Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (35 page)

“Harry, have you paid your phone bill?”

“Town does that for me.”

“Then why isn’t this damn thing working?”

“Sure as hell was working the last time I used it.”

“When was that?”

“Day or so ago. Alarm clock stopped, so I called the operator to find out what the hell time it was.”

“This line’s been cut,” Dennis said. He smiled thinly. “But I’ve got a cellular in the Jeep.”

He squeezed behind the wheel, picked up the phone, and punched the on button. There was no dial tone. Attached to his ring of keys Dennis kept a penlight. He shone it on the telephone wiring and saw no evidence of tampering.

He remembered what he had learned long ago in a wiretapping case that involved the Mafia and the NYPD. In certain branches of the military you were taught to disable a telephone by inserting a pin through the wire leading to the battery. When the fuse blew, you clipped off the ends of the pin. If anyone replaced the faulty fuse, it blew again. No damage was visible to the naked untrained eye.

They had seen his car, he realized. They had disabled the cellular when he was inside talking to Harry. He wondered what kind of men he was up against, and he felt the first touch of fear.

Chapter 28
Flight

CLOSE TO HOME Dennis saw lights in the kitchen. The mountains loomed beyond like walls of ivory, the night so quiet that from the road he could hear the roar of the creek coursing over its bed between slabs of ice. He turned off the car engine, and then he also heard the thump of his heartbeat.

“Come on in with me, Harry.”

In the warmth of the kitchen Sophie pressed her cheek quickly against his. She had been back from the Hendersons’ for half an hour. The children were in bed, probably asleep by now. Claudia had gone home. Sophie hugged Harry, who seemed suddenly sober.

“Dennis,” she said, turning her head, “there’s something wrong with our phone.”

With no apparent hurry he picked up the kitchen telephone and placed it to his ear. He heard no dial tone. He moved a little more quickly than he intended into the little book-lined room he and Sophie called the library. A fax machine on a separate phone line stood on the leather-covered chess table. He picked up the receiver—that line was equally silent. In his mouth he felt a dry, sour taste he had last known twenty-five years ago in the jungle near Da Phong. But when he sat down again at the kitchen table with Sophie and Harry, he was calm. He tilted his chair back and accepted the glass of wine Sophie handed to him. He told her all that had happened at Harry’s house.

“They didn’t see me. Oliver Cone had my car in the headlights of his truck for maybe ten seconds. He didn’t do anything about it, so I thought he didn’t know whose Jeep it was. I was wrong. They cut Harry’s phone line, then they cut the cellular phone in my car, then they came here and cut ours from the box on the road.” The muscles round his eyes tightened. He took Sophie’s hands in his. “They didn’t tell you they were going to bone Harry tonight, did they?”

Sophie shook her head slowly, burdened with an enormous weight of dismay.

“They kept you out of it,” Dennis said. “They could have found you if they wanted to. They don’t trust me because I’m Harry’s friend, and I’m still a skibtail. And they don’t trust you now because you’re my wife. The other day I told Harry they weren’t going to stop him with force. These were civilized people, I said, not barbarians. Sophie, tell me.
What are they?”

“Frightened,” she murmured. “Trying to protect what they’ve got. If Harry leaves …” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“If he leaves,” Dennis said, “I understand there’s a risk. But the alternative is worse. This community … no, I’ll put it more kindly—an element in this community intends to stop him no matter what they have to do. This won’t be assisted suicide, it will be outright murder. I heard them say they had to cain him. I can’t let them do that. You understand that, don’t you? Not for any reason. I’m not questioning anything you told me. But no civilized community has the right to execute except by law, and then only as punishment for a terrible crime. Sophie, what crime has Harry committed?”

A change came over Sophie, a collapsing of her lips inward against her teeth, the blood rising to her cheeks as if she had been slapped.

“They think he’ll go to New York,” she said, “and decide to live forever. They see that as a crime against our existence. And he drinks.” She turned to Harry, placing a hand lightly on his cheek. “I’m sorry, Harry. They believe that if you leave here you’ll drink—and talk.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Harry protested.

“You wouldn’t mean to. But it could happen.”

