by Jerry eBooks
Murtagh put his hands on his knees and lunged to his feet. He went into the dining room and bent over the wide iron grill of the hot-air register and called:
“Can you hear me, Les?”
Faintly, eagerly, “Sam! Ah, but it’s been a long time, fella. Sam!”
“You heard what I told Chief Evans?” There was a short pause. “I was listening at the pipe down here.”
“I meant it, Les. I can’t see you.” Murtagh’s lip curled with self-scorn. He felt dirty, clipping words the way he had with Evans. “Are you all right, Les?”
Les’s voice was faint through the register, but sullen, and biting. “I’m fine, brother mine.”
“And you still feel the same?” “Yes!” “You shouldn’t have broken jail, Les.”
“Hang it, I couldn’t stand it there any more. I couldn’t stand it! I didn’t kill the old man!”
“Yes, Les,” Murtagh said wearily. “But you haven’t made it any easier for yourself. Is there anything you want?”
Les’s answering words were something Murtagh was never going to forget. They bit themselves into his brain with etcher’s acid and burned like cancer. The voice was weak, but it needed no strength.
“Yes. I want you to go away, you cold-blooded reptile. I want—” Les coughed, and that was the last sound Murtagh could raise from the cellar.
“Put coal on the furnace so I don’t have to come down,” he said finally. “I can’t see you.” He straightened up and winced. His knees had bound from the long squatting.
He had a lonely supper of canned soup and bread in the kitchen.
In the morning, Murtagh made his own breakfast. Usually, his mother made it, soft boiled eggs, crisp bacon, golden brown toast and hot, strong coffee. His eggs came from the water as if laid by petrified hens, the bacon folded on his fork and the coffee was as bright as marmalade. The toast he didn’t even eat. He champed stolidly through this unappetizing meal, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and went to the front hall for his overcoat, that was too light for this chill December weather.
His face seemed unchanged, but to anyone who knew Murtagh his thick eyebrows overhung his eyes as if he and sleep had been at one another’s throats the night long.
The ancient LaSalle parked before the Cook & Greenlock printing works was not a familiar sight in Clifton, and still less familiar was the sight of Murtagh’s square figure plodding up the steps to the office entrance. The promised snow had started to whisper, but then had stopped and turned to rain.
Murtagh stood just inside the door and shook the wet from his hat and overcoat. To the left of the door was the receptionist’s desk. Murtagh was pleased to note that it was still the same irritable Mrs. Wells who had been enthroned there since his father, and Cook and Greenlock, had started the business.
His mouth lifted in an unaccustomed smile as her jaw dropped at the sight of him.
“Mr. Murtagh!” she said.
His smile fled as he remembered his errand. “Tell Cook and Greenlock I want to see them,” he said. “Tell ’em,” he added grimly, “they’d better see me.”
Her hands darted to the switchboard and she said respectfully, “Yes, Mr. Murtagh.” The plugs went in and her flurried voice whispered the open sesame. Mr. Murtagh back in the office! It was enough to flurry anybody, even a person less flurryable than Mrs. Wells. She looked up anxiously.
“They’ll see you, Mr. Murtagh. Mr. Cook’s office is the first door—” She stopped in confusion. “But you know where Mr. Cook’s office is better than I do, Mr. Murtagh.” She smiled wanly.
In a softer voice than was his usual wont, Murtagh said, “Thank you, Mrs. Wells,” and pushed through the thigh-high swinging barrier and walked down the familiar corridor.
Bill Cook’s door was at the end of the corridor, and across from his, Greenlock’s. The frosted glass on the door directly facing the narrow hallway had once borne the name of Murtagh, but the door was anonymous now.
Murtagh turned left into Bill Cook’s office. He took one step into the office, just enough to close the door behind him, and stayed there, his legs astride, his chin up in the accustomed Murtagh manner, his hands deep in his pockets.
Cook eagerly around the desk, his hand out-stretched, his creased monkey face even more creased in a grin of welcome. He was a brittle little man, in spats, a checkered waistcoat, with twinkling lecherous gray eyes. Greenlock, dark deacon in banker’s gray, stood somberly against-the steel filing cabinets beside the Venetian blinded window.
