361

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “We’re looking for the people who killed Dad.”

  “For the cops?”

  He looked at me. “Jesus,” he said. He shook his head and looked away. “No,” he said. “Not for the cops.”

  “For us,” I said. “Why?”

  He looked at me level this time. “Because he was our father.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Seven

  We spent the evening in the room, with separate bottles of Old Mr. Boston. Johnson woke us on the phone at nine in the morning. I talked to him. He said, “Those plates are registered to a ’54 Buick. Stolen three months ago. Not the car, just the plates. Lots of Plymouths stolen. It’s a popular car.”

  I said, “Thanks. The retainer cover it?”

  “If that’s all you want,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Listen, Mr. Kelly, you don’t have to dislike me.”

  “I don’t dislike you.” I hung up and forgot him. I spent a few minutes with the phone directory and a pencil, and then we went out to eat.

  It was now McArdle, Krishman, Mellon & McArdle. It was a building on the east side of Fifth Avenue, just down a ways from the cathedral. Friday morning, the early tourists streamed north to look at the cathedral and the Plaza. We pushed across their path from the cab to the doors. The tourist ladies wore green cotton dresses. All the little boys had hats like Daddy’s. I gave mine up when I was twelve. It was a Sunday hat, for church. I never wore it in New York. Lots of people don’t take their kids to New York. It doesn’t mean anything.

  The elevator had chrome doors on the first floor. On the twenty-seventh, they were metal doors painted maroon. A clever sign-painter had fit the whole name of the law firm on the frosted glass of the door. We went in and I asked the girl for Mr. McArdle. “The first one,” I said. She acted snooty, like a whole dancing class at once. She gave us the second one.

  He was about forty, with a soft body and a pale round face. His eyes were wet behind black-armored spectacles. “Well, boys,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “We want McArdle number one.”

  “My father isn’t an active part of the firm any more.” He smiled, like a man selling laxative. “I assure you, I’m almost as good a lawyer as he.”

  He was playing us for teenagers. I said, “Sure. We’ll take Krishman. Samuel Krishman. Not a coat-tail relation.”

  He frowned, mouth and eyebrows both. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you—”

  “Tell him Willard Kelly,” I said.

  It didn’t mean anything to him. He looked down at the card on his desk. “You gave your first name as Raymond.”

  “That’s my father.”

  “Raymond is your father?”

  “You’re a goddamn imbecile, mister.” I pointed at the phone. “Pick it up and tell Samuel Krishman Willard Kelly’s son is here.”

  “I’ll do no such thing.”

  I went over and picked up the phone. He reached for it and I said, “Bill.” He looked at Bill, who was coming around the desk, and he sat back, paler than before. “You won’t get away with this,” he said. But he was gabbling. It was just a sentence you say when people push you around and get away with it.

  There was a row of buttons on the phone, under the dial. I pushed the one that said, “Local.” Nothing happened. I dialed zero. Still nothing happened. I dialed some other number, I don’t know what. A guy came on and I said, “What the hell is Samuel’s number? I can’t remember.”

  “Eight,” he said.

  I broke the connection and dialed eight. An old man came on. I said, “I’m Willard Kelly’s son. I’m not as dumb as Andrew McArdle’s son, but I’m stuck in his office.”

  There was a pause, and the dry old voice said, “What was that name?”

  “You heard it right. Willard Kelly.”

  “Is Lester there?”

  “McArdle two? Yes.”

  “Tell him to show you to my office.”

  “Tell him yourself. He won’t believe me.”

  I straight-armed Lester the phone. He took it like it had bitten him once. He listened and agreed and hung up and said to me, “You could have been more civil.”

  “Not to you.”

  He showed us down a corridor that was green on one wall, rust on the other. White ceiling, black linoleum. Pastel doors. The one at the end was tan and closed and didn’t say anything. He handed us to a girdled brunette with a plaster hairdo. She played electronically and let us in.

