Jordan turned away from the chart and amplified his last statement. “The CCG,” he said, “is unfortunately honest.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Jordan,” I said. “Because I’m on my way to join them.”
He raised an eyebrow, but seemed otherwise unruffled by my news. “Tim,” he said, “are you sure you’ve thought this out?”
“What do you think?”
“I think there may be one or two points you haven’t considered,” he said.
“Such as?”
“If you turn on your friends,” he said, “they’ll turn on you. Remember, you’re just as implicated as anyone else. You’ve withheld evidence of crimes.”
I shook my head. “You’re wrong. I can’t be called on that after I’ve stopped withholding. The minute I turn my files over to the CCG, I’m clear.”
“If you do this, Tim,” he said, “you’re through in Winston, I hope you realize that. No one will be able to trust you any more. And you have to be trusted to stay in business.”
“Given the choice between living and being trusted,” I told him, “I’ll pick living every time.”
He shrugged. “All right,” he said. “You’re going to be obstinate. I don’t know why you waited to talk to me. There’s nothing I can say more than what I’ve already said.”
“You can say,” I told him, “that you guarantee to have the killer behind bars within the hour. You can say that Ron Lascow will be released one phone call from now.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do either, Tim,” he said. “They’re contradictory. Whether you like it or not, Ron Lascow is the man.”
At this point, it was obvious that the only thing for me to do was go away. He was harping on Ron, and letting me know that he wasn’t worried by anything I might do. Either he was lying, and he’d managed to wangle a deal directly with the CCG after all, or his trip to Albany had resulted in his reaching somebody high enough in the state government to offer him protection from the reformers.
“All right, Jordan,” I said. “They asked me to talk with you. I’ve talked with you.”
“Yes, you have,” he said blandly.
“I think you ought to know,” I said, “that my files are in a safe place. If anything happens to me, a friend of mine will turn them over to the CCG anyway.”
He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “you’re perfectly safe.”
While he was talking, there was a faint rap on the door. He frowned, called an order to come in, and the maid appeared in the doorway, white-faced and wide-eyed. “Mr. Jordan,” she whispered. She glanced at me, and bugged her eyes at her employer some more. It was plain they both wanted me to leave. So I left.
Twenty-Four
I raced through the house toward the front door, wondering what that maid had been so upset about and hoping it didn’t have anything to do with me. And I was all the way into the room where Alisan Reed was sitting crying before I even noticed she was there. I said, “Whoops!” and back-pedaled.
She looked up at me, her patrician face marred by tear stains and frown lines and a shiny nose, and she said, “Tim Smith! What are you doing here?”
“Getting nowhere with your father-in-law,” I said.
“Him.” The first pronoun insult I’d ever heard.
“What’s the matter, Alisan?” I asked her. We’d never known each other very well — she wasn’t a Winston girl to begin with, but something Marvin had brought back from college with his diploma — but it would have been ridiculous to call her Mrs. Reed at that moment.
“After the kind of son he produced in Marvin,” she said bitterly, “you’d think he’d be grateful there weren’t any more children in the line.”
I looked at her closely, and now I saw that she’d been crying tears of frustrated fury and not of sorrow. “He’s nagging at you for a grandson, huh?”
“Me!” she cried in rage. “Not Marvin, ever, only me!” She got to her feet, trembling with fury now, and I could see she was delighted at the chance to do some hollering. “Let me tell you something,” she said tightly. “Something he doesn’t seem to realize. Before you can have any children, you have to have sexual intercourse.”
“Uh,” I said. It was the most comprehensive answer to that little comment I could think of. I started edging toward the opposite door. “Well, uh—” I said, in amplification.
She shook her head, rubbing her forehead with the heel of one hand. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said angrily. “Never mind me. It was just that he came back from Albany— You’d think he was a feudal baron, the way he carried on.”
So it was in Albany that the change had taken place, whatever had changed that had made me no longer a threat. “I’ve got to get going, Alisan,” I said hastily. “I’m sorry, uh—”
“Oh, go on,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make a fool of myself. Go on.”
I went on. Outside, it was still a summer afternoon, moving slowly now toward evening. I stood on the screened-in porch for a minute, looking out at nothing in particular, thinking about how much I would have given to have heard that maid’s news, and wondering just what had happened in Albany that had shuffled me out of the deck, when Reed’s gardener-handyman, a grizzled, toothless, disgruntled old geezer, went trotting by at what was for him top speed, pausing only to glower at me suspiciously before disappearing around the corner of the house.
I left the porch and went back to the car. As I slid in behind the wheel, Art said, “What’s the good word, Mr. Smith?”
“I don’t think there is any,” I said. I jabbed the key into the ignition, started the engine, and said, “Let’s all go visit Ron Lascow. You got the saw with the cake baked in it?”
They laughed without understanding what they were laughing about, only understanding that I had said something funny and that I was in a dangerous mood, so it was a good idea for them to laugh, and then we drove away from Reed’s house, along Reed’s private road through Reed’s private woods and so back to McGraw’s Market Road.
Where we were stopped by three siren-blaring police cars just making the turn, and a plainclothes detective named Ed Jason stuck his head out the window to shout, “Okay, Tim, turn around and go back. Nobody leaves this property yet.”
Art, beside me on the front seat, said, “Now, what the hell is that all about?”
He didn’t get any answers.
Twenty-Five
It was a hell of a long quarter-mile back to the house. I had plenty of time to think, and plenty of uncomfortable notions to think about.
Jordan Reed hadn’t been worried. I had promised him that I was on my way to the CCG with enough information to turn City Hall upside down and shake it like shaking dirty socks out of a laundry bag, and he hadn’t been worried. I’d seen two possibilities for that — he’d made a deal with the CCG or he’d managed to make a deal higher up and pull the reformers’ sting — but not until right now did I see the third possibility.
That I’d never get back to town.
But there was the maid breaking into Reed’s office, and the funny look the gardener had given me. This might be something else entirely.