The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  He tried to get the full shot glass up to his lips, but his hand was trembling too much. Finally, he bent over it and slurped. When he straightened up, whiskey dripped from his chin. He hadn’t shaved for a few days; I watched drops run down through white stubble.

  “Two nights ago,” he said, “someone fired off a rifle, through my windows.”

  “Joy-riding kids,” I said.

  “That hound,” he said, choking. “The best.”

  This time he got the shot glass to his mouth, and drained it. I went over to the bar and bought him another, and a beer for me. I carried the drinks back to the booth.

  Grief must have mellowed him; this time he thanked me.

  “You tell Goodfellow about this?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. His rough, liver-spotted hands were still trembling; he gripped the edge of the table to steady himself.

  “You tell any cop about it?”

  “What’s the use?” he said despairingly. “They’re all in on it.”

  “In on what?”

  He wouldn’t answer, and we were back on the merry-go-round: vague hints, intimation, accusations—and no answers.

  “Mr. Coburn,” I said, “why would anyone want to poison your dog?”

  He leaned across the table. Those washed-blue eyes were dulled and rheumy.

  “That’s simple, ain’t it? A warning to me to keep my trap shut. A sign of what might happen to me.”

  “Why you?” I asked him. “Because you were Ernie Scoggins’s best friend?”

  “Maybe just that,” he said. “Or maybe they looked for that letter, couldn’t find it, and figured Ernie give it to me. Listen, maybe they hurt him, and he told them he give me the goddamned letter. Ernie, he wouldn’t do anything to cause me harm, but maybe he told them I had the letter, hoping it would keep them from killing him. But it didn’t. Now they’re after me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He sat back, folded his twitchy hands in his lap, stared down at them.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “Killed my dog. Shot out my windows. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Mr. Coburn,” I said, as patiently as I could, “if you feel your life’s threatened because of the Scoggins letter, why don’t you do this: put the letter in a safe deposit box at the bank. Then tell it around town how Scoggins gave you that letter, and it’s in a safe place, and it will only be opened in the event of your death. That’s a good insurance policy.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t trust the bank. That Art Merchant. How do I know them boxes are safe?”

  “They can’t open the box without your key.”

  He laughed scornfully. “That’s what they say.”

  I didn’t try to argue. He was so spooked, so irrational, that compared to him, my paranoia seemed like a mild whim.

  “All right,” I said, “then show me the letter. Let me read it. Tell everyone in town I’ve seen it. They’re not going to kill both of us.”

  “What makes you think so?” he said.

  I didn’t even have sense enough to be frightened. All I could think of was that I was drinking beer with a psychotic old man who kept talking about how “they” poisoned his dog, shot holes in his windows, and wanted to kill him. And I was going right along with him as if what he was saying was real, logical, believable.

  “The hell with it,” I said suddenly.

  “What?” he said.

  “Mr. Coburn, I’ve had it. I’ve enjoyed our little chats. Interesting and instructive. But I’ve gone as far as I can go. Either you tell me more, or I’m cutting loose. I can’t go stumbling along in the dark like this.”

  “Yeah,” he said unexpectedly, “I can see that.”

  He took his upper denture from his mouth, wiped it carefully on a cocktail napkin, slipped it back in. A jolly sight to see.

  “Tell you what,” he said. Then he stopped.

  “What?” I asked. “Tell me what?”

  He went through the same act with the lower plate. His way of gaining time, I suppose. I would have preferred finger-drumming or a trip to the loo.

  “Maybe I can get this whole thing stopped,” he said. “If I can, then there’s no need to worry.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  He looked up sharply. Bleached lips pressed tighter. That elbow chin jutted. Resolve seemed to be returning.

  “You figuring on being here tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Sure. I guess so. Another day at least.”

  “I’ll see you. Here at the Inn.”

  “I may not be in.”

  “I’ll leave a message.”

  “All right. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me now what this is all about?”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said evasively. “I’ll know by tomorrow.”

