The Gold Diggers (31 page)

“Is that woman still staying with you?” Sam asked as they reached the shelter. No reason, it seemed. He was just making conversation.

“Rita,” Nick said guardedly. “Yes, she is.”

“What does she do for a living?”

“She works in a store. Why?”

“No reason,” he said easily. And they passed through the arch to the shady lawn under the palms. The MG was in sight, not a hundred feet away, and now was the right time. No hard feelings, Sam, okay? But Nick held back, stymied by the turn toward Rita. What was the hidden motive in it? No, he told himself firmly, he was only getting paranoid. Sam's world was a hundred percent men, in bed and out. Women didn't even exist. So Nick decided to get on with it, and then Sam spoke again. “Does she want to be rich?”

“Doesn't everyone?” he answered, trying to warn Sam off. “How would I know? She doesn't seem to care that she never had it before, and she isn't killing herself to get it now either. Why? What do you want to know for?”

“I was just thinking,” he said, as if it was nothing, “what it must be like to live high up like that. You and Peter are loaded, right? It makes you wonder if Rita wants some of her own.”

“Well, that's Rita's business,” Nick said, ending it once and for all. He decided Sam was doing it for the hell of it, to make Nick worry that everyone would take him for a ride. It was as if Sam was trying to prove he had more morals than anyone else, and Rita might be a high-price hooker underneath it all. As if she was pawning his cuff links. And if that's what Sam meant, then he was more deluded and out of it than he seemed. He didn't know shit. And Nick said roughly, “Here,” pulling the key ring out of his jacket pocket at last. He held it straight out and dropped it. On a reflex, Sam snatched it out of midair, and as he stared at it and put two and two together, Nick decided he needn't have gone to this extreme at all. The remarks about Rita showed Sam's style up for what it was, a punk kid's teasing. If his talk had been a little less foul-mouthed, it would have been nothing, like a dirty book with the sex crossed out. Smut was
all
talk. It couldn't hurt a fly.

It was Nick's show now, and he didn't give Sam the chance to get his breath. The moment he raised his eyes to question what it was about, Nick looked away at the car, at the same time pointing. Not with a straight arm quivering, like a sorcerer whipping it up out of the dust. The gesture was as casual, as indifferent even, as one of Sam's. He didn't cheat either and try to watch the shock of it out of the corner of his eye. Let it go. He took no pleasure in a punk kid's toys. He put his mind to higher things, like Peter and Rita and him.

Sam snorted. “Thanks, anyway,” he said. “I've got a car, too.”

“You got a piece of junk,” Nick threw back at him. “Go ahead and take it. You think I'm trying to hold on, but I'm not. It's just a car. Let me say good-bye my way.”

“Listen,” Sam said, icy cold, and Nick stayed turned away to hear him out. His own cool attitude, aloof and very calm, did not survive the first few words Sam spoke. But he didn't dare look at Sam now because the fear would have shown. All his denials of it died at once. Sam said, “No matter what happens, remember this: I don't want anything of yours. From here on in, I only want what's mine.” But what's going to
happen
, Nick thought in a panic—
I
don't have anything of his, do I? And then the keys flew up past his face in an arc, but he made no move, and they fell to the ground. Sam said, “Starting now, you don't know who I am, and I don't know who you are. Good-bye, Nick.”

“Wait!” Nick said, but he didn't. He was already striding away across the lawn. It wasn't fair. Nick bent down to get the keys but couldn't see them right away in the deep grass. He had to stoop and run his hands around, and his mind raced: He can't have it all, he's got to go halfway with me, he has to take the car. Then he saw the keys and pounced, but when he stood up, Sam was out of sight. He broke into a run to the MG, but he knew it was no use. There was a ten dollar ticket tucked under the wiper. It was one o'clock on the nose.

