Sleep of the Innocent (20 page)

Horvath stiffened. “Look,” he said, leaning one long thin finger on Sanders's chest, “I don't run places like that. Understand? You can bring your family here. Your mother. Dinner. Dancing if you want. No girls. No funny stuff. The bar is run clean; the staff is clean. I watch these things.” His face was growing pink with agitation. Sanders gently put aside the hand that stabbed at him. “Okay,” Horvath said, as if conceding some great point, “when Mr. Neilson bought the place it had a lousy reputation. And there was a lot going on for a couple, three years. That was one reason he hired me. We got a new bartender; I put Addie there,” and he paused to nod at the sleepy-eyed waitress, “in charge of the dining room. We redecorated, updated the kitchen, everything. This is a clean place.” The unaccustomed color began to recede from his face. “You saw for yourself. The money, inventory, everything—it's all checked three times. Me, Randy, Mr. Neilson. We all did it.”

“But you don't actually count the money in the till.”

He shook his head. “That's Randy's job. Except on his days off, Addie does it. That's usually Sunday and Monday, when business is light. Not much money comes through here, though. Mostly credit cards.” He pulled together his cloak of professionalism. “What can we do for you this evening? It will be getting busy pretty soon, so—”

“Just a cup of coffee and some quiet corner where we can talk to Mr. West. He's expecting us.”

Randy West sat in Horvath's crowded office surrounded by piles of paper, rapidly entering data into the computer on the desk. He looked up wearily as they all crowded in: Horvath, Sanders, Dubinsky, and Addie with two cups of coffee. She set them down on the desk, gave West a poisonous glare, and swept out, dragging Horvath in her wake.

“So what's your scam here?” asked Dubinsky genially. “Besides screwing the waitresses out of their tip money. Maybe we should warn you that the books from this place smell like last week's stew—you might want to start working on a good line for the boys from the solicitor general's office.”

Randy West pulled himself upright, quivering with virtue. “What do you mean, scam,” he said. “Listen, I got no scam, okay? What do you think I am, some kind of genius? I just enter figures, check the math, count the bills. That's all. Mr. Neilson set up the system for this place with the chef and Horvath. I just do the numbers.”

“You know what I think you are, Randy? I think you're someone who embezzled half a mil out of a parts manufacturer over three years and never got caught until the owner died. That's smart, Randy. You're good. I have trouble imagining you running a clean operation with all that talent.”

“Okay, so I did. So I got caught. I did five years for that, and I'm out.”

“Did Mr. Neilson know about your talents, Randy? And how you used them?”

“Sure he did.” West was looking pale. He kept flipping a pencil in his fingers, pushing it down on a stack of computer printout, and flipping it again. It made a soft, irritating sound. “You can't keep something like that from someone. Mr. Neilson was willing to give me a chance. Jesus! I don't know what I'm going to do now. No one else is going to hire me to do this kind of work. I was really grateful—but I put in a hell of a lot of hours for him. Working nights and all.”

“What did Neilson have on you?” asked Sanders quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“He must have had something on you, just to make sure you stayed in line. To keep your fingers out of the cash. He liked having things on people, didn't he, Randy? He was that sort of guy.”

West smiled, a big open smile, and swallowed hard. “You guys are great kidders, eh? Real sense of humor. You don't need to have something on a bookkeeper who's been in for embezzling. Think about it. I needed this job. Real bad. And I dunno where you get this stuff about Mr. Neilson. I never heard any of it.”

“You remember Mrs. Neilson's birthday party, Randy? Maybe you helped Mr. Neilson organize it. It was here. Lots of people, lots of booze, everything. Costume party, wasn't it?”

The big open smile returned to his face. “A birthday party for
Mrs
. Neilson?” He looked puzzled, very puzzled, and shook his head. “Gee, I don't remember anything about that. Mr. Neilson had parties here sometimes, but Mrs. Neilson never came. I don't even know what she looks like. She's one of these real quiet ladies, I guess. Homey type.”

“Where does the cash go after you've finished counting it?” snapped Sanders.

“To the bank,” said West, opening his eyes in candid innocence. “Oh, you mean after that. Well, strictly speaking, Mr. Neilson didn't own the place. It's owned by a corporation. NorthSea owns fifty percent of the corporation. Anyway, I deposit the receipts in a special NorthSea account, the bills get paid out of that, and the auditors make sure the corporation gets what it's supposed to get.”

