The Heir

by Paul Robertson

  Forty-second floor. Down the hall to the locked door. No fumbling with the key this time. Pamela’s desk was empty. She’d finally be free of us Boyers, lucky her.

  The second door wouldn’t open. The lock had been changed? It was a ruin when I got through it. It hurt my shoulder, all of me, to ram the heavy bar into it again and again, but the pain would be over soon.

  There was my view! Breathtaking, and that was going to be literally true very soon. All the lights—lights everywhere. Nathan Kern could have it all. Take it! I was the winner, more than he would ever know. It would all be his or Fred’s, the curse of it, and I was glad to let them all kill each other. Gaining that whole world was the worst punishment I could sentence anyone to.

  I was seeing his face—the sincere, serious face he’d used to tell me that he’d asked Melvin to change the will. No man would have done that. I knew now, no one could turn down what that will was offering him. Let him have it. It would kill him, too.

  Enough of that. How beautiful it was outside! There were blinking lights below, red and blue flashes against the street and buildings. It was a celebration, all for me! I couldn’t hear the sirens because the glass was too thick. Not for long!

  I lifted the crowbar and swung. Circles spread out from the impact point like ripples as the glass fragmented. Two more swings sent the shards out into space and down into the heap of lights and sirens. The whole panel was gone except for bits around the edges.

  There was irony in escaping Nathan’s gun just to come here— but that was panic, and this was truth. Finally I knew the truth! The questions were over! It was all over. I had reached the end and I’d found what was there. And it was nothing. Nathan had shown me the answers just as I was hoping he would.

  I had a cool idea: if only I’d had Eric’s Corvette in the office. The hole in the glass was big enough to drive it through!

  I wanted to see what something would look like falling. I took the big armchair Fred sat in and pushed it to the opening. The wind was blowing in and it reminded me of night air out on the boat. There was even a tinge of salt. I pushed the chair over the edge of the glass and watched it sailing down, riding the wind, disappearing. If only Fred had been in it.

  There is sound now in the hall outside the office. They’re coming. Time to go.

  I stand at the precipice and see what I’ve looked for, for so long, the real reason a man lives. It is just so that he can die, and there is nothing else. Dying is real life, and living in the kingdoms of earth is real death.

  I lean out into the void and feel the gale wind taking me and below are the beautiful lights so far away.

  I want it to last forever, but almost before it started, the impact and darkness come.

  40

  I didn’t feel anything—there was just sound.

  Faint sound. Rustling, someone breathing. Some other quiet rhythmic whirr.

  Footsteps on a hard floor, coming, passing, going.

  It was my breathing. My eyes opened, and there was a white ceiling and bright lights. It hurt my eyes, and I closed them.

  Something scraped on the floor.

  “Tell them he’s awake. Get Wilcox.”

  That meant something. I didn’t want to move. I opened my eyes again. It was a hospital room. There was lots of white, and a blue uniform with a policeman in it.

  The whirr was a pump. A tube from it wandered to my bed and under the cover.

  Heavy footsteps, and people came. More police uniforms and another man, a doctor in a white coat. He studied the machines. “Yes,” he said to one of the uniforms. “He seems to be conscious.” He looked at me. “Good morning.”

  I didn’t talk. People came and went, and I didn’t talk to any of them. Time came and went, and I didn’t feel like doing anything.

  Then I saw a face I knew.

  “Mr. Boyer?” I could only stare at him. “Mr. Boyer?”

  Something was on one side of my face, wires holding my jaw. I could hardly move my mouth.

  “We need to talk with you.”

  I closed my eyes and opened them, but he was still there.

  “Mr. Boyer.” He glanced at the doctor beside him. “He’s hearing us, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need him to talk.”

  “I can’t make him do that.”

  Detective Wilcox came closer to me. “You’ve given us a real hard time.” He wasn’t talking nice. “They say you might not leave here for a week, and I don’t want to wait.”

