361

by Donald E. Westlake

  Bill wanted to go to another movie that night, but I couldn’t take it. So we sat around the room and drank and after a while I threw a gin hand out the window. A little after midnight, we went down to 42nd Street and saw an important movie that had been made from a Broadway play called A Sound of Distant Drums. It was about homosexuality and what a burden it was, but the hero bore the burden girlfully. It didn’t convert me.

  Wednesday we checked out of the hotel. We also went down and checked out of the Amington. We figured they were looking for us somewhere else by now, so we didn’t sneak around. Nobody noticed us particularly. Then we took the tube to Jersey City and got the car and drove up to Plattsburg. I rode in the back seat because I still couldn’t face highway driving in the right front. Sitting back there, I read the papers we’d bought in the city. The Post had an article about Eddie Kapp getting out of prison tomorrow. They were unhappy about it, and wanted to know if Eddie Kapp had really paid his debt to society. There was a blurred photo of him twenty-five years ago. No other paper referred to him at all.

  In Plattsburg, we checked into a hotel on Margaret Street. Bill was bushed, he’d driven three hundred and thirty miles in eight hours. I went out alone and found a bar and traded war stories with a guy who’d been stationed in Japan. If he was telling the truth, he had a better time in Japan than I did in Germany. If I was telling the truth, so did I.

  In the morning, we checked out again and drove the fifteen miles to Dannemora.

  Dannemora is a little town. In most of it, you wouldn’t know there was a penitentiary around at all. The town doesn’t look dirty enough, or mean enough. But the penitentiary’s there, a high long wall next to the sidewalk along the street. The sidewalk’s cracked and frost-heaved over there. On the other side, it’s cleaner and there’s half a dozen bars with neon signs that say Budweiser and Genesee. National and local beers on tap. Bill had Budweiser and I had Genesee. It tasted like beer.

  The bar was dark, but it was done in light wood lightly varnished and it was wider than it should have been for its depth. You got the feeling the bar wasn’t dark at all really, you were just slowly going blind. The bartender was a short wide man with a black mustache. There were two other customers, in red-and-black hunting jackets and high leather boots. They were local citizens, and they were drinking bar scotch with Canada Dry ginger ale.

  The Post had said Eddie Kapp would be a free man at noon, but we didn’t know for sure. We got to town shortly before ten and sat on high stools in this bar where we could see the metal door in the wall across the way. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Eddie Kapp. The picture in the Post was blurred and twenty-five years old. But he was sixty-one years of age. And how many people would be getting out all in one day?

  We sat there and nursed our beers. I wore my shirt-tail out, and when I sat leaning forward with my elbows on the bar, the butt of Smitty’s gun stuck into my lowest rib. Bill had the same problem with the Luger.

  At eleven-thirty a tan-and-cream Chrysler slid to the curb in front of the bar. Bill looked at it and turned to me and said, “Is that them? Is that the ones who killed Dad?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was looking at the guy in the right front seat. I knew him when.

  I started to get down from the stool, flipping the shirt-tail out of the way, but Bill grabbed my elbow and whispered, “Don’t be a jerk. Wait till Kapp comes out.”

  I stood there, not moving one way or the other. The gun butt felt funny in my hand. The side that had been against my skin was hot and moist. The other side was cold and dry.

  Then I said, “All right. You’re right.” He let me go and I said, “I’ll be right back.” I let go of the gun and smoothed the shirt-tail and walked down the length of the bar past the other two customers, who were talking to the bartender about trout. I went into the head. There was one stall. I went in there and latched the door and took the gun out from under my belt so I could lean over. Then I threw up in the toilet. I washed my mouth out at the sink and got back to the stall just in time to throw up again. I waited a minute, and then washed my mouth out again. There was a bubbled dirty mirror over the sink and I saw myself in it. I looked pale and young and unready. The gun barrel was cold against my hairless belly. I was a son of a bitch and a bad son.

  I went back out and sat down at the stool and held my glass without drinking. Bill said, “Nothing new.” I didn’t answer him.

  After a while, I got fantastically hungry, all of a sudden. I waited, but a little before one I asked the bartender what sandwiches he had and he said he had a machine that made hamburgers in thirty seconds. I ordered two and Bill ordered one. The machine was down at the other end of the bar, a chrome-sided infra-red cooker.

