Time Out of Mind (32 page)
Authors: John R. Maxim
Tags: #Horror, #General, #Psychological, #Suspense, #Memory, #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Time Travel
“
You're not going to tell me you saw Tilden there.”
I won't.” He smiled. ”I was only there a few times as
a very young man and then only with my father.
I did know
Oscar, however, the man who stopped Jonathan's ... Til
den's fight from turning into a Pier Six brawl. Now there's
someone who was famous. He became Oscar of the Wal
dorf when the first Waldorf-Astoria opened back in the nineties, and he must have been a fixture there for thirty
years. Not many people knew Oscar's last name. Jonathan would have known if he'd researched it, which is why I
questioned him about addressing anyone by his first name
in those days. He did not know it. Oscar's last name, in
cidentally, was Tschirky, T-s-c-h-i-r-k-y; pronounced ap
proximately ‘Jerky.’ It would not do to have a maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf-Astoria, let alone the Hoffman
House, who is called Mr. Jerky.”
Sturdevant noted a look of mild impatience on Gwen's
face with what she must have considered a bit of pointless trivia. Oscar's name, of course, was not significant in itself.
However, the fact that Jonathan seemed to recall him as
Oscar of the Waldorf was the single most puzzling facet of
this whole bizarre episode: Genetic memory is genetic
memory. One can only carry memories that an antecedent had
prior
to the conception of a descendant. The 1888 memories of the storm, the woman's death, the Hoffman
House scene, were sufficiently dramatic, even traumatic,
and sufficiently close to the conception of a child by Margaret that they might well have been retained in genetic
imprints. But why should Jonathan remember anything that
happened later? For that matter, why should he have this
fixation about Connecticut if Margaret moved there only after Tilden's son was conceived? Perhaps they'd find out
tomorrow.
Speaking of names,” he told Gwen, “there is not only
a currently living Tilden Beckwith, of the hotel-owning
Beckwiths, but he also has a sister named Ella. Care to
guess where Ella lives?”
“
Not Greenwich.”
“‘
Greenwich, indeed.''
“
We can go see her. Tomorrow.”
“
Not so fast, dear. If Jonathan is in fact a direct blood
descendant of the original Tilden Beckwith, and if the orig
inal Ella had a child by Ansel Carling, no Beckwith from
1888 forward is legitimately a Beckwith. They will not
greet that news with enthusiasm. That's assuming they
don't know it already and are not keeping it a closely
guarded family skeleton. Besides, the Beckwiths by all ac
counts are not particularly nice people.”
Sturdevant nodded. 'Tilden's son, or rather Ella's, was
Huntington Beckwith. My friend thinks Huntington was
Ella's family name. I remember Huntington Beckwith al
though I never actually met him. He was a cold, hard, tac
iturn man who would take anything that wasn't nailed down
and pry up anything that was. A thoroughly unlovely man,
no friends, belonged to no clubs, not that he didn't try to
join a few. He was even blackballed by the University
Club, which is about as exclusive as the state of New Jer
sey. In some respects he was a lot like Jay Gould, whose name also keeps popping up, although Jay Gould made no
effort whatever to be accepted by polite society.
Huntington, however, kept trying and was repeatedly re
buffed, which made him all the meaner.”
“
When was all this happening?” Gwen asked. “It would
have to have been during the twenties and thirties.”
“
It was. Why do you ask?”
“
You said Tiîden, Margaret's Tilden, was very well
known and liked. If Huntington was a part of New York
society at the same time, how could that society have ac
cepted one and not the other?”
It doesn't seem to have been a problem,” Sturdevant
answered. ”I, for example, must have seen Tilden Beck
with fifty times at one event or another. I never recall seeing
Tilden with his ‘son’ or his ‘grandson.’ It appears that al
though he saw to Huntington’s education and gave him a
place in a part of the family business, their estrangement was otherwise total and one never invited Tilden and his
son to the same party. No doubt an occasional hostess wondered why this seemed to be an established rule, but more likely she counted her blessings. Whatever inevitable whis
pers there might have been concerning the nature of their
rift are now largely forgotten, but you can be sure that at
least some of them focused on the physical dissimilarity
between the two men.”
You mean they guessed that Huntington was a bas
tard.”
“
In more ways than one.”
“
How bad could he have been? He found a woman
who'd many him. And she had two kids by him, right?
Another Tilden and an Ella.”
Harry Sturdevant shrugged. “It's said that there's no
man so mean that a woman or a dog won't love him. No
offense. As for Ella the ‘granddaughter,’ I don't recall ever laying eyes on her or hearing anything about her. I've seen Tillie at one affair or another but never really paid much
attention to him. That's sort of interesting, you know.
You'd think that I'd recall having compared him unfavor
ably to his grandfather—he was actually just a less satanic version of Huntington—but I don't. All by itself, my mind
seems to have separated the two men completely. That may
be why I was so slow in making this connection unaided.
By the way, there's still another generation of Beckwiths.
Eric Ludlow, the friend I called, says Tillie's wife, one
Elvira Payson, now lives in an alcoholic haze at the Beckwith Palm Beach home. Elvira produced two more Beck
withs, another son and daughter. The son also lives in
Greenwich, where he's called Chip, if you can believe that,
and is known to cheat at both yacht racing and bridge in
his own sober moments, which are increasingly few. The
daughter, named Barbara Beckwith, seems to have disap
peared shortly after graduating from college.”
