TWELVE

The next morning I called on Jason Cantwell.

The night of the funeral I had found Kris Ann in our bedroom, loading a black revolver.

“What’s that?” I blurted stupidly.

She gazed at me across the bed, gripping the revolver. It was blunt and smooth and oiled. “Daddy gave it to me this morning, after you left. To protect myself.”

“From what?”

“Jason Cantwell.” She looked away. “I’m afraid of him.”

“Why, exactly?”

“Because of Lydia. Isn’t that enough?”

She stood framed in the blackness of our window, shoulders curled as if cold. “I don’t like guns,” I said quietly. “Roland knows that. You know it, too.”

Her face burned. “I just need one until this is over.”

“Krissy, I want you to take it back.”

“Please—”

“I’m here, dammit. Isn’t that enough?”

Her look across the bed was level and silent. Then she repeated simply, “I need it, Adam.”

Her eyes held mine without wavering. Softly, I asked, “Do you know how to use that?”

“I haven’t in years. But Henry taught me when I was younger, for target practice. His father was a crack pistol shot.” She paused, then added, “He taught Jason, too.”

For a long time I stared at the gun. “Put the safety on,” I finally said, “and stick it in a drawer.”

She silently placed the gun in the drawer of her nightstand and closed it. I lit a cigarette.

“I’m sorry, Adam.”

She turned out the lights and got in bed.

There was nothing more said, or done.

In the morning we sat in the sunroom as we usually did, with coffee and the paper. The headline read, CANTWELL FAMILY CENTER OF PROBE. We said little about that or anything else, and nothing about the gun. Riffling the back pages I found Kris Ann’s picture above the caption “Mrs. Kris Ann Shaw, Chairman of the Junior League Volunteers for Retarded Children.” In the picture she smiled as she had the day I’d watched her kneeling in a circle of the children she taught, seemingly oblivious to dirty hair or tantrums or runny noses as she helped them shape clay into whatever they imagined. At the circle’s edge a small girl with taffy hair and guileless clear eyes had hung back watching her, unnoticed in the clamor of children thrusting lumps of clay toward Kris Ann for the smile she gave. Then the girl had put down her clay and walked to Kris Ann, touching her hair. Kris Ann had looked up, and then her smile had faded and she pulled the girl close, her eyes shut.

“I’m glad you still work with those children,” I told her now. “You’re good with them.”

She took a sip of coffee, her face abstracted. “Art’s something they need, that’s all. There are no wrong answers.” She rose, touching my shoulder, and went upstairs.

I stared out the window. Above me Kris Ann started running her shower. I got up abruptly, called the university for Jason Cantwell’s address, and left.

In the aftermath of rain, the morning was lush and bright and fresh as Creation. The campus—tan brick buildings with no trees around them—looked scrubbed clean. I found Jason’s apartment at its edge, a worn brick building stuck between an orthodontist and a marriage counselor. I parked, climbed one flight to the end of a dark hallway, and knocked.

The door was opened by an olive-skinned man with full black beard, flat cheekbones like hammered bronze, and black liquid eyes. His chest strained the dark T-shirt, and his arms were ridged and heavy.

“What do you want?” he demanded, surprised and ready to be hostile.

“I’m Adam Shaw. You remember. I represent your father now.”

“He send you?”

“No. This is my idea.”

The volatile eyes seemed to change like some unstable element. I was recalling more about him than I had thought: a nineteen-year-old boy at our engagement party who seemed somehow uninvited, a stray yet the center of a chemistry that kept Lydia glancing toward him, Kris Ann a careful distance she maintained wherever Jason moved. He had made an impression then, and after that—when I had seen nothing of him and heard nothing good—almost none. But the man who stood now in the doorway had the primal force of a prophet or a Mansonite. “You’ve got five minutes,” he said at last, and moved grudgingly aside.

