The Railroad (41 page)

“Well organized,” I told Moskowitz. “I can see where your money went.”

He grunted. “Not just mine.”

“The people in town?”

“Some. Some from other towns. We don’t advertise.” A thin smile slid across his face.

“Who are they? Are they your friends?’
He paused. “I don’t know them all that well. But we understand each other.”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess I mean that you were right before.
The Book People
are real.”

He locked eyes with mine, dead serious. “I’m
Of Mice and
Men
,” I said quickly.

He nodded. “Okay. Thanks for answering me.”

I nodded back. I’d answered the question he’d asked me weeks ago in my living room.

“I guess I’ve been seeing
Book
People
all along on the way up here.”

“You have. You leave a trail like a tank. No one could miss you.”

“I…what can I say?”

Eileen leaned a little closer. “I didn’t think you’d try to find us. If I thought you would, I would have…I don’t know.”

“You thought I’d given up on you, didn’t you?”

“I left and you couldn’t help me. That would stop most people.”

“I knew you had to go. It’s just when I thought you were…there was the whole
Chapter and Verse
thing and I thought you might be in trouble.”

“Still. I didn’t expect it.” She smiled at me and at Megan. Maybe I’d done something right.

“You’ve become sort of legend, Mike,” another voice said. It was Felice Hammon. I thought of her mother and the thought depressed me.

“I’m not so sure I’ve done such a wonderful thing. I don’t think Steve is happy with me.”

She smiled. “Steve likes to worry. We’ll be fine. What you did was wonderful. We need a little inspiration sometimes. No one else seems to care what happens to us.”

A few of the others nodded. Elena stood up. “Mike the Knight. I’ve always known that about you.”

Eileen got out of her chair and kissed me on the cheek. “I think Mike and I need to talk in private,” Moskowitz announced.

Eileen reached for Megan who refused to budge. “I want to stay with Mike!” she bellowed.

Eileen gave her a sad smile. “I know honey. But it’s really important that Mike talk to Steve. You’ll get to spend some time with Mike again.”

“No! He’ll go away again.”

“Come on, Megan. It’ll just be a little while.”

Reluctantly, the little girl slid out of my lap and took her mother’s hand. The two of them joined the exodus out of the room. Megan gave me one backward glance before she left.

“Come on, Mike. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

I followed him into the other room, moving slowly to prevent another explosion in my head. There was another table there, this one much smaller than the monster in the big room. Moskowitz took two glasses off an aged shelf on the wall. Then he opened a cabinet and brought out a bottle which he placed in front of me.

“Glen Garioch,” I said, approvingly.

“I can’t get Laphroaig up here.” He poured two generous drams and took a sip out of his glass. It seemed like it was some kind of ritual, so I followed suit.

He took another sip and then looked at me with something that seemed like hate. “Fuck you, Mike.”

“What?”

“Do you have any idea what position you’ve put me in?”

I paused. “I’m beginning to realize.”

“I know you meant well but you’ve fucked everything up. I don’t know what to do now.” He slammed his drink down on the table.

“I’ll do anything I can. If I leave here no one will know where I’ve been.”

“It’s not that simple,” he groaned. He took another slug and seemed to take hold of himself. “Okay. Listen to me. We don’t have an awful lot of time. So I have to ask you what you plan to do.”

“Plan? What does that mean?”

“It means basically do you want to go back to your life in Manhattan now that you know that Eileen and Megan are safe?”

I hadn’t thought about it—things had happened so quickly. I thought of Dennis and Barbara and the City View and a hundred other things that made New York what it was to me. Then I thought of Megan, saying that she knew I might go away again. I thought of Dennis and Barbara not having me around. Then I thought of Megan, being brutally disappointed once again. And I thought of Eileen growing old and being lonely.

And I knew I wanted to be there to make sure that none of that happened. I wanted to be Megan’s father. I wanted to be Eileen’s husband. How could my life be better spent? Nothing else seemed to compare.

“No,” I said finally.

He studied my face. “Convince me you’re sure.”

“Moskowitz. After all this time and what I’ve been through, do you think I’d make an impulsive decision?”

“I don’t know. But I guess I’m going to have to gamble on you. That really makes me sick because…all this is at stake.”

“I know.”

He was silent for a full minute. Then he shook his head like he was trying to shake off some kind of insanity. “Okay. I’m going to have to take a chance, which I hate doing. That means you’re going to have to work with me. What you did has caused problems.”

“I know that. And if I’d known…”

His voice rose in intensity. “No time for guilt now. Do you trust me? Do you believe in what I’m doing here?”

