On the Run (19 page)

He edged closer, held the handle in his right hand, laid the tip of the blade along the index finger of his left hand, slowly reached out until his finger touched the rib cage. As soon as the fingertip settled into the indentation between ribs, and the sleeper stirred, the right hand slid the blade into the heart, then jabbed with several short swift strokes, turning the handle slightly each time, inflicting a maximum damage.

There was a wheezing intake of breath, a hard gasp, a spasm, another spasm, and then a long rattling sigh. Bertold held his breath and he could hear no sound in the room. He wiped the invisible blade on a scrap of tissue, folded the stain inward and put the tissue back in his pocket, the blade back into his shirt. He stood up and turned his penlight on the dead face. He turned the light off, stood in the darkness and shut his jaw so hard his ears rang. All this delicate, perfect, professional effort to kill the wrong man, to give him a plausible, unremarkable, fatal heart attack in the middle of the night. Probably the brother. What was his name? George. No loss to anybody, particularly, but it complicated the hell out of this job. Two identical deaths were out. If they weren’t identical, maybe it could be worked. He felt the indignation of the master craftsman who sees a superb effort wasted. He turned the light on again and, aware of his responsibility to his trade, wiped the single drop of blood from the rib cage. The orifice he had made was almost invisible, the flesh puckering, closing the opening.

He told himself that he could not have risked the light. He told himself that it was a perfectly understandable accident. But he knew that he could not rationalize this mess. He had been too anxious to believe that it would be this easy. He had not felt right about this one. He
had thought himself calm, but in actuality the fear had been so great he had not taken the elemental precaution of being certain of his man. From that horrible old woman’s jabbering, he had learned that Sidney Shanley would be either in this room or the one across the hall. That meant George had to be in the other one. And he had found one empty room, and the door locked on the other one. He had thought it Sidney Shanley because he wanted so desperately for it to be Sidney. This, he decided, had better be the last one. And this one was bitched. The next move was to get out of this room and out of the house and out of this stinking village, to a safe and quiet place where he could think it over and decide what to do next. He moved through darkness out into the hallway, closed the door and locked it again. He stood in the silence, hearing a meaningless creak of the frame of the old house. He moved silently toward the stairs.

The abrupt change of the sound of the old man’s breathing brought her up out of her dream, her heart in her throat. It was a sound she had never heard before, a laboring gasp. She slipped out of her lover’s arms. He made a sleepy sound. She stepped into her slippers, snatched her robe and shouldered into it on the way to the bedroom door. She pulled the door open and closed it quietly and ran fleetly toward the top of the stairs, and ran headlong into one of the feral night things, one of the things out of the dreams of terror. She made a whimper as she was caught and turned, and a hardness clamped her throat.

It frightened Bertold so badly, he nearly yelled in terror, but in the first instant he knew he grappled with the silks and warmths and fragrances of a woman. His strong hands went instantly to the lock that would bring a hard pressure against the carotid artery, starve the brain of blood and make her faint instantly. But he was so agitated, he did not get it exactly right. She was a strong woman, made stronger by panic, and he tried to shift the pressure to the proper place. Inadvertently he tried to overcome with strength his momentary awkwardness, and suddenly he felt the larynx go, crushing beneath his fingers with an odd brisk papery feel under the smooth heated flesh of her throat. He felt an overwhelming
despair. He lowered her to the carpeting at the head of the stairs, on her back. She was making a horrid little clucking, squawking sound as she fought for air. He put his hand over her mouth. She brought her hands up and held onto his arm, firmly, as though she held the arm of someone trying to help her. She was very strong. She was trying so hard to live. Her lungs spasmed, fighting the obstacle. Then, in her extremity, she began to arch her body like a bow, lifting her hips, letting them thud back. He pressed his hand against the knotted muscles of her belly to hold her flat, and in soundless appeal, his lips moving, he said, “Die! For the love of God, die!”

And then she settled, and softened and was gone. He sat on his heels there for a moment, dripping with sweat.

