The Devil's Only Friend (33 page)

“I'm Jonah Walker, ma'am.”

“Pleased.” She held the Old Man's hand carefully in her own, stroked the ragged veins and bulbous knuckles as if she really loved him.

Lloyd's eyes were closed. His skin was ghostly white and draped close to the bones and cartilage of his skull. Most of his meat had gone away, and not much more than gristle and bone was left. His nostrils and his lips were pink and moist, and tears clung to the white lashes of his eyes.

“I know you think I brought those men to harm you, Mr. Caudill. But I didn't—I wouldn't—they just arrived of their own accord. I know you hate my sons.”

“That's not worth going over,” I said.

“Can't we be civilized?”

“You can have a go at it,” I said, “but it's too much to remember for me. I'll just be regular.”

She had tried with lipstick and makeup to approximate what she had looked like thirty years earlier. She knew enough to wear modern clothes to cover what time had done to her body, but she could not well hide her face.

“I'd like to hear you say you don't mean to harm my boys.”

Lloyd's eyes were open, but there was nothing to show that he could understand what was happening.

“I don't have any business going after them,” I told her. “But I don't lay off the possibility that I'll need to mop the floor with either one.”

“You're a tenderhearted man, Mr. Caudill, masquerading as a brute.”

“No.”

“Your father was a dear as well,” she said. “But he didn't feel the need to be cruel.”

I moved within an arm's reach of her.

“He was as handsome as you are, I'd say, though obviously not so damaged by wear.”

“Estelle,” croaked Lloyd.

“She's had it,” I said. “Now she's too old to have it anymore.”

“Please, Caudill. Please.” It was a chore for Lloyd to pull enough air into his flaccid to make the words.

Estelle Hardiman rose up from her chair. “I'll go, Jasper. It isn't good for you to be upset.”

“Don't, Estelle. Don't.”

“I'll come back tomorrow.” She leaned delicately over to place a kiss on Lloyd's bony forehead.

He closed his eyes and smiled as she did it, and the breath in his lungs rattled like a cat's purring.

“Can't we start anew, Mr. Caudill? Can't we make a fresh start from here?”

“I'm not willing,” I said.

She seemed genuinely hurt. “Someday, Mr. Caudill, you'll understand. I'm sure you will. Good-bye for now, Jasper.”

She walked out of the room with some dignity. I watched her as she went, as her crisp dress and her hair and her figure grew hazier and softer to my eye. Walker's reserved gaze seemed to accuse me; I had no real cause to be so harsh with the woman. I could see that the murder of her daughter Jane still cut her deeply, and I could believe that she might once have loved her husband Roger. A kind word from me might have helped her. But as with my mother, I always held back from that kind of gesture. It made me a coward, a moral coward.

Old Man Lloyd fluttered his fingers to draw Walker and me closer to him. Estelle Hardiman's perfumed odor still whispered at the bedside, not yet wiped over by the sickly stench of the cut flowers.

“Mr. Walker … we haven't properly met, have we?”

“No, sir. I'm Jonah Walker.” He bowed his head for the old man.

“Caudill—this Federle? Can you tell me—”

“I can't say I understand it,” I said.

“It's the war,” said Lloyd. “That's what it does.”

“Roger Hardiman was never in any war,” I said. “And look at the kind of man he was.”

“That's hurtful, Mr. Caudill. You speak ill of the dead.”

I don't think Lloyd was crying, really, but liquid brimmed over his pink eyelids and he worked his thin lips back over his teeth. Someone had done a poor job of shaving his slight whiskers.

“I've done bad things,” I said. “I don't excuse myself from it all.”

“Do you believe that the Lord is just, Mr. Caudill?”

Walker made a motion to say something, but thought better.

“I have to believe it, don't I?”

Lloyd managed a smile. “That's the boy,” he said.

“What will happen to the company now, Mr. Lloyd?” Walker asked.

“Oh, I shouldn't worry over it. Perhaps my daughter and my daughter-in-law…”

The Old Man's eyes had never lost their peculiar yellow color. He trained them on me and lifted a finger to call me closer still.

