Scare Tactics (27 page)

“Don’t you want me to ... to give you your bath?”

“I’m tired and I want to soak, that’s all.”

“Aren’t you glad everybody got along? Johnny? I didn’t do anything wrong. And I missed you all the time.”

“Dore, get out of here.”

“Are you sick?”

“I think so.”

“What can I do?”

“Just go, Dore.” 

“Do you want me to fix you something to eat before we go to the Governor’s Day ...”

“No. We?
We
aren’t going.”

“We ...”

“I don’t want you along tonight, Dore. It’s going to be a rough evening.”

“I won’t bother you.”

“I didn’t say you would. But you can’t go, I won’t have time to ...”

“Jim can sit with me.”

“He’s not going, either. There’s something I want him to do. Now, go put on your clothes and write a letter to that goddamn pianist who was sucking up to you.”

Her voice was shrill.
“People will think
...”

“Dore!”

“Just answer one question. When did you stop caring whether I lived or died?”

“Get out, Dore. I can’t say a damn thing to you when you’re acting like this.”

Practice sighed and turned toward the Governor’s desk, a cherished leftover from his college days. Over the desk, in defiance of the order and tranquillity wrought by the decorator, was a display of cheaply framed documents and photographs: John Guthrie as a law student, as a jazz musician in the murky Chicago night haunts of the late thirties, as a pilot in the RCAF during the battle for Great Britain. John Guthrie had lived hard in his youth without being pretentiously glamorous, and had survived the excess of his energies to fight a more subtle and involved battle with Starne Kinsaker.

It was not the kind of fighting he had a taste for, Practice thought. It pinched at his nerves and soured his blood, so that he was given to sullen and irrational moods. Politics had made his reputation as a man, but had shackled him to a curiously crippling half-life at the same time.

Practice didn’t hear Dore, and thought she must have come out of the bathroom, seen him, then made her exit through the kitchen to her own bedroom. After waiting a couple of minutes, he turned around and almost jumped.

Dore was standing in the middle of the carpet, completely nude, her shoulders hunched, one fist pushed up hard against her forehead, between her eyes. She was sobbing without a sound, digging her toes into the carpet.

In moving the draperies to get at the balcony doors, Practice had allowed a shallow stream of light into the bedroom. It angled sharply across Dore’s body at the small dimple of her navel, so that he could see the straining muscles of stomach, thighs, and calves. Even in such an unbecoming pose there was something quite gentle and tender, almost childlike, about Dore’s body. It was as if no eyes but hers had ever seen it, as if she had never borne a child or loved a man.

She was twenty-eight, and her hair had probably been a natural, if streaky, blond before she started sitting in at the beautician’s three afternoons a week. Dore had a figure which Lucy had once wryly described as “colossal”: long legs, just enough hip, and high, slightly elongated breasts that kept their shape and their rise without support. Her eyes were big and sooty blue in a catlike face that might have been prettier; an unfortunately carnal mouth diminished the effect of softly planed cheeks and jaw.

But there was something timorous and indefinite about her sex that a man would rarely identify, and that was a shame. Perhaps because of a confusion of emotions, she made the obvious choice and dressed to be sexually meaningful, was afraid of her purpose, and thus a failure. Frequently she believed that people were thinking badly of her—an intercepted smile or misunderstood wink would crush her—but she’d only try more frantically to be liked. Perhaps the moment might come when she could slip away from the party; Practice had seen her at such moments because he spent his time observing, not participating. He had seen her sitting under the trees in a dark landscape, staring at nothing, and when he could arrange to do so, he went out and sat with Dore and silently shared a cigarette with her. He sat with her not out of pity but in recognition, because in a distorted way the fact of Dore’s life repeated his own. Knock, knock, and you went in where you didn’t belong, in your best clothes, and somebody dumped a bucket of slops on your head.

Practice heard a gasp from Dore, and then there was a momentary silence. She hurried across the carpet and he looked up in time to see one bare leg vanish, as she drew the door to the bedroom closed behind her.

