The Price of Murder

Chapter One Lee Bronson

The parole officer came to the house on a hot Saturday afternoon in October. Lee Bronson had set up a card table on the small screened porch of his rented house at 1024 Arcadia Street, where he sat reading and marking the English themes turned in on Friday by his English Composition 2A class of forty-one students at Brookton Junior College.

He sat in a wicker chair and wore a T-shirt with a torn shoulder, faded khakis, and old tennis shoes. The porch was on the front of the house, with a heavy screen of plantings that nearly concealed it from the pedestrians on the walk beyond the shallow front yard. Big elms grew on Arcadia Street, and their roots had buckled and cracked the old sidewalk. High branches touched over the middle of the street, and in the summer the dense shade lay heavily on the shallow front lawns of the frame houses.

When he looked up from his work he could see a segment of sidewalk and street. He could hear the sounds of the street. Motors of delivery trucks, whirring clack of roller skates, the nasal sputter of a small, familiar, and excessively noisy power mower several houses down on the other side of the street.

He was twenty-nine, a big man with wide hard shoulders, sculptured chest, wide bands of muscle linking neck and shoulders — narrow through waist and flank. He held himself trimly and moved lightly and with a quickness. His hair was brown and cut short, his eyes gray, quiet, slightly myopic. Though his face was bony, forthright, his habitual expression was one of mild patience, tinged by sadness, and when he was amused there was a wryness in the way his mouth turned down at the corners. With his black-framed reading glasses on he looked properly scholarly. This was his third year at Brookton. His contract called for instruction in English and Physical Education. He acted as an assistant coach in the school athletic program, and worked at it hard enough to keep himself in trim.

He liked working with the kids. It gave him a sense of purpose. He liked to watch them grow and change, and feel that he had something to do with that growth. Yet it was only during his rare moods of complete depression that he was willing to admit to himself that without this joy in his work, his life would be unendurable. During those times he could clearly see the dimensions of the trap into which he had so blindly wandered. A perfumed trap. A silky and membranous and pneumatic little trap. A trap named Lucille.

He picked up the next composition. This was a new class. He had just begun to associate faces with the names. Jill Grossman. A strange and terrified little mouse, almost an albino, with a pinched little face and glasses with a blue tint. But her work had talent. He decided he would like to ask her to join his unofficial seminar, the kids he invited over to the house in the evenings.

But Lucille was being even more difficult about such get-togethers this year than last. She could not see any reason for doing anything you were not paid to do. Lucille flounced off to the movies on those evenings.

After he had marked Jill’s paper, and made marginal notes cautioning her about being too florid and precious, he looked at his watch. A little after four. He hoped Lucille would remember to bring back the cold six-pack of beer he’d asked for. But it wasn’t likely. But he was certain of one thing she would bring back — her standard comments about how grim it was to have to use the public pool to go swim with Ruthie, her best girl friend, when, it they could belong to Crown Ridge Club which was so cheap really, and they could get in easy, the pool was really lovely with lights under the water at night, and she could take Ruthie there, and all winter they had the dances. And of course they didn’t belong to the Crown Ridge Club because he didn’t love her. It was the only possible answer. He was taking her for granted. It was impossible to explain family finances to Lucille. Figures bored her.

And any serious attempt to make her understand the budget always gave her a new opening.

“So if we’re so poor we can’t join just one cheap little club, why don’t you write another book and make some money? You wrote a book, didn’t you? So you could write for the television and the movies and the big magazines, couldn’t you? Instead of having those weird kids coming over here all the time, you could be writing and making some money so we could live nicer. You don’t want me to have nice things. That’s it, isn’t it? You just don’t care any more.”

And it was useless to try to explain to her that his single book had used up a whole year of creative energy, that it had earned a big two hundred and fifty dollar advance and a magnificent one hundred and eighteen dollars and thirty-three cents in additional royalties. No use to try to tell her that his talent was small, and that it certainly could not accomplish anything in the environment she had helped create. The kids were his creative outlet. But he had displayed the “author” tag far too prominently during their brief courtship. It gave her a weapon she could never resist wielding.

Just as he picked up the final composition in the pile he had brought home, somebody banged on the screen door, banged with unnecessary loudness, with a flavor of irritation and arrogance. From where Lee sat he could see baggy knees of gray pants, a slice of white shirt.

He pushed his chair back and started to get up. The screen door was pulled open and a man walked in. He was a thickset man, heavy around the middle, with a lean hollow-cheeked face that did not match his puffy build. A tan felt hat with a sweat-stained band was pushed back off his forehead. His nose was bulbous at the tip, and patterned with small broken red veins, prominent against the uniform pallid gray of his face. His eyes were small and blue and the flesh around them was dark-stained and puffy. He carried his gray suit coat over his left arm. The left hand, in a soiled white glove that fit too tightly, was obviously artificial. His hard black shoes were dusty and he walked toward Lee as though his feet were tender.

