Chain of Fools (donald strachey mystery)

by Richard Stevenson

  As I laid out my findings, everyone on the porch listened with great interest, even Dan. He seemed at several points to be breathing heavily and erratically-particularly when I mentioned Chester’s visits to Craig in prison. And as I concluded my remarks, Dan got up quickly and made for the first-floor bathroom just down the hall from the porch.

  I was about to ask Arlene why Dan vomited every time the subject of an Osborne violent conspiracy came up, but just then the front doorbell rang and seconds later June was inside the house with a deputy sheriff.

  15

  How did we ever get mixed up in this?” Timmy said morosely.

  I said, “Let me think.”

  He was laid out on the four-poster in June’s old room, and I was at the desk nearby updating my notes. Lunch was to be served in another ten minutes. June had departed an hour earlier, after watching her mother be served with an order to appear for a court proceeding the following Monday, four days away. June and Chester contended that Ruth Osborne was mentally incapable of carrying out her duties as a Herald Corporation board member, and Mrs. Osborne would be expected to demonstrate that she was of sound mind. When she accepted the papers, Mrs. Osborne had looked at her daughter and asked pleasantly, “Are you wearing your retainer, June?”

  Timmy said, “My foot is hot and it itches.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t mean to whine. I realize there are people in this house with bigger problems than a broken foot.”

  “Go ahead and whine. I would.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Anyway, we’ve got enough whiners in this house. What a jerk Dan Osborne is. And Janet is perfectly rational except when she and Dan are in the same room together. Then both of them sound like a couple of twelve-year-olds.”

  “Dan can bring that out in anybody,” I said. “But it’s not his pomposity that’s the most interest to me. It’s his sensitive stomach. Every time the subject of an Osborne family conspiracy to commit murder comes up, Dan heaves.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing that too. Bui; you don’t suspect Dan of killing Eric, do you? Why would he?”

  “Right. Why would he?”

  “I can’t think of any reason having to do with the sale of the Herald, ” Timmy said. “Or any other reason, either.”

  “According to Janet, the Osborne household harbored more than the average amount of emotional deprivation when she and her brothers and sister were growing up. Emotional deprivation led to emotional warfare, and emotional warfare sometimes leads to physical violence. Still, fratricide is extreme and extremely rare, I know. So, no. I don’t have any real reason at this point to suspect Dan. But I do plan on gleaning his whereabouts on the afternoon Eric was murdered. And I’d sure like to find out why Dan vomits at the mention of his brother’s death. Is it the shock and terrible loss that hits him hard all over again? Is he squeamish? Or does he have some guilty knowledge of the event?”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “I’m considering doing that, Timothy. I need to get him alone first. I also need to come up with a sufficiently delicate way of phrasing my interrogatory. It won’t do to ask, ‘Why does mention of your brother’s bludgeoning make you puke your guts out, Dan?’ “

  “That sounds good enough to me, Don. Euphemisms for vomiting are for kindergarten teachers to use, and euphemisms for murder are for heads of state. Just ask him directly, is my advice. Dan’s a grownup.”

  “He’s a grownup, but he’s also a grownup who acts like he’s got some guilty secret that’s eating away at his insides. When I confront Dan, I don’t want him to clam up even tighter than he is now, and I don’t want him to bolt.”

  “He’s highly indignant over being stuck here, he says, but he’s not making any move to leave either. I wonder if he wants you to find out something important he knows. Maybe he’s trying to work up the courage to tell you something, and it’s when he gets close to saying it that he throws up.”

  “Possibly.”

  “On the other hand, maybe Dan is simply scared to death he’s going to be attacked and killed, and that makes him heave. Having somebody try to run your car over a cliff is bound to unsettle your break fast. I know I’m nervous about all this, and I’m not even on the Herald’s board. Here we are, like Chinese Gordon at Khartoum, the Mahdi’s turbaned hordes out there just beyond the perimeter tightening the noose, getting ready to come charging in for the coup de grace. It is frightening.”

