by M. K. Wren
“Sure. Well, this morning, anyway.”
“This morning. You mean yesterday morning. Get dry and warm first, then we’ll take care of your stomach.”
Lyn straightened, smiling tentatively. “Thanks, Conan.”
Half an hour later, Lyn, wearing one of Conan’s robes, sat cross-legged on the floor with his back to the fire, elbows on the coffee table, talking around a thick, roast beef sandwich. Conan, in a wool caftan, lounged on the couch, enjoying a cigarette and a snifter of Courvoisier.
“I’ve been a little crazy,” Lyn admitted. “Like that damn rifle. After I talked to you on the phone Saturday, I went straight down to Westport and bought the gun. You know, you can buy a rifle at any sporting goods store and just walk out with it. No license, no waiting period—nothing.”
Conan nodded, holding a sip of cognac on his tongue. “Of course. Only sane people with benign intent buy rifles. Where have you been hiding out all this time?”
He shrugged, chewing a mouthful before he answered. “Mostly in the woods south of Shearwater Spit.”
“In sight of Gabe Benbow’s house?” Lyn only nodded. “You were seen up the Sitka River.”
“Yeah, that forest ranger. There’s an old quarry above Cougar Creek. I went up there for some target practice. Just like riding a bicycle, you never forget. I’m still a damn good shot.” He said that with no hint of pride.
“You missed when you fired at Gabe at the cemetery.”
“I didn’t miss.” He put his sandwich down and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I mean, I pulled my aim. Hell, I could’ve hit him. Conan, I was out in the woods with that gun for—what?—three days? I don’t know how many times I had Gabe in my sights. But I kept telling myself I didn’t have a clear shot for one reason or another. Then at the cemetery, I had the old bastard right in the cross hairs and…damn it, I couldn’t kill him.” Lyn shook his head, then with a barking laugh, “But I figured I could at least scare the hell out of him.”
Conan nodded and raised his glass. “Oh, you did that. All the Benbows, in fact.”
Lyn picked up his sandwich, studied it a moment, then, “You want to tell me about your—well, your investigation?”
Conan told him, step by step, and day by day, while Lyn finished his sandwich, then paced up and down in front of the hearth, and finally settled at the other end of the couch with the snifter of cognac that Conan insisted upon.
Lyn asked a few questions, although he had various colorful comments, until Conan reached the point in his story at which he had discovered the Black Leaf 40. Lyn looked at the bottle that was now on the coffee table beside the manila envelope. “Is that it—the bottle you found?”
“Yes.”
Lyn stared at it; his voice was tight. “Any one of them could have poisoned her!”
Conan didn’t comment on that, but Lyn was wrong; only one person could have poisoned Corey. He went on to explain the ruse he’d perpetrated with Sergeant Todd’s help. “I just wanted to let Gabe know that the Black Leaf 40 had been recognized as the poison. When he realizes the bottle is gone, I hope he thinks Billy took it—as evidence. No, I had no ulterior motive beyond making Gabe—and his fellow conspirators—nervous. Now, my last little adventure of the night…” He picked up the manila envelope, tore it open, and handed the diary to Lyn. “Nina was keeping this for future reference, apparently.”
Lyn opened it to the November twenty-first entry, then his eyes squeezed shut, and he put the diary back on the table, asking huskily, “How did you get hold of it?”
“Outright robbery. I’ve had quite a career in crime tonight.” He didn’t elucidate on that, and for a time the only sounds were the whispers of fire and rain and the roar of the surf, a sound so continuous, the mind disregarded it for more immediate stimuli. But now when Conan stopped to listen to it, he heard the ominous undertone in it.
Lyn asked, “Is that all there is to it? You said the law doesn’t even recognize the fact that a crime was committed. Is that the end of it?”
“For the law, yes.”
“But there’s got to be—I mean, you found out what happened. Why can’t the police?”
“I found out because I’m not the police. The conspirators thought it was safe to talk to me. Not one of them is going to break—count on that, Lyn. And even if one did confess, the others would deny it. Besides, a confession isn’t worth a damn legally without evidence to back it up.”
