BOBBY PEEKED OVER the hedge and saw the Byrne boy get out of the car.
He could pop the little bastard now, one pump, one shot, and he’d be free to take care of the two Truscotts inside. Ram the shotgun up their throats and fire away and away and away, spattering their flesh and blood on the walls and columns until it was only the spatters that were getting ecstatically spattered. His breath quickened as he imagined it.
But taking out the Byrne boy now would be sloppy. They might hear the gunfire from outside and call the police. They might hide the money before he made his grand entrance. Even as Bobby lay in the mud, his clothes stained with rotted vegetables and his hair stinking of garbage, even as the flies buzzed around him as if he were a pile of feces, he prided himself on not being sloppy.
But wait a second, there was someone else in the car. How could he have missed it at first? Because the second man had been ducking down to avoid the camera at the gate, that’s how. Bobby watched as Byrne leaned toward the car window, reached in, and pulled out something. A file. The file. So this was the other man, the accomplice. And what was the accomplice putting on now? Earmuffs? No, headphones.
Which meant that Byrne would be wearing a wire. How delicious was
that? A wire. The only disappointment was that Bobby hadn’t thought of it first. The whole enterprise would be recorded for posterity.
The Byrne boy straightened up with the file in his hand, hesitated for a moment before heading for the front door of the mansion. Bobby would wait until he got inside, then scuttle over to the car and kill the accomplice. He’d do it quietly, silent as a ninja, just a quick slice of the neck so as not to alert the primary players inside. When Byrne entered the house and closed the door behind him, Bobby rose to his knees, opened the bag, pulled out a knife the size of a squirrel’s tail, a knife still stained with Malcolm’s blood. With blade in hand, he slithered through an opening between two of the boxwood plants and crawled toward the car.
Halfway there he stopped and stared. It was the man in the car, there was something familiar about him. Round face, a mop of gray hair, something knowing in the tilt of the head. At the house, before the fire, Bobby had seen only the outline of the figure, and yet even that had seemed familiar. But now he knew he had seen this face before. Where? Where?
When the answer came to him, his body tensed with such excitement that he almost stabbed his own chest with the knife.
It was impossible. He was dead. Robert had even gone to his funeral. But Robert hadn’t killed him, he knew that, despite what he had led his aunt to believe, so the impossible was indeed a possibility. And in its own perverse way, it made so much sense. How else could the boy have gotten his hands on the file? How else could the boy have known exactly what to do with it? Because he had been guided all the time by the venal hand of his father.
Liam Byrne had known he was targeted after the O’Malley girl drowned and his car was run off the road. He must have taken the half million paid out by the senator, faked his death, and run away with the cash. Amazing. And for his long run to end at Bobby’s hand fourteen years after he had first escaped Robert’s grasp . . . well, the irony was too perfect to ignore.
With renewed purpose Bobby crawled closer to the car. He would come around to the passenger side, rise onto his haunches, jerk open the door, and grab the old bastard by his forehead with one hand as he slid the knife across the neck with the other. It was so simple, so tasty.
He looked up again, could see the old man’s head through the windshield, his eyes closed as he tapped one of the headphones, trying to hear. He was the one listening, the one charged with making the tape. Bobby could just imagine it all as it imprinted itself on the magnetic ribbon. Her sweet and deceitful mewings, the senator’s fraudulent oratory, the Byrne boy’s demands for money, the whole story of the rape and its cover-up spilled to the waiting tape. And then Bobby Spangler arriving heroically to punish all for their sins, to save a grateful nation, to raise again the banner of the Spanglers. The tape would be played nationwide, all day long, over and over again on cable television. Even as he ran off with the money, first to wreak havoc on the Truscotts and then maybe to Mexico, maybe to Peru, his legend would rise.
But if he killed Liam Byrne now, who would take care of the tape? If he killed Liam Byrne, who would make sure the truth was known? And wouldn’t the pain he inflicted be all the sweeter if Liam Byrne were forced to hear the death of his son through the headphones?
Bobby took a deep breath and then backed away, backed away, slithered through the grass and back between the boxwoods, where his black bag awaited.
THE HOUSE KYLE BYRNE found himself inside smelled ancient, dank, and strangely like licorice. There were no lights burning in the hall, but a sliver of light slipped out around a door frame back through the house to the right, so he made his way toward it. He banged a knee into some hunchbacked piece of furniture placed smack in the middle of the hall, felt his way around the piece, and kept going.
