Vanish in an Instant (6 page)

“He needs one.”

“He'll get one.” Cordwink faced Loftus again. “Have you any money?”

“A little, yes. The past few months I've been able to work. I'm an accountant. That's what my treatments have been for, not so I could live longer, but so I could carry on with my job, live more efficiently.”

“How much money? Two thousand? One?”

“Oh, not that much.”

“Lawyers come high. The more crooked they are, the bigger their price. That's how they stay out of the booby hatch, by rubbing the lesions on their conscience with greenbacks.”

Loftus looked a little puzzled. “Well, if I have to have a lawyer, Mr. Meecham will suit me fine. He's been very kind.”

“Kind?” Cordwink raised his eyebrows, exaggeratedly. “This I must hear.”

“When he thought I was just a bum, he offered me two dollars.”

“Well, well. Where'd you get the two dollars, Meecham, selling phony oil shares to war widows?”

Meecham's smile was a little strained. “I object to the question on the grounds that it is intimidating and forms a conclusion.”

Dunlop put down his pencil, and said, with a faint whine, “When everybody keeps talking like this, I don't know what to write down. Everybody shouldn't keep talk­ing like this.”

“Don't write anything,” Cordwink said. “Call a patrol car and take Loftus down and book him.”

I'm going to jail
, Loftus thought. But he still couldn't quite believe it. Jail was for criminals, for thieves and thugs, for brutal angry lawless men. He said, with the sur­prise and disbelief evident in his voice: “I'm going to—to jail?”

“For the present, yes.”

“Why do you say, for the present?”

“We have no facilities at the jail for looking after a dy——a sick man. There's a prison ward at the County

Hospital. You'll be transferred there eventually.”

“The County Hospital.” Loftus laughed, holding his hands over his belly. It hurt him to laugh, but he couldn't help it. “That's funny, isn't it? The final irony. After all that's happened, I'll end up where I started—in a ward at the County Hospital.”

The sound of his laughter faded, though his mouth kept grinning. He saw Cordwink and Meecham exchange un­easy glances. “You're uncomfortable, aren't you?—dis­turbed?—you wish you'd never seen me? Yes, it's the same everywhere I go, I make people uncomfortable. I don't have any friends. No one wants to be near me, people are afraid to be near a man who's walking a step ahead of death. I make them too conscious of their own fate, and they hate me for it. I'm not blaming them, no, I understand how they feel. I loathe myself more than anyone could loathe me. I loathe this decaying body that I'm trapped inside, hope­lessly trapped inside. This isn't me, this grotesque body, it is my prison. What prison have you to offer that could be half so terrible?”

He didn't realize that he was crying until he felt the sting of salt on his lips. He sometimes cried when he was alone at night and the hours seemed so ironically endless; but never in front of anyone, not even his wife on the day she left him. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve, ashamed that he had broken down in front of these three men.

Cordwink stared out of the window, motionless, his face like granite. Inside, he felt something begin to move, like a steel claw, reaching out and clutching his stomach, squeezing.
It could be me. Or Alma and the kids. Don't let it happen. Me or Alma and the kids.

A pair of headlights swerved up the driveway. He glanced across the room at Loftus. Loftus had slumped for­ward in his chair, his hands covering his eyes. The back of his neck looked very young, a boy's neck, thin and vulner­able and white as wax.

“Loftus.”

There was no reply, no stirring in response to his name.

“Loftus,” Cordwink said again. “The car is here.”

Loftus raised his head slowly. He seemed dazed, as if he'd flown his prison, had gone miles and years away, and was now returning, like a soul to hell.

“I'm ready,” Loftus said.

6

611 Division Street
was a three-story red-brick house on the outskirts of the college district. Light and noise poured from nearly every window. On the second floor two young men were bending over a microscope. In the adjoining room a boy sat at a table by the window, absorbed in the blare of the radio beside him, his head resting on an open book. Meecham couldn't see into any of the rooms on the top floor, but it sounded as if a party was going on up there. There was a continuous babble of voices punctuated by sudden peals of laughter.

The left part of the lower floor was dark and the shades were drawn.

Following Cordwink up the sidewalk Meecham thought, it's a funny place for Loftus to live—a dying man in the midst of all this noise and youth.

The sidewalk forked to the left. A little path no more than a foot wide had been shoveled through the snow and sprinkled with cinders. This was Loftus' private entrance.

Cordwink took out the ring of keys that Loftus had given him. “Still want to tag along, Meecham?”

“Certainly.”

“What do you expect me to find?”

“The bloodstained clothes he was wearing Saturday night.”

“You seem to have a lot of confidence in that confession. Wishful thinking, Meecham?”

“Could be.”

“You and Loftus are kind of palsy for a couple of guys who never met before.”

“I'm palsy with everyone.”

“
Yeah. You got a heart of gold, haven't you? Cold and yellow.”

“You're getting to be a sour old character if I ever saw one.”

