Quests of Simon Ark (13 page)

I’d listened to the blues played on a black man’s horn, and I’d watched the lithe movements of the girl singer’s hips as she went through the motions of a song in the night.

It was the same now, with these kids. It would always be the same. This, I guess, was life. At least it was life in the fifth decade of the twentieth century.

Beyond the trumpet and the piano and the bass and the girl singer the hotel’s desk clerk lounged in the doorway, enjoying the music while waiting for the customers who wouldn’t come until the night grew a little darker.

Simon Ark moved among the swaying couples on the dance floor until he reached the man’s side, and then he asked, “Is there a man named Mara staying here?”

The room clerk looked him up and down, trying to judge whether or not we were detectives. Then he saw Shelly and decided we weren’t. “Upstairs. Third floor. Room 316.”

Simon started up the dimly lit stairs, and I turned to Shelly. “You’d better wait down here, dear. If any of these creeps try to pick you up, just give a yell.”

I smiled at her and followed Simon up the stairs. The place reminded me of one I’d often stayed in while I was in the army.

And finally we were at the door of Room 316. I wondered if Satan was always this easy to find, for those who looked.

At my side, Simon said, very quietly,
“Libera nos a malo
…”

“Is that another of your Coptic prayers?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “This one’s Latin,” he answered simply, and then knocked on the door of Conrad Mara’s room.

We waited …

From the inside, very softly, came the sound of music, as if from a radio. Simon Ark knocked again. “Judge Mara,” he called out; “we know you’re in there. We want to talk to you.”

And now an odor reached our nostrils, the heavy odor of a perfume, perhaps mingled with the scent of incense. Simon Ark tried the door, but it was locked.

He knocked again, and we listened. Now, in addition to the faint music, we could hear something bumping at regular intervals.

“Should I get the room clerk?” I asked.

“There’s no time; it might be too late already. Help me break down this door.”

We hit the thin wooden door together, and the lock sprang open. And then we were in the room. And we saw it …

Conrad Mara, the third Judge of Hades, was hanging from the light fixture in the center of the small room, a thin chain wrapped tightly around his neck. He was dressed in a woman’s black bathing suit and his body was doused with perfume.

“God!” I gasped, “what is this?”

Simon Ark stared at the swollen, dead face, and at the incense burner, and at the scattered newspapers on the floor. “We’re too late,” he said simply. “We’ve come too late to save Conrad Mara, but not too late to trap the devil of Maple Shades …”

Finally I asked, “Who killed him?” when I’d had time to recover from the shock of the scene before me.

“Perhaps his past,” Simon Ark replied. “Perhaps our modern civilization. Perhaps a force beyond our knowledge.” He paused a moment and then added, “Conrad Mara took his own life …”

“Suicide? Like this? Why, that’s impossible, Simon. Who’d ever dress up in an outfit like that, with perfume and everything, to hang themselves?”

“A masochist,” Simon answered simply. “People talk quite openly these days about rapists and homosexuals, but there are other areas of aberration less well known to the general public. Conrad Mara received sexual pleasure from the experience of physical pain; and in hanging himself with that chain he experienced the supreme masochistic thrill. There’ve been a number of similar cases on the West Coast in recent years.”

“But …” I began, still not wholly convinced, “how can you be so certain?”

“It’s been obvious to me for several hours that Mara was being shunned by the people of Maple Shades because of some act. It wasn’t criminal, or they’d have talked about it—rather, it was some sort of sexual act, something that was discovered and ruined his career as a judge.”

“Then you never really believed he was the devil?”

“Sometimes, my friend, Satan enters the bodies of those he would destroy. Who is to say he was not inside of this body until a few hours ago?”

Simon stepped to the house phone and called downstairs. “There’s been a suicide,” he said simply. “I suggest you call the local police. And you might tell the young lady who’s been waiting in the lobby that we’re all right and we’ll be down presently.” Then he hung up and turned back to me, averting the hanging corpse as much as possible.

“But why did he pick today to kill himself? Surely he must have had this … aberration for many years.”

