361 - Donald E. Westlake [61]
Cheever came over after me. I said, “Sit down here.”
Something in my face or voice tipped him off. He stopped, across the table from me, and looked at my face, warily. His hands were out in front of him, the fingers splayed wide apart. He said, “What is it? What’s the matter?”
I said, “Do you know who I am?”
“You were with Kapp. Up at Lake George. You were the one came up to the car.”
“But do you know my name?”
He shook his head.
I said, “Ray Kelly. Will Kelly’s son.”
He kept shaking his head. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know what you think, but you’re wrong.”
“Kill the Kellys,” I said. “That’s what I’m thinking. Somebody whispered that in Ed Ganolese’s ear. Kill the Kellys, kill them all. The old man and both sons and the daughter-in-law. The whole tribe, because Eddie Kapp is coming out of Dannemora, and we can’t be sure—”
He cried, “No! You got it all wrong! It wasn’t me!”
“Because we can’t be sure,” I finished, “which boy is Eddie Kapp’s son, and even if we get the right one, some other member of the family might stand in for him, and Ed you know how sentimental those old wops can get. Isn’t that right, Cheever? Somebody whispered that to Ed Ganolese, and then he pointed the finger.”
His head was shaking again, and he was backing away from me, away from the table. “Not me!” he was crying. “You got it all wrong, Kelly, you got to believe me! It wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that!”
“You set the whole thing in motion, Cheever,” I said. I picked up Smitty’s gun.
He turned and went running off into the woods, away from the road. In just a second, he was out of sight, and I could hear the sounds of his thrashing getting farther away.
I should have killed him. I could have. When he took his first running step, I had the revolver on him. There was one fraction of a second there when I was sighting down the top of the revolver barrel right into his left side, under his arm, his arm up in the running motion, and my brain told my finger to squeeze the trigger. And it didn’t.
I lowered my arm, and listened to him tumbling away through the woods, ripping his trouser legs, catching his shoelaces in the tough weeds, falling and scrabbling and running scared.
I couldn’t kill him. I told myself it was because I wasn’t sure of him, because there was still a chance it was somebody else who’d done the whispering in Ganolese’s ear. There were other reasons why he might have been the one picked to go up to Lake George.
It was true. But it wasn’t the reason. I hadn’t killed him because I couldn’t kill him.
He was gone. The woods were silent. Right doesn’t make might.
I went over and tossed the keys on the front seat of the car. I picked up the rifle and the revolver, and went across the road and into the woods on the other side, heading toward where the farm hideout should be.
I had to kill Ed Ganolese. I had to.
Twenty-Six
It was late afternoon, the sun was orange-red low in the sky behind me. It was evening dark there under the trees. I kept my direction by following the slant of the long red sunbeams.
I came to the dirt road first. I stepped out on it before I knew it was there, and then I pulled back into the trees again. I stood still and listened. Off to my right I could hear faint sounds of men talking. That would be the guards, down near the road. I turned left and moved slowly uphill through the trees, keeping close to the road.
The farmhouse was painted yellow. It was two stories high and sprawling. Three cars were parked in front of it, a black Cadillac and a tan-and-cream Chrysler and a green Buick. Four men sat on the stoop, talking together in monotones.
The house was shabby. Stretching away to the right, along a leveling of the ground, was what had once been cleared land. Behind and to the right of the main house was the barn.
Keeping to the woods, I circled to the left around the house. Once past it, the ground sloped more sharply uphill. I climbed