by Stuart Woods
“My source didn’t say exactly that, but that was my impression. You think there’s some sort of organization?”
Howell shrugged. “We don’t know for sure whether there’s even a crime, let alone a conspiracy. But if you’re right, and there are drugs involved, then there would have to be. It’s a long way from South America to north Georgia, and to move anything in quantity would take all sorts of help.”
Long after Scotty had gone to bed and left him trying to work, Howell woke with his head on the desk. He had an awful headache. It was pitch dark, and only the glow from the word processor’s monitor screen lit the room. There was a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to the machine, and an empty glass. Howell poured himself a stiff drink.
Maybe it would dull the headache. He could not bear to look at the blank screen any more, so he walked out onto the cabin’s deck, taking his drink with him.
Scotty had gone to bed early, and he had determined to make a start on the actual writing of Lurton Pitts’s book. He had it outlined on tape and in his head. He knew where to begin. But he had not been able to.
The moon was low, making a long streak of silver across the water. It was very beautiful, he thought, and he should know. He had spent enough time looking at it instead of working. He wondered why he could not clear the hurdle of chapter one. Perhaps, he mused, it was because once he actually started to write, he was a hack, finally and confirmed; a man who would ghost write something he loathed, just for the money. He cherished the irrational thought that, until he actually wrote chapter one, he could give Pitts back his expense money and save his self-respect. But the more he thought about it, the more he understood that his point of no return had been reached when he had packed the car, left his wife, and come to this place.
He looked out over the lake. No hallucinations, no spirits, crickets chirping loudly, all normal.
It began to be chilly, and he went back into the living room to retrieve a sweater from the back of his desk chair. As he reached out for it, his eye traveled to the empty monitor screen. It was not empty. It was filled with words.
Puzzled, he sat down and read the heading. “CHAPTER ONE,” it read. “How I Found God.” He pressed the scroll button, and more lines worked their way up the screen, lines that were, somehow, familiar, but that he simply couldn’t remember having written. It was all there, eight or nine pages of it, the fruit of his outline, in a prose style close to the manner of speaking of Lurton Pitts. He read it to the end, then pressed another button, sending the text to be stored on a disk.
Could he have been so drunk that he had written that without remembering it? Was that possible? Maybe, but that drunk, and he wouldn’t have been able to write. Or would he? The last thing he remembered before resting his head on the desk was a totally blank screen, glowing eerily in the dark room.
He tossed back the rest of his drink and lumbered toward the bed, baffled and exhausted.
Scotty sweated out the mail for a week. Each morning, the postman arrived about nine-thirty, dumped the usual load of circulars and letters on the station counter, tipped his hat and went on his way. Each morning, Scotty contrived to be at the counter instead of her desk when the postman arrived, beating Sally and Mike to the mail. Bo never arrived before ten.
On the eighth morning, the postman was a little late, and Bo, inexplicably, was a little early. Scotty looked up from the counter and, to her horror, saw them practically bump into each other just outside the front door. The postman went on his way, and Bo walked in with the mail under his arm.
Scotty’s first impulse was to vault over the counter and wrest it from him. Stifling this urge, she walked back to her desk, to be more in his path as he went into his office. She could see the letter as he came toward her; it was the same watermarked gold of the envelope in which her monthly Neiman’s bill came. She tried not to stare at it, but she knew she was a minute or so from an extremely, perhaps fatally embarrassing moment. Bo stopped at the radio to talk with Mike.
Scotty sat down, then stood up and pretended to go through some papers on her desk. Bo started to walk toward his office. It was time to panic, Scotty thought. All she could think of was to faint.
Scotty had never fainted before, not even in the very worst moments of her life, but she was so frightened that very little acting was required. She simply placed a hand on her forehead, then crumpled in sections at Bo’s feet, falling across his path like an elongated sack of oranges.
