Her eyes narrowed. “Exactly what are you up to, Conner? People like you don’t talk to men like Hapford more than once a century.”
“You’re right. He must be eighty if a day.”
She waggled an index finger at the book under his arm. “What’s that?”
“Something he asked me to look over. I guess you’d call it his personal journal of the incident.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Let’s talk bribery, Conner. I have to see that.”
“As much as I’d like to sit and hold hands as we go through it together, I could never concentrate with you so close. How could I keep from staring at the angelic downiness of your delicate white skin, the throbbing pulse in your throat as you struggle to suppress the desire you feel for me, and the delightfully obtuse earlobe that drives me wild? Besides, I’m sure he meant the book for my eyes only.”
She shook her head. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand how a nut like you can see into people’s souls, much less write about them, but I suspect that underneath the smart-talk exterior is a real nice guy. You should let him out once in a while, Conner. In the meantime—”
She pointed at the door. “Out.”
“As your humble slave, I can but obey.”
He was at the door when she called.
“What in the hell is an obtuse earlobe anyway?”
He grinned. “The description can only be murmured in the dark confines of a bedroom.”
He ran into Grainger in the corridor. The editor held up a hand.
“I read your column, Whit.”
“And?”
“Passable, but not the Whit Conner we all know and love. Have some sort of problem I can help with?”
“I wish I did. Let’s hope for something better next time.”
Grainger looked thoughtful. “I can only say that so many times, Whit.”
IT WAS WELL past dinner when he closed the book. With Susan’s story as background, it made far more sense than if he’d simply plunged in.
The police, with other things to do, had eventually dropped the investigation. Hapford hadn’t.
Over a period of years, he’d had three separate private investigators search for Olga Bateau. They had been no more successful than the police. One had either been very thorough or had enjoyed spending Hapford’s money. He turned in a report the length of a short novel that said nothing. All extended the possibility that Bateau had arranged the abduction and the subsequent murder of his wife, but none was willing to declare unequivocally that Olga Bateau was dead.
Hapford must have commissioned someone to save every reference in the papers not only to Mrs. Bateau but to her husband, including the one seven years later when a judge ruled Olga Bateau officially dead and Bateau free to remarry.
Bateau hadn’t enjoyed wedded bliss long. His new wife killed him six months later with one of his own mallets. The details of her horrendous marriage must have been pitiful enough to earn her an innocent verdict at a time when juries were still inclined to believe that marriage vows included the right of a man to beat his wife.
Fifty years. Much too long ago to even hazard a guess, but Conner sensed there was an answer somewhere between the lines.
Aside from a few passing sentences in the stories about the accident and his father’s death, there was nothing in the book about Hapford himself, which meant a great deal had been left out.
He could get the rest from the newspaper files, but this had always been a conservative, family-style publication. Fifty years ago, five other papers had been competing for readers, each covering the news in its own way.
Six viewpoints. If he couldn’t come up with an angle from those, there was none.
Three hours later, he emerged from the public library and stood on the steps, breathing deeply.
The city was dark, the night soft, the boulevard lamps surrounded by misty halos.
Checking all that microfilm had been a waste of time. He’d learned nothing more. If there was an answer, it was still between the lines and couldn’t be read without a key, and if there was a key, it was in Hapford’s hands.
He’d accommodated Hapford only to be polite, but he’d spent far more time than he’d anticipated. He really didn’t give a damn what had happened to Olga Bateau. That had been Hapford’s problem. He’d lived with it and should have died with it and left him alone. He’d drop the book off tomorrow and get out of there.
MRS. SMALLCROSS seemed even more unpleasant when she ushered him inside the next afternoon.
If the nurse had undergone no change overnight, Hapford had. The brightness of the day before was replaced by a pale weariness, and his hand trembled when it rose to meet Conner’s.
“I assume you went through the book thoroughly, Mr. Conner, and no discussion is necessary. Did you reach any conclusions?”
“Since Olga Bateau’s body was never found, doubt will always exist that Bateau killed her. At this late date, there is no answer.”
“If a man persists, the truth will always be found.” Hapford motioned. “Wheel me out onto the terrace, if you will.”
The terrace was wide and long, the wrought-iron railing ending at a set of broad steps. Wearing a blue baseball cap, Ross leaned with folded arms against the railing, a heavy sledge beside him.
Before them, evergreens accented the weathered gray as they curved around the sculpture, high in the center and descending as they swept toward the front, while twin beds of red and white roses completed a circle bisected by a flagstone walk that led to the statue and formed a patio before it, a small concrete bench off to one side.
The grove was obviously a shrine dedicated to the statue.
“Quite lovely, isn’t it?” asked Hapford.
With those eyes of his, he had to be speaking from memory.
“That was Bateau’s commission?”
Hapford nodded. “Many consider it only an ugly pile of cement. What do you see, Mr. Conner?”
The sculpture was blocky, almost crude, lacking detail, more form than shape and studded with small, polished stones, yet Conner thought he could see the image of a woman there; a sad woman, hands clasped before her, head bowed; as though what he saw was beneath the surface and waiting to be released by the sculptor’s chisels.