The corridors of the Desertside Convalescent Hospital reminded Rita of an air-raid shelter. Cement blocks on either side, painted a shade of beige that must have colored the domes of Limbo, seemed to pressurize the air. She walked behind the day nurse, but because the uniform was closer to a nun's, gray and hooded and bodiless, she could have come from another planet—or, as Hey would have said, another plane. But planet was more to the point, wasn't it, Rita thought, looping back on herself—anything to keep from imagining what would come at the end of the hall—because it was just like an underground passage in a sci-fi movie, too, leading to a rocket ringed with flickering lights. It smelled like—what?—insecticide, she thought, or raw petroleum. It smelled like they were trying to cover up the smell of death. And all the doors were ajar, but not so open that she could see in. They walked and walked to the very end of the west wing. Rita wondered, when they finally stopped at the last door, if Frances Dean had been pushed farther and farther off as the years went by.

“Thank you,” she said in a saccharine voice, playing as dumb as she could. “And Dr. Webber. He's been very kind.”

“Mr.,” the nurse corrected her. She had the wrinkled brow and the bad skin of a believer, but Rita couldn't guess the sect. She seemed too overwrought to read a thermometer and so on. “I know he wanted to interview you first, Miss Varda, but if he can't get back from lunch on time, well,
you
shouldn't be the one to suffer. Please watch the hour. We are very strict about the fifteen-minute limit on coma patients.”

“I understand.”

“For the family's own good. The patient doesn't care, of course, but we ought to spend our life with the living.”

“But she
is
living,” Rita said, bristling in spite of herself. “That's the whole point of why it's sad.”

“Sad is another word for doubt,” the nurse replied. “Where she is now, it's between her and her God.”

The last was accompanied by a sanctimonious grip on Rita's arm, and Rita took it with a weak-tea smile, trying to look as if she was undergoing a renewal of her faith. The anger boiled in her guts like an ulcer, but since she was on a special forces assignment, she hid it well and wouldn't indulge it. And then the moment passed. The nurse turned away and walked off in triumph, apparently feeling she'd given Rita the requisite strength with the laying on of a hand. Rita rubbed her arm and chalked up one for her side. She'd assumed all along that they wouldn't let her go in alone, that she'd have to listen to a recitation of medical bullshit at the foot of the bed, and that, to get the moment she needed, she'd be called upon to think quick like a terrorist. And here instead was a free ride. Maybe the standards had dropped all over the place at Desertside. If Mr. Webber wasn't back from lunch at three, for instance, then Mr. Webber must be a drunk.

She pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside, surprised at first by the daylight after the ghost lights that ran along the ceilings in the hall. Corner room, two windows. Otherwise, it was all as Hey had explained, the gunmetal gray steel furniture, the life-support equipment, and—on the low bureau under the window—a dozen roses in a Lalique vase. The roses were part of the contract. Rita wondered, since she was the first to visit in eight years, if they'd kept it up to Varda's specifications: roses, Tuesday; Friday, white carnations. With no witnesses, it was an easy enough corner to cut. And by that time she'd looked at everything else but Frances Dean, so she braced herself and went ahead. She walked over to the bed.

And even then she only glanced at the little body beneath the sheet, letting her eyes run up the tubes to the feeding bottle on one side, the waste bottle on the other. The respirator mask covered so much of the face that Rita couldn't even read it as a face. More sci-fi. The eyes had been closed so long, they looked like the blanks in a skull. And just a few wisps of hair. She looked away at the respirator beside the bed, the tank and dials so foreign to her they could have run anything, from a dentist's drill to a 707. But it was breathing, all right. The sound—it was the
machine's
sound—was like someone very deep asleep, far below the plane of dreams, and with something a little asthmatic about it, too, as if it needed better air to breathe itself. Rita wasn't interested. She cased it only until she saw where the cord came out of one side and snaked along the floor.

She followed it over to the baseboard and yanked out the plug.

She wasn't entirely sure just what would happen. Well, one of two things. Either the lungs would take over, or they wouldn't. But she didn't know about right then, the first few seconds, whether there might be a kind of convulsion as the light went out, or a rattle or a gasp. She stared down at the empty socket for a little, shaken to think she might be a coward after the fact. This was the girl who walked into a store and spotted the very thing she wanted,
zap
, who knew the moment she entered a room what ought to be moved and where. So go on, she told herself, because now is not the time to get like everyone else and play it over and over, because it's
done
. She was aware of the silence as she turned around. But it didn't feel dark like death, since it signified only the stop of the machine. Frances Dean was inert—no more, no less than when Rita walked in. Now she went right up to the bed, once and for all to dry up the fear, to promise she knew just what she was doing, and not for an instant to mourn. Though I suppose I'm here to say good-bye, she thought, so she said it, simple and direct, by way of last rites: Good-bye. She stopped short of adding the name. Frances Dean—any Frances Dean that made sense—was long gone, which was why she'd had to dispose of this impostor. The rightness of the hour caught Rita at last, and she felt as if she'd pushed a boat off the sand where it was beached. Standing ankle-deep in the shallows, she saw it float free, out to the open water. The room was full of relief.

