Chain of Fools (3 page)

"I imagined," Timmy said, "that after Christmas, when Skeeter finally stopped calling and writing, he'd found somebody else. At least that's what I made myself think." We headed for the kitchen, where I got a beer from the fridge, and Timmy said, "I guess I'd better have one too." We pried open the back door, abloat in the wet heat, and sat out on the moonlit deck with the petunias.

I said, "If you imagined Skeeter with someone else, weren't you jealous?"

"Absolutely. It was excruciating. But I was only getting what I deserved, I believed. And I was right. In fact, after what I'd done to Skeeter I deserved even worse."

"Nah."

"I did."

"You only did what a lot of people do at the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood: You leave your childhood sweetheart because you're both about to become grown-ups, and your lives and circumstances are going to be different. It's hard and it's cruel, but it's a necessary part of life."

"No," Timmy said, "the main reason I cut Skeeter off was I was afraid of not being normal. Mainly, not being
thought of us
normal."

"Yes, but that's all you did in the name of normality—end a high-school infatuation. You didn't—you weren't like Jean-Louis Trintignant in
The Conformist.
You didn't commit murder for the fascists in order to fit in."

Timmy raised his bottle. "Well, let's drink to that. No, at least I didn't do that—assassinate a liberal for the fascists. At least, as far as I can recall I didn't."

We drank.

I said, "And however much you may have rejected abnormality back in the sixties, Timothy, you certainly made up for it in the seventies. As so many of us did." I gestured salaciously.

Timmy didn't seem to notice this. Gazing at the red moon, he was deep in thought. Finally, he said, "I can never undo what I did to Skeeter back then. It's obvious that the pain I caused him was so deep and terrible that it will be a part of him until he dies. And it's going to make his dying too young even worse than it would have been, which is mean and stupid enough."

"Timmy, you're being far too hard on yourself."

"But you know," he said, giving me a weird, feverish look I wasn't sure I had ever seen on him before, "maybe I can make it up to Skeeter in a small way. I can do this by helping with the thing that's most important to him now: by finding out who killed Eric, and by keeping Janet safe if she's in any actual danger. And by saving the
Herald
from the bad chain, the chain of fools."

He had lit a citronella candle to keep the bugs away, and its light flickered across his fine-featured Irish mug and in his suddenly brighter eyes. He seemed almost possessed by this sudden notion, which to me felt vaguely but surely like trouble.

I said, "Hey, Timothy. I'm the detective, and you're the pragmatic but idealistically motivated social engineer. Remember?"

This didn't seem to register. "I'll hire you," he said, "and I'll take time off from work—the Assembly is in the August doldrums now—and I'll help you out. Anyway, Don, you're—'between projects' is the euphemism, I believe. It's something we can do together, and it's something I can do for Skeeter. One last thing."

I thought this over, but not for long. "Timothy, I don't know. Your impulse is worthy. It's your decent heart asserting itself. But as for our working together, that sounds risky. Often you don't like the way I operate. My methods have sometimes left you despondent. Outraged, even. The whole thing could become . . . awkward."

His face glowed in the strange moonlight. He said, "I'll take that chance. I certainly can't think of anybody I'd rather hire than you, Don."

"No, Timmy, you can't think of anybody you'd rather share a roll of dental floss with than me. Detective-client relationships are different. Anyway, Skeeter might want to hire me, or Janet Osborne might.

Either would make a lot more sense. This whole business of Eric's unsolved murder being connected to any possible attempts on Janet's life is highly speculative. Janet wasn't all that sure that the so-called Jet Ski attack that Skeeter was blithering about was even an attack on her at all. I'll talk to Janet tomorrow—I've agreed to do that with no charge or obligation to anybody. But how about if we just take this thing one step at a time?"

"Okay," he said, "but if it's all right with you, I think that tomorrow I'll just come along for the ride. We can decide later on who'll pay."

