There were three cops I talked to. One was a local plainclothesman, a comic relief clown who chewed cut plug. One was from the county District Attorney’s office, a ferret with delusions of grandeur. And the third was State CID, an ice-gray man with no tear ducts.
I told them all about Bill’s having lost his wife two months ago in an automobile accident, and his father being killed only a month before that, and how he’d been very depressed ever since, and he’d had the Luger for years but I hadn’t known he’d brought it along on this trip with him. And we were just traveling around the state, basically to try to forget our recent losses. But Bill had just got steadily more and more depressed, and now he’d killed himself.
The local cop swallowed it whole, with tobacco juice. The DA’s man would have liked a hotter story, but he didn’t want the work of digging for it. And the CID man didn’t believe a word of it, but he didn’t care. He was just there to memorize my face.
So it was called suicide. To me, it looked like a lousy job of staging. Aside from the fact that Bill wouldn’t have killed himself for anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.
The local cop had called a local undertaker, who might have been his brother-in-law. He looked at me and rubbed his hands together. We both knew that he was going to cheat me down to the skin, and we both knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Thursday night, I went out and got drunk. I barhopped out toward the air base. When I started a fight with a Staff Sergeant, the CID man came from out of the smoke and took me away. He drove a gray Ford, and he put me in it and took me back to the hotel. Before I got out, he said, “Don’t do what your brother did.”
I looked at him. “What did my brother do, smart man?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Whatever it was, you take warning.”
I said, “Go to hell.” I fumbled the door open and lurched into the hotel. I never saw him again. What -ever had bugged him, he’d either been satisfied or had given up.
In the room, I lay in bed, and for a long while I didn’t know what was wrong. Then I figured it out. I couldn’t hear the sound of Bill’s breathing in the next bed. I listened. He wasn’t breathing anywhere in the world. Poor sweet honest Bill.
I once read a book of stories by a man named Fredric Brown. In one of them he quotes the tale of the peasant walking through the haunted wood, saying to himself, I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn’t any justice, and a voice behind him says, There isn’t.
The author didn’t say so, but I know. The peasant’s name was Bill.
I wished I could go talk to Kapp, but we’d decided it would be best for us to keep away from each other until all the cops went home. It would only complicate things to bring Kapp into it. Just as I said I was alone when I found Bill.
I got up and turned on the light. I went downstairs, but all the bars in Plattsburg were closed. I went back up to the room and turned off the light and sat up in bed smoking. Every time I took a drag the room glowed red and the covers moved on the other bed. After a while I switched the light on and went to sleep.
Friday afternoon, Uncle Henry showed up from Binghamton, and we had a fight. He wanted Bill’s body shipped to Binghamton, and I wanted it stuck in the ground here and now. It wasn’t Bill, it was just some meat. There wasn’t any Bill any more.
I won, because I was willing to pay. Then there was trouble with a priest named Warren because Bill committed suicide, so he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. I said, “There are stupid policemen in your town, Father. Bill didn’t kill himself.”
He said, “I’m sorry, but the official view—”
I interrupted him, saying, “Didn’t you hear about the Constitution? They separated church and state.”
I said more than that, and got him mad at me. Uncle Henry was shocked, and told me so when we left: “The Church has its laws about suicide, and that’s—”
“If you say that word suicide once more, I’ll shove a crucifix down your throat.”
“If your father were alive—” And so on.
So Saturday six hired pallbearers carried the coffin from the funeral home. There was no stop at a church for the suicide; he went straight out of town to a clipped green hill with a view of Lake Champlain, and into a hole which no priest had blessed with holy water. He would have to make do with God’s rain.
Uncle Henry and I were the only ones beside the grave who had known Bill in life. The undertaker came over and wanted to know if we wanted him to say a few words. I had never known till then what a man would look like who had a complete and absolute lack of taste or sensibility. I looked at this wretch and said, “No. Not ever.”
After the funeral, I arranged for storage of Bill’s car. It was mine now, but I couldn’t drive it till the registration had been changed, which would take too long. No one can drive a car registered to a dead man.
Uncle Henry came back to the hotel room with me. He said, “Are you coming back home with me?”
“To Binghamton? I don’t have any home there.”
“You do with us, if you want. Your Aunt Agatha would be happy to have you stay with us.”
“I’ll be right back.” I went into the bathroom and sat on the floor and cried like a little kid. I wanted to be a little kid. The floor was all small hexagonal tiles. I counted them, and after a while I got up and washed my face and went back outside. Uncle Henry was standing by the window, smoking a cigar. I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been in a bad mood. You were a good guy to come up here.”
“It hasn’t been easy for you,” he said.
“I don’t think I want to go back to Binghamton. Not yet.”
