Текст книги "Chain of Fools "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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Richard Stevenson
CHAIN OF FOOLS
A Donald Strachey Mystery
St. Martin's Press New York
chain of fools Copyright © 1996 by Richard Stevenson All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews For information, address St Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N Y 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data
Stevenson, Richard
Chain of fools / by Richard Stevenson
p cm A Donald Strachey mystery " ISBN 0-312-16796-2 I Title PS3569 T4567C48 1996
813' 54—dc20 96-25586
CIP
First Stonewall Inn Edition November 1997
10 987654321
For Sydney and Zack
1
One's a good chain and one's a bad chain," Skeeter Mc-Caslin eerily intoned from his hospital bed. "One's a daisy chain and one's a chain of fools." His dark eyes were bright with fever, and he looked suspicious and terrified and cunning all at the same time.
Timothy Callahan and I glanced at each other over our gauze masks, then looked back at Skeeter.
"But when you called the other day," Timmy said, "you told me a friend's life was in danger—a woman at the newspaper in Edensburg. Why don't you tell Don and me about that, Skeeter? You were right to call. I'm really glad you did, because Don might be able to help."
Skeeter's jaw tightened under his stubble of black beard, the whiskers an indication not of fashion but of illness, and he scowled. "I just told you, didn't I? Now I am going to tell you one . . more . . time. One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools."
After a little pause, Timmy said, "Chain of fools?"
Skeeter did not rise up from his pillow—he was obviously far too sick and exhausted for that—but he cocked a bushy eyebrow and said, in a voice dripping acid, "Do I have to repeat myself a third time? One's a—"
"I'll be right back," Timmy said. He got up and walked out into the corridor.
I said to Skeeter, "Your friend who's in danger—is her name Aretha?" His eyes burned with contempt. I was a moron. I asked, "Is it Buchanan? As in Daisy Buchanan?"
"You're an even bigger idiot than your boyfriend is," Skeeter said.
He gave me a look indicating that I was as useful to him, and as appealing, as the uneaten dun-colored roast beef and bile-green string beans on the dinner plate at his bedside.
"Skeeter, I have a feeling you're not yourself tonight," I said. "Timmy always spoke well of you, and I hope we can get to know each other when you're feeling better. Then we can sort this thing out—whatever the situation is that led you to believe that your friend might be in need of a private investigator. Okay?"
Skeeter grinned dementedly. He said, "Did Timmy tell you about my birthmark?"
"Nope. Never did."
"Timothy sure did love that birthmark."
"Good."
Timmy came back into the room, trailing a nurse. She barged over to Skeeter, peered at the numbers on his IV-drip monitors, jiggled something, and said loudly, "Mr. McCaslin, how ya doin'?"
Skeeter replied, "One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain."
"Oh, is that so?"
"One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools."
"Uh-huh. Hmm." Now she was examining the label on one of the -drip bags. She said to Skeeter, "How long have you been on this?"
"Planet?"
"No, this prednisone."
"Forty-eight hours," Skeeter said.
"Oh, yeah?"
"That was before the admission into the union of Alaska and Hawaii. But I still stand up and salute when I'm not sick as a dog."
"Well, they might have to change this one med. I'll have to talk to the doctor about it. Who's your attending? Baptiste?"
"I'm just a simple forest ranger from Edensburg. I call him Baptist. Or Evangelical Lutheran."
"Uh-huh."
"One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. One's a daisy chain, and one's chain of fools."
"Well, you have a nice visit with your friends." The nurse turned and sped away, and Timmy sped after her.
Skeeter looked over at me balefully and waited.
I said, "Where's the birthmark?"
"Wouldn't you like to know. Wouldn't you just like to know."
"Timmy considers himself lucky to have hooked up with you, Skeeter. For most gay kids, high school is hell. I'm sure it was hard in a lot of ways for you too—not feeling as though you could be open about your relationship and all that. But at least you two knew exactly who you were and what you wanted, and you had each other. That's unusual."
He stared at me as if I had spoken to him in Gheg. After a moment, he said, "One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools."
"I got that, Skeeter. I just wish I had a clue as to what the hell you're talking about."
"You know what I'm talking about, Donald. You know damn well. Oh, ho ho."
Timmy returned. "Skeeter," he said, "you're on a steroid drug that's affecting your mind. Now that the Pneumocystis is under control, maybe they can change the medication. The nurse is going to check."
"It's your mind that's affected, not mine," Skeeter said. "You could cut my heart out, the way you did the last time, and plead temporarily asinine."