  I wanted to nail it down. “And if you don’t get the whole thing stopped, like you said, then you’ll show me Ernie Scoggins’s letter?”

  “You’ll see it,” he said grimly.

  Later, when it was all over, I realized I should have leaned on him harder. I should have leaned on all of them harder, bulldozing my way to the truth. But hindsight is always 20-20 vision. And at the time, I was afraid that if I came on too strong, they’d all clam, and I’d have nothing.

  Besides, I doubt if what I did or did not do had much effect on what happened. Events had already been set in motion before I arrived in Coburn and visited Crittenden Hall. Perhaps my presence acted as a catalyst, and the Thorndecker affair rushed to its climax faster simply because I was there. But the final outcome was always inevitable.

  Al Coburn went stumping off, and I went thoughtfully out into the hotel lobby. Millie Goodfellow beckoned me over to the cigar counter. She was wearing a tight T-shirt with a road sign printed on the front: SLIPPERY WHEN WET.

  “How do you like it?” she said, arching her back. “Cute?”

  “Cute as all get out,” I said, nodding.

  The dark glasses were still in place, the black eye effectively concealed.

  “I know something you don’t,” she said, making it sound like a 6-year-old girl taunting her 8-year-old brother.

  “Millie,” I said, sighing, “everyone knows something I don’t know.”

  “What will you give me if I tell you?” she asked.

  “What do you want—a five-pound box of money?”

  “I could use it,” she giggled. “But I want you to keep your promise, that’s all.”

  “I would have done that anyway,” I lied. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

  She glanced casually about. The lobby was in its usual state of somnolence. A few of the permanent residents were reading Albany newspapers in the sagging armchairs. The baldy behind the desk was busy with scraps of paper and an old adding machine.

  Millie Goodfellow beckoned me closer. I leaned across the counter, which put my face close to that damned road sign. I felt like an idiot, and undoubtedly looked like one.

  “You remember when someone broke into your room?” she said in a low voice, still watching the lobby.

  “Of course I remember.”

  “You won’t tell anyone will you?”

  “Tell anyone what?”

  “Tell anyone that I told you.”

  It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so goddamned maddening.

  “Told me what?” I said angrily.

  “My husband,” she whispered. “I think it was Ronnie who did it.”

  I stared at her, blinking. If she was right, that Indian cop had done a hell of an acting job when he came up to “investigate” the break-in.

  “Why do you think that, Millie?”

  “He took my keys that night. He thinks I didn’t notice, but I did. I told you I’ve got a passkey. And the next morning my keys were back.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  She lifted the black glasses. The mouse under her eye was a rainbow.

  “I didn’t have this before,” she sai
d. “You won’t tell him I told you, will you? I mean about the keys?”

  “Of course I won’t tell him,” I said. “Or anyone else. Thank you, Millie.”

  “Remember your promise,” she called after me.

  The elevator door bore a hand-printed sign: NOT WORKING. That would do for me, too, I thought glumly, walking up the stairs. Oh, I was working—but nothing was getting done. Bits and pieces—that’s what I was collecting: bits and pieces. I wondered, if Constable Goodfellow had been my midnight caller, how he had learned of that anonymous note and why he was so anxious to recover it. Every time I got the answer to one question, it led to at least two more. The whole damn thing kept growing, spreading. Of course I made the comparison to cancerous cells in vitro. No end to it.

  When I got to my room, the door was open, and I discovered why the elevator was out of operation: Sam Livingston was in 3-F, sweeping up, making the bed, setting out a clean drinking glass and fresh towels.

  “Morning, Sam,” I said grumpily.

  “Morning, Sam,” he said. He held up the quart vodka bottle. Maybe two drinks were left. “You have friends in?” he asked.

  “No, I did that myself.”

  “My, my. Someone must have been thirsty.”

  “Someone must have been disgusted. Have a belt, if you like.”

