No Cure for Death

TWENTY-SIX

“You have to understand about Stefan Norman,” Harold said. “Stefan Norman was a snake.”

His voice was a dry whisper; so was the wind.

“Stefan Norman,” Harold went on, “was the one who told Richard Norman’s wife about her husband and his secretary and a baby that might or might not have been aborted. And Mrs. Norman, she didn’t take it so well. She developed… nervous trouble. Then she developed drinking trouble. Psychoanalysis didn’t seem to help either problem. She proved a constant source of embarrassment for the Normans during the senator’s second national campaign. Rumors about her, which she in one way or another managed to generate, were so ugly that most people refused to believe them. Dismissed them as vicious smears. Like the one about her trying to drown their daughter while vacationing at Lake Okoboji.”

“Jesus,” I said.

Harold sighed heavily. “How the senator felt about his wife at this point I can’t really say. At one time he and I were rather close. He often revealed personal things to me, but… but when the business with his wife’s drinking and her cruelty to their daughter began, the senator clammed up.”

“What in hell possessed Richard Norman to get drunk and drive his car off Colorado Hill? It wasn’t suicide, was it?”

Harold said nothing.

“I get it,” I said. “Richard wasn’t driving that night. Richard wasn’t the drunk behind the wheel, was he? It was the wife. The wife.”

Harold nodded, said, “But the senator did allow his wife to drive back from Davenport when she was so drunk she could barely walk, let alone steer a car.”

“So what are you saying? That Richard Norman handing his wife the wheel was like handing her a revolver and saying shoot?”

Harold was looking past the drop-off before us, at the river. “Stefan felt that that interpretation of the events was likely, so likely that he advised Mr. Norman to go to the trouble of instructing the local authorities to have all the reports state that the senator was driving. Still, there were those who guessed past the cover-up that followed-those who guessed that Mrs. Norman had been driving, and who just knew she’d been steering accurately when she drove that car over Colorado Hill.”

Then he turned his one eye and his black eyepatch on me and said, “But they’re just guessing. And so are we.”

“What do you think, Harold? You and the senator were close, you said.”

“I don’t believe the death of his family was a conscious wish on the senator’s part. Maybe he hated his wife by this time; I don’t know. And he may have hated himself; that I don’t know, either. But he loved his little daughter. That much I do know.”

“Somebody else loved the daughter, too,” I said, gesturing with a thumb back at the house.

“Yes,” Harold nodded. “Mr. Norman loved the little girl. He used to say the little girl would grow up to be ‘the spittin’ image’ of his late wife. I feel it was the loss of the grandchild that triggered Mr. Norman’s stroke, more than losing his son the senator.”

“Who was it that remembered the other grandchild, Janet Taber’s illegitimate child? Stefan?”

Harold laughed; it was a deep, throaty laugh, and came as a shock, as he’d been speaking in hushed tones till now.

“Hardly,” he said. “Why would Stefan remind his uncle of another possible heir? I reminded Mr. Norman about the pregnant secretary. And it was the chance that a grandchild of his might be alive somewhere that made Simon Harrison Norman want to live again. And when the recovery had taken an upward turn, he spoke again, the first time since the stroke; he spoke to Stefan.” He laughed again. “Ordered his sole heir to search for the child.”

“Stefan wasn’t crazy about that, I assume.”

“No,” Harold smiled. “Stefan could hardly be expected to take pleasure in a search that would result in a decrease in his share of the Norman inheritance. But he went through the motions. He hired the necessary investigators and went himself to Des Moines to visit the girl’s mother, who hadn’t seen her daughter for several years, at that point.”

“And for a while that was as far as the search got.”

“Right. Mr. Norman got on Stefan’s case about it, from time to time, and once when Stefan said to his uncle that the search was useless because ‘the damn thing was probably aborted anyway,’ the old man flew into a rage. I suspected that Stefan was doing this to provoke another stroke-a fatal one-so I had words with him.”

“What kind of words?”

“Convincing words,” Harold said.

Harold was pressing his hands together in front of him, squeezing, like a vise of flesh. I was reminded for a moment that despite Harold’s gentle, genteel manner, this was still Punjab, still the one-eyed massive bear that I’d butted heads with at the bus station not so long ago.

