Mr. X (88 page)

“Captain, as entertaining as our get-togethers were, they didn’t seem to have anything to do with my father.”

“Was Edison the person who told you about Clothhead Spelvin?”

“Yes,” I said. “I liked Max Edison. He deserved better than being slaughtered in his bed.” I remembered that we were supposed to be speaking hypothetically. “If that’s what happened.”

“
If
that’s what happened, tell me the rest.”

“Sawyer took care of Max and Toby, and after that he had to get rid of Frenchy. He thought Frenchy probably said more than he should have to his girlfriend, so he killed her, too. Clyde Prentiss, I don’t know.” I remembered seeing Frenchy and Cassie Little in the ICU. “You know, maybe it was a kind of down payment. Prentiss could have saved himself some jail time by naming Frenchy.”

Mullan bristled. “Earl Sawyer killed four people because he didn’t want you to know he was your father, is that what you’re saying?”

“He felt betrayed,” I said.

“Do you want to add anything to that?”

“Do you want to tell me what you’re doing? Why did you think I might be working for the Louisville D.A.’s office or some federal agency?”

“Let’s say I feel betrayed.” Another glacial smile appeared and disappeared on what I could make out of his face. “You may be able to do your bit for civic order, Mr. Dunstan.” Mullan plunged ahead.

The odor I associated with Joy’s house again filtered out from the bricks; after another twenty paces, Mullan wheeled into Raspberry. In the darkness, the cobbles descended into a sunken vale where two policemen leaned against the walls on either side of a door sealed with yellow tape. They pushed themselves upright when they saw Mullan.

“This should interest you.”

By the time we reached the door, the two cops looked like sentries guarding Buckingham Palace. “Take off,” Mullan said.

They gave me that indifferent cop scrutiny and sauntered up the lane.

Mullan pulled away strands of tape. “Earl’s phone is still listed under Annie Engstad, the person who lived here before him, but Hatch’s security chief had the address on file. I had to bust the lock to get in. If you’re worried about Mr. Sawyer’s rights, Judge Gram, one of the guys I play golf with every Saturday, signed a search warrant.”

He opened the door, and the river-bottom stench moved out at us like an invisible wall. Mullan went inside and switched on a light. I heard rats scrambling for cover.

I said, “Good God.”

The door opened into a low-ceilinged room about twelve feet square that looked as though a bomb had gone off inside it. It was the ultimate residence of Cordwainer Hatch. Heaps of refuse, some waist-high, undulated over the floor. Newspapers crisped against the walls like dried sea foam. Against the wall to the left, a jumble of filthy shirts, socks, sweatshirts, and sweatpants lay over a narrow bed; against the opposite wall, geological deposits of junk flowed over the edge of a table to meet junk rising in layers from the floor. The enormity of the disorder made me feel dizzy. Rags, pizza boxes, glasses, crumpled magazines, paperback books without covers, plastic cups: the frieze of rubble lapped beneath and around a chair and washed into the room beyond, here and there parting to allow for passage.

“Earl’s living room and bedroom,” Mullan said. “This is going to sound funny, but don’t touch anything unless I give you permission. Some of this material is going to be used as evidence.” He pointed at the back room. “That was his kitchen and work room, I guess you’d call it. It’s even worse. Before we go in there, look at the closet.”

He waded through debris and tugged open a door. The shirt and trousers of Sawyer’s uniform hung beside a tan windbreaker and a pair of khaki pants. One wire hanger was empty. The uniform cap faced visor-out from the shelf alongside his Kangol cap, a long, black flashlight, a billy club, and the rounded ends of objects I could not immediately identify. The yellow eyes of a scrappy-looking rat stared up from a jumble of shoes on the closet’s floor.

Mullan yelled, “Scram!” and stamped a foot on the rubble. The rat whisked through an opening in the wall about as wide as a dime. “Look next to the baton.”

I stepped over spongy detritus, went up onto the balls of my feet, and saw a row of knives—kitchen knives, knives with stag handles and wooden handles, knives that folded into black metal handgrips, and knives with blades that flicked out of molded steel cases.

“Look closer,” Mullan said.

I leaned forward and saw rusty stains and dried palm prints.

“Earl liked knives,” Mullan said. “But he didn’t care about cleaning his tools any more than he did about cleaning anything else, as long as he kept his uniform and a few other things presentable enough to wear outside.”

I slogged behind him to a fan-shaped stain in the far right corner of the room, where he unearthed a half-buried cardboard box. “Fortunately, Earl kept souvenirs.” Mullan picked up a bent metal rod that had once been part of an umbrella and pried open the flaps on top of the carton.

I peered in at a jumble of wristwatches, bracelets, mismatched earrings, a couple of key rings, and old wallets scattered with small, white bones and the curving fragment of a human skull to which adhered a nugget of gristle.

Mullan tapped the fragment with the umbrella rod. “I wouldn’t be astonished if this used to be part of a gentleman named Minor Keyes. Remember him?”

“How could I forget?” I said. “It was the first time I was ever accused of murder.”

“See these little bones? My guess is, they’re what’s left of the hands cut off a newborn baby we found on top of a Dumpster about four years ago. We brought in the mother the next day. Sixteen years old. Charleen Toomey, a nice Irish girl. She confessed
that she had placed her infant daughter on top of the Dumpster, but swore it was breathing at the time. According to Charleen, she hoped some good Samaritan would come along and give her baby a home.”

“And according to you?”

