“That was the girl’s story. Told to you. That makes it hearsay by the time it’s reached my ears.”
“Don’t screw around with me, Brennan. A doctor up at the University Hospital told that to Janet. Check up there and you’ll find out.”
“Why should I? I don’t go nosing for trouble like some people I know. It comes my way, fine, I take care of it, otherwise
I leave well enough. Believe you me, I got plenty on my hands just taking care of what comes my way.”
“My God. What about the house? It
was
arson, wasn’t it?”
“That isn’t the way the fire chief sees it. Chief Nelson and his people looked into it yesterday morning and traced it down to some old papers and rags and cans of old paint out on the back porch. The building was a firetrap, too, one of them old wooden jobs, must’ve been near fifty, hundred years old.”
“Brennan.”
“What?”
“Are you covering up for somebody?”
Brennan bit down on his cigarette and gave me that practiced slow look of his and said, “I’m gonna pretend like you didn’t say that.”
“Then I’ll have to say it again: are you covering up?”
“Before I break you in half, Mallory, how about you tell me just who I’d be covering up for?”
“Simon Norman, maybe. Stefan Norman? Both of ’em?”
“Come off it.”
“You come off it. It’s no secret the Normans controlled local politics for a long time, at least while Richard Norman was alive. Maybe they still do. Norman money, anyway.”
“Don’t you believe them fairy tales. You probably run across that shaggy dog about how old man Norman’s supposed to be back of all the businesses in town. That’s bull, all of it, bull.”
“I saw Phil Taber last night.”
“Good for you.”
“He had five thousand dollars in his billfold.”
“He did?” Brennan sat up, tried to cover his show of surprise by getting rid of his old cigarette and replacing it with a fresh one. “So what?”
“Where would Phil Taber get five thousand dollars?”
“How should I know? I don’t know anything about him. Yesterday was the first and last time I ever seen him and that was for about ten minutes.”
“The Normans could afford something like that, if they were buying him off. What would five thousand be to them? What did Phil Taber tell you in that ten minutes you spent with him? Outside of giving permission for the autopsy.”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Who cares? Since when are you the cop?”
“Just trying to live up to your sterling example, Brennan.”
“All right, all right, he told me his wife and her mother didn’t get along. That his wife was kind of crazy, she was one of them split personality types, you know? She was all the time beating up on her kid, and on the mother, too.”
“And that’s why you’re not pursuing the angle about the mother being beaten up?”
“That’s as good a reason as any. You want a solution to the big mystery, don’t you? You feel you got to know the truth or you just can’t go on? Try this one out: the little Taber bitch beats her mother up, and then goes out to spend some time with a friend, and while she’s gone a fire starts up accidentally, so when she comes back the house is burning and her mother’s dying, trapped in there and beat up; the girl gets feeling low over what she done, and boozes it up and goes off the cliff.”
“No alcohol in the bloodstream, Brennan, remember?”
“Okay, so she was gonna go out drinking and had the bottle in the car with her. Still indicates the state of mind she was in, right? She was depressed and maybe a little suicidal and she drove off the cliff.”
“And that’s the way you see it?”
“No. I don’t see it no way. I see some dead people, some accident victims, nothing more, nothing less. No foul play apparent. No arson, either. Principal player dead. The end. Case closed.”
“You’re through investigating, then?”
“I never started.”
“She had a kid.”
“Who had a kid?”
“I told you about it before. Janet Taber had a kid. You just said she used to beat her kid, remember? He’s supposed to be in a clinic in the east waiting heart surgery. What about him?”
“He is his father’s concern.”
“Phil Taber, you mean.”
“That’s right. No worse off than a million other kids these days who gotta grow up with freaks for fathers.”
Lori came over from the sink, where she’d been rinsing off dishes, and said, “Mal? Can I talk to you for a moment?”
“Sure.” I looked at Brennan. “Excuse me, Sheriff.”
He puffed at his cigarette, said nothing.
Lori took me into the nursery, which was a small room about the size of a double closet, with blue plaster walls. The lights were off. Her little boy Jeff was sleeping in his crib, so she talked in whispers.