  When I was a kid I believed in a Business Pope. I thought there was a strict mercantile hierarchy, grocery stores and movie houses down near the bottom, factories and warehouses in the middle, Wall Street up near the top. And a Business Pope running the whole thing. I visualized the Business Pope as a shriveled ancient white-haired Pluto in a black leather chair. Black-capped chauffeur to the left, white-hipped nurse to the right. Every line on his face would record a decade of evil and cruelty and decay. I knew just what he would look like.

  That was Samuel Krishman. No chauffeur and no nurse. Black leather swivel chair. A mahogany desk of wood so warm it glowed. Maroon desk blotter. Two black telephones. Discreet papers, embarrassed to be white.

  He said, “Pardon me for not rising.” Five words he could say without thinking about them, while studying us. He waved a gnarled root of a hand at two maroon leather chairs. His cuff links were round, gold coins with Roman profiles.

  He looked at me. “You say you’re Willard Kelly’s son?”

  “We both are. That’s Willard Junior. I’m Raymond.”

  The pale eyes flicked to Bill and back to me. “You’re spokesman. You’re the one who spoke on the phone.” That was easy. I was looking at him, Bill was looking at me.

  I said, “My father used to work here.”

  He smiled. The perfect false teeth couldn’t have looked more out of place in a duck’s mouth. “Not here, precisely. Our offices were farther downtown then.”

  “He went to work for you in August of 1930.”

  “I suppose so. Approximately.”

  “He made the Times once, on the Morris Silber case. They did a profile.”

  The smile this time didn’t part the lips. It looked healthier. “I remember that. Willard was embarrassed. A shy young man. Unlike his son.” By him, Bill wasn’t even there.

  “He made the Times again,” I said. “Two months ago. You didn’t see it?”

  Thin eyebrows crawled on the rutted forehead. “Not that I recall. I didn’t notice it, perhaps.” The smile was open-mouthed again. “I read little beyond the obituary page these days.”

  I had the system now. When he showed his teeth the smile was phony. I said, “This wasn’t the obituary page, but it was the same thing. He was killed.”

  “Killed?”

  “Shot. In a moving car, by a moving car. I was with him.”

  “Ah. Did you recognize the attacker?”

  “I will.”

  “I see.” His hands crept up on the maroon blotter, crawled blindly together, clung. “That’s why you’re here,” he said. “You want vengeance.”

  “Second,” I said. “First, I want understanding. I was away for three years. Air Force. Germany. I just came back. No girl yet, no plans yet.” I jabbed a thumb at Bill. “He was out of it. Married, with a kid. All I had was home, and all that was was Dad. Twenty-three years and they left us alone. When I needed him most, they came in. Arrogant. Grinning.” I sat there. We were all quiet. I took my hands off the wooden chair-arms. The palms had the red lines of the wood. “I want to know why,” I said.

  “They killed my wife,” said Bill. It was a truculent apology for being there.

  Krishman sighed, and rubbed his face with one dry hand. He wasn’t the Business Pope, he was just an old man, afraid to retire because his friends died when they retired. “That was all so many years ago,” he said. “That’s behind us now. We don
’t have things like that any more.”

  “Anastasia,” I said. “The Victor Reisel blinding. Arnold Schuster, the twenty-two-year-old witness got killed in 1951.”

  “This firm,” he said, “hasn’t been involved for nearly twenty years. There were circumstances...”

  “McArdle number one?”

  He shook his head. He looked at me and smiled with closed lips. “Philip Lamarck,” he said. “His name came second, but he was the senior partner.”

  “He died in ’35.”

  “It takes a while to break free of connections like that.”

  “When did you break free?”

  “Shortly before the war. 1940, I suppose.”

  “Was Dad still working for you?”

  “He left us around then. Left the city, I believe.”

  “That was the year of the Eddie Kapp trial, wasn’t it?”

  “Eddie Kapp? Oh, yes, the income-tax trial. It’s been a very long time, you must understand...”

