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“When my father came into New York to pick me up,” I said, “somebody must have recognized him.”

“Sure. For twenty-two years, who cared? Before I went in, I told Will to get out of New York and stay out, not to ever come back as long as he lived. He knew I meant it, and he did it. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t have to know why.”

“He didn’t know I was yours?”

Kapp shook his head, grinning. “He knew you weren’t his. That’s all he knew.”

I emptied my glass. All I could see was Dad looking at me, that last second before he vomited blood. “He didn’t know why they were killing him. Jesus, that’s sad. Oh, good Christ, that’s sad.” When I waved at the waiter, my arm was stiff. I said to Kapp, “He never once let me know. I was his son. Mom was dead, he brought me up by himself. Bill and me, we were the same, exactly the same.”

I couldn’t talk. I waited, and when the waiter brought the glass I emptied it and told him I wanted another.

Kapp said, “They knew I was getting out soon. They saw Will Kelly in town. They got panicky. They had to get rid of Kelly, and they had to get rid of his sons. They couldn’t take the chance on the symbol still meaning something.” He nodded. “And it still means something,” he said.

I lit a cigarette, gave it to him, lit another for myself. The waiter came with more drinks. Kapp had the cigarette in his right hand. He picked up the glass with his left hand, then grunted and dropped it, and it fell over on the table. His face looked suddenly thinner, bonier. He said, “Good God, I forgot my hand.”

“Let’s see it.”

It was gray. A swollen oval on the back was black. I said, “The hell with this. We’ve got to find you a doctor.”

“I didn’t feel a thing,” he said. “Not until I picked that glass up.”

The waiter was there, looking irritated, mopping up with a red-and-white-checked cloth. I paid him, and we left, and got the name of a doctor from the desk clerk. And directions, just down the street.

We went there, and the doctor looked him over. He cut the hand, for drainage, and bandaged it up, and said it would be a couple weeks before Kapp could really use it. In the meantime, keep changing the bandage every day. And stop back in three or four days. Then he checked the left knee, because Kapp was still limping. He said that was nothing to worry about, just bruised. Kapp told him he’d walked into a chair. We both had liquor on our breath, so the doctor didn’t question us.

Then we went back to the hotel and up to the room. Bill was lying on his bed. His forehead was bloody around a small hole, and he had the Luger in his right hand.

Eighteen

There were three cops I talked to. One was a local plainclothesman, a comic relief clown who chewed cut plug. One was from the county District Attorney’s office, a ferret with delusions of grandeur. And the third was State CID, an ice-gray man with no tear ducts.

I told them all about Bill’s having lost his wife two months ago in an automobile accident, and his father being killed only a month before that, and how he’d been very depressed ever since, and he’d had the Luger for years but I hadn’t known he’d brought it along on this trip with him. And we were just traveling around the state, basically to try to forget our recent losses. But Bill had just got steadily more and more depressed, and now he’d killed himself.

The local cop swallowed it whole, with tobacco juice. The DA’s man would have liked a hotter story, but he didn’t want the work of digging for it. And the CID man didn’t believe a word of it, but he didn’t care. He was just there to memorize my face.

So it was called suicide. To me, it looked like a lousy job of staging. Aside from the fact that Bill wouldn’t have killed himself for anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.

The local cop had called a local undertaker, who might have been his brother-in-law. He looked at me and rubbed his hands together. We both knew that he was going to cheat me down to the skin, and we both knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about