"I think maybe we should come back tomorrow," Timmy said, his face coloring. "And then you'll be in better shape to talk about whatever you called me for on Thursday. Would I be wasting my breath if I asked you one more time to explain to Don and me about the good and bad chains, and how they're connected to your friend whose life may be in danger?"
Skeeter said, "Boo hoo, what a waste."
"Gotcha. I guess we'll head out then."
"I'm glad I finally got to meet you, Skeeter," I said. "I know it means a lot to Timmy too to be reconnected with you after all these years."
"Still crazy," Skeeter said.
I asked, "When was the last time you two saw each other?"
Skeeter said, "September second, 1963, four-twenty a.m. I still have his taste in my mouth."
Timmy blushed some more and said, "You've got a mighty long memory, Skeeter, or poor habits of oral hygiene. Anyway, you and I can do some catching up when you're feeling better. Which will be soon, I hope. I want to hear all about your life in the wilderness. I think
that's great—all you ever wanted to be, when we were kids, was a forest ranger, and that's what you went ahead and did. I'm impressed. Maybe even a little envious."
"Now you're impressed. Then you were undressed."
Timmy said, "Skeeter, your tact mechanism is on the blink, so I think Don and I will be going now. There's no point in our hanging around any longer tonight. We'll come back this time tomorrow and with any luck you'll be better equipped to explain why you think your friend's situation is dangerous. I hope you can get a good night's rest. Hospitals certainly aren't restful places. In that sense, they're terrible places to have to go when you're ill."
"They killed Eric and now they're trying to kill Janet," Skeeter said in a matter-of-fact way.
Timmy had given Skeeter's arm an affectionate squeeze and was preparing for his exit, but now he stared down at the man he called his "old high-school friend." On those rare occasions when he mentioned Skeeter McCaslin at all to me, Timmy had never used the term "lover." He'd once said it was too suggestive and sophisticated a word for a couple of sex-crazed adolescents in early-Beatles-era Poughkeepsie. Yet their two-year affair, which ended only when they graduated from high school, was carried on with high degrees of both stealth and emotional heat. If "lovers" was too grown-up a term for what Timmy and Skeeter had been to each other, "friend," or even "sexual friend," was clearly insufficient. "Boyfriend" wasn't right either—this was more than a decade before same-sex couples began showing up at the proms together. On this point, the language 'was as inadequate as the times had been.
Timmy let go of Skeeter and gazed down at him uneasily. The man in the bed was gaga—temporarily, we'd been assured—and assigning meaning to his utterances, or inviting additional ones, seemed risky.
Boldly, I said, "Who was Eric, Skeeter? And who is Janet—the one they are trying to kill?"
"And •while you're at it," Timmy added, "who are 'they'?"
"One's a good chain," Skeeter said, "and one's a bad chain. One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools."
Timmy said, "Skeeter, I guess you can't help it, but saying that over and over is not useful. I think we're going to have to wait until your
mind clears. Listen, old friend, we'll be back tomorrow. So you just hang in there and—"
"Eric was my lover," Skeeter said, "for eleven years. Eric Osborne, the famous eco-freak and prize-winning nature writer. When Eric won a Polk, he even knew who Polk was. To me, Polk was a pig in a poke. I said, 'Who's Polk?' and Eric knew. Eric knew puh-lenty. Eric knew me, ho ho—read me like a book, wrote me in a book. And I knew Eric like a mountain knows a polecat. Eric was the second great love of my life. But they killed him, on May the fifteenth, and now I'm going to die alone."
As he said this, a big, blue-eyed, long-faced woman with freckles and a sun-bleached mess of straw-colored hair strode into the room. From behind her surgical mask, she said, "Eldon, you are neither alone nor dying, just having a little psychotic episode. But you'll get over it. Hi," she said, offering Timmy, then me, a latexed hand. "I'm Janet Osborne, a friend of Eldon's."
"One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. ..."
"I'm Timothy Callahan, an old high-school friend of Eldon's."
"One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools. . . ."
"Don Strachey—I'm with Timothy. Are you one of the Edensburg Herald Osbornes?"
"I edit the paper. Are you the private investigator? Eldon told me his high-school main squeeze was now the partner of a private detective and he was planning on contacting you."
"I was Eldon's only squeeze in high school," Timmy said, "unless you count Carol Jean Nugent in ninth grade. Right, Skeeter?"
The man in the bed said, "Guilty. Guilty as charged."
