Rita said, her voice quiet, hurt. “You got motive written all over you, Harold. No wonder Mal thinks you might’ve done it.”
I said, “He knows I’ve got him ruled out, Rita.”
Washington smiled and Rita said, “Oh?”
“Sure,” I said. “If he was going to kill Janet Taber, he wouldn’t have gone into that tough guy routine at the bus station. He wanted to scare her off, not kill her off. When that didn’t work, it was too late to kill her, if he’d wanted to, after the public scene he’d just pulled.”
“Balls and brains,” Washington said. “You’re right. I took off my eyepatch and went down there hoping to rattle her, scare her off. I didn’t know there’d be a white knight around.”
That’s what his sister called me earlier.
I pointed a finger at the ceiling. “All of that just to protect that old man from something?”
He nodded. “That was the reason, and you’re right again, he is an old man, a sad, sick old man. Who’s paid and repaid and then paid some more for whatever wrongs he might’ve done.”
“You can defend him. You’re paid to.”
“Come off it, Mallory. You saw him. Talked to him. Did you find him malicious? A ghoul? Did you want to strangle him with your bare hands?”
“Of course not.”
He leaned forward in the chair and shook a thick finger at me. “He’s been good to me. I’ve been with him ten years, and he’s helped me help myself, help my family. How do you think Rita got her education? Ask her about the two brothers of ours that are in college right now, and on whose money. How do you think I came from ghetto and gang-fights to those books over on the wall? I wasn’t even able to speak proper English before I came to him. He did it for me.”
“What about those other people, years ago? Ones he didn’t help?”
“Look, I happen to know that he personally has reimbursed as many families as he’s been able to locate. His records were destroyed while he was in prison back in the forties, but by searching his memory and from people who contacted him, he was able to pay back much of what he took.”
“And did he pay them interest? Did he give them a share of what he made investing their money?”
“I don’t know why I’m even bothering with you, Mallory. You’re just like everybody else, you probably don’t even realize that a good deal of the earnings from Mr. Norman’s various business holdings are turned over to cancer research-cancer and other diseases.”
“A function of the Norman Fund, I assume?”
“Yes, but none of this has any relevance to your dead Janet Taber.”
“Did the Fund give a research grant to Phil Taber?”
“Who?”
“My dead Janet Taber’s husband. Perhaps it was a grant for research into the drug problem, since he’s a doper himself. I saw him yesterday. Somebody rushed him into Port City, paid him at least five thousand dollars, and I suppose rushed him back out by now.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Now you’re starting the I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about-routine. Stefan Norman pulled it on me this afternoon.”
“What?”
“He denied knowing anything about Janet Taber, except that a long time ago she worked for Richard Norman. And he’d never heard of Phil Taber, either, and you know what else? He denied knowing you. Why would he do that?”
Washington got up from his chair and said, “Probably because he’s smarter than I am. He had the good sense not to encourage you. And I think I will, if it’s not already too late, learn from Stefan’s example, and ask you to leave. And take my sister with you, will you?”
TWENTY
I sneaked into my bedroom and reached across Rita, who was sleeping on her stomach in my bed, and groped around on the nightstand for a roll of Lifesavers. I brushed against her on the return trip and she shifted over on her back and let out a sexy little grunt and looked up at me, a bit shyly, pulled the sheet up to mostly cover her breasts and said, “… uh… haven’t you been to sleep yet?”
Though the room was dark, my eyes were accustomed to it after an hour of insomnia and I could make her out very well. Her cocoa skin looked satin smooth, like skin in a retouched photo.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. A little embarrassed to be intruding on her privacy; and, as I was in nothing but my shorts, a little embarrassed, period.
“S’okay,” she shrugged, sleepily.
“You want one?” I said, offering her a Lifesaver. “They’re lime.”
“N’thanks,” she said, smiling crookedly. “G’night.” She rolled back over on her stomach, and the sheet slid down and left her back bare; she was already asleep again.
I wanted to stroke her back. Bend over and kiss the small of it, run my hand over the rise of her buttocks. But I didn’t. Instead I lifted the sheet up to her shoulders, tucked it around them, kissed her neck and whispered, “Goodnight,” but she didn’t hear me. I think.
I wandered back out into the living room and plopped back down on the couch, where I was spending the night, leaned my head back against the armrest and sucked on my Lifesaver.
Half an hour before, I’d given up on going to sleep: my mind was back trying to sort things out again. I’d managed to put all of it out of my mind, for a while, when after supper Rita and I had gotten into some friendly small talk-and some wine, which is why Rita was sleeping here tonight, since I didn’t want to drive her back to the Cities tipsy. I think maybe both of us would’ve liked more than that to have happened, but we didn’t let it-or hadn’t so far; but with her sleeping nude in the next room, it was, shall we say, hard to sleep. Even without the rest of it to mull over.
After we left her brother at the Norman house, we’d stopped at the all-night supermarket across from the place and came back to the trailer and had a good time getting a late supper for ourselves. Rita made up a whole skillet of American fries while I broiled steaks and tossed a salad. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between us not to delve further into the Janet Taber mess any more that night.
