No Cure for Death m-1

by Max Allan Collins

  “Why?”

  Harold’s laugh was short, sarcastic. “I thought-just for a moment, mind you-that he had found some compassion for his uncle, somewhere. It’s only recently become obvious that Stefan agreed to wait only because he was creating evidence, not just amassing it, and he didn’t have enough of it put together for it to hold up under a court’s scrutiny. I am convinced now that the child was indeed the senator’s, or Stefan would’ve moved on it sooner.”

  “When was all this?”

  “Not long ago. A few months. And then this past Monday afternoon, a call came from the clinic out east: the boy was dead. Stefan took the call. Janet and her mother were not told. Mr. Norman was. He took it hard, as you would expect. You’ve seen him. He’s slipping away.”

  “How did Stefan take it?”

  Harold’s face turned cold. “Stefan went to Mrs. Ferris and offered her a considerable sum for her defection-the mother wasn’t in the Norman will, after all, and Stefan felt Mrs. Ferris was, therefore, vulnerable. It’s a common mistake of a snake like Stefan, to assume that the rest of humanity is as greedy and vile as he is.”

  Harold was getting worked up; he was telling me things he had no firsthand way to know-things that only Stefan could have told him….

  Harold went on, almost as if I wasn’t there: “Stefan hoped Mrs. Ferris would help him convince her daughter to make a signed ‘admission’ that the son was Taber’s, not the senator’s. Stefan had to move fast; he couldn’t keep the child’s death a secret forever, you know. So he offered Mrs. Ferris a lot of money-I don’t know how much, that he didn’t say. ‘Generous financial settlement,’ he told me, but who knows what that amounted to, in Stefan’s mind? But one of the things he did promise-and this tells you all you need to know about Stefan Norman-he promised as a fringe benefit continued clinical treatment for the child.” Harold’s eye was wet. “Continued clinical treatment. For a little boy already dead.” He clenched both fists. Suddenly I wasn’t nuts about standing on the edge of a drop-off with this guy.

  “Mrs. Ferris and her daughter,” he said, “were to leave Port City at once. For good. Only it didn’t work out that way. Mrs. Ferris rejected Stefan’s overtures, and Stefan must’ve lapsed into hysteria, or violence, or something, because the upshot was the larger Mrs. Ferris was flailing the smaller Stefan, at which point Stefan’s friend Davis, waiting outside, heard the commotion, stepped in and beat her to death. The two men then set the fire, using old rags and paint cans on the back porch for fuel.”

  “And then that left only Janet to take care of,” I said.

  Harold covered his face with one large hand, briefly, then looked at me; it’s funny how an eyepatch can seem to stare at you just like an eye can.

  “I feel… sick when I think of my role in this. I had so bought Stefan’s bill of goods, I so believed that Janet Taber was a ‘blackmailing bitch,’ so believed that her child was Taber’s, not the senator’s, that I went looking for her, the Tuesday morning after the fire. You see, I knew there’d been a fire, and her mother hospitalized, but I didn’t know the mother had been beaten. I knew only that there had been a fire, and, naively, I assumed it was accidental. A dangerous assumption, with Stefan around. And, to my discredit, I thought Janet’s distressed condition would only make her more impressionable, more easily swayed. And so, I staged that ridiculous show at the bus terminal. To scare her off, to scare her off for once and for all.”

  “So that wasn’t Stefan’s idea.”

  “That was my own doing; he knew nothing of it. In fact, we were working at cross purposes, but didn’t know it. Stefan had told me that Janet Taber’s only reaction to the death of her child was to say that if she was in any way denied what she felt she had coming to her, she would malign the late senator publicly and drag the Normans thoroughly through the mud. I felt Mr. Norman had been put through enough already and hoped to put a scare into her, to convince her to leave Port City and any claims on Mr. Norman behind.”

  “But it didn’t work.”

