The Price of Murder

by John D. MacDonald

  He could have been an aggressive and seldom successful door to door salesman. Or the man who always stands in the neighborhood bar, propounding noxious and illogical argument. But the warning bells of Lee’s childhood were still efficient. He concealed his irritation and said evenly, “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Bronson?” Lee nodded. The man took out a wallet, flipped it open and held it out. “Keefler. Parole officer.”

  He sat in the other wicker chair without invitation, sighed, shoved his hat back another half inch and said, “Every day they say relief in sight. Last heat wave of the year will end. It gets hotter.”

  “Is this about Dan?”

  Keefler looked at him with a hard, lazy tolerance that had an undertone of cynical amusement. “So who else? Is there more than one ex-con in the family? Maybe I’m missing something.”

  “I thought a man named Richardson was …”

  “Rich used to have him. Now he’s mine. It’s like this, Bronson. I was a cop up to four months ago when they took off my hand. A young punk snuck his brother’s army .45 out of the house and tried to stick up a market, and lucky Keefler came along and took one right in the wrist and got it smashed too bad to save. Maybe you read about it.”

  “I think I remember it. You killed the boy, didn’t you?”

  “And I got a citation and a new job with the parole people and a dummy hand. Because I was a cop they’ve given me the rough cases. So now I’ve got your brother Danny. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “I’ll have to think back, Mr. Keefler. He came here after he was paroled. That was last May. And I think two other times. The last time was in July. I can tell you the exact date. The twenty-fifth.”

  “How come you happen to remember the exact day?”

  “I remember it because it was the day after my birthday. He brought me a present.”

  “What kind of a present? Expensive?”

  “A leather desk set with pen and pencil and clock calendar.”

  “Let’s have a look at it.”

  “It’s at school, in my office.”

  “What do you think it would cost?”

  “About thirty dollars, I’d guess.”

  “What did he have to say about how he was doing?”

  “He didn’t say much. Maybe I could be more help to you if you’d tell me what you’re after.”

  Keefler plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket, bent a match over in a folder of book matches and lit it with one hand. “Like that? Nurse in the hospital showed me how you do it.”

  “Pretty good.”

  “I can hold matches in this artificial hand. See? But its slower. Let’s get back to Danny. You’d cover for him, wouldn’t you?”

  Lee looked at Bronson’s lazy, wise half smile. “Would it make any difference how I answered that?”

  “It might.”

  “I can’t prove I wouldn’t. I might run into a situation where I would. But I wouldn’t put myself in the bag, Mr. Keefler, unless there was a good reason. You’ve talked to Mr. Richardson.”

  “He filled me in. He likes those big words. All the social workers know those big words. You and Danny and I all came from the Sink. We know the rules down there. We don’t need the big social worker words, do we?”

  The Sink was the name given to thirty city blocks in Hancock. Long ago Brookton had been a separate community, a farming community outside Hancock. But the big sprawl of the lake-side city had reached out and surrounded Brookton. The Sink was the oldest part of Hancock, built when Hancock had been a small, lusty, violent lake port. The derivation of the name had been forgotten. The thirty blocks were down in the flats between the old docks and warehouses and the railroad yards. It had always been the spawning bed for Hancock’s impressive output of criminals. Slum clearance projects had removed all but a narrow fringe of the original Sink.

  “It wasn’t an easy place to grow up,” Lee said.

  Keefler nodded. “There was just the two of you, wasn’t there?”

  “Danny and me. He’s three years older. My father was half owner of a tug. He died before I was a year old.”

  Keefler grinned. “He was dead drunk and he fell between the dock and an ore freighter. He was thirty-nine and your mother was twenty-three at the time. Her maiden name was Elvita Sharon and her folks ran a hunting lodge in northern Wisconsin and your father met her there on a hunting trip and ran off with her. After Jerry Bronson died, she married Rudy Fernandez. Bronson hadn’t left her a dime. Rudy was a dock worker. He was a trouble maker. A little while after they were married, Rudy was beat half to death. That’s when you moved into the Sink. When he got back on his feet, and tried to make more trouble, they killed him. It’s still on the books. Then she hooked up with a slob named Cowley, and there isn’t any record of any marriage on the books. When you were twelve and Danny was fifteen, Cowley died of a heart attack. The three of you lived in a cold-water flat at 1214 River Street, on the third floor. Elvita was a part-time waitress and a full-time lush. Both you kids were bringing money home, just enough so you could keep going.”

