On the Run (10 page)

It had been simple carelessness. He had known the lodge had been empty for three days. He saw Keogh arrive alone. He had assumed Keogh would either bring the girl, or she would be along later. He had not realized the girl had arrived earlier that same afternoon, sometime during the one hour he had not had the lodge under observation, had shut her car in the garage and gone in to take a nap while awaiting her middle-aged lover. Thinking the place empty and wanting to get it over with before the girl arrived, he’d gone in quickly through the French door he had previously jimmied and, in the instant Keogh turned, before he could speak, Bertold had put three small slugs into the meat of the man’s chest, high and just enough off center to the left. (At the school in Washington, long ago, they made you fire unaimed shots at surprise targets until, finally, it became as simple as pointing your finger.) Keogh fell solidly, dying as he went down, the impact bursting the air out of his lungs with a mindless retching sound. And the girl ran out of the bedroom into the short wide hallway, stared at him and ran back in again and snapped the bolt on the heavy door. Bertold went out of the lodge at a dead run and stopped at a point where he could see the bedroom windows without being seen. First she would try to phone. There was an extension in the master bedroom. He had removed the units from the mouthpieces during his inspection of the inside of the lodge. He reviewed the advantages and disadvantages of killing her. She had seen him for a few moments in reasonably good light, but she had never seen him before, and he looked very ordinary, and few people could give good descriptions. He circled the lodge in the opposite direction, yanked the distributor wires loose on both cars and began walking swiftly across rough country toward the main highway. He dropped the gun into the heart of a hollow rotten tree and put the canvas gloves under a wide flat stone in a creek. He recovered his suitcase
from dense brush near the highway. He abandoned his junk automobile near Milaca, walked into town and had a four minute wait before hailing the bus to Duluth. It was on schedule.

Carelessness, he thought. The girl had recorded him like a camera. Shanley would be as wary as Keogh had been. And his reflexes were probably much better. Keogh had taken a risk because he had thought the girl worth a risk. And had his oyster white silk shirt stapled into his chest by three bullets within a diameter no larger than that of a coffee cup.

He mentally reviewed the information about Shanley. Sleep took him.

The sun was high. Tom Brower studied his younger grandson. “My dear boy, at ninety-two one wishes to conserve the smallest effort, even that of keeping one’s head in a slightly awkward position. So if you would move to the right end of the window seat?”

“Of course.”

“And tilt the blinds so I am not looking at a silhouette. Thank you. Sidney, you are a mature and rather imposing looking fellow, in a certain craggy and impassive way. As a small boy you had a very … gentle face. Withdrawn and wary, but gentle. Do you remember the house?”

“More than I thought I would, sir.”

“Your presence must be due to considerable tact on Miss Paula’s part.”

“And the jade box. Without that I couldn’t have bought it. Without that the whole thing would have been too far out. The box made the connection.”

“Did you leave it behind on purpose, Sidney?”

“I forgot it. I remembered it when we were getting into the car, but he wouldn’t let me come back.”

“I want to ask questions, many questions, but inasmuch as I tire very easily these days, I prefer to use the time telling you about … my contemptible part in the first years of your life.”

“I don’t blame anybody for anything.”