“Estelle did know your father. It's true.”

“It seems like everyone knew my father,” I said.

“It's a pity, a pity.” He drew up his strength and seemed almost to glare at me. “You never really knew Jane, did you, Mr. Caudill? How could you have known her? That's the pity. She was a wonderful girl. I knew her when she was a baby.”

I pictured her again in my mind: the one time I had seen her in life, bright, open, and sure of herself. Then I saw her as Bobby and I had found her, spattered with her own blood.

“I had thought— In his younger days I thought my Whit was a shining star, such a perfectly charming boy. I wouldn't want to hurt you, Caudill. I'm nearing the end of my days.”

“I wish I could have been more use to you,” I said.

“It's all right, Mr. Caudill,” Lloyd said. “You don't need to worry anymore. Your work here is finished.”

I felt like I should thank him or curse him, or at least tender my best wishes, but it was as if I was speaking to a man who had already fallen from a great height. What could I tell him? He had only to make the best of every moment in his life, and he had tried to do so. Now that it was over, there was only the formality of waiting for his breath and his heart to cease.

“If you'll see James as you go,” Lloyd said.

“I will.” I turned away from them and stood for a moment to allow Walker to make his courtesy.

“I will pray for you, Mr. Lloyd,” he said. “My wife and I will pray for you.”

“Yes,” said Lloyd.

Walker and I stepped away from him. It was enough to think about, enough to occupy my mind for another year if I let it. We went out the door and closed it after us, and then I turned to enter the cubbyhole that James used for his papers and his desk during the Old Man's dying.

“Mr. Caudill, I have some papers for you. Mr. Lloyd has dictated some information about your father and his involvement with Frank Carter. He wanted you to have it. Some of this is possibly incriminating, and so—”

James was offering me a packet of papers about as thick as his polished thumbnail was wide. It had been sealed with a button of pressed wax and a gold-threaded ribbon.

“Mr. Lloyd thought you might want to know the truth.”

“The truth,” I said. “You've read this?”

“I took the dictation myself. There is no other copy, and no one else has ever been privileged to—”

“I'll take it,” I said. “When I'm old I'll read it.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“What will you do now?”

James looked surprised at the question. “There will be a great deal to attend to,” he said. “I'll continue in my capacity until my services here are no longer useful.”

“It's all right for me to keep the Chrysler?”

He thought for a moment. “I can't see any reason why you shouldn't.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank Mr. Lloyd.”

“No, I mean to thank you, James,” I said. “Thank you. Thanks for everything.”

“I haven't done anything more—”

“You've done a good job here for the Old Man,” I said.

“You should stop interrupting, Mr. Caudill,” said James. “Polite conversation is a skill like any other.”

“It's too late for me.”

“No,” he said. “You're a gentleman at heart.”

I took the packet of papers from him and tucked it under my arm. Then I walked out and picked up Walker as he was admiring a photograph of Jasper Lloyd and Mae West against a backdrop of some desert scene, with foothills in the distance.

“Are we finished?”

“I guess so, Walker.”

“It's a shame, isn't it?”

We said our good-byes to Pickett and got ourselves clear of the cold stone mansion. Walker and I did not need to speak during the long trip back to his apartment. The Chrysler puttered quietly along and I was left to pass the time lost in thought.

CHAPTER 31

Some parts of the city and the area girdling the city are foul with smoke and runoff from the plants. In some places downriver, where the houses are thick together like a checkerboard, the air is so thick with soot and grit that it crunches on your teeth; it gathers on the sheets of your bed as you sleep. You can think of the way water drains all of it soon or late, how even farmers have manure that runs off in a big wash of a storm sometimes. Blood spilled on bare ground soaks in and gets to be something else. It grows up into the sap of trees. They've got a system in the cities to funnel all that washes away down through pipes and tunnels underneath it all. They try to control it. But nothing ever just disappears. Traces of it gather below the ground or at the bottom of a lake, and sometimes it comes back to the surface to affect things or to blow things apart.

