Kapp recovered pretty fast. He pulled Smitty’s gun out from under him and looked at it, and then turned to me. “That was lousy shooting. It took you four shots to find him and then you threw two bullets away.”
“I’ve only got one eye,” I said. “I have trouble with distance judgment.”
“Oh. In that case, it was all right.” He looked at the back of Bill’s thick neck. “If this is a heist,” he said, “you two are crazy. Nobody wants me back money bad.”
“We just want to ask you one or two questions,” I said.
He looked at me again, and grinned. He had white false teeth. They looked better on him than the ones Krishman had worn. “Were you alive when I went in there, boy?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“Then you’re just lucky you’ve lived this long.” He hefted the gun, holding it by the barrel. “What if I were to break your head in with this? What’s your partner going to do?”
I looked into his grin and said, “We’re not playing.”
He studied me a while, and then he looked sad and dropped the gun onto the floor between our feet. “I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m ready to retire.” He sat back, showing me his profile, gazing up at the ceiling and trying to look sick. “That hard violent world,” he said, “that’s all behind me now.”
“Not all,” I said.
He quit joking. He turned to me and he kept his lips flat and his voice flat. “Ask your questions,” he said, “and go to hell.”
I said, “Why was Willard Kelly killed?”
He looked surprised, worried, wary, blank, one right after the other. He said, “Who the hell is Willard Kelly?”
I reached down and picked the gun up and tapped the butt against his knee. “I hear old men’s bones are brittle,” I said.
“Naw. I’ve got a geriatric formula. I take a spoonful of chancre pus twice a day. It’s a new thing on the market for senior citizens.”
“They let you read magazines. That’s fine, but I’m not playing. How’s your kneecap?” I tapped him again with the gun-butt, and he didn’t manage to hide the wince. I said, “Why was Willard Kelly killed?”
“He had B.O.”
I tapped him again. He put his hand down over his knee. His hand was older than his face; it had blue veins ropy against the skin. I tapped the back of his hand, and he said “Uh,” and took the hand away and held it tight against his chest. I tapped his knee. He said, “Go on and break it, you clumsy bastard. I could use a good faint around now.”
“You won’t faint.” I tapped him again. His face was paler, and there were strain lines around his eyes and mouth. I said, “Why was Willard Kelly killed?”
He turned his head away and glared out the window. I tapped him again.
He didn’t faint. Bill bypassed Plattsburg. A few miles south he took a turnoff that promised cabins by the lake. Lake Champlain. Another sign said, “Closed after Labor Day.” It was after Labor Day.
There were white cabins with red trim, somewhat faded, fronted by a strip of blacktop. There was no one there, but previous poachers had left their rubber spoor on the blacktop.
Kapp didn’t want to get out of the car. Bill came around and pulled him out by the hair and shoved him down between the cabins. He favored the left leg. We stood him up against the white clapboard back wall of a cabin. Trees screened us from the lake. Bill looked at Kapp and then at me and told me, “Remember McArdle.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”
Kapp said, “McArdle?”
“Andrew McArdle,” I said. “I asked him some questions, but he had a bad heart and died before he could answer them. Bill was telling me to be more careful with you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
We stood and waited for him to think. He stood slanted against the wall holding his injured hand. The expensive suit looked bad. He was having trouble with the left leg, and the back of his left hand was swelling and turning gray. He had more lines on his face. He was tired and worried and futile. He was being brave when it didn’t matter, and he knew it didn’t matter, but he didn’t know how to stop.
He tried to talk, and he had to take time out to clear phlegm out of his throat and spit it carefully away from us. Then he said, “I can’t figure you two. Those other guys, I know who they were. I can guess, I mean. But not you two. Amateurs, asking the wrong questions...” He shook his head. “Where’d you get so mean?”
“What’s a right question?” I asked him.
He looked up through branches at the sky. “I was a free man again a little while,” he said.
I said, “Bill, if he doesn’t open his mouth right now I’m going to kill him and to hell with it. We’ll go back to the city and go by way of the little islands.”
Bill frowned. “I don’t like it, Ray,” he said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
I said, “Here, take this gun up to the car and reload it. Better give me the Luger for while you’re gone.”
All of a sudden, Kapp laughed. He laughed like a man who’s just heard a good joke at a clambake. We looked at him, and he pointed at Bill and cried, “You silly bastard, you’re Will Kelly! You’re Junior, you’re his son!”
We just looked at him. He pushed himself out from the wall and limped toward us, grinning. “Why the hell didn’t you say you were Will’s goddamn kid? I couldn’t place you, I couldn’t figure you anywhere at all.”
I said, “Stop. Hold up the reunion a second. There’s still the question.”
He looked at me, and his grin calmed down. “All right,” he said. This time, he acted like he was at the clambake and it was his turn to tell a joke and he had a whopper saved up. “I didn’t know Will’d been killed,” he said. “But I know why. It was because he was holding something for me. Until I got out of jail. He was supposed to hold it and stay out of the city until I was sprung. He was killed because he was holding it and because I was going to be getting out.”
“What was it he was holding?”
He nodded. “You.”
“What about me?”
“You look more like your mother than your father,” he said.
Then I got it. “You’re a lying son of a bitch,” I said.
“You look a lot more like her. I know. I see your father in the mirror every morning.”
I laughed at him. “You’re crazy, or you think we are. Or are you just wisecracking again?”
“It’s true,” he said.
Bill said, “What the hell’s going on?”
I said to Kapp, “He didn’t get it yet. When he does, he’ll take you apart. You better say fast you were lying.”
“I wasn’t lying.”
“It was the wrong ploy,” I insisted. “Bill has a big thing about honor.”