“Excuse me for eavesdropping,” she said, “but I heard what Brennan said about Janet. What he said Phil Taber said about Janet.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Look I was talking on the phone this morning, with Annie Coe, about Janet....”
“Who’s Annie Coe?”
“Annie Coe’s a girl about my age Janet was hanging around with these months since she moved back to town. She’s divorced and she and Janet had a lot in common. Anyway, she’s the friend Janet was with that night, the night of the fire and everything.”
“And?”
“I don’t need Annie’s word for it to tell you that story about Janet being a split personality is a crock. I knew Janet well enough to peg that one as phony. And what Annie told me backs up my opinion. Annie said Janet and her mother had grown very close these past months. Janet felt her mother had really come through in time of need, you know? And though I never met Mrs. Ferris, Janet’s mother, I know from what Annie said this morning that it’s very unlikely Janet could have beaten up on her.”
“Why’s that, Lori?”
“You were with Janet, you know what she looked like. She wasn’t big. She was almost petite. It must’ve been her father she took after, from what Annie said. What Annie said was, probably the only reason the beating and the fire didn’t kill Mrs. Ferris right away was her size. Only reason she lasted most the night was that she was a big, healthy, fleshy woman. Stood close to six-foot. It’d take somebody good size to beat up
that
lady....”
There was a moon tonight, or a slice of it, anyway, but it was up under some clouds that were rolling by like dark smoke. Despite the darkness, I could see the Norman house plainly. The grounds directly surrounding it were free of trees and brush and sloped gently, very gently up around the house, which was outlined stark against the sky, sitting back from the edge of a hill that fell sharply to the Mississippi. The river’s waters reflected what light there was back up against the smooth, unpainted cement walls of the Norman house.
It looked like a Moorish fortress or castle, as cut to scale and modified by a would-be Frank Lloyd Wright; something like some of the things put up in the thirties in California towns, only more so, and minus the stucco. The top floor sat on the bottom like a smaller box on a slightly larger one, with a one-story wing on either side; the roof was tower-cut, with fat, stubby turrets on every corner. In its original conception it had been a combination penthouse above and radio station below—the back wall still had the shadow where a giant radio antenna once climbed. The front wall, the face of the house standing watch over the river, had three irregular windows along the bottom floor, like odd teeth, and, on the upper floor, running near the house’s width, a long horizontal window looking out on the river like the viewscreen on a welder’s mask.
We had found the gate open, Rita and I, and had followed the narrow drive up to the house. The drive was bordered by thick dead brush and the occasional outstretching arms of a skeletal tree, all part of a thicket that served to isolate the Norman house and its sloping grounds, making it an island in the midst of a heavily populated section. That island was a part of the uneasy transition between downtown Port City and East Hill, with supermarket, filling station, hardware store and lumberyard just across the way, and on either side of the protective thicket were clusters of middle-class housing. The way to the gate of the Norman drive was via an alley bordered on either side by frame houses.
I got out of the car just before we cleared the thicket and turned the wheel over to Rita, let her drive up toward the house alone. I stayed back in the brush and watched her pull my Rambler into the open graveled area and park by the back door. There were no other cars in the parking area; opposite the house, across the graveled space, was an unpainted cement garage, built years ago for three cars, big enough now for two, at a slant.
About the time Rita would have been taking her keys out of the ignition, the back door to the house opened, and in the light it let out I saw a big black man come out and rush over to help her out of the car. He was wearing a well-tailored, well-cut houndstooth suit, with a white shirt, open at the collar, and he wore a black eyepatch where a left eye had been.
Harold Washington.
We’d met before.
He and Rita embraced, and with an arm around each other’s waist, they went inside.
I approached the house carefully, staying within the confines of the thicket, and moved slowly around until I reached the
point where the brush met the slope of the hill that dropped to the river. I crouched and stared at the building for something like five minutes, then crawled up by a slant-roofed wing, edged around it and went in through the same door as Rita and her brother.