Suddenly, from outside the front door came a great brassy baritone voice, singing off-key with great drunken confidence. “Gone are the days when our hearts were young and gay! Dum dum dee dum. From the cott-tton fields a-wayyyyyy.”

Bertold forgot his tentative idea of leaving the woman crumpled at the foot of the stairs. He sprang to his feet. Every last fragment of composure was gone. He went racing and stumbling down the stairs, whimpering to himself. He burst out through the front door, ran into the hedge and fell and scrambled up.

“Hey!” the singer yelled. “Hey! Hey, wait!”

Bertold raced for his car, the singer lumbering along behind him rousing the quiet neighborhood with his yells. He tumbled into his car and started it and went roaring down through the sleeping village and off into the night.

At three o’clock in the morning, Doctor Ward Marriner came away from the old man’s bedside. He spoke to the woman he had been able to find to stay with the old man. She was a big starched woman, a practical nurse. He told her to watch for any change, and phone him. There was only one change he could reasonably expect.

He went wearily into the hallway. A voice spoke from the shadows at the foot of the stairs, startling him. “How is the old man?”

Marriner recognized Captain Lemon of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation of the State Police, a drab, quiet and earnest little man.

“Dying,” Marriner answered. “Where’s the rest of your gang?”

“They’re finished here, for now. I stayed to ask you a couple of things, if it’s okay with you. Thanks for the fast autopsy report.”

“Fast and not exactly legal, you realize.”

“I’ll cover you every way I can, like I said, Doctor. I want to know this. Suppose he didn’t kill the nurse up there in the hall. Suppose that drunk didn’t see him run out of the house. And tomorrow morning there’s a rush call for you to come and look at that George Shanley. What would you have called it?”

“Heart. Massive coronary occlusion.”

“But those other things happened, and we did find the scratches that showed the door had been unlocked and relocked from the hall, so we know he was killed with an ice pick.”

“I didn’t say that, Captain. I said something
like
an ice pick. Possibly a little more flexible.”

“Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the nurse and the drunken songbird, it would have been very neat and professional. But the reasons bother me. I couldn’t get much out of the brother. He was like a crazy man. George was apparently some sort of small time hoodlum from San Diego.”

“Something like that.”

“And the younger brother, Sid, he was in the nurse’s bed. Doctor, what the
hell
goes on around here?”

“A lot of bad luck, Captain. Quite a lot of bad luck, I think. That poor son of a gun heard the commotion and the singing and came out and fell right over Paula’s body. Captain, I loved that girl. Not the way it sounds. As a friend. As a good friend, both to me and to Tom Brower. A lot of woman, Captain, in a lot of ways. I’m going to look in on Sid on my way home. See if I can bring him back here and give him a pill and put him to bed. Staying with her like that, he’s tearing himself apart.” He sighed and shook his head. “Sam Gates doesn’t get ten bodies a year. Tonight he gets two. And one to go. Captain, if you want to know what the hell went on around here tonight, I think you better get that fake photographer and ask him.”

“Hefton. John Doe,” Lemon said quietly. “A professional, until things started to go wrong. The kid at the Inn took the license number when he checked in. We made the description of man and car sooner than we had any right to expect. It was a break.”

“Will you get him?”

Lemon stood up and stretched. “The longer he lasts, the worse it looks. Maybe he had another car stashed. I hope we get him. I’d like a little chat. I would dearly love a little chat with that savage little con man.”

At that same moment, Bertold was being picked up at mile marker fifty-one on the Thruway. He had plausible explanations for the trooper, but they were wasted because the trooper knew absolutely nothing beyond his orders to pick up the described car and driver. So Bertold knew he would be held and he knew how wrong it was going to go, and deplored his own failure to get rid of the keys and the little cutting pliers which could be
matched to the severed windowscreen hook. And with a complete astonishment at his own mental lapses, he remembered the bloodied bit of tissue in the pocket of his trousers, the tissue he had used to wipe the slender weapon.

During the hours of driving, holding the car exactly at the posted speed, he had known that he should revise plans, abandon the car, concentrate on the specifics. But when he would try to focus his mind, he would feel the woman’s hands holding his arm, feel the warm straining lift of her body, hear the horrid clucking. So he would hum and sing to cover the clucking noise and drive on.