“But what about the Black Leaf Forty? Maybe there were fingerprints—something…”
Conan closed his eyes. Lyn had to ask the questions, but that didn’t make the answers easier. “Of course there were fingerprints on it. But there is no legally acceptable proof that it had anything to do with Corey’s death.”
Lyn made a strangled sound, his glass coming down hard on the table. “Legally acceptable! Corey Benbow—remember her? Remember the way she laughed, the way she…danced through life? Corey was murdered and the law is blind?”
Conan let those words fall into a silence, then he said quietly, “It’s justice that’s blind in our symbology. It means justice is disinterested. Not uninterested.” He leaned forward to get his cigarettes from the table. “I’ve been thinking a lot about justice lately. It comes from the Latin—what else?—and it has to do with what is lawful, or right, or fair. I’ve never known a human being who didn’t have strong feelings about justice. I suppose that’s because we’re such social creatures; a concept of justice seems to be essential to any society.”
“Conan, for God’s sake!”
Lyn was staring at him, anger flashing in his eyes. Conan nodded as he lit a cigarette. “What would satisfy you, Lyn? What would you call justice in this case, given that the law is impotent here?”
“I don’t know what I’d call justice. I just don’t think it’s right for anybody to take another person’s life—and what do we have that’s more precious than that—and get away with it!”
“Or profit by it in any way? Or continue their lives as if nothing had happened?”
“Yes!”
Conan smiled fleetingly at that berserker’s fervor. It wasn’t foreign to his thinking. He said, “I’m glad you came out of the woods. I’ll need your help.”
Lyn came to his feet, hands in muscular, brown fists. “You’ve got it. What do you want me to do?”
Conan looked at his watch, drained his glass of the last of the cognac, then rose. “Right now, the first thing on the agenda is to get some sleep.”
Lyn frowned, distracted, as a blast of wind slapped the rain hard against the windows. “Any of those windows ever blow out?”
“No. They’ve withstood winds above a hundred and ten miles an hour. How far above, I don’t know. I lost my wind gauge on that one. I have braces for them. We’ll put them up tomorrow morning.
By the way, at four-seventeen tomorrow afternoon, there’ll be ten-foot high tide; the highest of the year.”
“With this storm behind it? Damn.”
Conan listened to the rumbling throb, mouth shadowed with smile. “Yes. And the wind is still holding west.”
Chapter 18
Conan came down from the ladder after inserting the last of the two-inch-wide, hardwood braces in the brass mounts in the window frames. He’d had little sleep in the early hours of this day; the raging of the storm had wakened him repeatedly, and in the hours since the dawn’s pale advent, the storm had intensified. He pressed the palm of his hand against the window, feeling the chill of it, the vibrations of rain torrents smashing against the glass, and in the span of his hand, he made contact with powers that stretched his imagination to comprehend.
The window might as well have been opaque for all he could see beyond it. He went to the sliding glass door near the fireplace, took a deep breath, as if he were about to dive into cold water, and stepped out onto the deck. The wind tore at his hair and clothing, sodden within seconds; his skin tingled with every chilling pulse of rain. He held on to the deck railing, palms ag
ain measuring the frequencies of power; these transmitted from the rock on which this house was built—rock that was a tuning fork for the pounding cadences of the breakers.
It was a veiled world, its tumultuous, ever-changing shapes all gray and white; yet within that narrow spectrum existed endless ephemeral subtleties of hue. There was no horizon; the sea had only one perceptible margin: here where it met and did titanic battle with the land. Four hours before high tide, yet the breakers were already hitting the seawall; the beach was visible only in the nadirs of the surges.
The swells had been forecast at thirty to forty feet, but measurements were meaningless. Mountains of water took shape beyond the distant limits of vision, moved in ranked ranges toward the shore, at length toppling in white avalanches. The freed water spilled shoreward faster than any human being could run, smashing into rocks and seawalls in blizzards of atomized water and fragmented foam. Logs and stumps, the accumulation of years that had rested stolidly on the sand, felt the tug of the receding waves, moved out with them, rolling and bobbing in an elephantine fugue, raw tons of timber floating like kindling on the ebbing waters until they were stranded on the sand, waiting for the next racing flood to pick them up and hurl them at the shore with a sound like thunder.
