Mr. X (87 page)

“Are you carrying a knife?” Rowley asked.

“Mr. Hatch further claims that during the ensuing struggle, you dislocated his shoulder and otherwise assaulted him. He wishes to bring charges.”

… going to some new place you’d never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story …

“I don’t care what Stewart Hatch does,” I said. “It won’t work. He’s telling his story backwards.”

“Mr. Hatch dislocated
your
shoulder?”

“Let’s see the knife, Dunstan,” Rowley said.

“I don’t have one.” I told them about going to Ellendale and tussling with a drunken Stewart Hatch. “Finally, he reached into the knife drawer and came out with a paring knife. He said something like, ‘I was looking for something a little more impressive.’ Then he rushed me, and I yanked him off his feet and dislocated his shoulder. I kicked him in the side, too, because by that point I was not in a good mood. After that, I threw him out of the house. He rammed into my rental and took off for Lawndale at about a hundred miles an hour. I’m surprised he’s so stupid. His wife saw the whole thing.”

“His alcohol level was four times over the limit,” Mullan said. “By the way, according to the officer who took Mrs. Hatch’s statement, the word her husband used when he saw the paring knife was ‘imposing,’ not ‘impressive.’ ‘I was looking for something a little more imposing.’ That’s a nice touch.”

“Captain,” Rowley said, “they cooked this story up between them. Mr. Hatch caught them in bed, and Dunstan pulled a knife.”

“The officer who questioned Mrs. Hatch was shown a garbage bag loaded with broken plates. I think we can dismiss Mr. Hatch’s accusations.”

“You went out there already?”

“We can move pretty quick, when we want to.”

Neddie!
I heard my mother say.
It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven
.

A chain-saw noise came from Rowley’s throat. “This guy is all over the place. Wherever we go, there he is. Nobody’s seen Joe Staggers in two days, and we
know
Staggers was after him. What do you think happened to Staggers?”

“So far, no one’s filed a Missing Persons.”

“Dunstan hands out alibis, and women back him up. Mr. Hatch’s troubles are going to blow away, and before long, Dunstan’s going to blow away, too. Then it’ll be business as usual. Who do you want in your corner, Captain?”

Mullan clasped his hands on his belly and regarded the ceiling of my room. “All in all, Lieutenant, I think you can go home for the night. Tell Officer Treuhaft he can leave, too.”

“Think it over, Captain.”

“Thank you for your assistance, Lieutenant. We shall see each other tomorrow.”

Rowley’s dead eyes moved from Mullan to me and back to Mullan. “Up to you, Captain.” He slammed the door behind him.

Mullan regarded me with the same opaque, detached gaze he had trained on my ceiling. “You’re a strange man, Mr. Dunstan.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

Mullan’s bleak smile told me only that Robert had been unimaginably reckless. “I assumed you would be waiting to hear from me.”

“I am.”

Mullan did not move so much as a centimeter. Even the wintry smile stayed in place. “Do you remember my mentioning
an anonymous telephone call from someone accusing Earl Sawyer of a number of homicides?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That’s what makes you a strange fellow. I didn’t mention it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s too much going on.”

“You wouldn’t be the fellow who placed that call, would you?”

“I would not,” I said.

“But the subject is of interest to you.”

“I can’t deny that,” I said, feeling my way through the minefield Robert had laid.

“At approximately nine o’clock
P.M.,
you visited my office for the purpose of informing me that you suspected Earl Sawyer of being the man once known as Edward Rinehart.” He raised his eyebrows, as if for corroboration. I nodded. “That would make two people who wanted to talk to me about Earl Sawyer. I don’t believe in coincidence, Mr. Dunstan.”

“I thought the police got anonymous tips all the time.”

“Be nice if we did. This old man wouldn’t have to work so hard. All right, forget the call. Correct me if I’m wrong here. When we went to St. Ann’s, didn’t you refer to Clothard Spelvin? Clothhead?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your memory,” I said. “I don’t suppose there ever has been.”

“At Headquarters, you said your mother had given you Rinehart’s name.”

His smile still looked like a map of the tundra, but he did not seem hostile. In a series of careful steps, Mullan was working up to something, and he had sent away Rowley and Treuhaft because it had to be kept between us. I had no idea what Robert had said to Mullan, and I could not afford to make a mistake. Nor did I have a hint of where Mullan was going.

“Not long before she died,” I said.

Mullan stretched out his legs and put his hands behind his head. “Let’s see if I have this straight. You got word that your mother had returned to Edgerton in ill health. How did that happen? Did one of her aunts call you in New York?”

“Yes, but I was already on my way,” I said. “I had some vacation time, so I thought I’d hitchhike across the country. I know that sounds crazy, but the idea appealed to me. I was going to work my way to Illinois, visit my aunts, and fly back. Two days
before my mother died, while the truck driver you talked to, Bob Mims, was taking me across Ohio, I…. I don’t know how this is going to sound to you.”

Mullan said, “Give it a try.”

“I had a strong feeling that she was having serious health problems, and that I had to get here in a hurry.”

“Although your mother was not a resident of Edgerton.”

“I knew she’d come home if she thought she was dying.”

“You were driving across Ohio with Bob Mims. You got the strong feeling that your mother had come home because she thought she was dying.”

“It sounds funny, but that’s what happened.”

“Then what?”

“Mims went off his route to drop me in front of the Motel Comfort, where I met Ashleigh Ashton, and she agreed to give me a ride here the next morning.”

