Day of Wrath

by Jonathan Valin

  The boy stuck his head through the open window and said, “Two dollars.”

  I got the money out of my wallet. He took it from me and stared curiously into my face.

  “Been in an accident?” he said.

  “Headed for one,” I told him and drove off the barge onto the landing and up the access road to the highway.

  My headlights stabbed through the sycamore trees along the bank of the river, lighting up the same rusted refuse—the oil drums and tackle boxes and odd scraps of tire rubber. And then the trees died away, and the river came back into view, flowing placidly westward—the moonlight spread softly over it as if it had been spilled into the water. The highway turned inland, down that paltry avenue full of small, glassy motels and loaf-shaped metal diners. I passed Tillie’s and her parking lot full of semis. And a mile or so farther on, the landscape flattened into featureless countryside—vacant acres of plowed fields and wind-bellied fencing. I drove through the dark, deserted flat land until my headlight caught on the sign posted on Clinger’s gate.

  I pulled off the highway and stopped. A chilly wind burned my face as I stepped out of the car. I stared at the sign—Private Property. And for the first time since I’d gotten in the car, I let myself think of what lay ahead of me—of what would happen if I couldn’t talk Clinger into letting Robbie go or if Irene and Logan and Reese decided to stop me. There was violence ahead, burning undetected in the night.

  I thought about Bobby Caldwell and Robbie. Thought that their disparate stories were coming to an end—that, like an author, I was adding my own life to theirs. And the story was love—nothing more. How it got lost behind that gatepost; how it got hidden in the mazy front yards of Eastlawn Drive; how it boiled away in a high, handsome Mt. Adams penthouse, where no one had thought to turn the fire off. That night, the world seemed full of love’s failures. Men and women driven by a relentless, inexplicable urge to destroy the grounds of their own happiness—running from all charity and comfort, as if the charity itself was a burden and the comfort a baseless lie. And I counted myself among them. For lots of reasons. But mostly because I was standing in front of that gate, staring into the distant fire and preparing to stick my hand into the flames and pluck out what was left of Bobby Caldwell’s heart.

  I kicked the gate open and walked back to the car. I was going straight in this time. No stumbling through the dark in another man’s preserve. There was the three of them and there was me. With Clinger standing somewhere in between. And the girl—she was lost in the night, waiting to be pulled out of the darkness, either to be saved or lost once again.

  28

  I FOLLOWED the road to the crest of the hill, then stopped and looked down at the farmhouse. There were lights burning in the kitchen and in one of the upstairs windows. But there wasn’t any movement behind the curtains or anywhere in the yard. There hadn’t been any movement the night before, either, when I’d almost been killed. I touched at the bruise on my head and felt a twinge of pain. Logan and Reese were tough country boys. And they were more than a little crazy, too, judging by what they’d let Irene talk them into doing to Bobby. They liked dealing out pain, and they wouldn’t think twice about killing me, if they caught me a second time. The thought sobered me.

  I checked the .45 to make sure it was cocked and locked. Took a deep breath of cold night air. And started the engine again, heading down the gently sloping hill, past the hedge of lilacs and the apple tree, into the deserted yard.

  As I pulled up to the house, I caught sight of a man sitting in the darkness of the porch overhang. I couldn’t tell who it was, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I slipped the pistol out of the holster and held it by my side, as I stepped out of the car and walked up to the steps. It wasn’t until I was standing directly in front of the porch that I realized that the man I’d seen was Clinger. He was sitting on a rocking chair in the darkness, staring out at his yard.

  “Clinger?” I said.

  But he didn’t answer me. I started up the stairs. Then a wild, piercing laugh came out one of the upstairs windows, and I froze. Clinger didn’t move.

