It didn’t take a detective to discover how Haney had come in the back way — through the broken fence of the building next door, across the back courtyard, and up the rear fire escape to break the hallway window.
“How’d he get in the apartment?” I asked Kaye as we sat in the hall at Charity Hospital the following morning, while Charley slept in the recovery ward. Dark circles around her eyes, she looked pale as she rocked Donna slowly. Thankfully, the baby was asleep.
“I heard scratching against the door and thought it was the cat, the black one that’s always around.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No. He just shoved past me and shot Charley. Then he stood there looking at me.”
A nurse came out of Charley’s room and said, “He’s awake now.”
I didn’t go in. I went back home to look up my landlord.
Charley Rudabaugh spent six days in the hospital. When I brought him home and walked him past my apartment door to the rear apartment, he balked until Kaye opened the door and smiled at him.
“What’s going on?”
Kaye pulled him in and I stood in the doorway, amazed at what she’d done with the place in a few days. It came furnished, but she’d brightened up the place, replacing the dark curtains with yellow ones. Donna, lying on her back in a playpen in the center of the living room, was trying to play with a rubber duck, slapping at it and gurgling.
It took Charley a good minute to take in the scene as Kaye eased up and hugged him.
“Here’s the deal,” I told them over coffee at their kitchen table. “The landlord gave us a break on the place. I’m fronting y’all the money. You don’t have to pay me back, but if you insist, you can, but get on your feet first.” I’d just put any money they gave me in a bank account for Donna’s education.
Then I explained about how it really wasn’t my money. It had been a gift, and I was sharing it. “Everyone needs help sometimes. And you two have had a bad time recently.”
I could see Charley was still confused but not Kaye, beaming at him, paying little if any attention to me. I thanked her for the coffee and stood up to leave. Charley’s eyes narrowed as he asked, “I understand what you say, but it’s just hard to figure you ain’t got some kinda motive. Everybody does.”
I started for the door, turned, and said, “Sometimes things are exactly as they appear to be.”
Kaye moved to her daughter and began humming that same song, repeating the line in French again, “le coeur a...”
“What is that?” I had to ask.
“It’s the reason you’re doing all this.” She smiled at me, looking like a schoolkid in her white shirt and jeans. “An old French saying that goes, ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing’.” She smiled down at her baby.
It wasn’t until later, as I sat in my mother’s rocker looking out the open French doors of my apartment, out at the dark roofs of the Quarter with the moon beaming overhead, that I heard my mother’s voice back when she was young, a voice I haven’t heard for so long, as she sang, “le coeur a...”
Then it hit me.
The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing. Kaye hadn’t meant just me. It cut both ways. She’d also meant Haney, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing up.
Poor Dumb Mouths[1]
by Bill Crenshaw
“I tell you that which you yourselves do know,
Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me.”
“Same deal, Adam. Five bucks an hour, ten hours tops. Anything over ten’s a freebie.” McMorton thumbed the folder with a thumb unnaturally soft and pink, a thumb streaked from pinching the moist end of his unnaturally brown and foul cigar.
Adameus Clay took the folder from him delicately and with some disgust, though it didn’t show on his face. Disgust rarely showed on his face. He almost always appeared to be smiling, even in his sleep. It was a physiological quirk that he had often regretted, though he had to admit that in the long run it had probably done him more good than harm. But the run had been long indeed, and just when the end was in sight, five years until early retirement, along came the twins and...
“Adam. You hearin’ me?”
“Of course, Marvyn.”
“Well, don’t space out on me, hear? I mean, brother-in-law or no brother-in-law, you space out, you’re through. Jiminy. Like I was saying, this one shouldn’t be more than a four hour job. An hour with the beneficiary, an hour on the reports, an hour writing it all up. I’m giving you an extra hour for fumbles.” McMorton leaned far back in his swivel chair, which Clay thought a dangerous thing to do, given all that bulk, and somehow grinned around the cigar clamped between yellow-tinted teeth. Clay knew what was coming because the same thing came at this time every time. “But this one’s so easy,” said McMorton, “that even a PhD could do it.” Then he laughed, the one sound that by itself could twist Clay’s face into a reasonable facsimile of disgust. “Well, good to see ya and all, Adam, but I’m a busy man, busy man. I don’t get paid to sit on my duff like you high foreheads do.”
Clay bit back a torrent of abuse, thinking particularly of Kent’s torrent against the wormy Oswald in Act II of King Lear. To all appearances, however, he was still smiling vaguely. He forced his next words out with difficulty. “Uh, Marvyn, I need more money?” Somehow it came out as a question.
“Yeah, so do I. Five bucks. Period.”
“You pay other claims investigators more.”
“Other claims investigators? You an investigator? Look, Adam, old bean, old chap, I’m doing you a favor, right? Gift horse, right? I mean, I’m going out on a limb here. Ever hear of nepa, of nepa...”
“Nepotism.” Clay shuddered at the implications of the word and closed his eyes against the sight of the primary implication and its fat cigar.
“Right. I could lose my job.”
Clay could see that McMorton was about to laugh again, so he stood up quickly. “Well, thank you anyway, Marvyn. My best to Ruth. I’d better be...”
But it was too late, and it was beyond laughter and into guffawing. “Of course, if you find fraud here,” — McMorton broke up completely for some long seconds — “fraud here, Acme Home and Casualty will pay you fifteen percent of a hundred and eighty G’s. That’s... that’s...”
“Twenty-seven thousand dollars,” murmured Clay wistfully.
“Yeah.” Guffaw turned into bellow. “Fat chance.”
Which was the term Adameus Clay used to refer to his brother-in-law from that moment on.
Clay felt guilty all the way to the hospital.
He should be grateful, he knew, and he felt guilty that he wasn’t more grateful, but it was hard to be grateful to Fat Chance. He had even calmly and rationally drawn up a list of all the reasons that he should be grateful — his brother-in-law was providing extra money, was letting him work at a job for which he had no training, had not let age stand in the way. But for every reason to be grateful, there was an equally compelling reason to punch Fat Chance’s potato nose — you call that money, no one needs training for this, age deserves some respect.
“Oh, well,” he sighed as he eased into the parking lot, “make virtue of necessity.”
But it was hard to make virtue of this. He hated what he was about to do. After carefully wiping all traces of Fat Chance’s smeared thumbprints off the folder with a handkerchief that he promptly threw away, Clay had scanned the summary report for main points. Auto accident six weeks ago at dusk. Bridge abutment. One dead, Susan Cannon, good but not bestselling writer of inspirational novels. One survivor, husband and beneficiary, Henderson Cannon. Multiple injuries — broken bones, dislocations, contusions, lacerations, punctures. A man severely injured and not yet out of the hospital, a man undoubtedly still grieving, a man to whom a hundred and eighty thousand dollars probably meant nothing at this point in his life. And here I am, he thought, about to go through the pointless and cruel exercise of quizzing him about the accident just so the proper forms can be filled out in double triplicate. Clay had trouble just talking to strangers, but this kind of invasion...
1
Originally published in AHMM, May 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Bill Crenshaw, used by permission of the author.