  “Go.” It was real hard to talk, and the words that came out were more like croaks. “Away.”

  “Don’t you wish.” He looked away toward the window, thinking and angry. “Where have you been hiding?”

  He was going away. Everything was. The sounds stayed longer, but then they stopped, too.

  I was awake again. I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want the people to come back. The sounds were still the same.

  I felt rotten. There was pain this time. I thought it would have gone away. I remembered the dark and the wind and the lights down and far.

  “Anything?” a voice said.

  “No, sir. He hasn’t moved.”

  I remembered driving in the dark. It had been raining.

  “The doctor been in here?” It was Wilcox.

  “Hour ago. He didn’t say anything.”

  I couldn’t move. Straps bound me in the bed.

  I remembered sitting at a table, eating. Talking.

  “DeAngelo wants something for the five-o’clock news.”

  “What’s the problem, anyway? We got him. It’s all over.”

  “They want to know where he’s been since he killed her.”

  I remembered standing in my office at home and someone screaming.

  “Nathan . . . Kern . . .” They were both startled and looking at me. “Killed . . . my . . . wife.”

  Wilcox was in my face. I was staring at his little mustache. “Oh, he did? You told your brother that it was Fred Spellman.”

  I remembered Eric limp on the floor..

  “Kern . . . killed . . . her. All . . . of them.”

  Everything was coming back. Sailing in the rain and dark. Finding her. Escaping and camping and coming back. The street behind the train station. Walking to Nathan’s house. Driving back into town in the police car.

  Standing in the broken window, looking out.

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  I was figuring out that I wasn’t dead.

  “What . . . happened?”

  “They grabbed your legs on the way out and you slammed into the side of the building. Two officers. You almost took them with you.” He stepped back from the bed. “They should have let you go out the window.”

  That was too much to deal with. I closed my eyes. Maybe he would go away this time.

  “I’m charging you with four murders, two attempteds.”

  “Stealing . . . the police car.” It really hurt to just talk.

  “That I’m charging against Officer Mulcahy, plus being an idiot. He saw you through the window so he knocked on the front door.”

  I remembered that scene. Nathan and his gun both looking at me.

  “Kern,” I said. “He . . . killed them.”

  “Next you’ll blame Harry Bright. Look, Boyer, you’re dead meat. If you—”

  A doctor had arrived, and two nurses. Wilcox backed into a corner while they examined and asked questions. I was still feeling a lot of pain in my shoulder and jaw, and the doctor told the nurse to crank up the morphine. Before they left I was starting to float away.

  There was one more thing. “Where is . . . Eric?”

  Wilcox’s voice floated up to meet me. “He was discharged yesterday, Wednesday.”

  I was dreaming about bullets. There had been a bullet in me.

  “I’ll tell DeAngelo he’s still too drugged to talk.”

  Lots of bullets. Bullets in everyone. “Bullets . . .” I heard myself say.

  “Ye
ah, what?” Wilcox had given up on the day.

  “Bullets in . . . me. In . . . Grainger.”

  “What?” He was listening.

  “Same . . . gun.”

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t know what I meant. Now I was too far away. He was still talking. “He’s crazy. He thinks he shot Clinton Grainger with Kern’s gun? That’s impossible.”

  The pain was gone, and everything else.

  Another morning came, and I felt much better. As bad off as I was, it was a better place to sleep than I’d had in a while. I figured out it was Friday.

  They had rearranged me in the night, propping pillows to put me on my side. After a while a flock of nurses, escorted by three large police persons, removed all the tubes from my body.

  I had taken inventory of that body. Rigid wires and not very soft pads held my jaw in a position I didn’t like. My right shoulder itched under the stiff wrapping.

  With all of this and a police escort attached, I made my premier voyage to the bathroom. When I returned to the bed, the straps were no longer necessary. I was simply handcuffed to the bedrail.

  Food was brought, a hospital milkshake. I didn’t finish it.

