Acts of Mercy

by Bill Pronzini

  The toy locomotive was just entering the tunnel cut into a green-painted “mountain” on the left side of the board. Augustine reached out a hand, ran fingertips over the rough papier-mâché surface—and the throbbing melody of “John Henry” began to play again inside his head.

  John Henry was hammerin’ on the mountain

  And his hammer it was strikin’ fire;

  He drove so hard till he broke his poor heart,

  And he laid down his hammer and he died,

  Lawd, Lawd, he laid down his hammer and he died.

  Well they took John Henry to the graveyard,

  And they buried him in the sand,

  And ev‘ry locomotive that comes roarin’ by,

  Says, “There lies a steel-drivin’ man,

  Lawd, Lawd,” says, “There lies a steel-drivin’ man.”

  Outside the window a voice called out abruptly, “Mr. President? It’s Christopher Justice, sir. I’d like to speak with you.”

  Augustine raised his head and looked over at the drawn curtains. But he did not say anything; he had no desire to talk to Justice tonight. More nonsense about a homicidal maniac, probably. He had enough things preying on his mind as it was, not the least of which was Maxwell Harper.

  “Mr. President?”

  No, the only person he wanted to talk to was Claire, and he had been putting it off since five o’clock. But what was the point in continuing to put it off? He would have to discuss it with her sooner or later; he might as well get it over with. She was innocent of any wrongdoing, after all; there was no doubt of that. How could there be any doubt of that?

  Augustine got to his feet and went out of the study without bothering to shut off the train board. Most of the lights were on, but the house was quiet except for the faint creeks and groans of settling timbers. Almost like the White House, he thought. Almost as if there were ghosts here too—the ghosts of his father and all the years of his life, whispering to him unintelligibly in the night.

  Claire was not in the master bedroom, not in the library or the parlor. He heard crackling noises in the family room, and when he entered he saw her bending before the hearth, feeding pine logs heavy with pitch into a blazing fire.

  She straightened around as she heard the sound of his footsteps, the orange firelight dancing on her face. She had changed clothes since he’d last seen her: wearing a blue sheath dress now, blonde hair combed out and brushed into waves that clung to her shoulders. When he came up to her he saw that her eyes were solemn—and the illusion that he could plunge into them, become absorbed by them, came over him again. But it was neither an uneasy sensation nor a sexual one this time; it was one of longing, because in absorption there would be escape.

  He said, “That’s a nice fire,” but he was only making words.

  A wan smile. “Yes. Are you hungry, Nicholas? I can have Mrs. Peterson fix you something—”

  “No,” Augustine said. He had skipped dinner because he had no appetite and because he hadn’t wanted to talk to her; he still had no appetite, the thought of food made him ill. “I want to ask you something, Claire.”

  “All right.”

  He took a breath. “I saw you with Maxwell this afternoon,” he said. “The two of you in the south garden.”

  Her face paled. “You ... saw us?” in a whisper.

  “Yes. I came out for a little air and I saw him touching you, I saw you run away from him. I want to know what happened out there.”

  Moistness glistened in her eyes. Tears? She didn’t speak. “Tell me what happened, Claire. Why was he touching you? What did he say to you?”

  “He said ... Nicholas, I don’t want to—”

  “Tell me!”

  “He said he had deeper feelings than any of us imagined, that he was a human being and not a machine.” Her throat worked. “He acted ... strange, different; it frightened me and I ran.”

  Dully Augustine said, “There’s more to it than that.”

  “No ...”

  “Yes. Yes there is. He said something else, didn’t he.”

  “All right. All right. He said he ... he said he was in love with me.”

  Augustine flinched. Betrayal—again and again and again. Even Maxwell Harper, of all people. Even him. But there was no anger in him; he was beyond the capacity for any emotion as intense as rage. “I see,” he said. “Was that the first time he told you how he felt?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had no idea of it before today?”

  “I can’t lie to you. I ... suspected.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “There was no point in it. Nothing ever happened.”

  Nothing ever happened, Augustine thought. “Is that why you’ve been reluctant to talk about him lately?”

  She nodded. “Nicholas, what are you going to do?”

  “Do?”

  “About Maxwell. About the incident in the garden.”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  Claire said abruptly, “Fire him.”

  “What?”

  “Fire him. Get him away from here right now, tonight.”

  He was silent for a time; then he said, “You’re sure that’s what you want?”

  “I’m not sure of anything anymore. Nicholas, I—”

  She broke off again. And reached up, touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. And then almost convulsively pushed past him and hurried across the room.

  Augustine stood looking after her, watching her hips move under the blue dress, the blue dress—

  John Henry had a little woman,

  And the dress she wore it was blue;

  She went walkin’ down the track and never looked back,

  Said, “John Henry I’ve been true to you,

  Lawd, Lawd, John Henry I’ve been true to you.”

  Fifteen

  Moonshine.

  The night is radiant with it as we make our way through the gardens. It paints the darkness with luminous yellows and golds, it softens the shadows and gives them a velvet gloss, it creates an almost religious aura of beauty and peace. It touches us, bathes us with its brilliance, and yet it does not reach us at all. Beauty and peace are strangers to us now. We knew them once, but no more—no more.

