Scare Tactics (24 page)

Evelyn opened her eyes. Daylight. She winced. A face materialized out of the glare inches above her.

“Where am I?” she asked the paramedic.

“Ambulance. On your way to Douglas County Hospital. The pilot made an emergency landing in Omaha when you became so ill. They’ll probably keep you in the hospital for a a day or two, for observation.”

“Then you belong to us,” a familiar voice said, and Evelyn turned her head painfully. She was lying flat on a stretcher or gurney. Her hands, her feet were restrained.

“Mr. Bronstein!”

“Hello, Mrs. Hammons.”

“What are you—what do you mean by—”

“Maybe I should explain it to her, Jake,” someone else said. A woman. Bronstein moved aside to make room for her.

“You—you’re the flight attendant! Maureen?”

“That’s right,” the green-eyed woman said. “Not my normal occupation. I’m a vice-president of Weststates Insurance. Frauds Division. Mr. Bronstein here is our chief investigator.”

“Oh ... God. I—what did you
do
to me?”

“Do to you, Mrs. Hammons?” Maureen glanced at Bronstein with a slight quizzical smile. “Nothing at all. We only listened to you. You had a great deal to say that was of interest to us.”

Bronstein held up a Dictamite. “Whatever it was you were taking for your nerves loosened your tongue quite a bit. I’ve got it all here.”

“Clive!” Evelyn wailed. “I want Clive!”

Bronstein glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid it’ll be a week or so until the two of you are arraigned, which is the next time you’ll be seeing him. We had Clive picked up fifteen minutes ago in San Francisco.”

“You ... you dirty bastards! Trapped me. I’m denying everything. I won’t be convicted. I deny it! I never killed him. It was an accident. That son of a bitch. I’m
so
glad he’s dead. How did you know? How could you possibly—”

“Mrs. Hammons,” Maureen said, “everybody who commits murder and tries to cover it up thinks they’re being very clever. But we’ve seen it all. Didn’t you and your boyfriend ever read
The Postman Always Rings Twice?
I don’t have anything against you, dear. It’s just my job to save the company money. With good behavior you’ll be out in twelve or fifteen years.”

“Which one of you—drugged me? You can’t get away with that! It’s entrapment.”

Maureen said, “It was a voluntary confession, Mrs. Hammons. You told him everything.”

Evelyn stared at Jake Bronstein. “What did I say to you? On my mother’s grave, I never told you anything!”

“You’re right about that,” Bronstein said. “It wasn’t me you spilled your guts to. But we’ve got some pretty resourceful operatives at Weststates Insurance.”

—

Maureen and Jake Bronstein were having a drink at the hotel bar in Omaha before catching a plane back to the coast.

A customer was having a fuss with the maître d’ by the entrance. Wasn’t dressed properly, something like that. Maureen looked casually over one shoulder.

“Here he comes,” she said.

Weststates Insurance Company’s ace investigator swaggered into the bar and took a stool next to Bronstein.

“Sunflower seeds,” he said to the bartender. He was wearing a purple necktie that was much too long for him.

The bartender looked him over. “Sorry, bud, we’re not allowed to serve parrots in here. You know how it is.”

The bird flew up and closed its beak on the bartender’s nose.

“Owww, owww, okay, sunflower seeds it is!”

“All around,” the parrot said, settling back on the barstool, his  pinfeathers sticking out in a show of indignation.

“Cool off, Rocky,” Maureen advised him. “You’ve got to do something about that temper of yours.”

“I don’t like the way they treat me in tank towns like this. Besides, I’m freezing my butt off. Omaha in January! Give me a break.”

“Got a new assignment for you, Rocky. Warm climate. Guatemala, as a matter of fact.”

“Guatemala, huh?” Rocky said, dipping his beak to the plate of unhulled sunflower seeds the bartender put in front of him. Satisfied that they were fresh and of good quality, he cracked several and passed the plate to Maureen and Jake. “I’ve got some relatives down that way. Several thousand, maybe.”

