An Old Friend of the Family d-3

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Not beyond yours.”

  He stopped in his pacing and they looked at each other silently. She could no longer see him as an old man. She felt torn between an impulse to jump out of bed and run to him, and a deeper urge, an inner warning even, to stay were she was.

  He said: “In you I see . . . a fragment of my earlier self. And a young love.”

  “A young love? Is she still alive?”

  “She? . . . ah yes, very much alive. In England.” His teeth flashed in a smile, and the starlight or moonlight made it appear for a moment that something had gone wrong with their shape. “Will you know your own great love, when he appears?”

  “At first sight, you mean? Oh, I’m not so foolish as to think that.”

  A little silence fell between them once again. The instinct that had warned Judy earlier now seemed to be signaling that the crisis, whatever it had been, was past. Under the covers she could feel her legs relaxing now, trembling slightly at the knees.

  “I beg your pardon, Judy. I should not have spoken so patronizingly.”

  “I think you’re a gentleman, Dr. Corday. You know, what people used to mean when they said someone was a gentleman. I don’t know if I’m saying it right.”

  “I think I understand. I thank you.”

  “I’m glad I called you here. I don’t understand how it worked, but I’m very glad I did.”

  “I also am glad.” The tall figure in the gloom moved just a little closer. “Be brave, and we will win. I do not tell you not to be afraid.”

  “Are you ever afraid?” Then Judy shook her head. “I suppose that when fear ends, life is over.”

  In the dimness the expression on the tall man’s face showed great tiredness, and now for a moment infinite sadness as well, so that for a moment Judy was frightened after all. And in the next moment, her visitor was gone.

  FOURTEEN

  The police artist was just packing up his sketch pads and getting ready to leave when Joe shepherded Judy and Clarissa past Johnny’s police bodyguard in the hospital corridor and into the private room. The artist was chuckling a little as he packed, having evidently just made some little joke—or maybe Johnny was the joker, for here the kid was, sitting straight up in bed and looking well, or almost well, just as his mother and father had so thankfully described him.

  A drift of vased and potted flowers and plants was mounting up at one side of the room, and two bedside tables were almost covered with cards and notes, along with some half-finished sketches that the artist had evidently abandoned. Johnny’s hands were both heavily bandaged, and he held them out awkwardly behind first Judy’s back and then Clarissa’s when the women hurried to hug him.

  When they took chairs at last, Joe moved up closer to the bed. “Well, buddy, you look a hell of a lot better than I expected.”

  “I feel real good, too.” John appeared to pause to think about his feelings seriously. “Mom and Dad said I shouldn’t have a bunch of visitors, but I hope you guys can stay a while.”

  “Cops have been bugging you with questions, I suppose.”

  “Oh, yeah, about the people who kidnapped me. They say the guy who stayed with me in the house is dead. They showed me a Polaroid of a dead man, and it was him, all right.”

  The kid seemed to be able to talk about it all quite lightly now. Wait, Joe thought, a reaction will hit him later. Nightmares at least. A little craziness of some kind, probably. The family will have to watch for it. He asked Johnny: “Who were the rest of them?”

  “There were at least two other men, and one woman. And once, I swear, they had like a party going on. Whole bunch of people, talking in some weird foreign language.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think the police and the FBI believe me either. They probably think I was delirious. But one night all these people were in the house, all talking what sounded like Latin.”

  “Latin,” said Clarissa, as if shocked, as if the use of Latin in such a business would be some kind of special sacrilege. She sat back in her chair and looked at Judy, who only gave an impatient little headshake in reply.

  John went on: “And the cops keep asking me if I ever got a message out, anything like that. I didn’t. I couldn’t. How’d you ever know I was in there?”

  Wishing that he hadn’t quit smoking quite so permanently the last time, Joe bit at a hangnail. “I don’t think I know the answer to that one myself.”

