Chain of Fools

9

Just after nine, I pulled into Chester Osborne's cul-de-sac on Summit Hill Road, a woodsy residential drive on a high hill overlooking Edensburg. The light was nearly gone from the murky sky, but it hadn't cooled off much and the August night air was only a little less dense than gumbo.

I had my car back, and Janet and Timmy had driven down to Albany to visit Skeeter and pick up some of Timmy's and my belongings so that we could all move into Ruth Osborne's house together for a time. Our purpose was mutual protection. Dale would be there too, and she had agreed to quit sniping at Timmy for the duration of my investigation. She did insist that a "shoot-out" at some convenient later date was inevitable. Timmy told me he was almost convinced Dale was batty, but he conceded that something about her was starting to become very dimly familiar.

Chester and Pauline Osborne lived in a two-story mock-Tudor house built on a shelf of fill on the downslope side of Summit Hill Road. The house looked freshly painted and stuccoed, and the height of the arbor vitae rising out of the bark-mulch beds that bordered all the walls of the place suggested it had been put up in the early eighties. The cul-de-sac had been newly tarmacked and was brilliantly floodlit. His-and-her Lexuses were parked in the driveway, one glistening black, one glistening teal.

When I had phoned earlier, Chester said he was disturbed to hear that Janet had felt the need to hire a private detective-June had undoubtedly been on the horn pronto following our late-afternoon encounter. Chester told me he was interested in hearing about my

"unnecessary" investigation, and why didn't I drop by for drinks after dinner? My own dinner, a couple of burritos, had been consumed at a picnic table outside Taco Bell. And while I wasn't sure which after-dinner drink was going to be appropriate, I had more pressing matters to take up with Chester Osborne, the stockbroker older brother with the history of violent outbursts.

"You found your way up here," Osborne said in a businesslike way. "Good for you. Well done."

"I followed your directions," I said. "They were clear."

"There's nothing worse than vague directions," he said with such finality that I decided not to bring up Chechnya. Leading me across the foyer, Osborne said, "We'll go in the study."

He was tall and stiff-backed in a gray pinstriped suit and silk tie with tiny blue digital clocks on it. Pleasantly large-featured in the by-then-familiar Osborne way, he carried himself with an assurance that suggested Janet's self-possession. Although something in Osborne's cool, blue, mildly bloodshot eyes hinted at a turbulent interior more like Dan's. Whether June's wackiness would also show up in the mix, I couldn't tell yet.

"Make yourself comfortable," Osborne said, indicating a striped-silk wing chair that looked as if it had been designed for anything but comfort. "Brandy?"

In some of the venues my line of work had taken me into, "Brandy," was more likely to be the name of a transvestite I was questioning than a beverage being served, and in that respect Chester Osborne's study represented a notable change. I said, "Yes, please."

The study, like the foyer we'd come through and the living room I'd briefly glimpsed (the back of a woman's blond head had been visible above the back of a couch), had wall-to-wall gray carpeting and the kind of furnishings more commonly found in investment bankers' offices: shiny formal chairs upholstered in silk or leather, heavily lacquered wooden sideboards, and desks whose design was vaguely, but not exactly, French provincial-more French Provincial Decorating Product. The watercolor of a mountain lake with a canoe on it hanging over Osborne's desk was identical to the watercolor of a mountain lake with a canoe on it hanging in the foyer.

"Looks good," I said, accepting a snifter half full of an amber fluid of considerable clarity. "No need to run this stuff through cheesecloth."

Ignoring that, Osborne stared at me for a long moment, and then said, "I spoke to my sister June earlier."

"I supposed you might have."

"June told me she ran into you today."

"Yes, this afternoon, at your mother's house." I sipped some of the brandy, which was not Fine Brandy Product, but the genuine article.

"June is a bit of a dingbat," Osborne said gravely, "but don't get the idea that I am."

"Okay."

He gave me an appraising look that was not friendly. Then he said, "I didn't like that talk about murder. June said you and Janet and Dale Kotlowicz were speculating about my brother's murder and what might have been an attempt to kill Janet-some crap about a Jet Ski attack June doesn't always get her facts straight, but she reported, to me that there was talk connecting these incidents to divisions within the Osborne family over the sale of the Herald. I didn't like that."

