The Road To Ruin

62

IT WAS THE BEST day’s sleep Mark had had in a good long time, maybe ever. Partly it was the hospital bed, infinitely adjustable, beautifully comforting, but mostly it was because, at long last, his conscience was clear.

When Os had driven Mark down the mountain from that lodge, Mark had known he was in deep trouble, both physically and legally. Physically, as it turned out in the hospital’s emergency room, that chair had given him a broken jaw, broken nose, and torn ear. But legally, as he was painfully aware, he was in even worse shape.

Monroe Hall and the butler were both gone, escaped from the lodge. Both could identify the lodge, which would mean the authorities would soon find Os, a relative of the lodge’s owner and a sworn enemy of Hall. Even if Os didn’t immediately give them Mark—and why wouldn’t he? Mark knew game theory as well as Os, and the first to turn gets the best deal—but even if Os did the unlikely and even selfless thing and kept his mouth shut, sooner or later the authorities would come to Mark, as Os’s closest associate, and insist he speak out loud in Monroe Hall’s presence. “That’s him! That’s the voice I heard!”

After the jaw and the nose had been set and the ear sewed up, Mark had been moved from the emergency room to this plain-to-barren single room, where he’d had nothing to do but think about the position he was in. A television set hung from the wall opposite the bed, reminding him unhappily of the butler’s chair jutting from the wall at the lodge, but it wouldn’t function until his credit card cleared, which, a self-satisfied nurse informed him, would be in twenty-four hours. You can buy a Cartier watch and only have to wait thirty seconds after the card has been swiped along the doohickey, but in a hospital it takes twenty-four hours. And they talk about advances in medicine.

Well, it was just as well he didn’t have television to distract him, or so he thought. It gave him time to consider his position, and his options. Not that he needed a whole lot of time, nor did he have, on reflection, a whole lot of options. Fifteen minutes after he was left alone in the room he reached for the telephone on his bedside table, grateful that at least this appliance didn’t need twenty-four hours to be activated, and phoned his lawyer.

“Iss is Ark,” he told the receptionist, which is what the jaw would now permit him to say. “Ark Sterling.”

The ensuing conversation was slow and difficult, but he did at last convince Dan Richards, his family attorney, that he needed a lawyer by his bedside, Saturday or no Saturday, before the cops arrived, as inevitably they would. Dan promised to send someone good from a firm closer at hand, but no lawyer had yet appeared when the plainclothes cop came in, unmistakable even without the badge on its leather carrier dangling from his shirt pocket. A bored, slender guy with black hair, short for a cop, grinned at Mark and said, “I’m Detective Cohan, Quentin Cohan.”

“I’ll talk,” Mark said, not entirely accurately, “en ny lawyer gets ere.”

“Oh, really.” Detective Cohan was both surprised and pleased, not having expected juice from this interview. No longer bored, he said, “Fine by me, Mr. Sterling. I got nothing but time.”

Seating himself in one of the two visitors’ chairs, Detective Cohan pulled a crossword puzzle magazine from his casual jacket pocket and amused himself for half an hour until a man who looked like central casting’s idea of a lawyer walked in. Bald head on top, black gorse around the ears. Pinstripe suit, white shirt, patterned red-and-yellow tie. Black briefcase dangling from left hand. Skinny black-framed eyeglasses that reflected the light. Watch on left wrist big enough and shiny enough to be the entire control panel on a Star Trek ship. Looking from Mark to Detective Cohan, apparently unable to sort them out, he said, “Mark Sterling?”

“Ere,” Mark said, and raised a hand.

“Eldron Gold,” the lawyer said. “The Richards firm sent me. Is this police officer arresting you?”

“Not yet,” Detective Cohan said, with a happy smile, as he stood and put away his crossword puzzles.

Eldron Gold said to Mark, “Would you like to speak to me privately before you answer the officer’s questions?”

“No,” Mark said. “I just ant to get it other ith.”

Detective Cohan stepped closer, still smiling, opening a small notebook. “Good idea,” he said.

Mark took a deep breath. “Thor other theothle and I kidnathed Nonroe Hall,” he said.

“Wait!” shouted Eldron, over some pleased exclamation of Cohan’s. “Are you sure we shouldn’t talk first?”

“No, it’s all right,” Mark assured him. “You’ll see.” To Detective Cohan he said, “Thigh oth us kidnathed Nonroe Hall.”

“This is completely unacceptable,” Eldron interrupted. “In a hospital setting, my client is sedated, he’s not responsible for his statements, absolutely none of this would be acceptable in a court of law.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Mark told his mouthpiece, patting the bed to calm the lawyer down.

“Objections noted, Counselor,” Detective Cohan said. He didn’t seem troubled.

Mark said to Eldron, “I hath to get this out. This isn’t easy thor ne to say.”

Detective Cohan smiled upon him. “We know that,” he assured him. “Go on, Mark.”

“All right.” Mark took a deep breath as his lawyer hopped around like the boy on the burning deck, and went on. “We kett Hall at my thriend’s thanily lodge uh-state thon ere. We also took the utt-ler, utt that was an accident. They oath got away. The utt-ler hit ne with a chair.”