  Lee looked down at his right hand and closed it slowly into a fist. “You seem to have the whole story, Keefler.”

  “Right out of those social worker files, boy. They have to know why a guy like Danny can’t … adjust to reality. But it seemed pretty real down there, didn’t it? Danny quit school at sixteen and went to work for Nick Bouchard. By the time he was nineteen he was bringing enough home so Elvita didn’t have to work at all. I was watching him then. He was a wise punk. I could have told all the social workers how he’d come out.”

  “He was the oldest. He thought he had to …”

  “He went where the fast money was. Right to Nick, the big boss man.” Keefler chuckled. “Nick took good care of the Bronson boys.”

  “Not me. I wasn’t any part of it.”

  Keefler’s eyes went round with surprise. “No? You were being the hotshot highschool athlete. I thought that when Danny took his first fall, that two and a half years he did for auto theft, Nick sent money to you every week.”

  “He did. But it wasn’t like that. It was part of the agreement he had with Danny. It had nothing to do with me. I talked to Nick. He … he wanted me to get out of the Sink.”

  “He helped you out of some trouble, didn’t he? You’re on the books, boy. Assault. And the charge was dismissed, and it was Nick’s lawyers who took care of you.”

  “There wasn’t any assault, Mr. Keefler. I was working in a wholesale grocery warehouse nights. I got picked up when I was walking home. I’d barked my knuckles on a packing case. They were looking for some men who’d broken up a bar and grill.”

  “Now that sounds reasonable,” Keefler said softly.

  Lee looked sharply at him. Keefler looked sleepy and contented and amiable.

  “Nick Bouchard wasn’t all bad,” Lee said.

  “Hell, no. He helped you go through college, didn’t he? So he couldn’t be such a bad guy.”

  “The way you say it, it doesn’t sound right, Mr. Keefler. I had a football scholarship. Danny used to send me money. Nick used to send some too, a twenty or a fifty, with a note telling me to live it up. I guess I was … a hobby with Nick. I played good ball the first two years. Then after my eyes went bad and they shifted me to guard, my leg went bad.”

  “You say I put things the wrong way. So tell me what happened to your mother. Tell it your way.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Come on, boy. Put it in your words. You’ve got the education.”

  “It … happened in my sophomore year. In December, Danny had moved her out of the Sink the previous spring. She … went back to the Sink to look up old friends. It was a cold night. She started drinking and she passed out in an alley, and by the time she was found it was too late. I came back for the funeral.”

  Keefler nodded. “That’s just about the way it looks on the records, kid. And then the next year Nick got too big for his pa
nts and tried to fight the syndicate so they cut him down and made it look like suicide, and a man named Kennedy came in and took over the boss job. He figured Danny had been too loyal to Nick, so Danny took his second fall.”

  “For something he didn’t do.”

  “He just got elected for it. Think of the things he did do, kid.” Keefler dropped his cigarette on the porch floor and rubbed it out with the sole of a black shoe. “Both the Bronson boys would have made out better if Nick had been smart enough to stay in the saddle.”

  “I don’t see how it made any difference to me.”

  “Oh, sure. He wanted to help you get out of the Sink. Until you got a college education.”

  “It hurt Danny. I’ll admit that. But when I graduated, I wasn’t a football bum looking for a job with Nick or anybody like him. I graduated with good marks.”

  “I know, I know,” Keefler said wearily. “And you got yourself wounded and decorated in Korea and you came back and went to Columbia Graduate School on the G.I. Bill. I’m talking about what you would have done.”

  But Lee knew he had done what seemed inevitable. After hospital time in Japan, he was sent back on a hospital ship, was completely ambulatory by the time they docked at San Francisco. His request for discharge at Dix was granted. He enrolled in Columbia Graduate School, carried the heaviest work load they would give him, and earned his Master’s.