  The morning dragged on, and the Mustache did not return. I started to think maybe I had died after all. I refused the lunch milkshake— partly because I was not convinced I wanted to live and partly because it tasted bad.

  I’d lost my drugged stupor and I was thinking clearly. There was nothing else to do. I thought about everything I’d done. All the people: Harry Bright, Bob Forrester, Fred, Eric. Nathan Kern. What a mess it all was. Katie.

  Oh, Katie.

  Morphine wouldn’t take that pain away. I couldn’t even begin to think about the future.

  It was four o’clock and I was staring at the window. There was a sudden disturbance in the hall.

  “You can’t go in . . .”

  “They said I could!” It was Eric’s voice. “Haven’t you seen the news?”

  The guard inside the door stood up. The outside guard was growling. “Nobody told me anything. Hey!”

  Eric had dodged them both and was in the room. His eyes locked onto me.

  “Jason!”

  The police were behind him, but they didn’t attempt to lay hands on him.

  “Eric.”

  Now he couldn’t say anything; he just stared. He looked fine, undamaged.

  Then he came close to the bed, the linebackers staying right with him.

  “Do you know?” he said.

  I shook my head. He kept staring.

  “What?” I said, finally.

  “They arrested Nathan Kern.”

  I felt myself collapse, which was redundant, as I was already flat on my back.

  “Are you . . . okay?” I said.

  “Me? Yeah! I’m okay. They let me out Wednesday.” He pointed to his head. “Nothing.”

  Too many replies pushed through my own head before I came to the one I meant.

  “I’m . . . sorry,” I said.

  It was beyond him to know how to answer that. But while he was trying, a sorrow welled up in his eyes, of an intricacy I’d never known in him before.

  “Sit down,” I said. He did and put his head in his hands and wept. I did, too, except I could only lie still in my bed.

  At last he looked up. He wiped his eyes and caught his breath. “What happened to your hair?”

  “Disguise.”

  Then he was laughing just as helplessly. “It looks stupid!” I didn’t think it was funny, and it would have hurt too much to laugh. When he got his breath again, he pulled his chair up close. “Where have you been? What happened, anyway? They said your jaw is broken, and there was a bullet in your shoulder. And you were all cut up.”

  “Later.”

  “All right. Jason, I’m sorry, too.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry what I thought about you, and that I didn’t believe you. And I’m sorry I didn’t help you when you needed it.”

  “It’s . . . okay.”

  “I never really believed it. It was Fred . . . he kept telling me things.”

  That was something I’d have to deal with. “Later. Turn on . . . news.”

  We watched for hours. Eric talked as much as the heads on the screen, and I listened. It was hard to keep up with the torrent of words.

  The guards did not wait for official instructions. The handcuff was removed. I gave them my own instructions—that no one besides Eric and my hospital staff was to get within a hundred yards of me. I had Eric unplug the phone and we watched Bill Sandoff, CNN, the networks, and everything else the remote could find. It was on every channel.

  The police had tested Nathan Kern’s gun, and there was no doubt it had killed Clinton Grainger. Nathan’s Washington alibi had fallen apart like a cheap lawn chair when they found that his rental car had been turned in with fifteen hundred miles on it for the weekend. Then they’d found the letter from Angela.

  Mr. Kern,

  I have found papers that dear Melvin had written about you, and I have read some of them. It is too difficult to read them. I think he was very angry at you and I don’t understand. I don’t want to think about him angry. I believe I hate the foundation now.

  I will not call you. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to think about any of this. I don’t want this to go on. It all has to stop. I’ll do anything to make it stop.

  It was a photocopy they’d found in a hidden drawer in his desk. On the television screen, the lines he’d cut off for the suicide note were highlighted.

  And then they’d found the Swiss bank account.

  Only Harry Bright was not convinced. “Jason Boyer is at the bottom of this,” he was quoted as saying. “I’ve always known a criminal when I see one.”

  I fell asleep, and Eric sat by me through the whole night.

