Foursome (37 page)

“That’ll do, Dag.”

Gates and I both looked over to the rutted, weedy road mouth. Ma Judson stood there, left foot in front of right, green felt hat at a determined angle, the old Weatherby at her hip and holding a little north of Dag’s belt buckle from thirty feet away.

“Ma, what’re you doing?”

“Might ask you the same. Heard Runty raising a ruckus, and I come over to find you trying to skewer a man.”

While Gates hopped a few steps toward her, I slid the knife carefully between my neck and the gag and began sawing away on the cloth.

Dag tried a smile. “Cuddy here, he went just plain crazy, Ma. Tried to kill Runty with one of my knives.”

“That why you trussed him up like that?”

“Well, yeah. I had to—”

“That why you got him gagged, too?”

Gates seemed confounded by that one.

Judson said, “What’s the matter, you afraid he’d
bite
Runty?”

Dag tried a laugh that didn’t work.

The sound of my knife ripping through the last fibers of the cloth brought his attention back over to me.

Watching Gates, I said, “He killed your brother, Ma. And the three people across the cove.”

“Don’t listen to him, Ma.”

Judson said, “Why not? Listened to you first, didn’t I?”

I said, “Dag found out that Shea and his wife were going to move up here year-round. He couldn’t stand that idea, so he set up Shea by killing the others.”

“Shut up, Cuddy!”

Judson lowered the muzzle a little. “Dag?”

He changed tacks. “They were going to ruin it for us, Ma. Ruin things all the year through instead of just for a little of the summer. I couldn’t abide that, and neither could you.”

The old woman gnawed her lower lip.

Gates said, “But he’s the only one who knows, Ma.”

I said, “No, I’m not.”

“He came here alone. We get rid of him, we’ll be all right. The pond’ll be all right. We’ll get everything back to normal again.”

Judson said, “Dag, what that Mr. Shea did to his property was wrong, but what you did was wronger. This here, this killing of another innocent, that’d be wrongest of all.”

I saw Runty coming back cautiously through the woods behind her.

Gates saw him, too. “But Ma, Cuddy’ll just spoil it for all of us!”

“No, Dag. He’ll just spoil it for you, account of what you’ve done already.”

“But—”

Judson said, “Put down the knife, Dag.”

I said, “Ma, Runty is coming up behind you.”

She didn’t look back. “Don’t matter. He won’t bite a hand that feeds him, no matter what Dag here might tell him.” A breath. “Dogs are a lot better that way than people, oftimes.”

Gates looked at his dog, then at Ma, then at me. I was no more than two bounds away from him.

He said, “I don’t believe you’d shoot me, Ma.”

Judson brought the muzzle back up to serious. “Be a bad thing to count on, Dag.”

Gates executed a turn to me on the ball of his foot, like a member of a precision drill team. Raising my knife, I got to my knees.

Judson said, “Dag, don’t.”

He gave me the madness smile with the half of his face she couldn’t see. Dr. Sardonicus. “Don’t believe you’d shoot a neighbor, Ma. Not over Old Tom and those despoilers.”

“Wouldn’t be over them, because I can’t bring them back. I can save Cuddy here, though, and I will.”

“Ma—”

She brought the stock to her shoulder. “It’s wrong, Dag, wrong, wrong all over wrong. And if you can’t see that, my not pulling this trigger can’t never save you.”

The madness smile spread wide, and his torso dipped a little, putting the coil into his spring. Gates left the ground and was still on the rise when a barrel from the old gun spewed flame and thunder. A sickening sound filled the air, the whumping noise a broom makes hitting a rug over a clothesline. Dag lofted left and capsized, losing the knife and landing on his back.

Runty was to him first, yipping and pushing his nose at what used to be the left side of his master’s chest. Ma Judson moved quickly, almost beating me. Gates’s eyes were open, the right one fluttery, maybe from the residual dirt, but I doubted it. Every time he breathed, there was a gurgling sound in his throat, and little bubbles of blood came up through several of the red-rimmed holes in his shirt.

