Hush Money

by Peter Israel

  I gave her an I for Insight. Then, to bring her back to a topic of greater mutual interest, I asked her what was in Bryce Diehl’s will.

  She told me, mostly. When she was done, I couldn’t keep a soft whistle from coming out. It wasn’t just the money then, it was the power that went with it. And all of it Karen’s.

  Maybe Grandpa Diehl had outgrabbed them all at that.

  “How’d you find out about it?” I asked her.

  “Karie told me.”

  “After George Curie told her?”

  “That’s right.”

  I began to see why Twink Beydon had gotten so exercised. Only what had taken him so long? “I haven’t seen as much of her as I should have,” he’d said once, where if I’d been in his shoes I’d’ve been down on my knees in front of her washing the linoleum before she took a step.

  “And then Karie died,” I said.

  “Yeah. Poor Karie.”

  “Which changed all the equations around. Did you push her, Robin?”

  It seemed like I’d asked that question a thousand times before, but I got the same answer.

  “No, like I said. She was busting out. I really think that’s what she was doing: busting out. I guess I could’ve stopped her, but …”

  She bit at a knuckle to show she was feeling bad.

  “Poor Karie,” she said.

  “And then you took off with the family jewels.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And they were off and running at Santa Anita.”

  She giggled a little.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Why’d you send me the journal? Was it just so I could read her poems? And why’d you call me up?”

  “I liked you, Cage. I needed you, I really did.”

  “Yeah, and you also thought I was still working for him, didn’t you? That maybe I could be your way in? And what about when I showed up the other night, is that still what you had in mind?”

  “Like I say,” she answered, “I liked you.”

  She smiled at me, a sideways smile. So help me, she even ran her fingers down the hair alongside her cheek.

  “Sure you liked me. Like your brothers liked me. Everybody likes me.”

  “They had me set up,” she said. “Both of us. Pablo knew all about you. They kept me zonked the whole week in case you showed up. They thought I’d tell you where it was.”

  “And you knew that’s what they hoped you’d do, didn’t you?”

  “Well …”

  “And you figured out a pretty good way to get rid of most of the competition, honh, all in one little lie? With a phone call to the law to put the frosting on the cake?”

  Just then while I was talking I may have had a little flicker inside, no more.

  “Tell me something, Robin, were you really stoned?”

  “Like there’s no way of faking that, man, is there?” she said. “No way.”

  Amazing. And to think of me, while she was setting us all up, down and under in the drycleaner’s clothes bin. A question of experience, I guess.

  “It’s too bad,” I said magnanimously. “If you hadn’t diddled me around so much, maybe I could have figured out a way to cut you in.”

  “You didn’t seem the type, Cage.”

  “The type?”

  “To cut people in on anything.”

  “I’m not,” I said, “any more than you’re the type who writes poetry.”

  That seemed to piss her off. Of all things. Her face went tight, and without any warning she started hollering at me:

  “What makes you think you’re such a hot shit? Look at you! You’ve got it all wired, haven’t you? Right! That’s how you get your rocks off, honh? Oh you’ve got it wired all right, sure you have! You’re real clever, and you’ve outthought everybody, Mr. Bigshot Cage! There’s not a man in the world you can’t outthink, is there? Or a woman who’s not gonna cream her jeans just at the sight of you? Oh right, right! Oh right …”

  The flicker again, stronger. I’d been nice enough long enough.

  I stood up.

  “O.K. Robin, you’ve said your piece. Now let’s have Nancy’s letter.”

  She didn’t budge. Instead she began to laugh, that cackle sound that curled my ears. The flicker became a twitch and all of a sudden all of the little balls shook loose in the glass puzzle and started to roll around again.

  “Let’s have Nancy’s letter! Let’s have Nancy’s letter! Listen to him now, Mr. Bigshot Cage! What makes you think I’d give it to you if I had it? You’d have to cut my heart out first, you bastard! You’re late, Mr. Cage! You’re too late! And all while we’ve been sitting here shootin’ the breeze! You’ve fucked up, Mr. Smartass Cage, and now I don’t think you’re ever gonna get it!”

