“I’ve heard there’s trouble for you,” I said.
“There is always trouble, Caudill. Always a jury for this and a jury for that. It’s a fabric of lawsuits that holds the business world together. This indictment,” he said with phlegm rattling in his lungs, “this indictment doesn’t cost me any sleep. They’ll never get a thing out of me, if that’s what worries you. My time has come and gone. Harder men than these have stood against us.”
“If it’s the G-men, they won’t come to play footsie with you.”
“The federal men take their orders from behind the curtains, just like any other hired men. They make a wage—they are allowed to make a wage if they fall in line.”
“You say so.”
Lloyd could muster just a spark of the fire he once had. There was only the flicker of dim hope to keep him animated. His eyes were moist and rheumy and he had lost so much vitality that his lower eyelids drooped down so you could see their pink insides. His sagging jowls worked around as he sat in thought.
“I fear now for my son,” he said. “And secondarily for the company that bears our name.”
It seemed unlikely that any spy could overhear our conversation; I could barely make out the old man’s reedy drone myself. I can’t say why he unpacked his heart to me—I had seen very old men lose their dignity before. Whitcomb Lloyd—“Nit Whit,” as he was known privately to men like Hank Chew—was Jasper Lloyd’s only son. He was the president of Lloyd Motors, a position secured not with his head for business but with the force of the company stock still held by the Lloyd family. As Jasper Lloyd explained to me, Whit had not shown an interest in the workings of industry. The younger Lloyd had enjoyed the family’s sudden wealth, and had shown only that wealth could be enjoyed best when frittered away. Young Whit was a sportsman, a hunter and a climber, a skier, and in general an inveterate traveler, even during wartime, more apt to be found playing tennis in Palm Springs than in the boardroom of the company he was obligated to lead. He fancied himself, Lloyd explained, after the model of the intrepid British explorers of the previous century.
“He had lived all his days here in the Middle West,” said Lloyd. “Until I sent him abroad to be schooled as a gentleman. The grandchild of farmers.”
“I can’t say what you ought to do about it,” I said.
“But you’re here to help me, aren’t you, Mr. Caudill?” He muttered this so softly that I wasn’t sure I heard right.
“You’re thinking of Frank Carter,” I said. “Or my father, maybe.” Because I regretted having called Hank Chew, I thought I had come only to ask Lloyd for help in looking into the death of Walker’s sister. I had been vague with the guard at the gate. Now I wondered how it could be possible for the Old Man to have some other plan for me.
“You couldn’t hope to be half the man Frank Carter was,” said Lloyd, stiffening his backbone and swaying in his chair. “Imagine it! Mr. Carter once commanded a force of over three thousand security men for me. He was instrumental in the formation of one of the greatest industrial concerns in the history of the human race. The cancer that came upon him—so suddenly—in the midst of such a grand enterprise. A man such as yourself, Mr. Caudill, you couldn’t possibly see the whole of it. You couldn’t honestly aspire to replace such a man.”
“I don’t see why I’d aspire to be your toady, old man,” I said. “Why did you let me in here at all?”
“I left a standing order to have the men let you through to see me if you ever came,” he said. “I knew you’d return when the money ran out.”
If I had smacked him then, his brittle bones could not have held against it, and I would have killed a giant, the last of the old titans. I stood up and began to walk away from him. Does he know about my father’s money? I wondered. Is it possible that he can get into my safety box at the bank? I didn’t walk fast, but I had gone a good ten yards or more before he gulped in enough air to call after me.
“It’s that witch Estelle Hardiman! She aims to ruin me!”
It was the only name he might have mentioned to stop me. It brought up a flash of anger in me, and I walked back so quickly that the old man involuntarily raised an arm to shield himself.
“She blames me for what happened to her husband. Of course she can’t prove anything!”
“I’m glad she’s after you and not me,” I said.
“But she’s hell-bent—forgive me—on looking into things! I’m convinced that she’s been pressing this investigation, this grand jury now. She’s connected to everything here in the city, and she’ll hound me to my grave.”
“Keep your voice down,” I said.
Lloyd had worked himself up enough to make sweat come out over his withered lip, seeping down to soak the neatly trimmed, silky whiskers.
“I’m finished. I’m finished. In itself this is fair enough. For my part in the whole sordid affair, for the aid we gave in the early days to those vile men—however little I knew of it—I must accept culpability.”
“So you’ll spill your guts to the jury. Just tell them everything, then.”
His face puckered and his eyes could not keep from searching about the big pool room.
“It’s not for me,” he insisted again. “My son … my grandchildren … the city, how it’s grown…”
“So you’ll just save the guilt for another day.”
He became more measured. “I’ll settle my account before the Lord like any other man,” he said.
“As long as you can weasel out of the noose for the time being.”
“Surely, Mr. Caudill, you are aware that your own involvement is far more direct than mine will ever be shown to be.”
“So that’s it.”
“I’m not threatening you. I’ve asked for your help. You have an exasperating way of goading me into discomfort! I’m too old for this nonsense! I’m certainly willing to cast you to the wolves in order to protect my own interests. The war, these Germans, the Japanese are insane! They’ll fight to their very last man! The work mustn’t be disrupted!”
