pritchard.

  Still Alice said nothing. What would her test show? She was anxious but at the same time reluctant to find out. Surely she had to be! What other reason was there for her being so sick, so often?

  ‘I saw the photograph, the one you tried to hide in the cabin. I saw it by the telephone and found where you’d hidden it, when you were in the bath.’ There was no anger in the flat tone.

  Alice finally sat on the collapsing, hair-greased chair. ‘I know John loved you. Your marriage was never in any danger.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you! What did you and he do, just fuck?’

  Alice winced. ‘Can I try to explain?’

  ‘I want you to. I want very much to have it explained to me. All of it.’

  ‘I loved John, too.’

  ‘And he loved you!’ There was a jeer in Jane’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  Jane made a balancing gesture with both hands. ‘So that’s how it was, he loved us both, fifty-fifty.’

  ‘Yes, I guess. But you were his wife. Would always have been his wife.’

  ‘And you would have always been his mistress.’

  ‘For as long as he wanted me.’

  ‘Or until he didn’t want me any more!’

  ‘That would never have happened.’

  ‘Tell me you talked about it!’

  ‘We did! He told me he would never leave you, because he loved you, and I said I didn’t want or expect him to.’

  ‘I’m supposed to believe that?’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘How often, once a week, twice a week? All the time when I was out of town?’

  She had the right, Alice accepted, although she didn’t feel there was anything to defend herself against. ‘We were happy.’

  ‘How about the cabin? How often did you sneak away to the cabin?’ Jane’s face was set, rigid.

  Everythi
ng she’d told Jane was the truth. There was no guilt. ‘Just three times. The photograph you saw was the first.’ It was back at the cabin, packed in her case, she abruptly realized. Whatever happened she had to go back to the cabin to get it.

  Jane jerked her head towards the telephone, upon which she’d made two further calls after that to the gynaecologist. ‘Did he tell you why we were seeing Rosemary?’

  Alice shook her head. ‘I didn’t know you were.’

  ‘Something he didn’t actually tell you?’ It was weak sarcasm.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We were going to have a baby.’

  Alice felt a physical lurch at the confirmation but didn’t speak.

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘It will be wonderful …’ stumbled Alice. ‘John would have … you will be a wonderful parent …’

  The rigid face creased slightly, then cleared. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if John was still alive? You’d have gone on sleeping together?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice at once, holding the other woman’s look. ‘I’m not ashamed. I know it’s difficult for you to believe … I guess you never will … but I was never a threat to you … and I’ve tried to save you, literally save your life, because you don’t know how bad things are.’ She knew that Geoffrey Davis, whom Jane had told in another of her calls to block any legal move against John’s bank, was the firm’s lawyer. Presumably Burt, whose surname Jane had never used and to whom she’d repeated the blocking instructions, was the personal attorney.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t know. So tell me about that, too. All of it, because I can’t be hurt or betrayed any more, any worse, than I already have been.’

  But she was, her face twisting as if she were in genuine pain when Alice told her everything. Alice held nothing back but conscious of Jane’s stricken look said at the end: ‘I don’t believe … John didn’t believe … that your father did it willingly, in the beginning. John was sure he was tricked … cheated … and from then on was blackmailed into carrying on …’