Game Bet

by Forrest, Richard;

  He knew, in a vague way, that Norm’s father had been involved in mysterious business dealings in South America, relationships that were never fully explained. The family had returned to West Deerford when Norm was eight, and his father had never worked again but spent the remaining years of his life cultivating the trees and plants in the solarium.

  Distant warning bells still rang. Cory decided to approach the house from the rear, making his way through the trees that banked the swimming-pool wall. Turning left at the next corner, he began an even jog toward the woods that ran parallel to the street.

  The underbrush in the woods behind the house had been partially cleared, and he was able to make his way silently toward the dark, looming wall around the pool. As his fingers brushed across the rough stucco, he found that he was unable to reach high enough to grasp the top. He jumped, his hands curling over the top of the rough stone, scrabbling to pull himself over the wall onto the red tiles of the enclosed cabana.

  He was about to drop off the roof onto the patio when he saw them.

  There were lights on in the solarium, and Norm, drink in hand, was talking to a large man who had a rifle slung over his shoulder. The man listened, nodded, and left the solarium through the large doors to the rear.

  Another figure was revealed in the light from the solarium as he slowly walked across the patio. He also carried a rifle that casually rested over his forearm. The man in the patio was dressed in a Deerford police uniform.

  Cory inched back across the roof on his stomach and dropped off the wall, back into the woods. He lay a moment near a large tree. His breath came in short gasps as he shivered.

  There wasn’t anyone else to call, but he waited until he found an all-night drugstore nearly two miles from the staked-out house. She answered on the first ring.

  “Is that you, Cory?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. It was on the news. After you left I turned on the TV, and there was a picture of you and …”

  “Can I stay with you tonight? I can explain.”

  “Explain?” A distant question. It seemed an appraisal of a thousand poor actions she had taken in her life. Her pause was long. “Where are you? I’ll come after you.”

  He described a spot three blocks from the drugstore, where a small river abutted the road and where he could hide in the underbrush with a clear field of retreat. “Warren and Main. Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”

  Again the pause. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 6

  His clammy palms left a film of perspiration on the phone receiver.

  “I don’t know what I can do for you except to arrange a negotiated surrender.” The attorney’s voice was pontifical.

  “That’s what I want you to do, Jerry.”

  “Why in hell did you do it?”

  Cory sighed. “It’s not how it appears.”

  “Then you’re innocent?” A hopeful question.

  “You’re damn right! I never had any intention of firing at the President. It was all part of a bet. A game and a bet.”

  “You’re going to have to lay that on me heavy. Not on the phone. Let me make a couple of calls and call you back.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “You sound paranoid. I’m not in the habit of turning in my clients without their knowledge.”

  “I want to surrender, but under the right terms. What’s the procedure?”

  “As soon as I’m off the line with you, I’ll call an S.A. at the local FBI office. The case falls under their jurisdiction. We’ll make arrangements for you to surrender at their office.”

  “Then what?”

  “They do the usual: read your rights to you, photograph and prints, and then the interview. If they feel they have probable cause, which I think they have at this point, they arrange for your arraignment before a federal magistrate.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “And then I begin my legal maneuvers. Give me an hour, and then I want to have a long talk with you regarding the exact circumstances, before we surrender.”

  “I’ll call in an hour.”

  He hung up and felt the dull sheen of depression engulfing him. The attorney’s resolute voice and attitude were a slim thread of hope, but at least the two of them would be taking some constructive action.

  “The morning paper’s on the counter,” Ginny said from the stove, where she was frying bacon.

  He sat at the counter before a cooling cup of coffee and flipped open the paper. His own photograph stared up at him. He began to read the long article and felt her standing beside him with a plate of bacon and eggs.

  “Doesn’t do you justice,” she said of the picture.

  “Wait until you read the article.”

  She squinted at the newsprint. “Are you really a discontent, a minor banking official heavily in debt because of gambling losses?”

  Cory groaned. “There goes my job.” The smell of eggs near his face nauseated him, and he pushed the plate far down the counter.

  “You don’t like my eggs?”

  “It’s not that. I don’t think I could eat anything this morning, even if it were prepared by a chef from the Cordon Bleu.” He turned the newspaper to the second page, where the lengthy article continued. There had been no identification of the man he had shot. The article listed him as a fellow accomplice, but no fingerprints were on file, nor did he have any identification on his body. A nationwide distribution of the dead man’s picture had been made in order to aid in his eventual identification.

  Cory wadded the paper and threw it toward the trash can in the corner. It missed.

  Ginny sat across from him and began to work ravenously on the eggs. “When you told me what really happened, I believed you.”

  “And you don’t now?”

  “I do. But you know—” she paused to finish a mouthful of egg, “I can’t figure out why. I’m a sucker for anything a guy I care about tells me. Why did you buddy call the cops on you last night?”

  “Panic. Fear. Perhaps reasons I don’t know about. Lewis is a strange man.”

