The Demolishers (3 page)

When we drove up to the lodge in the bright morning sunshine, a big car was parked by the stairs that led up to the veranda that ran around three sides of the raised building. Bert glanced at it curiously.

“Rental car from the airport,” he said. “But we’re not expecting any . . . Doreen?”

His wife was coming down the wooden stairs, looking slender and competent in jeans and a checked shirt. She didn’t respond to her husband’s implied question, but came straight to me.

“You’ve got some visitors, Matt,” she said. “They’re waiting for you in the living room.”

“Visitors?”

Instinctively, I unzipped the shotgun case I was holding and reached into my hunting coat pocket for shells. If people had gone to the trouble of tracking me here, I preferred not to meet them unarmed. A duck load will do as well as buckshot at short ranges.

Doreen laughed in an odd, strained way. “Oh, no, you won’t need a gun, Matt. It’s nothing like that. But . . . but I’m afraid you’d better brace yourself for bad news. I’m sorry.”

I looked at her for a moment, but she obviously wasn’t going to tell me, so I went past her and up the stairs and around the veranda to the front door. The sea view was great from up here, except for a few oil rigs, but I wasn’t into scenery at the moment. I slid the door back and stepped inside, closing it behind me, a little hampered because I still held the cased shotgun.

Of the two women who sat on the sofa side by side, the smaller was the one who’d have drawn a normal man’s attention first. Basically a pretty girl, and quite young, she was spectacularly beat-up-looking at the moment. In the glance I gave her, I noted a-sling, a head bandage, and some ugly facial bruises; but I’d already recognized the woman beside her and couldn’t be bothered with taking the inventory any further. To hell with the battered kid. I wasn’t a normal man. I was an ex-husband facing his former wife. She rose as I crossed the room towards her.

“Hello, Beth,” I said.

“Matt.” She swallowed hard. “I ... I can’t say it, Matt. It’s easier if you read it. Here.”

She held out a page torn from a newspaper, folded to put a certain story on top. Tucking the shotgun under my arm, I took it and studied it warily. At first glance it was just another terrorist incident. A bomb had been flung into a small restaurant called La Mariposa, in West Palm Beach, Florida. I read on and came to the kicker:
Killed by the blast were . . . Ernesto Bustamente, West Palm Beach, Fla.; Simon Greenberg and Rosa Greenberg, New York, N. Y.; Matthew Helm, Jr., Old Saybrook, Conn. . . .

Mac would have been proud of me. My first thought was that my older boy was dead, murdered by a bunch of terrorist thugs, while my instinct was telling me to keep a careful eye on a damn dog.

I
looked
from the newspaper page to the woman I’d once married. She hadn’t changed very much. She still had that fresh, healthy, almost boyish, New-England-nice-girl look. Just slightly taller than average, she had light brown hair that still showed no hint of gray. Her figure, in blue tweed, was still slim and youthful; and her legs were still fine in sheer nylon. Her blue shoes had moderate heels. The color of her expensive suit, and matching cashmere sweater, emphasized the blueness of her eyes. There was something intent and hypnotic about the way they watched me. I didn’t gather that she was in a very stable mental state at the moment; but, then, who was?

She was no longer my wife, of course. Her name was Logan now and had been for more years than I cared to remember, Mrs. Lawrence Logan, but we still shared something unique that belonged only to us: the memory of a small child in a crib, our first. There had been two after that, and we’d eventually become hardened to parenthood, but the first is the scary one, particularly when you’re as young as we were. You don’t know anything about it, either of you, in spite of the baby books you’ve been reading. You’re afraid of holding it too hard and breaking it, or not hard enough and dropping it. You can’t believe it’s really alive. You expect it to stop breathing any minute. . . .

Then she buried her face in her hands and began to cry. She swayed dangerously and I thought she was about to collapse. I started forward, but the kid got to her first, and led her back to the sofa, and looked up at me.