  Her cackle went up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other. Then her knee came up, ready, and it stopped me cold.

  I reached for my musket.

  The laughter died down. In its place came tears, and I guess they were real enough though with Robin Fletcher I wouldn’t take bets. They ran down her cheeks and wetted up her hair like hay left out in the rain.

  “Go ahead, Cage!” she shouted. “Do you think I give a damn? He’s gone now, long gone, and I’ll never catch him, and neither will you!

  “Sure I gave it to him!” she howled, seeing the look on my face. “After you called what did you think I was gonna do? Sit here and wait for you? He’s ten feet taller’n you, Cage! Than you’ll ever be! Sure I called him! He drove all night, which is more than you ever did! And he beat you, Cage! We beat you, me ’n’ Andy! We beat you by an hour and now it’s more, every second. So what you gonna do, Cage, shoot me? Sure, go ahead Cage, shoot me!”

  “You dumb cunt!” I shouted back at her. “D’you think you’ll ever see him again now? D’you think he’s coming back for you?”

  She didn’t have to answer. She just peered out at me with that cockeyed lop-ended teary grin on her face.

  “So long, sweet baby,” she said hoarsely. “Have a nice day.”

  She was asking for it so, was that the only reason I didn’t give it to her? I glanced down at the musket. It looked absurd, stuck there in my hand. I put it away.

  Then I lit out, leaving her singing the last chorus of the Andy Ford blues. I punched the Mustang into action and turned her loose. By the time we hit the freeway she was wide open, and any cop that wanted to stop us would have had to call the Air National Guard for help. It was then or bust, and if I was going to end up with spaghetti for dinner, I’d just as leave have eaten it in hell as Santa Monica.

  At that I’d hate to have had to bet on my chances. He could have gone south or north. Heads you win, tails I lose.

  I picked south.

  She’d said he had an hour or more head start, and that made it tough odds even for Breedlove.

  But it must have been less. Either that or he’d stopped for coffee, or to count his money before he had it.

  I guess we’re all entitled to one mistake.

  I caught him even before he’d made the top of the pass. The cream-colored van all right, black curtains and all. And out in the fourth lane doing like eighty uphill, which is about twice what any van is entitled to do, it says in Road & Track. But no match in any case for the Mustang on a dry strip.

  He saw me.

  He started to zig and zag from lane to lane like he expected me to try and pass him, over in the third and back into the fourth, back into the third and over in the second, all the way into the first and back out again. He was good at it too.

  I sat on his tail and admired his style.

  Hell, what was I supposed to do on four lanes of freeway, pass him? And then what? Try to run him off into the island or the shoulder, take your choice? After all, it’d only have been paying him back for what he’d done to me once.

  But no sir. That wasn’t my style. I wanted what he had, not him, and I wanted it in one piece, clean and legible, with no charring around the edges. So I sat on his ass, righ
t up close to give him something to think about, and we went over the pass that way, zigging and zagging and braking and accelerating—Oh he was a cute one, he was—and started down the other side, the L.A. side, past the lodges and the motels they’ve got up there, and then I guess he started thinking overtime. Or stopped altogether.

  In other words he made a second mistake, just like I had and just as dumb, and you’d have to say it was his last one too.

  19

  Some years back on that particular road, they had quite a headache with trucks running out of brake on the grades and causing general havoc among the downhill populace, not to say themselves. I mean, you figure that sea level is some four to five thousand feet down from the top of the pass, and you put Joe Truck on the downgrade loaded up to the earlobes with lettuce and take his brakes away, and it doesn’t even take high school physics to imagine the salad he’s going to make by the time he comes to a dead halt. It used to be great reading at breakfast along with the comics.