Simon Ark pointed to the scattered newspapers on the floor. “But it was just today that he read about the accident in Maple Shades; and he realized the truth of it.”

“You mean he was in some way connected with the deaths of my father and sister?”

Simon nodded. “In a way. You might say that his existence was the cause of the deaths on the River Road yesterday morning.”

“Is it all over, then?”

“Just about, my friend. As soon as the police get here, we’ll start back to Maple Shades. There’s only one Judge of Hades left now. He will, perhaps, be interested to learn of these developments.”

And then the police were on the stairs, and all around us; one man was asking us questions while another was taking pictures, and two others were gently lowering the body of Conrad Mara to the floor …

And so we went back, for the last time, to the town of Maple Shades, across the state line, and along the highway lined with the maple trees that gave the place its name, at some time in the forgotten past when pioneers in wagons and explorers in boats had first made their way into this wilderness.

I thought about it, and I thought about my own early days in Maple Shades, and about my father. And Stella.

The cab deposited the three of us in front of the funeral parlor, and we stood watching the twinkling lights of the town by night. And suddenly I knew that this was no longer my home and these were no longer my people. My home was back in New York, among the glistening towers and the narrow streets, as I always thought it had been.

“Simon,” I said, “we’re not going back in there. Shelly and I aren’t waiting around for the funeral; we’re going back to New York tonight.”

They both looked at me as if I was crazy, but I knew it was perhaps the only sane thing I’d said in the last twenty-four hours.

“Let us walk together for a ways,” Simon said quietly. “Shelly, you wait for us inside.”

And we walked, down the main street of the town that was no longer mine, passing the people I no longer knew, and the unfamiliar stores and all the glistening tributes to suburban living.

“I don’t want to know,” I told him finally, as we walked. “I thought it was the most important thing in the world to me, to know which of them it was. But I don’t want to know any more. I don’t want it to be my sister, and I don’t want it to be my father. I don’t want you to tell me which one it was.”

“I’m sorry,” Simon Ark said, “but the truth will always come out. If I don’t tell you now, some day—some night—next week or next year, you’ll want to know. You’ll be warm and happy, but suddenly you’ll be sorry you didn’t know.”

We’d passed through the main part of town now, and we faced the million-dollar county hospital rising silently in the night before us. “Come,” Simon said. “We will pay a visit to Frank Broderick and clear up the attack on him last night. It is a good starting place for my story.”

I said nothing, and followed him into the hospital. A nurse informed us it was after visiting hours, but in his usual mysterious manner Simon talked his way past her. And upstairs, on the top floor of the building, we found Frank Broderick’s room at the end of a long white hall.

“How are you getting along, Frank?” I asked as we entered. He gave a start and then relaxed when he saw who it was. “Can’t complain,” he replied. “I’ll be out of this place in the morning.” He was sitting up in a chair, reading a book, and we could see his taped ribs through the open front of his pajamas.

“We’ve come to clear up the attack on you,” Simon said.

“Oh? Did they catch the guy who did it?”

“Not exactly,” Simon replied slowly.

“Well …?” Frank Broderick looked at me with a puzzled glance that I transferred to Simon.

“Judge Mara killed himself in Cincinnati this afternoon,” Simon stated.

And then, before our eyes, Frank Broderick’s face and composure seemed to crumble. He sank deeper into the chair and watched us through thin terrified slits of eyes.

Simon Ark stepped to the room telephone and asked the operator for the number of the funeral home. After he got it he called the number and requested to speak to Hallison James.

“Mr. James? This is Simon Ark. I’d like you to come over to the hospital right away. Frank Broderick would like to make an official statement about the auto accident.”

Then he hung up, and the three of us faced each other, and Frank Broderick said through clenched teeth, “Damn you, how did you find out …?”

It was very quiet in that room, and we might have been the only three people in the universe just then. But we weren’t. District Attorney Hallison James was on his way, and Simon Ark and Frank Broderick knew what that meant, even if I didn’t.

