“Why don’t you ask him about it when you find him?”
“The hell with you guys,” I said. “You remember, if I get the chance, all four of you—”
“You shouldn’t talk so much,” John said.
“You should try to be happy with what you have.”
“You were close to being dead, but we didn’t let you die.”
“Now you’ve got the chance for a second life,” Mike said. “Don’t squander time looking for revenge.”
The pair of them walked off and left us. The wet smell of fresh bread swallowed us. The noise in the food service building was constant but not as maddening as the din in the plant itself.
“Can you walk, old man?” I asked Pickett.
“I can do anything,” he said. “It takes a little longer.”
“We’ll try to find Whit Lloyd. Where do you think he is, Walker?”
“I’ll go along with Federle’s idea. If it was me, I’d get far away. Don’t they grow rubber in South America?”
The old man said, “Maybe he ain’t welcome down there either. He don’t keep friends for too long.”
“We’ll look for Lloyd at his office,” I said.
“That’s good for a laugh,” Pickett said. “They’d grab him in a minute if he showed up there.”
Walker asked, “What kind of a show would he want to put up in here? He’s a desperate man, and now he’s got to feel like he’s backed into a corner. It might be best to back up and let him run off before he gets a mind to hurt any more people.”
I said, “If he wants to go, he’ll be gone already. If he’s here, he’ll try to make a big splash.”
“You mean a blowup?” Pickett said. “We’ve had blowups before. Anyplace you have a furnace you could have a blowup.”
I thought with dismay about the sheer size and complexity of the great plant, and about all the warrens and tunnels they had built over the years. Whit Lloyd probably knew every route, every shadowy corner, and it would be impossible to tell where he might go. Doubtless there were places in some of the buildings that hadn’t been used in years, railcars parked along sidings, pump houses, shanties built and forgotten—it was like its own city, like Detroit, a sprawling blot on the landscape.
“We’ll just try his office first, how’s that?”
There was a moment of silence, and then the old guard turned and led us away. His spindly legs churned and churned, but the pace wasn’t so fast that we ever got winded. Coming and going on the workroom floor through a number of buildings, we had only to show our badges to pass. Walker just kept between us. After a steady half hour’s walk, we were inside the administration building. By this time many of the office regulars had gone out, and mop jockeys were beginning to swab things down. The smell of bleach affronted my nose.
With his ring of keys, Pickett got us up to Lloyd’s floor. We stepped off the elevator, and though it seemed deserted, I could sense that it was the wrong kind of stillness. Walker sensed it, too, and we spread out on either side of the hall, leaving the old man to trudge resolutely down the middle toward the office. My hand itched for a gun.
“I’m going to need to piss before too long,” Pickett said. “So you know.”
One of the Lloyd security men stepped out where the hall widened in front of Whit Lloyd’s office. He had drawn his gun from the shoulder rig, and now rested it casually along his backside.
“You’ve got no business here,” he said.
“We’re looking for Whit Lloyd,” I said.
“You and everybody else. Seems young Whit doesn’t want to talk to anybody just now.”
“He’ll talk to me,” I said.
“Who are you?” said the security man. “I know you, you’re the Old Man’s monkey.” To him it seemed funny.
“We’ll check the office.”
“You can check the door,” he said. “But you won’t get in. It’s a regular lockbox.”
I took it as an invitation to step closer. The handle was locked, and from the setup I could see how it was. I brought up a hard knuckle and rapped a few times.
“That should work,” the security man laughed. “I think I would’ve seen if he come by me already.”
Pickett stepped close and jingled his keys again. “Come on, come on. The crappers I get to work with.” He worked his fingers over the keys to select the one he wanted.
“How do you come to have a key here, old man? Nobody’s supposed to have any keys in this area.”
“Nobody pays me any mind. I come and go where I please, and nobody pays me any mind.” He added, “You motherless bastard.”
He brought up the key to the polished brass plate of the door bolt. Because we were all crowding him, it seemed that his hand could not work fast enough.
“I’ll go in first,” the security man said. “You all hold back.”
“That’s all right with me,” I said, thinking now that Lloyd, even if he had not managed to make it to the plant or to his office, might have left a surprise. Walker and I moved back from the door and pressed ourselves along the walls of the hall.
Pickett finally made the key work, and then turned the big handle to set the door swinging. The security man elbowed his way past Pickett’s belly and peeked into Lloyd’s outer office. Then he stepped in with his gun down. From where I stood, I could just see across the room, which was unlit, to the tall windows facing the jagged skyline of the plant. Clouds had moved over the sky, blocking most of the light from the low sun.
It seemed that the outer office, at least, was empty, and Pickett moved through the door too. I was about to follow after them, but I stopped to try to think. Walker stood opposite me, his mouth and lips dry, looking tired and wary.
I patted up my ribs where I would have kept a gun if I had a proper rig, and then smiled across at Walker.
“I’ll go in,” I said. “You find an angle out here in case he tries to come up behind us.”
Walker nodded, and then he began to scan the hallway for a place to set himself. He walked toward the alcove where the security man had stood in wait. Because Lloyd’s office floor was covered with an assortment of woven rugs, I could hear only the intermittent tapping of Pickett’s oversized feet as he went through the outer office.