Now he could not accept what was happening to him. All the explanations—even if anyone would listen—were obsolete.

So he faked a stumble, brought the trooper down with a judo chop, and sprinted toward the high wire fence fifty yards beyond the shoulder, knowing as he ran that he was in a blind panic, and should have paused long enough to kick the man in the head.

As he jumped and grasped the fence, the thirty-eight caliber slug pierced the left buttock, ripped through the groin and shredded the left femoral artery. He lay on his back on the dry grass and looked at fading stars and felt as if the world was falling away from him. The trooper put the flashlight on his face just in time to see the last fragment of comprehension in the eyes as the fugitive bled to death.

When old Sam Gates opened the door to Doctor Marriner, he said in a nervous whisper, “Doc, for gosh sakes, can you get him out of there? It ain’t right. There’s things I should get started on, Doc. I tried to get him out of there and he didn’t even …”

“Shut up, Sam,” Marriner said wearily. “Just please shut up.”

The shadows were harsh in the small back room. There was a bright bare bulb in a wall fixture. The body was on the grooved slab, covered with coarse sheeting. Under the molding of the sheet it was the body of woman, eternal. Shanley sat on a low stool, close to the slab, the light behind him. He was doubled over. When
Marriner walked around the slab he saw that Shanley had the dead arm out from under the sheeting. The forearm rested on his knee. His forehead rested on the forearm. He held her hand in both of his. He was utterly still, and Marriner sensed that the first raw violence of loss had slowly leached out of him here in the acid-smelling silence.

Marriner put his hand on the man’s shoulder, squeezed it, shook it gently. “Come on now. I’ll take you back.”

In a few moments Shanley lifted his head and frowned blankly up at Marriner. “What?”

“I’ll take you back to the house now.”

Shanley gave a slow nod. He stood up. He lifted the edge of the sheeting and, holding the leaden arm by the wrist, neatly and carefully laid it in at her side and put the sheeting back and gave it a small pat to make it neater.

Marriner walked him out through the dim rooms and out the front door of Gates’ place. Six feet beyond the door Shanley stopped abruptly and looked back over his shoulder.

“Why?” he said, his voice loud and hoarsened and despairing.

“Come on along. Mankind has been asking that same damn fool question for two million years, and we’ll keep asking it until there’s just one last one of us left. And that’ll be the last word he says. I’ll take you back and give you a little something.”

“I don’t need it.”

“You’re getting it anyway.”

“… All right.”

On the day she was buried, Shanley drove Jane Weese and old Davie to the church service and then to the cemetery and back to the house. Jane Weese made snorting sobs all the way back. Shanley wished he had been able to weep. There had been the incredulity and the rage, and then the numbness, as if some drug had been injected into his brain. All sights and scents and sounds were vivid but they did not mean very much. It was like living in a very detailed and plausible dream, among people he had imagined.

As he turned into the driveway he saw the stranger on the front steps and hit the brake too hard, startling Jane and Davie.

“Who is that?”

“Why, that’s Mr. Fergasson!” Jane said.

He drove to the back of the house, parked there and they got out. He went through the house. Fergasson was in the front hall and made as though to speak, but Shanley went by him and into the study off the living room. The nurse sat knitting.

“No change at all,” she said in a voice that seemed too loud for that room. It was a skull covered with wet grey cloth and through some distasteful trick it kept breathing. He despised it for living when all the world’s warm flesh was casketed and deep.

When he walked back into the hall Fergasson was there.

“Mr. Shanley, I …”

“We’ll talk outside.”

Fergasson followed him out the front door and around to the wall where, a lifetime ago, Paula had sat in the sun.

“So you’re the one who found me.”

“I had that good fortune,” Fergasson said. He was a tidy little man. He had that servile arrogance of a waiter who feels superior to his customers. “I am sorry about Miss Lettinger. And the old man. And your brother, Mr. Shanley.”

“What do you want?”

“Forgive me. This was a strange and tragic mixup. They identified the man. Did you hear? His name was Bertold.”