Killed on the Rocks

by William L. DeAndrea

  “You don’t think anybody else is in danger?”

  “No, I think everybody but me is happy with the way things are now.”

  “Then go tell them.”

  “You do it,” I said. “You’re in charge.”

  And if I hadn’t ducked the ashtray he threw at me, I’d have a broken nose, too.

  20

  That’s it! It all made sense now.

  —Lorenzo Music, “Garfield’s Babes and Bullets” (CBS)

  IT WAS HARD TO decide who was happier to be outside, Roxanne or Spot. Roxanne was a purple streak down the mountain in the bright sunlight. I’d already seen her come down twice. She skidded to a stop, then slid gently over to Spot and me.

  “This is great!” she said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  I smiled at her. “Sure I do. All I have to do is watch Jack limp and listen to Ralph groaning in pain, and I know what I’m missing.”

  “Party poop,” she said. “I’m in love with a party poop.”

  “Besides,” I said. “This is the only day you’ll have for this, if the weather forecast holds up. You don’t want to waste it on the bunny slope, or whatever the hell you call it.”

  “I don’t care about that, so much. The weather, I mean. It will be good to get out of here.”

  “As soon as the driveway is visible,” I promised her.

  “Okay,” she said. “The mountain calls.” I wouldn’t have thought she could kiss me while she was standing on skis, but she did a little dip thing with one knee and leaned sideways enough for me to bend over and meet her. Very nice. I felt like a jerk for having denied myself the pleasure for so long.

  Still, everything has its price, and I was beginning to suspect the form of payment I’d have to render to Roxanne Schick. Sooner or later, my newfound beloved was going to end me up in traction by making me ski.

  While I was making gloomy predictions, I also foresaw a lot of tsuris when we could finally get out of here, and Ralph and I told everyone they weren’t going home, but to the sheriff’s office for questioning. I wasn’t expecting any actual bloodshed, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. I’d like it a lot better if I could walk in there with a story that had more behind it than the one I had now. “A ghost told it to me” was good enough for Hamlet, but the State of New York is a lot more rigid about those things than the State of Denmark.

  To hell with it. I decided to worry about that when the time came. I took Spot off the lead and just let him run. Samoyeds were bred to be sled dogs—running in the snow is what they like best. Spot left dog prints all over the snow we had so carefully kept unmarked. It didn’t matter. The wind and the rain would do it in by tomorrow, anyway. Spot ran over and sniffed the now brownish-black hole in the snow where G. B. Dost’s body had lain.

  “Spot! Here, boy!”

  Spot was glad to oblige. He can smell, all right, but he’s no hound. He’d be curious about blood, but not obsessive.

  I gave him (and me) a good, long walk. I was getting good at using snowshoes. Maybe there was hope in my learning to ski, after all.

  We took one complete turn around the house. Rocky Point, up close or from a distance, was as impressive as ever. I remembered thinking when I’d first seen it that it was a house built to be haunted, but I hadn’t meant it so literally.

  Then I remembered the note, the note that had gotten me here in the first place. The one that had warned of insanity, treachery, and murder, and I knew—knew, not just suspected—that someone had been leading us around by the nose up here, that what had happened had been planned.

  The promise of the note had been redeemed too well for it to have been the work of a crank. I’d sooner believe in a haunted television set than that some maniac could predict so nicely what would happen in the first forty-eight hours of the Network’s face-to-face acquaintance with Mr. G. B. Dost.

  And speak of the poor devil, Spot and I were walking past the locked door of the shed that held the end of the Dost line just as I thought the man’s name. It was the first time I’d been out here since Ralph and I had deposited the billionaire’s body. Barry had been brought in by Cal Gowe and Fred Norman.

  Spot ran to the wall at the edge of the cliff exactly as though he planned to jump over it.

  “Spot! Stop!”

  Spot is well trained. He always obeys commands in proper form. That doesn’t mean he has to like them, though. He stopped, but he turned around and looked hard at me. His perpetual Samoyed’s grin was more a “What’s with you” kind of sneer.

