No Cure for Death (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  He shook his head and a lock of the long white hair fell like a thick comma across his brow; the blue hypnotist’s eyes were open and clear and you could see they’d been compelling in their day. “You know, it made you feel... important. Hell, I was important, and I knew it, and I was doing people good, too, no matter what some thought and said. Do you know that? I did do people good, and I’ve done good since, in different ways, quieter ways. I’ve helped this town, it’s grown because of me, people have jobs because of me, they feed their families, do you know that? Did you know I licked the scoundrels who ran the water ’n’ light trust? It was me got a municipal water and light plant put up, back in ’26. And that building’s still in use today. You go look at it. I designed it, just like I designed this house. And like this house it’ll be there long after I’m gone. Did you know I drew the rough design of this house on a tablecloth? Well it’s true. The night we got the okay from the Department of Commerce, you know, to go ahead and build the station, well a bunch of us got together in my café and started trying to pin down this hazy aircastle I’d been dreaming of so long. Everybody had an idea of his own of what it should be and just about every kind of architecture you can think of got suggested. Then it came to me... why not take the best of all of them and build something unique? A touch of Spanish here, a dab of Egyptian there, and toss in some of what that man Wright was doing. And I built it here, on the highest point in Port City, two hundred feet above the Mississippi, where everyone, always, could see it. And years from now they’ll say, that’s Doc Sy’s hill and that’s where he lived and worked, and when I’m long gone it’ll still be up here. You know, a man likes knowing he’s left something behind that’ll be there after he’s gone, you know that?”

  “It must be a comforting feeling,” I said, “to know you’ve accomplished something in your life.”

  “Oh it is, it is indeed. Though, I’ll tell you, uh, what was your name?”

  “Mallory.”

  “Mallory. I’ll tell you, Mallory, a man feels a little empty at this stage of life, no matter how full it’s been up to then. It’s a kind of a used-up feeling, I guess, and it doesn’t matter how grand your achievements...” (he affectionately patted the glass over the autographed picture of Hoover) “... no matter how grand, you just feel empty.”

  I didn’t say anything; it would’ve been a good time to find things out, but I couldn’t make myself ask anything.

  Finally, he went on himself: “It’s not so much I miss her—my wife, I mean—it’s been so long ago, and she was a young girl and here I am an old man, but... I don’t have anything left of her and there won’t be anything left of her after I’m gone... nothing of the two of us together... not with Richard gone... and my grandson.”

  His mind must’ve been wandering, I thought; Stefan was his nephew, not his grandson.

  He went on: “... and Stefan, too, is a loss, I suppose, even if I do feel some bitterness, can’t help but feel some bitterness....”

  I had to say something now. Inside me I sealed compassion over, much as someone had mortared the cracks in the old house.

  I said, “I suppose you must feel a little bit sad, being the last of the Normans. It’s a lot of tragedy to go through, losing a wife, a son and his wife and daughter, and now your nephew.”

  “He shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Commit suicide you mean?”

  “No, no, boy, that’s not at all what I mean. Under the circumstances suicide was ideal, really. It’s that he shouldn’t have gone bothering that little Taber girl.”

  There was fondness in his voice; that stopped me.

  “Wasn’t Janet blackmailing you, Mr. Norman?”

  “Blackmailing...?” A dry rasp sounded in his throat: his laugh. “No, no, Stefan knew that wasn’t so, or he at least should have. Still, I suppose he meant well.”

  “I’m... sure he did.”

  “But it was so silly of him, so silly to think she was taking advantage of me. Why, I doubt she even knew of me, I kept in the background so. Stefan should have known better.”

  “He should have?”

  “Why, of course. He was the one I had contact the girl’s mother, he better than anyone knew how badly I wanted to find the girl, and then how pleased I was when, after several years had dragged by, she turned up again.”

  “Why did you want to see her, Mr. Norman? Why would you search for Janet Taber?”

