Might she not have put the keys with the papers that were pertinent to Jim Clancy’s estate so that all of them could be turned over to the Murrays tomorrow or the next day?
I left the bedroom, thought of another angle, and returned to the bedside. I brushed my lips lightly against hers. Only a hint of response. Sound, sound asleep. I mussed my side of the bed to make it appear that I might have slept there for a while and then—last brilliant thought—turned on the light in the bathroom.
A sleepy woman, waking and wondering where her husband was, would see the light and slip quickly back into her drug-induced nothingness.
Brilliant, O’Malley, brilliant. You have improved at this comedy through the years. Your improvisations are not as stupid as they used to be.
I had opened the back door and shivered in the cold when I remembered that I’d forgotten to look for the key to the summer house in Rosemarie’s key box in her study.
Idiot!
I stole quietly back into the house, crept into the parlor and then into the study, and turned on her desk light. I fished the key box out of the drawer in her desk, and opened it. No key for the summer house.
Then it dawned on me that she might just possibly have left it on the key hanger that I had placed at the front door with the curt observation, “If we get into the habit of leaving all important keys here, we won’t have to search for them when we need them. Isn’t that true Rosemarie?”
She had sighed patiently. “Yes, dearest husband mine.”
Well, there’s nothing wrong with a little neatness, is there? Since we never used the house, we had little need of the key. Perhaps now Rosemarie would sell it and we would buy a house in the dunes.
Sure enough, the key to the summer house, with my tag on which SUMMER HOUSE had been neatly inked, was just where it ought to be.
I slipped out the back door, crept in the shadows alongside our garage into the alley. Yes, we have alleys in Oak Park.
Then I remembered that I had forgotten to take a flashlight. There would be one in Vince’s car, would there not?
Don’t bet on it.
I returned to the house, found a light after considerable searching, on a shelf outside my darkroom, decided I had to make sure I had reserve batteries, found them in the tool cabinet (totally unused by both my wife and me) in another corner of the basement, and crept out again into the winter night.
Once I was back in the alley I walked the full length of the block to Berkshire, turned west, crossed Oak Park Avenue, and, shivering with the cold, walked three more blocks to the Horace Mann School on Berkshire and Kenilworth.
There was the dark blue Fairlane, waiting for me as promised. It needed a wash, as did most cars in the Chicago area after a winter thaw. Neither my sister nor her husband was as compulsive as I was about keeping cars clean.
Or changing the oil.
I looked in either direction. No sign of activity. The Oak Park police would be around in another hour to ticket cars illegally parked on the streets after dark. Residents would know that, so any car on the street would say “cop” very loudly.
I switched on the ignition, waited for the motor to warm up, turned on the lights and the heater. It would take two hours or so to drive to Lake Geneva, maybe a little longer depending on how bad the roads were. I figured I would go as fast as I could on the way up in case I had to take it slow coming home.
There were many different routes to Lake Geneva in those pre-expressway days, the most favored being Illinois 41 (Cicero) or Illinois 42-A (Harlem) north to Wisconsin 50 and then left to Geneva City and along either side of the lake to the home you were seeking.
Those who lived, as did the Clancys and, once long ago, my father’s family, at the west or Fontana end of the lake sometimes argued for either U.S. 14 (Northwest Highway) or U.S. 12 (Rand Road). The latter wended its way through Fox Lake and Wonder Lake before it crossed into Wisconsin. The former took the long way around through Harvard and Woodstock and Walworth and came in to Fontana from the west; the distance was longer in miles but, according to its advocates, not in time because one missed the concentration of resort towns on the other routes.
I chose this route because I figured that the fewer people who had a chance to see me in the middle of the night the better off I would be. I drove up Harlem Avenue, turned left on Northwest Highway, and settled in for the long ride, WIND blaring popular music on the car radio to keep me awake. I winced when they played “Three Coins in the Fountain.” That interlude at the Beverly Hills Hotel must have happened in another incarnation.
The suburbs on the road, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, Barrington, even Crystal Lake, had expanded enormously since the last time I had been on those roads before the war (and have grown even more incredibly since then). Small towns on the North-western, they had become part of the metropolis now. An idea for a study tickled the back of my head. I dismissed it for the present. I had other fish to fry.
Only in the Woodstock area and beyond did I find the familiar farmlands of yesteryear, now barren and blanketed with snow as they sped rapidly by on either side of me as I cut through the night.
I still had not dismissed the tiny scruple in the back of my head. Certainly I believed Rosemarie. Still…
If she had killed either or both, she had ample reason. Didn’t she?
So far it was all going easily. No flat tires. No red-haired French border guards. No black Zouaves.
I thought of Trudi again, for the first time in years. Eight years this coming summer I had driven them to Stuttgart.
I would never know what had happened to her, but it was, somehow, a comfortable mystery to eat up the time during my race through the February night.
North of Woodstock I opened up the car to seventy, but slowed down carefully to observe the speed limits in Harvard and Walworth, though it was most unlikely that the local police would be anywhere but in their beds.
As I told you, however, I am a careful man—given the mad assumptions of the context in which I found myself.
