Day of Wrath (23 page)

"You're telling me he was lynched?" I said incredulously.

"He may have been," Clinger said. "I've had business dealings
with some of these people. It's quite easy to feel cheated by someone you
don't like—someone you're afraid of, someone whose values you don't agree
with. A few of these men came out to the farm a couple of weeks ago. They
threatened my life and the lives of my family. That's the reason why I
hired Logan and his friend."

I made a confused face and Clinger pointed to my head.

"Logan is the man who found you on the porch."

"
I see."

I wanted to ask him about what Annie had told me about
the drug connection. He'd made it seem as if the business he'd been involved
in was perfectly ordinary and that the men had come after him because they
hadn't liked his looks. Perhaps that was the way he'd rationalized it—as
one more foray from the straight world, aimed at destroying his unconventional
empire. After twenty years of hippiedom, it would be fairly easy to see
the world in black and white. But rationalizations aside, he was hedging.
Drug dealers weren't ordinary businessmen, and they weren't straight arrows,
either. What he wasn't saying made the rest of it sound like a lie.

"What about Robbie?" I asked him. "What happened to her?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. She left with Bob on
Wednesday afternoon, as I told you. And I' haven't seen her since then."

I studied his face and said, "I don't think I believe
you, Mr. Clinger."

"I didn't expect you to," he said. "Your job is to be
suspicious. Nevertheless, I'm telling you the truth. She was with us for
a time, and then she left."

"As simple as that," I said.

"Robbie was a free agent, just as we all are."

"She was also fourteen."

"And what of it," he said a bit angrily. "What does her
age have to do with her capacity to enjoy life in her own way. Or do you
believe that happiness has a date on it? Do you think she should have kept
on leading a life that was a living hell because the law said that she
was too young to know her own mind?"

It was a reasonable question and there was only one way
of answering it. "How happy is she now?"

"That's beside the point," he said bitterly. "She chose
to leave with a boy who loved her. And I am not responsible for that or
for the accidents of fate."

"Then exactly what are you responsible for?" I asked him.

"For myself," he said. "And only myself."

But it wasn't that simple, and Clinger was smart enough
to know it. I could tell from the defensive tone of voice and the angry
look on his face that he wasn't comfortable or satisfied with his own explanation.

"
Our talk is finished," he said and got up off the piano
bench. "Your car is parked outside. Get in it and drive away from here."

"]ust like that?" I said with a laugh. "It won't be that
easy, Theo. I know about the drug deals. I know about the kind of men you've
been doing business with. And I'm going to go to the police with what I
know."

"
You do what you have to do," he said. "I have nothing
to fear from the police."

He sounded so confident that it bothered me.

"I wouldn't count on Irene Croft's help, Theo," I said
to him. "She's pulling out on you. Her family is making her pull out."

"Irene is a loyal friend," he said. "But she is a free
agent, too. I have no need of her help. I'm not guilty of any crime."

I could have told him what he was guilty of, but I didn't
think he would have understood me.

I got up off the couch and my leg almost collapsed beneath
me. The ankle was stiff from the fall and I had to nurse it along, hobbling
down a hallway to the front door and out onto the porch.

It was early morning-the sun just rising over the hedge
of lilacs. The farm yard was deserted, except for the Pinto, parked beneath
the apple tree. I glanced back through the door, into the dark house. Upstairs
a girl laughed easily and a man sighed. Clinger's family, I thought. His
sleepy children, for whom he bore no responsibility. The doctrinaire son-of-a·bitch.
I looked back at the yard and knew that out there in the morning twilight,
in a weed field or a backwater, Robbie Segal might be sleeping, too. The
victim of . . . I didn't know what to call it. Of the red, lubricious thread
of selfishness that ran from that porch across the river to the high towers
of Mt. Adams and then over the green hills to Eastlawn Drive. The victim
of the violence that sprang up like a spark whenever love turned doctrinaire
and self-regarding. And yet she had been truly loved. Bobby Caldwell had
loved her. And it hadn't been enough.

