The Sixth Commandment (23 page)

“Of course not,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve picked up some conflicting opinions, and I thought you could straighten me out.”

He stared at me over the rim of his glass. It was a dried apple of a face: lines and creases and a crinkly network of wrinkles. Black and gleaming. The teeth were big and yellow. His ears stuck out like flags, and his eyes had seen everything.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Supposin’ you asks your questions. If I want to answer, I will. If I don’t, I won’t. If I don’t know, I’ll tell you so.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “My first question is about Al Coburn. You know him?”

“Sure, I know him. Everyone in town knows Al Coburn. His people
started
this place.”

“You think he’s a nut?”

He showed me that keyboard of teeth.

“Mr. Coburn?” he said. “A nut? Nah. Sly as a fox, that man. Good brain on him.”

“Okay,” I said. “That was my take, too. Art Merchant?”

“The banker man? He’s just a banker. What do you expect?”

“You think that newspaper, the
Sentinel,
is making money?”

He took a sip of his drink, then looked at me reflectively.

“Just,” he said.

“You think they’ve got loans from the bank?”

“Now how would I know a thing like that?”

“Sam,” I said, “I got the feeling that there’s not much going on in Coburn that you don’t know about.”

“Agatha Binder could have some notes at the bank,” he acknowledged. “Most business folks in Coburn do.”

“You know the Thorndeckers?”

“I’ve seen them,” he said cautiously.

“To speak to?”

“Only Miz Mary. We’re friends.”

“Constable Goodfellow? You know him?”

“Oh sure.”

I threw my curve.

“Anything between him and Dr. Thorndecker’s wife?”

The curtain came down.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“Ever hear any gossip about what’s going on at the Crittenden Research Laboratory?”

“I never believe in gossip.”

“But you listen to it?”

“Some.”

“Ever hear about a man named Petersen? Chester K. Petersen?”

“Petersen? Can’t say that I have.”

“Scoggins? Ernie Scoggins?”

“Oh my yes, I knew Ernie Scoggins. He sat right where you’re sitting many’s a time. Stop by here to chew the fat. Bring me a jug sometimes. Sometimes he was broke, and I’d make him a little something to eat. Nice, cheerful man. Always joking.”

“They say he just took off,” I said.

“So they say,” he nodded.

“Do you think he did?” I asked him.

He thought a long moment. Finally …

“I don’t know what happened to Ernie Scoggins,” he said.

“What do you
think
happened?”

“I just don’t know.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Couple of days before he disappeared.”

“He came here?”

“That’s right.”

“When? What time of day?”

“In the evening. When he got off work.”

“Anything unusual about him?”

“Like what?”

“What was his mood? Was he in a good mood?”

“Yeah, he was in a good mood. Said he was going to get some money pretty soon, and him and me would go up to Albany and have a steak dinner and see the sights.”

“Did you tell Constable Goodfellow this?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t ask.”

“Did Scoggins tell you how much money he’d be getting?”

“No.”

“But could you guess from what he said how much it’d be? A lot of money?”

“Anything over a five-dollar bill would be a lot of money to Ernie Scoggins.”

“Did he tell you where the money would be coming from?”

“No, and I didn’t ask.”

“Could you make a guess where it was coming from?”

“I just don’t know.”

I went along like that, with his “I don’t know’s” getting more frequent. I couldn’t blame him. As he said, he had to survive in Coburn; I was going home one blessed day. I knew he wouldn’t reveal the town’s secrets—until thumbscrews come back in fashion.

I ran out of questions, and accepted another small Scotch. Then we just sat there sipping, talking of this and that. I discovered he had a deadpan sense of humor so subtle, so hidden, that you could easily miss it if you weren’t watching for it. For instance:

“Are you a church-going man?” I asked him.

“I certainly am,” he said. “Every Saturday—that’s my afternoon off here—I sweep and dust the Episcopalian Church.”

Said with no smile, no lifted eyebrow, no irony, no bitterness. Apparently just an ingenuous statement of fact. Ingenuous, my ass! This gaffer was
deep.
He was laughing, or weeping, far down inside himself. If you caught it, fine. If it went over your head, that was also fine. He didn’t give a damn.

But he could say profound things, too.

