Angie chuckled, and coughed until the pain made her stop. “He didn’t do it. Did you know that, Mr. Detective?”
“What?”
“Michael didn’t even kill my old man. Al Rodman did. Oh, Michael slugged him and all, like I told the police, and we drove away because we were scared, but when we stopped for gas I called Al and told him what had happened and said for him to go out to my folk’s place and see if he could find any of that money they claimed daddy had stashed away. Later Al told me daddy came to and caught him snooping around and Al tried to make him tell where the money was and hit him too hard and killed him.”
“So Nelson wasn’t in hell after all.”
“Oh, he was in hell all right, but not the one he thought he was in. Hysterical, isn’t it?”
“Did Rodman find the money?”
“Out in the shed under the firewood. Over ninety grand. That old drunk made me dress in rags when all the time that money was out there. If Al hadn’t killed the bastard, I would have.”
“That’s what got you and Rodman together in Rutledge. Money and murder.”
She nodded. “I suppose you’re shocked at all this, Tanner. Outraged. All that middle-class crap.”
“Nothing much shocks me, Mrs. Nelson. Not after scraping the gilt off people’s dreams in this town for twelve years. To me you’re just another gold digger. You’ve got more blood on your hands than most, but you’re still a gold digger. And that’s as middle-class as you can get.”
“You son of a bitch. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not middle-class.”
“Sure you are. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be so worried about it.”
A sneer curled her lip. “So I’m just another greedy broad, huh? Well, try this one on for size. You know Al Rodman?”
“Slightly. I scarred his face a century or so ago.”
“You must be better than you look.”
“I’d better be.”
“I set it up so Claire would fall for Al, you know? That way he could keep an eye on her for me.”
“So?”
“So this. Claire fell for Rodman like a ton of bricks. He may not be overly bright, but he knows what women like. I taught him. He hated Claire, but I made him stay with it. Made it worth his while, if you know what I mean.”
“Harley Cates told me all about how you made things worthwhile.”
“Harley. Jesus.” She shook her head “Well, Claire wanted big Al to make a woman of her. And I made him do it. He begged to get out of it, but I made him screw her, right down there in her prissy little room. Al told me she loved it.”
“You and Al should join the Salvation Army.”
“There’s more, Tanner. I was telling the truth awhile ago. Michael isn’t Claire’s real father.”
“Who is?”
“Al Rodman.”
Whatever she saw on my face made her laugh. “Vice is nice, but incest is best, huh, Tanner? Still think I’m middle-class?”
I stood up and lit a cigarette and looked at my watch. My mouth was dry and my head ached and my flesh was warm and sticky, like tar. I walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she yelled. “Come take this thing off.”
She began to fumble with the tourniquet, trying to untie it. I went over to her and tugged her hands away from the knots. “Leave it,” I said.
“I can’t feel anything, Tanner. I’ll get gangrene or something. Take it off.”
“Leave it.”
She tore her hands loose and plucked at the knots again. I went to the closet and found a narrow belt and came back and looped it around one of her wrists, then tied it to the other one, tugging them both behind her so she couldn’t reach the wound.
“You’re no better than I am,” she cried. “You’re going to let my leg rot off. Oh, you bastard. You fucking bastard.”
I went over to check on Nelson. He was breathing evenly and his pulse was steady and the bleeding had stopped. I looked at my watch again and went back to Angie and leaned down. Her body glistened with spit and sweat and blood and urine. The stench was repulsive. She was gasping for breath, her lungs whistling like a steam kettle. The light in her eyes had dimmed. The lids drooped. I took out a pen and wrote the time on her leg just below the wound.
A pair of sirens called out high above the normal city sounds, the dissonance getting louder by the moment. I looked at Nelson one last time, then tightened her bandage another notch and walked to the door.
“Tanner?” she whispered.
I turned to listen.
“I’ve done a lot of things, bad things, but I’m not ashamed of them. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. I took my shot and didn’t make it. I’d do it again, the same way.”
I nodded.
“One more thing.”
“What?”
“I just want you to know. I didn’t kill your friend.”
“I know,” I said.
I went out the door, leaving the tourniquet in place. You’re not supposed to take them off anymore. Angie didn’t know it, but they changed the rule.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The door opened immediately, as though I were expected, and she led me inside on the leash of her smile. She blinked and said she was glad to see me, and asked if I wanted a drink. I said everything I was supposed to say.
I sat down on the couch and lit a cigarette. Clinks and clatters drifted in from the kitchen. When she came back with my drink she sat in the captain’s chair across from me.
I sipped my drink without tasting it and watched her fondle a button on her blouse. I blew smoke into the room and it hovered over us like a chaperone.
She said I looked terrible and I said I felt even worse. Then she asked me if I’d found Claire. I said I had. She asked if Claire was all right. I said she was. Then she asked where Claire was and I told her. The game was Ping-Pong and it was deuce.