“Steve! What’s wrong with you? After what I saw tonight do you think I don’t trust you?”

“I can’t read your mind. I need to know what you’re going to do when you leave here. Who you’re going to talk to and what you’re going to tell them. One thing goes wrong and all these people are fucked. Do you understand?”

I realized he was scared. All of this was on his shoulders and the responsibility had most likely been killing him for years. And now there was something threatening it.

“I trust you Steve. I admire you. I doubt this has ever been done in the history of the world.”

“That’s what you’re saying now. But I got the impression you were…wary of me back when I got you out of the police station in Targersville. That makes me wonder.”

“Of course you got that impression. I saw you take an envelope from Benoit at that party. I thought it was full of money. I know better now.”

His eyes widened. “Oh shit. Yeah, I bet you did. You thought that Benoit was paying me for some service?”

“I didn’t know what it was. But…it’s what it looked like.”

He was quiet for a moment. “What was in that envelope was a report that Benoit had gotten from a private detective. I guess ten pages folded up looks pretty hefty.”

He took another sip from his glass. “You were right: Benoit took that postcard from your house; the one with
4-5-1
written on it. He recognized Megan’s handwriting. He hired a detective who followed their trail just like you did. Only he was a professional. He didn’t find them. But he did find that the trail ended around here a few towns away; he couldn’t get any more information out of the folks in the towns around here than you did. But they acted suspicious. And that made him suspicious. That’s what he put in his report.”

He sighed and his eyes went away for a moment, thinking of something. “Benoit was trying to bait me. I’d given him so much trouble in the past that he enjoyed rubbing my nose in it. He told me that he was going to come up here himself with a couple of friends of his. He was calling me every night drunk to remind me of it. Of course he never said anything concrete on the phone, just a lot of innuendo. Then he told me that he’d be going up to Maine in the next couple of days. He loved being able to tell me that.”

He stopped talking suddenly and the silence seemed significant. After all of the shocks of the evening, I hadn’t really considered the significance of Benoit’s death. My mind went around in a few logical circles until it came to rest right back in the room I was in and the man who sat in front of me.

I remembered his pain when we’d met at the Chinese restaurant weeks ago. Something had been weighing on his mind. Perhaps it was something he knew he had to do, something that went against the most basic of his ethics.

I stared at him and his eyes seemed to mist up, just a little. I turned away.

“There are no
Chapter and Verse
Killers
,” I said softly. “Which means the people who’ve been chasing me since New York were…”

He smiled for a fleeting moment. “They were friends of mine. I thought we could scare you away. You turned out to be different than I thought.”

I sipped my drink and he sipped his. The weight of what we both knew made it a little hard to talk. Then he said, “You have to be sure. I’m putting everything in your hands. You decide you don’t want to deal with this and all these people….I can’t risk letting things get bad.”

“I understand. I think you know me well enough to know what I’ll do.”

He watched me for a few more seconds; I guess he was trying to be certain. “Do me a favor. Go ask everyone else to come in.”

I did as he asked. When I came back the two glasses had been refilled. I sat down in front of mine as Moskowitz’s flock filed in. He held up his glass and looked into the amber liquid.

“Mike, you have a drinking problem. No, wait. Let me finish. These things can get out of hand if you don’t get help. September 11th, leaving New York, losing your new family, all that has taken its toll. Now you’ve started your downward spiral. You’re not rational. You’ve just spent days and driven hundreds of miles looking for people who are gone and you really have no idea where they are. It’s something that crazy people do. It’s what people with delusions do. In the end you just had a psychotic break of some kind and you threatened some men in a bar with a pistol. One of the men had to subdue you. You’ll spend a night or two in the local jail until you’re released.

“Things don’t get better for you after that. In a few months you’ll start to fall apart completely. You’ll get paranoid. Maybe you’ll start going to the police and accusing people of being involved in the
Chapter and Verse
murders, just like you did with Benoit. You’ll avoid your friends in New York, telling them you just don’t care about them anymore and you eventually will move back to Bardstown. You’ll go on drinking. Then you’ll start going to the newspapers with your paranoid theories. You’ll make a nuisance of yourself and they won’t want to talk to you anymore.”

He took a sip. “Then things will get really bad. Because one night you’ll be watching the news and you’ll hear that Eileen’s car was found somewhere in Upstate New York with
4-5-1
written on the windshield in her blood. And you’ll know what that means.

