by Farris, John
Guthrie took a cigar from a box on his desk and held it in his hand without lighting it.
“He was tall and thin, and didn’t have a head. Only eyes.”
“Only eyes? You mean he was wearing a mask.”
“Probably that’s what Chris meant. Anyway, the kids were too scared to stand around gawking at him. Chris did say that he was holding up a big sack, as if he were getting ready to pull it over Chris’s head. Chris was closest to St. George, I suppose. The boys ran. Hugh slipped and fell down, losing a shoe, but Chris didn’t stop. He said that Hugh got up right away and wasn’t far behind him as they went down the stairs. Hugh was screaming that the man was going to get him. The passage Chris found himself in was dark, but he kept running. He doesn’t know if Hugh was following or not. He ran until he fell into the water, then he crawled on his hands and knees to the opening of the well and lowered himself inside. He could hear some muffled cries in another part of the prison. Then he didn’t hear anything at all for a long time.”
“He doesn’t remember my pulling him out of the well.”
“No. But as I say, Liles’s man didn’t press him too hard. No reason for it.”
Practice rose. “Well, I’ll stop by the hospital to see him on my way to Lucy’s.”
“Do that. I imagine he’s getting pretty bored with nobody but Dore for company. Jim ...”
Practice stopped and looked back at Guthrie.
“Do me a favor and don’t hound the boy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well—Liles has the notion that you’re not happy with the case against St. George. Hell, man, as a lawyer ...”
“Val St. George himself proved how weak his story was by committing suicide. As a lawyer, there’s no more for me to do. But who says I’m a lawyer anyway?”
Guthrie smiled grudgingly. “Getting ready for a bout of the running fits?”
“Maybe.”
“Why don’t you take a week or two off, then? Good for the soul to get away.”
“You mean after the conference at Sharp’s is over.” Guthrie nodded. “I’ll need you close to hand until then.”
“Thanks very much,” Practice said deliberately, and went out.
• 20 •
The door at 217 Bartow Street, where Fletcher Childs had lived and raised his sister, was standing open a few inches, and as Practice walked up to the porch he heard the hum of a vacuum cleaner inside. He hesitated at the door, which was neither open wide enough to let him walk in or closed sufficiently so that he felt he should ring the bell. He compromised by knocking, loudly, and presently the vacuum cleaner was silenced and a black woman with a dustcap on her head peered out at him, blinking in the sunshine.
“Miz Childs ain’t admittin’ no visitors.”
“I think she’s expecting me. Jim Practice.”
The woman looked him over doubtfully. “Well, okay. She’s in the liberry. Come on.”
Practice stepped into the living room. All the furniture had been moved to one side and the carpets were rolled up. The drapes had been taken down and neatly folded, and the shades were rolled all the way up. Two of the windows sparkled as if just washed; the others showed their winter’s accumulation of grime.
He made his way to the library. The furniture here had been shoved into a corner and all the books were removed from the shelves. Lucy was down on her knees in front of the French doors, washing the glass. She saw his reflection in one of the doors and got up, stripping the protective bandanna from her head.
“Hello, Jim,” she said quietly.
“What’s all this, Lucy?”
She shrugged lightly. “Just my way of doing things. Time for spring cleaning, so we’re cleaning house.” Her hands were damp and reddened; she wiped them on her apron. “I just couldn’t stand being alone in this big empty house, so I’m letting in the air and light. As long as I keep working I don’t have time to think too much.”
“Lucy, is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, there isn’t anything.” Her eyes met his briefly, then she looked away.
“John tells me you’ve resigned as Chris’s governess.” She nodded. “I had to. I’m going to miss having Chris around, but ...”
“Any plans yet?”
“Let’s go in the kitchen and have some coffee. We can talk there.”
She put the coffeepot on and stood looking out at the garden, while Practice pulled out a chair beside the breakfast counter and sat down.