  “A little early in the morning for me,” he said, “but I thank you kindly. What you disgusted about?”

  He kept moving around the room, emptying ashtrays, rearranging the dust.

  “You want a complete list?” I asked him. “The weather, for starters. With this lousy town running a close second.”

  “Nothing you can do about the weather,” he said. “God sends it; you take it.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t bitch about it.”

  “As for this town, I don’t reckon it’s much worse than any other place. Trouble is, it’s so small, you see it clearer.”

  “I’m not tracking, Sam.”

  “Well, like in New York City. Now, you got a lot of rich, powerful people running that town—right?”

  “Well … sure.”

  “And maybe some of them, you don’t even know their names. Like bankers maybe, newspaper editors, preachers, union people, big property owners, businessmen. They really run the town, don’t they? I mean, they got the muscle.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I know so. And you don’t even know who they are, because that city is so big, and they like to keep their names out of the papers and their faces off the TV. They want to be invisible. They can do that in a great big city. But in Coburn, now, we’re small. Everyone knows everyone else. No one can keep invisible. But otherwise it’s the same.”

  “You mean a small group of movers and shakers who run things?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “Also, this town’s in such a bad money way—no jobs around, the young folks moving out, property values dropping—that these here people they got to stick together. They can’t go fighting amongst theirselves.”

  I stared at him, saw that old, black face deliberately expressionless. It was a mask that had been crumpled up, then partly smoothed out. But the wrinkles were still there, the scars and wounds of age.

  “Sam,” I said softly to him, “I think you’re trying to tell me something.”

  “Nah,” he said, “I’m just blabbing to pass the time whilst I tidy up in here. Now you get a lot of people in a lifeboat, and they all got to keep rowing and bailing, bailing and rowing. If they don’t want the whole damn boat to go down.”

  I thought about that pearl of wisdom for a moment or two.

  “Sam, are you hinting that there’s a conspiracy? Amongst the movers and shakers of Coburn? About this Thorndecker grant?”

  “Conspiracy?” he said.

  “What does that mean—a bunch of folks get together and make a plan? Nah. They don’t have to do that. They all know what they got to do to keep that lifeboat floating.”

  “Rowing and bailing,” I said.

  “Now you got it,” he said. “These people, they don’t want to get wet, floating around out there in the ocean, boat gone, not a prayer. So they go along, no matter what they hear or what they guess. They gotta go along. They got no choice, do they?”

  “Self-preservation,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said cheerfully. “That’s why you finding it so tough to get people to talk to you. No one wants to kick holes in the boat.”

  “Are things really that bad in Coburn?” I asked.

  “They ain’t good,” he said shortly.

  “Well, let me ask you this: would the ‘best people’ of Coburn, the ones who run the town, would they go along with something illegal, something criminal or evil, just to keep the boat floating?”

  “You said it yourself,” he said. “Self-preservation. Mighty powerful. Can make a man do things he wouldn’t do if he don’t have to. Just to hang onto what he’s got, you understand.”

  “Yes, I do understand,” I said slowly. “Thank you, Sam. You’ve given me something else to think about.”

  “Aw hell,” he said, gathering up broom, mop, pail and rags, “I’d have thought you’d have figured that out for yourself.”

  “I was getting to it,” I said. “I think. But you spelled it out for me.”

  He turned suddenly, looked at me with something like alarm in his face.

  “What did I say?” he demanded. “I didn’t say nothing.”

  I turned my eyes away. It was embarrassing to see that fear.

  “You didn’t say anything, Sam,” I assured him. “You didn’t tell me word one.”

  He grunted, satisfied.

  “I got a message for you,” he said. “From Miz Thorndecker.”

  “Mary?”

  “No,” he said, “the married one.”

  I couldn’t tell if his “Miz” meant “Miss” or “Mrs.”

  “Mrs. Julie Thorndecker?” I asked.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “She wants to meet with you.”