While we were eating, however, Rita began to tell me things about her brother, in an offhand casual way, and though she said nothing directly related to Janet Taber and company, I knew she was trying to fill in some of the holes for me.
An uncle of theirs, she said, had worked for Simon Norman from the thirties up until ten years ago. This uncle was usually referred to in the family as the “rich” uncle, since he had by far the best-paying job of any family member. When the uncle had to leave the position due to failing health (he was sixty-five at the time and died within the year), he recommended his nephew Harold to Simon Norman as his replacement. Even though Harold’s background was a trifle rough (he had lost his eye in a gang-fight as a kid, just as Jack Masters had told me), he had covered, in a five-year period of bumming around, a number of jobs that seemed applicable to the position: he had been everything from nightclub bouncer to gardener to short-order cook to hospital orderly, and the only duty of the uncle’s he couldn’t take on officially was that of chauffeur, since he couldn’t get a chauffeur’s license due to his missing eye; but unofficially he was up to it, and Norman rarely went out these days, anyway.
When Norman gave him the job on a trial basis, Harold made an immediate effort to live up to his “rich” uncle’s image, an effort that helped fill the long hours in the empty old house. He began a self-education program, by reading, and, later, through correspondence courses of many kinds. While he had grown intellectually since beginning to work for Norman, he had become increasingly isolated and somewhat arrested socially-or so Rita felt. She said that even his irregular visits up to different clubs in the Quad Cities-where among other blacks he would revert somewhat to his rougher, less reserved old self-had stopped a year or so ago, when Norman had a severe stroke. And he rarely if ever went out into Port City even on errands, having everything delivered, and only once in a great while would he drive up to Rock Island
to see Rita. He’d had for a time a steady woman in the Cities, but broke it off shortly after Norman’s stroke.
I lost patience sucking and bit down on the Lifesaver. I chewed it up and swallowed. I had kind of a raw taste in my mouth, combination of sour, from not brushing my teeth for a decade or so, and sweet, from chewed-up Lifesaver. I got up to get a drink of water.
Even though I hadn’t been sleeping, it took me a moment to get my balance. I stretched my back, felt the spinal knuckles pop, and suddenly was very awake, even more awake than is usual in my occasional insomniac turns. I decided I was awake enough to have more than a glass of water, ready for a glass of orange juice, maybe. I made my way to the kitchenette, my eyes so well-adjusted to the dark I stubbed not a single toe, and opened up the icebox and got out a bottle of Pabst.
I went over to the couch and sat staring at my front door, drinking my Pabst, feet on the coffee table, feeling, about halfway through my beer, tired for the first time that night. My eyes were getting fuzzy and the lids were drooping and I almost thought for a second I could see the door knob moving. Turning.
Well, boy, when inanimate objects start moving around, then you know you’re falling asleep, or already asleep and dreaming, and I was about to let my lids slide all the way shut when the door opened, all the way, and I was awake again.
I didn’t move.
It was dark. Whoever it was wouldn’t expect me to be up, wide awake, eyes in tune with the darkness.
He was big. The outline of him as he stood in the doorway was huge, shoulders almost touching the frame of the door. But I couldn’t see who it was, it was just a massive black form in the door, the light very bright around the shape, from the streetlamps and the piece of moon now out from behind the clouds.
I stayed motionless. I was sure he didn’t see me. He was putting something in his pocket now, the skeleton key he’d used to get in, maybe, or maybe some gizmo he’d picked the lock with.
One thing I knew: it wasn’t John, or even Brennan, or anybody else friendly or semi-friendly who might be playing a practical joke. He was too big even for Brennan, too wide, and the slow, methodical way he moved had no humor in it at all, just deadly, serious business.
He stepped inside and shut the door gently behind him and lifted a hand with a long-shafted flashlight in it. He switched on the flash and aimed it over toward where the living room trails into the hall that leads into the bedroom.
I slipped my feet down off the coffee table. Like I was balancing an egg on each toe.
He directed the flash down the hall, moving toward there himself, his free hand balled into a fist that was like a rock he was getting ready to pound into somebody’s head.
I threw the beer bottle at him and caught him on the ear.
He fell against the wall and slid down, the flash rolling out of his grasp, and I jumped through the darkness at him and caught a knee in my stomach. I tumbled away and smacked into the coffee table and then crawled off to catch my breath, but I could hear him scrambling around behind me.
He wasn’t used to the dark like I was, and he didn’t know where the light switch was, to do something about it. I hustled off on my hands and knees toward the kitchenette while he was rustling around after the flashlight, which had gotten switched off when he fumbled it.
Then the beam of the flash started cutting through the room’s darkness like the searching strokes of a knife. I huddled in the corner of the kitchenette, my mind stuttering. I edged my hand up the woodwork and over into the sink and my fingers found a glass, and then the skillet, still greasy from the American fries. I brought both skillet and glass, carefully, soundlessly, out of the sink and down to me, clutching them to me like treasure. I hefted the skillet; it wasn’t as heavy as I would’ve liked, but it was iron and it would do. I watched the probing beam of light, then aimed as best I could and pitched the glass at him and knocked the flash from his hand, then crouched with the iron pan in hand and waited for him to come after me.
