by Farris, John
Practice heard a gasp from Dore, and then there was a momentary silence. She hurried across the carpet and he looked up in time to see one bare leg vanish, as she drew the door to the bedroom closed behind her.
He crossed to the bathroom and rapped on the door. “Governor?”
“Where the hell have you been? Come in.”
The firm which had redesigned and redecorated much of the mansion had installed new fixtures and a slip-proof tile floor in the Governor’s bathroom, but otherwise had left it much as before. The carved oaken panels of the ceiling were bleached to a paler shade, along with the wood of the deep glass-fronted cupboards. The glass was leaded, except for a clear diamond center pane, one to each shelf, for displaying the Governor’s collection of family shaving mugs. The bathtub took up all of one wall of the room.
Guthrie was lying full length in his tub, water chest-high, his head supported by a plastic float that resembled a horse collar.
“Any news about Sharp?”
“No,” Practice said, clearing a bench opposite the bathtub. “He’s not in town yet.”
“But he’ll be at the dinner tonight.”
“He made that piece of news known two weeks ago. There hasn’t been another word from him or his associates.”
“Damn it, Jim,” the Governor complained, “I don’t think you’ve done much of a job this time.”
Practice looked swiftly at him. Guthrie’s eyes were closed, but he looked unrested. Shampoo lather was dripping from one ear, foaming over his thick, dark shoulders and chest. He checked a curt reply. The afternoon had been a bad one, and he didn’t want a fight with Guthrie to cap it off.
“I’ve done my work, John. A.B. Sharp is even more eccentric than your old friend Major Kinsaker. He doesn’t own a telephone. All of his mail goes directly to his lawyers. You can’t drive within a mile of his house. I tried. Not many people even see that old boy from one year to the next.”
“But he can swing a quarter-million votes in six important districts. Ever since I can remember he and the Major have had a common view about politics, although maybe they don’t say a dozen words to each other, week in and week out. The Kinsakers have always held the land next to Sharp’s up there in Greenbard, and they both wear the old school tie, so I suppose a gentleman’s agreement was a natural and unspoken thing between them. What do you suppose’ll happen, Jimmy, if old A.B. has decided to dissolve his gentleman’s agreement with the Major?”
“After that, the deluge.”
The Governor nodded, and massaged his eyes with fingers that trembled as he raised them. Practice frowned. Guthrie was a shaken man and the sight disturbed him.
Guthrie was so dark he looked purple under the eyes and down from the ears where he shaved and under his still-firm jaw. At the age of forty-eight his hairline was slipping back rapidly, giving him a lofty forehead and a shine at the temples. His black eyes looked suspicious when he scowled and sensual when he smiled. The sex in his face came from those eyes, from a straight chin with an arrogant commalike notch at its base. He wore glasses more often now, and they added a certain dignity and maturity to his appeal; and his hair leathered up from a brushing in a way that made women want instinctively to reach up and smooth it down.
“I have dreams at night, Jimmy. The two of us, the Major and myself, on a landscape as bleak as the moon, trying to kill each other. Some nights I win; some nights he kills me.” For a moment pain glinted in his eyes; there was a vulnerable, scared twist to his mouth. “I don’t have a taste for blood anymore, Jimmy. But how can I stop now?”
“Maybe it’s not up to you. A.B. Sharp may have the answers.” He hesitated, and then added, “I think the Major already knows what Sharp is going to do.”
Guthrie floundered in the tub, removing the float from his neck. He stood up.
“Hand me a towel, Jimmy. When did you see the Major?”
“This afternoon.”
Guthrie took the proffered towel and began drying himself.
“What did he have to say?” Guthrie asked, not as casual as he was pretending to be.
“It wasn’t what he said; it was the way he looked, like a man with a barb sunk deep in his guts.”
“Then he’ll quit.” Still half wet, Guthrie reached for his robe. He was perhaps an inch shorter than Practice and carried ten more pounds, but not well; he was sinking into a ponderous belly. He stood flat-footed beside the tub, wrapping the robe around him, then slid his feet into slippers and went into the bedroom. Practice rose slowly and followed.
