No Cure for Death (13 page)

“I guess not.”

“You know, I wasn’t the black villain you’d think I was, if you heard those politicians tell it. The way they talked, bringing Richard down with all of it, and distorting it besides... hell. I gave them a lot of comfort, do you know that? Many people had hope, thanks to me. In their final days, even their final hours, they had hope because of me. False hope, you might argue, but it was hope, whatever kind, and real enough to them.” He coughed. “You... you just try to put a price tag on that, try to say you can charge too much.” He coughed some more.

I grabbed a stack of tissues off the cluttered nightstand and handed it to him. He coughed into one, crumpled it and tossed it on the stand.

He said, “People thanked me, you know.”

I nodded.

“You don’t know, you weren’t born. Listen here, you see that desk back there? Back by the windows.”

I nodded.

“Go over there and look at the top of it. Go ahead!”

I got up and walked across the room and stepped up on the platform by the window and looked down at the desktop. Under glass were photographs, aging, of varieties of people in snapshot poses, all of them with personal notes written on them thanking Simon Norman. In the middle was a signed photo of Herbert Hoover: “Best wishes, Doc Sy!” All of the inscriptions but Hoover’s were in the same hand.

I walked back and sat down.

“What do you think of that?” he said.

“Impressive.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Yes, I am. You seem in better spirits now.”

He smiled and reached out and patted my shoulder. “I like having someone your age to talk to. You know, when you spend a holiday evening alone like this, it makes you reflective, makes you think on things—and people—that you’ve lost. My son, I lost my son, you know, did you know that? He might’ve been president one day. Before that May Belle, and now...”

“Now?”

“Say, did you look at the picture on the mantel?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Go on over and look at it.”

I got up again and went to the fireplace and lifted off the silver-framed photo. The portrait in purple smiled down at me as I looked at the photo, a studio shot of a pretty young woman, in the thirties manner: plump face, wide bright eyes, rosebud mouth, dark tight curls.

“Your wife, Mr. Norman?”

“She was a dancer,” he said. His voice was soft now, as if in another room. “You never saw her feet touch the floor, that’s how she danced. I took some patients down to Miami that winter and she was dancing in a club. Not just the chorus line, mind you, she was featured. Everyone loved her, but it was me she came back with and married. Ah, you should have seen this place then. White fluffy carpet, all the latest furniture, mirrors everywhere. She liked mirrors. Over there was where the baby grand was, a white baby grand; I hired a fella to come in and play on it now and then so she could dance. Over against the wall there was the bar, and oh, it was stocked with everything, you wouldn’t believe... the funny thing is, she died of cancer, did you know that? Do you have any idea what it’s like to help others and not be able to help somebody you love?”

“Mr. Norman.”

“Yes, uh... Mallory, is it?”

“That’s right. Mr. Norman, a young woman named Janet Taber died the other day. Did you know that?”

His eyes became cloudy again, then immediately hardened. “Yes,” he said, “yes, of course, I mentioned that, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t... I...”

“Mallory. Mallory. You’re the one Stefan called about. He said I shouldn’t...” And he leaned over to the nightstand and pressed a white button.

I didn’t bother moving. Five seconds later the door opened behind me and I didn’t have to turn around to know there was a big black man back there waiting for me.

Harold Washington said, “I’ll make you a proposition.”

I was sitting on a couch next to Rita in her brother’s one-room living quarters on the lower floor of the Norman house. Rita didn’t seem angry with me, though she wasn’t pleased, either; apparently she felt my little whitey lie classified me more like kid-in-the-cookie-jar than Judas. I’d expected my confrontation with brother Harold to be rather on the short side; he’d show up and it would all be over but the shouting. Well, it wasn’t over and there wasn’t any shouting. He had quietly escorted me out of Simon Norman’s presence, down the stairs and into his room, where Rita was waiting. And now Harold Washington was politely asking me if he could make a proposition.

I shrugged. “Propose away.”

He said, “I have to go back up and give Mr. Norman his medication. If you’ll wait here while I do that, I’ll come back and answer some questions. Providing, of course, that you’re first willing to answer a few of mine.”

