The Price of Murder (3 page)

“For something he didn’t do.”

“He just got elected for it. Think of the things he did do, kid.” Keefler dropped his cigarette on the porch floor and rubbed it out with the sole of a black shoe. “Both the Bronson boys would have made out better if Nick had been smart enough to stay in the saddle.”

“I don’t see how it made any difference to me.”

“Oh, sure. He wanted to help you get out of the Sink. Until you got a college education.”

“It hurt Danny. I’ll admit that. But when I graduated, I wasn’t a football bum looking for a job with Nick or anybody like him. I graduated with good marks.”

“I know, I know,” Keefler said wearily. “And you got yourself wounded and decorated in Korea and you came back and went to Columbia Graduate School on the G.I. Bill. I’m talking about what you
would
have done.”

But Lee knew he had done what seemed inevitable. After hospital time in Japan, he was sent back on a hospital ship, was completely ambulatory by the time they docked at San Francisco. His request for discharge at Dix was granted. He enrolled in Columbia Graduate School, carried the heaviest work load they would give him, and earned his Master’s.

By then he had destroyed the short stories and the notes for the novel. He had over seventy pages done on an entirely different novel. He had three hundred dollars. The placement agency had come up with the instructor-ship at Brookton Junior College. He went out for an interview and signed a contract. During that summer he worked on a road job to get back in shape. After the first week of exhaustion he began to adjust to the labor, and began work again on the book. The construction company was working on a stretch of new divided highway in southern Michigan where rooms were hard to find. He found a room in the farmhouse of a couple named Detterich. They had three young sons on the farm and an older daughter working in an insurance office in Battle Creek.
The daughter came home to the farm for her vacation—the last two weeks of August. Her name was Lucille. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

The following December, after half a dozen trips in the ancient Plymouth he had purchased in order to be able to drive down to Battle Creek, and after he had been with his new job long enough to know that he liked it and could do it well, and after he had received the advance on his book of two hundred and fifty dollars, he married her in the parlor of the Detterich farmhouse on the second day of the Christmas vacation. They honeymooned in New Orleans, an unexpected honeymoon made possible by Danny’s wedding gift of five crackling new hundred dollar bills, wrapped in a sheet of hotel stationery on which he had scrawled,
Have a ball, kids.
Danny had been out for a year and a half. He was back in Hancock, and he seemed to be doing very well indeed.

Lee Bronson was twenty-six. He had work he liked. The pay was low, but the acceptance of the book took the sting out of that. There would be more books, and there would come a day when he could either go on teaching or give it up, as he chose. He had a bride men turned in the street to stare at. The world was a fine place, that December.

Danny lost again the following March, the same month they found the house on Arcadia Street and moved out of the dingy furnished apartment. Lee went down to see him, before he was sentenced. Danny was a little heavier. He was a week away from being thirty. He was very depressed, and he marveled bitterly at his bad fortune.

“Twice before I got picked up, Lee, and neither damn time had I done what I got sent up for. This time it’s worse, almost. Now, get this: I’m way uptown, at Sonny’s. I’m at the bar, a little loaded, but minding my own business. It’s four in the afternoon. Day before yesterday. I got a date in the bar. She’s coming in to meet me at five. The bar is empty except for a couple down the bar. They’re having a fight. I’m paying no attention. I’m just there drinking my drink, damn it. The woman isn’t bad looking, not bad at all. They’re both drinking and barking at each other. All of a sudden she comes down, takes the
stool next to me, grabs my arm and says I should buy her a drink. It’s nothing to me. So I do. You know that’s a nice place. A good trade. No trouble. He comes down. She won’t look at him or talk to him. He’s a big joker. My size. Maybe fifteen years older. He starts grabbing at her. Rough like, I tell him to take it easy. The bartender tells him. But no. The big shot has to grab me by the shoulder, spin me around and swing. I ducked my head and he hit me right on top of the head. It hurt. I was drinking. I wasn’t so lucky it left a mark where he hit. It’s still a little sore, but no mark. Enough is enough. I rush him right back into a corner, fast. Wham, wham, wham. Maybe I hit him four five times, every one right down the alley. I had to hold him up for the last one. Nothing dirty. No knee. Nothing. Like a gentleman I did it, every one on the mouth and he bleeds all over the place. I let him drop, got my hat off the stool next to mine and left a buck tip out of my change and took off. They don’t know me so good there. But you see, I got this date I got to come back for. I come back and I’m grabbed. I think it’s like a joke. No joke, kid. Assault. The big guy’s name is Fitch. He’s big news. A banker from Detroit and he stops there when he’s in town. The bitch he was fighting with is his wife. He once upon a time loaned Sonny some money, I hear. So it goes down like this, and this is what the three of them say, the only witnesses. I come in loaded. I make a pass at his wife. He objects. The bartender tells me to leave. So I beat up on the banker and walk out. Busted his jaw, not too bad, and ruined a lot of expensive dentist work. I give Kennedy the picture. No dice. It’s too hot. Maybe I’m not worth the trouble. So here I go again. Jesus, Lee!”