The Governor was standing at the west windows, the draperies gathered in one hand, his face looking clean and as white as bone in the pale light from the sky.
“No, he won’t quit,” Practice said.
Guthrie remained standing by the windows until the light had failed appreciably. He shook himself once, all over, as if something was clinging to his back. Then he sat down in front of his little-used baby grand piano and spread both hands over the uncovered keyboard.
“Jimmy, I’m getting to where I hate life,” he said tonelessly, and smashed his fingers against the keyboard with all his might. “Fix me a drink?”
“Sorry,” Practice said, drawling. “Not one of my better days.”
The Governor glanced up at him, then rose and went to his liquor cabinet. After making his choice, he disappeared into the kitchen for ice.
“I can’t say what it is that makes me feel this way. The family doesn’t like it, of course, this bloody scrimmaging with the Major; it isn’t gentlemanly at all. But then it’s been a long time since I cared how they felt about anything. Maybe it’s because I’ve always taken it for granted that I was an exceptional man. I’ve been righteously arrogant about it. Well, being Governor doesn’t take an exceptional man, no great intellect, no qualities of saint and mule skinner. All it takes is a tremendous ego, a rind like a pineapple instead of skin, and some of the commoner traits of the fanatic. All I’ve brought to the job was ego. Unfortunately, my skin is not always thick enough. I can handle any man in an open fight. What I can’t tolerate is”—he returned to the bedroom, holding his glass high in one hand, squinting at the color of the whiskey—“the damned undertow that’s always trying to sweep me out where I can’t keep my head above water, where the crabs are waiting to take a pinch of flesh here and a bite there. And when they’ve had their flesh, come and gone in the dark, the big boys move in. It’s the sharks that take their meals in chunks, until the bones are clean.”
He sat on the edge of a chair, with his oversize bare feet sticking up from the carpet, and reached into a pocket of his robe. “Come here, Jimmy.”
By the time Practice had approached the chair, Guthrie had unfolded a sheet of paper and was holding it in his lap.
“Switch on the light.”
Practice did so and looked down in puzzlement.
“Where did that come from?”
“Crank mail. Wastebasket stuff.”
“But you kept this one.” He pursed his lips. “Mind if I take it and use the glass on it?”
“No, go ahead.”
Practice accepted the leaf and carried it to the desk. There he weighted down each corner of the yellowing paper and turned on a powerful desk lamp.
He was looking at a four-color drawing on fairly heavy, smooth paper, in dimension about six inches by nine inches. The left side of the paper was unevenly frayed, as if it had been carefully torn from a book, a book of fairy tales, he guessed, although neither the title of the book nor the page number was left. The reverse side was blank, except for some of the same brownish-red smears which decorated the margins of the drawing.
The drawing itself featured a scaly, blue and green dragon with a lashing, arrow-tipped tail. The dragon, crouched in front of a cavern, was bleeding from a sword puncture approximately where his “heart” might have been.
The sword-wielder was a young, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed knight in armor. He held the huge double-edged sword by the hilt with both han
ds, and had raised it for another swipe.
Someone had carefully pasted over the dragon’s head a photograph of Governor John Guthrie.
Practice didn’t know whether to laugh or not. He picked up the magnifying glass and carefully studied the brown-red stains in the margin. Under closer scrutiny two and a half fingerprints—or was one a thumbprint?—became clear. Again he studied the pasted-on photograph, which probably had been cut from a newspaper. No prints showed around the photograph or in the two streaks of glue that bound it to the sheet. He removed the weights and picked up the paper, sniffing the glue.
“What do you think of it?” Guthrie asked. He had started a cigar and the air around his head was a drifting blue.
“Childish. But ...”
“I know. The fingerprints. That’s blood, isn’t it, Jimmy?”
Practice frowned. “Hard to say. The fingerprints are nearly as old as the paper itself. The paper is good quality; it wouldn’t age quickly unless the book were left open to the air. I’d say the page was torn out recently. I’m sure the picture of you was pasted in just a day or two ago. The glue still has an odor.”
