The Last Coin (7 page)

“
I
didn’t say anything about coins on his eyes; you did. I don’t believe it’s that at all. It’s payment, is what I think. Somebody’s dead, and somebody else has killed him. The coins are payment for services rendered. Payment for a long series of betrayals.”

“Comes cheap, doesn’t he?” said Andrew, referring to Pennyman, or whoever it was.

“We haven’t seen the coins, have we?”

“Why did They do it?”

“I don’t think They did. I think
one
of Them did, working at cross purposes to the others. There’s something in those coins …”

Andrew tried to study
Grossman’s Guide
again; all of a sudden
Grossman’s
talk about appropriate gins and bitters had begun to sound wholesome and comfortable. When it got around to particulars, this talk about conspiracies gave him the willies. Something was pending. He’d felt it last night when he was in the tree. He wasn’t sure he was ready for it. Pickett and his mysteries! The truth of it was that if you didn’t go looking for them you’d never see them. Let well enough alone; that was what Rose would advise. And it would be good advice, too. “Why do you suppose he recommends stainless steel fruit knives?”

“Who? Pennyman?”

“No, Grossman. What’s wrong with a carbon steel knife? It holds an edge better.”

“Turns the fruit dark. Stainless steel doesn’t. It’s chemistry is what it is. I can’t explain it better than that. A
glass
knife is what I’d advise. That’s what they use somewhere.”

“They?”
asked Andrew, picturing Pennyman stepping out of the fog with a glass knife in one hand and a frightful looking fish in the other.

“No, not
Them
. I forget where. Hotel in Singapore, I think.”

Andrew nodded, relieved. “How about one of those Ginzu knives? I saw them on television. Apparently you can beat them with hammers if you want to.”

Pickett gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you want to do that?”

“I don’t have any idea,” said Andrew, shaking his head. “Just on general principles, I should think. I’ll stick to
Grossman
here, though. Distrust anything modern, that’s my motto. Stainless steel fruit knives it is—three of them.”

His list looked pretty healthy, all in all, but it would cost him a fortune to buy the whole lot of it. He couldn’t bear the idea of a half-equipped bar, though. He was an all-or-nothing man at heart. “The Balzac book,” he said to Pickett, “have you read it?”

“Years ago.”

“What was the old man’s name? Ferragus. That was it. Remember? ‘A whole drama lay in the droop of the withered eyelids.’ Fancy such a thing as ‘withered eyelids.’ I love the notion of all that sort of thing—of the Thirteen, the
Devorants.
”

“You’ll love it a lot less when they come in through the door.”

“So you think this is Them, then?”

“No,” said Pickett. “This is not the same crowd. That was the wrong Them. This isn’t the Thirteen nor ever has been. This isn’t a fiction. Mr. Pennyman is who it is, and I’m telling you that you’d better be careful of him.”

“But is there thirteen of Them, of our Them?”

“How on earth do
I
know? There might be ten; there might be a dozen.”

“A baker’s dozen, for my money. That’s what we’ll call the inn.”

“What, The Baker’s Dozen?”

“Sounds foody enough, doesn’t it? And with all this Thirteen business, it seems to fit. It’ll be our joke.”

“Sounds cheap to me. Like a chain restaurant, a coffee shop.”

“Then we’ll call it The Thirteen. Just like that. And it’ll work, too. That’s our address, isn’t it? Number 13 Edith Circle. Destiny shoves its oar in again. That’s just the sort of thing that appeals to me—the mysterious double meaning. To the common man it’s merely an address; to the man who squints into the fog, though, it signifies. You like that notion, too. Admit it. The number is full of portent.”

Pickett shrugged. “It has a ring,” he said. “But …”

“But nothing,” said Andrew. “It has an inevitability, is what it has.” He looked up at Pickett suddenly and then stepped across to peer through the half-open door that led down the hallway to the kitchen. Apparently satisfied, he said in a whisper, “Speaking of poisons and conspiracies, what’s the name of your man at Rodent Control? The guy you interviewed for the newspaper?”

“Biff Chateau.”

