"Where you left her—locked in the hall closet. She got out after she heard you leave. And to think she had to find Gus like that. Poor Ceil…no one should have to see something like that. Especially her. She's been through enough." He slammed his fist against the Jag's mahogany steering wheel. "If I could make you pay—"
"When did she phone the cops?"
"Don't worry about the cops. I paid you and that puts me in this as deep as you, so I won't be saying anything."
Jack was getting a little tired of Oscar Schaffer. "Answer me, dammit. When did she call the cops?"
"Right before calling me—around three A.M."
Jack shook his head. "Wow. Three hours…she spent more than three hours on him."
"She? She who?"
"Your sister."
"Ceil? What the hell are you talking about?"
"When I left their house last night, Gus was on the living room floor, trussed up with two broken legs—out cold, but very much alive."
"Bullshit!"
Jack gave him a cold stare. "Why should I lie? As you said, you're not going to dime me. And someday when you have time you should try to imagine how little I care what you think of me. So think hard about it, Oscar: why should I lie?"
Schaffer opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"I left Gus alive," Jack said. "When I was through with him, I opened the door to the closet where I'd put your sister, and took off. That was a little while before midnight."
"No," he said, but there was no force behind it. "You've got to be lying. You're saying Ceil—" He swallowed. "She wouldn't…she couldn't. Besides, she called me at three, from a neighbor's house, she'd only gotten free—"
"Three hours. Three hours between the time I opened the closet door and the time she called you."
"No! Not Ceil! She…"
He stared at Jack, and Jack met his gaze evenly.
"She had Gus all to herself after I left."
Slowly, like a dark stain seeping through heavy fabric, the truth took hold in Schaffer's eyes.
"Oh…my…God!"
He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel and closed his eyes. He looked like he was going to be sick. Jack gave him a few minutes.
"The other day you said she needed help. Now she really needs it."
"Poor Ceil!"
"Yeah. I don't pretend to understand it, but I guess she was willing to put up with anything from a man who said he loved her. But when she found out he didn't—and believe me, he let her know in no uncertain terms before he pulled the trigger on her."
"Trigger? What—?"
"A long story. Ceil can tell you about it. But I guess when she found out how much he hated her, how he'd wanted her dead all these years, when she saw him ready to murder her, something must have snapped inside. When she came out of the closet and found him helpless on the living room floor…I guess she just went a little crazy."
"A little crazy? You call what she did to Gus a little crazy?"
Jack shrugged and opened the car door.
"Your sister crammed ten years of payback into three hours. She's going to need a lot of help to recover from those ten years. And those three hours."
Schaffer pounded his steering wheel again. "Shit! Shit! Shit! It wasn't supposed to turn out like this!"
Jack got out and slammed the door. Schaffer leaned over the passenger and looked up at him though the open window.
"I guess things don't always go according to plan in your business."
"Hardly ever," Jack said.
"I gotta get back to Ceil."
Jack listened to the Jag's engine roar to life. As it screeched away, he headed for Abe's.
4
"Occam's what?"
"Occam's Razor," Abe said.
Jack had picked up half a dozen raisin bran muffins along the way. He'd also brought a tub of Smart Balance margarine in a separate bag. Abe had spread the sports section of the morning's Times on the counter and the two of them were cutting up their muffins. Parabellum hopped about, policing the crumbs.
"Kind of flaky, these muffins," Abe said. "They fresh?"
"Baked this morning." Jack didn't want to tell him they were low fat.
"Anyway, Occam's Razor is named after William of Occam, one of the world's great skeptics. And he was a skeptic back in the fourteenth century when it could be very unhealthy to be a skeptic. Such a skeptic he was, one of the popes wanted his head. Occam's Razor is something your friends in that chowder club—"
"SESOUP," Jack said.
"Whatever—it's something everyone of them should memorize by heart, and then take to heart."
"How do you memorize a razor?" Jack said.
Abe stopped sawing at the muffin and stared at him. He raised the knife in his hand.
"Occam's Razor is not a cutting instrument. It's an aphorism. And it says, 'Entities ought not to be multiplied without necessity.'"
"Oh, well, I'm sure that will make everything clear to them. Just tell them, 'Necessity cannot be multiplied unless you're an entity,' or whatever you said, and all talk about antichrists and aliens and New World Orders and Otherness will be a thing of the past."
"Why do I bother?" Abe sighed, glancing heavenward. "Listen carefully to the alternate translation. 'It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer."
"Fewer what?"
"Assumptions. If you've got two or more possible solutions or explanations for a problem, the simplest, most direct one, the one that requires the fewest assumptions, tends to be correct one."
"The shortest distance between two points, in other words."
"Something like that. Let me illustrate: You and I are walking down a country road in Connecticut, and all of a sudden we hear lots of hoofbeats around the bend. When we reach the bend, however, whatever was making those hoofbeats is now out of sight, so we must make assumptions on what they could have been. What's the most logical assumption?"
Jack shrugged. "A horse, of course. What else?"
"What else, indeed. But I bet that some of your friends in Paella—"
"SESOUP."
"Whatever—would probably imagine a herd of zebras of wildebeests, am I right?"
"Or UN invaders on horseback…or hoofed aliens…or the legions of hell…"
"That far out we won't go," Abe said. He'd finished slicing his muffin in half and was reaching for the bag with the margarine. "Wildebeests will serve fine. But you see my point? We're in the country in Connecticut where a lot of people keep horses. I should expect wildebeests? No. Horses require very few assumptions.
Wildebeests, however, require assumptions like someone has been importing the creatures and keeping their existence secret—I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any stories in the paper about a black market in wildebeests. So Occam's Razor demands we assume, until proven otherwise, that the noise was made by horses and—"
Abe had pulled the Smart Balance from the bag and was staring at it like a wino contemplating a bottle of O'Doul's.
"What on earth is this?
"It's a kind of margarine."
"Margarine? So? What happened to my Philly? Or my nicely salted Land o' Lakes?"
"This is supposed to be good for your heart."
Outwardly Jack remained casual, but inwardly he cringed, waiting for the explosion. This was sacred ground. Not counting a few friends like Jack, Abe didn't have a hell of a lot in his life beyond his business and his food.
Yeah, he had every right to eat himself into an early grave, but Jack had just as much a right to refuse to shorten that trip.
"My heart? Who should be worried about my heart?"
"You," Jack said.