  “That’s a little overly vivid, Timothy. But I get your point.”

  “And then there’s Dale,” he said, throwing his arms back in a gesture of despair. The pom-poms on June’s snowy white bedspread trembled.

  “Aren’t you glad she’s on our side?” I said.

  “I’ll say. I’d hate to have her across the Nile in Omdurman sharpening her panga.”

  “I like her,” I said, “and I thinkyou would too, Timothy, if she hadn’t somehow confused you with Jesse Helms or Richard Speck or whoever it is, and treats you accordingly. She’s prickly and blunt in ways you’d find refreshing if you weren’t the one getting prickled and pum-meled. And Dale can obviously spot a phony a mile away.”

  He writhed. “Yeah, a phony like me.”

  “Oh, you’re obviously much worse than a mere phony. You said yesterday she was starting to seem dimly familiar. Still no luck placing her?”

  “Nah. There is something about that head of hair and the face under it-I’ve seen them both before somewhere, I’m more and more certain. But hard as I try, I cannot remember where.”

  “Peace Corps? Was she in your India group?”

  “No, that I’d remember. Anyway, she’s ten years too young.”

  “You didn’t have a falling out in 1969 over competing poultry de-beaking techniques in Andhra Pradesh?”

  “I have a feeling I’ve run into Dale more recently than that. I think it had something to do with work-something at the Assembly. It’ll come to me soon, I think. Whatever it is, there must be some misunderstanding. I can’t imagine that Dale and I would have been on opposite sides of anything very important. I mean, could we have?”

  “It seems unlikely. Yet she referred today to a ‘moral chasm’ between the two of you And she said you had done something with ‘grim consequences for American society.’ Whatever it was, it was plainly a big deal to Dale.”

  Timmy twisted on the bed again, in obvious mental pain. I went over and climbed on June’s bed beside him. I placed my mouth close to Timmy’s ear and whispered, “Dale has apparently become convinced-and a woman as smart as she is has to have her reasons-that you are actually G. Gordon Liddy, Timothy. It must be your excellent posture, if not something awful you once did, that has led her to confuse the two of you. To her, this is a turnoff. But not to me. I’m excited. Come to me, Gordo. Hold yourself above my flame.”

  He smiled weakly, but that’s as far as his ardor rose. Timmy had been irritated with Dale earlier, and then angry. But now he was haunted. I hadn’t been crazy about it when his mind had been full of Skeeter, and now it was time for me to be patient and indulgent while his mind was full of Dale. Luckily, I had plenty to occupy my mind too-a distinguished New York State family whose members apparently were trying to kill one another off for reasons of ideology and/or cash.

  16

  With fewer than ninety-six hours to go before Monday’s court hearing, the pressure was on. Ruth Osborne’s mental state was unpredictable; we knew she might show up and argue eloquently on her own behalf that she was as sane as a NASA flight commander, or she might stare vacantly at the judge for half an hour and then remark on the resemblance of a mole on the side of his neck to the star Sigma Octantis.

  After a tense lunch where no one but Arlene had much to sayhoisting a sandaled foot onto the edge of the table, she explained to us what each of her Tibetan toe rings signified-I tried to lure Dan aside for a private talk. But he said he and Arlene had to leave immediately to deal with car insurance matters and to rent a “vehicle” until th
ey could buy a new one. They also needed, he said, to drive out to the scene of that morning’s car crack-up and retrieve their stash of “buds.” Dan did agree to spend the night at the Osborne house, and when I said I’d like to speak with him privately later in the day, he got a queasy look and said sure, maybe, if he had a chance, he’d see.

  Both Janet and Bill Stankie had spoken with the Edensburg chief of police, and he agreed to have a patrol car cruise Maple Street periodically during the day and to watch the house from sunset to sunrise. The chief also offered to provide an escort for Dan and Arlene as they went about their errands, but they said no thanks.