“What do you think of Millie Goodfellow?” I inquired.

He said: “She’s lonely with too many men.”

I asked him if he was the only black in town. He said no, there were two families, a total of nine men, women, and children. The men farmed, the women worked as domestics, the kids went to a good school.

“They doin’ all right,” Sam Livingston said. “I don’t mess with them much.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t mess with
anyone
much.”

“No family of your own, Sam?”

“No,” he said. “They all gone.”

Whether that meant they were dead or had deserted Coburn, I didn’t know, and didn’t ask.

“Sam,” I said, “you say you and Mary Thorndecker are friends. How is that? I mean, does she visit you here? What opportunity do you have to talk to her?”

“Oh …” he said vaguely. “Here and there.”

I stared at him, remembering what Agatha Binder had said about Mary Thorndecker going to an evangelist church about five miles south of Coburn. A fundamentalist church. The Reverend Peter Koukla had said something similar.

“Your church?” I asked Livingston. “You and Mary Thorndecker go to the same church? A born-again place about five miles south of here?”

The glaze came down over his ocherous eyes again.

“Sam,” he said, “you do get around.”

“I’d like to visit that church,” I said. “How do I get there?”

“Like you said: five miles south. Take the river route, then make a left. You’ll see the signs.”

“You drive there?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t drive. Miz Mary, she stops by for me.”

“When are services?” I asked. “Sunday?”

“Sunday, and every other night in the week. Every night at eight.”

“I think I’ll go,” I said. “Good minister?”

“Puts on a good show,” he said, grinning. “A joy to hear.”

The Scotch was making me drowsy. I thanked him for his hospitality, and stood up to leave. He thanked me for the whiskey, and offered to take me up in the elevator. It came down into the basement, alongside his little apartment, and he could hear the bell from inside his room. I told him I’d walk up, the exercise would do me good.

I started down the cement corridor. He was still standing at his open door. A small, wizened figure, a frail antique. I had walked perhaps five steps when he called my name. I stopped, turned around. He didn’t say anything more.

“What is it, Sam?” I asked him.

“It’s worse than you think,” he said, moved inside his room, and closed the door.

I stood there, surrounded by cement and iron, trying to decipher: “It’s worse than you think.” What did he mean by that? Coburn? The Thorndecker investigation? Or maybe life itself?

I just didn’t know.

Not then I didn’t.

I trudged slowly up the stairway to Room 3-F. I was pondering the sad fate of Ernie Scoggins. Thought he was coming into some money, did he? The hopeful slob. As Al Coburn had said, he just didn’t have much above the eyebrows. After what Sam Livingston had told me, this was the scenario I put together:

Scoggins had seen something or heard something. Or both. Probably on his job at Crittenden Hall. If Constable Ronnie and Julie Thorndecker really did have the hots for each other, maybe Scoggins walked in on them while they were rubbing the bacon. Somewhere. In the woods. In the stall of that big bay gelding. In the back seat of Goodfellow’s cruiser. Anywhere.

So Scoggins, having watched plenty of
Kojak, Baretta,
and
Police Woman,
thinks he knows just how to profit from this unexpected opportunity, the poor sod. He tries a little cut-rate blackmail (which in Coburn, N.Y., would be on the order of $9.95). If they don’t pay up, Scoggins threatens to report their hanky-panky to Dr. Thorndecker. Who knows—maybe he’s got some hard evidence: a tape recording, photograph, love letter—something like that.

But the lovers, realizing like all blackmail victims that the first demand is just a down payment, decided that Ernie Scoggins had to be scrubbed. I figured Goodfellow did it himself, driving his cruiser; he had the balls for it. And the Constable working alone would explain why Scoggins’s car hadn’t been taken away, and why Goodfellow had said nothing about the blood-stained rug when he “investigated” Scoggins’s disappearance. It would also explain what was in that letter left with Al Coburn: the hard evidence of Julie and Ronnie putting horns on the head of the august Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker—photograph, love letter, tape recording, whatever.

That scenario sounded good to me. I could buy it.

And tomorrow, I reflected sourly, I would solve the riddle of Chester K. Petersen’s death and burial, on Saturday I would discover what was meant by that note: “Thorndecker kills,” and on Sunday I would rest.

