“Spill it,” Ed said. “You know I’ll help. I thought you would be on top of the world now, being chief here. But you’ve had a vacant look in your eyes for days. What is it?”
Ruddy sighed. Impulse and counterimpluse clashed in Ruddy’s mind. He wanted to tell Ed everything, but something—was it pride, shame, or defiance?—held him in, censored what he was about to say. In his mind he was staring hard at the whimpering features of Marie, but when he began to speak, he thrust her from his mind and feelings, changed the aspect of her, decided to alter what he would report about Tommy.
“Tommy’s had a bad shock,” Ruddy reported.
“Aw, now we’re getting somewhere.” Ed approved of the apparent openness.
“Doctor’s call in other doctors when they have illness in their family.” Ruddy’s voice rumbled. “I’m calling you in.”
“I’m here,” Ed said with flat emotional adherence. “I caught wind of some emotional confusion in Tommy this morning, but I didn’t wish to pry. What kind of shock has he had?”
“A girl jilted ’im,” Ruddy lied, hoping that that would cover enough of what was happening in Tommy for Ed to help.
“Aw, I wondered,” Ed said. “He’s at the age. Nineteen, isn’t he?”
“That’s it. Soon he’ll be twenty.”
“This is not unknown,” Ed said comfortingly. “That kid’s between two families now: the one he wanted to establish and the one in which you are the head. He’s kind of lost. That makes for guilt feeling, giddiness, confusion.”
“But why in hell did he pretend to take part in the goddamn robbery this morning?” Ruddy asked raspingly.
“He was trying to evade some responsibility,” Ed said.
“Ed,” Ruddy called in a forlorn, hopeless voice.
“Yeah.”
“I was not completely surprised when it was reported that a bit of gun handle had been found in a cement mixer,” Ruddy said with a constricted throat.
“No?”
“Y-you-s-see I…” Ruddy swallowed. “Hell, here’s what happened, goddamnit. I’m straight. I’m an officer. I’ll go the goddamn limit. Ed, I found a bit of concrete on the soles of Tommy’s tennis shoes the other night. Something made me take a pinch of it and wrap it in paper and keep it. Then came this report about the gun handle and the concrete mixer—”
The telephone tingled.
“Yeah,” Ruddy breathed a sigh into the receiver.
“Chief, this is Lieutenant Parrish.”
“Yeah. I’m listening.”
“Those two samples of cement you sent over to the lab,” Lieutenant Parrish reported. “Well, they are the same. There’s no doubt about it.”
“That’s what I figured,” Ruddy mumbled. “Thanks.” He hung up and turned bloodshot eyes to Ed.
“I heard it,” Ed said before Ruddy could speak. “You say you took that from Tommy’s tennis shoes?”
“Yeah.”
“And our lab reports that it is the same cement?”
“Yeah.”
Ed’s right palm lifted and clapped over his pursed lips. “Mama mia,” he breathed.
Ruddy leaped to his feet and bellowed: “Ed, I’m going crazy! My son’s no murderer! But the facts are here. Jesus, the chief of police’s son is the criminal that is captured! Is this a joke? Is somebody playing a goddamn trick on me? Well, it isn’t funny, goddamnit. Was that stunt about Tommy pretending that he was a robber true?”
“Yeah, it was true, Ruddy,” Ed said sadly. “But I never dreamed about this angle. Good God. What are you going to do?”
“I’m an officer,” Ruddy yelled bitterly. “I’ll do my duty! Like I’ve always done!”
“Sure. Sure. N-nobody doubts that,” Ed said in a mollifying tone, but his eyes were staring as though about to leap from their sockets. “But…what motive could he have had to do such a thing?”
Ruddy looked forlornly at Ed. “You know those things better than I do.” Ruddy sighed. “Maybe he got mad with everybody because of that girl and—”
“Aw, no. Ruddy, that’s as bad as that faked robbery this morning,” Ed said. “I don’t know of a case on record where a boy took a gun and went shooting people because a girl jilted ’im.”
