“Have you seen him, Mr. Fredericks?”
“No. Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.” His hatchet profile chopped the air. “She saw him, though.”
“Where is he, Mrs. Fredericks?”
Her husband answered for her: “She told me they went to check in at the hotel, him and the girl both.”
Some obscure feeling, guilt or resentment, made the woman say: “They didn’t have to go to the hotel. I offered them the use of my house. I guess it isn’t good enough for mucky-mucks like her.”
“Is the girl all right?”
“I guess so. Theo’s the one that’s got me worried. What did he want to come here for, after all these years? I can’t figure him out.”
“He always did have crazy ideas,” Fredericks said. “But he’s crazy like a fox, see. Watch him close when you go to nab him. He talks smooth, but he’s a real snake-in-the-grass.”
“Where is this hotel?”
“Downtown. The Pitt Hotel – you can’t miss it. Just keep us out of it, eh? He’ll try to drag us into his trouble, but I’m a respectable man–”
His wife cried: “Shut up, you. I want to see him again if you don’t.”
I left them locked in the combat which seemed the normal condition of their nights.
The hotel was a three-story red brick building with one lighted window on the second floor corner. One other light was burning in the lobby. I punched the hand-bell on the desk. A middle-aged little man in a green eyeshade came yawning out of a dark room behind it.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“I’m up late. Can you rent me a room?”
“Sure can. I got more vacancies than you can shake a stick at. With or without bath?”
“With.”
“That will be three dollars.” He opened the heavy leather-cornered register, and pushed it across the desk. “Sign on the line.”
I signed. The registration above my signature was: Mr. and Mrs. John Galton, Detroit, Michigan.
“I see you have some other Americans staying here.”
“Yeah. Nice young couple, checked in late last night. I believe they’re honeymooners, probably on their way to Niagara Falls. Anyway, I put them in the bridal chamber.”
“Corner room on the second floor?”
He gave me a sharp dry look. “You wouldn’t want to disturb them, mister.”
“No, I thought I’d say hello to them in the morning.”
“Better make it late in the morning.” He took a key from a hook and dropped it on the desk. “I’m putting you in two-ten, at the other end. I’ll show you up if you want.”
“Thanks, I can find it by myself.”
I climbed the stairs that rose from the rear of the lobby. My legs were heavy. In the room, I took my .32 automatic out of my overnight bag and inserted one of the clips I had brought for it. The carpet in the dim corridor was threadbare, but it was thick enough to silence my footsteps.
There was still light in the corner room, spilling over through the open transom. A sleeper’s heavy breathing came over, too, a long sighing choked off and then repeated. I tried the door. It was locked.
Sheila Howell spoke clearly from the darkness: “Who is that?”
I waited. She spoke again:
“John. Wake up.”
“What is it?” His voice sounded nearer than hers.
“Somebody’s trying to get in.”
I heard the creak of bed springs, the pad of his feet. The brass doorknob rotated.
He jerked the door open, stepped out with his right fist cocked, saw me and started to swing, saw the gun and froze. He was naked to the waist. His muscles stood out under his pale skin.
“Easy, boy. Raise your hands.”
“This nonsense isn’t necessary. Put the gun down.”
“I’m giving the orders. Clasp your hands and turn around, walk slowly into the room.”
He moved reluctantly, like stone forced into motion. When he turned, I saw the white scars down his back, hundreds of them, like fading cuneiform cuts.
Sheila was standing beside the rumpled bed. She had on a man’s shirt which was too big for her. The shirt and the lipstick smudged on her mouth gave her a dissolute air.
“When did you two have time to get married?”
“We didn’t. Not yet.” A blush mounted like fire from her neck to her cheekbones. “This isn’t what you think. John shared my room because I asked him to. I was frightened. And he slept across the foot of the bed, so there.”
He made a quelling gesture with his raised hands. “Don’t tell him anything. He’s on your father’s side. Anything we say he’ll twist against us.”
“I’m not the twister, Theo.”
He turned on me, so suddenly I almost shot him. “Don’t call me by that name.”
“It belongs to you, doesn’t it?”
“My name is John Galton.”
“Come off it. Your partner, Sable, made a full confession to me yesterday afternoon.”
“Sable is not my partner. He never was.”
“Sable tells a different story, and he tells it very well. Don’t get the idea that he’s covering up for you. He’ll be turning state’s witness on the conspiracy charge to help him with the murder charge.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Sable murdered Culligan?”
“It’s hardly news to you, is it? You sat on the information while we were wasting weeks on a bum lead.”
The girl stepped between us. “Please. You don’t understand the situation. John had his suspicions of Mr. Sable, it’s true, but he wasn’t in any position to go to the police with them. He was under suspicion himself. Won’t you put that awful gun away, Mr. Archer? Give John a chance to explain?”
Her blind faith in him made me angry. “His name isn’t John. He’s Theo Fredericks, a local boy who left Pitt some years ago after knifing his father.”
“The Fredericks person is not his father.”
“I have his mother’s word for it.”
“She’s lying,” the boy said.
“Everybody’s lying but you, eh? Sable says you’re a phony, and he ought to know.”
“I let him think it. The fact is, when Sable first approached me I didn’t know who I was. I went into the deal he offered me partly in the hope of finding out.”
“Money had nothing to do with it?”
“There’s more than money to a man’s inheritance. Above everything else, I wanted to be sure of my identity.”
“And now you are?”
“Now I am. I’m Anthony Galton’s son.”
“When did this fortunate revelation strike you?”
“You don’t want a serious answer, but I’ll give you one anyway. It grew on me gradually. I think it began when Gabe Lindsay saw something in me I didn’t know was there. And then Dr. Dineen recognized me as my father’s son. When my grandmother accepted me, too, I thought it must be true. I didn’t know it was true until these last few days.”
“What happened in the last few days?”
“Sheila believed me. I told her everything, my whole life, and she believed me.”
He glanced at her, almost shyly. She reached for his hand. I began to feel like an intruder in their room. Perhaps he sensed this shift in the moral balance, because he began to talk about himself in a deeper, quieter tone:
“Actually, it goes back much further. I suspected the truth about myself, or part of it, when I was a little kid. Nelson Fredericks never treated me as if I belonged to him. He used to beat me with a belt-buckle. He never gave me a kind word. I knew he couldn’t possibly be my father.”
“A lot of boys feel like that about their real fathers.”
Sheila moved closer to him, in a tender protective movement, pressing his hand unconsciously to her breast. “Please let him tell his story. I know it sounds wild, but it’s only as wild as life. John’s telling you the honest truth, so far as he knows it.”