Tony and Susan (15 page)

‘It’s hard,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s Turk.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Bobby Andes took him to dinner. He was elated. ‘Good man,’ he said. ‘We got him now.’

Exhilarated. He coughed and coughed. ‘We’re going to charge him with murder.’

‘You got enough evidence?’

‘We got you, and we got fingerprints. We’re going to check hair samples.’

He ran over the case. ‘This Lou, it’s his prints on the trailer and the car. That’s why I wanted you to look at him.’

‘Then he did go back to the trailer after leaving me.’

‘Looks like it. Probably he went back and told them where he left you, and that’s why they went back with the bodies.’

‘To get me.’

‘I’m betting your friend Ray was the third in our holdup.’

‘The guy who escaped running?’

‘The description fits.’

‘What happens next?’

‘We’ll work up the case against Lou. You’ll have to come back, you prepared for that? Meanwhile, I’m gonna find Ray.’

Tony Hastings returned home the next morning with shaky joy, the face of Lou, which he thought he wanted to spit in, looking at him with frightened eyes.

Looks like we’re going to chase crooks, Susan says, with Part Three to mark the point. We’ve killed Turk, caught Lou, and are after Ray. Good. The crime hangs over this story like a poisonous cloud. It needs to be washed away, which can’t be done, Susan believes, without going after the perpetrators. Lou’s discomfiture just makes plainer the need to get Ray.

Yet something odd is happening. That facetious police lineup. Tony’s identification of Turk in the morgue. What’s Edward doing with these hints of sleaze? Complicating the simple division between bad Ray and innocent Tony? It makes her queasy, wondering if she can keep her balance as she follows.

She’s queasy too about Tony’s little tribute to wife and child, more mannered than usual with its compressed phrases and sparse oddly chosen details. The quease slides into Arnold. She wonders, if he praised her like that, what odd detail would he elevate? As for Edward, she remembers the rowboat in the harbor when he was depressed. He said, I’ll descend into oblivion. No one will ever know what I saw or thought. She said,
I’m
in oblivion now. No one knows my visions and thoughts, either. He said, You’re not a writer. It doesn’t mean as much to you.

He told Francesca Hooton at lunch: ‘We got two of them. I identified one and they killed the other.’

She said, ‘You’re glad?’

‘Damn right.’

‘They killed one. You’re glad of that?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you want them to do with the one they caught?’

‘Lou? I want to see justice done.’

‘What would that be in this case?’

Tony Hastings was not prepared for the question.

‘Death? Should he get the death penalty?’

It occurred to him this was a political question. He had always avoided political discussions with Francesca because of her crazy right wing slant. He said, ‘Lou’s not the important one. The bad one is still at large.’

‘Should
he
get the death penalty?’

He thought if Francesca knew his mind, she might think they had killed the principle in him that opposed the death penalty. He admitted, ‘I don’t know what punishment I want.’

She said, ‘You do want them to suffer, don’t you?’

The idea made him bite his lip the way he used to as a child. He said, ‘I’d like them to have what they did to me.’

‘Their wives and daughters killed.’

‘No, I don’t want that.’

‘They themselves should be killed.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Like Turk. Are you satisfied how Turk was killed?’

‘Turk wasn’t important. He went along with Ray.’

‘You’re not answering my question.’

‘I don’t know. He was killed in a holdup.’

‘So he got what he deserved and you are satisfied.’

‘Maybe not. It wasn’t a punishment. He didn’t know what he was being punished for.’

‘You’d like him to know?’

‘I’d like them to know what they did. I’d like them to be shown exactly what it was they did.’

‘They know what they did, Tony.’

‘They don’t know what it means.’

‘Maybe they do. They just don’t care.’

‘I’d like to make them care.’

‘Repent? Say how sorry they are?’

‘I’d like them to know exactly how awful a thing they did.’

‘Tony, is that possible?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Is it even what you want? Say Ray did learn that. He’d be a different person. Shouldn’t he then go free?’

‘He mustn’t go free.’

‘He knows he hurt you, Tony. Count on it, he knows.’

‘I’d like to hurt him back.’

‘Hurt him. But not kill him?’

‘Kill him too. Both.’