Ordinarily I keep a case notebook during an investigation, filling it with observations, bits of dialogue, suggestions for further inquiries. The notebook is a big help when it comes time to write my final report.

But after the tossing of my room at the Coburn Inn, I hadn’t put anything on paper. I kept it all in my pointy little head. It was a mess up there. Nothing seemed neat.

I couldn’t get a handle on what the hell was going on. Or even know positively that anything
was
going on.

I sprawled on the hard bed, boots off, hands clasped behind my head. I tried to find a thread, an element, a theme that might pull it all together. I had been flummoxed like this on other investigations, and had devised a trick that sometimes worked for me.

What I did was try my damndest to stop
thinking
about the case. I mean, try to ignore who did what, who said what, and the things I had seen, done, guessed. Just wash the whole shmear out of my consciousness and leave myself open to emotions, sensations, instincts. It was an attempt to get down to a very primitive level. Reasoning was out;
feeling
was in.

When I tried to determine what I felt about the Thorndecker inquiry, what my subjective reactions were, I came up with an odd one: I suddenly realized how much this case was dominated by the conflicts of youth and age, the problems of senescence, the puzzles of natural and perverse death.

Start with the Thorndecker application. That was for a grant to investigate and, hopefully, isolate and manipulate the X Factor in mammalian cells that causes aging and the end of life.

Add a nursing home with a high death rate: normal for institutions that provided care of the terminally ill.

Add a middle-aged doctor married to a very young wife who, possibly, was finding her jollies elsewhere with, amongst others, a macho Indian cop and, maybe, a stepson younger than she.

Add a bedraggled covey of old, old men: Scoggins, Petersen, Al Coburn. Even Sam Livingston.

Add a staff of very young, whiz-kid researchers who might be long on talent and short on ethics.

Add a village that was a necropolis of fractured dreams. A village that seemed to be stumbling toward oblivion, that was not merely old but obsolete, showing its toothless mouth and sounding its creaks.

All these were notes in a player piano roll: holes punched in thin paper. And the discordant melody I heard was all about age, the enigma of age. I could understand Thorndecker’s passion to solve it. Compared to what he hoped to do, a walk on the moon was a stroll to the corner drugstore. I mean the man wanted it
all.

One other factor crept into my merry-go-round brain … Maybe
I
was obsessed with youth and age, their mysteries and collisions. I had rejected Joan Powell for what I imagined was a good and logical reason: the difference in our years. But was that really a rational reaction, or had I demonstrated an inherited response I was not even aware of? Something in my cells, or genes, that forced me to discard that good woman? Something to do with the preservation of my species?

I didn’t, I decided, understand
anything.
All I knew was that right then, I wanted her, needed her. Loved her? Who said that?

I spent the late afternoon that way: stewing. It had been a yo-yo day: I was up, I was down, I was up, I was down. When it came time to shower and dress, preparing for the Reverend Peter Koukla’s “friendly get-together,” I had resolved to put in a token appearance, split as quickly as I reasonably could, and return to the sanctuary of Room 3-F with a jug of comfort provided by Sandy’s Liquors and Fine Wines.

So much for high hopes and good intentions …

Koukla had been right; his place was easy to find. Not only was the porch light on, but the front door was open and there were guests standing outside, drinks in hand, even though it was a sharp night. Cars were parked in Koukla’s driveway, and on both sides of the street. I took my place at the tail end of the line, about a block away, left coat and hat in my locked car, walked back to the party.

If he had organized that bash on short notice, the Reverend had done one hell of a job. I reckoned there were forty or fifty people milling about, drinking up a storm. But after I plunged into the throng, shaking hands and grinning like an idiot, I saw that most of the guests were researchers from the lab and off-duty staff from Crittenden Hall. In other words, Thorndecker had called out the troops.

Most of them were in civvies, but a few were wearing white trousers and short white jackets, as if they had just rushed over from nursing home or laboratory. I didn’t see Mary Thorndecker, but the rest of the clan was there. And Agatha Binder, Art Merchant, Dr. Kenneth Draper, and Ronnie Goodfellow, self-conscious in his uniform. There were others whose names I had forgotten but whose faces were vaguely familiar: the “best people” Goodfellow had introduced on my first morning in Coburn.