“So it was Jennings.”
“Could be.”
Kennerly said, “Do you think he’ll come back? Maybe even yet tonight?”
“How should I know what I think? He hasn’t done a damn thing yet that’s made any sense; who knows what he’ll try next? I might be willing to make a guess on his coming back if I could dream up any reasonable motive for his coming around here in the first place.”
“Jesus Christ,” Vince said animatedly, his eyes growing wet, his cheeks dotted with red. “I keep telling you why he came here—why doesn’t anyone take me seriously?”
“Maybe you could try cutting out the whining,” I said angrily. “Stop acting like a spoiled kid who thinks he’s not getting enough attention and start pretending you’re an adult. You might pick up the habit.”
“Here, now—” Charles Castelar said hotly.
The kid looked as if he wanted to deck me, or try to, but he merely stood there, glaring balefully at me, his teeth grinding, his fists again knotted at his sides. I reminded myself that his old man had been killed only twenty-four hours earlier; that entitled him to more slack than I was cutting him. I said, gently, “I apologize. That was out of line. It’s late, we’re all tired, and we’re all very keyed up and worried about Kate.”
The anger went out of him like air out of a balloon. “I used to worry about Kate all the time,” he said forlornly. “Now I don’t think I need to anymore.” His voice was empty, hollow. Something in it made my scalp crawl. Vince looked at Kennerly, his uncle, me in succession. “Well, if he hasn’t killed her, then where is she?”
“Very good question,” Castelar murmured. Then, regarding me smugly: “Perhaps you’d like to field that one, Mister Private Investigator.”
Kennerly jumped in with characteristic optimism: “I think it means she’s uninvolved after all. I think she’s gone into hiding on her own—perhaps she’s afraid of Jennings, perhaps he made some sort of threat against her, too—”
“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” I said irritably. “We have lots of good guesses but we don’t know anything. Except that if Jennings is still lurking around, there’s a much better chance of his getting caught. And then, presumably, we’ll find out about Kate. However, I don’t think that’s going to be tonight. Not that there’s much of tonight left anymore. And since these twenty-hour days get to be a bit much on someone of my advanced years, I think I’m going to run on home and put in a little sacktime before tomorrow’s festivities.”
“Just a minute,” Kennerly said hastily as I turned toward the door. “I want you to stay here tonight. In case he comes back.”
“What good will that do? Vince can call the cops just as well as I can.”
“Besides, this day has been real hard on my mom and Amy; I don’t think we should disrupt things even more.”
“It’s an unnecessary precaution and an unnecessary expense,” Castelar proclaimed vigorously. “I think it’s criminal the way you two are … feeding on a grieving, confused widow. Do you stay up nights trying to come up with new ways to pad your billings?”
“I get paid by the day,” I shrugged, rapidly coming to the conclusion that if Castelar didn’t like the idea, it must be good.
“And I get paid to act in Emily Castelar’s best interests,” Kennerly said solidly. He turned to Vince. “I think protecting her life qualifies.”
“I can look after her.”
“And what if something happened to you? What if Jennings had been armed tonight and had shot you when you went outside? Where would that have left your mother? She’s so doped up on tranquilizers that she hardly stirred when the deputies were tramping up and down the yard with flashlights and floodlights—how would she defend herself? And Amy—what about Amy?”
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Castelar said, leaving the room in an angrier version of that curiously bouncy walk of his. A moment later we heard the rustle of a newspaper in the living room.
Kennerly looked up at me. By the fire in his eye I could see that there was very little use in arguing with him. Besides, he did have a point, a good one. So when he asked me if I had a gun, I told him there was one in the car; when he told me to go get it, I went.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The place to be was on the ground floor, in the study, since that’s where the action had taken place earlier. Vince fixed me up with a sleeping bag and a pillow on the leatherette couch. The study, which was at the end of the short hallway that ran parallel to the stairs from the dining room, had probably been a bedroom once upon a time—the single closet suggested it—but now it was a small comfortable office, with a desk and a file cabinet, the couch and a coffee table, and three custom-made bookcases side-by-side on the south wall. These held more photos and nicknacks than books, as well as a bar set and a pair of partly filled decanters, a stereo receiver, and a small color television. Castelar had lacked only the outdoorsy scenes on the walls, maybe a couple of Terry Redlin prints, to give it that country-squire look.