His apartment was cramped—a small living room with a kitchen nook off that and one bedroom—and its contents a riot of confusion. On the far wall a poster of Ho Chi Minh watched from above the color television. A half-finished macrame lay on the couch to the left, there was a cocaine spoon on the coffee table, and I stood on a costly looking Persian rug. A bookshelf of bricks and boards held a revisionist history by Eugene Genovese, some Herbert Marcuse, and a gothic romance, in paperback. In the kitchen, a blue-jeaned girl with long brown hair washed dishes by a spice rack and copper teapot. I figured those, and the paperback, were hers.

“Hello,” I said.

She turned, eyes turquoise and unsure. She was tall and pretty, with tawny skin and small delicate features. Her body stretched with a young girl’s leanness to sudden full breasts, and there were tints of honey in her curly hair. “Hi,” she said in a near whisper and turned quickly back to her dishes.

I felt Jason’s eyes warning me off, as clear as speech. He stood in the center of the living room, thumb stroking one side of his beard. “I hear you found the old lady.” His voice was slow and guttural and half-curious. “The cops said her neck had these purple welts.”

He could have been discussing a dead hamster. But I couldn’t make him out. His neck was bent to the side, his body rigid, and each word seemed molten and heavy. There was something old about him, and terribly young. I nodded. “That’s right.”

Jason stared at his feet. “Yeah, well, that’s how I found out, you know—from the cops. By the time old Henry called, the pigs had been all over me. He must have thought they’d trap me first.”

I caught the edge of hostile pride. “That’s my doing,” I told him. “They were on the way before Henry got home. I had the will with me when I found her. You did know about the will?”

“No.” The pulse throbbed in his temple. “The old lady made noises but she never said she’d done it.”

“Well, she had, and that’s why the cops came after you. I thought maybe now you could tell me who else might have killed her.”

He gave me a sharp look. “I don’t see how it much matters.”

“Yeah, I noticed you missed the funeral.”

The girl had left the kitchen and moved to the corner of the couch, watching Jason. His eyes turned bright and violent. “So what? I’m sure you being there was enough for Henry.”

I shrugged. “Another man might have come, for his father’s sake.”

Jason’s chest rose. “You feel real sentimental about him, don’t you, Shaw?”

“We’ve spent some pleasant evenings. He’s a sensitive, intelligent man. People could have worse fathers and generally do.”

“Well, I’m just fucking thrilled you’ve gotten so much out of him. Let me tell you, man, I used to get a handshake when they sent me off to prep school. Old Henry, the walking secret.”

“None of which explains who killed your mother.”

“I already told that pig lieutenant I was right here with Terry.” He wheeled on her for confirmation. She nodded and Jason turned back with dark satisfaction, as if he’d scored some point about the girl. “But the pigs wanted to push me around. They asked how I liked Lydia, looked for pieces of her skin under my fingernails—” His throat began working.

“They were horrible,” the girl broke in.

Her words seemed to draw out his poison. Jason’s face relaxed and his breathing eased. “Maybe they’d heard you’d quarreled,” I said.

“I just reminded her,” he said in a succinct voice, “that her family were corrupt fascists who got rich exploiting miners. That her father murdered two black men for racist votes. That her little civic works were one pathetic daisy on the family pile of shit.”

It was clear that Jason Cantwell was a wounded man. But he made it hard to care. “Perhaps your mother was trying, in her own way.”

“Yeah, by taking a busload of black kids to the symphony. Poor Lydia, she had the soul of a fucking Barbie doll—‘Give the niggers presents, make them feel better.’ She didn’t like me saying that. I told her whites covered the brown man like thin scum on the surface of the world. You could see her get scared. Hell, she was so paranoid about blacks that the last time I saw her she was all uptight that the fucking yardman was watching her. I said, ‘Sure, in your dreams.’ She got pissed and said she’d cut me off, she always did.” Jason kept saying more than he needed, as if he cared more than he wished. He caught himself. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t need money or anything else. From her or Henry.”

