The Will

by Reed Arvin

  Henry leaned back in his chair. “And the moral of the story?”

  “All I know is that when I get up against it I still say my Hail Mary’s.”

  Henry smiled, admiring the way the champagne flute looked in her fingers, the simple, graceful curve of her hand. “That storm,” he said, “did it just blow back out to sea?”

  Amanda thought for a moment. “It did come in, four or five miles north of us. Did quite a bit of damage. Killed three or four people, I think.”

  Henry’s smile faded. “And how about them?” he asked. “Didn’t God hear their prayers?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we prayed harder.”

  Henry picked up the bottle and tipped it over Amanda’s glass; the last few drops dribbled out, making tiny splashes in her champagne. “I’d love another bottle, but now that I only have one client I can’t afford it,” he said.

  “So where do we go with Boyd?” Amanda asked. “What are you planning on doing about the will?”

  “Maybe I’ll say a few Hail Mary’s.”

  “You’re not Catholic.”

  “I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

  “You can joke if you like. But I’m going to light a candle for Raymond tomorrow morning at the cathedral in Topeka.”

  “And will that keep the hurricane from coming in?”

  “I don’t know,” Amanda said, looking into his eyes. “Maybe the wind will bounce off our prayers.”

  “They have Boyd under medical care.”

  “What?” Frank Hesston eyed Carl Durand uneasily. The news was not good, and he wanted to make sure he had got it right. “Who has him under medical care?”

  “Mathews. Collier says he got a doctor to sign Boyd off to his custody.”

  “What do they have him on?”

  “Shit, Frank, I can’t get the medical files. I’m not the CIA.”

  Hesston rubbed his temples. He was starting to hate Henry Mathews. “I thought we were done with Mathews problems when his old man died,” he said after a moment. “He was always filing pointless motions over foreclosures and getting in the way. Now the son is back here, just as bad as the father. This is turning into a mess.”

  “So? What about your plans now? If you had let me kill Boyd in the first place, we wouldn’t have this situation.”

  “We can’t just kill everybody, Carl,” Hesston said with exasperation. “You’re too indiscriminate.” His partner had every asset necessary for a profitable relationship except the most important: self-restraint. “Tell me what else Collier said.”

  “One more thing. I don’t know what the hell it means, though. Mathews has hooked up with somebody. A woman.”

  “Who is she?”

  Durand gave a malevolent expression of loathing. “Amanda Ashton,” he said with disgust. “A real pain-in-the-ass, save-the-whales type. I’ve run into her before. Works in the state department of environment. She’s snooping around the wells in Cheney County. I thought I had her taken care of, but thanks to Tyler’s will, she’s back, like a bad disease.”

  “What do you mean, snooping?”

  “She’s got some idea about the old wells falling apart. Thinks chemicals are leaching into the groundwater.”

  “Are they?”

  “How the hell do I know? The main thing is she wants access to the wells for tests.”

  “Could she find out anything?”

  Durand thought. “I doubt it. She could take her little samples for days and never find out what we’re doing. On the other hand, she’s not stupid, and she’s curious as hell. Either way, I hate the idea of anybody near those wells, Frank. It makes things unpredictable. I don’t like that.”

  “What’s she doing with Mathews?”

  “Collier doesn’t know yet. But Mathews connects her to Boyd. I don’t like that either. You got a wacko environmentalist and a hotshot lawyer hanging around asking a lot of questions.”

  Hesston leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed. “Where’s Boyd now?” he asked.

  “He’s back at his own place, if you can believe that. Or will be soon. Collier says Mathews and his new girlfriend are gonna clean up his place and try to get him back over there. The doctor’s overseeing the deal. Collier thinks Boyd will do whatever they want. Apparently the little freak feels safe around the two of them.” Durand ground out his cigarette. “Look, Frank, this is getting serious. Maybe you think doing Boyd is messy, but it’s not any messier than this. We can’t have a convention around Boyd and expect nothing to happen.”