When he reached the wide door, he heard the low hum of conversation coming from the other side. There was no handle, but he placed his hand into the gap and slid the door open.
“Ah, there you are,” said an old woman in a voice Kyle recognized. She was sitting regally on a high-backed chair, her bony body twisted and shivery, arms and neck jerking hither and yon as she sat there. She looked vaguely familiar, with her tall gray hair and twitching limbs, and he stared a bit before realizing he’d seen her before, sitting next to the widow at Laszlo Toth’s funeral.
“No need to be shy,” she said. “Come in, come in. We’ve been discussing you. Would you like a drink?”
“Not really,” said Kyle. “I only drink with friends, or at least with people who haven’t been trying to kill me.”
“Oh, you must be exaggerating, Mr. Byrne. Why would anyone want to kill you? Now, your father always loved a stiff drink. I admired that in him. But come in, come in, dear, and let us get our business out of the way.”
The room was a large parlor, with blue walls, twin crystal chandeliers, fancy French furnishings perched on dark, delicate legs. There were grand landscape paintings on the walls, thick rugs on the floors, vases the size of ponies. In its day that room had been quite the fancy place, but its day was not this day. The paintings were browned with grime and age, the rugs in some spots were worn through. And the smell of licorice was overpowering.
When he stepped into the room, he looked to his left and then did a double take. Standing by a fireplace, his arm on the mantel, was Francis Truscott IV. Above the senator was a painting of a blustery man in hunting clothes and with a bully’s lip leaning on that very same mantel.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Senator,” said Kyle. “I thought you would be on your knees in front of a pack of fat cats, working for your money.”
“I ducked out of the fund-raiser,” said Senator Truscott. “Our discussion raised a number of questions that I needed to ask my mother.”
“Did you get your answers?”
“Yes.”
Kyle looked back at the old woman. The phone call had convinced him that the murder of Colleen O’Malley, the attempted murder of his father, the murder of Laszlo Toth, all of it had been at her insistence. “I wouldn’t rely too much on what she told you, if I were you.”
“Is that it?” she snapped. “Is that the O’Malley file?”
“This is it,” said Kyle. “The whole caboodle.”
“A ny copies?”
“Not that I made.”
“How about your . . . accomplice?”
“Accompl ice?”
“The man you were with. Your partner in crime. Oh, one needn’t be a genius to know you’ve not been alone. It would take more than the likes of you to get this far.”
“There are no copies,” said Kyle.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll trust you, because you are young and I am idealistic. But be forewarned, Mr. Byrne, you’d be wise not to trifle with me.”
“No chance of that,” said Kyle with a wink. Then he turned from her and walked over to the senator. “I thought you weren’t buying.”
“I’m not,” said Truscott.
“But she is. Isn’t it the same thing?”
“I don’t have control over what she does.”
“But she apparently has control over you.”
“Don’t be impertinent,” said the woman, interjecting herself forcefully into the conversation. “He is a United States senator, and I am nothing but an old lady.”
“Don’t sell yourself short for my benefit,” said Kyle, still looking at the senator, whose chiseled face turned even more stony under Kyle’s gaze. “You might be as old as dust, but you’re no lady.”
“Feisty for a messenger boy, aren’t you?”
“This is all her doing,” said the senator. “I didn’t even know about it until you showed up. But I admit I’ve had second thoughts since we spoke. I believe I can do more good in the Senate than out on the street.”
“Oh, I get it,” said Kyle. “You wouldn’t want to deprive the republic of your irreplaceable value. Your patriotism warms my heart.”
“I simply began to see that maybe it is not the worst thing for everyone if the file disappears once and for all.”
“She’s persuasive, isn’t she? I suppose she keeps your balls quite safe in her pocketbook.”
“That’s enough,” she hissed from her side of the room.
Kyle turned his head toward her. “What, now you’re going to tell me you don’t like feisty?”
“Let’s get this done and you on your pathetic way.”
“Fine by me,” said Kyle. “But I must say, I’m disappointed in you, Senator. You impressed the hell out of me this afternoon. I thought I had actually met a politician with sincerity, but I suppose that’s like a vampire with sincerity—does it really matter if he sincerely wants to suck your blood?”