This was unprecedented This was not good I said, "Well, I think you just
won't
come along for the ride tomorrow Timmy, even if you were my client, I don't generally take clients along while I'm working on an investigation They tend to get in the way, and you would not want to do that. Look, how about if I don't come to work with you and you don't come to work with me' How's that?"

"I've helped you out plenty of times," he said levelly, "and on cases that were just as murky in the beginning as this one is. I've done my share of cleaning up the murk. I've never—as you put it—gotten in the way. Admit it. Have PI have only been helpful—sometimes extremely helpful—and occasionally in dangerous and ugly situations."

"This is different," I said, knowing exactly where this was heading. "You are emotionally involved."

"Well, of
course,
I'm emotionally involved," he said, throwing up the hand that wasn't tightly clutching a bottle of beer. "Skeeter is going to die, for God's sake' And since I hurt Skeeter very badly at the beginning of his adult life, I think I owe it to him to make things easier, if I can, at the end of his life. I'm in a position to help Skeeter and ease my own guilty conscience over the hell I put him through thirty-two years ago. And damn it, Don, I want to do it!"

I thought, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter.

3

The
Edensburg Herald
had been founded in 1895, when young Daniel Lincoln Osborne, a fire-in-the-moral-soul Eugene Debs progressive, borrowed $11,000 from Hiram Young, his father-in-law, a foundry owner esteemed for his fair-labor practices, and merged two weekly newspapers of no particular distinction into the town's first daily. The new paper soon made a name for itself—not a good one, according to local mossback Republicans. From the beginning, the
Herald
railed against the depredations of the robber barons, supported labor and trustbusters, and was passionate in its editorials favoring the preservation of the Adirondacks' water, air, wildlife, and rugged natural beauty. It was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of six state and two national parks, one containing what is now Lake Osborne, New York, and another Osborne Falls

Later, the
Herald
welcomed FDR's New Deal, which the Eden County Republican Committee branded "the triumph of the Bolsheviks." When Hiram Young was in his eighties, he was still shunned by Edensburg families prominent in banking, real estate, and canoe manufacturing who never forgave him for bankrolling his son-in-law's renowned and apparently indestructible purveyor of—in the words of the president of the Eden County Savings Bank—"socialist hog offal"

The paper won its first of three Pulitzers, just before old Dan's retirement in 1945, for its editorials urging the formation of the United Nations. The second came during the Vietnam war, when Dan's son and successor, William T. "Tom" Osborne, drove Lyndon Johnson to distraction with antiwar screeds so elegantly incisive that papers all over the country regularly reprinted them, and Frank Church and J William

Fulbright read them aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The
Herald's
third Pulitzer, ten years later, went to Eric Osborne for the "Letter from the Wilderness" reports that ceased only when he died the previous May, bludgeoned to death on one of the mountainsides he had so lustrously vivified for his readers.

Eric's was the most recent addition to a gallery of photographic portraits that half-filled the wall at the end of the
Herald's
second-floor newsroom in an old Victorian block on Edensburg's Main Street. Founder Dan Osborne was there, and his son Tom, and a series of managing and news editors, one of the earliest scowling out from under a green eyeshade, several of the later ones sporting polka-dot bow ties above their bulging oxford-cloth collars—the entire gallery comprising what I later heard some of the younger
Herald
reporters refer to as "the dead white males."

Janet Osborne was the
Herald's
first female editor, selected by her father upon his retirement in 1985 because, he told her, "You're the best man for the job." No one within the family, and few outside it, doubted the wisdom of the choice. Among Janet's siblings, only Eric had been as qualified as she was to put out the paper, and he hadn't been interested. He'd have had to come in out of the wilderness too often.

Eric's and Janet's brother Dan, namesake of the founder, had approximately the right politics for the editor's job, but he was notoriously hotheaded and inept in his interpersonal relations and would have driven the entire news staff at the
Herald
up the wall or out the door in a matter of weeks. Nobody in the family wanted that, despite the tug of Dan's name, pedigree, and gender. Nominally, Dan Osborne was "publisher" of the
Herald,
but a nonfamily member actually ran the business side of the paper, freeing Dan to organize on behalf of leftist third-party political candidates and lead sugar-harvest expeditions to Cuba.

