“Yes sir. Thanks very much.”
“You okay, Gunny? You need help or anything?”
“No sir. I’m fine. You told me what I needed to know.”
“Good luck to you, Sergeant. Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi, sir.”
He turned to Russ. “Good man. But goddammit, now where we going to go?”
“What about—to dinner?” Russ said.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Bob.
They went to the motel restaurant and sat down. Bob ordered a cheeseburger, Russ the tuna salad. But Bob wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. Russ had never known a man quite like this: he just locked himself off, still, almost in repose, his face dark and wary, his eyes alert, but a definite No Trespassing sign impressed in the set of lines. He only pretended to eat. Something about Chardy or Frenchy, or that lost war and the men it devoured, was dogging him, Russ guessed.
“Uh, I have an idea,” said Russ.
“What?”
“I said, I have an idea.”
“Lord spare us,” said Bob.
“Frenchy Short is gone; you’re not going to get anything out of the Agency, that’s a given. So we have to move from what we’ve got. Our first principle: your father knew something. That’s what got him killed. Well, my thought is that we should locate whoever is left of the people he spoke to on the last day. Not casually, but his friends. Your mother is gone. Sam, we spoke to Sam, he didn’t say anything. But didn’t he mention—”
Bob nodded.
“Miss Connie,” he said. He remembered her too, from all those years ago: an imposing, beautiful woman, in her fifties, who came from the East and was married to and widowed by Rance Longacre, the county aristocrat. She had a son: he died young too. She had a kind of doomed quality about her: everybody she ever knew or loved died. He had some memory coming home on leave back sometime in the early sixties, before the war, that someone—his mother possibly?—had told him she’d left and gone back. No, his mother was dead then. Sam. Sam knew her.
“She’d be in her nineties now,” Bob said, “that is, if she’s alive, if her mind hasn’t gone, if we could find her, if she would talk.”
“Maybe Sam would know where she went.”
“He would have said something. I have the impression—I don’t know why—that there may have been something between them but it ended badly. He never talks about her.”
“Um,” said Russ, digging into his salad.
“Damn, boy, don’t you ever eat meat?”
“It isn’t good for you.”
“Hell, it didn’t do me any harm. I’m fifty goddamned years old and I may live another two or three days if I’m lucky.”
He smiled finally, and Russ saw that he was joking again.
“But it’s a good idea,” he continued. “It’s a damned good idea. Maybe Sam will know, wouldn’t that be nice. We’ll call him tonight. Maybe he’s found that coroner’s brief or whatever it was.”
They got back to the room and called, but there was no answer, and Russ tried ten more times.
“I wonder where that old bastard is,” Bob said.
“Maybe he’s got a new girlfriend,” Russ said.
Finally, in the morning, somebody answered at Sam’s.
The voice, vaguely familiar, confounded Bob.
“Sam? Uh, I’m trying to reach Sam Vincent.”
“Who is this, please?” asked the man.
“Ah, my name is Bob Lee Swagger and—”
“Bob! Bob, it’s John Vincent, Sam’s eldest son.”
John was a physician in Little Rock, Bob knew; and he also knew the tone of voice, that hushed, exhausted tone that communicated in its remoteness the bad news.
“Is something wrong?”
“Bob, Dad died last night.”
“Oh, God,” said Bob, who really thought Sam would live forever, like some magnificent old black-maned lion howling toothlessly at the moon. He felt the news as a physical pain, a loss of breath and stability. He sat down on the bed.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
“You know, Dad was slipping in and out of gears. Well, last night, he went to his office late on some fool errand or other, something in the way his mind worked. He was wearing my mother’s bathrobe and no socks and two different shoes. He slipped and fell at the top of the stairs and broke his neck in two places. At least it was clean, and over in an instant.”
“John, I owe my life to your father.”
“He was a damned good man but you couldn’t tell him anything. I pleaded with him to move in with us; there was plenty of room. He could have gone to any of his children. You know there was money for a nurse, a home, anything, but Dad was set in his ways.”
Bob could say nothing.
“They found him at seven this morning. I got a call at seven-thirty and just got here. Lord, I don’t know what got into him. He tore his house apart and he tore his office apart. He was looking for something.”
Bob realized he was looking for that coroner’s document.
“I just saw him a day or two ago. He was big as life and twice as mean.”
“You know, he loved your father. He thought your father was the best man that ever lived. And he loved you, Bob. I’m glad you got to spend some time with him before it happened. The funeral will be in a few days, Friday, I think. And after, we’ll hold a family wake. We’d really like to see you.”
“I’ll be there,” said Bob.
He sat on the bed. Paint it black. Hello, darkness. Death was no stranger, he’d seen it come in many forms and shipped it out more than any man ever should. But this one hit him particularly hard. He sat and looked at the wall until the wall went away, replaced by a great nothingness.
In time, Russ came in from his room, dressed and ready to go, and asked what was wrong and Bob told him, then retreated back into his emptiness.
Nothing seemed to happen. Bob just sat there, lanky and still and sealed off. Who could tell what was going through his mind? Russ thought of Achilles in his tent, sulking, nursing his anger into a fury so pure nothing could stand before it.
“The funeral?” Russ finally asked.
“No,” said Bob. “Not with people hunting us. That’s sure where they’d look.”
He shook his head. Then he said: “They took my father. Then they took his body, his memory. Now they’ve taken Sam.”
“You think—”
“You saw Sam. Whatever he was, he was not infirm. He did not have balance problems. He would not fall down stairs. Someone pushed him. Because again, he found something out. He was looking for that coroner’s report or something, he found it, someone was watching him, he had to be stopped. Some hero sent him flying down those steps.”
Russ saw where they were: the place called paranoia, deep into the culture of conspiracy, where everything was a part of the plot, evidence of the sinister tendencies of the universe.
“He could have just fallen. He was an old man.”
“He didn’t just fall. Some men fall. Not Sam. You think I’m nuts? You think I’m making all this up? Tell me, sonny: they was hired gunmen with submachine guns trying to fry our asses in Oklahoma, wasn’t they?”
“Yes, it’s true. But to—”
“Where’d that goddamn deputy who was dogging us go? We was dogged by that deputy. Then he disappears and the gun boys come onto the scene. So where’s the deputy go? We won’t go to the funeral but we will go to the wake. You nosy around, you see if anybody saw that deputy. That’s your job. But he’s just a little man. There’s someone behind this thing, you mark my words, watching us, setting all this up. And I will by God find him and face him down and we’ll see who walks away.”
“Yes sir,” said Russ, seeing that no headway could be made against the iron of Bob’s rage.
“But the funeral ain’t till Friday. Today’s Tuesday. Today’s the day you find Connie Longacre. You got that?”