“I meant what I said this afternoon.”
“That means you were against buying the file before you were for it. Those questions you had for your mother. Were they about what happened to Colleen O’Malley?”
“My mother assured me that she wasn’t involved.”
“How about Laszlo Toth? What did she say about him?”
“My mother is not a murderer.”
“She didn’t pull the trigger, if that’s what you mean. I guess she’s in no condition to do her own wet work. But I’ve watched enough TV to know that you don’t have to pull the trigger to be guilty of murder.”
“Can we end these mad ravings and make our deal?” said Mrs. Truscott. “And then, dear, I have a psychiatrist I can recommend. He is quite fashionable—all the best loons see him.”
“What are you getting at, Byrne?” said the senator.
“You know a Spangler?”
“Spangler?” He looked at his mother. “What about it?”
“There’s a Spangler wanted in the killing of Laszlo Toth. And I’d bet he was involved in Colleen O’Malley’s strange drowning death, too. And the funny thing is, if you look in this file, the lawyer opposing my father, the one representing your interests in the O’Malley matter, was a Spangler, too. Want to look?”
“What’s he talking about?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“Mother?”
“I have no idea what this maniac is talking about.”
“Well, there you go, Senator. Another mystery for you to solve, or to sweep under the family carpet, though I imagine it’s getting pretty lumpy by now. Here’s another lump.”
Kyle spun the file in the air toward the senator. Truscott didn’t move to catch it. The file hit the floor with a plunk, and he just stared at it while a briefcase appeared, as if magically, in the old lady’s twitchy hands.
“Take your money and get the hell out of my house,” she said.
Kyle gazed at the briefcase for a moment, thought of all the dreams contained within its flat gray walls, the new car, the trip to Aruba, a real start in life. And he also thought of his father outside, listening intently to the headphones as the scene audibly played out for him.
“Keep it,” said Kyle finally. He could almost see the wince on his father’s face, as if he’d been slapped. “Spruce the place up. Buy another pillar for outside, you can never have too many. I don’t want your damn money.”
The senator looked up, his face creased in bewilderment.
“Don’t look so puzzled, Senator,” said Kyle. “You’re the one who convinced me. You told me you weren’t going to turn me into a blackmailer. After talking to you, I decided I wasn’t going to let anyone else do it either.” Another shot across his father’s jaw. “So take the file. For free. This story belonged to Colleen O’Malley, not my father. He didn’t have the right to use it for his own gain, and neither do I. My father was wrong to bring it out fourteen years ago, and I’m trying to right the wrong by giving it back to you.” Slap, slap, slap.
“If you don’t want the money,” said the senator, “why did you come?”
“To put Colleen’s ghost to rest,” said Kyle. “And to see what I could learn about Spangler.” And to tell Liam Byrne over the wire what Kyle couldn’t tell him face-to-face: that he loved him, yes, but he wasn’t going to be him.
“My mother’s maiden name is Spangler,” said the senator. “And the lawyer whose name you saw in the file is my cousin Robert, my mother’s nephew. But he’s hardly a murderer. If you could meet him, you’d know that. He’s a harmless old man, I’m sure.”
“Don’t be, because he’s now on the run and considered armed and dangerous.”
“Mother?”
“I don’t know what he is talking about,” said the old lady, her chin jerking spasmodically upward. And now, strangely, beneath the licorice scent floated a line of something fetid, as if the rot at the heart of this old woman’s ambitions for her son were finally being exposed.
“Mother?” said the senator.
“Look at me, dear. I am telling you the truth. I don’t know what he is talking about. But whatever Robert might have done under an excess of zeal, he did it without my knowledge. You must believe me, dear. You must.”
“Oh, yes, you must,” said a voice from the doorway to the room. Kyle turned quickly, and there, with a bulky black bag in his hand, was O’Malley. His clothes were streaked with stains, an obviously false hairpiece was comically out of place, his face was filthy, and he smelled god-awful.
“Robert?” said the senator.
“O’Malley?” said Kyle.
The man sneered and gave the bag a quick hoist as if it were quite heavy. The bag’s zipper was open, and something shifted so that the thick black barrel of a shotgun poked out of the end.
“I wondered when you’d show up,” said Mrs. Truscott, even as she curled into herself and away from the stench. “Unfortunately, Bobby, we have ourselves a problem.”