The Crossroads

by John D. MacDonald

  Sharry and Gold went through the cabin with the casual, thorough skill of good training and long practice. They were an effective team, the best in Walterburg, possibly the best in the state. Bill Sharry had a logical, consecutive pattern of mind. Lew Gold’s intellectual equipment was more devious, intricate, intuitive. And they were both vastly stubborn.

  “Huh!” Gold said. Sharry immediately turned from the inspection of a drawer and went to where Gold knelt in front of the closet, an open suitcase in front of him.

  “What you got?”

  “Stick your nose in that corner.”

  Sharry sniffed, straightened up. “Gun oil, maybe.”

  “How long would it stay that strong?”

  “No way to check that, Lew. The suitcase was closed. Maybe a month. Maybe a day. Maybe six months. Maybe he had a fish reel in there.”

  In another fifteen minutes they were through.

  “Nothing,” Sharry said. He went over and sat on the cot. Gold propped one ham on the corner of the scarred bureau, long leg dangling. “What about him?” Sharry asked. “This was your move.”

  “He’s damn bright,” Gold said. “Good control. A loner. He’s talked to cops before.”

  “I felt that.”

  “He was a lot more tightened up than he looked. I felt that wheels were going around in his head. He had to figure out why we’d come to him. When he got an answer that satisfied him, he took the chance of beating us to the punch, bringing up the Drovek woman. To give a frank and earnest impression. When you told him he’d guessed wrong, it shocked hell out of him. You could see that. And maybe made him sore at himself. But he was really rocked when you made that crack about Lawrenz not liking him. I wish we could have taken that further.”

  “Taken it where?”

  “I don’t know. If I’d known, I would have come in right there and made some kind of a play. But when he found out why we’d come to him, it seemed somehow to take him off the hook. I had that impression. As if we’d lost him somehow.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “And I get the feeling of certain inconsistencies, Bill. Of all the people we’ve talked to about Sylvia Drovek, he’s the only one who seems to think she’s bright in any way.”

  “So maybe he thought so. I don’t follow you.”

  “Or wants us to think so. I don’t follow myself on this. It’s pretty vague.”

  “What else was inconsistent?”

  “His reaction to my asking the doctor’s name … a lot of loud bluster, compared to how he reacted when I asked for the key to this place. It’s instinctive to try to block people from searching your castle even when you know there’s nothing there to find.”

  “He was pretty willing, at that. But look, Lew. The fact Lawrenz used Brodey’s name cancels him out of the picture, doesn’t it?”

  Gold frowned. “I guess so.”

  “Are those little bells of yours ringing?”

  “Not so I can hear them, Loot.”

  “What about it, then?”

  “Let’s put him in the reserve file. We got anything that aims even remotely in his direction, let’s come back on him and strip him down to component parts.” He grinned suddenly. “Always allowing for the fact that my judgment is colored by the fact I just instinctively don’t like the little bastard.”

  “I wouldn’t want to get too chummy with him myself. Let’s go drop off the keys and get back to work.”

  “What do we do next, boss?”

  “See how the passenger lists are coming along.”

  It was three in the afternoon, after Gus left, before Mark Brodey had a chance to cover himself. He had to risk using the phone. It had to be set up in case they came back.

  She answered on the fourth ring. “Hello, honey,” he said.

  “Who … who is this?”

  “Don’t tell me your memory is so short, Liz.”

  “Mark? What do you want?” She sounded alarmed.

  “I tried to phone you yesterday, baby. Three or four times, between ten-thirty and two.”

  “You did? I was right here all the time. But what are you calling me for?”

  “Don’t sound so unfriendly, Liz. How’s married life?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Wish you were back on the job, being a cocktail waitress again?”

  “Well … sometimes, I guess. But not very much. What do you want? I … I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”

  “You saw me yesterday, honey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does hubby come home for lunch?”

  “No, he eats … Yes, he always comes home.”

  “Don’t try to kid an old pal, Liz. I got to your house about ten-thirty and I left about two. We had a ball.”

