I could understand it if Trask and Slade had done the killing. They leave the house, Agricola stops to say something to Clarence and then goes upstairs, Trask or Slade sneak back in, follow him up, kill him, go back down, leave the house again, and they drive away. But they hadn’t done it, they just hadn’t done it, of that I was positive.
Then I saw it.
It hit me so hard I sat up, shedding afghan on all sides. Bright sunlight angling low through the back window blinded me — we were going east, which didn’t help me much, except to tell me we were somewhere on Long Island — and I squinted against it and pointed at Trask. Both of them were in the front seat, Slade driving. To Trask I said, “You didn’t go along!”
He turned his head and scowled at me. “Down, nephew,” he said.
“Tell me,” I insisted. “When Slade went to see Mr. Agricola, you didn’t go along. You stayed watching Artie Dexter’s place, or my mother’s place.”
Trask said, “So what? Lie down and cover up.”
To Slade I said, “Who went with you? Who did you take to see Farmer Agricola?”
It was the answer of course, the ultimate answer. But I wasn’t to receive it, not that easily. Slade didn’t say a word, and Trask reached over a big-boned hand with a big hard gun gripped in it and clonked me gently on the head with the barrel. “I said down, nephew.”
So I went back down, pulling the afghan up over myself.
There was the answer, locked away in Slade’s head. Trask and Slade hadn’t gone to see Farmer Agricola, Slade had gone with someone else. That someone else had seen or heard or said something that was dangerous to him, so when they left he said to Slade, “Forgot my cigarettes,” or, “Remembered something I wanted to ask the Farmer,” or, “Hold it, I got to go back and use the head.” Something, anything. Slade waited, the other guy went back in, killed Agricola, came out, rode away with Slade.
And they might have suspected him, Slade at any rate might have remembered and suspected him, if I hadn’t come blundering onto the scene a few minutes later, taking all the blame and suspicion onto myself.
I should have realized it long ago, but I was too used to thinking of Trask and Slade as a team, inseparable. But hadn’t they been separate last night, one of them watching Artie’s place while the other was probably with Inspector Mahoney? If only I’d stopped to think then of the implications, that Trask and Slade could survive for short periods of time away from one another, I might now be a lot closer to the solution than I was.
Still, it was something. I knew how Agricola had been killed, and I could guess why. All that remained now was the knotty question of who.
And just before the car stopped I realized who it had to be.
Had to be, absolutely had to be. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who could have known the proper things, who could have been in the right places at the right times, who could have handled this whole mess with such a teetering combination of panic and cunning, desperation and wiliness.
The car had left the road, was moving slowly now across something that crunched beneath the wheels. Sand, it sounded like. More and more slowly, rising and falling over uneven ground, the big black car finally settled to a stop.
Doors opened and then shut again. Feet crunched through sand. Another door opened, the one by my feet. Trask’s voice said, “Okay, nephew.”
I pushed the afghan away and sat up. “It’s all right,” I said. “I know now.”
“Let’s go for a walk, nephew,” Trask suggested.
He wasn’t listening to me. “But I’ve figured it out,” I said. “Everything’s all right now, I’ve got it doped out.”
Trask showed me that big hard gun again. “Come out of the car, nephew,” he said.
I looked at him. I looked past him, and saw nothing but Slade.
I had it all figured out, and these two knobheads couldn’t care less. I knew the whole thing, and I’d run the course anyway.
“Nephew,” said Trask. “Come along. We’re goin’ for a walk.”
Chapter 24
Pardon me if you will, but I intend to drop into third-person narration for just a little while now. This next scene is far too nerve-racking for me to relive in first person. I want to view it all from as great a distance as possible — the middle of Long Island Sound, for instance.
Therefore...
The setting is a bit of sandy beach not far from Orient Point, one of the two eastern tips of Long Island. The other, Montauk Point, farther to the south, is better known, duller to look at, and more heavily commercialized. A ferry leaves Orient Point three times a day in summer, bound for New London, in Connecticut. In summer, also, pleasure boats cruise these waters, swimmers and sunbathers dot these beaches, but after Labor Day pockets of emptiness appear and grow, and by the first snowfall Orient Point is virtually deserted.
This particular stretch of beach is one of these pockets of emptiness, or was until a few minutes ago, when an automobile came driving slowly across the rolling sand from the direction of the invisible road. A big black car, new and gleaming, reflecting the mid-September sun. It stopped about a city block from the water’s edge, and two tall men in dark clothing got out. They wore dark topcoats and the sea wind whipped the coat tails around their legs.
A minute or two later a third man got out of the car, somewhat shorter and thinner than the first two, this one wearing a black raincoat which also whipped around his trouser legs.
The three began to walk away from the car, in single file, the one in the raincoat coming second. The other two walked hunched and stolid, their hands in their topcoat pockets, but the one in the middle appeared to be talking; his arms were in constant motion, like an erratic windmill, and his head bobbed with the speed and intensity of his words. The other two appeared not to be listening to him.
In their dark clothing, in the wind, in the sunlight, silhouetted against the light tan of the sand, the three walkers were impressive, curious, somehow frightening. They moved across the sand in a deliberate way, the two bigger ones picking their feet up high and leaning forward and moving their shoulders a great deal, the way men will walk through sand when their hands are in their topcoat pockets and they have a specific place to go. The one in the middle slid around in the sand more, seeming to be constantly on the verge of throwing himself off balance with his waving arms.
They walked at an angle in relation to the water, not directly toward it but rather off to the right away from the car, toward a small break in the beach where the ocean had eroded away a tiny cul-de-sac of water, a minuscule pool or cove or lagoon, walled in by sand. Gray driftwood choked this cul-de-sac, and more gnarled twisted pieces of driftwood up on the sand ringed it in.
As the procession moved closer to this cluster of driftwood the walker in the middle seemed to grow more and more agitated, as though the driftwood held for him a significance he found both unpleasant and impelling. His rapid, disjointed half-sentences rang out across the water, whipped away by the wind.
The trio reached the driftwood. The two taller men situated the talker where they wanted him, standing at the edge of the little drop to the water, standing amid the driftwood, his back to the water. They moved away from him, still facing him, and both took small machines from their pockets.
The one standing shin-deep in driftwood talked louder and faster than ever, and an occasional whole sentence blew out across the water: “What if I’m right? What if you’re wrong and I’m right? How did I know who went with you to the farm?” And other comments, loud and rapid and urgent in tone.