  “Is he out yet?”

  “Kapp? I have no idea. You think there’s a connection between him and your father’s death?”

  “When he was shot, Dad said his name. ‘Kapp,’ that’s all.”

  “Are you sure that’s what he meant?”

  “No. But it’s likely. Would McArdle know?”

  “Know what?”

  “If Kapp was out yet.”

  “I doubt it. You want to talk to him, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “I’ll call him. I’m sure he’ll talk to you. We all liked Willard very much. A brilliant legal mind, for such a young man. And a cheerful red-headed Irishman.” He nodded at Bill. “You look very much like him.” Back to me. “You take after Edith more. The fair hair, shape of your face.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “From what you’ve said, I take it your mother is dead.”

  “Died when I was two. In Binghamton.”

  “That’s where he went. He should have stayed in New York. His talents would be wasted anywhere else. Corporation law, but with fine courtroom presence.”

  “He did corporate work in Binghamton. Small-time. You say you’ve got a different class of client now?”

  “Yes. Since before the war. Shipping lines, food packagers. Industrial corporations almost exclusively.”

  “McArdle handled the Kapp income-tax case, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, I believe he did.”

  “Did my father have anything to do with that case?”

  “I should think so. He had the Kapp file.”

  “What?”

  “He was the one who normally handled all of Kapp’s legal affairs. You see, every regular continuous client has a file, kept by the man in this office who is his immediate contact and who does all or most of his legal work. The income-tax trial, of course, was something else again. Not that Willard Kelly couldn’t have handled it as well as anybody. But Kapp was an important client at the time. It was necessary to have one of the firm’s partners in charge of the case.”

  “Who were Dad’s other regular clients?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea.”

  “What about the files?”

  He shook his head. “Some files,” he said, “we retain for seven years, some for fifteen years, a few for twenty. We would have no files at all for that far back. Your father left us more than twenty years ago.”

  “If you had the same kind of client that you have now, would you have the files?”

  Closed-lips smile. “Most likely.”

  “What about Morris Silber?”

  “Is that the case when the Times wrote the profile?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. He was minor even then. I would have no idea where he is today or if he’s even still alive.”

  “But Dad had his file.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Can you think of anyone else?”

  Parted-lips smile, hands spread out, trembling a bit at the end of his sleeves. “It’s been so long.”

  “Sure. You said you’d call McArdle one.”

  “Of course.”

  He spent a few minutes on the phone. He called McArdle ‘Andrew,’ not Andy or anything like that. He didn’t say anything surprising. When he hung up he said, “Do you have a car?”

  Bill spoke for the second time. “Yes.”

  Krishman told him, “He lives out on the Island. Long Island. Beyond King’s Park, on the North Shore. He has an estate out there.” He gave Bill directions, route numbers and so on, and Bill nodded. Then we got up to leave. I thanked him for his answers, he congratulated Dad on producing such fine boys.

  At the door, I turned and said, “Up till 1940, when you made the changeover, about how many professional criminals did you help evade the law?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “More than a hundred?”

  Closed-lips smile. “Oh, yes. Far more.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of the retribution of justice?”

  “At this late date? Hardly.”

  “You will never be punished by the law.”

  “Never. I’m sure of it.”

  “And you obviously haven’t lost your money or your social standing. Do you have ulcers, or anything like that?”

  “No. I’m perfectly healthy. My doctor says I’ll live past ninety. Do you have a point to make?”

  “Yes. To my brother, not to you. He needs an education. He still believes in good guys and bad guys. That they’re born that way and stay that way. And that good guys always win and bad guys always lose.”

  Closed-lips smile. “A great number of people believe that. It’s comforting to them.”

  I said, “Until the guns come out.”

