Acts of Mercy

by Bill Pronzini

  I didn’t do it, Christopher.

  Then who did? If it wasn’t the President, who is it?

  The insight began to come together.

  I didn’t do it, Christopher.

  And he knew who it was.

  Insight, intuition—just like that he knew who the psychopath was and it was not the President; it was not the President, he had died for nothing.

  Justice ran to the roan mare and swung up into the saddle, heeled the horse swiftly downslope.

  Toward the person who had murdered not three men but four; toward the person who had murdered Nicholas Augustine.

  Eighteen

  The front door of the house was unlocked, and Justice opened it without knocking and stepped inside. A ceiling globe burned in the hallway and flickers of firelight created dancing shadows in the family room; everywhere else there was darkness. He paused for a moment, listening to the purring and the snapping of flames, and then slowly walked to the doorway on his left and entered the family room.

  She was sitting on the couch near the hearth, hands folded in her lap, head turned toward him. Claire Augustine: the First Lady, the President’s wife.

  Murderer.

  Justice hesitated again. How many times had he read scenes just like this in mystery novels? The detective, the policeman, facing the murderer in the final chapter; the confrontation scene in which the truth was revealed at last: the motives, the hidden relationships, the intricacies of plot and counterplot. The clues and the clever deductions. The confession. The wrap-up.

  But this was not a mystery novel and this was not that kind of confrontation. What was involved here was real crime and real pain, the real deaths of the attorney general and the domestic affairs advisor and the press secretary and the President of the United States—murder and madness so devastating that it literally affected the lives and futures of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. This was the confrontation at the end of the greatest single tragedy in the history of America, and it was awesome, and it belonged with terrible irony to him and to the woman sitting across the room.

  Justice went to stand in front of her. And felt nothing in that moment except emotional exhaustion—no anger, no hatred, no pity, not even grief. If there was anything left in him at all, it was a sense of shame.

  “Mrs. Augustine,” he said.

  She seemed to quail at the sound of his voice, the grim authority in it. She looked small sitting there, hunched, as if she had withdrawn into herself so deeply that it had become physical as well as mental. Her eyes were wide, but there was no lustre in them, no animation—the eyes of an interloper inhabiting the body of the First Lady.

  He said tonelessly, “The President is dead, Mrs. Augustine.”

  Her reaction was convulsive; a look of fearful disbelief made her face seem grotesque in the flickers of orange light. Her hands came up, fluttering like white wings, and turned palms outward as if to push away the truth of his words. She whispered. “What are you saying?” in a voice that trembled, nearly broke.

  “It’s true,” Justice said. “He fell into the river gorge at Lookout Point. I was there but I couldn’t save him. I just couldn’t save him.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “He thought he’d killed Mr. Harper,” Justice said. “He was a sick man and he found Harper dead in his cottage and he thought he’d done it. But he didn’t do it, Mrs. Augustine. We both know that.”

  “No,” she said, “no,” and tears welled in her eyes, began to spill over her cheeks in glistening runnels. Her body quivered, her hands came together above her breast and wrapped in the material of her blouse, twisted it so hard Justice heard a faint ripping sound.

  He forced himself to keep looking at her. “It was you, Mrs. Augustine,” he said. “You’re the one who killed Harper and Briggs and Wexford, you’re the one who’s really ill. And you killed the President too, just as sure as if you’d bludgeoned him to death like the others.”

  “Stop it! Please stop it ...”

  “I don’t know why you did it,” Justice said. “Maybe you thought you were helping the President, saving his career by eliminating people you believed were his enemies—”

  “I can’t stand any more of this, I can’t take any more!”

  “Then confess the truth and it will be over.”

  She stared up at him with her huge wet eyes. And the tears stopped and the trembling stopped, and he could almost see her gathering herself together at the edges. “Yes,” she said finally, in a voice that was dull and lifeless, but controlled now, “the truth. It’s time for the truth; it’s much too late for anything else.”

  “That’s right,” Justice said. “Go ahead, Mrs. Augustine.”

  “I waited too long,” she said. She was not looking at him now, was looking instead into the fire. “Out of love, out of blind hope. Out of weakness. I’ve always thought I was strong, but I’m not; it was just a facade. I didn’t know what to do; I tried to confide in Elizabeth Miller, of all people, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was like a little girl alone in the woods at night, surrounded by shadows I couldn’t understand and couldn’t cope with. I kept thinking the night would end and they would all go away. God forgive me, I waited too long.”

  Justice frowned. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, ma’am. Why don’t you just confess the truth and be done with it?”

  “I am confessing the truth. I’m doing what I should have done days ago, weeks ago.”

  This isn’t going the way it should, he thought. Not the last chapter of a mystery novel but a confrontation nevertheless, and it isn’t going the way it should. It was as if she had managed to take subtle command of it, as if their roles had somehow shifted.

  “I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Why did you kill Maxwell Harper? Why did you kill the press secretary and the attorney general?”

  “I didn’t kill them,” she said. “No one killed them.”

  “What?”

  “They are not dead.”

  He gaped at her. “What kind of a lie is that? Of course they’re dead!”

  Her eyes on him again, tears in them. “Austin Briggs is alive in Washington. And so is Julius Wexford; he got off the train with us yesterday, he took a car from the station to San Francisco.”

