Final Notice (25 page)

I stared at the Bible on the floor. I'd seen it that morning on a nightstand in the Lord house. Jake must have brought it with him from home. Perhaps that's the only reason he'd come all that way in the rain -to say a prayer over his poor, misbegotten brother before the police found him in the morning. To say goodbye to his best friend.

"He's puffed up pretty good," Al said. "But you can see needle marks on his right arm, all right. My guess is that he O.D.'d or just plain starved to death. Looks like he was in a bad way for a long time."

I looked at the dead man's face, at those lifeless black eyes and at the flesh surrounding them that had pouted like a piece of rotted fruit. It was almost as if he was looking at something on the opposite side of the room. On the wall, behind us.

"Give me your flashlight for a second, will you, Al?"

He handed it to me.

I flashed it along the wall beside the door. And there it was. The thing that Hack was still looking at, even in death. The same thing that had hung on Effie Reaves's wall in that nightmare trailer. A sketch of the Eden Park Overlook. The place where he'd killed Twyla Belton.

"Now what the hell does that mean?" Al said.

I stared at the picture and thought I knew, thought that I'd gotten a glimpse into that strange mind of his. It wasn't the beautiful park he'd cared about, it was the statue -the same one that Twyla had centered on. Only for him it had an entirely different meaning -that statue of two brothers suckled by a mother-wolf. For him, it was symbol of his own blighted family life and a key to what had caused him to go so terribly wrong.  He'd left the same drawing in Effie's trailer -the same message. Because he'd had an artist's eye, after all, and the childhood trauma he'd never outgrown was his single theme. I was a little surprised that Jake had left it there for that long gaze of Hack's dead eye to see.

"Harry?" Al said suddenly. Something about his voice made me shiver and drop the flashlight beam to the floor. I turned around and saw him kneeling again beside Hack. "When did you go out to that trailer park?" he said. "When was Effie Reaves killed?"
For a minute I couldn't think of it. So thoroughly had I tried to block that memory out of my mind. "Thursday. Thursday afternoon."

"We got a problem then," Al said in that unsettling tone of voice.

"What problem?"

He got to his feet and pulled a cigarette from his coat. His right hand was trembling a bit and that worried me more than the tremor in his voice. Something had shaken him up and he was not a man who was easily shaken. "Now I don't want to sound like George DeVries, but there is something fishy about this." He pointed to Hack's body. "I'm no forensic specialist, but I've seen my share of corpses. And, Harry, this one's been dead for a couple of days."

At first, it didn't sink in. "So, he's been dead for a couple of days, so what?"

"Yeah, but this is just Saturday morning," he said and glanced at his watch. "Two A.M., Saturday morning. And Effie was killed on Thursday afternoon around one."

I felt a thrill of terror run up my spine. "What are you saying, Al?"

"Well, Harry," he said almost bashfully. "I think all this time we might have been looking for the wrong man."
 
 

The S.W.A.T. team arrived at two-fifteen. They had a coroner in tow. The doctor -a silver-haired man with a cast in his right eye and the rumpled, ornery look of a country physician- spent about fifteen minutes examining Hack, then joined us out on the porch where we'd gathered to wait.

"I can't be sure of the exact time of death," he said casually. "Or of the cause. But he sure couldn't have murdered anyone on Thursday afternoon. Even if he wasn't dead, he wouldn't have had the strength to raise his arm."

"Jesus," I said out loud.

And then my mind went to work with a kind of blazing speed, running through alternatives, checking each one out; even though a part of me knew, without thinking, that there was only one real alternative that made sense of all I knew. There were those two boys on Ringold's list, Harry. The ones you never got around to checking. Only what did they have to do with Effie Reaves? And the answer was nothing. Well, there was Norris Reves, then. Maybe he'd killed his sister over the speed, a business deal that had gone as bad as it could get. Only why would he cut her up that way -the way Twyla Belton and the library books had been cut up? He didn't know about the Belton girl or the books. So it couldn't have been Norris. And that left just the one. The one I didn't want to think about.

"Twyla Belton was killed two years ago," I said, putting it together once and for all.

Foster said, "Right."

"And when did Hack start living with Effie?"

He said it solemnly, as if he were fighting the same battle that I was.

"Two years ago."

"And those damn books," I said. "Say he started tearing them up again a couple of months ago."

"Just about the time when Hack was really going to hell," A1 said. "Really falling apart."

"Then Hack dies. Maybe in his arms. And he loses control. And instead of striking out randomly as he'd done two years before with Twyla, he kills the Reaves woman in a savage act of revenge."

"What the hell are you saying?" George DeVries said.

I walked into the house and upstairs to the back room. There was something I wanted to check out. Something crucial. As I stepped through the door, I heard Foster say it for me.

"We've been looking for the wrong brother, George. It was Jake doing the killing all along."

"Jake!" I heard him say. "That just isn't possible. What about that drawing? What about the tattoo? Twyla didn't implicate Jake."

Only she had, I thought, as I made my way up the dark stairs to the back of the house. Because he had been there, too. In the picture she'd drawn on that summery afternoon, two years before, in the Hyde Park Library. He had been there in the white background beyond his brother's tattooed arm. In the part of the page that was like an undeveloped print. Jake had been there, too. Jake was always there. Tag-along Jake. His big brother's shadow. He might even have watched her as she drew, seething inside because his brother had betrayed him by running away with a woman like his own despised mother. Then tearing up the books in the john, where Leo Sachs had seen him. Tearing them up, as if he were cutting up Hack himself -that paragon of talent and physical perfection. Tearing up, at one and the same time, the symbols of his brother and of the sexuality that he thought was destroying him. Jake, the good brother, the good son.

