Hush Money (20 page)

He made the first curve all right, and then he ran out of macadam. The surface turned to dirt, and a cloud of dust showered up and over my windshield. Even so I saw him go. There was a second hook sharper than the first, and halfway around it the van did its two-wheel number, a shadowy teetery dance with death. Then it must have hit something which kicked it over the rest of the way. It squealed on its side like a dragged steer. Then it flipped on its head and some rocks tore its scalp open in a spray of sparks. And over again … and again, like in slow motion, clunk … and clunk …

Then another clunk.

Then nothing.

The Mustang all but went after him. I threw out the anchor. The wheels skidded, spun dirt, held.

It was all over in a couple of seconds, but when I got out, the nerves in my legs were shaking like jumping beans. I ran down the slope, expecting the explosion that never came. The van was scrunched against a bed of rocks, its four wheels up in the air like legs. I climbed up its flank and got the door open on the passenger side. Everything had shook loose. The eggs had scrambled, the butter had curdled and the medicine chests had spilled out their guts in a junkie's paradise.

As for Andy Ford, I guess he wasn't ten feet taller than me any more. He was mashed against what used to be the window of the driver's door. If he wasn't dead already, his head didn't look any too secure, lolling that way off his neck.

It would be nice to say I hung around there, thinking up epitaphs. I didn't. I found what I was looking for laying on the seat next to him, like he'd left it there for me. I took it. It was in a Number 10 envelope addressed to Miss Robin Fletcher at the address he and I had already visited that morning. I checked it out, enough to see the Dear Karen and the first paragraph, and then before you could say “Only the good die young” I was back behind the wheel of the Mustang, driving down the runoff a little further till I found a spot to turn around, then back out, off the dirt and onto the macadam, and off the macadam and on my way.

The law made a big thing of it. I suppose you can't blame them. The
Times
ran it in their another-pusher-meets-his-fiery-end section, but whether that “fiery end” was the rewrite man's imagination or the van had gone up in smoke after I left or the law lit a match to it for reasons of their own, I've no idea. There was even an interview with my there-is-no-local-drug-scene sheriff who said they'd been shadowing Ford for weeks, trying to find Mr. Big, but no connection to Karen or Robin or me, or anyone you know.

End of obit.

I drove down through the earthquake country around Sylmar, taking it slow and easy. Where the freeway splits in two, I got off. Time was on my side for a change. Before my next stop, like the lady said, I wanted everything wired, all the circuits plugged in, so that when I threw the switch it came up Bell Fruit Gum, once twice three times, and not a wheelbarrow made big enough to cart away the silver.

I put the Mustang in a carwash and walked across to a W. T. Grant's. I borrowed their copying machine—at 10¢ a sheet it came to $2.40—and I ate an omelet at their counter with a side of German fries and a couple of cups of what they called coffee. Then I picked up the Mustang and drove around till I found a U.S. Post Office. I bought a stamped envelope, an extra stamp because of the weight, folded in Nancy Beydon's original, addressed it, licked it, sealed it, and dropped it in the slot. A little more complicated than Robin Fletcher's method, and though I'm not about to divulge any trade secrets, if you picture a baseball diamond with Cage on third, Cage on second and Cage on first, you'll have the skeleton of it. If Cage in the middle ever muffs the doubleplay ball at a pre-arranged time and place, well then, the old scoreboard blows up and the game is over. Call it the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance system, Karen's notebooks were already in it, and I guess at that it's pretty foolproof.

And then over a couple of scotches in an aztec saloon in San Fernando, I made the acquaintance of Nancy Diehl Beydon, posthumously.

Twelve pages' worth of Happy Birthday Karen, on both sides, and written in the kind of perfect slanting script you don't expect to see any more, except maybe among the finishing school set. She hadn't been in any hurry. There weren't any smudges or scratchouts or wavery lines, and for a while I was thinking Karen's brand of hysteria had to have come from some other hereditary line, which wouldn't have been Twink either. And maybe so. But looking at it another way, you could say that Karen's notebooks were what Nancy's letter would have been if the right upbringing, plus twenty-some-odd years of marriage to Twink, hadn't squeezed the juice out of the lemon, leaving nothing but an even monotone, with the i's after e's except after c's.