“Not consciously perhaps. I shall not embroider this narrative. My only child, Alicia, was born in 1900. She was very like her mother, sweet, vague, imaginative, and not physically strong. I was thirty when she was born, and Margaret, your grandmother, was ten years younger. It was a difficult birth, and a full year before your grandmother
was herself once more. As a small family of three, we had nineteen marvelously happy years, though my wife’s health was failing toward the end of that time. When Alicia was nineteen she met and fell in love with Clyde Shanley. In those days it was still possible for people to talk about marrying beneath one’s self. Shanley was completely impossible. He had no background. He was a strange, violent, bitter young man, given to strong drink and strong language. But he had a kind of wild and reckless gaiety and, for Alicia I suppose, a raw charm unlike anyone she had ever met before. When she persisted in seeing him, in direct disobedience of my orders, her mother and I took her on an extended trip. We had to return prematurely when my wife became less well. Alicia was twenty when we returned to this house. I thought she knew the seriousness of her mother’s condition. Two weeks after we returned she ran away with Clyde Shanley. Her mother’s condition worsened. I blamed this upon Alicia’s cruelty and thoughtlessness. I was a harsher man forty years ago, my boy. Margaret became bedridden. I learned Alicia and Shanley had been married. I should have gone after her then. Perhaps she would have come back. I think that by that time she knew she had made a mistake. I had the fatuous idea she would come crawling back, begging forgiveness. I forgot, or ignored, that terrible pride of hers. I can give Shanley credit for one thing. We were reasonably well off in the twenties, but he had not married her with the idea of receiving monies from me. She wrote us some letters. I did not answer them. I did not let my wife know I had received them. Ah, I was a righteous man, puffed with my own sense of injured self-importance, quelling any feeling of love and sympathy as being a kind of weakness.

“Your brother George was born in 1921. Shanley was moving from job to job, from one industrial city to another. He was a brawler, and found it difficult to keep any job very long. I knew it was only a matter of time until he abandoned my daughter and my first grandson, and then she would come home. I would wait. I lost track of them entirely in 1925. I could have instituted a search, but I thought that would be a sign of weakness. You were born in 1927, I learned later. This was a bleak
unhappy house, Sidney. Quite suddenly the world moved into a monstrous era called the Depression. No values were ever the same again. All the security I’d worked for, it all crumbled away, boy. Margaret died in her sleep in 1930. Jane Weese came here to take care of me and the house. I was sixty years old, and I did not give a damn. I was certain I would not live long. I was going through the motions of trying to ward off the ultimate financial disaster, because that was habit, the familiarity of things to do. In 1931 I received a phone call. Your father was in a city jail serving ninety days. Alicia had died after a long illness. They found my address among her papers. Your father’s term still had a few weeks to run, I peddled some jewelry that had belonged to your grandmother in order to get the extra money to go there and bring my daughter’s body back for burial here. I brought you back too. I would have brought George back, but I could not find him. Two weeks later your father came storming in here when I was out. He pushed Jane to the floor, grabbed you and took you away. I knew that a man like that should not, could not have custody of you. I would take you and George away from him, legally. But it costs money to accomplish such a thing. And I set about my work with a new goal, Sidney. But they were black years. It took time. So much time. I made mistakes. It was almost eight years before I reestablished myself. It took time to get information about you. I learned that Clyde Shanley had been killed in an industrial accident in Youngstown. I learned he had married again. My people could not trace the woman. Where were you?”

“I was eleven when he died. George had run away two years before that. Hilda got some money when my father died. We went to Atlantic City. When the money was gone, she took off. I was twelve. I hitch-hiked back to Youngstown because, I guess, that was the place I remembered best. They picked me up after I was there about three days, and the juvenile court put me in a foster home. It wasn’t too bad. They, the couple who took me in, usually had three or four kids at all times. It was a business deal, extra income for sheltering kids.”

“We’ll talk more, Sidney, later on. I’ve gotten too tired. Every part of this mechanism is ninety-two years old, full of flaws and fragilities. I’m a passenger in a rackety
old vehicle, and I must not force it beyond its limits. But I want you to know I am ashamed of myself, Sidney. A large segment of my life is shadowed by an attitude I now find despicable.”

“What else could you have done?”

“Come now, my boy. Don’t try to present me with ready-made rationalizations. Out of pride I suppressed my love and denied my only child, giving her no opportunity to admit her marriage was a mistake, forcing her to live with it and die with it.” He closed his eyes. His voice became faint. “If I had only …”

The voice stopped. Shanley stared at him. He hurried to find Paula and met her as she was coming through the living room toward the study.

“I was coming to break it up,” she said.

“He doesn’t look right.”

Her smile vanished. She hurried to the bed. He stood in the doorway. When she turned toward him she was smiling again. They walked out into the side yard. Summer clouds had moved across the sun. She sat on the stone wall and looked up at him. “He goes to sleep like that.”