“And if it did,” Dennis said, “and people came here and asked for the fountain of youth, you’d laugh at them and talk them out of it the same way you did with those people from Oregon. But even that wouldn’t happen. If Harry told people, they’d think he was crazy.”

“Not if he became famous,” Sophie said. “And if he didn’t grow old, then they would have to believe. They’d have evidence.”

Dennis prowled the room, the glow from the fireplace passing across his face and making it seem almost savage. He picked up his glass of wine, drank it, then set it on the coffee table.

“Is it the whole town, Sophie, or just McKee and Cone and Grace Pendergast?”

“It’s them, but they’re doing what the town wants.”

Dennis faced Harry Parrot. “You’re sober now, aren’t you?”

“I sure am,” the painter said. “Might be better if I wasn’t.”

“When you came here sixty-five years ago and they took you in, you agreed to the pact, isn’t that so?”

“You know I did,” Harry said.

“You had a choice. You could have said no.”

“Sure I could have.”

Dennis realized he was cross-examining. Old habits died hard. “You understood what you were swearing to, didn’t you?”

“Yep. I did.”

“In the light of that, will you keep your word? Will you agree to go through with the departure ceremony?”

“No, I sure as hell won’t,” Harry said.

“You won’t change your mind?”

“No way, amigo.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Leave. Get the hell out.”

Dennis spread his hands on the kitchen table, pressing hard enough for the knuckles to whiten. “I can’t allow them to kill him,” he repeated to Sophie.

“But they won’t let him leave!” she cried.

“I’m going to drive him to Aspen right now. Mickey Karp will take him in.” He turned to Harry. “Tomorrow we’ll hire a truck. We’ll come up here with a couple of deputy sheriffs. No one will be able to stop you from loading your paintings and anything else you want into that truck. Nobody will stop you from leaving this town and this valley for wherever you want to go. You’ll be safe, Harry. You’ll be free. ‘ Softly, Sophie said, “If you do that, Dennis, they’ll never let you back into Springhill. Not you, not your children. Not me.”

“That may be so,” he said. “I’ll deal with that when Harry’s in Aspen and doesn’t have to worry about these fanatics pinning him down so Grace Pendergast can shove a needle into his vein.”

He was quiet for a few seconds; he tried to read Sophie’s mind, but her eyes told him nothing.

“Stay here with the children,” he said.

Harry had brought extra socks and underwear in an old Adidas bag. He wore corduroys and fur-lined boots and a beat-up red parka that smelled of stale tobacco. He sat next to Dennis in the front seat of the Jeep, drumming his fingernails against the metal of the glove compartment. He reached inside his jacket and took out a cellophane-wrapped cigar.

“Do me a favor,” Dennis said, “and don’t light it.”

“You sure are fussy at some funny times. How about back East? They let you smoke a good cigar when you feel like it?”

“I can’t remember. Write me a postcard and tell me.”

“You won’t be here to get it. Didn’t you hear what your woman said? They find out you did this for me, you’ll be out of here.”

Dennis tried to understand exactly what that meant. Sophie owned the house: they could not be dispossessed. The worst the town could do was shun him. Would they take it out in some way on the kids? He couldn’t tolerate that.

It had already occurred to him that if he were forced to leave Springhill with his two children, Sophie might not come. If she renounced him, she would be able to stay. Her life was here. He was her husband and partner, but it might be more painful for her to give up her roots and home than give up a man she had known for so few years. I’m not sure what she’ll do, he realized.

“You got a weapon with you?” Harry asked.

“Goddamit, of course not. Is this Dodge City? Am I supposed to be Wyatt Earp? They’re not going to bushwhack us, Harry.”

Chewing on the unlit cigar, Harry shrugged, which Dennis took as a form of agreement.

They passed through the town, turning north past the general store on the narrow forest-lined road that wound down with a dozen hairpin turns toward the flats of the Crystal River, the village of Redstone, and then the town of Carbondale. It was dark enough on Main Street for Dennis to be sure no one was following them.

They passed Harry’s gray Victorian. The old Chevy truck was parked by the woodpile. The night had clouded over. The road took a sharp turn to the left.

Dennis slammed on the brakes. A massive dark load of snow blocked the road, plowed to bulk five feet above the level of the road for a distance of ten yards. The Jeep could not get through it.