  Hesston opened his eyes and looked intently at his partner. “This little machine has been running for more than twenty-five years because of my careful planning, Carl, and I’m not going to let it blow up now. Of course we have to get rid of Boyd. But it has to be smart. Just killing him would put a spotlight on things. Roger would get tagged, and he would turn us over without a thought. The whole thing would be over in forty-eight hours.”

  “Are we overestimating this kid Mathews? His father wasn’t much of a problem.”

  “His father didn’t make it to Wilson, Lougherby and Mathers.”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “They’ve never heard of you, more accurately. They’re big, they’re mean, and they’re nasty. If the boy ended up there, he’s not his father.”

  “Then what?”

  Hesston paused, concentrating hard. “Things aren’t that bad, not yet. They don’t really know anything, not even Roger. Anyway, greed can control him. There’s still only two people who know enough to pose a genuine threat.”

  “Boyd and Ellen.”

  Hesston nodded. “If they stay contained, we can ride this out.”

  “Boyd isn’t going to stay contained. He’s going to get treatment, and he’s going to start making sense.”

  “Then we can’t let him improve. It’s as simple as that.”

  “He knows everything about the scam. He knows about Ellen. And he obviously knows about the field hand. Your trick with the bird bought us some time, but it got him arrested, and that got him a doctor. A few weeks from now he could be reciting the whole story in a coherent state of mind.”

  Hesston shook his head. “I’m not going to second-guess killing the bird, Carl. When you hit a man that hard, you can’t predict where he’ll fall within an inch. The important thing was to keep him under pressure. But I agree that we need a long-term solution.” He paused. “I don’t like Mathews hanging around. We have to keep him occupied. He’s not afraid of anybody in the equation, and that makes him dangerous. But there’s an easy solution to that situation, fortunately.”

  “Which is?”

  “We start proceedings contesting the will. I’ll file this afternoon, and by dinner Collier serves Mathews with papers.”

  “How fast can you turn it around?”

  Hesston smiled. “Judge Brackman’s a friend, and his clerk is in my pocket. By tomorrow afternoon Mathews will be up to his neck in briefs.”

  “All right. What about Boyd?”

  Hesston mused for a moment, deep in thought. After some time, his face cleared, and he poured himself a glass of bourbon. “Let me ask you something, Carl,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “What does Ellen Gaudet want more than anything else in the world?”

  “To be Mrs. Tyler William Crandall. I have a feeling that’s not going to happen now.”

  “Other than that.”

  “Other than that, I’d say a truckload of money might ease her pain. To never work in that two-bit bank again.”

  “Money we might be willing to pay her, in return for services rendered.”

  “What kind of services? And what kind of money?”

  “She has no concept of real wealth. A couple hundred grand at the most. Money to get her to do something . . .” He paused, lingering over his choice of words. “Final,” he said at last.

  Durand stared at his partner, comprehension coming into his eyes. “Do you think it would work?”

  “It worked before. S
he got Boyd involved in the first place. Now that Ty’s dead, she’ll be anxious, vulnerable.”

  “But she’s got a soft spot for the fruitcake.”

  “I didn’t say she’d take a gun and pull the trigger. She doesn’t even need to know what we have in mind. She’ll just bring him to us where we can take care of things.”

  “So when do we talk to her?”

  “We don’t talk to her, not yet.” Hesston sighed and said, “Efficiency, Carl. Neither one of us can go to Council Grove, obviously. Roger can do that.”

  “And get him in deeper.”

  “I thought you’d like that.”

  Durand looked at his watch. “He’ll be here in three hours for instructions about the will.”

  Hesston smiled. “Leave him to me.”

