by Peter Straub
“Cobbie’s frightened,” I said. “Why don’t you go back to your place?”
“This isn’t about Cobbie! This bitch ruined my life.” He wagged a finger at me. “But you know all about that, don’t you?” Stewart took an insinuating step forward. “Screw my wife, send me to jail, is that the deal?”
“Are you going to jail, Stewart?”
“I hate to say it, I really hate to say it, but I may be given that delightful honor. Ashton did the impossible, and we know how, don’t we? I’m a reasonable guy, I’d just like to hear the truth for a change.” Boozy rage darkened his flush.
He was getting close to losing control again, and he liked the idea. Losing control would make him feel better than he did now.
“This is what puzzles me,” Stewart said. “That Kentucky nobody tied me into deals she couldn’t have known about unless some underhanded piece of shit turned over the documentation. Which nobody knew I had, except Grennie, and he sure as hell didn’t do it.”
He grinned at me, looked down at half of a perfectly bisected plate, and kicked it aside with one of his tasseled, basket-weave loafers. He gave a demented Huckleberry Finn chuckle. “We have been requested to appear at Police Headquarters at nine o’clock tomorrow morning to undergo”—he raised his head and searched for the word—“the formalities before questioning on a number of criminal charges. Fraud, for example. Tax evasion. Embezzlement. Getting down and dirty with that glorious institution, the U.S. Post Office. Grennie is shitting porcupines. My guess is, he’ll eat a bullet. Won’t that make me look good?”
“I like your compassion,” I said.
“Yeah. I like yours, too.” Stewart wiped his hands over his face. “Be a stand-up guy, tell me how you did it. I’m in the dark here. Help me out.”
“Stewart,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He flattened a hand over his heart. “Did you break into my building after all? The rules of evidence say that’s a no-no.”
“You were a lousy criminal,” I said. “You didn’t even know enough to hire C. Clayton Creech.”
Stewart wheeled sideways and raised his arms. “Creech! My father would rather have crossed the street than say good morning to C. Clayton Creech.”
“Your father wasn’t a criminal,” I said. “Cordwainer took care of that for him.”
Stewart’s face took another incremental step toward purple. He looked at Laurie, who shook her head. “No? Well, no. I suppose not.” He swung back to me, ticking toward eruption. “Now, little buddy, did I happen to tell you about my departed Uncle Cordwainer? Refresh my memory.”
“You told me about him,” I said.
“Did I happen to mention his name? I think not.”
“Cordwainer’s name is plastered all over town. But I understand why you’d prefer to keep quiet about him.”
He reared back. “Who have you been talking to?”
“All secrets come out in the end,” I said. “Even yours. Go home, Stewart.”
“You know? I think the Sesquicentennial was a really crummy idea.” He laughed, making a sound like a crow, dry, self-important, completely without humor. “Maybe this bitch with a cash register for a soul, and I speak of my dear wife, maybe she didn’t sell me out after all.”
“Don’t think I wouldn’t have,” Laurie said.
“And she’s married to me,” Hatch said. He laughed his ugly laugh, caw caw caw. “Does that tell you anything?” He was on the edge of the explosion he had wanted all along. “Tell me about secrets, Dunstan. I’m getting a better picture here, I’m getting, what’s the word, some perspective.”
“If you don’t get out, I’ll put you out.”
“Do you think I have anything to lose?” He stepped toward me. There was a tight grin on his face. “I don’t. But you do.” He threw a lazy punch at my head.
I dodged to the left and hit him in the stomach.
Laurie yelled, “Stop it!” Stewart staggered back. “Cute,” he said. “Know my golden rule?”
I shook my head.
“Never fight when you’re shitfaced.” Stewart dropped his hands and took a step toward the back door. When I moved closer, he pivoted on his heel and fired off a fast, hard left that would have broken my jaw if I hadn’t ducked. His fist rammed into my skull. My head rang. I saw Stewart move in to follow up with a right and punched him in the gut again, harder than the first time. He shuffled into the counter and said, “Uh-huh.” His eyes were almost entirely red. He reached behind his back, fumbled in a drawer, and came out with a paring knife.