There was a faint aroma from the kitchen, something boiling I couldn’t quite place. “You tell Rayfield about the yardman?”

“I forgot.” His one-sided smile was no smile at all. “You’re worried about old Henry, aren’t you? Well, it wasn’t Henry, not that he gives a damn for anything that breathes. Henry likes poetry and vases. He doesn’t have the guts for killing.”

“Not to mention that he loved your mother.”

He repeated the same unpleasant smile. “Who you been talking to, Shaw? Henry? He never even touched her. Hell, they had separate bedrooms. I could never see how they got it up to have me.”

“They probably knew what they could look forward to.”

It was as if I’d struck a match. Jason stepped forward, fists clenched, eyes full of prep school fights and murdered dogs and all the people who had called him a curse to his parents.

“Jason,” the girl said sharply.

He blinked, stopping in his tracks. I went on as if nothing had happened. “Maybe she had someone else. Was your mother friends with any men?”

“No.” His voice was low and murderous.

“Ever see her with Dalton Mooring?”

His body strained. “Did you?” I prodded.

The girl perched on the edge of the sofa, watching Jason. The room seemed like a cage. Jason stared at his fingernails. “He was there the second last time I went, sitting next to her on the couch. They were having tea.” His voice rasped. “Lydia always liked to have tea.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. They looked surprised, then Mooring started asking about school, how I was doing, bullshit like that—like it was really a big deal to him. He acted strange, kind of embarrassed. She was sitting close to him with her eyes all bright and funny, smiling at me like she didn’t know what to do. I got sick of them both and left.”

“Think he and your mother were having an affair?”

His voice lashed out in sudden pain. “Look, I don’t give a shit what Lydia did.”

The smell from the kitchen was tea.

Jason’s face was contorted in a torment of hate, instability, and thwarted love. “Okay,” I said flatly. “Thanks for the talk.”

“Hang on, Shaw.” Jason’s stare brightened with sudden, malevolent curiosity. “I want to hear how you’re making out with Kris Ann Cade.”

His gaze was keen and oddly excited. The girl looked fragile, her eyes deep blue and scared. “Fine,” I answered.

“I was just wondering. I remember old man Cade was all bent out of shape, you being Catholic and all.”

“That was a while ago.”

The soft answer drew him on. He looked eagerly at the girl, then to me. His voice seeped adolescent taunting, getting back his own. “Yeah, I guess you kissed that off to go fuck Kris Ann and live off her old man’s money. She must be good. You’ve really got it made now, don’t you?”

The girl turned to me, lips parted in mute appeal. “As running dogs go,” I answered mildly. “Of course nothing’s perfect. You never come to our parties.”

He moved closer. “I wouldn’t come near you or your cunt wife. You’re just a fucking leech.”

All at once I’d had enough. “Look at you,” I said, “dancing on your mother’s grave and spouting drivel while your girlfriend does the dishes. Christ, you haven’t the moral sense or compassion God gave a maggot. Your father’s worth ten of you.”

His fist smashed into my forehead.

I wobbled, staggering against the wall. His second punch cracked against my cheekbone. My knees buckled. I ducked by instinct as his next swing crashed into the wall above me.

He yelped, losing a split second. As he grabbed for my throat I spun, still crouching, and hit him in the stomach with a left hook. He grunted, air gasping from his mouth. I hit him in the ribs with a right cross, then sent a left to the stomach that doubled him over and drove him back. The girl screamed. I pivoted and sent a right to his jaw with all the force I had.

Pain shot through my arm as the punch stood him up. He dropped to the floor. The girl sprang from the couch and bent over him.

My face and throat ached and blood was rushing in my head. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and was. But she didn’t answer or even look up. As I left, the sound of Jason’s moans came through the hallway like keening.

I made it to the stairs and then down to the car, one step at a time, leaning against the wheel until my head cleared. But I had decided to find Mooring by the time I drove away.