“I searched the place,” Morris said. “Somebody else had searched it, but I did anyway, and I found Parker’s name on a sheet of paper with a phone number in New Jersey. So I took it along, and I went looking for a fellow named Berridge.”
Jessup said, “Berridge? Who’s he?”
“He’s somebody else that’s dead,” Morris said, and looked at Claire. “I hope you don’t know any of these people, Mrs. Willis. I’m sorry to be talking about death so much at your table.”
“No, that’s all right,” she said, stumbling. “I mean, I don’t know them.” She didn’t know Berridge.
Morris said, “Berridge is an old man who was going to work with Parker and Keegan and that other fellow and me, but he decided he was too old, and then he got killed. I figured maybe, since Berridge had been the first one killed, maybe somebody that knew Berridge would know what was going on. So I went and talked to some people who knew Berridge, and I found out Berridge had been having a lot of trouble with a grandson of his. The grandson had been hustling him for money. Apparently he’s an acidhead of some kind.”
The air in the room had suddenly changed. No one was eating, or even pretending to eat. Morris was talking calmly, as though there were no tension in the air at all, but Claire could see in his cheekbones, in the way he moved his eyes, that he too was tense.
She shifted her gaze without turning her head— she was almost afraid to turn her head—and saw Manny looking sullenly at Morris, his head down like a bull when frustration is about to make it charge.
Jessup, his voice flat, said, “You think this grandson had something to do with what happened to Berridge and Keegan?”
Morris said, “I think Berridge had promised the grandson money out of this work he was going to do with the rest of us. But then the old man lost his nerve or his wind or something, and the grandson was stuck. So I think the grandson decided to take the money away from the other guys, from me and Parker and Keegan and the other fellow. And I think Berridge was going to warn us about it, and the grandson killed him. But Berridge had told the grandson where we were going to be at one certain point, so the grandson hung around until we left that place, and’ then picked one of us to follow, and it happened to be Keegan.”
Jessup said, “To rob him, you mean.”
“That’s right. And to find out from him how to reach the rest of us. What I don’t understand is the torture, though.”
Claire said, “Torture?” She hadn’t known she was going to say anything at all, and the sound of the word in her own voice startled and frightened her. Vague images of torture—fire, pinching things, whips, electricity—flickered like bits of a silent movie in her mind.
Morris looked at her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Willis. I won’t describe it. But what I don’t understand is why it was done.”
Jessup said, “Maybe this fellow Keegan wanted to keep some of the money for himself. Maybe he wouldn’t tell the grandson where it all was, just one little part of it.”
Morris shook his head. “Keegan wasn’t crazy. He’d rather be alive and poor than dead and rich. Besides, there wasn’t that much money to give over.”
Jessup said, “How much?”
“I suppose Keegan would have gotten home with about sixteen thousand,” Morris said.
Manny made a sudden startled sound, and Jessup said, quickly, “That little? For the kind of thing he was doing?”
“When you figure it was one night’s ticket receipts, and it was split four ways, and the financing had to come out of it, there wasn’t that much left.” Morris looked appraisingly at Jessup, and said, “Do you suppose that’s what happened? Do you suppose Keegan gave the sixteen thousand to the grandson and he wouldn’t believe that was all of it? Do you suppose they tortured Keegan to death trying to get him to give them something he didn’t have?”
Claire said, “That’s awful. He wouldn’t have any way to make them stop.”
“He could die,” Jessup said. Though he was answering Claire, he kept looking at Morris. He said, “So what now?”
“I came here,” Morris said. “The phone number got me the address. I figured Parker ought to know what was going on, and maybe I’d run into the grandson around here someplace.”
“Well, he hasn’t showed up yet,” Jessup said. “Maybe because Parker isn’t here, or because he saw Mrs. Willis had friends with her.”
“To protect her,” Manny said. The words had a curious leaden quality to them, as though he didn’t understand English but was reading a prepared speech written down phonetically.
Jessup said, “What’s the grandson’s name?”
“Berridge, like his grandfather.” Morris grinned at him and said, “Your name’s Jessup.”
“That’s right.”
Morris turned his head and looked at Manny. “And your name’s Manny. That’s your first name, isn’t it?”
What happened next was very fast and very confusing. Morris’ hands moved and there was a quick glimpse of a gun coming out from under the sheepskin jacket, but at the same time Jessup flung his plate of food into Morris’ face, and Manny grabbed up the steak knife they’d been cutting the Italian bread with and lunged forward to jab it into Morris’ left side just above his belt.
Then everyone was standing, and Morris’ and Claire’s chairs had tipped over backward. The gun was no longer in Morris’ hand, which now was clutched around the wooden handle of the steak knife; his other hand was wiping frantically at the food smeared on his face, trying to get it out of his eyes.