Bo’s inexperience with fainting apparently matched Scotty’s, because he reacted as if she had taken an arrow in the chest. He shouted for help from Mike and Sally, swept her onto the sofa in his office, loosened a lot of her clothing, demanded a wet towel for her face, and generally dithered about like a white, male Butterfly McQueen. Scotty half expected him to call for boiling water.
She had time to reflect that she enjoyed the loosening of the clothing; then she stirred, moaned, and went into her routine. “What happened?” she asked, weakly.
“You passed out, sugar,” Bo replied, sponging at her face and ruining her eye makeup. He looked whiter than she did, she was sure.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Bo. I’ve been fasting for a couple of days to lose some weight. I guess I overdid it.” She cast an eye about for the mail. Somebody had put it on Bo’s desk.
“Well, Jesus Christ, Scotty, you’ve gotta eat something, you know. No wonder you’re so weak. Mike, run over to Bubba’s and get a cheeseburger with everything on it and a glass of milk.”
Scotty sat up. “What I really need is to go to the bathroom,” she said. There was a toilet at the back of Bo’s office. She aimed so as to pass as closely as possible to his desk.
“Are you sure you can make it?” Bo was still terribly concerned.
“Oh yeah, I think that was just temporary.” She turned her back to him to squeeze between him and the desk, pinched the letter, and held in in front of her as she walked toward the toilet. She closed the door, sat down on the John lid, and tore open the letter. It was there, a clear photocopy of enough to get her killed. She tore it into the smallest possible pieces and flushed it down the John, doing it twice and checking for pieces that didn’t make it.
When she came out of the toilet, Mike was waiting with the food, and Bo forced her to eat half of it on the spot.
“Come on,” he said, when he reckoned she had eaten all she would. “I’m going to take you home. You need some rest.”
Scotty went meekly with him. Her landlady was at work. The room looked odd to her, she had spent so little time there since meeting John Howell. Bo walked her up the stairs as if she were in the last stages of a difficult pregnancy.
“Really, Bo, I’m feeling great, now,” she said, showing him into her room. “The food is working. That was all it was, just too much fasting.”
“You ought to take better care of yourself,” Bo said, softly. He raised a hand and brushed at her hair. The hand stayed, resting on her cheek. He suddenly bent and kissed her, and Scotty met him halfway. They kissed again, then again. In moments, the action had escalated.
It was wild. There was much heavy breathing and tearing at clothes, then they were on the bed, locked together, moving, moaning, coming together. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than three minutes, Scotty reflected, but she liked it, and so, apparently, did he. They had had this carnal curiosity about each other, and they had both enjoyed satisfying it.
“Christ, I want a cigarette,” Bo said. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t. I mean I haven’t for damn near ten years, but suddenly, I want a cigarette.”
“Some old reflex, I expect,” Scotty laughed.
Bo laughed, too. “Yeah, maybe.” He fingered the framed photograph on the bedside table. “Your folks?”
“Yes. My mother’s dead.”
“You don’t look like either one of them. Who do you look like? Grandparents?”
> “Who knows? I was adopted.”
“Yeah? How old?”
“Brand new, I gather. A regular foundling.”
Bo was quiet for a moment. His face seemed filled with pity. “You mean you were left on their doorstep?”
“On the doorstep of the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home in Hapeville, in a cardboard box. My folks were already on the waiting list. I was theirs in a day or two.”
Bo started to get dressed. “Well, I gotta get back,” he said. “Lot to do.”
“Sure. Thanks for the day off.”
Bo stopped at the door but did not turn. “Scotty…” He seemed to be having trouble speaking.
“Yeah?”
“You think we could just… forget about this? Try and believe it never happened?”
“You’re worried about John.”
He waited a moment, then nodded. “Yeah.”
“Sure. It never happened.”
“Promise me you won’t ever tell anybody. Not John, not anybody. Not ever.”
Jesus, Scotty thought, he sounds like the girl. “Okay,” she said, “I promise.” And I sound like the guy.