Dan's early participation in the Venceremos Brigades was a source of sour amusement with the two of Tom Osborne's offspring who somehow turned out politically conservative. Chester, an Edensburg stockbroker, and June, who had devoted her years as head of the Eden County Museum board of directors to keeping twentieth-century art out of the museum and all but out of the county, regarded their siblings'— and parents' and grandparents'—unshakable principled liberalism as a

family pathology. Some families produced a lot of harelips, others a lot of liberals

Neither Chester nor June, however, had ever dared interfere with
Herald
editorial policy. For one thing, deference was due Osborne family tradition, however mushbrained Chester and June considered it. And anyway, the two weren't about to tangle with Janet and Dan—both scrappers who could get rough—or their widowed mother, Ruth Osborne. Even as her health had begun to falter, Ruth was understood by family members to be fully capable of protecting the
Herald's
pro-gressivism with savvy, diligence and—on rare, awful occasions—cold fury. Once, at a family picnic, June's husband, Dick Puderbaugh, chortled over a
Herald
editorial calling for Richard Nixon's impeachment— this was early in Nixon's
first
term—and Ruth tore into her son-in-law savagely, calling Nixon and Henry Kissinger war criminals who ought to be in United Nations-run prisons, and making a connection between the napalming of Asian babies and Dick Puderbaugh's fuel-oil dealership. This was a linkage that even young Dan, then a leader in the SDS, thought might be going too far.

Ruth's role in Osborne family affairs had been complicated recently by early signs of Alzheimer's disease, but only Janet knew about that. She did not expect her mother's so far negligible mental impairment to figure in the family battle over whether to sell the
Herald
to the good chain or the bad chain—the daisy chain or the chain of fools. But Janet was concerned enough over her mother's mental state that every day she stopped by the old Osborne family home on Maple Street after work en route to "the lake house," the Osborne summer home that Janet now shared year-round with her lover, Dale Kotlowicz

I learned all of this Wednesday morning while sitting in Janet Osborne's office, a glass-enclosed rectangle overlooking the
Herald
newsroom. The desk and decor in Janet's editorial headquarters—which had been her father's and grandfather's—were late Victorian, but the old Underwood typewriter up on a shelf and the pneumatic tubes for shooting copy to the linotypists in the rear of the building had been replaced for practical purposes by a video terminal and computer keyboard. And alongside the old framed wall photos of earlier Osbornes posing with Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor (separately), Chester Bowles, and Al Gore Sr., among others, Janet was pictured smiling happily in the company of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.

Janet gave Timmy and me her twenty-minute
Osbome-and-Hemld-
family-and-newspaper history, explaining in the course of her narrative how it all led up to the current crisis. The paper had always been profitable, she said, but in 1988 Stuart Torkildson, the Herald Company's vice president and chief operating officer, came up with a plan to ensure the paper's future economic health in the face of rising costs and growing competition for ad revenues. The company would cash in on the Reagan go-go economic boom with an $18 million mountain resort twenty-six miles from Edensburg in the village of Blue Valley. Profits from the resort, to be called Spruce Haven, were meant to guarantee the paper's survival—and editorial independence, Stu Torkildson emphasized—for at least the next century.

Most of the Osbornes loathed the Republican president that one of the
Herald's
1986 editorials referred to as "an amiable blowfish," as they did "the country-club piranhas who swarmed in his wake." But the Spruce Haven design won prizes for both its esthetics and its uncompromising environmental sensitivity. And if cashing in on the Reagan boom could protect the paper's traditions against the general ongoing dumbing down of American journalism—now often combined with advertising and public relations in a watery porridge called "communications"—then it made sense to borrow the $16 million the family would need to see the project through and plunge boldly into the new millennium.