He felt ice ripple down his spine. “I’m not quite sure.”
“I’ve felt the same way for fifty years,” said Hapford quietly.
The ice spread into Conner’s stomach. “How did Bateau work?”
“He spent a great deal of time building his forms. Then he mixed and poured the concrete himself. Once he began, he couldn’t stop until it was finished, since the concrete had to be of the same texture and consistency throughout. That was the point he made, you see. Busy mixing and pouring, he was aware of nothing else, so that it was quite possible for his house to be ransacked and his wife abducted while he worked in utter concentration. More than one person testified that it was not unusual for him to work through the night, completely unaware of what went on around him. If forced to stop, he would tear the form apart and reduce the work to rubble with a sledge.”
“I think that if I had been you, I would have reduced this one to powder,” said Conner slowly.
“Don’t be so certain.”
“Dammit, you had no choice!” Conner snapped.
Hapford’s voice was thin and tired. “Think fifty years ago, Mr. Conner.”
Conner’s anger faded. The old man was right. He was thinking now, not then.
The sculpture had been commissioned, completed, and delivered. What happened to it was up to Hapford. If he smashed it and didn’t find the body of Olga Bateau inside, he had nothing but his memories of the woman he loved to sustain him, and finding nothing would prove nothing—she could be dead and buried elsewhere, or she might even still be alive.
If he did find her body, he would have the satisfaction of seeing Bateau convicted, but the sweetness of revenge couldn’t last forever, the statue of the woman he loved would be gone, and worse—wha
tever slight hope he was clinging to that she was still alive would also be gone.
Either way, he’d lose.
“I apologize,” said Conner. “On second thought, I’m not sure I would have done differently.”
Hapford nodded. “I knew you’d understand. You see, I know you, Mr. Conner. I’ve admired your insight and depth and warmth for years, but lately the tenor of your columns has changed. I think I know why. You no longer seek the truth. You pursue the truth as you see it.”
Conner suppressed the touch of irritation that criticism always brings.
“Maybe we should postpone this discussion to another day.”
Mrs. Smallcross appeared and took up a position behind Hapford’s chair, her eyes concerned.
The old man’s voice was tired. “There are no more days left. I have traveled the road as far as medication and the tender care of Mrs. Smallcross can take me, but I wished to make a point. The statue stands before you. So does the truth. With the sledge, you can destroy the sculpture in moments if that is where you believe the truth is. Mr. Ross will help you. Or you can walk away, certain that the truth is as you see it.”
“Is this your way of getting me to smash the statue for your benefit?”
Hapford smiled. “Not mine. Yours. I already know the truth. It took me fifty years to discover it, because I did what you have been doing. Certain that I was right, I looked no further.”
His voice faded along with the smile as he leaned back against the yellowed wicker.
Suddenly aware of his stillness, Mrs. Smallcross touched his throat, held her fingers there for a moment, and looked at Ross, tears in her eyes. Ross slowly removed the blue baseball cap.
The nurse tucked the lap robe around Hapford tenderly as if it still mattered and wheeled him inside.
Shaken, Conner stared after her. It was as though Hapford had willed himself to stay alive until he talked to him.
No one else had known what was wrong with his columns, and he’d been unable to put a finger on it himself, but the old man had. “You pursue the truth as you see it,” he’d said, which meant he’d been injecting into those columns what he wished he saw, rather than what was actually there, and they had become contrived and flat.
He stepped from the terrace and studied the statue, painted by the sun with light and shadow. He was certain Olga Bateau was inside. Bateau had committed a perfect murder, sat back, and laughed at Hapford because he had known Hapford wouldn’t have the nerve to destroy it. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation of why her body had never been found, but without smashing the sculpture, there would always be a slight doubt, and Hapford had used that doubt to make him take a look at himself. He had, and was grateful.
He waved at Ross, took two steps toward his car, and stopped. Hapford hadn’t said it had taken him fifty years to realize the truth. It had taken him fifty years to discover it. And Hapford had not been the sort of man who ignores the precise meaning of words.
He walked slowly around the semicircle of flowers and back again. The beds were two embracing arms held apart by the flagstone walk, the stones set precisely, filling the circular area before the sculpture with a fan-like pattern that radiated from a rectangle in the center.
Conner stepped back. There was no logic in the rectangle.
In keeping with the circular pattern, the center should have been square so that it was equidistant from all edges.
He studied the shrine. If the centerpiece was not the sculpture but the rectangle, then the sculpture was positioned like—
A headstone.
Ice rippled down his spine again.
He turned to Ross. “He never knew?”
“Not until last week. He asked me to wheel him out. Mrs. Smallcross usually did that, but she had to run into town. You see, no one else knew, so they would walk on the flagstones in the center. I could never do that. Walk on a grave. I steered him around them. He noticed. He sort of looked at them and then up at me and asked very quietly, ‘What happened, Ross?’”
“What did happen?”
An errant blade of grass at the edge of a flower bed had escaped the shears. Ross replaced his cap, knelt, broke off the blade, and chewed it thoughtfully.