He crossed to the bathroom and rapped on the door. “Governor?”

“Where the hell have you been? Come in.”

The firm which had redesigned and redecorated much of the mansion had installed new fixtures and a slip-proof tile floor in the Governor’s bathroom, but otherwise had left it much as before. The carved oaken panels of the ceiling were bleached to a paler shade, along with the wood of the deep glass-fronted cupboards. The glass was leaded, except for a clear diamond center pane, one to each shelf, for displaying the Governor’s collection of family shaving mugs. The bathtub took up all of one wall of the room.

Guthrie was lying full length in his tub, water chest-high, his head supported by a plastic float that resembled a horse collar.

“Any news about Sharp?”

“No,” Practice said, clearing a bench opposite the bathtub. “He’s not in town yet.”

“But he’ll be at the dinner tonight.”

“He made that piece of news known two weeks ago. There hasn’t been another word from him or his associates.”

“Damn it, Jim,” the Governor complained, “I don’t think you’ve done much of a job this time.”

Practice looked swiftly at him. Guthrie’s eyes were closed, but he looked unrested. Shampoo lather was dripping from one ear, foaming over his thick, dark shoulders and chest. He checked a curt reply. The afternoon had been a bad one, and he didn’t want a fight with Guthrie to cap it off.

“I’ve done my work, John. A.B. Sharp is even more eccentric than your old friend Major Kinsaker. He doesn’t own a telephone. All of his mail goes directly to his lawyers. You can’t drive within a mile of his house. I tried. Not many people even see that old boy from one year to the next.”

“But he can swing a quarter-million votes in six important districts. Ever since I can remember he and the Major have had a common view about politics, although maybe they don’t say a dozen words to each other, week in and week out. The Kinsakers have always held the land next to Sharp’s up there in Greenbard, and they both wear the old school tie, so I suppose a gentleman’s agreement was a natural and unspoken thing between them. What do you suppose’ll happen, Jimmy, if old A.B. has decided to dissolve his gentleman’s agreement with the Major?”

“After that, the deluge.”

The Governor nodded, and massaged his eyes with fingers that trembled as he raised them. Practice frowned. Guthrie was a shaken man and the sight disturbed him.

Guthrie was so dark he looked purple under the eyes and down from the ears where he shaved and under his still-firm jaw. At the age of forty-eight his hairline was slipping back rapidly, giving him a lofty forehead and a shine at the temples. His black eyes looked suspicious when he scowled and sensual when he smiled. The sex in his face came from those eyes, from a straight chin with an arrogant commalike notch at its base. He wore glasses more often now, and they added a certain dignity and maturity to his appeal; and his hair leathered up from a brushing in a way that made women want instinctively to reach up and smooth it down.

“I have dreams at night, Jimmy. The two of us, the Major and myself, on a landscape as bleak as the moon, trying to kill each other. Some nights I win; some nights he kills me.” For a moment pain glinted in his eyes; there was a vulnerable, scared twist to his mouth. “I don’t have a taste for blood anymore, Jimmy. But how can I stop now?”

“Maybe it’s not up to you. A.B. Sharp may have the answers.” He hesitated, and then added, “I think the Major already knows what Sharp is going to do.”

Guthrie floundered in the tub, removing the float from his neck. He stood up.

“Hand me a towel, Jimmy. When did you see the Major?”

“This afternoon.”

Guthrie took the proffered towel and began drying himself.

“What did he have to say?” Guthrie asked, not as casual as he was pretending to be.

“It wasn’t what he said; it was the way he looked, like a man with a barb sunk deep in his guts.”

“Then he’ll quit.” Still half wet, Guthrie reached for his robe. He was perhaps an inch shorter than Practice and carried ten more pounds, but not well; he was sinking into a ponderous belly. He stood flat-footed beside the tub, wrapping the robe around him, then slid his feet into slippers and went into the bedroom. Practice rose slowly and followed.

