Judge Me Not (15 page)

“Windy? Ravel’s boy?”

“Right. And Sandscone, over at the Chamber of Commerce, advises me that he talked with Devlin, of the Board of Education, and Devlin said that the area in question is the logical place for the new high school. Devlin expects the bond issue to be approved.”

“Oh, fine!” Teed said. “Weiss is dummy for Raval. Raval picks up the land, pressures Devlin to locate the high school there, pressures the Common Council to approve the bond issue, sells the land at a fat profit and then has one of his own companies put in the low bid on construction, knowing that he can get the cooperation of the inspectors and cut enough corners in construction so that the profit is fat.”

“In a way,” Powell said slowly, “Raval is telling us, by going ahead with this thing, that he doesn’t think we can hurt him. He isn’t even doing us the courtesy of battening down his hatches until the storm is over. Take the folder, Teed, and see if you can write up the facts in such a way that Ritchie Seward can carry the ball with a series on it when we’re ready to fire.”

Teed took the manila folder and stood up. “I’ll be on my way. Thanks, Powell.”

Powell looked a little uncomfortable. “I suppose I ought
to tell you this. I had a little session with the men who put up our war fund. They don’t like this recent development. They wanted to get back more control of the purse strings. I talked them out of it.”

“This time.”

“Right. Well … take it easy.”

“Thanks for telling me, Powell. Is Carboy back on the job?”

“Not yet. The funeral was Thursday. He left the hospital Thursday morning, and now he’s at his home. They expect him to be back in the office Monday.”

“Funny it should hit him so hard, Powell. Hell, he must have realized that Felice wasn’t … I don’t know how to say it.”

He found his car in the City Hall lot. He hunted for the keys and found them in the ash tray. When Barbara had fled from Boyd and Pilcher she must have known that she was making enemies who could do her harm. He had been too dazed to realize at the time what he was asking her to do. The wind was raw. He closed the windows and turned on the heater.

Mrs. Kidder was at the desk. She seemed more shy than usual as she handed him his mail. He tried to revive the jokes between them, but there was no response in her. He realized that her attitude toward him had been changed by recent events, and he was annoyed that it should bother him so much.

“Mrs. Kidder?”

“Yes, Mr. Morrow.”

“Did you ever hear that about believing half what you see and nothing of what you read?”

“Yes, I’ve heard that, Mr. Morrow.”

“You give me the impression that you’re critical of me.”

She met his glance for longer than ever before and then looked away. “When people pay their rent and don’t annoy the other tenants, Mr. Morrow, it’s not my place to be critical.”

He shrugged and turned away, anger thick in his throat. As he walked across the central park toward his apartment, he leafed through the mail. Bills and ads. Except the last one. A personal letter. Feminine handwriting. Gray stationery with a white border.

He stopped outside his door to read it.

There was, of course, no return address. He unlocked the door and went in. He sat down and picked up the phone book, found Armando Rogale’s home number. He put his hand on the phone, then shrugged and tossed the book on the shelf of the phone table. Seeing her again would not help her, or him. To stir other persons, cause them to examine their own motivations, open them to self-doubt, is a responsibility that should not be lightly assumed. In stripping Barbara of her tough defenses, he had realized how fragile were his own. He was quite certain that she would not want to see him. Once the catalyst has caused the chemical reaction, its function is over. The reaction, once started, is self-sustaining. He knew that Barbara would not dramatize herself or her decision. As a woman and a human being she had set out to punish herself for some real or imagined lack. The punishment was over. The organism had survived. It was altered, irrevocably, but it had survived.

He was still sitting at the alcove phone table, his back to the door, when he heard it swing open, felt the coolness on the back of his neck.

He turned quickly, chair legs sliding on the hardwood floor of the alcove. Mark Carboy leaned his back against the door, slamming it shut. He was hatless, and his hands were deep in the slash pockets of his dark overcoat. His eyes were puffed, reddened, and completely wild. Carboy
was a big-bellied man with a long hard-boned face. The flesh appeared to have slid from his face, gathered in loose folds that overlapped his collar. It was a face which, in photographs, seemed full of a steel-eyed resolution, and in life looked oddly broken, as though something deep within the man had snapped long ago.

“Mr. Mayor, I … I’m glad to see you,” Teed said inanely.

“Get on your feet, Morrow,” the man whispered.

Teed stood up slowly. The revolver was grotesquely huge. It was the biggest revolver Teed had ever seen. The absurdly large eye of the muzzle wavered in a slow circle, a small circle with Teed’s belt buckle as the center point.

“What do you want?”

“I’m going to kill you,” Carboy said. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He reached his left hand over and strained to pull back the massive hammer. The cylinder revolved with an oiled click.

“What for? Dammit, what for?” Teed cried, knowing that he sounded abused and petulant, almost childish.

The muzzle lifted until it pointed at the center of his chest. Teed knew that, through shock and surprise, he had lost his opportunity. At that range, the revolver would blow the entire center of his chest out through his backbone.

Carboy stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, looking like a man trying to thread a needle. Teed heard a hard roaring in his ears and his vision misted until the only thing that stood out with painful clarity was the eye of the muzzle, the blade sight above it.

The second went by. “Do it, then!” Teed said. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

The trembling started in Carboy’s knees, spread upwards until his whole body shook like that of a person in a chill. His teeth began to chatter. Teed saw the arm lower slowly until the muzzle pointed at the floor. Carboy stood with his eyes shut, his lips bluish.

Teed turned mechanically, woodenly, and marched to a chair and sat down. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes and concentrated on taking deep breaths.

Carboy walked in and sat on the couch. He laid the gun beside him on a cushion. They stared at each other and Teed felt the odd camaraderie of two men who have closely avoided a disaster.