  “It is going to be all right, isn’t it, Cory?”

  “It will take time to get straightened out, but I have witnesses to the bet Norm Lewis made with me, and then there’s the camera attached to the rifle. All of that will support my side of the story. It’s the aggravation. I really could do without having my life history plastered over page one of every newspaper in the country.”

  “When everyone finds out the truth, you’ll be a hero. I mean, if you hadn’t shot the other man, he might have killed the President.”

  “The newspapers think some cop got him.”

  “They don’t know who?”

  “By the end of today ten guys will claim they fired at that window.”

  “That would be lying.”

  “Ginny, Ginny, for a cocktail waitress who’s seen everything, your naïveté is utterly boundless.” He stood up and felt the stubble on his chin. “You wouldn’t happen to have a razor around, would you?”

  Cory called Jerry Granville back in exactly one hour. The lawyer’s voice sounded more somber than it had earlier.

  “What’s up?” he asked without identifying himself.

  “It’s all arranged. Get down to my office right away. Do you have transportation? They found your car in the garage.”

  “I’ll work it out. What did they say?”

  “Not over the phone. You and I talk, and then we surrender. I’ll be with you every step of the way. You have to trust me in this, Cory.”

  “I know. I’ll be there.”

  Cory turned down Ginny’s offer to drive him and walked five blocks until he found an outdoor phone booth, where he dialed for a cab.

  Jerry Granville’s office was in a small red-brick building on a mixed residential and commercial street that ran parallel to the street containing the courthouse. Cory had the driver let him off at the corner and walked to the office.

  Granville must have be
en waiting by the window of his first-floor office. He met Cory at the door, grasped his arm, and quickly ushered him into a private office.

  The attorney was a huge man of mammoth proportions layered in consecutive rolls of fatty tissue that merged together to give him a spherically rotund appearance. Cory initially had doubts about the man’s intellect, prejudiced by the excessive obesity. He soon discovered that under layers of flesh, buried within the folds, resided a mind of lightning intellect. They had first met and worked together when Jerry’s client, a builder, was closing a loan with the Nutmeg Bank. The attorney also represented civil-rights activists and the few remaining state Indians. He was a good choice for the problem at hand.

  The lawyer’s face was dark as he trundled across the office and lowered himself into an outsize swivel chair. He propped a microphone in the center of the desk and switched on a recorder.

  “I want it from the top and I want it straight. You’re in a passel of trouble, Cory. Or need I tell you that?”

  “I saw the newspaper this morning. There’s one initial problem, Jerry. About a retainer …”

  The corpulent attorney laughed. “Hell, there’s enough publicity in this to satisfy a Belli. We’ll work something out, sell your story rights to someone, some damn thing. Now, what in hell happened?”

  Since their phone calls, Cory had been mentally rehearsing the story. He tried to align his facts, structure them cogently, and present them in a straightforward manner. He started with the rainy afternoon at the hunt club, where the wager began.

  Jerry Granville shook his head when Cory finished. “Do you want me to comment on the intelligence of your actions?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary. You couldn’t possibly add anything I haven’t already said to myself. What I want is legal advice. How do I get out of this mess so I can put my life back together?”

  The attorney nodded. “It’s not going to be as easy as you think. After we finish here, I’ll drive you over to the Federal Building. The FBI expects us at three. I will remain with you during all interview sessions and give advice as to certain of your answers. We won’t allow any news people to talk to you until we prepare a statement tomorrow. After they lock you up, I’ll start hitting the courts with a batch of writs.”

  “You mean I’ll be in jail?”

  “My God! Where did you think this would lead? We’ll be lucky to have you out next week. It all depends on how long it takes me to get corroboration in the statements from—” he looked down at his notes, “from Joe Page and Ed Robinson.”

  “What about the camera mounted on my rifle? That proves what I was really doing.”

  There was another one of those strange pauses that Cory had become so fearful of. “There wasn’t any camera. Or if there was, it has been removed.”

  “Oh, Jesus! Then we’ll get statements from Lewis, Page, and Robinson.”

  “I don’t think anything Lewis says is going to help you.”

  Cory thought about the measured phone call he had had with Lewis and the lies that culminated in the stakeout of the Spanish home. “Lewis must have panicked when he heard all the publicity. That would explain why he called the cops.”

  Granville looked at his notes again. “For the second time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who tipped off the police that a man with a rifle was in the Faber Building?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There seem to be a lot of things you don’t know. The FBI told me Lewis has already given a sworn deposition that after the shooting you came by his office and demanded money. Why would Lewis lie?” It was a slashing attack.

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “It will be my job to find out. In the meanwhile, if the other two men back up your wager story, you’ll be in the clear. Page and Robinson are respected men in the community, and you aren’t exactly a Lee Oswald.”

  “You wouldn’t know that from the newspaper this morning.”