“My God, he’s sharp.”

“Sometimes he goes a little off. Not often. And it makes him very angry when he does. He goes into the past, and becomes confused about who I am and why he’s in bed.”

“What are you doing for him?”

She shrugged. “Keeping him clean and comfortable and entertained. What else is there to do? Ward Marriner is an excellent doctor. The malignancy is slow and localized and not pain-making. He’ll die easily, Sid.”

“When?”

“Soon. But I have a very unprofessional opinion about that. It won’t be tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Because he wants to talk to you and listen to you. And to George.”

“When does George get here?”

“This evening or tomorrow. Do you mind listening to the old man?”

“Funny question, Paula. I don’t mind. It’s a very strange feeling. I didn’t think I had anybody. Then there’s this link, going so damned far back. Way back. For God’s sake,
his
father knew Lincoln!”

“Don’t you want roots like that?”

“What good do they do me?”

“A sense of belonging, Sid. Small towns are full of all the tangled roots. When your mother was a little girl she played in the yard. She sat on this wall. That was her room up there. She looked out of those windows. When I was eleven years old I fell out of that crab apple tree on the other side of the road and chipped this tooth. See? My best friend lived in that house over there.”

He looked at the stones of the wall. “Stop trying to do it,” he said. “Stop trying to pull me into all this … damned identification. Last night wasn’t any lifetime guarantee.” He heard the words after he said them, knowing how deeply they could hurt her, and he was aware of her stillness and afraid to look at her. When he did look at her, he saw what effort the smile cost her, saw the tears standing in her eyes, and marveled that she could smile.

“Oh, Sid,” she said. “That damned door, with the rusty hinges. I pry it open a little way, trying to let some fresh air in, and then you suddenly get terrified and you slam it shut. And you try to slam it on my hands, don’t you?”

“I just want you to understand …”

“You don’t give me credit for understanding. What am I supposed to be? Some sort of dangerous swamp? Last night was complete in itself. I won’t let you spoil it.”

He tried to answer her smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil it.”

It had not been anything planned. By Sunday noon he had realized they were getting ahead of schedule. He had stopped at a second rate motel and dickered with the owner-manager and they had been charged a dollar apiece for the use of one unit in which to take showers. She had gone first. When she had come out, in her fresh yellow blouse, she had acted odd in a way he could not identify. He went in, carrying fresh clothing. The little bathroom was humid with steam, mildly pungent with the characteristic scents of her. And on the big misted mirror she had left him a message, written with her finger. A bloated heart, a crooked arrow. P.L. loves S.S. It was both wry game and delicate overture. It was funny, and curiously touching.

Five miles up the road she said primly, “Send a message and nobody answers.”

“You see that sort of thing everywhere. Peter Lorre loves Sylvia Sydney. It’s one of the true romances of show biz.”

“I hate people who think up lines to take themselves off the hook.”

“Well, we’re running ahead of time. The only possible solution is to find another motel and steam up another mirror and spend the night writing messages to each other.”

“Sir! You owe me a message, not a communications center.”

“Okay. S.S. loves P.L.”

“I’ll never believe it until I see it carved into a tree.”

“Or painted on a national monument.”

She looked at him oddly. “You’re getting better, Sid, You were so heavy and kind of reluctant. You were out of practice. Do you know you are actually laughing out loud once in a while?”

“I’m traveling with a very comical woman.”

“I swear it, Sid, some day we’re going to laugh until we cry. We’re going to totter around, weak and gasping, trying to stop and not being able to. And you don’t know how good that is going to be for you.”

“Climb into the back, woman. You’re overdue.”

“For what?” she asked with a vast innocence. “Oh! I see what you mean. I should sleep. Yes six, captain sir. For a moment there I had the idea …”

“Nurse!”

With mock haste and fright she clambered lithely over the back of the seat and stretched out. He heard her humming to herself, slightly off key. In a very little while she was sound asleep. The sun moved lower behind them. The big pike rolled through the gentle country.