“What about the fingerprints?”
“I’m no expert. I remember most of what they taught me at the state patrol school. Chances are these are the fingerprints of a woman—or maybe a child. Do you have the envelope?”
“No. There was nothing on it but a typed address: Governor John Guthrie, the Capitol, and so on. And a personal, underlined three times. Postmarked here in the city, eleven o’clock Monday night.”
“When did you receive it?”
“Today. Paul opens most of the mail marked personal, unless it has a name on it which he recognizes. He opened this one, thought to tear it up, then had one of those cases of the shivers he gets from time to time. So he had to show it to me. And bring up ...”
The Governor took his cigar out of his mouth and sat glowering at it.
“Bring up what?”
“You know how Dunhill is,” the Governor growled. “He’s a damned superstitious old lady. Always reading more into these crank notes than anyone else would. For some reason the Hilda Brudder thing has been on his mind again. I ran him off before he could rehash the whole case and get himself thoroughly hysterical.”
Practice nodded, his eyes on the storybook dragon and knight, wondering what tale the drawing had illustrated. Was the knight one of King Arthur’s or some unknown Prince? Or even a commoner proving his mettle? His knowledge of fairy tales was sketchy; there had been few books in his father’s house.
With a faraway look in his eye, Practice put the drawing carefully on the desk and began hunting in one of the drawers for an envelope.
The Governor smoked silently in his chair, his eyes closed again. Perhaps he was thinking of Hilda Brudder, who had been the first of little Chris’s nursemaids. She had been a part of the Guthrie household from the day Dore brought Chris home from the hospital and in a panic gave the baby over to Hilda’s care. Hilda had the instinct for raising children which Dore seemed to lack entirely.
Hilda was a big-shouldered, round-faced woman who had spent the pre-World War years of her life in Bremen. She spoke competent English, had the constitution of a dray horse, and liked nothing better than to spend her free time tramping around the woods or, in winter, to skate with surprising deftness on the frozen ponds and streams around the city.
As soon as Chris was able to walk, she began taking him to the park at the edge of the city. Shortly after Chris’s third birthday Hilda was killed.
Two women found Chris, alone and hysterical, wandering on one of the paths, with blood in his hair and on his face. At about the same time, Hilda was discovered at the edge of the lake, sitting cross-legged, slumped against a tree. She had been shot cleanly through the neck. Chris hadn’t been able to say much. Apparently he was sitting in her lap when the bullet struck. The subsequent investigation turned up no information. The Commissioner of the Highway Patrol, a good friend of Guthrie’s, concluded that Hilda had been killed by a stray bullet from someone hunting in the hills and woods above the lake. Several hunters who had been in the vicinity were tracked down and questioned, but all denied shooting in the direction of the park.
After that, Chris had had a succession of nurses with whom he had been moody and uncooperative. Lucy had done a lot for the boy in the year and a half she had been at the mansion, and if Chris remembered Hilda Brudder at all he never spoke of her.
“Why should Dunhill bring up Hilda Brudder?” Practice asked now.
Guthrie got to his feet and stuffed his cigar into an ashtray.
“You know what he thought at the time. Some nut was taking a whack at Chris and got Hilda instead.”
“He should have given up that idea by now,” Practice said. “If someone had been gunning for Chris, he could have killed Chris right after Hilda.”
“Sure, I know. Dunhill’s an old lady.” Guthrie gestured with one hand. “That thing ...”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
Guthrie shrugged. “Throw it away, I suppose. Still—it’s weird.”
“Most of the vicious mail you get is the Dear Bastard, I’m going to kill you, sort of thing. This is more complicated. The fantasy involved is no spur-of-the-moment inspiration. I’m curious about these fingerprints, the bloodstains—if they are bloodstains.”
Guthrie had gone to his closet and was standing with the door open, choosing a suit.
“I’m curious, too,” he said softly.
“You don’t have any idea who it came from?”
“No idea. See what you can come up with, but don’t waste a lot of time.”
“I’ll get on it in the morning.”