The kid had rounded up a toothbrush that he was fairly certain had never been used; I held it under the hot tap for a good long time before I let it anywhere near my mouth. When I padded back across the hall to my bedroom pro tem Vince was arranging a heavy mug and an insulated carafe of coffee on the low table near the couch.
We had debated about whether I wanted anything to eat or drink—I taking the position that I did not, Vince handling the opposition. Finally we had compromised on the coffee. Once Kennerly had finished thoroughly beating him about the head and neck with the idea, Vince had accepted my spending the night and set about playing the good host, largely, I assumed, because his mother was, shall we say, indisposed.
“How’s your mother holding up?” I asked as it popped into my head.
Vince poured off a cup and positioned it next to the white plastic pot. “Pretty good, I guess. She’s still real upset, of course, but I think it’s going to be all right. She sort of moped around all day, kind of confused, and then she went to bed at around eight. I looked in on her a few times and she seemed to be resting.”
Out like a light, more like it, based on the impression I’d gotten from both Kennerly and Kate. “How about Amy?”
He was unzipping the sleeping bag, throwing the top part over the back of the couch, smoothing the half that lay on the seat. It was a plush green thing with red flannel lining, a camper’s sleeping bag. You could survive nuclear winter in there. “She’s doing a lot better. That psychiatrist came by this morning and they did a marathon like all day. I guess you’ve got to jump on these things right away. Anyhow, she was pretty encouraging—the doctor—and she says Amy’s already showing good response. It’s true, you can see she’s coming around; she’s not totally vegged out like this morning. So they can probably treat her at home at first, then later in the doctor’s office. That way they don’t have to screw up her life any more than it already has been.”
I took the mug from the table and sipped tentatively. Lousy. I was getting used to bad coffee, but this was the worst so far. “Your uncle left without saying good-bye.”
Vince finished fussing with the bag and perched on the couch’s big round arm. “He said good-bye to me,” he said through a grin. “He waited until you were in the bathroom. You know he called here tonight in an uproar. Like he said, he wanted Mom to fire you and Kennerly. But she won’t.”
Imagine my relief. “How’d your uncle get along with your father?”
He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I mean, they weren’t best friends or anything, I don’t think, but they got along okay as far as I know.”
“Your uncle told me he recently sold a lot of his shares in the bank.”
Vince nodded.
“Why’d he do that, do you suppose?”
“I suppose he needed money. Or maybe he thought he could make a better investment.”
“He said he needed the cash to cover a bad investment. But if he did, couldn’t he have gotten it from the bank?”
�
��Sure. If that’s what he really needed it for, Dad’d’ve fixed it. But if it was for something else …” The grin returned. “Charlie entertains a lot, I guess you’d say. He likes women an awful lot. And he never does things halfway or settles for second best. If it was just a question of living it up too much, Dad wouldn’t’ve been in a real big hurry to bail him out.”
Interesting. “Your uncle plans to turn the bank over to you pretty soon now.”
The grin broadened. “Like it was up to him,” he said pleasantly. “It’s up to the board, and my mom is the board, pretty much. In fact, the reason Charlie’s at the bank now is because I asked him to step in. Acting for my mother, of course. The last thing on her mind today was the bank, but I knew that business had to go on as usual. So I asked Charlie to take up the slack for a while. He wasn’t thrilled, but he knows I’m right: You can let anybody manage the place, but you have to have a member of the family setting policy, and he’s the only one to do it until I can step in.”
“You seem pretty confident.”
“I’d better be. There’s no one else. Charlie won’t do it, not permanently. My mother certainly can’t. And Amy’s a little young.”
“What about Kate?”
He gave me a long look that went through me and left marks on the wall beyond. “If we ever get Kate back … well, she can’t even balance her checkbook.”