“Who owns the other fifty percent?”

The smile came out again. “Who knows? Could have been Mr. Neilson under another company name. He had pretty smart accountants—very good at setting up things to minimize taxes and stuff like that. All legal, of course. But very complicated.”

“Then who is the guy who came here to talk to you, who seems to think he owns part of the place?” By now, Sanders's voice was very soft.

“Are you kidding? There's no one like that. Who told you that? You find him for me. I'd like a good laugh right now. Look, I got to get this done before the evening rush starts. If you don't mind.”

“We'll be back, Mr. West,” said Dubinsky, rising to his full height and leaning over the little bookkeeper. “You could just try to remember the name of your friend who thinks he owns the place. Because next time we come, we could be feeling a little less patient than we are now.” His voice was gently caressing.

Randy West started entering figures with furious haste onto the numeric keypad.

Annie had slept most of Tuesday and Wednesday, waking to eat, a little more each time, and obediently drinking whatever liquids Rob thrust at her. Her conversation was limited to monosyllables; either she was too weak to talk or she had no taste for it. Once he had helped guard a witness who spoke only Arabic, sitting, the two of them, in a hotel room, one shift on, one off, for four days. That had been bad. This was worse. Then he had been able to watch television, dreary as it could be sometimes, to pass the time. And he had felt that the man would have talked to him if he could have. Now he could only pace around the echoing room. When she was sleeping, he ventured outside in the sun, shaking himself like a bear come out of hibernation, stretching and stamping his feet and taking great gulps of outdoor air. He was impatient for her to get better, to tell him exactly what had happened, but he felt a strong reluctance to pry.

On Thursday he was awakened by a thumping sound, looked up, and saw her hopping across the room, leaning heavily on pieces of furniture and the wall as she maneuvered her way into the bathroom by herself. When she emerged again, he was leaning against the wall outside the door.

“Tired?”

“Not that tired. I can manage,” she said irritably.

“Why not let me help you back,” he said, picking her up again and carrying her to her bed. She felt more solid, less likely to crack if he grabbed her too hard. And heavier. “How about some real breakfast this time?” he said, as he dropped her down.

She nodded silently and turned to look out the window.

After breakfast he went out into the woods and began to look for a suitable piece of timber. He found a pine branch, relatively straight, ripped green off its tree by some violent winter storm. He had already picked up a hunting knife and a whetstone from the garage; he settled himself in the sun on the deck and began to turn the branch into a usable cane. Stripped of its bark and sanded a little, it gleamed palely in the sun. He purloined a heavy-duty rubber tip from a leg of the barbecue and slipped it on. He sacrificed one of his cotton T-shirts to make a padded handgrip on the top, fastened on by four neatly placed tiny nails. He returned the tools to the garage, walked back into the cottage, and solemnly placed the cane at the foot of her bed.

She stared at it. “It's for you,” he said at last. “A cane. Crutches would have been better, I suppose, but they're harder to make.”

“Thank you,” she said at last. “That's nice of you.” Her voice was dull and unenthusiastic.

He was nettled. He wasn't expecting long speeches of gratitude, but he had spent a hell of a long time making that thing. He reverted to silence. Two could play that game. He fetched the medical bag that Mike had put together for him and began the daily routine of changing her dressings. The gunshot wound was not beautiful—the scar was red, thick, and jagged—but it had almost healed; the skin around it looked clean and healthy. There was no point in replacing the dressing, he decided.

The foot had always been a different story. Scarlet, inflamed, oozing, infected, for days it had looked unstoppable, intent on eating away her flesh. Only massive willpower had kept him from gagging whenever he uncovered it. But that day, as he carefully peeled the old bandage off, small areas of thin reddish new skin were visible around the edges of the wound. In his excitement he forgot his punctured self-esteem.

“It's getting better,” he said, as he cautiously placed a new pad where the old one had been and then bandaged over it. “A lot better. All of a sudden.”

She nodded. “Thank you for the cane,” she said. “It will help.”

On Friday she sat up most of the morning. She had insisted on negotiating the potentially hazardous path to the bathroom entirely by herself, leaning on her pine cane, and the sense of independence it gave her seemed to have cheered her up. She still only spoke when he goaded her into it, and he was beginning to realize how very dependent on human conversation he was.

