Haig stared at him. He was on his feet again. “I can prove almost all of it,” he said. “Once the facts are known and established, the proof is rarely hard to come by. Had you taken your time, you might have managed to bring it off. You did come very close at that. You killed four out of five. Had sex with four of your sisters, killed four of your sisters.
“And you were very patient at the onset. You waited to kill Philip Flanner, waited to marry his widow, waited to kill her. But then you got a taste of it and you liked it, didn’t you? You loved it.”
Bell didn’t say anything. The muscle was really having a workout in his temple, and he didn’t look his usual happy self.
“You incestuous murdering bastard,” Haig said. “You never did what you wanted to do. You never killed your father and you never slept with your mother, and you used your sisters as surrogates for both, one after another. But you’ll never get the last one, Bell, you’ll never put a hand on her!”
The son of a bitch moved fast. He had the knife out of his pocket and the blade open before I could even blink.
A fat lot of good it did him. He wasn’t even out of his chair before Seidenwall had an arm wrapped around his throat and Luther Polk’s long-barreled automatic was jabbed into the side of his head.
They took turns advising him of his rights. He went limp, but that didn’t make Seidenwall let go of his throat or Polk stop jabbing him in the head with the gun barrel.
On the way out, his hands cuffed behind his back, he turned and smiled at me. It was a smile I will never forget as long as I live. I can close my eyes and see it now. I wish I couldn’t.
“You know,” he said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with having you beaten up. I hope you can believe that.”
Nineteen
After the three cops had escorted Ferdinand Bell out of there, I figured everybody would start talking at once. I guess nobody wanted to make the first move. They all just sat there staring at each other.
Finally Addison Shivers said, “The vagaries and inconsistencies of human nature. How many persons did that man kill?”
“I know of nine,” Haig said. “The four sisters; Philip Flanner; Maria Tijerina; Elmer Seaton, the sailor; Seamus Fogarty; Gregory Vandiver. Nine. There may have been others, but I doubt it.”
“And yet the one crime he was anxious to deny was the administration of a beating to young Chip.”
“Indeed,” Haig said. “He was not responsible for it, as it happens.”
Kim said, to me, “You never told me you were beaten up.”
I agreed that I never did.
“If he didn’t do it, then who did?”
I got to my feet. It was doomed to be anticlimactic, but it was my part of the show. “That’s easy to answer,” I said. “Gordie McLeod set me up. Didn’t you, old buddy?”
Everybody stared at him. He didn’t return the favor. He stared at his hands, mostly. Kim got up and drew away from him as if he was a leper. Which, come to think of it, he more or less was.
I said, “Well?”
He stood up. “I made a mistake,” he said.
I just looked at him.
“Well, I’ll tell you, man. All I could see is you’re nosin’ around my girl. And then I find out you’ve got some people down to the docks askin’ questions about me. What do I need with people askin’ questions, and I don’t know about any murders, and I figure maybe you’re doin’ a number, and if you’re doin’ a number I figure maybe I can cool things out is all. I told ’em to take it easy with you.”
The look on Kim’s face was worth the price of admission.
“So I made a mistake,” he went on. “You know, the way I feel about Kim and all, and so I got carried away. I never had your advantages, I never went to college, never joined a fraternity, I’m just your ordinary guy, works hard all his life and tries to make a go of it.”
“You were also born stupid. Don’t forget that.”
“Well, I never said I was the brightest guy in the world. Just your average Joe.” He gave his shoulders a shrug. He had a lot of shoulders and they moved impressively. “Look,” he said, “I’m the kind of guy gives credit where credit’s due. I had you wrong. You’re okay. I made a mistake.” He extended a paw like an overtrained retriever. “No hard feelings, huh?”
“None at all,” I said, and I extended my hand and moved toward him, and for some odd reason or other my hand kept going right on past his hand, fingers bunched and rigid, and the fingers jabbed him almost exactly three inches north of his navel, assuming he was born once and had one, and that’s where the solar plexus is supposed to be, and that’s where his was, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work like a charm.
He doubled up and turned sort of orange, and he started folding inward like a dying accordion, and I interlaced my fingers and cupped the back of his head with both hands and helped him fold up, and at the same time I raised my right knee as high as it would go, and it couldn’t go all the way up because it met his face coming down.
You wouldn’t believe the sound it made.
After Wong sponged the blood off him, we put him in a chair, and I stood in front of him trying not to look at his nose. It was a pleasure not to look at it.
“No hard feelings,” I said, “but I’ve had a yen to do that since I first saw you. It was the sort of yen that kept getting stronger until there was just no restraining myself. Do you understand what I’m saying, or should I use smaller words?”
He tried to glare at me.
“Here’s the point,” I said. “I have a feeling I’m going to get that yen over and over. It’s not the sort of thing you do once and get bored with. So it would probably be a good idea if you arranged your life so that you and I were not in the same place at the same time, because kicking the shit out of you could get to be a habit with me.
“I’ll tell you something else. You don’t give a shit about Kim, beyond the fact that she’s easy to look at and worth a couple of million dollars. She’s far too good for you, and even you must be bright enough to realize that. She would have written you off a long time ago, but she was afraid of you. I think she can see that you’re nothing much to be afraid of. You’re not going to see Kim any more.”
He tried a little harder to glare at me.
“You didn’t beat me up to keep me away from Kim. You had your buddies work me over to keep me off your back, because you’ve got a nice little hustle going and you figured I might turn it up. I did. We got a call just before you got here today. It was from — never mind who it was from. You take days off from the docks now and then.
“You have one talent on God’s earth: you can start a car without the key, and that’s what you’ve been doing for a living. I could tell you just where you drive them, and just how much you get for them, but you already know. Or maybe you write the address on your shirt cuff so you won’t forget it.”
“Who told you?”
“Mr. Haig has some very good friends. Mr. Haig’s friend asked that his name not be mentioned so I’m not going to mention it. Mr. Haig’s friend asked if he could take care of this for us. He said a good friend of his has a paving contract up in Rockland County. He wanted to know if we wanted him to arrange to tuck you under a section of four-lane divided highway.”
His face got very white. Except for around the nose, where it was still doing a little low-grade bleeding.
“We told him you weren’t worth the trouble. If you start being worth the trouble, meaning if you turn up on Kim’s doorstep again, Mr. Haig will call him and say he changed his mind. A lot of this man’s friends are in the highway construction business. I guess it’s profitable.”