The Devil's Only Friend (6 page)

“I knew you would make your way over to me eventually, Caudill,” he said. “You see we're in this together.”

“Only you're living in a mansion.”

He considered it. His eyes played about the room they had set up for him. Underneath a single satin sheet, his rail of a body seemed to writhe minutely for balance.

“I would trade places with you,” he said, “if such a thing could be arranged. I've played over the idea in my mind a thousand times.”

“You could find a better carcass than mine.”

“You're in the prime of your life, Caudill. You might consider a brightening of attitude. You might work another fifty years in your time. They could be pleasant years or—”

“Is it safe to talk here?”

“They bring flowers every day,” he said. “Sad to say, I am unable to check thoroughly for hidden microphones. I'm at the mercy of my son and his wife now, at the mercy of their servants.” He wriggled up a bit on his cushions. “I ring a little bell when I need something. So far a nurse has answered every time.”

“Be plain with me,” I said.

“I get so many visitors, Caudill. It's tedious but necessary. The many relationships I've formed over the years must be tended to. I can't well drop away at the end of my time with unfinished business. But I must say, Caudill, of all my visitors—”

“Can you get up out of that bed?”

“It's frowned upon.” He considered the idea for a few moments—his tired eyes looked out at the trees, went all over the four corners of the little box they kept him in. Then he slithered his hand up along the side of the bed till he found the button for the electric buzzer.

In a flash a slender fellow of middle age appeared at the door. He was dressed in a nicely cut suit with all the trimmings: cuff links, tie pin, pearl buttons. Yet the suit gave him an air of subservience, as if he had been forced to monkey up to please the old man.

“Yes,” he said.

“Bring a chair for me, James,” said Lloyd.

“A chair, sir?”

“A rolling chair. Mr. Caudill and I are going for a tour of the house.”

The man stepped out and returned with another trim fellow and an old bentwood wheelchair. They briskly went through the business of transferring Lloyd to the chair. As they did it, I looked away. There wasn't any reason to look at an old man festering in his bedclothes.

“Where shall we go, sir?”

“Back to your cribbage, James. I'm sure Mr. Caudill is capable of pushing me along.”

Both the dandy fellows gave me the eye, but they knew the routine well enough to hold their objections. I thought they might lag along behind us out of sight, but I could hear their footsteps falling away from us as Lloyd and I wheeled out of the room and down the long hall. I pushed him past the photographs of people I didn't care to know that lined the walls, past the paintings and the sculptures that sat on tiny pedestals. It was what a rich man's house should look like.

“My son is in South America,” Lloyd piped. “His hand in the business takes him far afield. You might think he's seeing to the management of our plantations there, but I know what's in his heart. I imagine he's climbing a mountain or some such nonsense. Now of all times. And his wife is in California with her tea-party movie friends.”

It was necessary to take an elevator to the ground floor. In the cramped space, I got a little too much of the stale smell of the old man. We rolled along the length of the house until we came to the great open room that enclosed the swimming pool.

“I used to swim for my health as a younger man,” Lloyd said. “But I have not taken to water for recreation since you threw me into that filthy river almost a year ago. The doctors tell me that some of the water set into my lungs, and that it's caused a good deal of trouble for me since.”

The water in the pool was glassy smooth. I wheeled Lloyd to a little table at the far end and sat down near to him.

“You'd rather I left you on the yacht with those men? A quicker death than just wasting away?”

He pursed his old lips and darted his tongue to wet them. His mustaches were silky and white, like a baby's hair, and they had shaved off his customary goatee.

“It's true I should be grateful,” Lloyd said. He trained his eyes on me. The warmth and moisture in the air seemed to perk him up a bit.

“I've heard there's trouble for you,” I said.

“There is always trouble, Caudill. Always a jury for this and a jury for that. It's a fabric of lawsuits that holds the business world together. This indictment,” he said with phlegm rattling in his lungs, “this indictment doesn't cost me any sleep. They'll never get a thing out of me, if that's what worries you. My time has come and gone. Harder men than these have stood against us.”