“It’s your life, Ray. But you’re always welcome, you know that.”
“Thank you.”
We were silent a minute. He wanted to say something, and he didn’t know how. I couldn’t help him; I didn’t know what it was he wanted to say. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “About Betsy.”
“Betsy?”
“Bill’s girl. We’ve been caring for her.”
“Oh. I forgot about her.”
“We’d like to keep her. I’d like to adopt her.” He waited, but there wasn’t anything for me to say. “Would that be all right with you?”
“Oh. Well, sure. Why ask me?”
“You’re her uncle. You’re her next of kin.”
“I don’t even know her, I’ve never seen her. I don’t have any kind of home or anything.”
“I’ll start the papers then. There may be something you’ll have to sign, I don’t know. Where can I get in touch with you?”
“I’ll write you when I get an address.”
“All right.”
He cleared his throat again. “I should start back. I don’t like to drive at night.”
I went down to the car with him. He said, “Oh, yes, one other thing. Bill’s house—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, not now! Some other time, some other year, let me alone!”
“Yes, all right. You’re right. Be sure to send me your address. I’ll take care of things till then.”
He drove away, and I went to a liquor store and asked for two bottles of Old Mr. Boston before I remembered. I took them both anyway, and went back to the hotel room. I sat cross-legged on the bed and smoked and drank and thought. Very gradually, I unwound. Very gradually, I got so I could pay attention to my thoughts again.
It got slowly dark outside, and I treaded heavily through my thoughts to some conclusion I didn’t yet know. And Kapp knocked on the door at a little after nine.
I got up and let him in. He said, “Your uncle gone home?”
“This afternoon,” I said.
“I’ve been watching. You haven’t had any tail. I guess they’re satisfied with the suicide idea.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Crap. Neither are you. If that job was done by a professional, they’ve got a lot slacker than my day.”
“I know.”
He pointed a stiff finger at his forehead. “The angle was wrong,” he said. “You know what I mean? Dead on that way. I saw that right away. Too high.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What’s that you’re drinking? I brought some House of Lords.” He had a brown paper bag under one arm. He took the bottle out and showed it to me. “Want some?”
“I’ll stay with this.”
I sat on the bed again, and he sat in the armchair in the corner. He said, “You feel like talking, Ray?”
“I think so.”
“Before we found Bill dead, I was going to ask you a question. You know the question I mean.”
“I suppose so.”
“I want to make the move, Ray. I want to get a base and call a few people and tell them okay, they can count on me. And the first thing they’ll ask me, ‘You got your son with you?’ What am I going to tell them?”
I didn’t say anything. I read the label on the Old Mr. Boston bottle. What I was drinking was seventy proof.
He waited, and then he spoke rapidly, as though he were trying to catch up. “I’ll tell you the way it stands, Ray. This thing’s going to happen, one way or another. People are coming back, people are choosing sides. If you say yes, no, it doesn’t make any difference, you see what I mean? It’s still going to happen.” He held up a rigid finger, peered over it at me. “There’s only one difference if you say no. Only the one. Eddie Kapp won’t be running things. I don’t know who will be—maybe there’ll be a fight first, I don’t know—but it won’t be Eddie Kapp. I’ll take my sister away from her husband and go down to Florida like I figured.”
“I hear it’s nice down there,” I said.
He frowned. “Is that your answer?”
“I don’t know. Keep talking.”
“All right. I want you with me. I mean besides everything else, you know what I mean? The hell with it, you’re my son. I never thought about it this way, I never knew it’d hit me this way. When I went in, you were just a—you know, just a little thing in a crib. I saw you maybe three four times. You weren’t anybody at all yet, you know what I mean?”
“And now your heart is full.”
“Okay. And my glass is empty.” He refilled it from the bottle of House of Lords. “I don’t expect you to feel anything like that for me,” he said. “What the hell, I’m no kind of a father or anything. But it hits me, I swear to Christ it does. You’re my son, you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know what you mean. Forget what I said there, I didn’t mean to be a smart-aleck.”
“Sure, what the hell. But there’s two of the reasons why I want you to stick with me, you see? Because you’re my son, and it’s as simple as that. And because if you’re with me I can make my move. There’s a lot of profit in the New York operation, Ray, take it from me. God knows how much these days.”
I held up my hand. “Wait a second. Let me tell you something. That doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean anything to me at all. I don’t care about the New York mob. If you take it, I’m not your heir.”
“If you feel that way—”
“I feel that way. Have you got any more reasons?”
“It depends what you want to do,” he said.
“In what way?”
“You still want revenge? Because if you do, you should stick with me. We’ll be after the same people.” He drank half a glass. “It depends whether that’s what you want or not,” he said.
