The Ax (24 page)

The gate. I unhook it, step through, hook it. Without a backward glance, I stride up the path, almost as purposeful as she is.

On the walk back, I eat both apples.

About three miles before the turnoff to Scantic River Road, still inside Connecticut, there’s a gas station with an outside pay phone on a stick. That’s where I stop to make my call, glad to see this phone has the same exchange as GRB’s. Local calls disappear more readily.

I’m phoning GRB’s house because I had a sudden revelation last night. So many marriages fall into trouble among the downsized; not just mine and Marjorie’s. What if GRB and his wife have split up? What if he’s living somewhere else, all the time I’m crouched in the woods behind his house, waiting for him?

Or, another possibility. What if he’s taken one of those time-serving jobs, say, assistant manager at the local supermarket, then he’ll
never
be home during the day. For whatever reason, and there must be one, he hasn’t been home the two days I’ve watched the place. So it’s time to find out what the situation is.

Nine-forty. She won’t have left for her walk yet. I dial the number from GRB’s resumé, and she answers on the second ring: “Blackstone residence.” She sounds efficient but impersonal, as though she’s chief of staff there, not the lady of the house.

I say, “Garrett Blackstone, please.”

“He’s not in at the moment, may I say who’s calling?”

“It’s an old friend from the papermill days,” I say. “Is there any way I can get in touch with him?”

“Well, he’s at work right now,” she says. She sounds a bit doubtful.

I say, “Could I call him there?” I need to know where the man is, dammit.

“I’m not sure,” she says, not wanting to offend an old friend of her husband’s, but troubled by something. “He’s just started there,” she explains, “and he might not want outside calls right now.”

“Oh, it’s a job he likes?”

“It’s a wonderful job,” she says, and all at once the restraint gives way, and she bubbles over, saying, “It’s
just
the job he wanted!”

Arcadia! The son of a bitch got my job, I’ll kill him today, I’ll kill him in an hour! Gripping the phone so tight my hand is cramping, but unable to relax, I say, “Oh? Back at a paper mill?”

“Yes! Willis and Kendall, do you know them?”

Five
hundred
pounds drops away from my body. I could dance. I say, “The tin can labels!”

“That’s right! That’s just the job, do you work there, too?”

“Oh, that’s great,” I say, and I truly mean it. “That’s wonderful. Mrs.—Mrs. Blackstone, please give your husband my, my
strongest
congratulations. Tell him I’m delighted for him. Oh, tell him I’m delighted.”

“Who should I say—”

I hang up, and float back to the Voyager. I couldn’t be happier if I had a job myself. It’s true; well, almost true. But he’s at work, he’s in a
position
, he’s where he wants to be!

By God, I don’t have to kill him.

Oh, that’s great, that’s great. Starting the Voyager, making the U-turn, I’m grinning from ear to ear.

As the miles go by, as I drive closer and closer to home, the weight slowly settles down on top of me. Two to go.

Saturday morning. I’m in my office, and I’ve just taken out of the file drawer the last resumé, I’m just reaching for the road atlas, when Marjorie knocks on the door. I place the road atlas on top of the resumé, and say, “Yes?”

She opens the door. She looks worried, and a bit confused. She says, “Burke, there’s a policeman here. He wants to talk to you. A detective.”

Terror closes my esophagus. I’m caught, I know it, and everything was in vain. And I was so close. Standing, trying to find a reaction I can share with Marjorie, I say, “Billy? Is it something about Billy?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I don’t know what it is, Burke. He’s in the living room.”

“All right.”

I step into the hall. The Voyager is closer the other way than the living room is this way. But there’s no point in that. I walk down the hall, while Marjorie goes back to whatever she was doing.

He’s in the living room, a slender young guy in a gray suit, on his feet, facing the sofa as he smiles at the framed print that hangs above it. It’s a Winslow Homer seascape, very turbulent, and I don’t know why we have it. Marjorie saw it for sale years ago, at a frame shop, and bought it, with some embarrassment. “I just love it,” she told me. “I don’t really like prints, but we’ll never have a
real
Winslow Homer. Is it all right, Burke?”

Of course I told her it was all right, and I drove the nail into the wall and hung the framed print, and it reminds me that other people are mysterious, no matter how much we get to know them. I will never understand why that picture spoke to Marjorie, that picture more than any other, but it’s all right; that’s the lesson. The surface of the print is flat, it can’t hide what it is, a print and not a painting, but the subject is this roiling sea, over vast unknowable depths. That’s what we all are for one another, flat surfaces on which some turbulence can be seen, but unknowable depths. It doesn’t matter that I’ll never know Marjorie very deeply; I know her enough to know I love her, and that’s enough.

And would I like her to know my depths?

The detective turns, sensing me, and smiles, nodding toward the picture. “I grew up on boats,” he says. “My father’s a great sailor. Mr. Devore?”

“Yes?”

He extends a hand and we shake, as he says, “Detective Burton, state CID. I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

“Not at all. Sit down.”

He does, on the sofa, twisting around to look at the Homer again, while I sit on the armchair across from him, trying to conceal my worry, reassured a bit by his friendly manner.

He turns away from the picture at last, saying, “You a sailor, Mr. Devore?”

“No,” I say, regretfully. I wish I could say yes, so we’d have a kinship. I say, “My wife loved the picture.”

“I grew up on Long Island Sound,” he says, taking a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. Chuckling, he says, “And sometimes in it.” Opening the notebook, he studies something written in there, then looks seriously at me and says, “Do you know a Herbert Everly?”

It
is
me he’s after! How did I ever think I’d get away with it? But what can I do but pretend innocence, ignorance, disconnectedness? “Everly?” I say. “I don’t think so.”

