Sea Change

Mrs. Plum stared at Jesse. Jesse walked over to the railing and leaned on it beside Ortiz. Mr. Plum poured himself a Manhattan from a silver shaker beaded with moisture. He offered the shaker to Mrs. Plum who shook her head. She sipped from her still-sufficient glass.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Plum said.

Ortiz ate his sandwiches. Kelly Cruz sat with her legs crossed, her hands clasped over her right knee. Jesse waited.

No one spoke. Slowly Mrs. Plum shifted her gaze from Jesse to her husband. He smiled at her.

He said, “It’s going to be all right, Mommy.”

2 8 3

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

She continued to look at him. He sat calmly with his Manhattan delicately held with thumb and forefinger. His face was toward her, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything.

“You are a monstrous pig of a man,” Mrs. Plum said to him.

Her voice was calm and the tone was simply the assertion of an obvious fact.

“Mommy,” he said, “please. Not in front of guests.”

“You killed her,” Mrs. Plum said. “Didn’t you.”

“Mommy,” he said again in his pleasant detached way,

“please let’s mind our manners.”

“She sent you the tape and you went into a jealous frenzy and drove up there and killed her.”

“Tape?” Mr. Plum said.

“You think I don’t know about the tape? You think I didn’t recognize her handwriting when it came? You think I didn’t find it in your study while you were out? You think I didn’t play it? You think I don’t know about you?”

Her voice went slowly, almost ploddingly, up the scale until she was almost screaming.

“That tape was private,” Mr. Plum said.

“Private?” Mrs. Plum’s voice was down into calm again.

“That is my daughter.”

“And mine,” Mr. Plum said. He seemed still to be looking at nothing. “It was private between me and my daughter.”

“Whom you have been fucking since she was thirteen,”

Mrs. Plum said.

Mr. Plum suddenly looked at her.

2 8 4

S E A C H A N G E

“Mommy,” he said firmly, “don’t be crude.”

She stared at him and then looked at Jesse and Ortiz, then at Kelly Cruz.

“He’s been doing it since they were little girls,” she said to Kelly Cruz. “All three of them. We never talked about it.

Maybe he thought I didn’t know, but I knew.”

“And did nothing?” Kelly Cruz said.

“He had money and we were well situated,” Mrs. Plum said. “He made no demands on me. It was easier to drink.”

“Not for the girls,” Kelly Cruz said.

“I loved those girls,” Mr. Plum said. “And they loved me.”

“And you destroyed them,” Mrs. Plum said. “And now you’ve killed Florence.”

“Betsy,” Mr. Plum said. “Please. Can’t this wait until our guests have departed?”

Mrs. Plum finished her Manhattan. With no apparent thought, Mr. Plum refilled her glass. She began to cry silently.

“See him,” she gasped. “See him? That’s what he’s like.

He’s like a reptile. He doesn’t hear. He doesn’t feel. He has no body warmth.”

Kelly Cruz nodded.

“I am not a reptile, Betsy,” Plum said. “I am a man with the feelings and impulses of my gender.”

“And you killed Florence,” Mrs. Plum said.

Her voice was beginning to soar again.

“You killed Florence because you were jealous that she was having sex with other people.”

“The tape was insulting,” Mr. Plum said.

2 8 5

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

“And you killed her.”

“She betrayed me, Betsy.”

“And you killed her,” Mrs. Plum said. “Say it. Say you killed her. Say something for once in your weird reptilian existence, say something true. Say . . . you . . . killed . . . her!”

“You can’t know,” Mr. Plum said. “None of you can know how I loved those girls.”

“Which is . . . why you . . . killed her?”

Mrs. Plum struggled to speak.

“You . . . loved her so . . . much . . . you killed her?”

“I killed her to keep her from becoming worse than she had become,” Mr. Plum said. “I really had no choice.”

He picked up the silver shaker, found that it was empty, put it down and rang the little bell for the maid.

2 8 6

61

K elly Cruz turned her drink slowly on the bar in front of her. She was drinking Jack Daniels on the rocks.

“So what about Darnell and Ralston?” she said to Jesse.

They were sitting at the bar in Jesse’s hotel. Jesse was drinking a Virgin Mary. Kelly Cruz had on a black dress with spaghetti straps and a skirt that stopped above her knees. She had a nice tan. A small black purse lay on the bar beside her drink.

“We busted them yesterday, for statutory rape.”

“Will it hold in court?”

“We got Darnell on videotape.”

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

“Righteous tape?”

“Absolutely.”

“How about Ralston?”

“If our witness holds,” Jesse said.

“She might not?”

Jesse shrugged.

“She’s a kid,” he said.

“Think they’ll do time?”

“Not my area,” Jesse said.

“What do you think?” Kelly Cruz said. “Cop to cop.”

Jesse smiled.

“I don’t think about that,” he said. “Too many variables.

How good is their lawyer? How good is the prosecutor? Will their sexual history be admitted? Will they plead out?”

“Probably,” Kelly Cruz said.

Jesse nodded.

“No jail time,” Kelly Cruz said.

Jesse shrugged.