  Finally the highway engineers went back to the drawing board, and they came up with a series of emergency runoffs spaced out all the way down. Escape hatches, you could say, or a kind of highway ejection seat. So nowadays when you get that uneasy weightless feeling where there’s nothing under the brake pedal but floor and the gear shift comes loose in your hand and the little voice starts shouting, “Bombardier to Pilot, Bombardier to Pilot, we’ve been hit, sir, is it O.K. to bail out?” You’re supposed to answer, “Leave everything to me, boys, hang on to yer cocks” and make for the nearest runoff, and if you kill yourself that way, well, at least it spares a lot of civilians.

  Like I say, Andy Ford made a mistake. Meaning that he tried to pull a Cage, and not a bad idea at that, except that it had occurred to me too.

  A few miles down from the crest he zagged over into the second lane, and he stayed there. I zagged over behind him, and when he didn’t zig back for the next half-mile, his mind was all spread out before me in big boldface type with plenty of white space between the thoughts.

  He waited till the last second to try it. Then he blew across the truck lane doing eighty and he hit the runoff square on the money.

  I went right behind him. I won’t say it didn’t give me a turn. The Mustang fought it. She sucked in her sides and wallowed and screeched her ass end and generally fried rubber all over Interstate 5. But when I opened my eyes again, all I saw was California mountain vista and ZNV 218 square in the middle of the picture.

  It must have panicked him. I mean, by that time I was supposed to be halfway down and no place to turn around till I got to Hollywood and Vine. It had thrown me too when the Firebird showed up in my rearview that night on the Diehl Ranch. But then I’d had my unknown friend at 22 Acacia Drive, whereas the only friend Andy Ford had left in the world was me.

  He made the first curve all right, and then he ran out of macadam. The surface turned to dirt, and a cloud of dust showered up and over my windshield. Even so I saw him go. There was a second hook sharper than the first, and halfway around it the van did its two-wheel number, a shadowy teetery dance with death. Then it must have hit something which kicked it over the rest of the way. It squealed on its side like a dragged steer. Then it flipped on its head and some rocks tore its scalp open in a spray of sparks. And over again … and again, like in slow motion, clunk … and clunk …

  Then another clunk.

  Then nothing.

  The Mustang all but went after him. I threw out the anchor. The wheels skidded, spun dirt, held.

  It was all over in a couple of seconds, but when I got out, the nerves in my legs were shaking like jumping beans. I ran down the slope, expecting the explosion that never came. The van was scrunched against a bed of rocks, its four wheels up in the air like legs. I climbed up its flank and got the door open on the passenger side. Everything had shook loose. The eggs had scrambled, the butter had curdled and the medicine chests had spilled out their guts in a junkie’s paradise.

  As for Andy Ford, I guess he wasn’t ten feet taller than me any more. He was mashed against what used to be the window of the driver’s door. If he wasn’t dead already, his head didn’t look any too secure, lolling that way off his neck.

  It would be nice to say I hung around there, thinking up epitaphs. I didn’t. I found what I was looking for laying on the seat next to him, like he’d left it there for me. I took it. It was in a Number 10 envelope addressed to Miss Robin Fletcher at the address he and I had already visited that morning. I checked it out, enough to see the Dear Karen and the first paragraph, and then before you could say “Only the good die young” I was back behind the wheel of the Mustang, driving down the runoff a little further till I found a spot to turn around, then back out, off the dirt and onto the macadam, and off the macadam and on my way.

  The law made a big thing of it. I suppose you can’t blame them. The Times ran it in their another-pusher-meets-his-fiery-end section, but whether that “fiery end” was the rewrite man’s imagination or the van had gone up in smoke after I left or the law lit a match to it for reasons of their own, I’ve no idea. There was even an interview with my there-is-no-local-drug-scene sheriff who said they’d been shadowing Ford for weeks, trying to find Mr. Big, but no connection to Karen or Robin or me, or anyone you know.

  End of obit.