“By jinks, it’s good to see you back again, Sam!” Cook said eagerly. He seized Murtagh’s unresisting hand and pumped it vigorously. “Greenlock over there is full of prunes and prisms, but don’t mind him. He’s just as glad to see you as I am. How are you, you old sourpuss?”
Greenlock’s ascetic face raised in a slight, wintry smile. He said with more restraint:
“Welcome home, Sam.”
When Cook released his hand, Murtagh put it back in his pocket.
“Hello, Cook, hello, Greenlock,” he said. He stood there.
Taken aback, Cook said, “Now Sam!” Greenlock said, “Sam, You can’t blame—”
Murtagh lowered his head between his shoulders. “I didn’t come here begging,” he rumbled. “I came to give you fair warning. Les is out.”
Cook pranced on his polished shoe-tips and looked at the long-faced Greenlock, his shoulders shrugging. He raised one eyebrow in a simian expression, blended of glee and puzzlement.
“Listen, Sam,” he said, “we want you back. We need you. Let’s cut out all the nonsense about this and that. We’ll buy out that decrepit old Banner of yours, you can name your own price, and you come back as general superintendent here in the plant. And, by the stars, you can name your own price there, too! What say, fella?”
“Les is out,” Murtagh said again. “That’s what I came to say. He hasn’t changed his mind about anything. He still thinks one or both of you killed the old man, and he’s going to kill one or both of you. I just came to warn you. That much,” he set his teeth, “I had to do.”
He turned back toward the door, but Cook darted forward and grasped his arm.
“No, you don’t, Sam. You don’t run out on us like that. Wait a minute. Listen to our proposition, now.”
Murtagh shook off his restraining hand. “I’ve warned you,” he said, and walked out of the office.
Cook stood staring at the blank eye of the closed door. He turned to Greenlock.
“The crackpot’s serious!” he said in an awed voice, but there was an undercurrent of merriment in his voice. “He’s as serious as the first verse of Genesis! Well, what the devil!”
Greenlock pushed out his tiny underlip.
“You antagonized him,” he said. “Me!”
“You!”
“Oh, for gosh sake! Pass the plate. I antagonized him! Jumping cats. Did I molest his wife? Whattya mean I antagonized him?”
“Your rotten mind runs in laid-out gutters. He hasn’t got a wife. But,” Greenlock worried, “What do you think about Les? I don’t like that warning.”
“The police will take care of Les,” Cook said crisply, no longer interested. “That was just a little of the usual Murtagh melodrama. You remember the old man? How he used to put it on? Is this any different? Forget it.” Cook pulled down the points of his plaid vest. “Sorry I’ve got to leave you in a crisis like this, but there’s a little chick out in Long Island who expects me.” His wink was a deliberate affront to Greenlock’s strait-laced morality . . . .
Murtagh didn’t have to read the newspapers. As he sat over his second amateur breakfast, the news came to him through the little plastic radio on the kitchen table.
“—to death in his home at Three-Fourteen Fairlawn Drive. Mr. Cook was senior partner of the well-known firm of Cook and Greenlock of Clifton . . . .”
Murtagh reached up and twirled the knob and the radio jabbered insanely, “—and it is rumored that the Russians are believed to have—�
�
He pushed back his plate of oatmeal as his mother hobbled into the kitchen, leaning heavily on her cane. Arthritis, was her plaint, arthritis that no doctor could diagnose or alleviate, arthritis that dwelt craftily only in her mind. It had been her defense against the crushing steel of old Murtagh’s will, and now it was her defense against Sam’s somber brooding, his retreat, since the old man’s violent death, into himself.
But Murtagh knew. He knew that her cane was just the last remaining symbol of her frail dominance. He had seen her stride fiercely and freely without it when her high Scots temper burned brightly. But he respected her pride and treated her gently, though the thoughts that turned and turned again in his mind were not gentle.
“Cook’s dead,” he said slowly. “He was beaten to death in his home.”
She leaned on her cane, motionless. “I know.”
“The radio?”
