Killing Time

Twenty-Three

If you look at a map of the town of Winston, it will probably strike you right away that the town is shaped like a balloon on a string, and if you happen to know the particulars of the case, the symbolism of that won’t escape you.

The balloon itself is the main area of the town, the business and residential and industrial districts. The string is a two-lane blacktop road headed northwest into the Adirondacks, called McGraw’s Market Road. I doubt that anybody any more knows who McGraw was or what kind of market he had. And at the end of the string, where the owner of the balloon would be holding it, that’s where Jordan Reed’s estate is.

Reed bought the estate around twenty years ago, and at that time the place was a good five miles from the city line. Which meant it wasn’t hooked up to the town sewage system or water mains, and the county rather than the city had the responsibility for keeping McGraw’s Market Road free of potholes and frost heaves. Two years after Reed moved in, the City Council unanimously agreed that that five-mile stretch of McGraw’s Market Road was really a part of Winston after all.

The house itself was set back a quarter-mile from the road on a slim plateau midway up Claridge Mountain. The whole plateau, maybe a couple miles long and half a mile wide, was the Reed estate, heavily forested and securely fenced. One turned right from McGraw’s Market Road, past two massive stone gateposts, and dead ahead a quarter of a mile on blacktop through the trees to the house.

The house was one of those big rambling monstrosities built at a time when bay windows and comer towers and rococo wood curlicues were all the rage. The first-floor exterior was of stone, the two floors above it faced with gray shingles. The roof slanted this way and that over the various wings and outcroppings of the place, and a wide screened porch surrounded the first floor on three sides.

I pulled the Ford onto the dirt beside the house, where guests were supposed to park, told my crowd to wait for me, and walked over to the house.

The porch was cool and dim. Woven straw rugs crackled underfoot, and whitewashed tables and chairs were off to the left, with an old crank-’em-up phonograph which now, its guts removed, served as a liquor cabinet.

I rang the bell and waited, listening to the silence. The trees were rustling a little bit, but that was all the noise there was in the world.

A maid opened the door, finally, and said, “Mr. Smith, yes. Mr. Reed said you’d be calling. This way, please.”

I followed her inside and through the long, cool rooms. Jordan Reed himself was the modern businessman, dressed to the minute, completely up to date in both his business and social life. His plant was so modern it was painful. But his home was a cool, dim breeze straight out of the nineteenth century.

We walked back through the house, through rooms muffled by deep-piled Oriental carpets, the wall mirrors gleaming dark, the rich woods of the furniture burnished to warm highlights, the ceilings high and dim, the walls papered with gentlemen and ladies riding in carriages or sitting quite formally in tiny rose arbors. There were no halls or corridors in this house, at least not on the first floor. One simply walked from room to room, through doorways graced with heavy, polished, intricately carved doors.

I half-expected to see Marvin Reed lurking in a corner of one of these rooms, still hiding from the by-now-departed Paul Masetti, but aside from the stolidly waddling maid, I saw no one, not Marvin or his wife Alisan or any other servants.

We stopped, finally, before one of the most rococo doors this side of the nearest cathedral, and the maid tapped diffidently on a curlicue. A muffled sound from inside might have been instructions to enter. The maid opened the door, ushered me in, closed the door again, and presumably went away.

This was Jordan Reed’s den, and a fantastic room it was. For some reason, that den always seemed to emphasize my chunkiness. The wall directly opposite me as I walked in was almost completely glass, two high wide windows looking out across the cleared side lawn and down the long forested slope of Claridge Mountain to the valley, where the whole town was laid out like a model on a table top. Between the windows was a six-foot-wide strip of wall, dominated by a frowning dark gloomy oil painting of Jordan Reed’s father Jonas, who, with Michael King, founded Reed & King Chemicals back before the turn of the century. The entire left wall, side to side and floor to ceiling, was lined with bookshelves, with the old morocco-bound matched sets on the upper shelves leading down through grim-colored texts on business and finance and American tax structure, through gaily dust-jacketed novels bought by Jordan’s late wife via mail-order book clubs, down to the bottom shelf way over on the right where red and yellow paperback books were not quite hidden from view. The right-hand wall held photographic blowups of the Reed & King plant and various members of both families, over a leather davenport, a couple of ashtray stands and a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Brown-leather armchairs flanked the doorway, with a map of Winston on the wall to the left of the door and a genealogical chart of the Reed clan to the right.

In the center of all this was a huge U-shaped desk, custom-made to Jordan Reed’s own plans, with Reed himself at the chair in the middle of the U, sitting with a loose-leaf notebook open in front of him, making notations in it from a sheet of paper to his right.

He looked up at my entrance, his face bland and smiling. “Ah, Tim,” he said, getting to his feet and backing out of the U. “Scotch,” he asked me, “or rye?”

“Neither,” I said. “Talk.”

He frowned, paused midway to the liquor cabinet, studying me. “All right,” he said. “Sit down, Tim.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Oh, come on, Tim, don’t have a chip on your shoulder.”

I’d expected him to be just a little bit worried. This bland good humor had me worried. “Do you remember,” I asked him, “what I promised yesterday?”