“He knows something about those killings,” Ruddy contended sadly. “Or that cement wouldn’t have been on his shoes. He had that gun; he tried to destroy it.”
“Yeah, that seems true,” Ed admitted. “But was anybody with ’im?”
“That Charlie Heard boy before he died?”
“We’ll check. But I doubt it. I’m thinking of a homosexual linkup.”
“Oh!” Ruddy was flabbergasted. “No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Nothing like that in Tommy.”
Yet he was afraid. What did he really know of Tommy? Now that Tommy had pretended to have taken part in a holdup, and now that it was circumstantially proved that he had been at the site where the murder gun had been hidden, Ruddy was emotionally inclined to believe that maybe many others things had happened, that the worst could be true. “What have I done wrong?” he moaned to himself, sitting again and lowering his head into his hands. Then a ray of desperate hope came to him.
“Maybe that dead Heard boy led ’im astray?”
“We’ll check,” Ed said without conviction. “But I doubt it. Those crimes seem to be the work of a lone hand.” Ed bit his lips. “This will not be good for you, if it breaks that Tommy was involved in this.”
“I know. I’ll be finished.” Ruddy heaved up his words.
Ed paced the floor, daring glances at Ruddy’s distraught face. “Where is this girl—Tommy’s girl?”
The question caught Ruddy by surprise. He knew that Ed was wanting to question the girl, and that was the last thing that Ruddy wanted. He felt now as strongly as Tommy about her shame, her taintedness, and he felt that he had to mislead Ed.
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“Why did the girl reject Tommy?”
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Ruddy sank deeper into his deception, feeling horribly, hotly guilty.
“How long had Tommy known her?”
“Oh, about two years, I think.”
“Goddamnit, if Tommy did this, then I don’t think that anything that that girl did made ’im do it.” Ed seemed to be talking out of a fund of knowledge beyond the ken of Ruddy.
“Don’t know,” Ruddy mumbled, siding now more and more with his guilty son but being unable to distinguish his own guilt from that of his son’s. Then he opened his lips in wonder. Oh, God, how easily Agnes had said, “OK, but that’s nothing…” Yeah, women were strong. Here he was trembling in the face of one of his best friends, and Agnes had taken what now was troubling him in her heart’s stride.
“What does your wife think of this?” Ed shot at him.
“I-I haven’t told her yet,” Ruddy lied, hating himself as he did so. Oh, hell, why couldn’t he trust Ed and tell him the truth? Yet he knew that it was hopeless to try. He now understood why Tommy had not been able to tell him. Yes, by God, he would see this through and resign.
“Ruddy?” Ed called in a questioning tone.
“Yeah, Ed.”
“Let’s understand each other,” Ed began. “You’re the chief. But insofar as your son’s involved in this, let me handle it. I can be more objective than you about it. I’ll swear that Tommy’ll be protected as much as possible. I—”
“Don’t protect anybody,” Ruddy growled. “I won’t try to defeat the law. You know that.”
“I wasn’t talking about that,” Ed hastened to assure him. “It’s precisely because you’re in a conflict here that I’m asking the right to decide for you. You can’t think or feel straight about this; your own flesh is involved. You might be too hard on the boy or on yourself. That’s why I’m asking.”
Ruddy thought hard. Maybe Ed might learn the truth about Marie. Perhaps. But he wouldn’t tell him where Marie was and he was certain that Tommy would not. So,
feeling that the shameful secret was safe, he said, “Okay. You take over.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll take over. But I’ll do it in a way that won’t embarrass you, see?”
“Okay,” Ruddy said, feeling relieved but also defeated.
The intercom crackled.
“Yeah,” Ruddy spoke after flicking the switch.
“Chief, this is Captain Snell speaking.”
“Yes, Captain. What is it?”
“I’d like to see you at once. Something urgent.”
