Chapter Forty #2
Florence Abrams climbed from the back seat of the car and shut the door. The bell towers of Byrd Castle rose up before her, and her heart clenched a little more with each step toward them. What would become of it now that her child was the site of an infamous disgrace?
Florence clasped her handbag as she crossed the red tiles she had set into the clay herself.
She paused at the esplanade overlooking the ocean, and listened to the wind sing through the palm fronds, carrying the salt of the sea to her.
She had come to say goodbye. She watched the zebras grazing.
She wondered what would happen to the house, the animals, once the police were finally gone.
She walked through the open-air loggias. The house teemed with special agents from the FBI. Tracking mud onto the floors. Taking down priceless works of art to check behind their frames. They needed her to make sure they had found all of the last secret passageways.
She consulted with them on the blueprints, the catacombs, all the secret areas that she could name.
She told them about the codes Truman liked so much, so that they could look for any more hidden places even she didn’t know about.
And then she climbed the stairs to his office one last time.
Accompanied by an agent, she went to his desk and pulled out the one thing he had asked her to get. The train car, flaked with gold paint.
She was standing there, holding it, when she heard a shout.
She walked over to the banister, and watched as they began to dig. Eventually, they raised a large wooden crate that had been buried beneath the aviary.
Florence closed her eyes. Oh, Truman, she thought. She knew whatever she was looking at would likely be the nail in his coffin.
They cracked open the crate and found hundreds of damning files. Cover-ups, thefts, murders, and frame-ups by the mob and complicit public servants on half of the east and west coasts.
Apparently, Truman Byrd was just the first domino whose fall was going to bring down many others.
Truman woke on a cot that creaked with rust. The mattress was thin and lumpy, as though he were lying on a pile of teeth.
The prison tunic felt like burlap, and the lights flickered as the guard came to rouse him for his morning meeting.
His defense attorney, Melville Clayton, was waiting in the conference room.
Mel was the best that money could buy, and, walking down the hallway toward him, Truman was paying by the footstep.
Mel stood when Truman entered. For a moment, they sized each other up.
“Coffee?” Mel asked. Truman nodded, and Mel arranged for it to be brought. Then he settled back into his seat and templed his fingers.
“This conversation is off the record, of course,” Truman’s attorney said, his voice brimming with assurance. “No one here but us. So I’d like you to tell me the whole truth, Truman. What is the story with the Bastion?”
Truman inhaled deeply and sat back in his chair. “There’s nothing to tell,” he insisted. He took a sip of sludgy coffee. “I’m being framed.”
Mel raised an expensive eyebrow.
Truman still remembered the way he and Ronald had sweated beneath their masks, a bit of whiskey on their breaths for added courage.
And even more than a decade later, Truman still relished the look of surprise that had flashed across the Bastion guard’s face when they sneaked up behind him and Mabel.
“Remember me?” Truman had whispered. And then had cracked him over the head with a crowbar.
“You can trust me, Truman,” Melville said now. He leaned forward, the wire frames of his eyeglasses catching the light. “Or at least, trust in the fortune you’re paying me.”
But there was no one Truman trusted anymore, save for possibly his old friend Ronald Rutherford.
Mabel had been the one to make the introduction to the black market, by way of a close cousin she had grown up with in Brooklyn.
Ronald had done the meeting and brought the goods.
And Truman had spun the tale in his paper.
Except he had kept one thing for himself.
Truman had handed Mabel the razor and pointed to the Lazarus that night. “I want that one,” he said. “For me.” And Mabel had planted a kiss on his lips and gotten it for him.
But the guard Ronald was tying up hadn’t been completely subdued.
Without warning, he grabbed Truman’s knife and caught him in the side with it. Truman had cried out. Felt the warmth of the blood as it began seeping through his clothes. There’d been a brief struggle. And then he heard the sick puncture sound Ronald’s razor had made when it met flesh.
The guard had lain, choking in his own blood, while they came up with a new plan in a matter of ten terrifying minutes. It had been thin as spider silk, and just as strong. It was a miracle that it had held past that night.
They had decided to dispatch the other guard to keep him quiet.
It had been unfortunate but necessary. And then, while he and Ronald sneaked out the back with the paintings, Mabel had waited in the shadows until she saw two men outside.
When they were close enough to hear her, she started screaming.
She had always been a master of tricking men into doing what she wanted, using herself as bait.
And then she had set the hook.
“Truman?” Melville prodded.
No one had ever guessed how a fledgling, maudlin tabloid had gotten such an inside scoop.
The infamy of that story was the match that launched Truman’s publishing empire.
Mabel’s cousin had vouched for her, and Ronald had sold four of the five paintings for almost a million dollars to black-market buyers.
And along the way, Truman swayed public opinion of guilt toward the Yates brothers.
But he’d kept the Lazarus for himself.
He’d waited to seek treatment for the wound in his side until enough time had passed that no one would draw any connection to the robbery.
In the meantime, the wound festered, and he ended up in the hospital with an infection the week the trial commenced.
He’d had to send Mabel to cover the trial in his stead.
Now Truman pulled the tunic away from his neck. He itched to edit the stories about himself with his own pen.
Everything irritated him. He hadn’t heard a word from Clementine since his arrest. Or any of the many guests he’d hosted with extravagant generosity over the years.
In fact, the only letter he had received was from the nurse he’d paid off in Illinois to take care of his father.
She had sent word that his father had died peacefully, and just as the man had wanted: listening to Haydn quartets, talking about the young son he had once lost, with the nurse holding his dry, papery hand.
He had never once told Truman that he was proud of him.
Truman took out the train car from his pocket. He ran his fingers over the old peeling paint.
“You’re going to get me out of here,” Truman told his lawyer. It was an order. “Whatever it takes.”
“I will,” Melville assured him.
But Truman had seen that look before. He had been that man himself, too many times. The cool assurance that was merely a mask for detached indifference.
And for the first time, he felt fear. He cradled the train car in his hands. There had always been a way out; and if there wasn’t, he made one.
He couldn’t accept what would happen to him if the trial didn’t go his way. That after everything he had built, his own end would come without fanfare or comfort; without deference to his will or all of his careful orchestrations.
He would die worse off than his father had.
Alone, wings clipped. In a cage.