I had left Oak Park at 11:30. At 1:35, I turned the corner of the Walworth road, climbed over the hill, and entered Fontana, nothing more than a beach and a street or two of houses behind it in those days before the construction of the big hotels and marinas. The lake, in summertime a turquoise mirror nestled in the hills, was now a smooth dark patch surrounded by snow and an occasional streetlight.
Though I wanted to rush down, do my work, and return to the comforts of my bed, I forced myself to stop the car at the beach and think.
The only possible problem would be that Rearden might be lurking in woods, waiting for me. That was not very likely, but neither was it impossible.
I drove away from the beach, parked in the public lot near the town hall (jammed on summer weekends and, I was told, a marvelous place for necking at night), locked the car, and began to trudge the half mile along North Shore Drive to the Clancy house.
How many lifetimes ago since the prom?
Only nine years since I had fished her out of the lake and kissed and caressed her, with savage delight, to tell the truth, in the two-story “den” of this house?
It must have been longer than that, must it not?
My initial impression then had been correct in one respect: she was indeed a very satisfactory partner in the kissing and caressing business.
I wished I was home in bed with her, not making love, because she would be sleeping so deeply, but perhaps holding her hand.
It was bitter cold; the temperature must have fallen more than the Weather Bureau had anticipated. And the snow, off North Shore Drive, was higher than my boots. So a wet, insidious chill slipped into my stockings and then into my feet. If I was not careful, I would give myself a fearsome cold.
(I am aware intellectually that colds are caused by a virus, but I was raised in such profound faith that colds were caused by wet feet and unwrapped mufflers that I cannot shake those convictions.)
I had decided
that if I was to continue to avoid even the unanticipated risks, I would not enter from the driveway into the Clancy house, but rather from the front door on the lake side. This would mean I would creep in over the property of the next-door neighbor and cross his front lawn. I assumed that the neighbor would not be on the premises during midweek in February.
Resorts in the dead of winter are ugly, naked places, bereft of their charm and glitter. A great idea for a study, wasn’t it? Well, even if this was a wild-goose chase, at least it wasn’t a completely wasted night.
I paused in front of the Clancy house. The lake was frozen, the pier removed so that it would not be damaged by the ice.
The scene was totally different, but, yes, I did fish her out of the water right there. It had turned out, on balance, not to have been such a bad error, even if it had brought me back here tonight under such preposterous conditions.
I put the key in the door, tried to open the lock, and discovered that it wouldn’t move.
Frozen?
One was supposed to heat the key with a match, then try again. Alas, O’Malley, who doesn’t smoke, virtuous and wholesome lad, doesn’t carry matches.
Well, the next step was to rub the key in your hands so that it would absorb some body warmth. Right?
I pulled off a glove and I began to massage the key, but it was cold and elusive. After a few brisk rubs, it slipped out of my hand. I reached for the flashlight, fumbled with the switch, and turned it on.
Beneath me was nothing but trampled snow.
I searched frantically with my bare fingers, ignoring the sharp pain from the cold snow and ice. I thought I had found it in a clump of snow, but it slipped out of my fingers. I dug deeper, but uncovered only a twig.
Had I not done the same thing in the forest between Bamberg and Nuremberg? Still clumsy.
Now nearly frantic, I flashed the light in all directions and, my knees digging into the wet snow, searched desperately in the mess I myself had created.
Finally I found it, wedged up against the screen door.
This time it turned the lock easily and the door swung slowly open. I was still thinking clearly, despite my clumsiness. The daimon, I suppose, was at work. Don’t leave any clues (other than your footsteps on the lawn and the trampled snow at the doorway!). Take off your boots and leave them inside the door.
So with wet stocking feet I padded down the corridor and into the big den. I paused in the dark to orient myself. On my left, where there was a massive patch of gray, would be the big window overlooking the lake. Dead ahead would be the fireplace with the moose’s head on the wall. Beneath it the rug on which I had romanced the young Rosemarie. On the right would be the massive desk and the library shelves with leatherbound books that Jim Clancy probably never opened.
Lord have mercy on him, as Mom would have said.
So, immediately on my right, hard right, would be the wall with the painting of Clarice and a safe behind it, usually left open because, according to Rosemarie, it contained nothing of value except Jim Clancy’s enemies list.
I flicked on the light quickly, flashed it on the wall, found the picture, and turned the light off.
Presumably there would be no one on the lake with field glasses focused on the Clancy windows, but why take chances, right?
Pull the shade?
And leave fingerprints?
I groped around in the dark, found a big, plush chair against the wall, climbed up on it, fished for the picture, discovered it, and, ever so gently, lifted it off its hanger.
Then I flashed the light on and off again to locate the safe.
Everything was going according to plan, I told myself. I touched the combination lock of the safe and eased it toward me. It swung open easily.
I probed around inside with my hand—several stacks of paper. I reached for them with such vigor that I fell off the chair.
And hit the floor with a noisy clatter and several appropriate obscene and scatological expressions.
Several parts of my anatomy, most notably my posterior, felt like they had been damaged for life. Moreover, I was dazed and confused. Where was I? What was I trying to do? Might I not need a little nap?