“Thanks,” he said, and left.
Scotty got up and went to the window. She watched as he went down the walk. Before he got into the car, he put his elbows on top and rested his face in his hands. When he lifted his head again, she thought he looked crushed, shattered.
Bo and she were different generations, she thought, in more ways than one. She had never placed a whole lot of importance on sex; apparently he did. It was rather sweet, she thought, as he drove away.
Well, it finally happened, she thought, as she stretched out on the bed, though, from Bo’s reaction, it wouldn’t happen again. It had been nice, if a little rushed. She certainly felt no guilt about it; it was simply not in her nature to take sex that seriously. Then she remembered that Bo was not just a passing man, but the subject of her investigation, that she hoped to put him in jail. Now she felt not a moral guilt, but a professional one. She had always thought of herself as a pro, and now she had crossed a line that was supposed to separate her professional judgment from her personal feelings. She wondered if cops ever liked or pitied the criminals they tried to convict.
She would just damn well have to steel herself and do her job. She was tough enough to do that, she knew it. Some secret part of her, though, began to hope that her information about Bo was wrong.
22
Enda McCauliffe stood over Eric Sutherland and pointed. “Sign here, Mr. Sutherland, and then initial every page, please.” Sutherland signed, then McCauliffe and the two men from the bank witnessed the document.
“Stay a minute, Enda,” Sutherland said, waving the other two men out.
McCauliffe took a chair next to the desk. He felt odd being called “Enda”; everyone had called him “Mac” since he was a kid in the valley. Only Sutherland used his Christian name, and that was a recent event, since he had become McCauliffe’s client.
Sutherland looked a bit uncomfortable. “I just wanted to tell you how pleased I am with the way things have been going since you signed on,” he said.
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Sutherland,” the lawyer said.
“Why don’t you call me ‘Eric,' “ Sutherland said. ”All my friends do.“
McCauliffe was taken aback. “I… well, you have to understand, you’ve always been Mr. Sutherland to me, all my life, and I don’t think I’d feel comfortable this late in the game…”
“All right, all right,” Sutherland said, resignedly. “I understand. In fact, the only person in town who calls me ‘Eric’ is Bo Scully, and I think he does it only because I insist.”
McCauliffe felt sorry for the man, something he had never thought would be possible. He had spent so much of his life feeling nothing but contempt for Sutherland that, even now, when he knew more about the man’s life and felt some real sympathy for him, he still had trouble pushing his old feelings aside.
“Enda,” said Sutherland, “tell me what you think of this John Howell fellow.”
“Well,” McCauliffe replied, “I like him. We’ve had a few lunches down at Bubba Brown’s. I think he’s bright; he certainly was a solid newspaper reporter in his day, although I thought his column wasn’t all that good the last few months he was doing it. To tell you the truth, he strikes me as being sort of unhappy in his personal life.”
“Do you think he bears me any ill will?”
“Why, no sir, I don’t. I think… well, he’s just the sort of person who’s… curious, I guess. He’s spent most of his working life asking a lot of questions, and now, it just comes naturally to him.”
“Enda, you understand that I can’t have him asking questions around here.”
McCauliffe nodded. “I certainly see why that would make you uncomfortable, sir, especially after what you’ve told me, and after this.” He held up the document Sutherland had just signed. “But I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Howell is not here to write about us. He’s just curious, that’s all.”
Sutherland shook his head. “I just don’t want the whole thing opened up again. It’s been twenty-five years.”
McCauliffe decided that since Sutherland was now his valued client, he should tell him everything he knew. “Mr. Sutherland, I don’t think you should assign too much weight to this, but not long after John Howell arrived here he had some out of town people out to the cabin and they… well, they had a seance.”
Sutherland winced. “Oh… my… God,” he said, quietly. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Tell me about it.”
Bo Scully was admitted to the house by Alfred, and was taken straight to the study; Eric Sutherland was waiting for him.
