Mr. X (92 page)

“So I noticed,” I said.

“If Cordwainer Hatch died in the Knacker, he had the honor of meeting several of my former clients.” Creech grasped the handle of his briefcase and stood up, uttering a raspy sound I understood was a Creech-chuckle only after he had gone across the cell and called for the guard.

A quarter of an hour later, an officer escorted us to the lobby. A few cops turned away when they saw Creech. We emerged
into an overcast morning twenty degrees cooler than the day before. Wisps of fog meandered across Town Square. The tips of fingers lightly tapped my elbow, I thought in acknowledgment of my new freedom. On a bench near the fountain, Goat Gridwell’s golden hair tumbled out from beneath a mound of blankets. “Thank you, Mr. Creech,” I said, and discovered that he was gone.

130

Through coiling fog I went up the lanes, Dove, Leather, Mutton, Treacle, Wax, with each step anticipating the footfall, the low smear of laughter that would announce Robert’s presence behind me. I knew what he had done, and I knew why he had done it. And Robert knew what
I
had done—there could be no more pretense between us. The threat posed by the being I had known as Mr. X had been forever eradicated. I had
done
that, I had
carried it off
. Robert and I had come into equilibrium, I thought, and I wanted to tell him that I had given away half of the fortune he had schemed to get. Each of us had saved the other’s life. We were finished. It was
over
.

I crossed Veal Yard and turned around to scan the narrow buildings and shadowy openings beyond the fountain. Robert was hovering; he was awaiting his moment. I went into the lobby and saw Laurie Hatch floating out of a leather armchair.

She wrapped me in her arms and pressed her smooth cheek against my unshaven cheek. “Thank goodness.” She tilted her head and looked into my eyes. “How are you?”

“Reports are still coming in,” I said.

“I feel so…. I don’t how I feel. I had to see you. Last night, the world turned upside down, and everything went flying. I felt numb. Then the police barged in and asked all these questions. They even asked about the pictures. Did they talk to you?”

“They talked to me all night long,” I said.

“And let you go. You’re not in trouble.”

“I’m fine.”

Laurie put her head on my chest. I glared over the top of her head at the bug-eyed day clerk, and he scuttled down the counter.

“I’m sorry about what I did to you,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

“No, Ned, please.” She placed her hand on my cheek. “You didn’t make a mistake, I did.
God
, I’ve been worried. I didn’t know if I’d ruined everything, I just kept rolling over and over, wanting you next to me.”

I held her hand as we went up the stairs.

When I pushed the door shut behind us, Laurie brought her entire body into contact with mine.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“Known what?” Her smile widened along my shoulder.

“Did you know who I was the first time you saw me?”

The top of her head nearly struck my chin. She moved a few inches away. “How could I?”

“Stewart pushed you off the committee because he didn’t want you to see the pictures I showed you last night.”

“Never mind Stewart. Do you think I recognized you?”

“I’m trying to figure that out.”

She took another exasperated step away. “Stewart is about a hundred times more interested in his family than I ever was. I don’t remember how much attention I paid to the Hatch stuff. I looked through it, if that’s what you mean. Maybe your face looked familiar when you came up to me in the hospital, but I wouldn’t have known why.”

“Didn’t you call Parker Gillespie two days later?”

“Of course I did!” She raised her arms and held out her hands, palms up. “Ashleigh was in town, remember? I was worried about what would happen to Cobbie if Stewart went to jail. The natural person to talk to was the lawyer for the estate. Ned, don’t make both of us unhappy.”

I took her hand in mine and kissed it. “I don’t want to make anyone unhappy. I’m just looking for explanations. Tell me about this. A day after you did everything you could to help me find Edward Rinehart, you wanted me to forget the whole thing.”

Laurie settled her hand on my hip. “Honey, you told
me
you thought you might be putting Cobbie and me in danger.”

“You probably haven’t heard about Grenville Milton.”

Her eyes deepened.

“Last night, Grennie charged two first-class tickets to Mexico City and took off for a motel in Cape Girardeau. He was carrying
a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and a gun, and he begged his girlfriend to come with him. When she refused, he killed himself.”

The shadow of a thought as precise as a Euclidean theorem moved across Laurie’s eyes. She moved toward the table, tapping her lips with an index finger. “Does Stewart know yet?”

“That’s probably why he called C. Clayton Creech.”

“Stewart’s going to ruin as many people as he can. He’ll try to bring down everyone who ever had anything to do with him.” Laurie slid out the chair from which Captain Mullan had begun our progress toward a believable fiction and sat down almost heavily. “He’s going to smash up everything he can.”

“Like the Hatch trust,” I said.

The sketchy smile brought to her face by the thought of her husband’s destructive passions disappeared. She crossed her legs and waited for what I was going to say. Her face looked as transparent as a mountain stream.

“He called Parker Gillespie,” I said. “He couldn’t have known that I was talking to a cop named Mullan about Cordwainer Hatch. He just wanted to smash things up.”