  Henry, Amanda, and Dr. Harris walked into the Trailside Diner dog tired; it had been a long day cleaning up Raymond’s house, and it had gone well. At least Collier had removed the bird from the door. The inside of the house hadn’t been the nightmare it could have been as well; there was nothing really frightening inside, just a startling accumulation of dirt and the mild chaos that comes from almost complete neglect. But the payoff had been substantial: Boyd had gone in easily, if only to look around the place and then to retreat back to the park and his worn bench.

  They found a booth near the back and ordered coffee. Harris took off his glasses, rubbed his temples, and sighed. “I don’t know whether to be happy or sad,” he said. “All that work, and he wasn’t in the place ten minutes.”

  “And you don’t see a problem with him going back to the park?” Amanda asked, sounding concerned.

  “The park is the one thing I don’t worry about,” Harris replied. “He’s obviously comfortable there. There’s really nothing we can do until we have him regulated medically, anyway. You saw him take his medication this morning, right, Henry?”

  “Every morning at nine, that’s our deal,” Henry answered. “I give him the pills, and I watch him take them.”

  “Then that’s all right. If we can get the delusions to fade, we can get down to the real work.”

  “You deserve to be in some psychiatrist hall of fame for helping with the house,” Henry said.

  “I had my reasons,” Harris answered matter-of-factly. “The way a schizophrenic lives is a major source of information about him. I was hoping to find some window into Raymond at the house.”

  “Did you?” Amanda asked.

  “What I got was confirmation, I suppose. There wasn’t the kind of disorder I would have expected in that place if his was a true, deep schizophrenia. At this point I’m convinced he’s simply been decompensated.”

  Henry and Amanda settled in for the explanation. The coffee came, and Harris stirred sugar into his cup, staring into the dark liquid. “A lot of people have latent brain pathologies, but they compensate for it. They find ways to manage. You could work right beside one of them and never know it.” He nodded at Henry. “You, for example.”

  Henry looked up, surprised, and Harris smiled, releasing him. “It was just an example. But people can quietly live for years on the edge of coming unglued.”

  “How is that possible?” Henry asked.

  “They develop strategies to stay ahead of their illness. Maybe they self-medicate with booze or drugs. Maybe they have a secret compulsion they indulge. They stack matchbooks or they clean floors. They rearrange socks. These strategies can get incredibly elaborate, but they’re hidden from public view. They can actually get through life that way, if they’re lucky.”

  “What about the decompensation?” Amanda asked.

  “An emotional trauma of sufficient power destroys their ability to mask the illness. The energy used to manage the trauma can’t be spared from the pathology. They break, and the illness emerges. Decompensation.”

  “Could a person in that condition hold a position of some responsibility?” Henry asked. “Say, manage a bank?”

  “Until the decompensation, he could function at a tolerable level. But there would be subtle signs, if you could find them.” Harris stared past Henry and Amanda, his eyes focusing on the space beyond them. “The important thing now is what caused it,” he said. “Something has obviously hurt him, and I’m not talking about the bird. This is something from his past, something never resolved.”

  “We do know one thing,” Amanda said. “Raymond is terribly disturbed by the wells on Crandall’s land.”

  “Tell me about the wells,” Harris said, putting on his glasses and pulling out a notebook. “Tell me everything.”

  “We took Raymond out there about a week ago and he went into an apocalyptic tirade about plague and bloodshed,” Henry answered. “Something about burning sulfur and hailstones.”

  “And there was something else,” Amanda broke in, “something about hidden things being brought into judgment.”

  Harris’ face clouded over. “I don’t like that,” he said quietly. He looked at Henry. “I remember your saying at the jail that the wells were in some dispute.”

  Henry nodded. “To put it mildly.”

  “Raymond has an obsession with General Custer,” Harris said. “He said the whole Custer thing was about mineral rights. He had completely identified with Custer himself. What do you two know about the story?”

  “Just the schoolboy version,” Henry said. “But obviously Custer gets it in the end. That’s not very hopeful.”