“When you reached Edgerton the following morning, you requested Assistant District Attorney Ashton to drop you at St. Ann’s Community. Not on Cherry Street. You must have had another strong feeling.”

“You could put it that way. Captain Mullan, why are we talking about this?”

“For a couple of reasons. Okay. You go to the ICU. You learn that your mother had a stroke. Her heart’s in bad shape. Deep down, you know she’s dying, but at least you got there in time to see her, talk to her. Communication isn’t easy. Every word costs her tremendous effort, and you have to strain to make them out. All these factors make everything she says extremely significant. Am I right?”

Mullan was still gazing across the room with his legs out before him and his hands laced behind his head.

“It sounds like you were there.”

“I have been there,” Mullan said. He took another step toward his mysterious destination. “Under these conditions, your mother does something unexpected. She grabs your hand and says, ‘Edward Rinehart.’ And she manages to give you some information about this unknown gentleman.”

Captain Mullan had fed me precisely enough to let me off the hook. Anything affirmative I said would be right. Mullan wanted to see if I knew that Rinehart was my father.
He
knew, and at a mere agreement that Star had indeed given me information
about the unknown gentleman, he would tell me in a way that implied I had known, too. Mullan was leading me through a maze. He had pulled the rug from under my feet, but even more, I thought, he had yanked it from beneath Robert’s. For reasons of his own, he wanted to find out how deeply into the maze I had already penetrated.

“She said Rinehart was my father.”

“You must have wanted to see what you could learn about the man. You thought Toby Kraft might be able to help you.”

“Toby was the first person I asked,” I said.

“Did he help you? Indirectly, I mean? For example, did you and Mrs. Hatch go to the V.A. Hospital in Mount Vernon on Toby’s recommendation?”

Mullan had been doing his homework. “He suggested I talk to a man named Max Edison, and Mrs. Hatch offered to take me there.”

Mullan turned his head to me without altering his posture in any other way. “I don’t suppose you know about Edison. It never made the papers.”

I could already see the corpse lying across the bloody bed, the severed throat.

“It was a lot like Toby Kraft, except there was a knife next to him. Same night. Suicide, is the general opinion. Which is fine with me. The guy has maybe three, four months to live, and he decides to get out while he can still make decisions for himself. But here’s an interesting thing. A clerk out there says a private detective named Leroy Pratchett turned up to see Edison the day before. A scrawny guy in a black leather jacket. He had a goatee.”

“Frenchy,” I said.

“You have a suspicious mind,” Mullan said. “How did you connect Rinehart with Earl Sawyer?”

I told him about Buxton Place and Hugh Coventry’s recognizing the owners’ names. I described meeting Earl Sawyer, being let into the cottages, seeing the books by Rinehart and Lovecraft and finding Sawyer’s name in “The Dunwich Horror.”

Mullan tugged his chair closer to the table and did his best to look as though he believed what I was saying. “Did you pay a second visit to Buxton Place at a time when Sawyer was not present?”

I shook my head.

“You were not responsible for the destruction of those books?”

I realized what he was telling me. “You went to Buxton Place.”

“Mr. Dunstan, I have spent the evening going wherever I thought I might find Earl Sawyer.” He stretched his arms and yawned. “Excuse me. I’m too old for this crap. Fairly soon, or so I hope, Edward Rinehart’s coffin at Greenhaven penitentiary will be disinterred. Maybe we’ll find out who is buried in the damn thing. It sure as hell isn’t Rinehart.”

“I don’t suppose it can be,” I said.

“What do you call that, understatement?” Mullan asked me. “On your feet, Mr. Dunstan. You and I are going for a walk.”

125

Mullan gestured to the far end of the reception desk and the steps down to the back door. “This way.” The clerk came through the office door and spun around to inspect the junk mail on a shelf behind him.

I followed Mullan down the stairs and over the concrete floor to the exit. Moving faster than I had expected, the captain banged the door open and marched out. I caught the door on the backswing and went into a narrow brick trench that had to be Horsehair. The gray blur of Mullan’s suit and a smudge of white hair were vanishing into the obscurity to my left.

I thought I recognized Lavender’s double doors and listing buildings as we rushed across into the continuation of Horsehair. Mullan stopped moving, and the pale blur of his Irish face revolved toward me. “Let’s talk about your suspicious mind. This so-called Pratchett turns up at the V.A. Hospital. Suppose he was Frenchy. What does that mean? Prentiss, he’s already dead. The next night, bang, like ducks, all in a row, Edison, Toby Kraft, Cassandra Little, and La Chapelle. Between you and me, is it possible that you have some hypothetical sort of explanation?”

“Speaking hypothetically, I guess I do,” I said. “Helen Janette told me Frenchy grew up in these lanes. Maybe Rinehart—Earl Sawyer—had scared him, one way or another, since he was a kid.” I told him Sawyer’s story about “Charles Ward” having a boy named Nolly Wheadle deliver his weekly salary and Nolly’s account of a figure he called Black Death.

“Maybe Rinehart, Sawyer, whatever you want to call him, sent Frenchy to the V.A. Hospital to find out if I had been there asking questions. Some of the staff told him that two people had been talking to Max Edison, and maybe Edison said these two people got his name from Toby.”

“In all our many conversations, Mr. Dunstan, you never said a word about Edison or Edward Rinehart.”