I said, "It was a theory that came up."

"Well, I don't like it. It's too close to slander." Osborne gazed down at me with his bloodshot eyes. He was still standing beside the bar a few feet from me, holding a snifter that he had not drunk from.

I said, "Any questions of slander could keep a couple of law firms' meters running indefinitely, but I'm more interested in finding facts, Chester. The police think a drifter killed your brother, and I'll be looking into that shortly. There is some evidence that somebody is trying to kill Janet, and with millions of dollars hanging on her vote on the Herald's sale, any prudent investigator is going to consider a connection. Of course, as an experienced investigator, I know enough to keep an open mind and I'll follow any trail of evidence wherever it may lead. Do you have any idea, Chester, why anyone might want to kill Janet?"

He stared down at me, still holding, but not drinking, his brandy. "No. I don't," he said. "You'll have to ask Janet about that. Or Dale Kotlowicz."

"Why Dale?"

"Dale and Janet are dykes-husband and husband. You didn't pick up on that?"

"Oh, sure."

"They have their private lives, which I know very little about and which I try not to think about. If someone is trying to kill either one of them, that's what I would look at, the lesbian angle. What I would not do is, I would not go poking into the Osborne family's business affairs, if I were you. You won't learn anything useful in your investigation, and you're liable to make some people mad who are people it would be better for you not to get mad."

"You, for example?"

"Me, for example."

Violent history or no violent history, what a twit he was. I said, "What are you, some kind of small-bore mobster, Chester, and you're threatening to smash my liver with a tire iron? Or do you talk like that because you spend too much time watching old Louis Calhern pictures on the Nostalgia Channel? Either way, I'm unimpressed."

He flushed and glared hard, and it occurred to me that Osborne was going to fling his drink in my face. But he maintained control-I had a feeling he devoted much of his energy in life to maintaining his emotional and physical equilibrium-and after a moment of what looked like bitter reflection, Osborne said, "And I'm unimpressed with you, Strachey. You think you've got me pegged as some small-town, country-club blowhard, but your impression is too limited to do you any good, and I'm not going to correct it. That's because, for one thing, I'm not given to psychobabble. For another thing, who or what I am is none of your goddamned business. And for a third and very important thing, you've got a lot of gall coming into my house and insinuating that I would kill anybody, let alone my own brother or sister. It's not an accusation I feel I need to dignify with a response. Now, I asked you up here for a briefing on this investigation you're supposedly conducting, and you agreed to fill me in, so let's stick to that. It's possible, but not likely, that someday you'll be experienced enough in life and wise enough in the ways of the world to understand my background as Tom Osborne's son. But in the meantime, I would be very careful about any assumptions you make about me, if I were you."

He was still hovering over me with a brandy snifter in his hand, and this was making me nervous. I said, "Chester, I think you're right that maybe we've gotten off on the wrong foot here. Sit down and let me bring you up to speed on the investigation-which I can tell you has only just begun, and there's not a whole lot to tell. I especially don't want you to think I came here to threaten you. And I don't recall insinuating that you ever killed anybody or ever gave a thought to homi cide. But do understand, your threatening me is a poor way to either gain my cooperation or affect the way I approach the Osborne family's personal or business activities. Your threats, as a matter of fact, serve mainly to pique my interest."

Osborne took this in with a show of fierce concentration, looking as if I were speaking in Esperanto and he was trying to follow somebody's simultaneous translation. Then he seemed to decide something, and he relaxed. He lowered himself into a wing chair, threw back the glass, and swallowed a slug of his brandy.

He said, "I don't like you, and I don't like what you're doing, Strachey. But I also know that refusing to cooperate with you is not the way to go. We'll just get each other riled up that way. I'm better off staying in touch, keeping tabs on you. So, with that in mind, I've set up a meeting for you tomorrow at nine-thirty with Stu Torkildson. You're to come by the Herald office. I'll also be present."

"I'll be there."

