by David Daniel
St. Onge looked at me a moment, then followed Deemys out. Reluctantly, I told Jerry that Justin Ross was dead. He whispered something, sat down heavily, and said nothing more. The paramedic with the mustache returned. He said Gripaldi was a lucky guy, too; the gunshot wound was a clean one, no serious damage. The paramedic opened a plastic box and took out a pair of pool cues fashioned to look like hypodermic needles. St. Onge came back. “I sent Deemys over to get Westrake. We also found Ross. Looks like he might’ve been tortured before he was strangled.”
“With a soldering iron, I think. To find out if Jerry knew about tonight,” I said.
St. Onge nodded. “Then the kid took Ross’s rental car.”
“Yeah, and left behind the stolen Camaro I asked you about. How Westrake got here, I guess. In the campus steam plant there’s one more person to account for.” I told him about Curtis Smyth.
St. Onge took notes with a grim expression, then he said, “You played loose with this. We had a deal.”
I found nothing to say.
“I’m gonna need your weapon.”
I let him take it. He knocked out the cylinder, peered into the chambers, drew the weapon close to his nose, and sniffed. I didn’t need to tell him it had been fired. He closed it and put it into his jacket pocket.
“If you’d talked to me, it’s possible we might’ve stopped some of this,” St. Onge said.
The truth of the words was sharper than the needle that pricked my arm. I could have told him I didn’t know enough until it was too late, but what did it change? Three people were dead, and nothing was going to alter that. I didn’t say anything.
“That one’s tetanus,” the paramedic explained. “With a puncture wound, you’re better safe than sorry.”
“God forbid Rasmussen gets lockjaw,” St. Onge said.
As the paramedic thumbed the plunger on the second syringe, St. Onge looked away.
“What about my gun?” I said.
“It’ll go to a lab, to assure me no one got dead by it. You won’t be operating any heavy machinery tonight.” He fitted a cigarette into a corner of his mouth where it bounced, unlit, as he spoke. “If you’re up to it in the morning, you can give your complete version. Don’t plan on basking in the limelight though. Lieutenant Droney’s already there, beaming for the cameras, weaving fables about the glorious exploits of Lowell’s finest, making the city safe for a favorite son.” St. Onge shook hands with Jerry Corbin and went out.
Jerry was saying something to me, but the words were mush in my head. My brow was clammy all at once. Everything began to spin. I pressed tighter in the chair, but it didn’t slow things down. I was on a wild carousel. Faces around me started to fuzz, and the stage lights ran together. Then there was no light or time, just voices, faint and far, far away, part of a background—Alex … Alex … Alex … Except I was someplace too interesting, a place of color, movement, and sensation that would engage me to the end of forever. Alex … Alex …
But something went wrong. Or right. I didn’t want to be there forever. The voices moved out of the background.
“Alex!”
I turned the focus wheel and saw haloed forms bending over me. Corbin and the paramedic and Chelsea were squatting there. Chelsea had a cool compress on my brow. My head was on something soft. “Welcome back, tough guy,” Jerry Corbin said.
I looked at them. “I was out?”
“About a minute there. We managed to catch you before you hit the deck. How do you feel?”
“Like I had my hat blocked, with me wearing it.”
“What hat?” Corbin said.
The paramedic folded up his stethoscope. “Just a delayed reaction. Your blood pressure’s coming back, and your signs are fine.”
I sat up slowly. The pillow, I saw, was Corbin’s tux jacket. They helped me to my feet. The floor didn’t cave under me. The paramedic said, “I gave you morphine. It’ll knock the edge off your pain, but when it does, it’s gonna be like someone dumped a hod of bricks off a scaffold on you.”
“Nothing new,” I mumbled.
“It’ll take a little while, but then you’re gonna sleep.”
I thanked him, and he left.
“Want some water?” Jerry asked. “Or coffee?”