Gwen folded her arms across her chest and shuddered. Sturdevant raised an eyebrow. It was the second time he'd
seen her do that in the past five minutes.
“
What is it, Gwen?”
“
Nothing,” she said. But she'd hesitated first.
“
If you have an insight, I'd like to hear it.”
“
Nothing like that. It's just remarkable that there can be
so many bad seeds growing out of anything so really lovely
as the feelings between Tilden and Margaret. Or out of
Jonathan.” Gwen Leamas paused thoughtfully. “See
what's happening? I'm beginning to think of Jonathan as
almost the same man as Tilden. The nice Tilden. And I like
them both very much. And I'm afraid for both of them.”
“
You're clear, aren't you, that the Huntington seed has no relationship whatsoever to Tilden and Margaret?”
”
I understand that.”
“
And that Tilden and Margaret started a line that very
probably ends with Jonathan. We can either fly to. Chicago
and try to trace it back, or go to Greenwich tomorrow and
try to trace it forward.”
Gwen nodded, looking away, then shivered a third time.
“
Gwen, dear. What is it?”
“
This Huntington Beckwith. He's dead, isn't he?”
“
For at least twenty years, I think. Why do you ask?”
“
We were being followed today. Jonathan knew it too.”
“
By whom?” Sturdevant frowned. “Did you see him?”
“
There was a man in a black hat and coat. I think I might
have seen him several times during the afternoon without
it really registering. Then back on Fifty-eighth Street Jon
athan suddenly turned, quite furious, as if he knew this man
was there. That's when I knew it as well. But we didn't
see anybody.”
“
Who did Jonathan think it was? Did he say?”
“
No.” Another long pause, her lips moving tentatively.
“There is this man, who's always been after Jonathan, in
his mind.”
“
Gwen”—Harry Sturdevant looked directly into his
niece's eyes—“who do you think was following you?”
”
I know I'm wrong.”
“
Who, Gwen?”
”
I think
...
I feel that it was Huntington Beckwith.”
“
Even though you know he's dead.”
“
His ghost, then.”
“
Or his hatred.”
It was useless, Lesko knew, to go to bed like normal. For
one thing, he had heartburn. He wasn't sure whether it was from the duck sauce he poured all over his ribs or from
listening to the jarring ring of the phone while he was trying to eat his Chinese and watch the Islanders blow three power
plays in a row all at the same time. Eighteen rings he counted last time. Since then it's been quiet. Too quiet.
Like they say in the war movies just before the Japs charge but you already know they've been creeping up in the dark
through the jungle. Lesko swallowed the last chalky quarter
inch from a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, then followed it with
looked at his watch. A little over an hour. But
now what?
Would Dancer really say the hell with it and wait until
morning? No, he won't. Too uptight. His choices are going
to be to come over or to send someone else. If he comes over it'll be to try to make a deal that will get him the
notebook before Lesko can stash it and to buy himself
enough time to cover his tracks one way or the other. The
best way to do that is to have no more Lesko because Dancer has got to figure old Raymond sees an annuity in here
someplace. Which means he's got to send somebody over
anyway so he might as well skip the first step. At least
that's the way to bet. But if that happens, and Lesko is just sitting here waiting for them and if someone ends up get
ting shot, even assuming it's them, he's still going to have
the cops and the reporters crawling all over him for the
next few days. Maybe it's better I wait down in the street,
Lesko decided. Maybe it's better I go sit in Mr. Makowski's
car which he leaves unlocked so the junkies can see there's
nothing inside worth smashing a window for.
It took Lesko thirty minutes to reach the street. The first
five were gun-in-hand as he checked the stairway in the
hall outside before going back and locking his door. Next
he slowly climbed four flights to his roof, where he relaxed
on seeing no fresh footprints in the snow. From the roof's edge he spent another ten minutes adjusting his eyes to the
darkness and surveying the street below. Checking cars was
easy, since only two on the entire block had clear windshields. The one alley most suitable for a potential shooter
to watch and wait in was directly across the street and it
was clean. Up toward Queens Boulevard, Lesko saw a sin
gle pedestrian come into view on the far sidewalk—a big
man, heavy set like himself. That looks like what's-his-
name, he thought, the bus driver who lives down next to Mrs. Hannigan. But in the dark he could have been Lesko
to anyone down there who was looking for Lesko. The ex-
cop held his service revolver in both hands and with it
tracked the bus driver's progress down the street. No one,
nothing, stirred. No one stepped out of a doorway for a
closer look or pointed a finger. Lesko waited until the man
was safely inside his front door, then crossed over to the
adjoining building and made his way down to the street.
At the end of thirty minutes he was cursing Mr. Makowski,
who had locked his car after all. At the end of an hour,
now on numbing feet in the alley across from his building,
it began to dawn on Lesko that this was a very stupid idea.
No one, he realized, was coming after him. He wasn't the
problem. In Dancer's mind, he knew, Raymond Lesko was
an annoyance and a potential expense, but he was not really
the priority problem. The priority was Corbin.