The Night Remembers

38

Snow had made the rutted cabin road even trickier to navigate. My car jostled left and right as if its springs were being tested. The windshield wipers, one of which needed new rubber, thwacked through the accumulating snow. The heater roared ineffectually at the seventeen-degree temperature. I found it a good idea to keep my black leather gloves on inside.

Finding the shelf I’d used the other day, I pulled the car over and got out. From here I could see down through the heavy forest and the whipping snow to the cabin and the lone blue Buick Regal parked there.

Huddling into my coat, my nose and cheeks already numb with cold, I started angling my way down the road.

In all, it took fifteen minutes to reach the small horseshoe-shaped clearing to the west of the cabin. Kneeling behind the thick trunk of an elm, I tried to see into the side windows ten yards away. But the only sign of life was the fragile curl of gray smoke from the chimney and my own silver breath. A vast silence lay on the cold day.

As I trotted across the clearing to the cabin, my feet crunching through patches of ice on the dead brown grass, I took out my .38 and gripped it tight into the curve of my hand.

I went around back. A screen door opened onto a small porch where three garbage cans and a tarpaulin-covered lawnmower stood. My weight on the porch wood was sufficient to make it creak as loud as the cry of a bird. I paused, my whole system charged with anxiety, certain that I’d been heard.

After a long minute, I took another step up onto the porch, leaning across so my hand could grab the doorknob and give it a turn. I wasn’t really surprised that it was locked.

Backing off the porch, fixing my .38 tight into my hand again, I started around the side of the cabin, walking on my haunches because the windows were low and otherwise I would be easily spotted. I had gone perhaps ten feet hunched down this way when a voice behind me said, “I have a rifle, Mr. Walsh, and I’m fully prepared to use it. Please set your gun down carefully and turn around.”

In one way the words had an almost comic effect. You hear them so often on television and so seldom in life — in my case, never once had I heard them in more than thirty years of law enforcement. But I didn’t doubt their seriousness. There was a heat in them, a desperation, and I knew enough to take them seriously.

I squatted and set my gun on a patch of browned clover. Knees cracking, I stood up, turned around, and faced Paul Heckart.

Ever dapper, he wore a gray herringbone suit and a startling white shirt and a red necktie. A black fedora rested at a jaunty angle on his silver head, and a black topcoat complemented perfectly the gray of the suit. In his black-gloved hands he held a Remington, the stock an expensive mahogany, the blue steel oiled expertly. He looked like the world’s most fashionable assassin.

He came closer, though not by much. We stood five feet apart. “I wish you hadn’t come out here,” he said.

“After your brother was killed, there wasn’t any place else to go.”

He couldn’t have faked it, that look of surprise and remorse. He said, shaking for the first time and not from the cold, “Richard is dead?”

“Yes. He died in my office.”

His face resembled that of an animal that is just beginning to experience intolerable pain. His features could not settle on an expression but remained fluid in their grief. “Jesus, all he ever tried to do was help.”

“You and Vandersee and Stella Czmek were involved in importing child pornography and Richard found out and tried to get you out of it by closing down the whole operation. Right?”

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t give the impression he was listening very carefully.

“And you killed Karl Jankov because he learned what you were involved in and started blackmailing you along with Stella Czmek.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Well, somebody killed Jankov and Stella Czmek and Conroy and Richard.”

“It wasn’t me.” He was beginning to fold under the pressure. I had the sense that a part of him wanted to hand the Remington over to me and put me in charge. He raised his head. He looked terrible. “I know what you think of me and my — compulsions. The children, and what happened, and all. But I didn’t kill anybody. I swear.”

“Is George inside?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I want to talk to him about Conroy.”

“What about Conroy?”

“Who was he working for?”

“For Richard.”

“What?”

“That’s how Richard found out that I was involved with — the slides.”

“This was when?”

“Years ago.”

“And he was still working for Richard when he was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Richard was afraid that I was still caught up in it all. Conroy would follow me around and—”

“There’s something wrong here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All these deaths. There’s somebody on a rampage. You just don’t kill this many people without—”

The rifle shot was a high, hard sound on the drab, frozen day. At first, I reacted instinctively, not even trying to determine the direction of the shot. I simply dove for the crusted earth, banging my chin on the ground as I did so, stars forming on the sudden temporary darkness inside my eyes. As I struggled to shake my senses clear again, I heard the second shot, this one accompanied almost instantly by a small animal sob, the sound of an entity abruptly dying. There was the unyielding noise of a body hitting the ground, joined again by the gasp and sob of death, and then, as the echo of the gunshot died, there was once more the frozen silence.

The bullet had gone in the back of his head and ruined utterly his swank black fedora, just as it had ruined his forehead where the bullet had exited, leaving only a raw red hole, like something from the inside out, that I did not care to look at for long.

There was nothing to be done for him now. I hurried inside the cabin.