“And if you’re working for Janet,” Osborne said casually, “you can help Dan find the ]ewels, and you can still use them to keep the fucking Herald from being taken over by assholes like Chester Osborne.”
This was getting treacherous. I said, “I couldn’t do that. If I found the jewels, I’d have to return them to the police, or the gems’ owners, or their insurance company. That’s a given I have no choice.”
He gave me a look—one of the two or three in his repertory—that bordered on the salacious, except it had to do with an appetite other than sex. He said, “You could do it. And you will too.” Then his face hardened. “Have you met my father?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Do you want that piece of shit to control the future of the Herald?” He waited.
“No,” I said.
“Then the jewels have to be used.”
“Even if the Herald’s debt isn’t paid off by the September deadline,” I said, “a majority of the company’s board members are planning to sell the Herald to Harry Griscomb, who’ll retain the paper’s staff and standards and probably keep Janet on to run it. Your father is one of a minority on the board who want to sell out to a sleazy bottom-line-oriented chain, but it looks as if this can be kept from happening. So your father is not going to control the future of the Herald, no matter where the jewels end up. I know you aren’t crazy about your father, Craig, and I think I know some of the reasons why you don’t want to see him get his way. But even without the jewels, your father won’t succeed. Janet is determined to keep it from happening.”
Osborne sneered. “You don’t fucking get it.”
“Get what?”
He slowly shook his head. “Dan told me somebody tried to hit him with a truck and drown Janet with a Jet Ski. You really don’t get what’s happening here?”
“It’s true that attempts have been made on Janet’s and Dan’s lives. And all the indications are that these attacks are meant to knock Dan and Janet off the Herald’s board. Yes, I get that. But Janet and Dan are
both under police protection now. So is your grandmother. We can keep them safe until after the board votes on September eighth, and that’s what we’re going to do. The stolen jewels, Craig, are irrelevant now. Sorry.”
“The fuck you can protect them,” Osborne said. “Chester Osborne will find a way to get to one of them—Dan or Janet or Grandma—just like he killed my cousin Eric.” Again he watched me with his unreadable eyes, the eyes of a habitual liar, the other Osbornes said.
“Your father killed Eric? How do you know that?”
“He told me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“In December, my father came out here and talked to me for the first time in ten years. When the warden told me Chester was up here, I wanted to come up here and stick a fork in his gut. But I figured I’d never get close enough to him to do it. Then I thought, fuck it, I’m not even gonna come up here and look at his stupid face. But then I thought, maybe I can come up here and find out something I can use against him. So I came.”
“Right.”
“I came up here and I actually talked to old shitface. And what he wanted was, he knew Dan had been trying to track me down before the hotel hit. Then when the jewels weren’t recovered after I was picked up, Chester put two and two together and came up with this idea that was basically what had happened. I guess Chester’s where I got my criminal mind from. He told me if Dan or I used the take from the hit to save the Herald, he would see that an investigation happened and Dan would be fucked.
“And then the evil old man—you’ll love this—then old Chester Osborne demands that he get control over the sixteen million. Dan’s Cuban had set up a plan to have the jewels fenced in Venezuela and then have the cash funneled through a bank in the Caymans. Chester had a bank in the Bahamas we were supposed to use—the cash was supposed to come back in the form of a loan to the Herald from this bank, supposedly, only the terms of the loan would be so easy that it was like the Herald never really had to pay it back. The loan deal was all just cover.
“The one part of the Bahamas loan agreement that Chester liked the most was, the loan would only go through if Janet, Eric, and Dan all
got off the Herald board, and Tidy and two people from outside the family came on the board, and Stu Torkildson would be the publisher.” Osborne smiled mirthlessly. “So you tell me, Mr. Private Dick? Where do I get my criminal tendencies from? Huh?”
I said, “I see your point. So, did you agree to your father’s criminal demands, Craig?”
