Son of the Endless Night, page 17
"No, Rich! You don't mean that. What happened wasn't your fault. You must have been drugged. Look at you. It's still in your system. That will come out in court. No jury— "
Rich's laughter was an ear-splitting bray. Conor almost dropped him.
He glimpsed an amorphous face at the observation port in the door, a suspicious ballooning eye that reminded him, irrationally, of a childhood concept of God as the Omnipresent, the All-Seeing, like the eye of the giant squid in the movie Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. After a few moments the face floated blurrily away, leaving Conor feeling coldly oppressed.
"Rich! Rich! Get hold of yourself!"
The boy had been mumbling under his breath, words Conor found unfamiliar, heathenish. Rich looked up, startled at the sharp intrusion of his brother's voice. He fell mute, his face going slack. The eyes grew heavy-lidded, the complexion even paler than it had been. Then, after a long suspenseful period of time, as Conor felt himself drawn irresistibly toward the darkness and the depths where his brother had disappeared, Rich came back to life. It was like a half-drowned face rising gradually to the light of day.
"Drugged? Probably. I only wish . . . that could be all there is to it. But it's worse, Conor." He hissed the word again. ' 'Worssse." Then he sat down on one of the benches, hands knotted between his knees. "And you're the only one— who can help me now."
"I'll do everything that's in my power, kid. And with God's help I know we can— "
Rich turned aside the suggestion with a cutting gesture of one hand, a grimace of disdain. Now he looked more like himself. Muscles bunched randomly in his face, like little knots of worms beneath the skin. The flashes of other personas had ended. Certain drugs did that, Conor knew. He'd seen a lot of drugs, both as a kid in his Boston neighborhood and as a priest. He knew first-hand of the schizoid effects that LSD, angel dust, and even cocaine could have on otherwise normal kids. Whoever had done this to Rich, hell was too good for them! He felt a little tingle along his spine, a current in his bones. He sat down opposite his brother, leaned toward him.
Rich looked back at the door. For now they were unobserved. "How much time do we have?" he asked quietly.
"I don't know. A few minutes more. But I'll be back."
"And he'll be back," Rich retorted. He shuddered, but he wasn't cold. His pores had opened, his face rained perspiration. Drops of it glistened on the backs of his hands. He spoke urgently, in a near-whisper. "Find them for me, Conor. Windross. Polly. Well— I think Polly must be dead too. Listen to the tape in my car, the tape from the Record A Call. That's how it all began, with Polly." He spoke faster, not pausing to breathe; he seemed to be under enormous internal pressure.
Conor, although he could barely make sense of what Rich was saying, suffered for him. They edged closer toward each other until their heads, confessional, were almost touching.
"And Inez! Inez Cordway. That's what she calls herself •now, but her name used to be Courdewaye." He spelled it and nodded, licking at the wet salt on his lips. "Inez knows the truth. She's real. I know she's real. The others— I'm not sure. Anyway, find Inez. She can tell you everything that happened to me. But if she offers you wine— for God's sake, Conor! Don't drink." Conor leaned back; Rich's tone had made him feel light-headed with horror. Rich's eyes leaped to his, looked away. "I was only trying to help Polly! There's so much I can't remember. I don't think he wants me to." Rich's complexion was suffused with a dusky red, he gasped for breath.
"I can't follow— who are you— " "No, Conor! Just listen. Remember. He's not here right now. But I know he'll be back, and then— I don't know what he'll have me doing next. I dreamt— dreamt I was a fly, hanging upside down from the ceiling of my cell. I think it was only a dream. Are you listening? The Courdewaye house, Ripington Four Corners. Ask anybody in town, they'll tell you— how to find the place. All I remember— it was snowing. Hard. I just can't— now it's a blur, most of the time."
Rich had stiffened again. His eyes squeezed shut, receding behind closed lids as if they were being drawn into a vacuum; depths closed over him, volumes of darkness, and he started to topple sideways. Conor grabbed him.
