Back Bay (58 page)

For a time, they sat silently and listened to the noise of the city traffic.

Philip picked up his tennis racket and a ball and absent-mindedly began to bounce the ball on the strings. “No, William Rule was the first person ever to make a serious challenge against us, and I believed we could turn him back, either by convincing the stockholders to stay with us or by scaring the bastard out of his hairpiece. So far, we’ve failed on both counts.” He paused. “Maybe the mistake was made back in 1876, when Artemus Pratt decided to go public.”

“Then, Pratt Rail and Mining, or whatever it was called back then, would never have grown into Pratt Industries,” said Calvin. “Even if we lose, we’ll still have all the stocks, bonds, and comforts that Pratt growth has provided for us. And there will be other worlds to conquer.”

Philip laughed. “Other worlds to conquer.” He bounced the ball higher on the racket and tried to turn the racket over between bounces. “How can we expect to conquer other worlds when we can’t even hold onto this one?”

“Philip,” Calvin spoke sternly. “If you believe that you’ve lost, you have.”

Philip continued to bounce the ball. “No pep talks, Calvin. I’m just trying to face facts. Twenty years ago, we would’ve rattled our saber, and a nobody like Rule would’ve run for cover. Now, we have to try bluff and blackmail.”

“Don’t start getting philosophical on us, Phil. Not yet, anyway.”

“But consider the absurdity. The president of a major corporation, his father’s hand-picked successor, and unless he can find some clues from a three-hundred-year-old poem, he’ll be out in the street on Monday.” He stopped bouncing the ball and thought
for a moment. “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe it’s time I remade my life. I’ve always dreamed of stocking up the
Gay Head IV
and trying to sail her around the world. Maybe this year.”

Isabelle appeared at the roof entrance and walked across the court. She was smiling. She seemed excited. “We’re closer than ever,” she announced. “I’ve been reading birth certificates all day, and I think I’ve done it. Sean Mannion’s last known descendant is a man from South Boston named Kenny Gallagher.”

Tom and Danny Fallon followed Peter’s instructions with care. At nine-thirty that night, Danny dressed in a gray suit and dark tie. He and Tom sneaked out the back door of their duplex, made sure that no one was watching them, and walked to Kelleher’s Funeral Home. With Tom following in a rented Mercury sedan, Danny drove the hearse to a spot in the South End near the
Herald-American
newspaper plant.

Fallon, Evangeline, and Ferguson were waiting for them under a light rain that added more humidity to the heat. Peter, in a dark suit, and Ferguson, in his usual rags, climbed into the hearse. Evangeline got into the rented car; white shoes, stockings, and the hem of a white dress showed beneath her raincoat. Tom Fallon wished them luck and watched them as they headed for the expressway. Then, he went home to wait.

Peter had tried to prepare Danny for Jack Ferguson, but Ferguson had to be seen to be appreciated. For a moment, Danny stared at the big man on the other side of the front seat. Then Peter introduced them.

“You’ve got a damn nice hearse here.” Ferguson greeted Danny with a friendly handshake and a broad smile, and Danny warmed up to him.

“We had a helluva time gettin’ it,” explained Danny. “Uncle Dunphy had a shit fit when we asked him to lend us a hearse. So Dad asked Dunphy who gave him the loan to buy the funeral home, and Dunphy came around, although he made us change the plates so the hearse couldn’t be traced.”

“Nice idea,” said Ferguson. “This whole thing’s a nice idea. I gave my approval the minute I heard it.”

“Your approval?” Danny sounded surprised. “Which one of you guys is the boss?”

“We’re partners,” said Ferguson. He was beginning to like the concept. He had always been a loner. “Now that you’re in it, you’re a partner, too. Every partner gets to have a say, but since I been lookin’ for five years, and your brother’s only been at it a week, I think my say counts for a little more.”

Danny smiled. “Just so long as we find it, I don’t care who says what.”

“That’s the way to talk.” Ferguson liked a positive attitude. He reached across Peter, who was sitting in the middle, and slapped Danny on the knee.

Danny grinned. “You know somethin’, Jack? You don’t smell half as bad as I expected.”

Ferguson laughed.