“How did you know?” Frank Broderick repeated.

“Stella’s body was thrown through the windshield when the two cars hit,” Simon explained, in a voice that hardly rose above a whisper. “Did you ever hear of the
driver
of a car being thrown through the windshield in an accident? No, you never did, because the steering wheel is in the way.”

The words were a roar in my brain, and I tried to cling to the wall for support. What was he saying? What did Simon mean?

“Stella went through the windshield because she
wasn’t
driving, because she was sitting next to the driver at the time. And once I knew that, I asked myself who had been driving. I asked myself who would have been driving your car if Stella wasn’t, and of course there was only one possible answer. You, Frank Broderick! It was you who saw Richard’s car coming down the River Road in the morning’s dawn. It was you who aimed your car at his, disregarding your wife’s frantic screams, and then leaped to safety just before the two cars hit!”

Frank Broderick mumbled something deep in his throat, and I faced him as a stranger. It had not been my father who caused the accident; it had not been Stella. It had been this man before me.

“Perhaps,” Simon continued, “it was necessary to knock your wife out, to stop her struggles. Perhaps it was necessary to bash in your father-in-law’s head after the accident to make sure he was dead. But in any event, you still had time to pull yourself into a ditch or a field before the farmer reached the scene. And then you made your way back to your house so you could be there when the sad news came to you. But of course your leap from the death car hadn’t been completely without injury. You landed badly, and cracked a couple of ribs. You couldn’t very well just show up at a doctor’s office or the hospital with them—not right after the accident. So you waited until last night and then made up the story of the attack to account for them.

“Cracked ribs are an odd thing to get from an attacker. I’m surprised I was the only one who fitted them in with the accident. Of course I already suspected you, and was looking for some confirming injury. It would have been truly amazing if you had made that last minute jump without suffering some sort of injury.”

Frank Broderick was beginning to get back his composure. “That’s a good theory for a detective story, but you’d never convict me in court on that evidence. What was my motive?”

“You’ve hated Richard for years,” Simon replied. “And as for your wife, her death was simply necessary to your plan.”

“Exactly! I hated Richard for years! So why should I hate him any more on yesterday morning?”

Simon Ark sighed. “I have no time to play games with you. We both know the truth, and it will do you no good to deny it. You killed the judge yesterday morning because he had just discovered that Conrad Mara was your father …”

And of course I knew it all then. The pieces all fell into place, and I saw all of Simon’s reasoning as clearly as if he’d spoken it. Conrad Mara had left a ten-year-old son in Havana, back in 1937, and Stella had first met Frank in the West Indies. And even my wife had remarked how familiar Mara’s face looked on that campaign poster.

I could picture Frank Broderick, or Frank Mara, meeting my sister in Havana—perhaps even seeking her out—and taking another name because he knew of his father’s aberration. And then he married Stella, and came to Maple Shades himself, still keeping his real identity a secret against the day when scandal would certainly ruin his father. My own father became his hated enemy; and then—as he’d feared—the ruin came down upon Conrad Mara’s head, somehow, just before the last election.

And so he was a son alone, his father an outcast who fled the town perhaps on some dark night. And he lived with his secret; he lived with it until my father received word from the private detectives in Cuba of the father-son relationship.

I knew what my father would have done then. I knew what he’d said over the telephone yesterday morning when he’d called Frank. He wouldn’t have a daughter of his married to such a man’s son!

And as he’d raced through the morning toward their house, Frank set out to meet him, on the River Road. My sister would have tried to stop him, but she would have been powerless. And then, with his car speeding along the River Road at sixty miles an hour, he would have seen my father’s car, coming the other way. He would have headed right toward it, hunting it down like an animal, and jumped free at the last second, leaving his wife and father-in-law to die in the crash, to silence those accusing lips forever.

And Conrad Mara, reading the newspaper account, had realized the truth, and hanged himself …

The door opened, and Hallison James was in the room with us. “What is it?”

Frank Broderick, who was really Frank Mara, rose from his chair. “No,” he screamed silently. “No …”