Looking smug, Osborne said, “I told him he was full of shit and I blew him off. I’d love to have told him the truth. But then Chester would’ve gone after Dan too soon, and that could’ve blown the whole deal. I warned Dan that Chester was suspicious and to make sure the source of the Cayman loan couldn’t be traced. Dan said the Cuban said it was foolproof, so then I dropped the subject. I figured I’d have to get my satisfaction just from knowing that Chester wasn’t getting control of the Herald—that he’d gotten fucked over, even if I couldn’t rub his ugly face in it.”
I said, “But that wasn’t the end of it with your father, I guess.”
He shook his head. “Fuck, no.”
“He came back out here again?”
“In May,” Osborne said. “A week before Eric •was killed “
“What did your father want this time?”
“When the jewels still didn’t turn up,” Osborne said, looking me directly in the eye, as he had since my arrival, “old Chester starts thinking that Dan and Eric and I did do the job, and Dan and Eric have got some kind of last-minute surprise that will squeeze Chester and Stu Torkildson out of the Herald totally. That’s how good a judge of people my father is—he thought my straight cousin Eric was in on the hit! Eric was queer, but he was still the straightest guy I ever knew—nuts and berries and grass and trees and all that shit that’s supposed to turn Osbornes on, though as for me, you can have it.
“So Chester comes out here in May, and he’s ripshit He says he knows something is up, and where the fuck are the jewels? By then, though, see, Dan has told me the fucking jewels are missing. That’s what Dan says—they’re missing and he’s trying to locate them, he says. Since I want to know where the fuck the fucking jewels are myself, I tell Chester, ask Dan where they are. And this is just what Chester needs to hear. It was a fucking dumb thing for me to say—Eric might still be alive if I’d kept my mouth shut—but I was pissed at Dan by then, and at everybody else, and I just didn’t give a fuck.”
“So your father went back and confronted Dan?”
Osborne snorted. “Dan told him to fuck off. Dan denied everthing. He said I was playing head games with Chester to get even with him for how he treated me when I was a kid.”
“How did he treat you?” I said.
Osborne looked at me with his dead eyes and said, “My father beat the shit out of me every chance he got. He’d do it when my mother wasn’t around. Whenever we were alone, he’d pound on me. My mother knew it, but she ignored it.” He watched me with his blank look.
I said, “I can see why you want revenge.”
“That’s what I want.”
“You’re getting it at a high price. It looks as if your life is your revenge.”
Now he looked irritated. “Who the fuck are you, Adolph Freud? Hey, shit, man, do you think I’m too stupid to understand that? Fuck yes, my life is my revenge against my father.”
I said, “You could have waited until you were bigger than your father and then punched his face in. That’s crude and illegal, but people in your situation do it and it sometimes seems to make a difference.”
He said, “I’m not a patient person.”
“What happened,” I asked, “after Dan told your father he was mistaken in his suspicions?”
“My father went to Eric.”
“How do you know he did?”
“Dan told me. Eric called Dan one day, Dan told
me, and said Chester had been running at the mouth with Eric about some jewel robbery, and asking where were the fucking jewels, and Eric asked Dan what the fuck Chester was talking about. Dan told Eric that this was just some shit I had made up to fuck up my father’s head. Then Eric went back to Chester to tell him there was nothing to the jewel-hit story, and my father had one of his violent fits that he has, and killed him.”
I watched Osborne and waited, but he just sat there looking at me as if we were discussing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and it was my turn to add a pertinent thought.
I said, “You’re saying that your father killed Eric impulsively, in a rage of frustration, after Eric—what? Disappointed him by refusing to confess about the sixteen-million-dollar jewel heist that your father was convinced Eric was involved in?”
“That’s what set him off,” Osborne said. “Chester has been famous since he was a kid for beating on people. You must have heard about that from Janet. She knows the story.” I nodded. “So,” Osborne said, “old Chester finally beat somebody to death. Too bad for Eric.”
I said, “And your father admitted this to you?”
“In so many words, he did.”
“What were those words?”