I managed to nod. Where was the cyclops-like, bus station brute of Tuesday past? Punjab, is that you, Punjab?

“Would you like me to bring you a cup of coffee when I return?”

I managed a second nod. What’d I do, knock human kindness into his head with that Pepsi bottle the other day?

“How do you like it?”

“Uh, black.”

“Rita?” he asked.

“Nothing, thanks,” she said. She seemed embarrassed, as if her brother’s kindness and instant unspoken forgiveness was far worse than a scolding.

“Okay,” he said, and he ambled out like a big tame bear.

I looked around the room, which was the reverse of the rest of the all-but-unfurnished house. The floor was carpeted in rich, wall-to-wall brown, and there was a large deep gold reclining chair next to the couch Rita and I were sitting on, with a coffee table between. From where I sat, the door was on my left and the wall surrounding it was the only one with its cream color nakedly showing. The wall behind me was paneled, and the wall across from me was a network of wooden shelves that housed not only a considerable library, but a component stereo, its various speakers, photographs of Rita and (I assumed) other Washington family members, a small but well-shaped ebony statue of a jungle cat and a hunk of driftwood; two-thirds down the wall the shelves gave way to closed cabinets, with a space in the center making room for a big color television. A single bed ran along the brown-draped back wall, next to an arched doorless closet in the corner.

“Your brother keeps a neat house,” I said.

“Are you trying to make up?” Rita asked.

“No.”

A few moments of silence limped by.

She said, “Why aren’t you?”

“Why aren’t I what? Trying to make up? Because you aren’t mad at me.”

“I’m not?”

“Hell, no. You know it wouldn’t do any good.”

“That I’ll admit.”

“And you know my motives are altruistic.”

“You never stop bullshitting, do you?”

“I never noticed I was.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m right about what?”

“My brother does keep a neat house.”

“He sure does.”

Washington came in, shutting the door with his foot as he balanced two cups of coffee in his hands. He came over to me and handed me a cup, set the other down on the table by the couch, then went over and pulled a chair off the wall and dragged it over by me and sat down. He was still wearing the houndstooth suit, and not even the absence of a tie made him seem any less formal. His bald head and lack of eyebrows seemed somehow less frightening than they had two days ago, and made him seem almost peaceful, monklike. The only tangible difference in his appearance from the other time we’d met was the eyepatch, which was large enough to hide the lengthy scar as well as the empty socket. But this difference was a major one: the raving madman seemed now a quiet and sane gentleman. Yes, gentle, damn it, which was, after all, what everybody’d been telling me about him.

“Mr. Norman asked me,” he said, “to convey an apology to you for his abrupt show of bad manners. He said he enjoyed speaking with you, and hopes you aren’t offended.”

“Hardly. I was intruding.”

“That,” he said, sipping his coffee like a lady at a tea, “would seem as good a place as any to begin.”

I wasn’t fooled by any of this: I knew full well any moment he’d start pulling the arms and legs off me.

Rita said, “He was supposed to wait in the car, Harold, I was going to tell you...”

“That’s beside the point,” he told her. “And I’m not at all interested in how he got you talked into smuggling him in here. I’m sure it took some nice footwork, but whatever it took, done is done, you brought him here and here he is.” He turned back to me. “Now, do you mind telling me why you’re sticking your nose in around here?”

I said I didn’t mind at all. I told him how two days ago I’d seen him giving Janet Taber a very rough time in a bus station. I told him how that same night I saw her dead inside a car at the bottom of Colorado Hill. That she was supposed to be drunk-driving, only she didn’t drink, and she was supposed to have died in the crash, but her neck was broken like maybe a couple big hands did it. That that was when I started sticking in my nose, and I found out she used to work for a guy named Richard Norman. Who also died in a car crash out at Colorado Hill. Son of that guy upstairs in the bed. Who a certain Harold Washington worked for.

“Have you noticed yet,” I said, “that there’re a few connections between these people and incidents?”

“I see the connections,” Washington said. “I just don’t see yours.”

“My connection is I liked Janet Taber.”

“Knew her well, did you?”

“No. Somebody denied me that chance.”