“I’m going to sell the house as soon as I can,” Lucy said. “I don’t have any reason to keep it now. Of course, the will has to be probated; that’ll take time. I’d like to get away for a few months, but I don’t have any idea yet where I’ll go.” She was grave and composed, but not as if she were on the. edge of severe grief. She and her brother had been friends, Jim knew, but they weren’t especially close. “Jim, Captain Liles told me this morning that you talked to Val just before he—he killed himself. What did he say? Did he give any reason for ...” She bowed her head for a moment, wincing, then straightened.
“Val never admitted killing either Fletch or Hugh McAdams. He said that he was innocent. He wanted me to tell you so. It was the truth, he said. He was anxious for you to understand ...”
“Understand!” she said bitterly. “All I understand is that I trusted him and he killed my brother, for no reason, no reason at all. Fletch tried to help him, and ...”
“It’s done, Lucy. What happened wasn’t any fault of yours. There was no reason why you shouldn’t have believed in Val.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand so many things about him. What did he have against the Governor? And Chris? Was he just so crazy that—no, I don’t want to talk about him. I can’t stand to talk about him. I was so sure of that boy. He was so sad, and alone, and so determined to be better ...”
Her voice failed and she went quickly to the stove, removing the pot of coffee. She poured a cup for Practice and stood near him, holding her own cup in both hands, sipping, looking bleakly at nothing.
“Fletch was very interested in politics, wasn’t he, Lucy?”
“What—oh.” Her eyes focused as she glanced at him with a brief smile. “You ought to know, the two of you never talked about anything else.”
“I know he was active in the party. But did he ever say anything to you about running for office?”
“Half of our library is made up of books on political theories, and Fletch’s notebooks on politics fill a trunk.”
“Was he inclined to be, oh, unhappy because he thought his party had passed him by?”
“Not as far as I know. Why the questions, Jim?”
“I was just curious.”
She looked at him blankly. “I’d like to get back to work, Jim. I suppose you know about the arrangements for Fletch.”
“Yes. I’ll be there, Lucy.”
As he rose she was already a step toward the door, and it was easy for him to reach out and catch her by the wrist. He thought she would resist, and then she softened and came toward him, her eyes tightly closed, and huddled against him, her face pressed against his chest. He raised his other hand to the back of her head, hesitated, and let the hand drop. In a few moments Lucy lifted her shoulders and stood free of him, a faintly sad, distantly friendly look on her face.
—
The funeral next day happened quickly. Nearly 150 mourners were at the cemetery, but Practice was interested only in the man who had not attended: Major Starne Kinsaker.
His absence was inexplicable. After the funeral, as they were walking back to the limousines parked below the hill where Fletch had been buried, Practice was able to question one of the Major’s partners in the Osage State Bank. No, he hadn’t seen the Major for several days. It was unusual for him to have stayed away from the funeral of a friend; perhaps he was ill.
Practice sat in his car until long after the last automobile had driven slowly down the lane to the gates of the cemetery and had be
en absorbed by the traffic on the highway.
He had lain awake most of the night before, his head filled with contradictions, suspicions, and vague theories. About four-thirty, as the boy downstairs went whistling off on his bike to deliver the morning newspapers, he got up, showered, shaved, fixed himself a breakfast which he wasn’t able to eat, and then sat for two hours with a yellow legal pad and several sharpened pencils before him. At the top of the pad he wrote:
Proposition I: That Val St. George was innocent of the murders of Fletcher Childs and Hugh McAdams.
He then wrote down all he could recall of his conversation with Val. Since he already had done virtually the same thing for Mike Liles, he felt satisfied that every scrap of information was on his pad. After studying what he had written, testing and rejecting various hypotheses, he tore the pages from his pad and picked up his pencil again.
Proposition II: That Major Starne Kinsaker murdered both Fletcher Childs and Hugh McAdams.
He wrote busily for an hour, his eyes clouding thoughtfully from time to time. When he had finished, he read over his pages critically, smoking, and tapping his pencil against the table.
