Брайан Гарфилд - What of Terry Conniston?

Mitch thought about it sluggishly. “Do what you want to do.”

“I can’t move him by myself. He weighs too much.”

Unreasonable and loud, he shouted, “What the hell do you want me to do? Bury him with full military honors? Embalm him and build a thousand-dollar casket? Leave me alone!”

Very businesslike, Billie Jean only waited out his tirade patiently and then said, “Do the same thing he did with Georgie.”

Mitch resisted it for half an hour but in the end he did what Billie Jean wanted because it was the only thing he could do. He didn’t know where Theodore had put Georgie and he didn’t want to find out. He put Theodore around back of the store near an anthill and left him there bloody and naked. He carried Theodore’s clothes inside and stuffed them into a knapsack with Georgie’s things. Working mindlessly, doing what Floyd had ordered last night, he policed the place, picked up every last scrap and carried everything across the street into the barn. The trunk of the sports car was not locked; he put everything into it and had to sit on the lid to close it.

He stood in the barn entrance, soaked in sweat and caked with dirt and blood. He felt feverish, drugged. Across the powder-stripe between the buildings Terry Conniston was standing near the place where Theodore had died. She had picked up the knife. Billie Jean slumped resentfully against the edge of the porch, breathing hard, her big breasts rising and falling. Evidently they had both thought of the knife at the same time and Terry had won the race for it.

Mitch still had the gun in his hip pocket. He took it out and after a minute discovered how to break the cylinder open. All the cartridges had been fired. He put it back in his pocket and started to cross the street.

Billie Jean said, “Well?”

“Well what?” he snapped.

“What do we do now?”

“Christ, how the hell should I know?”

“You better think of something,” Billie Jean said. “I don’t think Floyd’s gonna come back.” By some simple animalistic process she had already put Theodore completely out of her thoughts. She said again, matter-of-fact, “He ain’t coming back. You know he ain’t.”

Carl Oakley sat in the Cadillac behind rolled-up tinted windows, wearing a hat and dark glasses and hoping he looked enough like Earle Conniston from a distance to pass the test. He twisted in his seat to sweep the picnic area and the cottonwood-sycamore copse that surrounded it; nothing stirred except a few birds and a few leaves, roughed up by the wind. He looked at his watch, because the dashboard clock like all dashboard clocks did not work — almost three hours since he had arrived. The engine had begun to overheat and he had switched it off, killing the air-conditioner; he had started it up at fifteen-minute intervals to cool down the interior. In these hills the heat wasn’t too bad but he was covered with a nervous glaze of oil-sweat.

He chewed a cigar and felt an acid pain in his gut — the sense that it was already too late. They had likely murdered Terry long since: he ought to call in the police. But the police would insist on talking to Earle.

Forty-eight hours ago Oakley had considered himself an honest man, within the acknowledged flexibility of business morals. He was surprised by the ease with which he had shattered that illusion. What he was doing was illegal, dangerous, and inexcusably dishonest, and during the night he had traveled the full length of rationalizations and faced the reality of his crime. All these years he had enjoyed the self-satisfied comfort of the knowledge that he did not covet what was not rightfully his. To the best of his belief he had never envied Earle Conniston, never resented the difference in their stations nor been tempted to cheat Earle — a temptation which, had it existed, would not have been difficult to fulfill. Earle had trusted him with unreserved confidence; Oakley had enjoyed the smug satisfaction of knowing Earle’s confidence was deserved. Today, in hindsight, he marveled at his own record of pious self-righteousness.

The new ambitiousness could not have sprung full-blown into his consciousness like a fully shaped god from the head of Zeus; it must have been there all the time, undetected, waiting. What had triggered it had been the sudden awareness that Earle was shrinking — no longer the larger-than-life idol who had moved through the corporate world with demoniacal grace, pokerish imperterbability, uncanny judgment, athletic balance. Not until Earle had revealed unmistakably his own weakness had insidious thoughts wriggled past Oakley’s puritan conscience, changed wish to desire; and even then, he thought, it was unlikely he’d have done anything about it if Earle had lived. The options would have been unfavorable. Petty embezzlement? Even if he had been convinced he could get away with it, it was beneath him. A full-scale raid designed to wrest the empire from Earle? No: he lacked the calculated brutality for that, the rapier fineness, the stamina, the acrobatic agility. He was a good lawyer, sensitive to subtlety and nuance, alert to opportunity, keen to the openings that were to be found between the fine-print lines of financial documentation. He had discovered, investigated, discarded and recommended countless deals for Earle Conniston; he had protected the empire against incursion and insult; he had unerringly weeded out deadwood and dispassionately called for its amputation. But he had achieved these successes because he had been confident, and he had been confident because he was backed by Earle’s weight. Thinking it through relentlessly he had concluded that the lucky timing of Earle’s death had been the only event in the world which could possibly have given him both the opportunity and the resolve to make his grab.

He didn’t know whether to feel grateful or angry. Something Earle had said ten years ago remained in his head as if written in letters of fire: In anything you do, risk is determined not by what you stand to win but by what you stand to lose . Today, for the first time in his life, Oakley had committed himself fully: he stood to lose everything. Absolutely, literally everything. It frightened him.

In his way Oakley had always been a fatalist. Things were determined by chance as often as not. Luck: the very fact that he existed at all was only a matter of chance. How had his father happened to meet his mother? How had he, a bright but undistinguished young lawyer, chanced to meet Earle Conniston at precisely the opportune moment for them both? It had been, he recalled, at a poker game — the perfect setting. The shape of a man’s life was carved not only by his own decisions and reactions but, equally as much, by blind coincidence, sheer accident. Luck.

It was Earle’s bad luck, and perhaps Oakley’s good luck, that Earle had blundered into Louise’s bedroom at the wrong moment, blundered into Frankie Adams’ drop-kick, blundered against the bedpost. It amazed Oakley that his conscience remained untroubled. Not responsible for Earle’s death, he felt no guilt about the course he had pursued since then — unless guilt could be defined as the gnawing fear that his whole scheme would collapse, with him under it.

He inspected his watch irritably and shot his cuff. Ten past eleven. He had arrived before eight o’clock after making the ransom drop along the road as instructed. Presumably Orozco’s operatives in Nogales were monitoring the radio signal from the bugged suitcase which contained the money.

He sat it out another twenty minutes, at the end of which time he got out of the car and walked around the clearing, went into the woods and scoured the ground, not sure what he was looking for but half afraid he might stumble across Terry’s body. He found nothing at all to indicate the kidnapers had ever been there. He went back to the car and rolled out of the clearing with the air-conditioner roaring softly. The big car took the rutted roads fast, swaying on its springs, bottoming now and then with a sickening bang. By the time he reached Patagonia he had chewed his cigar to mangled shreds; he scraped the remains off his fingers in the dashboard ashtray and bumped across the railroad tracks and put the car onto the paved road to Sonoita, gunning it up to ninety across the rolling valley.