He could have been an aggressive and seldom successful door to door salesman. Or the man who always stands in the neighborhood bar, propounding noxious and illogical argument. But the warning bells of Lee’s childhood were still efficient. He concealed his irritation and said evenly, “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Bronson?” Lee nodded. The man took out a wallet, flipped it open and held it out. “Keefler. Parole officer.”

He sat in the other wicker chair without invitation, sighed, shoved his hat back another half inch and said, “Every day they say relief in sight. Last heat wave of the year will end. It gets hotter.”

“Is this about Dan?”

Keefler looked at him with a hard, lazy tolerance that had an undertone of cynical amusement. “So who else? Is there more than one ex-con in the family? Maybe I’m missing something.”

“I thought a man named Richardson was...”

“Rich used to have him. Now he’s mine. It’s like this, Bronson. I was a cop up to four months ago when they took off my hand. A young punk snuck his brother’s army .45 out of the house and tried to stick up a market, and lucky Keefler came along and took one right in the wrist and got it smashed too bad to save. Maybe you read about it.”

“I think I remember it. You killed the boy, didn’t you?”

“And I got a citation and a new job with the parole people and a dummy hand. Because I was a cop they’ve given me the rough cases. So now I’ve got your brother Danny. When was the last time you saw him?”

“I’ll have to think back, Mr. Keefler. He came here after he was paroled. That was last May. And I think two other times. The last time was in July. I can tell you the exact date. The twenty-fifth.”

“How come you happen to remember the exact day?”

“I remember it because it was the day after my birthday. He brought me a present.”

“What kind of a present? Expensive?”

“A leather desk set with pen and pencil and clock calendar.”

“Let’s have a look at it.”

“It’s at school, in my office.”

“What do you think it would cost?”

“About thirty dollars, I’d guess.”

“What did he have to say about how he was doing?”

“He didn’t say much. Maybe I could be more help to you if you’d tell me what you’re after.”

Keefler plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket, bent a match over in a folder of book matches and lit it with one hand. “Like that? Nurse in the hospital showed me how you do it.”

“Pretty good.”

“I can hold matches in this artificial hand. See? But its slower. Let’s get back to Danny. You’d cover for him, wouldn’t you?”

Lee looked at Bronson’s lazy, wise half smile. “Would it make any difference how I answered that?”

“It might.”

“I can’t prove I wouldn’t. I might run into a situation where I would. But I wouldn’t put myself in the bag, Mr. Keefler, unless there was a good reason. You’ve talked to Mr. Richardson.”

“He filled me in. He likes those big words. All the social workers know those big words. You and Danny and I all came from the Sink. We know the rules down there. We don’t need the big social worker words, do we?”

The Sink was the name given to thirty city blocks in Hancock. Long ago Brookton had been a separate community, a farming community outside Hancock. But the big sprawl of the lake-side city had reached out and surrounded Brookton. The Sink was the oldest part of Hancock, built when Hancock had been a small, lusty, violent lake port. The derivation of the name had been forgotten. The thirty blocks were down in the flats between the old docks and warehouses and the railroad yards. It had always been the spawning bed for Hancock’s impressive output of criminals. Slum clearance projects had removed all but a narrow fringe of the original Sink.

“It wasn’t an easy place to grow up,” Lee said.

Keefler nodded. “There was just the two of you, wasn’t there?”

“Danny and me. He’s three years older. My father was half owner of a tug. He died before I was a year old.”

Keefler grinned. “He was dead drunk and he fell between the dock and an ore freighter. He was thirty-nine and your mother was twenty-three at the time. Her maiden name was Elvita Sharon and her folks ran a hunting lodge in northern Wisconsin and your father met her there on a hunting trip and ran off with her. After Jerry Bronson died, she married Rudy Fernandez. Bronson hadn’t left her a dime. Rudy was a dock worker. He was a trouble maker. A little while after they were married, Rudy was beat half to death. That’s when you moved into the Sink. When he got back on his feet, and tried to make more trouble, they killed him. It’s still on the books. Then she hooked up with a slob named Cowley, and there isn’t any record of any marriage on the books. When you were twelve and Danny was fifteen, Cowley died of a heart attack. The three of you lived in a cold-water flat at 1214 River Street, on the third floor. Elvita was a part-time waitress and a full-time lush. Both you kids were bringing money home, just enough so you could keep going.”

Lee looked down at his right hand and closed it slowly into a fist. “You seem to have the whole story, Keefler.”

