Thomas Perry Read online

“Who is he?” asked Cushner with eager impatience. “Where can I find him?”

  Millikan hesitated. “Let me look him up.” Millikan didn’t have to look him up. His number was one of five printed in the last page of his address book, without names or addresses beside them, but this one he knew by heart. There had been times in his life when he had sat and stared at the number, repeated it to himself over and over, feeling the temptation to dial it. He would toy with the idea, imagining how the call would go: he would say his name, and Prescott would remember him, then take over his problem.

  He had always resisted. As he remembered that, the enormity of what he was doing settled on him. He had decided to do it because the man was rich, and it would cost money. But the money was just numbers, not worth worrying about. What was important was the guilt. He was about to involve the old man in it, but only to share: he would not be able to shift it off his own conscience.

  “Professor Millikan?”

  The old man was waiting. Millikan closed his eyes again. “His name is Prescott. He’s . . . a kind of specialist, who takes a certain kind of case. What he does isn’t exactly illegal, or at least nobody’s proven that it is. But it’s—”

  “Did you find his number?” The voice was strong and sure.

  Millikan admitted, “Well, yes . . .”

  “Then give it to me.”

  Two days later, Cushner took the same early-morning flight that Millikan had taken. A few hours after he reached Los Angeles, he was in the restaurant at his hotel, waiting. It was a dim, old-fashioned room where waiters spoke in quiet voices and then disappeared. At precisely eight o’clock, as arranged, a tall, slim, athletic-looking man with light hair and gray eyes stepped up to the maître d’ and spoke quietly with him, then allowed himself to be ushered to the table. Cushner could see that he wore simple, conservative clothes—a navy blue summer-weight blazer and gray slacks. Not a dandy, at least. When the man came closer, Cushner was reassured to see that he was not a young man. He was at least forty-five and his face had the look common to men who had proven their worth through some kind of work that didn’t involve merely pleasing people.

  “Mr. Prescott?” said Cushner, and began to get up, but Prescott only nodded and said, “Sit down.” Prescott sat down across from him, and said quietly, “I’ve taken the time to read some of the press reports in the Louisville papers. Are they mostly accurate?”

  Robert Cushner answered, “Yes, as far as I know.” He stared across the table at Prescott, and suddenly understood. Millikan had not been taking all that time to search for a telephone number. He had been trying to give himself time to refuse, probably trying to get himself to lie and say he’d lost it. This Prescott was exactly the kind of man a vengeful father yearned for—a hard, violent, cold man—but Millikan had almost kept the phone number to himself.

  Millikan need not have bothered to feel guilty for the sake of Robert Cushner, but apparently he did not know that. Maybe Millikan did not have children, and he certainly had not had a predator set his filthy eyes on one, or he would have understood. He was supposed to be a famous criminologist, so he should have known not to hesitate. He should have known about the purity of fire, the hot hatred that burned up all compunction that a normal good man would feel, a man who had been left undisturbed and intact. Revenge is not sweet, a luxury. It’s a necessary restoration of balance in the universe.

  When Cushner looked at Prescott’s face, he had to raise his eyes a little because Prescott was tall. His height conveyed the impression that he was thin, but he wasn’t, exactly. He looked like a runner or a swimmer, with shoulders and arms that were hard, with long muscles. The face was unchanging, the features relaxed but never in motion, as though there were no such thing as surprise. His was the face of a man in a room by himself. The eyes were different—bright and alert, but without sympathy: they did not veil the fact that they were looking at you but not feeling what you felt.

  Cushner said to Prescott, “My son’s name was Robert too. He was a very special person, not just to me, but to everybody who knew him. He left a wife and two children. The little one probably won’t even remember what he looked like. Right now, he cries every night. The older one thinks her father was killed because she talked her mother into taking them to a movie, and that made her father have to eat alone in a restaurant.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Cushner.” Prescott’s eyes were cold and piercing, but his voice was quiet and calm. “You want to tell me why you would pay me money to find his killer. That isn’t what I want to hear. I’m not just coming to this problem for the first time, the way you are. I don’t need to be convinced that you have a reason. I’m not interested in what you feel, or how you got to feeling it. I’m not interested in you at all. The one who matters is the one who killed him. That’s all I can help you with.”

  Cushner looked at him for a long moment. “You’re right.” He started over. “What can I expect—written reports, or calls, or what?”

  Prescott said, “If what you want is reports, the Louisville police will give you reports for nothing.”

  Cushner was uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat, then admitted, “No. I guess that’s not what I want. I want you to find him and make sure he never does it again. But I’m talking about you and me, how we do business.”

  “I get three hundred thousand to start,” said Prescott. “When I come back with proof that it’s over, you pay me three hundred more. Then I go away.”

  “But how are you going to do it? How can you expect to find him if the police can’t?”

  “I don’t expect to find him,” said Prescott. “I’ll wait for him in a place where he’s going to be.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I get to know him.”

  2

  James Varney saw the end of the big hotel pool coming toward him for the last time, the lines between tiles resolving their blurriness into clean, straight edges. His right hand touched the wall with its last stroke. A mile. He reached up with both hands and pulled himself to the deck, then walked to the men’s shower and stood rinsing the chlorine off his skin. He savored the feeling in his muscles, mildly tired but stretched and comfortable: it was a good way to finish.

