The Price of Murder (2 page)

“I now ask for a full minute of silence. During this minute please try to visualize that scene of murder. Go!”

The parole officer came to the house on a hot Saturday afternoon in October. Lee Bronson had set up a card table on the small screened porch of his rented house at 1024 Arcadia Street, where he sat reading and marking the English themes turned in on Friday by his English Composition 2A class of forty-one students at Brookton Junior College.

He sat in a wicker chair and wore a T-shirt with a torn shoulder, faded khakis, and old tennis shoes. The porch was on the front of the house, with a heavy screen of plantings that nearly concealed it from the pedestrians on the walk beyond the shallow front yard. Big elms grew on Arcadia Street, and their roots had buckled and cracked the old sidewalk. High branches touched over the middle of the street, and in the summer the dense shade lay heavily on the shallow front lawns of the frame houses.

When he looked up from his work he could see a segment of sidewalk and street. He could hear the sounds of the street. Motors of delivery trucks, whirring clack of roller skates, the nasal sputter of a small, familiar, and excessively noisy power mower several houses down on the other side of the street.

He was twenty-nine, a big man with wide hard shoulders, sculptured chest, wide bands of muscle linking neck and shoulders—narrow through waist and flank. He held himself trimly and moved lightly and with a quickness. His hair was brown and cut short, his eyes gray, quiet, slightly myopic. Though his face was bony, forthright, his habitual expression was one of mild patience, tinged by sadness, and when he was amused there was a wryness in the way his mouth turned down at the corners. With his black-framed
reading glasses on he looked properly scholarly. This was his third year at Brookton. His contract called for instruction in English and Physical Education. He acted as an assistant coach in the school athletic program, and worked at it hard enough to keep himself in trim.

He liked working with the kids. It gave him a sense of purpose. He liked to watch them grow and change, and feel that he had something to do with that growth. Yet it was only during his rare moods of complete depression that he was willing to admit to himself that without this joy in his work, his life would be unendurable. During those times he could clearly see the dimensions of the trap into which he had so blindly wandered. A perfumed trap. A silky and membranous and pneumatic little trap. A trap named Lucille.

He picked up the next composition. This was a new class. He had just begun to associate faces with the names. Jill Grossman. A strange and terrified little mouse, almost an albino, with a pinched little face and glasses with a blue tint. But her work had talent. He decided he would like to ask her to join his unofficial seminar, the kids he invited over to the house in the evenings.

But Lucille was being even more difficult about such get-togethers this year than last. She could not see any reason for doing anything you were not paid to do. Lucille flounced off to the movies on those evenings.

After he had marked Jill’s paper, and made marginal notes cautioning her about being too florid and precious, he looked at his watch. A little after four. He hoped Lucille would remember to bring back the cold six-pack of beer he’d asked for. But it wasn’t likely. But he was certain of one thing she would bring back—her standard comments about how grim it was to have to use the public pool to go swim with Ruthie, her best girl friend, when, it they could belong to Crown Ridge Club which was so cheap really, and they could get in easy, the pool was really lovely with lights under the water at night, and she could take Ruthie there, and all winter they had the dances. And of course they didn’t belong to the Crown Ridge Club because he didn’t love her. It was the only possible answer. He was taking her for granted. It was
impossible to explain family finances to Lucille. Figures bored her.

And any serious attempt to make her understand the budget always gave her a new opening.

“So if we’re so poor we can’t join just one cheap little club, why don’t you write another book and make some money? You wrote a book, didn’t you? So you could write for the television and the movies and the big magazines, couldn’t you? Instead of having those weird kids coming over here all the time, you could be writing and making some money so we could live nicer. You don’t
want
me to have nice things. That’s it, isn’t it? You just don’t
care
any more.”

And it was useless to try to explain to her that his single book had used up a whole year of creative energy, that it had earned a big two hundred and fifty dollar advance and a magnificent one hundred and eighteen dollars and thirty-three cents in additional royalties. No use to try to tell her that his talent was small, and that it certainly could not accomplish anything in the environment she had helped create. The kids were his creative outlet. But he had displayed the “author” tag far too prominently during their brief courtship. It gave her a weapon she could never resist wielding.