  All wrong, this is all wrong. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, Mrs. Augustine, but it won’t work. Briggs and Wexford are dead. And Harper is dead, he’s lying out in his cottage right now with his skull crushed. If you make me do it I’ll take you out there and show him to you.”

  “No,” she said, “you won’t.”

  “Why won’t I?”

  “Because he isn’t there. He was never there.”

  “He’s there—”

  “He doesn’t exist,” she said.

  Confusion in him now, like a black mist. He shook his head, saw her get painfully to her feet and reach out an entreating hand to him—as he had reached out a hand to the President on Lookout Point. He backed away from her with revulsion.

  “You can’t keep lying to me,” he said. “I’m a trained policeman—”

  “You’re not a policeman.”

  “Christopher Justice is a policeman.”

  “Christopher Justice doesn’t exist either.”

  Pain in his head now. “I’m standing here in front of you!”

  “Nicholas Augustine is standing in front of me. You are Nicholas Augustine.”

  And the mist, the mist. “The President is dead! I saw him die on Lookout Point, I couldn’t save him!”

  “You haven’t left this house tonight. You’ve been here with me all along.”

  “No, no ...”

  “Oh God I hate this,” she said in anguish, “I hate seeing you this way, Nicholas—”

  “Don’t call me that, don’t call me by his name.”

  “—but I’ve got to make you understand. You’re the President, you’re Nicholas Augustine. Maxwell Harper and Christopher Justice a
re imaginary people; your poor overworked mind created them and gave them histories and functions and finally made you become each of them. For the past month I’ve listened to you peaking in their voices, different voices like the one you’re using now; I’ve listened to you carry on two- and three-way conversations with yourself, I’ve heard you fantasize entire events and situations, distort other things that actually did take place, mix up fantasy and reality in your mind ...”

  He retreated from her again, but she moved after him, hands clasped at her breast, and kept talking, talking, words and sentence fragments piercing his ears like needles, terrified me from the first, I just didn’t know what to do, flames in the fireplace leaping at him, trying to grab him, didn’t happen very often until this past week and never in public, I deluded myself into believing no one suspected and we could get through until January, just until January because I thought I could convince you eventually not to run for reelection, the mist swirling behind his eyes now, love you so much, Nicholas, I only wanted to protect you from shame, his back coming up against the curtains over the French doors, never thought it would get this bad, so bad you would imagine people murdered, even your own death, gliding along the wall beside the doors but she kept advancing with him, then Austin called me on Wednesday and said you’d been to see him in his office, talking to him in a strange voice as if you were another person, I had to lie and tell him it was a game you were playing, only a game, roaring in his ears like that of a train, terrible shock when you fantasized Austin’s death, all I could think of was to get you away from Washington as soon as possible, up against the couch, around the couch, realized Julius suspected the truth too when I talked to him on the train, and when you told me yesterday he was dead I finally found the courage to call Doctor Whiting, but he was away from the Capital and couldn’t get here right away, moving toward the hall doorway, hate myself for telling you to fire Maxwell tonight, I should have guessed you might fantasize murdering even one of your own personas, pain and mist, mist and pain, accused me just now of killing all those people, killing you, I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t wait, I had to tell you the truth—

  She stopped speaking, turned her head away from him toward the doorway as if reacting to a sound only she could hear. Then her shoulders slumped and she said, “Oh thank God. Thank God you’re finally here.”

  He looked at the doorway and there was no one there.

  “Nicholas,” she said, “It’s Walt Peterson and Doctor Whiting.”

  No one there. No one in the room except him and Mrs. Augustine-

  Only then the ceiling lights came on and she was nowhere near the light switch, and he blinked and began to shake his head, the mist swirling, swirling, and in the center of it a small spot of truth and acceptance, and he heard himself whimper and then say, “I’m Christopher Justice, I have to call my superiors, I have to notify my superiors,” and he ran for the doorway.

  Hands caught him before he reached it, hands that were not there, hands that held him with invisible fingers, and he cried out and struggled desperately for a moment, just a moment before the strength went out of him and he became rag-doll limp. The hands guided him gently to a chair and sat him down, and he heard Claire Augustine saying brokenly, “Nicholas, oh Nicholas, what have we done to you, what did I do to you?” and heard another voice too—Doctor Whiting’s voice?—coming to him as if from a great distance.

  And a voice came out of him then that was not his own, a voice that belonged to the President, and the President said clearly and lucidly, “You shouldn’t have let me go on, Claire. I might have done something unspeakable, didn’t you realize that?”

  Then the voice was still, and he put his head in his hands and wept in mourning for the President, the fall of the President, the last long fall of President Nicholas Franklin Augustine.

  Then the voice is still, and we put our head in our hands and weep. But not in mourning and not for me.

  We weep instead for what might have been, for what could have been done about Briggs and Wexford and Kineen and Oberdorfer and the media and the minority party and the Indians and the National Committee and the pressure groups and the electorate and Israel and the Arabs and the Russians and the Red Chinese. We have known from the beginning that death is the only answer; and there is no moonshine in our soul. If only we had carried that knowledge to its ultimate conclusion. If only we had thought of it.

  We could really have committed an act of mercy then.

  We could have murdered them all.