“He told me on the phone a week after Eric was offed that Eric deserved what he got for trying to screw Chester and June by hogging all the credit for saving the Herald with the jewel heist. Chester was still convinced Dan was about to spring something, even though by then Dan had lost control of the jewels. My father also said Eric deserved what he got because Eric was trying to keep the Herald under the control of hippies and socialists, and Chester said their day was past.”
I said, “That’s a powerful expression of sentiment on your father’s part, but it’s not an admission of guilt.”
“It’s as much of an admission as I need,” Osborne said laconically. “I know my father. That’s the other fucking reason I’m telling you this, as a matter of fact. I can’t tell all this to the prosecutors or they’ll go after Dan. I don’t want that—at least not yet. It depends on what my radical cousin did with the jewels. If he gave the jewels to some fucking coffee-pickers’ liberation front somewhere—which he has been known to do with Osborne family money—I am going to be extremely pissed off. But I’ll wait to hear about that. While you’re on Janet’s tit, you can go ahead and clear it up for me as to just what became of the goddamn jewels. And the other thing you can do for me, Strachey, is you can fucking nail Chester Osborne for Eric’s murder. That’s what you can do for me and for the entire human race.”
I sat looking at him and wondering how much of what Osborne had told me was true, how much of it lies, how much of it fantasy fed by his boiling need for revenge.
I said, “Have you told anyone else, Craig, the story you’ve told me here this morning?”
He said, “Just my mother. I called her up on Wednesday and told her there were some things about her husband I thought she needed to know.”
18
Back in Edensburg just after four, I drove directly to Ruth Osborne’s house. Now that I had the goods—or what I confidently believed closely resembled the goods—on Dan, I was eager to confront him.
“He’s gone,” Timmy said. “Arlene too.”
“They left a note,” Dale said. “It just said ‘Don’t worry about us.’ But they didn’t say where they went or when they’d be back.”
Timmy and Dale were seated across from each other at the dinner table on the back porch. I could hear Elsie moving about in the kitchen nearby, and Ruth Osborne was outside, fifty feet away, snipping something with a scissors into a basket in the herb garden. Timmy and Dale were in the midst of a game of Scrabble and acted distracted and vaguely annoyed by my interruption.
“When did they leave?” I asked.
“It must have been not long after you did,” Timmy said “We were all still asleep. What time did you leave for Attica?”
“Six-thirty.”
“I was up at seven,” Dale said, “and they were out of here by then. They left the note here on the table “
“Would you like some iced tea?” Timmy asked, indicating a perspiring crystal pitcher and a tray of glasses.
Helping myself, I said, “Where’s the note?”
It appeared to be Dale’s turn in the Scrabble game, so it was Timmy who glanced around the room in search of Dan’s note. “Here it is.” He turned over the sheet of typing paper their Scrabble scores were
written on—Dale was leading, 180 to 167—and on the other side was the scrawled note: “Don’t worry about us—Dan.”
I said, “Is that Dan’s handwriting?”
“I think so,” Dale said, not looking up from her letter holder. “Janet saw it, and she didn’t say it wasn’t Dan’s handwriting.”
“Did the phone ring, that anybody knows of, before they left? Could they have received a call from someone?”
“I didn’t hear it,” Timmy said. “And there’s a phone in our room.”
“Ours too,” Dale said. “But it’s only rung once all day. That was around noon, when Pauline called for Janet.”
“Was Janet here?”
“Yes, she came home for lunch,” Timmy said. Now both Dale and Timmy were furiously rearranging the letter squares on their holders.
“Did Janet say why Pauline called her?”
Dale ignored this, and Timmy shook his head and said, “Nnn-nnn.”
“Janet didn’t say anything about Pauline still being upset after the way she held a gun on me yesterday?”
“Nnn-nnn.”
Leaning against a nearby wicker settee were Timmy’s wooden crutches, and my impulse was to pick one of them up and sweep all the letter squares off the Scrabble board and onto the players’ laps. Instead, I said, “Aren’t you two curious to hear about my meeting with Craig out at Attica? It was eventful.”