I worked my way down the steps into the yard. Clinger
came out on the porch and watched me hobble over to the car. My ankle was
killing me, and my head was spinning, but I'd be damned if I was going
to let him know it.

"I'll be back, Theo," I called out as I got into the Pinto.
"You can count on it."

"
No, you won't, Mr. Stoner," he called back. "You're not
welcome here any more. If you value your life, you'll stay away."

I managed to drive myself to Clifton, although I had to
stop a few times to let my head clear. It was a bad concussion—the kind
that could leave me with ringing ears and nervous tics and double vision.
But the only treatment was bed rest, and I simply didn't have the time
to spare.

When I got to the Delores, I washed my head off in the
bathroom sink, bandaged my temple with gauze, taped my ankle, took three
aspirins, and went to bed. I set the alarm for noon, which gave me five
hours to recuperate. As I was drifting off, I thought of what Clinger had
said about a friend of mine telling him who I was. I figured that that
friend had to be Grace. I didn't really know anyone else who stayed at
the farm—at least, anyone else who qualified as a friend. If it had been
Grace, she'd probably saved my life, because, in spite of his cool, candid
manner of speaking, Clinger was a desperate man. Only a desperate man would
hire dumb, trigger-happy muscle like Logan to protect him.

Clinger was the last thing I thought of before I fell
asleep. But I dreamed of Robbie and Bobby Caldwell—a sad, violent dream
that woke me up before the alarm had gone off. I tried going back to bed,
but my head hurt too badly. And I knew that there was too much left to
do. So I got up, took a quick shower and three more aspirins, emptying
the rest of the bottle in a coat pocket. As I dressed, I reconsidered Clinger's
explanation of what had happened to Bobby and the lost girl—that they
had been killed by his "enemies."

In as far as any tragedy can be adequately explained,
it seemed a reasonable story. He'd gotten in over his head on a drug deal
and his enemies had taken it out on his family. But the very fact that
it had come from Clinger—a man I didn't trust or like—made me search
out inconsistencies. And the closer I looked, the more of them I found.
For one thing, the murder had been an amateur job; and while there were
plenty of two-bit druggies wandering around, living on their own pills
and macho fantasies, they didn't seem like the kind of men Clinger would
have been trading with. He'd needed big money to refloat his empire, and
the big money pushers —the ones who wore business suits—didn't leave
bloody fingerprints all over their victims. Moreover the crime had not
been done gangland style. It was too messy for that, too hateful, too full
of joy in the boy's pain. Bobby had been killed by someone who'd wanted
to watch him die, someone who'd enjoyed it. And that meant someone with
a personal grudge. True, the grudge could have been against Clinger, as
he himself had claimed. But if that were the case, he'd managed to provoke
a hell of a lot of anger in someone who was an obvious psychopath. And
that had been a very stupid and unbusinesslike thing for a man as shrewd
as Clinger to do.

I suppose that the biggest inconsistency in Clinger's
explanation of the murder was the behavior of the girl herself. On Sunday
night, Robbie had practically thrown herself at any man in The Pentangle
Club. On Monday, she'd astonished Annie by sleeping with half the men at
the farm. On Tuesday, she'd had a violent argument with Bobby and Theo
about whether or not she should leave Clinger's paradise. In the face of
all that contrary evidence, I wondered why on Wednesday she had suddenly
changed her mind and gone with Caldwell. It wasn't simply that the choice
didn't jibe with the facts as I knew them, it didn't jibe with my intuitive
feeling about the girl, either. I'd convinced myself that she'd been using
Bobby to get away from Eastlawn Drive—that while she might have loved
him, she hadn't been consumed by him, as he had been by her. Robbie had
wanted something more than Bobby Caldwell—she'd wanted that delirious,
unfettered sense of freedom that Clinger apostled and the farm represented.
I now thought that that had been the true meaning of the drunken look of
pleasure on her face in the second photograph. It hadn't been drugs or
sex that had made her look so high, although they'd been part of it. It
had been the pure thrill of escape. And her behavior at the bar and at
the farm confirmed it. More than Bobby Caldwell, more than the security
of a lover, she'd wanted out—away from her mother and her house and anything
else that smacked of Eastlawn Drive.