“Where did you find her?” Sara asked.
“The Whitson ranch. With her father.”
The blue eyes came toward me. “Roland?”
I nodded. “And Michael.”
The eyes narrowed. “Both?”
“The father, the son, and the unholy ghost. Quite a trinity.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Roland Nelson’s masquerade. I’m talking about Roland Nelson and Michael Whitson being the same person.”
She uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again. The eyes wandered, then came back. “That’s impossible. I don’t believe it.”
“Sure you do. You’ve known it all along.”
Her face lost softness; so did the eyes. I finished my drink and rattled the ice until she took the glass from me and went off to fill it up. I was immune to the passage of time. When she came back she asked where Nelson was.
“In an ambulance.”
“Is he hurt? What happened?”
“I shot him.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“Want to bet?”
“But why?”
“I guess I thought it would do some good.”
“Will he be all right?”
“Probably. Our glorious expedition in Southeast Asia taught the docs a lot about gunshot wounds. These days you have to shoot someone with a blunderbuss to put them down for good.”
“What’s wrong with you, Marsh? Why are you talking like this? Why did you shoot Roland?”
“Because he was going to shoot someone else and I thought I should try to stop him. I didn’t quite make it.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “Are you saying Roland Nelson shot someone?”
“That’s what I’m saying. That’s exactly what I’m saying, Ms. Brooke.”
I was punchy. Words came out and staggered across the room before I summoned them. My eyes were packed in sawdust; I couldn’t seem to blink.
“Who did he shoot, for God’s sakes? Not Claire?”
“Not Claire. Angie Peel.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, no. Oh my God. Her.”
“Her.”
“But who? Who is Angie Peel? Where is she? Where did she come from?”
“She’s Jacqueline Nelson, and she’s in an ambulance, too, with Nelson’s bullet in her thigh.”
Sara wrapped her arms over her breasts and around her shoulders, as though a cold breeze had just blown through the room. Maybe it had. Dreams and nightmares both come on the winds, ebb and flow with the currents, bathe and buffet us at will, beyond calculation or control.
She began to shake as though her soul were on fire. I wanted to comfort her, to hold her the way I had held her once before. In this very room. A long time ago.
The telephone rang, several times. She finally got up to answer it. She listened and then said something into the receiver and turned to me. “It’s Sheriff Marks. He wants to talk to you.”
I shook my head. “Just tell him it’s over and that I’ll call him tomorrow and tell him about it. Tell him no one else is going to die, not because of anything that happened in Oxtail.”
She gave him my message and listened for a minute and then hung up and sat down again. “He says he’ll wait for your call. Is it really over?”
“Almost.”
“Will you tell me what happened?”
In the apartment below someone started practicing his trumpet, running through the scales and some fingering exercises, warming up. He was good. Somewhere in the middle he stopped and called out to someone and got a girlish laugh in return. Happy people down below. Strangers.
“Marsh?” Sara whispered. “Marsh? What happened?”
I told it. The words poured out like salt and I listened to them with the detachment of a critic. They were rational words, academic and sterile, as if murder and blackmail and two decades of rage were as traditional as nursery rhymes.
I went over it all, all the bodies and the blood, all the fear and the trembling, all the sickness unto death. All of it except the part about Al Rodman being Claire Nelson’s father as well as her lover. No one was going to hear about that part. Not from me. Not ever.
By the time I finished, Sara had brightened, the eyes as crisp as Wedgwood. “Are you sure Roland’s going to be all right?” she asked.
“Pretty sure.”
“And he didn’t kill Angie’s father? He won’t have to go to jail?”
“Not for that. He may face charges for shooting Angie but I doubt it. Even if she dies, no one’s going to be interested in avenging her. No one’s ever been interested in doing anything for Angie Peel.”
“You sound as though you feel sorry for her.”
“I feel sorry for practically everyone right now. Especially me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve lost some things that are hard to replace. A friend. A lover. Harry Spring. You.”
Her smile was calculated to bring me out of it. “You haven’t lost me, Marsh. I just need some time, that’s all. Dreams don’t come true very often, but now one has, the only dream I’ve ever had, and I’ve got to see whether I really want that dream to be my life. Right now I’m not sure what I want. But I do like you, Marsh. I think you may be something that I need. I think maybe you need me, too. But I can’t deal with it all, right now. I’ll call you. Soon. I’ll let you know, one way or the other.”
The smile became as intimate as a movie usher’s. She didn’t look at me. She wouldn’t call, and we both knew it. Only one of us cared.
The trumpet player moved into an up-tempo version of Avalon, an echo of the big-band days, when music could lift you out of your life and put you on your feet and give you a charge of energy more thrilling than anything anyone ever put in a pill. The old days.
“What are you thinking, Marsh?”
“I was thinking about Harry. And about the woman who killed him.”