“Finally,” Harold said, almost ignoring me, “Mrs. Ferris contacted Mr. Norman. Her daughter had phoned her, finally, with a tearful story of a critically ill child. And Mr. Norman-through Stefan-arranged for Mrs. Ferris to bring Janet to Port City to live, where they could be looked after. Mr. Norman thought it best to remain anonymous, being wary of the young woman’s once before having refused Norman money.”

“And old Sy Norman changed his will,” I said. “Which Stefan didn’t like one little bit.”

Nodding, Harold said, “First the young boy was written in, though a third of the estate would still go to Stefan, and Stefan would be executor, in charge of the boy’s funds and the Norman Fund, until the child reached twenty-one. But by then Mr. Norman had started thinking of Janet Taber as his late son’s ‘other wife,’ as the woman who shared his son’s love-shared it more than that ‘miserable bitch’ who drove him off a cliff, anyway.”

“And so Janet was written into the will, too,” I said. “And made her son’s executor?”

“Yes,” Harold said. “She was second in importance only to the grandchild himself. And stood to gain control of the Norman Fund, as well.”

I thought that over. “Stefan had already been forced to turn the will’s leading role over to the child,” I said, a little breathlessly, putting it together. “Now he was reduced from co-star to supporting player. After years of controlling the Norman money through the Fund, answering only to a bedridden, near-senile old man, he now had to deal with young, intelligent Janet Taber, not to mention her shrewd momma. Or the lawyers and accountants they’d bring with ’em during the takeover. And maybe Stefan’s books for the Fund weren’t any better balanced than Richard Norman’s wife when she drove off Colorado Hill, hmmm?”

Harold was shaking his head, and it wasn’t in a “no” gesture; he said, “You are a mystery writer, aren’t you?”

“Am I wrong?”

“Did I say you were? I told you Stefan was a snake. I always knew that. But I didn’t know to what extent, until I found he was putting together evidence designed to prove to Mr. Norman that the child was the offspring of Janet’s hippie, common-law husband.”

“Phil Taber,” I nodded. “So he and Stefan were connected.”

“Very much so. Taber had been going with Janet at Drake before the summer she and the senator… well. It was not a farfetched notion that Taber could’ve been the child’s father. In fact, Stefan came to me with his evidence first. Stefan knew Mr. Norman valued my opinion, trusted me as he trusted no other. So he used me as a guinea pig, though I didn’t know that at the time. I looked at the signed statement Phil Taber had made, and motel registration slips and so on, and I was convinced that the child was quite likely Taber’s. I begged Stefan not to show Mr. Norman the evidence! I felt it would only serve to demoralize Mr. Norman, perhaps even cause another stroke. I suggested to Stefan that he wait till after Mr. Simon had passed away; the evidence could then be used to contest the will, rather than now, when it would only serve to hurt the old man. And Stefan agreed to wait.”

“Why?”

Harold’s laugh was short, sarcastic. “I thought-just for a moment, mind you-that he had found some compassion for his uncle, somewhere. It’s only recently become obvious that Stefan agreed to wait only because he was creating evidence, not just amassing it, and he didn’t have enough of it put together for it to hold up under a court’s scrutiny. I am convinced now that the child was indeed the senator’s, or Stefan would’ve moved on it sooner.”

“When was all this?”

“Not long ago. A few months. And then this past Monday afternoon, a call came from the clinic out east: the boy was dead. Stefan took the call. Janet and her mother were not told. Mr. Norman was. He took it hard, as you would expect. You’ve seen him. He’s slipping away.”

“How did Stefan take it?”

Harold’s face turned cold. “Stefan went to Mrs. Ferris and offered her a considerable sum for her defection-the mother wasn’t in the Norman will, after all, and Stefan felt Mrs. Ferris was, therefore, vulnerable. It’s a common mistake of a snake like Stefan, to assume that the rest of humanity is as greedy and vile as he is.”

Harold was getting worked up; he was telling me things he had no firsthand way to know-things that only Stefan could have told him….

Harold went on, almost as if I wasn’t there: “Stefan hoped Mrs. Ferris would help him convince her daughter to make a signed ‘admission’ that the son was Taber’s, not the senator’s. Stefan had to move fast; he couldn’t keep the child’s death a secret forever, you know. So he offered Mrs. Ferris a lot of money-I don’t know how much, that he didn’t say. ‘Generous financial settlement,’ he told me, but who knows what that amounted to, in Stefan’s mind? But one of the things he did promise-and this tells you all you need to know about Stefan Norman-he promised as a fringe benefit continued clinical treatment for the child.” Harold’s eye was wet. “Continued clinical treatment. For a little boy already dead.” He clenched both fists. Suddenly I wasn’t nuts about standing on the edge of a drop-off with this guy.