Rich's head revolved eerily: he might have been trying to follow something in rapid flight around the room. But his eyes remained tightly closed. "Look out, look out!" he cried. "What is it? Some kind of horrible— "
He was jolted, as if struck powerfully in the solar plexus. Then for fifteen or twenty seconds he appeared catatonic, unbreathing. Down there in the deeps where God was. Or something unmade by God, uniquely hideous. Conor's senses reeled, he almost couldn't catch his own breath. "Dear Lord, save him," he prayed.
"I f-feel sick, Conor," Rich complained, drawing breath, still unmoving.
"Dear Lord," Conor said again. It was the voice of a child he had heard.
Rich's face swam to the light; a sear of pain bloomed there. His eyes opened, he stared at his big brother. "It flew at me, Conor! Make it go away." His face convulsed, he was determined, the little tough guy, not to weep. But there was a stink of urine in the air. He had wet himself, all down one leg. "He's got me. He's in me, Conor! He killed Karyn. Made me hit her. And hit her, and hit her— until she died.''
"What are you saying?" Conor straightened the angle of his brother's lolling head. He saw something disappear from the secluded eyes, like a scuttling bug when the lights go on. The swift shadowy departure of an unknown vileness caused Conor to tremble. But Rich's expression remained earnestly childlike.
"The dee-monn!"
"Mother of Heaven. Are you trying to tell me— you're possessed?"
Rich screamed hysterically, rocking on the bench.
Conor smacked him across the face with a hard palm. The hood fell from around Rich's head. His gaze seemed wildly fragmented, broken into shards of light. His voice changed again.
"Pol-Polly. Tried to help Polly. But she died too. That was— after he took me. Poor Polly. Poor Richard!" He jumped to his feet, hands grabbing for Conor's face, his beard. "You're a priest, Conor. You can help me, can't you? Get him out of me! Before he makes me do something terrible again!"
The door opened. The guard came in, hickory swinging from a leather thong around his wrist.
"What's going on?"
Conor looked up powerlessly, holding Rich at bay by his wrists.
"It's an attack of some kind. He's sick. Don't do that!" The guard had drawn back his club.
''Can you handle him?"
"Yes. Yes." Conor lowered Rich back to the bench. The boy sat there in a pathetic huddle, shuddering, one side of his face scarlet and beginning to puff up from the impact of Conor's hand. A single tear inched down the assaulted cheek.
"He should be in a hospital, not a jail," the outraged Conor said.
The guard looked carefully at the big man, his club still half raised.
"I have to take him back now, fella."
"Put him in a cell? Look at him!"
"There's nothing I can do." The guard squared his shoulders and said in a tone of pious cruelty, "You forget what he's in here for? They said the girl didn't even have a face when he got through."
"Shut up," Conor told him, quietly enough, but veins were standing out thunderously on his forehead.
The guard, keeping the bench between himself and Conor, reached down and pulled Rich to his feet; he handcuffed him one-handedly with the deftness of a stage magician locking up an assistant. Conor couldn't bear to watch.
"Pissed in your pants, did you?" the guard said disgustedly. "Let's go."
"Remember," the boy whispered. "Windross. Courdewaye. Help me."
Rich went scuffling along with the guard, his head down, feet tripping up; he lurched into a wall and struck an elbow, cried out in pain. His cry freed Conor from his paralysis and he tried to follow, but was turned back at a barred and armored door.
"I'll get help, Rich!" But he saw only the prisoner's back, the shape of shoulder blades beneath the prison jumpsuit, sharply winged from the stress of having his hands locked behind his back. Conor couldn't be sure the boy had heard him as he was led down a flight of echoing iron steps.
33
Conor's visit to the Franciscan father who was the lone priest of the small parish in Chadbury was unrewarding. First Father Gregus had to be roused from his nap by the rectory housekeeper, a Swiss-German woman who spoke English almost incomprehensibly and resented Conor's ignorance of their routine: the hours during which the priest was available to parishioners were clearly posted on the rectory door. Conor pleaded an emergency and was received in a tiny study lightless except for the blue flames in a stove.
