No Cure for Death

TWENTY-FIVE

Harold was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell. He seemed too big to fit within the walls: he was a ship in a bottle and I wondered how it was done. He said, “How’s Mr. Norman?”

“He’s all right. I helped him back to bed.”

“You didn’t make things worse for him?”

“I’m not sure that’d be possible,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

He said, “I sent Rita across the street for some groceries and when she gets back she’s going to fix us breakfast. That should give us time to discuss things.”

“You were expecting this?”

“Of course,” he said. “Weren’t you?”

He led me into the empty living room, where the sun was slanting in through the many odd-shaped, undraped windows like swords stuck in a magician’s box. Our footsteps clomped, but didn’t echo. Harold gestured toward an arched doorway and I went on through it and he followed. We walked across the dead lawn and stopped a few yards from the drop-off. The river was choppy today; a gray barge was riding down to the lock and dam and wasn’t having an easy time of it. There was a crisp breeze and I wished I had worn a jacket.

“Rita says you write mystery stories,” Harold said, looking out toward the river.

“That’s right.”

He looked at me; the one eye bored into me. “You think life’s a mystery story?”

“What do you mean?”

“That tidy. That neat. That easy to deal with.”

I shrugged. “No. But life is like a mystery story, sometimes. Full of secrets somebody’s trying to keep, and can’t. Or anyway shouldn’t.”

He grunted; his breath smoked in the cold air, like the exhaust of a car. “My life isn’t a damn mystery story. Anyway it’s not your damn mystery story.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m in it.”

He thought about that. Nodded. “I guess you are.”

“Why don’t you tell me, Harold?”

“You’re the mystery writer. You tell me.”

“All right. I’ll tell you a story. It might not be much more than a story, but I’ll give it a whirl.”

He grunted again.

“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a senator named Richard Norman. And this senator had an affair with a secretary of his called Janet Ferris. It might’ve started at his senate office in Des Moines; but it wound up in Port City, probably in a motel room, during the summer the senator was launching his campaign for national office.”

Harold just stood and listened, impassive as a rock.

“The senator had a wife, too, but she was pregnant at the time-very pregnant. She delivered a baby girl to the senator late that summer. Maybe it was during those last few months of the wife’s pregnancy that the senator finally gave in to the secretary, and what might have started as a simple flirtation turned into something more complex, more complex than just another affair, too. Because the secretary also got pregnant.

“Now I don’t know whether the senator told his wife about the pregnant secretary. I kind of doubt it. But I’m pretty sure he would’ve told his political advisor, monetary backer and guiding light behind everything he did: his father, Simon Norman. The man behind the man. And I’m pretty sure I know how Sy Norman would’ve handled the secretary: he would pay her off to go away quietly and just disappear.

“And she did. She went off to Old Town in Chicago and was a hippie with her hippie husband for a while, quite good and soured on an Establishment she’d briefly believed in. How am I doing, Harold?”

When Harold answered, I was almost surprised: it was like the rock suddenly talked. “It’s your story,” he shrugged.

“Is it? Anyway, a few years pass and in the midst of launching a second attempt to go to Washington, the senator dies in a car crash. So does his wife. And so does his only child-the only legitimate child, that is. Old Sy Norman has a stroke shortly after. And then someone remembered the pregnant secretary, and reminded the old man about her; perhaps she hadn’t had an abortion-perhaps she’d had the child.

“And so the Norman forces tracked down Janet Taber; or anyway, tracked down Janet’s mother. And it turned out Janet had indeed had the child, a son. A grandson for Sy Norman. Something that would outlive him. Something that came from him that would last. For some reason, Janet’s mother was used as a go-between. Was it because Janet was bitter toward the Normans? Could it be that that other time Janet had turned down the money they offered her, and had just disappeared into Old Town and became a hippie, snubbing their capitalistic offer?”

Harold turned his gaze on me and nodded.

“Okay, then. It starts to make sense. The mother acted as go-between; Janet suspected who was behind it, but since her child needed medical care, she went along-maybe lied to herself that it wasn’t the Normans paying the bills. Hoping it was some other good-hearted John Beresford Tipton type. Maybe it was easier for her to live with it that way. Whatever the case, whatever the reasons, she went along with it, and her son went to that clinic in the east.

“And now I have to guess. I can only guess. But I’m almost sure I’m right. A day or two before you pulled your scare tactic on Janet at the bus station, Harold-and why exactly you did that, I admit I’m still not sure of-a day or two before things started getting ugly, the boy died.”

Harold again turned his gaze on me. Again he nodded slowly. Sadly.

“I thought so! The little boy in the big fancy clinic died. But Janet Taber never knew that. She was never told. That’s something, anyway; that’s a burden she didn’t have to carry to her grave with her. But that’s about the only break she got. Because Stefan-and his killing machine, Davis-had decided to get rid of both Janet and her mother, before they found out the boy was dead.”

“And why would they do that, Mallory?”

I poked his barrel chest with a finger. “Because Janet and her son were both in the old man’s will! Am I right? Because Stefan wanted it all, and because news of the grandson’s death might kill the old man, and then Stefan would lose a good chunk of his inheritance. So Stefan had to act fast-a fire, a car crash-and then he stood to inherit it all again. Pretty sloppy work, if you ask me, but then it helps to have the local cops in your pocket when you’re doing work as clumsy as it is ruthless.”

Harold laughed humorlessly. “Stefan was a clumsy criminal. He was a manipulator, a schemer-but when it came to murder, he was out of his depth.”

“So much so that he ended up committing suicide.”

“Right. But the blame for that is yours, Mallory.”

“Mine?”

“Stefan’s clumsy staging of ‘accidents’ would’ve held up, but for you. Like you said, the police and the sheriff are in the Norman family’s pocket; the investigations of these events would’ve been cursory, at best. How was Stefan to know a… a mystery writer like yourself would be on hand to poke in here, and unravel there?”

The elation I’d been feeling, from putting the pieces together, suddenly faded; the wind was cold on my face but the sun had come out from under some clouds and made me squint.

I said, “So when the holes in Stefan’s not-so-grand design began to show and the local law had to start looking into things, and when his roommate Davis ended up dying for him-when it all began coming apart and falling in on him-he had an attack of despair and wrote a self-serving suicide note, apparently designed to spare his uncle’s feelings, a bit, and then put a bullet in his brain.”

Harold nodded. The barge horn blew, a foghorn sound.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You killed Stefan, Harold. Why don’t you just tell me about it? It is your story, after all….”