Kapp said, “We ought to sit down over a bottle of imported and talk. We’ve got a lot to fill in, the both of us.”
Bill said, “Goddamn it, for the last time, what’s going on?”
“Kapp says we’re half-brothers. We shared a mother, only Willard Kelly wasn’t my father.”
Bill’s eyebrows came down. “Who does he say is your father?”
“If he’s smart, he’ll change his story.”
“I say it’s me,” said Kapp, “and it’s true.” He was mad at us.
Bill raised his shoulders and took a step and I tripped him. I said to Kapp, “He’s going to kill you now, I swear to God he is. And there isn’t a thing I can do about it.”
Bill was struggling to his feet, and Kapp backed away to the wall, talking fast, mad and scared both. “Your mother was a two-bit whore out of Staten Island, a goddamn rabbit. She sucked Will Kelly into marrying her, with the first kid. The second was mine. I know it, because she was at my cabin on Lake George for six months and she only went back to Kelly because I told her to.”
Bill was on his feet and I was hanging on his arm. Kapp spat words at us like darts. “Edith got exiled to a burg upstate with Will Kelly and orders to behave and never come back to the city. She couldn’t stand it. She was there a year and she stuck razor blades in her wrists.”
Bill threw me away, and I bounced off a tree-trunk. I shouted, “Tell him you’re lying, or you’re a dead man!”
Kapp flamed at me. His eyes were on fire. “And you’ll have another dead father to revenge, brat!”
Bill swung a fist like knotted wood. Kapp tried to lean inside it, but he was too slow. It caught him behind the ear and dropped him on his face in the weeds. Bill bent over, reaching to pick him up again.
I came up and clubbed Bill with the Luger. He went down on his knees. Kapp crawled away downslope, and Bill fell on his legs. I rolled him over, freeing Kapp’s legs, and Kapp crawled up a tree trunk to a standing position and stood hangdog, his arms around the thick trunk.
I stood in front of him, holding the Luger by the barrel. “Don’t stop talking,” I said.
“Not now, boy, I’m an old man.”
“Stop playing!”
He shivered, and leaned his forehead against the bark. His eyes were closed. “All right,” he said. “But give me a few seconds. Please.”
I gave him the seconds. When he raised his head, there were fine lines from the bark on his brow. He pushed his lips over in a weak smile. “You’ve got her looks, boy, but you’ve got my guts. I’m glad of that.” I didn’t say anything. He shrugged and let the smile fade out, and said, “All right. Her name was Edith Stanton. She came out of Rosebank on Staten Island in ’34. She went with Tom Gilley a while. He made her pregnant, but he aborted her with some right hands to the stomach. Then she floated around, here and there, with one or another of a bunch that mainly knew each other. This was still just after Repeal, and we were all trying to get organized again. She came across Will Kelly, and he fell for her. He was the only one’d ever held a door for her since Staten Island, and she liked it. Then she got pregnant again, by him this time, and suckered him into marriage. But she didn’t like staying home with the kid all the time, and she got to hanging around with the old bunch. Kelly stayed home and changed diapers. I think he’s waking up.”
I turned and looked. “We’ve still got a few minutes,” I said.
“All right. It’s like this, some women come to life with motherhood. I never paid much attention to Edith at all before, but when she started hanging around again she was different. No, she looked different. Tougher, maybe. More basic. I don’t know what it is, it happens to some women. I took her home. She was a rabbit, but there was something interesting in her besides that. I don’t know how to explain it.” He was getting nostalgic.
“I don’t even care,” I told him. “Get on with it.”
That brought him back. He said, “For a while, in ’38, there was some trouble. Baltimore was where heroin and that came into the country. There was a kind of dispute, Chicago and us, as to who was going to run Baltimore. So I went up to a private place on Lake George. I had two boys with me, two I could trust. And Edith. I told her come along and she came. We were there six months, and nobody touched her but me. She came back pregnant. She named the kid Raymond Peter Kelly. That was a private joke between her and me. I owned the cabin as Raymond Peterson.”
Bill moaned. I said to Kapp, “We’ll finish the conversation in the car. Come on.”
“All right.”
He took a step away from the tree and fell down. He looked up at me, shame etched on his face. “There was a time a workout like this would’ve meant nothing,” he said. “Not a thing. Not a thing at all.”
“I believe you.”
I switched the Luger to the other hand and helped him up. He leaned on me and we went back up between the cabins and around to the Mercury. I looked at him. He wouldn’t be running anywhere. I said, “I’ll be right back. You won’t have to go over this part again.”
He nodded. I opened the back door and he sagged onto the seat, his feet hanging out onto the blacktop, his head leaning sideways against the seatback. I turned away from him and went back and found Bill coming up, one arm straight out beside him holding the cabin. His face was square gray stone.
I stood in front of him. I said, “Bill, I want you to know something.”
He said, “Get out of the way.”
“There’s an old man up at the car. If you kill him for telling the truth, I’ll shoot you down for a mad dog. What did you do when they told you Ann was dead? Punch the guy who brought the news?”
He said, “Go to hell.”
I stepped aside. “You can’t stamp out facts with fists,” I said. “Your father was a crook’s shyster. My father is sitting in the car up there. Our mother wasn’t the kind they have in the Ladies Home Journal.”
He let go the cabin and went down on his knees and started to cry with his hands hanging straight down at his sides. I went back to the Mercury and said to Kapp, “He’ll be along pretty soon. He won’t do anything any more.”
“Good.” He nodded. His eyes were half-closed, his hands were limp in his lap. The swollen hand looked worse. “I’m tired,” he said. He pushed his eyelids open more and studied me. He smiled. “You’re my only child, do you know that? The only child I ever fathered. I’m glad to look at you.”
I lit us cigarettes.