No Cure for Death

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Hey,” she yelled.

She was coming across the brown grass, coming to meet us, and she was smiling and looking very pretty, very fresh, incongruously so against the image of the bleak gray house looming up back of her.

We stood there awkwardly, Harold and I, like actors who couldn’t remember their lines, and waited for her to join us. She latched onto Harold by the hand and me the same and tugged at us, saying, “You two gonna come in and eat the breakfast you had me cook, or do you like your eggs cold?”

So we turned and walked with her back across the lawn and into the house, turning left as we entered the living room and going through a doorless archway into the wing adjacent to Harold’s room. She deposited us in a breakfast nook, a cubbyhole stuck between the pantry and kitchen and filled by a wooden booth painted with once-vivid colors in a vaguely Scandinavian pattern. The colors in the kitchen area were the brightest in the house, with pale blue walls instead of cream, and with the dimmed reds and blues and yellows of the painted booth in the midst of it.

I sat and stared across at Harold and the air was thick with things unsaid. There wasn’t any purpose in saying them, after all. I looked at Harold and Harold’s single solemn eye and his black patch looked back at me and we knew.

I knew, Harold knew, that Stefan Norman had handled the Mallory problem in the same manner he’d handled the Renata Ferris problem, and that of Janet Taber as well: he’d dispatched Davis, that violent extension of himself, to do his work. Stefan had had no compunction about treating human lives like so many pieces on a chessboard: he was the chessmaster and I was just another pawn for him to send his queen out to get. And even if his queen fell, suicide was not Stefan’s style, not in his makeup.

Harold knew all this. No need for me to tell him.

Rita came in and put a plate down in front of each of us, scooched in next to me on my side of the booth. I looked down at the omelet and the hash browns and the toast and knew I would have trouble getting it down, knew also that I had to. “Oh damn,” Rita said, and got up and went back into the kitchen and came back with coffee and filled our cups.

I poked around at the plate of food, and Harold did likewise, but between bites we exchanged looks, continued our silent conversation.

Harold knew, as I do, as you do, that suicide says despair, that suicide means finality, and a man in despair doesn’t change the facts around “a little” in what amounts to a deathbed confession of murder, just to make himself look a shade less corrupt. He might make excuses, he might even lie to himself, he might rationalize; but shape a slightly different, slightly juggled, slightly edited, slightly more excusable explanation, before putting a gun to his head? Please.

Neither would Stefan be likely to care about sparing old Sy Norman’s feelings.

But Harold would.

Harold had made no secret of his loyalty to Mr. Norman, and had expressed it in no less tangible and eccentric a manner than my first meeting with him when he tried, for the sake of his elderly employer, to scare Janet Taber out of town.

But that was when he was under the mistaken impression that Janet was a “blackmailing bitch,” that was when he was still caught up in the various machinations of Stefan’s plotting. Somewhere recently along the line, Harold had seen through Stefan, Harold had stopped being conned by him and that intense loyalty for Mr. Norman, that fierce protective instinct for the old man who had done so much for him, was channeled into a concentrated effort by Harold to put a stop to Stefan Norman’s scheming.

In my mind, I could see it: Harold stands beside Stefan, holding Stefan’s own gun over him, dictates the “suicide note”; Stefan sits at the desk, takes it all down, sweats as the black, one-eyed apparition hovers over him; the note is finished and Harold shoots Stefan; Stefan falls limp across the desk, like the inanimate object he has become.

“More coffee?” Rita said.

“Please,” I said.

“Harold?”

Harold nodded.

I managed to finish the eggs and potatoes and toast and when I glanced over at Harold, he had done the same. Rita came back, poured refills on coffee, and joined us. Harold and I sipped at the cups, looking away from each other when approaching a stare.

Rita was finally beginning to suspect something was wrong, because the silence hung heavy, like a tapestry pulling at its nails, and as the anxiety began to show on her face, I ventured with, “Fine breakfast, Rita, really fine,” and Harold said, “Yes, yes it is, it’s fine.”

She smiled. “I guess I can understand you boys being so quiet. This whole affair has been a real drain on us all-physically and emotionally both. You wouldn’t believe how relieved I am it’s over.”

“I am pretty tired,” I said.

“You should be,” she said. “You been up practically all night.” She reached across the table and patted her brother’s pawlike hand and said, “How ’bout you, bro? You feeling it yet?”

“I could use some sleep,” he said.

“Did you get back to bed this morning after I called you?” she asked him. “You haven’t been up all this time, have you?”

“I went back to bed,” he said.

I said, “Rita, you called Harold? When?”

“After you called me, when that guy… what was his name? The guy who broke in.”

“Davis.”

“Yeah, him. After you called me, when Davis was killed. I wanted to prove to old hardhead Harold here that you and I weren’t paranoid, that somebody was going ’round doing those things we told him about.” She smiled embarrassedly at her brother. “And frankly, Harold, I was relieved that you weren’t involved, ’cause Mal was entertaining thoughts you might be one of the bad guys. And you did seem mad at me for bringing him here to see you last night.”

