Маргарет Миллар - Spider Webs

“Everybody wears shrink-to-fits.”

“Everybody around here.” Harry emphasized the word as if it referred to a place where people lay around in the sun and committed immoral acts and never held a job. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

“You didn’t bring me. Cully did.”

“It was my idea. I thought you needed the experience. Little did I know what kind of experience you’d get. But I should have suspected. A friend of mine told me about it, how the crazies all went west and when they couldn’t go any farther, they had to stop and that was California.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“What did you say?”

“I was agreeing with you.”

“No, you weren’t. You were smart talking. No son should smart talk his father.”

The iron hand squeezed Richie’s stomach again. “Leave me alone.”

“What’s the matter with you these days? You act like you’re losing your best friend.”

Richie went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Harry ate the rest of the chicken, the rolls and all the doughnuts except two, which he put away for breakfast. He heard the toilet flush and water running in the basin for a long time. When Richie came back, his eyes were red as if they’d been stung by soap.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said.

“Wait a minute and I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

“I got a better idea. Why don’t we stay home and watch TV? There’s a good movie on, real funny, I seen it before. It’s a million laughs.”

“I don’t feel like laughing.”

Harry made one more attempt. “You’re barefoot. How come you forgot your shoes?”

“I don’t need any.”

“What if you step on a piece of glass and get blood poisoning?”

“So I croak, so what?”

“That ain’t a sensible attitude.”

“Lay off me, will you?”

“Okay, go your own way. But be back by ten.”

“Why?”

“Because I say so.”

“That don’t make it a federal law.”

“No. It’s just an old family custom: The father gives the orders, and the kids obey them.”

“Why are you always harping on this family stuff?”

“Some sons,” Harry said grimly, “have to be reminded.”

“I’m reminded.”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Okay, okay.”

He walked to the door, his movements slow and hesitant, almost as if he wanted to be stopped. But Harry said nothing more to stop him, and the boy went out. He didn’t know if he’d be back by ten or twelve or ever.

Donnelly woke up to the sound of chimes. He often received telephone calls at odd hours of the night so he’d had the chimes installed to replace the shrill bell. The difference in sound made little difference in his reaction. He still woke with a sudden surge of adrenaline and a stopping of the heart.

It was Gunther.

“Charlie, you want to guess where I am?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. I’m at the county jail.”

“I suppose you’ll also tell me how you got there.”

“If you insist. I was out with this chick, and we weren’t having such a great time. What with one thing and another. So to liven things up, I turned on the police calls and I heard this dispatcher talking about a BIP at the harbor on a boat named the Bewitched . BIP, that’s what the cops around here call burglary in progress. See, the people who listen in on police calls figured out long ago what the various code numbers mean, so the local cops switched to letters.”

“How clever.”

“So I sent the chick home in a cab — you’ll find the bill on my expense account — and drove down to the Bewitched. And guess what.”

“Guessing games at two-thirty A.M. are not nice, Billy boy.”

“All right, I’ll tell you. The burglar, as in BIP, was the kid Richie Arnold. He got past the guard by swimming out to the Bewitched and climbing up the port side. Funny thing, I thought they were crazy to keep a guard on that boat all this time but apparently not. The guard heard a noise, went to investigate and came up with our boy Richie.”

“What was he doing?”

“By the time I got there he was sitting in the back of a patrol car, wrapped in a blanket. The cops weren’t saying a word, so I followed them out here.”

“Has he been booked?”

“No. There’s some shenanigans over him being a juvenile as well as a material witness. But the kid’s asked for a lawyer. Kids these days watch so much TV that even a first grader picked up for playing hooky will demand a lawyer.”

“Did they get him one?”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Gunther said. “He asked for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re Cully King’s lawyer.”

“Didn’t anyone explain to him that I can’t work both sides of the street?”

“Nobody’s explaining anything to anybody. But I can tell you there’s a lot of excitement in the air, good or bad I don’t know, and I don’t think they do either.”

“What was the boy doing on the Bewitched? ”

“Stealing.”

“Stealing what?”

“Nobody seems to know that either. As far as I could see, it was something wrapped in a dirty piece of canvas, a sail bag maybe. Whatever is in that bag must be plenty important because they’ve called the DA and even the judge. I think you’d better get down here, too.”

“All right.”

“You want me to wait or can I go home?”

“Stick around.”

“I need some sleep.”

“Some scientists believe that people can be trained to do without sleep entirely. Look on this as a golden opportunity to start practicing.”

When Donnelly arrived at the jail, he didn’t waste time asking questions that wouldn’t be answered. He simply requested a meeting with his client, giving no explanation or apology for the timing.

Even at three o’clock in the morning the jail grapevine was in full operation. When Cully was escorted into the consulting room, his eyes were wide and wary.

He said, “What’s happening?”

“I thought you might tell me.”

“I heard some kid had been picked up for stealing from a boat down at the harbor. No names were mentioned, but I kind of guessed the boat was the Bewitched and maybe the kid was Richie Arnold. What did he steal?”

“What did you hear?”

“That it was just an old canvas bag.”

“Containing?”

“Someone said it hadn’t been opened yet. They’re waiting for the DA and the judge.”

“Do you know what was in that bag, Cully?”

“I heard it was a sail bag. So it probably contained sails.”

“Does it seem reasonable to you that a kid with as much sense as Richie would swim out to the Bewitched and take a chance on being arrested in order to steal a sail bag?”

“That doesn’t seem reasonable, no.”

“What does?”

Cully turned away with an exaggerated shrug that gave Donnelly as much of an answer as any words.

“You’ve known Richie for a long time,” Donnelly said, “and I’ve known him for only a short time, but we’re both aware he’d need a powerful motive to pull a dumb stunt like that. Do you have any idea what that motive could be?”

“How c-could I?”

The slight stammer in his voice confirmed Donnelly’s suspicion that Cully was scared and unpredictable. It would be necessary to prevent the district attorney from questioning him in private about anything, even the weather. Donnelly had long since discovered that the smartest crook in the world could trip over the most basic fact: One word led to another.

“What’s next?” Cully said.

“Next, Mr. Owen or one of his henchmen will try to pump you for information whether you have it or not. If you answer some questions and not others, the balk will be fed into a computer. If you don’t answer any questions at all, they won’t have anything to feed the computer. Whether he asks, ‘How are you?’ or, ‘Did you kill Madeline Pherson?’ your reply will be the same: ‘I respectfully refuse to answer on advice of counsel.’ Understand?”