I watch greed and caution fight out their battle on Mrs Stacey’s dull features. It is caution – with obvious regret – which finally wins.
“Gary don’t need no money,” she says.
“Everybody needs money, Mrs Stacey.”
“Gary’s got plenty of cash. Got enough that he can send me a few hundred every month.”
“I really think it’s up to Gary to decide whether or not he wants the money we’re offering,” my partner says.
The fat woman’s eyes are now like those of a cornered rat. She has probably been hassled by officials before – by welfare workers, truant officers, health department workers – but none of them has been as quietly tough as Carrie.
“If you just give us his address, we’ll handle everything,” Carrie persists.
The fat woman relaxes – the rat has found a bolt-hole.
“Don’t know where he is,” she says triumphantly. “He moves around a lot.”
“Moves around?” Carrie repeats. “I assume that’s for his work. Exactly what kind of work does Gary do, Mrs Stacey?”
“He don’t have to do noth—” the fat woman begins, then her mouth freezes. She walks over to the door and flings it wide open. “Ya gotta go now.”
“Mrs Stacey …”
“I don’t wanna talk to you no more. Ya gotta go, or I’m callin’ the cops!”
She’s probably never called the police in her life, but, just this once, her fear of the law might be less than her fear of more questions. And since we are on the run, this is a chance we can’t take.
So we leave.
She stands on the front porch, thick arms crossed, watching us. As we reach the corner, I turn and look back. She is still there.
*
Ever since we left Mrs Dillworth’s house I have had the feeling that there’s something I missed – something I should have noticed, but haven’t. And all afternoon, while I’ve been playing the journalist, the government agent and the private eye, the thought has been throbbing away like a mild headache. Now, as we approach Marty’s Eldorado, I realize what that something is.
I picture the Dillworth’s’ living room. There is a photograph of Mrs Dillworth’s husband hanging on the wall, but there isn’t one of the son of whom she is so proud. And all the time she was telling us about Harvey’s achievements, she never once offered to show us her family photograph album.
There has to be a reason for her not doing what would come naturally to any mother, and I think I know what it is. She doesn’t show people her photographs – like she doesn’t go to Boston – because her precious Harvey has asked her not to!
“I want to go to the public library,” I say.
“The public library?” Carrie repeats, incredulously. “In this one-horse town? What the hell for?”
I grin. “Because, my dear Carrie,” I say, “none of the great libraries of the world, with all their millions of books, can give me the information that I am hoping to find in the library of this one-horse town.”
*
The library and museum are in an old frame house opposite the Town Hall. We walk in through the front door and look around. It is a single large room. At one end are glass cases containing arrowheads, ancient rifles, pottery, and pioneer costumes. At the other end are the bookshelves, stacked with maybe a thousand volumes, most of them lightweight paperbacks.
“Hey, neat idea coming here,” Carrie says. “This looks a real great place to do research.”
“Can I help you?” a voice asks.
We turn to see a small, grey-haired woman with half-moon spectacles sitting behind a very large desk.
“Do you keep the high school yearbooks, back to say … 1974?” I ask, and at the edge of my vision I see Carrie raising a questioning eyebrow.
“Yes, we do keep them,” the librarian says, adding, with a hint of pride in her voice, “but which high school are you interested in? We have two here in Macclesfield – Emerson and JQA.”
“JQA? What does JQA stand for?” Carrie asks.
“John Quincy Adams,” the librarian says severely, like Carrie has just failed a test. “He passed through here once. He was President, you know.”
Despite myself, I find that I like this town. Sure, it’s provincial with a capital P, but there’s something reassuring about its easy complacency. Harrisburg could be like Macclesfield, I think – if most people didn’t have to spend most of their time worrying about just getting by.
“So which of the yearbooks would you like to see?” the librarian asks.
“Both of them, I guess.”
“JQA is on the third shelf down. You’ll find Emerson High just below it.”
I take the yearbooks from the shelves – three copies of each, so I have one each side of ‘74 – and place them on the table.
“What exactly are you expecting to find?” Carrie whispers. “Is it some kind of high school confession you’re looking for, along the lines of, I don’t know – ‘Harvey has always had a crooked streak and his ambition after he graduates is to help Maxwell Tait corrupt the city of Harrisburg’?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, flicking through the first volume. “That isn’t what I’m looking for at all,”
I find what I am looking for in the 1973 edition of JQA. There is no high school confession, but there is a short poem:
‘No time for girls, no time for leisure,
Working to be a lawyer is all Harvey’s pleasure.’
The picture above the verse is grainy, but despite that, I can still see that the face gazing up at me from the page is both serious and intent. I can see more – I can read into that face the helpless hope of a small-town boy who is burning up with ambition but who knows, deep inside himself, that it is almost certain his quest will end in soul-destroying failure.
Now I know why the photograph of Harvey’s father hanging in Martha Dillworth’s living room reminded me of someone.
And now I understand why Maxwell Tait hasn’t yet bought himself a home on Beacon Hill. It’s because he knows he’s not ready yet, and so he has been hiding out in the suburbs for the last seven years, slowly building up the right persona, so that when he does finally make the move to the Hill, he will be able to act as though he were born to it.