“Come right in,” Ruddy said, switching off the crackling vibration. “Snell’s coming. Something’s come up, he says.” Ruddy was now sure that even more evidence had come in against Tommy.
“I’m now sure that Tommy was trying to hide something this morning,” Ed said serenely.
“Oh, yeah.”
“The problem is: What was he trying to hide by pretending he had been in a holdup?”
“You’ve got me.”
“He didn’t kill those people because of a girl’s saying no,” Ed stated emphatically.
“Then what could it be? If he did kill them…”
“He would have told you, crying, weeping…But he would have,” Ed stated confidently.
“But he seems as sure as hell involved,” Ruddy pointed out. “That cement places him as having been in possession of that gun.
“Look,” Ruddy said with sudden hopefulness, “maybe he’s pretending to be involved in these murders like he pretended about that holdup this morning.”
Ed pursed his lips and stared. “Maybe…but he’s being spurred by something else. And that’s what’s troubling me.”
Again Ruddy felt on the tip of his tongue the desire to tell Ed the truth, but he could not. And then he recalled the ease with which Agnes had taken Marie’s plight, her simple and all-embracing phrase: “But that’s nothing…”
The door burst open more unceremoniously than Ruddy had ever seen it, and Captain Snell came rushing in with a newspaper extended in his right hand. He paused before Ruddy and Ed, as though baffled as to what to do, then he asked softly, “Did you see this?”
“What’re you talking about?” Ruddy asked.
“An extra…the Globe. It says…”
He did not finish; he could talk no more. He laid the paper upon the desk, then stepped away, as though disassociating himself from the tall black headline:
POLICE CHIEF’S SON CONFESSES TO MURDER WAVE
Ruddy half rose; his lower jaw dropped, then he sank down again. He lifted his open palms as if to cover his eyes, then froze, reached out and lifted the paper, and stared at the blown-up face of Tommy whose eyes were staring defiantly into his own.
“Jesus…oh, Mother of God,” Ruddy intoned and slipped into his seat, his huge body seemingly crumpled.
Sensing his friend’s consternation, Ed stepped purposefully forward and picked up the newspaper and stared fixedly at the headline; his expression did not change; his eyes did not blink, but the newspaper fell from his still and seemingly nerveless fingers and landed dryly upon the glass top of the desk. He turned as though to walk out of the room, then whirled and came back to the desk, but his eyes were sightless.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he sighed.
The office was filled only with the soft, faint sound of the huge, electric clock on the wall and the breathing of the three men. Captain Snell avoided looking directly at either Ed or Ruddy, but his eyes darted in the direction of one of them and then the other, and finally rested upon the newspaper. He blinked his eyes and bit his lower lip. As though by telepathy, Ed would not meet Ruddy’s eyes and Ruddy’s would not meet Ed’s. A decision was being made and tension and anxiousness made the three men silent; it was in this long moment that the scepter of moral leadership in the office of the chief of police passed from Ruddy to his friend Ed; it passed without a word, without a gesture.
“We’ve got to get hold of Tommy,” Ed said in a low, determined tone.
“Yes, that’s the first thing,” Ruddy agreed.
“I wonder if that”—Ed tapped the newspaper—“Globe is holding ’im? I suspect that they paid him for his confession.”
“My God,” Ruddy moaned.
Paris, summer/fall of 1960
About the Author
RICHARD WRIGHT won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African-American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his books, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. He died in 1960.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Books by Richard Wright
Uncle Tom's Children
Native Son
Black Boy
The Outsider
Savage Holiday
Black Power: A Record of Reactions in the Land of Pathos
Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past
"White Man, Listen!"
The Long Dream
Eight Men
American Hunger
Rite of Passage
A Father's Law
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Adri Berger/Getty Images
Copyright
A FATHER’S LAW. Copyright © 2008 by The Estate of Richard Wright by special arrangement with Julia Wright. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JUNE 2008 ISBN: 9780061980527
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