Claire was backing away, her mouth open wide, grimacing with the pressure of trying not to scream. Jessup had gone down on one knee for the gun, but Manny had grabbed up his fork and was poking it at the food on Morris’ face and then into his own mouth, at Morris’ face and into his mouth, fast hard movements, and at the same time laughing and shouting, “Look! I’m eating! Look at this! I’m eating!” Morris was trying to keep away from the fork, and not fall over the chair lying down behind him, and get the food—it must be stinging him—out of his eyes, and do something about the knife in his side, and stay alive, and none of it was going to happen.
Jessup came up with the gun, and Morris went crashing backward over the chair, and Manny yelled with laughter and lunged after him, and Claire turned and ran full-tilt for the bedroom.
“Come out of there, honey,” Jessup called, and tapped on the bedroom door.
The last five minutes had been full of pointless frantic activity. She’d run in here and locked the door and pulled the dresser over in front of it to block it. And then there was the door to the bathroom—they could get into the bathroom from the kitchen, and then through this other door into here—and she jammed a chair-back under the door handle of that. And there was the glass door to the porch and the outside. And flanking it were windows.
Parker had been right. There was no way to lock yourself safely into this house. Too many doors, too many windows.
And now, too late, she realized she should have left the house at once, when she’d run in here. She should have kept on going, through the bedroom and out the door to the porch and across the yard and away from here.
There’d been a scream, just one, very hoarse, less than a minute after she’d come in here, while she was still barricading the first door, but there hadn’t been another sound since then. Where were they now, what were they doing?
It was too late to run now. She’d been mindless and frantic when she’d run into this room, and because of that she’d thrown away her chance, while they were both concerned with Morris.
But why hadn’t they come after her? She turned and stared hard at the windows, half-expecting to see Manny’s moon face grinning at her there, but the porch was empty.
Was there still time? Or were they playing cat and mouse with her, making believe they weren’t thinking about her, waiting for her to make the jump and try to get away? That would be like them, that would be their style. Let her think she still had a chance, and then do s
omething really awful to her.
Once before, since the start of her involvement with Parker, people from his world had intruded into hers, bringing discomfort and danger with them, but that time the people involved had been rational and businesslike. They’d wanted Parker to do something, he hadn’t wanted to do it, they’d tried to use her for leverage against him. She had been afraid, but not the way she was afraid now, because that time she’d been dealing with sane human beings who wouldn’t do anything pointless. But Jessup and Manny weren’t sane, and they were barely human beings. It was as she’d thought before, like having a mountain lion loose in the house; no way to talk to him, no way to guess what he’ll do next, no way to reason with or about him at all.
She stood blinking and immobile in the middle of the bedroom, the two doors barricaded, the third door and the windows still unblocked, and for a minute she was incapable of any kind of movement at all. And then Jessup called, and tapped on the hall door, and she .took a fast aimless step to nowhere.
The porch door. Out, or block it? How barricade a glass door? How barricade the windows flanking it?
Jessup, sounding bored and irritable, called a second time, “Don’t make it tough on yourself, honey. Open the door and come out.”
What if she were to hide? What if she hid, and led them to believe she already bad escaped from the house?
But where? Where, in this small and simple bedroom? The closet, no good. Behind the drapes, no good. Under the bed, no good.
Under the bed.
The doorknob rattled. Jessup called, “I hate physical labor, bitch! You better open this door!”
Was it still there? She dropped to her knees and looked wildly under the bed, and the rifle was lying there where she’d left it, slender, long. She started to reach for it, and then suddenly became aware of the light in the room and the darkness outside, and how this room was now like a stage set. And was there an audience, outside the windows, in the darkness on the porch?
To have Jessup hammer and threaten at the hall door, and Manny waiting and grinning outside on the porch, hoping she would try to make a run for it—that was their style.
She left the rifle where it was, and got again to her feet. She moved awkwardly now, self-consciously, convinced that eyes were watching her.
The night-table lamp on her side of the bed was the only source of light. She moved to it, cumbersome, uneasy, blinking, and bent suddenly to switch it off. In the new darkness she dropped to the floor again, felt along the bed, reached her hand underneath and slapped at the floor till she felt the cold metal of the rifle barrel. And all the time wincing from the expected sound of breaking glass, sure that Manny would crash into the room now from the porch.
But nothing happened. She pulled the rifle out, sat up, and leaned her back against the side of the bed. She sat cross-legged, tailor fashion, with the rifle across her lap; the barricaded hall door was to her left, the vulnerable porch door to her right.
Nothing happened.
Was that voices, was that movement?
Jessup’s voice, low and threatening, sounded from against the blocked door: “Manny says you’ve turned out the light. You goin’ to bed now? But you got to finish your dinner.”
So she’d been right. Manny had been watching the porch door, that was the only way he could know the light had been turned off.
She thought of shouting to them that she was armed, that they should go away, but she was afraid that would simply make them meaner and more difficult to deal with. It was the mountain lion again; you can’t scare off a mountain lion by telling him you have a gun.
Jessup called, “Honey, you can come out now and cverything’ll be okay, no trouble at all. But you stay in there and you’ll be sorry.”
It was such a temptation to believe him. It would be so much easier that way, to hide the rifle again under the bed, pull the dresser away from the door, and just walk out there. If she could believe him.