"Eldon, I never knew you had such an adorable nickname when you were a kid. Was Eric aware that you were once a Skeeter?"
"The wearin' o' the green," Skeeter said.
"And you work for the legislature, is that right, Timothy?"
"For Assemblyman Lipshutz."
"Eldon said he'd once read a piece in Cityscape about the two of you—a well-known gay-couple-about-Albany—and when he decided that I might be in need of a private eye, he remembered you two. Though my suspicion is, he mostly wanted to satisfy his curiosity about what had become of his first great love."
"Timmy popped my cherry real good," Skeeter said. "I cannot tell a lie."
"I didn't even know Skeeter was in the area," Timmy said. "We hadn't been in touch at all since high school."
"Instead of staying with me, he gave himself to the Mother Church," Skeeter said. "What he gave me was the Poughkeepsie royal kiss-off."
"By that, Skeeter means I went off to Georgetown, where I majored in political science."
Skeeter said, "Now it's thirty-two years later and he's still the ail-American Irish hunk with milk-white skin and hair as soft as eiderdown, and me, I'm a dead duck."
"Eldon, you're a long way from dead," Janet said, "and the nurse says you're making steady progress."
"Quack, quack."
I said, "Eldon called Timmy before he got sick last week and told him he had a friend in Edensburg whose life was in danger. Apparently he meant you, Janet."
She gave a quick nod. "I suppose we should talk about that. We could go somewhere—or it could wait until tomorrow."
"They killed Eric, and now they're trying to kill Janet," Skeeter said. "One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools."
"Eric was my brother," Janet said. "He was a writer. Eldon and Eric were together for eleven years. Eric died in May. He was murdered. We were all devastated, but no one more than Eldon. To lose someone you love that way—it's just the absolute hellish worst." Janet Osborne was a youthful and robust-looking woman, but when she spoke of her brother's murder something in her face altered, and it occurred to me that she was not as young as I had first thought.
"Don and I both read Eric's books," Timmy said. "He was a wonderful writer. His love of the Adirondacks was so infectious that every time either of us read Eric, we'd plan a camping trip the first chance we got to try to see the wilderness the way he saw it. Once, after we read Eric's article in Harper's about his winter week on Berry Pond, we decided to spend a February weekend there ourselves. Although I have to admit we spent the second night at the Edensburg Travelodge."
"Couple of nellies," Skeeter said. "Timmy, do tell me: Is it still your habit to take three showers a day?"
"No, Skeeter, I make do with two now that I'm middle-aged and am called upon to perspire less often than when I was younger."
"Living with me has turned Timothy into a big slob," I said.
"I was sure your skin would be all dried out from washing your natural body oils down the drain three times a day for forty-some years, but your skin's not hideous at all. I don't know why. You're almost totally bald in the back though."
"Skeeter, I would have expected that as a forest ranger you'd have progressed to concerns less fleeting than those of mere human vanity."
"Oh, so now you're into enemas. I could have predicted this."
"What?"
Janet said, "Eldon, I think we'd better leave you now, and you can get a good night's rest—or a bad night's rest if that's the best anybody can manage around here. I'll come back tomorrow night and see how you're doing, and some of the forest service gang is planning to come by too. The nurse thinks you ought to be okay, especially if they can get you off this prednisone. You're probably clinically insane, which as far as I know is not what the doctor ordered."
"Call me Olivia."
Timmy said, "So long, Olivia."
"I hated you for leaving me," Skeeter suddenly spat out. "I was so mad at you I could have killed you." He started to breathe fast and hard. This was bad, I was sure, for a man recovering from a lung disease.
Looking stricken, Timmy said, "Oh."
Skeeter gasped out, "I went up in the woods past Peterson's Bluff and screamed my head off. I pulled trees out by the roots. I cursed your name, Timmy. I despised you. I crushed your skull with rocks. When I got to forestry school, I cried half the night before I fell asleep. I lied to the other guys and told them my mother had died."
"Oh. Oh, Skeeter. God."
"I loved you and hated your guts for years, Timmy." Timmy looked away. "I never really got completely over you until I met Eric," Skeeter said, glaring at Timmy.
Timmy flushed scarlet and said, "All those years. Jeez, Skeeter. I'm sorry."
"Then and only then were you kaput, Callahan."
"Oh."
"And then it was Eric and I—in for however long it lasted, what with our HIV. Till ridiculous death do us part."
"I'm so sorry."
"I'm the one that got sick first."
"That was awful."
