“Who did it?” I said. “Who knifed you, Owen?” Maybe it was too late. Maybe the speech mechanism was rusted shut. But he tried to talk, and I could sense the great effort, though his face didn’t change much.
It was a tiny gurgling whisper. “Didn’t see...” That wasn’t all. He had more to tell me. One of his fingers curled a little. I didn’t dare move him from the awkward position.
“Carla... Kennedy. I saw her. Back was burned. Watch out, Pete...”
I put my face closer to his. “Who is Carla Kennedy, Owen?”
I don’t know if he heard me. He was a few seconds away from dying and what was in his mind pressed hard to get into words.
“She got... box from... car... threw it in... bay... I got it. Hid... hid in... bot...”
The last word stuck and he never finished it. He died quietly, with one last tiny shiver of breath. The blood spilling from his mouth had a metallic gleam.
I got up slowly, holding the few words that had come from him as if they were something light and delicate that would disintegrate and be gone forever if I wasn’t careful. There was a warning sound in my brain but I was too intent on something else to listen to it. Owen had hidden the contents of the box. I went into the bedroom, already beginning to suspect the answer I would find, but needing to know.
The bedroom was no different from all the others. I took the closet first, searched hurriedly. No place of concealment there. I turned to the dresser. The top drawer was jammed full of expensive underwear, socks, various accessories. I scooped them out of the drawer, pitched them toward the bed. Underneath I found six wrapped quarts of whisky lying side by side like bombs in an arsenal.
I scooted them out of the way one by one, stopped. One of the packaged bottles was far lighter, and there was no shift of liquid in it when I picked it up. I tore the sack away from the bottle. The top had been broken off once, then clumsily reglued. I took the neck and shoulder of the bottle and rebroke it with my hands. The contents of the bottle spilled into the drawer.
I looked at the items. Two neat clippings about the fire that had burned to death the family of Carla Kennedy more than twenty years ago. A little model of a Napoleonic soldier, trim and erect, rifle on his shoulder, coat a bright splash of red. A child’s locket, engraved Carla from Pop. It was an old locket, blackened in places. My fingers searched through snapshots, some of them old and yellowed. A family portrait. Another picture of a girl about thirteen, standing beside a man in a wheelchair. The most recent picture showed the invalid man, older now, beside a sidewalk newsstand. He was smiling proudly. He was all by himself. The newsstand was hung with gay streamers. It was opening day. Carla was probably there. But that time she wouldn’t want to be photographed. She wouldn’t want anyone, except maybe Stan Maxine, to know of her connection with the crippled news dealer in the wheelchair.
I had found Carla Kennedy. Like a lot of things you find in life, she had been found too late.
“Turn around, Mallory,” I heard a hard slow voice say.
Chapter Twenty-six
I felt the brush of a bony hand across the nape of my neck. It was too late to think about being careful now. I turned very slowly, holding the broken piece of bottle.
Taggart was all dressed up and ready for town. He wore a new blue suit and a self-conscious little bow tie and there was a small revolver in one outsized hand. It pointed right at my stomach. His face had about as much expression as a beach pebble.
“Where is she?” I asked him. I wondered how close he was to pulling the trigger. It might come without warning, with no spreading of lips or crinkling of lines around the eyes. But maybe he had just enough dislike for me to wait and let the fact that he was going to kill me soak in. It was a hope.
His hard lips came apart an eighth of an inch in a sly smile.
“Who do you want?”
“You know who I want,” I said. “Diane. Carla Kennedy. Which name do you know her by?”
He ignored that. His eyes caught the movement of broken glass in my hand. “Drop that,” he said. I let it slip to the rug.
“She’s down by the gatehouse,” Taggart said. “With Aimee. Waiting for Macy to come looking for Aimee.”
His big square feet moved a little uneasily, as if he realized he was taking too much time with me. “She’s going to kill him herself. I get to take care of you.”
“Like you took care of the others?” My lips felt large and numb. It was an effort to talk. I began to feel the rise of fear, the kind that freezes you stiff. It was working up through my legs without haste. I was always conscious of the gun under my arm. But with Taggart’s little revolver steady on my stomach, it might as well have been hanging in the closet—unloaded.
“That’s right,” Taggart said. He was getting a curious sort of enjoyment talking to me. It was even loosening up his face muscles some.
“You were the traveling boy,” I said, trying to keep my voice smooth and level, with no sudden pauses to give away my panic. “You had the chance to run the old gang down one by one and cut their throats. Sooner or later you could make all the territory and nobody would get suspicious. Just old Taggart doing his job. You use the same knife that’s sticking out of Owen’s back?”
He didn’t comment. He looked cool and efficient in the crisp blue suit. Some mother’s boy had grown into this. He couldn’t he quite sane.
“What about Harry Small? How did Diane feel when you bladed him? Or was it her idea?” Just keep talking, Mallory. Just keep jamming that thumbnail brain so he can’t get down to work.
“Diane said we had to,” he admitted. “She said you were going to find him and he’d talk about her. She didn’t want to do it.”
“But I was hard to kill, so she didn’t have a choice. You tried twice. I suppose you were with Winkie when he pulled the shotgun ambush. It would be your idea. Did you doctor the Buick over on Monessen, too?”
“Yeah.” He looked faintly puzzled. “How did you get out of that? Nobody saw me.”
“Only a little boy who didn’t look old enough to talk. He should grow up and get J. Edgar’s job. He deserves it.”
Something happened inside Taggart then. I could feel it happening. I could sense the ponderous slow thoughts swinging around to the problem at hand: my death.
“How did Diane talk you into this?” I said. “Those passionate midnight meetings on the beach. Did she tell you she loved you?”
He took a full step toward me, as if I had bitten a nerve. His mouth opened. “She does love me. I love her.” He made a sad calf noise in his throat. “Did you ever see her back? She’s beautiful. But her back — it’s ugly. Macy Barr did that to her.” The gun nosed up a little. “I love her. I’d do anything for her. Anything she asked me. We’re going to go away together. Nobody ever loved me before. I never got anything but kicked around, because I was a bastard. Everybody hated me. They looked at me with hateful eyes and wished I’d run away. Diane doesn’t hate me.”
From outside the house, above the sound of the wind, there were two shots, sharp cracks spaced a second apart. And a child began to scream in terror, as if the shots had unlocked a hidden place inside her and old nightmares tumbled out, writhing in her mind.
Taggart thumbed back the hammer. I was going for the gun anyway. It was no good — my fingers would never touch it — but it was no good just to stand there and die, either. A second before I shoved my hand toward the butt of the .38 there was another shot, different from the first two. Heavier. The faraway roar of a .45. I knew Macy had somehow got to the automatic in his back pocket. Taggart knew it, too. He was thrown off stride by the sound of it. The slow-focusing mental processes were off me for a full second.