‘Both? It’s not enough for him just to suffer?’

‘I’d like him to suffer the agony of dying.’

‘Ah. Torture?’

‘I would like him to know he is dying and I’d like him to know why. That’s what I mean by agony.’

‘Would you like to kill Ray yourself?’

‘I’d like him to know he is dying because of me.’

‘Aha.’ She smacked her fist into her hand. ‘You
don’t
want him to understand how bad he was. You don’t give a damn about that. You want him to know he can’t hurt you like that and get away with it. Because of who you are.’

‘He can’t do that to me and get away with it.’

‘Now you’re talking.’

Her gold-edged hair hung down one side of her face as she leaned on her hand, her eyes eager and beautiful on his behalf.

‘I remember Helen lecturing Laura and me what a primitive emotion revenge is. We made a fine distinction between revenge and justice, and I remember how civilized we thought we were.’

‘You were civilized. It’s Ray who’s not.’

‘That puts a burden on me,’ he said.

‘It does if you think it does.’

The latest call came to his office. Louise Germane was there, she had just come in, he wondered what she wanted. He knew the voice: ‘Andes here, can you pay us another visit?’ He never did find out what Louise had wanted.

This was June, and Tony Hastings was free to travel, his third trip back. He drove his car, taking all day. The next day he sat with Bobby Andes in the top row of bleachers on the first base side, sandlot baseball on Sunday afternoon. The home team’s white uniforms had CHEVROLET on their shirts, the visitors in gray wore the name of Poleville, a town fifteen miles up the valley. The outfield stretched to a row of houses beyond a wire fence. Above them was a bluff with trees, and the valley spread in a broad plain on both sides. Cars on the highway watched on the third base side, and when someone got a hit the horns blew.

Wearing a hat and dark glasses, Bobby Andes dropped cigarettes through the boards to the dead grass while the sun glared on his haggard face. The wind was blowing. A dark rain cloud with black undersides lurked over the two round hills across the valley. The sun shone around the black undersides.

They were watching home player number 19, who was sitting on the bench below them, not playing. Tony could see only the back of his uniform from time to time between the heads of fans in the first row. Number 19 was jiggling, fidgety. He was yelling out to the field. Once he turned and grinned
up into the bleachers. Not close enough to recognize, his tanned face in the sun with tiny white fisheyes. His name was Ray Marcus, and someone had named him a frequent companion of Lou Bates and Steve Adams. The lieutenant was sure he was Tony’s Ray because of the description. The possibility gave Tony chills in the sun.

With no one sitting near, Bobby Andes told Tony about it while the game dragged on. How he got the tip from the guys at Herman’s, after questioning Lou and getting nowhere. Herman’s, a bar in Topping, thirty miles up the valley from Grant Center. This Lou is a dumb ox, with one strategy: keep your mouth shut. Excellent detective work revealed that Lou came from California with Steve Adams, but nothing would make him tell who the other guy was in the Bear Valley holdup. As for your case, it couldn’t have been him because he was in California.

Bobby Andes told about Lou’s wife in California who hadn’t seen him in a year and a half with good riddance. That was fine detective work too, finding her, though it provided no useful information. Meanwhile Lou was living in Topping with a Patricia Cutler, who was almost as dumb and stubborn as Lou although not quite. Her slightly higher intelligence led her into revealing things Lou’s rocky stupidity kept hid, like the helpful admission they were
not
in California last year. And when Bobby Andes told her she wasn’t a wife and therefore not protected from giving testimony, she did remember a jerk they went around with, real creep, but not his name nor what he looked like, for he never came around and she never saw him. Which might be true, for he seems to have had his own life separate from theirs.

According to Andes, that didn’t matter, because he had what he needed. A good detective knows his people. Lou and
Turk were known in the village, though no one cared to have known them well. They were remembered at Herman’s, with gossip, including a rumor about a place in the woods for pickup women which Patricia Cutler did not know about. Which Bobby Andes detective figured was probably your murder trailer before it got notorious.