I shook my head. After a moment he went over to the side of the stage to deal with some TV people. Chelsea took my arm. As a testament to her continuing good taste, she was costumed as nobody but herself. She had on a Black Watch kilt, with a big gold pin in it, and a black cowl-neck sweater, and her glasses. New pennies glinted from her loafers. “You’re sure you’re feeling okay?”
“Like a million,” I said, wincing as she helped me into my jacket. “Make it a thousand.”
It leveled off at a hundred by the time we got my trench coat on, though I was happy for that. She offered to drive me home, but I told her I could make it.
“We can talk in the morning, then. After you’ve slept. Right now I want to call Justin’s family in California.”
I nodded. “He was tough. I doubt he told the kid anything.”
“I’ll let them know.”
“And talk to Jerry.”
“That, too. I’m determined.” She stood on tiptoe and gave me a kiss. “You were great tonight.” She turned and went off, the kilt swaying with her walk, the calves in her tanned swimmer’s legs rippling. I watched her appreciatively. I’d take her over painkillers, any day.
Morrie the accountant offered to run me over to the lot where my car was parked, but I figured the fresh air would do me good. I said I’d muddle along okay.
32
AND MUDDLE IT was. When I got outside, a cold wind was grabbing everything handy and hurling most of it at me. My hat was probably halfway to Worcester. The moon had gone the color of ice. Whoever he was, the Old Farmer knew his stuff. When I got to my car and reached into my coat pocket for the keys, my fingers found something else.
I picked a route across the city. The walk to the car had wakened me briefly, but now I was fighting a thick tiredness, a yen to be in bed under a blanket of sleep, but I needed to answer a question while it was in my mind, before the pumpkins turned into coaches and took everything away. I found a booth near Kerouac Park and made a call.
As I drove up Mansur Street to the heights of Belvidere, leaves did a manic dance in the beam of the headlights. Behind and below me, in the distance, the city was a bewitched village, blurred by the morphine, without consequence now.
The turreted house on Belmont Avenue had the look of a sacked castle, the windows staring emptily. No candle-lit jack-o’-lanterns grinned from the stoop. I parked in the circular driveway. I was slow getting out, and when I did I spent another moment just holding on before I gimped to the door. Wind rattled the hemlocks. On my third salvo with the rampant-bear knocker, the fellow with the après-ski accent opened the door. I gave my name, in case he didn’t recognize the disheveled figure in the trench coat standing there in the weak glow from the sconces. He didn’t offer candy, but he was polite enough to let me step into the foyer of the grand hall. “It’s late, sir,” he said, frowning.
“You can say that again.”
“Mr. Devlin has long since gone to bed.”
His voice had an odd timbre in the big, shadowy room: Erich von Stroheim protecting Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
“This is kind of important,” I told him.
“It’s all right, Heinz,” said a voice from the dimness. “I couldn’t sleep. Have Mr. Rasmussen come upstairs.”
Heinz looked uncertain, but he knew who paid him. I walked slowly across the parquet and the oriental carpets to the winding staircase. I was tempted to ask to use the escalator chair, but that would have sounded silly. Anyway, the chair wasn’t at the bottom. I climbed past the big paintings, pretending to admire them every few steps as I caught my breath. Basil Devlin stood at the summit, leaning on his dark cane. He was dressed in pajamas and slippers and a maroon satin robe, but that was the only color about him. He
looked faded, his face pale, his fine white hair in disarray. Maybe he wanted me to feel at home.
“Come in,” he said.
We went into the sitting room we’d been in that afternoon. The big fireplace stood empty and cold, the ashes swept out. Instead, a semicircle of quartz heaters buzzed and clicked thermostatically. Basil Devlin sat in one of the hard wooden chairs. “Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“Did you attend the show?”
“Enough. You heard what happened?”
“No.”
Heinz came in. “I’ve brought your medication, sir.”
It was some kind of green syrup, which Heinz poured into a spoon. The air in the room had a sweet, hospital smell. I missed the tart aroma of geraniums. I was glad for the quartz heaters, though. I could feel a draft moving down the chimney. Come winter, trying to keep this place warm would be a lost cause. When Heinz left, Devlin managed a weak smile. “My doctors warn me about pneumonia. Do you know what the old treatment for pneumonia used to be?”
