Richard Stevenson - Chain of Fools
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- Название:Chain of Fools
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"Mom, what do you mean!"
Mrs. Osborne let out a mordant little laugh. "Oh, don't get excited, Janet, I'm not about to pull a plastic bag over my head, and of course I'd never own a gun. I'm just talking."
In the awkward silence that followed, I could just barely make out the distant sound of a man's raised voice coming out of the telephone receiver down the hall in the kitchen. I couldn't pick up his words, just his plaintive tone.
8
I think I might be revising my position on capital punishment," Timmy said. He was in the front passenger seat of Janet's car, which Dale was driving, heading back to the Osborne house. I was behind him massaging his neck. He smelled of lake water and sweat and the fiberglass cast on his broken foot.
"What has your position been on capital punishment?" Dale asked.
"Against it. It morally demeans the state that carries it out, it has no demonstrable deterrent effect, and since the justice system is imperfect, it's inevitable that innocent people will be executed. But that asshole on the Jet Ski could have killed me, and now I'm mad."
"If he was tied down," Dale said, "and you were there with a Ton-galese pigsticker, would you slice his guts open?"
Turning, Timmy couldn't get around quite far enough to catch my eye. But I caught his meaning: What is with this woman? Instead, he said, "I was speaking rhetorically."
"Oh. Oh, I see," Dale said blithely.
I had told Timmy about the visit to Dan and Arlene's, and Dan's vom-itous reaction to our speculation that an Osborne might be plotting to murder-or to have murdered-another Osborne over the Heralds sale to a good chain or a bad chain. I also filled him in on our unsettling encounter with June Puderbaugh and Parson Bates, and on Ruth Osborne's thirty-hour lapse into insensibility and subsequent recovery.
"Of course," Timmy said, "I'm doing my level best trying to keep some kind of rational perspective on this whole frightening business. I realize that my injury was inadvertent-a line-of-fire unlucky accident. And a broken foot is paltry next to murder. And it certainly does sound from what you've discovered just in the past couple of hours, Don, that any number of people in this whole rat's nest that you've uncovered are capable of murder."
Dale said, "Are you saying, Timothy, that to you the Osbornes are a family of rodents? That seems rather sweeping."
I saw the blood rise in the back of his neck as he snapped, "Dale, you seem to have some kind of hair across your ass in regard to me. Why is that?"
By shifting a little, I could see her face in the rearview mirror. Her eyes narrowed and she said, "I do believe you're imagining that, Timothy."
"Hey, do you think I have some vital parts missing, or what? I am not imagining that no matter what I say to you, you are sneering and sarcastic, and you talk like I'm some kind of half-wit. Which I am not. Now, 'what exactly is the problem?"
For a long moment she just watched the road and drove, and said nothing. Then she said coolly: "You really don't remember me, do you, Timothy?"
"No, Dale, I am not aware that we were ever acquainted."
"Well, you should be aware."
"Oh," he said, "let me think. What could it have been? Now, did we sleep together once in the seventies? Were you ever a man?"
She made a face that said, "Oh, please."
"If you think," Timmy said, "that I'm the one who gave you anal herpes, be assured that you are mistaken. I've never had it."
"He's right about that, Dale," I said.
She looked for a brief instant as if she might crack a smile, but her control was sure and none appeared. She said, "I want you to think about it, Timothy. It was not a friendly encounter. If you think hard, it will come back to you."
"Oh, we're going to play games now. Swell."
She said, " 'Swell.' There's a word you rarely hear anymore. 'Swell' goes a long way back. That it's currently most often used sarcastically, as you used it just now, only adds to the word's quaint perdurability."
I had resumed massaging his neck and paused now to check the pulse behind his right ear. It was up.
I said, "Maybe, Dale, since we're all going to be spending a good bit of time together on a matter of current great importance, it would be best to clear the air on this other matter. Don't you think?"
She said nothing as she turned off Main and onto Maple Street.
"After all, you and Janet and Timmy and I are financial partners in this investigation," I said. "Based on long experience, I can tell you that when clients squabble, trouble ensues in an investigation. My professional advice is to get this business out into the open and see if you can't get it behind the both of you."
Dale pulled into the Osborne driveway and parked alongside a big patch of bright blue delphiniums that looked like the Emerald City. She turned to Timmy and enunciated the words, "April-1987."
He looked at her, mystified and clearly irked. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," he said. "Perhaps you're confusing me with Ronald Reagan. Did you ever have a run-in with Ronald Reagan in 1987? I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at that encounter."
"You're not too far off," Dale said, and got out of the car and strode into the house.
9
Just after nine, I pulled into Chester Osborne's cul-de-sac on Summit Hill Road, a woodsy residential drive on a high hill overlooking Edensburg. The light was nearly gone from the murky sky, but it hadn't cooled off much and the August night air was only a little less dense than gumbo.
I had my car back, and Janet and Timmy had driven down to Albany to visit Skeeter and pick up some of Timmy's and my belongings so that we could all move into Ruth Osborne's house together for a time. Our purpose was mutual protection. Dale would be there too, and she had agreed to quit sniping at Timmy for the duration of my investigation. She did insist that a "shoot-out" at some convenient later date was inevitable. Timmy told me he was almost convinced Dale was batty, but he conceded that something about her was starting to become very dimly familiar.
Chester and Pauline Osborne lived in a two-story mock-Tudor house built on a shelf of fill on the downslope side of Summit Hill Road. The house looked freshly painted and stuccoed, and the height of the arbor vitae rising out of the bark-mulch beds that bordered all the walls of the place suggested it had been put up in the early eighties. The cul-de-sac had been newly tarmacked and was brilliantly floodlit. His-and-her Lexuses were parked in the driveway, one glistening black, one glistening teal.
When I had phoned earlier, Chester said he was disturbed to hear that Janet had felt the need to hire a private detective-June had undoubtedly been on the horn pronto following our late-afternoon encounter. Chester told me he was interested in hearing about my
"unnecessary" investigation, and why didn't I drop by for drinks after dinner? My own dinner, a couple of burritos, had been consumed at a picnic table outside Taco Bell. And while I wasn't sure which after-dinner drink was going to be appropriate, I had more pressing matters to take up with Chester Osborne, the stockbroker older brother with the history of violent outbursts.
"You found your way up here," Osborne said in a businesslike way. "Good for you. Well done."
"I followed your directions," I said. "They were clear."
"There's nothing worse than vague directions," he said with such finality that I decided not to bring up Chechnya. Leading me across the foyer, Osborne said, "We'll go in the study."
He was tall and stiff-backed in a gray pinstriped suit and silk tie with tiny blue digital clocks on it. Pleasantly large-featured in the by-then-familiar Osborne way, he carried himself with an assurance that suggested Janet's self-possession. Although something in Osborne's cool, blue, mildly bloodshot eyes hinted at a turbulent interior more like Dan's. Whether June's wackiness would also show up in the mix, I couldn't tell yet.
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