Judson took one look and said, “I’ll get the Bronco.”

Something like Dag’s voice said, “Ma, hospital’s … twenty miles.”

“We’ll still try.”

“Ma, I wouldn’t make it … to the end of the camp road.”

Judson’s voice quavered. “Well, we can’t leave you in the dirt to die, Dag.”

He looked toward the west. “Sun’s setting. Be mighty fine … to sit in that lawn chair a while.”

Judson got me untied from the chain stringer. I went to the waterfront as she took off her buckskin jacket and pressed down on as many of his wounds as she could. Between us we managed to get Gates up and into the chair at the side of the house, the far ridge across the pond visible between a couple of tree trunks and over a low, needled pine branch.

The sun touched the ridge tangentially with its rounded bottom, firing the underbellies of the clouds above it like bricquets. The shoulders of the clouds blushed toward lavender and then deep purple before the pale blue background of the sky. The part at the horizon finally hazed toward pink as all the clouds darkened and scudded slowly southward.

Dag Gates got to see most of it.

Turn the page to continue reading from the John Cuddy Mysteries

U
SUALLY THEY CALL FIRST.
Clients, I mean. Seventy, maybe eighty percent of a private investigator’s work comes in through law firms, and attorneys rarely do anything without an appointment. On top of that, almost always you’re the one who has to visit their offices.

That Tuesday afternoon, though, the knock came before the telephone rang. I looked up from my desk, which had on it what I’d been able to gather about a teenaged runaway from Vermont. The pebbled-glass part of my door was still shaking against the wooden frame, the stenciled JOHN FRANCIS CUDDY, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS dancing a little. That was odd, too, because most folks will rap on the wood, not the glass.

When I said come in, they did.

A woman and a man, she entering as he held the door open for her. The man nearly had to nudge the woman across the threshold so he could come in, too, and close the door behind him. People are uncomfortable bringing their troubles to a stranger, but from the awkwardly polite way the two of them moved around each other, I got the impression they weren’t used to being together, either.

The man said, “Mr. Cuddy?”

I stood up. “Yes?”

He cupped his right hand gently around the left elbow of the woman. “This is Pearl Rivkind, and I’m William Proft.”

The woman said, “Mrs. Abraham Rivkind,” as though she were both correcting him and reassuring herself.

To Rivkind, Proft said, “Sorry,” in a voice more formal than sincere. Then he looked to me. “I wonder if we could have a few minutes of your time?”

It’s a good idea to be wary of off-the-street business, but a bad idea to turn it away automatically.

I closed the file on the runaway and eased back down. “Please, take a seat.”

My office has two client chairs that face my desk and two windows that overlook the Park Street subway station at the northeast corner of the Boston Common. Rivkind and Proft sat so that each was in line with one of the windows behind me.

Pearl Rivkind was barely five feet tall, even with high heels. Into her mid-fifties, she wore heavy makeup that did little to hide her age and nothing to hide a lantern jaw that would make Jay Leno wince. Her hair was tinted a few shades redder than brown and chopped stylishly short. The silk dress was stylish, too, and went with the warm, late June weather outside, but the clinging silk only accentuated a body that would have seemed dumpy in a bulky bathrobe. It was her eyes that caught you up close, though. Big and brown and deep, the whites were bloodshot and bulged with the irritation of someone who’d lately spent a lot of time crying.

William Proft was tall and lanky, taking a while to lower himself into the other chair. Thirtyish, his hair was sandy but balding front to back over a long face, hollow cheeks, and prominent lips that curled a little, a perpetual grin that you could grow tired of very quickly. He wore a seersucker jacket over a buttoned-down shirt and solid black tie. The jacket rode up on him as he finally got settled, as though he didn’t usually wear one or didn’t get to sit in it much. Up close, Proft’s eyes caught you, too, but more like the guy at the next table in a restaurant who’s constantly staring at the food on your plate to be sure he’s ordered the best item on the menu.