She wrote like she painted, meaning flat, unemotional, and in a way that was worse. By the time I was done, I'd have settled for twink twike tweek twuck. Because with Karen, well, you could always say she was freaked out, stoned, or that it was fantasy, or that it was just the younger generation dumping on the older; but Nancy reminded you of those people you see fishing every so often who drop the fish back in the water once they've caught him, with the hook still in his mouth, just for the pleasure of catching him again.

The fish, of course, was Twink.

Or maybe it was the other way around, take your choice.

To make a long story short:

It had been a nightmare, she said. When he'd found out she was pregnant, he'd wanted her to have an abortion. She'd refused. She'd wanted Karen more than anything in the world, she said. Instead, according to her, she'd offered him a divorce. He'd turned her down. Karen's real father hadn't been anything more than a passing fancy to her. She'd never seen him again. Twink had always let it be known he'd paid him off, but she had good reason to believe it was more than that. He was dead, she said. She knew how he'd died. She'd never had the courage to try to prove it, but she told Karen how if Karen felt otherwise.

She had stayed with Twink for form's sake, and for Karen's. She accepted Karen's condemnation of her for having done so. Looking back, she believed she even shared it. She asked Karen to try to understand, however. Yes, she'd had grounds for a divorce since (here she went into the story of the tramp Twink had taken up with, one Margaret Tanner, their bastard included, and what that had meant to her), but she'd never been able to bring herself to initiate it. That was her weakness, her fear of scandal perhaps. Instead she'd built her life on another basis. She'd found another way to pay him back.

The one thing he wanted, she said, she'd been able to deny him. That was control of the company. Left to themselves, she thought, her brothers (Karen's uncles) would have long since capitulated to him. He'd wanted to make a public offering of the company's stock, that was his technique, and she'd thwarted him. She alone. More than once he'd tried to convince her: how much money it would mean to them all, how it made sense from a purely business point of view and so on. The last time—a scene she described with as much relish as I guess she could allow herself—he had even proposed in exchange the divorce she'd once offered him.

“It was my great pleasure to refuse him,” she wrote to Karen.

And why had she finally decided to unburden herself of the truth? Why this letter, after all the years? It was because she was dying, she said. She knew she was, and perhaps it was just as well. She even had her own medical theory to go along with it: that the deception of her own life had made her susceptible to cancer.

And now, you could say, she was passing the truth on to Karen, along with the rest.

“When I was twenty-one,” she wrote, “I did something against my father's advice. It was a big step, and I was very young. How often I've wished I could have told him he was right.

“But now, Karen dear,” she wrote, “you're going to have a choice to make, also at twenty-one. What I suggest you do, once you've read and digested this letter, is to go to George Curie and ask him to show you your grandfather's will. The rest will be up to you, and you will have three years to think about it and make up your mind. It is in order to help you that I'm sending you this rather ghastly confession of the truth.

“May God bless you and keep you, darling.”

Read cold, I suppose, and with the prose misted up a little, it might have had you reaching for your handkerchief.

You maybe. Not me.

Happy Birthday, Karen.

A discrepancy in that last paragraph interested me, but I filed it away. It wasn't the only one by a long shot. Maybe you'd have to take Twink's version, and Margaret's, and Nancy's, not to leave out Karen's, and scramble them all together to get the family portrait in focus.

Even then …

But what got to me more was how little effect it seemed to have had on the Karen of the notebooks. I mean, you imagine getting a birthday card like that from your old lady. Well, you could say Karen was strung out already, also that it would have taken a mental retard to grow up in a household like that and not put a few things together. But it was more like Nancy had been talking to her all her life, that the letter only confirmed what she already knew in her bones. Like Twink, the murderer. Like a name for Twink's whore. Like that abortion detail, which gave her phony letter to Twink an extra twist of the knife. The more I thought of it, the more I thought: like mother like daughter.

Sure she'd've made up her mind already.

And then she'd jumped.

If
she'd jumped.