This staggering display of power was a psychic catharsis that cleared the mind and put life and death in perspective. Even Corey’s death fit into this tumultuous perspective in some sense Conan couldn’t verbalize. He wasn’t surprised, nor did it seem an invasion of a private experience, when Lyn Hatch joined him on the deck. This was something the two of them could share, just as—or perhaps, because—they shared the experience of grief.
At length, Conan went back into the living room, and Lyn followed, his hair and beard flecked with snowflakes of foam. He laughed in wondering exuberance. “My God, it’s beautiful!”
Conan nodded as he pushed his wet hair back from his forehead. Then, reluctantly, he turned away from the windows and crossed to the stairs. “Beautiful, but incredibly wet. You’d better get into some dry clothes.”
Lyn sobered. “Yes, I guess so. Conan, what…well, when do we get started?”
Conan paused at the top of the stairs. “Soon. I have a phone call to make, then some shopping to do.”
A short while later, Conan sat at his desk in the library, while Lyn stood at the windows, mesmerized by the storm that provided a rumbling undercurrent to every word and thought. Conan pulled the phone toward him and punched a number. It was Jonas who answered finally with a cautious, “Hello?”
“This is Conan Flagg, Jonas, and I want Gabe. Before you tell me he won’t talk to me, give him this message: I have Kate Benbow’s diary. The original.”
Jonas hesitated only a few seconds. “I’ll go get him.”
Conan waited patiently until at length Gabe initiated the conversation with, “Flagg, you son of a bitch! The original? I’ll believe that when I see it!”
Conan laughed. “I’ll have it with me this afternoon.”
That elicited a long silence, followed by a suspicious, “This afternoon?”
“I think a reunion of sorts is called for to discuss this turn of events. I mean, the fact that I have the diary now. Of course, I’m not as naïve as Corey was. I have photographs of the diary and the pertinent passage in a safe place, and if anything happens to me—an unfortunate accident for instance—the photographs will find their way into the hands of the DA. And in case Owen Culpepper absentmindedly forgets them, copies will go to the state attorney general and the commissioner of the Real Estate Board.”
When at length Gabe responded, his voice was husky with tension. “What do you want, Flagg?”
“Justice. But that’s rather an abstract concept. What I want is an opportunity to talk to all the conspirators. That means you, Jonas, Moses, France, Nina, and Leo. Today, Gabe. At your house, let’s say…three-thirty.”
Gabe spluttered incoherently, finally making his exasperation intelligible. “Today! At my house! Flagg, you’re crazy, and so’s anybody else who’d be out in this storm. We’ll be lucky to have any power on. Lights’ve been going on and off all day, and I—”
“Today, Gabe. Get out some candles.”
“But I can’t—well, Leo sure won’t drive all the way up here in this—”
“He’d damn well better chance it! I want him there, Gabe.” Conan paused, his tone almost honeyed now. “It might be worth the trip. My father—ol’ Henry Flagg—was a born horse trader, and maybe a little of it rubbed off on me.”
“Horse trader? What do you mean?”
“I don’t think I need to spell it out. By the way, if you’re still entertaining a publicly funded bodyguard, get rid of him. What we have to talk about, you don’t want him to hear. Three-thirty, Gabe. I’ll expect all of you there.” He gently cradled the phone, cutting off another spluttering volley, then looked up at Lyn, who was listening intently.
Lyn asked, “You think they’ll come?”
Conan looked past Lyn to the rain-curtained windows. “They’ll come. They all have too much at stake not to.”
Chapter 19
Where the last of the jack pine, stunted by salt winds, offered a scant cover, Conan stopped the car and looked down at Gabe Benbow’s house. The windshield wipers could clear the driving sheets of rain only for split seconds at every sweep. The usually quiet waters of Sitka Bay were ridged with white wave fronts, and to the west of the spit, foam-capped mountains rumbled one after another toward the beach, reached for the grassy spine of the spit, then slid back to meet the oncoming waves in running walls of water. The vast thundering was unrelenting.