“No.” Guthrie took a dark gray suit from the closet and held it up to inspect it for creases. “Do it tonight. Bill Dylan’s probably still in his office. Give him a call.”
Bill Dylan was the local agent of the FBI, who ran a one-man office in the Department of State building.
“Why Dylan?”
“If you start sleuthing around with that drawing and those fingerprints, word’ll get out. Oh, it’s nothing; I know it’s nothing. But the thing is ridiculous enough to make me look damned silly, and I’ve got enough on my mind without a lot of people giggling behind my back.”
“Dylan it is,” Practice said, sealing the drawing into a clasp envelope. “I’ll call the Commissioner and have him send one of his boys over to drive you to the rally.”
“Won’t be necessary. Luke can drive.”
“If I’m not going, I want somebody I can depend on to be there,” Practice said obstinately.
Guthrie sighed. “Suit yourself.”
“I’ll either be at Lex’s Steak House getting my dinner while Dylan does my work or here at the mansion,” Practice said. He went out, the yellow clasp envelope tucked under his arm.
• 4 •
Bill Dylan turned the rust-stained page Practice had brought him, then laid it atop the envelope and settled back in his chair, gazing out of the window of his tenth-floor office at the flow of traffic in the street below.
“Why bring it to me?” he asked Practice. “I’ve seen political cartoons more threatening than this.”
“The bloodstains, for one thing.”
“Can’t say for sure that it’s blood.”
“Assuming it is. The whole concept is grotesque and a little frightening. I’d like to know who sent it. Maybe he’s Homebody I should talk to.”
Dylan stood up and began rolling down the sleeves of his shirt.
“Whoever the sender is, he’s probably eager for attention. He might as well have signed his name.”
“Are those fingerprints good enough for a trace?”
“I think so,” Dylan murmured, holding the paper up to the light again. “And your man, or your woman, if that’s the case, must have known that. Of course, the prints might not he those of the sender.”
“Can you work on it for me, Bill?”
“Officially I can’t. But ...” The FBI agent glanced at his watch. “I’m already keeping half the file clerks in this place on overtime. I could drop this off at the state patrol lab on my way to dinner. Truscott owes me a favor. Shouldn’t take long for his department to test these stains and photograph the prints. I’ll send a set of photographs over to the ten o’clock plane and have the girls downstairs check the classifications through the state files. Are you in a hurry for the data?”
“I’d like to get this thing cleared up.”
“It’ll take six hours at the most to run through the state files. Probably two days by wire from Washington, if the subject is still living. I wish I had the envelope. Guthrie shouldn't have thrown it away.”
“More likely his secretary. Thanks a lot, Bill. The Governor appreciates this.”
Dylan grinned. “The hell with him. It’s his duck blind I’m interested in. Best location on the lake.”
—
They went down together in the elevator and parted on the terrace of the new state office building. It was full dark and the neon of the Congress Hotel on the hill flashed redly in the sky. The air had turned chilly and Practice wished he had remembered his trench coat as he walked in the direction of the hotel. He had no plans for the evening other than a leisurely dinner at Lex’s, the best steak house in town. After that, it would be several hours before he knew if the fingerprints on the drawing had turned up in the limited files of the state’s investigation bureau.
A man in a winter topcoat and muffler dashed down the steps of the Congress Hotel’s main entrance in front of him, and Practice called, “Fletch! Dr. Childs ...”
Fletcher Childs hesitated, then gathered himself and hurried on for a few strides. Then he stopped and looked cautiously around. He smiled.
“Oh, hello, Jim. Didn’t recognize—thought it was one of my patients. Didn’t want to get started on gallbladder diets in the middle of Tenth Street.” He was a tall, stooped man with the kind of prim, professorial face reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson. Dr. Fletcher Childs, however, preferred horn-rimmed glasses, which he continually had to adjust on the bridge of his nose. “I’m in a flap. Haven’t dressed and the dinner starts in three quarters of—suppose Lucy’s on your mind, too. Why don’t you walk over to the parking garage with me, if you—hell of a thing, I admit I don’t know what to say to her.”