  “Mark, I don’t know what in the world …”

  “Now you listen to me, Liz, and stop making bleating noises. I might have to give your name to some cops. If they check with you, you back me up. I was there. For old times’ sake or something. Ralph won’t have to know a damn thing about you backing me up.”

  She had started to cry. “But here, in my own house. My baby is here …”

  “You know me, Liz. You know I do what I say. If you don’t back me up, you’re going to have trouble. Ralphie is going to get a complete case history on you. And after he throws you the hell out, I’m going to find you and really work you over good. You remember the time I did work you over, don’t you?”

  “Mark. Honest to God, I …”

  “You do as I tell you. Maybe they won’t come near you. But if they do, you do like I say. Okay? Or do I have to come out there right now and have a little talk with you about it?”

  “No. Mark. Please don’t come here.”

  “Will you do it? You do it and I won’t ever come near you.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it. But …”

  He hung up just as a couple arrived, a young hard-bitten pair who had parked their gleaming motorcycle in front of the diner, the girl in black jeans wearing a wide leather belt studded with rivets in the shape of hearts. After he had served them pie and coffee, he thought about his current tactical position. Liz would come through. She didn’t have much choice. It made up for the mistake of telling those cops about Sylvia. It had been one of the worst times of his life, sitting there with them, not knowing what they knew, thinking about the old joker at the airport parking lot, wondering if Sylvia had left some damn fool confession, wondering if some farm kid had been hiding in the brush when he’d killed them. He’d been so careful to set it up so they would never come anywhere near him. Damn near dropped in a dead faint when they came in. But maybe it was better this way. They didn’t have anything to go on. Nothing they could use. And he wasn’t going to make any more mistakes. Particularly the worst mistake. Getting nervous, taking the money and running. Then they’d come after him.

  He decided another call to Liz, soon as he had a chance, wouldn’t hurt anything. Scare hell out of her. Keep her scared. Maybe, after this all died down, he might even go see her. For laughs. Funny, she was a lot like Sylvia. Like her in a lot of ways. The kind you can scare. The best kind. The ones whose faces turn white and sweaty and their mouth trembles. And then they do just what they’re told.

  At two o’clock on that Tuesday afternoon the voices of the enormous choir suddenly became distinct and clear for Clara Drovek. She leaned forward, trembling, her head cocked to one side. Every word was enunciated. And she was shocked. It did not seem possible to her that she could have so completely misinterpreted the messages they were singing to her. She had thought they were singing of the Glory of God.

  But now that they finally sang with the absolute clarity she had been anticipating for so long, she understood that it was not religious music at all. She listened, in a fixity of horror, to the perfect enunciation of obscenities, to unspeakable suggestions, to an utter vileness in the tones of a mighty organ. She turned on the television set, neglecting to adjust the vertical hold, so t
hat the picture tumbled endlessly in a dizzying way. The television sound was loud, but not loud enough to drown out the foul clarity of the trained voices. She turned the set off. She shuffled unsteadily to the kitchen. The choir followed her to the kitchen, so close behind her that she had the feeling the whole front of the house was full of them, standing all jammed together, their throats open, their eyes sneering, singing at her while all the time they did filthy things to each other.

  She took two bottles of bourbon from the cupboard and put them in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. The choir was so loud that she could not hear what Nancy was saying to her, even though she could see her standing there, her mouth moving, her eyes worried.

  “I’m fine!” Clara shouted to her. “I’m perfectly all right.”

  Nancy shrugged and went back to her room. Clara went into the living room. She took the letter out of the Bible and tried to read it, but she saw the filthy words the choir was singing instead of the words on the page. She held her hands over her ears, but the singing was undiminished. They were so loud and close she could hear the way they all sucked their breath in simultaneously before starting a new passage.