Where I grew up on the east side, we always called it Belle Island. When we had the fare, we rode on streetcars right to the foot of the bridge and walked over to spend the whole day exploring the place. If you knew how to do it, you could hop on without paying the fare. Belle Isle is stuck right there close to the Detroit side of the big river, and the water on either side is deep enough to make you think of it like a moat—like a place protected from the ugly life of the city that could be seen from almost any point on the island. We felt like kings, Tommy and I and our cohort, and we wished for a castle on the island. We thought that somehow we might own the place someday, when we'd conquered the city, when we could claim our spoils.

It never happened. Tommy was gone. Our father was gone. Our mother …

Eileen had invited me for a picnic to meet her beau—Eugene was his name. He was decent enough. Though his mustache put me off, and though his eyes seemed to bulge too much, he seemed sensible. His own wife had died during a bank robbery in Oklahoma ten years earlier—right before his eyes, he said, not two months after they had been married. He had taken out a mortgage on a nice home in Highland Park, he kept a pair of German short-haired retrievers in a kennel in the back.

“That breeze doesn't quit, does it?” Eileen said. “It's making a mess of me.”

“It keeps the bugs away,” Eugene said. “If you go up into the trees, you'll get eaten alive.”

“Sure,” I said. “It's fresh air.”

“Mother seems to be enjoying herself.”

My mother and her friend Paulette sat on a bench looking over the water. They wore scarves and sweaters and housedresses, and seemed happy just to sit.

There were dozens of small boats and canoes tacking back and forth across the water on the Detroit side, and larger sailboats and freighters moved up and down the river in the deeper channel on the other side of the island.

“We should try to make it a regular thing,” said Eileen. “We should have a picnic every Sunday. Look at mother kicking her legs like a school girl.”

“Sure. It seems like a good idea. But you can never tell what will come up.”

“You could get a regular job any day of the week, Pete,” Eugene said, his little mouth pulling into a natural smile. “We've got men pulling eighty hours every week. If you start in, you'll make a decent salary right away, and you can arrange to take Sundays off.”

“All right, Gene, I'll think it over.”

“You could get a job anyplace. It doesn't have to be over here.” He waved to the stacks of the Jefferson plant, not far up the river. “It's a good time to get in somewhere.”

“It's so far away, isn't it? We can sit out here without being afraid.” Eileen looked over the spread she had made for the picnic: roasted chicken, greens, potato salad. “It's almost hard to imagine how the fighting could be.” She glanced over at me and smiled. “Pete knows about fighting.”

“It's a nice little island here,” I said. I was thinking about Whitcomb Lloyd and Ray Federle. “We should enjoy our peace while we have it.”

“You're right, Pete. You're sure right about that.” Eugene picked up a greasy leg and pulled it apart politely with his little teeth, wiping his mustache clean after every bite.

“It will be summer soon,” Eileen said. “They say the Japanese are on the run.”

“They ought to be,” Eugene said. “With what we're sending after them.”

“The Germans, too.”

I lifted my iced tea as a toast. “Here's to the end of it all,” I said, “whenever it may come.”

They lifted their cups and drank and seemed happy enough.

Eventually, before any lull or silence in the conversation could let lurking darkness break into our day, I wandered off toward the water and sat on a hard bench watching the gulls cry and fight over bits of food. I felt the damage that had been done to my ears; the wetness in the air seemed to swell the inside of my head, and I heard all the sounds of the water lapping and children playing like it came through a cardboard tube. But it didn't bother me overly.

Since Lloyd's secretary James had given it to me, I had kept the packet of papers inside one of the cubbyholes of the Chrysler—unopened. My father had been a good man. He had been bad at times, but from what I knew about the way he had lived his life, he had on the whole tended toward the good.

For some years after it had happened, I had believed that he had killed himself out on Fighting Island. I wondered now, why had I ever been willing to believe such a thing? This was the sharpest kind of betrayal, really, to show your back to your own family, and there wasn't anything I could do to take back or change the wrongness of what I had done to his memory. Worse, now, I could feel from my own bad urges that maybe my father had really thought of ending his own life. He had chosen to go on living, and I knew now that he must have fought hard against those men who roped him up on that tree.