  He waved a quavery hand in the air, like the reluctant blessing of a disillusioned old priest. “That doesn’t matter, not now....”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s dead. And her son’s dead.”

  “Her son?” And I remembered Janet’s little boy and his heart trouble and the anonymous benefactor. “You were helping Janet help her son? Did you arrange for his treatment at a clinic in the east?”

  He nodded. “But none of that matters. She’s dead. Her son is dead.”

  “Her son,” I said.

  “Her son,” he said. “Hers and Richard’s.”

  I looked out the window; it caught the reflection of the smiling portrait behind us.

  “My grandson,” he said. Softly. Softly.

  TWENTY–FIVE

  Harold was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell. He seemed too big to fit within the walls: he was a ship in a bottle and I wondered how it was done. He said, “How’s Mr. Norman?”

  “He’s all right. I helped him back to bed.”

  “You didn’t make things worse for him?”

  “I’m not sure that’d be possible,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  He said, “I sent Rita across the street for some groceries and when she gets back she’s going to fix us breakfast. That should give us time to discuss things.”

  “You were expecting this?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Weren’t you?”

  He led me into the empty living room, where the sun was slanting in through the many odd-shaped, undraped windows like swords stuck in a magician’s box. Our footsteps clomped, but didn’t echo. Harold gestured toward an arched doorway and I went on through it and he followed. We walked across the dead lawn and stopped a few yards from the drop-off. The river was choppy today; a gray barge was riding down to the lock and dam and wasn’t having an easy time of it. There was a crisp breeze and I wished I had worn a jacket.

  “Rita says you write mystery stories,” Harold said, looking out toward the river.

  “That’s right.”

  He looked at me; the one eye bored into me. “You think life’s a mystery story?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That tidy. That neat. That easy to deal with.”

  I shrugged. “No. But life is like a mystery story, sometimes. Full of secrets somebody’s trying to keep, and can’t. Or anyway shouldn’t.”

  He grunted; his breath smoked in the cold air, like the exhaust of a car. “My life isn’t a damn mystery story. Anyway it’s not your damn mystery story.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m in it.”

  He thought about that. Nodded. “I guess you are.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, Harold?”

  “You’re the mystery writer. You tell me.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you a story. It might not be much more than a story, but I’ll give it a whirl.”

  He grunted again.

  “Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a senator named Richard Norman. And this senator had an affair with a secretary of his called Janet Ferris. It might’ve started at his senate office in Des Moines; but it wound up in Port City, probably in a motel room, during the summer the senator was launching his campaign for national office.”

  Harold just stood and listened, impassive as a rock.

  “The senator had a wife, too, but she was pregnant at the time—very pregnant. She delivered a baby girl to the senator late that summer. Maybe it was during those last few months of the wife’s pregnancy that the senator finally gave in to
the secretary, and what might have started as a simple flirtation turned into something more complex, more complex than just another affair, too. Because the secretary also got pregnant.

  “Now I don’t know whether the senator told his wife about the pregnant secretary. I kind of doubt it. But I’m pretty sure he would’ve told his political advisor, monetary backer and guiding light behind everything he did: his father, Simon Norman. The man behind the man. And I’m pretty sure I know how Sy Norman would’ve handled the secretary: he would pay her off to go away quietly and just disappear.

  “And she did. She went off to Old Town in Chicago and was a hippie with her hippie husband for a while, quite good and soured on an Establishment she’d briefly believed in. How am I doing, Harold?”

  When Harold answered, I was almost surprised: it was like the rock suddenly talked. “It’s your story,” he shrugged.

  “Is it? Anyway, a few years pass and in the midst of launching a second attempt to go to Washington, the senator dies in a car crash. So does his wife. And so does his only child—the only legitimate child, that is. Old Sy Norman has a stroke shortly after. And then someone remembered the pregnant secretary, and reminded the old man about her; perhaps she hadn’t had an abortion—perhaps she’d had the child.