“Right out of those social worker files, boy. They have to know why a guy like Danny can’t... adjust to reality. But it seemed pretty real down there, didn’t it? Danny quit school at sixteen and went to work for Nick Bouchard. By the time he was nineteen he was bringing enough home so Elvita didn’t have to work at all. I was watching him then. He was a wise punk. I could have told all the social workers how he’d come out.”

“He was the oldest. He thought he had to...”

“He went where the fast money was. Right to Nick, the big boss man.” Keefler chuckled. “Nick took good care of the Bronson boys.”

“Not me. I wasn’t any part of it.”

Keefler’s eyes went round with surprise. “No? You were being the hotshot highschool athlete. I thought that when Danny took his first fall, that two and a half years he did for auto theft, Nick sent money to you every week.”

“He did. But it wasn’t like that. It was part of the agreement he had with Danny. It had nothing to do with me. I talked to Nick. He... he wanted me to get out of the Sink.”

“He helped you out of some trouble, didn’t he? You’re on the books, boy. Assault. And the charge was dismissed, and it was Nick’s lawyers who took care of you.”

“There wasn’t any assault, Mr. Keefler. I was working in a wholesale grocery warehouse nights. I got picked up when I was walking home. I’d barked my knuckles on a packing case. They were looking for some men who’d broken up a bar and grill.”

“Now that sounds reasonable,” Keefler said softly.

Lee looked sharply at him. Keefler looked sleepy and contented and amiable.

“Nick Bouchard wasn’t all bad,” Lee said.

“Hell, no. He helped you go through college, didn’t he? So he couldn’t be such a bad guy.”

“The way you say it, it doesn’t sound right, Mr. Keefler. I had a football scholarship. Danny used to send me money. Nick used to send some too, a twenty or a fifty, with a note telling me to live it up. I guess I was... a hobby with Nick. I played good ball the first two years. Then after my eyes went bad and they shifted me to guard, my leg went bad.”

“You say I put things the wrong way. So tell me what happened to your mother. Tell it your way.”

“Is it important?”

“Come on, boy. Put it in your words. You’ve got the education.”

“It... happened in my sophomore year. In December, Danny had moved her out of the Sink the previous spring. She... went back to the Sink to look up old friends. It was a cold night. She started drinking and she passed out in an alley, and by the time she was found it was too late. I came back for the funeral.”

Keefler nodded. “That’s just about the way it looks on the records, kid. And then the next year Nick got too big for his pants and tried to fight the syndicate so they cut him down and made it look like suicide, and a man named Kennedy came in and took over the boss job. He figured Danny had been too loyal to Nick, so Danny took his second fall.”

“For something he didn’t do.”

“He just got elected for it. Think of the things he did do, kid.” Keefler dropped his cigarette on the porch floor and rubbed it out with the sole of a black shoe. “Both the Bronson boys would have made out better if Nick had been smart enough to stay in the saddle.”

“I don’t see how it made any difference to me.”

“Oh, sure. He wanted to help you get out of the Sink. Until you got a college education.”

“It hurt Danny. I’ll admit that. But when I graduated, I wasn’t a football bum looking for a job with Nick or anybody like him. I graduated with good marks.”

“I know, I know,” Keefler said wearily. “And you got yourself wounded and decorated in Korea and you came back and went to Columbia Graduate School on the G.I. Bill. I’m talking about what you would have done.”

But Lee knew he had done what seemed inevitable. After hospital time in Japan, he was sent back on a hospital ship, was completely ambulatory by the time they docked at San Francisco. His request for discharge at Dix was granted. He enrolled in Columbia Graduate School, carried the heaviest work load they would give him, and earned his Master’s.

By then he had destroyed the short stories and the notes for the novel. He had over seventy pages done on an entirely different novel. He had three hundred dollars. The placement agency had come up with the instructor-ship at Brookton Junior College. He went out for an interview and signed a contract. During that summer he worked on a road job to get back in shape. After the first week of exhaustion he began to adjust to the labor, and began work again on the book. The construction company was working on a stretch of new divided highway in southern Michigan where rooms were hard to find. He found a room in the farmhouse of a couple named Detterich. They had three young sons on the farm and an older daughter working in an insurance office in Battle Creek. The daughter came home to the farm for her vacation — the last two weeks of August. Her name was Lucille. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

The following December, after half a dozen trips in the ancient Plymouth he had purchased in order to be able to drive down to Battle Creek, and after he had been with his new job long enough to know that he liked it and could do it well, and after he had received the advance on his book of two hundred and fifty dollars, he married her in the parlor of the Detterich farmhouse on the second day of the Christmas vacation. They honeymooned in New Orleans, an unexpected honeymoon made possible by Danny’s wedding gift of five crackling new hundred dollar bills, wrapped in a sheet of hotel stationery on which he had scrawled, Have a ball, kids. Danny had been out for a year and a half. He was back in Hancock, and he seemed to be doing very well indeed.