Father Gregus, in brown robe and sandals, was elderly, hard of hearing, only a year away from retirement. He had heard about the murder, and was repulsed by it. His throat clearings, varying in tone, duration and profundity, were like another language by which he conveyed a lack of sympathy. Nonetheless he would do his duty as long as there was a Catholic soul in jeopardy. He offered, after a promise to visit Rich, to hear Conor's confession. Conor declined, preferring to spend his time in prayer at the altar in the sanctuary.
Alone, on his knees, he experienced a terrible weakness; his prayers were blocked, his mind simply wouldn't function. In this country chapel he felt the consequences of his disavowal as if the shadow of the angel of the Annunciation that stood near the chancel door had fallen across his back with the weight of stone itself. Faced with the Lord's sublime agony, he heard his brother's voice.
Courdewaye. Windross. Polly. Find them, Conor!
He drove back to the state police building and asked for Captain Moorman, who had gone home for the day. Conor spoke to him on the telephone.
"Did you see your brother?"
"I don't know who I saw! There was so little resemblance— One thing, I know he doesn't belong in a jail cell. He's obviously a very sick man. Hallucinating. He needs medical attention. Can't he be moved to a hospital?"
"Facilities are limited here. Only the state mental hospital has a ward equipped to deal with homicidal patients. But a psychiatric exam would be required, and that's out of my hands."
"Who was the doctor who saw him this morning?"
"Harbison? About all he can do is keep your brother tranquilized."
"It's better than nothing," Conor muttered.
"Have you seen a lawyer yet?"
"I haven't had time. What happened to Rich's car?"
"The Porsche? We impounded it."
"I'd like to have a look."
"Why?"
"There's something in the car Rich wants me to have. A tape cassette. He said it was from his telephone answering machine."
"Why does he want you to have it?"
"Something to do with a girl named Polly. Rich wants me to find out where she is now."
Moorman thought it over. "All articles in the car were collected, along with his clothes from the suite at the Davos Chalet. They were checked in to the police property department. I can't release them to you, but— I could arrange for you to listen to that tape tomorrow. Of course I'll want to hear what's on it myself."
"Thank you."
"Is Polly another girl friend of his?"
"I never heard the name before. But Rich kept referring to some people he may have met up here. Inez. Windross. And Polly. He said they knew what really happened to him."
"What did he mean by that?"
"I don't know, Captain. He said he was trying to help Polly, whoever she is. They were both at a place called the Courdewaye House, in Ripington Four Corners. Does that mean anything to you.
"Ripington Four Corners is about twenty miles north of here. I don't know offhand of any Courdewaye House— is it an inn?"
"I have no idea. But whatever it is, after talking to Rich I'm convinced something happened to him there that had a— a drastic effect on his behavior, and probably led to the killing of Karyn."
"If you're referring to drugs, no. The blood screen turned up some alcohol, but in a quantity well below the level legally established for drunkenness."
Conor couldn't think of anything else to say. At the other end of the phone, in the policeman's house, a dog barked, kids quarreled, there was a television going. His throat thickened with a need for his own nest, for the familiar jumble of domesticity. Drugs? No. It was a blow, a loss of hope. Had Rich simply gone insane, for no apparent reason? What about a brain tumor? He refused to think about the third possibility Rich had insisted upon.
Dee-monn!
The word was a bombshell inside the brain. It cast a chilling unholy light that made Conor blanch.
He's got me! He's in me, Conor! He killed Karyn!
"Hello?"
"Oh— I'm sorry. Thanks for your time, Captain Moorman. When can I see you tomorrow to listen to that tape?"
"Nine o'clock would be okay."
34
Conor drove back to the Waites Inn. It was just before six, the cocktail hour ending; a dinner bell called the boisterous ski crowd into the dining room. They were like a splendid fellowship he could no more think of joining than if he were a troll from a cave. He smelled Yankee pot roast and baked bread and was famished, but the act of eating represented an ordeal he had to prepare himself for. He collected a whiskey at the small bar in a parlor corner of the lobby where cigarette smoke still hung spectrally in the air. He sat on a long couch that faced the fireplace to drink it. He knew he should call Gina, but had no idea of what to say to her.
"Mr. Devon?"
