“He’s bringing some wine.”
“A good claret would go nicely with peanut butter and jelly.”
“So would Mogen David.”
“Since it’s Slick, perhaps I should make him an omelette.”
“I like your beavers,” I said.
She looked at the watercolor critically. “They are rather precious, aren’t they?” She turned to Nelson and Elizabeth. “Why don’t you tell your Uncle Harvey what we’ve decided. En Français.”
“You do it,” Nelson said and nudged his sister.
Elizabeth smiled her silky smile. “We will be very good and not bother our dear mother for the rest of the day,” she said in her rapid French. “And if we are good, our dear uncle will let us swing on the swing and later he will take us to visit the beavers.”
“Oh, what fun,” I said.
“I think Audrey could use some solitude today,” Ruth said.
“Probably.”
“What’re your plans?”
“Well, I think I’ll go out on the porch and put my feet up and watch the Christmas trees grow.”
“When I’m through with this I might come out and help you.”
I sat on the porch watching the Christmas trees grow and going over it all in my mind, everything from Murfin and Quane’s first approach until the news bulletin about Arch Mix’s death, and by the time that Slick arrived at 11:30 I had decided that there indeed had been a conspiracy and that I was fairly sure that I knew who had both designed and executed it.
Slick looked hot and worried when he climbed the steps to the porch and handed me the bottle of wine. He looked around as if expecting to see someone.
“Where’s Audrey?” he said.
“She hasn’t come back yet.”
“Are Ruth and the children here?”
“Over there,” I said and pointed to where they were feeding the ducks.
“I think I was followed,” Slick said.
“From where?”
“From Washington.”
“All the way?”
“I’m not sure, but I think so.”
“Let’s go see,” I said.
Slick loosened his tie, but didn’t take off his coat. The loosened tie was ample evidence that he was concerned. He followed me down the stairs and around the house. A quarter of a mile away, where the dirt lane turned in from the wood, a car had stopped. It was pulled over to the edge of the lane. A man was on top of the car, reaching up with something shiny.
“I think, dear boy, that he’s cutting your telephone wires.”
“I think you’re right.”
We turned and hurried around to the other side of the house. I called to Ruth. She must have heard the note of alarm in my voice because she took the children by the hand and almost ran over to us.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I’m not sure yet, but I want you to take the kids and go over to Pasjk’s. Go to the other side of the pond and up through the trees and down. If Pasjk’s phone is working, call the sheriff. If it’s not, have him run you into town and tell the sheriff to get out here right away.”
“Can’t you come?”
“I’m going to see if I can find Audrey first.”
“Where’re we going?” Nelson asked.
Ruth made herself smile at him. “En Français. You promised.”
“Okay,” Nelson said and then he said, “Where are we going?” in French.
“We’re going to see Mr. Pasjk for some cookies and lemonade and maybe a ride into town.”
“You’d better go now,” I said.
Ruth nodded and started off around the pond. She stopped, looked back, and said, “Harvey.”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and smiled nervously. “Nothing.”
Slick and I watched them until they disappeared into the pines. Then Slick said, “I hate to be an alarmist, but do you keep a weapon in the house?”
“An M-1 carbine.”
“I think you’d best get it.”
“I think you’re right.”
Inside the house, I went to the living room closet and opened the door. I kept the carbine on two pegs at the rear of the closet, but it wasn’t there.
“I was wrong,” I told Slick. “I don’t have a weapon.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know.”
We heard the car making its way over the bumps in the lane. It was going a little fast and its tires were bouncing up and grinding themselves against the fender wells.
“I don’t think I want to wait for them, do you?” I said.
“I have no desire to,” Slick said.
“Let’s try the pines.”
We hurried down the steps of the porch and ran around the pond and up into the pines. They were thick enough so that we couldn’t be seen from the house, but if we carefully pulled some branches down we could watch the car as it pulled up and stopped near the house, not quite a hundred feet away.
The car was a black four-door sedan, a Plymouth, I thought. Its front doors opened and two men got out. A third man got out of the rear of the car. The three men had guns in their hands. I recognized the first two men. One of them, sitting outside my sister’s house, had told me that his name was Detective Knaster, but he had lied. The other man was dark and had caterpillar eyebrows and the last time I had seen him he had been bounding down some stairs after having cut Max Quane’s throat.
I recognized the third man with a gun, too. The third man was Ward Murfin.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Murfin led the way toward the house. The two men followed behind him for about five paces and stopped. The blond man went into a crouch and raised his gun with both hands. I recognized the crouch although the last time I had seen the blond man go into it he had been wearing a ski mask. A red one. So had the man with the caterpillar eyebrows, although his ski mask had been a different color. Blue, I remembered.
The blond man was taking careful aim just as he had when he had shot Sally Raines. I yelled it as loudly as I could. I yelled, “Murfin! Behind you!”
It may have been something that he had learned from Filthy Frankie in Pittsburgh because Murfin went down into a tumbling dive and then rolled and kept on rolling. The blond man fired at him, but missed.
Murfin fired twice as he rolled and the blond man staggered, dropped his gun, clutched at his stomach just above the belt, and then sank slowly and perhaps even carefully to his knees. He stayed there on his knees for a moment before he toppled over onto his left side.
The man with the caterpillar eyebrows snapped two shots at Murfin, but when he didn’t hit anything he darted back behind the parked Plymouth. Murfin got quickly to his feet and ran around the corner of the house just as the man with the caterpillar eyebrows aimed carefully and fired again. I didn’t think that he had hit Murfin, but I wasn’t sure.
“That’s not quite the way we had it planned, dear boy,” Slick said.
I turned and looked at the gun that Slick held in his right hand. It was aimed at me. It looked like a Walther, the PPK model. I had won one just like it in a poker game a long time ago.
“Well,” I said, “thanks for letting Ruth and the kids go.”
“I’m sorry, Harvey,” he said. “I really am.”
“Sure.”
“I think it would be better if we went up the mountain a bit.”
“Okay.”
“You first.”
I started through the pines up the mountain. “Whose idea was it, Slick, yours or Gallops’s? But that’s a dumb question; it had to be yours, didn’t it?”
“Mr. Gallops’s imagination is somewhat limited.”
“The two-million-dollar ransom. Do you split it?”
“You don’t really think I was in it for the money, do you, Harvey?”
“No. Not really. I suppose you were in it for the power.”