“How about somebody named Kane Asche?”

“Kane Asche. No, doesn’t ring a bell.”

He says, “You worked for Halcyon Mills, didn’t you, for a long while?”

“Were they
there
?”

“No, no,” he says, grinning at the misunderstanding. “But they did work at paper mills. Different ones from you.”

I spread my hands. I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you want.”

“Neither do we, Mr. Devore, to be perfectly frank,” he says, with his guileless smile. Can I trust him? He’s still holding that notebook. He says, “We got a very strange call the other day from the personnel officer with a paper company called Willis and Kendall.”

“I applied for a job there, a few weeks ago.”

“That’s right,” he says. “And you were one of the people they interviewed.”

“I didn’t get a callback, though, so I guess I didn’t get that job.”

“There were four people they called for a second interview,” Burton tells me, “and turned out, two of them had just been killed. They’d both been shot to death.”

“Good God!”

“It’s these two, Everly and Asche.” Burton taps his notebook. “And
now
,” he says, “ballistics tells us they were both killed with the same gun.”

I say, “Was it somebody they worked with?”

“They didn’t know each other,” Burton says, “so far as we can tell. There’s no link we can find between these two men except they both applied for the same job.”

I say, “Do you mean, you think somebody’s going to come shoot
me
?”

“It’s probably simple coincidence,” Burton says, “those two getting callbacks for the same job. A number of people applied, and so far everybody else is perfectly fine, like yourself. They hired somebody now—”

“I thought they must have.”

He grins in sympathy and says, “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

“No, you get used to it,” I say.

“It can get rough, I know,” he says. “My brother was laid off down at Electric Boat, and his wife was laid off one week later from the insurance company. They’re going nuts.”

“I’m sure they are.”

“What we think,” Burton says, “is that Everly and Asche must have met somewhere, sometime. Maybe a trade conference, or a job referral outfit, who knows. They met each other, and they met somebody else, and something went wrong. So the Willis and Kendall connection’s just a coincidence.”

“The man the company hired,” I say. “Is
he
all right?”

“He’s fine. No threats against him, no mysterious strangers lurking around.”

“So it probably doesn’t have anything to do with that company,” I say.

“That’s right. If there’s a link, it’s somewhere in the past. That’s why I’m here, we’re canvassing everybody with any connection at all to either of the victims.”

“Mine’s not much of a connection,” I say. “We all applied for the same job.”

“But it’s the phone call from that employer that got us started on this,” he points out. “We don’t know what we’re looking for, so we’ve got to look everywhere we can think of. Like, if we could find some place, some time, when people like you in your industry got together, somewhere you all might have been at, a trade fair—”

“I ran a product manufacturing line,” I say. “I almost never went to sales conferences, things like that.”

“Would you mind,” he says, “taking a look at a couple photos, see if they jog your memory? See if you ever met either of these people
anywhere
.”

I say, “It’s not—they’re not pictures of them dead, are they?”

He laughs: “We wouldn’t do that to you, Mr. Devore. They’re perfectly ordinary photos. All right?”

“Sure,” I say.

He has the photos in his notebook, and now he shakes them out and extends them toward me.

Here they are, my resumés one and four, with their faces intact, before I shot the bullets into them. I look at the photos and feel a great sadness swelling up inside me, so that my eyes sting. I feel so sorry for these two men. They seem like decent guys. I shake my head, and when I look toward Burton I’m aware of that stormy Winslow Homer sea above his head. “They just seem like nice guys,” I say. “Excuse me, it’s making me teary or something. They look so
ordinary
.”

“Sure,” he says. “You’re identifying, I understand that. Things like that aren’t supposed to happen to folks like us. Unfortunately, they do.”

Handing the photos back, I say, “I really don’t think I ever met them. Either of them.”

“Okay,” he says, and puts the photos in the notebook and the notebook away in his inner jacket pocket.

Is this it? All of it? Am I still free, uncaught, unsuspected? I say, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”

“Oh, you helped,” he says, and gets to his feet, and so do I. He says, “We never like coincidence, but sometimes it happens. If it never happened, we wouldn’t have a word for it.”

“I guess that’s true,” I say.

From his side trouser pocket he takes a wallet, and from the wallet a card, which he hands me, saying, “If you think of anything, or if anything weird happens around here in the next week or so, call me, okay?”

With a shaky smile, I say, “Weird, like me getting shot?”

“Whatever it was,” he says, “two seems to be it. I really don’t think we’re going to come across a third. I think you’re safe, Mr. Devore.”

“That’s good news,” I say.

I’m back in my office. Burton has gone, I’ve described the reason for his visit to Marjorie, I’ve had more conversation with Marjorie on the subject of the two murders than I wanted but I felt I shouldn’t cut it short, and now I’m back in my office, and I’m shaking with the realization of the close call I’ve had.

These two dead men, and their link to job-hunting, could be a coincidence, that’s true. Two might be a coincidence or not a coincidence, and pretty soon they’re going to come to the conclusion that coincidence is the only answer that fits these two.

But not three.

If I’d found Garrett Blackstone. If he hadn’t been given that tin can label job. If I’d shot him either time this week that I’d been to his house, Detective Burton and the other detectives would now have
three
job-hunting paper mill managerial types shot in the same state with the same gun, and it wouldn’t be a coincidence, and they’d start thinking about possible motives, and they wouldn’t rest until they found me.

The same gun. I’ve been incredibly stupid, and incredibly lucky. It never occurred to me that they could—or would think to—link these separate murders by showing they came from the same gun. (If Willis & Kendall’s personnel man hadn’t stuck his oar in, they might very well not have.)