  “Thanks to you, Mallory. But do you realize if I’d been successful in scaring her off, she might still be alive? If she’d been fearful enough to grab a bus to points unknown instead of staying around? Do you realize that if you hadn’t gotten involved, she might not have died?”

  He was right. By trying to help, I’d hurt. In a weird, roundabout way, I’d done as much to contribute to the death of Janet Taber as anybody!

  Then Harold said, as if on some sort of automatic pilot, not wanting to hear the words he was speaking, “Janet Taber’s ‘accident’ was hastily planned, but came off smoothly enough. Davis met the young woman as she got off her bus in Iowa City, telling her he was a plainclothes officer there to escort her to the hospital to see her mother. Once he had her in the car, he chloroformed her and broke her neck and… maybe she did see her mother, after all; but not in this world.”

  His voice was so hushed I could barely hear him now.

  “The… accident… at Colorado Hill was staged in the hope Mr. Norman would assume his son’s ‘other wife’ had taken her life at the site of the death of her ‘husband’-her ‘suicide’ there might seem the ultimate expression of sorrow over the loss of the son she bore her ‘lost love.’”

  I felt weak, sick, dizzy; but somehow my brain kept up with all of it, and I heard myself saying, “So that’s the Colorado Hill connection, but that seems like such half-assed logic to me. And risky. Why connect Janet’s death to the senator’s? Just for the old man’s benefit? It’s crazy.”

  Harold shrugged. “Stefan knew how his uncle’s mind worked. Mr. Norman backed Stefan and hushed the two deaths up, all the way. If nothing else, Mr. Norman knew what kind of unpleasant memories stood to be unearthed by a full-scale investigation of Janet Taber’s death. So such an inquiry was to be avoided. Stefan knew what he was doing.”

  “The son of a bitch.”

  “I told you what kind of man he was,” Harold said. “A snake.”

  Harold stared out over the drop-off; I stared at Harold.

  “When did he tell you all this, Harold?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I went on: “Oh, but that’s obvious-it was right before you killed him.”

  Without turning to look at me, he said, flatly, “I didn’t say I killed him, Mallory.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  Harold turned his head, not his body, and smiled at me; it was a smile that had no humor in it, just secrets. Harold still had secrets.

  “Maybe I didn’t kill him, Mallory,” he said.

  And then Rita’s voice, sounding far away, called out to us.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Hey,” she yelled.

  She was coming across the brown grass, coming to meet us, and she was smiling and looking very pretty, very fresh, incongruously so against the image of the bleak gray house looming up back of her.

  We stood there awkwardly, Harold and I, like actors who couldn’t remember their lines, and waited for her to join us. She latched onto Harold by the hand and me the same and tugged at us, saying, “You two gonna come in and eat the breakfast you had me cook, or do you like your eggs cold?”

  So we turned and walked with her back across the lawn and into the house, turning left as we entered the living room and going through a doorless archway into the wing adjacent to Harold’s room. She deposited us in a breakfast nook, a cubbyhole stuck between the pantry and kitchen and filled by a wooden booth painted with once-vivid colors in a vaguely Scandinavian pattern. The colors in the kitchen area were the brightest in the house, with pale blue walls instead of cream, and with the dimmed reds and blues and yellows of the painted booth in the midst of it.

  I sat and stared across at Harold and the air was thick with things unsaid. There wasn’t any purpose in saying them, after all. I looked at Harold and Harold’s single solemn eye and his black patch looked back at me and we knew.

  I knew, Harold knew, that Stefan Norman had handled the Mallory proble
m in the same manner he’d handled the Renata Ferris problem, and that of Janet Taber as well: he’d dispatched Davis, that violent extension of himself, to do his work. Stefan had had no compunction about treating human lives like so many pieces on a chessboard: he was the chessmaster and I was just another pawn for him to send his queen out to get. And even if his queen fell, suicide was not Stefan’s style, not in his makeup.

  Harold knew all this. No need for me to tell him.