  By then he had destroyed the short stories and the notes for the novel. He had over seventy pages done on an entirely different novel. He had three hundred dollars. The placement agency had come up with the instructor-ship at Brookton Junior College. He went out for an interview and signed a contract. During that summer he worked on a road job to get back in shape. After the first week of exhaustion he began to adjust to the labor, and began work again on the book. The construction company was working on a stretch of new divided highway in southern Michigan where rooms were hard to find. He found a room in the farmhouse of a couple named Detterich. They had three young sons on the farm and an older daughter working in an insurance office in Battle Creek. The daughter came home to the farm for her vacation—the last two weeks of August. Her name was Lucille. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

  The following December, after half a dozen trips in the ancient Plymouth he had purchased in order to be able to drive down to Battle Creek, and after he had been with his new job long enough to know that he liked it and could do it well, and after he had received the advance on his book of two hundred and fifty dollars, he married her in the parlor of the Detterich farmhouse on the second day of the Christmas vacation. They honeymooned in New Orleans, an unexpected honeymoon made possible by Danny’s wedding gift of five crackling new hundred dollar bills, wrapped in a sheet of hotel stationery on which he had scrawled, Have a ball, kids. Danny had been out for a year and a half. He was back in Hancock, and he seemed to be doing very well indeed.

  Lee Bronson was twenty-six. He had work he liked. The pay was low, but the acceptance of the book took the sting out of that. There would be more books, and there would come a day when he could either go on teaching or give it up, as he chose. He had a bride men turned in the street to stare at. The world was a fine place, that December.

  Danny lost again the following March, the same month they found the house on Arcadia Street and moved out of the dingy furnished apartment. Lee went down to see him, before he was sentenced. Danny was a little heavier. He was a week away from being thirty. He was very depressed, and he marveled bitterly at his bad fortune.

  “Twice before I got picked up, Lee, and neither damn time had I done what I got sent up for. This time it’s worse, almost. Now, get this: I’m way uptown, at Sonny’s. I’m at the bar, a little loaded, but minding my own business. It’s four in the afternoon. Day before yesterday. I got a date in the bar. She’s coming in to meet me at five. The bar is empty except for a couple down the bar. They’re having a fight. I’m paying no attention. I’m just there drinking my drink, damn it. The woman isn’t bad looking, not bad at all. They’re both drinking and barking at each other. All of a sudden she comes down, takes the stool next to me, grabs my arm and says I should buy her a drink. It’s nothing to me. So I do. You know that’s a nice place. A good trade. No trouble. He comes down. She won’t look at him or talk to him. He’s a big joker. My size. Maybe fifteen years older. He starts grabbing at her. Rough like, I tell him to take it easy. The bartender tells him. But no. The big shot has to grab me by the shoulder, spin me around and swing. I ducked my head and he hit me right on top of the head. It hurt. I was drinking. I wasn’t so lucky it left a mark where he hit. It’s still a little sore, but no mark. Enough is enough. I rush him right back into a corner, fast. Wham, wham, wham. Maybe I hit him four five times, every one right down the alley. I had to hold him up for the last one. Nothing dirty. No knee. Nothing. Like a gentleman I did it, every one on the mouth and he bleeds all over the place. I let him drop, got my hat off the stool next to mine and left a buck tip out of my change and took off. They don’t know me so good there. But you see, I got this date I got to come back for. I come back and I’m grabbed. I think it’s like a joke. No joke, kid. Assault. The big guy’s name is Fitch. He’s big news. A banker from Detroit and he stops there when he’s in town. The bitch he was fighting with is his wife. He once upon a time loaned Sonny some money, I hear. So it goes down like this, and this is what the three of them say, the only witnesses. I come in loaded. I make a pass at his wife. He objects. The bartender tells me to leave. So I beat up on the banker and walk out. Busted his jaw, not too bad, and ruined a lot of expensive dentist work. I give Kennedy the picture. No dice. It’s too hot. Maybe I’m not worth the trouble. So here I go again. Jesus, Lee!”