  After lunch, I went into Tom Osborne’s study, cleared a space on the library table, and worked the phone for an hour. Janet had obtained from Tidy an address in Papeete for his brother, Tacker. A Los Angeles investigative agency I’d done business with on a number of occasions had South Pacific contacts, I knew, and the agency agreed, for a fee, to track down Tacker Puderbaugh and establish his whereabouts, currently and on May 15.

  I called another contact, a business reporter for The New York Times with whom I’d had a brief, hectic affair of between forty-eight and seventy-two hours in the early seventies and been friends with since then. He told me Crewes-InfoCom had a reputation for being stingy and mean, but he’d never heard of them using violent tactics. Its bullying, in acquisitions and as an employer, stayed within the law, as far as the Times reporter knew. But he said he’d ask around and get back to me. Harry Griscomb, the owner of the “good chain,” had a reputation in media business circles, I was told, for excellent journalism and “unattractive” profit margins. What was “unattractive”? I asked. “Ten percent instead of twenty or thirty,” was the reply.

  Then I made several calls to the New York State Department of Correctional Services. After forty minutes in and out of telecommunications computer limbo-“Press forty-one to descend from the Purgatoria to the Inferno”-I reached the appropriate office at Attica State Correctional Facility and was able to set up a meeting for the next morning at ten o’clock with Craig Osborne.

  Dan and Arlene were off on their car-related errands, and Janet went back to work at the Herald. With Timmy and Dale to watch over Ruth Osborne, and a cop car patrolling the neighborhood, I had the rest of the afternoon to roam Edensburg.

  The town was, if not an idyllic Rockwellian piece of small-city Americana, still reasonably healthy for the unstable age it had survived into. The (so far) locally owned canoe manufacturing company that had been Edensburg’s economic mainstay for over one hundred years had not moved its factory to low-wage, long-hour Ciudad Juarez or Kuala Lumpur; in fact, Janet had told me, the company was doing reasonably well, having diversified into the production of fiberglass bodies for Jet Skis, ORVs, and light-truck bumpers. Tourism brought seasonal work into the area too in summer and during the ski season. Even the Herald would have been making a go of it, had it not been for Stu Torkildson’s Spruce Haven debacle.

  Edensburg’s Main Street had only a few vacant storefronts. The four-story department store had been carved up into smaller businesses a comic book store, Betty Lou’s Hairport, a New Agey place called Crystals n’ Constellations, among them-and J. J. Newberry’s looked as if it was still going strong despite the competition from the Kmart at the edge of town. A battle to keep Wal-Mart out of the county was hard-fought and ongoing, Janet said. The Gem Theater on Main Street had been triplexed, but at least it was still open. It was showing one film that had the word “fatal” in the title, one with “deadly,” and one with “mortal.”

  I had a town map and an Edensburg phone book with me and had no trouble locating Dick Puderbaugh’s fuel-oil distributership. I thought he might be willing to talk with me in a general way about the Osbornes’ intrafamily feuding over the future of the Herald and I’d pick up an odd, useful nugget on the family dynamics, particularly the propensity among some Osbornes for violence. But as soon as I introduced myself, Puderbaugh, a whey-faced little man with what looked like a rodent insignia on the left breast of his golf shirt, turned hostile.

  Puderbaugh fumed that he and June had both been insulted by Janet’s “accusation” that a connection existed between Eric’s murder and the pro-InfoCom Osbornes. He said it was “a goddamn shame” that people like himself and his wife could have their “private rights” interfered with by people like me. Puderbaugh was barely coherent and bordering on the hysterical as I backed out the door and said, “Have a good one, Dick.”

  Following Janet’s directions, I drove the four miles out of town to Parson Bates’s spats museum and pear orchard. I thought I might chat him up too on the split among the Osbornes. Bates was up in a tree when I pulled in, sitting on a branch about eight feet off the ground. I walked up a knoll toward him, and when he recognized me he glowered. Perched up there, Bates looked like a man who might be going to tell me that he had just been taken for a ride by space aliens.