  I was halfway through the second hamburger when the door across the street opened and an old man without a hat came out.

  His suit, even from across the street, looked expensive and up to the minute. It hadn’t been given him by the government. It was gray and flattering. His shoes were black and caught the sunlight. His hair was a very pale gray, not quite white. None of it had fallen out. His face was tough to see from this far away; squarish and thick-browed, that was about all.

  As soon as he came out, I spat my mouthful of hamburger onto the plate and got off the stool. Bill said, “Wait till he reaches the car.”

  I said, “Yeah, sure.”

  I walked over by the door. Only Kapp wasn’t coming toward the car, he was turning and walking in the other direction. His shadow trailed him aslant along the wall.

  He had to be Eddie Kapp. Age and timing. Expensive suit.

  The Chrysler slid forward, staying close to the curb. It purred down the block, moving at the same rate as Kapp, keeping behind him. He didn’t look around at it. Apparently, he hadn’t seen it.

  Bill said, “What the hell is that all about?”

  I said, “Go get the car. Stay at least a block behind me.”

  He shook his head, baffled. “Okay,” he said, and went out to the car. The bartender and the other two customers were looking at me. I went out onto the sidewalk and strolled along after the Chrysler.

  We went three blocks that way, like some stupid parade. Kapp out in front, on the left-hand side of the street. Then the Chrysler, on the right side, half a block behind him. Then me, also on the right side, another half a block back. And then Bill, a full block behind me on this side, in the Mercury. Kapp was headed for the bus depot, from the direction he was taking. Downtown, anyway.

  Then we got to a quiet block, and the Chrysler jolted ahead, angling sharp across the empty street, and it was clear they meant to run him down. I shouted, “Look out!” and ran out across the street after the Chrysler. The goddamn ankle slowed me down.

  Kapp turned when I shouted, saw the Chrysler jumping the curb at him, and dove backwards through a hedge onto a lawn. A dog started yapping. The Chrysler jounced around on a parabola back to the street, up and down the curb. The guy on the right had his head and arm out the window, and was shooting at me, the way he’d shot at Dad. He had a little mustache.

  I dragged Smitty’s gun out and pointed it down the street and pulled the trigger six times. The guy’s head slumped down, and his arm hung down beside the door. The Chrysler made a tight hard right turn, and the guy hanging out the window flapped the way live people don’t.

  I stood in the middle of the street and grinned. When I was four days in Germany, two guys took me to a Kaiserslautern whorehouse in Amiland, and I was afraid to admit I was virgin and afraid I’d be too afraid to do anything about it. The whore had been so damn indifferent I’d got mad and jumped her trying to attract her attention. I did, and she had an orgasm. She hadn’t with the other two. Going back to the base, I broke a bus window for the hell of it. I felt the same way now, standing in the middle of the street and grinning, while the Chrysler took a lump of clay around the corner and out of sight.

  The Mercury pulled up beside me, and Kapp came struggling back through the hedge. I could hear
the dog going nuts. Kapp looked shaky and wobbly. He’d made a great dive for sixty-one, but now he was acting his age. His left trouser leg was ripped at the knee.

  I stopped grinning and opened the back door of the Mercury. I threw the empty gun in there and went over and took Kapp’s arm and brought him to the Mercury and shoved him inside. He acted dazed, and didn’t fight back or ask questions. I got in after him, and slammed the door. A black-haired woman in a flowered apron came to a break in the hedge and looked at us. Bill tromped the accelerator and we rode away from Dannemora.

  Sixteen

  Kapp recovered pretty fast. He pulled Smitty’s gun out from under him and looked at it, and then turned to me. “That was lousy shooting. It took you four shots to find him and then you threw two bullets away.”

  “I’ve only got one eye,” I said. “I have trouble with distance judgment.”

  “Oh. In that case, it was all right.” He looked at the back of Bill’s thick neck. “If this is a heist,” he said, “you two are crazy. Nobody wants me back money bad.”

  “We just want to ask you one or two questions,” I said.

