Night My Friend (10 page)

While Frank went off on his mission, Jim Tweller adjusted the wobbly microphone and began his speech of thanks and acceptance. I was just then more interested in two boys wrestling along the water’s edge, tussling, kicking sand at each other. But Tweller’s speech was not altogether lost on me. I remember scattered words and phrases, and even then to me they seemed the words and phrases of a political candidate rather than simply an award winner. “…thank you from the bottom of my heart for this great honor… I realize I think more than anyone else the fact that our party needs a rebirth with new blood if it is to win again in November… loyal old horses turned out to pasture while the political colts run the race…” I saw Mayor Myerton, a man in his sixties, flinch at these words, and I realized that the simple acceptance speech was taking a most unexpected turn.

But now my attention was caught by the sight of Frank Coons returning with the foaming pitcher of beer. He’d been gone some minutes and I figured he’d stopped long enough to have one himself, or perhaps he’d found someone else who carried gin in a cough medicine bottle. Anyway, he passed the pitcher up to the man at the end of the platform, the opposite end from my grandfather. I wondered if this was his revenge for being refused that drink earlier. The man on the end filled his glass with beer and then passed it on to the mayor who did likewise. Jim Tweller interrupted his speech a moment to accept the pitcher and fill his glass, then pass it to Mrs. Finch of the school board who was on his right. She shook her head with a temperate vigor and let it go on to the man I didn’t know, sitting next to grandfather at the end of the platform.

Tweller had taken a drink of his beer and shook his head violently as if it were castor oil. “Got a bad barrel here,” he told the people with a laugh. “I’m going to stick to the hard stuff after this. Or else drink milk. Anyway, before I finish I want to tell you about my plans for our community. I want to tell you a little about how…” He paused for another drink of the beer. “…about how we can push back the final remains of the depression and surge ahead into the Forties with a new prosperity, a new ve… agh…”

Something was wrong. Tweller had suddenly stopped speaking and was gripping the microphone before him. Mayor Myerton put down his own beer and started to get up. “What’s wrong, man?” he whispered too near the microphone. “Are you sick?”

“I… gnugh… can’t breathe… help me…” Then he toppled backward, dragging the microphone with him, upsetting his glass of beer as he fell screaming and gasping to the ground.

Somewhere behind me a woman’s voice took up the scream, and I thought it might have been Miss Hazel. Already Doctor Stout had appeared at the platform and was hurrying around to comfort the stricken man. As I ran forward myself I caught a funny odor in the air near the platform, near where the beer had spilled from Jim Tweller’s overturned glass. It was a new smell to me, one I couldn’t identify.

Behind the platform, Doctor Stout was loosening the collar of the convulsed man as grandfather and the mayor tried to assist him. But after a moment the thrashing of arms and legs ceased, and the doctor straightened up. The bright overhead sun caught his glasses as he did so, reflecting for an instant a glare of brilliance. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said quietly, almost sadly. “The man is dead.”

Suddenly I was bundled off with the other children to play where we would, while the adults moved in to form a solid ring of curiosity about the platform. The children were curious too, of course, but after a few minutes of playing many of the younger ones had forgotten the events with wonder at their newly found freedom. They ran and romped along the water’s edge, setting off what few firecrackers still remained, wrestling and chasing each other up the brilliant brown dunes to some imagined summit. But all at once I was too old for their games of childhood, and longed to be back with the adults, back around the body of this man whom I hadn’t even known a few weeks earlier.

Finally I did break away, and hurried back to the edges thinning now as women pulled their husbands away. I crept under the wooden crossbeams of the platform, became momentarily entangled in the wires of the loudspeaker system, and finally freed myself to creep even closer to the center of the excitement. A big man wearing a pistol on his belt like a cowboy had joined them now, and he appeared to be the sheriff.

“Just tell me what happened,” he was saying. “One at a time, not all at once.”

Mayor Myerton grunted. “If you’d been at the picnic, Gene, instead of chasing around town, you’d know what happened.”

“Do you pay me to be the sheriff or to drink beer and listen to speeches?” He turned to one of the other men. “What happened, Sam?”