  “And so the Norman forces tracked down Janet Taber; or anyway, tracked down Janet’s mother. And it turned out Janet had indeed had the child, a son. A grandson for Sy Norman. Something that would outlive him. Something that came from him that would last. For some reason, Janet’s mother was used as a go-between. Was it because Janet was bitter toward the Normans? Could it be that that other time Janet had turned down the money they offered her, and had just disappeared into Old Town and became a hippie, snubbing their capitalistic offer?”

  Harold turned his gaze on me and nodded.

  “Okay, then. It starts to make sense. The mother acted as go-between; Janet suspected who was behind it, but since her child needed medical care, she went along—maybe lied to herself that it wasn’t the Normans paying the bills. Hoping it was some other good-hearted John Beresford Tipton type. Maybe it was easier for her to live with it that way. Whatever the case, whatever the reasons, she went along with it, and her son went to that clinic in the east.

  “And now I have to guess. I can only guess. But I’m almost sure I’m right. A day or two before you pulled your scare tactic on Janet at the bus station, Harold—and why exactly you did that, I admit I’m still not sure of—a day or two before things started getting ugly, the boy died.”

  Harold again turned his gaze on me. Again he nodded slowly. Sadly.

  “I thought so! The little boy in the big fancy clinic died. But Janet Taber never knew that. She was never told. That’s something, anyway; that’s a burden she didn’t have to carry to her grave with her. But that’s about the only break she got. Because Stefan—and his killing machine, Davis—had decided to get rid of both Janet and her mother, before they found out the boy was dead.”

  “And why would they do that, Mallory?”

  I poked his barrel chest with a finger. “Because Janet and her son were both in the old man’s will! Am I right? Because Stefan wanted it all, and because news of the grandson’s death might kill the old man, and then Stefan would lose a good chunk of his inheritance. So Stefan had to act fast—a fire, a car crash—and then he stood to inherit it all again. Pretty sloppy work, if you ask me, but then it helps to have the local cops in your pocket when you’re doing work as clumsy as it is ruthless.”

  Harold laughed humorlessly. “Stefan was a clumsy criminal. He was a manipulator, a schemer—but when it came to murder, he was out of his depth.”

  “So much so that he ended up committing suicide.”

  “Right. But the blame for that is yours, Mallory.”

  “Mine?”

  “Stefan’s clumsy staging of ‘accidents’ would’ve held up, but for you. Like you said, the police and the sheriff are in the Norman family’s pocket; the investigations of these events would’ve been cursory, at best. How was Stefan to know a... a mystery writer like yourself would be on hand to poke in here, and unravel there?”

  The elation I’d been feeling, from putting the pieces together, suddenly faded; the wind was cold on my face but the sun had come out from under some clouds and made me squint.

  I said, “So when the holes in Stefan’s not-so-grand design began to show and the local law had to start looking into things, and when his roommate Davis ended up dying for him—when it all began coming apart and falling in on him—he had an attack of despair and wrote a self-serving suicide note, apparently designed to spare his uncle’s feelings, a bit, and then put a bullet in his brain.”

  Harold nodded. The barge horn blew, a foghorn sound.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You killed Stefan, Harold. Why don’t you just tell me about it? It is your story, after all....”

  TWENTY–SIX

  “You have to understand about Stefan Norman,” Harold said. “Stefan Norman was a snake.”

  His voice was a dry whisper; so was the wind.

  “Stefan Norman,” Harold went on, “was the one who told Richard Norman’s wife about her husband and his secretary and a baby that might or might not have been aborted. And Mrs. Norman, she didn’t take it so well. She developed... nervous trouble. Then she developed drinking trouble. Psychoanalysis didn’t seem to help either problem. She proved a constant source of embarrassment for the Normans during the senator’s second national campaign. Rumors about her, which she in one way or another managed to generate, were so ugly that most people refused to believe them. Dismissed them as vicious smears. Like the one about her trying to drown their daughter while vacationing at Lake Okoboji.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Harold sighed heavily. “How the senator felt about his wife at this point I can’t really say. At one time he and I were rather close. He often revealed personal things to me, but... but when the business with his wife’s drinking and her cruelty to their daughter began, the senator clammed up.”