And he went again. He was given a one to ten, that curious sentence that means a man is eligible for parole after one year but, in the discretion of the warden and the parole board, can be kept for the full ten.

Daniel Bronson served two and a half years, less one month. He came to see Lee when he was released. He was a silent and sour man. He had found a job, prior to release, with a trucking firm, the owner of which, having done time in his youth, was willing to hire ex-convicts and
men on parole. Lee had asked him if it was a blind, a myth for the parole people as other jobs had been the other times he had been released.

“No. I’ve been a sucker long enough, kid.”

“Going straight?”

Danny’s smile was slow and savage. “This late? I’ve lived very well. I can’t adjust at this late date to a beer and beans existence.”

Lee remembered his surprise at the choice of words and the careful diction, and he remembered that Danny noticed his surprise. Still smiling, he had said, “Don’t be a snob, little brother. I’ve always been smart enough, I think. I learned to handle myself right, and I learned to wear the right clothes. I was fine until I opened my stupid mouth. So this time I didn’t waste my time up there in Alton. I haven’t got your fancy degrees, kid, but from now on it’s going to be harder for people to figure me out. I finished high school English requirements. I read books, kid. Maybe a hundred books.”

“I still don’t know what you have in mind.”

“Neither do I. Yet. But I’m not going to play horse for Kennedy. Sooner or later I’d take the fourth fall and get tagged an habitual. Seven and a half years out of thirty-two on the inside. I’m going to find an angle, sooner or later. I’m going to look and I’m going to find one, and until I do I’ll wheel a rig for Grunwalt, draw my pay, and tell Kennedy to shove it if he tries to hook me back in. The organization never gave me anything but a bad time. I want a solo kick.”

That had been in May. The next time he had stopped by had been in June, and he was still working for Grunwalt. But the last time Lee had seen him, in late July, Danny’s situation had obviously changed. He had been driving a late model sedan, a medium-priced car, gray and inconspicuous. He had been wearing a rayon cord suit, a narrow maroon knit tie, a button-down collar. Lee had just come back from teaching a summer session class when Danny had come striding up the walk, gift-wrapped box under his arm. He had thought at the time that if you didn’t know Danny’s history you could easily take him for a successful youngish man of the salesman type. He was a
bit shorter than Lee, and broader, with heavier bones. His hair, paler than Lee’s, was a dark blond, with a tight kinky wave.

Up close, the illusion suffered. There were the small scars, and the bright, cold, predatory eyes, and the restless, reckless flavor of all the bad ones. Lee, worried about what he might be up to, had tried to question him. Though Danny fended off the questions with smiling ease, Lee caught an impression that surprised him. Whatever Danny was doing, he was slightly shamefaced about it, as though it did not fit his own picture of himself.

And whatever Danny was doing—it had brought Keefler here on this hot afternoon. Keefler seemed sleepy and reasonable. But too anxious to lump Lee with Danny.

“Look, Mr. Keefler. Danny went in the wrong direction. He started early. Maybe it’s too late for anything to be done. I don’t know. But I didn’t go in that direction, and you didn’t go in that direction. We got out of the Sink.”

Keefler raised one eyebrow. “We?”

“You and me, Mr. Keefler.”

“Let me get this.” He pointed at Lee’s chest and then his own. “You want to put us in the same bundle. But it doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

“Because I come up by myself. You got your way bought for you. With stinking money from a hood brother and stinking money from a big mobster. You want to lump yourself with somebody, you fit with Danny, not with me.”

In the moment of shock before anger came, Lee felt astonished at the sudden bitterness and the unreasoning anger of the man. When Lee’s anger was complete, he did not let it change his voice or his expression. “I was under the ridiculous impression that we were reminiscing, Mr. Keefler. You are sitting on my porch in a chair I bought, dropping ashes on a porch I painted. You are a parole officer. I am an instructor at a state educational institution. I’ve tried to be pleasant to you for Danny’s sake. If you have questions, ask them. But from now on, watch your mouth and your manners.”

Keefler stared at him for long seconds. Then he chuckled and said, “Now if you aren’t the one!”

“Ask your questions.”