Evangeline got to Lynnewood Manor ten minutes ahead of the hearse, at about eleven o’clock. It had stopped raining. She tucked her hair up under her nurse’s cap and put on her glasses, a pair of heavy hornrims which considerably changed her appearance. She took off the raincoat, smoothed out the wrinkles in her nurse’s uniform, and headed to the entrance.

The nursing shift changed at eleven o’clock. The central desk would be surrounded with white uniforms and Evangeline might have a chance to slip past.

She stopped at the foot of the steps which led into the reception hall. For a moment, she thought of the madness of it all. But she was committed now. She knew that the only way out was straight ahead. She would recover the tea set and learn the truth about her family’s relationship to it. She did not want to spend her life wondering what had killed her father and her brother. She refused to spend her life wondering what might come to her door. She had always relied on herself. She would rely on herself to end it.

She smoothed the uniform once more and reminded herself to act confident. If she looked nervous or self-conscious, she wouldn’t have a chance. She took a deep breath and strode up the steps. The reception area was a large, circular room, paneled in gumwood, with comfortable furniture scattered all about, with recreation
rooms and library opening onto it. The main desk was located beside the hallway that led to the back of the house. A dozen nurses and orderlies, part of the evening shift, clustered near the desk, and Evangeline had to walk past them to reach her objective.

She stopped briefly just inside the door. No one paid special attention to her. No one seemed to be waiting for her. She knew she could make it. Then she wondered if her grandmother had been moved, leaving no need for a guard at Lynnewood.

A nurse’s aide walked past and said hello. Evangeline realized that she was hesitating. She smiled pleasantly to the aide, then crossed the reception area. As she approached the nurses’ desk, she looked straight ahead. If anyone stopped her, she planned to tell them she was a private nurse called in on short notice to care for the man in bungalow eighteen; Fallon had gotten the name from the lunch list. But no one stopped her. Although a nurse or two glanced up, they were all busy with clipboards and doctors’ reports, and the staff was large enough that new faces were not conspicuous.

Evangeline walked crisply down the hall. She felt her heart pounding as the adrenaline coursed through her. She had passed the first obstacle. She did not look back.

She glided past four patient rooms to the solarium at the back of the house. The solarium was in darkness, but two floodlights illuminated the porch on the other side of the full-length windows. She had been hoping for complete darkness. She put on her raincoat again. It was navy blue and would make her less visible.

She stepped outside and hurried to the end of the porch. One of the floodlights was directly above her, but its beam angled outward so that she was in shadow. Just beneath the floodlight, the telephone wire ran from the main building down to the gatehouse. It was exactly where Tom Fallon had anticipated she would find it, at the corner closest to the gatehouse, about eight feet above the porch.

She carefully stepped onto the railing, which brought her within reach of the wires. She gripped the corner of the building with her right hand and balanced herself precariously on three inches of wood. She didn’t look down. She didn’t want to see the twenty-foot drop to the doctors’ parking lot. With her left hand,
she carefully reached up toward the wire. She didn’t look up. She was afraid of losing her balance. She found the wire, then brought her hand back down, reached very slowly into her pocket, and froze.

Someplace below her, a door opened and a man walked out of an entrance on the basement level. Evangeline listened as the man moved up the sidewalk a short distance and stopped. It seemed to her that he was standing directly beneath her. She felt her knees begin to tremble. She hoped she wouldn’t fall. Then, she heard keys jangle. A car door opened, an engine kicked over, and the man drove off.

Evangeline forgot her fear of heights. She wanted to get down from that railing, and fast. She pulled a set of wire cutters from her pocket, reached up, and snapped the telephone line. She jumped down and hurried to the other end of the porch, where the drop to the ground was much shorter. She climbed over the railing and lowered herself into the shrubbery, where she left her raincoat. She smoothed her dress again and started down the lawn to the gatehouse.

In the gatehouse, two guards were playing gin rummy. They were Lynnewood Manor security people, an old man and a boy of about twenty, both unarmed.

“Excuse me,” she said cheerily.

Both men looked up, and both looked as though they liked what they saw.

She smiled. “Hi. They sent me down from the main desk to tell you that your phone’s out of order. They’ll have it fixed in a while. They also want to tell you to be expecting a hearse soon.”

“Second one today,” said the old man.