Beneath the last sentence he scrawled, in large capitals, “No evidence.”
This is what he had written:
The death of Molly Kinsaker seems to have been the most crushing blow of the Major’s life. Essentially she was all he lived for, because undoubtedly after more than a quarter century of politics his involvement was not acute, nor were there any great challenges left to him in politics.
Molly died in a ghastly and cruel accident. Perhaps his grief would not have been as great if the true facts of the accident had been available to him; perhaps, eventually, he would have recovered from the blow.
But because of Fletcher Childs, he was not allowed to recover. It seems certain that Childs, only witness to the accident which killed Molly, moved the unconscious John Guthrie to the seat behind the wheel of the jeep so that it would appear he had been driving at the time. He then filmed every incriminating detail: empty beer cans in the jeep, John Guthrie staggering—with drunkenness, or shock, or both—around the jeep, and Molly Kinsaker lying on the hood.
John Guthrie was then being groomed as his party’s candidate for Governor. He had been a close friend, since boyhood, of Major Kinsaker’s.
Thus the crime which Fletcher Childs had committed, adding tragedy to tragedy, was very disturbing. He could have had only one motive: by disgracing John Guthrie, he hoped to succeed him as the party’s candidate for Governor.
But Major Kinsaker acted in an entirely unpredictable way. With Childs’s assistance—unlikely a third man was involved—he carefully removed all traces of the accident, and had Molly’s horse brought from the farm. Then the Major tried to go on as if John Guthrie had been nowhere near his daughter that day. But, strong as he was, eventually he gave way to his grief. (Fletcher Childs would not let him forget it, nor let him forget that John Guthrie was the cause.)
Guthrie and the Major split long before the elections, but the Major continued to work for his election, because he still felt that Guthrie was the only man available who would make an unbeatable candidate. And even as he worked for Guthrie, a need for revenge took shape in his mind. That was the Major’s secret, and Fletcher Childs must have spent many sleepless nights wondering what was holding the Major up.
When Guthrie made his attempt to take the party leadership away from the Major, it must have seemed the final outrage, an attack on life itself in the Major’s eyes.
The Major is an outstanding marksman, and with his rifle he first attempted to revenge himself on Guthrie by killing the Governor’s son. It was easy to see how he could have missed his first shot as he lay concealed in the woods above the lake where Hilda Brudder and Chris sat. But why hadn’t he tried a second shot? Was he afraid to make the boy’s assassination perfectly obvious, or did he have Chris lined up in his sights when something—a car on the road, a noise in the woods nearby—distracted him?
Or was it only because he couldn’t bear to go through with it? Wasn’t he able, then, to hate John Guthrie enough to take his only child?
In the next three years John Guthrie inadvertently kept the Major’s hatred of him raw, until the Major was literally insane with a desire for vengeance.
How long had he planned his second attempt on Chris’s life? Had he ever wished that it might not be necessary: had he ever prayed for John Guthrie to leave him alone with what life he had left?
From his house on Tournament Hill the Major could see the school that Chris attended, and, perhaps, on many of the afternoons when he was in the garden, he looked down at the children playing and thought of his own daughter.
What was Fletcher Childs thinking during the months when the struggle between the Governor and the Major grew more bitter? He knew that with just a few words the Major could bring disgrace to John Guthrie. Perhaps he brought pressure of his own to bear on the Major. He wanted to be in office badly enough to jeopardize his professional reputation, and he wouldn’t have been content to sit back and say nothing while the Major stubbornly allowed John Guthrie to go on hacking him to bits.
With so much against him, how long was the Major able to hold on to his sanity?
On the night Val St. George demolished the Governor’s room at the mansion, and went to Dr. Childs for help, the doctor administered sodium pentothal as a sedative, and under the influence of this so-called truth drug Val babbled enough of his life to convince Childs that he had what he needed, with or without the Major’s help, to ruin Guthrie. So he drove Val to the reservoir for safekeeping and then telephoned the Major to brag about his prize, or perhaps to urge the Major to join him in his plot.