“If it's the G-men, they won't come to play footsie with you.”

“The federal men take their orders from behind the curtains, just like any other hired men. They make a wage—they are allowed to make a wage if they fall in line.”

“You say so.”

Lloyd could muster just a spark of the fire he once had. There was only the flicker of dim hope to keep him animated. His eyes were moist and rheumy and he had lost so much vitality that his lower eyelids drooped down so you could see their pink insides. His sagging jowls worked around as he sat in thought.

“I fear now for my son,” he said. “And secondarily for the company that bears our name.”

It seemed unlikely that any spy could overhear our conversation; I could barely make out the old man's reedy drone myself. I can't say why he unpacked his heart to me—I had seen very old men lose their dignity before. Whitcomb Lloyd—“Nit Whit,” as he was known privately to men like Hank Chew—was Jasper Lloyd's only son. He was the president of Lloyd Motors, a position secured not with his head for business but with the force of the company stock still held by the Lloyd family. As Jasper Lloyd explained to me, Whit had not shown an interest in the workings of industry. The younger Lloyd had enjoyed the family's sudden wealth, and had shown only that wealth could be enjoyed best when frittered away. Young Whit was a sportsman, a hunter and a climber, a skier, and in general an inveterate traveler, even during wartime, more apt to be found playing tennis in Palm Springs than in the boardroom of the company he was obligated to lead. He fancied himself, Lloyd explained, after the model of the intrepid British explorers of the previous century.

“He had lived all his days here in the Middle West,” said Lloyd. “Until I sent him abroad to be schooled as a gentleman. The grandchild of farmers.”

“I can't say what you ought to do about it,” I said.

“But you're here to help me, aren't you, Mr. Caudill?” He muttered this so softly that I wasn't sure I heard right.

“You're thinking of Frank Carter,” I said. “Or my father, maybe.” Because I regretted having called Hank Chew, I thought I had come only to ask Lloyd for help in looking into the death of Walker's sister. I had been vague with the guard at the gate. Now I wondered how it could be possible for the Old Man to have some other plan for me.

“You couldn't hope to be half the man Frank Carter was,” said Lloyd, stiffening his backbone and swaying in his chair. “Imagine it! Mr. Carter once commanded a force of over three thousand security men for me. He was instrumental in the formation of one of the greatest industrial concerns in the history of the human race. The cancer that came upon him—so suddenly—in the midst of such a grand enterprise. A man such as yourself, Mr. Caudill, you couldn't possibly see the whole of it. You couldn't honestly aspire to replace such a man.”

“I don't see
why
I'd aspire to be your toady, old man,” I said. “Why did you let me in here at all?”

“I left a standing order to have the men let you through to see me if you ever came,” he said. “I knew you'd return when the money ran out.”

If I had smacked him then, his brittle bones could not have held against it, and I would have killed a giant, the last of the old titans. I stood up and began to walk away from him.
Does he know about my father's money?
I wondered.
Is it possible that he can get into my safety box at the bank?
I didn't walk fast, but I had gone a good ten yards or more before he gulped in enough air to call after me.

“It's that witch Estelle Hardiman! She aims to ruin me!”

It was the only name he might have mentioned to stop me. It brought up a flash of anger in me, and I walked back so quickly that the old man involuntarily raised an arm to shield himself.

“She blames me for what happened to her husband. Of course she can't prove anything!”

“I'm glad she's after you and not me,” I said.

“But she's hell-bent—forgive me—on looking into things! I'm convinced that she's been pressing this investigation, this grand jury now. She's connected to everything here in the city, and she'll hound me to my grave.”

“Keep your voice down,” I said.

Lloyd had worked himself up enough to make sweat come out over his withered lip, seeping down to soak the neatly trimmed, silky whiskers.

“I'm finished. I'm finished. In itself this is fair enough. For my part in the whole sordid affair, for the aid we gave in the early days to those vile men—however little I knew of it—I must accept culpability.”