"But at least I still had Eric along for the idiotic ride—until they killed him."
"Who are 'they'?" Timmy said, seizing on this turn in the conversation toward behavior that was even more reprehensible in Skeeter's mind than Timmy's had been.
"That's what your boyfriend has to find out. Who they are. I can tell you this: They're in it with the bad chain."
I said, "The chain of fools?"
"Yes, yes, yes, yes."
"The business about the chains is still unclear to us, Skeeter. We might have to come back tomorrow to get that part of the story straight."
Janet said, "I can explain what Eldon is talking about. The Herald is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the family is being forced to sell out. One newspaper chain that's interested has made a low bid, but the advantage is that it would maintain the paper's high standards and progressive editorial page, especially on environmental matters. That's the good chain. The high bidder is a big chain run by a reactionary thug who would fire most of the staff, gut the paper editorially, and use it primarily as a vehicle for chain-store advertising. I guess that's the chain of fools. Some members of my family want to sell to the thug and walk away with a bundle. Others want to sell to the good chain, break even, and keep the Osbornes' good name. One vote for the good chain was lost when Eric "was murdered. Someone may be trying to kill me—this is Eldon's theory—and eliminate my vote for selling out to the good chain With my vote lost, the reactionary thug would win." A sheen of perspiration was visible now across Janet's forehead and around her pale eyes.
"Do you have any reason to believe that Eldon's theory is correct?" I asked
"I'm not sure," Janet said. "I hate to think that any of the Osbornes would murder someone else in the family for money, or for anything else, or would ever murder anybody for any reason. But, I also know
that—let's just say for now that what Skeeter is suggesting might be possible " She gave a wan little shrug, as if to apologize for any homicidal tendencies in the Osborne family.
Skeeter said, "They sent the Jetsons to attack her. Betski-wetski. Honk honk, she almost got conked."
Timmy looked blankly at Skeeter, but Janet seemed to know what this meant. "Last week somebody might have tried to run me over with a Jet Ski," she said. "On the lake where I live. That's what Skeeter is referring to in his overly colorful way."
"Might have?" Timmy asked.
"There are a certain number of hotdoggers on the lake, so it could have been carelessness," Janet said, looking grim. "Or it could have been deliberate. We just don't know "
"One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. It was almost a tall doll with a fractured skull," Skeeter said, and rolled his eyes up inside his head and made his tongue loll idiotically. That's when we all agreed it was time for Skeeter to get some rest.
2
She was determined to stay calm—I'll bet she's a real rock—but you could see that Janet Osborne is frightened," Timmy said later, as we walked back toward our house on Crow Street.
A big red moon with an enormous blotch shaped like Sri Lanka hung in the eastern sky, and the August night air was as thick as black tea. As we headed down Madison, the Victorian-revival apartment buildings on our side of the street could have been overlooking an Indonesian waterfront instead of Washington Park. It was tropical Albany at its most intoxicating until we got to the donut shop at the corner of Lark, where the light was cold fluorescent and the smell was of powdered sugar and jelly filling and the illusion was lost.
"Families are supposed to be safe havens from the violence and irrationality of the larger world," Timmy said. "To suspect somebody in your own family of killing somebody else in the family must feel like having your soul poisoned."
I said, "Homicide is not one of the family values Pat Robertson would encourage, as a rule, but it does crop up from time to time. And that's not counting, of course, all the subtler intrafamily assassinations that don't involve bloodshed and therefore aren't against the law."
"Operating a family business must be particularly tricky," Timmy said, "since business decisions have to be fairly hardheaded and Freudian undercurrents can only muck things up. And then when the business starts to fail, all kinds of old family furies must be let loose."
"According to the literature—so I've heard—family businesses tend to fall apart, if they're going to, when the third generation takes over," I said. "The first generation founds the business, the second builds and
secures it, and then the third-generation fuckups arrive and run the whole thing into the ground. The Osbornes are not unique in this, although there's something especially ugly about a newspaper of the Herald's history and caliber being wrecked as if it were just a thoughtlessly situated Chinese takeout."
"How did the Herald end up near bankruptcy, anyway? Edensburg's economy should be solid—tourism and the canoe factory are both holding up—and there's no other paper up there to compete in any serious way."
We turned off busy Madison Avenue and onto cozy Crow Street, with its brick sidewalks and historically beplaqued town houses. "I'll find out more about the Herald when I meet with Janet tomorrow," I said. "But I know newspapers everywhere in the country are having a tough go of it with newsprint costs way up and ad revenues being drained off by junk mail, shoppers' guides, cable TV, and whatever else is hurtling down the information superhighway toward us."