I look down at the picture again.
“How hard you must have worked at re-inventing yourself,” I say aloud.
He’s sacrificed his life to it – and his mother’s. He’s built a new shell around himself, molding that shell as a potter moulds his clay. And yet, even now, he’s not sure of himself. Even now he daren’t come to see his old mother in case the shell can’t stand the heat – in case it cracks and the old Harvey Dillworth emerges from beneath the smooth, glazed finish of Maxwell Tait.
34
The sun is setting as, on the outskirts of the town, we pass the sign which says:
‘Goodbye from Macclesfield – Home of the Famous Macclesfield Pure-Maize Biscuit’.
A few hours ago, those words inspired Carrie to break out into song, but now she keeps silent.
And so do I! I’ve been wrong about things before, but nowhere near as spectacularly as I have been wrong today – and I feel about as low as any man could.
So I was going to expose Maxwell Tait and Harvey Dillworth to Thurston Craddock, was I?
Oh yes I was – and I had it all worked out. Dillworth is the evil genius with the law degree, I would explain to the millionaire businessman, and Tait is nothing more than his front man.
A brilliant theory, except that now I’ve found out that they are one and the same man, I’m left with almost nothing.
What can I prove actually prove about Tait? That he was brought up in poverty, and changed his name when he moved to Boston?
Maybe Craddock knows it already. And even if he doesn’t, how does that go any way towards me proving that Maxwell Tait is in Mayor Pine’s pocket?
At the edge of town, I reach a junction at which a left turn will take me back to Bosto
n and a right turn will have me heading towards the expressway going south. I indicate to the right.
“Aren’t we going back to Boston?” Carrie asks.
“What would be the point?” I reply, despondently. ‘We’ve learned all there is to learn there – and it hasn’t helped us at all.’
“So where are you planning to take us?”
“Back to New York City.”
“And what are we going to do when we get there?”
A good question.
“Hand Marty back his car and his Amex card, I suppose.”
“And then what?”
Another good question.
“I don’t know what we’ll do next,’ I say, “but I’m sure that we’ll come up with something.”
“Like what?” asks the mocking voice in my head. “Like travelling around under assumed names, getting work when and where you can, and having adventures?”
No, not like that – because although it might have worked for Dr Richard Kimble while he searched for the one-armed man who killed his wife, this ain’t television. As far as all the police forces right across the whole damn country are concerned, we’re cop killers – which makes us the absolutely worst kind of people – and they’re not going to stop looking for us for a long, long time.
We have to face the facts, which are that we’re already dead and it’s just that we haven’t stopped breathing yet.
“What about Gary Stacey?” I ask, clutching at a straw.
“What about him?” Carrie says, without enthusiasm.
“Why is Tait paying him off? When you think about it, it’s Gary who owes Tait – not the other way round.”
Carrie shrugs. “Maybe Tait just wants to make sure he keeps some kind of distance between them. I mean, he wouldn’t be exactly over the moon if he ran into Gary in downtown Boston, now would he?”
“So you’re saying that he pays Gary to live somewhere a long way away? Like the West Coast?”
“Yeah. Or maybe even the Chicago area would be far enough.”
It makes sense. Sure Tait would do that – and why should Thurston Craddock blame him?
But wait a minute – wait a minute!
Gary Stacey left town the day he was released from jail, and at the time Tait was still Harvey Dillworth, with no more than a few dollars to his name!
I suddenly realize that, in finding out that Tait and Dillworth are really the same person, there’s one thing we’ve overlooked.
“Where did the money come from?” I ask.
“What money?”
“For starters, there’s the money to pay Gary Stacey to leave town and never come back. And then there’s the money that Tait used to buy himself a senior partnership in Tait, Walsh and Fineberg. Until about an hour ago, that didn’t seem important, because we knew nothing about Tait’s background. But now we do know about it – and now we also know that there’s no way he could have raised the cash himself!”
“He’s got to be nothing but a front man for someone else after all!” Carrie says, excitedly.
“Damn right,” I agree.
The enthusiasm drains away from Carrie’s face.
“But how are we going to prove it?” she asks. “We can’t go to the IRS or Treasury and ask them to investigate. We’re fugitives from justice, Mike.”
She’s right. And now another depressing thought hits me. Even if we could prove Tait is just a front man, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s also crooked. Maybe he simply has a backer who read about the way that he handled the Stacey case and figured he was a good investment.
Maybe … maybe … maybe …
We slip back into silence. Ahead of us is the Macclesfield Pure-Maize Biscuit factory, and beyond it, I can see a number of other industrial units. This is Macclesfield’s own Prosperity Park – the sort of place Porky can see when he closes his eyes and imagines a thriving Harrisburg.
We are almost level with the biscuit factory when Carrie screams, with a sudden urgency: “Stop the car, Mike! Stop it right now!”
Without even thinking about it, I slam on the brakes. The tires screech in protest, the Eldorado slews to the side. I wrench on the wheel, pull us out of the skid, and bring the vehicle to a juddering halt.