  I’d never looked over the wall, hadn’t looked at this side of the house much at all. I walked over to it. The bricks came up to my chest; there were another eight or nine inches of snow on top of that. I wondered why they’d make a wall so low until I remembered I was standing on top of at least two feet of snow.

  I brushed the snow off the top of the wall. I was careful, in case there was something nasty built into the top, but I got down to the smooth concrete cap with no problems. The man who built Rocky Point must have figured, sensibly enough, that if a nine-hundred-foot climb wasn’t going to discourage intruders, barbed wire or broken glass probably wouldn’t, either.

  I looked over the edge and was impressed. Anything that went over this wall would fall a long way before it hit anything. It wouldn’t fall all nine hundred feet, though. The rock wall angled out just a bit, with outcroppings of rock scattered more or less regularly along the wall like teeth on a grater.

  I have too much imagination. I shuddered and turned away.

  Spot was barking at me. He wanted to romp in the snow, and I’d made him sit in one place all this time.

  I walked away from the wall, then told him he could come to me. We walked around the rest of the house. If there was anything worth noticing there, I missed it.

  This route took us by the northwest corner, just below the room where all the wires came into the house. If I stood under the wires, I could look in a straight line from the house to the tall pine tree about twenty-five feet from the house, to the spot where some force had slammed G. B. Dost’s body into the black teeth of the driveway rocks.

  Since I had decided that I no longer gave a damn about the snow, anyway, I decided to walk that line. I wasn’t looking for anything, except maybe inspiration. I remembered from junior high that any two points determined a line, and any line can be extended indefinitely. Fine. I had point A (where the body was found) and point B (that corner of the house) because not only had that room afforded the best look at Dost in situ, but because it was where I’d tangled with Barry that morning. The fact that the tree came smack in the middle of them had to be a coincidence. I mean, the tree was there long before the house was, long enough for the scars of lopped-off branches to have darkened to the same color as the bark.

  Still, when you’re faced with incredible flying corpses and haunted TV sets, you might as well check the sincerity of fine towering trees, too. I walked.

  And son of a gun, it turned out that the tree wasn’t quite on a direct line from the spot where Dost’s body had been found. The tree had about a six-foot clearance to my left, maybe five. It was still plenty of room for Spot to walk alongside me, neither brushing the tree nor crowding my snowshoes. So much for The Sinister Tree Scenario, I thought.

  The only wood my path took me in contact with was the skinny broken branch that had been the only thing besides the corpse that had marred the smooth whiteness of the snow the other morning. The damned thing snagged in my snowshoe, and I had a terrible time getting it out. I almost had to sacrifice my dignity and sit down in the snow, but I managed to lean against the tree and pull it loose.

  I went back to the base of the lift. Fred Norman had his nose in a Thermos bottle. The grunt he made into it when he saw me might have been a sound of greeting or of disgust. I made a similar noise back.

  I watched Roxanne come expertly down the last part of the hill again. Her face was very red as she slid over to us again.

  “A
re you that good, or is the run that easy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never fall down.”

  “Cobb, you don’t have to be World Class at something not to fall down while you’re doing it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was second-team small college all-American basketball player, and I fell down constantly.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  She stuck out her tongue and looked back up the mountain. “I’ll work on it,” she said.

  “You do that,” I said. “In the meantime, I’ve persuaded Spot it’s time to go inside. How about you?”

  “Pretty soon,” she said. “I’ve got enough daylight for two more runs down the mountain.”

  “Have fun,” I told her.

  “I try always to have fun, whatever I’m doing. For instance, I’m going to need a hot shower when I come in in a little while. Is there any possible way to make a shower fun?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “I’ll loan you my rubber duckie.”

  Roxanne nodded soberly. “That’s a start,” she said. Then she did the little kiss trick again, and went back to the chair lift.