It hung there a minute or more and I forced down some more bitter coffee. I was going to have to do something about the quantities I was pouring into me lately. Caffeine overdose is an occupational risk in my line—both of my lines, the writing and the gumshoeing. Occasionally I’ll get concerned and trim back my number of cups, or pots, per day, and my palate responds in an appealing fashion. But when I let the average creep back up, I’ll drink any brown water you set before me. I may bitch, but I’ll drink it.
Tonight I didn’t even bitch. It wouldn’t’ve been polite. I drank some more and wished it would do something about the dull, leaden ache behind my eyes. I suspected sleep would be the surest cure.
A framed photograph of the entire family, dog included, stood on one of the bookshelves. From the looks of the kids, I gathered it had been taken two or three years ago in the magazine-spread living room. I traced a finger across the glass, over the image of Kate, standing alongside Jack.
“Your father planned to bring you into the business slowly, in stages. What did you think of that?” I turned leisurely from the picture.
Vince shrugged. “I didn’t see why he wanted to go so slow. I was ready for real responsibility, and I knew I could learn the job in a couple years, not seven or eight, or eight or ten—the estimate kept changing. Besides, he’d’ve still been around, as chairman and probably CEO. He could’ve let me run the day-to-day.”
“Sounds like you had it all figured out.”
He smiled. “I’ve known since I was twelve years old that it’s what I wanted to do.”
I nodded and ambled aimlessly around the room. Stopped at the window—it was still snowing, but far less persistently—inspected a brass drake on the desk, gave the globe the inevitable spin. “Did you and your dad disagree a lot, Vince?”
“Yeah, we did,” he answered without hesitation. I looked up from Mali. Vince was still perched on the arm, his feet on the edge of the coffee table, his arms, folded, resting on his knees. “The police know this; everybody does; it’s no secret. We fought all the time. The generation gap or something.” He smiled perfunctorily and so did I, wondering how long it’d been since I’d heard the term. The last time I had, I think the word groovy occurred in the same sentence.
“Dad … he had trouble taking me seriously. I don’t know why. Maybe he was used to telling people what to do and them doing it. Maybe I was a threat to him. Maybe he just thought I was stupid.” There was no humor in his faint smile, only pain.
More time passed before he resumed. “Anyway, he never let me have any real responsibility, never let me take the initiative on anything, never … never took me seriously.” He looked up from the globe beneath my fingers; his eyes had fastened on it, unfocused, as he spoke. “So, yeah, we fought a lot. Or I should say I fought; he wouldn’t even take that seriously, usually.”
“What about Kate?”
“I never fought with Kate.”
“I mean, did she and your dad fight?”
“Never seriously. You know—maybe he didn’t like the people she was hanging around with, or he thought she was spending too much money, or her grades were lousy—that kind of stuff. Until she started going out with Jennings last summer, that is. Then they fought a lot. But even then it was usually Mom who’d get bent out of shape, and Dad would be the one to smooth things out, almost ending up taking Kate’s side.”
“Why do you suppose she went out with him?”
“Who, Jennings? Wish to hell I knew. I never could figure her and her boyfriends; she could sure pick the dorks.”
So thought Kate, I recalled. I shrugged. “I don’t know; I met her old boyfriend, Tom Black, today—he seemed pretty nice.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“Guess I was mistaken, then. How’d they ever get together—Kate and Jennings, that is? I wouldn’t guess their circles’d overlap.”
“Well, she sort of knew him from the neighborhood, you know. We all did. You’d see him in town, usually going into a bar, back before he lost the farm. Then last summer I guess she ran into him down in the city, bar-hopping with some friends of hers.”
“Did she ever talk to you about him, or any of her male friends?”
He shook his head and returned his eyes to the globe.
“Oh, I had the impression that you two were—are—very close.”
“We were,” he said without looking up. “We are. I—sometimes she’d tell me. I didn’t want to hear about it, but sometimes she’d tell me because she knew it bugged me. You know?” He looked at me. “Like the way a kid will do something just because he knows it ticks you off? It didn’t mean anything. Kate and I loved each other, we really did. And anyway, she was making it all up.”
