He stopped, his hands working jerkily in his lap. He looked pleadingly at me, at Harcum, even at Alisan. “Anything,” he said. “I didn’t do it.”
It was uncomfortable as hell, for everybody concerned, and we were all grateful for the interruption when the silence following Marvin’s plea was broken by the screen door opening.
It was Art, looking in with polite apology, saying, “You okay, Mr. Smith?”
“I’m peachy,” I told him.
He took that at face value, and said, to the group in general, “Is it all right if I use the phone?”
Jordan turned away from glaring at the town to glare at Art, a who-the-hell-are-you glare, and then he shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks.” Art came in the rest of the way and said to me, in a somewhat lower voice, “Got to check in with Jack again.”
He went on into the house, and Harcum cleared his throat portentously. “It seems like a pretty clear case to me, Marv,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
Before Marvin could answer, I got to my feet and said to Harcum, “Can I talk to you for a second?”
He frowned at me. “What the hell is it, Tim?”
“Just take a second,” I said.
Grumbling, he followed me along the porch and around the corner, out of sight and hearing of the family group back there. I said, “Let me do you a favor, Harcum. Jordan just might reconsider. You better take it easy with Marvin.”
“It’s an open-and-shut case, Tim,” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s an obvious case,” I told him. “But it isn’t open-and-shut. You don’t have any witnesses, you’ll never trace that knife back to Marvin in a million years, and you don’t know for sure that she even got to Marvin.”
“I got a good circumstantial case—” he started.
“You don’t have any case at all,” I told him. “A good defense lawyer will run your case right out of court. And if Jordan reconsiders, Marvin will have a good defense lawyer.”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” he demanded.
“Take it easy,” I advised him, “and let your detectives handle this. That’s what the city pays them for. You’ve already made one stupid arrest—”
“You mean Lascow? I’ve got a case against him, by God.”
“And the hell you do, too.”
“I’ve got a case!” he insisted.
“I’d sure like to see it,” I said.
“You’ll see it,” he said darkly. “You might like to know what Lascow’s job is in the National Guard.”
I blinked. I knew Ron was a lieutenant in the Guard — it kept him from active duty — but I didn’t see what the hell that had to do with the price of beans. “I give up,” I said. “What is his job with the National Guard?”
“He’s in charge of a bomb demolition squad,” he said. “They taught him all about taking bombs apart. And putting them back together again.”
I stared at him. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“Not by a long shot.” He pushed past me, the conversation finished for now, and went back to the Reeds, where he started telling Marvin how he shouldn’t leave town or anything, that although he wasn’t under arrest he would probably be wanted for questioning and he should keep himself available and—
I broke in, saying, “You want me to stick around here any more?”
He looked at me, thrown off the track. “Hell, no,” he said, and went back to Marvin, trying to remember where he’d left off.
“Keep yourself available,” I prompted, collected my dirty look, and went back to the car.
Art hadn’t returned yet, so I sat there and answered Bill’s questions for a while. Then Art came strolling toward the car, frowning, his usual sardonic smile missing from his face. He slid into the front seat beside me and said, “There’ve been some changes, Mr. Smith.”
“Such as?”
“Jack says for me and Ben to come on back in.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “It looks like the arrangement between you and him is all finished.” Meaning that our own private arrangement was still alive.
“He wants you right away?”
“Right away,” he said.
I wondered if this move had anything to do with Reed’s earlier smugness. I had the feeling in the small of my back that it did.
“Just in case he changes his mind again,” said Art casually, “where do we get in touch with you?”
I wasn’t sure myself. I still didn’t have a working phone at home, and I’d be pretty much on the move from now on. I finally decided on Cathy’s place, figuring she could take a message if I wasn’t there.
He took down the address and number and said, “Mind dropping us off in town?”
“Not at all.”
This time, we got to the highway with no interference, and I went a couple blocks out of the way to drop Art and Ben off in front of the People’s Candy Store. Bill switched to the front seat, and we drove on down toward the center of town.
Twenty-Six
“I’m worried, Tim,” said Ron Lascow. “At first, I thought Harcum was crazy, he’d never make the charge stick. But now I’m not so sure.”
We were sitting in the Visitors’ Room in the Winston City Jail, a buggy-whip era clink that took up half of the basement of City Hall. There was none of the wire mesh separating me from Ron that they have in the big city jails and the state and federal penitentiaries. The Visitors’ Room was simply a bare square room with cream-colored walls and four of the old wooden chairs that used to be upstairs in City Court. The door to the cell area was open. The other door was closed and locked, but it was simply a wooden door with an ordinary Yale lock on it.
All four chairs were occupied at the moment. There was Ron, and Bill Casale, and a cop named Titus O’Herne, and me.
“Why aren’t you sure?” I asked him. “There isn’t a bit of evidence against you.”
“There’s that tax-scheme thing,” he said.
“So what? I already knew about that. You knew you were safe from me, you had no reason to want to kill me.”
He nodded, and rubbed a hand wearily over his face. He was wearing brown slacks and a white shirt open at the collar, the sleeves rolled up. Just the fact of being in jail, innocent or not, had taken a lot of starch out of him. “I don’t have any alibi for the time when the grenade was thrown,” he said. “I was home, alone.”
“So were a lot of people,” I told him. “So was I, for that matter. And I know about the National Guard thing, the bomb demolition squad. That maybe gives you the method for the bomb in the car, but not for the hand grenade.”
His grin was sick. “Sure it does,” he said.
“How so?”
“The Guard isn’t as tight as the regular Army,” he said. “I mean the controls aren’t as good. And you’ve got a bunch of young kids in there. Every summer, during the two weeks at camp, something disappears from the armory. A gun, or a grenade, or maybe just a holster. But always something.”
“So if the whole damn Guard is short one hand grenade,” I said, “they’ll try to pin it on you?”
“They’ve got it all, Tim,” he said. “Not enough to convince you, maybe, because you know me, and you’re on my side. But whose side is the judge going to be on? And they’ve got it all, motive and method and opportunity.”
“What about the other tries?” I demanded. “What about the Tarker killing? Or the shots fired at me from City Hall?”
He shook his head. “I won’t be charged with trying to kill you,” he said. He nodded at Bill. “I’ll be charged with killing his grandfather.”