I'd been playing with my loose change on the bar top. I picked the coins up again and dropped them and pushed them around in the wet till I had them all lined up in ranks like bright young troopers standing Reveille. They were singing out “
Here
, sergeant!” and listening to them gave me that warm, feet-up-by-the-fire feeling. I ordered another scotch by way of a salute. Not that what it added up to was necessarily the whole bona fide cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die truth, but it would do. Oh it would do. They were all there, present and accounted for, all the bright young troopers. The only one missing was the C.O., and I had his spot zeroed in nicely in the crosshairs.

It was dusk when I came south over Sepulveda Pass. The rush hour was long since over and all the Valley breadwinners back home and finished dinner and settled down for the Tuesday Night Movie. I wave them goodby. Out toward Santa Monica the sky was a deep deep purple. I headed east from the freeway, past UCLA, the gates of Bel Air and into Beverly Hills, and by the time I pulled off Sunset onto Doheny, the deep purple had lost its nerve.

What did I say? That I'd have settled for twink twike tweek twuck?

Then make a wish. Because that's exactly what I got.

20

I'm going to give it to you the way you want it first. Otherwise it'd spoil the poetry.

Poetry? Well, I don't know what else you'd call it, unless you want to figure Twink Beydon and his shyster had been sitting there holding hands for the past forty-eight hours, waiting for Lonesome Cage to ride in with the Pony Express. As for me, I'd expected maybe a cleanup woman or two, or if I was lucky that receptionist number boning up on her law, or unlucky, Miss Sensible Shoes polishing her lorgnette. Or most probably, nothing at all but an alarm system to worry about.

But that's why I hustle for a living instead of writing poetry. I mean, you put the scene together: a soft night falling onto Beverly Hills, Lonesome Cage riding up on his trusty Mustang, clippety-clop, clippety-clop, Lonesome Cage tethering his Mustang to the hitching post, giving the joint the once-around, walking around to the shyster's private office where the lights were on, looking around the corner of the window and spotting in the library … who? two chambermaids polishing up the spittoons?

Not in this ballad, friend.

So Lonesome Cage tested the front door, locked, and drew his trusty six-shooter. He blasted a hole through the lock big enough to drive a team of mules through. He kicked in the door and climbed into the library, spurs clanking.

The cattle-rustler looked up from the table where he was shuffling the pasteboards. The shyster looked up too. The cheroot fell out of the shyster's mouth.

“We been waitin' on ya, Lonesome,” said the cattle-rustler. “How're they hangin'? You want I should deal ya in?”

“Ain't got time, Big Twink,” said Lonesome Cage. “Brung somethin' you been lookin' for.”

Lonesome Cage unbuttoned his shirt pocket, pulled out the papers, dropped them on the table.

“Read,” said Lonesome Cage.

The shyster reached for the papers. Lonesome Cage shot a hole through the shyster's palm, about as round as a silver dollar, about as clean.

“Read,” said Lonesome Cage.

Big Twink read. The nerves commenced to jump in his jaws.

“I fold, Lonesome,” said Big Twink when he'd finished. “The game's over. You win. It's all yourn.”

Big Twink pushed the chips and the paper money across the table. He pushed the gold and the silver across the table. Then he looked up at Lonesome Cage, his brows in a question mark.

Lonesome Cage said nothing.

“You name it, Lonesome,” said Big Twink. He got up, knocking his chair over.

Big Twink went over to the wall safe, his back to Lonesome Cage. He fiddled with the wall safe dial.

“You name it, Lonesome,” said Big Twink over his shoulder.

Big Twink had the wall safe open.

“Ain't money,” said Lonesome Cage. “It's your ass.”

Big Twink commenced to laugh. His whole body shook with the laughing.

“My ass!” said Big Twink, laughing. “My …”

“Ain't me who wants it neither,” said Lonesome Cage. “It's Karen.”

Big Twink stopped laughing. He froze by the wall safe and his eyes rolled in their sockets. He reached inside the wall safe and came out with the Gatling Gun. Even before he turned around the gun was going off in his hands. It spit lead all around the library. It tore the chandelier out by the roots and sent it crashing to the floor.