I said, “Say Rita, all of a sudden I’m really hungry. You got any more of those hash browns?”

“Hungry? You serious, Mal? Hell, you just poked at your food.”

“No, really, I’m just starting to wake up. I always get hungry when I start waking up. And those hash browns hit the spot.”

“I could whip up some more, I guess.”

“Would you, please?”

She shrugged. “Okay. Harold, how about you?”

Harold said, “Fine.”

She rose from the booth and disappeared around the corner into the kitchen.

I spoke softly, a near-whisper. I said, “You want to tell me… I think I know, but do you want to tell me?”

Just as softly, Harold said, “If you know it, tell it, mystery writer.”

“All right. All right. We’ll start in where Rita called you and told you how a guy named Davis busted into my trailer and ended up dead. That was the breaking point, am I right? When Stefan went so far as putting your own sister in danger?”

Harold didn’t say anything. He was going to make me do it all.

I said, “You probably already had your mind made up to have it out with Stefan, just from the things I’d told you about him. Things like his denying he knew Janet Taber, his denying even that he knew you. And then there was that business of Phil Taber being in town, five thousand bucks richer than before he came, last payment for services rendered to one Stefan Norman. This time Taber was getting paid off for seeing that Janet and her mom got shoved under the ground as soon as possible. But he’d been paid by Stefan Norman before.”

Harold remained silent. He wasn’t going to give me any help at all.

I said, “So what happened, after Rita called you? Did you try Stefan’s Davenport number and get no answer? And then did you try his office number here in town, and he was there, but waiting for a call? Did he answer the phone saying something like… ‘Davis, how did it go?’”

Harold stirred.

“And what then? Hell, why bother? We both know what happened after that.”

“It wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t that way.”

“Sure it was. You got Stefan’s gun out of his room here in the house. Then you went down to the Maxwell Building, went up to the Fund office and held Stefan at gunpoint and told him what to put in the note. Somebody had to have told Stefan about Davis’s death-I figured maybe Brennan or one of the local cops had. But it was you, Harold. You. You shot him.”

“You know what the trouble with you is, Mallory?”

“No. Tell me.”

“You don’t think. You put things together, but you don’t think. Did you read the note?”

“You know I did.”

“Did it sound like a suicide note?”

“It sounded like a phony suicide note.”

“Did it even sound like that? Did it even sound like a convincing fake?”

I didn’t know what he was getting at and said so.

He said, “It was a confession. I made him write a confession, can’t you see that? You can see the rest, why can’t you see that it wasn’t meant to be a suicide note, not when I had him write it.”

“A confession.”

“A confession. What I wanted from Stefan was a written statement of guilt, something I’d have to hang over him. The sword of Damocles, ever hear of that? I had to keep him in line. Make sure he didn’t go pulling any more stunts. Make sure he didn’t make miserable what little there is left of Mr. Norman’s life.”

“But it wasn’t an accurate confession….”

“Of course not. I wanted a confession that would give Mr. Norman the least possible pain, but still would be damning to Stefan. Do you think I wanted Stefan’s suicide? Do you think Stefan’s suicide is the kind of thing I’d want to put Mr. Norman through?”

“Stefan is dead, Harold.”

“Yes, he is.”

“So something went wrong.”

“You might say that.”

“What? How?”

“Once he got it written, I told Stefan what I planned to do with the note. I told him it was going to be sealed in an envelope and given to a lawyer, with instructions to open it either at my death or my request, whatever came first. After that, when Stefan knew that, that was when he got stupid.”

“And tried to take the gun away from you.”

“And tried to take the gun away from me.”

“And, in the struggle…?”

“In the struggle.”

We sat and looked at each other.

Then I said, “And you left the confession there, to make do as a suicide note?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said. “So now I know.”

Harold smiled on one side of his face. “So now you know it all. How’s it make you feel, mystery writer? All satisfied inside?”

Rita came in and set down a dish of hash browns and said, “Here’s your seconds.”

Before we finished eating, Rita went back out to the kitchen for some more coffee, and Harold said, “Mallory?”

“Yeah?”

“What I told you… you believe me?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s no way Brennan’s going to figure it out, and even if he does, he’s not going to prove anything. Or want to. Not with Davis dead. Funny.”

“What?”

“Stefan wept when I told him Davis was dead. I didn’t know Stefan had it in him. But it must’ve made him a little bit suicidal at that.”

I sipped my coffee.

“Mallory?”

“Yeah?”

“What’re you going to do now?”

“Finish my eggs.”

“And then?”

“Drive your sister home.”

“That all?”

“No. I’ll probably try and get some sleep. I’m feeling tired.”

Harold nodded. “I know what you mean.”

Rita came back in and filled our cups and we finished our food and coffee and soon she and I were getting into the Rambler and Harold was standing, filling the back doorway, like something permanent in the house, watching us go.