“That’s what I was worried about,” Harry said. “You can’t get out of Dodge if they don’t want you to.”

The two-lane road lacked shoulders. Beyond the tons of snow in the shadows of fir trees Dennis made out the black angular mass of the truck and attached snowplow. It sat there on the road like a silent prehistoric animal guarding a burial site.

“And my guess,” Harry said, dropping his hoarse voice to nearly a whisper, “is that if you or me were dumb enough to try and walk through the woods and get around that bit of snow, either Mr. Cone or Mr. Frazee—or both, or some others—is sitting in the cab of that truck. And with a weapon. You think this ain’t Dodge City?”

“These men are crazy,” Dennis said.

“Maybe so, but you better get it through your skull that they’re serious about being crazy. They ain’t gonna let us leave.”

Dennis jammed the gears of the Cherokee into reverse and began backing up along the road until he could swing into Harry’s driveway, and then he headed home.

The fire still burned in the wood stove. A minute after Dennis and Harry arrived, two four-wheel-drive vehicles pulled up on the road outside the house, switched off their lights, and simply sat there. Boxing us in, Dennis realized.

With Sophie’s long hair piled atop her bowed head he could see the slender white nape of her neck. She suddenly seemed fragile to him— this vividly beautiful woman, his wife who would probably live to be one hundred. He told her what had happened on the road.

“You can’t get past the men in those trucks,” she said.

“What about your parents’ house … ?”

He meant: one of us can get there by way of the creek, use their phone to call for help. But Sophie shook her head. .

“Why not? You think they’ve cut—”

He stopped, realizing that wasn’t what she meant: the Hendersons’ phone line had not been cut.

He felt the blood rush to his face. “They owe me,” he said sharply.

“They would be loyal to the village,” Sophie said. “They owe the village for ninety years of life.”

And who do you owe, my love? To whom is your deeper allegiance? You haven’t said anything about that. You haven’t made
your
commitment.

He peered outside where no stars shone through the cloud cover and the mountains were barely visible. Now he understood there would be more men gathered outside than just Cone and McKee. Harry was right: they were determined men, protecting what they held dear, knowing that whatever happened, the town would in turn protect them. Dangerous men, armed and skilled in the use of their arms.

He tried to put himself inside their minds. It would be too reckless for them to come marauding in darkness: he could be armed too. But he had no weapon, not even a deer rifle. He had always refused, had seen no need.

They would wait until dawn. Light was on their side, darkness on his.

Tomorrow morning, he remembered, he had two appointments at his office and a lunch date with one of Mickey Karp’s clients to discuss a federal tax evasion probe. He was not going to make those dates.

“Sophie, I’ve got to take Harry out.”

“How can you do that?”

“The back door leads to nowhere except the forest. They’d never expect us to go that way—and from the road they can’t see it. Do you remember the Tenth Mountain hut we once stayed in?” They had made love there, but Dennis was not so blinded by the event that he had failed to survey his surroundings. “Harry and I can get there on snowshoes. There’s emergency equipment—a two-way radio and generator, remember? Josh told me those radios have a channel that gets through by way of Carbondale to the Sheriff’s Office in Aspen.”

Sophie took his hand in both of hers. “It’s pitch black out there. Do you know where that hut is? In Lead King Basin, in the Maroon Bells. The Bells are a death trap.”

“I know the way.”

“We were there in warm weather. And in daylight.”

“We’ll go before dawn, when it’s still dark—stay just the other side of the creek until it grows light. In daylight it won’t be too difficult. Josh will send people to bring us out.”

Sophie seemed to coil back into the shadows. “Dennis, you’ll never find that hut. The only way into Lead King Basin is a pack trail at 10,000 feet. Otherwise it’s just gorges, couloirs, gullies on the sides of 14,000-foot peaks. Do you understand what it’s like this time of year? The leaves may be budding in Connecticut, but here it’s still deep winter.”

A pain pressed inside his eyeballs. “If we stay here, they’ll come for Harry. And they’ll murder him. Murder, Sophie. This time:
murder
.”

She covered her eyes for a moment as if the world were too offensive to contemplate. When she lowered her hands she said, “I’ll take you. I know the way.”