“So you'll spill your guts to the jury. Just tell them everything, then.”

His face puckered and his eyes could not keep from searching about the big pool room.

“It's not for me,” he insisted again. “My son … my grandchildren … the city, how it's grown…”

“So you'll just save the guilt for another day.”

He became more measured. “I'll settle my account before the Lord like any other man,” he said.

“As long as you can weasel out of the noose for the time being.”

“Surely, Mr. Caudill, you are aware that your own involvement is far more direct than mine will ever be shown to be.”

“So that's it.”

“I'm not threatening you. I've asked for your help. You have an exasperating way of goading me into discomfort! I'm too old for this nonsense! I'm certainly willing to cast you to the wolves in order to protect my own interests. The war, these Germans, the Japanese are insane! They'll fight to their very last man! The work mustn't be disrupted!”

“Settle down, will you? If you kick off now, they'll pin it on me.”

“Make light of death now, Mr. Caudill. Soon enough you'll confront your own mortality.”

“Not so soon as you, I think.”

Lloyd's chin drooped and his eyes traced a long crack in the floor tile before drifting out of focus. I watched him, but not too keenly. Maybe his old brain was dredging through some old memory, a time when horses snorted and pulled their carts through the dirt roads of Detroit, when he had been a young and hungry man.

“A young woman was killed and dumped inside the compound of one of our plants in Cleveland,” he said finally, pursing his mouth.

“That's a case for the Cleveland dicks, isn't it?”

“It would be, yes, certainly. They've been gracious enough to allow an investigation discreet enough to deflect attention from the company. But now there's been another murder—a woman in Indiana.”

“What am I supposed to do about any of that?”

“You see that it's all a part of a plan—a single murder, why, in a time of war, especially, a random act of violence might not prove so difficult to manage. But you see that they've crossed state lines, now. They've made it a federal case! That Hoover has been dogging me for years, and now, with war production so crucial—”

“Why would anyone think the two murders were related? Other than where they were found?”

He looked blankly at me. “The facts of the case.”

“You'll have to be more plain with me.”

“You haven't said whether you're interested in helping. For all I know,” he said, “you're out to get me, too. Certainly you've not expressed a great deal of concern for my predicament.”

I sat down and thought it over. Only a week earlier I had been all set up to go nowhere in my own time. It suited me. It wasn't a life to be proud of, but then I had never had that anyway. I couldn't blame Walker for dragging me in. He was only looking after his sister, naturally enough. I could have turned him away, as I had turned everyone else away. But now it looked like Lloyd had been ready to send his man James or some other drub out to drag me in anyway. I was bound to find myself muddied up in it, one way or another. I'd already made the promise to Walker, and my social calendar was empty of engagements.

Lloyd could see how I was going over it in my mind. “I expect you'll be asking for some cash now,” he piped.

“Sure,” I said, shrugging. “Throw me some dough, why don't you?”

CHAPTER 6

In the end I didn't take any money from him—just as well, considering. From the Old Man's secretary I got some papers and photos and a letter of passage with an embossed gold seal, which was supposed to get me into any of Lloyd's plants to have a look around. I had never put any faith in paper, but I took the packet anyway.

Evening came along before I could make my way back to my hole-in-the-wall. Since Ray Federle had more or less ruined my haven on the fire landing, I stayed in and spread out the papers from Lloyd on my little table. I guessed that Walker's sister had been found well inside the perimeter of the Lloyd plant in Ohio; it wasn't clear if the Lloyd security men in Cleveland had moved the body off the property to the swampy area outside the fence or if that was only a story for the papers. A few photos showed the area of the property where she had been found—what looked like a slag heap or a machinery dump toward the rear of the complex. There were no photos of the body, though, nothing showed blood, and I was glad for it. There wasn't much in the packet of papers I couldn't have scrounged for myself, and there wasn't anything that could make Lloyd look bad. It was just papers. Without an idea how it all went together, no one could use the packet to make any case against Lloyd. He didn't care anything about the women; he just wanted me to stop any more mess from happening.