The Heir

by Paul Robertson

  He had to believe me. Nothing would work if he didn’t. The reason I was going through all of this was to talk to him. I couldn’t see anything past that. Maybe because there was nothing. Maybe I’d fought through the pain and hiding and wretchedness without a reason. I waited.

  I’d done so much waiting the last week. It was good practice for prison, or being dead.

  The sun descended. When would he get home? Would he eat out? I still didn’t even know for sure that he was coming home at all. He might have just left for a month-long conference in Bombay.

  A car pulled into the driveway and around to the back of the house. It wasn’t him; it was a woman in a gray uniform. She let herself in the back door. I waited two minutes and silently opened the door myself and followed her in.

  I didn’t know if she was the maid or the cook or what. The kitchen was the first room on the left of the passageway, but it was empty. I needed a place to hide. I opened a closet. It held brooms and mops. I closed the door and kept looking.

  In the hall I stood still, listening, and I heard her upstairs. I hurried through the dining room and front hall to Nathan’s study.

  There was a door on the far side. I opened it. It was a conservatory, with glass windows and plants in pots on the floor and hanging. I had no idea Nathan would have had such a place. It wasn’t visible from the front street. I closed the door behind me and wedged myself behind a chair. Most of the pain was from my bruised, pounded muscles, and it was starting to fade. Just my jaw was getting worse.

  I waited.

  I couldn’t hear anything from here, or see her leave. It was about four o’clock when she’d come. I kept waiting.

  At six thirty I unrolled myself and let what blood I had left back into my knotted limbs. Nathan might be home already. The maid might still be cleaning or cooking. I opened the door.

  The study was dark and empty. I crept through the house. There were lights on in the front hall but no cars in the driveway or garage.

  I went upstairs and found a bathroom. What a luxury it was, after the past days. I cleaned myself as well as I could. I’d take a shower soon, after he got back.

  The kitchen was lit, and a casserole dish was warming in the oven. The timer showed forty minutes to go. The smell of it cooking was overpowering, and there were cabinets of food, but I left them. I went back to the study.

  I didn’t know how to meet him. He’d be startled. I practiced:

  “Nathan! It’s Jason. I’m here!”

  The voice sounded strange to me. Had it changed, too, like everything else? I wasn’t used to it.

  “Nathan. I’m Jason.”

  It was hard to speak anyway. I sat in the armchair. He would arrive anytime in the next hour.

  The room was so organized. The amount of paper he went through must be immense. Just the notes from his years of conferences took shelves.

  I opened one binder. The pages were filled with his neat, straight writing. The meeting had been a decade before, but at the bottom of the page a line had been drawn and another paragraph added, dated years later. These were the records of his life, these notes about poverty and crime and hunger. What if this was the answer, Nathan’s purpose in life—to do good? That was why Melvin had hired him, to do the good that a rich man didn’t have time or interest for.

  I heard the garage door opening, a muffled groan like thunder in the distance.

  I practiced again. “Nathan. I need help.” Would he recognize me? “Nathan. I’m Jason.”

  The roar of a car engine echoed in the garage and then died. Where should I wait for him? He might not come to the study. If he didn’t, I’d go to him in the kitchen.

  The garage door closed with the same growl. A door opened, back by the kitchen. Would he have anyone with him? He was in the kitchen now. I’d hear him talking if he wasn’t alone, but it was silent. Faintly, I heard the oven door open and close.

  Even Nathan Kern would wonder what was for supper.

  There were footsteps in the hall. I put the binder back on the shelf.

  “Mrs. Hammond?” He was at the foot of the stairs. Somehow he knew someone was in the house. “Are you there? Hello?”

  I was standing in the center of the room and he was in the doorway, his eyes wide, his hands half raised.

  His mouth dropped open. “Jason? Is it you?”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  39

  It was too much for him. His mouth moved and his eyes blinked. I suddenly wondered if he had a weak heart.

  He recovered enough to speak. “Where have you been?”

  “You have to believe me. I didn’t do it.”

  He nodded. “I believe you.”

  I could have fainted right then over those words. I almost did, and he moved quickly to catch me. But I stayed upright.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Sit down.”

  I dropped back into the big reading chair, and he pulled another chair up close. For a minute or two we didn’t talk. Everything had been just to get here, and now I didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say, either.

  “I found her,” I said. “It was my gun, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t have the gun.”

  “Of course.”

  “Remember? Fred still had it. He’s the one, Nathan. He killed her.”

  “Fred Spellman?” He was still stunned just from seeing me. “But . . . surely not . . .”

  “He had the gun.”

  “But that doesn’t mean . . .” He stopped and breathed and got his hands to stop trembling. One of them darted into his suit coat and pulled out the cigarette case. It was reflex. He didn’t even know he’d lit it until he’d inhaled the smoke and couldn’t blow it out with my face inches from his.

  He turned and exhaled. “Excuse me. It’s all a shock.” He gave the nicotine time to do its job. “Someone else could have found the gun,” he said.

  “From Fred’s office?”

  “Eric was there, of course.” He saw me react. “No, I don’t mean he would have used it. But he may have taken it, and then someone else took it from him. Or Katie took it. That would have been quite likely. And then it was there in the house when . . .” He didn’t finish.