  I called his name again—softly. And when he still didn’t move, I knew he wasn’t going to answer me—or anyone else. I shuddered a little, walked up to the porch landing, and took a look at him. Not a long look. They’d tied him to the chair with chicken wire. One of his hands had been hacked off and the flesh of his cheeks had been sheared away, so that the back teeth were exposed on either side and his grin stretched from ear to ear. One of them had fashioned a crown out of brown paper and stuck it on his head, turning him into a grinning memento mori—the leering lord of his ruined kingdom.

  There was a crash upstairs, followed by that demented laughter and more crashing noises. It sounded like they were tearing the place apart—breaking the house’s bones, as they’d broken the bones of its master. I thought of what they might have done to the girl and was filled with a fury that had little to do with Caldwell or Clinger or Robbie herself. Hell was loose inside that farmhouse, and I hated it. I wanted to put an end to its reign. I unlocked the pistol and pushed at the front door. It opened noiselessly.

  I stepped into the narrow hallway. There was a room at the far end and two openings on the left wall. A staircase emptied into it midway down the right wall, and it was down that staircase that all the noise and laughter was coming. I slid down the left wall, peering into the two darkened rooms. In the faint light coming from upstairs, I could see that they’d both been savaged. Broken glass and china littered the floors; the Victorian furniture had all been gutted—stuffing dripped from every knifehole and slash mark. They’d even destroyed the piano in the parlor. The wires had been cut. They dangled from the sounding board like the legs of a centipede.

  I skirted the staircase and peered into the room at the end of the hall—the kitchen. Every dish had been smashed. Food was spattered on the walls. The refrigerator lay on its side like a dead animal. I walked over to it and opened the door. Clinger’s hand was lying inside on a vegetable rack. I kicked the door shut and turned back to the hall.

  “Party’s over!” I bellowed.

  And the crashing sounds upstairs stopped.

  “Come on down!” I shouted, and my voice sounded queerly inviting.

  I walked over to the staircase and flattened myself against the wall on the left side of the opening.

  “Boys and girls?” I called to them.

  I could hear them talking upstairs. And then the house went quiet.

  I took the magnum out of my belt with my right hand and cocked the hammer. I held it against my right side and, back against the wall, pointed the automatic in my left hand toward the staircase opening. Since I was pressed against the wall, all I could see of the stairway was the last step. But I could see either way down the hall—front and back.

  There was a sound on the stairs and then a shotgun went off with a terrific bang. The buckshot tore a huge hole in the wall across from the staircase, filling the hallway with plaster dust and gunsmoke. Immediately after the gun went off, a naked man came charging down the stairs. He leaped into the hallway and looked to his left—toward the front door. A shotgun was poised in his hands. When he turned right and looked at me, I shot him. With both pistols.

  The impact of the bullets sent him bouncing down the hall, spraying blood on either wall. He fell to the floor near the door, jerked crazily for a moment, and fired the shotgun into his own feet.

  I stepped into the smoky stairway.

  “I’m coming up!” I shouted.

  I charged up to the first landing—the pistols in my hands. I flattened myself against the wall and pointed the guns at the top landing. A man darted from behind the left wall at the top of the stairs and fired a shotgun at me. I fired back as soon as I saw him. There was just a split second between our shots. The shotgun blast broke my left shoulder, and the .45 fell out of my hand. I tossed the magnum on the floor, picked up the Colt with my right hand, and climbed up to the lan
ding. The one called Logan was lying in the hallway. The shotgun was still in his hand. There was a red, pulsing hole in his back. He turned his head and looked up at me. And I shot him again.

  I was badly hurt, and I knew it. The buckshot had cracked some ribs and gone through into the left side of my chest. My shirt was soaked with blood and my left arm was turned out at an odd angle. I bit my lips against the pain and wiped the blood from my mouth with my good hand.

  “All right, Irene,” I said, staring at a lighted room at the porch end of the hallway. “It’s your turn, now.”

  A woman shrieked inside the lighted room. Then she came running out. She was naked, like the men. And her face was sheer madness. She fired a small caliber pistol at me as she ran. One of the bullets hit me in the right side, above the hip.