“According to me, she was going to toss it in, but she chickened out at the last minute.” He poked one of the wallets. “Property of a drunk named Pipey Leake, who was beaten to death in the service alley alongside Merchants Hotel in 1975. This one came from a kid named Phil Doria, hung around the Buffalo Hill area at night and mugged older guys. In 1979, someone stabbed him to death. This bracelet probably belonged to a runaway smack addict who peddled her tail along Chester Street under the name Sidewalk Molly.”

“Shouldn’t this stuff be taken to Headquarters?”

“It will be,” Mullan said. “Shortly after that, Earl Sawyer-Edward Rinehart is going to become public property. And you are, too, Mr. Dunstan. Right now, we still have a chance to decide what kind of story it’s going to be, and how much attention you come in for.”

“What are you saying?”

Mullan tossed the rod onto a mound of refuse. He no longer looked anything at all like a bartender. “Certain aspects of the way your friend Stewart Hatch likes to operate are probably bringing my department under investigation. I’d like to keep the scandal down to a dull roar. It’ll be bad enough without dragging in Jack the Ripper.”

“You want to cover this up?” I was—only one word will do—aghast.

“Even if I was stupid enough to want to, I couldn’t. You can’t cover up a story like this. Even Rowley can see that he might pocket some more of Hatch’s money by pushing you into the spotlight. It wouldn’t do that much good, but it sure as hell would draw attention away from Stewart.”

“Pushing me into the spotlight,” I said.

“About two hours ago, Grenville Milton packed a bag and drove across the river to a motel outside Cape Girardeau. He booked two first-class tickets to Mexico City on a seven-thirty
A.M.
flight tomorrow from St. Louis. He had a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and a Ruger .45 with him. I don’t know
what it is about Rugers. Guys like Milton, they want a weapon, that’s what they buy.”

“Two tickets,” I said. “First class.”

“Then he called a woman named Ming-Hwa Sullivan. Ming-Hwa is a piece of work. She refused to come to the motel, and she laughed at the idea of meeting him at the airport. He said he’d kill himself, and she said, ‘Grenville, if you were a grown-up, you’d understand how little I have to do with that decision.’ Her words. When she got off the phone, she called us, and we talked to Cape Girardeau. They had two units out on a gunfire report. Fifteen minutes later, the captain there called back. Milton fired the Ruger four times. He killed the telephone in his room. He killed his TV set. He opened his window and killed the neon sign in front of the motel. Then he sat down on the floor, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and blew off the top of his head.”

“Does Hatch know about this?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” I said.

Mullan stepped carefully around me. “Come into the kitchen.”

126

More rats, along with several cockroach nations, scuttled into hiding when he switched on the overhead bulb. In the back half of the room, ecstatic flies congregated over coalesced, shining foothills of green jelly divided by trails leading to the bathroom, the sink, and the back door. The bathroom door stood open far enough to let me know that I never wanted to see it when the light was on.

Like a clearing in a forest, a rectangular section of the table at the left of the kitchen stood apart from the mess rising up around it. At the center of the clearing, a black, gold-trimmed fountain pen lay parallel to the edge of a bound journal similar to those in which Toby Kraft had entered his fictional accounts. Above the rubble at the far end of the table hung a photograph in a silver frame. Crayons and a golden marker had overlaid the image
within the frame: the photograph had been taken out and deliberately altered before being replaced. I moved up through the chaos surrounding Captain Mullan and myself; I stood in front of the table and took in what my father had done to a formal portrait of the Hatches.

Hand-drawn knives and arrows bristled like quills from Carpenter and Ellen Hatch. Their eyes had been inked out, and vampire smiles erased their mouths. Swirls of black crayon eradicated small Cobden Hatch. A golden crown broadcast vibrating rays from the head of young Cordwainer, and a golden heart flamed at the center of his chest.

“You noticed that picture,” Mullan said.

It was what Earl Sawyer had shoved into a drawer on Buxton Place; it was what Edward Rinehart had ordered Toby Kraft to steal from his family’s house on Mansion Row.

“Tell me the name of the kid wearing the crown.”

“Earl Sawyer,” I said. “Edward Rinehart.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Dunstan. Your father and Stewart’s father were brothers, which makes you and Stewart first cousins.”

“I guess Earl wasn’t too fond of his family,” I said.

“Pull that chair out,” Mullan said. “Swing it around and sit down.”

I pulled out the chair in front of the table and sat down.

“Here we are, Mr. Dunstan,” Mullan said. “You and me. Lieutenant Rowley is working the phone, shoring up his walls, doing his best to bribe or threaten himself above flood level, but Rowley can’t touch what we do in this room. Do you understand that?”

“What does Rowley know about Earl Sawyer?”

Another wintry smile. “He knows that Earl has been going around murdering people for the past thirty years. The exciting little twist that Earl Sawyer happens to be long-lost Cordwainer Hatch has not yet come to his attention.”

“And are we supposed to hide that?”

“We can’t keep that from coming out. I don’t give a damn if it
does
. All I want to do is hold the publicity to a minimum and walk away with my reputation and my pension intact. Reporters are going to pile in from all over the country. I’ll have to dodge microphones every time I walk out of Headquarters. I can handle that.”

“So why are we here?” I asked him.

“If you’re willing to help me see what’s going on, maybe we can salvage something out of this mess. Do you trust me, Mr. Dunstan?”

“I can’t answer that,” I said.

“All right. Nothing you say to me is on the record. That is a promise. Do you want to keep talking?”