Dick Francis - Straight

“What if he does wake up?” he said, pointing to Rollway.

“I give him another clout with the crutch.”

He nodded as if that were normal behavior.

“Thanks for coming back,” I said.

“Didn’t go far. You’ve got a Volvo...”

I nodded.

“Is it the one?”

“Sure to be,” I said.

“Strewth.”

“Take my friend back to the Selfridge,” I said. “Forget she was here. Forget you were here. Go home.”

“Can’t leave you,” he said. “I’ll come back.”

“The police will be here.”

As ever, the thought of policemen made him uneasy.

“Go on home,” I said. “The dangers are over.”

He considered it. Then he said hopefully, “Same time tomorrow?”

I moved my head in amused assent and said wryly, “Why not?”

He seemed satisfied in a profound way, and he and Clarissa went over to the doorway, pausing there and looking back, as she had before. I gave them a brief wave, and they waved back before going. They were both, incredibly, smiling.

“Brad!” I yelled after him.

He came back fast, full of instant alarm.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Just fine. But don’t shut the front door behind you. I don’t want to have to get up to let the police in. I don’t want them smashing the locks. I want them to walk in here nice and easy.”

It was a long dreary evening, but not without humor. M I sat quietly apart most of the time in Greville’s chair, largely ignored while relays of people came and efficiently measured, photographed, took fingerprints and dug bullets out of walls.

There had been a barrage of preliminary questions in my direction which had ended with Rollway groaning his way back to consciousness.

Although the police didn’t like advice from a civilian, they did, at mild suggestion, handcuff him before he was fully awake, which was just as well, as the bullish violence was the first part of his personality to surface. He was on his feet, trashing about, mumbling, before he knew where he was.

While a policeman on each side of him held his arms, he stared at me, his eyes slowly focusing. I was still at that time on the floor, thankful to have his weight off me. He looked as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, and in the same flat uninflected voice as before, called me a bastard, among other things not as innocuous.

“I knew you were trouble,” he said. He was still too groggy to keep a rein on his tongue. “You won’t live to see evidence, I’ll see to that.”

The police phlegmatically arrested him formally, told him his rights and said he would get medical attention at the police station. I watched him stumble away, thinking of the irony of the decision I’d made earlier not to accuse him of anything at all, much less, as now, of shooting people. I hadn’t known he’d shot Simms. I hadn’t feared him at all. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I might not act against him on the matter of cocaine. He’d been ready to kill to prevent it. Yet I hadn’t suspected him even of being a large-scale dealer until he’d boasted of it.

While the investigating activity went on around me, I wondered if it were because drug runners cared so little for the lives of others that they came so easily to murder.

Like Vaccaro, I thought, gunning down his renegade pilots from a moving car. Perhaps that was a habitual mode of cleanup among drug kings. Copycat murder, everyone had thought about Simms, and everyone had been right.

People like Rollway and Vaccaro held other people’s lives cheap because they aimed anyway at destroying them. They made addiction and corruption their business, willfully intended to profit from the collapse and unhappiness of countless lives, deliberately enticed young people onto a one-way misery trail. I’d read that people could snort cocaine for two or three years before the physical damage hit. The drug growers, shippers, wholesalers knew that. It gave them time for steady selling. Their greed had filthy feet.

The underlying immorality, the aggressive callousness had themselves to be corrupting; addictive. Rollway had self-destructed, like his victims.

I wondered how people grew to be like him. I might condemn them, but I didn’t understand them. They weren’t happy-go-lucky dishonest, like Pross. They were uncaring and cold. As Elliot Trelawney had said, the logic of criminals tended to be weird. If I ever added to Greville’s notebook, I thought, it would be something like “The ways of the crooked are mysterious to the straight,” or even “What makes the crooked crooked and the straight straight?” One couldn’t trust the sociologists’ easy answers.

I remembered an old story I’d heard sometime. A scorpion asked a horse for a ride across a raging torrent. Why not? said the horse, and obligingly started to swim with the scorpion on his back. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the horse. The horse, fatally poisoned, said, “We will both drown now. Why did you do that?” And the scorpion said, “Because it’s my nature.”

Nicholas Loder wasn’t going to worry or wonder about anything anymore; and his morality, under stress, had risen up unblemished and caused his death. Injustice and irony everywhere, I thought, and felt regret for the man who couldn’t acquiesce in my murder.

He had taken cocaine himself, that much was clear. He’d become perhaps dependent on Rollway, had perhaps been more or less blackmailed by him into allowing his horses to be tampered with. He’d been frightened I would find him out: but in the end he hadn’t been evil, and Rollway had seen it, had seen he couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut after all.

Through Loder, Rollway had known where to find me on Sunday afternoon, and through him he’d known where to find me this Wednesday evening. Yet Nicholas Loder hadn’t knowingly set me up. He’d been used by his supposed friend; and I hadn’t seen any danger in reporting on Sunday morning that I’d be lunching with Milo and the Ostermeyers or saying I would be in Greville’s house ready for Gemstones’ bids.

I hadn’t specifically been keeping myself safe from Rollway, whatever he might believe, but from an unidentified enemy, someone there and dangerous, but unrecognized.

Irony everywhere...

I thought about Martha and Harley and the cocaine in Dozen Roses. I would ask them to keep the horse and race him, and I’d promise that if he never did any good I would give them their money back and send him to auction. What the Jockey Club and the racing press would have to say about the whole mess boggled the mind. We might still lose the York race: would have to, I guessed.

I thought of Clarissa in the Selfridge Hotel struggling to behave normally with a mind filled with visions of violence. I hoped she would ring up her Henry, reach back to solid ground, mourn Greville peacefully, be glad she’d saved his brother. I would leave the Wizard’s alarm set to 4:20 P.M., and remember them both when I heard it: and one could say it was sentimental, that their whole affair had been packed with sentimental behavior, but who cared, they’d enjoyed it, and I would endorse it.

At some point in the evening’s proceedings a highly senior plainclothes policeman arrived whom everyone else deferred to and called sir.

He introduced himself as Superintendent Ingold and invited a detailed statement from me, which a minion wrote down. The superintendent was short, piercing, businesslike, and considered what I said with pauses before his next question, as if internally computing my answers. He was also, usefully, a man who liked racing: who sorrowed over Nicholas Loder and knew of my existence.

I told him pretty plainly most of what had happened, omitting only a few things: the precise way Rollway had asked for his tube, and Clarissa’s presence, and the dire desperation of the minutes before she’d arrived. I made that hopeless fight a lot shorter, a lot easier, a rapid knockout.