“But who keeps score?” Bronstein said kiddingly.

“Watch yourself,” Rocky said, his feathers standing out even more. He was in some kind of mood tonight. Bronstein tried flattery.

“You were great today,
boychik.
Three rabbis on my mother’s side, you could have fooled any of them. It was a pleasure working with you.”

“When you need the best, you get the best,” Rocky said, mollified.

The telephone behind the bar rang. The bartender picked up.

“You Rocky?” he asked.

“Tell her I’ll meet her in twenty minutes,” Rocky said.

“So that’s where you disappeared to this afternoon,” Bronstein chided him.

“Who’s the lucky lady?” Maureen asked with an arched eyebrow.

“A Rainbow Lorikeet from Australia. She’s the only one of her kind at Ogletree’s Exotic Pets. For what that’s worth.”

“Stepping out of your class tonight, aren’t you, Rocky?” Bronstein said.

“Every other parrot I met today was either dead or molting. What the hell. It’s January, and I’m in Omaha.”

“Mazel tov,”
Maureen said, salting her sunflower seeds and crunching them between her perfect white teeth.

A Novel

M
ajor Starne Kinsaker was a tall man with a stiff, dour, seamed face, straight yellow eyes and straight lips, and a neck shrinking down into his collar like a turkey’s, or, more accurately, a vulture’s neck. His hair was straight and gray and dying off; his forehead was paisley with age spots, and his cheekbones shone like weathered, ivory knobs. But his hands were large; they looked strong and reliable. Jim Practice wasn’t sure how old the Major was—somewhere in his late sixties. He wore high, obviously expensive horse boots, and jodhpurs, as if he had just come in from a ride.

An awesome face, in a way. Since Practice had been working for the Governor, he had encountered the Major many times and now he found himself studying the man with heightened interest, wondering in the back of his mind what the Major could want with him.

He had rung the bell outside the opaque glass doors of the Major’s office suite in the Osage State Bank Building, expecting at least a token delay before being admitted, but the Major had answered the buzzer himself.

“Please come in, Mr. Practice.”

Apparently the Major hadn’t gone to much expense in furnishing the anteroom. There was a desk with a gray typewriter stand beside it and three straight chairs against one wall. The lone adornment was a narrow vase full of wilting iris on the desk. As he followed, Practice wondered if Kinsaker had some sort of unhappy surprise waiting so close to the Governor’s Day Dinner. After considering the possibility, Practice disallowed it. If the Major had found a hold that would effectively break John Guthrie’s back, he would go ahead and break it without ceremony, or make his deal, which would amount to the same thing. Jim Practice would not have been called in either way.

Major Kinsaker’s office was a large one, and by contrast with the cheerless room outside it had been furnished with a great deal of care. Six windows overlooked the center of the city. Most of the furniture had the look of heirlooms. There was even a tall cabinet clock behind the Major’s desk, between the windows.

“Will you sit down?” Kinsaker asked, his hand resting on the high back of a leather chair in the middle of the carpet, facing the desk.

“Thank you, Major. Do you mind if I build a smoke?”

“Not at all.” The Major bent his gaze on Practice with a hint of interest as he took out cigarette papers and tobacco. “Not many men go to such trouble anymore,” he said, as if he approved of the ritual.

“I suppose I’m contrary in some ways,” Practice replied. He liked the routine; it was comforting to him. He also told himself that he enjoyed the taste of the cigarettes he made.

Kinsaker moved slowly through the sunlight that intersected his desk and approached a door-front cabinet. Watching him, Practice recalled a brief conversation he had had with Governor Guthrie not long ago. He had made some sort of slighting remark about Kinsaker, and Guthrie looked up at him tiredly in the dwindling hours of the night.

“I don’t think you have a right to think of him in that way,” Guthrie said, then softened his tone. “The Major can be mean, and he can be kind, but for all the contradictions, his kindness is no less real than his unattractive qualities. Let’s remember that.”