Lee Bronson was twenty-six. He had work he liked. The pay was low, but the acceptance of the book took the sting out of that. There would be more books, and there would come a day when he could either go on teaching or give it up, as he chose. He had a bride men turned in the street to stare at. The world was a fine place, that December.

Danny lost again the following March, the same month they found the house on Arcadia Street and moved out of the dingy furnished apartment. Lee went down to see him, before he was sentenced. Danny was a little heavier. He was a week away from being thirty. He was very depressed, and he marveled bitterly at his bad fortune.

“Twice before I got picked up, Lee, and neither damn time had I done what I got sent up for. This time it’s worse, almost. Now, get this: I’m way uptown, at Sonny’s. I’m at the bar, a little loaded, but minding my own business. It’s four in the afternoon. Day before yesterday. I got a date in the bar. She’s coming in to meet me at five. The bar is empty except for a couple down the bar. They’re having a fight. I’m paying no attention. I’m just there drinking my drink, damn it. The woman isn’t bad looking, not bad at all. They’re both drinking and barking at each other. All of a sudden she comes down, takes the stool next to me, grabs my arm and says I should buy her a drink. It’s nothing to me. So I do. You know that’s a nice place. A good trade. No trouble. He comes down. She won’t look at him or talk to him. He’s a big joker. My size. Maybe fifteen years older. He starts grabbing at her. Rough like, I tell him to take it easy. The bartender tells him. But no. The big shot has to grab me by the shoulder, spin me around and swing. I ducked my head and he hit me right on top of the head. It hurt. I was drinking. I wasn’t so lucky it left a mark where he hit. It’s still a little sore, but no mark. Enough is enough. I rush him right back into a corner, fast. Wham, wham, wham. Maybe I hit him four five times, every one right down the alley. I had to hold him up for the last one. Nothing dirty. No knee. Nothing. Like a gentleman I did it, every one on the mouth and he bleeds all over the place. I let him drop, got my hat off the stool next to mine and left a buck tip out of my change and took off. They don’t know me so good there. But you see, I got this date I got to come back for. I come back and I’m grabbed. I think it’s like a joke. No joke, kid. Assault. The big guy’s name is Fitch. He’s big news. A banker from Detroit and he stops there when he’s in town. The bitch he was fighting with is his wife. He once upon a time loaned Sonny some money, I hear. So it goes down like this, and this is what the three of them say, the only witnesses. I come in loaded. I make a pass at his wife. He objects. The bartender tells me to leave. So I beat up on the banker and walk out. Busted his jaw, not too bad, and ruined a lot of expensive dentist work. I give Kennedy the picture. No dice. It’s too hot. Maybe I’m not worth the trouble. So here I go again. Jesus, Lee!”

And he went again. He was given a one to ten, that curious sentence that means a man is eligible for parole after one year but, in the discretion of the warden and the parole board, can be kept for the full ten.

Daniel Bronson served two and a half years, less one month. He came to see Lee when he was released. He was a silent and sour man. He had found a job, prior to release, with a trucking firm, the owner of which, having done time in his youth, was willing to hire ex-convicts and men on parole. Lee had asked him if it was a blind, a myth for the parole people as other jobs had been the other times he had been released.

“No. I’ve been a sucker long enough, kid.”

“Going straight?”

Danny’s smile was slow and savage. “This late? I’ve lived very well. I can’t adjust at this late date to a beer and beans existence.”

Lee remembered his surprise at the choice of words and the careful diction, and he remembered that Danny noticed his surprise. Still smiling, he had said, “Don’t be a snob, little brother. I’ve always been smart enough, I think. I learned to handle myself right, and I learned to wear the right clothes. I was fine until I opened my stupid mouth. So this time I didn’t waste my time up there in Alton. I haven’t got your fancy degrees, kid, but from now on it’s going to be harder for people to figure me out. I finished high school English requirements. I read books, kid. Maybe a hundred books.”

“I still don’t know what you have in mind.”

“Neither do I. Yet. But I’m not going to play horse for Kennedy. Sooner or later I’d take the fourth fall and get tagged an habitual. Seven and a half years out of thirty-two on the inside. I’m going to find an angle, sooner or later. I’m going to look and I’m going to find one, and until I do I’ll wheel a rig for Grunwalt, draw my pay, and tell Kennedy to shove it if he tries to hook me back in. The organization never gave me anything but a bad time. I want a solo kick.”