I struggled to my feet, limped around in the darkness to find the overturned chair, and tried again.
Dummy.
Steadying myself, I made sure that I had all the papers and then, much more carefully this time, eased my tense and aching body back off the chair.
I flicked the light on. A few bills, some prospectuses from Las Vegas hotels, and an unsealed envelope.
It was labeled, “For the police, in the event of my death.”
Nicely put, huh?
I opened it and glanced at the contents. Sure enough, a long letter claiming that Rosemarie had killed her mother and expressing fear that she and I would kill him. A list of servants who could testify to the strange events of the day of Clarice’s death and of witnesses who would testify to my many threats to kill him.
Nice practical joke, huh?
Still running on my daimon’s automatic pilot, I put the irrelevant papers back in the safe, closed it, and hung the picture. I flicked the light over the floor to make sure that I had not left any papers on the floor after my fall.
One of my shins began to hurt. A skinned knee probably, of the kind I thought I had left behind on my fourteenth birthday.
I had banged up my knee in Bamberg too. For a moment I thought I was back in the woods. I shook my head to clear the fog. Had I hit my head when I fell?
Mrs. Clancy—Clarice—I reflected, was a lovely woman, not as striking as her daughter but still lovely. Dear God, why did she have to suffer so much?
No answer.
I turned off the light to reflect. Would the practical joke have worked? Maybe. Maybe not? The Murrays would have found many witnesses to testify to Jim Clancy’s emotional aberrations. There could be no proof that Rosemary had killed her mother; his charges would not be enough to establish that. Who were the witnesses? Might he have paid them off to commit perjury? Would they be ready to take that chance after he was dead?
That did not seem likely.
And, as to his own death, the mere fact that he expected his daughter and son-in-law to kill him would not prove that we actually hired the hit man who planted the bomb in his car.
No, neither he nor Rearden had enough to fry us. Still, there was enough to drag us through the courts for months, maybe years, and to destroy our reputations and make our lives miserable. And the lives of our children.
Great little joker, Jim Clancy. Quite amusing, as his mother had said.
Requiescat in pace.
Who were the witnesses?
I flicked on my flashlight and watched the light die. Ah, but O’Malley is provident. I pulled the fresh batteries out of my pocket and, bumbling and fumbling in the dark, tried to install them.
Finally I got all the parts of the light more or less properly screwed back together. Proud of my skills, I flicked the switch again. It didn’t work.
Provident O’Malley didn’t bring a fresh bulb.
Then I made a terrible mistake.
The most callow of readers will say that, having found what he expected to find, O’Malley should now redeploy. Instantly. Get the hell out. Who needs a flashlight? You can read the stuff in your car. Go home. To your warm bed. And your warmer wife. Right?
So O’Malley spends fifteen precious minutes groping and fumbling for a flashlight.
Fifteen stupid minutes.
Finally, I found a light in one of the drawers of Jim Clancy’s desk. I was about to turn it on when a searchlight swept across the room, nailed me behind the desk, and then passed on.
Now what?
Whose searchlight? And from where?
A car door slammed. Voices crackled in the cold night air. The searchlight had been auto headlights. Had they seen me? Where should I hide? They were coming in the back door. So if I…
I rushed madly, banging my shins a coup
le of times, across the jet black room, and out the door into the corridor leading to the front entrance.
Should I try to make my escape, hoping that I hadn’t been seen? Or should I wait to see who they were and what they wanted?
With Clancy’s letter crammed into my trousers pocket, the better choice—and I admit it was a close judgment call—would have been to run.
So I stayed to listen.
The visitors had a hard time with the driveway door. One of them was, with considerable obscenity, trying to pick the lock.
Cops?
Or robbers raiding the house of a dead man?
Which did I want?
Professional thieves would not be so blatant or so clumsy.
Cops. Five will get you ten that it’s Rearden and a buddy. I would recognize him shortly, perhaps, by his smell.
Instead I recognized the voice. I omit the obscene language from the conversation because it would be tedious to record it all.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Artie; this is breaking and entering. And in another jurisdiction.”
“You read the letter, didn’t you?” The light went on in the den. “The evidence we want is here. We’ll take it and get out. Who’s to know where we found it? We’ll tell them it was in the old guy’s home in Chicago.”
“Geez, look at the layout, the guy must have been loaded, know what I mean?”
“And it’s all going to that little cunt and her faggot husband. I’ll laugh when they both fry.”
“You think you can fry them, Artie, really?”
“Him for sure. Her… well, it might be better than being raped by butches for the rest of her life. I’d enjoy thinking about that more. Serve the rich bitch right.”
“That’s for sure—hey, is that the picture the letter talks about?”
I’ll admit that I’d been pretty clumsy. But I was an amateur, not a pro. These two were as bad as Special Agent Clarke, the FBI man who wanted to turn Trudi and her mother and sister over to the Ruskies. Suppose some local police come by and see the car in the driveway and lights on in the house. Suppose they are a little trigger-happy. Suppose they come in with guns drawn, without warning. Suppose that Artie and his rasping buddy try to reach for their guns.
A Christmas Wedding Page 28