Sam was the man who’d been on the end of the platform, the opposite end from grandfather. “Hell, Gene, you know as much about it as I do. He was talkin’ and all of a sudden he just toppled over and died.”

At this point Doctor Stout interrupted. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the man was poisoned. The odor of bitter almonds was very strong by the body.”

“Bitter almonds?” This from Mayor Myerton. He was wiping the sweat from his forehead, though it didn’t seem that hot to me.

Doctor Stout nodded. “I think someone put prussic acid in Tweller’s beer. Prussic acid solution or maybe bitter almond water.”

“That’s impossible,” the mayor insisted. “I was sitting right next to him.”

Grandfather joined in the discussion now, and I ducked low to the ground so he wouldn’t see me. “Maybe the whole pitcher was poisoned. I didn’t get around to drinking mine.”

But the mayor had drunk some of his without ill effects, as had the man on the end named Sam. Someone went for the pitcher of beer, now almost empty, and Doctor Stout sniffed it suspiciously. “Nothing here. But the odor was on the body, and up there where his glass spilled.”

“Maybe he killed himself,” Frank Coons suggested, and they seemed to notice him for the first time. Frank seemed to be a sort of town character, lacking the stature of the others, an outsider within the party. And—I knew they were thinking it—after all, he was the one who went for the pitcher of beer in the first place.

“Frank,” the sheriff said a little too kindly, “did you have any reason to dislike Jim Tweller?”

“Who, me?”

“Don’t I remember hearing something a few years back about a house he sold you? A bum deal on a house he sold you?”

Frank Coons waved his hands airily. “That was nothing, a misunderstanding. I’ve always liked Jim. You don’t think I could have killed him, do you?”

The sheriff named Gene said, “I think we’d all better go down to my office. Maybe I can get to the bottom of things there.”

Some of them moved off then, and I saw that the undertaker’s ambulance had come for Jim Tweller’s body. The undertaker discussed the details of the autopsy with the sheriff, and the two of them proceeded to lift the body onto a stretcher. At that time and that place, no one worried about taking pictures of the death scene or measuring critical distances.

But I noticed that the woman from the school board, Mrs. Finch, pulled grandfather back from the rest of the group. They paused just above me, and she said, “You know what he was trying to do as well as I do. He was using the acceptance of the award to launch a political campaign of his own. All this talk about rebirth and new blood meant just one thing—he was getting to the point where he was going to run against Mayor Myerton.”

“Perhaps,” my grandfather said.

“Do you think it’s possible that the mayor slipped the poison into his beer?”

“Let me answer that with another question, Mrs. Finch. Do you think the mayor would be carrying a fatal dose of prussic acid in his pocket for such an occasion?”

“I don’t know. He was sitting next to Tweller, that’s all I know.”

“So were you, though, Mrs. Finch,” my grandfather reminded her.

They moved off with that, and separated, and I crawled back out to mingle with the children once more. Over by the beer barrel, the man named Sam was helping himself to a drink, and I saw a couple of others still eating their lunch. But for the most part the picnic had ended with Tweller’s death. Even the weather seemed suddenly to have turned coolish, and the breeze blowing off the water had an uncomfortable chill to it. Families were folding up their chairs and loading picnic baskets into the cars, and one group of boys was helpfully ripping down the big colored banners and campaign posters. Nobody stopped them, because it was no longer a very good day for a picnic.

The two remaining weeks of my visit were a blur of comings and goings and frequent phone calls at my grandfather’s house. I remember the first few days after the killing, when the excitement of the thing was still on everybody’s lips, when one hardly noticed the children of the town and we ran free as birds for hours on end. Frank Coons was jailed by the sheriff when they learned for certain that the beer had been poisoned, but after a few days of questioning they were forced to release him. No one could demonstrate just how he would have been able to poison only the beer poured into Jim Tweller’s glass while leaving the mayor and the others unharmed.