That had been in May. The next time he had stopped by had been in June, and he was still working for Grunwalt. But the last time Lee had seen him, in late July, Danny’s situation had obviously changed. He had been driving a late model sedan, a medium-priced car, gray and inconspicuous. He had been wearing a rayon cord suit, a narrow maroon knit tie, a button-down collar. Lee had just come back from teaching a summer session class when Danny had come striding up the walk, gift-wrapped box under his arm. He had thought at the time that if you didn’t know Danny’s history you could easily take him for a successful youngish man of the salesman type. He was a bit shorter than Lee, and broader, with heavier bones. His hair, paler than Lee’s, was a dark blond, with a tight kinky wave.

Up close, the illusion suffered. There were the small scars, and the bright, cold, predatory eyes, and the restless, reckless flavor of all the bad ones. Lee, worried about what he might be up to, had tried to question him. Though Danny fended off the questions with smiling ease, Lee caught an impression that surprised him. Whatever Danny was doing, he was slightly shamefaced about it, as though it did not fit his own picture of himself.

And whatever Danny was doing — it had brought Keefler here on this hot afternoon. Keefler seemed sleepy and reasonable. But too anxious to lump Lee with Danny.

“Look, Mr. Keefler. Danny went in the wrong direction. He started early. Maybe it’s too late for anything to be done. I don’t know. But I didn’t go in that direction, and you didn’t go in that direction. We got out of the Sink.”

Keefler raised one eyebrow. “We?”

“You and me, Mr. Keefler.”

“Let me get this.” He pointed at Lee’s chest and then his own. “You want to put us in the same bundle. But it doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

“Because I come up by myself. You got your way bought for you. With stinking money from a hood brother and stinking money from a big mobster. You want to lump yourself with somebody, you fit with Danny, not with me.”

In the moment of shock before anger came, Lee felt astonished at the sudden bitterness and the unreasoning anger of the man. When Lee’s anger was complete, he did not let it change his voice or his expression. “I was under the ridiculous impression that we were reminiscing, Mr. Keefler. You are sitting on my porch in a chair I bought, dropping ashes on a porch I painted. You are a parole officer. I am an instructor at a state educational institution. I’ve tried to be pleasant to you for Danny’s sake. If you have questions, ask them. But from now on, watch your mouth and your manners.”

Keefler stared at him for long seconds. Then he chuckled and said, “Now if you aren’t the one!”

“Ask your questions.”

“Sure, but first I’ll make my little speech. They keep telling me it’s a free country. It don’t mean a thing to me if you wave your education in my face. Not a thing. There’s a fence, see? Right across the middle of the world. I’m on one side. And the Bronson boys are on the other. You both got records. You’re both in the files. He’s got a thicker file. I’ll talk to you just the same way I talk to anybody on the other side of that fence. I got a right to talk to anybody I want to. And you are going to play it my way. If you don’t like my way, and if I think maybe you’re hiding something, I go over to that school you work at, and I got my hat in my hand and I ask them a hell of a lot of polite questions about you, and if when I’m through there’s anybody left over there that doesn’t know you got a brother who’s a three-time loser who put you through school on stolen money, it’s going to surprise both of us. And they’ll know your brother has busted his parole and he’s on the loose and he gives you fancy presents. And they’ll know you got picked up on an assault charge and it got squashed because the guy who showed up to squash it was the smart shyster who worked for Nick Bouchard. If they still love you over there, I’ll see you get pulled in for questioning, and I’ll see it happens often, and I’ll make sure it comes when you should be teaching like they are paying you for. Now if you think they’ll still keep paying you for teaching after all that, you can pop off some more about my mouth and my manners. To Johnny Keefler, you are one of the Bronson boys, and both the Bronson boys stink. End of speech.”

Anger had suddenly become much too expensive. A luxury. He straightened the papers on the card table and he was annoyed with himself to see that his hand was shaking. He saw the factor he had missed in Keefler’s personality. The man was not entirely sane. He was perfectly capable of doing exactly what he threatened. He would do it knowing well that he would gain nothing but the satisfaction of smashing the orderly life of Lee Bronson. Perhaps, before the loss of the hand, he had been merely a tough cop with a streak of sadism. Lee knew he had no important contacts, no place he could go and ask that Keefler be pulled off him. He knew that the only thing he could do was crawl. And it was humiliating even with the rationalization that it was but to placate a madman.

He looked down at the stack of themes, and spoke in an expressionless voice. “He came here on the afternoon of July twenty-fifth. He was too well dressed to be still working for Grunwalt. He was driving a gray two-door, a recent model. Maybe a Dodge or a Plymouth. He stayed from about three-thirty to five-thirty. We had some drinks. I wondered what he was doing. He wouldn’t tell me. He admitted he wasn’t at Grunwalt’s. I asked if Rich knew about that. He said it was all fixed. I asked him if he’d gone back with Kennedy and he said no.”

“Now you’re being a good boy, but it’s a lot of crap you’re handing me. He’s your brother. If he was onto something, he’d tell you.”