  When she could no longer endure it, but before the bourbon had really had a chance to become as cold as she wanted it, she got the two bottles from the kitchen and took them into the living room. She opened both of them. She had learned that she could drink tepid whisky slowly, but that if she attempted to drink it too fast, it made her gag. Whisky would still the vile voices of the singers. She sat in her chair. She tilted the bottle up. At the sixth long swallow, her stomach leapt and spasmed. She lowered the bottle, gasping, tears running down her cheeks. She tilted it up again and was able to drink longer. She finished the fifth in a desperate haste. The room had started to tilt and dip and swim. The voices swelled and faded and came back strongly again. She held the second bottle in both hands. Liquor poured over her chin and down the front of her housecoat. The bottle slipped from her hands, rolled down her lap and onto the floor, spilling as it rolled away. Her head tilted over onto her shoulder and her eyes closed. The voices faded steadily. The choir was marching away, into a dreamy distance. She could see them far away, all in white as she had imagined them, in sunlight, at the far end of a dark passageway. When they were so far away they were a tiny white dot, their voices were entirely gone. And then the white dot faded away too, into darkness.

  Once her head flexed and stirred. She breathed through her open mouth. Her heart and her respiration began to slow down. Her pulse rate went down to fifty, forty, still slowing. By the time her heart was beating once every two seconds, she was breathing eight times a minute. Her extremities were cold. She took one long gentle breath and then the paralysis of the central nervous system was complete. She breathed no more. The heart beat twice after breathing stopped, and then it too was still.

  Joan had driven Chip to the hospital that afternoon. When they returned she let him off at the office and then drove home. She was just passing Chip’s house when Nancy came running out, crying, her face crumpled with tears. She was not coherent. Joan parked her car on the lawn and ran into the house. She looked at Clara. She touched the icy wrist gingerly. She turned toward Nancy.

  “Go phone Dr. Kloss, dear. Hurry. Tell him she seems to be dead. He’ll know what to do. Then phone your father. He’s at the office.”

  As Joan had hoped, with something to do, Nancy was able to pull herself together. She hurried to phone from her room.

  Joan sighed and went to the windows and fixed the blinds to let more light into the room. It was an unkindness to the dead woman, to cast more light on that pallid and bloated face, but Jimmy Kloss would want light in which to examine her before she was moved. The stink of spilled bourbon was bright and sharp in the room. She moved back toward the chair and looked at the dead woman. An ornate Bible lay open on the floor at the side of the chair. She saw a white corner of paper between Clara’s thigh and the side of the chair. She hesitated, then, grasped the paper and pulled it out. An envelope came into view and she picked that up too. She scanned the letter quickly. It was dated. Clara had had it a long time. One edge of the letter was damp with spilled bourbon. Joan took a deep breath, then folded the letter and envelope into a small wad and pushed it deeply into the pocket of her skirt. It could not help anything for it to be found. It could only hurt.

  “He’s coming right away,” Nancy said. “Daddy too. I told Daddy she was … sick?”

  “Don’t look at her, darling. Please.”

  “She yelled at me. That was the last thing she ever did,” Nancy whispered. “She yelled at me. She was putting bottles in the refrigerator. It made me mad to be yelled at. I shouldn’t have let it make me mad. I should have known something was wrong.”

  Joan put her arm around Nancy and led her back to the kitchen. “There’s nothing you could have done about it, dear. Nothing anybody could have done.”

  Nancy was weeping again. She was still weeping when Chip came hurrying into the kitchen. He looked at Nancy and then at Joan. And suddenly all his urgency was gone.

  “Where is she?” he asked in a dull voice.

  Joan went into the living room with him. He looked at her. He touched the empty bottle with the side of his shoe. It made a half revolution on the rug, coming to rest with the label up.

  “She never brought bottles in here,” he said softly. “She had … a sort of code about it. Never drink out of the bottle. Go to bed before you pass out. She must have … poured it down. Why? All of a sudden, why this?”

  Joan was acutely conscious of the letter in her pocket. “Why any part of it, Chip?”

  “I know. My God, this on top of the other. Everything … is happening at once.”

  “She’s well out of it, Chip. Keep thinking of that.”

  He looked at her sullenly. “That’s easy to say. But why was she the … way she was? Some of it had to be my fault.”

  “No one could have been more patient, or tried harder.”

  “I’d like to believe that.”

  Jimmy Kloss arrived five minutes before the County Coroner. He examined the body without moving it. Leo and Betty arrived. Betty went to Nancy’s room to be with her. Pete was the last to arrive.

