All The Bells on Earth (4 page)

Happily alone, at least for the moment, Walt looked out through the dripping branches of the avocado tree and knew that right now there was no place in the world he’d rather be. Even the threat of pending houseguests was somehow diminished by the misty weather. Solitude—that was the good thing about working out of the house, especially on a day like this with the rain coming down and with Christmas on the horizon. Ivy was earning pretty good money, thank God, and her income allowed Walt to run his catalogue sales business out of the garage. Once the business was really up and running, the money would roll in, and Ivy could flat-out quit if she wanted to. The Christmas season was already boosting sales, and he was counting on his most recent catalogue to turn things around for him.

“You hope,” he said out loud. Money—the subject had gotten increasingly unbearable to him. The truth was that he was past forty and still didn’t have a real job. He worked like a pig, but somehow that didn’t equate to bringing home the bacon. Ivy never complained, of course. She wasn’t the complaining type. But a man had his pride.

Anyway, he wasn’t in much of a position to complain about Jinx and Henry, no matter how long they intended to stay. He looked at his watch. It was just past noon.

He noticed now that there were a couple of dark red tomatoes on last summer’s vines along the fence. The vines were still green, but it was a gray-green, not the emerald green of high summer, and of course there were no blooms left at all. The two tomatoes were probably fossilized by now. The basil in the adjacent herb garden had gone to seed, and the three basil plants had maybe six leaves between them, but the rosemary and sage would last out the winter no matter how lousy the weather got. And during the cool fall months the lemon tree at the opposite end of the garden had set on so many lemons that now the wet boughs were bent nearly to the ground beneath their weight. Avocadoes, lemons, lawns greening up in the rain—that was winter in southern California; no wonder Henry and Jinx got the hell out of Michigan every year and drove west. They must miss the hell out of California since they’d moved away.

Right then a spider, some kind of daddy longlegs, crawled out of the hole in the bottom of an overturned flowerpot on a shelf and stood there looking around, as if it had slept late and the thunder had awakened it. The pot had a sort of door in the front, a ragged arch where a piece had broken off. It occurred to Walt that the spider worked out of its house, too, and he wondered suddenly what kind of furnishings it had inside—a hammock, a pantry, shelves of books. If Walt had kids he’d be tempted to load the flowerpot up with doll furniture and tiny books and then pretend to find it like that, forever changing his children’s notions about bugs.

Thinking about children, he wondered uneasily if Ivy would bring up that subject again tonight. She’d been on a kick lately about starting a family. Usually the subject came up around bedtime. He’d managed so far to fend her off with logic, just like he had in the past. But that couldn’t go on forever. Ivy had a deep suspicion of logic. She said it was a leaky boat. Last night she had told him that there was nothing logical anyway about starting a family, and so trying to apply logic to it was illogical.

Even now the argument looked irrefutable to him, and he had the vague notion that he’d been defeated. Well, he was safe for the moment anyway, there among the sacks of planting mix and tools and clay pots, watching the heavy branches of the avocado tree shift in the wind, and listening to the swish of its big green leaves and the sound of the rain pelting down. A haze of mist rose from the shingles of the garage, and he could hear the drops pounding on the tin roof of one of the storage sheds, nearly drowning out the sound of the church bells. The bellringer was a hell of a dedicated man, out in weather like this in an open tower, yanking on soggy ropes whether anyone could hear the bells or not: art for art’s sake, or more likely for the glory of God, like the old Renaissance painters.

Walt listened closely. It took him a moment to recognize the melody. It was “In the Bleak Midwinter,” one of his favorites, and it really needed a big church choir to do it justice. He recalled the words to his favorite stanza, and was just on the verge of singing along when the bells broke into a clamor that sounded like a train wreck, the discordant echoes finally clanging away into silence.

T
HE KEY TO THE
third drawer was taped to the back side of the old metal desk. There was nothing in the drawer but the red telephone, and it hadn’t rung for nearly ten years. Unless the phone rang, the drawer stayed locked. There was a phone jack behind the desk, and the phone cord exited through a hole drilled in the back of the drawer. Most of the time it was unplugged from the wall, the cord shoved back into the drawer. It was only when Flanagan was in the building alone that he plugged it in. And it was only when the phone rang that he called himself Flanagan. He had plugged the phone in religiously for the ten years that the phone hadn’t rung at all. It was like walking along a sidewalk: once it occurred to him to avoid stepping on cracks, it became a small obsession. And until he arrived at his destination, he was a careful man.

As far as the phone was concerned, he hadn’t arrived at his destination yet, but there was something in the rainy winter air this morning that made him fear that he was close. It was twenty years ago that he had helped send three men off in the general direction of Hell, and by now he understood that the pit he had dug for these other men was deep enough to contain him too.

So when the phone rang now, inside its drawer, it wasn’t really a surprise, despite the ten years. He put down his pen, letting the phone ring four times before he reached behind the desk and pried the key out from under its tape. He unlocked the drawer, still counting the rings, and picked it up on the tenth.

“Flanagan.” The name sounded idiotic to him.

There was a silence. Then a voice said, “Is it you?”

“It’s me.”

“We have to talk.”

“We’re talking.”

“I don’t mean over the telephone. This kind of business can’t be conducted over the telephone. I think … I believe something’s happening.”

“I’m certain it is.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do
you
mean?”

There was a silence again, as if the man was forcing himself to be patient. His voice was urgent; something had happened to frighten him. “I mean I want out,” he said at last.

Now it was Flanagan’s turn to be silent. Was this what he had expected? He looked around at the old paint, the exposed extension cords, the water dripping in the sink that Mrs. Hepplewhite optimistically called her “kitchen.” He didn’t have to do any calculations now; he had already done them a hundred times—how much hard cash he needed just to keep the church afloat. “I can’t help you,” he said, and he knew it was only partly right even as he said it. The flesh was weak.