“Do you have a key to this other door?” The security man rattled the handle on the door to Lloyd’s inner lair. “I don’t even see a lock here.”
As I came through the door, I caught from the corner of my eye a flash like lightning through the bank of windows. Where the thunder should have rumbled there was an immense shivering crack, followed closely by a blast of air that rattled the windows of the outer office. I could see, across the expanse of the plant, that there had been an explosion at the power station. The tall stacks were obscured by a swirling plume of fire and black smoke, and the nearer buildings were silhouetted and thrown in garish light.
I walked close to the windows and put my hand on the glass. The security man came quickly over.
“Good God,” he said.
Pickett’s foul breath wafted over my shoulder. “That’s the end of us,” he said.
Another blast blew out from the powerhouse, and I thought I could see two of the stacks tipping gracefully toward the river. From our position at the eastern end of the facility, we could see the power winking out from each building in the complex like a big wave had come over everything. When the loss of power hit us, the administration building seemed to shudder into darkness. For a few moments, we were lit up only by the big fire. As Walker crept in toward us at the window, an emergency generator somewhere tried to push juice through the wiring; I could feel it in the walls.
Alarm sirens began to moan across the plant. A weaker buzzer sounded in our building as a minimal flow of power helped a few emergency lamps flicker on.
Pickett said, “You really think Whit could do this?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think about it now,” I said. “It’s done.”
“You don’t think it’s that Federl
e?”
I had to give it some thought. “No,” I said. “I don’t know what he’d do, but I don’t think he’d want anything like this.”
The security man was at the window, tearing his hair and tapping his pistol to his skull. “This is a disaster,” he said. “A disaster.”
It grabbed him suddenly that he ought to do something.
“We’d better get over there,” he said. As he jostled again past Pickett’s belly, he put his gun into the holster and smoothed his hair.
Pickett stood next to me for a moment more, and then waddled off after him.
It was something to watch. The power station was caught up entirely from within by white flame.
How many men? I thought.
“Come on, Detective,” Walker murmured. “We had better get out of here.”
“Do you think Federle could have done this?”
“As far as we know, it could be an accident,” Walker said.
“Walker, that’s no accident.”
As with any fire, we couldn’t take our eyes off of it. Sometimes in the dead of winter the temperature is so low that the smoke belching from the stacks blows white and hangs in the air. But the smoke from the power station was black, and lit from within.
If Federle was like me, as he had always said, he would not want to pull the world down around him. If he was empty of hope, if he felt that his life had not panned out as he had dreamed it would, that he had botched up and ruined any chance for happiness, then he would want simply to be able to sleep. I thought it most likely that he had driven off in the Chrysler to some remote spot and put a bullet through his brain.
I wanted to do it, too. Not a day had gone by in the last several years without some thought of ending it all. John was right: It wasn’t that I wanted so badly to die; I wanted things to be better, but I could not see how it could happen. I had been through my own fire, and it had stripped away for me the layer of illusion that makes life bearable and even happy for most men.
“We’d best be moving,” Walker said, standing shoulder to shoulder with me now.
“What’s the rush?”
He was looking beyond me toward the big desk that Mrs. Bates kept. He walked over, picked something up, and pulled it close to his eyes. When he brought it close to the window to catch light from the fire, I saw that it was the picture of his sister I had given to Hank Chew. His tired eyes glistened.
The moaning alarm sirens now meshed with the familiar wavering air raid sirens. I saw that they had opened up a few powerful spotlights to rake the sky. Because I had never taken the idea of an actual air raid seriously, I had never taken notice, but I thought now that there might have been some sort of antiaircraft bunker set up to protect the plant. It was not a raid, though. Enough damage had been caused to cripple the whole facility for a time, but it could not be a raid. We were in Michigan, cradled by water and by friendly relations with our northern neighbor.
The fire at the powerhouse no longer flared like an inferno, but the thick black smoke that pushed out of the place went up and spread out like a sooty layer of cloud. They would be scrambling now, telephoning the far corners of the globe in an instant to ask for help and to pass on the news of the disaster. I knew that before too long the administrative personnel would be called back to the site to start to put things right again.
“Why would he do such a thing, Detective?”
I made no answer.
“Do you think it could be the money? When I think of my own son,” Walker said, “I just can’t imagine it. It passes outside my understanding.”
“This will be the death of the Old Man,” I said. “How could he live through such a thing?”
“He’s lived through the fullness of his life.”
Whitcomb Lloyd darkened the frame of the door leading to the hallway. “Let me tell you something about shame, Caudill.”
Walker tensed up as if he might try to make a rush at Lloyd, but he saw as I did that Lloyd held a revolver in one hand and an oddly curved blade in the other.
“You know a taste of what it means to disappoint a father so roundly. Surely you can’t miss the irony? Granted, you haven’t lived up your father’s standard, you’re a failure, but for me—well, it’s a matter of magnitude. It’s a matter of degree.”
“Come on, Lloyd,” I said. “What kind of man are you?”
“A tragic man?” He smiled broadly as he said it, and raised his gun to stop Walker from creeping to the side.