I knew that Mrs. Finch still harbored her suspicion of the mayor, and it was very possible that he suspected her as well. All of them came to grandfather’s house, and the conversations went on by the hour. The fact that no one much regretted the death of Tweller did little to pacify things in those first two weeks. The man still had his supporters outside of the political high command, all the little people of the town who’d known him not as a rising politician but only as the donor of land for a hospital. These were the people who’d voted him his humanitarian award, and these were the people who publicly mourned him now, while the top-level conferences at grandfather’s house continued long into the night.

At the end of two weeks I departed, and grandfather took me down to the railroad station with what seemed a genuine sadness at my going. I stood in the back of the train waving at him as we pulled out of the station, and he seemed at that moment as always to be a man of untried greatness. His white hair caught the afternoon sunlight as he waved, and I felt a tear of genuine feeling trickle down my cheek.

If this had been a detective novel instead of a simple memoir of youth, I would have provided a neat and simple solution to the poisoning of Jim Tweller. But no such solution was ever forthcoming. I heard from my mother and father that the excitement died down within a few weeks and the life of the town went on as it had before. That November, the mayor and my grandfather and the other town officials were re-elected.

I saw my grandfather only briefly after that, at annual family reunions and his occasional visits to our home. When I was sixteen he died, quietly in his sleep, and we went up to the town once more. It hadn’t changed much, really, and the people seemed much the same as I remembered them. In the cemetery, I stood between father and Mrs. Finch, who commented on how much I’d grown. The mayor was there, of course, and Doctor Stout, and even Miss Pinkney and Miss Hazel. I understood from the talk that Frank Coons no longer lived in town. He’d moved south shortly after the murder investigation.

So I said goodbye to my grandfather and his town forever, and went back to the city to grow into manhood.

I said a moment ago that this was a memoir and not a mystery and as such would offer no solution to the death of Jim Tweller. And yet—I would not be honest either as a writer or a man if I failed to set down here some thoughts that came to me one evening not long ago, as I sat sipping a cocktail in the company of a particularly boring group of friends.

I suppose it was the sight of cocktails being poured from an icy pitcher that made me remember that other occasion, when the beer had passed down the line of speakers. And remembering it, as the conversation about me droned on, I went over the details of that day once more. I remembered especially that pitcher of beer, and the pouring of Tweller’s drink from it. I remembered how he drank from the glass almost immediately, and commented on the bad taste. Certainly no poison was dropped into the glass
after
the beer had been poured. And yet it was just as impossible to believe that the poison had gone into the glass
with
the beer, when others had drunk unharmed from the same pitcher. No, there was only one possibility—the poison had been in the glass
before
the beer was poured in.

I imagined a liquid, colorless as water, lying in the bottom of the glass. Just a few drops perhaps, or half an ounce at most. The chances were that Jim Tweller never noticed it, or if he did he imagined it to be only water left from washing out the glass. He would pour the beer in over the waiting poison, in all likelihood, or at worst empty the glass onto the grass first. In any event, there was no danger for the poisoner, and the odds for success were in his favor.

And I remembered then who had occupied the speaker’s position immediately before Tweller. I remembered grandfather with the empty glass before him, the empty beer mug with its thickness of glass to hide the few drops of liquid. I remembered grandfather with his little bottle of cough medicine, clear cough medicine that usually was gin. Remembered his reluctance that day to give Frank Coons a drink from it. Remembered that I hadn’t seen the bottle again later. Remembered most of all grandfather’s devotion to the party, his friendship with Tweller that must have warned him earlier than most of the man’s political ambitions. Remembered, finally, that of all the people at the picnic only grandfather had known that Tweller was the winner of the award, that Tweller would be on the speaker’s platform that day. Grandfather, who called out to Coons for the pitcher of beer. Grandfather, the only person with the motive and the knowledge and the opportunity. And the weapon, in a bottle that might have been cough medicine or gin—or prussic acid.

But that was a long time ago, a generation ago. And I remember him best standing at the station, waving goodbye…

O
’BANNION QUIT HIS JOB AT
three o’clock on a sunny Friday afternoon in April. It happened suddenly, though certainly he had considered the possibility many times in the past. It happened with words, a pounding fist, and then the decision that could not be recalled. It happened, oddly enough, on the same day that a man called Green robbed and killed an armed messenger for the Jewelers’ Exchange.