I didn’t.
“They’d bundle the patient under quilts and open the windows on a frigid night, on the theory that there are more molecules of oxygen in cold air. It was supposed to open the lungs.”
“What’s the new treatment?” I asked.
“I have no idea. I’m scheduled to fly to Palm Beach in the morning. I’m closing the house for winter. Doctors’ orders. Are you all right?”
“Not bad,” I said. “Got time for a story?”
“If it isn’t too long. Heinz is right, I should be resting.”
I sat down. I didn’t waste time trying to find a fancy beginning. “Back in the early fifties, there was a fellow who taught drama at Harvard. And there was this right-wing group who felt his ideas were as red as Stanislavski. But Harvard isn’t a place that worries a lot about that sort of thing. In fact, I gather it took pride in being on McCarthy’s hit list. So this group figured another way to ruin the professor. He was married to the daughter of a prominent Back Bay family, and the group threatened to expose the fact that he was a closet bisexual. He told them to shove it, so they outed him.”
“Outed?” Basil Devlin said.
“I know, it’s one of the new words. Exposed him.”
Devlin frowned.
“In the messiness, the man’s marriage broke up, and for whatever reason, Harvard didn’t renew his contract. He was blacklisted in his own way and was lucky to land a job at a little state teachers’ school. In time he got married again, built a life. But later, when he saw a chance to exact some revenge on Harvard, by cheating in a quiz contest, I think he did.”
“This is a curious ramble, Mr. Rasmussen, but you’ll forgive me—I’m sure you didn’t come here at this hour to tell me this.”
“Sorry. It seems this professor did some research on the group that had tried to destroy him. He put it all in a journal. The group’s had an interesting lineage over the years. The sons of slave traders, rumrunners, and later, right-wing politicos. Tom Chapman and son Paul bring it right up to date.”
He looked at me in puzzlement. I was annoyed with this. “Come on, Mr. Devlin, it is late. Let’s not jack each other up.”
“Sir, I think you’d better leave.”
He was right. In fact, if I’d felt stronger, I might have done just that. But my head was starting to swim again, and my face was hot. I loosened my tie and shifted position on the hard chair. “Tell me about Crossbones,” I said.
The pale blue eyes had grown fierce. “I’m not asking anymore, I’m ordering you to leave.”
“The Chapman kid was probably always was a bit rocky,” I said. “High IQ, that talent for electronics, and Shakespeare too. But his father’s death, and the revelation that his father was broke when he died pushed the kid over the edge. When I walked in here, and up to just a minute ago, my thinking was that though you condoned it, you didn’t actually take part in what the kid was doing. I figured you may or may not have been guilty of anything criminal, but you’d certainly been party to stupidity. And since nobody else apparently has it figured, I wanted you to hear it.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Basil Devlin said, trying to work menace into his voice.
“Yeah, I do. Some of it. Paper spooks. Kooky letters to try to keep Corbin away. You played on the fact that the Chapman kid, like his father, was in Crossbones. Like you, and like all those Devlins there in the portraits. What was your ancestors’ claim to membership? Founders of the Guy Fawkes society?”
“You’re out of line.”
“It happens. The kink in the hose was that Paul Chapman wanted Corbin here. He blamed Jerry for old crimes. Maybe he saw his own life jinxed before he was born, beginning that day Corbin and company beat his father’s team, and his father got drunk with his teammates and boasted about how his club ought to take revenge. More likely he was just a sick kid whose old man had blown his inheritance and who needed someone to blame for things. Maybe you put him onto Corbin, got him the job working at the auditorium.”
More of it was making sense now, coming in little flashes: like how Devlin had arranged for the fax and the private telephone in Corbin’s hotel suite—installed by the Chapman kid, probably, who had used the phone bug to learn that Florence Murphy wanted to meet Chelsea in the locker room. Maybe he was afraid that she was going to tip Corbin that Westrake had cheated in the quiz bowl. The kid would have wanted that squashed because Corbin might start unraveling things, as I was trying to do. But my mind was struggling to hang onto the thread. Something like a stage curtain was descending slowly behind my eyes.
