“Liz won’t let me.”
“No one’s going to rat on poor Jason,” announced Liz, “not around me.”
Dad looked coldly from Liz back to Kirsten, then said, “Well, now you’re both going upstairs. We’re all going. He’s holding a hostage in your room, you see, until you come back.”
“But—”
“He won’t hurt you!” Cathy proclaimed suddenly. “It’s me he really wants to hurt, and since I’m here now...”
It was an interesting procession once we got going, anyway, with Dad in the lead telling Kirsten what she had to do, followed by Liz, then Cathy, then myself as backstop. Along the third floor hallway we went slowly and in dead quiet. Dad made Kirsten rattle the door a little and then say, “Where’s that key?” before she unlocked it, but he was the one through first, straight at the danger, as usual, with his eyes wide open, shielding everyone else.
For various reasons, I couldn’t see things from where I stood, but the scenario was described to me like this: Mom was sitting calmly at a kitchen table a few feet in and to the left, while Jason stood to the right and farther back with the stud gun pointed at her, only he looked different from what everyone expected because he’d shaved his head and beard and dropped the earring. The three girls crowded in after Dad, but when Jason saw Kirsten peeking out and then Cathy standing openly to one side, he did what I think of as the inevitable but unpredictable thing, as if he’d been waiting there the whole afternoon, going through all the permutations in his head until he found the single workable response. He raised the nail point sticking out of the stud gun and braced it against his right temple.
The revolver Dad had halfway drawn was useless against that particular move. Even Mom’s deadeye marksmanship, now that she could pull out her target pistol, was useless too; the angle made it impossible for her to shoot away the gun and not kill Jason.
“Jason, no!” I heard Cathy cry. “Please! I’m sorry!”
Cathy’s presence must have been what threw Jason off. He knew Dad was coming eventually because Mom had told him so; he was expecting Kirsten; Liz was a familiar friend, the one who’d hidden him out secretly through his last finals, I found out later.
But when he saw his cousin there, crying and crying out, he was up against an eventuality he hadn’t considered and wasn’t prepared for. So all at once there were tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice. “I’ve... you just stay back, Cath. I’ve already done this to one person.”
“But the person was already cold and dead,” Dad responded. “For days. And you’re not.”
Mom and Dad exchanged a quick, communicative look and Dad nodded. “Berkham’s. Right.”
None of the rest of us understood, except possibly Cathy, but no explanation came because things started happening too fast.
“Oh, Jason! Why don’t you stop whining and grow up!” Kirsten said in a whiny tone from behind Dad’s shoulder.
Jason tried to answer her, speaking through Dad: “You don’t need to hide, Kirsten. Honestly. This was never for you. I just wanted you to pay attention! I wanted someone to pay attention! So now... you’re all paying attention!”
“Don’t!”
“No!”
Liz and Cathy seemed to shout together before Cathy stepped much nearer and Jason ordered, “Stay Back, Cath! I mean it!”
“Shoot me, then, Jason, if you have to, but don’t shoot anyone — that’s best! Nothing’s that bad if you didn’t—”
“Get away, I said! And — and everyone, all of you, move! Over by Mrs. Carr! Do you understand! All of you!”
So then came a mass shuffling toward Mom, with more cries and protests, followed by Jason circling around toward the still open apartment door with the weird pistol held up to his head. “Mr. and Mrs. Carr?” he said finally. “I’m sorry for all the trouble. I really am. Liz? You’re a good friend. Cathy — Cathy, I love you. Honestly.” A long pause. “You’re the last, I guess, Kirsten. And you can go straight to hell for all I care now.”
Only as he stood there making farewell speeches with his back to the open door, I slipped up behind him from outside in the hall — I was the backstop, remember — and sort of slapped the gun away from his head. It flew off and bounced around without firing, and I had Jason’s arms pinned before he could even respond.
And so that’s pretty much how Steve Carr turned out not to be an entire flop in his first real detective case — brawn far more than brain.
Dad has fudged quite a few cases over the years to keep what Mom calls “the innocent guilty” from facing authority, but mostly when no serious harm was done. In this affair, the car fire alone was serious enough, not just mischief, and so we four, Dad, Mom, Cathy Lindner, and I, escorted Jason to the Appleton police station, where he turned himself in, basically in a state of shock but looking relieved. Cathy promised to post bail as soon as it could be managed, and seeing the two of them say good-bye in front of a bunch of strangers made me decide I didn’t know enough about the ins and outs of human feelings.
After that we had dinner in a good but noisy restaurant, then the folks and Cathy checked into a motel with me tagging along, and finally, at about nine that night, we all got together for the full explanation which, as usual, only Dad knew.
“The crucial point, Steve,” he began, addressing me because I was being a little querulous about the delay, “was the point we didn’t know. Jason all of a sudden called up Cathy at work on Monday morning and announced that he was coming back up here to hunt for a job. All right, fine. But why? He and Cathy were—”
“We weren’t really speaking,” she said. “I was mad at him and he was mad at me, and we both felt guilty about... various things. It was mostly my fault, though, because I never gave him a chance. I was so hard on him, I’m ashamed. I wanted him to hurt a little, the way I had, before we made friends again.”
“Yes,” said Mom. “Except that, in his state of crisis he took it as absolute rejection.”
“Anyway,” I grumbled, “somehow he hatched a crazy plot. So what is this mysterious point I still don’t know?”
“It’s why he was fired summarily on Sunday night from his job at Berkham Truck Rentals. He wasn’t scheduled to work Friday or Saturday — or Sunday either — but he was called in unexpectedly that last morning. It wasn’t to do his usual work, which was cleaning vehicles overnight.”
Mom took over then: “It was a holiday weekend, you see, and there had also been that horrible storm. So not many trucks were under lease, but breakdowns among those on the road were doubtless far more numerous statistically and probably more difficult to confront with an understaffed holiday crew. That much was evident.”
“And so,” Dad picked up, “our guess was that Jason had been called to go out as a helper on some kind of emergency roadside service. Since I knew that the motto of the company was ‘We Specialize,’ I was expecting something a little different when I drove over there this morning, but I honestly didn’t see anything that gave me a clue. Lots of vehicles geared to specific use, sure, but nothing that connected to the problem.
“When I asked about Jason, though, the manager on duty practically shouted me out of the place. I yelled back that by not opening up he might just be allowing a crime to be committed, and he said that if one did happen he wasn’t responsible — and only if it did would he talk to the police. A real nice fellow, and logical too.”
“So you came up here still not knowing why Jason was axed.”
“The official explanation was ‘carelessness,’ but consider the time sequence. He and Cathy had argued and weren’t speaking all Friday and Saturday; he was called in for emergency work Sunday morning and got back to the Lindner house in the middle of the night. At ten or so on Monday morning he rented the stud gun, putting up two hundred dollars in cash; an hour later he called Cathy to say he was heading up here. Late Thursday and again Friday morning he tried to call Cathy collect, meaning he was out of money and desperate to talk. Friday afternoon he posted the announcement about the car fire—”