  I drove down through the earthquake country around Sylmar, taking it slow and easy. Where the freeway splits in two, I got off. Time was on my side for a change. Before my next stop, like the lady said, I wanted everything wired, all the circuits plugged in, so that when I threw the switch it came up Bell Fruit Gum, once twice three times, and not a wheelbarrow made big enough to cart away the silver.

  I put the Mustang in a carwash and walked across to a W. T. Grant’s. I borrowed their copying machine—at 10¢ a sheet it came to $2.40—and I ate an omelet at their counter with a side of German fries and a couple of cups of what they called coffee. Then I picked up the Mustang and drove around till I found a U.S. Post Office. I bought a stamped envelope, an extra stamp because of the weight, folded in Nancy Beydon’s original, addressed it, licked it, sealed it, and dropped it in the slot. A little more complicated than Robin Fletcher’s method, and though I’m not about to divulge any trade secrets, if you picture a baseball diamond with Cage on third, Cage on second and Cage on first, you’ll have the skeleton of it. If Cage in the middle ever muffs the doubleplay ball at a pre-arranged time and place, well then, the old scoreboard blows up and the game is over. Call it the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance system, Karen’s notebooks were already in it, and I guess at that it’s pretty foolproof.

  And then over a couple of scotches in an aztec saloon in San Fernando, I made the acquaintance of Nancy Diehl Beydon, posthumously.

  Twelve pages’ worth of Happy Birthday Karen, on both sides, and written in the kind of perfect slanting script you don’t expect to see any more, except maybe among the finishing school set. She hadn’t been in any hurry. There weren’t any smudges or scratchouts or wavery lines, and for a while I was thinking Karen’s brand of hysteria had to have come from some other hereditary line, which wouldn’t have been Twink either. And maybe so. But looking at it another way, you could say that Karen’s notebooks were what Nancy’s letter would have been if the right upbringing, plus twenty-some-odd years of marriage to Twink, hadn’t squeezed the juice out of the lemon, leaving nothing but an even monotone, with the i’s after e’s except after c’s.

  She wrote like she painted, meaning flat, unemotional, and in a way that was worse. By the time I was done, I’d have settled for twink twike tweek twuck. Because with Karen, well, you could always say she was freaked out, stoned, or that it was fantasy, or that it was just the younger generation dumping on the older; but Nancy reminded you of those people you see fishing every so often who drop the fish back in the water once they’ve caught him, with the hook still in his mouth, just for the pleasure of catching him again.

  The fish, of course, was Twink.

  Or m
aybe it was the other way around, take your choice.

  To make a long story short:

  It had been a nightmare, she said. When he’d found out she was pregnant, he’d wanted her to have an abortion. She’d refused. She’d wanted Karen more than anything in the world, she said. Instead, according to her, she’d offered him a divorce. He’d turned her down. Karen’s real father hadn’t been anything more than a passing fancy to her. She’d never seen him again. Twink had always let it be known he’d paid him off, but she had good reason to believe it was more than that. He was dead, she said. She knew how he’d died. She’d never had the courage to try to prove it, but she told Karen how if Karen felt otherwise.

  She had stayed with Twink for form’s sake, and for Karen’s. She accepted Karen’s condemnation of her for having done so. Looking back, she believed she even shared it. She asked Karen to try to understand, however. Yes, she’d had grounds for a divorce since (here she went into the story of the tramp Twink had taken up with, one Margaret Tanner, their bastard included, and what that had meant to her), but she’d never been able to bring herself to initiate it. That was her weakness, her fear of scandal perhaps. Instead she’d built her life on another basis. She’d found another way to pay him back.

  The one thing he wanted, she said, she’d been able to deny him. That was control of the company. Left to themselves, she thought, her brothers (Karen’s uncles) would have long since capitulated to him. He’d wanted to make a public offering of the company’s stock, that was his technique, and she’d thwarted him. She alone. More than once he’d tried to convince her: how much money it would mean to them all, how it made sense from a purely business point of view and so on. The last time—a scene she described with as much relish as I guess she could allow herself—he had even proposed in exchange the divorce she’d once offered him.