“Angie.”
“You.”
The eyes flicked toward the door, as though she were trying to remember how I got in. “Don’t joke about something like that, Marsh. Please.”
“The joke’s on me, Sara. It always has been.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“Probably.”
“Why would I kill Harry Spring?”
“To keep him from unmasking Roland Nelson and ruining your life and your work. The same motive I’ve always thought was behind it. My mistake was in thinking Michael Whitson had killed to protect himself. Now I’ve finally got it straight. You did it for him.”
“No. Angie did it, Marsh. Angie and Rodman. Like the others. You’ve got to believe that.”
My head throbbed, percussed by every heartbeat. “Angie didn’t feel threatened until I told her about Harry’s murder and where they found his body. Until I told her, Angie didn’t even know Claire had hired Harry. Neither did Nelson. Neither did Rodman. But you did. You and no one else.
“I figure you followed Harry, or had him followed, and once he headed for Oxtail you decided not to take any chances on what he might turn up. So you put a bullet in his brain.”
“But I didn’t know who Roland was. I had no reason to think Claire’s search for her natural parents was any threat to him.”
“Nelson tells it different. He was trying to save you when he said it, but he put you in a cell instead. He says you recognized him right away and wanted to take up where you left off ten years before. But he wouldn’t go for it. He was afraid of Angie until a couple of weeks ago. That’s when he decided to break away. He told you he was finally free to love you, but you didn’t know what had changed. You didn’t know Nelson had decided to let the past be known. You thought it was still buried, and that’s why Harry had to die.”
She frowned. “But even if that were true, I couldn’t have known that Claire was Roland’s daughter. If I didn’t know that, I had no reason to worry about what Harry Spring might uncover. Don’t you see?”
She leaned back and donned a tight smile, the look of a lawyer who had just impeached an eyewitness. But the words flowed too smoothly for truth. She had been practicing, and only the guilty ones rehearse.
“You might not have known for certain that Claire was Roland’s daughter,” I said, “but I think you suspected it. Maybe it was something Nelson said to you. More likely, I think you knew about Angie’s baby from the day it was born. I think you haunted that hospital, hoping Angie would die. She had taken the thing you valued most, your ticket out of that little house in Oxtail, and you hated Angie as much as she hated you. I think you knew Angie had a baby, Michael Whitson’s baby, and that she put it up for adoption. Later on, I think you found out that Claire was that baby. If I have to, I’ll run up to Sacramento and talk to the people at the orphanage. I’ll bet if I show your picture around I’ll find someone who recognizes you.”
Clouds formed in front of the eyes and I knew she had given up. “You know what?” she said flatly.
“What?”
“Claire doesn’t look like Roland at all.”
There was nothing else I wanted to say, about Claire or Angie or anyone else. I just wanted to get away from it, the curse that Oxtail had cast upon everyone who lived there. That was where the guilt lay, with the town, with the collective consciousness that twisted and bent and spoiled and soured the people who had grown up with it, breathing its vapors. But they don’t put towns in jail. They probably should, but they don’t.
I got to my feet and walked to the door. She asked me where I was going. I told her I was going home.
“What about me? Are you going to tell the police what I did?”
There it was. A page turned, a chapter ended. The confession should have made me feel something, but all I could think of was sleep. “I’m going to tell Marks what I know,” I said. “Then I don’t want anything more to do with it.”
“You don’t have any evidence. I can’t be indicted.”
“I didn’t get into this to build a case. I got into it to find out who killed Harry Spring. Now I’m getting out. Marks will make a case. He’ll come u
p with something once I get him on the track.”
“Is there anything I can do to make you change your mind?”
“I don’t know what it would be.”
She got up and came to the door and stood beside me. Her fingers rested on my arm, as light as the wings of a butterfly. She smelled like sleep.
“I’m not a bad person, Marsh,” she said quietly. “I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s true. I lived for twenty years wanting just one thing—to be loved by Michael Whitson. When Roland called me and asked me to come see him and told me he loved me and that soon we’d be able to live together, I was delirious with joy. Then when Claire told me she was digging into the past, was trying to unearth all those bones that had been buried for so long, I went crazy. Oh, I’m not going to plead insanity, but that’s what it was. Your friend was dead before I stopped to think what I was doing, before I could think of anything but myself and my dream and how close it finally was to coming true. I just want you to know that I didn’t do it for money or anything like that.”
I brushed her fingers off my arm. “I’m sick of people excusing their crimes because they were committed for some cause or some savior or for some other grand and glorious reason that us mere mortals can’t fathom. It’s all crap. It’s been argued by everyone from Ozymandias to Nixon, and it’s still crap.”
She smiled ruefully. “In the end, it doesn’t make any difference anyway, does it? Isn’t that what they teach the first year of law school? A good motive is no excuse?” She paused and touched me again. I let her hand stay where it was.
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