“And coming around here bothering Simon Norman is supposed to lead you to the somebody who did that.”

“Maybe. The thought has crossed my mind that I’m talking to that very somebody right now.”

Rita shifted nervously next to me.

“Mr. Mallory...” Washington began.

“Call me Mal. Do you prefer Harold or Harry? I hear some of your pals call you Eyewash.”

“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that much. Brains, that I’m not so sure about. Do you really think I broke Janet Taber’s neck?”

“You tell me.”

“I didn’t. Now ask me if I think it was a bad thing, her getting killed. Because I’ll tell you it was a good thing.”

“People getting killed is rarely a good thing.”

He had something prepared for me, I could see it in his eye, something gone over in his mind he was now going to get to let loose.

He said, “This woman, this woman you knew for minutes, this woman whose posthumous honor you’re out to protect, was a back-stabbing, self-serving, blackmailing bitch, and you better know that, know it well, before you waste any more time on her.”

Rita said, “Hey, come on, brother, this dead chick was all of
that?
You’re laying it on a little
heavy,
aren’t you?”

“The only way you’d believe me,” he said to both of us, “is if I told you, in detail, just what she was trying to put over on Mr. Norman. And obviously, since I wanted to see her kept quiet, I’m not about to pass on to you the things that died with her.”

Rita said, her voice quiet, hurt. “You got motive written all over you, Harold. No wonder Mal thinks you might’ve done it.”

I said, “He knows I’ve got him ruled out, Rita.”

Washington smiled and Rita said, “Oh?”

“Sure,” I said. “If he was going to kill Janet Taber, he wouldn’t have gone into that tough guy routine at the bus station. He
wanted to scare her off, not kill her off. When that didn’t work, it was too late to kill her, if he’d wanted to, after the public scene he’d just pulled.”

“Balls
and
brains,” Washington said. “You’re right. I took off my eyepatch and went down there hoping to rattle her, scare her off. I didn’t know there’d be a white knight around.”

That’s what his sister called me earlier.

I pointed a finger at the ceiling. “All of that just to protect that old man from something?”

He nodded. “That was the reason, and you’re right again, he
is
an old man, a sad, sick old man. Who’s paid and
re
paid and then paid some more for whatever wrongs he might’ve done.”

“You can defend him. You’re paid to.”

“Come off it, Mallory. You saw him. Talked to him. Did you find him malicious? A ghoul? Did you want to strangle him with your bare hands?”

“Of course not.”

He leaned forward in the chair and shook a thick finger at me. “He’s been good to me. I’ve been with him ten years, and he’s helped me help myself, help my family. How do you think Rita got her education? Ask her about the two brothers of ours that are in college right now, and on whose money. How do you think I came from ghetto and gang-fights to those books over on the wall? I wasn’t even able to speak proper English before I came to him. He did it for me.”

“What about those other people, years ago? Ones he didn’t help?”

“Look, I happen to know that he personally has reimbursed as many families as he’s been able to locate. His records were destroyed while he was in prison back in the forties, but by
searching his memory and from people who contacted him, he was able to pay back much of what he took.”

“And did he pay them interest? Did he give them a share of what he made investing
their
money?”

“I don’t know why I’m even bothering with you, Mallory. You’re just like everybody else, you probably don’t even realize that a good deal of the earnings from Mr. Norman’s various business holdings are turned over to cancer research—cancer and other diseases.”

“A function of the Norman Fund, I assume?”

“Yes, but none of this has any relevance to your dead Janet Taber.”

“Did the Fund give a research grant to Phil Taber?”

“Who?”

“My dead Janet Taber’s husband. Perhaps it was a grant for research into the drug problem, since he’s a doper himself. I saw him yesterday. Somebody rushed him into Port City, paid him at least five thousand dollars, and I suppose rushed him back out by now.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Now
you’re
starting the I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about-routine. Stefan Norman pulled it on me this afternoon.”

“What?”

“He denied knowing anything about Janet Taber, except that a long time ago she worked for Richard Norman. And he’d never heard of Phil Taber, either, and you know what else? He denied knowing you. Why would he do that?”