The Sixth Commandment (18 page)

I had been deceiving myself to think I was the only comforter, the lone consoler. She had given warm assurance to me as well, and when I waved goodby, the lights of her car fading into the black night, I was sorry to see her go. Because then I was really alone. And I was afraid.

I knew what it was. It all came back to Thorndecker. I could hear the name itself, boomed out by the Voice of Doom, with deep organ chords in the background: “Thooorn-deck-er. Thoorn-deck-er.” It was like the tolling of a mournful bell. And even when I was in bed, covers pulled up, anxious for sleep to come, in my fear I heard that slow dirge and saw a dark funeral procession moving across frozen ground.

I
WOKE SUDDENLY, TASTING
my tongue, smelling my breath. I stared at the crackled ceiling and wondered how long I had been buried in Coburn, N.Y.

I had been through that mid-case syndrome before. In any investigation, the disparate facts and observations pile up, a jumble, and you’d like nothing better than to walk away whistling, tossing a live grenade over your shoulder as you go. Then you close the door carefully and—
boom!
—all gone.

I think, in my case, the discouragement comes from a hopeless romanticism. I want people to be nice. Everyone should be sweet-tempered, polite, considerate, and brush their teeth twice a day. There should be no stale breaths and furry tongues in the world. I like happy endings.

I stared morosely at my sallow face in the mirror of the bathroom medicine cabinet, and I knew the Thorndecker investigation wasn’t going to have a happy ending. It saddened me, because I didn’t dislike any of the people involved. Some, like Stella Beecham and banker Art Merchant, left me indifferent. But most of the others I liked, or recognized as fallible human beings caught up in fates they could not captain.

Except Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker. I couldn’t see him as a willy-nilly victim. The man was master of his soul; that much was obvious. But his motives were wrapped around. At that dinner party—his youthful vigor and raw exuberance. A part he was playing? And then, in his study, another role: the serious, intent man of science, with a politician’s use of charm and a secret delight in the manipulation of others. Which man was Thorndecker? Or was there another, another, another? A whole deck of Thorndeckers: Jack, Queen, King, and finally … the Joker?

I showered, shaved, dressed, and had a terrible desire to telephone Joan Powell, that complete woman. Not even to talk. Just to hear her say, “Hello?” Then I’d hang up. I didn’t call, of course, I just mention it here to illustrate my state of mind. I wasn’t
quite
out of the tree, but I was swinging.

Sam Livingston took me down in the ramshackle elevator. We exchanged mumbles. We both seemed to be in the same surly mood. If I had given him a bright, “Good morning, Sam!” he’d have kicked me in the jewels, and if he had sung out, “Nice, sunny morning,” I’d have delivered a sharp karate chop behind his left ear. So we both just mumbled. It was that kind of a morning.

I saw Millie Goodfellow behind the cigar counter, and was pleased to know she was still alive. She was in one of her biddy’s costumes again: a ruffled blouse cut down to the pipik, wide black leather belt, short denim skirt with rawhide lacing down the front, like a man’s fly. She was also wearing dark, dark sunglasses.

I bought another pack of cigarettes I didn’t need.

“Incognito this morning, Millie?” I inquired casually.

She lifted those dark cheaters, and I saw the mouse: a beauty. She had tried to cover it with pancake makeup, but the colors came through: glistening black, purple, yellow. The whole eye was puffed and bulging.

“Nice,” I said. “Did you collect that at Red Dog Betty’s?”

“No,” she said, replacing the glasses, “this one was home-grown. I told him what I thought about him and his fancy lady.”

I really didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t know if she was lying. I didn’t know what the truth was. And on that feckless morning, I didn’t care.

“See you around,” I said, and started away.

A hand shot out, grabbed my arm.

“Remember what you promised last night?” she whispered.

That was last night, in another mood, another world, and before I knew her husband got physical.

“What?” I said. “Oh. Sure.”

I stared at blank glass, not seeing her eyes.

“I remember,” I said with a sleazy grin, more determined than ever to get my ass back to civilization as soon as possible.

I had another of those big, bulky country breakfasts. This one involved pancakes and pork sausages. I don’t know what it did for my cholesterol count, but at least it took my mind off such topics as hanging, cyanide, and a long walk off a short pier. When I returned to the city, I decided, I’d diet, join a health club, exercise regularly, manufacture a hard stomach, and put the roses back in my cheeks. Is there no end to self-delusion?