  “What in hell possessed Richard Norman to get drunk and drive his car off Colorado Hill? It wasn’t suicide, was it?”

  Harold said nothing.

  “I get it,” I said. “Richard wasn’t driving that night. Richard wasn’t the drunk behind the wheel, was he? It was the wife. The wife.”

  Harold nodded, said, “But the senator did allow his wife to drive back from Davenport when she was so drunk she could barely walk, let alone steer a car.”

  “So what are you saying? That Richard Norman handing his wife the wheel was like handing her a revolver and saying shoot?”

  Harold was looking past the drop-off before us, at the river. “Stefan felt that that interpretation of the events was likely, so likely that he advised Mr. Norman to go to the trouble of instructing the local authorities to have all the reports state that the senator was driving. Still, there were those who guessed past the cover-up that followed—those who guessed that Mrs. Norman had been driving, and who just knew she’d been steering accurately when she drove that car over Colorado Hill.”

  Then he turned his one eye and his black eyepatch on me and said, “But they’re just guessing. And so are we.”

  “What do you think, Harold? You and the senator were close, you said.”

  “I don’t believe the death of his family was a conscious wish on the senator’s part. Maybe he hated his wife by this time; I don’t know. And he may have hated himself; that I don’t know, either. But he loved his little daughter. That much I do know.”

  “Somebody else loved the daughter, too,” I said, gesturing with a thumb back at the house.

  “Yes,” Harold nodded. “Mr. Norman loved the little girl. He used to say the little girl would grow up to be ‘the spittin’ image’ of his late wife. I feel it was the loss of the grandchild that triggered Mr. Norman’s stroke, more than losing his son the senator.”

  “Who was it that remembered the other grandchild, Ja
net Taber’s illegitimate child? Stefan?”

  Harold laughed; it was a deep, throaty laugh, and came as a shock, as he’d been speaking in hushed tones till now.

  “Hardly,” he said. “Why would Stefan remind his uncle of another possible heir? I reminded Mr. Norman about the pregnant secretary. And it was the chance that a grandchild of his might be alive somewhere that made Simon Harrison Norman want to live again. And when the recovery had taken an upward turn, he spoke again, the first time since the stroke; he spoke to Stefan.” He laughed again. “Ordered his sole heir to search for the child.”

  “Stefan wasn’t crazy about that, I assume.”

  “No,” Harold smiled. “Stefan could hardly be expected to take pleasure in a search that would result in a decrease in his share of the Norman inheritance. But he went through the motions. He hired the necessary investigators and went himself to Des Moines to visit the girl’s mother, who hadn’t seen her daughter for several years, at that point.”

  “And for a while that was as far as the search got.”

  “Right. Mr. Norman got on Stefan’s case about it, from time to time, and once when Stefan said to his uncle that the search was useless because ‘the damn thing was probably aborted anyway,’ the old man flew into a rage. I suspected that Stefan was doing this to provoke another stroke—a fatal one—so I had words with him.”

  “What kind of words?”

  “Convincing words,” Harold said.

  Harold was pressing his hands together in front of him, squeezing, like a vise of flesh. I was reminded for a moment that despite Harold’s gentle, genteel manner, this was still Punjab, still the one-eyed massive bear that I’d butted heads with at the bus station not so long ago.

  “Finally,” Harold said, almost ignoring me, “Mrs. Ferris contacted Mr. Norman. Her daughter had phoned her, finally, with a tearful story of a critically ill child. And Mr. Norman—through Stefan—arranged for Mrs. Ferris to bring Janet to Port City to live, where they could be looked after. Mr. Norman thought it best to remain anonymous, being wary of the young woman’s once before having refused Norman money.”