Just as he picked up the final composition in the pile he had brought home, somebody banged on the screen door, banged with unnecessary loudness, with a flavor of irritation and arrogance. From where Lee sat he could see baggy knees of gray pants, a slice of white shirt.

He pushed his chair back and started to get up. The screen door was pulled open and a man walked in. He was a thickset man, heavy around the middle, with a lean hollow-cheeked face that did not match his puffy build. A tan felt hat with a sweat-stained band was pushed back off his forehead. His nose was bulbous at the tip, and patterned with small broken red veins, prominent against the uniform pallid gray of his face. His eyes were small and blue and the flesh around them was dark-stained and puffy. He carried his gray suit coat over his left arm. The left hand, in a soiled white glove that fit too tightly, was
obviously artificial. His hard black shoes were dusty and he walked toward Lee as though his feet were tender.

He could have been an aggressive and seldom successful door to door salesman. Or the man who always stands in the neighborhood bar, propounding noxious and illogical argument. But the warning bells of Lee’s childhood were still efficient. He concealed his irritation and said evenly, “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Bronson?” Lee nodded. The man took out a wallet, flipped it open and held it out. “Keefler. Parole officer.”

He sat in the other wicker chair without invitation, sighed, shoved his hat back another half inch and said, “Every day they say relief in sight. Last heat wave of the year will end. It gets hotter.”

“Is this about Dan?”

Keefler looked at him with a hard, lazy tolerance that had an undertone of cynical amusement. “So who else? Is there more than one ex-con in the family? Maybe I’m missing something.”

“I thought a man named Richardson was …”

“Rich used to have him. Now he’s mine. It’s like this, Bronson. I was a cop up to four months ago when they took off my hand. A young punk snuck his brother’s army .45 out of the house and tried to stick up a market, and lucky Keefler came along and took one right in the wrist and got it smashed too bad to save. Maybe you read about it.”

“I think I remember it. You killed the boy, didn’t you?”

“And I got a citation and a new job with the parole people and a dummy hand. Because I was a cop they’ve given me the rough cases. So now I’ve got your brother Danny. When was the last time you saw him?”

“I’ll have to think back, Mr. Keefler. He came here after he was paroled. That was last May. And I think two other times. The last time was in July. I can tell you the exact date. The twenty-fifth.”

“How come you happen to remember the exact day?”

“I remember it because it was the day after my birthday. He brought me a present.”

“What kind of a present? Expensive?”

“A leather desk set with pen and pencil and clock calendar.”

“Let’s have a look at it.”

“It’s at school, in my office.”

“What do you think it would cost?”

“About thirty dollars, I’d guess.”

“What did he have to say about how he was doing?”

“He didn’t say much. Maybe I could be more help to you if you’d tell me what you’re after.”

Keefler plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket, bent a match over in a folder of book matches and lit it with one hand. “Like that? Nurse in the hospital showed me how you do it.”

“Pretty good.”

“I can hold matches in this artificial hand. See? But its slower. Let’s get back to Danny. You’d cover for him, wouldn’t you?”

Lee looked at Bronson’s lazy, wise half smile. “Would it make any difference how I answered that?”

“It might.”

“I can’t prove I wouldn’t. I might run into a situation where I would. But I wouldn’t put myself in the bag, Mr. Keefler, unless there was a good reason. You’ve talked to Mr. Richardson.”

“He filled me in. He likes those big words. All the social workers know those big words. You and Danny and I all came from the Sink. We know the rules down there. We don’t need the big social worker words, do we?”

The Sink was the name given to thirty city blocks in Hancock. Long ago Brookton had been a separate community, a farming community outside Hancock. But the big sprawl of the lake-side city had reached out and surrounded Brookton. The Sink was the oldest part of Hancock, built when Hancock had been a small, lusty, violent lake port. The derivation of the name had been forgotten. The thirty blocks were down in the flats between the old docks and warehouses and the railroad yards. It had always been the spawning bed for Hancock’s impressive output of criminals. Slum clearance projects had removed all but a narrow fringe of the original Sink.