On the way out, I detoured through the bar. Jimmy was behind the taps. I nodded at him. I didn’t see anyone else, until I heard a rasped, “Todd. You there.” I turned, and there was old Al Coburn sitting alone in a booth. He had a beer in front of him. I walked over.

“May I join you, Mr. Coburn?” I asked.

“No law against it,” he said—as gracious an invitation as I’ve ever had.

I slid in opposite, called to Jimmy, pointed at Coburn’s beer, and held up two fingers.

While we waited for our drinks to come, I said to him, “What’s it like outside? Is the sun shining?”

“Somewhere,” he said.

That seemed to take care of that. I stared at him. Have you ever seen bald land after a bad drought? Say the banks of a drained reservoir, or a parched river bed? That’s the way Al Coburn’s face looked. All cracks and lines, cut up like a knife had been drawn deep, the flesh without juice, squares and diamonds of dry skin.

But there was nothing juiceless about those washed-blue eyes. Looking into those was like staring into the Caribbean off one of the Bahamian cays. You stared and stared, seeing deep, deep. Moving things there, shifting shadows, sudden shapes, and then the clean, cool bottom. A few shells. Hard coral.

Maybe it was those pork sausages bubbling in my gut, but I felt uneasy. I felt there was more to Al Coburn than I had reckoned. I had misread Millie Goodfellow; there was more to her than the frustrated wife, the Emma Bovary of Coburn, N.Y. There was more to Al Coburn. If that was true, then it might be true of Agatha Binder, Art Merchant, Constable Goodfellow, Stella Beecham, Dr. Kenneth Draper—for the whole lot of them.

Maybe I was making an awful mistake. I was seeing them all (except Dr. Thorndecker) as two-dimensional cutouts. Types. Cardboard characters. But the longer I stayed around, the deeper I dug, the more they sprouted a third dimension. I was beginning to glimpse hidden motives and secret passions. It was like picking up Horatio Alger and finding William Faulkner. In
Coburn, N.Y.!?
A boggling thought, that in this brackish backwater there were characters who, if they didn’t qualify for a Greek tragedy, were at least a few steps above, or deeper, than a TV sitcom.

We sipped our beers and looked vaguely at each other.

“How you coming?” Al Coburn asked in his scrawly voice.

“Coming?” I said. “On what?”

He looked at me with disgust.

“Don’t play smarty with me, sonny,” he said. “This Thorndecker thing. That’s what I mean.”

“Oh,” I said. “That. Well, I’m making progress. Talking to people. Learning things.”

He grunted, finished his old beer, started on the new.

“He’s doing all right, ain’t he,” he said. “On Coburn land. Got a nice business going.”

“It appears to be prosperous,” I said cautiously. “Yes. I looked it over.”

“That’s what you think,” he said darkly.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Coburn?”

“The death of a man?” he said. “The world’s heart don’t skip a beat.”

I shook my head, bewildered. I grabbed at a straw, and came up with nothing.

“Are you talking about Petersen?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Chester K. Petersen.”

“Never heard of him.”

“All right,” I sighed. “You’ve lost me completely.”

We drank awhile in silence. He glowered at his glass of beer, almost snarling at it. What a cantankerous old geezer he was. I watched him, damned if I’d give him another opening. If he had something to say, let him say it. Finally:

“Was he another?” he said.

“Petersen? I don’t know. Another
what?”

“Heart attack?”

“He died of congestive heart failure.”

“Who says?”

“The death certificate says.”

He smiled at me. I hope I never see another smile like it. It was all store teeth and blanched lips. A skeleton could smile with more warmth than that.

“The death certificate says,” he repeated. “You believe
that?”

This isn’t original with me; I remember reading somewhere that the worst American insult, absolutely the
worst,
is to say, “Do you believe everything you read in the papers?” Al Coburn’s last question had the same effect. I immediately went on the defensive.

“Well, uh, of course not,” I stammered. “Not necessarily.”

“Tell you a story,” he said. More of a statement than a question.

I nodded, waved for two more beers, and settled back. I had nothing to lose but my sanity.

