The Glendower Legacy (10 page)

Chandler looked up, heard a rushing in his head.

“That’s it,” he said as calmly as he could. “I want to see your credentials. Right now—hand ’em over.” Sweat was breaking from every pore.

“The hell with credentials …” The big man whirled, as if possessed, a sudden dervish, did an elephantine pirouette, lifted the bust of George Washington from the pedestal and smashed it on the floor. Plaster chips stung Chandler’s face, a cloud of white dust erupted from the exploding head. The big man gagged on the fine particles, coughed. Washington lay in a million pieces. Chandler felt hot tears burning his eyes. His heart throbbed, terror touched him. The big man circled the low table and leaned over him from the left. His breath smelled of French fries and salt. “Give us the picture, Professor. We know that much now, it was a picture, a framed picture—”

“A picture?” Chandler croaked.

“A document,” the smaller man whined. “Maybe a document—”

“Bill Davis didn’t give me anything,” Chandler cried,
“nothing …
Now, goddamnit, let me see those credentials or get out …” He pointed at the mess on the floor: “And you’re sure as hell gonna hear about that!” He pointed at the doorway. His hand was trembling and he knew they wouldn’t let him out of the chair. “Now, right now—or get out!”

The big man’s fist moved like a large, brutal piece of machinery, faster than Chandler could quite register, and he felt something like a hammerhead smash against his face, pain ricocheting through his nose and sinuses, tears immediately flowing. The inside of his upper lip had shredded against his front teeth and he felt blood on his face, tasted it in his throat as his nose, inside and out, grew wet and sloppy with it, thick, salty. His cheeks were wet with tears, his glasses had been driven into his face, but somehow remained more or less in place. His entire body and mind felt incapacitated at the shock of such a blow, such overt violence. He kept his eyes closed, waiting for more. One punch, he reflected with part of his mind, one brief economical punch from a professional and the machine comes apart, the protective ramparts of civilization collapse, the barbarians are within the gates and you’re left bleeding and gasping and exhausted …

Porkpie cleared his throat: “Now, Professor, that was just to get your attention, y’know? Let that be an end to it.” He was leaning against the big man, getting between them, restraining him.

Chandler moaned quietly, wetly. His lip was split: he swallowed blood and mucus, spit a gob of something onto the floor. Why had the son of a bitch broken George? He flicked a glance at the big man, still standing to the left of him. Why George?

“What was that, Professor?”

“Who are you guys?”

“D.A.’s office … tactical squad, the tough guys. When the heat’s on, they send for us. Licensed to kill—”

“Bullshit!”

Chandler hadn’t been paying attention: the big man had gotten further behind him again and he didn’t see it coming, a hard slap to his left ear. He heard something crack inside his ear, heard himself shriek in pain, fall sideways in the chair, his face nearly colliding with the Chemex in its heat ring. He touched it with his hand, burned his fingers, yanked back, hung on the chair arm, staring past the Chemex at the remaining fragments of Washington’s noble head lying in dust on the hardwood floor. Miserable bastards! He fought for breath.

He prayed his eardrum was all right. The inside of his ear felt as if it were dripping. He had further chewed up the inside of his mouth.

“The picture, Professor,” Porkpie said.

“Honest to God,” he groaned, cupping a hand over his ear, “I don’t know. You think I’d go through this if I could just give you the goddamn thing … I don’t know, I don’t know …” He fumbled, straightened his glasses on the painful bridge of his nose.

Porkpie, hat still firmly in place, stared down, shook his head as if in deepest sorrow or trying to sell a used car.

“You’re going to regret this attitude, Professor,” he said. He looked at the big man. They were both so utterly unruffled. “Get the pliers.”

Porkpie went around behind the chair and Chandler felt strong hands on his shoulders, anchoring him against the chair. They knew their man, Chandler thought: weakened, terrified, hurt. The big man took a huge hand out of his pocket, leaned toward him, knelt beside the chair. The gold tooth glinted through the open mouth. Chandler heard the deep, resonant, labored breathing.

Suddenly a great paw clamped down on Chandler’s left hand and pressed the fingers flat on the arm of the chair. Chandler strained, fought back the urge to vomit. The big man, expressionless, held a pair of simple pliers and stared into Chandler’s eyes. “This is gonna hurt,” the big man said softly. He had laugh lines etched deeply at the corners of his mouth, a friendly face.

