Mr. X (32 page)

“I didn’t win that money. I brought it with me from New York.”

“Do you always take along five or six hundred dollars when you go out of town?”

For the fourth or fifth time, I said, “I didn’t know if my ATM card would work here. I didn’t withdraw it all at once, it accumulated over the past week or so.”

“Funny how it matches what Staggers and the others say you took off them. Even worse, they identified you.” Some of the savagery left his face. “It’s tough, Ned, but it isn’t as bad as you think.”

A young policeman cracked open the door, came up to Rowley, and whispered in his ear. Rowley planted a finger on his shoulder and pushed him back. “Blanks? No ridges? Will you please get the hell out of here?”

Rowley was about forty-five, roughly the same age as Stewart Hatch, but his skin looked borrowed from someone a decade older and recently deceased. “I mean that.” He willed some life into his face. “Know what? Right now, I’m the best friend you have.”

He hitched his chair closer to the table. “Forget the money. Joe Staggers and his friends
know
you took money off them at the Speedway, and they
know
you were in Hatchtown tonight. Keep saying you weren’t involved, you’re looking at life in prison.”

“I wasn’t in town on the night of the card game,” I said.

Rowley fixed my eyes with his. “I’m on your side, Ned. I know how it went.” He thumped his hand on the table. “All of a sudden, a guy was coming at you with a baseball bat. The whole thing went down in a couple of seconds. To me, you were a Marine in there. Probably you didn’t even know he was dead, am I right?”

Rowley spread his arms. “In the twenty-two years I been on this force, I never heard a better defense. Come in telling the truth, chances are you walk out free and clear. Why don’t we take your statement and put you on your way back home?”

“I didn’t win any money in a card game at the Speedway,” I said. “On Wednesday night, a truck driver for Nationwide Paper named Bob Mims picked me up in Ohio and dropped me off at the Motel Comfort. In the bar, I met an assistant D.A. from Louisville who told me she could give me a ride here the next day. Her name is Ashleigh Ashton, and she’s staying at Merchants Hotel. Thursday morning, she dropped me off at St. Ann’s Hospital. Last night, I ran into Mrs. Ashton and Mrs. Hatch at Le Madrigal, and they invited me to their table for dinner. After that, I went to see Toby Kraft. I drank too much. On the way home, I got as far as Merchants Park and passed out on a bench. I got back to my aunt’s house around twelve-fifteen, twelve-thirty.”

“Maybe twenty minutes later? A witness puts the time at twelve twenty-six.”

“Why don’t you call Mrs. Ashton and ask her where I was on Wednesday night?”

“We will,” Rowley said. “We’ll talk to Mrs. Ashton, and we’ll hear what she has to say about Wednesday. It won’t have any bearing on what happened at twelve twenty-six last night, but we’ll check it anyhow. In the meantime, I want you to think about what I said.”

“I can’t confess to a murder I didn’t commit,” I said.

Rowley took me downstairs to a cell. I stretched out on the cot and surprised myself by going to sleep.

The clanging of the door woke me up. A gray-haired man with a pink, weary face that had a lot of miles on it walked into the
cell. His belly pushed out the front of his white shirt, his sleeves were rolled up, and his tie was yanked down over his open collar. Behind him, Rowley loomed like a ferocious statue. “On your feet, Mr. Dunstan,” said the gray-haired man. “We’re releasing you.”

I rubbed my hands over my face.

“I’m Captain Mullan,” he said. “For the present, no charges will be brought against you. You can pick up your things and go back to your aunt’s house. I’d like to request that you remain in Edgerton for the next forty-eight hours and inform us of any changes of address. I want to talk to that truck driver, Bob Mims, before we give you a clean bill of health.”

“My mother’s funeral is on Wednesday,” I said. “I won’t leave before that.”

Mullan shoved his hands into his pockets. “You must be an old-fashioned gentleman, Mr. Dunstan.” From over Mullan’s shoulder, Rowley was giving me a smoky glare which suggested that he was no longer my best friend.

“Why is that?”

“Mrs. Ashton confirmed that she met you at the Motel Comfort on Wednesday night and drove you here the following day. She also tells us that you could not have been involved in an encounter with Mr. Keyes at twelve twenty-six this morning, because you came to her hotel room at approximately eleven o’clock and did not leave until exactly twelve twenty-five. The doorman and the desk clerk verify her statement.” Mullan smiled at me. He looked as though he should have been pulling pints of Guinness in a Third Avenue Irish Pub.

