The Paper Grail (40 page)

22

“N
OT
going along, Stoat?” Touchey asked in a sneery voice. He stopped on the front porch, talking back into the house. Stoat stood up and headed toward them, shaking his head. Reverend White trained the video camera on Jason the artist, who looped his arm around Touchey’s shoulder and struck a pose, turning to profile and drawing on his cigarette holder.

“Malicious mischief isn’t in my line,” Stoat said. “This sort of prank leaves me rather cold, I’m afraid. And it accomplishes nothing at all. It’s frivolous. I don’t
brawl
.” There was a pettish tone to his voice, as if he thought he was being picked on.

“Howard’s going to pound it,” Gwendolyn Bundy said.

“
Pound
it!” Reverend White laughed out loud. “I dare say he will if you don’t keep your hand out of his pants.” He pinched Ms. Bundy on the flank, and she turned and slapped playfully at him.

“Come
on
, Stoatie,” she said. “Don’t you want to see Howard get tough? He’s the spitting image of one of those quiet detectives with steel fists, isn’t he? My kind of man. Drinks Scotch out of an office bottle and calls women dames. He’s going to wax manly with Humpty Dumpty—show it no mercy at all. Isn’t that right, Howard?” She grinned into his face and moistened her lips, flicking her tongue at him. Her breath smelled of champagne.

“That’s right,” Howard said. “No mercy at all.” He hesitated, though, on the porch, remembering Graham’s cane—his cane—and he turned to look back through the window, into the well-lit living room where Stoat had sat back down in a sulk. Mrs. Lamey had evidently put it down somewhere. She waved at him happily, like somebody’s mother sending a pack of children out on a scavenger hunt.

The idea of losing the cane panicked him. He was a fool to have brought it here in the first place—although he couldn’t quite say why—and he was a double fool for letting it out of his sight. “My cane,” he said, slapping his forehead. “I’d better get it.”

“Later,” Ms. Bundy said decisively. “We’re only going across the street. We’re not going to make an evening of it. This is a sort of guerrilla raid. Slash and burn. We’ll come back and play with your cane later.”

Howard was doubtful, but he let himself be led away through Mrs. Lamey’s front-yard garden. He had no idea what sort of high jinks they were up to, but it was true, apparently, that they were only going across the street. The sea wind was cold; there was no way they’d be out long.

“It’s a battle in the art wars,” Glenwood Touchey said. “All that cut-out crap in that front yard makes me sick.”

“Throw up for us, Glen,” Ms. Bundy said. “Get sick. I love performance art.”

“I’ll show you performance art,” Touchey said, skipping across the street toward Bennet’s house and kicking a wooden pansy into the air.

“Hey!” Howard shouted, taken utterly by surprise, but his shout was lost when Reverend White howled out a drunken whoop and followed along behind Touchey, chasing him with the camera. Ms. Bundy pulled up a pair of long wooden tulips and tossed one to Jason. The two of them began to fence with the tulip stems, trampling back and forth across the lawn and through the flower beds.

All of them were kept quiet now, giggling and challenging each other in hushed tones. Howard stood watching. He had to do something to stop it, but, like Stoat, he didn’t like the idea of brawling, and he didn’t want to lose his cane, either. Their antics reminded Howard of when he and his friends had toilet-papered lawns when he was a teenager, except that this was malicious and somehow deadly serious. They were making a hash of Bennet’s flower garden for some ulterior purpose that he only barely understood, unless it was just pure, idiot meanness.

“Come on,” Ms. Bundy said to him, lunging toward him with a tulip and jabbing him in the crotch with it. “Don’t be a jerk. Have some fun for a change.” Her blouse was half untucked and pushed all askew by now, another button having been lost in the tulip skirmish. It was clear that she was just warming up. Her eyes blazed, and there was a sadistic look in them that propelled Howard a step backward toward the curb.

It occurred to him abruptly that there were worse things waiting, that this smashing-up-the-Humpty-Dumpty prank was nothing more than a prelude for grander, more depraved things later in the evening—things involving him.