She went to one of the windows. She still had to wait out the next twelve minutes, of course, and once again she could only guess what was happening. As far as
she
was concerned, it was a corpse already. She just knew. But officially, didn't it take the brain six minutes or something to run down all the way? She couldn't remember. What kind of a measure was it, though, for a woman who'd gone under in a stroke twelve or thirteen years ago? Maybe it had to do with the heat of the blood, she thought, its dipping below a certain point. It didn't matter, as long as things were going in that direction. When it came to splitting hairs, it turned into a question for priests and doctors. Every few seconds, she took a look back to see if the sheet had started to rise and fall at the chest, because she might get cheated yet. But the stillness held. If anyone had asked
Rita's
opinion, she would have measured death in just that way, by the keeping still. Clever of her, really, because she could argue then that the woman she'd killed was already dead for years and years. I could plead my own case, she thought, staring out the window at the parking lot, and then I could write a book and make a million bucks. She could, except she'd developed such a fierce protective attitude toward the privacy of Rusty Varda and Frances Dean. She was just like a bodyguard, only it wasn't their lives that had to be protected now, but their deaths.

She'd forced Hey to go over it a dozen times, but she couldn't get a handle on the money. Nick would know, but she would have had to tell him she was coming here today, and she didn't want anyone else involved. The point was—reluctant as she was to admit it—everyone else would have told her not to. They'd say it was because of the risks she would be running, but she had a feeling it was the other thing they'd be thinking, that they thought it was wrong. Not wrong-evil. More like wrong-why-make-trouble. Hey had briefed her for hours between Sunday and now, and he must have guessed from the questions alone, but he didn't want to know in so many words. He didn't know enough about money himself, didn't have the
feel
for it, like a baker who can't get the hang of dough, so he couldn't remember all that he'd heard. Apparently, Rusty Varda set up a trust fund for Frances Dean the year she went into Desertside. Very generous, from twenty-four hour care to hothouse roses. Hey was sure of one thing: It was worded so that the principal went, upon her death, to Desertside itself, since neither of them had heirs. Varda was trying to insure the best for her if she should outlive him, though he didn't expect her to.

Why a separate trust? Rita had asked herself. Now she thought she knew, putting it together with something else. He'd cared enough to keep Frances Dean in West Covina to keep her anonymous. The publicity back in the twenties that tore her apart when she was already down and out on dope was the very thing that led her to Crook House. So he must have had a vivid need to cushion it for her. She was terrified of the media, of the papers and cheap-shot magazines of her own bad press, but she nearly jumped out of her skin as well when she first saw TV, as if she knew how much more helpless people were when the film was turning and the guy with the mike held it only an inch away, no matter how much the victim squirmed. Varda was probably afraid that if he paid her bill out of petty cash and left her the big bucks in his will, the story would get out when he died, and they'd come down on Frances Dean like jackals, no matter how sick she was.

What he couldn't know, Rita thought bitterly now, was how the money would trap the last of Frances Dean. She was worth so goddam much to Desertside that they spared no effort to keep her going. How did they know they weren't being monitored by a posthumous spy for Rusty Varda? So they gladly jailed her in the most expensive system they could find, and to be safe, they probably went ahead with the flowers, too, in case they were ever audited. They'd keep her alive till she was a hundred and ten if they had to. It was worth a couple of million in the end if they did it right. Mr. Webber could lunch from twelve till four. Rita could see as she made her way through the place that Desertside wasn't spending its liquid assets on medical research or geriatric recreation. In spite of the presence of the nonaffiliated sisters, it was clear that money would come to no good here.