The Galton Case

Chapter 32

I DROVE my rented car into Pitt at three o’clock, the darkest hour of the night. But there were lights in the red house on the riverbank. Mrs. Fredericks came to the door fully dressed in rusty black. Her heavy face set stubbornly when she saw me.

“You got no call coming here again? What do you think you’re after? I didn’t know those Hamburg fellows were wanted by the police.”

“They’re not the only ones. Has your son been here?”

“Theo?” Her eyes and mouth sought obtusely for an answer.

“He hasn’t come near me for years.”

A husky whisper rose from the shadows behind her. “Don’t believe her, mister.” Her husband came forward, supporting himself with one hand against the wall. He looked and sounded very drunk: “She’d lie her false heart out for him.”

“Hold your tongue, old man.”

Dark anger filled her eyes like a seepage of ink: I’d seen the same thing happen to her son. She turned on Fredericks, and he backed away. His face looked porous and moist like a deliquescent substance. His clothes were covered with dust.

“Have you seen him, Mr. Fredericks?”

“No. Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.” His hatchet profile chopped the air. “She saw him, though.”

“Where is he, Mrs. Fredericks?”

Her husband answered for her: “She told me they went to check in at the hotel, him and the girl both.”

Some obscure feeling, guilt or resentment, made the woman say: “They didn’t have to go to the hotel. I offered them the use of my house. I guess it isn’t good enough for mucky-mucks like her.”

“Is the girl all right?”

“I guess so. Theo’s the one that’s got me worried. What did he want to come here for, after all these years? I can’t figure him out.”

“He always did have crazy ideas,” Fredericks said. “But he’s crazy like a fox, see. Watch him close when you go to nab him. He talks smooth, but he’s a real snake-in-the-grass.”

“Where is this hotel?”

“Downtown. The Pitt Hotel – you can’t miss it. Just keep us out of it, eh? He’ll try to drag us into his trouble, but I’m a respectable man–”

His wife cried: “Shut up, you. I want to see him again if you don’t.”

I left them locked in the combat which seemed the normal condition of their nights.

The hotel was a three-story red brick building with one lighted window on the second floor corner. One other light was burning in the lobby. I punched the hand-bell on the desk. A middle-aged little man in a green eyeshade came yawning out of a dark room behind it.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“I’m up late. Can you rent me a room?”

“Sure can. I got more vacancies than you can shake a stick at. With or without bath?”

“With.”

“That will be three dollars.” He opened the heavy leather-cornered register, and pushed it across the desk. “Sign on the line.”

I signed. The registration above my signature was: Mr. and Mrs. John Galton, Detroit, Michigan.

“I see you have some other Americans staying here.”

“Yeah. Nice young couple, checked in late last night. I believe they’re honeymooners, probably on their way to Niagara Falls. Anyway, I put them in the bridal chamber.”

“Corner room on the second floor?”

He gave me a sharp dry look. “You wouldn’t want to disturb them, mister.”

“No, I thought I’d say hello to them in the morning.”

“Better make it late in the morning.” He took a key from a hook and dropped it on the desk. “I’m putting you in two-ten, at the other end. I’ll show you up if you want.”

“Thanks, I can find it by myself.”

I climbed the stairs that rose from the rear of the lobby. My legs were heavy. In the room, I took my .32 automatic out of my overnight bag and inserted one of the clips I had brought for it. The carpet in the dim corridor was threadbare, but it was thick enough to silence my footsteps.

There was still light in the corner room, spilling over through the open transom. A sleeper’s heavy breathing came over, too, a long sighing choked off and then repeated. I tried the door. It was locked.

Sheila Howell spoke clearly from the darkness: “Who is that?”

I waited. She spoke again:

“John. Wake up.”

“What is it?” His voice sounded nearer than hers.

“Somebody’s trying to get in.”

I heard the creak of bed springs, the pad of his feet. The brass doorknob rotated.