Conor looked around reluctantly. He saw a man of about thirty, wearing a collegiate-looking brown tweed suit, blue shirt with a button-down collar, rep tie. His hair was brown, razor cut, mildly bouffant, and he wore a shaggier, lighter mustache that threatened to overwhelm his upper lip. The woman with him was close to the same age. Pretty, with a kind of frivolous space between her upper front teeth that relieved some of the ponderousness of thick eyebrows. They had the smiles of Jesus freaks, or yellow journalists.
Conor wanted to be rude, but merely shrugged, and turned his face back to the low fire. A log broke; sparks flew like meteors into the black space of the upper hearth. The young man came around one end of the Naugahyde couch and offered his hand.
"Adam Kurland. This is my associate Lindsay Potter."
"Hello," Conor said without warmth, putting some effort into the handshake. The young man didn't flinch. He had bigger bones and more muscle than Conor had taken in at first glance. He decided to stop being a bastard, relaxed his grip, and nodded pleasantly to the woman. "Reporters?"
"Lawyers," Kurland said, offering his business card. Embossed. Two colors, dark blue and gold. It had a certain dignified presence between Conor's fingers, establishing— no questions asked— reliability and value. "Kurland Bates Harpold, in Braxton. Do you know Vermont?"
"I've wrestled here a few times, in Burlington and Rutland."
"Oh," Lindsay Potter said with a not overdone lifting of her heavy eyebrows, "are you a professional?"
"That's right. I use the name Irish Bob O'Hooligan." He should have business cards of his own printed. Bonecracking and divers entertainments.
She nodded, but clearly the name didn't mean anything to her. Conor liked her. She had a long neck and a tomboy stance; wise pixie eyes, hazel, but shading to a brass yellow by firelight. The bones of her wrists, the lobes of her ears incurable plebeian, blue collar, "triple decker." Conor's habitat, and he had known many like her. Born with the intellectual vitality to escape her Dorchester neighborhood, the inevitable stifling marriage, too many kids. Some still became nuns. This one had gone to a good college, upgraded the accent; but nobody had taught her yet how to wear clothes. Suit of a conservative cut, too brownish for her complexion. The wrong lipstick. She wasn't diminished by her choices, they just made her more interesting in a haphazard way.
"Braxton's the third largest city in Vermont," Kurland told him. "It's about sixteen miles down the road from here, on the Connecticut River."
"What do you want?" Conor said uninterestedly.
Kurland didn't hesitate. "I want to defend your brother."
Conor took a deep breath and settled a little more snugly into the couch, ignoring the twinges of pain from the region of his kidneys. He raised his glass, gazed through it at the now-amber fire and drank.
"You're young to be heading your own law firm."
"That was my grandfather and my father. But I'm the only Kurland with the firm right now. I'm thirty-two. My practice is limited to criminal law."
"Dope dealers? Rapists?"
"I've also defended three alleged murderers in the past two years. Two of them went free, the other is incarcerated at the state mental hospital."
"This case may be out of your league, Mr. Kurland. Do you know who Karyn was? Her family, I mean?"
His question didn't faze the lawyer. "I've found out quite a lot about the Vales since eight thirty this morning." He glanced at the dining room, where the first course was being served. "Have you had dinner, Mr. Devon?"
"Not yet."
"Linds and I know a good steak house in Talbot. Morecambe's. Have you eaten there?"
"No."
"Please be our guest. I'd like to convince you I'm the best man in the state of Vermont to defend your brother. I'm assuming you don't have counsel yet."
"I just got here." Conor looked at Kurland, who was serious and well composed except for a habit of rotating the expansion-band watch on his wrist, as if gearing himself up for another round of smooth salesmanship. And at young Lindsay, who smiled gently and seemed to commiserate with Conor in his dilemma.
Even if he didn't hire Kurland, he thought, he might get some free advice as to what he should do, whom he should see about Rich's mental condition. Conor heaved himself up off the couch and went with them.
Morecambe's was a glorified tap room with rough-hewn paneling, no windows, and not even enough light to read a menu by. But there was no menu. You chose your own steak from a butcher's case, took baked or fried or wild rice trimmings, put your own salad together from the variety of crisp offerings on crushed ice at the back of the long room. They all drank whiskeys while waiting for their steaks.
