The Paper Grail (51 page)

“I just wanted to make you admit it,” Sylvia said, almost smiling for a moment. “And I didn’t say he was innocent of any crimes. I only said that I don’t think he’d stoop to arson and murder. I don’t think he had anything to do with screwing up Mrs. Deventer’s car. I saw him next morning downtown. He’d just heard about her accident. He was pretty shaken up.”

“Easy to fake,” Howard said sulkily.

“That’s true, too. Anyway, what I’m saying is that they
would
be murderers, and that they almost murdered Bennet. Your being jealous of Stoat makes you underestimate them. That kind of thinking is dangerous here.”

No one spoke for a moment while Howard grappled with this notion. Finally Mr. Jimmers said, “She’s right, you know.”

Howard shrugged. It was possible. Hell, she probably
was
right.

“I’m familiar with this jealousy business,” Jimmers said. “It’s a potent thing. It’ll fill you up with false regrets. Take it from a man well seasoned in it.”

Howard nodded. “I’ll try to keep things straight,” he said. He smiled at Sylvia, though, rolling his eyes, and got a smile in return. Maybe there hadn’t been any harm in clearing the decks. He could get on with it now. “So what are we talking about here? What’s the stakes?”

“Higher than you can imagine,” Jimmers said. Then, after a pause, he added, “It was your coming here that brought it to a head. You were bound to come. There’s no blame involved. But all of us knew something was coming, Roy included. Graham was fishing for someone, and out of the blue you called up and volunteered for the post. You were a natural. You can bet it didn’t surprise Roy Barton any when they made their move. He was primed for it. I’m afraid that of all of us, you’re the
one who knows the least. So I’ll be blunt. Right now the stakes are high and simple: they want you and the print.”

“That’s the deal?” Howard asked.

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

Howard shrugged. “Then let’s get on with it.” There seemed to be no option. He was moderately certain now what it was he had inherited, and he was equally sure that he didn’t want it. What he wanted, he had come to understand, was Sylvia and a change in the way he lived his life. As unsettling and strange as the north coast air seemed to be, in the few days he’d been there he had come to like it. It suited him. Southern California had grown gray and hazy for him. “Let’s give the damned thing up, right now. We’ll go up to the motel and deliver it like a pizza, trade it straight across for Uncle Roy. Then we’ll all go out for dinner. Maybe we can squeak a couple of months’ free rent out of the deal.”

Mr. Jimmers sighed. “She doesn’t just want the
object
. She wants to
use
it. She wants its power. If she can’t use it, it’s worthless to her.”

“Let her go to town on it. She can use it like crazy. We need a little rain.”

“She couldn’t even begin to get the pizza out of the box,” Jimmers said. “She would need you for that. And you can bet she won’t be satisfied with a little rain. She sees herself as the queen of the weather, and right now, she’s too close to being right. If there’s any going out to dinner tonight, you wouldn’t be along for it, I’m afraid. She’ll put you to some sort of … use.”

“To hell with dinner,” Howard said, although doubtfully now. “I’ll grab a bite at the Gas ’n’ Grub.”

“Father’s been fighting this war for years,” Sylvia said. “We can’t just go up there and chuck it all in. He wouldn’t want that.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Jimmers said. “Nice of you to offer, though, Howard. It’s exactly what I’d expect you to do. And more importantly, it’s exactly what
they
expect you to do by now, or rather, what
she
expects you to do. ‘How serious is Howard Barton?’ she’s been asking herself. ‘What does he
want?
As soon as she discovers that you don’t
want
anything, not like she wants things, then she’ll think you’re easy to read. There’s nothing particularly complicated about a hero. A hero will take another man’s bullet without thinking it out first. And when he does have time to think it out, he’ll take the bullet, anyway.”

Howard waved the notion away. “That’s somebody else you’re
talking about. I’m not big on bullets. But what do we do? How long do we have?”

“They’ve given us a deadline, actually. Very melodramatic. We come through by midnight tonight if we want to see Roy Barton alive.”

T
HE
Sea Spray Motel sat above the ocean, cheerfully painted in yellow and white and blue, with scalloped bargeboard trim along the length of the single-story row of rooms. Edith parked the station wagon in the deserted lot and surveyed the motel, not letting herself think, but simply keeping on. Roy was in one of the rooms, and she meant to find out which one. And then join him there. It was simple as that.