As for this Ray, first there was a source at Herman’s who remembered seeing a third guy with them, and then others remembered. With the folks at Herman’s cooperating (because the people around here are peaceful and respect the police and regard these guys as foreigners bringing evil from outside), someone finally showed up who knew your guy’s name, which is Ray Marcus from Hacksport, and here we are. Which for Lieutenant Andes pretty well closes the search, even before you take a look at him. Even the god damn name. He told about poking around Hacksport, where Ray Marcus was well known. Work as an odd job man, now in the tool factory, formerly and more usually a miscellaneous assistant, sometimes to the electrician, sometimes the plumber, with a short record of minor offenses. Breaking and entering, assault, a fight in a bar. One rape charge, which the woman dropped the case. And nobody wanting to admit being his friend.

Bobby Andes told how he took a peek at Ray in the factory. Not a bad match to both your description and the guy in the holdup. No fingerprints, but we knew that before.

‘I wonder why there weren’t any fingerprints,’ Tony said.

‘His hands were probably on your wife. Hell man, we’re lucky to have the ones we do.’ He said, ‘Does he look familiar?’

‘I’ll need a closer look.’

‘Plenty of time.’

Bobby Andes full of details. He said, ‘I assume in the used car case this Ray was not involved. This Lou, maybe.’

‘Used car case?’

‘Ajax. Where you couldn’t recognize Turk. Though you recognized him dead easily enough.’

‘I was nervous. He looked different.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’m thinking your Lou might have been the guy who got away in Ajax. The black beard. I’m thinking this Lou and Turk decided to travel a bit and that’s what they got into. More bad company. Why do you suppose they came back here? Because of Patricia or because of Ray? It looks to me like Ray has been here all along.’

Tony calculated. This was thirty miles from Bobby’s office. It was fifteen miles from the place in the woods where they had taken him. Predators travel far in the night.

A gust of wind came up, blowing dust from the infield across the pitchers’ mound and to the benches, stopping the game so the players could wipe their eyes. The shower on the two round hills had disappeared beyond the ridge. Overhead the bright clear sky, and more dark clouds over the other ridge.

In the seventh inning Marcus, number 19, entered the game, out in right field. Someone shouted at him, he grinned back, he did a dance step. He moved his hips in a hula, his face dark and tiny under the beak of his cap.

A ball came his way, he was lazy getting to it, the batter took second. Someone booed. He held up his middle finger, the boos were louder. He caught an easy fly, someone exaggerated a cheer. In the bottom of the ninth he waited in the batter’s circle for his turn to bat. ‘Let’s go down to the backstop and get a closer look,’ Bobby Andes said.

They worked through the small crowd to a place behind the backstop. Watched number 19 as he wiggled his legs, kicked and dug at the dirt, swung his bat and pointed it at the pitcher. His teeth and his eyes, tiny spots of white in his ruddy face.

The right type, you could say that. He took a ball and three strikes, not swinging at anything, and with each call said something to the umpire. Tony Hastings tried to see his expression. The man went back to the bench, shouting to someone in the bleachers. He stood for a moment with his bat in his hand. His words broke through a sudden silence. ‘Fuck you, asshole.’

From behind the backstop, Tony Hastings watched him in profile as he sat on the bench and took a swig of water with a dipper from the bucket. He took off his cap and ran his arm over his head. The high forehead, the bare front half of his head.

‘Looks like him,’ Tony said.

‘You sure?’

‘I’d like a better look.’

‘Wait.’

The game ended, the crowd loosened and spread out, fans merged with the players and began to disperse. Tony Hastings followed Bobby Andes into the cluster around the Chevrolet team. Bobby Andes had a baseball. He went up to the Chevrolet pitcher.

‘Mr. Kazminski, would you mind autographing this here ball for my son?’

Kazminski, tall, young, surprised, laughed and said, ‘Why shore, I’d be glad to.’ Tony Hastings looked at Ray nearby. He was standing alone, looking out vaguely at the road, his glove hanging at his side, his cap in his hand. He was chewing, his adams apple went up and down. He looked as if he didn’t know what to do. He stood there a long time, Tony looking at him. He turned around. Tony saw directly into his face, their eyes met for a flash, a shock for Tony, but Ray remembered nothing. He looked at the cluster around Kazminski, spat on the ground, and turned away. He walked slowly toward the road by himself.

‘Well?’

‘That’s him,’ Tony Hastings said.