  There is no moonshine in our soul; there is only warm black.

  When we near the southernmost guest cottage we see that there are lights showing faintly behind drawn front-window shades. But of course we have expected to find him awake; it is only a few minutes past eight o’clock. Is he alone? We will have to take the chance that he is, and return later if he is not.

  We walk through the moonshine to the door, putting our hand in our coat pocket to conceal the bulge of the heavy glass ashtray we have placed there. A moment after we knock the door opens, and he peers out at us with listless eyes: the cool Harvard intellectual is gone and in his place stands a derelict. Is it because his sins weigh heavily on his mind? No matter. Treason is treason; remorse means nothing.

  “What do you want?” Harper says in a wooden voice.

  Behind him we can see most of the room, and it is empty. “We ... that is, I’d like to talk to you,” we say.

  “Talk about what?”

  “May I come in?”

  It is obvious that he does not want to be alone with us, and just as obvious that he does not care enough to refuse. He shrugs finally and says, “I suppose so, if you make it brief.”

  “Oh I will. Very brief.”

  He steps aside, and we enter past him and walk three careful paces into the room. We turn as he closes the door. He stands with his back to it and hides his hands inside the slash pockets of the dressing gown he wears. The dressing gown is rust-hued, the color of dried blood. We wet our lips; the ashtray is warm against our palm.

  Harper says, “Well? What is it you came to say?”

  We move over in front of him, close enough so that we can smell the faint sour odor of his breath. He avoids our eyes. “Just good-bye,” we say. �
��Good-bye, Maxwell.”

  And we bring the ashtray out of our coat and club him with it across the bridge of the nose.

  But it is a glancing blow, a sharp corner penetrates the skin and brings a spurt of blood, we have attacked with too much haste this time—and he screams. The others did not scream but Harper shrieks in a thin shrill voice, like a woman, and the sound of it—God, the awful sound of it!—fills us with a kind of wild desperate confusion. We hit him again as he staggers, but his hands are clapped to his forehead, blood streaming over the hands, and the ashtray strikes only his knuckles and he screams again, reels off a table and falls to his knees, screaming, still screaming. We know we have to shut off that sound before someone is alerted, before the pitch of it shatters our brain like crystal, and we rush forward and drive the ashtray against the back of his head, drive him flat to the floor, fall beside him and hit him again and then it stops, at last it stops, and he is still and silent and we know he is dead.

  The confusion still has control of us; our head has begun to ache intolerably. We’re afraid, for the first time we’re terrified.

  And inside us something seems to be happening—

  We stand again, panting, and stare down at Harper. The back of his skull is crushed and bloody. We can’t make this one look like an accident, they’ll, know it’s murder. But there is nothing we can do now, and—

  —we’re losing the fusion, that’s what is happening inside us, we’re losing control-Still holding the ashtray. When we look at it we see our fingers smeared with crimson, Harper’s blood on our hand. We fling the ashtray away from us, hear it bounce and clatter across the floor, then frantically scrub my fingers—

  —our fingers, scrub our fingers clean on the tail of his dressing gown. Then I back away

  We back away, we do it. But I is trying to take over and we mustn’t let me do it. Get out of here before I realizes the truth! We turn blindly and stumble to the door, pull it open. Moonshine engulfs me

  Us. Engulfs me us me

  Moonshine—and then darkness....

  He was standing in the guest-house doorway.

  He could not seem to remember walking here, he could not seem to remember opening the door; he was simply standing in the doorway, blinking away a wetness that dimmed his vision. In his mind there was upheaval, as though he were just starting to emerge from some sort of dreamlike state. Malignant pain in his head, too. Perspiration encasing his body, warm and mucilaginous like that caused by high fever.

  Fuzzy thoughts: What’s happening to me? I was all right a little while ago, I didn’t feel sick—

  And he saw the body.

  His vision cleared and he saw the body of Maxwell Harper lying bloody and twisted on the cottage floor.

  Shock. Horror. The pain in his head magnifying, manufacturing the illusion of sound in his ears, like the whine of a high-speed drill. Upheaval filling all the spaces of him; pieces of his mind seeming to fragment, cohesive thought, all rationality breaking up into a swirl of bright shards.

  Look at his head, Maxwell’s head, no accident somebody killed him murdered him Justice was right, psychopath killing people Briggs and Wexford it’s true, but who, why does my head ache like this why can’t I remember, psychopath, no, psychopath ...

  Vertigo assailed him and he leaned hard against the doorjamb to keep from falling, clung to the wood there with his right hand. The hand was up in front of his face and he saw it like a claw, a fat white claw with dark spots on it, liver spots, and something else too, something adhering in the skin ridges on the backs of his knuckles, something that might have been dirt and might have been coagulated fluid, blood—blood! He ripped the hand down, thrust it behind him to hide it from his eyes, to hide it from—

  —the other eyes. There were other eyes close by, tyes that watched him in the night.