  Harris nodded. “There’s something else that bothers me. What Custer is getting is really a kind of justice, depending on which side of the story you’re on. He was ambushed, but on the other hand he was going up there to kill a bunch of Indians minding their own business on reservation land. From that perspective, he was nothing but a common criminal.”

  “You’re inferring a lot from this story,” Henry ventured doubtfully. “What if this is just a part of his delusion? After all, Custer’s Elm is where he’s spent the past twenty-five years. Custer’s the main character. It’s a natural connection to make.”

  “He definitely is delusional,” Harris said, “but that doesn’t mean his delusions don’t have meaning. They certainly do.”

  “Custer wanted to go up and strip all the money off that reservation land,” Amanda said. “And that’s what Crandall has been doing for the past twenty-five years with those wells. Isn’t Raymond’s association with Custer a way of saying he had something to do with that?”

  “Drilling for oil doesn’t make someone a criminal,” Harris replied.

  “It might in this case.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a long story,” Amanda answered. “But leave that for a second. The wells connect Raymond to Crandall. Based on his reaction to them, they also connect him with his illness.”

  “They also connect you to Carl Durand,” Henry said. “Are you sure you’re not confusing your personal feelings here?”

  “I don’t pretend to be objective. But the wells don’t just connect me to Durand. If there’s really something funny going on out there, they might connect Raymond to him as well.”

  “Who’s Durand?” Harris asked.

  “Satan,” Amanda answered simply.

  Henry held up his hand. “A wildcatter from around here who’s up in state government now.”

  Amanda cleared her throat softly. “That’s the longer description. But listen, I can help on all this. Henry, I told you I wanted another look at those wells, this time with a real geologist. I’ve found one.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “He can be here tomorrow.”

  “Not exactly compelling qualifications.”

  “It’s the same way I picked Dr. Harris.”

  Henry looked at the doctor. “Maybe we were lucky.”

  “I asked him to come just before the pumps run, in the early evening. We’ll have just enough daylight.”

  At that moment the door to the Trailside opened. Henry glanced over Amanda’s shoulder to see Sheriff Collier coming
in the restaurant with his lazy gait. The sheriff glanced around the place, strolled through the mostly empty diner, and walked up to the table. “Look what we got here,” he said, scratching himself. “It’s the fucking dream team.”

  “Sheriff Collier,” Henry answered lightly, “no dogs to catch today?”

  Collier shot Henry back an indifferent look. “I had to take your shit the other day,” he said, “but you’re gonna be kinda busy from now on. If you got any left, better shovel it now.” He threw an envelope down on the table.

  Henry looked at the envelope and instantly understood its meaning. “I’m impressed that you were able to take time off from writing parking tickets to deliver this,” he said. “What an exciting life you lead.”

  “What’s going on?” Amanda asked.

  “This,” Henry said, keeping his eyes on Collier, “is a court date for one Roger Crandall and one Raymond Boyd to meet at the Cheney County courthouse for a legal tango. I will be representing Mr. Boyd. Roger will be dancing with Frank Hesston, I believe.”

  “That’s right,” Collier said, staring back at Henry.

  “Amanda, you’d just love Hesston,” Henry said, smiling grimly. “Always defending the downtrodden, wherever he may find them.”

  “I hope he cleans your clock,” Collier said, his sallow grin gone.

  “It’s been a pleasure, Sheriff,” Henry stated, looking unconcerned. “With you on patrol, let no man live in fear.”

  Collier stood before the table, attempting to formulate an answer. At last he muttered, “I gotta go,” and spun on his heel.

  When he had left, Amanda said, “My God, Henry. You’ve got a mean streak.”

  Henry’s expression was implacable. “None of that was meant for Collier.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Our sheriff has picked sides,” he replied calmly. “I don’t know if something’s changed, but he’s obviously made his decision, for whatever reason. He thinks we’re going to lose, and he’s acting accordingly. I wanted him to let his bosses know that I’m not afraid of them.”