He must have been more than a little taken aback to discover that the Major knew about Val’s existence; knew enough, in fact, to thoroughly smear the Governor without any assistance from Val. But by now the destruction of John Guthrie’s reputation wasn’t enough for the Major; he had bloodier plans. He drove to the reservoir in the hope of heading off Childs, and encountered violent resistance from the doctor.
Was Fletcher Childs upset enough at this point to tell the Major that Molly Kinsaker had caused her own death?
If so, what was the Major’s reaction? (Remember what Steppie has had to say about the films of the accident: imagine the Major sitting all these years and running them, studying the face of John Guthrie, the drunken gait, the grinding tragedy that repeated itself night after night.) How could he believe, so long after, that what he had accepted as true, what he must believe, was not true at all?
He could not allow himself to believe Fletcher Childs, because he could only live with hate, not the truth. And so he killed the man who was trying to tell him he had no reason to hate John Guthrie.
That killing sparked his second attempt on the life of Chris Guthrie.
Perhaps he intended to shoot Chris while he was at play in the school yard; the distance was about three quarters of a mile from his house, not a difficult shot for a man of the Major’s prowess, and it would be next to impossible for investigators to say exactly where the bullet had come from. Perhaps he sat in his room with a rifle and scope nearby and waited for the moment when the children would come hurtling through the doors for recess. And while he sat with his eyes on the brick school yard, he saw the two boys, Chris and Hugh McAdams, jump down from the window of the washroom and hurry down the bare slopes of the little valley to the prison.
And another idea occurred to him ...
Practice swallowed hard and picked up a cup of lukewarm coffee. Some drops spilled on his pad as he drank. Wearily he read the last paragraph again, then picked up his pencil and wrote, “But where was Steppie?” after it.
—
The sun was nearly overhead in the cemetery when Practice shook himself from his reverie and blinked his eyes at the glare of light on his windshield. A flower-scented breeze came down from the heights of the cemetery and swept through his car
. The legal pad was still in his hand. He looked down and reread the last sentence.
Steppie, of course.
If anyone could prove that the Major was guilty of murder, it was Steppie. If she had been in the Major’s house for several days, then she must have heard or seen him go out the night Fletch was killed. Perhaps she could verify the fact that he had left the house not long before Hugh McAdams’s murder.
Practice remembered the look on the Major’s face when he had come into the room and seen Chris lying on the bed. He had been severely shocked, but at the time, Practice had passed off his reaction as natural. Where was the Major when Practice brought Chris up the hill from the prison? Was there some way he could enter and leave his house without being observed, either by someone in the house or in the immediate neighborhood?
Practice reached over and opened the glove compartment, and took out his revolver and a holster. He unfastened his belt and slipped the holstered gun under his coat, then tightened his belt again and started the car.
He was ready now to talk to Major Kinsaker.
—
Between the low-hanging boughs of the oaks in the steep and uneven front yard of the Major’s hilltop house a man rode a power mower, leaving a green wake of freshly cut grass behind him. Practice could smell the grass in the still air, as he got out of his car in front of the granite gateposts at the foot of the drive. He glanced up at the house, but there was nothing about it to suggest that anyone had lived there for the last ten years.
He was halfway up the drive when the engine on the power mower quit and the man who drove it called cheerfully, “’Fraid you won’t find anybody home.”
Practice changed course and approached the gardener. He pushed his hat back on his head with an expression of disapproval and resignation.
“Now, how am I going to plan a new kitchen if I can’t get in to see the old one?”
The gardener wiped his damp forehead with the back of a grimy glove.
“I guess you can’t. Anyway, the Major left early this morning, just as I drove up.” He waved a hand at a dilapidated pickup truck parked in the porte cochere.