He shrugged. “Maybe with high-priced lawyers you could beat the rap eventually, but it would take time, years possibly, because I would be persistent in my charges. And since workers are pretty spooked about working on the terraces, it’s also possible that it would come to a standstill while you’re involved in a legal tangle.”
“This is extortion,” Merrihew said in a harsh voice. “What are you after? What do you want?” At that moment Constance strolled into the room, dressed exactly the way she had been on his first visit, in a pale blue sweater, black pants, running shoes.
Merrihew made a strangled sound in his throat as she seated herself in the wing chair and regarded him calmly. “You suspected a deadly enemy from the start,” she said. “You were right. There is such an enemy and he has no intention of allowing you to finish the terraces. Who killed Lorna, Mr. Merrihew?”
He gave a violent start, started to rise, then fell back into the chair, watching her as if hypnotized. “It was an accident,” he whispered.
“So they decided. People were taking pictures of her on the cliff and no one saw another person up there. No one else was in the pictures that were taken. But you saw him, didn’t you? You knew. When you look into the mirror, Mr. Merrihew, who looks back at you? Your sister saw him, didn’t she? Then the message was sent and you received it just fine. A man killed in an avalanche of dirt, another in a fall. Just like your father, asphyxiated under an avalanche of grain, and your wife, killed in a fall. You understood the message perfectly well, didn’t you? And you started to keep watch. To protect the workers? To keep your enemy away from them? Or, more likely, to make certain the terraces moved ahead in spite of his efforts. But he prevailed time after time, and you didn’t see a thing, did you? In fact, aren’t there short periods when your memory fails, when you have blank spots? You suspected Alzheimer’s, or said you did, but those aren’t the symptoms, Mr. Merrihew. Your memory failed when there was a fatal accident near you. Your enemy was responsible for those deaths, and he will keep causing them as long as the project continues and you are nearby. He wants you to understand that he is doing it. He does not intend for you to complete the terraces and achieve the satisfaction you yearn for. He has decided you don’t deserve it.”
She was speaking in a conversational tone, cool and reflective, regarding him steadily as she talked. And he continued to watch her as if entranced. “Who did you see on the cliff by Lorna?” she asked then, not changing her tone at all.
“My father,” he whispered. “I saw him.” He shook himself abruptly, then said in a rasping voice, “It was an accident! Everyone knows it was an accident! The trapdoor was secure when I checked it!”
Constance stood up and walked from the room, and Merrihew turned toward Charlie. “It was an accident,” he said in a choked voice. He looked as if he had aged ten years since entering the house.
Charlie shrugged. “I suggest that you set up a corporation or something, turn over enough assets to complete the terraces, rename them, and bow out all the way. Stay away from that site. Call them the Fall Creek Terraces, or the New Inca Terraces, anything else, and keep the hell away from there.”
Merrihew didn’t move for a moment, then he jerked up from the chair unsteadily and regarded the tape recorder at hand with abhorrence. He picked it up and threw it as hard as he could into the fire. He walked like a very old man as he went toward the foyer and the front door without another word. He didn’t give a glance at the check on the table.
Constance joined Charlie at the window. He put his arm around her shoulders and together they watched Merrihew make his way to the limousine, get inside, and leave in it.
Charlie was thinking of the conversation they had had in the motel two nights before. “You have to break him,” she had said. “Take charge and keep it, disorient him. You saw the kind of control he has, not a twitch, not a flicker of his eye, as still as a statue. We have to get through that barrier for it to work, and you can do it.” When he protested that it was pointless, Merrihew was a killer and a kidnapper, and they couldn’t prove a thing against him, she had said, “He knows and he has to admit to himself that he knows. Let me take care of him my way, Charlie. The terraces are all he has to live for.” And today they had watched a defeated man leave their house.
At the window, when the limousine had vanished from sight, he squeezed her shoulder and murmured, “He’s his own worst enemy.” And, he thought, she scared the bejesus out of him at times.
She looked at him with bright interest. “But you don’t have a guilty conscience.”
And that was the scariest thing of all, he added to himself.
And If He Sees His Shadow
by Jeremiah Healy
Jeremiah Healy, author of 13 novels featuring the protagonist of this story, John Francis Cuddy, also writes legal thrillers under his pseudonym Terry Devane. The third and latest Devane novel, A Stain Upon the Robe, features attorneys Mairead O’Clare and Sheldon Gold as they become involved in Boston’s priest-rape crisis. The book has been optioned by Flatiron Films, and “Terry”/Jerry will be the American Guest of Honour at the 2004 Toronto Bouchercon.
I parked my aging Honda Prelude on a side street, and while the six-paneled wooden door in the slumping brick building displayed the right address, I had a feeling that the insurance agency probably fronted on the main drag. Turning the corner, I could see tarnished chrome handles standing out from two glass doors, the words THOMAS G. FLAHERTY — INSURANCE — ALL KINDS emblazoned in peeling silver letters at eye level. I took a breath and pulled on the closer handle.
A string of sleigh bells rang out. We were a lot closer to Easter than Christmas, though, so I assumed the low-tech warning system was a year-round thing.
Inside the doors were clear glass partitions, what seemed a secretarial or clerical area to the right, a more executive office to the left. The wood paneling on the wall was separating at the ceiling, and the only light at seven P.M. came from one of those green-shaded, fluorescent desk lamps everybody had when I first entered insurance investigation after Vietnam.
Tommy Flaherty rose from behind the desk and lamp. If I hadn’t known this was his place of business, I’d have been hard pressed to recognize him.
When Tommy had worked as a claims investigator for me at Empire Insurance, he’d been slim with a full head of wavy Black-Irish hair and a certain flair for fashion and humor. The man who came around the desk tried for the old smile, but there was no spark to it, and the weight he’d added and the hair he’d lost couldn’t save the stained business shirt and poorly knotted tie.
“Hey, John Francis Cuddy,” Tommy said, a damp right hand pumping mine. Concave steel splints kept his left ring finger straight. “Jeez, it’s good to see you.”
“Same, Tommy.”
“Sit, sit.” He waved me to a client chair, padded with good leather once, but either so old or so neglected that little puffs of white stuffing oozed from cracks in the seat cushion. Tommy brought a bottle of Jim Beam out of his bottom desk drawer, two short glasses already resting on some papers in front of him.
One of the glasses looked as though it had been there awhile already. “Just a splash for me, Tommy.”