“What took place before the accident, I have no idea, but he hadn’t been alone, as everyone thought. She was with him. He liked to drive fast, it was a rainy fall night, and the driveway was covered with wet leaves. He skidded off the curve. She was killed, he was knocked unconscious. The only people here were his father and me, a kid of fifteen. My dad was the gardener then. The crash brought both of us running. Real nightmare for a kid. For anyone, when it comes to that. His father sent me to the house to phone for an ambulance, but I knew, and I guess he did, too, that it would take an hour to get here. When I came running back, he said, ‘We have to bury her, Ross.’”
Ross spat out the remnants of the blade. “Understand, I was fifteen, and old Mr. Hapford was a sort of god to everyone who worked here. That was the height of the Depression, and if you had a job, you had to keep it because there were no others, and plenty of men would be happy to take my place making seven dollars a week helping my father on the estate. He said we have to bury her, and I said sure, Mr. Hapford. If there were any questions about what we were doing, he’d have to answer, not me. We carried her here. My father had already started a flower bed, so the earth was soft and loose, and no one can dig faster than a scared kid. By the time the ambulance came, she had been buried.”
Conner stared at him. “What in the hell could his father have been thinking?”
Ross shrugged. “Family name, that sort of thing, I suppose. Name splashed all over the newspapers. Scandal. Drunken son out with married woman. Kills her. He was real straight-laced. We’ll never know. There we were, covered with mud and standing in the rain, but the ambulance men never looked at us, and I was wondering what the old man could say to his son if he didn’t die, when he sort of coughs and keels over and they took him along. I couldn’t tell if J. A. was dead, but I was sure the old man was, so if there was any explaining to do, it was going to be me.”
“You should have said something right then,” said Conner slowly.
Ross smiled. “Remarkable how good hindsight is. I should have, but I didn’t. No one ever asked and I never volunteered. After all, what could a kid know? The statue was delivered while he was in the hospital. I told my father that J. A. had told me he wanted it here, with the trees and the flower beds and the flagstone, making it all up as I went along. J. A. was in a coma for a few days, and when he came out of it, he couldn’t remember a thing about that night. It always did remain a blank. I’m sure you’ve heard of cases like that. Guilt blockage or something, they call it.”
Conner nodded.
“Well, hell, I didn’t know that at the time. I thought he’d surely remember and then I’d tell him, but he never did and I kept my mouth shut. I think he and Mrs. Bateau must have talked about telling her husband, and to fill in that gap in his memory, he told himself it actually happened. That’s why he accused Bateau. You can understand why a fifteen-year-old kid in my position wasn’t going to stand up and tell him he was wrong. Four years later the war came along. I went to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. I sometimes wondered if I were killed would the secret die with me, or would someone stumble across it someday, but I wasn’t, and when I came back, he’d accepted it and lived with it, so there was no point to putting him through it all again. Maybe somehow he knew, which was why he shut himself off. When I told him last week, he said, ‘Thank you, Ross,’ as though I’d done him a favor.”
“Maybe you did,” said Conner.
“Only we two know now. Have anything in mind?”
Conner looked at the shrine. “I think not.”
Ross stooped, snipped off a rose, and held it out. It was a deep purplish red, blue toward the bottom.
“Developed it myself. I call it a Bateau Blue. J. A. liked that.”
Conner turned the
rose over in his fingers. “So do I.”
SUSAN LOOKED up and smiled.
“Find out what Hapford wanted?”
“To give me a lesson in humility. He called it looking for the truth, which was his gentlemanly way of telling me I’d become a fat-headed bore.”
“Three very loud cheers for Hapford.”
“He’ll never know of your approval. He died at approximately two thirty, and I regret that very much. I’d have liked to have known him better.”
He placed the rose on her desk. “For you. It’s called a Bateau Blue.”
She breathed its fragrance with closed eyes. “It’s beautiful. Thank you, Conner. But what about Olga—”
“Care to trade in that sticky bun raincheck for a dinner?”
She studied him for a moment. “I have the feeling that it won’t be necessary to bring my mace.”
“All we’ll do is talk like two sensible adults.”
She smiled. “Sounds like a dull evening, but I’ll be pleased to accept, Mr. Conner.”
He met Grainger in the corridor again and held up a hand before the editor could speak.
“Don’t derail my train of thought.” In his office, he slid behind his keyboard.
All of the people who had searched for Olga Bateau through the years had never thought to ask a gangly, fifteen-year-old kid if he knew anything. If they had, the kid would have made news.
He didn’t write about people who made news. He wrote about people who would otherwise never be noticed.
Like a gaunt genius of a gardener with prominent ears and a blue baseball cap who grew blue roses, whose work few people had ever seen because it was on top of a hill where time had stood still for fifty years.
CONNIE HOLT
HAWKS
June 1989
THIS STORY, PUBLISHED in 1989, won for its author the Robert L. Fish Award for the Best First Short Story. In a genre where the subject matter is violence and the realism is often “gritty,” this story is a small jewel of understatement and implication, but no less disturbing for that. We like the way the little details accumulate to create a subtle but powerful ending.
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense Page 31