I’d managed to get the layout of the house from Rita, so I wasn’t worried about finding my way around. The door to her brother’s living quarters was to my right and tight-shut, though soft sounds of conversation were seeping out. The game plan I’d outlined to Rita was that she would talk to Harold for half an hour, brother-sister small talk, and then break it to him she’d brought somebody along to see him. I had something else in mind, though, which necessitated a mild double cross.
The lobby I was in was boxlike, and its ceiling went the building’s full two stories. The walls were smooth plaster, cream-colored, bare. A coatrack by the door was the only furniture, a tiny throw rug the only carpeting. The floors were well-varnished wood that yellowly reflected an overhead light. In the middle of the facing wall was an archway that cut through an otherwise enclosed hall.
I went over and stood within the hall. Its ceiling was as high as the lobby’s. I checked my bearings: beyond the archway was the living room—big, sparsely furnished, much like an extension of the lobby, with various large, oddly shaped, undraped windows. To my right was a steep incline of stairs, no rail, crowded by claustrophobically tight walls.
I climbed the stairway, palms scraping against the confining walls, and at the top of the stairs found a landing. On the left was a door. I turned the knob and found the door unlocked and pushed it gently open and stepped in.
The room encompassed the whole top floor. There was no carpeting, again only bare, but well-varnished wood. The walls, too, were bare, except in the middle on the left where an artificial fireplace with elaborate woodworking stood dark and absurdly out of place in this cream-walled context. An oil painting of a pontifically smiling, handsome man in a purple suit and tie hung over the mantel, and on the mantel in front of the Rockwell-style portrait was a single silver-framed photograph. Along the end wall, with its long window looking over the Mississippi, the floor was raised half a foot, like a stage, and center-stage was a battered desk, coming up to the sill. The back wall was relatively crowded: a door in either corner—one I’d just come in, the other to a bathroom, I presumed—and a bed. Its head was to the wall, with a cluttered nightstand on one side and a dresser on the other, a wheelchair in front of the dresser, and a portable television on a movable stand in front of that. The bed had a man in it.
The man said, “Well. Hello. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
He was old. The bedcovers were tucked up under his arms, which lay straight and limp in front of him like the limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He was so old he was shrinking; the gray silk pajama top was sizes too big, a parachute he was lost in. The flesh of his hands was like parchment, and you could’ve stored things in the hollows of his cheeks. His hair was white and long, longer than mine, as though he didn’t bother having it cut anymore. Though the handsome cast of his features hadn’t been completely dimmed by time, the gray-blue eyes, once hypnotic and piercing, were milky and confused now.
“Hello, Mr. Norman,” I said.
“Do... should I know you, young man?” The voice was resonant and not as old as the rest of him. “That is, I don’t
remember meeting you, but as you might guess, my mind is not all it once was.”
There was a chair by the nightstand. I pulled it around by the bed and sat down. “We haven’t met, sir,” I said. “Excuse me for barging in, but I needed to see you.”
He smiled, and in it you could imagine the masterful con man’s smile it had been; unlike his nephew Stefan’s, Simon Norman’s teeth were his own.
“I haven’t received many guests in the past few years,” he said. “But now, this particular moment, even an uninvited guest is welcome. It’s Thanksgiving evening, you know, and the kind of time best not spent alone. If one can’t share such times with relatives or friends, then a stranger will do. What was your name?”
“Mallory,” I said, and offered my hand.
He took it. His grip was firm, but the flesh around it seemed ready to jump ship. The eyes got a little brighter and he said, “You aren’t here to do me in, are you, Mallory? I didn’t swindle your mother, did I? Or would that be grandmother? Did I swindle your grandmother out of her hard-earned dollars and are you here for retribution for that misconduct?”
“No,” I said, “nothing like that.”
“I must confess, if you were on, well, a mission of vengeance, you’d’ve picked a good night for it. You’d have a willing victim, as I’ve been rather melancholy this evening.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, sitting up somewhat straighter in the bed. “You assume I mean
guilt,
don’t you? Well that’s not it, not at all. Oh, hell, it was wrong of me, wrong to charge so high when times were so tough back in my clinic days. I was wrong. I
was
wrong, I’m first to admit it. Can you deny that? Hmmm?”