  Rita came in and put a plate down in front of each of us, scooched in next to me on my side of the booth. I looked down at the omelet and the hash browns and the toast and knew I would have trouble getting it down, knew also that I had to. “Oh damn,” Rita said, and got up and went back into the kitchen and came back with coffee and filled our cups.

  I poked around at the plate of food, and Harold did likewise, but between bites we exchanged looks, continued our silent conversation.

  Harold knew, as I do, as you do, that suicide says despair, that suicide means finality, and a man in despair doesn’t change the facts around “a little” in what amounts to a deathbed confession of murder, just to make himself look a shade less corrupt. He might make excuses, he might even lie to himself, he might rationalize; but shape a slightly different, slightly juggled, slightly edited, slightly more excusable explanation, before putting a gun to his head? Please.

  Neither would Stefan be likely to care about sparing old Sy Norman’s feelings.

  But Harold would.

  Harold had made no secret of his loyalty to Mr. Norman, and had expressed it in no less tangible and eccentric a manner than my first meeting with him when he tried, for the sake of his elderly employer, to scare Janet Taber out of town.

  But that was when he was under the mistaken impression that Janet was a “blackmailing bitch,” that was when he was still caught up in the various machinations of Stefan’s plotting. Somewhere recently along the line, Harold had seen through Stefan, Harold had stopped being conned by him and that intense loyalty for Mr. Norman, that fierce protective instinct for the old man who had done so much for him, was channeled into a concentrated effort by Harold to put a stop to Stefan Norman’s scheming.

  In my mind, I could see it: Harold stands beside Stefan, holding Stefan’s own gun over him, dictates the “suicide note”; Stefan sits at the desk, takes it all down, sweats as the black, one-eyed apparition hovers over him; the note is finished and Harold shoots Stefan; Stefan falls limp across the desk, like the inanimate object he has become.

  “More coffee?” Rita said.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Harold?”

  Harold nodded.

  I managed to finish the eggs and potatoes and toast and when I glanced over at Harold, he had done the same. Rita came back, poured refills on coffee, and joined us. Harold and I sipped at the cups, looking away from each other when approaching a stare.

  Rita was finally beginning to suspect something was wrong, because the silence hung heavy, like a tapestry pulling at its nails, and as the anxiety began to show on her face, I ventured with, “Fine breakfast, Rita, really fine,” and Harold said, “Yes, yes it is, it’s fine.”

  She smiled. “I guess I can understand you boys being so quiet. This whole affair has been a real drain on us all-physically and emotionally both. You wouldn’t believe how relieved I am it’s over.”

  “I am pretty tired,” I said.

  “You should be,” she said. “You been up practically all night.” She reached across the table and patted her brother’s pawlike hand and said, “How ’bout you, bro? You feeling it yet?”

  “I could use some sleep,” he said.

  “Did you get back to bed this morning after I called you?” she asked him. “You haven’t been up all this time, have you?”

  “I went back to bed,” he said.

  I said, “Rita, you called Harold? When?”

  “After you called me, when that guy… what was his name? The guy who broke in.”

  “Davis.”

  “Yeah, him. After you called me, when Davis was killed. I wanted to prove to old hardhead Harold here that you and I weren’t paranoid, that somebody was going ’round doing those things we told him about.” She smiled embarrassedly at her brother. “And frankly, Harold, I was relieved that you weren’t involved, ’cause Mal was entertaining thoughts you might be one of the bad guys. And you did seem mad at me for bringing him here to see you last night.”

  I said, “Say Rita, all of a sudden I’m really hungry. You got any more of those hash browns?”

  “Hungry? You serious, Mal? Hell, you just poked at your food.”

  “No, really, I’m just starting to wake up. I always get hungry when I start waking up. And those hash browns hit the spot.”

  “I could whip up some more, I guess.”

  “Would you, please?”

  She shrugged. “Okay. Harold, how about you?”

  Harold said, “Fine.”

  She rose from the booth and disappeared around the corner into the kitchen.

