Now You See It (23 page)

“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.

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 to 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.