  Judy said defensively: “I keep telling everyone, I just had a feeling of where you were. First in a dream. And then, when Dr. Corday hypnotized me, I could find the house. I seemed to be able to really see you for a while, in that closet.”

  Mention of the closet made John give his head a twitchy shake. “Where’s Dr. Corday now?” he wondered. “I asked Mom and Dad and they just sort of put me off. I’d like to be able to thank him.”

  Judy said: “He seems to have disappeared from his motel this morning.” She sounded almost casual about it, which made Joe feel vaguely relieved.

  Johnny’s eyes widened. “I hope those guys didn’t . . .”

  “The kidnappers?” Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so. The cops were watching the motel all night, I’m sure.”

  “Then how’d he get out?”

  “That’s a good question.” Joe had his own ideas about that. His police instincts, if after eight years in the business you maybe began to have such things, told him that the old man had not looked at all like Dr. Corday when he came out, and furthermore Dr. Corday was not going to be easy to find again. Because Dr. Corday no longer existed. Disguises were generally nonsense, of course. But `the kindly old family doctor from London’ had itself been a disguise, one good enough to work, for a while anyway and among strangers. Except . . . Clarissa, of course. Granny Clare. Joe was going to have to talk to her in private when he got the chance. She hadn’t met his eye directly all morning.

  “Jeez, I hope he’s all right.” Johnny was starting to get upset about it.”

  “I’m sure he is,” said Judy impulsively, sounding like there could be no doubt.

  “I’m just as glad he’s gone, myself,” said Joe, and felt astonished at the violence of the glare that Judy turned on him.

  She said: “He got my brother out of there.”

  “Yes, he did do that.” Joe turned to the window, to study the grayness of middle-class Evanston in midwinter, through black skeletal trees. “Afterwards, though, Corday and I were talking, alone. The dead man was there on the cot in the same room. The deputies were out in their car using the radio. Corday was talking pretty crazy, then. I’m saying this because if he pops up again I think you all ought to use care in dealing with him.”

  “Crazy how?” Judy challenged.

  “Well. Like it might very well have been him who killed that fellow, that way. Though he didn’t confess it in so many words. To brag about something like that, whether you really did it or not . . . I’ve got to see Charley Snider later today and go over all of this with him.”

  Judy was angry. “If he killed a kidnapper, does that make him crazy?” Her brother was watching numbly. Clarissa was hiding her face, or maybe just resting her eyes.

  Joe continued: “And then he said some incoherent-sounding things, like how the man had run down the hill to get to running water. That man’s not normal . . . Clarissa, you all right?”

  “Running water,” repeated Granny Clare, through lips suddenly gone pale. Looking worse than Johnny in his hospital bed, she started to get up, clutched at a bedside table, sent papers spilling to the floor. Then she sank back in her chair.

  Judy, her normal self again, hurried to fuss over her grandmother. Clarissa popped a nitroglycerin pill, took some water, looked a lot better.

  Joe asked: “Does running water mean anything in particular?”

  Judy scowled at him again, and turned to her brother, changing the subject. “What did the other people look like?”

  “Oh, the only ones I really saw were the two men in the car,
the ones who grabbed me. I got the best look at the one who was driving but he was sort of ordinary-looking, I guess. See, I was walking along the side of Sheridan Road there, after dark, coming home from the Birches’, and this car just pulled up slowly, and this guy with a dark beard rolled down his window and asked for some kind of phony directions. Then the back door opened, and this real monster sort of jumped out. I didn’t get much of a look at his face, not then anyway, but man was he big. He was the one who . . .”

  John’s voice trailed off. His eyes fell to his bandaged hands, and for a moment the boy’s face showed shock, as if it were just coming through to him now what those bandages really meant. “I’ll be able to use my hands almost as good as ever,” he added, with the air of doggedly repeating something he had been told.

  “You said there was a woman,” Judy prodded, probably just trying to snap Johnny out of his dark contemplation.