“I can only give you my word that he didn’t. My wife was with us all the time. She’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“She’s due back any minute. In fact, she’s a little late.”

“I got the time.”

“Don’t lean on her, Mr. Keefler. She’s not used to...”

“You forget easy. I’m doing this my way, Bronson. Where is Danny now?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“You act like you want to make it hard for yourself. We’ll get him anyway. He broke parole. So he owes the state seven years and seven months. There’s no way in the world he can get out of that.”

“I’ll tell you one thing. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like him. He’s smarter than that.”

Keefler gave a snort of contempt. “That clown isn’t smart. No three-time loser has brains, professor. Here’s how smart I am. Rich and those other guys were carrying too big a load. So they’re told to turn over so many files apiece to me, and make it the rough ones. From Rich I get your brother and a few others. He briefs me on them. They’re all doing fine, he says. Danny Bronson is checking in like he should. No trouble with Danny. No trouble at all. He gives me the big words. Fine adjustment. Social conscience. Crap! I ask when he’s due in, and Rich says he phones in. I ask if he ever stops over to see him on the job and Rich says it might embarrass the men to go drop in on them. First I go check on where he’s living. I find he moved out of that flea bag room early in July. There’s a violation right there. Change of address without notification or authorization. No forwarding address. Then I go to Grunwalt. Bronson, sure. Worked here for six weeks. Quit the end of June. As far as Rich knew, he was still working there. So he’s a wise guy, and I’ve decided he’s had too much fresh air and he’s due back inside to think it over. So I drift around town, asking who’s seen him. Nobody. While I’m looking he phones Rich on schedule, a local call. By then I’ve told Rich off, told him how the wise punk was kidding him. Maybe over the phone Rich breaks into tears or something, telling the poor fella how he’s let his friends down. That call came in last Monday. I’m still looking. He’s on the tape now, with a pick-up order out for him. I got the rest of my punks hacked into line. They jump up and say sir. Rich and those other clowns are too soft. I’m going to get Danny and he’s going to go down on his knees and he’s going to beg and he’s going to blubber, and then he’s going back to Alton for violation of parole, and by God, he’s going to stay there. Your smart brother wasn’t a damn bit smart, Bronson.”

“All I can tell you is I honestly don’t know where he is, Keefler.”

“Mister Keefler.”

“Mister Keefler.”

“Try it again, with a little more snap, professor.”

“Mister Keefler.”

“That’s better. You saw him last on the twenty-fifth of July?”

“That’s right.”

“Try it again, with a sir.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“You’re coming along nice, professor. You’re certain you haven’t seen him since?”

“I’m positive... sir.”

“What are all those papers, Bronson?”

“Class work, sir. English themes.”

Keefler stood up, reached over and took the top paper. Jill Grossman’s work. He read it, frowning, his lips moving, for about twenty seconds. Then he tossed it contemptuously on the desk. “Good god, is that what you teach them? What the hell is it about?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Different people don’t understand different things. Think the parents of those kids would understand about you? About your old lady, maybe? The record says she was a lush, a part-time waitress and a part-time whore that got herself froze to death in an alley in the Sink.”

Lee’s hand was on his knee, hidden by the table top. He looked up at Keefler’s smile and, keeping his face blank, he closed his hand into a hard fist. He could hear the sound it would make against that slack smile, and he could feel how it would jolt all the way up to his shoulder. He had the feeling that Keefler knew exactly what was coming, and had known just how to push him over the edge. But at that crucial moment he heard the muted yelp of tires and the bang of springs and shocks as Lucille drove the old Plymouth into their driveway in her normal frantic fashion.

“This your wife now?” Keefler asked. Lee nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. Keefler sat down. Lee felt weak and sick with reaction. Keefler said, “You stay put, professor. She’ll come on out here by herself, won’t she?”

“Yes. She’ll come out here.”

“What else? Come on, get it up.”

“Sir.”

He heard Lucille coming through the house, heard the clack of her clogs on the hardwood in the hallway, the softer sound of her steps on the rug. She came out onto the porch, saying, in a whining voice, “Honey, you just gotta do something about the car. When I stopped to let Ruthie off, it stalled and I...” She stopped as she saw Keefler. Lee saw her quick and expert appraisal of him, saw her arrive at the immediate conclusion that Keefler could be of no interest to her, saw her face change into the look of hauteur and indifference she reserved for everybody she considered the least bit inferior.

“Lucille, this is Mr. Keefler. He’s Danny’s parole officer.”

And the look of indifference was gone, and Lee saw a curious alertness about her. “How do you do,” she said, very politely.