“He wanted to smash me up,” Laurie said.

“He said he was relinquishing his claim to the trust. He told Gillespie that he had discovered the existence of the rightful heir, Ned Dunstan, who was the illegitimate son of his father’s older brother. Too bad for Cobden Carpenter Hatch, but he could not suppress the truth. It would have gone something like that.”

Laurie shifted sideways in the chair and noticed the tidy graffiti on the edge of the table. She lifted a hand and glided her fingers along it, as Mullan had done. In the inner ear of my inner ear, Star said,
He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer …

“I never heard very much about Cordwainer,” Laurie said. “Wasn’t he arrested for something, ages and ages ago?”

… and there I was, with you growing inside me, and I thought it was like one beautiful birth after another
.

“The part about arrests and convictions doesn’t apply to Cordwainer. Cobden Hatch added it in the late sixties.”

“I hardly know what to say.”

“You don’t sound too surprised.”

“You gave me a big, fat hint about thirty seconds ago,” Laurie
said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not surprised. Mr. Creech talked this over with Gillespie? There isn’t any doubt?”

“Stewart knew what he was doing,” I said. “Was any of this on your mind when we talked about you moving to New York?”

Her composure saw her through a long moment of silence. “That was nasty.”

“I couldn’t blame you for wanting Cobbie to get what he was always supposed to have.”

“He should get it.” She faced me with a direct appeal. “Ned, I’m still adjusting to your news, and I haven’t had time to think about how it will affect you and me, but you must see that this isn’t right. Don’t you agree? Twenty-four hours ago, you had no idea that Stewart’s uncle was your biological father.
He
didn’t want to inherit the trust. He wasn’t even a real Hatch!”

“Legally, he was,” I said.

“But you—
you
, Ned Dunstan—you’re not that kind of person. You’re not like Stewart. I want us to have a life together in New York. You’d be a better father to Cobbie than Stewart ever was or could have been. That’s
true
. And I love you. There’s no reason for the two of us not to have a wonderful life together. But Cobbie’s right to the trust is more valid than yours. You see that, don’t you?”

“What I see doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “According to the law, Cobbie has no right to it at all. Before we can start talking about the rest of our lives, you have to deal with the real situation, not what you want it to be.”

She continued to focus her utter transparency upon me. “What would have happened if Grennie hadn’t killed himself? If Stewart hadn’t called Parker Gillespie?”

“You know the answer to that,” I said. “I would have gone back to New York and waited for you. I thought that sounded great.”

“It still sounds great to me,” she said.

“But if Stewart hadn’t called him, Parker Gillespie would be about to find himself in a terrible dilemma. This afternoon, everyone in Edgerton is going to learn that Sawyer was Cordwainer Hatch, and that I was his son. What do you think Gillespie would have done?”

“Spoken up,” she said. “Obviously. I don’t know if he would have done it right away, but it wouldn’t have taken him more than
a couple of hours. And then we would have celebrated at Le Madrigal.”

“Like a happy family.”

“Isn’t that what you want most of all?”

“Even Stewart had me figured out better than I did,” I said. “You saw through me right away.”

“I saw the most interesting man I had met in years,” Laurie said. “I started falling for you when we had dinner with Ashleigh. You know what you did? You told Grennie he was a jerk, you understood my sense of humor, and you were
all there
, Ned, you looked at me with those incredible brown eyes and you were
there. You
weren’t judging me, you were looking at my face instead of my breasts, and you weren’t trying to figure out how fast you could talk me into bed. The last thing I wanted to do was get interested in some new guy, but I couldn’t help it. Ashleigh knew what was happening in about ten seconds. If you don’t believe what I’m saying, you’re a fool.”

“I started falling for you in the hospital gift shop,” I said. “After Creech told me about the trust, he asked how much I wanted to give away. He could see through me, too, but C. Clayton Creech sees through everybody.” I told her about the division of the money and the new trust to be set up for her son. “In the meantime, you’ll have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, paid from his share.”

Nothing had changed in the bright shield of her face. “You don’t think we should have talked about these arrangements?”

“I was in a cell at Police Headquarters, Laurie. Creech came in for about fifteen minutes before they let me out. I did what I thought was right.”

“Creech convinced you of what he thought was right. It isn’t too late to change things.” Shining with the utter, straightforward sanity of twenty-twenty foresight, she opened her hand before her as if the world lay in her palm.

“Creech doesn’t know about us. And he doesn’t understand New York. How could he? The kind of apartment I’m going to need costs about two million. I’ll have to have dinner parties, meet the right people, and do the right things. We’ll need teachers and tutors and lessons in Europe. How much do you need to be set for life? Three million? Five? The rest could be made over to Cobbie, with a provision that I have something between five and eight hundred thousand a year. We would be
together. If we got married, it would be as though you never gave anything up.”