“It wasn’t an easy place to grow up,” Lee said.

Keefler nodded. “There was just the two of you, wasn’t there?”

“Danny and me. He’s three years older. My father was half owner of a tug. He died before I was a year old.”

Keefler grinned. “He was dead drunk and he fell between the dock and an ore freighter. He was thirty-nine and your mother was twenty-three at the time. Her maiden name was Elvita Sharon and her folks ran a hunting lodge in northern Wisconsin and your father met her there on a hunting trip and ran off with her. After Jerry Bronson died, she married Rudy Fernandez. Bronson hadn’t left her a dime. Rudy was a dock worker. He was a trouble maker. A little while after they were married, Rudy was beat half to death. That’s when you moved into the Sink. When he got back on his feet, and tried to make more trouble, they killed him. It’s still on the books. Then she hooked up with a slob named Cowley, and there isn’t any record of any marriage on the books. When you were twelve and Danny was fifteen, Cowley died of a heart attack. The three of you lived in a cold-water flat at 1214 River Street, on the third floor. Elvita was a part-time waitress and a full-time lush. Both you kids were bringing money home, just enough so you could keep going.”

Lee looked down at his right hand and closed it slowly into a fist. “You seem to have the whole story, Keefler.”

“Right out of those social worker files, boy. They have to know why a guy like Danny can’t … adjust to reality. But it seemed pretty real down there, didn’t it? Danny quit school at sixteen and went to work for Nick Bouchard. By the time he was nineteen he was bringing enough home so Elvita didn’t have to work at all. I was watching him then. He was a wise punk. I could have told all the social workers how he’d come out.”

“He was the oldest. He thought he had to …”

“He went where the fast money was. Right to Nick, the big boss man.” Keefler chuckled. “Nick took good care of the Bronson boys.”

“Not me. I wasn’t any part of it.”

Keefler’s eyes went round with surprise. “No? You were being the hotshot highschool athlete. I thought that when
Danny took his first fall, that two and a half years he did for auto theft, Nick sent money to you every week.”

“He did. But it wasn’t like that. It was part of the agreement he had with Danny. It had nothing to do with me. I talked to Nick. He … he wanted me to get out of the Sink.”

“He helped you out of some trouble, didn’t he? You’re on the books, boy. Assault. And the charge was dismissed, and it was Nick’s lawyers who took care of you.”

“There wasn’t any assault, Mr. Keefler. I was working in a wholesale grocery warehouse nights. I got picked up when I was walking home. I’d barked my knuckles on a packing case. They were looking for some men who’d broken up a bar and grill.”

“Now that sounds reasonable,” Keefler said softly.

Lee looked sharply at him. Keefler looked sleepy and contented and amiable.

“Nick Bouchard wasn’t all bad,” Lee said.

“Hell, no. He helped you go through college, didn’t he? So he couldn’t be such a bad guy.”

“The way you say it, it doesn’t sound right, Mr. Keefler. I had a football scholarship. Danny used to send me money. Nick used to send some too, a twenty or a fifty, with a note telling me to live it up. I guess I was … a hobby with Nick. I played good ball the first two years. Then after my eyes went bad and they shifted me to guard, my leg went bad.”

“You say I put things the wrong way. So tell me what happened to your mother. Tell it your way.”

“Is it important?”

“Come on, boy. Put it in your words. You’ve got the education.”

“It … happened in my sophomore year. In December, Danny had moved her out of the Sink the previous spring. She … went back to the Sink to look up old friends. It was a cold night. She started drinking and she passed out in an alley, and by the time she was found it was too late. I came back for the funeral.”

Keefler nodded. “That’s just about the way it looks on the records, kid. And then the next year Nick got too big for his pants and tried to fight the syndicate so they cut
him down and made it look like suicide, and a man named Kennedy came in and took over the boss job. He figured Danny had been too loyal to Nick, so Danny took his second fall.”