361 - Donald E. Westlake [32]
He didn’t faint. Bill bypassed Plattsburg. A few miles south he took a turnoff that promised cabins by the lake. Lake Champlain. Another sign said, “Closed after Labor Day.” It was after Labor Day.
There were white cabins with red trim, somewhat faded, fronted by a strip of blacktop. There was no one there, but previous poachers had left their rubber spoor on the blacktop.
Kapp didn’t want to get out of the car. Bill came around and pulled him out by the hair and shoved him down between the cabins. He favored the left leg. We stood him up against the white clapboard back wall of a cabin. Trees screened us from the lake. Bill looked at Kapp and then at me and told me, “Remember McArdle.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”
Kapp said, “McArdle?”
“Andrew McArdle,” I said. “I asked him some questions, but he had a bad heart and died before he could answer them. Bill was telling me to be more careful with you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
We stood and waited for him to think. He stood slanted against the wall holding his injured hand. The expensive suit looked bad. He was having trouble with the left leg, and the back of his left hand was swelling and turning gray. He had more lines on his face. He was tired and worried and futile. He was being brave when it didn’t matter, and he knew it didn’t matter, but he didn’t know how to stop.
He tried to talk, and he had to take time out to clear phlegm out of his throat and spit it carefully away from us. Then he said, “I can’t figure you two. Those other guys, I know who they were. I can guess, I mean. But not you two. Amateurs, asking the wrong questions...” He shook his head. “Where’d you get so mean?”
“What’s a right question?” I asked him.
He looked up through branches at the sky. “I was a free man again a little while,” he said.
I said, “Bill, if he doesn’t open his mouth right now I’m going to kill him and to hell with it. We’ll go back to the city and go by way of the little islands.”
Bill frowned. “I don’t like it, Ray,” he said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
I said, “Here, take this gun up to the car and reload it. Better give me the Luger for while you’re gone.”
All of a sudden, Kapp laughed. He laughed like a man who’s just heard a good joke at a clambake. We looked at him, and he pointed at Bill and cried, “You silly bastard, you’re Will Kelly! You’re Junior, you’re his son!”
We just looked at him. He pushed himself out from the wall and limped toward us, grinning. “Why the hell didn’t you say you were Will’s goddamn kid? I couldn’t place you, I couldn’t figure you anywhere at all.”
I said, “Stop. Hold up the reunion a second. There’s still the question.”
He looked at me, and his grin calmed down. “All right,” he said. This time, he acted like he was at the clambake and it was his turn to tell a joke and he had a whopper saved up. “I didn’t know Will’d been killed,” he said. “But I know why. It was because he was holding something for me. Until I got out of jail. He was supposed to hold it and stay out of the city until I was sprung. He was killed because he was holding it and because I was going to be getting out.”
“What was it he was holding?”
He nodded. “You.”
“What about me?”
“You look more like your mother than your father,” he said.
Then I got it. “You’re a lying son of a bitch,” I said.
“You look a lot more like her. I know. I see your father in the mirror every morning.”
I laughed at him. “You’re crazy, or you think we are. Or are you just wisecracking again?”
“It’s true,” he said.
Bill said, “What the hell’s going on?”
I said to Kapp, “He didn’t get it yet. When he does, he’ll take you apart. You better say fast you were lying.”
“I wasn’t lying.”
“It was the wrong ploy,” I insisted. “Bill has a big thing about honor.”
Kapp said, “We ought to sit down over a bottle of imported and talk. We’ve got a lot to fill in, the both of us.”
Bill said, “Goddamn it, for the last time, what’s going on?”
“Kapp says we’re half-brothers. We shared a mother, only Willard Kelly wasn’t my father.