  I was sagging. So much had depended on finding the killer. Now I was back to the beginning, not knowing at all.

  “It’s too hard,” I said. And what had Eric said about the gun? “I don’t know if it matters.”

  “But it does! Of course it does! Jason, everyone is convinced you killed her and your father and the others.”

  “I don’t think I care anymore.” I needed him to say something profound.

  He did. “When did you last eat?”

  “Saturday morning.”

  “Let’s take care of that. Come to the kitchen.”

  I wrestled down a few bites of the casserole, but my jaw was excruciating. Nathan didn’t ask questions. I drank a glass of milk through a straw, and ten minutes at the table slowly undid a little of the damage of the last three days.

  “Now,” he said. “It seems you’re exhausted. I wonder what you’ve been through! But I think we need to make plans.”

  The “we” was as energizing as the food. I’d had so many guards up, and it was such a relief to let some of them down.

  “I was sure it was Fred,” I said.

  “Yes, we’ll get to that. But no matter who it was, it was still someone.” He shook his head. “I can help you, Jason. But I’m afraid I don’t know much about these things. I’m not sure what to do. You need medical attention, and you need food and rest. Maybe my own physician could come here.”

  “No. It’s too risky.”

  He nodded. “Whatever you say. But I’m sure you can stay here safely for a few days. I’ll tell Mrs. Hammond not to come for the rest of the week.” He set his jaw into a grim smile. “We’ll work out what to do. You’re safe now. We’ll get through this fight.”

  Now I was beginning to
crumple. Again I wondered if it even mattered to me. Maybe it wasn’t Fred. I’d used everything I had and far more to get here. “I can’t fight anymore.”

  “You need to rest. After you’ve eaten and slept, you’ll be ready to keep going.”

  Keep going . . . wasn’t just getting to this house all I’d been trying to do? “But why?”

  “We need to find this murderer, Jason. That’s the important thing.”

  It was hard to just keep talking. “I’ve given up on that. There’s only one thing left I want. Just tell me why.”

  “Why you should keep going?” He was confused.

  “Why is all of this happening?” Was that the question? “Why shouldn’t I give up?” It was so hard to even think. “Why am I here? That’s why I came to you.”

  We were in hard kitchen chairs, not beside the cozy fire I’d imagined. But this was why I’d come. It wasn’t about Katie’s or Melvin’s deaths—it was about my life.

  He took time to answer, and I was fading. But in his eyes there was such deep thought, and I stared back and kept myself awake.

  “Life is precious,” he said. “Look at yourself, Jason. I don’t know what you went through to come here, but I can see in you that it has been terrible. If you don’t know why you want to keep living, you still know that you do.”

  “But I have to know why!”

  “Of course. Certainly. Everyone needs a purpose, something they can serve. You need a purpose outside of yourself. You’ve only had yourself as your life, and through these terrible struggles you’ve finally seen how unworthy that is, how without value. Now, and only now, you can start to look for something else.”

  What was he saying? This was what I’d wanted my whole life, to hear this. The answers. From someone who knew. This was so important.

  “Eric said I had the gun,” I said.

  He was bewildered for a moment. “He . . . what?” He didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “You called Fred, and he told you he still had the gun.” Suddenly, inside my head a vortex had opened, spinning, pulling in every thought. “But Eric said I had the gun in my hand when I left Fred’s office.”

  He’d changed to the new subject, but he hadn’t caught up with me yet. “Well . . . he must have been mistaken. It must have been very confused at that moment.”

  “Because that means I’d have brought it up to my office, where you were.” Now the whirlwind was throwing the thoughts back out, strange thoughts, in strange patterns. “That afternoon, before I met Clinton Grainger at the hotel. I told you I was meeting him.”

  The intimate, confessional mood between us was far gone. “Jason . . . what are you saying?”

  I didn’t know. The words were hardly mine. I was too tired to think. I could only watch the thoughts whirling by too fast to see what they really were.

  “Was there something in Melvin’s notes about the foundation?” It couldn’t be true. Nathan was the only one who had withstood the corrosion of the money and the power. I had to believe it was possible for a man to do that; I had to believe he had answers. “Angela found something in them. Grainger had seen it, too, when he raided Melvin’s office. All that I’d left there were those files on the foundation, and Grainger got copies of them. That’s what he meant that night, his ‘surprise.’ He knew something about the foundation, and he was going to use it against me. And he met someone else afterward.”

  “What are you talking about?” Now there was anger in his eyes. It was mirroring my own.

  “You knew Melvin was going to change his will. If he’d had his accident a couple hours sooner . . .”

  He forced calm back into his eyes and breathing. “Jason. Do you know what you’re saying?”

  Could it be? How many times had I already been wrong? “I don’t know.”

  “I was in Washington when Angela was killed.”

  Of course. I slumped back in the chair. “I’m sorry, Nathan.” How could I have accused him?

  “Come with me,” he said, very gently. “I’ll show you my notes. They’re in the study. That will be proof.”