“Feller I knew name of Scoggins,” he started. “Ernie Scoggins. We was friends from way back. Grew up together, Ernie and me. His folks had a sawmill on the river, but that went. They had an ice house, too. That was before refrigerators, you know, and them with all that sawdust to pack it in. Cut it on Loon Lake in the winter, and cover it over with burlap and sawdust in the ice house. Ernie and me used to sneak in there in the summer and suck on slivers of ice. I guess we was two crazy kids.”

I could feel my eyeballs beginning to harden, and knew I was getting a glassy stare. I wanted to yelp, “Get on with it, for God’s sake!” But Al Coburn wasn’t the kind of man you could hurry. He’d just shutter on me, and I’d never learn what he had on his mind. So I let him yabber.

“Bad luck,” Coburn said. “Ernie sure had bad luck. His son got killed in Korea, and his two daughters just up and moved on. His wife died the same year my Martha went, and that brought us closer together, Ernie and me. Something in common—you know? Anyway, the sawmill went, and the ice house, of course. Ernie tried this and that, but nothing come out good for him. He took a lick at farming, and lost his crop in a hailstorm. Tried a hardware store, and that went bust. Put some money in a Florida land swindle, and lost that.”

“Bad luck,” I said sympathetically, repeating what he had said. But now he disagreed.

“Mebbe,” he said. “But Ernie wasn’t all that smart. I knew it, and I think sometimes he knew it. He just didn’t have much above the eyebrows, Ernie didn’t. Throwing his money around. But I’ll tell you this: he was the best friend a man could have. Shirt off his back. Always cheerful. Could he tell a joke? Land! And a good word for everyone. Wasn’t a soul in Coburn who didn’t like Ernie Scoggins. Ask anyone; they’ll tell you. Old Ernie Scoggins …”

He fell silent then, staring at his empty beer glass, ruminating. I took it for a hint, and signaled Jimmy for two more.

“What happened to him?” I asked Al Coburn. “Old Ernie Scoggins—is he still around?”

He didn’t answer until Jimmy brought over our beers, collected the empty glasses, and went back behind the bar again.

“No, he ain’t around,” Coburn said in a low voice. “Not for almost a month now.”

“Dead?”

He glanced at Jimmy, then leaned across the table to me.

“No one knows,” he whispered. “Mebbe dead, mebbe not. He just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” I said incredulously. “You mean one fine day he just turned up missing?”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t anyone try to find him? His family?”

“Ernie didn’t have no family,” Coburn said, “rightly speaking. No one even knows where his two daughters are, if
they’re
still alive. No brothers or sisters. I reckon you could say I was Ernie Scoggins’ family. So after he didn’t show up for a few days, I asked around. No one knew a thing.”

“Did you report his disappearance to the police?”

Coburn snorted disdainfully, then took a long swallow of beer.

“To that Indian,” he nodded. “Ronnie Goodfellow. The two of us went out to Ernie’s place. He was living in a beat-up trailer out on Cypress Road. Goodfellow tried the door, it was open, and we went in. Everything looked all right. I mean the place wasn’t broken up or anything like that. But most of Ernie’s clothes was gone, including his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, and a battered old suitcase I knew he owned. Goodfellow said it looked to him like Ernie just took off of his own free will. Just packed up and left.”

“Sounds like it,” I said. “Did he have any debts in town?”

“Oh hell, Ernie
always
had debts. All his life.”

“Well then? He just flew the coop. Got fed up and decided to try his luck somewhere else.”

Al Coburn looked at me with a twisted face. I couldn’t read it. Contempt there for me, and something else: indecision, and something else. Fear maybe.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “The debts wasn’t all that big. And for about two years before he disappeared, Ernie Scoggins had been working for Thorndecker out in Crittenden Hall.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It wasn’t much of a job,” Coburn said. “‘Maintenance personnel’ was what they called it. Raking leaves, cutting down dead branches, taking care of the wife’s bay gelding. Like that. But Ernie said it wasn’t too hard, he was outside most of the time, you know, and the pay was good. I don’t figure he ever paid a penny to Social Security in his life, and he needed that job. I can’t see him just walking away from it. He wasn’t any spring chicken, you know. My age.”

I moved my beer glass around, making interlocking rings on the tabletop.

“What do you think happened?” I asked him. “Why did he leave?”

His answer was so faint I had to lean forward to hear his scratchy voice.