  He looked vacantly at his sister for a moment before answering. “Yeah. There in the house, at night. She looked into the closet at me, but it was too dark for me to see her. I dunno. It’s all kind of vague.” Suddenly turning into a hospital patient after all, Johnny lay back on his pillows.

  “I think we’d better let you rest.” Judy bent over her brother to hug him one more time.

  When it came Joe’s turn to say farewell, he grinned at the boy and shook his own two hands together. “Let us know if we can bring you anything.”

  “I will.”

  Judy had paused to restore the papers fallen from the table. Looking at one sketch, she gave a little sniff and almost smiled. “Know who this looks like to me? I met him once, when he was trying to get Kate to go on a skiing weekend with him. Craig Walworth.”

  FIFTEEN

  You didn’t just find upper-crust society in the Chicago phone book, of course. But if you were in the police department you knew a number to dial to be told the address of someone with an unlisted phone.

  Alone after dropping Judy and Clarissa off in Glenlake, driving on south toward the Loop’s sky-notching towers, Joe considered for the dozenth time why he shouldn’t just lay Craig Walworth’s name on Charley Snider. The main reason, he decided, was his feeling that the evil old man wanted him to do just that. Why else had the old man brought the name up out of nowhere when they were alone? Who is Craig Walworth? Damn the old man to hell, anyway, for asking that and then disappearing. So there was no real Walworth-connection to be pointed out to Charley. One question, from someone who was very clever and not to be trusted; and one sketch that might look a little like Craig Walworth but had evidently been discarded because it didn’t look too much like the bearded kidnapper.

  When they had given Joe his days off to mourn for Kate, they hadn’t specifically warned him to keep from muddling up the Southerland investigations by doing any poking around on his own. The captain evidently hadn’t thought him dumb enough to need a warning of that kind. Well, he wasn’t dumb. And he wasn’t getting into the investigation, he told himself now. He was only trying to get it clear in his own mind whether there might be anything that could tie Craig Walworth into it.

  While driving Judy home he had questioned her casually—as casually as he could manage—about that skiing weekend invitation. Judy had been very definite that Kate had never accepted any proposition like that from Craig Walworth. But Judy would say that now, anyway, just to spare Joe’s feelings.

  When he reached the tall apartment building on Lake Shore Drive, Joe had a qualm about using his police ID to get in. He compromised by using it and then telling the doorman he wanted to see Walworth on personal business. The doorman, an old-timer whose badly fitting jacket suggested he might just have been called out of retirement, told him, sure lieutenant, that’s okay, I’ll watch your car, just leave it in the drive. I’ll just give him a buzz to let him know you’re coming. Oh, yes, the ID helped.

  Joe went up alone in the small elevator, up to a small marbled foyer where someone’s old raincoat hung covering a mirror or picture. He touched a bell button beside a dark door of massive wood, that reminded him of yesterday’s broken-in front door. A lean old fellow like Corday, wiry-strong or not, could hardly have done that without a sledge . . .

  Walworth himself came to answer the door. And Judy had been right about the sketch, it hadn’t been far off at all in depicting this man’s face. The dark hair and even the short beard were messed up now. Walworth was wearing a loose, short, very fancy robe of some kind, his hairy, muscular arms and legs protruding. He had the look of someone just out of bed, even to the puffiness around the eyes. He also looked a little jumpy. But a great many perfectly innocent people looked jumpy when you came on as the police.

  “If you’re a cop,” said Walworth in a voice whose loudness sounded habitual, “come in and get it the hell over with, whatever it is.”

  “Thanks.” Joe came in, let Walworth close the door behind him. The palatial apartment was a littered mess, evidently from last night’s party. “But like I said, it’s not police business. I just wondered if I could have a word with you about Kate. Sorry I got you up.”

  “Kate?” The dumb look might be genuine.