  Instead, he yelled down at me, “I do believe I detect a detectiveor would I be venturing too far afield in my verbal perambulations if I began again and put it thusly: I do believe I detect a defective.” Bates said this with the type of loony-eyed jovial sneer rarely encountered outside state mental institutions prior to the deinstitutionalization consent decrees of the 1960s and ’70s. Here was a man you might have expected to be arrested in a midtown Manhattan subway station for sticking his face down the bosoms of young matrons while he whistled “Heartaches,” and up here in Edensburg he was considered by many to be a solid citizen. So much for rusticity as an inducement to clear thought.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Bates,” I yelled up at him. “I just thought I’d drop by and see if you might give me a few moments of your time. I’m interested in hearing as many points of view as possible on the conflict over the disposition of the Herald, and I know you’ve had a long association with the paper and the Osborne family.”

  That seemed like an innocuous enough opener, but Bates made no move to climb down and stand on the same ground I stood on. “The disposition of the Edensburg Herald is none of your concern,” he said, giving me his fish eye. “It is solely the concern of the Osborne family. Not that family life is a subject you would know anything about, I believe I have been reliably informed.”

  “Oh, I come from a family too, Mr. Bates. And I have observed others. They’re all over the place. Anyway, the Osbornes’, like all families, is made up of individuals. One of those individuals has been murdered, and attempts have been made on the lives of other Osbornes. Did you know that this morning someone tried to run Dan Osborne’s car off a rural road?” A quick glance at Bates’s parked Hillman Minx helped eliminate him as a suspect.

  “Yes,” Bates said testily, “I am aware that Dan drove his car into a ditch earlier today. As for the precise circumstances of the mishaplet’s just say that his sister June relayed to me Dan’s version of the incident. But it is June’s belief, and mine, that dubiety is in order. Item: Dan Osborne is a marijuana addict. Most of the time, he and Arlene Thurber are stuporous. Surely, safe driving is a stranger to the both of them. Item: Dan Osborne can be ruthless and conscienceless on behalf of his causes. In his youth-and I mean his actual youth, not his latter-day infantilism-Dan Osborne was found to have planted an explosive device in the offices of an antiwar organization in an attempt to create the appearance that the FBI was persecuting war protestors. Conclusion: both Dan Osborne’s mind and morals are impaired. I would be strongly inclined to await the outcome of a thorough police investigation before I drew any conclusion that this morning’s event constituted an actual attempt on Dan’s life. A more likely verdict will be trickery.”

  “I heard the story from both Dan and Arlene,” I said, “and whatever their moral and other habits, their version of this morning’s incident rings true.”

  Bates sniffed and said, “I remain unconvinced. You don’t know those two. All this talk of murder afoot is nonsense. Eric, poor lost lad, was slain by a homicidal maniac on the loose, according
to the State Police. And as for Janet’s contention that she was menaced by a Jet Skier, my estimation of the event is that she misperceived the motorized behavior of some doltish and unmannerly youth-suchlike are everywhere these days, heaven knows-and she became unstrung over it. You know how women can be.”

  One phone call to an old friend of mine active in the Albany chapter of Lesbian Avengers might have further interfered with Bates’s lazy afternoon among his pear crop, but I had more pressing concerns. I said, “I was present for one of the Jet Ski attacks, Mr. Bates. In fact, my partner, Timothy Callahan, was injured. His foot was broken when he was hit by the skier. Everyone who witnessed this incident-and there were four of us-agreed that what it was was attempted murder.”

  “I doubt that very much. In my estimation, you and your cohorts simply saw what suited your agenda.”

  It was probably his use of “agenda” that did it-the term had come to be used by the loony right more or less interchangeably with “flamethrower”-and the words flew out of my mouth before I could snatch them back. I said, “You’re a blithering idiot, Bates.”

  He shot back, “As of this moment, you are trespassing on my property!”

  I reached down, ripped a dandelion leaf out of Bates’s meadow, and stuffed it in my mouth. I looked up at him, munching.