  41

  In the morning, Eric was still there, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes.

  The second thing I saw was a dead caterpillar. No . . . it was Detective Wilcox’s lip.

  And he was so sorry for the misunderstanding. Oh, how sorry he was.

  The wretched man was treading eggshells on top of eggshells. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men weren’t going to save more than a third of the careers in the Division of State Police, and I, Jason Boyer, was the king.

  Would I mind just a few questions? A couple things he hoped to clear up. They had a good idea of how three of the murders had been committed. Nathan Kern was singing like a canary, trying to nurture any mercy in his captors. Wilcox wanted to describe the whole thing, to see if I had any additions or corrections. It had been such a misunderstanding. And had he mentioned how sorry he was?

  I sent him out of the room while I freshened up, and when I was ready, I allowed him to begin.

  Melvin had told Nathan months ago that he was changing his will. He had not said why. At first Nathan had graciously accepted the decision. As time passed, though, he couldn’t. He tried to persuade Melvin to keep the arrangements as they had been. Melvin refused to discuss the matter. Nathan apologized, but he had pushed a little too hard.

  Melvin’s confidence in his director had been shaken.

  I saw how it was, and Wilcox guessed at it, too. Even if Nathan hadn’t recognized how deeply the money had him hooked, Melvin saw it right away. The less trusting Melvin became, the more frantic Nathan acted.

  He realized his days might be numbered at the foundation, and he couldn’t bear the thought of a less elegant lifestyle. So he’d opened a bank account in Zurich and started juggling the budget.

  He was not very good at crime, whereas Melvin was an expert. Though he did not think Nathan was dangerous, his notes about the foundation were clear—he was getting very upset with his director. The police had found the whole stack of papers in Nathan’s basement.

  “This was . . . after . . . Melvin said . . . he was . . . changing . . . his will.” The contraption on my jaw w
as getting real old.

  “That’s right,” Wilcox said. “As far as we can tell from your father’s papers and the bank records, none of this was part of the original reason he decided to change his will.”

  Then Melvin died. Nathan claimed no part of that. He didn’t know how to drain a brake line, or even that a car had such a thing.

  Nathan hadn’t known that Melvin had uncovered the embezzling. After Nathan had talked to Angela about being on the board, she had looked at Melvin’s papers. She didn’t understand them, except that something was making Melvin angry. She wrote Nathan the letter to say she would have nothing to do with the foundation.

  He called her but she was even more determined. She told him she’d call me and tell me to fire him. She’d show me the notes.

  “She called . . . me,” I said. “She . . . only said . . . she wouldn’t . . . be . . . on the board.”

  “And then you called Kern. That’s when he knew she hadn’t tattled on him. Could she have been blackmailing him?”

  “She didn’t . . . like . . . black. Only . . . pink.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’d . . . have to . . . know her.”

  “I’ve talked with other people who knew her,”Wilcox said. “She was apparently eccentric, if that’s what you mean.”

  Nathan flew to Washington, but then he drove back to meet with her. He asked to see her privately. But he quickly saw that she was irrational, that his position was threatened, even hopeless. And Angela, helpless fool, had her gun out for protection. How easily he took it and used it. He had the letter she’d sent and saw how it could be made into a suicide note.

  It had all been so quick, so natural. It hadn’t been planned—it was self-defense. So much was at stake. After he killed her, he took the incriminating files from Melvin’s office.

  The suicide facade fell through very quickly. He realized it wasn’t going to be so easy.

  Then Clinton Grainger called. He’d seen copies of the notes, delivered earlier by his agent who had broken into Melvin’s office. He could tell they would be worth something against me, and he wanted to see if he could blackmail Nathan onto his side.

  I’d called Nathan the afternoon before I met Grainger at the hotel and told him about the meeting. He had hardly a qualm at that point. He bought his own gun that afternoon. He called Clinton and said he wanted a meeting that night, which they arranged for the hotel after our meeting.