  He looked at me again, and grinned. He had white false teeth. They looked better on him than the ones Krishman had worn. “Were you alive when I went in there, boy?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re just lucky you’ve lived this long.” He hefted the gun, holding it by the barrel. “What if I were to break your head in with this? What’s your partner going to do?”

  I looked into his grin and said, “We’re not playing.”

  He studied me a while, and then he looked sad and dropped the gun onto the floor between our feet. “I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m ready to retire.” He sat back, showing me his profile, gazing up at the ceiling and trying to look sick. “That hard violent world,” he said, “that’s all behind me now.”

  “Not all,” I said.

  He quit joking. He turned to me and he kept his lips flat and his voice flat. “Ask your questions,” he said, “and go to hell.”

  I said, “Why was Willard Kelly killed?”

  He looked surprised, worried, wary, blank, one right after the other. He said, “Who the hell is Willard Kelly?”

  I reached down and picked the gun up and tapped the butt against his knee. “I hear old men’s bones are brittle,” I said.

  “Naw. I’ve got a geriatric formula. I take a spoonful of chancre pus twice a day. It’s a new thing on the market for senior citizens.”

  “They let you read magazines. That’s fine, but I’m not playing. How’s your kneecap?” I tapped him again with the gun-butt, and he didn’t manage to hide the wince. I said, “Why was Willard Kelly killed?”

  “He had B.O.”

  I tapped him again. He put his hand down over his knee. His hand was older than his face; it had blue veins ropy against the skin. I tapped the back of his hand, and he said “Uh,” and took the hand away and held it tight against his chest. I tapped his knee. He said, “Go on and break it, you clumsy bastard. I could use a good faint around now.”

  “You won’t faint.” I tapped him again. His face was paler, and there were strain lines around his eyes and mouth. I said, “Why was Willard Kelly killed?”

  He turned his head away and glared out the window. I tapped him again.

  He didn’t faint. Bill bypassed Plattsburg. A few miles south he took a turnoff that promised cabins by the lake. Lake Champlain. Another sign said, “Closed after Labor Day.” It was after Labor Day.

  There were white cabins with red trim, somewhat faded, fronted by a strip of blacktop. There was no one there, but previous poachers had left their rubber spoor on the blacktop.

  Kapp didn’t want to get out of the car. Bill came around and pulled him out by the hair and shoved him down between the cabins. He favored the left leg. We stood him up against the white clapboard back wall of a cabin. Trees screened us from the lake. Bill looked at Kapp and then at me and told me, “Remember McArdle.”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”

  Kapp said, “McArdle?”

  “Andrew McArdle,” I said. “I asked him some questions, but he had a bad heart and died before he could answer them. Bill was telling me to be more careful with you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  We stood and waited for him to think. He stood slanted against the wall holding his injured hand. The expensive suit looked bad. He was having trouble with the left leg, and the back of his left hand was swelling and turning gray. He had more lines on his face. He was tired and worried and futile. He was being brave when it didn’t matter, and he knew it didn’t matter, but he didn’t know how to stop.

  He tried to talk, and he had to take time out to clear phlegm out of his throat and spit it carefully away from us. Then he said, “I can’t figure you two. Those other guys, I know who they were. I can guess, I mean. But not you two. Amateurs, asking the wrong questions...” He shook his head. “Where’d you get so mean?”

  “What’s a right question?” I asked him.

  He looked up through branches at the sky. “I was a free man again a little while,” he said.

  I said, “Bill, if he doesn’t open his mouth right now I’m going to kill him and to hell with it. We’ll go back to the city and go by way of the little islands.”

  Bill frowned. “I don’t like it, Ray,” he said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  I said, “Here, take this gun up to the car and reload it. Better give me the Luger for while you’re gone.”

  All of a sudden, Kapp laughed. He laughed like a man who’s just heard a good joke at a clambake. We looked at him, and he pointed at Bill and cried, “You silly bastard, you’re Will Kelly! You’re Junior, you’re his son!”

  We just looked at him. He pushed himself out from the wall and limped toward us, grinning. “Why the hell didn’t you say you were Will’s goddamn kid? I couldn’t place you, I couldn’t figure you anywhere at all.”

  I said, “Stop. Hold up the reunion a second. There’s still the question.”