  I groaned and returned fire with the automatic.

  The bullet knocked her onto her back. She lay on the hall floor—panting.

  I braced myself against the wall with my right hand and worked my way down the hallway to where she was lying. Her eyes were wide open. They darted from side to side, like the eyes of a dying animal. There was blood on her teeth and lips.

  “Where is she?” I groaned. “Where’s Robbie?”

  The woman’s fathomless black eyes just kept ticking back and forth, until they stopped, like the hands of an unwound clock.

  I stepped around her body and into the room she’d come out of.

  The place was a shambles, like everything else in that hellish house. But in a corner, bundled against the wall among the broken lamps and picture frames, was Robbie Segal. My Robbie. As mad and as naked as the other three. There were bloodstains on her fingers. From Clinger, I thought. She wiggled them at me and began to laugh.

  For a moment, I felt like shooting her, too. Because it was clear now that she was as guilty as the rest of them.

  “You killed him, didn’t you, Robbie?” I said. “You killed Bobby Caldwell.”

  She laughed and laughed—her long blonde hair shaking on her shoulders. She wiggled her bloody fingers and laughed.

  29

  OF COURSE, there was no way to really know.

  I thought later, in the hospital, that she might have gone with Bobby on impulse that Wednesday. Impulse seemed to be her only motivation. I thought that seeing him killed by the men and the woman she’d been sleeping with might have destroyed all that was left of her self-control. Grace had said that Robbie had been hysterical when she was brought back to the farm on Wednesday night. Grace had said that she’d tried to kill herself and that Theo had stopped her. But, of course, that didn’t prove that she wasn’t guilty of Bobby’s murder or of taking a part in it. It was just as likely that she’d gone off with the Caldwell kid on Wednesday afternoon because Irene had told her to go—to lead him to his death, as he’d thought he was leading her to safety. Maybe Irene hadn’t told her what she and Reese and Logan had planned for the boy. Maybe they’d left that for a surprise. They hadn’t told her what they’d had planned for her, either—at the tail end of that bloody Saturday night. After the fun, after the devastation, it was my guess that they would have killed her, too, as Grace had heard them planning to do. And then, for all I knew, they might have turned on each other.

  Maybe she’d loved him, I thought. Maybe she’d realized it on that fatal afternoon, when he’d stood up against all of them and braved death for her. But by Saturday night that love had been swallowed up in horror and in the madness that Irene Croft had spread like contagion, once she’d become the reigning queen of Clinger’s blasted paradise.

  The boy shouldn’t have gone back for Robbie on Wednesday is what I finally thought. He should have listened to Grace and left her at the farm. But then he’d been the victim of his own sweet obsession and, in the end, he couldn’t let her go. In the end, I couldn’t either, although the girl I’d brought out of that charnel house might have been better off dead.

  ******

  The case worked out strangely for all of us. Instead of being charged with murder, as I’d expected to be, I was visited one May afternoon, in the hospital where I was recuperating, by Jerry Lavelle and snowy-haired Arthur Bannock. Lavelle did most of the talking.

  “Harry,” he said, pulling a chair up to my bed. “How’s the arm?”

  The arm would never be the same—nor would the leg or the left lung—but I told him it was all right.

  “That’s fine. Just fine,” he said cheerfully. “The cops talked to you, yet?”

  “Every day,” I said.

  “Well, that’ll probably stop,” he said.

  I stared at him uncertainly.

  “A murder trial, Harry...” He shook his head and cracked his gum. “It’s a terrible thing. One question leads to another and before you know it, you got a—”

  “Scandal?” I supplied the word.

  “Exactly,” he said. “We don’t want that, do we, Harry? So we worked out a little deal for you. You cop a plea—self-defense. And we’ll see that it washes.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “Well, the four of them were loaded with drugs. The coroner’s report shows that. And they’d murdered the Clinger man earlier in the evening. Their clothes were covered with his blood. And the women had sperm in them. So right away we got the sex angle, too. And the rest is easy. You show up looking for Robbie. And high on drugs and sex and bloodlust, they tried to murder you.”