Cordwink inserted one of the keys into the lock. It didn't fit, but the second one did. The flimsy door, curtained at the top, swung inward. “By the way, it wouldn't be quite ethical to take on a second client while your first client is still in jail.”

“She won't be in jail long. Your forty-eight hours are nearly up, Cordwink. By tomorrow morning you have to charge her or release her.”

“And if she's released, you'd take on a lost cause like Loftus?”

“One minute you're implying that his confession is a phony and the next minute he's a lost cause. Make up your mind.”

“He's a lost cause to you, anyway. He hasn't much money.”

“Well?”

“Or at least that's what he claims.” Cordwink turned on the light switch inside the door, but he didn't look at the room. He was watching Meecham. “Suppose you were in Loftus' shoes and wanted some money.”

“Money isn't much good, where's he's going.”

“Suppose he didn't want it for himself. For a relative, maybe, or a close friend. It seems to me that Loftus had something very valuable to sell—his absolutely certain knowledge that he's going to die anyway. No matter what he does, he has nothing to lose.”

“So?”

“So he committed a murder. For money.”

“Whose money?”

“Virginia Barkeley's.”

“That sounds reasonable enough,” Meecham said calmly, “except for a few little things. First, Mrs. Barkeley only met Loftus once, in a bar, for about five minutes. That's not quite long enough to arrange a big deal like murder.”

“She could have known him before. They'd both deny that, naturally, if there's a deal on.”

“In the second place, if she paid him to kill Margolis, she wouldn't have arranged the matter so that she'd be caught as she was.”

“Maybe she's very, very subtle.”

“In the third place she hasn't any money and neither has her husband. I've checked. They live up to their income, the house is mortgaged and the furniture isn't paid for.”

“There are ways of raising money.”

“And in the fourth place you don't even know that Loftus has any money.”

“I'll find out.”

“Your trouble is stubbornness, Cordwink. You were sure Mrs. Barkeley was guilty and you can't admit you were wrong even with Loftus' confession staring you in the face.”

“What's staring me in the face is a lot of funny coinci­dences and right in the middle of them is a lawyer called Meecham.”

“Is that a fact?”

“That's one. Another one has just occurred to me. Sup­pose Loftus was paid for services rendered, what did he do with the money?”

Meecham said wearily, “He dug a hole in the back yard and buried it.”

“I figure he gave it to someone, either the party he wanted it for in the first place, or a go-between.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Whom am I going between, or between whom am I going? Oh, hell. You know I never saw Loftus until to­day.”

“That's your story.”

“His, too.”

“It would be, of course, if the two of you are working in collusion.”

Meecham lit a cigarette. There was no ash tray in the room that he could see, so he put the burnt match in his pocket. “So now you've dreamed up a place for the money you've dreamed up. Want to see my wallet? Check books? Or maybe I'm wearing a money belt. Why don't you check?”

“Don't worry, I will. When the time comes.”

“You can waste a lot of time chasing little bright butterflies, Cordwink.”

“I like the exercise.”

Meecham raised his head. He saw that the Sheriff was looking rather pleased with himself, and he wondered whether Cordwink really believed in his own theory or whether he was merely needling him. Cordwink hated all lawyers, but his hatred wasn't a personal one. It was a matter of principle: he hated lawyers because he believed their sole objective was to circumvent the law.

Cordwink began to circle the room, his eyes moving from object to object with alert precision.

The room was fairly large, and fitted out for light house­keeping. In one corner, half-hidden by a painted card­board screen, was a small sink and a two-burner gas plate and a table. The bed was a studio couch neatly covered with a blue and yellow chenille spread, and above it, high on the wall, a trio of college pennants was nailed:

Illinois. Arbana. Yale.

The pennants were very old and very dusty. They prob­ably didn't belong to Loftus, Meecham thought. They had been on the wall when he moved in and he left them there because they were too high to reach. Anyway, there they were, emphasizing the transient feeling of the room, sym­bols of college boys who were no longer boys, football teams that were forgotten, textbooks left to mildew, with silverfish camping, sleek and comfortable, between the pages.

A room for transients, with Loftus the last, the most transient of them all. It was as if Loftus had known this and had taken pains to obliterate his traces. The whole room, except for the pennants, was scrupulously clean. There were no clothes or shoes lying around, the top of the bureau held only an alarm clock with a glass bowl in­verted over it, and the wastebasket beside the desk was empty. Whatever had been in the wastebasket—letters, bills, check stubs, pages from a diary?—they were all gone now. There was no clue to Loftus' mind and person­ality in the room except for the books that filled the high narrow bookcase.

The books were oddly assorted: a few novels, two an­thologies of poetry,
How to Win at Canasta
, a biography of Pasteur and a Bible—but most of them concerned psychol­ogy and medicine. Cecil's
Textbook of Medicine, Cancer and Its Causes, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Peace of Mind, Release from Fear, Alcoholism and Its Causes, The Alcoholic and Allergy, A New View of Alco­holism, How to Treat the Alcoholic, Drinking Problems, Glandular Deficiency in Alcoholism.