  I could picture them, neat lines filling sheets of white paper. As ordered and right as everything about him. He turned on the study light, and I stood by the wall of binders as he stopped at his desk.

  “I’ll need my glasses.” He was looking through a drawer. “I’m sorry I was angry. You’re not yourself.”

  I’d been so close to hearing his words. How could we get back? I glanced at the shelves, my back to him. I couldn’t work out how they were ordered. It must have been by subject because the dates weren’t in order. It suddenly bothered me, or something did. I turned abruptly to ask him.

  The bullet hit my shoulder—it would have been my back if I hadn’t moved.

  I dropped. It was reflex, or pain, or the force of the impact. My arm was on fire. I tried to scramble behind a chair, but then I saw his face, set in nervous determination, and the gun at arm’s length pointed right at my head.

  His hand was only trembling a little.

  I was frozen. Panic pressure in my head ripped my thoughts apart. My heart was exploding in my chest. The terror was like iron chains holding me. I heard myself telling Fred, “If a man has a gun and he’s trying to kill you . . .”

  I stared at Nathan, beyond thought, and at the round black hole of the gun. I couldn’t move.

  “You can either dodge bullets or . . .”

  He looked away.

  He’d been startled. The gun moved away. It wasn’t just blood pounding in my ears; there was some other sound. He looked back to me and straightened his aim, but the sound was louder.

  Someone was knocking on the front door and ringing the bell.

  I shoved the chair aside to get behind it. He fired again but was distracted. I felt the chair shudder. I was still pushing and clawing to get behind it.

  There was a crash and Nathan turned and started toward the door to the hall, the gun still in his hand. At the doorway he stopped, his face white and confused. He pointed once more, wildly, and fired. The wall above my head splintered.

  I was close to the door to his conservatory. I lunged toward it. It wasn’t latched and I fell through into the pots and branches.

  Someone was shouting, and I heard Nathan saying, “In here! He’s in here!” I got myself upright and threw my side into the sunroom glass wall. It shattered and I fell through bushes and hit the ground.

  There were roots, and once I was up I tripped on them and fell. It was too hard to stand again. I crawled through the stiff branches and out onto the grass.

  “Out there!” Nathan’s voice followed me. “There he is!”

  The yard was dark. I pulled myself upright and ran and limped toward the street. A light-colored car was at the curb, and I got around it and crouched by the driver’s door.

  The front door of the house flew open. I could see two silhouettes in the light of the hall.

  “He’s out there. I saw him.”

  “Was it Boyer?” a deeper voice said.

  “Yes, yes! It was! He’s somewhere here! You can find him! Catch him!”

  I was gawking at the steering wheel inside the car. Keys were hanging down from behind it.

  “I’ll call for backup,” the deep voice said.

  I yanked the door open and was inside the car. I turned the key and hit the accelerator and pulled the door closed.

  It took two minutes to breathe again, and think. The car was an unmarked police cruiser. I was on the main road back into town, the road I’d walked that morning. The fire in my jaw had spread to my shoulder.

  As the panic subsided, the pain swelled. I was tired of it. I kept driving. I was tired of everything.

  The road widened and I picked up speed. A highway ramp was ahead and I pulled onto it. From the highway I could see the skyline ahead like a line of teeth. I raced into them.

  Traffic was light toward downtown, nothing to slow me. Straight in front was my goal, glowing forty-two stori
es high.

  It probably took less than twenty minutes to reach my exit. I had no time for the red light at the bottom, and the horns and screeching tires amused me. Eight blocks, right turn, three blocks. There were no spaces at the front door so I left the car in the middle of the street.

  There was a crowbar in the trunk. Perfect.

  I strolled into the empty lobby and looked around—it had become pretty familiar the last few weeks. It would be a good place, this building.

  The coffee shop was closed but the television was on, and I stopped a minute to watch through the gate.

  “. . . again eluding police.” It was Bill Sandoff himself. It made me feel so much at home. “The intended victim was Nathan Kern, director of the Melvin Boyer Charitable Foundation, who had been under police surveillance as a possible target. We will continue to update the story as more information comes in. Again, Jason Boyer is still at large, driving a light tan Buick Riviera. He is armed and extremely dangerous.” They had a picture up, the same one they’d been using for a week. Everyone must be getting pretty tired of it. “If you believe you see him, call the police immediately. Do not approach him. Commissioner DeAngelo has asked that citizens—”

  Good ole Miguel, he’d be squirming right now. I couldn’t imagine what the Harry Bright quote would be. It would almost be worth waiting one more day to find out.

  There’d be the Nathan Kern story; that would be adorable. “Kern told reporters how he managed to use his gun in self-defense.” Maybe he could rumple his suit a little.

  No, I didn’t want to hear it. There’d be an even bigger story soon anyway.

  I pushed the elevator button. The doors opened and I was face-to-face with a young lady in a blue suit and two-hundred-dollar hair. I grinned at her and she screamed.

  She shoved past me and ran. I think she got blood on her suit. I was covered with it.

  Top button. Up and up and up, farther and farther from the ground. Faster, up into the sky, away from all the problems and foolish lives, away from all the people wasting their energy living. They didn’t know how useless it all was. I knew better now.