  He had risen at five, come to the hotel exercise room while the other guests were still asleep, and done a good approximation of his usual weight training. Then he had spent time on a treadmill and a stationary bike before he had gone into the pool. He could see the clock on the wall at the other end of the locker room. It was nearly nine, and he was ready to buy the morning newspapers and eat breakfast. He stepped into the locker room, took some towels from the counter, dried himself, and began to dress.

  After Varney did a job at night, he liked to get into a car and drive until morning, or until he heard the first announcement on the car radio. That usually put him far enough away so that he could drop out of sight for a time, watch television, read the papers, and wait.

  On his way to Louisville this time, he had stopped in Columbus, Ohio, and registered at this big, comfortable hotel. Columbus was only 214 miles from Louisville on Interstate 71, so he had selected it as a convenient stop on his way home. But now he had lingered in Columbus for five days. Whatever agitation of the authorities that might have added any risk to highway travel was well over by now. He supposed it was time to continue his journey home.

  When Varney traveled, he studied the junior-level executives and salesmen in their late twenties or early thirties he saw in airports and hotels, and made sure he looked and dressed the way they did. But he was not what they were. He was a special person.

  James Varney had experimented at living a life of adventure since he was eleven years old, but he had not been able to get the last of the obstacles out of his way until he was nearly eighteen. After that, things had been more to his liking, and he had been able to get what he needed.

  The experiments had started with Aunt Antonia. She had taught him simply by being in his way. In those days, the f
amily had lived in a big old house in Oakland, California, all dark brown wood, with a big cold kitchen and a great, broad, creaky staircase that always collected dust beneath the railing and next to the wall. The staircase led from the foyer, just opposite the front entrance, up to a row of dark, musty rooms on the second floor. The tiny one at the head of the steps was his, the big master suite at one end of the hall belonged to his parents, and another just like it was set aside for Aunt Antonia. The other three bedrooms were furnished with beds and mismatched furniture, but nobody ever went into them except when Aunt Toni nagged his mother into stripping the beds and washing the sheets and blankets, then pointlessly making the unused beds again. Days like that had made the boy sad.

  Aunt Antonia was of no more relevance to the life of the family than the cocker spaniel that was always at her heels, and she was no more pleasant. Each time another member of the household came in the front door, she would be there to complain and criticize, her shrill voice accompanied by the dog’s cranky yapping. They both continued bravely and unremittingly as long as the enemy was in sight. Sometimes when an attack was interrupted, they even waited in siege outside a bathroom door for the next sortie, when they would stage a flank attack and keep up harassment barrages until the next time a door was closed to them.

  Each time the intruders departed again, she and the dog both collapsed on the long couch in the study, letting nervous agitation disappear in contemplation of the new wrongs the enemy had committed during this engagement. This new list of crimes would provide fresh rallying cries to inspire them when they repelled the next invasion.

  An older person might have taken a more complex view, and decided that Aunt Antonia had some pleasure in her life—even that she enjoyed her warlike outbursts—and that as a living organism, she had a right to them. But Jimmy was a child, and such thoughts did not occur to him.

  When he set his mind to killing her, his concerns were simple and practical. It had to be done in a way that would lead no conceivable investigator to him. That was pure instinct. And it had to be done in a way that ensured she and the dog would go together. He knew it was likely that once she was dead, the dog would be put to sleep too, but he felt that he must not rely on this. If there were some kind of mysterious adult sense of propriety or even sentimentality that he had not noticed because he did not feel it, they might keep the dog alive. He could hardly expect to kill the dog later.

  He set about stalking his aunt and her dog, being careful not to let them catch him at it. He would get up early every morning through the summer by the simple expedient of leaving the east window of his room uncovered so the rising sun would wake him. Then he crept to her door, watched, listened, and waited. By the end of a week he knew all of her habits, and he began to plan.

  He would follow her from place to place at a distance, recording in his mind when she did things and how she did them. He devised all sorts of causes for her death. She could go too close to her open window on the downhill side of the house, where the driveway was dug in deeper so the car could go into the garage under the first floor. The fall from her room would be at least forty feet to the concrete pavement. She could plug in her coffeepot when the kitchen stove was on and the pilot light out, and blow herself up. She could fall on a kitchen knife. She could be mistaken for an intruder and shot by his father in the night. Her own dog could be infected with rabies and bite her, so they would both die a lingering, simultaneous death. Each of these ideas had faults. He had to settle for electrocution.

  He waited until all of the conditions were right on a hot August evening. When he heard her bathwater run for a long time and then stop, he listened for the music on her radio. When he heard it, he walked in, tossed her dog into the tub beside her, and pushed the radio in with them.

  In the end, there was no real investigation, because the adults who rushed in as soon as they could get up the stairs thought they knew everything instantly. The dog had barked out of playful overexcitement and jumped into the tub to be with its mistress, knocking the radio into the water. The commotion had first brought the boy in—a second tragedy, to have one so young confronted with the sight of his electrocuted, naked aunt and the ugly, dead little dog—and then everyone else.