  They waited in the kitchen. Kloss and the Coroner spent a long time in the living room. The Coroner went out the front way. Jimmy Kloss came back into the kitchen, carrying the two bottles, one empty, the other with an inch or so in the bottom. He set them on the drainboard. He looked tired and discouraged.

  “Alcohol is a deadly poison if you manage to get enough into the blood stream,” he said. “He was reasonable about it. After I went over the case history with him, he understood. And there’s no point in airing the laundry. The concentration of alcohol she must have, it’s enough to stop the heart. So he approved what I put on the certificate. Congestive heart failure. You can go ahead now and get hold of your undertaker, Chip.” He smiled in a self-deprecatory way. “Sorry I wasn’t able to do more with her. Sometimes there’s no way you can win.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy, for everything.”

  “How’s Nancy?”

  “Pretty rocky. She found her.”

  “I got some stuff in the car that should help.” He went out and Chip followed him. He put some small blue pills in an envelope. “Give her two of these now, and two before she goes to bed. There’s two more for tomorrow, but I don’t think she’ll need them.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry about your other trouble too, Chip. I hear they did a fine job of patching up your father.”

  “He seems to be coming along fine.”

  Kloss got behind the wheel of his car. He looked out at Chip. “Think of it this way, Chip. She did it the quick way instead of the slow way. But either way, she would have done it.”

  Kloss drove away. Chip walked slowly into the house. Joan was on the phone, contacting the undertaker. The two bottles had disappeared. He took the pills to Nancy’s room. When he c
ame back to the kitchen, Joan was talking to Leo and Pete.

  “They’ll be right out, Chip,” she said. “We’ll set the service for Friday, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Anything is all right.”

  Pete said, “Chipper, why don’t you and Nancy move over to my place for a few days?”

  “Good idea!” Joan said quickly. “Betty and I can sort out Clara’s things and decide what to do with them. Pete has those two guest rooms.”

  “Okay,” Chip said. “Okay. Anything is all right.”

  ELEVEN

  A Walterburg businessman named Ruffin C. Derlock had one expensive hobby which both annoyed and baffled his wife. He was never able to put his infatuation into words, and make her see how essential it was to him. She understood well enough that he had flown in the war. In fact the silver wings over his blouse pocket had been an effective component of his courtship. But it seemed grotesque to her that a grown man should keep a little blue Cub as a sort of toy. He didn’t have to travel in his business. She was terrified of flight, and refused to let him take the kids up.

  But on nice days Ruffin Derlock would leave his office on impulse, drive out to the Walterburg Airport and take his little airplane out for an hour or two. It was the only disconcerting flaw in what was otherwise a thoroughly practical man, a good husband and father.

  For Ruffin Derlock, it was an essential part of his life. He didn’t rack the Cub all over the sky. He just went up and flew over the countryside, making lazy eights and slow turns over the gentle sunlit land. It was a kind of aloneness that was necessary to him. It took the commercial kinks out of his soul. Sometimes, alone up there, he would laugh aloud for no reason at all.

  Wednesday, the twenty-fifth day of June, was exactly the sort of day which pleased Ruffin Derlock. There was no cloud in the blue vault of the sky. The day sparkled. There was no perceptible breeze. At ten o’clock Derlock canceled a lunch date, and by eleven he was lazing around at fifteen hundred feet several miles southeast of the city, the engine purring sweetly.

  He saw the tiny cars and trucks on the highways, the checkered patterns of farmland. He banked left almost directly over a crystal pool set in a fold of hills near a narrow road, looked down and saw a red car on the bottom of the pool. It astonished him. He slipped down for a closer look, suspecting some trick of vision. At the first pass a wind was riffling the water and he could not be certain. He came back at five hundred feet and saw that it was indeed a car. When he was west of it, the sun turned the water into a mirror and he could not see below the surface. He wanted to make absolutely certain. So he took his Cub down onto the floor and came up across the pond in a climbing turn. It was down deep, he judged. Maybe in thirty feet. But it was a perfect day for seeing it. And the color of it, showing up through the crystal water, had been the thing that originally caught his eye.