The night was lit by moonlight and neon, and she could see Pudding Creek just to the south of the motel, running out through a drain under the highway and then looping around toward the ocean. It was very nearly dry and it pooled up into a little slough between big sand dunes. A railroad trestle some thirty or forty feet high spanned the water and dunes at the mouth of the creek, and beyond the trestle the sandy beach was heaped with big clumps of brown kelp, looking like low, creeping shrubs in the moonlight. There was the smell of the ocean and of diesel exhaust from trucks on the highway.

Seeing a movement of drapes in a nearby lighted room, Edith stepped along up the concrete walk and knocked squarely on the door, holding her purse.

There was nothing for a moment except the sound of gulls and traffic. Then there was a swish of quiet movement inside and hushed talk, followed by a muffled shout—just the word “Hey!” very loud and cut off by the sound of a hand slap and a grunt. Edith knocked again, hard this time. More silence followed.

“I have it!” she shouted, knocking once more. “Heloise Lamey, I have what you want!” The light in the room blinked out, and there was the sound of a chain lock sliding and rattling. The door swung halfway open. The room inside was dark, and Edith squinted to see.

“Come in,” a woman’s voice said.

And then immediately there was another shout, the word “Don’t!” followed by the sound of another hand slap and voice hissing out a warning.

Edith steeled herself and walked into the room. The door shut behind her and a man stepped out from behind it and switched on the light. Heloise Lamey sat in a chair by a wood-grain Formica
table. There was a crossword puzzle and pencil in front of her, along with a couple of Styrofoam cups empty except for coffee dregs and lipstick stains.

“Timothy!” Edith said, surprised to see the man who had stepped out from behind the door.

He nodded at her, looking half ashamed of himself. Mrs. Lamey glanced at him sharply, as if suddenly unhappy and doubtful. “I didn’t know that you and Edith Barton were on such familiar terms, Mr. Stoat.”

“Years ago,” he mumbled. “Knew each other briefly.”

“It
was
brief, wasn’t it?” Edith said. “I seem to remember, though, you having eaten at our table more than once. You must have forgotten that.”

He shrugged and moved away, sitting across from Mrs. Lamey, his usual cool and haughty demeanor gone from his face and replaced now by something like the look of an embarrassed teenager. “Lock the damned door,” Mrs. Lamey said to him in a disgusted tone.

“It
is
locked,” Stoat replied. “It locks automatically.”

“The chain lock, too.”

Edith turned around and slipped the chain lock into place.

“Thanks,” Stoat said politely, cutting it off sharp when Mrs. Lamey gave him a vicious look. He shrugged, narrowing his eyes, and then started to pick at the rim of one of the coffee cups, tearing off little fragments of Styrofoam and avoiding the gaze of either woman.

“Well?” Mrs. Lamey asked.

“I don’t have it,” Edith said. “That was a lie to get you to open the door.”

Mrs. Lamey nodded slowly and wide-eyed, as if Edith were a first grader at share time. “Then what do you want?” she said.

“I want my husband.”

“Well, you can’t have him.” Mrs. Lamey’s voice drifted up an octave. “Except in trade. That’s what I told you over the phone. Things haven’t changed any, have they? I expect I’ll have to dispose of both of you now. You can’t leave, you know, after walking in here like this. That was your second great mistake. Your first was to marry Roy Barton. What an unhappy and unfathomable thing. I can’t say I understand it at all.”

“Of course you can’t. You don’t understand anything, not really. If you did, you’d know that I don’t
want
to leave, not without Roy. Didn’t I just tell you I wanted my husband? That meant nothing at all to you.”

Mrs. Lamey stared at Edith for a moment, as if she were going to contradict her. Haughtily Mrs. Lamey said, “You know
nothing
about me. Nothing. How
dare
you judge me. I am … I’m a …
victim
, Mrs. Barton.” She smoothed her hair, straining to keep her face composed.

“Aren’t we all?” Edith said softly.

“Some of us more than others, I assure you,” Mrs. Lamey said. ‘There’s no time for philosophy now, though. What you do or do not understand is of no concern to me. I told you that you can’t
have
your husband, although why on earth you’d want a bloated old hulk like that I can’t say.” Mrs. Lamey was blinking hard now, staring at the tabletop, her lips pursed with tension. “He was young and fit once, I suppose, which might explain something. But now … I’m afraid he’s become a commodity now. Something to be bought and sold.”

“That’s all there is to you, isn’t it?” Edith said. “Buying and selling. You’re as simple as a wrinkled old dollar bill.”