  “And what’s the quid pro quo?” I asked him.

  He smiled as if he loved the sound of the words. “The Croft family never comes up. You don’t know me or Bannock or anything about our little deal.”

  “I can’t prove anything about it, anyway,” I said. “Why the hell do you bother to cover it up?”

  “You maybe can’t prove anything,” he said. “But a friend of yours maybe can.”

  I thought about it for a moment and smiled. I glanced over at Bannock, who was staring at me spitefully. “You were born under a lucky star, boy-o,” he said. “Make no mistake about that.”

  I said, “It’s Al Foster, isn’t it? He looked into the case, after all.”

  “He did more than look,” Lavelle said woefully. “If we can’t work something out, he’s going to blow this thing sky high.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told them, although there wasn’t much to think about. I wanted to expose the Crofts’ vicious conspiracy. But I also wanted to stay out of jail. And when it came down to it, self-interest won out.

  ******

  Another week went by and I was released from the hospital.

  I couldn’t move around very well yet. It had practically been a miracle that the surgeons had managed to save my arm. It was still attached—with wire and plastic and metal rods. But it didn’t move when I told it to. Nothing seemed to move right any longer. Not even my thoughts.

  Something about the case—something beyond the savage bloodshed—had sapped my strength. I’d done my job. I’d gotten the girl back. But she’d been sent to an asylum, probably for the rest of her life. And I’d been left with nothing, except for bad dreams. I found myself thinking about leaving the city—putting some space between me and those dreams. I began to plan for it; it made the hours pass.

  Spring spun on toward summer. The elm trees blossomed in the back yard. The dogwoods dropped their waxy pink petals on the sidewalks. And the nights began to smell of honeysuckle.

  One Thursday toward the end of May, I drove out to see Mildred. We’d seen each other at the coroner’s inquest. And again at Robbie’s sanity hearing. But we hadn’t spoken after that. So I decided to pay her a last visit—to say goodbye.

  There was a blue Mayflower moving van parked in the driveway when I drove up Eastlawn to her tidy little house. I pulled up to the curb and watched the men in their green overalls carting out the furniture—the sofa with the floral print cover, the blue wing-back chairs, paper boxes full of plates and glasses, the white rocker from Robbie’s room. They stacked it all on the sunny lawn, then ho
isted it onto the truck. It embarrassed me a little to see Mildred’s life spread out in pieces for everyone to see.

  I walked up the tar driveway to the front door. It was open.

  I stepped inside and stared at the empty room. It looked small and naked without the furnishings. Mildred was standing in the dining room. She saw me and her long, horsey face went blank, as if I were just another stranger. I’d seen that look on her face during the hearing, as if she’d ceased to understand what the proceedings were about, as if they didn’t connect with anything in her life. She’d blocked something off inside—some passageway to the heart—and had become a spectator at her daughter’s trial. She hadn’t even flinched when the court had sent Robbie to an institution. It was as if it were all happening to someone else, as if she’d disowned the experience. But then she was an economical woman and the cost of facing the truth—of feeling it fully—was simply too dear.

  I didn’t blame her for that. In my own way, I’d been doing the same thing. First, when I’d accepted Lavelle’s offer. And second, when I’d begun to think of leaving. I, too, had stopped caring about what couldn’t be helped. But then we were kin, she and I.

  She said hello to me. And I asked her why she was moving.

  “The neighbors,” she said with vague embarrassment. “Their looks. Their questions. It’s simply too much for me.”

  “And what about Robbie?” I asked gently.

  Her face bunched up for a second and her lips trembled. “I just can’t...” She put a hand to her mouth.

  “They’ll take care of her,” she said after a time. “And perhaps someday she’ll come back to me.”

  She held out her hand, and I shook it.