“I don’t feel sorry for you, however you want to think about it.”
“Sorry?” He stepped into the room and with his heel closed the door behind him. Somehow he had changed into a London-cut suit and put a clean shave on his face. The hand and arm that held the knife were doused in blood, still wet. “It’s a tragedy of epic proportion! The storming of heaven! Celebrate, Mr. Caudill. You’ll never again see such a spectacle in your lifetime.”
Walker said, “Will you kill us, Mr. Lloyd?”
“Why shouldn’t I, Mr. Walker?”
“I have a wife and children who look to me to keep them from living in the street.”
“I, too, am in a family way.”
“You have the money to take care of them, even if you go to jail for all this.”
“You should tell him not to inflame me, Mr. Caudill.”
“Woman killer,” I said. “And now a bomb?”
“There was no bomb,” Lloyd said. “Do I look like an anarchist to you? It’s a matter of throwing a few switches, opening a valve or two, and closing the vents.”
“Either way, it makes you a coward.”
“Coward! At least I can face up to what I am. And you? A whoremonger! A cripple—an adulterer. You’ve no moral standing to say a word to me, Caudill. After all this?”
He was keyed up to bursting. The light in the room was dim, but his eyes glowed with such fire that I knew he would have no trouble putting a bullet or two wherever he wanted. The gun followed every movement, every sigh Walker and I made, like it was connected by wires to us. Lloyd stepped sideways until he was away from the door.
“Pick up the statue on the desk. Yes, the woman. Pick her up and press the base of the statue over the handle of my door there.”
His words were clear, and I could see what he wanted me to do, but I moved like molasses. Lloyd was not rushed, though, as he knew that he had finally come to the end of things. He meant to kill the Old Man; but he could have simply put a blade to him any time he wanted to. What Whit Lloyd wanted was to make the Old Man die of shame, of a broken heart.
“Put the base of the statue to the—it’s magnetic, you see. There you have it.”
The statue was around eighteen inches tall and weighed a good fifteen pounds, and when I stood it on end over the handle to the door to Lloyd’s office, I could hear the lock click. I pushed the door in slowly.
Inside the outer office, the shot from Lloyd’s gun blasted like a drum. The bullet passed not two inches from my ear and slapped into the door. Bits of shattered shellac and oak bit into my face. If you care so little, I told myself, why don’t you rush him now?
“Don’t think of attacking me with the statue,” Lloyd said. “Just drop her on the floor. Or rather put her back on the desk there.”
Walker and I stood before him unhappily, but there was no way to get a drop on Lloyd. I rubbed my thumb over the ample bronze breasts of the statue and put her down on the desk.
“Go on in and see how Mrs. Bates has fared.”
The doorway was wide enough for Walker and me to go in together. We went slowly, in the vain hope that there might be a place to duck aside or split up so that we could scramble for something to use against Lloyd. But we were tired.
“Mrs. Bates didn’t deserve to die,” Lloyd said. “Certainly not Mrs. Bates. But you can see just the same she’s gone.”
It wasn’t until I looked closely that I could see that Mrs. Bates was in pieces. Lloyd had arranged her on the floor to look like she was taking
a peaceful nap, lying on her side. Her ankles were crossed, and the knees were hidden by the bottom hem of her dress, so it was not easy to see that they had been disconnected. One plump severed arm served the old woman for a pillow.
“It’s no use,” I said. “You can’t try to pin all this on me. Nobody will believe it.”
Lloyd looked at me quizzically. “I wouldn’t try to pin anything on you, Mr. Caudill. I was only trying to see if you were clever enough to figure it out for yourself.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Perish the man whose mind is backward now!” Lloyd cried.
Walker took a few halting steps away from me and then crumpled down to the floor as if he had been struck low. I rolled across Lloyd’s desk and down to the floor behind it, then flipped up the desk and charged it toward Lloyd. I could feel the two shots hitting the desktop but I could not see where Lloyd had gone in the dimness.
The desk came to ground on top of Mrs. Bates and continued to roll toward the door. Walker crawled rapidly to one side, and I saw a flash of Lloyd along the wall, racing toward the row of potted plants before the window. I angled myself to intercept him, intending to tackle him and smash us both through the window to the ground four floors below. But as we connected, I found that the broad window was so thick that we bounced off it.
Lloyd’s gurkha knife sliced lightly through my shirt and opened a nick against my rib as we fell to the floor near the elevator, but I was worried about the gun. I got close enough in to his body to take away the angle he might use on the knife, and I smacked his head sideways as I went for the pistol. I was lying over him, trying to put my weight down, using both my arms to stretch out his gun hand so he couldn’t point the weapon at me. In such a struggle it’s better to have your hands free, and it was putting him at a great disadvantage to keep hold of both weapons. He wouldn’t let go of the knife, which was doing some damage against my leg and back, but the gun went skittering away.
Lloyd pulled himself in and managed to slip partway out from under me. He brought the butt of the knife against the side of my head, bone against bone. I knew that Walker would get the gun if I could keep myself between it and Lloyd, so I concentrated on keeping free of the blade.
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