The Governor was standing at the west windows, the draperies gathered in one hand, his face looking clean and as
white as bone in the pale light from the sky.

“No, he won’t quit,” Practice said.

Guthrie remained standing by the windows until the light had failed appreciably. He shook himself once, all over, as if something was clinging to his back. Then he sat down in front of his little-used baby grand piano and spread both hands over the uncovered keyboard.

“Jimmy, I’m getting to where I hate life,” he said tonelessly, and smashed his fingers against the keyboard with all his might. “Fix me a drink?”

“Sorry,” Practice said, drawling. “Not one of my better days.”

The Governor glanced up at him, then rose and went to his liquor cabinet. After making his choice, he disappeared into the kitchen for ice.

“I can’t say what it is that makes me feel this way. The family doesn’t like it, of course, this bloody scrimmaging with the Major; it isn’t gentlemanly at all. But then it’s been a long time since I cared how they felt about anything. Maybe it’s because I’ve always taken it for granted that I was an exceptional man. I’ve been righteously arrogant about it. Well, being Governor doesn’t take an exceptional man, no great intellect, no qualities of saint and mule skinner. All it takes is a tremendous ego, a rind like a pineapple instead of skin, and some of the commoner traits of the fanatic. All I’ve brought to the job was ego. Unfortunately, my skin is not always thick enough. I can handle any man in an open fight. What I can’t tolerate is”—he returned to the bedroom, holding his glass high in one hand, squinting at the color of the whiskey—“the damned undertow that’s always trying to sweep me out where I can’t keep my head above water, where the crabs are waiting to take a pinch of flesh here and a bite there. And when they’ve had their flesh, come and gone in the dark, the big boys move in. It’s the sharks that take their meals in chunks, until the bones are clean.”

He sat on the edge of a chair, with his oversize bare feet sticking up from the carpet, and reached into a pocket of his robe. “Come here, Jimmy.”

By the time Practice had approached the chair, Guthrie had unfolded a sheet of paper and was holding it in his lap.

“Switch on the light.”

Practice did so and looked down in puzzlement.

“Where did that come from?”

“Crank mail. Wastebasket stuff.”

“But you kept this one.” He pursed his lips. “Mind if I take it and use the glass on it?”

“No, go ahead.”

Practice accepted the leaf and carried it to the desk. There he weighted down each corner of the yellowing paper and turned on a powerful desk lamp.

He was looking at a four-color drawing on fairly heavy, smooth paper, in dimension about six inches by nine inches. The left side of the paper was unevenly frayed, as if it had been carefully torn from a book, a book of fairy tales, he guessed, although neither the title of the book nor the page number was left. The reverse side was blank, except for some of the same brownish-red smears which decorated the margins of the drawing.

The drawing itself featured a scaly, blue and green dragon with a lashing, arrow-tipped tail. The dragon, crouched in front of a cavern, was bleeding from a sword puncture approximately where his “heart” might have been.

The sword-wielder was a young, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed knight in armor. He held the huge double-edged sword by the hilt with both hands, and had raised it for another swipe.

Someone had carefully pasted over the dragon’s head a photograph of Governor John Guthrie.

Practice didn’t know whether to laugh or not. He picked up the magnifying glass and carefully studied the brown-red stains
in the margin. Under closer scrutiny two and a half fingerprints—or was one a thumbprint?—became clear. Again he studied the pasted-on photograph, which probably had been cut from a newspaper. No prints showed around the photograph or in the two streaks of glue that bound it to the sheet. He removed the weights and picked up the paper, sniffing the glue.

“What do you think of it?” Guthrie asked. He had started a cigar and the air around his head was a drifting blue.

“Childish. But ...”

“I know. The fingerprints. That’s blood, isn’t it, Jimmy?”

Practice frowned. “Hard to say. The fingerprints are nearly as old as the paper itself. The paper is good quality; it wouldn’t age quickly unless the book were left open to the air. I’d say the page was torn out recently. I’m sure the picture of you was pasted in just a day or two ago. The glue still has an odor.”