At last Gold interrupted, saying, “Sterling, are you sure we shouldn’t discuss this, you and I? Just you and I?”

“A little late, Counselor,” the happy Detective Cohan said. “Tell us about the other four, Mark.”

“Don’t!”

Ignoring Eldron, Mark said, “One is ny izness thartner, Osthourne Thaulk. The other three are, uh, union nenthers. I don’t know the union.”

“Their names will do,” Detective Cohan said.

“Well, they’re Nac, Thuddy and Ace.”

Both Eldron and Detective Cohan leaned in closer. Detective Cohan said, “Would that be Mac, Buddy, and Ace?”

“Yes. Os knows Thuddy’s real nane, I think, I don’t know ith he knows the others.” Then Mark sighed, his story told, happy to be unburdened.

It took Detective Cohan a while to realize the story was now complete. He had another half hour of questions, intermixed with useless objections from Lawyer Gold, but Mark had essentially told the whole story right at the beginning. Once he’d done so, he felt much better about things. He knew he’d been first to turn state’s evidence, which would mean they’d come to him first for testimony against the others, which meant he would be treated more leniently than everybody else. What a relief.

Such a relief, in fact, that when Detective Cohan and Lawyer Gold finally left, Mark fell immediately and deeply asleep, and remained asleep for most of the day. The shadows outside the hospital room window were long and amber when at last he stirred, stretched, smiled, stopped smiling because it made his jaw hurt, and then remembered where he was and everything that had happened.

What a terrific sleep, after so much tension and worry! That was the moment he told himself it was probably the best day’s sleep of his life, and just the fact of it reassured him he’d made the right decision. Betraying one’s friends and associates, it turned out, wasn’t something to agonize over or regret. No, it was merely an unfortunate possibility in life, as much so for Os and the union men as for himself. One was sorry to find that one had reached that point in one’s life, but then one accepted the reality and got on with it. He had got on with it, and everything was better—for him—as a result.

Smiling again, though more carefully, he turned his head, and there was Detective Cohan, smiling right back at him from the visitor’s chair. He was a very happy boy.

“So you’re awake, are you?”

“Oh, yes. God, I theel rested.”

“Good.” Detective Cohan rose and came over to smile down on Mark. “A lot has happened while you’ve been asleep,” he said.

“I thought it would.”

“We went looking for this Osbourne Faulk,” Detective Cohan told him, “and it turns out, he’d already fled the country.”

Mark blinked. “Thled?”

“Went straight to Brazil. I doubt we’ll ever get our hands on him.”

“Di-ruh—Thra—” No; impossible to say the name of that country. “Why not?” he asked instead.

“Well, there’s no extradition treaty between the United States and Brazil,” Detective Cohan explained. “Once he’s there, there’s no way we can get our hands on him.”

“There are Territories!” Mark cried.

“Sure,” Detective Cohan said, “a number of territories around the world without that extradition treaty. Most of them you wouldn’t want to go to, but Brazil isn’t bad. Rio, you know. Very tall women in bikinis, the way I understand it.”

“What athout—What athout Nac and Thuddy and Ace?”

“Well, you don’t know their real names, and you don’t know what union they’re in,” Detective Cohan pointed out. “Your friend Osbourne may have known at least one real name, but he’s long gone, and believe me, there are dozens of Macs and Buddies and Aces in every union in the United States.”

“So I’m the only one you’ve got.”

“I’m afraid it gets worse, Mark,” Detective Cohan said, with his pleasant smile.

Mark had always hated it when policemen called him by his first name, thinking they were doing it only because he was upper-class and they weren’t, but he suspected this was not the time to make an issue of it. He said, “How could it get worse?”

“Well, they found Monroe Hall,” Detective Cohan told him. “Found him wandering around, had some concussions, hit his head a lot.”

“I didn’t do that. None oth us did that.”

“No, no, nobody’s accusing you, don’t worry about that. The point is, all those bumps to the head, Monroe Hall’s got amnesia.”

“Well, if anythody deserthes—” But then it hit him. “He what?”

“No memory,” Detective Cohan said, and waved a hand beside his head as though saying good-bye to his brain. “The doctors say, he’ll never get his memory back, it’s all gone.”

“Inthossi—Inthoss—”

“But true. Also, just by the way, it seems the butler has disappeared. John Howard Rumsey. Nowhere to be found. It’s beginning to look like, up there in the wilderness where he ran away from you people, a city man like that, something went wrong. Maybe he fell in a mountain tarn, or could be he met up with a bear. Anyway, gone. We’ll keep looking, but it doesn’t seem hopeful.”

“Tough,” Mark said, not seeing any connection with himself, and already bitter about not learning of Monroe Hall’s amnesia until too late.

But Detective Cohan was not finished with his cheerful smiles and his bad news. “All in all, Mark,” he said, “it’s a good thing you spoke. Without you, we’d never have found that lodge, or you, or your friend Faulk’s name, or anything. Yes, sir, Mark, without you coming forward the way you did, the entire Monroe Hall kidnapping would have remained a complete mystery forever. I’ll send your lawyer in now, shall I?”