Cordwink, too, was staring at the books. “He doesn't look like a lush,” he said finally.

“No.”

“You can't always tell, though. One of the worst lushes I ever knew used to take up collection in the Methodist church. No one even knew he took a drink until one night he started hopping around the house trying to get out of the way of the fish. He thought there were little fish flop­ping all over the floor. Bats and snakes and beetles I'd heard of, but never little fish. It was creepy, made the bot­tom of my feet kind of ticklish. Funny, eh?”

“What happened to him?”

“He hit the real skids after that. Landed in jail four or five times that year for non-support, disturbing, petty theft. He always had a whale of an excuse. Drunks are the wildest liars in the world.”

“Loftus isn't a drunk.”

“Maybe not.”

There was no closet in the room, but between the studio couch and the screen that hid the gas plate, a seven-foot walnut wardrobe stood against the wall. It was a massive piece of furniture, with a big old-fashioned plain lock. There was no key to fit it on the key-ring Loftus had given him, so Cordwink forced the lock with the small blade of his jacknife. When the door opened, the pungent smell of moth crystals filled the room. Cordwink sneezed, and sneezed again.

There was hardly enough clothing inside the wardrobe to justify the lavish use of moth crystals: two suits, well-worn but cleaned and pressed, a sweater, shoes, a pair of galoshes, a khaki baseball cap, some pajamas; and on the floor, three suitcases. Two of them were empty. The third Cordwink took out and placed on the studio couch.

Pasted across the top of the suitcase was a faded Railway Express consignment slip: From Mrs. Charles E. Loftus, 231 Oak Street, Kincaid, Michigan, to Mr. Earl Duane Loftus, 611 Division Street, Arbana, Michigan. Value of contents, $50.00

“His mother,” Cordwink said. “Or maybe his sister-in- law. Or maybe it doesn't even matter.”

The value of the original contents might have been fifty dollars. The present contents had little monetary value: an old trench coat, a blue serge suit, and a pair of brown oxfords, all of them stained with blood.

Cordwink pressed down the lid of the suitcase. “I'd like to talk to the woman who runs this place. Loftus said she's a Mrs. Hearst. Go and get her, will you?”

“Why don't you? You have the authority.”

“This stuff is evidence. I wouldn't trust you alone with it.”

Meecham colored. “What the hell do you think I'd do, grab it and take off for South America?”

“I don't know and I'm not going to find out. Be a good boy now, Meecham, and co-operate, and some day you may be District Attorney, then you can kick me in the teeth if I've got any teeth left by that time.”

“Who are you kidding? You haven't got any left now.”

Cordwink's eyes narrowed, but he didn't make any re­ply. He crossed the room to the door that led into the hall­way of the house, unlocked it, and motioned Meecham out with a curt nod.

Meecham went out, quite meekly. He felt a little ashamed of himself for making the crack about Cordwink's teeth. Nearly everyone in town knew that Cordwink had had his front teeth knocked out in a fight with two berserk sailors who were equipped with brass knuckles. The sailors went to a military prison, Cordwink went to the dentist, and the brass knuckles went into his pile of impounded weapons that included everything from sawed-off shotguns to paring knives.

Meecham followed the hall past an immense high-ceilinged dining room into the kitchen. It was a big old-fashioned kitchen, designed not merely for cooking and eating, but for all kinds of family living. There was a card table with a plastic canasta set, a rocking chair, a record player, a bookcase and a couch with a blanket neatly folded at the foot. A woman stood at the sink, wiping dishes and humming to herself.

Her voice and figure were youthful, and her light hair was cut girlishly short and curled close to her head. But when she turned, hearing Meecham approach, he saw that she was about forty. Her hair was gray, not blonde as it appeared at first, and the skin around her sharp blue eyes was creased and dry, like crepe paper.

She smiled at Meecham as she rolled down the sleeves of her dress and buttoned them at the wrists. Her smile was not artificial exactly, but facile, as if she was accus­tomed to smiling in all kinds of situations and at all kinds of people. “Were you looking for someone?”

“Yes, the owner of the house.”

“The bank owns it,” she said crisply. “Arbana Trust and Savings. I rent it.”

“You're Mrs. Hearst?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Eric Meecham. I'm a friend of Mr. Loftus.”

“A friend of Earl's? Isn't that
nice
, it really
is
.” Out of habit, she spoke with a little too much emphasis. It made her enthusiasm, which was real, sound forced. “For a min­ute there I thought you were going to try and sell me something.
Not
that I wouldn't like to buy something, but nobody ever got rich on college boys. They're nice boys, all of them, boys from
good
homes. But what with taxes the way . . .” She paused, suddenly frowning. “You're from out of town?”