Act of Darkness(54)

“Harvey,” she said, “give me a break, will you please? I can’t get out of here.”

“Why not?”

“Because the police won’t let me, for one thing. They won’t let any of us. Out of Oyster Bay, I mean.”

“You could go to a motel.”

“No, I couldn’t. This is Fourth of July weekend. There’s an enormous festival going on up here. There are fireworks every night.” She looked dubiously in the direction of her windows, covered tightly with thick curtains that had been weighted with lead to make them stay put. There wasn’t any point in telling Harvey Gort about the rain. “Harvey,” she said, “there isn’t a vacant hotel room on all of Long Island.”

“Hotels and motels,” Harvey said in a singsong voice. He did that sort of thing sometimes, like an old-time priest suddenly breaking into plain chant. Clare had never understood why. “Let me think,” he said. “It’s important now. With that bastard Debrett out of the picture, there’s no reason for Fox to get that much of our money.”

Out of the picture. Clare pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it. Squawking noises came from the earpiece. Harvey was rambling on. She put the receiver back to her ear and listened with mounting astonishment.

“The only thing I want to know,” Harvey was saying, “was whether it was cocaine or AIDS. That’s it. You know it’s got to be one or the other. They’re all like that, the effing sons of bitches with their effing M.D. degrees. All sniffing it up one end and getting it porked up the other and then acting like the rest of us are—”

“Harvey.”

“You know it’s true, Clare. You spend all your time with them. You know—”

“What I know is that I’m sick to death of listening to you eff this and eff that all day long. Don’t you ever let up?”

“It’s a perfectly respectable Anglo-Saxon word, Clare. The only reason you object to it is because you’ve been brainwashed by—”

“Stuff it,” Clare said. “I’m not interested in another lecture on capitalist sexual oppression and I’m not interested in another lecture on using the weaknesses of establishment structures to bring about social change. Why do you think the police won’t let us leave Oyster Bay?”

“Because they’re pigs, that’s why. They like throwing their weight around.”

“I could give you a lecture on recent decisions in constitutional law, Harvey, but it’s like I said. I’m not interested in lectures at the moment. They’re keeping us here because they think Kevin Debrett was murdered.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, long and hollow, that made Clare feel instantly better. Finally, finally, after six years, she had managed to bring Harvey Gort to a full stop.

“Well?” she said.

Harvey cleared his throat. “I listened to the eleven o’clock news,” he said. “I’ve got the Early Bird News on right this minute. There isn’t anything about murder.”

“There wouldn’t be, would there? There won’t be until they’re sure.”

“How can they not be sure?”

“Let’s say there are some very strange things about this death, Harvey. Let’s say something else. If they have to pick a likely suspect, somebody with a motive right out there for everybody to see, I’m the prime candidate.”

“You?”

Clare thought about developing this for him, but decided not to. It seemed so obvious to her that it also seemed impossible that anyone could miss it.

Suddenly, sitting up in bed felt as confining as lying in it had. Clare threw off the covers, swung her legs over the side, and stood up. It was all jumbled up together in her mind. Kevin Debrett and the death of Kevin Debrett. The Empowerment Project. Harvey Gort. Herself. She would have said she didn’t care if Harvey and his people got their cut of the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children, but it wasn’t true. She devoutly hoped they wouldn’t get a dime. She took the phone away from her ear again, and stared at it again, and shook her head. What could she possibly be thinking of? This was like contemplating suicide.

She put the phone back to where she could use it and said, “Harvey?”

“I’m here,” Harvey said. “I still think what I was saying was valid. You can’t tell me they’re really holding seminars up there this weekend. After this, I mean.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing. Nobody’s said anything. Everybody’s in shock.”

“Bull dung.”

“It may be bull dung to you, but a lot of these people have known Kevin Debrett for a long time. And remember something, Harvey. Even if Debrett is dead, his clinic isn’t. There’s that. There’s also the obvious, which is the thing you never think of.”