“I was looking for something a little more imposing,” he said.
Laurie started to move toward the living room. Stewart pointed the knife at her and yelled, “You stay put!” She glanced at me.
“I’m sick of Hatches coming at me with knives,” I said. Too angry for common sense, I went straight at him. “Stick me, you white-bread, chicken-shit, overprivileged future convict.”
To keep me in my place, Stewart jabbed at nothing. He shifted to the side, went a hair off-balance, and tried to correct himself by leaning forward and taking another poke at me. I grabbed his wrist, yanked him forward, and kicked him in the ankle. He toppled facedown onto the kitchen tiles and the broken plates. In tribute to Lieutenant Rowley, I kicked Stewart in the ribs.
“Stop!” Laurie shrieked.
I straddled him and dropped to my knees. He grunted. I took the paring knife out of his hand.
“Don’t kill him!” Laurie said.
“Be quiet, please, Laurie,” I muttered, and twisted Stewart’s right arm behind his back. Then I hauled on his arm and pulled him to his knees. Another pull got him upright. “Damn, Stewart,” I said. “You need a keeper.” I biffed him in the ear with my left hand. “Should we call the police, tell them how you tried to knife me?”
“Fuck you if you can’t take a joke,” Stewart said. “I’m under a little stress right now.”
I wrested his arm another two inches up his spine, and he cried out in pain. “I know you’re troubled, Stewart. But you pulled a knife on me, and I can’t say I dislike the idea of hurting you.”
Stewart kicked the heel of a tasseled loafer into my right shin and tried to break away. I rammed his arm toward the back of his neck and heard the tearing of ligaments and the loud pop of the ball detaching from his scapula.
Stewart groaned and staggered forward.
“You broke his arm!”
“Actually, what I did was, I pulled his shoulder out of joint,” I said. “After good old Stewart drives to Lawndale and checks into emergency, a nice doctor will pop it back into place right away. You can drive with your left arm, can’t you, Stewart?”
“They wouldn’t let you in the door at Lawndale,” Stewart said.
I whapped him in the shoulder. Stewart yelped, and his knees wandered.
“I can drive.”
I pushed him down the counter and told him to open the door. We went out to his Mercedes. “Where are your car keys?”
“Right pocket.”
I dipped into his pocket for the keys. Stewart collapsed onto the leather seat and dragged his legs under the wheel. I put the keys in his left hand. Sweating and grimacing, he managed to start the car. He twisted sideways to get his left hand on the shift lever. Whimpering, he put the car into reverse and backed into the driveway. The sound of crumpling metal and breaking glass told me he had also backed into the Taurus. The Mercedes shot down the driveway and rocketed into Blueberry Lane. One of its tail lights swung from a tangle of wires. The right rear panel of the Taurus looked like a used tissue. I took the folders off my passenger seat and looked over the top of the car to see Laurie gazing speculatively at me from the living room window.
122
She stepped outside and hugged me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming. I don’t know what he would have done, he was so out of his mind.” I smelled a faint, not unpleasant trace of whiskey.
“Is Cobbie all right?�
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“I told him you helped calm his father down.” She moved through the doorway, sighed, and rested her head on my shoulder. “The poor kid should fall asleep in about a minute and a half.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Cobbie didn’t need that.” I kissed the top of her head, and she clung to me a moment longer.
“I really am grateful, Ned.” She looked up at me and smiled. “Did you get my message?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
“You didn’t tell me it was your birthday! I had to find out from Nettie.”
“I didn’t want you to go to any trouble,” I said.
She raised her mouth for a kiss. “Until you got here, was it a nice birthday?”
I laughed. “You could say that.”
“What did you do?”
“My aunts had a party for me. I’ve kind of been on the run ever since.”