In a celebratory mood, he opened a bottle of beer, some smoked oysters and other oddities he found in the Buchanans' well-stocked cupboards, and set out a small hors d'oeuvre plate on the bed before lunch. Annie was drinking fruit juice mixed with soda water—something she seemed to have acquired a taste for in her delirium—and looking soberly out at the lake. In the eight or nine days since they had arrived, the ice had almost disappeared, even from the shaded coves. The only trace of winter was the occasional patch of snow trapped under thick growth in the woods.

“You know,” he said. “People keep telling me you're a singer. Why don't you sing?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Even my mother used to sing sometimes—under her breath, and not very well, but she sang. When she was happy, I suppose, or concentrating on something.”

“The only thing I concentrate on when I'm singing,” said Annie coldly, “is singing.”

“I suppose I deserved that. So sing something. Concentrate.”

“What would you like?” she asked. As if he had suggested that she make him some lunch. “Opera? Pop? Folk moderne? Folk genuine? Folk artsy? English madrigal style? Lieder? Italian or French art song? Take your pick. If there's one thing I got, it's repertoire. I am not equally good at all of it, but you pays your money and you takes your chances.”

He shook his head. “Sing something you like—something you feel like singing,” he said, and walked over to the window, in case she was put off by having him three feet away.

“Then I shall sing ‘Down by the Salley Gardens,'” she said. “Nothing fancy. It's Yeats, you know, and very pretty.”

She straightened up a bit, settled her shoulders, and sang, “Down.” Her voice quavered, lost, and began searching for the note she started with, turned husky, and died away. He stared at the lake, burning with embarrassment, unable to face her. For chrissake, she was absolutely awful. He should have known better.

“Sorry,” she said calmly. “It's been a while. Wrong key. Drastically wrong key.” This time “Down” was pitched higher—much higher. It grew and then faded softly, gathered strength, and the figure of the first line soared upward. He turned back in astonishment. Her voice, clear and rich, and yet totally unornamented, filled the room. He held his breath, terrified now that it could not last, that the hoarseness and quavery pitch would return. Almost without wanting to, he came closer and then crouched by the coffee table to bring himself down to her level. Here he realized that she didn't see him at all. She was singing to a huge audience somewhere out across the lake, and he looked down at the floor, making himself a part of that audience. She toyed lightly with every playful, heartbreaking word of the little song until, with a wry grimace, she came to “But I was young and foolish, and now . . .” She paused. “—am full—” Her voice hoarsened, cracked and stopped again.

He looked up, surprised. The tears that were supposed to end the song were pouring down her face. She shielded herself from his gaze with her right hand and clumsy, plastered, left wrist, sobbing now, helpless to control her grief. He got up and walked over to the bed, sat down beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders.

“Don't touch me,” she gasped, and then began to cry even harder.

He got up again and headed for the bedroom, reached into his overnight bag, and extracted a large, clean linen handkerchief, elegant, expensive, monogrammed—another little offering from his stepmother. “Here,” he said, once he was sitting down beside her again. “This works better than plaster of Paris.” He opened up the handkerchief and thrust it into her good hand. Now she buried her face in it, still sobbing.

He waited for a minute, two minutes. “I don't know if it will help,” he said. “But you have a magnificent voice. I was overwhelmed.” It didn't seem to help. She continued to cry, each sob turning into a huge gasping intake of breath.

He couldn't stand watching her so unhappy and comfortless, with no one to turn to but him—and he was clearly the last person she wanted to depend on. “Annie,” he said helplessly, “Annie, darling, please—” and, astonished at himself even as he did it, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. She stiffened and then let herself fall against him, burying her face in the harsh wool of his sweater. He wanted desperately to lift that unhappy face, to kiss the tears from her eyes and cheeks, to murmur mad things in her ears, and now it was his turn to hold himself still and in check. It was one thing to comfort a weeping woman who was sick and in distress—anyone could do that; it was quite another to transport a wounded, helpless creature forcibly to a remote spot in the woods and then to rain kisses on her. There were nasty terms for that—many of them in the criminal code—and in his innocence or stupidity he had never thought this out. “Christ,” he murmured into her tangle of black hair, “this is one hell of a complication.”