The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [89]
Hillman shrugged. “What good will it do? It won’t bring Pam back.”
Annie waited.
The editor turned away from Annie and began to pace, head down. “Pam. Oh, Christ, Pam. Maybe if I tell you, tell somebody, maybe it won’t hurt so goddammed much. You’re supposed to break open pockets of infection, let all the nasty, foul-smelling pus seep out, but I’ve never talked to anybody about it Not even Derek. Especially not Derek. He was at school. He didn’t see the way his mother began to break apart. It was like watching silver tarnish. Everything bright and shiny and beautiful and then one day the darkness starts to spot and grow and pretty soon all the shine is gone.” Hillman slumped into a chair on the last row, fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a pipe. But he simply held it in his hand and stared down at the gleaming bowl. “I suppose if I were a ‘real’ man,” his voice put corrosive brackets about it, “the kind Bledsoe talks about, I would have driven out there and grabbed Pam and thrown her in the car, taken her the hell out of there, gotten her away from Bledsoe before it was too late.”
Annie looked away from the soul-deep agony in his eyes.
“But I didn’t realize how bad it was. Then, too, I thought that, hell, she’d made the choice, picked him, not me. You see,” his voice dropped almost to a whisper, and Annie knew it was because he couldn’t trust it not to break, “we were just getting to the point where we both knew that maybe we were going to have something together, something special—then she met Neil.” The hand holding the pipe tightened until the knuckles whitened “I’m a pretty ineffectual bastard, in comparison. Pam and I went to the opera together. We took walks in Central Park; we made love once on a beach in Saint Lucia But I never took her white-water rafting on the Snake River or on a rock climb in the Tetons or elk hunting in Canada.”
He turned his face away and Annie scarcely heard him say, “I just loved her very much.”
“Bledsoe—” Annie didn’t know how to say it, but she had to try, “Bledsoe has a kind of magic, even when you know he’s everything you despise.”
Hillman looked at Annie with reddened eyes. “Yeah. I give him that. But I should have seen it, understood it for what it was. Almost a sickness. I shouldn’t have given up on Pam.” He jammed the pipe back into his jacket. “I didn’t know what was going on. Not for a long time. I’d turned her over to another editor. Saved myself pain, that’s how I looked at it. But Judi saw what was happening. She went up to Stamford, to their place, for a conference about the next book, and when she came back she came in to see me … and said Pam was a mess, fat and no makeup and drunk the whole weekend and Judi sure understood why, the way that jerk rode Pamela, one nasty, vicious jibe after another. I called Pam and she was sober, I swear it. I laid it on the line. I told her I loved her, that she was the loveliest woman in the world, the best writer I’d ever known, that I knew she was sick and I was going to come and get her and bring her home with me.” His face broke into angles of sorrow. “Jesus, Little Mr. Do-good, announcing his arrival. Why the shit didn’t I just get in the car and go get her? Why did I call?”
Annie watched with dawning horror.
“She was dead when I got there. She fell down the goddammed stairs. Drunk, they said. That’s what they said.” He buried his face in his hands.
Max held the telephone receiver away from his ear. The voice, deep and angry and violent, spilled into his office. “Aren’t you fuckers satisfied? Spence is dead. Isn’t that goddam well enough?”
Max interrupted sharply, “I couldn’t agree more. But times are different now. Maybe if the truth about Burke Spence came out, what happened and why, maybe it could cause Bledsoe trouble. Have you ever thought about that?”
Annie checked all the late-afternoon panels: Die Laughing—Peters, MacLeod, Hess, and Cannell; The Butler Didn’t Do It—Millar, Du Maurier, Hintze, and Muller; and Those Brits—Moyes, Cody, Porter, and Caudwell. She looked in the bar. She walked a half mile in either