“That was my own doing; he knew nothing of it. In fact, we were working at cross purposes, but didn’t know it. Stefan had told me that Janet Taber’s only reaction to the death of her child was to say that if she was in any way denied what she felt she had coming to her, she would malign the late senator publicly and drag the Normans thoroughly through the mud. I felt Mr. Norman had been put through enough already and hoped to put a scare into her, to convince her to leave Port City and any claims on Mr. Norman behind.”
“But it didn’t work.”
“Thanks to you, Mallory. But do you realize if I’d been successful in scaring her off, she might still be alive? If she’d been fearful enough to grab a bus to points unknown instead of staying around? Do you realize that if you hadn’t gotten involved, she might not have died?”
He was right. By trying to help, I’d hurt. In a weird, roundabout way, I’d done as much to contribute to the death of Janet Taber as anybody!
Then Harold said, as if on some sort of automatic pilot, not wanting to hear the words he was speaking, “Janet Taber’s ‘accident’ was hastily planned, but came off smoothly enough. Davis met the young woman as she got off her bus in Iowa City, telling her he was a plainclothes officer there to escort her to the hospital to see her mother. Once he had her in the car, he chloroformed her and broke her neck and… maybe she did see her mother, after all; but not in this world.”
His voice was so hushed I could barely hear him now.
“The… accident… at Colorado Hill was staged in the hope Mr. Norman would assume his son’s ‘other wife’ had taken her life at the site of the death of her ‘husband’-her ‘suicide’ there might seem the ultimate expression of sorrow over the loss of the son she bore her ‘lost love.’”
I felt weak, sick, dizzy; but somehow my brain kept up with all of it, and I heard myself saying, “So that’s the Colorado Hill connection, but that seems like such half-assed logic to me. And risky. Why connect Janet’s death to the senator’s? Just for the old man’s benefit? It’s crazy.”
Harold shrugged. “Stefan knew how his uncle’s mind worked. Mr. Norman backed Stefan and hushed the two deaths up, all the way. If nothing else, Mr. Norman knew what kind of unpleasant memories stood to be unearthed by a full-scale investigation of Janet Taber’s death. So such an inquiry was to be avoided. Stefan knew what he was doing.”
“The son of a bitch.”
“I told you what kind of man he was,” Harold said. “A snake.”
Harold stared out over the drop-off; I stared at Harold.
“When did he tell you all this, Harold?”
He didn’t answer.
I went on: “Oh, but that’s obvious-it was right before you killed him.”
Without turning to look at me, he said, flatly, “I didn’t say I killed him, Mallory.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Harold turned his head, not his body, and smiled at me; it was a smile that had no humor in it, just secrets. Harold still had secrets.
“Maybe I didn’t kill him, Mallory,” he said.
And then Rita’s voice, sounding far away, called out to us.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Hey,” she yelled.
She was coming across the brown grass, coming to meet us, and she was smiling and looking very pretty, very fresh, incongruously so against the image of the bleak gray house looming up back of her.
We stood there awkwardly, Harold and I, like actors who couldn’t remember their lines, and waited for her to join us. She latched onto Harold by the hand and me the same and tugged at us, saying, “You two gonna come in and eat the breakfast you had me cook, or do you like your eggs cold?”
So we turned and walked with her back across the lawn and into the house, turning left as we entered the living room and going through a doorless archway into the wing adjacent to Harold’s room. She deposited us in a breakfast nook, a cubbyhole stuck between the pantry and kitchen and filled by a wooden booth painted with once-vivid colors in a vaguely Scandinavian pattern. The colors in the kitchen area were the brightest in the house, with pale blue walls instead of cream, and with the dimmed reds and blues and yellows of the painted booth in the midst of it.
I sat and stared across at Harold and the air was thick with things unsaid. There wasn’t any purpose in saying them, after all. I looked at Harold and Harold’s single solemn eye and his black patch looked back at me and we knew.
I knew, Harold knew, that Stefan Norman had handled the Mallory problem in the same manner he’d handled the Renata Ferris problem, and that of Janet Taber as welclass="underline" he’d dispatched Davis, that violent extension of himself, to do his work. Stefan had had no compunction about treating human lives like so many pieces on a chessboard: he was the chessmaster and I was just another pawn for him to send his queen out to get. And even if his queen fell, suicide was not Stefan’s style, not in his makeup.
Harold knew all this. No need for me to tell him.
Rita came in and put a plate down in front of each of us, scooched in next to me on my side of the booth. I looked down at the omelet and the hash browns and the toast and knew I would have trouble getting it down, knew also that I had to. “Oh damn,” Rita said, and got up and went back into the kitchen and came back with coffee and filled our cups.
I poked around at the plate of food, and Harold did likewise, but between bites we exchanged looks, continued our silent conversation.
Harold knew, as I do, as you do, that suicide says despair, that suicide means finality, and a man in despair doesn’t change the facts around “a little” in what amounts to a deathbed confession of murder, just to make himself look a shade less corrupt. He might make excuses, he might even lie to himself, he might rationalize; but shape a slightly different, slightly juggled, slightly edited, slightly more excusable explanation, before putting a gun to his head? Please.
Neither would Stefan be likely to care about sparing old Sy Norman’s feelings.
But Harold would.
Harold had made no secret of his loyalty to Mr. Norman, and had expressed it in no less tangible and eccentric a manner than my first meeting with him when he tried, for the sake of his elderly employer, to scare Janet Taber out of town.
But that was when he was under the mistaken impression that Janet was a “blackmailing bitch,” that was when he was still caught up in the various machinations of Stefan’s plotting. Somewhere recently along the line, Harold had seen through Stefan, Harold had stopped being conned by him and that intense loyalty for Mr. Norman, that fierce protective instinct for the old man who had done so much for him, was channeled into a concentrated effort by Harold to put a stop to Stefan Norman’s scheming.
In my mind, I could see it: Harold stands beside Stefan, holding Stefan’s own gun over him, dictates the “suicide note”; Stefan sits at the desk, takes it all down, sweats as the black, one-eyed apparition hovers over him; the note is finished and Harold shoots Stefan; Stefan falls limp across the desk, like the inanimate object he has become.
“More coffee?” Rita said.
“Please,” I said.
“Harold?”
Harold nodded.
I managed to finish the eggs and potatoes and toast and when I glanced over at Harold, he had done the same. Rita came back, poured refills on coffee, and joined us. Harold and I sipped at the cups, looking away from each other when approaching a stare.
Rita was finally beginning to suspect something was wrong, because the silence hung heavy, like a tapestry pulling at its nails, and as the anxiety began to show on her face, I ventured with, “Fine breakfast, Rita, really fine,” and Harold said, “Yes, yes it is, it’s fine.”
She smiled. “I guess I can understand you boys being so quiet. This whole affair has been a real drain on us all-physically and emotionally both. You wouldn’t believe how relieved I am it’s over.”
“I am pretty tired,” I said.