“They must have had a barbecue. Your jacket smells like smoke.” She leaned back with her arms still around me and smiled beautifully up. “It’s a very suburban sort of jacket.”
“May magpied it for me,” I said. “Do you like it?”
“Of course. After the way you handled Stewart, I want to keep you in a good mood. You look gorgeous in pink. You should always wear pink pants, pink shirts, and pink suits with little sailboats and nautical flags.”
Her ability to reduce the ugly scene into a shared joke pulled me into her private aura. I felt the deep tug of having whatever troubled me being met with this same teasing, dissolving irony. Then the thought came to me that seeing it in this way meant that I had already separated myself from it.
“I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
“Stewart frightened me. You impressed me.”
“You knew you were going to take care of things, in the end. Maybe I made it worse.”
“Hardly.” She kissed me again. “After demolishing my china cabinet, I think he was going to move on to the glasses. Will you help me clean up the wreckage?” She glanced at the folders under my arm. “What’s that?”
“I’ll show you later.” I put the folders on the coffee table, and we went into the kitchen and started sweeping up broken plates. Shards and sections of china lay in archipelagos down the floor and made irregular islands on the counters. Shaken, Posy came in and began picking up the mess beside the butcher block. “Cobbie finally went to sleep, but I practically had to read every book he owns. Is everything all right?”
“Ned was heroic,” Laurie said. “You should have seen him. Stewart pulled a knife.”
“A paring knife,” I said. “Even he was embarrassed.”
When we had bagged all the broken china, Posy asked if she could do anything else.
“No, we’re fine,” Laurie said.
“I’m glad Ned came along to drive out the wild beast.”
I bowed, and she blew me a kiss and left the kitchen. Her soft footsteps went up the stairs.
“Wouldn’t you say we deserve a drink?” Laurie asked.
“I don’t think we can catch up with Stewart,” I said, “but I’m willing to give it a try. I’m going to have a whopper of a bruise on the side of my head, and my hand hurts. No wonder boxers wear gloves.”
Laurie took a glass from the shelf and another from beside the sink, pressed them against the ice lever in the refrigerator door, and brought out a liter of the late Tobias Kraft’s favorite liquor. She poured whiskey over the ice until the glasses were three-fourths full.
“You were having a drink when Stewart showed up,” I said.
“Was I?” I could not tell if she had forgotten, or was pretending to have forgotten. Then I saw that she was presenting me with a mild challenge. “Oh, yes. I gave you a clean glass, but I took this one from the counter. Ah, I see. Whilst enumerating my flaws, Stewart included heavy drinking.”
“He skipped that one. People who drink as much as Stewart don’t think it’s a flaw.”
“Good point,” Laurie said. “God, let’s sit down.” She put an arm around me, and we moved into the living room.
We settled on the long sofa in front of the coffee table. The big room seemed as vibrantly empty as an abandoned airline terminal.
“I’m sorry about yelling,” Laurie said. “Vastly to my surprise, I discovered that I felt sorry for Stewart.”
I took a slug of Scotch.
She let her head roll back on the cushion. “What do you think is going to happen to him? Is he going to be all right?”
“You want to know what’s going to happen to good old Stewart?” I said. “Let me tell you. After a year in prison, Stewart will have a personal encounter with Jesus and become a born-again Christian. For the rest of his sentence, he’ll lead prayer groups and Bible study classes. When he gets out, he’ll get ordained by some third-rate Bible college and devote a few years to a prison ministry. He’ll send out press releases, and a lot of articles will be written about him. Let’s face it, it’s a great story—civic leader and heir to private fortune falls into crime, finds salvation in jail, devotes himself to good works. The guy can’t miss. In three years, he’ll have his own church and a good-sized staff. When he describes his past, Ellendale will sound like Sodom and Gomorrah. Rare steaks, fancy cars, expensive suits, chains, leather, and whips. His congregation will quadruple, and he’ll buy a new building with a television facility. Then he’ll write a book and get on talk shows.”