Mrs. Lamey stood on her front porch now, watching. Her red kimono flapped in the sea wind, and her hair blew straight out away from her head so that skinny and painted and powdered in the light of the porch lamp, she looked like something that had crept up out of a subterranean bordello. She waved at Howard, as if to encourage him, and then stepped back into the house and shut the door, having nothing more to do with the nighttime frolic.

He shrugged submissively as Ms. Bundy grabbed his arm and wrestled him toward the Humpty Dumpty. She gouged him in the ribs and then thrust her hand into his pants pocket, pushing up against him and shoving her tongue into his ear, biting him hard on the lobe.

“Hey!” he shouted, pulling away and very nearly losing a piece of flesh. The Reverend White stood panting next to a wooden, man-milking-a-cow whirligig, bathed in light from the video camera. One of his eyes jumped with a massive twitch, and there was a runnel of drool along his mouth. He handed the camera to Jason and then grabbed the cow with both hands, yanking it off its stake, throwing it over the house, end over end like a Frisbee. “Raise a little hell,” he said to Howard, winking broadly.

Glenwood Touchey surged past just then with the hammer upraised, leaping up and swinging it at the Humpty Dumpty. The thing was too high for him, though, and the blow was a feeble one. He cursed, taking another ineffective shot at it. “Damn it,” he said. “Reverend!”

“At your service,” Reverend White said, bending over. Touchey climbed onto his shoulders, and his horse stood up shakily, staggering and nearly pitching over. Touchey yelped, holding on, and then when they were nearly steady he grasped the Reverend’s collar like reins, and the two of them rushed at the Humpty Dumpty, which regarded them out of faintly Asiatic eyes, waving one last morbid goodbye at Howard, as if it knew it was about to undertake the fateful fall, had perhaps been waiting for it all evening.

Ms. Bundy grasped Howard’s hand, pulling him forward. She had the look in her eye of a lecher at a pornographic film. He dug his heels in, though, looking around, and then shrugged out of her grasp and stepped across to the post that had held up the whirligig cow, just as Touchey slammed away futilely at the egg man with his hammer again.

Touchey cursed out loud, furious with the painted sheet of vibrating plywood. He had his left hand curled into Reverend White’s hair now, and the preacher bucked and lunged, trying to shake him loose and yelling “Ow! Ow!” so that half of Touchey’s blows hit nothing at all, but swung wide, the force of them nearly throwing him from the Reverend White’s shoulders.

Howard wiggled the stake out of the ground—a length of two-by-two fir painted white and some four feet long. Gripping it like a baseball bat a foot from the bottom end, he steeled himself, drew in a deep breath, and then shouted at Touchey, “No! Like this!” Jason moved in, flooding all of them in electric light, camera whirring as Howard set his feet. Reverend White backed away gratefully, wheezing, anxious to give Howard a chance.

“Swing away!” he said. “One for the Gipper!” He bent into a shaky crouch in order to tumble Touchey off onto the ground.

“Hey!” Touchey yelled, holding on like a rodeo rider, clearly nowhere near finished with the smirking Humpty Dumpty, and at that moment Howard said, “Sorry, Reverend,” and whipped the stake around, slamming the preacher across the stomach.

The preacher crumpled at the waist, his breath shooting out of him like wind from a rusty machine. Touchey shrieked and flew forward, face-first into the dirt, scattering wooden flowers and helplessly trying to throw his hammer at Howard, who sidestepped, turned at the same time, and smashed the heavy stake across the top of Jason’s video camera. There was a satisfying crack of something breaking, and a large black chunk flew off and skittered away down the sidewalk. Howard took a half-step back and swung again, smashing out the lamp in a spray of glass.

Ms. Bundy lunged in furiously, clawing at Howard, raking her fingernails across his neck. He spun around, swinging the stake deliberately high so that she was forced to fall to her knees as the club whizzed past overhead. Then, after aiming one last blow at Jason, who swung the ruined camera wildly at his head, Howard loped across the street, up Kelly toward town, flinging his club into the weeds of a vacant lot.