She didn’t move.
Nothing happened then for a long while. She continued to sit there, straining to hear a sound that would tell her what they were doing, what they were planning to do.
Where was Parker? Five hours since he’d called.
Noises. Bumping and thumping in the living room, Manny and Jessup saying things to one another. She couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded as though they were doing some sort of work together and were giving one another instructions and comments.
Her eyes had grown more used to the darkness. It was an overcast night, with intermittent starshine; the rectangles of door and windows were paler blurs in the darkness, and at intervals she could make out the light-reflecting restless water of the lake.
The thumping noises were coming closer, moving now across the porch from the direction of the living-room door. Were they bringing something heavy to batter their way through this door? I can’t faint, she told herself, insisting on it because she was afraid she might faint; her arms were trembling, her stomach was light and queasy, and the blinking was back again, worse than ever.
What were they doing? Vaguely she saw movement outside, on the porch. They were out there, or one of them was out there.
Should she shoot at them through the glass? But they were so vaguely seen, and it was probably only one of them anyway, and the chances were she wouldn’t hit them at all, not under these conditions. And afterward they would know she had a gun.
Dragging sounds, rustling movements, half-seen busyness out there on the porch. And then nothing. There still seemed to be someone or something there, a vague shape bulky outside the glass door, but she couldn’t make out what it was.
Turn on the light? But that would illuminate her much more than it.
There were porch lights, two of them, operated by a pair of switches, one beside the door in here and one beside the door in the living room. Either switch operated both lights. She could crawl over to the door—standing up and walking was beyond her now—and reach up and turn on the porch lights, and then she would know what it was out there. But did she really want to know?
She shifted position, turning half-around on the floor so as to put her left side toward the porch. She raised the rifle and pointed it at the bulky thing beyond the door.
Nothing happened. She waited, and nothing happened.
And then the porch lights came on, suddenly, unexpectedly, and she screamed at what was outside the door, looking in at her.
Morris. Dead and naked and cut all over his body and tied upright in a kitchen chair. Just sitting there, with his arms hanging down at his sides, his head dangling to the right, his eyes looking at her.
She emptied the rifle into him, and the laughing kept on anyway, and she was squeezing the trigger to make click sounds against emptiness when Jessup and Manny punched their way in through the bathroom door.
PART FOUR
The plane circled Newark for fifteen minutes, and had been late getting there in any event. It was nearly eight o’clock before they landed and the passengers could get off.
At night, Newark Airport looks like Newark: underilluminated, squat, dirty. The terminal building seemed to be full of short people speaking Spanish, all of them excited about one thing or another. Parker went through them like a panther through geese, and trotted across the blacktop street out front to the parking lot and the Pontiac.
He had major highway to drive on most of the way, with country blacktop for only the last ten miles or so. He drove by the turnoff to the road that circled the lake, knowing that just over a mile farther on, the other end of the same road came around to intersect with the one he was on.
There’d been a lot of traffic coming the other way, eastbound, weekenders on their way back to the city, and a car was waiting to come out at the second turnoff. Parker steered around it, and met two others coming out while he drove in. He would have preferred a week night, when there’d be a lot less activity around the lake.
He picked a likely-looking house on the lake side o
f the road, one that showed no lights or any sign of recent activity, but which didn’t have its windows boarded up for the winter. He left the Pontiac in the driveway, looked through one of the windows in the garage door, and saw a fairly large outboard motorboat in there, on a wheeled carrier. So the owner hadn’t started coming up yet this year at all, or the boat would be in the water and room would have been left in the garage for their car.
Parker walked around the side of the house and down the slope of weedy lawn at the back to the water’s edge, and looked out across the lake. There were maybe fifteen houses showing light over there; one of them would be Claire’s. He was too far away now to make out anything but light and darkness.
The house here was built on land that sloped pretty steeply down toward the water, so that what was the first floor on the road side was a good eight feet above the ground back here, held up by a series of metal posts. Part of the underneath section had been closed off to form a sort of workshop, and the rest was left open and used for storage of various things: a lawnmower, jerry cans, an oildrum-and-wood-platform float, and two aluminum rowboats.
Parker wrestled one of the rowboats out of the storage space, turned it right side up, and dragged it down to the water’s edge. Then he went back and found several wooden oars, their green paint flaking off, leaning against the rear of the storage space. He brought them down to the rowboat, fit them into the oarlocks, and pushed the boat into the water.
It was a cloudy night, with occasional spaces of starry sky but no moon. Parker set off in the rowboat, and twenty feet from shore he could no longer clearly make out the house he’d started from.
It was a cool evening, but the rowing was warm work. The boat moved well enough so long as he kept at the oars, but it never built up any momentum; the instant he would stop to rest, the boat would sag to a halt in the water.
Out in the middle, he stopped for a minute to study the far shore, trying to figure out which house was Claire’s. But it still wasn’t possible, the lights were anonymous, not giving a clear enough indication of the shape of any of the buildings, and he was still much too far away to make out the rooms inside any of those lit windows.
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