  Here we were, at the crossroads of our relationship. The woman had said she’d been carrying a torch for me since she was practically a child. Now, after one false start years ago, we’d Found Each Other. Now, on our first full day as an Item, she spends it skiing.

  This was the question: Should I, or should I not, be pissed off and jealous?

  I thought it over for a second. Finally I decided, nah. I was looking for a woman, a mate. An help meet for me, as the Bible would say. Not a Siamese twin.

  I took Spot up to the room and fed him, then I brushed his fur so it would dry better. He loves that.

  I didn’t enjoy it so much. Not the work itself, which is a small price to pay to be allowed to stay in the dog’s apartment back in New York, but because I couldn’t stop my mind from racing.

  I hate when that happens. Images, thoughts, memories, snatches of conversation start chasing each other around in my brain faster and faster until I think I’m going to go nuts. Dost dead. Barry yelling. Barry running. Barry taking the bullets. Barry dead. Aranda crying. Aranda smiling. Suspicious looks from the Normans. The view down the mountain from Rocky Point. Carol Coretti not-flirting with people. Ralph’s raccoon face. Roxanne in my arms.

  I tried to hold on to that last image, but the thoughts whizzed right on by. Finally, I closed my eyes and said, “Now, cut it out.”

  That works, for a while. The light show goes away and I walk around irritated, as though there were something itchy sitting under my brain.

  Roxanne knocked—I let her in. “Spot do something?” she asked.

  “No, he’s been fine. I was talking to myself.”

  “You were very stern with yourself.” She had left her parka and snow pants and skis downstairs; She was unlacing her boots.

  “I deserved it,” I said. “Come on, I’ll show you how to have fun in the shower.”

  A little while later we went downstairs to the library. Roxanne felt it was the best place for après-ski hanging around, and I thought a change of scene might give me something else to think about. At least it might slow my brain down a little bit.

  There was a fire in the library fireplace, and drink-makings and hors d’oeuvres were scattered around the place, but only Bats Blefary was taking advantage of it. He was sitting in a big leather armchair with his feet up on a matching ottoman, looking into a brandy snifter with all the intensity Aranda undoubtedly devoted to her crystals.

  “Mind if we join you?” Roxanne said brightly.

  Bats jumped. Not enough to spill the brandy. If I was reading the signs correctly, Bats hadn’t spilled much brandy on the way to his mouth today. Not that he was drunk or anything, but his eyes had a strange glimmer, and his glasses were a little askew, and he didn’t seem to care about adjusting them.

  “Huh?” Bats said, looking up. “What?” Then the message sank in, and he smiled. “Oh. No. Not at all. Please, sit down.”

  We sat. Bats asked us what we’d been up to all afternoon. We told him. “What have you been up to?” I asked.

  “Oh, just sitting here. All alone. Getting blotto on this brandy.” He took a sip. “This is very, very good stuff. I’m not usually a brandy man, but Mrs. Dost insisted I try some when I told her I was going to look for a book to read. Only I didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Look for a book. I sat here alone wondering if someone was going to sneak up on me and kill me.”

  “I told you you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “Yeah. Well, you were a lot more convincing when you told me I did.”

  “Why didn’t you come outside and play like the rest of the kids?” Roxanne’s smile would have cheered up a mask of tragedy, but Bats didn’t see it. He kept staring at the firelight in the glass.

  “I didn’t feel like playing. I wanted to think. And you know what a day of thinking has led me to?”

  He didn’t wait for us to ask.

  “It has led me to the conclusion that life is a plot to make you look like a fucking idiot. Then it kills you.”

  This had the look of a conversation that was headed for places I didn’t especially want to go. Hoping against hope, I tried to head him off at the pass. “I must be immortal, then,” I said. “With all the times I’ve looked like an idiot, I should be dead a thousand times already.”

  Bats looked at me and I knew we were doomed, at least as far as cheerful conversation was concerned.

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said.

  I sighed. “What do you mean, Bats?”

  “Look at Dost. All this running around, all this building an empire, all these ... trappings, and what happens? He gets killed by his son for no reason at all.