He jerked the door open, stepped out with his right fist cocked, saw me and started to swing, saw the gun and froze. He was naked to the waist. His muscles stood out under his pale skin.

“Easy, boy. Raise your hands.”

“This nonsense isn’t necessary. Put the gun down.”

“I’m giving the orders. Clasp your hands and turn around, walk slowly into the room.”

He moved reluctantly, like stone forced into motion. When he turned, I saw the white scars down his back, hundreds of them, like fading cuneiform cuts.

Sheila was standing beside the rumpled bed. She had on a man’s shirt which was too big for her. The shirt and the lipstick smudged on her mouth gave her a dissolute air.

“When did you two have time to get married?”

“We didn’t. Not yet.” A blush mounted like fire from her neck to her cheekbones. “This isn’t what you think. John shared my room because I asked him to. I was frightened. And he slept across the foot of the bed, so there.”

He made a quelling gesture with his raised hands. “Don’t tell him anything. He’s on your father’s side. Anything we say he’ll twist against us.”

“I’m not the twister, Theo.”

He turned on me, so suddenly I almost shot him. “Don’t call me by that name.”

“It belongs to you, doesn’t it?”

“My name is John Galton.”

“Come off it. Your partner, Sable, made a full confession to me yesterday afternoon.”

“Sable is not my partner. He never was.”

“Sable tells a different story, and he tells it very well. Don’t get the idea that he’s covering up for you. He’ll be turning state’s witness on the conspiracy charge to help him with the murder charge.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Sable murdered Culligan?”

“It’s hardly news to you, is it? You sat on the information while we were wasting weeks on a bum lead.”

The girl stepped between us. “Please. You don’t understand the situation. John had his suspicions of Mr. Sable, it’s true, but he wasn’t in any position to go to the police with them. He was under suspicion himself. Won’t you put that awful gun away, Mr. Archer? Give John a chance to explain?”

Her blind faith in him made me angry. “His name isn’t John. He’s Theo Fredericks, a local boy who left Pitt some years ago after knifing his father.”

“The Fredericks person is not his father.”

“I have his mother’s word for it.”

“She’s lying,” the boy said.

“Everybody’s lying but you, eh? Sable says you’re a phony, and he ought to know.”

“I let him think it. The fact is, when Sable first approached me I didn’t know who I was. I went into the deal he offered me partly in the hope of finding out.”

“Money had nothing to do with it?”

“There’s more than money to a man’s inheritance. Above everything else, I wanted to be sure of my identity.”

“And now you are?”

“Now I am. I’m Anthony Galton’s son.”

“When did this fortunate revelation strike you?”

“You don’t want a serious answer, but I’ll give you one anyway. It grew on me gradually. I think it began when Gabe Lindsay saw something in me I didn’t know was there. And then Dr. Dineen recognized me as my father’s son. When my grandmother accepted me, too, I thought it must be true. I didn’t know it was true until these last few days.”

“What happened in the last few days?”

“Sheila believed me. I told her everything, my whole life, and she believed me.”

He glanced at her, almost shyly. She reached for his hand. I began to feel like an intruder in their room. Perhaps he sensed this shift in the moral balance, because he began to talk about himself in a deeper, quieter tone:

“Actually, it goes back much further. I suspected the truth about myself, or part of it, when I was a little kid. Nelson Fredericks never treated me as if I belonged to him. He used to beat me with a belt-buckle. He never gave me a kind word. I knew he couldn’t possibly be my father.”

“A lot of boys feel like that about their real fathers.”

Sheila moved closer to him, in a tender protective movement, pressing his hand unconsciously to her breast. “Please let him tell his story. I know it sounds wild, but it’s only as wild as life. John’s telling you the honest truth, so far as he knows it.”

“Assuming that he is, how far does he know it? Some very earnest people have fantastic ideas about who they are and what they’ve got coming to them.”