“Morning, Eric,” Bo said, taking care that he sounded relaxed and confident. He was never either relaxed or confident in Sutherland’s presence.
Sutherland offered no greeting. “Tell me about the credit card,” he said.
He looked angry, Bo thought. He had probably been working up to it for days. “I called Neiman-Marcus in Atlanta immediately. They referred me to the credit manager in Dallas – that’s the main store-and he refused to tell me anything without a written request.”
“So?”
“So I wrote to him, asking for a copy of the credit application.”
“And?”
“And I’m expecting a reply any day, now.” Bo leaned forward in his chair. “Eric, I think this whole business with the credit card is easily explained. Somebody at the party…”
“Dammit, I’ve told you there was nobody named MacDonald at the party!”
“Look, this guy MacDonald could be a friend or relative of somebody who was there. There are all sorts of possible explanations. Have you had any workmen around the place lately?”
“No, not a one, except the gardener, and believe me, he doesn’t have a charge account at Neiman-Marcus. I don’t pay him enough for that.”
“Eric, when we hear from Neiman’s, I promise you it’s going to be the most logical, ordinary thing. Besides, you’re not missing anything from the office, are you?”
“What may be missing from the office is not an object that somebody has walked away with. What may be missing is information that somebody has now that he didn’t have before. Knowledge is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, and I think you know I mean Howell. I saw him looking in there, and the dog just went berserk that night.”
“I talked with Alfred about that, Eric. He says the dog gets after rabbits down there in the woods. It’s happened before.”
“What about the boat?”
“Alfred says it was just adrift. That’s happened before, too.”
“We’re going to have to get rid of Mr. John Howell, Bo, that’s all there is to it.”
Bo leaned back in his chair. “Well, now, I had a little talk with Howell a couple of days ago, and I think he’s off your back.”
Sutherland looked at him in surprise. “What did you say to him?”
>
“Well, he’d heard the O’Coineen rumors, all right, and I gave him the whole story.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I told him about the letter from Joyce. I think that clinched it. You see, Eric, even if he did get into your office, all he wanted was a look at the maps. What he knows now makes the maps unnecessary, irrelevant. He understands that.” Bo hoped the hell Howell did understand that. “He didn’t come up here about that, Eric. He came to write his book, just like he said. He heard the O’Coineen story after he was already up here, and I guess he was a little bored, and it got him all excited.”
“Damn right he got excited,” Sutherland said. “Did you know he and some people had a goddamned seance up there? Enda McCauliffe told me.”
Bo’s blood ran cold. He didn’t show it. “So what? You don’t believe all that crap that halfwit Benny Pope spreads around, do you? His brain has been pickled for years.”
“Howell’s been to see Lorna Kelly, too.”
Bo felt as if he’d swallowed a block of ice. “For what?”
“McCauliffe says Howell slipped a disc, or something.”
“Did she fix it?”
“Apparently. He certainly seemed agile enough at the party.”
“Well, then…”
Sutherland wiped a hand across his brow. “I wish she’d die, damn her. I’d like to spend my last years in peace, without her around.”
Bo stood and placed a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Eric, it’s my job to see that you have the peace you deserve. You’re making much more out of all this than is called for, really you are. I’m going to take care of everything. Just trust me.”
Sutherland stood and took Bo’s hand in both of his. “Bo, I’ve always trusted you, and you’ve never let me down. Help me enjoy my last years, and I promise you, when I’m gone, you’ll be remembered.”
“Thank you, Eric,” Bo said, and took his leave.
He drove back into town, afraid to the very bottom of him. Too much new was happening – the business with Scotty, this seance, Howell’s acquaintance with Mama Kelly. Bo felt as though control of things was slipping through his fingers, that there were more holes in the dike than he could plug. He didn’t trust Sutherland, either. He’d heard that promise before, and he’d believe it when the old man was in the ground and the will was being read.