Murder For Revenge

Carlotta brushed aside a bit of soil and peered at the roots. Her heart soared. Things were healing just beautifully beneath the surface. All good things would follow in time.

Eric Lustbader

For many years, Eric Lustbader was identified on his dust jackets as Eric Van Lustbader, and the books were martial arts adventures that regularly found their way onto the best-seller lists. Having seen a Bruce Lee movie once, and years later a Chuck Norris movie, I viewed these martial arts productions as analogous to the wit they offered viewers-it was halfway there. However much ‘martial’ there was on display, there was precious little ‘art’.

Because I found no pleasure in the movies, I expected to find equally little to enchant me in books devoted to descriptions of the scenes I found so improbable on the screen.

Then I read a book by Marc Olden, which I liked. The author later recommended Eric Van Lustbader to me, and I learned that I’d been missing something after all. As time passed, however, Lustbader dropped the Van and his novels became more mainstream crime novels set against a big canvas, much of it in the Far East, and they are a thrill a minute. Now, of course, I’m baffled that these thrilling adventure novels aren’t made into movies. Preferably starring Steven Seagal or Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis or another of those bulked-up guys who can perform remarkable physical feats.

The following story is nothing at all like those novels, it should be noted. Nor like the movies.

Dead Cat Bounce

The night of my daughter’s wedding, my husband, William VanDam, broke one of his inviolable rules.

“Persis,” he said to me, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” He had never before admitted such a thing. To do so in his securities business would have meant immeasurable loss of reputation.

The best way to deal with this revelation, I decided, was to do nothing. Nothing spins so well as on its own momentum, I once heard him tell a junior partner. “Dear, why don’t you take off your tux?” I said. I was sitting in my champagne silk charmeuse slip, at the dressing table in the truly hot hotel suite we had rented for the week. By hot I mean designer hot.

Observing Willie in the mirror, I could not help also seeing myself: black hair framing the pale oval face of a Mado

Because I was a concert pianist, I took extraordinary care of my hands. I confess my one abiding fear was that I would develop arthritis. I never went outside without do

The air smelled of evening primrose as I stared at him in the mirror: a big man with a rough-hewn, handsome face. When we had first met, I had felt utterly transported by his commanding presence. He had given me shivers all over.

“I’m not in the least bit tired;”

I could smell his sweat like a halo of rage. He never perspired like this in his office, not even during the excruciatingly complicated corporate mergers his securities firm brokered. It was the details that could kill you, as he had drummed into me time and again. Which was why people came to him: they knew he’d sew up every detail without reaching for the Zantac. He didn’t miss one.

But he looked like he’d missed this one and now he was ready to tear his hair out.

“I may never sleep again. It’s like ants crawling over my skin.”

I swivelled around to face him. I heard the tone in his voice and was instantly warned. He had this wild streak-a volatile temper that had taken me quite some time to figure out. Often enough, he’d cruelly thrown back at me the fact that I was an orphan. “Shape up or I’ll abandon you as quickly as your mother did,” he used to tell me when I disobeyed. He could always make me cry with that, even now.

I knew I needed to be calm. I rose, slipped off his black Armani tuxedo jacket, and hung it over a chair back. Then, leaning in so that my breasts pressed against his chest, I kissed him hard on the lips, the way he liked. “Come to bed now. Whatever’s troubling you, can’t it wait until morning?”

He leaned forward and slipped his left arm around my slender waist. But instead of embracing me fully, he slashed out with his right arm in a vicious arc, smashing my bottles of cream and lotion and nail polish to smithereens. Smears of colours ran down the mirror like blood.

“Does that answer your question?” His voice was acid; the fist he made trembled as nails dug into skin. My smooth surface had inflamed him all the more.

“Willie, for God’s sake, calm down.”

“If you’ve nothing else to contribute to the conversation, kindly keep quiet.” He dropped his arm from around my waist. “Christ, what do you really know about the real world, Perse?” He was always lecturing about the real world, a place I apparently knew nothing about. “I took you out of the mess you had made of your life. I’ve kept you protected, safe from all the evil you were getting yourself into.” He was quite correct in that. My parents had left me in a hospital, and seventeen years later, it was a hospital in which Willie had found me. If I looked at the insides of my wrists in the proper light I could still see the scars, straight as the razor blade that had caused them. By that time, I’d had it with evil. Every form of lowlife imaginable had gotten his claws into me. They were outsiders, and you might think so was I. But you’d be wrong. I wasn’t even that. I was a parasite on the naked butt of an outsider. I have to admit, he had cause to despise what I’d been.

“Caroline is just like you, ignorant of life,” he went on. “You can’t expect me to do less for her.”

“Is it Caro who’s somehow upset you so?”

“In a ma

My eyes opened wide.

“Oh, I know that look, Perse. You don’t want to hear anything bad about him.”

“He’s Caroline’s husband. Our son-in-law. Eddie’s family now.”

Now he seemed disgusted, impatient to turn away. But I held him to me with my sure and comforting artist’s touch. “They love each other, Willie. I’ve rarely seen two people so crazy in love.

Think of how they danced while I played ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’” I smiled, trying, in my way, to make him mimic me.

“That was Caroline’s request,” he said tightly. “Gershwin always moved her to tears. But what did he want?”

“The same, I’m sure. The look in their eyes while they danced-“

“He was looking at me, Perse. Because he knew.”

I cocked my small, elegant head. I had been told many times that I looked like a ballet dancer, not a concert pianist. But ballet, what could I know of ballet in the filth of my former life? But music, oh, music was my sole escape. “Knew what?” The silence my husband generated was like a sound-damped engine. What remained unheard I felt. I gripped his powerful arms. “Willie, what could he know?”

“It started when Yates found Eddie had a license to carry a gun.” Ross Yates was Willie’s private investigator, one of Willie’s major secrets from the outside world. Even Caroline didn’t know of his existence, but I did. Of course, Willie had had Eddie investigated. “I asked him if he carried and he lied, said he didn’t. And when I confronted him with Yates’s report that showed the receipt for the nine-millimetre pistol he’d bought, he gave me another bullshit story that it had been stolen and he’d never replaced it.”