I expected him to flare up again. He surprised me by saying: “I know, it’s what I was scared of, that I was hipped on the subject. I really used to be hipped when I was a boy. I imagined I was the prince in the poorhouse, and so on. My mother encouraged me. She used to dress me up in velvet suits and tell me I was different from the other kids.

“Even before that, though, long before, she had a story that she used to tell me. She was a young woman then. I remember her face was thin, and her hair hadn’t turned gray. I was only a toddler, and I used to think it was a fairytale. I realize now it was a story about myself. She wanted me to know about myself, but she was afraid to come right out with it.

“She said that I was a king’s son, and we used to live in a palace in the sun. But the young king died and the bogeyman stole us away to the caves of ice where nothing was nice. She made a sort of rhyme of it. And she showed me a gold ring with a little red stone set in it that the king had left her for a remembrance.”

He gave me a curious questioning look. Our eyes met solidly for the first time. I think the reality formed between us then.

“A ruby?” I said.

“It must have been. I talked to a woman named Matheson yesterday in Redwood City. You know her, don’t you, and you’ve heard her story? It made sense of some of the things that had puzzled me, and it confirmed what Culligan told me long before. He said that my stepfather was an ex-convict whose real name was Fred Nelson. He had taken my mother out of a place called the Red Horse Inn and made her his – lover. She married my father after Nelson was sent to prison. But he escaped, and found them, and murdered my father.” His voice had sunk almost out of hearing.

“When did Culligan tell you this?”

“The day I ran away with him. He’d just had a fight with Fredericks about his board bill. I listened to it from the cellar stairs. They were always fighting. Fredericks was older than Culligan, but he gave him an awful lacing, worse than usual, and left him unconscious on the kitchen floor. I poured water on Culligan’s face and brought him to. It was then he told me that Fredericks killed my father. I got a butcher knife out of the drawer, and hid it upstairs in my room. When Fredericks tried to lock me in, I stabbed him in the guts.

“I thought I’d killed him. By the time I saw a newspaper and found out that I hadn’t, I was across the border. I rode through the Detroit tunnel under the burlaps in an empty truck-trailer. The border police didn’t find me, but they caught Culligan. I didn’t see him again until last winter. Then he claimed that he’d been lying to me. He said that Fredericks had nothing to do with my father’s death, that he’d simply blamed Fredericks to get back at him, through me.

“You can see why I decided to play along with Culligan and his scheme. I didn’t know which of his stories was true, or if the truth was something else again. I even suspected that Culligan had killed my father himself. How else would he know about the murder?”

“He was involved in it,” I said. “It’s why he changed his story when he wanted to use you again. It’s also the reason he couldn’t admit to other people, even Sable, that he knew who you were.”

“How was he involved?”

How wasn’t he? I thought. His life ran through the case like a dirty piece of cord. He had marked Anthony Galton for the ax and Anthony Galton’s murderer for the knife. He had helped a half-sane woman to lose her money, then sold her husband a half-sane dream of wealth. Which brought him to the ironic day when his half-realities came together in a final reality, and Gordon Sable killed him to preserve a lie.

“I don’t understand,” John said. “What did Culligan have to do with my father’s death?”

“Apparently he was the finger man. Have you talked to your mother about the circumstances of the killing? She was probably a witness.”

“She was more than that.” The words almost strangled him.

Sheila turned to him anxiously. “John?” she said. “Johnny?”

He made no response to her. His gaze was dark and inward:

“Even last night she was lying to me, trying to pretend that I was Fredericks’s son, that I never had another father. She’s stolen half my life away already. Isn’t she satisfied?”

“You haven’t seen Fredericks?”

“Fredericks has gone away, she wouldn’t tell me where. But I’ll find him.”

“He can’t be far. He was at home an hour ago.”

“Damn you! Why didn’t you say so?”

“I just did. I’m wondering now if I made a mistake.”