  “Or look at Barry, for God’s sake. One of the great corporate empires being built up—for him to have. Anything he could think of to want, in the meantime. Then he goes nuts and he kills his father, gets himself killed, and puts quite a little dent in the empire, too, I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t wait to see what Wall Street does when we get out of here and spread the word.”

  “Neither can your boss,” I said.

  Bats smiled for the first time. “Ho, ho,” he said. He turned to Roxanne. “Haskell went out playing with the kids today, didn’t he? Borrowed a pair of skis from the playroom and went skiing, right?”

  “I thought he was going to kill himself,” Roxanne said. “He kept riding the lift all the way to the top. He seemed scared, just shuffling around up there. He may once have been good enough to do that run—he must have been, considering he got down there twice in one piece—but he’s out of practice and out of shape. I tried to tell him, nicely, but he just snarled at me.”

  Bats nodded. “I will bet you one thousand bucks he took the lift to the top of the mountain to see if he could ski down the other side.”

  “That would be insane,” Roxanne said.

  “Depends on your priorities,” I said. “He would merely be risking his life. If he gets nailed with a big fine for insider trading, or attempted insider trading, or whatever the hell they want to call it, he might have to sell his boat.”

  “But to hell with Haskell,” Bats said. “I was giving you a philosophy lesson, wasn’t I?”

  “Blefary’s Metaphysics,” I said. “Volume One.”

  He smiled. “Right, right. As Blefary so cogently says, life makes you look like a jerk before it kills you. By this principle, Haskell’s on his way out. Of course, so am I.”

  He was no longer drinking his brandy the way brandy is supposed to be drunk. Instead of sipping, he was guzzling it like lemonade.

  “Aha,” I said. “Self-pity. I knew we were building up to something.”

  Bats looked at me with disdain. “Not just any old self-pity,” he proclaimed. “Delayed-reaction self-pity. Life has been planning my jerkdom f
or years.”

  “Well,” I conceded. “Right now, you’re acting like a jerk.”

  “Thank you. But you still don’t see. Because back at Princeton, I used to lie awake nights wishing I was Barry Dost.”

  Roxanne said, “Huh?”

  Bats looked at her. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll treasure that. But you’ll notice the limits of my ambition. I wasn’t wishing to be Burt Reynolds or Warren Beatty, or whoever else was hot at the time. I mean, I just knew it wasn’t possible.

  “But Barry and I were both business nerds. Skinny and nearsighted and funny-looking, crazy about sports, and lonely as hell. The only difference between us was that his father had a billion dollars, and my father sold plumbing fixtures.

  “But see, that made all the difference. I knew that good-looking women would want to sleep with him. I knew he didn’t have to worry about finding a job—hell, Barry Dost as an ignominious failure would have a more comfortable life than I would as a wild success.”

  I opened my mouth. “Before you say anything,” Bats interrupted, “I know that Barry’s father started with nothing and made that billion. I also know that I could never take the kind of risks it took to make that kind of money.

  “So all the time we were hanging around together, being mutual misfits, I secretly hated Barry for being the misfit with the money. The rest of the nerds probably felt the same way about him.

  “And Barry had to know it. This was Princeton, after all. We were highly intelligent misfits.

  “And he was never anything but nice. I mean, we didn’t try to have him bankroll us or anything—I guess he was on a pretty tight allowance, anyway. But he was always willing to do a favor for someone, drop your paper off if you were sick, volunteer to hang around and take messages. All that sort of stuff.”

  Bats smiled sadly and shook his head. “I remember one night, the Knicks were playing the Sixers at the Spectrum, an important game, and it wasn’t on Philadelphia TV. It was being televised back in New York, which we couldn’t get. So Barry spent the whole day—he cut classes—weaving together this huge network of coat hangers, must have been fifteen feet square. We hung it out the side of the building, hooked it up to the TV, and by God, we got the broadcast from New York. Not great, but passable.