“I doubt it,” he said. “Lobo’s dead. Sun killed him.”
Angela cried, “Daddy!”
“His death,” Tyrone Ten Eyck told her savagely, his control beginning once again to slip, “will be the second most enjoyable moment of my life. Your death, sweet sister, will be the first.” He extended his right arm at shoulder-height, the Luger in his fist pointing directly at Angela’s face.
And, once again, I ran.
30
In a way, this book is a kind of confession. I am describing the events leading up to the moment when I violated all my principles, negated all my beliefs, disobeyed every doctrine I’d ever defined in my pamphlets, and generally speaking made a lie of my entire life.
I would like to be able to say that this second time I ran (the first being when I’d inadvertently dragged Angela away from Ten Eyck and the rest) was as blind and unpremeditated and unknowing as the first, but it was not. I knew exactly what I was doing every step of the way.
I ran toward Tyrone Ten Eyck, and I knew I was doing it, and in my heart of hearts I approved my intentions. I ran to him, and I took the Luger out of his amazed fingers, and I threw it away. Then, knowingly and deliberately, I laid violent hands upon him.
(Please excuse me if I don’t describe what I did. I remember it all — only too vividly — but I’d rather not say any of it.)
A long time later, as I was kneeling astraddle Tyrone Ten Eyck, Angela began to pluck at my shoulder and cry, “Stop it, Gene! Stop it!”
Reluctantly (I’m ashamed to say), I stopped it. I looked at what I’d done, and in that moment I felt nothing, only emptiness, as though a cargo I had carried patiently for a long long time had finally been delivered.
I got up and went out of the room, out to the hall. The air reeked of gunpowder. I stood there and devoted myself to formulating the question I may spend the rest of my life answering:
If I’ve been right all my life about who I was, how came I to be where I was?
A minute or so later Angela came out and said, in a hushed voice, “He’s breathing.”
“That’s good,” I said, but only because it was the response I knew was expected of me.
“That was a terrible thing for a pacifist to do, Gene,” she said solemnly.
I said, “Uh huh.” I licked my skinned knuckles.
“We better call the police,” she said.
“Phone lines were cut.”
“Then we better go get them.”
“Right.”
We tied Tyrone up, then went downstairs and almost as far as the front door when I stopped and said, “Hold on a minute, I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“I’m wanted for murder,” I said.
“For murdering me, Gene. It’ll be all right, I’ll be right there with you.”
I could hear the explanation as Angela would do it, and it wound up with me in the electric chair before they got it all straightened out. “I don’t see any police,” I said, “without my lawyer.” I turned and headed toward where I’d last seen Murray.
31
They were both still asleep, Murray smiling and Papa Ten Eyck snoring. Angela rushed to her father and there was a joyful reunion; perhaps a bit livelier on one side than the other. I let it go until she began to pat the old walrus on the cheek and tell him to wake up, and then I said, “Not him. He can sleep till Christmas for all of me. It’s Murray I want. My mouthpiece, my solicitor, my shyster.”
“Shylock,” she said.
“Nonono, that’s a moneylender. Lawyers never lend money, it’s part of their Hippocratic Oath.”
“Are you sure, Gene?”
“Take Murray’s ankles,” I said.
We carried Murray to the kitchen, thumping him into lots of door jambs on the way, and propped him into a more or less sitting position at the kitchen table, and spent a while trying to wake him up. Splashing water in his face, pulling his hair, dribbling coffee into his mouth (and down his chin), slapping his cheeks. He snorted every once in a while, but that was all.
Next we carried him to a bathroom and stripped his outer clothing off, leaving him in his shorts and undershirt. (A clean, neat suit is the lawyer’s basic tool, the way chalk is to a teacher or an airplane to a pilot. Lawyers can’t do a thing unless they’re dressed right, and I figured I’d want Murray to do lots of things for me before this night was over, so I was a lot more careful with his suit than I was with him.) Next we dumped him into the shower stall, turned on the cold water, and five minutes later he was pretty nearly awake. He could even hold a coffee cup, and blink his eyes, and say, “Whuzza? Whuzza?”
Angela by now had gone back to see what she could do with her father. I walked Murray slowly and gingerly back to the kitchen, sat him down at the table again, sat across from him, and kept telling him to drink his coffee. Every time I told him, he raised the cup and took a slurp; he kept reminding me of Lobo.
All at once the dull film over his eyes was replaced by a bright glaze and he said to me, “Gene.”
“Right,” I said.
He put the cup down. He pressed his palms together, as though helping something inside himself snap back into place, and then he turned abruptly brisk and insane. “Well,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m glad you came to me.”
“Murray—”
“You don’t have to tell me you didn’t kill her, Gene. I’m sure you didn’t. But the point is—”
“Murray,” I said.
“Don’t interrupt,” he said. “The point is, they’ll be holding you for first degree murder, which means no bail can be set, even if you do give yourself up, so the prospect—”
“Murray,” I said.
“Let me finish. I believe the claim is you killed her in New York and transported the body to New Jersey, so the trial would be held—”
“Murray,” I said. “If you don’t shut up I’ll put you back to sleep and hire your father.”
He said, “For a man charged with murdering a socially prominent young lady, you—”
“Look around you, Murray.”
“What?”
“Look around,” I told him. “Where are you?”
He looked around. The glaze began to crackle. “Well,” he said. “It seems— I don’t— Of course, if you— On the other hand—”
Angela came in, then, and said, “I can’t get him to wake up, Gene.”
“You’re lucky. This one did and look at him.”
Murray stared open-mouthed at Angela. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “My God, you’re alive!”
“Murray, will you either wake up or go back to sleep? You’re driving me crazy. Of course she’s alive. You’re in her house, you idiot, you already knew she was alive.”
The glaze crackled even more, and then fell off his eyes entirely, leaving them bloodshot and somewhat confused. He looked at me and said, “Gene? What happened? A lot of Chinamen came in, and—”
“That about sums it up,” I told him.
For the next half hour we drank coffee and filled one another in on recent events, while waiting for Murray to feel well enough to perform. When he pronounced himself ready, Angela drove down into town and got the police and brought them back to the house.
So the first thing they did upon arrival was arrest me for the murder of Angela Ten Eyck.
Then, when Angela tried to help me by pointing out that she was Angela Ten Eyck, they arrested her, too, as accessory after the fact.
I guess a lawyer needs more than just a suit. Maybe a briefcase is necessary, too; Murray didn’t have his with him. And Murray was arrest number three, also accessory, for claiming the other accessory was who she said she was.