  I spoke softly, a near-whisper. I said, “You want to tell me… I think I know, but do you want to tell me?”

  Just as softly, Harold said, “If you know it, tell it, mystery writer.”

  “All right. All right. We’ll start in where Rita called you and told you how a guy named Davis busted into my trailer and ended up dead. That was the breaking point, am I right? When Stefan went so far as putting your own sister in danger?”

  Harold didn’t say anything. He was going to make me do it all.

  I said, “You probably already had your mind made up to have it out with Stefan, just from the things I’d told you about him. Things like his denying he knew Janet Taber, his denying even that he knew you. And then there was that business of Phil Taber being in town, five thousand bucks richer than before he came, last payment for services rendered to one Stefan Norman. This time Taber was getting paid off for seeing that Janet and her mom got shoved under the ground as soon as possible. But he’d been paid by Stefan Norman before.”

  Harold remained silent. He wasn’t going to give me any help at all.

  I said, “So what happened, after Rita called you? Did you try Stefan’s Davenport number and get no answer? And then did you try his office number here in town, and he was there, but waiting for a call? Did he answer the phone saying something like… ‘Davis, how did it go?’”

  Harold stirred.

  “And what then? Hell, why bother? We both know what happened after that.”

  “It wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t that way.”

  “Sure it was. You got Stefan’s gun out of his room here in the house. Then you went down to the Maxwell Building, went up to the Fund office and held Stefan at gunpoint and told him what to put in the note. Somebody had to have told Stefan about Davis’s death-I figured maybe Brennan or one of the local cops had. But it was you, Harold. You. You shot him.”

  “You know what the trouble with you is, Mallory?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “You don’t think. You put things together, but you don’t think. Did you read the note?”

  “You know I did.”

  “Did it sound like a suicide note?”

  “It sounded like a phony suicide note.”

  “Did it even sound like that? Did it even sound like a convincing fake?”

  I didn’t know what he was getting at and said so.

  He said, “It was a confession. I made him write a confession, can’t you see that? You can see the rest, why can’t you see that it wasn’t meant to be a suicide note, not when I had him write it.”

  “A confession.”

  “A confession. What I wanted from Stefan was a written statement of guilt, something I’d have to hang over him. The sword of Damocles, ever hear of that? I had to keep him in line. Make sure he didn’t go pulling any more stunts. Make sure he didn’t make miserable what little there is left of Mr. Norman’s life.”

  “But it wasn’t an
accurate confession….”

  “Of course not. I wanted a confession that would give Mr. Norman the least possible pain, but still would be damning to Stefan. Do you think I wanted Stefan’s suicide? Do you think Stefan’s suicide is the kind of thing I’d want to put Mr. Norman through?”

  “Stefan is dead, Harold.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “So something went wrong.”

  “You might say that.”

  “What? How?”

  “Once he got it written, I told Stefan what I planned to do with the note. I told him it was going to be sealed in an envelope and given to a lawyer, with instructions to open it either at my death or my request, whatever came first. After that, when Stefan knew that, that was when he got stupid.”

  “And tried to take the gun away from you.”

  “And tried to take the gun away from me.”

  “And, in the struggle…?”

  “In the struggle.”

  We sat and looked at each other.

  Then I said, “And you left the confession there, to make do as a suicide note?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I said. “So now I know.”

  Harold smiled on one side of his face. “So now you know it all. How’s it make you feel, mystery writer? All satisfied inside?”

  Rita came in and set down a dish of hash browns and said, “Here’s your seconds.”

  Before we finished eating, Rita went back out to the kitchen for some more coffee, and Harold said, “Mallory?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What I told you… you believe me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s no way Brennan’s going to figure it out, and even if he does, he’s not going to prove anything. Or want to. Not with Davis dead. Funny.”

  “What?”

  “Stefan wept when I told him Davis was dead. I didn’t know Stefan had it in him. But it must’ve made him a little bit suicidal at that.”

  I sipped my coffee.

  “Mallory?”