Light filled the room.
Rita stood at the mouth of the hall, her hand on the light switch. She presented quite a sight: a beautiful naked brown girl with tousled black hair and brown nipples and…
And he was a big white guy and he stood and looked at her with his mouth hanging open.
In that second he gave me, I crowned him from behind with the skillet.
For a big man, he went down fast, hitting his cheekbone as he fell, and it wasn’t necessary to clobber him again. Rita came rushing over, questions tumbling out of her, but I snapped an order at her, telling her to get me a tie out of my closet, and she jiggled out after it and back with it in four seconds flat. I quickly bound his hands behind him, but there was nothing to worry about: he wasn’t anywhere near conscious yet.
I flipped him over. Well, he was too heavy to flip, really, alone anyway: I needed Rita’s help to do it, as out of breath as I was.
“What’s this all about, Mal?” she wanted to know. She was so startled by all of this she wasn’t bothering to cover up; I was so startled I wasn’t bothering to look.
“I’m not sure myself,” I said. “But it’s safe to say this guy wanted to do some damage.”
Then, as an afterthought, I searched him quickly and found a small, compact automatic. Blue metal, pearl-handled, it looked like the kind of thing women sometimes carry in purses. I balanced it in my palm.
Rita looked at the gun and swallowed. “What are you gonna do now?”
“I’m going to call my friend John and get him and his hard-ass stepfather over here. I’ll be damned if that sonofabitch Brennan is going to ignore this.”
“Should I get some clothes on?”
I grinned. “Well, it’d make John’s day if you didn’t, but I don’t think Brennan’s ready for it,”
She grinned back and covered herself rather demurely, like September Morn, but I wasn’t completely buying it. “You swing a mean skillet,” she said.
“You swing a mean… go get in your clothes.”
I went over to the phone and dialed.
John answered, groggily.
“Thanksgiving’s over,” I said. “Drag Brennan out of bed and get him over here. Somebody just broke into my place and I had to hit him with a skillet.”
“Huh?”
I told him again and he got it this time. I added that though I hadn’t hit the guy hard enough to kill him or anything, I’d done a good enough job that a doctor would probably be a wise thing to bring along.
“Who is it? That black guy with one eye?”
“Hardly.”
“Well, then, who the hell is he? You ever see him before?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking over at the still slumbering housebreaker. He was wearing a yellow sweater and mustard bell-bottoms. “His name is Davis.”
PART FOUR
NOVEMBER 29, 1974 FRIDAY
TWENTY-ONE
I stood outside the hospital room and leaned back against the wall; its tile surface was cold on my neck. Down the hall a few feet, by the elevator, Brennan was shuffling around the small waiting area, giving the “No Smoking” sign a dirty look each time he passed. He kept turning the brim of his Stetson in his hands like a piece of evidence he couldn’t make anything out of. Then he wandered over to one of the windows opposite the elevator and stared out at the morning blackness.
I left him alone. Went over and sat on a couch. I was just too damn tired to play the I-told-you-so-I-told-you-so game. And Brennan was boiling, anyway-why get him any angrier? It was hard to tell whether his irritation was because of my digging into this when it was none of my business, or if it was just because nobody is crazy about getting rousted out of bed in the wee morning hours. And, as he pointed out a number of times, I really should’ve called the Port City police instead of him.
But he had come out himself, and as yet hadn’t contacted the Port City cops. Which gave me at least some reason to stay a shade wary of his motives.
I yawned. In my head, my eyes were s
tones. A few minutes crawled by and Brennan drew away from the window and began pacing in front of the couch like an expectant father.
The couch was in a waiting area facing the elevator door, which I was staring at, Brennan’s form cutting my path of vision as he went by. Several minutes more dragged past, and I started nodding off, then got startled awake as the elevator door slid away like an effect in a cheap science-fiction movie. John was standing there with three Pepsi necks in the tortured grasp of one hand and a box of doughnuts in the other. He came over and sat beside me on the couch adjacent mine, and handed me over the box of doughnuts while he put the Pepsis safely down on the floor. Brennan immediately forgot his mad and joined the communal feed.
There were two doughnuts apiece, and I was finishing my first and Brennan was starting his second when he said, through a mouthful, “This Davis.”
John and I looked up at him and I said, “What?”
Brennan repeated, “This Davis,” and swallowed the bite of doughnut.
“Yeah,” I said, “go on.”
“I know him.”
“How do you happen to know him?”
“Know of him’s more like it.”
“Where do you know him from?”
“The Cities. He’s been involved in some things up there.”
“What kind of things?”
“Oh, you know, strong-arm stuff. Putting pressure on people.”
“He goes around putting pressure on people.”
“Yeah.”
“Why does he do that, Brennan?”
“That’s what he does, that’s all. That’s his living. Some people didn’t inherit money, Mallory. Some people got to go out and turn a buck, which is something you wouldn’t know much about.”
“What you’re trying to say is he’s a thug.”
Brennan shrugged.
“A thug for the Normans,” I added.
“I didn’t say that. The stuff I heard about Davis dates back to when he was working for some mob guys in the Cities.”
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