  He looked at me, and his grin calmed down. “All right,” he said. This time, he acted like he was at the clambake and it was his turn to tell a joke and he had a whopper saved up. “I didn’t know Will’d been killed,” he said. “But I know why. It was because he was holding something for me. Until I got out of jail. He was supposed to hold it and stay out of the city until I was sprung. He was killed because he was holding it and because I was going to be getting out.”

  “What was it he was holding?”

  He nodded. “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “You look more like your mother than your father,” he said.

  Then I got it. “You’re a lying son of a bitch,” I said.

  “You look a lot more like her. I know. I see your father in the mirror every morning.”

  I laughed at him. “You’re crazy, or you think we are. Or are you just wisecracking again?”

  “It’s true,” he said.

  Bill said, “What the hell’s going on?”

  I said to Kapp, “He didn’t get it yet. When he does, he’ll take you apart. You better say fast you were lying.”

  “I wasn’t lying.”

  “It was the wrong ploy,” I insisted. “Bill has a big thing about honor.”

  Kapp said, “We ought to sit down over a bottle of imported and talk. We’ve got a lot to fill in, the both of us.”

  Bill said, “Goddamn it, for the last time, what’s going on?”

  “Kapp says we’re half-brothers. We shared a mother, only Willard Kelly wasn’t my father.”

  Bill’s eyebrows came down. “Who does he say is your father?”

  “If he’s smart, he’ll change his story.”

  “I say it’s me,” said Kapp, “and it’s true.” He was mad at us.

  Bill raised his shoulders and took a step and I tripped him. I said to Kapp, “He’s going to
kill you now, I swear to God he is. And there isn’t a thing I can do about it.”

  Bill was struggling to his feet, and Kapp backed away to the wall, talking fast, mad and scared both. “Your mother was a two-bit whore out of Staten Island, a goddamn rabbit. She sucked Will Kelly into marrying her, with the first kid. The second was mine. I know it, because she was at my cabin on Lake George for six months and she only went back to Kelly because I told her to.”

  Bill was on his feet and I was hanging on his arm. Kapp spat words at us like darts. “Edith got exiled to a burg upstate with Will Kelly and orders to behave and never come back to the city. She couldn’t stand it. She was there a year and she stuck razor blades in her wrists.”

  Bill threw me away, and I bounced off a tree-trunk. I shouted, “Tell him you’re lying, or you’re a dead man!”

  Kapp flamed at me. His eyes were on fire. “And you’ll have another dead father to revenge, brat!”

  Bill swung a fist like knotted wood. Kapp tried to lean inside it, but he was too slow. It caught him behind the ear and dropped him on his face in the weeds. Bill bent over, reaching to pick him up again.

  I came up and clubbed Bill with the Luger. He went down on his knees. Kapp crawled away downslope, and Bill fell on his legs. I rolled him over, freeing Kapp’s legs, and Kapp crawled up a tree trunk to a standing position and stood hangdog, his arms around the thick trunk.

  I stood in front of him, holding the Luger by the barrel. “Don’t stop talking,” I said.

  “Not now, boy, I’m an old man.”

  “Stop playing!”

  He shivered, and leaned his forehead against the bark. His eyes were closed. “All right,” he said. “But give me a few seconds. Please.”

  I gave him the seconds. When he raised his head, there were fine lines from the bark on his brow. He pushed his lips over in a weak smile. “You’ve got her looks, boy, but you’ve got my guts. I’m glad of that.” I didn’t say anything. He shrugged and let the smile fade out, and said, “All right. Her name was Edith Stanton. She came out of Rosebank on Staten Island in ’34. She went with Tom Gilley a while. He made her pregnant, but he aborted her with some right hands to the stomach. Then she floated around, here and there, with one or another of a bunch that mainly knew each other. This was still just after Repeal, and we were all trying to get organized again. She came across Will Kelly, and he fell for her. He was the only one’d ever held a door for her since Staten Island, and she liked it. Then she got pregnant again, by him this time, and suckered him into marriage. But she didn’t like staying home with the kid all the time, and she got to hanging around with the old bunch. Kelly stayed home and changed diapers. I think he’s waking up.”