I walked into the room and stared again at Hack's dead eyes. But this time I tried to see the room from Jake's peculiar angle of vision. To see what he'd left behind him to guide his pursuers. Because death itself was Jake's medium and this was a scene he had composed as carefully as he'd composed the one in Effie Reaves's trailer.

I looked into Hack's eyes and back at the wall at which he was staring. And I knew. "He's going to kill again," I said out loud.

Foster, who was standing in the doorway, said, "Maybe not. Maybe this is the end of it."

"Look for yourself, damn it!" I pointed to Hack's body and to the picture on the wall. "This has all been arranged, Al. Just like the crap in Effie's bedroom. He's got his brother staring at that damn statue again. It was just a yearbook picture of Hack in the trailer. But it's the same message -Haskell, the Overlook statue, and death. He's going to kill again tonight. We've got to get to a phone."

And then he understood, too. "Kate," he said and the cigarette fell right out of his mouth.

She was back at the Lord house at that very moment. Maybe searching his room.
 

I WOULDN'T want to repeat that drive back to Hyde Park racing through the dark and the rain to find ... God only knew what when we arrived. There isn't much that you can't picture in your mind's eye. Your own death. The death of a lover. But the image of Kate Davis torn to pieces the way Effie Reaves had been torn apart ... that was something I didn't dare conjure up. That was something that the saner part of me just wouldn't let me imagine. So I didn't think at all. Just listened to the tires singing through the rain and watched the rain-swept countryside whirl past us in a blur, until the trees and hillsides died away and we were coasting past storefronts and car lots and, finally, past the sedate rows of yellow brick apartment houses and graceful colonials that marked the fringes of Hyde Park.

Al had radioed ahead, so there were cops all over Stettinius when we pulled up to the Lord house at about three-thirty. Blue lights were flashing from one end of the street to the other like some seasonless celebration.

I didn't wait for Al to park. Just leaped out the side door as he pulled to the curb and ran through the rain up to the open door of the Lord home. A cop tried to block my way -a husky kid in a rain cap and slicker with his night stick dangling at his side. I shoved him aside so hard that he went down in the mud, then stepped over him and through the door. The mother was sitting on the stairs with her head in her hands and a weak look of pity on her face. When she saw me, she smiled grotesquely.

"They don't understand, Mr. Stoner," she said as if she'd been lost for hours and finally chanced upon someone who spoke her own language. "They've got it all confused. Jacob is a good boy, you know that. You tell them. Maybe, they'll believe you." She threw her hands up as if to say she'd tried herself, but they just wouldn't listen.

I walked up to her and wrenched her off the stairs. I must have been burning more adrenaline than I thought, because I actually picked her up off the ground, like a big straw doll. Her eyes got very large and she let out a yelp of terror.

"You're the one who doesn't understand!" I said through my teeth and shook her a little in rage.

I sat her back down on the stairs. Hard. She wrapped her arms around her breasts and held herself tightly. She was scared. I wanted her to be. I wanted something to get through that thick hide of hers.

"Your son Haskell is dead."

She nodded "Dead."

"I know you don't care about that," I said almost hysterically. And for a second I wanted to club her so that she'd feel something outside of her own selfish circuit of emotions. But I held back. She was a lost cause anyway. And Kate still had to be,found. So I played it the only way I knew would work. Her way.

I looked her in the eye and said, "If you don't want to see Jake dead, too, you'll tell me exactly what I want to know."

She nodded again.

"Because he's in great trouble."

She shook her head. "Not Jake."

"Yes, Jake!" I shouted at her.

She flinched. "He's not here. He left the house around midnight. Then he came back and went upstairs. When he found out what that friend of yours had done, he became very upset and left again."

"What do you mean? What did Kate do?"

"She took some of Jacob's pictures," Mrs. Lord said loftily. "I told her not to tamper with my boy's things. But she wouldn't listen. I wouldn't blame Jacob a bit for being upset with her."

"You wouldn't, huh?" I said and had to restrain myself from slapping her. "Did Kate say where she was going?"

Mrs. Lord blushed. "Why, to your apartment, Mr. Stoner. She was upstairs for quite a long time, looking through the boys' rooms. Then she came back down with two sketches and said she was going to your apartment. She seemed very excited. Frankly, I didn't understand her at all."

"When?"' I said. "When did she leave?"

"At least an hour ago," the Lord woman said.

"And Jacob? When did he leave?"

"Around two-thirty, I think. Then all these people arrived..."

I whirled around on the stairs and ran back out the door.

Al Foster was talking to a plainclothesman on the walk. "She's at my place, Al," I shouted to him. He nodded and said, "Let's go!"
 
 

It took us ten minutes more to get to the Delores -ten more minutes through the dark, slick streets of Hyde Park and east Walnut Hills. I didn't know what Kate had taken away with her when she left the Lord home -what it was that had made her so excited. All I knew was that Jacob hadn't liked it and that was enough to scare the hell out of me. When we hit Burnet Avenue at Melish, I turned on the car seat and tried to explain to the other men, as calmly as I could, what Mrs. Lord had told me. Then I gave them the lay-out of my apartment building, in case Jacob was waiting there.

"I live on the fourth floor of the Delores, toward the rear. Apartment E," I said. "There are two ways into the building. Through the lobby door and up the stairs or through the rear door at the head of the parking lot. A1 and I will go in the front. George, you and Cal guard the back."

One of them said, "Fine."

I turned back to the dash and stared miserably at the raindrops beading up on the windshield. "If that crazy bastard has. .." But I still couldn't think about it.

"It's going to be O.K., Harry," George DeVries said stoutly.

I kept repeating that -"It's going to be O.K. It's going to be O.K."- as we raced the last mile and a half down Burnet to the Delores lot. When A1 pulled over to the curb and stopped the engine, I turned back to DeVries and said, "Give me the shotgun."