Mrs. Lamey gave Stoat a sudden furious look. “What are you grinning at, Cheshire Cat?” she asked him, and abruptly he went back to picking at his Styrofoam cup, dropping the pieces onto a little heap inside. “It’s
you
that knows nothing and never has,” she said to Edith. “You’ve lived an empty, wasted life. You’ve accumulated
nothing
. You’ve come to
nothing
, except perhaps the end, finally.” With an air of furious dismissal she picked up the crossword puzzle book, asking Stoat, “What’s a five-letter word for a confounding problem?”

“Bitch,” Stoat said flatly, standing up and heading for the door. “I’m going down the road for another cup of coffee.” As he passed Edith he widened his eyes briefly, meeting her own and then looking hard at the door and throwing his head back a barely perceptible half inch.

“Try ‘poser,’” Edith said to Mrs. Lamey, ignoring Stoat entirely. Stoat went out into the evening, shutting the door after himself. Then Edith asked, “Where is he?”

Mrs. Lamey nodded toward a connecting door to an adjacent room. Without asking anything more, Edith strode across to it, opened it, and stepped through. Beyond was a room identical to the first, except that Uncle Roy sat tied to one of the two chairs at the Formica table. In front of him was a Coke can and an ice bucket half full of melting ice. Lying on the bed was an oily-looking man in his twenties, smartly but casually dressed and with small, close-set eyes. He jotted notes in a spiral binder and didn’t look up.

Edith ignored him just as thoroughly. A line of blood trickled from the corner of her husband’s mouth and the side of his face near his right eye was puffy and bruised. She forced herself to smile at him, and he smiled back, wiggling his ears and then wincing. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“I couldn’t stay away. I missed you too much. This isn’t one of your little business ventures, you know. You need me here.”

“That’s a fact,” he said simply.

“And there’s a lot we haven’t said to each other,” she said. “There’s a lot we haven’t done.” She sat in the chair across from him and put a hand on his knee, giving him a squeeze.

His chest heaved and he grinned lopsidedly, tried to speak, and couldn’t. She reached up and wiped the corner of his eye, starting to cry herself, and then, suddenly angry, she began to untie the rope that held him in the chair.

The man on the bed looked up tiredly, as if the whole business were a bore. “Would you
please
give that up?” he asked.

Roy nodded at her, and she sat up. “We’ll wait, then,” she said. “Shouldn’t be long.”

“Something happening?” Roy asked aloud.

“Jack MacDonald and thirty or forty mill workers are coming down here with something—what was it? Iron pipes, I think he said.”

She looked up at the man on the bed, who was very casually rubbing an automatic pistol with a rag now, buffing out fingerprints. He sighted down along the barrel, swinging it from the swag lamp to the ice bucket to Roy’s head. Edith gasped and half stood up, as if she would push Roy’s chair over backward. “Bang,” the man said quietly, and then laid the pistol down on the nightstand next to the bed.

“This is Glendale Flounder,” Roy said to Edith. “Something unfortunate like that. I misremember his exact name. He’s a hoser of the first water, though. A literary critic out of San Francisco, who’s got this thing about pistol barrels that would make Freud sick. Nearly shot his foot off a half hour ago. I had to show him how to release the damned safety. With her money you’d think she could afford pros, and instead she hires a bunch of goddamn artists and poets. It’s enough to make you wonder. He’s writing his novel right now. As we speak. I bet it’s good. A laugh a minute. Excuse me. Glendale. What’s the title again? I forgot.”

The man said nothing. His pencil scratched across the page.

“Don’t antagonize him,” Edith whispered.

Roy shrugged. “Say!” he said, brightening up. “I’ve come up with a great notion, speaking of business.”

“Good,” she said cheerfully. “What’s your idea?”

“A sort of miniature golf course and amusement park, out between the airport and the azalea gardens.”

“Really?” Edith said in an encouraging tone of voice.

“A sure bet, too. Almost no risk. Limited capital outlay. There’s a whole lot of Georgia-Pacific acreage lying fallow out there. Hasn’t been used in thirty years. I figure that Bennet and me can build a stucco castle—big and gaudy but just a cheap facade, something you can see from the highway—and fill it full of video games. We’ll lay out a pissant little golf course along the bluffs, indoor-outdoor carpeting and that sort of thing. A bunch of Bennet’s whirligigs. That’ll draw the families, you know. Families are paramount, even though financially speaking they aren’t worth anything to you. It’s the video games that pay, but we don’t want this just to be some kind of teenage hangout.”