The porkpie spoke near his ear, pleading: “You sure you don’t remember where it is? Save yourself all sorts of trouble …”

Pain was replaced by absolute, unreasoning terror: Chandler’s breath came in desperate gasps, he felt Porkpie’s arms, like barrel bindings, come around his neck, a hand smelling of Big Mac smothered his mouth too tightly to bite.

“Well,” the big man said philosophically, “by the time you’ve run out of fingernails, we’ll either have the goddamn thing or we’ll be pretty damned sure you haven’t got it …”

Chandler watched the pliers move toward his fingertips, the metal shining in the lamplight, cold and icy, more pain in palpable form. This was all impossible, it couldn’t be happening … He felt the anger and frustration gurgling in his chest, in the brain: he felt the first gentle tug as the pliers were fitted to the nail on the little finger of his left hand. The big man looked up, perspiration on his forehead, a thin smile playing across his wide, pasty face: “Last chance, Professor, it’s gonna make you toss your cookies—”

At the last moment, as the pliers clamped tight and he felt the first white-hot pain searing his hand and arm like a lightning flash, as he knew he couldn’t stand it or make them stop by giving them the answer they wanted—Chandler grabbed the Chemex with his right hand and threw the hot coffee directly into the big man’s face.

Chandler never knew how long it took, maybe a second or five, but it was just long enough to get the job done.

The big man screamed, clawed at his face, the pliers clattering away to the floor. Porkpie’s grip loosened in surprise. Chandler lunged forward pushing the big man backwards from his kneeling position, knocking him against the edge of the coffee table. Chandler skirted the table with Porkpie’s hands scraping at the back of his bathrobe. With a desperate yank Chandler freed the old television set from its moorings, swung it in a brief, violent arc which ended as it intersected with Porkpie’s ridiculous hat. The glass screen broke and the picture tube exploded, sending Porkpie staggering backwards in a shower of broken glass and puffs of whatever resides in an antique picture tube. Porkpie fell across the armchair. The picture tube had exploded like a fireworks bomb, filling the room with a nasty, acrid smell. Chandler grabbed the pedestal which had lately held poor George, wrenched it upward, his feet slipping in the plaster wreckage, and launched it lengthwise across the big man’s chest as he struggled to his feet; his face and raincoat were brown, streaming hot coffee. He howled as the pedestal smashed him, fell back clutching his chest. Turning, Chandler rammed the base of the pedestal into the small man’s breastbone, thought he felt something give

Chandler wasn’t thinking: he was reacting mechanically, a machine working its way through a survival program. It seemed to him that he’d never moved so fast, his slippered feet barely skimming over the floor, his heart a driving, nearly bursting engine, adrenalin overloading, providing a hectic frenzy of energy he’d never dreamed possible.

He was out of the room, through the front door, across the yard past the tree, sprinting to the right on Hawthorn, his bathrobe open, a tall man with a bloody face, running like a son of a bitch in his bathrobe and pajamas … He’d covered two blocks when he slowed, a wicked stitch developing in his side, finally came to rest against a mailbox out of the yellow blur of the streetlamps … The sidewalk was empty, a car moved slowly past in the opposite direction. He looked at his Rolex, legs shaking, eyes bleary, his mouth dry but for the taste of blood. He felt it caking on his face. Looking back the way he’d come, he saw nothing, no one in sight.

Trying vainly to get his breath back, he realized they weren’t coming after him,
couldn’t
come after him. He grinned painfully to himself, satisfied at the damage he must have inflicted. Then he staggered off along Brattle Street past the looming ominous tower of St. John’s Chapel, left down Mason Street toward the blurred lamplight of the Radcliffe Courtyard. He mounted the stairway between the white pillars and down into the dark cloister surrounded by college buildings. He tied the belt of the old blue monogrammed robe, summoned up his last patches of dignity, and marched resolutely into the open from among the protective shrubbery.