“Hi, Lucille,” Keefler said, remaining stolidly in his chair. Lee had screened the porch a year and a half ago, and he had left the original railings. The screen was about eight inches beyond the railing. Lucille moved over and sat on the railing, long round legs straight, crossed at the ankles. She wore her dark blue swim suit, a short pale blue beach coat of thick terrycloth over it, and wooden clogs with white straps. Her hands were shoved deeply into the big pockets of the short beach coat, and the collar was turned up. Her hair was the coppery dark of old pennies, and coiled tightly, the coils no larger than coins, hair fitting her head closely with a look of spirit and bravery like a Roman youth. She was, Lee thought, almost unchanged by three years of marriage. Her perfect face had babyish blandness, large blue eyes set very wide, elfin snub of a nose, lips wide and heavy, teeth a bit too small and of a perfect white. She was now, as she had been three years before, one of the most provocative looking women he had ever seen. The life of her seemed so very close to the sensitive and unflawed satin of her skin. It was visibly warm in the pulse of her throat, in the lucent blue of veins at temple, wrist and ankle. Her long legs seemed to have extra curvatures, tender hollows, velvety paddings which, in other women, were but the hints of what here, in her, was almost too graphically expressed.

She usually kept her hands out of sight. They were small hands, but thick through the palms, with very short fingers. The nails were deeply nibbled and ugly.

Now she had her perfect summer tan, a honeyed luminescence that seemed more a glow of gold from beneath the skin than a deepening of color of the skin itself. The whites of her eyes were blued with her perfect health. There had been a little change. Her waist did not nip in above the sweet abundance of hips with quite such a startling contrast; there was a tiny roll of fat around her middle. There was a fullness under her chin, a small pad that unfortunately made it slightly apparent that there was not a great deal of chin in the first place. Her round high breasts were larger, the tissues less firm. And there were two tiny brackets of discontent around her mouth.

He remembered a time last May when she had been at the school to meet him and had somehow missed him, and he had been hurrying to catch up with her when he spotted her a half block ahead, walking toward home, walking with her short quick steps, hips swinging in wine linen slacks. As he had come up behind two boys who were following her, keeping pace with her, he heard one of them say, with thick-throated fervor, “Damn! She’s really built for it.”

That phrase had remained in his mind because it had been, in a curious way, an index of his self-betrayal. In the very beginning she had been the perfect delusion. Blinded by that magical face and body, he had read into her all the things he wanted to find. Her wide-eyed look was honesty. Her farm background and the office job in Battle Creek denoted energy and integrity. He detected an undertone of seeming cleverness in her most banal remark. Her automatic sexual hunger could not be anything but love.

He could not believe that a face and body of such perfections could contain a third-class mind. He told himself that her environment had not given her a chance to grow. When he talked she looked at him with shining eyes and rapt attention that could only come from a superior intelligence and from a sensitivity that had never been given a chance to develop. He would develop it. He would take delight in her growth.

He had been stubborn, and it had taken a year before he could see her clearly and know how poor had been the bargain he had struck. As the first child and only daughter of the Detterichs she had been grievously spoiled. She had been that rarity — a beautiful baby, a beautiful child, a beautiful adolescent. In a world where beauty was so highly prized, it was only necessary to be looked at and admired. She had learned that she was a great prize, and that it was inevitable that she would be given all the good things of the world. By someone. Her parents gave all they could. She was never given chores. She never made her own bed, or cleaned her room. In school she had been an indifferent scholar, a bland dreamer without intellectual resource. In her dreams she was a famous actress, or singer, or movie star. But never was there any effort to implement these dreams.

Even the job, he learned, had been a phony. She had dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year, and for the next two years had done absolutely nothing, rising at noon, washing her hair, lounging around the farmhouse, waiting only for dusk and the inevitable car in the drive, the peremptory honk, the long evening date. Boredom had finally driven her to Battle Creek. After a six weeks’ course at a business school, during which she had learned very little, she had gone to work for her uncle, her mother’s brother, a general agent. Lee remembered the way Uncle Rog had said, “Seel dressed up the office pretty good.” And chuckled. “Hard to keep the boys out working on prospects. Used to be if you wanted to lose anything for good, have Seel file it.”

The last illusion to go was the one of love. Unlike the norm of most beautiful women, she was strongly, hungrily sexed. But her only interest was her own gratification. He existed as an available instrument of her completion, not as a person. She would say the expected words of love, but as a short lesson learned by rote.

He knew that, as a person, he did not exist for her. Nor did anyone else in the world really exist. She lived entirely for herself, and anyone who entered her life in any way existed only as a part of the frame around her. Should they fit her preconceived notion of herself, they were acceptable. If they did not fit, they were ignored.