  “She does? When did she tell you this?”

  “She got the word to me,” he said vaguely.

  “Where does she want to meet?”

  “There’s a place out on the Albany post road. It’s—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “A roadhouse. Red Dog Betty’s.”

  “You know it?” he said, surprised. “Yeah, that’s the place. It’s got a big parking lot. That’s where she’ll meet you. She don’t want to go inside.”

  “When?”

  “Noon today,” he said. “She drives one of these sporty little foreign cars.”

  “She would,” I said. “All right, I’ll meet her. Thanks again, Sam.”

  He told me how to get to Red Dog Betty’s. I gave him five dollars, which he accepted gratefully and with dignity.

  I had more than an hour to kill before my meeting with Julie Thorndecker. There was only one thing I wanted to do: I got into the Grand Prix and drove out to Crittenden. I didn’t have anything planned; I just wanted to look at the place again. It drew me.

  It was another lost day: someone had destroyed the sun and thrown a gauzy sheet across the world. The sky came right down—you wanted to duck your head—and the light seemed to be coming through a wire strainer, and a rusty one at that. Damp wood smell, and the river, and frosted fields. The melancholy of that place seeped into my bones. The marrow shriveled, and if someone had tapped my tibia, I’d have gone ting! Like a crystal goblet.

  Nearing Crittenden, I passed a Village of Coburn cruiser going the other way. The constable driving wasn’t Ronnie Goodfellow, but he raised a hand in greeting as we passed, and I waved back. I was happy to see another officer. I was getting the idea that the Indian worked a twenty-four-hour shift.

  I drove slowly around the Crittenden grounds. The buildings looked silent and deserted. I had the fantasy that if I broke in, I’d hear a radio playing, see hot food on the tables, smell hamburgers sizzling on the grill—and not a soul to be
found. A new Marie Celeste mystery. All the signs of life, but no life.

  I saw a blue MGB parked on the gravel before the main entrance of Crittenden Hall, and figured it was Julie’s “sporty little foreign car” that Sam Livingston had mentioned. But I didn’t see her, or anyone else.

  I drove around the fenced estate. Fields and woods dark and empty under the flat sky. No guard with shotgun and attack dog. Just a vacant landscape. I came up to the cemetery, still rolling gently, and then I saw someone. A black figure moving quietly among the tombstones, not quite sauntering.

  There was no mistaking that massive, almost monumental bulk: Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker surveying his domain, a shadow across the land. He was overcoated, hatless; heavy brown hair fluffed in gusts of wind. He walked with hands clasped behind him, in the European fashion. His head was slightly bowed, as if he was reading the tombstones as he passed.

  Something in that wavery air, that tainted light, magnified his size, so that I imagined I was seeing a giant stalking the earth. He tramped the world as if he owned it, as indeed he did—at least that patch of it.

  He was doing nothing suspicious. He was doing nothing at all. Apparently just out for a morning stroll. But his posture—bowed head, slumped shoulders, hands clasped in back—spoke of deep, deep thoughts, heavy pondering, dense reflection. A ruminative figure.

  Even at a distance, seeing him as a silhouette cut from black paper and pasted against a frosty scene, the man dominated. I thought of how we all revolved around him, whirling our crazy, uncertain courses. But he was the eye of the storm, the sure calm, and everyone looked to him for answers.

  I had a wild desire to walk alongside him through that home of the dead and ask him all the questions that were troubling me:

  Did you shoot your father deliberately, Dr. Thorndecker?

  Did you contrive your first wife’s death?

  Why did you marry such a young second wife, and how are you able to endure her infidelities?

  Why are you obsessed with the problems of aging, and do you really hope to unlock the secret of immortality?

  He might, I dreamed, tell me the whole story: father, wife, love, dream—everything. In grave, measured tones, that resonant baritone booming, he would tell me the complete story, leaving nothing out, and the tale would be so wondrous that all I’d be able to say would be, “And then what happened?”