“Settle down, will you? If you kick off now, they’ll pin it on me.”
“Make light of death now, Mr. Caudill. Soon enough you’ll confront your own mortality.”
“Not so soon as you, I think.”
Lloyd’s chin drooped and his eyes traced a long crack in the floor tile before drifting out of focus. I watched him, but not too keenly. Maybe his old brain was dredging through some old memory, a time when horses snorted and pulled their carts through the dirt roads of Detroit, when he had been a young and hungry man.
“A young woman was killed and dumped inside the compound of one of our plants in Cleveland,” he said finally, pursing his mouth.
“That’s a case for the Cleveland dicks, isn’t it?”
“It would be, yes, certainly. They’ve been gracious enough to allow an investigation discreet enough to deflect attention from the company. But now there’s been another murder—a woman in Indiana.”
“What am I supposed to do about any of that?”
“You see that it’s all a part of a plan—a single murder, why, in a time of war, especially, a random act of violence might not prove so difficult to manage. But you see that they’ve crossed state lines, now. They’ve made it a federal case! That Hoover has been dogging me for years, and now, with war production so crucial—”
“Why would anyone think the two murders were related? Other than where they were found?”
He looked blankly at me. “The facts of the case.”
“You’ll have to be more plain with me.”
“You haven’t said whether you’re interested in helping. For all I know,” he said, “you’re out to get me, too. Certainly you’ve not expressed a great deal of concern for my predicament.”
I sat down and thought it over. Only a week earlier I had been all set up to go nowhere in my own time. It suited me. It wasn’t a life to be proud of, but then I had never had that anyway. I couldn’t blame Walker for dragging me in.
He was only looking after his sister, naturally enough. I could have turned him away, as I had turned everyone else away. But now it looked like Lloyd had been ready to send his man James or some other drub out to drag me in anyway. I was bound to find myself muddied up in it, one way or another. I’d already made the promise to Walker, and my social calendar was empty of engagements.
Lloyd could see how I was going over it in my mind. “I expect you’ll be asking for some cash now,” he piped.
“Sure,” I said, shrugging. “Throw me some dough, why don’t you?”
CHAPTER 6
In the end I didn’t take any money from him—just as well, considering. From the Old Man’s secretary I got some papers and photos and a letter of passage with an embossed gold seal, which was supposed to get me into any of Lloyd’s plants to have a look around. I had never put any faith in paper, but I took the packet anyway.
Evening came along before I could make my way back to my hole-in-the-wall. Since Ray Federle had more or less ruined my haven on the fire landing, I stayed in and spread out the papers from Lloyd on my little table. I guessed that Walker’s sister had been found well inside the perimeter of the Lloyd plant in Ohio; it wasn’t clear if the Lloyd security men in Cleveland had moved the body off the property to the swampy area outside the fence or if that was only a story for the papers. A few photos showed the area of the property where she had been found—what looked like a slag heap or a machinery dump toward the rear of the complex. There were no photos of the body, though, nothing showed blood, and I was glad for it. There wasn’t much in the packet of papers I couldn’t have scrounged for myself, and there wasn’t anything that could make Lloyd look bad. It was just papers. Without an idea how it all went together, no one could use the packet to make any case against Lloyd. He didn’t care anything about the women; he just wanted me to stop any more mess from happening.
Of course I was useless as far as this went, even more useless than I had been during my brief time as a police detective. After leaving my mother’s house on Holy Saturday, I had simply shown up at Lloyd’s gate. Lloyd could not have known I would ever show up there. How had I even known that he was staying with his son there on the east side? I must have read it somewhere in the paper. Why would I even believe what was printed in the daily rags? Yet every indication was that Lloyd had been waiting for me; he had been thinking of me all along. It was possible, I knew, that Lloyd might have been stringing along any number of palookas over the years, and he had only to wait for the unluckiest to show up at his door when something messy needed to be fixed again. But there was an odd feel to it; why should Walker’s sister be involved? I had never given a specific word to anyone but Hank Chew.
I was startled by Ray Federle’s sharp rap at my window. I could see his wide-eyed face peering in from the outer stairs, his palms pressed to the glass, a cigarette held to the side between his lips. As I lifted the window to let him in, I realized that it would be possible for anyone to enter my little room this way.
“Hiya,” he said.
“You could use the door.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m funny sometimes.” He was in his shirtsleeves, and he was rubbing his arms from the cold. “I wanted to apologize for my wife. I heard she really gave it to you.”
“I’ve been smacked up by plenty of women.”
“She worries about the girls,” he said. “I was gone for so long, and now—”
“Next time I’ll know,” I said. “She won’t get a drop on me. Kids or no kids, she gets the hard ticket out.”
He smiled an empty smile, sucked a drag from his butt, and laughed the smoke out dryly. “It’s only fair,” he said. “It’s only right. She won’t give you no more trouble. She’s sorry.” He glanced around my place, and I could see that he had an interest in the papers on my little table.