  He jerked his head up in panic. In the room’s north wall, beyond Harper’s body, was another window, and the shades were not drawn across it, and a face peered in at him there. Frozen behind glass, eyes enormous, mouth open with incredulity. Familiar, agonized, accusing.

  Justice’s face.

  The implacable face of Justice.

  The panic consumed him and he turned, Nicholas Augustine turned, the President of the United States turned and fled into the night.

  Sixteen

  Continuing his vigil, Justice had moved past the dark tennis courts, come back through the fruit trees that grew in even rows between the rear of the guest cottages and the security fence. The two northernmost cottages had been dark, but lights still shone inside the third; he had walked up alongside it, as he had done earlier, and glanced through the side window: Frank Tanaguchi still seated at the desk in the front room, working over a stack of papers, listening to classical music on a portable radio.

  Justice had turned away immediately, gone past the fourth and fifth cottages, both of which were dark, and approached the sixth, the one occupied by Maxwell Harper. The bright rectangle of light that was the side window drew him again. He looked inside.

  And went rigid.

  And stared with sick fascination at Harper’s body lying on the floor and the President standing in the doorway beyond, holding onto the jamb and gazing fixedly at his right hand.

  Oh my God I knew it, it’s my fault, I should have found a way to prevent it—

  The President, what is the President doing here?

  Augustine looked ghastly; his face had a gray ravaged appearance, like decaying wood. Shock, that was it. He had come to talk to Harper for some reason and found him like this. But then why was he staring at his hand that way? It was almost as if—

  No.

  Chills on Justice’s body, nausea in his stomach.

  The President?

  No! Potential victim, he couldn’t be the psychopath! Augustine pulled his hand down from the doorjamb, shoved it behind him. Then his expression changed all at once to one of panic and his head came up and he was looking straight across at the window. His body tensed, and Justice thought: he sees me, he’ll beckon me inside now, he—

  The President spun and ran.

  Justice was stunned. It couldn’t be Augustine—but when someone ran from the scene of a crime, ran from the presence of an officer of the law, it was almost always because of guilt. The President had no reason to run from his bodyguard unless he was guilty. But he couldn’t be guilty.

  Then why did he run?

  Justice shook himself, and the policeman in him took command and sent him racing around to the front of the cottage. He slowed near the door, scanned the moonlit grounds with quick jerks of his head. At first he did not see Augustine; then there was a flash of movement to the south, in the shadows cast by a line of four-foot high cinquefoil shrubs. A second later the President appeared as a silhouette against the bright moonglow, running southeast in long lurching strides.

  Justice sprinted in that direction, leaving the paths where they meandered around trees and shrubs and flowers so that he could maintain a straight-ahead course in Augustine’s wake. He lost sight of him in the small copse of evergreens planted as a windbreak near the garage barns. Plunged through the trees and saw him again seventy yards away, heading across open ground toward the rear of the barns. Except for the two of them, the night seemed desertednothing moving anywhere. And Justice was thankful for that: he did not want anyone to see the President running, he did not want anyone else to catch him.

  Catch him, he thought, catch the President.

  Draw his gun and shout at him to halt, as he would have done with any homicide suspect? Hold him at bay, spread him out and search him? Question him, demand to know why he had run? A feeling of surreality came over Justice. That was the President up there, he was chasing the Chief Executive of the United States across the grounds of his own estate. There was a psychopath loose at The Hollows and he was running after the President and the President was not the one, he was not the one.

  Ahead, Augustine had vanished again behind the first of
the barns. Justice fought to lengthen his strides, reached the corner, turned past it. The President was midway along the rear wall of the second barn, running with his head down and his arms pumping like cylinder valves. The distance between them was still at least seventy-five yards.

  When Augustine was beyond the second barn he veered at an angle to the west. Justice, coming out along there moments later, saw him heading toward the far side of the stable, and clenched his teeth in frustration because the gap that separated them seemed to have increased: the President was maintaining the frenzied pace of someone half his age.

  The stable loomed blackly; the fence rails enclosing the corral and the paddock were like black bars drawn on a yellow-white backdrop. Augustine went past the building, along the paddock fence—but there was nothing beyond the end of it except another copse of evergreens and then the security fence. Where is he going? Justice thought. Where is he running to?

  Why is he running?

  Why am I running? Augustine thought.

  But it was fragmented, submerged with other thought shards in the raw fluid of panic. Blood on my hand, but it isn’t blood. Get away, get away from Justice, don’t let him catch you. Ashtray on the floor, blood on that too, bludgeoned Maxwell to death with an ashtray. Get away. I couldn’t do a thing like that. He was in love with Claire but I couldn’t do a thing like that. Psychopath. Three murders, I should have listened to Justice. Christopher, I didn’t do it. Run. Help me, I don’t know what’s happening to me. Run!

  And his brain continued to give motor commands and his body continued to respond: flight, escape. The exertion constricted his chest, formed a stitch in his left side; he could not get enough air into his lungs. Sweat streamed into his eyes, made perception of his surroundings an aqueous blur, as though he were running at great speed underwater.