She was an indifferent housekeeper, a dull, lazy and unimaginative cook. In his final knowledge he admitted to himself that she was stupid, lazy, insensitive, greedy, superficial and curiously coarse. He had thought a child might change her, but after he became convinced they could not conceive, he felt a guilty relief. He took the joyless use of her that she took of him. And he intoned the expected words with her own lack of conviction. He felt responsibility toward her. He did not feel that he could leave her. And when he thought of how she would be in twenty years, soft, fat, querulous, whining, his heart seemed to hang sick and heavy in his breast. He knew she would hurt him in his profession. At the moment it was not too important. At faculty affairs she was decorative, and when she opened her mouth and the emptinesses came out, it was thought cute. Lucille, the doll-wife.

The one factor he most resented was the way she managed to stifle his ability to do a second novel. He tried. He could not work. There was always the knowledge of her in the house. Her listless boredom, her sighing discontent. She felt he had cheated her somehow. This life was too meager. She didn’t understand money, or how to handle it. She merely knew that she had to have a great deal more than she had. Her desires were infantile. She wanted a glossy convertible, country club membership, a mink, travel, matched luggage, a fulltime maid, and one really good square-cut emerald. Lee obviously couldn’t acquire those things and never would. So Lee had cheated her. And her family felt Lee had cheated her.

As he was unable to work at what he wanted most to do, he had filled his time as completely as he could with extra work. Any obligation was preferable to the endless evenings after eating one of those frozen horrors she purchased called “television dinners,” trying to read in the small living room while she lived the spurious life of the picture tube.

The marriage had become a curious armed truce. In a small and very guilty corner of his soul he hoped that out of her ignorance and her boredom she would commit some act so monstrous that it would cancel his obligation to her and he would be free of her. Though he had the dark suspicion that there had been very few personable men in her home neighborhood who had not managed to trigger her quick physical responses, she seemed now to be utterly faithful. She spent a great deal of time with Ruthie Loftis, the plump brunette wife of a car salesman who lived three blocks down Arcadia Street. Ruthie was cut from the same pattern. When he was forced to over-hear fifteen minutes of any Lucille-Ruthie conversation, he felt like throwing his head back and roaring like a gut-shot bear.

He glanced at Keefler and saw that the man was looking at Lucille with cold avidity and an overtone of astonishment.

“Seems like your brother-in-law Danny has come up missing,” Keefler said easily. “When was the the last time you saw him? Now don’t look at him, honey. You look at me and tell me.”

“Gee, I got to think. It was a long time ago. Lee, wasn’t it about your birthday?”

“I told you not to look at him.”

“I’m sorry. It’s like a game, sort of, huh? He was here the day after Lee’s birthday, when he was twenty-nine. I’m twenty-four. Let me see. He brought you something. I can’t remem... oh, that stuff for your desk. I don’t know why he had to bring junk like that.”

“Have you seen him since?”

Lucille’s eyes looked wider. She shook her head from side to side, with the slow solemnity of a child. “No, Mr. Keefler. We haven’t seen him at all.”

Lee felt the tension at the nape of his neck. Lucille was a congenital liar, and a poor one. There were always reasons for her lies. Where did the change go? Gee, honey, it must have fallen out of my pocket. Those are new shoes, aren’t they? Are you crazy! I’ve had these for ages. Why didn’t you tell me Dr. Ewing called? But he didn’t, honest. Always with the same extra width of eye, the same slow shake of her lovely head, the slight abused pout of her heavy lips. He had seen it so many times that he knew beyond any doubt that Lucille was lying to Keefler. He looked narrowly at Keefler, who took out a cigarette and lit the match one-handed. Keefler stood up. “Well, you back up what your husband told me, Mrs. Bronson. I guess you folks are in the clear.”

He started toward the screen door and turned sharply and said, “What work is he doing, Lucille? What work is Danny doing?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Honest. He wouldn’t say.”

Keefler stood by the screen door, nibbling his lower lip. “Go on in the house, honey,” he said.

Lee saw Lucille obey with an unexpected docility. She never took readily to being ordered about. Keefler gestured to Lee. He got up and walked over. Keefler looked up at him. “Big bastard, aren’t you?”

“Is that a question... sir?”

“Don’t get porky. You can’t afford it. You don’t mean anything to me. I can step on you like on a bug. Now I’m telling you just what you’re going to do. You’re going to wait, and if you get any kind of word from Danny, you aren’t going to wait ten seconds before you get hold of me. You’re going to move fast, Bronson. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be the sorriest guy in the state. Right now he’s a wanted man. Understand? You hide one single damn thing, and there’s laws that cover that, and I’ll go to a lot of work to see that I make them stick.”

Keefler settled his hat more squarely on his head. He shook out his suit coat and rehung it over his left arm. He went down the steps and out to the walk. He looked back once and lifted his arm in a sardonic gesture of farewell.