John got the message. He didn’t speak again until we were a few blocks from his mother’s house. Then he turned in the seat and said across Sheila:

“Don’t worry about me. There’s been enough death and violence. I don’t want any more of it.”

Along the riverside street the rooftops thrust their dark angles up against a whitening sky. I watched the boy as he got out of the car. His face was pinched and pale as a revenant’s. Sheila held his arm, slowing his abrupt movements.

I knocked on the front door. After a long minute, the door was unlocked from the inside. Mrs. Fredericks peered out at us.

“Yes? What now?”

John brushed past me, and faced her on the threshold:

“Where is he?”

“He went away.”

“You’re a liar. You’ve lied to me all your life.” His voice broke, and then resumed on a different, higher note. “You knew he killed my father, you probably helped him. I know you helped him to hush it up. You left the country with him, changed your name when he did.”

“I’m not denying that much,” she said levelly.

His whole body heaved as if in nausea. He called her an ugly name. In spite of his promise to me, he was on the thin edge of violence. I laid one hand on his shoulder, heavily:

“Don’t be too hard on your mother. Even the law admits mitigation, when a woman is dominated or threatened by a man.”

“But that isn’t the case. She’s still trying to protect him.”

“Am I?” the woman said. “Protect him from what?”

“From punishment for murder.”

She shook her head solemnly. “It’s too late for that, son. Fredericks has took his punishment. He said he would rather have digger get him than go back behind walls. Fredericks hung himself, and I didn’t try to argue him out of doing it.”

We found him in a back room on the second floor. He was on an old brass bed, in a half-sitting position. A piece of heavy electrical cord was tied to the head of the bed and wrapped several times around his neck. The free end of the cord was clenched in his right hand. There was no doubt that he had been his own executioner.

“Get Sheila out of here,” I said to John.

She stood close to him. “I’m all right. I’m not afraid.”

Mrs. Fredericks came into the doorway, heavy and panting. She looked at her son with her head up:

“This is the end of it. I told him it was him or you, and which it was going to be. I couldn’t go on lying for him, and let you get arrested instead of him.”

He faced her, still the accuser. “Why did you lie for so long? You stayed with him after he killed my father.”

“You got no call to judge me for doing that. It was to save your life that I married him. I saw him cut off your daddy’s head with an ax, fill it with stones, and chunk it in the sea. He said that if I ever told a living soul, that he would kill you, too. You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him. He held up the bloody ax over your crib and made me swear to marry him and keep my lips shut forever. Which I have done until now.”

“Did you have to spend the rest of your life with him?”

“That was my choice,” she said. “For sixteen years I stood between you and him. Then you ran away and left me alone with him. I had nobody else left in my life excepting him. Do you understand what it’s like to have nobody at all, son?”

He tried to speak, to rise to the word, but the gorgon past held him frozen.

“All I ever wanted in my life,” she said, “was a husband and a family and a place I could call my own.”

Sheila made an impulsive movement toward her. “You have us.”

“Aw, no. You don’t want me in your life. We might as well be honest about it. The less you see of me, the better you’ll like it. Too much water flowed under the bridge. I don’t blame my son for hating me.”

“I don’t hate you,” John said. “I’m sorry for you, Mother. And I’m sorry for what I said.”

“You and who else is sorry?” she said roughly. “You and who else?”

He put his arm around her, awkwardly, trying to comfort her. But she was past comforting, perhaps beyond sorrow, too. Whatever she felt was masked by unfeeling layers of flesh. The stiff black silk she was wearing curved over her breast like armor.

“Don’t bother about me. Just take good care of your girl.”

Somewhere outside, a single bird raised its voice for a few notes, then fell into abashed silence. I went to the window. The river was white. The trees and buildings on its banks were resuming their colors and shapes. A light went on in one of the other houses. As if at this human signal, the bird raised its voice again.

Sheila said: “Listen.”

John turned his head to listen. Even the dead man seemed to be listening.

The End