“Would you mind putting away that firearm, Mr. Helm?” she asked calmly. “Guns make me very nervous.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and zipped up the case and set the shotgun in the comer. Then I went to the little bar across the room and found three glasses and my private bottle. The Hapgoods didn’t have a license. You provided your own booze; they just supplied what you drank it with and out of. I took two glasses to the sofa, set one on the end table for Beth, and gave the other to the girl, although I wasn’t quite sure about the ethics of that. She was really pretty young. “Scotch is what there is,” I said.

“Thank you,” said the beat-up kid, still with an arm around Beth. “Incidentally, Mr. Helm, I’m your daughter-in-law. We sent you announcements and invitations at the time, if you’ll remember, two years ago.”

“I remember,” I said. “You were both still in college.”

“Is that why you didn’t come, because you disapproved?”

I shook my head. “A man in my line of work does better to stay away from public occasions involving his kids. There were other reasons why I figured the cere
mony would proceed better without me. I didn’t think one absentee daddy would be missed.”

“You were wrong,” she said stiffly. “But I believe we thanked you properly for the present and the check.” “You did,” I said. I looked at her for a moment. “So you’re Cassandra. Cassandra Varek as was, if I remember correctly. Cassie or Sandra?”

“Sandra. I might answer to Sandy if you yelled loudly enough.” We’d both been intent upon the business of getting acquainted; now the kid glanced at Beth, who’d stopped sobbing and was groping in her purse for a handkerchief. Sandra asked me, “Where’s a bathroom?” “Through those doors and down the hall to the right.” But when she’d helped Beth up and started to lead her that way, I said, “Wait a minute. Why don’t you take her to my room? There’s a small john there, and she can rest on the bed if she wants to. Out the front door and around the veranda to the left. Here’s the key; the number’s on it.”

When the girl returned alone, I was leaning against the bar, sipping the drink I’d made for myself, although I didn’t want it very badly. I’m not a morning drinker. But it seemed like something that should be done, a gesture that should be made. You get a big tragic shock, you take a stiff drink, right? Sandra made a detour to pick up her glass and came over to face me.

“Elizabeth will be ail right. She’s just been holding it in, and it was a long plane ride.”

“Sure.”

“She doesn’t mean it, of course. What she said to you. She’s not really a vengeful person.”

I studied her carefully, trying to estimate what she’d look like when she wasn’t a walking disaster area, this girl my son had married. She was shorter than Beth, sturdy and dark, with black hair cut very short. Perhaps, after having a significant part of it shaved away to permit treatment of the head injury, she’d decided to chop it off totally and let it all grow back at once. The area of tape above her right ear was quite extensive.

She had a rather wide dark face, snub-nosed and fulllipped, with thick eyebrows that had never heard of tweezers. It was a good strong face, very attractive in a young and sultry way. I wouldn’t have judged it to be the face of a girl who’d fear guns and forgive her enemies; but on the subject of girls I’ve been wrong before. Her eyes were brown, and there was an ugly discoloration around the right one; she also had a bruise on the side of her chin. The sling I’d noted earlier supported her right arm. There were small dressings on both hands. She was wearing a tailored gray pantsuit with a black blouse, open at the throat. I could see through her trousers a suggestion of a bandage on her right thigh; I’d already noticed that she favored that leg slightly.

She was aware of my scrutiny, of course, and she spoke without expression: “Twenty-seven stitches in the leg. A lot more in the scalp; but I think they take smaller stitches up there for cosmetic reasons. Greenstick fracture of the radius bone; that’s the smaller one in the forearm. My hands got pretty well sliced up as you can see; my knees look like hamburger. Of course I’m black and blue practically all over, turning a beautiful green in spots. My ears only stopped ringing from the blast a couple of days ago. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“It’s a wonder they let you out of the hospital,” I said. “The flight from Washington can’t have been much fun for you.”

She shrugged. “I’m tough. I don’t like hospitals. How did you know we came from Washington?”

“It’s the only place you could have learned where to find me. Although I don’t check in there any longer, my former chief has ways of keeping track. But he wouldn’t have given you this address over the phone. I wouldn’t have thought he’d give it to you at all.”