I said, “How did you find me?”

Rivkind said, “My lawyer, he called around, got a recommendation on you.”

“Is there some reason he didn’t contact me himself?”

“Yeah,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “He doesn’t think it’s such a hot idea, my coming to see a private investigator. Neither does my son or anybody else, for that matter.”

I was beginning to like Rivkind. She’d corrected Proft on the introductions, and she wasn’t afraid to be direct with me.

Proft said, “Perhaps if I summarized our situation, you could get a sense of what’s involved here.”

I was beginning not to like Proft much, but I said, “Go ahead.”

He crossed his right leg over the left, showing Hush Puppy shoes I hadn’t noticed before. “Two weeks ago—that Thursday, actually, so almost three weeks now—Mrs. Rivkind’s husband was brutally murdered during an attempted robbery at his furniture store. This past Saturday—three days ago—my sister, Darbra, who worked as a secretary at the store, came back from vacation and seems to have disappeared.”

At his mention of the husband, I looked to Rivkind and nodded in sympathy. Her jaw came out a little more, but she nodded back.

To Proft, I said, “You have reason to think the two are related?”

“Frankly, no. But Mrs. Rivkind came to my pharmacy yesterday to have a prescription filled—”

“Sedative. My doctor, he said, ‘Pearl, no matter what, you’ve got to sleep.’ ”

Proft took the interruption in stride. “She and I began talking about the, well, odd coincidence at best, and we thought it might make sense to consult someone like you.”

“There a reason you didn’t call first?”

They exchanged glances. Rivkind came back to me. “It seemed kind of hard to talk about over the phone.” Her eyes drifted toward the window. “Kind of hard to talk about, period.”

She said the last in a neutral way, like she’d had a lot of practice with the phrase over the last few weeks.

I said, “What exactly is it that you’d like me to do?”

Proft said, “Well, since Darbra’s disappearance may be tied in with Mr. Rivkind’s death, we thought you could investigate them together.”

Rivkind said, “Kind of a package deal, right?”

I turned my chair to look out the window that shows the top of the State House over some shorter trees on the Common. The capitol dome was dedicated two hundred years ago, Paul Revere sheathing it in copper when the original wooden shingles fell off. Just after the Civil War, some gold leaf was applied. They regilded the thing every twenty years or so until 1942, when it was painted gray to protect us from German bombers or U-boats, nobody seems to be sure which. Now the most recent gold leaf from the late sixties is peeling so badly it should be replaced, but the new fiscally responsible governor who succeeded the old fiscally responsible governor doesn’t think the quarter of a million needed would go over too well with state employees who haven’t seen a pay raise in five years.

Proft said, “Mr. Cuddy?”

I shook my head and turned back to them. “Representing joint clients isn’t a great idea.”

“How come?” said Rivkind.

“First, it’s tough to give equal time to each side of the problem.”

She said, “You can’t kind of … use your own judgment on that?”

“Yes, but then there’s the problem of conflicts.”

Proft said, “What conflicts?”

“If the death and the disappearance have nothing to do with each other, then I’m wasting somebody’s money looking into the other side of this. If the death and the disappearance are related, then it’s possible, even likely, that I might find out something that helps one of you but hurts the other.”

In the neutral voice, Rivkind said, “I don’t think I can hurt worse than this. I hope not, anyway.”

I didn’t say anything.

Proft arched his shoulders forward in the chair. “Couldn’t you work on our problems together until a conflict—what do they do, ‘arise’?”

He said the last with the lips curling a little more than they had been.

Before I could answer him, Rivkind wrung her hands together, the four rings on her fingers clicking against one another. “I don’t like saying this to a man I never met before, but I … I don’t know if I can go through this with another investigator.”

I looked at her. The makeup was cracking over the muscles in her jaw and cheeks as she tensed them to keep from crying. The woman was doing what she thought was right, despite other people bumping her the other way.