“Close,” Teed breathed. “God, was that close.”

“I thought I could do it. I was so sure I could do it.”

“Drink, Mayor?”

“Please.”

Teed walked to the small kitchen on knees that threatened to bend the wrong way. He broke cubes out of the tray, splashed generous measures of bourbon onto the cubes, added water to each, carried the glasses back in. Carboy’s glass chittered against his teeth as he drank deeply. Teed picked up the gun, swung the cylinder out, pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped down with a rat-trap noise. He shoved the cylinder back in and handed the gun to Carboy. Carboy took it gingerly and shoved it into his pocket.

“Hate guns,” he said. “Always have.”

“Where did you get a cannon like that?”

“My father brought it back from Silver City in the eighties. Forty-four Colt, I think it is. God, Morrow, I feel as though I’d been bled white.”

“You,” Teed said, “are not alone. What was the idea, anyway?”

“Because you killed my wife, Morrow. Revenge, I guess.”

“But I didn’t kill her!”

Carboy stared at him without particular interest. “I know that.”

“Would you mind going over that slowly, Mayor?”

“I don’t understand it very well myself. If I could cling to the belief that you killed her, Morrow, stick with that belief right up to the point of killing you, then the act of killing you would fix that belief in my mind. Maybe the idea was that once you were dead you couldn’t deny it strongly enough to shake my belief.”

“Isn’t that pretty metaphysical, Mayor.”

“The other choice, Morrow, is less pretty. If you didn’t do it, then it was done by the orders of the people who put me where I am. And that isn’t an easy thing to fit your mind around. Men take your courage and your honesty and your self-respect, and then, almost as an afterthought, they kill your wife because she still has those qualities, in part, that you have lost somewhere along the line.”

“And that’s what was going through your mind when you were on the verge of blowing me in half?”

“That was the argument for doing it, Morrow. The argument against it is that I can’t kill. Even to regain self-respect.”

“Did she mean that much to you?”

Carboy chuckled. It was an unpleasant sound. “Felice? She enjoyed being the first lady of the city. She wasn’t going to give that up, you know. I was the pimp. Ugly word, isn’t it? She bought our prestige in her own way and between us we split the gains. And they like that. They knew that Felice made me easier to control. Any man who is thoroughly sick of himself is easy to push around. Felice made it profitable, too. I backed Raval’s ventures up with public oratory, and each public bump and grind I did fattened the kitty.”

“Then why did you take it so hard, Mark?”

“Because I killed her, of course. Sound a little irrational, don’t I? Felice decided that Dennison is going to win. She wanted to gamble on it. She wanted to trade immunity for me for information that would assure Dennison’s winning. I was afraid, Morrow. We fought it out until the small hours of Monday morning. And she won. So I told Raval what information she was going to give you. I wanted her stopped. I didn’t think Dennison would lend himself to such a trade. So Raval … stopped her. You see, if I could keep forcing myself to believe that you killed her, Morrow, then I would be guiltless.”

Teed leaned forward. “What was the information, Mark? Tell me.”

Carboy shook his head, almost sadly. “I won’t tell you. It is something I have, maybe the only weapon I have left, and I shall use it as I see fit.”

“Tell me one thing. Is it conclusive? Will it hurt Raval?”

Carboy grunted to his feet. “It will very likely kill him, Mr. Morrow.”

He walked heavily to the door and Teed followed him. At the door, Carboy turned. His eyes were clouded.

“You know, I have been thinking, wondering, just when and where my life changed. It is an odd thing when a man can’t remember the exact moment a choice was made. Possibly the choice is never clear-cut. I have been thinking a great deal.”

“The moralists talk about right and wrong, Mark.”

“It isn’t that simple. A man enters public life and he tells himself that he will do good. He will be effective and the people will benefit. It is idealism of a respectable variety. And then he discovers that he must make certain compromises in order to achieve good. Like a man who builds a house. To afford the roof, he must order cheaper windows.
To afford a fireplace, he must skimp the foundation. The house no longer satisfies him as much as it did, but he tells himself that without the short cuts there would be no house at all.

“But in public life, each compromise makes the next compromise easier, and each move toward good makes the next move more difficult. It is a miserable equation to live with. Yet the man goes on, and he tells himself that if you take the total good, and subtract the total evil, the net result is good. He drifts along, clutching the illusion, until one day he adds it up and he discovers that evil outbalances good. And he never knows the precise point where the balance changed, nor does he know which specific compromise was the wrong one.”

He drew himself up for a moment, and in that moment looked as noble as the retouched election photographs. “I think slowly, Morrow. I am not quick in my mind. But I do not believe that I am stupid, or that I am consciously evil.”

“I do not believe that either, Mark,” Teed said softly.

“It is time to change the balance of the scales.” Carboy left. Teed stood at the window and watched the black Buick drive away, Carboy huddled in the back seat.

The moment Carboy had been driven away in the city sedan, Teed got on the phone. Powell had left the office and was not yet home. He phoned police headquarters, found that Captain Leighton was not on duty, was given Leighton’s home phone number.

A child answered and Teed heard him call his father.

“Captain Leighton, this is Teed Morrow.”

“What’s on your mind? Going to confess?”

“I want to thank you for helping Rogale find where I was.”

“It was worth it to watch you give Pilcher the works by the desk there. What gives? You got some new murders on your mind?”

“This may be for the wild geese. I don’t know. I just had a visit from Mayor Carboy, here at my apartment. This call goes through the switchboard here at the apartments. I wonder if you could come over, understanding that it may be nothing.”

“Most of my life has been spent tracking down nothing. Give me a half hour.”

Leighton arrived in twenty minutes in his rusty black suit looking, with hollow chest, stooped thin shoulders, like a sleepy scavenger bird.