  And he went again. He was given a one to ten, that curious sentence that means a man is eligible for parole after one year but, in the discretion of the warden and the parole board, can be kept for the full ten.

  Daniel Bronson served two and a half years, less one month. He came to see Lee when he was released. He was a silent and sour man. He had found a job, prior to release, with a trucking firm, the owner of which, having done time in his youth, was willing to hire ex-convicts and men on parole. Lee had asked him if it was a blind, a myth for the parole people as other jobs had been the other times he had been released.

  “No. I’ve been a sucker long enough, kid.”

  “Going straight?”

  Danny’s smile was slow and savage. “This late? I’ve lived very well. I can’t adjust at this late date to a beer and beans existence.”

  Lee remembered his surprise at the choice of words and the careful diction, and he remembered that Danny noticed his surprise. Still smiling, he had said, “Don’t be a snob, little brother. I’ve always been smart enough, I think. I learned to handle myself right, and I learned to wear the right clothes. I was fine until I opened my stupid mouth. So this time I didn’t waste my time up there in Alton. I haven’t got your fancy degrees, kid, but from now on it’s going to be harder for people to figure me out. I finished high school English requirements. I read books, kid. Maybe a hundred books.”

  “I still don’t know what you have in mind.”

  “Neither do I. Yet. But I’m not going to play horse for Kennedy. Sooner or later I’d take the fourth fall and get tagged an habitual. Seven and a half years out of thirty-two on the inside. I’m going to find an angle, sooner or later. I’m going to look and I’m going to find one, and until I do I’ll wheel a rig for Grunwalt, draw my pay, and tell Kennedy to shove it if he tries to hook me back in. The organization never gave me anything but a bad time. I want a solo kick.”

  That had been in May. The next time he had stopped by had been in June, and he was still working for Grunwalt. But the last time Lee had seen him, in late July, Danny’s situation had obviously changed. He had been driving a late model sedan, a medium-priced car, gray and inconspicuous. He had been wearing a rayon cord suit, a narrow maroon knit tie, a button-down collar. Lee had j
ust come back from teaching a summer session class when Danny had come striding up the walk, gift-wrapped box under his arm. He had thought at the time that if you didn’t know Danny’s history you could easily take him for a successful youngish man of the salesman type. He was a bit shorter than Lee, and broader, with heavier bones. His hair, paler than Lee’s, was a dark blond, with a tight kinky wave.

  Up close, the illusion suffered. There were the small scars, and the bright, cold, predatory eyes, and the restless, reckless flavor of all the bad ones. Lee, worried about what he might be up to, had tried to question him. Though Danny fended off the questions with smiling ease, Lee caught an impression that surprised him. Whatever Danny was doing, he was slightly shamefaced about it, as though it did not fit his own picture of himself.

  And whatever Danny was doing—it had brought Keefler here on this hot afternoon. Keefler seemed sleepy and reasonable. But too anxious to lump Lee with Danny.

  “Look, Mr. Keefler. Danny went in the wrong direction. He started early. Maybe it’s too late for anything to be done. I don’t know. But I didn’t go in that direction, and you didn’t go in that direction. We got out of the Sink.”

  Keefler raised one eyebrow. “We?”

  “You and me, Mr. Keefler.”

  “Let me get this.” He pointed at Lee’s chest and then his own. “You want to put us in the same bundle. But it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I come up by myself. You got your way bought for you. With stinking money from a hood brother and stinking money from a big mobster. You want to lump yourself with somebody, you fit with Danny, not with me.”

  In the moment of shock before anger came, Lee felt astonished at the sudden bitterness and the unreasoning anger of the man. When Lee’s anger was complete, he did not let it change his voice or his expression. “I was under the ridiculous impression that we were reminiscing, Mr. Keefler. You are sitting on my porch in a chair I bought, dropping ashes on a porch I painted. You are a parole officer. I am an instructor at a state educational institution. I’ve tried to be pleasant to you for Danny’s sake. If you have questions, ask them. But from now on, watch your mouth and your manners.”