“I heard.”
He sat with his head bowed, then placed his hands on the table edge and pushed himself up from his chair. He went into the dining room and crouched over the wide register. He called, “Les, Les!” There was no answer.
He heard his mother’s cane behind him, her voice. “You wouldn’t see him, your brother, your flesh, the flesh of my flesh,” she keened, “and now neither of you speak to the other. Ashes. The family is a low-burning fire, soon to go out.”
“Stop it, mother!” he said sharply. He bent over the grill again. “Les, Cook is dead. Beaten, like the old man.” He thrust himself to his feet.
His mother watched him, an emotion which he could not fathom behind her high-boned, lonely face. He went to the garage beside the house and backed the old LaSalle to the street. A police car picked him up at the corner and warily followed him, a half block behind. In the car Evans sat beside the driver, and in the rear seat lounged two hard-faced detectives in anonymous clothes.
They were conscious of their guns, all four, the driver, the Chief, the two plainclothesmen with the cold, vigilant eyes. They followed Sam Murtagh all day as he went from shop to shop, from store to factory, gradually, methodically filling the empty spaces in the dummy of The Banner’s Christmas supplement.
Before dark they had learned every familiar trick of his hands, his gait, the motions of his heavy head. They followed him to the office and watched as he took the leatherette cover from his typewriter and poised his thick-fingered hands thoughtfully over the keyboard.
Murtagh was writing the story of his brother’s escape from prison. He had learned the craft of the reporter by patient reading of many newspapers. But The Banner was a dull paper, as dull and plodding as Murtagh’s heavy stride. Dull, unimaginative, all but unreadable, a weary parade of mostly trivial events.
One detective crossed the street from the windowfront of The Banner office and stood at the open window of the police car, chewing on the stem of a wooden match.
“What’s he doing now?” Evans said ill-temperedly. “Phoning? What?”
“Just pecking away at his typewriter.”
“Hang it, is that all you came over to tell me? Get back at your post. The minute he phones, duck into the fish market and call the chief operator. She’s waiting to trace any call he makes.”
The Chief’s temper was tattered from the long hours of empty watching. The detective touched the brim of his low hat and marched back across the street. Murtagh was still typing. The sleuth leaned against the angle of the window and munched his match.
Murtagh’s two thick forefingers punched out Cook’s obit, writing only from memory. His mind was one that never forgot, a slow moving glacier that knew intimately every pebble, every fold, every rise in the land over which it had traveled.
He allowed himself a little grim malice in pointing up Cook’s accession to the Murtagh kingdom after the old man was killed, for old Murtagh had built the printing business from two rickety rotaries to the thundering three-storied mastodon it now was. The old man’s relentless will alone had done that. Cook and Greenlock had merely been hitch-hikers on the wagon the old man had tied to the high star.
Helen, a thin, gray, unrewarded spinster, watched him from the linoleum-covered counter over which she took the classified ads, her hand further messing her untidy hair.
“Mr. Murtagh,” she said critically, with the freedom of the long-employed, “you look awful.”
He growled, “Shut up!” and pondered over the last lines of Cook’s obit. From habit, he wrote rapidly, “He is survived by—”
“Your face,” she said in a tone of wonder. “It looks awful. You’ve been making the most awful faces. You look as if—as if—” She stopped as he raised his head and stared bleakly at her.
“Get out!” he said savagely, “Get out and go home and don’t come back.” He stared at her. “Go home,” he said more gently. “It’s been a long day. You must be tired. But,” he added practically, “you’d better get in a little earlier in the morning. We have to put out the Christmas supplement.”
She said timidly, “Yes, Mr. Murtagh,” and went to the oak clothestree and took down her worn green cloth coat, first making a few economical dabs with her fingers to lay the hair over the worn spots of the fur collar.
The detective at the window turned to the car and made a cabalistic gesture with his hand, when Helen came from the office, bent forward a little as she walked. The other detective separated himself from the car, walked down the street parallel with her, crossed at the intersection, and followed her casually.