Conan smiled obliquely as he recognized the cars in the parking area: Nina’s Cutlass, France’s and Moses’ Cadillac, and Leo Moskin’s Rolls. He checked his watch: 3:12. “Well, Lyn, we aren’t the only ones who believe in early arrivals.”
Like Conan, Lyn Hatch was attired in a hooded rain parka; at his knee, he held the rifle, still in its protective sleeve. He had to raise his voice against the wind and rain pounding at the car. “Conan, don’t leave me standing outside the back door too long. I might blow into the bay.”
Conan nodded. “Five minutes, Lyn. If somebody hasn’t opened the door for you by then, open it yourself, even if you have to shoot off the lock. And, Lyn…” Conan studied him a moment, then, “Be careful.”
Lyn only laughed at that as he opened the door. The car shuddered when he slammed it behind him, and within seconds, he had disappeared into the undergrowth.
Conan drove toward the house, gripping the wheel hard to keep the car on the road. There were no lights visible in the house, but most of Taft County had been without electricity for nearly an hour. He parked beside the Rolls, then took his Mauser out of the glove box and slipped it into the pocket of the jacket under his parka. For a moment, he watched the voracious waves battering the spit.
For Corey; for justice.
He got out of the car, flinching at the blast of cold rain, went to the trunk and took out a paper sack; the bottles clinked together until he got the sack tucked firmly under his left arm. The parka flapped noisily as he ran up the flagged walk; he was all but blinded by the rain, and he felt nakedly vulnerable. A howitzer could be aimed at him from the darkened house, and he wouldn’t be able to see it.
But it would have to be behind the closed drapes, he realized when he reached the front deck. There was no movement in the drapes, but he had no doubt that his arrival had been closely observed. Observation from the windows was, fortunately, precluded once he reached the front door. He put the sack down and rang the doorbell, then stood hunched against the wind, giving anyone inside ample time to identify him through the peephole, but when the knob began to turn, he quickly stepped to one side of the door. When it opened, he was for a vital moment invisible.
It was Gabe Benbow who flung open the door to greet his visitor with an old .38 revolver in hand. Gabe let out a hoarse cry at the chop across his wrist that paralyzed his hand. C
onan caught the gun, then jabbed it hard against the old man’s chest. “Inside, Gabe!”
Gabe retreated as ordered, his mouth slack, yet he seemed affronted more than fearful. Conan put the sack inside the door, then kicked the door shut behind him and surveyed the room. Two kerosene lamps on the mantel, a cluster of candles on a tray in the center of the coffee table, and the blue glow of the gas flames in the fireplace provided a wan light that cast irrational shadows. Jonas had been standing near the door on Conan’s right, but he withdrew toward the couches, hands raised. Moses’ retreat from the other side of the door was equally expeditious. He stopped beside his wife, who stood near the fireplace, hugging a brown wool mantilla around her shoulders.
To her left, in front of the hearth, Leo Moskin balanced his considerable weight evenly on both feet, his chin down like a wary bull. Nina stood behind the farthest couch, her hands resting on the back, green eyes narrowed. A purse was in the seat in front of her, its clasp open.
Conan stayed near the door, the revolver moving in a slow arc. “I would advise all of you not to make a move. A thirty-eight bullet can do a great deal of damage. You, Gabe—sit down. There, in your usual chair.” Gabe started to protest, then clamped his jaw tight and went to his chair to sit glowering at him.
Conan caught an aborted movement. “No, Nina. Don’t try it. Bring it here—the purse. Carefully.”
She snapped the purse shut, then brought it to him. Her slacks were too well fitted to conceal a gun or any other weapon, Conan noted, nor were her walking shoes suitable for hiding places, nor the soft sweater and cardigan.
She thrust the purse at him, then, cold eyes mocking, held her arms out from her body and asked, “Do you want to frisk me? Get your kicks for the day?”
He opened the purse and took his eyes off her only long enough to look inside. The chrome-plated, Saturday night special gleamed in the dim light. “Sorry, Nina, no body search will be necessary. Go sit down. On the couch, exactly where you were Friday night.” She lifted her chin, then strode back to the far couch, where she sat with her arms folded, mouth a harsh, compressed line. Conan shifted his attention to France. “Your purse, France—and take off the shawl.”