  Eight

  It was forty miles out to McArdle’s place. We took the Triborough Bridge and the Expressway. For the first ten or fifteen miles it was all city, slit open by the Expressway. After Floral Park and Mineola it got more suburb. Every once in a while, there was a glimpse of Long Island Sound off to our left. But it still didn’t seem any more like an island than Manhattan did.

  The last mile and a half was private road, blacktop. McArdle shared it with two other millionaires, and his place was last of the three, where the road made a hangman’s knot. There was a birdbath inside the loop, and a Negro with a power mower. The house was clapboard and brick and masonry. Windows enclosed the porch.

  When we got out of the car, the Negro stopped and wiped his face with a white handkerchief. His hat was gray and he held it in his left hand, then put it back on his head. He kept the power mower running, and it sounded loud but far away, the way they do. He never quite looked at us, and he never quite looked away.

  We went up the stoop and tried the screen door. It was locked and there wasn’t any bell. I rattled the door and shouted. A guy in a white jacket came out, carrying a towel. He looked at us through the screen.

  “Kelly,” I said. “We’re expected.”

  He pointed to his right. “Down at the dock,” he said. He went back inside.

  The house was backed against a half-moon of forest. A brown path led in among the trees to the left of the house, going gradually downhill. We went down it. Behind us, the Negro put his handkerchief away and went back to work.

  A voice droned ahead. The path wound downhill. Through the trees, there were blue glimpses of the Sound.

  We came out on a narrow strip of shade-mottled lawn. At the lower end, a swath of smooth pebbles led down into the water. A little blond girl in a ruffled bathing suit stood half-bent in the shallows, filling her green pail with water.

  The lawn was flanked by brush and trees, down the sides and overhanging the water’s edge. To the right, an unpainted dock jutted out atilt into the water. A white motorboat nodded beside it. A boy and girl of about twenty were on and off a float a ways away. Four people sat in white-fence lawn chairs to the right, three of them watching the little girl.

  The woman of about twenty-seven, wi
th the white bathing suit and the ash-blond hair and the vertical frown lines between her brows, would be the mother of the little girl and the sister of one or both of the people out on the float. The nondescript middle-aged heavy couple in city clothes would be her parents, he the brother of the McArdle I’d met at the law office, this one older and tougher and not a lawyer. The gross ancient bald man wearing young man’s sports clothes would be Andrew McArdle.

  I stopped and looked at him. The short-sleeved white shirt showed flabby blue-veined white-skinned arms, the muscles so little able to bear weight that the upper slopes of the arms were only skin over narrow frail bone, the fat all hanging in long bags of skin underneath. The shirt was open at the throat, showing gray flesh writhing over a convulsive Adam’s apple. There was no chest. The shirt sagged down to a gross belly. Tan slacks covered the stick legs beneath, and the feet were bare, looking like frozen plaster molds.

  His head sagged back, his mouth hung open, the thin-veined lids were stretched over his eyes. The sound of his breathing was very loud.

  The voice I’d heard had been the middle-aged man. He stopped and looked at us. The women turned their heads and looked, and then the ash-blonde watched the little girl again. The boy and girl on the float stood still, arms at their sides, gazing in at us. The little girl ignored us. She laughed suddenly and splashed herself with water.

  The ancient man gulped and rolled his head around and opened his eyes. He stared at Bill. “Willard.” His voice was a croak that had once been a ringing bass.

  I came across the lawn, Bill trailing me. “Mr. Krish -man called you,” I said.

  The present slowly came into his eyes. He looked at me. “Yes. Arthur, go up to the house. All of you, up to the house.”

  The middle-aged woman smiled like a beautician. “You shouldn’t exert yourself, Papa.” She got up and crouched over him, hoping everyone would think she was solicitous. She was afraid to strangle him. “Don’t you talk too long, now,” she said.

  Arthur said to her, “Come on.”

  The ash-blonde called to the little girl, “Linda. Come here.”

  She came out of the water, carrying the green pail. She stopped in front of me, serious, squinting up at me with sun in her eyes. “Why do you limp?”