"The trouble with the information superhighway," Timmy said, "is that it's a brave new highway mostly carrying the same tired information, and worse. And it's destroying institutions like the Herald, where the quality of the information is still considered more important than the extent of the profits that are piled up delivering it." A thoughtful pause. "I guess I'm beginning to sound like a fogy. Don, am I becoming a fogy?"
"You were always a fogy."
"I forgot."
"Gramps Callahan."
"Gramps when not Grumps."
"Except, Timothy, your fogyism is appropriate in this case—as it is, I've noticed as I get older, on any number of occasions. Commercial enterprises with social consciences are getting swallowed up by soulless conglomerates with superior technology, big bucks, and a habit of tossing workers by the thousands out on the street. And the Edens-burg Herald, if it's grabbed, will represent a classic example of the trend. It stinks. If somebody in or outside the Osborne family is using murder to hurry the process along, I'd like to interfere if I can."
"Good."
"You know, it was interesting tonight to be reminded of how un-fogylike you were in your last two years of high school, Timothy. Your
information superhighway sure was humming back then."
"Well, that's about what it amounted to—neurons and glands working overtime."
"Neurons and glands and hydraulics."
"Those too."
"Poor Skeeter. For him it wasn't just teenage lust, it's now apparent."
"No."
We crossed Hudson Avenue, where the streetlight was aswarm with tiny insects. "Weren't you a little rattled by Skeeter's display tonight?" I asked. "It is not in your nature to intentionally bring emotional pain to another human being. I guess you didn't know—back in '63—just how smitten Skeeter was with you."
Looking straight ahead, Timmy said, "I knew."
We walked on, but I could feel him tense up beside me. A little farther down the block, he said, "The trouble was, see ... I couldn't face it."
"No."
"Being a faggot, I mean."
"I knew 'what you meant."
"Skeeter wanted us to keep on being—sexually infatuated was what it was for me. For him it was more. I was only in love with sex, but Skeeter was in love with me. He wanted to write, and phone, and visit me in D.C., and for me to visit him in Plattsburg and for us to spend our vacations together. I broke it off partly because I had mixed feelings about Skeeter as a person—he was always just a little too emotionally erratic for me. But mainly I broke off the relationship—it's as clear to me now as it was back then—because Skeeter was a homosexual, and if I stayed with him that would mean I was a homosexual too."
"Yuck. Arrgh."
"So I broke it off."
"You never saw him again?"
"I didn't accept his phone calls in the dorm, I didn't answer his letters, I didn't go home for Thanksgiving, and at Christmas I faked the flu and never left the house. He phoned twice a day for three weeks, and I told Mom I was too sick to come to the phone. Actually, I was in my room writing a paper on Teilhard de Chardin and reading City
of Night, which was camouflaged inside the cover of A Stone for Danny Fisher. Talk about confused."
"Your parents never caught on?"
"I'm sure they were baffled, and worried. They could see that I wasn't all that sick. I'm sure I was consuming an awful lot of baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise for a flu victim."
"And then there was Skeeter baying outside your window. It must have been hellish for him. For both of you."
"It was."
We came to the house and Timmy, his key out of his pocket and aimed like a derringer for the previous half block, led the way in.
"I imagined," Timmy said, "that after Christmas, when Skeeter finally stopped calling and writing, he'd found somebody else. At least that's what I made myself think." We headed for the kitchen, where I got a beer from the fridge, and Timmy said, "I guess I'd better have one too." We pried open the back door, abloat in the wet heat, and sat out on the moonlit deck with the petunias.
I said, "If you imagined Skeeter with someone else, weren't you jealous?"
"Absolutely. It was excruciating. But I was only getting what I deserved, I believed. And I was right. In fact, after what I'd done to Skeeter I deserved even worse."
"Nah."
"I did."
"You only did what a lot of people do at the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood: You leave your childhood sweetheart because you're both about to become grown-ups, and your lives and circumstances are going to be different. It's hard and it's cruel, but it's a necessary part of life."
"No," Timmy said, "the main reason I cut Skeeter off was I was afraid of not being normal. Mainly, not being thought of us normal."
"Yes, but that's all you did in the name of normality—end a high-school infatuation. You didn't—you weren't like Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist. You didn't commit murder for the fascists in order to fit in."