“That’s the one. Fancy my having forgotten a name like that. What’s he got in the way of poisons?”

“Mostly anticoagulants.”

“Work quick, do they? Feed a ‘possum a dose of one of them and—what?—he’s dead in an hour?”

Pickett shook his head. “I don’t think so. Most of them are cumulative. Rat nibbles a little bit on Monday, Snacks on it on Tuesday, still feels in top form on Thursday. A week later, though, he’s under the weather. Then, as I understand it, all his blood turns to vapor or something and just leaks out through every available pore. Grisly sort of thing, but effective.”

“Do they ever murder a dog by mistake?”

“In fact, yes. It’s rare, though. A dog has to eat a heap of the stuff. They could kill an elephant with it, I suppose, if they took the time to do it right.”

Andrew nodded and stroked his chin. “Can this man Chateau get me a dead ‘possum?”

“More than one, I should think. They’re always turning up dead in someone’s backyard and being taken for enormous rats. They probably have a half dozen in the dumpster right now.”

“I only need one,” said Andrew. He stepped across to the window and looked out, as if he were suddenly in a hurry. The street was in shadow, since the sun was behind the house, but the rooftops blazed with sunlight, and Pacific Coast Highway, a block away, was thronged with barefoot beach-goers, taking advantage of the hot spring weather. Andrew peered back down the hallway, listening.

A vacuum cleaner rumbled somewhere on the second floor. Rose was working away. God bless her, thought Andrew, as he and Pickett slipped out through the back door and headed toward Andrew’s Metropolitan, parked at the curb. Knowing that Rose was at work wrestling the bungalow into submission was like knowing there was coffee brewing in the morning. It gave a man hope. It made things solid.

There were days when it seemed to him that the walls and the floor and the chairs he sat on were becoming transparent, were about to wink out of existence like snuffed candle flames, leaving only a smoky shadow lingering in the air. But then there was Rose, looming into view with a dust rag or a hammer or a pair of hedge clippers, and the chairs and walls and floors precipitated out of the air again and smiled at him. He’d be a jellyfish without her, a ghost. He knew that and reminded himself of it daily.

So what if she was short-sighted when it came to beer scrapers or imported breakfast cereals or just the right bottle of gin or scotch? She had
him
, didn’t she? He had a genius for those sorts of things. She didn’t have to bother with them.

The Metropolitan grumbled away toward the highway, blowing out a plume of dark exhaust. If he was lucky, Rose wouldn’t have heard them go, and he could slip back in later, undetected. Pickett would want to stop at Leisure World and look in on old Uncle Arthur, but there wouldn’t be any time for that. This was business. He’d have to settle the score with Aunt Naomi that afternoon, or there’d be trouble.

Good old Aunt Naomi. In the light of day—when she wasn’t snoring, when her cats were out stalking across the rooftops—it was easy to take the long view. The idea of Rose pulling things together made it even easier. Sometimes. In truth, sometimes it just made it easier to feel guilty. He sighed, unable to keep it all straight. Well,
he’d
look to the delicate work. It was the best he could do. No one could ask more of him than that. What had his father said on the subject? If it was easy, his father had been fond of saying, they would have gotten somebody else to do it. Or something like that. It seemed to apply here, in some nebulous way that didn’t bear scrupulous study. He realized suddenly that Pickett was talking—asking him something.

“What? Sorry.”

“I said, what do you want with poison?”

Andrew stayed up late that night reading in the library. Mrs. Gummidge and Aunt Naomi played Scrabble upstairs until nearly eleven; then they went to bed. Rose had been asleep for hours. Pennyman had turned in at ten. By midnight the house was quiet and dark; only the pole lamp in the library burned. Andrew felt like a conspirator, but in fact he wasn’t conspiring with anyone. This was
his
plot, from end to end. He hadn’t even discussed it with Pickett, although his friend had agreed to come round early in the morning, pretending to be on his way to the pier to fish. At six A.M., Andrew thought, smiling, the tale would be told.