“Name your price.”

“I’m not talking about price. I mean to say that I’ve never helped you. What you’ve done, you’ve done alone.” This was wrong too. He himself was as blameworthy as a felon.

“You know, Mr. Flanagan, I don’t think so. If I thought so, I wouldn’t have called you. What have you taken from me over the years, twenty thousand?”

“I don’t keep accounts.”

“Of course you do. We both know the truth.”

“The truth is, I’m not in that line of work any more, so never mind the past. You might say that I’ve changed; I’ve gone over to the other side.”

“The other side! And yet you answer to the same name and at the same old number. I wonder if some things haven’t changed. How about the color of money? Has that changed, too?”

“I recommend that you ask God for help.”

“Let’s not drift off the subject,” the man said. “I’m willing to pay you a hundred thousand dollars, any way you like—through Obermeyer, cash in a briefcase, trust fund, you name it. I have a certain naive faith in you. Can you believe that? You’ve kept your word to me in the past, and I’m willing to take a gamble on you again. What do I have to lose? Stay near the phone while you think it over. I’ll call back.”

W
HEN
A
RGYLE HUNG UP
the telephone his hand was shaking. He stood by the desk for a moment, getting a grip on himself, then stepped across and turned up the stereo. The children out on the playground had just come out for their midmorning recess. The sound of them shouting and screaming and laughing gave him a headache, or worse, and he’d found that tapes of special-effects type noises—train sounds, ocean waves, thunderstorms—served to drown out their voices better than music did. And these days the sound of music was nearly as intolerable as the sound of children. Nothing was free. Everything had its price.

He realized that his phone was ringing, his personal line, and he turned the stereo volume down slightly and picked up the receiver, sitting down at his desk. “Robert Argyle,” he said. He listened a moment. It was George Nelson with news about Murray LeRoy—good news; LeRoy was dead.

“When?” Argyle asked. His momentary enthusiasm for LeRoy’s death started to wane as Nelson went into detail, and he found himself staring at his desktop, recalling the conversation he’d had a few moments ago. Probably he should have offered Flanagan more money, pushed all his chips into the center of the table. “What did the police say? Did they have any kind of explanation for it?”

“They found the metal parts of a Bic lighter in the alley and the presence of gas from the manhole that’s right there. One theory is that the lighter leaked butane gas into LeRoy’s pocket, and then when he lit his cigarette the gas followed his hand to his mouth and ignited. Apparently it happens more often than you’d guess. If he was wearing flammable clothes, he could have gone up like a torch. All of this is just conjecture, of course, since there aren’t any clothes left to examine except one of those damned white patent leather loafers that he wears, with the tassels. Everything else burned to ash. Even his shirt buttons vaporized. The heat was incredible.”

“And the fire investigators buy this? The butane lighter and all?”

“There was the manhole, too. Apparently gasses might have built up out there in the alley. A spark can set them off. They think it’s some kind of combination of this stuff, perhaps aggravated by chemicals like deodorant and cologne. I suggested kids—punks, skinheads, street gang, something like that—but they didn’t like the idea. The city doesn’t need that kind of talk. There’s also a good possibility that it was a suicide, that he doused himself with flammable liquids and lit himself on fire. There was no gas can, though, no more evidence of suicide than anything else.”

“And you were the one that told them who it was, who you thought it was?”

There was a pause, then Nelson said, “I didn’t think I had any choice, and it turns out I was right. It seems that a couple hours before dawn, LeRoy broke into Holy Spirit Church, up on Almond. He roughed up the old priest and smashed some windows. Apparently our man had a
very
busy morning, dragging those white shoes all over town. I’ve got it on good authority that the priest described them to the police. I’d swear that LeRoy
wanted
to be caught, or at least didn’t give a damn if he was recognized. There must be fifty people around town who’d know straight off the shoe was his. I couldn’t see any choice but to identify it myself.

“Anyway, what I said is that I was expecting him at the office, that we were supposed to head across the street to Moody’s for breakfast at six. I saw the flames through the curtains and ran out with a fire extinguisher, but couldn’t do any good. Every part of that was true, including my trying to put out the flames. Of course I didn’t know who it was then, but I didn’t say so.”

“Who was the investigating officer?”

“Tyler, from Accident Investigations.”

“And he’s satisfied?”

“There’s no reason he shouldn’t be. As I said, it’s the truth, lock, stock, and barrel. Oh, and by the way, somebody kicked apart the nativity scene in the Plaza early this morning, too. We know that was LeRoy, don’t we? That’ll be his footprints in the flowerbeds?”

Argyle wondered suddenly if the question was simply rhetorical, or whether it was full of implication. “Of
course
it was him, unless there’s something you’re holding back.”

“I’m
not holding anything back,” Nelson said, and then paused again, letting his silences speak volumes. Argyle waited him out. “One way or another,” he continued, “I hinted around that LeRoy had been talking about destroying the creche, which is true again; half a dozen people heard him. You should have seen him last night, crying and swearing. His tears were pure gin. No wonder he burned like that; his cells were saturated with alcohol.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I’m a lawyer. I’m not in the business of believing in things. I simply wanted to make sure you understood the entire affair. As far as the police are concerned, the case is closed, and I can tell you that I’ll breathe a little easier now. But I think we ought to get together tonight anyway, just to make sure we’ve all got the same perspective on things.”

Argyle hung up the phone finally, moderately satisfied. It was certainly convenient to have a dead man to point the finger at, if a finger needed pointing. They could clean out LeRoy’s house at the first opportunity. Probably there was nothing there to implicate either of them anyway. There was no reason to think they’d have any trouble with the police. Nelson was thorough and convincing—utterly treacherous.