Murtagh zipped the paper from the typewriter, read it rapidly, scribbled a head, marked it “24 pt. Caslon bold” and tossed it in the basket marked Copy. He stood for a minute beside his desk and drew his hands shudderingly down his face, then turned and walked to the office safe with a decisive step. He spun the dial, swung open the heavy door, unlocked the inner compartment and took out a long green box.
The detective at the window could not see what he transferred from the box to his inner pocket. Murtagh locked the safe again, straightened up and went back to the desk, over which he had thrown his thread-thin overcoat. He semaphored into it, turned out the light and lurched toward the front door. The detective quickly flattened into the entrance of the fish market next door.
The police car followed Murtagh home. It parked up the street, partially hidden by the thick rhododendron bush on the corner. The Chief leaned forward and watched through the windshield, champing on his unlighted cigar.
The house was dark. Murtagh turned on the hall light and phlegmatically hung his overcoat on the moosehead. He looked into the mirror beneath it, searching his dark face, standing eye to eye with himself. He drew a long, labored breath and walked bent-shouldered into the dining room. He did not crouch over the register this time. He stood erect beside it.
“Listen to me, Les,” he said in a thick voice. “I’ve made up my mind. You have to go. You have to be gone by tomorrow. My coat is hanging on the moose. In the pocket are two thousand dollars. There is a suit of clothes in the closet under the’ stairs. Also father’s fur-lined overcoat. It should fit you. All your old shoes are there too. I’m sorry, Les, but—” his voice faltered. He lifted his chin. “I just finished writing Cook’s obituary, and—Well, so long and good luck.”
There was no answer.
Murtagh went into the kitchen, made a frugal meal and stolidly ate it. His mother, he knew, had locked herself in her room. After dinner, he sat at the dining room table and worked on the Christmas supplement dummy for three hours, completed his instructions to the printers, folded it and put it in its 10 x 14 manila envelope. He laid it on the shelf beneath the moosehead in the hall.
He looked around the dim hallway with a sad, slightly bewildered expression then turned and plodded up the stairs to his room. He undressed and crept into the chilly bed. For a long while he lay awake, but as the hours stretched into the silent night, feeling for the dawn, his eyes closed and his head turned sideways on the pillow, looking haunted even in sleep.
Outside
his open door, his mother stood hard against the wall, her cane dangling from the crook of her elbow. She watched fiercely until she was sure he was deep in sleep, then silently she slipped down the stairs. She went to the closet and took out one of the suits that hung there. Swiftly she pulled on the trousers and pushed her feet, still in slippers into one of the pairs of shoes. She wrapped the heavy, fur-lined overcoat around her. Then before the mirror near the door, she carefully concealed her iron gray hair under a gray felt fedora. She took a small gun from her bathrobe and dropped it into her overcoat pocket. She opened the front door and slipped out of the house, walking quickly . . . .
The sustained, imperious ringing of the doorbell the next morning brought Murtagh to unwilling wakefulness. He pushed back the covers, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and groped for his slippers. He trudged down the stairs, awkwardly knotting the cord of his robe at his waist.
Outside on the porch stood Police Chief Evans, Greenlock and the two detectives.
Evans said ominously, “We want to talk to you, Murtagh,” and pushed into the hall, thrusting Murtagh aside. Greenlock sidled in, backed by the detectives. Old Mrs. Murtagh stood at the head of the stairs, grimly looking down at them, supporting herself on her cane.
“Mr. Greenlock here says you went to his office to warn him and Mr. Cook against Les,” Evans said brusquely to Murtagh. “Now Mr. Cook is dead. I want to find out how you knew Les would go for them. That’s what I want to find out. I think,” he said violently, “that you talked to Les. Now, blast it, I want him, and I want him fast!”
Murtagh said, “You do?” His eyes did not leave Greenlock’s sallow, hysterically rigid face.
“Yes I do!” Evans snapped. “I want him before he does any more damage. You know where he is, Murtagh, and by gravy, if you don’t produce him, I’ll have you up for it, and don’t think I won’t. It’s gone far enough. Last night Les tried to kill Mr. Greenlock here. Took three shots at him as he got out of his car to open his garage door. Luckily, he missed.”