“Mrs. Ferris and her daughter,” he said, “were to leave Port City at once. For good. Only it didn’t work out that way. Mrs. Ferris rejected Stefan’s overtures, and Stefan must’ve lapsed into hysteria, or violence, or something, because the upshot was the larger Mrs. Ferris was flailing the smaller Stefan, at which point Stefan’s friend Davis, waiting outside, heard the commotion, stepped in and beat her to death. The two men then set the fire, using old rags and paint cans on the back porch for fuel.”

“And then that left only Janet to take care of,” I said.

Harold covered his face with one large hand, briefly, then looked at me; it’s funny how an eyepatch can seem to stare at you just like an eye can.

“I feel… sick when I think of my role in this. I had so bought Stefan’s bill of goods, I so believed that Janet Taber was a ‘blackmailing bitch,’ so believed that her child was Taber’s, not the senator’s, that I went looking for her, the Tuesday morning after the fire. You see, I knew there’d been a fire, and her mother hospitalized, but I didn’t know the mother had been beaten. I knew only that there had been a fire, and, naively, I assumed it was accidental. A dangerous assumption, with Stefan around. And, to my discredit, I thought Janet’s distressed condition would only make her more impressionable, more easily swayed. And so, I staged that ridiculous show at the bus terminal. To scare her off, to scare her off for once and for all.”

“So that wasn’t Stefan’s idea.”

“That was my own doing; he knew nothing of it. In fact, we were working at cross purposes, but didn’t know it. Stefan had told me that Janet Taber’s only reaction to the death of her child was to say that if she was in any way denied what she felt she had coming to her, she would malign the late senator publicly and drag the Normans thoroughly through the mud. I felt Mr. Norman had been put through enough already and hoped to put a scare into her, to convince her to leave Port City and any claims on Mr. Norman behind.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“Thanks to you, Mallory. But do you realize if I’d been successful in scaring her off, she might still be alive? If she’d been fearful enough to grab a bus to points unknown instead of staying around? Do you realize that if you hadn’t gotten involved, she might not have died?”

He was right. By trying to help, I’d hurt. In a weird, roundabout way, I’d done as much to contribute to the death of Janet Taber as anybody!

Then Harold said, as if on some sort of automatic pilot, not wanting to hear the words he was speaking, “Janet Taber’s ‘accident’ was hastily planned, but came off smoothly enough. Davis met the young woman as she got off her bus in Iowa City, telling her he was a plainclothes officer there to escort her to the hospital to see her mother. Once he had her in the car, he chloroformed her and broke her neck and… maybe she did see her mother, after all; but not in this world.”

His voice was so hushed I could barely hear him now.

“The… accident… at Colorado Hill was staged in the hope Mr. Norman would assume his son’s ‘other wife’ had taken her life at the site of the death of her ‘husband’-her ‘suicide’ there might seem the ultimate expression of sorrow over the loss of the son she bore her ‘lost love.’”

I felt weak, sick, dizzy; but somehow my brain kept up with all of it, and I heard myself saying, “So that’s the Colorado Hill connection, but that seems like such half-assed logic to me. And risky. Why connect Janet’s death to the senator’s? Just for the old man’s benefit? It’s crazy.”

Harold shrugged. “Stefan knew how his uncle’s mind worked. Mr. Norman backed Stefan and hushed the two deaths up, all the way. If nothing else, Mr. Norman knew what kind of unpleasant memories stood to be unearthed by a full-scale investigation of Janet Taber’s death. So such an inquiry was to be avoided. Stefan knew what he was doing.”

“The son of a bitch.”

“I told you what kind of man he was,” Harold said. “A snake.”

Harold stared out over the drop-off; I stared at Harold.

“When did he tell you all this, Harold?”

He didn’t answer.

I went on: “Oh, but that’s obvious-it was right before you killed him.”

Without turning to look at me, he said, flatly, “I didn’t say I killed him, Mallory.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Harold turned his head, not his body, and smiled at me; it was a smile that had no humor in it, just secrets. Harold still had secrets.

“Maybe I didn’t kill him, Mallory,” he said.

And then Rita’s voice, sounding far away, called out to us.