Not looking up, Timmy said, “Absolutely.”
“Yes, Donald,” Dale said, “but if you don’t mind keeping your dick in your pants until we’re through with this game, that’ll be just too, too groovy.”
I picked up one of the crutches, played with it, put it back.
“It might look as if we’ve got our priorities screwed up,” Timmy said, “but this game is more important than it may seem. Each word that Dale places on the board is meant to offer a clue about what it is I once did that makes me a moral slug in her eyes.”
“And each word that Timothy plays shows his reaction to the word I last played,” Dale said.
I studied the board. Among the words snaking this way and that way, up and down the board, were these: fib, ill, liar, retch, cuffed, ducky,
CURT, UMBRAGE, KNEED, EEL, DORKY, RIPRAP.
I said, “Is ‘riprap’ a clue or a response?”
“Neither, exactly,” Timmy said. “But it got me a triple-letter score. That was the response I felt like expressing at the time.”
“Which was not following the agreed-upon rules of the game,” Dale said. “When he played that word, Timothy was not keeping his word— as usual.”
Timmy frowned deeply as Dale spelled out “pimp.”
I left them and walked outside across the broad back lawn, aromatic and abuzz with bees, to the herb garden. Ruth Osborne had placed a low flat basket on the ground beside the spot where she was bending over. The basket contained eight perfect sun-ripened tomatoes that must have come from the vegetable garden in the southeast corner of the yard. Mrs. Osborne had snipped off a small bunch of basil sprigs, and their perfume in the heat of the late afternoon was strong and transporting. Scientists who know the geography of the human brain say the olfactory and memory centers are located next to each other, and that’s why smells can trigger such powerful memories. Basil set off a welter of memories for me, all of them good. Among them were my grandmother’s vegetable garden in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and beside her herb patch a hidden pathway through the brush down to the banks of the Delaware River. The
n it was on to lunches with Timmy at our pensione in Fiesoli, and on and on in a fraction of a second.
“Smells wonderful,” I said.
Mrs. Osborne straightened up slowly and said, “This is the season I’ll miss when I’m dead. It isn’t even a season—just a week or two in August when the tomatoes are at their peak and the basil hasn’t begun to wilt and the local corn is sweetest. What luck it is for a person to be up and around and conscious in Edensburg in August!”
I said, “It’s one of the times of the year when we remember why we live in this part of the country.”
“Oh, I live in Edensburg because I came back here and married Tom Osborne,” she said, “instead of marrying one of the boys from Yale who came up to Mount Holyoke on weekends. If I’d married Ogden Winsted of Philadelphia, I’d have gone off with him to darkest Chestnut Hill and never been heard of again. Or if I’d accepted Lew McAl-ister’s proposal of marriage, I’d probably still be in the Cameroons shining Christ’s light on the heathen. Either locale would have left me a long way from Edensburg.
“There were other offers, too, some of them worth considering. But
I loved Tom Osborne from the time he was a sixth-grade … ‘patrol boy’ was what the school crossing guards were called back then, and I was a frightened first grader, and Tom held my hand every day when I crossed Third Street on the way to Stuyvesant Grammar.
“I adored Tom and felt safe and secure with him, and although much later, of course, I had to set him straight on a few matters—he could be dumb as a post when it came to what he used to call ‘the female of the species’—still, I never in all our fifty-nine years together stopped leaning on Tom or looking up to him. You know, Mr. Donaldson, I was just thinking: Tom had asked that his ashes be scattered in the mountains, and I was too selfish to let the kids do that. Even though Tom is now just bits and pieces of bone and whatnot, I drew comfort from having what’s left of him around. But now I’ve come up with another idea. Why not spread Tom’s remains around in the herb garden? That way he’d be out in the weather, which is what he wanted. At the same time, I could visit him—and I do use that term loosely—and I could continue to be reassured by Tom’s nearby presence, however irrational that may seem to others. What do you think?”
Chain of Fools Page 14
