The Matlock Paper (8 page)

“Where’s the almighty discretion, Doctor?” chuckled Beeson, sitting on the floor in front of the couch, reaching occasionally for one of his wife’s legs.

“You’re better friends than I thought you were.”

“Just the
beginning
of a beautiful,
beautiful
friendship.” The young wife slowly reclined on the couch and giggled. She seemed to writhe and put her right hand on her husband’s head, pushing his hair forward.

Beeson laughed with less control than he had shown earlier and rose from the floor. “I’ll get the magic then.”

When Beeson walked into his study, Matlock watched his wife. There was no mistaking her action. She looked at Matlock, opened her mouth slowly, and pushed her tongue out at him. Matlock realized that one of Seconal’s side effects was showing. As was most of Virginia Beeson.

The second dosage was agreed to be three, and Matlock was now easily able to fake it. Beeson turned on his stereo and played a recording of “Carmina Burana.” In fifteen minutes Ginny Beeson was sitting on Matlock’s lap, intermittently rubbing herself
against his groin. Her husband was spread out in front of the stereo speakers, which were on either side of the turntable. Matlock spoke as though exhaling, just loud enough to be heard over the music.

“These are some of the best I’ve had, Archie.… Where? Where’s the supply from?”

“Probably the same as yours, old man.” Beeson turned over and looked at Matlock and his wife. He laughed. “Now, I don’t know what you mean. The magic or the girl on your lap. Watch her, Doctor. She’s a minx.”

“No kidding. Your pills are a better grade than mine and my grass barely passed inspection. Where? Be a good friend.”

“You’re funny, man. You keep asking. Do I ask you? No.… It’s not polite.… Play with Ginny. Let me listen.” Beeson rolled back over face down on the floor.

The girl on Matlock’s lap suddenly put her arms around his neck and pressed her breasts against his chest. She put her head to the side of his face and began kissing his ears. Matlock wondered what would happen if he lifted her out of the chair and carried her into the bedroom. He wondered, but he didn’t want to find out. Not then. Ralph Loring had not been murdered to increase his, Matlock’s, sex life.

“Let me try one of your joints. Let me see just how advanced your taste is. You may be a phony, Archie.”

Suddenly Beeson sat up and stared at Matlock. He wasn’t concerned with his wife. Something in Matlock’s voice seemed to trigger an instinctive doubt. Or was it the words? Or was it the too normal pattern of speech Matlock used? The English professor thought of all these things as he returned Beeson’s look over the girl’s shoulder. Archie Beeson was suddenly a
man warned, and Matlock wasn’t sure why. Beeson spoke haltingly.

“Certainly, old man.… Ginny, don’t annoy Jim.” He began to rise.

“Pinky groovy …”

“I’ve got several in the kitchen.… I’m not sure where but I’ll look. Ginny, I told you not to tease Jim.… Be nice to him, be good to him.” Beeson kept staring at Matlock, his eyes wide from the Seconal, his lips parted, the muscles of his face beyond relaxation. He backed away toward the kitchen door, which was open. Once inside, Archie Beeson did a strange thing. Or so it appeared to James Matlock.

He slowly closed the swing-hinged door and held it shut.

Matlock quickly eased the drugged girl off his lap and she quietly stretched out on the floor. She smiled angelically and reached her arms up for him. He smiled down, stepping over her.

“Be right back,” he whispered. “I want to ask Archie something.” The girl rolled over on her stomach as Matlock walked cautiously toward the kitchen door. He ruffled his hair and purposely, silently, lurched, holding onto the dining room table as he neared the entrance. If Beeson suddenly came out, he wanted to appear irrational, drugged. The stereo was a little louder now, but through it Matlock could hear the sound of Archie’s voice talking quietly, excitedly on the kitchen telephone.

He leaned against the wall next to the kitchen door and tried to analyze the disjointed moments that caused Archie Beeson to panic, to find it so imperative to reach someone on the telephone.

Why? What?

Had the grand impersonation been so obvious? Had he blown his first encounter?

If he had, the least he could do was try to find out who was on the other end of the line, who it was that Beeson ran to in his disjointed state of anxiety.

One fact seemed clear: whoever it was had to be more important than Archer Beeson. A man—even a drug addict—did not panic and contact a lesser figure on his own particular totem.