“Sure.” I reached over to the nightstand and got the bottle. I didn’t need the glass, so I tossed it over onto Bill’s bed. I drank from the bottle, and held it, looking at it, while I talked. “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Up here, since my uncle left. Trying to figure out what I’m going to do with myself. You want to hear what I’ve been thinking?”
“Well, sure. Certainly. I mean, that’s just exactly what I want, you see?”
“Yeah. All right, this is what I’ve been thinking. To begin with, every man has to have either a home or a purpose. Do you see that? Either a place to be or something to do. Without one or the other, a man goes nuts. Or he loses his manhood, like a hobo. Or he drinks or kills himself or something else. It doesn’t matter, it’s just that everybody has to have one or the other.”
“Okay,” he said. “I can see that. Like me wanting to live with my sister. So I’d have a home if I didn’t have any purpose. I can see that.”
“All right. Now me, I’ve been a kid, that’s all. So what I always had was a home. Even if I was in the Air Force in Germany, I still knew I had a home, and that was on Burbank Avenue in Binghamton, where my father lived. Then they killed him, and I didn’t have any home any more. But I had a purpose instead. Vengeance. To kill my father’s killer. That’s enough of a purpose, isn’t it?”
“Sure it is.”
“Sure it is. Only then you came along. And now my father is not my father. Is revenging a foster father just as good? No, it isn’t.”
“What about your brother?”
“My half-brother. Wait. Let me tell it to you the way I thought it out. Right now, I’m adrift. I have neither home nor purpose, only bits and pieces of purpose. To continue the vengeance of my father-who-is-not-my-father. To revenge my sister-in-law, whom I never knew. To protect my niece, about whom I care less than nothing. To assist you in your palace revolution, in which I have no stake. To even the score for the loss of my eye, which I can never get back. To save my own life, which isn’t worth saving unless I have a purpose. To avenge my halfbrother, where at least my own familial blood was spilt.”
“All right, what’s wrong with that?”
“Avenging Bill? But I need more than that. It isn’t purpose enough.” I raised the bottle and lowered it. While I got out a cigarette, I said, “In all of it, there still is one purpose worth having. But it dead-ends.”
He shifted in the chair. “What purpose is that?”
“Somewhere in New York City, there’s a man who pointed a finger and said, ‘Take away Ray Kelly’s home.’ Other men did it, but they were only extensions of the pointing finger. I can cut that finger off. Not because he killed a foster father or a half-brother or a half-brother’s wife. But because he killed my home. He left me no choice but purpose. To kill him.”
He laughed nervously, saying, “It comes around to the same thing, Ray, doesn’t it?”
“To kill the man who killed the me who might have been. Not exactly the same thing, Kapp.”
He emptied his glass, refilled it. “What the hell,” he said, “however you say it, you’re still after the same people as me. The ones running the organization in New York. Same people, different reasons. Why go off by yourself and fight them?”
“Because it’s my own purpose.”
“We could double up. I help you, you help me.”
“Fine. What’s the name of the man who owns the pointing finger?”
“What?”
“The guy who gave the order to kill Will Kelly. What’s his name?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“You want the crown, Kapp. You’ve got to know who’s wearing it now.”
“Hell, yes. But you don’t know this kind of organization. It might be any one of half a dozen guys. I don’t know which one.”
“A fair trade, Kapp. You give me the name, I’ll give you two weeks. You won’t need any more than that. The people you want to impress, they want to see me at first, that’s all. Once you’re organized, they’ll be too busy to wonder where the kid is.”
“You mean that? You’ll stick around till we’re set up?”
“Two weeks. Until—what’s the date today? Thursday was the fifteenth, so this is the Seventeenth. Thirty days hath September. Okay. Saturday, the first of October, I’m leaving.”
“But you’ll play it like you’re going to be sticking around, right?”
“Sure.”
“You’re my son and heir, right? As far as these guys are concerned, you’re set to sit in the throne when I pop off, right?”
“I’ll play it that way. All you have to do is give me the name.”
“I will. By the first of October, I’ll know which one it was.”
“Not that way, Kapp.”
He jumped to his feet, slamming the empty glass on the dresser. “Goddamn it, I don’t know which one! Ray, face it, I know it’s got to be one of maybe six or seven men. I could toss out one of their names and you’d swallow it, you know damn well you would. But I don’t know for sure which one it is, and I’m trying to play this square. I want you to go gunning! That’d work out fine for me, you know what I mean?”
“All right.”
“I’ll find out which one it was. I’ll have him fingered definite by the time you want to leave. I swear my oath on that.”
“All right.”
“Shake on it!”
I shook his hand. When he left, I finished the other bottle.