  “Kate Southerland.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Sure. Terrible. What can I tell you? I hardly knew her.” Walworth picked up a half-empty bottle, frowned at it, put it down. No doubt the maid, or a battalion of maids, would soon be along to see that it was disposed of.

  Joe said: “You see, I had asked her to marry me.”

  “Oh,” said Walworth, and his face went through several changes of expression, the first of which looked like genuine surprise. None of the expressions seemed likely to be helpful. “I’m very sorry,” he thought of saying finally.

  “Yeah. Well, I just wondered if you could tell me about what happened the last night she was here.” Joe had designed this question, or statement, with great care, and had rehearsed it on the long drive down from Glenlake.

  “Here?” For a moment, consternation. “But she was never here.”

  Joe had also rehearsed his next step, to be taken after this anticipated denial; but before he could put his plans for further probing into effect, he heard a door opening and closing somewhere down a hallway.

  “Craig?” The one tentative word in a softly feminine voice preceded the girl around a corner and into the room. She came wearing a cloud of red hair almost the color of fresh copper wire, and a large green towel wrapped around her body from armpits to hips. She had a green-eyed pixie face, with an upturned, freckle-sprinkled nose that made her look so young that statutory jailbait was the first thought—or anyway the second—that sprang into Joe’s police-trained mind. But she could have been six months or a year past eighteen.

  “Craig?” Her voice was still soft but Joe could tell now, watching her sober face, that there was intense anger driving it. “Where did you put my clothes?”

  Walworth gave Joe a look that seemed to be meant as an appeal for man-to-man solidarity in this situation. Then, shaking his head, the host walked out of the room in the direction the girl had come from.

  Now looking at Joe, the girl in the green towel announced, in a different though still distant voice: “My name is Carol.”

  “I’m Joe.”

  “Joe, could I ask you to give me a lift? It won’t be very far.”

  “Sure. I’ve got a car.”

  Carol continued to look at him, as if daring him to try to say something about the towel. He had nothing funny available, even if he had wanted to try. He walked over to one floor-to-ceiling window and looked out through the thick protective glass at the Drive twenty stories below, a strip of snowbound park beyond, and then the winter-blackened lake, a rim of white snow and broken ice extending outward from the shore a hundred yards or so. A very dull December day. What day was it, Wednesday?

  He would try to pump the girl a bit before he decided whether to come back to Walworth, or to give Walworth’s name to Charley Snider, or just what to do.

  In about one min
ute Walworth was back in the room, carrying an armful of assorted garments. Wordlessly Carol accepted these, meanwhile maintaining her towel’s position carefully. The she went out the way that she had come, silent pink feet sinking into carpet. Her legs were very nice.

  Walworth paced the floor, showing no inclination to say anything more to Joe. Once he stopped to pick up a stray bottle, take a drink from it and grimace. All right, Joe told him silently, you’ve answered my question. You’ll find out about it if I decide your answer doesn’t stick.

  Before Joe had begun to expect her, Carol was back in the living room with them, wearing boots and jeans and a carefully faded, expensive-looking shirt: what the wealthy wear when they want to look like they don’t care. She went straight to the guest closet, took out a hip-length ski jacket, went through its pockets, came up empty.

  “My money?” she demanded then, of Walworth’s back.

  He turned right around, not having to pause for an instant. “What d’you charge?”

  That stung enough to show for just a moment in her face. “I mean the money that was in my pockets when I came in here last night.”

  “I don’t know.” He glared at her brutally. “Look around for it, if you want. Or if you don’t want to miss your ride, come back later and maybe it’ll have turned up.”

  “For eight dollars I’m not going to stay here long enough to look around.” She pulled her jacket on, turned to Joe. “Not for eight hundred. Can I have that ride now?”

  Wishing he could think of comebacks that quickly, Joe just managed to have the door open as she reached it. A last glance back as they went out showed Walworth picking up a bottle again.

  “Don’t like him, do you?” Joe remarked, when they had ridden the elevator halfway down.