“I haven’t seen you before.” The young man wasn’t suspicious. He was trying to be charming.

Evangeline acted interested. She took out a cigarette, and the young man offered her a light. She stepped back into the middle of the driveway. The young man followed her with his lighter. She put her hand gently on his, drew the flame into the cigarette, the smoke into her lungs, and almost choked.

“Nothing like a butt to tear up your lungs,” said the young guard.

Evangeline agreed between gasps. She hated cigarettes, but the lighting of the cigarette was her signal for the Fallons. She thanked the guards, turned, and walked back toward the main building. When she was out of sight of the gatehouse, she cut back across the lawn and strolled past bungalow sixteen.

Nurse Harriet Burnham, a carbon copy of her sister, Nurse Drexel, was in Katherine Carrington’s bedroom preparing her patient’s nightly injection. Katherine Carrington was preparing to make her nightly scene. Katherine Carrington’s bodyguards, dressed as orderlies, were watching a
Kojak
rerun on television.

The gatehouse guards waved the hearse ahead, and Peter directed Danny to a small lot near the bungalows. Evangeline saw the hearse pulling through the gate, and she hurried down the walk to meet it.

Peter jumped out of the car. A smile broke across his face when he saw her. He had been worried about her.

“We can do it.” She spoke firmly, more to convince herself than Fallon. Then she described the arrangements at the bungalow.

“Were there any Pratt men watching the door in the main house?” asked Peter.

“Not that I could tell.”

“Then I guess we’ll be up against it with the guys in the bungalow.” He sounded as though he wanted to meet them.

“Let’s stop shootin’ the shit and get goin’,” said Danny. “The more I stand around thinkin’ bout this, the stupider it gets.”

They opened the back of the hearse, and the coffin rolled out as smoothly as a drawer in a file cabinet. They placed it on its folding metal cart and started up the path to bungalow sixteen. They walked slowly, almost respectfully, with the cart wheels clicking rhythmically over the joints in the concrete.

An old man peered out of his bungalow to see a white angel leading two dark figures and a coffin through the night. He watched the cortege curiously, then moved toward his door, as though he were thinking about joining the vision.

Danny saw the man outlined in the pale-blue glow of a television set. “We’ll be back for you later,” he whispered.

“Shut up,” rasped Peter.

“He didn’t hear me.”

“I did,” came the voice from the coffin.

“You shut up, too,” said Peter.

Evangeline knocked on the screen door of bungalow sixteen.

One of the guards appeared. He studied her from behind his Fu Manchu mustache. “Yeah?”

“Hello. I’m…” Her nerves caught the words in her throat. She swallowed. “I’m a special for an old gent next door. He’s in the tub at the moment and I can’t seem to get him out. I was wondering if one of you gentlemen could help me.”

“We’re private. Call the main house if you want an orderly.”

“My telephone isn’t working, and if he stays in the tub much longer, I’m afraid he’ll start to pucker up.”

The guard glowered at her, then he turned to his partner. “I’ll be back in a minute, Benny.”

Evangeline heard the Fallons moving into position in the darkness behind her. For a moment, she pitied the guard.

He unlatched the screen door.

“Thank you so much,” said Evangeline. She swung the door wide open and stepped out of the way.

The coffin hit the guard full force in the groin and knocked him halfway across the room. Before Benny could react to the sight of a coffin flying through the door, the lid flew open and Jack Ferguson aimed a pistol at his head.

“Move or make a sound and you’re dead. And you better believe me, because anybody ridin’ around in a coffin is fuckin’ crazy to begin with. Got it?”

The other guard rolled to his feet.

“And tell that friend of yours that if he don’t stay right where he is, I’ll leave you all over the wall.”

Benny saw the glint in Ferguson’s eye. He believed everything Ferguson said. “Back off, Sonny.”

In the bedroom, Nurse Burnham grabbed the telephone. Katherine Carrington reached over and pulled the wire out of the wall.

Peter heard the scuffle. He stepped into the bedroom, and the nurse started to scream. He couldn’t let her scream. He came to her and clamped a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite him, to wrestle away from him, but he held tight. He wasn’t going to let
her ruin everything. She began to swing and kick at him, and he tried to tell her she would be all right.