He was around the corner and into the darkness before they were after him, and without looking back he cut hard to the left, crawling into a row of bushes along Mrs. Lamey’s back fence.

Footsteps approached, passed him, and pounded away down the block. He thought he could hear more going off in some other direction. They’d gotten clever and split up, maybe, thinking to surround him. Taking the time to do it had cost them. He looked
out carefully. There was no one around. He heard one of them shout from a good distance away. Apparently they were scouring the bluffs for him.

He hoisted himself up and over the wooden fence, dropping heavily to the ground beyond and wincing at the pain that shot up through his ankle and knee. He was surprised to find how much he had come to depend upon Graham’s cane. Since he had given it up a bare half hour ago, the pain in his leg seemed to have tripled.

Without waiting another instant he limped in through the unlocked back door, shutting it noiselessly, and climbed straightaway into one of the big service-porch pantries. It turned out to be the hot water heater closet, and had a vent in the door that he could just barely see through. He steeled himself for a long wait, running through his mind the layout of the rest of the house. Somewhere in there lay his cane, and he wasn’t leaving without it.

He might have taken the chance of going right in after the cane, except that Stoat still sat in the living room, talking to Mrs. Lamey. Howard could hear their voices. He wasn’t keen on the idea of fighting any more, not if he didn’t have to. He discovered that his knees were shaking from the last battle. It was necessary to get the cane out of there without anyone getting hurt, especially himself.

Howard resigned himself to waiting it out. There was still an hour to go before eleven. If nothing at all could be done, he could easily slip out the back door and be gone, having made an utter hash of the evening. So much for convincing the enemy that he had the soul of a mercenary.

Gwendolyn Bundy was the first one home. Howard could hear her nagging at Mrs. Lamey with news of Howard’s treachery. Stoat laughed out loud, pretending to be confounded that this came as any surprise. He and Mrs. Lamey had watched the whole escapade through the window. The lot of them had got nothing more than they deserved. He wasn’t in the business of pulling wings off flies, he said. He favored crushing them outright—quickly. That’s why God had invented fly swatters.

Then Ms. Bundy asked, “Now who will we use?” Mrs. Lamey was silent.

Use
, Howard wondered. What the hell did that mean? Only that his instincts had probably been correct. They had been toying with him, tenderizing him in some foul way. Gwendolyn Bundy came into the kitchen. Through one of the vent slats he could
see her haul the bottle out of the bucket and tilt it back, sucking the champagne out in long gasping drafts.

“You’re hurt!” she said to someone. It turned out to be Touchey, whose face was covered with garden dirt.

“He’s a dead man,” the critic said, slamming his fist down onto the counter and then turning on the faucet. He filled his palms with water and splashed his face.

“What a sad thing he’s not a novelist,” Gwendolyn Bundy said, petting the back of his neck. “You could work him over in the
Chronicle
“

“Go to hell.” Touchey strode back out as the woman opened the refrigerator door, pulling out and uncorking another bottle. The voices of Stoat and Reverend White could be heard then, arguing, and for the space of five minutes everyone was talking at once.

Someone mentioned the “staff,” which Howard understood to mean the cane, and suddenly the voices dropped and for another five minutes there was nothing but murmuring. Then there was silence, and Howard could hear footfalls echoing away up the stairs as the lot of them shuffled away.

The cane was upstairs, then, or so it seemed. There was no way on earth to get it, either, short of a massive sort of diversion—and quickly, too. Stealing a car wouldn’t work this time. An explosion would be better. If only he had three or four of the cherry bombs left over. He could light them and then throw them into the downstairs toilet and shut the lid.

It was closing in on eleven o’clock. He couldn’t wait all night to act. It was possible that Sylvia, finding him missing, might come around to investigate. The very thought of it got him down to business. Who would they
use
? That’s what Gwendolyn Bundy had asked Mrs. Lamey. Howard looked around wildly. What would
he
use? He could unscrew the gas line, climb out of the closet, and toss a match in. That was insane, though. The old wooden house would go up like tinder along with half the people in it. And the cane, for that matter. It would divert the hell out of them, though, and would add murder and arson to his rap sheet.