  “Such are the wages of notoriety. Are you sure you’ve told me everything?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then we’ll go over it a second time. There might be one small item that you left out.”

  They began again. Cory included everything that happened, from the lovemaking with Ruth Lewis to a complete recapitulation of his activities after the shooting; but again, cautious instinct and a desire to protect her made him leave out any reference to Ginny.

  When he had finished, Jerry looked even more thoughtful. “Explaining why you zeroed in that rifle when you didn’t intend to use it is going to be hard to explain.”

  “There really isn’t any good explanation. Maybe I was looking for something to do until Thursday arrived.”

  “And you never knew the man that you shot?”

  “Never. I’ve told you that.”

  “You met him casually?”

  “How many times …”

  “We have to be absolutely sure. We don’t want to make categorical statements and then get shot down.”

  “I saw him with the rifle. He was leading the President, and it was obvious that he was going to fire. He couldn’t have missed.”

  “This is an important area. They’re going to do their damnedest to make a connection between you. You claim you had never seen him before, and yet he was in a window across the street. How are you so damn sure!”

  “I had a telescopic camera lens.”

  “If he was preparing to fire, wouldn’t the rifle be at his shoulder? Wouldn’t his elbow protrude in such a manner as to hide part of his features?”

  “Well, yes, but I’m almost sure I had never seen him.”

  “Almost isn’t good enough.” Jerry Granville leaned back in the chair to the creaking protest of the inner mechanism. He laced his hands behind his head for a few moments and seemed to be minutely examining the ceiling. “How can you be almost sure?”

  “They had the guy’s picture in the paper this morning.”

  “Very good—” He looked up in surprise.

  Two large men erupted into the room. They were big men, their sports coats stretched tight across bulging shoulders as they moved in concert in an enveloping movement that placed them on either side of Cory’s chair.

  Granville, in a lithe movement surprising for his bulk, was on his feet, angrily leaning over the desk. “What in hell!”

  “Pierce, FBI.” The man to Cory’s right quickly flashed an identification with one hand while the other tightly gripped Cory’s shoulder. “We’re taking the prisoner in, Counselor.”

  “Listen, whatever your name is. I talked with Special Agent Atkins and made arrangements for this surrender.”

  “Atkins will be waiting for you at the Federal Building. In the meanwhile, we’re taking custody.”

  Both men’s hands grabbed Cory’s shoulders, and he was dragged to his feet and shoved toward the door.

  “Stop!” The vehemence of the attorney’s command made both men pause. Jerry Granville’s features changed, and his eyes seemed to have recessed into a face that now sparkled with anger. “Let me see that ID again.”

  Without answering, the men kept Cory moving toward the door.

  “I said stop!” There was no mistaking the authority in Granville’s voice. “You will not remove my client from these premises without my permission. I am making a phone call.” He began to dial.

  The man called Pierce snatched the phone from Jerry’s fingers and slammed it into the cradle. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Jerry’s eyes narrowed further. “I know you. I’ve seen you in court. You’re not FBI … city police. Sergeant Pierce. You work for Wilton James.”

  With the larger Sergeant Pierce at Granville’s desk, Cory made his move. He slammed his shoulder into the second man who sprawled across a leather divan against the wall. He ran from the office, wrenched open the front door, and leaped the few stone steps leading down to the pavement. It was wrong. It was all wrong. He didn’t know how or why,
only that he must escape.

  “Halt!”

  In five strides Cory was in full run. The police patrol car parked halfway down the block was astraddle the street. Two uniformed patrolmen, carrying shotguns and wearing flak vests, were crouched behind the vehicle. He swerved away, his new path allowing him to see the front steps of Jerry’s office from the corner of his eye. The two large men who had broken into the office were now on the front stoop. Both had drawn handguns, and one knelt with his arm braced on the wrought-iron bannister, while the other stood and braced his right wrist with his left. They aimed at Cory.

  Jerry Granville’s bulk broke from the office door and plummeted against both men, sending them sprawling down the steps. Pierce’s gun fired; the shot went wild.

  Other firing began, and Cory realized that sharpshooters were stationed on the rooftop across the street.

  Jerry was now in the center of the street with his hands held forward in a gesture of supplication. His face exploded, and he jerked backward into the gutter.

  A dozen weapons fired at once. Cory saw more shots rip into Jerry’s body, jouncing the huge man in a dance of death.

  A voice. “Cease fire! Cease fire, goddamn it!”

  Firing seemed to increase as a kill craze swept the police.

  Cory fell, rolled over, and stumbled to his feet in a low crouch. Splutters of concrete blew away from the curbing as he ran.

  There was an open drainage ditch for pipe repair to his front, with a sawhorse blocking the way. He threw himself against the horse and fell into the pit, with crackling rifle fire still whining around him.

  Jesus God! They had killed Jerry. They were going to kill him.

  They were going to kill him!