He nodded. “Of course,” he said, and continued on to the liquor cabinet. “You threatened to go to the CCG,” he said, “if there were any more attempts on your life.”

“And there was another one last night,” I said. “Wanamaker and Watkins asked me to wait until I talked to you.”

He nodded, and mixed himself a drink, moving slowly, and not looking at me again until the drink was ready. Then he glanced over and said, “You waited. And it’s a good thing you did, since now it’s pretty plain you had the wrong idea.”

“Which wrong idea was that?”

“That it was one of the people at that meeting,” he said. Behind the bland smile, he was watching me.

I held it in, trying to be as matter-of-fact as possible. “That isn’t pretty plain to me,” I said.

He did a creditable job of looking surprised. “But Harcum has made an arrest,” he said.

I laughed in his face, and the laughter was mainly from relief. He had been acting so cool, so pleased with himself, I’d been worried he had some ace up his sleeve, some way to cancel me out as a threat. But all he had was Ron Lascow!

He looked hurt. “I don’t see anything funny, Tim,” he said.

“Neither do I,” I told him. “Not really. Harcum’s working out of desperation. He thinks he can frame Ron, and he’s crazy.”

“Not necessarily, Tim. I’ve talked with Harcum, briefly, and it does all hang together. Lascow had opportunity—”

“So did a lot of other people.”

“Of course. And he also had just as much motive as anybody at City Hall. And he wasn’t one of the people to whom you delivered your ultimatum. Believe me, Tim, we all know you don’t make empty threats. None of us would—”

“Stop it, Jordan,” I said. “It’s one of you seven, and you know it. Do you have anything sensible to talk about, or should I just go away and chat with the CCG?”

He shrugged, not looking worried at all. “I had assumed,” he said, strolling across the den, “that Lascow’s arrest was the end of all this trouble, and we’d be able to concern ourselves with the CCG from now on.” He paused in front of the genealogical chart, and reached up to tap it. “I’ve left a lot of room there,” he said. He turned to look at me, smiling. “Think I’ll make a good grandpa?”

He was too damn sure of himself. I said, “You went to Albany to see Bruce Wheatley, the head of the CCG. Did you manage a deal?”

“Of course not,” he said. He looked back at the chart again. There were Reeds listed as far back as 1734. William begat Francis, and Francis begat Hiram, and Hiram begat Lawrence, and on and on it went, until finally Jonas begat Jordan and Jordan begat Marvin, and Marvin didn’t beget anybody. I knew that bothered Jordan. Jonas had left the firm to Jordan, who would leave it to Marvin, and he wanted to know that Marvin would be leaving it to another Reed. I had the feeling Jordan had managed to ignore an awful lot of Marvin’s weaknesses, just for this reason. I also had the feeling that Jordan was unaware that Marvin had done most of his sowing in recent years away from home. If Jordan had learned that, Marvin would have been out on his ear, and not because Jordan is a prude, which he isn’t, but because Marvin could sow his wild oats only after he had fulfilled the begat requirement.

Jordan turned away from the chart and amplified his last statement. “The CCG,” he said, “is unfortunately honest.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Jordan,” I said. “Because I’m on my way to join them.”

He raised an eyebrow, but seemed otherwise unruffled by my news. “Tim,” he said, “are you sure you’ve thought this out?”

“What do you think?”

“I think there may be one or two points you haven’t considered,” he said.

“Such as?”

“If you turn on your friends,” he said, “they’ll turn on you. Remember, you’re just as implicated as anyone else. You’ve withheld evidence of crimes.”

I shook my head. “You’re wrong. I can’t be called on that after I’ve stopped withholding. The minute I turn my files over to the CCG, I’m clear.”

“If you do this, Tim,” he said, “you’re through in Winston, I hope you realize that. No one will be able to trust you any more. And you have to be trusted to stay in business.”

“Given the choice between living and being trusted,” I told him, “I’ll pick living every time.”

He shrugged. “All right,” he said. “You’re going to be obstinate. I don’t know why you waited to talk to me. There’s nothing I can say more than what I’ve already said.”

“You can say,” I told him, “that you guarantee to have the killer behind bars within the hour. You can say that Ron Lascow will be released one phone call from now.”

He shook his head. “I can’t do either, Tim,” he said. “They’re contradictory. Whether you like it or not, Ron Lascow is the man.”

At this point, it was obvious that the only thing for me to do was go away. He was harping on Ron, and letting me know that he wasn’t worried by anything I might do. Either he was lying, and he’d managed to wangle a deal directly with the CCG after all, or his trip to Albany had resulted in his reaching somebody high enough in the state government to offer him protection from the reformers.

“All right, Jordan,” I said. “They asked me to talk with you. I’ve talked with you.”

“Yes, you have,” he said blandly.

“I think you ought to know,” I said, “that my files are in a safe place. If anything happens to me, a friend of mine will turn them over to the CCG anyway.”

He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “you’re perfectly safe.”

While he was talking, there was a faint rap on the door. He frowned, called an order to come in, and the maid appeared in the doorway, white-faced and wide-eyed. “Mr. Jordan,” she whispered. She glanced at me, and bugged her eyes at her employer some more. It was plain they both wanted me to leave. So I left.