Rowley said that I could pick up most of my property on the way out. “I’ll hold the money until we talk to Mims.” His face looked like a paving stone.

An arcade of fluted stone columns stood before the entrance to the big stone facade of the building alongside Police Headquarters. I thought it must have been City Hall. Down at the bottom of the long flight of steps, uniformed policemen smoked and talked in front of half a dozen angled-in patrol cars. Across the street, a fountain at the center of a grassy square sent up a glittering spray.

The policemen moved closer together. One flicked a half inch of cigarette at the bottom of the steps. I came down onto the sidewalk and saw that I was on Grace Street. Two blocks away, a
pillared entrance that must have been the front of the library curved out from a row of storefronts and office buildings. The cops separated without quite spreading out.

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Clark opened the door and called back into the house, “The boys didn’t rough him up too bad.”

“They didn’t rough me up at all,” I said.

Nettie surged up from the sofa, grabbed my biceps, and stared into my eyes. “I don’t know when I have been so upside-down upset in all my life.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about anymore, but for your sake, I ought to go somewhere else.”

Nettie re-formed into a thunderhead.

“Joe Staggers is likely to come looking for me. I don’t want to put you and Clark in any danger.”

“Any Mountry knotheads turn up around here, they’ll be sorry they did. I’ll call May, and we’ll get breakfast ready.”

Nettie and May attended to my edited version of the night’s events as they mopped up the contents of their plates. Clark shoveled in his one true meal of the day and agreed that I should take up Toby Kraft’s offer. “Mountry boys are stupider than mud, but they’re persistent. Best pack your things and give Toby a call. When they come around here, we can say you took off and we don’t know where.”

I saw the box the UPS driver had delivered. Nettie followed my gaze. “About time you looked through your mother’s few things.”

I set the carton on the bed and folded my clothes into the duffel before looking at it again. Star’s peaky handwriting glowed up from the shipping label, and sorrow, more than sorrow, heartbreak’s tremendous wallop, leaked through the taped seams. When I had run out of diversions, I pulled the carton onto my lap and ripped it open.

I took out some old paperbacks and one hardback book and sorted through the thirty or forty CDs Star had shipped home—Billie and Ella, Louis and Nat and Sinatra, and a lot of records by Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Paul Desmond, and the other musicians she liked. All of these I slid into my bag. I set aside brooches, bracelets, a couple of gold necklaces, and three silk scarves for my aunts.

At the bottom of the box lay a wallet-sized photograph and an envelope on which Star had written
For Ned
. I picked up the photograph, at first saw only an image of a small boy in a striped shirt, then realized that the small boy was myself and the photograph had been taken on the morning of my third birthday. I gave an involuntary shudder, put the photograph in my billfold, and opened the envelope. It contained what looked like a safety-deposit key taped to an index card above the words
Illinois State Provident Bank, Grace Street
.

The idea that Star wanted me to have something she had secreted in a safety-deposit box gave me an uneasy tingle, but I tucked the key into my shirt pocket and turned to the little collection of books. I propped the paperbacks—
Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Invisible Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son
—on an empty shelf and picked up the hardback.

The dark green boards of its cover seemed more crude than ordinary bindings. The title,
From Beyond
, had been stamped in gold on the spine and front cover. I opened the book and turned to the title page:

I looked across the room to the closet without really seeing it. I heard myself say, “Edward Rinehart?” When I looked down again, the name was still there. I turned the page and saw:

On the facing page was the dedication:

The table of contents listed ten or twelve stories. Words like “Abandoned,” “Crypt,” and “Hideous” swam up at me, disconnected from whatever preceded or followed them. My numb eye took in “Blue,” and I concentrated on it long enough to see that the word formed half of a title called “Blue Fire.” I said something like
Oh, no
. The book slammed shut, and for a while I just looked at the binding. Hoping for a paragraph about the author, I opened it from the back, but Edward Rinehart had chosen to keep mum about his past. I crammed the book into my knapsack and went down the hall to stand under a cascade of hot water.

Clean-shaven, wearing a white button-down shirt, blue blazer, and jeans, I came downstairs and overheard Clark discoursing about the differences between murder and manslaughter. I put my bags near the door and spread the jewelry and scarves on the coffee table. “Ladies,” I said, “Star would have wanted you to share the things she sent, but you’ll have to come in here to do it.”

While Nettie and May exclaimed over the treasures, I faded into the kitchen and called Toby Kraft. He told me to go a rooming house on Chester Street. “The landlady’s an old acquaintance of mine, woman named Helen Janette. I’ll set it up in five minutes, get you a cheap rate.”

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