Perhaps the evening wasn’t a failure; or his failure—conversely—a necessity. In Beeson’s desperation, he might let slip information he never would have revealed if he
hadn’t
been desperate. It wasn’t preposterous to force it out of the frightened, drugged instructor. On the other hand, that was the least desirable method. If he failed in that, too, he was finished before he’d begun. Loring’s meticulous briefing would have been for nothing; his death a rather macabre joke, his terrible cover—so painful to his family, so inhuman somehow—made fruitless by a bumbling amateur.

There was no other way, thought Matlock, but to try. Try to find out who Beeson had reached
and
try to put the pieces of the evening back where Beeson might accept him again. For some insane reason, he pictured Loring’s briefcase and the thin black chain dangling from the handle. For an even crazier reason, it gave him confidence; not much, but some.

He assumed a stance as close to the appearance of collapse as he could imagine, then moved his head to the door frame and slowly, quarter inch by quarter inch, pushed it inward. He fully expected to be met by Beeson’s staring eyes. Instead, the instructor’s back was to him; he was hunched over like a small boy
trying to control his bladder, the phone clutched to his thin scrunched neck, his head bent to the side. It was obvious that Beeson thought his voice was muffled, indistinguishable beneath the sporadic crescendos of the “Carmina Burana.” But the Seconal had played one of its tricks. Beeson’s ear and his speech were no longer synchronized. His words were not only clear. They were emphasized by being spaced out and repeated.

“… You
do not
understand me. I want you to understand me.
Please
, understand. He keeps asking questions. He’s not
with
it. He
is not with it
. I swear to Christ he’s a plant. Get hold of Herron. Tell Herron to reach him for
God’s
sake. Reach him,
please!
I could lose everything!… No. No, I can tell! I
see
what I
see, man!
When that bitch turns horny I have
problems
. I mean there are appearances, old man.… Get Lucas.… For Christ’s sake
get
to him! I’m in
trouble
and I can’t.…”

Matlock let the door swing slowly back into the frame. His shock was such that thought and feeling were suspended; he saw his hand still on the kitchen door, yet he felt no wood against his fingers. What he had just heard was no less horrible than the sight of Ralph Loring’s lifeless body in the telephone booth.

Herron.
Lucas Herron!

A seventy-year-old legend. A quiet scholar who was as much revered for his perceptions of the human condition as he was for his brilliance. A lovely man, an honored man. There had to be a mistake, an explanation.

There was no time to ponder the inexplicable.

Archer Beeson thought he was a “plant.” And now, someone else thought so, too. He couldn’t allow that. He had to think, force himself to
act
.

Suddenly he understood. Beeson himself had told him what to do.

No informer—no one not narcotized—would attempt it.

Matlock looked over at the girl lying face down on the living room floor. He crossed rapidly around the dining table and ran to her side, unbuckling his belt as he did so. In swift movements, he took off his trousers and reached down, rolling her over on her back. He lay down beside her and undid the remaining two buttons on her blouse, pulling her brassiere until the hasp broke. She moaned and giggled, and when he touched her exposed breasts, she moaned again and lifted one leg over Matlock’s hip.

“Pinky groovy, pinky groovy …” She began breathing through her mouth, pushing her pelvis into Matlock’s groin; her eyes half open, her hands reaching down, stroking his leg, her fingers clutching at his skin.

Matlock kept his eyes toward the kitchen door, praying it would open.

And then it did, and he shut his eyes.

Archie Beeson stood in the dining area looking down at his wife and guest. Matlock, at the sound of Beeson’s footsteps, snapped his head back and feigned terrified confusion. He rose from the floor and immediately fell back down again. He grabbed his trousers and held them in front of his shorts, rising once more unsteadily and finally falling onto the couch.

“Oh, Jesus! Oh, sweet Jesus, Archie! Christ, young fella! I didn’t think I was this freaked out!… I’m far out, Archie! What the hell, what do I
do?
I’m
gone
, man, I’m sorry! Christ, I’m sorry!”

Beeson approached the couch, his half-naked wife at his feet. From his expression it was impossible to
tell what he was thinking. Or the extent of his anger.

Or was it anger?

His audible reaction was totally unexpected: he started to laugh. At first softly, and then with gathering momentum, until he became nearly hysterical.