"Stu will reassure you as to any suspicions you may have regarding a connection between Eric's death and the sale of the Herald, or any connection between the sale of the paper and this ridiculous Jet Ski business. You need to be set straight on that score, and Stu can do it."

"How can he?" I asked.

Osborne looked nettled. "How can he what?"

"How can he reassure me that there's no connection between the sale of the paper and these other events unless he knows who killed Eric and why, and who tried to run over Janet with a Jet Ski and why?"

Osborne snorted once and looked at me as if I were a pathetic dunce. "You've never met Stu Torkildson, have you?" he said.

"Not yet."

"Stu is a persuasive man."

"So I've heard. But I hadn't heard he was all-seeing, all-knowing. Torkildson certainly lacked clairvoyance on the Spruce Haven resort project. After that bust-which is finishing off one of the more distinguished chapters in American journalism-I'm surprised you take this guy's judgments seriously at all."

Osborne dismissed this with a little wave of his brandy glass. "The financial loss is potentially considerable, but the rest of it, my friend, is just history. There's no point in getting sentimental over it. As a means of dispersing information, newspapers are all but dead. Half the people in the country own personal computers, and half of those are on-line. In another thirty years, newspapers will have disappeared, with books and magazines soon to follow old-time journalism into oblivion. By the middle of the next century, print on paper will be regarded as quaint, the way we look at gas lamps and phonograph records.

"The Herald's days are numbered, no matter what happened with the Spruce Haven investment, and the only smart thing to do now is for the family to sell to the highest bidder, then take the money and invest it in something with a future. If Janet, Dan, and Mother had a head for business, they'd see that. But they're stuck in the past. They like the word 'progressive' and that's how they think of themselves. But, believe me, they are anything but progressive. Strachey, the only violence associated with the sale of the Edensburg Herald is the potential that eight million dollars will be flushed down the toilet. And if you want to prevent a disaster, my friend, that is the one you should be trying to put a stop to."

He gazed at me with his cool, bloodshot eyes and waited.

I said, "In June, a month after Eric died, you told your mother, Chester, that in order to keep the Herald from being sold to Harry Griscomb, the more responsible newspaper chain but the lower bidder-and here I quote you, Chester-'Somebody else might have to get hurt.' What did you mean by that?"

He missed just a fraction of a beat before he said icily, "I said no such thing."

"Your mother says you did."

A slight trembling of the brandy snifter and an emphatic shake of the head. "No."

"You seemed to be saying that you knew that Eric's death was connected with the sale of the paper, and someone else might die if that would ensure a sale to InfoCom instead of Griscomb. Your mother told me that your remark was unmistakably a threat."

His eyes flashed for an instant, but his fight for self-control was constant and, with me so far, availing. He said, "Then my mother did not know what she was saying. She talks gibberish half the time. If you were in her house today, you know that my mother is mentally ill. She is suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease. In fact, soon she may have to be institutionalized."

What was this? "Institutionalized?"

"Yes," he said, "Mother is mentally incompetent. I know it, and if you were with her today for any length of time, then you know it too. It's tragic to see this happening to a woman who always took pride in her intellect. June told me how heartbreaking it was this afternoon to find Mother sitting like a zombie and staring into her garden. What Mother needs now is professional care. There's just no getting around it."

"That's your opinion," I said. "Have you discussed it with Janet or Dan? Or with your mother?"

"Not yet," Chester said in a matter-of-fact way. "But June and I talked it over, and I called Franklin Whately, mother's physician. Frank was negligent in not filling me in sooner on Mother's condition, but this evening he brought me up to speed. So it's not too late to see to it that Mother is placed in the appropriate setting for someone in her medical condition."

"You called a doctor when you heard about your mother's supposed poor condition-which, incidentally, is not nearly so dire as you're making it out to be, Chester. And did you call a lawyer too?"

He hadn't smiled once since I'd entered his house, but now he came perilously close to betraying what must have passed for amusement with him. Osborne's face relaxed just perceptibly and he said, "What do you mean, did I call a lawyer? It would have been wildly irresponsible of me not to."