After talking with Tom Black, I wasn’t so sure. “Why did it bother you so much?”
“Why wouldn’t it?” he said with some heat. “It was such a waste. She had money and status, looks, brains—if she’d’ve used them—but she was wasting her time with jerks and losers.” He laughed. “I sound like Dad. But it’s true. I’d try and talk to her about it, try to make her see that she was cheating herself, but she’d only laugh. That’s when she’d tell me these … stories.”
“Stories.”
He nodded desolately. “She liked to pretend she was kind of fast, you know? Not promiscuous, just …”
“Adventurous?”
His eyes went white-hot. “Who told you that? That son of a bitch Tom Black—did he? ’Cause if he did, then he’s a goddamn li—”
“Take it easy, kid, you’ll burst a blood vessel. And after all, you’re telling me the same thing, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not.” His temperature had come down, but what’s a few hundred degrees from white-hot? “I’m telling you it was just a put-on, an act, sort of a game between me and Kate. A tease, that’s all. When I’d rag her about seeing Jennings she’d needle me, make up stuff about what they did, about what she let him do, disgusting things, really sick …” Vince’s eyes had wandered away from me; now they returned. “You know, she probably fed Black the same bullshit, or told someone she knew would tell him. And he’s such a jerk, he probably believed it.” He shook his head. “That girl, she sure knows how to pick creeps.”
I recalled Kate complaining that her mother objected to everyone she dated, and wondered if Vince didn’t take after Mom’s side of the family in that respect. I didn’t wonder for long, however. The day was fast catching up to me, and Vince could see it. He apologized for keeping me up, urged me to sack in as long as I wanted, and all but salaamed out of the room. Strange kid, I thought as I sat and emptied my pockets
onto the coffee table. Baring his teeth at you one minute, snuggling up to you the next. I had a dog like that once, years ago. Had to have him put down.
The light hurt my eyes, so I put it out and Brailled my way across the room to the desk in the far corner. I lifted the receiver, heard the dial tone, and called my place. After it had rung a dozen times I hung up.
It was true that Jen slept like one dead, but I was certain she wasn’t asleep. Not on Decatur Street, at least.
Well, why not? What we had going for us hardly fit any working definition of a marriage, or any definition of a working marriage. Nor could I claim to have kept unswervingly to the straight and narrow. I knew that she had spent time with other men, slept with other men, in every corner of the world; why should I be upset if she was doing it here?
Why indeed.
I had poured myself another cup of coffee—don’t ask me why—and I stood with it at the window. It was an old-fashioned window, tall and wide, and its many small panes had each collected frost in the same corners, just like in the paintings. There was still no moon, but in the diffused light from the yard lamp behind the house, the snow that blanketed the long expanse of lawn was a soft, soft blue; the trees that hid the road were black and stark, except where velvet-looking puffs collected in crooks and on branches.
Dancing silver in the night air, large, porous flakes whirled and collided soundlessly and fell to earth. It was a Christmas-card scene, far removed from the winter wonderland of travelers’ advisories and highway fatalities, of heart attacks and broken bones, of kidnaping and vandalism and sudden death in the night.
Kate wasn’t dead. Like Vince—judging by my conversation with him—I had been having trouble deciding whether Kate belonged in the present tense or the past tense in my own thoughts, even though I had necessarily operated under the assumption that she lived. Now the knowledge came into my mind with sudden, solid certainty, in one of those quantum jumps of logic that force you to go back and try to find the path that brought you to your conclusion. In this case, I couldn’t. I didn’t have any “proof,” any more than I’d had that morning. It was sheer intuition that jelled the proposition into certainty in my mind. It hinged mainly on the absence of the corpse, of any trace whatsoever, as if she had stepped through the looking glass. Again I asked myself why a killer would make the effort to conceal one and not the other. You can swing only once, no matter how many corpses you leave littering the landscape.
Moving Targets Page 16
