An Old Friend of the Family

FOURTEEN

The police artist was just packing up his sketch pads and getting ready to leave when Joe shepherded Judy and Clarissa past Johnny’s police bodyguard in the hospital corridor and into the private room. The artist was chuckling a little as he packed, having evidently just made some little joke—or maybe Johnny was the joker, for here the kid was, sitting straight up in bed and looking well, or almost well, just as his mother and father had so thankfully described him.

A drift of vased and potted flowers and plants was mounting up at one side of the room, and two bedside tables were almost covered with cards and notes, along with some half-finished sketches that the artist had evidently abandoned. Johnny’s hands were both heavily bandaged, and he held them out awkwardly behind first Judy’s back and then Clarissa’s when the women hurried to hug him.

When they took chairs at last, Joe moved up closer to the bed. “Well, buddy, you look a hell of a lot better than I expected.”

“I feel real good, too.” John appeared to pause to think about his feelings seriously. “Mom and Dad said I shouldn’t have a bunch of visitors, but I hope you guys can stay a while.”

“Cops have been bugging you with questions, I suppose.”

“Oh, yeah, about the people who kidnapped me. They say the guy who stayed with me in the house is dead. They showed me a Polaroid of a dead man, and it was him, all right.”

The kid seemed to be able to talk about it all quite lightly now. Wait, Joe thought, a reaction will hit him later. Nightmares at least. A little craziness of some kind, probably. The family will have to watch for it. He asked Johnny: “Who were the rest of them?”

“There were at least two other men, and one woman. And once, I swear, they had like a party going on. Whole bunch of people, talking in some weird foreign language.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, I don’t think the police and the FBI believe me either. They probably think I was delirious. But one night all these people were in the house, all talking what sounded like Latin.”

“Latin,” said Clarissa, as if shocked, as if the use of Latin in such a business would be some kind of special sacrilege. She sat back in her chair and looked at Judy, who only gave an impatient little headshake in reply.

John went on: “And the cops keep asking me if I ever got a message out, anything like that. I didn’t. I couldn’t. How’d you ever know I was in there?”

Wishing that he hadn’t quit smoking quite so permanently the last time, Joe bit at a hangnail. “I don’t think I know the answer to that one myself.”

Judy said defensively: “I keep telling everyone, I just had a feeling of where you were. First in a dream. And then, when Dr. Corday hypnotized me, I could find the house. I seemed to be able to really see you for a while, in that closet.”

Mention of the closet made John give his head a twitchy shake. “Where’s Dr. Corday now?” he wondered. “I asked Mom and Dad and they just sort of put me off. I’d like to be able to thank him.”

Judy said: “He seems to have disappeared from his motel this morning.” She sounded almost casual about it, which made Joe feel vaguely relieved.

Johnny’s eyes widened. “I hope those guys didn’t . . .”

“The kidnappers?” Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so. The cops were watching the motel all night, I’m sure.”

“Then how’d he get out?”

“That’s a good question.” Joe had his own ideas about that. His police instincts, if after eight years in the business you maybe began to have such things, told him that the old man had not looked at all like Dr. Corday when he came out, and furthermore Dr. Corday was not going to be easy to find again. Because Dr. Corday no longer existed. Disguises were generally nonsense, of course. But `the kindly old family doctor from London’ had itself been a disguise, one good enough to work, for a while anyway and among strangers. Except . . . Clarissa, of course. Granny Clare. Joe was going to have to talk to her in private when he got the chance. She hadn’t met his eye directly all morning.

“Jeez, I hope he’s all right.” Johnny was starting to get upset about it.”

“I’m sure he is,” said Judy impulsively, sounding like there could be no doubt.

“I’m just as glad he’s gone, myself,” said Joe, and felt astonished at the violence of the glare that Judy turned on him.

She said: “He got my brother out of there.”

“Yes, he did do that.” Joe turned to the window, to study the grayness of middle-class Evanston in midwinter, through black skeletal trees. “Afterwards, though, Corday and I were talking, alone. The dead man was there on the cot in the same room. The deputies were out in their car using the radio. Corday was talking pretty crazy, then. I’m saying this because if he pops up again I think you all ought to use care in dealing with him.”

“Crazy how?” Judy challenged.

“Well. Like it might very well have been him who killed that fellow, that way. Though he didn’t confess it in so many words. To brag about something like that, whether you really did it or not . . . I’ve got to see Charley Snider later today and go over all of this with him.”

Judy was angry. “If he killed a kidnapper, does that make him crazy?” Her brother was watching numbly. Clarissa was hiding her face, or maybe just resting her eyes.

Joe continued: “And then he said some incoherent-sounding things, like how the man had run down the hill to get to running water. That man’s not normal . . . Clarissa, you all right?”

“Running water,” repeated Granny Clare, through lips suddenly gone pale. Looking worse than Johnny in his hospital bed, she started to get up, clutched at a bedside table, sent papers spilling to the floor. Then she sank back in her chair.

Judy, her normal self again, hurried to fuss over her grandmother. Clarissa popped a nitroglycerin pill, took some water, looked a lot better.

Joe asked: “Does running water mean anything in particular?”

Judy scowled at him again, and turned to her brother, changing the subject. “What did the other people look like?”

“Oh, the only ones I really saw were the two men in the car, the ones who grabbed me. I got the best look at the one who was driving but he was sort of ordinary-looking, I guess. See, I was walking along the side of Sheridan Road there, after dark, coming home from the Birches’, and this car just pulled up slowly, and this guy with a dark beard rolled down his window and asked for some kind of phony directions. Then the back door opened, and this real monster sort of jumped out. I didn’t get much of a look at his face, not then anyway, but man was he big. He was the one who . . .”

John’s voice trailed off. His eyes fell to his bandaged hands, and for a moment the boy’s face showed shock, as if it were just coming through to him now what those bandages really meant. “I’ll be able to use my hands almost as good as ever,” he added, with the air of doggedly repeating something he had been told.

“You said there was a woman,” Judy prodded, probably just trying to snap Johnny out of his dark contemplation.

He looked vacantly at his sister for a moment before answering. “Yeah. There in the house, at night. She looked into the closet at me, but it was too dark for me to see her. I dunno. It’s all kind of vague.” Suddenly turning into a hospital patient after all, Johnny lay back on his pillows.

“I think we’d better let you rest.” Judy bent over her brother to hug him one more time.

When it came Joe’s turn to say farewell, he grinned at the boy and shook his own two hands together. “Let us know if we can bring you anything.”

“I will.”

Judy had paused to restore the papers fallen from the table. Looking at one sketch, she gave a little sniff and almost smiled. “Know who this looks like to me? I met him once, when he was trying to get Kate to go on a skiing weekend with him. Craig Walworth.”