“Elizabeth said she’d met him once before, your boss, many years ago when you were being divorced. He looked her up then and tried to persuade her to change her mind about leaving you.”

I said, “My ex-boss, please. My former chief, I said.

I quit two weeks ago.”

“So he told us; but he let Elizabeth come to see him anyway, for old times’ sake, I guess.” Sandra shrugged. “I went with her, because she’s still a bit shaky—and of course I had a personal interest, too. That’s a polite and soft-spoken man, but I wouldn’t want to get him mad at me. I don’t think he’s a very kindly person, really.”

I laughed. “We’re not a kindly outfit. My own humanitarian impulses can hardly be called dominant. What did he say?”

“He wanted to know why Elizabeth was looking for you. When she told him, he was very sympathetic and gave her this address. He said he thought you were probably here, since the waterfowl season was opening today and you had a new hunting dog you wanted to try out.” The kid laughed shortly, watching me. “What is it, some kind of a compulsion, Mr. Helm, that you just can’t stop shooting things?”

It’s never any use arguing with them, young or old, when they get on that kick. “Man gets in a rut, I guess,” I said. “But you’d better call me Matt. All this formality doesn’t go with such high-minded disapproval.”

She said, “Maybe my disapproval isn’t so very high-minded . . . Matt. Maybe I don’t really care what you shoot. Maybe I’m just trying to give you a hard time for other reasons.”

“Reasons such as?”

She licked her lips. “Maybe I’m remembering a very nice guy, a guy you might even have liked if you’d made an effort to know him. A guy who’d have enjoyed having a father, even an offbeat daddy like you. But you were never there. Oh, there were occasional letters, and presents when presents were indicated, and a check now and then, but never a warm body, not even at his wedding, not even at his graduation.”

I said, ‘‘I gave you my reasons. And Larry Logan makes a pretty good substitute papa. I checked him out.” Sandra shook her head. “Elizabeth’s husband is Very much okay, and he did what he could to fill the daddy spot, but a stepfather isn’t the same thing even when he’s adopted his new wife’s kiddies legally and given them his name. If you’d died and Elizabeth had remarried, that would have been bearable. But knowing that you were still around, somewhere, and just couldn’t be bothered with your own son, with any of your children ...” She drew a long breath. “Of course, that was what drew us together in college, Matthew and me. We had it in common. My daddy was a lot like you in many ways. My mother died when I was very young, and he couldn’t be bothered with being a papa, either. So he wished me off on nurses and governesses and boarding schools, and never once . . . Well, to hell with that. Sorry. I didn’t mean to inflict my bleak.childhood on you.”

I said, “Did Beth know how Matthew felt?”

Sandra grimaced. “What you want to know is, did she make him feel that way, did she turn her children against their father deliberately, like many divorced wives? No, of course she didn’t, she’s too nice a lady. In fact, Elizabeth has been defending you stoutly all these years, telling your kids how busy you were saving the world for democracy, or something; and how you couldn’t visit them anyway, even when yoh had time, because you were afraid somebody who didn’t like you, somebody you’d injured in the line of duty, say, might strike at your family if they knew it existed. That routine you just used on me. I don’t think it’s a very plausible excuse for neglecting your kids, Mr. Helm . . . Matt, and they didn’t think so either. It might have been better if you’d been honest and simply let them know you weren’t interested, the way my daddy did. At least I could console myself, a little, with the fact that I hadn’t been sired by a hypocrite.”

I asked, “Is that why Matthew changed his name back to Helm?”

She said, “Yes, he wanted to show that he was still your son, even though you’d practically disowned him, getting Larry to adopt him and make him a little Logan. I don’t blame him. He wanted you to know, I suppose, that there
was
another Matthew Helm around whether you liked it or not, and that he’d seen through your ridiculous pretense of trying to protect him by giving him another name and staying away from him, when what you were really doing was washing your hands of him and the rest of your offspring!”