The Major opened one of the cabinet doors and light from the windows shone on the liquor decanters massed on a shelf inside. Probably, Jim thought, there was a small refrigerator in the closet hard by the liquor supply. Gracious living, he told himself, his nerves chased by a spook of annoyance as the Major turned to him.

“What will you have, Mr. Practice?” he said, his hand gripping the shelf below the array of cut-glass bottles, no expression in his narrow eyes.

Practice spent a few moments carefully shaping up his cigarette, taking perverse satisfaction in letting the Major wait for his answer.

“You know all about me, Major. I assume that, anyway, because I don’t carry any secrets of my own around with me. You know when I was weaned and where I was baptized and how many girls I coaxed up into the barn loft before I was fifteen years old. I work for John Guthrie, and that’s all in the Blue Book, sixty-two thousand dollars a year, which is two thousand dollars more than the Governor himself makes. You know these things about me, so you know I can’t drink. That’s the first thing you must know about me.”

“Then I won’t drink, either,” the Major said, turning away from the cabinet and closing the doors. He moved slowly, precisely, but with an underlying gracefulness and ease.

“Go ahead, it’s nothing to me.”

Practice had slipped into the drawling habits of speech that he adopted unthinkingly when under duress, or annoyed, because he had allowed the man to goad him, to try him. He had come to listen, he reminded himself; no more.

He struck a match and held it to his cigarette, then broke the match. Because the chair was just out of arm’s reach of the desk and an ashtray, he kept the match, toying with it. For some reason he didn’t want to get up out of the chair, go to the desk, and deposit the match; the notion of standing, stepping, then turning, and turning again to sit in the rather low chair seemed awkward, obscurely humiliating. Which could explain why the chair had been placed at that particular point, where a man might sit and talk with Major Kinsaker and feel as isolated from him as if he were in the next room.

Without appearing to notice the match, the Major walked around his desk and picked up the ashtray, handing it to Practice, who set it on one of the wide armrests of the chair. The Major continued unhurriedly to the far side of the room with an air of reflection and detachment, and Practice turned his head to follow his progress for a few moments.

He was aware again of something remotely demonic about the man; another age and the Major might have made a first-class sorcerer. But he sensed now a part of what Guthrie had been trying to tell him, that Major Kinsaker was far from the malevolent, grasping man he was sometimes made out to be. His attitude was one of willful loneliness, apartness, perhaps with a faint distaste for but enchantment with the lives of ordinary men. The Major’s family, among the original settlers of the state, had been wealthy for generations. Besides the Osage Bank, Kinsaker owned land, utilities, and diversified industry. He lived in a comfortable house in the oldest part of town, owned one car, rarely traveled outside the state, and had been married only for a short time. Practice had a hunch that his chief inspiration was a craving for intrigue. The dikes were crumbling all around him, but he didn’t act like a man about to get his feet wet or be drowned.

The far wall of the Major’s office was blank, except for a series of framed photographs of a young girl—as an infant in a snowsuit, as a child astride a Shetland pony which the Major held by the halter, as a blooming thirteen-year-old. They were the first pictures Practice had ever seen of Major Kinsaker’s daughter, Molly. Shortly after her thirteenth birthday Molly had died after a fall from a horse; her death had been an almost fatal blow to the Major.

“I know many things about you,” Kinsaker said. “I’ve looked into your beginnings. By the way, your father is married again. The girl is seventeen—and you have another half brother.”

“I’m not interested in my father,” Practice said, disliking the sour taste in his mouth; disliking the Major, who knew his life by the inch, his every stupidity and failure. “I haven’t seen or spoken to him for twenty years.”

“I don’t blame you,” Kinsaker replied, still without emphasis in his voice.

“What do you want, Major?”

Practice’s bluntness provoked a frown. “I know about you—your promise and your failure. But I’d like to know more; I’d like to understand your relationship with John Guthrie. Why does he trust you and no one else?”