“Sure, but first I’ll make
my
little speech. They keep telling me it’s a free country. It don’t mean a thing to me if you wave your education in my face. Not a thing. There’s a fence, see? Right across the middle of the world. I’m on one side. And the Bronson boys are on the other. You both got records. You’re both in the files. He’s got a thicker file. I’ll talk to you just the same way I talk to anybody on the other side of that fence. I got a right to talk to anybody I want to. And you are going to play it my way. If you don’t like my way, and if I think maybe you’re hiding something, I go over to that school you work at, and I got my hat in my hand and I ask them a hell of a lot of polite questions about you, and if when I’m through there’s anybody left over there that doesn’t know you got a brother who’s a three-time loser who put you through school on stolen money, it’s going to surprise both of us. And they’ll know your brother has busted his parole and he’s on the loose and he gives you fancy presents. And they’ll know you got picked up on an assault charge and it got squashed because the guy who showed up to squash it was the smart shyster who worked for Nick Bouchard. If they still love you over there, I’ll see you get pulled in for questioning, and I’ll see it happens often, and I’ll make sure it comes when you should be teaching like they are paying you for. Now if you think they’ll still keep paying you for teaching after all that, you can pop off some more about my mouth and my manners. To Johnny Keefler, you are one of the Bronson boys, and both the Bronson boys stink. End of speech.”

Anger had suddenly become much too expensive. A luxury. He straightened the papers on the card table and he was annoyed with himself to see that his hand was shaking. He saw the factor he had missed in Keefler’s personality. The man was not entirely sane. He was perfectly capable of doing exactly what he threatened. He would do it knowing well that he would gain nothing but the satisfaction of smashing the orderly life of Lee Bronson. Perhaps, before the loss of the hand, he had been
merely a tough cop with a streak of sadism. Lee knew he had no important contacts, no place he could go and ask that Keefler be pulled off him. He knew that the only thing he could do was crawl. And it was humiliating even with the rationalization that it was but to placate a madman.

He looked down at the stack of themes, and spoke in an expressionless voice. “He came here on the afternoon of July twenty-fifth. He was too well dressed to be still working for Grunwalt. He was driving a gray two-door, a recent model. Maybe a Dodge or a Plymouth. He stayed from about three-thirty to five-thirty. We had some drinks. I wondered what he was doing. He wouldn’t tell me. He admitted he wasn’t at Grunwalt’s. I asked if Rich knew about that. He said it was all fixed. I asked him if he’d gone back with Kennedy and he said no.”

“Now you’re being a good boy, but it’s a lot of crap you’re handing me. He’s your brother. If he was onto something, he’d tell you.”

“I can only give you my word that he didn’t. My wife was with us all the time. She’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“She’s due back any minute. In fact, she’s a little late.”

“I got the time.”

“Don’t lean on her, Mr. Keefler. She’s not used to …”

“You forget easy. I’m doing this my way, Bronson. Where is Danny now?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“You act like you
want
to make it hard for yourself. We’ll get him anyway. He broke parole. So he owes the state seven years and seven months. There’s no way in the world he can get out of that.”

“I’ll tell you one thing. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like him. He’s smarter than that.”

Keefler gave a snort of contempt. “That clown isn’t smart. No three-time loser has brains, professor. Here’s how smart I am. Rich and those other guys were carrying too big a load. So they’re told to turn over so many files apiece to me, and make it the rough ones. From Rich I get your brother and a few others. He briefs me on them. They’re all doing fine, he says. Danny Bronson is checking in like he should. No trouble with Danny. No trouble
at all. He gives me the big words. Fine adjustment. Social conscience. Crap! I ask when he’s due in, and Rich says he phones in. I ask if he ever stops over to see him on the job and Rich says it might embarrass the men to go drop in on them. First I go check on where he’s living. I find he moved out of that flea bag room early in July. There’s a violation right there. Change of address without notification or authorization. No forwarding address. Then I go to Grunwalt. Bronson, sure. Worked here for six weeks. Quit the end of June. As far as Rich knew, he was still working there. Solfes a wise guy, and I’ve decided he’s had too much fresh air and he’s due back inside to think it over. So I drift around town, asking who’s seen him. Nobody. While I’m looking he phones Rich on schedule, a local call. By then I’ve told Rich off, told him how the wise punk was kidding him. Maybe over the phone Rich breaks into tears or something, telling the poor fella how he’s let his friends down. That call came in last Monday. I’m still looking. He’s on the tape now, with a pick-up order out for him. I got the rest of my punks hacked into line. They jump up and say sir. Rich and those other clowns are too soft. I’m going to get Danny and he’s going to go down on his knees and he’s going to beg and he’s going to blubber, and then he’s going back to Alton for violation of parole, and by God, he’s going to stay there. Your smart brother wasn’t a damn bit smart, Bronson.”