The bit about chains and leather popped out while I was rolling along. That so much anger still boiled away within me came as a surprise.
She was clear-eyed and amused. “I bet you’re right. Where did you get the stuff about chains and whips? He’s too normal for S and M.”
“I threw it in for the sake of a better conversion story. Once Stewart’s locked up, I should write him that fiction is way more effective than reality.”
Laurie looked at me with the same contemplative speculation I had seen from over the roof of my car. “You said you were sick of Hatches coming at you with knives.”
“Heat of the moment.”
“You threw that in, too? How many Hatches are there, after all?”
Oh, no, I thought.
Her eyes underwent a subtle change. “What? I don’t get it.”
I swallowed another mouthful of whiskey, preparing myself. I did not want to prepare myself.
“Ned?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I have to explore something with you.”
“You were going to show me those folders.” Her crisp voice rose wonderfully to the challenge. Laurie sounded like an army poised at the top of a hill, pennants flying and weapons at the ready. I felt nothing but admiration.
“First you have to hear about the past two days. I owe that to you. You introduced me to Hugh Coventry, and you helped me learn about Edward Rinehart.”
“That’s what you want to explore?” The pennants rippled beautifully in the wind.
“That’s what we have to explore,” I said.
123
I began with Buxton Place and Earl Sawyer. After leaving the cottages, I said, I had come to Blueberry Lane and seen the caretaker’s name in Posy’s Lovecraft collection.
“That’s why you got so strange?” Laurie said. “Posy and I couldn’t understand what happened to you.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I had to get away and think.”
“Well, thank God, you came back. What then?”
“At Toby’s funeral, someone implied that Stewart owned my aunts’ block on Cherry Street. It didn’t make sense. All along, I never understood why they pretended not to know anything about my father.”
“Me, neither,” she said. “But I don’t see the connection.”
“I did something I shouldn’t have. I looked through Nettie’s closet. That’s where I found one of those folders. The other one came from Stewart’s house.”
“You broke into Stewart’s house?”
“I didn’t have to break in. I took the folder, but he stole it first. I was reclaiming it.”<
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“He had your aunts’ pictures?”
“He wanted to keep them out of the exhibition.”
“The other ones were at Nettie’s? Well, at least you got that settled. They were holding them for ransom. Nettie and May, they’re not stupid.”
“Nettie and May know how to get what they want.” I grinned. “The question is, what did they want?”
Laurie gazed imperturbably back. “They must cherish those photos.”
“Let me show you some of them.”
“I can hardly wait.” She set down her glass and leaned toward the coffee table.
I slid the photograph of Omar and Sylvan out of the folder. “Remember these faces.” Next came the photograph of Howard Dunstan I had put before Cordwainer.
“He looks like you.” She turned to me with a shining smile and looked back down at the picture. “In a way. You don’t have those heebie-jeebie eyes.”
“That’s Howard Dunstan. Nettie and May were his daughters.”
“Complicated so and so, wasn’t he? What’s this?” She took another photograph from the pile. Under the eye of a squat foreman in a derby hat, two men pushed wheelbarrows toward a lattice of scaffolding and girders rising from a muddy lot. From the right side of the frame, two others carried an armload of two-by-fours across Commercial Avenue. A Model T Ford and a slat-sided truck were parked a little way down from the site. A well-upholstered onlooker in a seersucker suit and a boater like the one worn by the young Carpenter Hatch took in the excitement from a few feet behind the supervisor in the derby. The angles of their hats and their postures matched with the neatness of a rhyme.
“That’s Merchants Hotel, under construction in 1929. Hugh Coventry liked this picture.”
“It’s good, isn’t it? There’s a lot of movement in it, and the two guys in hats are like a joke.”
“Here we have baby me.” I put down the photograph from my third birthday.
“God, what a beautiful child.” Pleasure and humor shone from her eyes. “I mean, of course you were a great-looking kid, but you were a really great-looking kid. You should have been on billboards.”