I moved forward on the chair, cleared my throat. “So the idea became to zap Corbin on live TV. I’ve got to assume you weren’t doing it to impress Jodie Foster—so why? What did you need?” I fumbled the framed photograph out of my coat pocket, still talking, not wanting to lose momentum. “And then I got hold of it. I saw this and wondered, how does it fit? Who’s this guy in the back here?”
Devlin’s thickly veined hands clutched the picture of Chelsea’s mother taken long ago, when she was a kid crooning songs for the sheer joy of it.
I went on, “A blind guy helped me see. I phoned Matty Silver on my way here just now. Seems you liked to go slumming down at Silver’s jazz joint. He said you got to be a regular at the Canal Club—reserved table, bucket of champagne, and a corsage for the pretty singer.”
Basil Devlin’s eyes stayed on the photograph. “She was so beautiful,” he murmured.
“Silver said you lost your heart to Betty Crown, only to lose her to a college kid whose folks were servants for your family. Big J was beating your time, and you…” I stopped, swallowed, started again. “You…”
It wasn’t lockjaw, because that part worked fine: it was just that when I opened it, nothing came out. Devlin had lowered the old photo. He looked past me and nodded. And what came down on the back of my neck was no curtain. I jacked forward in the chair. I reached for something to take hold of, but there was nothing there.
33
THE SUN ROSE and set a hundred times, and old women slowly knitted a shroud. Above the click of their needles, I gradually grew aware of voices: muffled and distant, those of other inhabitants of the dark realm where I opened my eyes. There was a chill fall of moonlight on me. I was in a room laid out on the floor, alone. This was becoming a bad habit.
Then, with a faint metallic clinking, the sun began to rise again, and I squinted into the orange glow of a quartz heater coming to life. The warmth felt good. I lay there in it a long moment. The voices were still indistinct, but I realized now where I was and where the voices were coming from.
I counted fingers and recited my name. As feats go, it wasn’t much, not like putting together a busy jigsaw puzzle; but that was already done. Now I just needed to bring in the cops. With great labor, I turned over onto my side and pushed to a sitting position. I worked my hand inside my coat and touched the bandage. Damp. I didn’t look to see what color it was. A month
later, I got my feet under me and stood up.
When I reached the doorway of the sitting room, where light from the hallway shone, I paused to consider the row of Devlin portraits. Each man smiled out at posterity, holding a book, now blue, now green; but always bearing the same little emblem that I had first seen on the book Paul Chapman had left behind at Harvard and had mistaken for a cross, but now knew represented a pair of crossed bones. I could almost hear the laughter of the painted faces. And the joke was on me.
At the head of the stairway, I thought for the second time that night that I’d like to use the escalator chair; and for the second time it was at the other end. Hanging onto the banister, I lowered myself a step. Then another. And another. I heard voices again. From below, beyond the turn in the stairs, one I didn’t recognize said, “You’re all set, sir. Everything’s packed. The pilot’s on his way to Hanscom Field now. He’ll meet you there in an hour.”
“All right. Now, listen carefully,” Basil Devlin answered. “Once I’ve gone, I want you to contact the police. Speak with Lieutenant Droney. He may not be on duty, but insist that you speak with him personally. Tell him where you’re calling from. Tell him you caught a prowler upstairs. He came at you abruptly, with a bloodstained coat, so God knows where he’d been or what he had in mind. But when he threatened you … was there a gun on him?”
“No, sir. Just the photograph, which you have.”
“When he attacked you, you were forced to defend yourself. Have your bat handy. The police will want to know how he got banged up. You scuffled, and he fell down the stairs and broke his neck. It wasn’t your fault. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got his name from the license you have there. Get that message to Droney. He knows Rasmussen was in trouble before and doesn’t like him. He’ll be interested in what happened.”