“Oh,
God
, old man! I said it! I
said
she was a minx!… Don’t worry. No tattle tales. No rapes, no dirty-old-man-on-the-faculty. But we’ll have our
seminar
. Oh, Christ, yes! That’ll be some
seminar!
And you’ll tell them all you picked
me!
Won’t you? Oh, yes! That’s what you’ll tell them, isn’t it?”

Matlock looked into the wild eyes of the addict above him.

“Sure. Sure, Archie. Whatever you say.”

“You better believe it, old man! And don’t apologize. No apologies are necessary! The apologies are mine!” Archer Beeson collapsed on the floor in laughter. He reached over and cupped his wife’s left breast; she moaned and giggled her maddening, high-pitched giggle.

And Matlock knew he had won.

He was exhausted, both by the hour and by the tensions of the night. It was ten minutes past three and the choral strains of the “Carmina Burana” were still hammering in his ears. The image of the bare-breasted wife and the jackal-sounding husband—both writhing on the floor in front of him—added revulsion to the sickening taste in his mouth.

But what bothered him most was the knowledge that Lucas Herron’s name was used within the context of such an evening.

It was inconceivable.

Lucas Herron. The “grand old bird,” as he was called. A reticent but obvious fixture of the Carlyle campus. The chairman of the Romance languages department and the embodiment of the quiet scholar with a deep and abiding compassion. There was always a glint in his eyes, a look of bemusement mixed with tolerance.

To associate him—regardless of how remotely—with the narcotics world was unbelievable. To have heard him sought after by an hysterical addict—for essentially, Archer Beeson
was
an addict, psychologically if not chemically—as though Lucas were some sort of power under the circumstances was beyond rational comprehension.

The explanation had to lie somewhere in Lucas Herron’s immense capacity for sympathy. He was a friend to many, a dependable refuge for the troubled, often the deeply troubled. And beneath his placid, aged, unruffled surface, Herron was a strong man, a leader. A quarter of a century ago, he had spent countless months of hell in the Solomon Islands as a middle-aged infantry officer. A lifetime ago, Lucas Herron had been an authentic hero in a vicious moment of time during a savage war in the Pacific. Now over seventy, Herron was an institution.

Matlock rounded the corner and saw his apartment half a block away. The campus was dark; aside from the street lamps, the only light came from one of his rooms. Had he left one on? He couldn’t remember.

He walked up the path to his door and inserted his key. Simultaneously with the click of the lock, there was a loud crash from within. Although it startled him, his first reaction was amusement. His clumsy, long-haired house cat had knocked over a stray glass or one of those pottery creations Patricia Ballantyne had inflicted on him. Then he realized such a thought was ridiculous, the product of an exhausted mind. The crash was too loud for pottery, the shattering of glass too violent.

He rushed into the small foyer, and what he saw pushed fatigue out of his brain. He stood immobile in disbelief.

The entire room was in shambles. Tables were overturned; books pulled from the shelves, their pages torn from the bindings, scattered over the floor; his stereo turntable and speakers smashed. Cushions from his couch and armchairs were slashed, the stuffing and foam rubber strewn everywhere; the rugs upended,
lumped in folds; the curtains ripped from their rods, thrown over the upturned furniture.

He saw the reason for the crash. His large casement window, on the far right wall bordering the street, was a mass of twisted lead and broken glass. The window consisted of two panels; he remembered clearly that he had opened both before leaving for the Beesons. He liked the spring breezes, and it was too early in the season for screens. So there was no reason for the window to be smashed; the ground was perhaps four or five feet below the casement, sufficient to dissuade an intruder, low enough for a panicked burglar to negotiate easily.

The smashing of the window, therefore, was not for escape. It was intended.

He had been watched, and a signal had been given.

It was a warning.

And Matlock knew he could not acknowledge that warning. To do so was to acknowledge more than a robbery; he was not prepared to do that.

He crossed rapidly to his bedroom door and looked inside. If possible, his bedroom was in more of a mess than the living room. The mattress was thrown against the wall, ripped to shreds. Every drawer of his bureau was dislodged, lying on the floor, the contents scattered all around the room. His closet was like the rest—suits and jackets pulled from the clothes rod, shoes yanked from their recesses.