My heart is beating like a wild Keith Moon drum solo, my pulse has gone into overdrive.
“What’s wrong?” I ask – still not quite more angry than shaken, but certainly getting there.
Carrie doesn’t answer – in fact, I don’t think she even hears me. What she is doing is gazing with total horror at a billboard advertising the pure-maize biscuits.
I look at it myself. It is like a split screen. On one side of it, a healthy-looking country type in overalls stands with his back to maize field. On the other side, a pretty housewife is working in her luxury kitchen. Both are smiling, and the rustic, his arm reaching across from his world to hers, is handing her a packet of the biscuits.
“So what’s the big deal?” I ask, and now, it is the anger which is in control.
“The words!” she gasps – totally oblivious to my tone. “Read the words.”
They are in large letters, across the top of the billboard.
‘Macclesfield All-Maize Biscuits.
Established 1986’
“Okay, so the factory was built while Tait was still living here,” I say. “What does that prove?”
“He must have been here as well,” Carrie replies.
“Who must have been here as well?”
“Are you blind?” Carrie demands, almost hysterically.
“No, but—”
“There!”
Carrie points, not at the legend over the picture, but at the words in smaller letters underneath it.
‘A division of Craddock Industries’, I read.
And instantly, everything fits together in my mind – like iron filings forming a pattern around a magnet; like pieces of paper in a kaleidoscope tumbling into a fixed design.
In one flash of insight I have answered all the questions that have been nagging at me, and see the whole thing for what it truly is.
And I feel a great weight of sadness descend upon me as I accept the fact that Bobbie Hopgood really must have raped all those little children in Harrisburg after all.
35
The room I have checked into at The Blue Ridge Motel has both a water bed and a twenty-four hour blue movie channel, but I do not take advantage of either of them. Instead, I pick up the phone and dial the Harrisburg number which is hand-written on the back of the thick business card.
“Tait, Walsh and Fineberg,” says the receptionist, who still has the trick of making you feel like you’ve made her day just by calling. “How may we help you?”
The last time I rang her, I was pretending to be Porky Pine, but now I use my normal voice.
“I’d like to speak to Mr Tait, please.”
“He’s in a meeting at the moment. If you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll ask him to call you back.”
“It’s very important that I talk to him right now.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Tait has left strict instructions—”
“He won’t give a damn about whatever strict instructions when he hears who I am,” I say – and now I am sounding just a little aggressive.
“Mr Tait always—”
I sigh theatrically.
“Listen, sister, you do what you want. Why should I care, when it’s your job, not mine, that’s on the line?”
There are a couple of seconds of silence, then the receptionist says: “Could I have your name, sir?”
“Tell him it’s Harvey Dillworth.”
“Is that D … I … double L …?”
“He knows how to spell it.”
Another short silence.
“Hold the line please,” the receptionist says, and from the new edge to her voice, I’d guess I’m not making her day any longer.
It makes maybe a minute for her to give Tait the good news, and f
or him to reach for a phone.
“Who is this?” he demands. “Is it some kind of joke?”
He sounds worried.
Understatement – he is positively crapping himself.
He has worked so very hard – changing his name, changing his life, never even visiting his mother because she is a connection to a past he has disowned. And now, just when he thinks it is safely buried, his old dead self is calling him up.
“Who is this?” he asks again, as I keep him waiting – make him sweat.
I can sense the way his mind is working. He’s still hoping that this is all just a coincidence – that I am an industrialist from Chicago, or a banker from Baton Rouge, who has been recommended to him, and who really is called Harvey Dillworth.
Yeah, he’s hoping – but not with too much conviction.
“Are you alone?” I ask.
“Yes, I—”
“Then shut up and listen. I’m Mike Kaleta.”
“Kaleta! But—”
“I told you to shut up! I know exactly what’s been going on. I know why the rapes started to happen just when they did. I know why Bobbie had to die in that prison cell. I know the whole deal, Harvey.”
“Maxwell,” he says angrily. “My name isn’t Harvey – it’s Maxwell.” There is a pause while he weighs up his options, then he says: “You know, for all your bluster, you can’t prove a thing, Kaleta.”
“Is that right?” I ask. “You don’t think that maybe Gary Stacey is a weak link in the chain?”
“You don’t—”
“Know where he is? No. Nobody does – because he travels around a lot, and nobody is looking for him. But once I give the cops what I’ve got, they’re going to want to talk to him real bad. And how are they going to find him, Harvey? Why, all they have to do is study the national crime statistics until they find a city where there’s been a sudden spike in the number of child molestations.”
“It can’t be as easy as that – it simply can’t be,” says Tait, like he’s trying convince himself.
“It’s exactly that easy,” I say. “Let me tell you something about low-life perverts like Gary Stacey – they’re too dumb to cover their tracks or go into hiding for long. Three days, Harvey, that’s all it’s going to take. Three days, tops. And once they’ve got Stacey in custody, he’ll sing like a bird to save his own neck.”
Violation Page 20