“I’m about to hit the hay,” I told him, though the night was still young. “If that’s all you had to say.”
“Okay! I only wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“It’s nothing.”
“She’s a good woman,” said Federle. “She deserves to have a good life.”
“Well, I don’t stand in the way, so long as she keeps her hands to herself.”
“Sure, sure.” Federle tried to grin again, and this time it came out with a bit of feeling. “I’ll tell her you’re not mad. Is that all right?”
“Tell her what you want to.”
“Okay, Pete.” He made his way back to the window and hoisted a leg up on the sill. “I don’t have a key to get back in my door,” he said.
I could see that it was hard for him to move through the window and out onto the stairs. He was still young enough to have a spring in his step, but when he moved, something held him back. It seemed likely that he had taken some injury in the fighting. He would not have been sent home unless he couldn’t go on. Maybe he’s got a wooden leg, I thought. Or two wooden legs. But for the time I didn’t care to ask him about it. If he had to tell me, I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it corked up.
After he was gone, I closed the window and turned the latch to lock it. I’m sure I did. While Ray Federle was still clanging up the metal stairs, I pulled down the shade and tried to think of a place to stash Lloyd’s papers. I began to get thirsty for a drink.
* * *
I went better than two hundred pounds, even if some of it had turned to lard by then. I told myself that they must have come into my room at two or three in the morning—it’s the only part of the night when my sleep gets so deep. To soothe my conscience, I told myself that they must have clobbered me in my bed right away, or maybe it was ether or chloroform. Either way, sure, I had the welts to show they didn’t want me squawking while I went. If I ever looked closely at the little room I kept, at the way my building was set up, it might not have seemed possible that they could have carried me out without rousting the whole place given the size of me and the general cheapness of the lumber that went into the walls and floor. What a story! In my shorts they took me out and carried me to a car or a truck and drove me some distance across town. They must have, I thought, they must have—or else I sleepwalked into it, and that doesn’t seem likely.
How could they have done it without anyone hearing? First thing I remember after lying down to bed is my feet in the water. It felt like swimming up out of a deep sleep, struggling to wake yourself up inside that darker world because your dream or your nightmare in some way matches up with the real world. If someone’s knocking hard at your door in real life, you might dream about chopping down a tree with a hatchet. Because my feet were wet, I remember thinking that I was set to pee the bed, and so I forced myself to come to my senses.
My head got clear pretty quick.
Not much light came into the room, but I saw right off I wasn’t anymore in Kansas. My heart threw an enormous heave of panic because I could not move. I was in a big room with an old wood-beamed ceiling. Some hard guys were there—one stood to either side of the long tank of water beneath me. An electroplating tank? They had me strapped faceup to a board, a sizable piece of lumber. My belly was lashed hard to the board with a cord tight up under my rib cage and another just at the top of my hips, my chest was lashed under my armpits, and my hands were roped together on the underside of the board. I couldn’t move or even feel my elbows, either, but my legs were loose. I gave a start and my eye danced around the room.
They dunked me under the water for a few seconds and then brought me up.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What is it?”
“You’re a guilty man, Caudill.”
I didn’t say anything because I figured I’d need my breath.
“A dirty man.”
I could not tell which of the two thugs spoke because each had a kerchief over his mouth and nose. They were close enough to touch—if my hands had been free.
Down I went again, not far, but far enough to keep my face under water. I could turn my head, crane toward the surface, but
I could not move enough to let my mouth break into the air. How many seconds it lasted I couldn’t say. Before my lungs burst, though, they brought me up again.
They waited for me to stop retching.
“Mr. Lloyd’s troubles don’t concern you.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Or do they?”
Again I chose to keep my breath.
“You’re not talking, Caudill.”
It seemed that they were switching off in their speech like a vaudeville act. How many? I thought. One or two? Even their voices seemed the same, if my ears hadn’t been fouled with water. They had the timing of a comedy team. Both men had blue eyes, and I could see that they had muscles enough because they were naked from the waist up. But the real beef was at the other end of the long board. A pair of oxen, jumbo-sized boys, leaned their elbows on the board like a lever to keep me above water. I couldn’t seem to make out their faces either. Two big guys and two bigger guys.
“You’ll talk plenty before we’re through.”
“You’ll sing like a bluebird.”
“More like a blue jay.”
It didn’t seem funny to me.
“We’d like you to tell us about Jasper Lloyd.”
I could see there wasn’t any point in trying to be hard. But still—
“We’re not bad men.”
“Not too bad.”
“We’re all Americans here.”
“In the service of our country.”
If they were giving a signal to the lever men, I didn’t see it. My eye was blinking furiously from the filthy water. When I went under, I kept still long enough to see the smaller pair wavering over me, looking down into the water. Then the thrashing started. You can’t keep from thrashing. Sooner than the cords would ever break or come loose, my shoulders would pop out of their sockets. I knew it, but it didn’t stop me from thrashing. My heart started whacking and my head cracked back on the board and my teeth were grinding. My only eye was burning like a welding torch in the socket, and I was sure that I’d be blinded entirely. But that was only a flash of worry.
The Devil's Only Friend Page 5