  The boy’s parents had behaved as though they were convinced, not that they had pieced together the sequence of events using inferences and imagination, but that they had seen it, somehow, having seen all of the evidence immediately afterward. The policemen who arrived a few minutes later and did such things as unplug the radio and make everyone leave the bathroom found no fault with the parents’ story. They went away convinced that they had investigated. Later, the coroner’s report had made the tale unassailable: she and the dog had definitely died of electrocution, hadn’t they?

  The boy was aware, at the instant when he dropped the radio into the water, that he was taking an irrevocable step. He knew he was casting off his innocence, but he did not think of it as a descent into evil. It struck him as a first, necessary step into adventure. He had stopped cowering in shadows, depending for comfort on not being noticed. He had, instead, seen circumstances as a chance to mold the future to his will. As it happened, the effort at improving the future had failed because he’d had incomplete information. Aunt Antonia was the wife of his father’s dead brother, and thus no real relation to the family.

  A week after the funeral, his parents packed all of their belongings and his. They sat him down and explained that the house had belonged to Aunt Antonia. Because his father had been in what he called “a bad patch,” she had allowed them to live with her for a time. The boy had wondered at this, because at the age of eleven, he could not remember having lived anywhere else. But now, her will had been read. The house and the money they had all lived on were going to her sister, a woman none of them had ever met, who lived in Omaha. The house was going to be sold, and even if it weren’t, his parents did not have enough money to pay the heating bills for a place that size.

  The boy had noticed that when his parents packed, they took with them a number of things that he had never seen anyone use but his aunt. He saw a woman’s watch, rings and necklaces, a silver tea set, a couple of antique clocks from her bedroom, a set of hairbrushes and a mirror with mother-of-pearl inlays. He knew from the many suddenly empty surfaces in the house that there was more that he had not seen them pack.

  As he grew, the event diminished in his memory: his effort had turned out to have been of little consequence or advantage. He had acted well and decisively, but the forces of the universe were not easily moved. He was still not given the kind of attention that he felt his parents should give him. They were still just as distracted and, if anything, busier than before. Gradually, he came to see that they were simply that way: people of little account. After that they bustled about in the usual way, frantic and occasionally noisy, but he knew it was of no importance to him.

  When their scheming and hustling seemed to gain them some money, they would squabble over it, because they had each spent it in their minds already. His mother would have a new dress, usually, and his father would be in a bad mood because he had bet his share on something that had not behaved as he had predicted: a horse, a team, some cards.

  At some point the next year, a change took place, but it was minor too. His father disappeared. The noises in the periphery had been louder lately, but had not changed in character. After one of the small temporary victories, his father had gone out as usual, but he simply hadn’t come back. The boy at first assumed that he had gone off somewhere to get over his usual remorse in solitude. A few days later he noticed that his father was still not around, but the boy assumed that he’d come and gone without his noticing. The next time the boy thought of it, he asked his mother where his father was, and she gave him an unusually sour look. She said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” He waited for a moment, suspecting that she did care. Because he did not ask, she added, “I guess life is too much for him. Things were fine for him when
I was at his beck and call anytime. But after you came along, I was too busy to take care of two babies.” There followed a day or two of dire mutterings, at times against his father, and at times against him.

  The man he was used to was gone, but he was replaced by others. Some would stay for a month, but others would simply be a knock on the door or a phone call. Late at night there would be whispers, creaking stairs, or the thump of a shoe dropping on a floor above his head. It didn’t matter which it was, because the ones who came were empty, just more people of no account to keep his mother occupied at the edge of his vision.

  The good part was that the constant squabbling about money had ended. Whatever negotiations she had with the men who stayed or passed through were carried on out of earshot, and seemed to be resolved mostly in her favor. The things she liked—new dresses, makeup, hair and nail work—were in plentiful supply. But he still was alone most of the time. He got up and went to school, came home, ate what was left over from the dinners she had shared with her male guests, washed the dishes, and went out again. If he was home in time to be gone again by the time she woke up, he had nothing to fear from her displeasure.

  For years, he made no further forays into the world of adventure he had glimpsed in the death of Aunt Toni. He prepared. He got up in the morning and did his sets with weights, chinned himself, did crunches and push-ups, showered, and went to school. Then he came home, did his homework, ate what he could find around the house, and went out to run a few miles. When he came back he did a second workout, showered, and went out again to walk the night streets.

  He detested the weak, so he worked and sweated to be strong and hard and fast. Failure was humiliating and brought unwelcome attention, so he avoided trouble by doing his homework and getting good grades.

  In the second month of his senior year of high school, it seemed to occur to his mother, all at once, that he existed. It was as though while he was young and small he was able to be invisible, but by that October, he had grown too big to ignore. He had to endure detailed recitations of her daily life. He had to endure less specific lists of sacrifices she had made for his sake. He had always had to hear her say that having him around was such a terrible burden that she could not stand it any longer. But now he had to experience a strange new set of indictments: the complaints against his father that had been silently refined in her mind during six years of resentment were now delivered to the boy as though the transgressions were his.