Timmy raised his bottle. "Well, let's drink to that. No, at least I didn't do that—assassinate a liberal for the fascists. At least, as far as I can recall I didn't."
We drank.
I said, "And however much you may have rejected abnormality back in the sixties, Timothy, you certainly made up for it in the seventies. As so many of us did." I gestured salaciously.
Timmy didn't seem to notice this. Gazing at the red moon, he was deep in thought. Finally, he said, "I can never undo what I did to Skeeter back then. It's obvious that the pain I caused him was so deep and terrible that it will be a part of him until he dies. And it's going to make his dying too young even worse than it would have been, which is mean and stupid enough."
"Timmy, you're being far too hard on yourself."
"But you know," he said, giving me a weird, feverish look I wasn't sure I had ever seen on him before, "maybe I can make it up to Skeeter in a small way. I can do this by helping with the thing that's most important to him now: by finding out who killed Eric, and by keeping Janet safe if she's in any actual danger. And by saving the Herald from the bad chain, the chain of fools."
He had lit a citronella candle to keep the bugs away, and its light flickered across his fine-featured Irish mug and in his suddenly brighter eyes. He seemed almost possessed by this sudden notion, which to me felt vaguely but surely like trouble.
I said, "Hey, Timothy. I'm the detective, and you're the pragmatic but idealistically motivated social engineer. Remember?"
This didn't seem to register. "I'll hire you," he said, "and I'll take time off from work—the Assembly is in the August doldrums now—and I'll help you out. Anyway, Don, you're—'between projects' is the euphemism, I believe. It's something we can do together, and it's something I can do for Skeeter. One last thing."
I thought this over, but not for long. "Timothy, I don't know. Your impulse is worthy. It's your decent heart asserting itself. But as for our working together, that sounds risky. Often you don't like the way I operate. My methods have sometimes left you despondent. Outraged, even. The whole thing could become . . . awkward."
His face glowed in the strange moonlight. He said, "I'll take that chance. I certainly can't think of anybody I'd rather hire than you, Don."
"No, Timmy, you can't think of anybody you'd rather share a roll of dental floss with than me. Detective-client relationships are different. Anyway, Skeeter might want to hire me, or Janet Osborne might.
Either would make a lot more sense. This whole business of Eric's unsolved murder being connected to any possible attempts on Janet's life is highly speculative. Janet wasn't all that sure that the so-called Jet Ski attack that Skeeter was blithering about was even an attack on her at all. I'll talk to Janet tomorrow—I've agreed to do that with no charge or obligation to anybody. But how about if we just take this thing one step at a time?"
"Okay," he said, "but if it's all right with you, I think that tomorrow I'll just come along for the ride. We can decide later on who'll pay."
This was unprecedented This was not good I said, "Well, I think you just won't come along for the ride tomorrow Timmy, even if you were my client, I don't generally take clients along while I'm working on an investigation They tend to get in the way, and you would not want to do that. Look, how about if I don't come to work with you and you don't come to work with me' How's that?"
"I've helped you out plenty of times," he said levelly, "and on cases that were just as murky in the beginning as this one is. I've done my share of cleaning up the murk. I've never—as you put it—gotten in the way. Admit it. Have PI have only been helpful—sometimes extremely helpful—and occasionally in dangerous and ugly situations."
"This is different," I said, knowing exactly where this was heading. "You are emotionally involved."
"Well, of course, I'm emotionally involved," he said, throwing up the hand that wasn't tightly clutching a bottle of beer. "Skeeter is going to die, for God's sake' And since I hurt Skeeter very badly at the beginning of his adult life, I think I owe it to him to make things easier, if I can, at the end of his life. I'm in a position to help Skeeter and ease my own guilty conscience over the hell I put him through thirty-two years ago. And damn it, Don, I want to do it!"
I thought, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter.
3
The Edensburg Herald had been founded in 1895, when young Daniel Lincoln Osborne, a fire-in-the-moral-soul Eugene Debs progressive, borrowed $11,000 from Hiram Young, his father-in-law, a foundry owner esteemed for his fair-labor practices, and merged two weekly newspapers of no particular distinction into the town's first daily. The new paper soon made a name for itself—not a good one, according to local mossback Republicans. From the beginning, the Herald railed against the depredations of the robber barons, supported labor and trustbusters, and was passionate in its editorials favoring the preservation of the Adirondacks' water, air, wildlife, and rugged natural beauty. It was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of six state and two national parks, one containing what is now Lake Osborne, New York, and another Osborne Falls