Of course, I could have been wrong about the girl. She
might have had her fling and decided to return home. But the decision seemed
too precipitous—too out of character. And my doubts about her change
of heart cast doubt on everything else Clinger had told me.

I walked into the living room and sat down at the rolltop
desk. I had two calls to make—one to George DeVries at that D.A.'s office
and one to Art Bannock.

George was an expert on the narcotics traffic in the city—just
the man to ask about big-time drug dealers and their clientele. And as
for Bannock, I wanted to find out how much he knew about Bobby's death
and about Clinager's "enemies."
 

I GOT THROUGH TO GEORGE DEVRIES IMMEDIATELY AND made an
appointment to see him at one-thirty. I was about to call Bannock when
someone knocked on the door. I put the receiver back in its cradle, walked
over to the peephole, and took a look outside. Jerry Lavelle was standing
in the hallway. I couldn't see much of him through the fish-eye lens—just
the tanned head, the creased blue eyes, and the jewelry smiling on his
chest. He was wearing another leisure suit—carmine red—and a brown,
open-collared shirt.

I figured it was no coincidence that he'd come calling
the morning after I'd been to Clinger's farm. just to be on the safe side,
I stepped back to the desk and took a revolver out of the drawer. I slipped
it in my coat pocket before unlatching the lock.

"Hello, Harry," Lavelle said in his genial, Vegas greeter's
voice. "Mind if I come in?"
He glanced at the bruises on my temple and made a sympathetic
face. "Terrible.. just terrible."

"What is it you want, Lavelle?" I said.

"You going to make me stand out in the hall?"

I backed away from the door and he stepped in.

"I'm just here to talk business, Harry," he said, opening
the flaps of his coat to show me he wasn't armed.

"
What kind of business?"

He sat down on one arm of the sofa and took a stick of
gum out of his pocket. He peeled off the foil and folded the gum into his
mouth. "Things have changed since I talkedto you last," he said, chewing
noisily on the gum.

"What a tsimmes! That Irene . . . she doesn't stay put.
She doesn't do the smart thing. The family is very worried."

He shook his bald head mournfully.

"You a family man, Harry?" he said suddenly.

Lavelle didn't wait for an answer. He dug furiously into
his coat and pulled out a leather wallet. He flipped it open like a cigarette
holder and handed it to me. "My wife and children," he said proudly.

I glanced at the snapshot. A bland—looking woman in
a housecoat was standing on a porch. Two teenage kids were standing beside
her.

"
The family means everything to me," Lavelle said with
great feeling. "Without them, I'd be dead today. Swear to God. I don't
make a move without we talk it over first. A man's nothing without his
family, Harry. He's like an orphan at a picnic. He hasn't got a thing to
call his own."

If the situation hadn't been so ridiculously inappropriate,
I might have found his pride touching. It reminded me of Fred Bostow's
dream of family life. But then Jerry Lavelle probably lived on a nice suburban
street in a modest, well-kept home. In the light of his own sentimental
hopes, you could almost mistake him for an ordinary, middle-class businessman,
with a wife and two kids and a thirty-year mortgage. Only I wasn't in a
sentimental mood.

"
What do you want, Lavelle?" I said and handed him the
photograph.

"
I want you to be reasonable," he said, tucking the wallet
back in his coat. "I want you to keep an open mind and hear me out."

"I'm listening."

"Let me be honest with you," he began. "A few years ago,
the Croft family hired a private detective—a man like you. A professional.
They wanted him to keep an eye on Irene—to steer her away from trouble.
So everything's fine up until a couple of months ago when the detective
finds out Irene's gotten herself mixed up with this Clinger. A very bad
business. Well, I guess I don't have to tell you." He nodded at my bandages
and cracked his gum.