“I think that you’ll become so irrational that you’ll start doing strange things like confronting people, accusing them of murder. It doesn’t matter who. You’ll go to the police and report all kinds of things. You’ll tell them you’ve found the
Chapter and Verse Killers
but you’ll be accusing people who have nothing to do with anything. Maybe the old man who runs the hardware store in Bardstown. Maybe a police detective. You’ll become violent, getting yourself arrested, maybe for disturbing the peace, maybe for something else. Who knows? You’ll continue to make noise about the
Chapter and Verse
Killers
. And eventually you’ll announce that you’re offering a $50,000 reward to anyone with information on the killers. And you’ll start making a show of driving around Westchester and Rockland looking for them. You’ll get a little press coverage from that probably.”

He smiled and for a second I could see that he was proud of himself and what he’d accomplished. “And then one day they’ll find your car on some road. You won’t be in it. And they'll find
4-5-1
written in your own blood on the windshield. Maybe it will be some friends of Robert Benoit’s who get you—you might have killed him after all and they want revenge. Maybe someone just doesn’t like you and the trouble you’ve caused. You’ll never be seen again.”

He drained his drink and looked first at me and then at Eileen and Megan. None of us said a word. He smiled. “Say good-bye to Mike. He’ll be leaving in a half an hour.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The two men in my cell in Gaston said very little to me. It was something in the way I found them staring at me occasionally that made me think that they might be
Book
People
.

I spent two nights in that jail. Then I was brought before a judge who seemed like he didn’t care that I was there. He told me I’d have to pay a fine before I left. In a few hours I had the money Dennis sent me and I was a free man. A policeman drove me back to my car which they’d put in a lot in Piedmont. It seemed that the trip was a little longer than it should have been, but I chalked it up to my having been drunk and raving when I’d driven up from Piedmont. It was when the man beside me coughed loudly that I realized what had happened. I looked out the window and saw a barn in the shape of
Noah’s
Ark
. My policeman friend stared out at the road, a faint smile on his face.

I had been euphoric the first night in jail. After that my mood settled into a soft glow that never seemed to leave me. I knew what I had to do and I was ready for it; certainty is a powerful healer.

The only part that bothered me was the effect it would have on Dennis. I’d be going off again, acting worse than I had before, and sooner or later I’d be gone. It would hurt him badly.

I played it well, acting irrationally and making a show of drinking heavily. In reality I paced myself and managed to spill a decent amount on my clothes. I found it was easy enough to act drunk and stink of booze; it gave me the effect I was after.

It was two weeks before things got so tense between Dennis, Barbara and I, that I decided it was a good time to leave. I did my best not to have a fight with Dennis; I was simply gruff and unresponsive as I packed my stuff and left.

In the weeks that followed, I did everything that Steve had told me to do. I boozed almost every night but in several bars; that gave me maximum exposure and let me pace my drinking so I wouldn’t have to drink too much. I made regular visits to see Wills, spouting increasingly paranoid theories. Eventually, he came to see me as a drunk and a man

on the edge of a breakdown. There came a time when I was barred from the station, entirely.

I hounded the local papers. At first they listened to me, remembering Samuel and the ongoing investigation into the
Chapter and Verse
murders; that netted me two news stories with my name prominently displayed. But after a while they figured out I had nothing to offer and they stopped taking my calls.

I watched the news every night and there came the day when the police found Eileen’s car in a small town in Upstate New York.
4-5-1
had been written in her blood on the windshield.

And then, for all intents and purposes, I went insane. I’d go to bars and drink quietly for hours until something in me would apparently snap. At that point I’d stand up and begin screaming, throwing my drink and anything else that was handy, screaming at other patrons, tossing barstools. I got myself arrested at least once a week and eventually was banned from all the bars in the area.

After a while, I could be found loitering outside of police stations, newspapers and public officials' offices, always drunk and raving. All the police in Westchester and Rockland counties knew me by sight and would do their best to get me to go home the second they saw me; I got a couple of arrests out of that gambit.

Finally I staged Steve’s coup; I stood in front of the court building in Targersville and told the people who passed by that I was offering $50,000 for any information on the
Chapter and Verse
Killers
; I even carried a homemade sign. A stringer at the court picked it up and a couple of the newspapers found it newsworthy, despite my reputation. I even bought some time on a local cable station each week to spread the news about my quest.

I became a walking joke; people actually recognized me in the streets and laughed at me. And all that time I carried with me the knowledge that up north, Eileen and Megan were alive and safe. And that someday I’d be with them.

It was lonely and sometimes I wondered if Steve would just forget me in the chaos of his double life and leave me to my lonely existence.