He waited for the stroke of midnight, just for the romance of it. Then, feeling as if his chest were empty, he tiptoed up the attic stairs carrying the dead ‘possum in a bag. It was starting to ripen, having been found yesterday in Garden Grove, already dead and torn up by something—cats, probably. That would be a stroke of luck if he played his cards right. It was dark on the stairs, but he couldn’t use even a flashlight. Being discovered now would mean … He couldn’t say. They’d take him away. Men in lab coats would ask him deceptive questions. They’d whirl his brain in a centrifuge and come to conclusions.

He let himself into the little, gabled cubbyhole, so that he could climb out the window onto the roof. The ladder had been a wash-out the night before; he wouldn’t chance it again. He could see the shadow of Pickett’s telescope in front of the casement. Slowly, carefully, he hauled it aside, eased open the window, and stepped out. Thank goodness there wasn’t much of a slope. He pulled the bag out after him, left it lying on the roof, and edged down the asphalt shingles toward where the pole lay tilted against the house, hidden by the foliage of the camphor tree. There it was.

He pulled it up through the leaves, scraping it over a limb, and then set it on the roof with the noose in front of him. The moon wouldn’t be up for an hour yet; last night he had learned that much, anyway. The ‘possum cooperated admirably. Dead ‘possums tell no tales, he thought, grinning. He tightened the noose around its neck, and, towing the pole behind him, crept toward Aunt Naomi’s window.

It was closed. Of course it would be. She wouldn’t want any more marauders. Last night had been enough to put the fear into her. Andrew slipped a hand into his back pocket and pulled out a long-bladed spatula, then shoved it through the gap between the two halves of the ill-fitting casement windows. It was the work of an instant to flip up the latch. In the hot, still night there wouldn’t even be a breeze to disturb the sleeping Aunt Naomi.

If there was trouble, if she awoke again, he could just let the ’possum lie and drop the pole back down into the tree. He’d go across the roof and climb down onto the carport, and from there onto the top of his pickup truck. The library window was wide open, and there was a pile of bricks outside it. He’d be reading in his chair inside of two minutes, and all they’d find on the roof would be a dead ’possum. He had thought it through that afternoon—studied it from the street. It was as if Providence had come round to set it up: the bricks, the ’possum, the pole already lying beneath the tree; all of it had been handed to him with a ribbon tied around it. But if his luck held, he wouldn’t need to use the escape route. It would be a neater job all the way around if he could plant the ’possum in Aunt Naomi’s bedroom and let her find it in the morning.

Nothing stirred inside. Aunt Naomi snored grotesquely; the cats slept through it. He slid the pole in through the window, barely breathing. Dropping the ’possum onto her bed would lead to spectacular results, except that she’d probably wake up on the instant and shriek. Near the door—that would be good enough—as if the beast were trying to escape, but hadn’t made it. He positioned the pole just so, paused to breathe, then played out the line. Immediately it went slack; the ’possum whumped to the floor, and Andrew hauled the pole out into the night.

He pulled the casement shut and slid along on his rear end toward the tree, dropping the pole down through the leaves so that it rested on the same branch that it had been tilting against all day. Crouching, listening, he counted to sixty. The snoring continued, uninterrupted. She hadn’t even stirred.

He crept back to the casement, pulled out his spatula again, and pushed the latch back into place, neat as you please. In a moment he was back in at the window, shifting Pickett’s telescope, shoving the ’possum bag in behind the foil-backed insulation stapled into the unplastered studs. He tiptoed back down the narrow stairs, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, and opened a beer to celebrate. It was 12:13 by the clock, and he’d already accomplished a night’s work.

Far too full of anxious energy and anticipation to sleep, he lay down on the couch with the idea of reading a book, and in a half hour got up to pour himself another glass of beer. He read some more, half-heartedly, his mind wandering away from the book, until he found himself studying in his mind the complexities of coffee mugs. That led him on to silverware and to copper pots and pans and enormous colanders suitable for draining twenty pounds of fetuccini. He dreamed about extravagant chefs’ hats, about his wearing one, standing in front of an impossibly grand espresso machine that was a sort of orchestrated tangle of tubes and valves, reaching away to the ceiling.