Chain of Fools - Stevenson Richard (читать книги без TXT) 📗

"I like her," I said, "and I thinkyou would too, Timothy, if she hadn't somehow confused you with Jesse Helms or Richard Speck or whoever it is, and treats you accordingly. She's prickly and blunt in ways you'd find refreshing if you weren't the one getting prickled and pum-meled. And Dale can obviously spot a phony a mile away."

He writhed. "Yeah, a phony like me."

"Oh, you're obviously much worse than a mere phony. You said yesterday she was starting to seem dimly familiar. Still no luck placing her?"

"Nah. There is something about that head of hair and the face under it—I've seen them both before somewhere, I'm more and more certain. But hard as I try, I cannot remember where."

"Peace Corps? Was she in your India group?"

"No, that I'd remember. Anyway, she's ten years too young."

"You didn't have a falling out in 1969 over competing poultry de-beaking techniques in Andhra Pradesh?"

"I have a feeling I've run into Dale more recently than that. I think it had something to do with work—something at the Assembly. It'll come to me soon, I think. Whatever it is, there must be some misunderstanding. I can't imagine that Dale and I would have been on opposite sides of anything very important. I mean, could we have?"

"It seems unlikely. Yet she referred today to a 'moral chasm' between the two of you And she said you had done something with 'grim consequences for American society.' Whatever it was, it was plainly a big deal to Dale."

Timmy twisted on the bed again, in obvious mental pain. I went over

and climbed on June's bed beside him. I placed my mouth close to Timmy's ear and whispered, "Dale has apparently become convinced— and a woman as smart as she is has to have her reasons—that you are actually G. Gordon Liddy, Timothy. It must be your excellent posture, if not something awful you once did, that has led her to confuse the two of you. To her, this is a turn-off. But not to me. I'm excited. Come to me, Gordo. Hold yourself above my flame."

He smiled weakly, but that's as far as his ardor rose. Timmy had been irritated with Dale earlier, and then angry. But now he was haunted. I hadn't been crazy about it when his mind had been full of Skeeter, and now it was time for me to be patient and indulgent while his mind was full of Dale. Luckily, I had plenty to occupy my mind too—a distinguished New York State family whose members apparently were trying to kill one another off for reasons of ideology and/or cash.

16

With fewer than ninety-six hours to go before Monday's court hearing, the pressure was on. Ruth Osborne's mental state was unpredictable; we knew she might show up and argue eloquently on her own behalf that she was as sane as a NASA flight commander, or she might stare vacantly at the judge for half an hour and then remark on the resemblance of a mole on the side of his neck to the star Sigma Octantis.

After a tense lunch where no one but Arlene had much to say— hoisting a sandaled foot onto the edge of the table, she explained to us what each of her Tibetan toe rings signified—I tried to lure Dan aside for a private talk. But he said he and Arlene had to leave immediately to deal with car insurance matters and to rent a "vehicle" until they could buy a new one. They also needed, he said, to drive out to the scene of that morning's car crack-up and retrieve their stash of "buds." Dan did agree to spend the night at the Osborne house, and when I said I'd like to speak with him privately later in the day, he got a queasy look and said sure, maybe, if he had a chance, he'd see.

Both Janet and Bill Stankie had spoken with the Edensburg chief of police, and he agreed to have a patrol car cruise Maple Street periodically during the day and to watch the house from sunset to sunrise. The chief also offered to provide an escort for Dan and Arlene as they went about their errands, but they said no thanks.

After lunch, I went into Tom Osborne's study, cleared a space on the library table, and worked the phone for an hour. Janet had obtained from Tidy an address in Papeete for his brother, Tacker. A Los Angeles investigative agency I'd done business with on a number of

occasions had South Pacific contacts, I knew, and the agency agreed, for a fee, to track down Tacker Puderbaugh and establish his whereabouts, currently and on May 15.

I called another contact, a business reporter for The New York Times with whom I'd had a brief, hectic affair of between forty-eight and seventy-two hours in the early seventies and been friends with since then. He told me Crewes-InfoCom had a reputation for being stingy and mean, but he'd never heard of them using violent tactics. Its bullying, in acquisitions and as an employer, stayed within the law, as far as the Times reporter knew. But he said he'd ask around and get back to me. Harry Griscomb, the owner of the "good chain," had a reputation in media business circles, I was told, for excellent journalism and "unattractive" profit margins. What was "unattractive"? I asked. "Ten percent instead of twenty or thirty," was the reply.

Then I made several calls to the New York State Department of Correctional Services. After forty minutes in and out of telecommunications computer limbo—"Press forty-one to descend from the Purgatoria to the Inferno"—I reached the appropriate office at Attica State Correctional Facility and was able to set up a meeting for the next morning at ten o'clock with Craig Osborne.

Dan and Arlene were off on their car-related errands, and Janet went back to work at the Herald. With Timmy and Dale to watch over Ruth Osborne, and a cop car patrolling the neighborhood, I had the rest of the afternoon to roam Edensburg.

The town was, if not an idyllic Rockwellian piece of small-city Americana, still reasonably healthy for the unstable age it had survived into. The (so far) locally owned canoe manufacturing company that had been Edensburg's economic mainstay for over one hundred years had not moved its factory to low-wage, long-hour Ciudad Juarez or Kuala Lumpur; in fact, Janet had told me, the company was doing reasonably well, having diversified into the production of fiberglass bodies for Jet Skis, ORVs, and light-truck bumpers. Tourism brought seasonal work into the area too in summer and during the ski season. Even the Herald would have been making a go of it, had it not been for Stu Torkildson's Spruce Haven debacle.

Edensburg's Main Street had only a few vacant storefronts. The four-story department store had been carved up into smaller businesses—

a comic book store, Betty Lou's Hairport, a New Agey place called Crystals n' Constellations, among them—and J. J. Newberry's looked as if it was still going strong despite the competition from the Kmart at the edge of town. A battle to keep Wal-Mart out of the county was hard-fought and ongoing, Janet said. The Gem Theater on Main Street had been triplexed, but at least it was still open. It was showing one film that had the word "fatal" in the title, one with "deadly," and one with "mortal."

I had a town map and an Edensburg phone book with me and had no trouble locating Dick Puderbaugh's fuel-oil distributership. I thought he might be willing to talk with me in a general way about the Os-bornes' intrafamily feuding over the future of the Herald and I'd pick up an odd, useful nugget on the family dynamics, particularly the propensity among some Osbornes for violence. But as soon as I introduced myself, Puderbaugh, a whey-faced little man with what looked like a rodent insignia on the left breast of his golf shirt, turned hostile.

Puderbaugh fumed that he and June had both been insulted by Janet's "accusation" that a connection existed between Eric's murder and the pro-InfoCom Osbornes. He said it was "a goddamn shame" that people like himself and his wife could have their "private rights" interfered with by people like me. Puderbaugh was barely coherent and bordering on the hysterical as I backed out the door and said, "Have a good one, Dick."