361 by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page A

belly laughed, shaking him. “He never knew anything. A fool!”
    “But you do.”
    He started the old man routine again. I said, “Tell me who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town?”
    “Go away. I don’t know.”
    “Who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town?”
    “No. No!”
    I kept my voice low. “Tell me or I’ll kill you.”
    “I’m an old man—”
    “You’ll die. Here and now.”
    “Let me go. Let the past alone!”
    I bowed my head, covered my face with my hands. I plucked the glass oval out. I closed my left eye, and then I was blind. I kept the right lid open, but it was a strain with the eye out. It was warm in my palm.
    I lowered my hands in my lap. Still blind, I raised my face toward him. I smiled. “I can see your soul this way,” I said. “It’s black.”
    I heard a choking. I opened my eye and he was gaping, staring, choking, his face turning bluish red. I put the glass eye back in.
    Bill was already running up the path, shouting for the family.

Nine
    I had meant to frighten him. He was afraid of death, and I think he would have answered me. I had no idea how strongly it would affect him. I hadn’t meant him to die.
    We had to stay and wait for the doctor. I told them our father had once worked for McArdle, Lamarck & Krishman. I told them he had died recently, but I didn’t tell them how. I told them he had told us once to look up his old bosses, they could maybe help us get a start in life.
    They believed me. It was believable. Bill listened to me tell it, and then he knew it too. But he wasn’t meeting my glance. He thought I’d done it on purpose. I’d have to tell him, once we got away from here.
    While we waited, I talked with Karen Thorndike. She was the ash-blonde. She was the daughter of Arthur and the woman with the beautician’s smile, as I’d supposed. She was divorced from Jerry Thorndike. She said, “You don’t want to come to New York.”
    “Why not?”
    “There’s nothing here but people clawing each other. Everybody wants to get to the top of the heap, and it’s a heap of human beings. A big hill of kicking, struggling human beings, trying to crawl up one another and be at the top.”
    “You’re thinking of Jerry Thorndike,” I said. “You got burned. Not all the people in a city are like that.”
    “They are in New York.”
    Linda, the little girl, came over and started asking stupid questions. She was like her mother, interesting until she opened her mouth. I thought of taking my eye out for her, but not seriously.
    The doctor was big and hearty. People paid him to be like him. His name was Heatherton. He wanted to know what we’d been talking about when the old man had had his attack. I said the weather in New York.
    Nobody was really upset. He was eighty-two years old. They’d all been hanging around waiting anyway. After a while, I asked Dr. Heatherton if there was any reason for Bill and me to stay there any longer. He said no.
    As we went out the private road, a gray Cadillac hearse purred by us, going in.
    It wasn’t yet three. But it was Friday afternoon, so there was quite a bit of traffic headed toward the city, most of it in late-model cars.
    We rode in silence for a while, and then I lit a cigarette and handed it out to Bill and he said, “No, thanks,” without looking away from the road.
    I stuck the cigarette back between my lips and said, “Don’t be stupid. I didn’t want to kill him.”
    “You said you were going to.” He glowered grimly at the road. “You told him you would and you did. I don’t know you any more, the Air Force did something to you. Or Germany.”
    “Or being in the car with Dad.”
    “All right, maybe that. Whatever caused it, I don’t like it. You can have the money in the bank. I’ll need the car, I’m going back to Binghamton.”
    “You don’t care any more.”
    “I’ll stop off and talk to that state cop, Kirk.”
    “And