The night air was cold and wet, held a faint mist in it, and you could see your breath before you. He found a wad of Kleenex in his pocket, gingerly dabbed at his nose, licked his upper lip feeling the blood like a fragile crust beneath his nostrils. He was still operating on the fear-borne adrenalin surge, legs moving mechanically, heart refusing to calm down. It was almost midnight; he was just a man in his bathrobe wandering around the Radcliffe Courtyard. With blood all over his face. And his ear on fire. And a library full of damaged goods at the house in Acacia Street. God … he was beginning to shake again, not with fear or pain this time, but with anger. Anger like he’d never thought he could feel. Things are always happening in a murder case, that’s what she’d said. Out of her experience with such things, it was almost as if she’d been warning him.

He passed a young couple, he with his arm around her, hugging her in the night, and they didn’t even look up at him. Chandler wasn’t as young as he used to be: the stitch in his side wouldn’t quit and he was having trouble getting his breath. Damn it, no business for a professor … He reached the center of the courtyard as he heard the chimes at midnight. He sagged down on a bench, hung his head for a moment between his knees, then leaned back, drawing in the night air, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. He prayed that no watchman would find him. He needed to rest … The miserable shits, he thought, seeing before him the smashed bust of George Washington.
I made them pay, I made them pay …

Somehow he managed to avoid terminal hypothermia sitting there sweating on the little circular bench which hugged itself around the trunk of what he identified from a plaque as a maple tree honoring the memory of the mother and father of one Miriam H. Kramer, ’23. He read the inscription in the dim mist-diffused glow of the courtyard’s lamps, clutched the robe tight around his clammy, rapidly chilling body. Later he couldn’t remember dozing but somehow, miraculously, he heard a bell chiming one o’clock. He couldn’t have been sitting there shivering like an idiot for an hour … but, yes, apparently he had. Perhaps he’d passed out for a bit. He wasn’t accustomed to much exercise, let alone to stark, unreasoning terror. Awake and aware once again of his ridiculous situation and appearance, he took stock and realized he didn’t want to leave the safety of the courtyard. The two monsters who’d attacked him couldn’t be expected to just lie there licking their wounds until morning: the big one might well need hospital treatment for coffee burns—and the other one could have a broken rib or two, perhaps even a punctured lung. Chandler was oddly ashamed when he discovered himself smiling at the prospect. But perhaps they weren’t as injured as he hoped, perhaps they had pulled themselves together and were even now out and about, prowling the streets with blood in their eyes, scouring alleyways and darkened porches for a man in a bathrobe …

It was one o’clock, he was toying with pneumonia and God only knew what else, and he had to do something.

He got up and walked slowly over to Harvard Square. The lights were brighter there and he didn’t know if that was better or worse. Now he could be seen, if they were looking for him. But he might be able to summon help … maybe. The Square was dripping and rather deserted. Light shone from Brigham’s ice cream parlor, people moved inside. Who were they at such an hour?

So, what the hell was he going to do?

Providentially he found a single dime in the lint and wadded Kleenex in his pocket. He couldn’t imagine a single reason for having a dime in the pocket of his bathrobe, but there it was, loose change he’d picked up or change from paying the paper boy. He stopped to rest under the University Theatre’s marquee, leaned against the wall in the shadows. Presumably he should call the police, tell them what happened. There was, however, one problem with that stratagem. He had no idea just whose side the police were on.

Finally he went to the telephone booth midway in the block, deposited his dime, and dialed Hugh Brennan’s number.

No answer. Twenty rings, no answer. Obviously Brennan was off in search of amorous adventures, gone for the night. It was one-fifteen. It was cold. He rubbed his hands. Who to call? Damn, he had a flash! Goddamn Polly Bishop! She’d started the whole thing, dragged him into it, and now she could damn well get him out of it. What had she said as they stood at the bottom of the steps while her crew packed up the television gear?
If anything happens—and believe me, things are always happening in murder cases … Get hold of me, at home or the station.

Well, Polly, here goes, your fondest hopes about to come true. Things have been happening all day.

Unfortunately she wasn’t listed in the directory, not Polly-the-Star, nor did Information have a listing. He swore, rubbed his nose unthinkingly, felt warm blood trickling back into his throat, down his upper lip. He sniffed. Fuck it … He couldn’t think of another alternative so he called Channel Three. A youngish man answered, his voice edged with tiredness and too many cigarettes. Chandler went into some detail in an attempt to be convincing, explaining that he was an old friend of Polly’s from the coast, stopping over at Logan International, and that he had forgotten her telephone number, wondering if he could get it from the station …