361 - Donald E. Westlake [63]
It was deserted. All the cars were gone. I walked down the dirt road to the asphalt two-laner and turned left. A woman in a station wagon with two young kids and a Doberman pinscher gave me a lift to Suffern. I got a bus there for New York. I went back to the hotel room and took a long hot shower and went to bed. I slept fourteen hours, without dreams, and woke up drugged, to find there was mail for me.
It was a letter from Uncle Henry, a thick envelope fat with papers. There was a note from him, telling me to be careful, telling me I should come home to Binghamton. There were documents to be signed, about Bill’s house and Bill’s car and Bill’s kid. And there was a clipping from the Binghamton Press.
In the note, Uncle Henry said about the clipping, “This ought to relieve your mind.” The clipping showed a photograph of a scared balding man in a dark suit, his elbow held by a sun-glassed policeman. The story with the photograph told how methodical police laboratory work had finally cracked the hit-run accident of August 29th, in which Mrs. Ann Kelly, mother of one, had been killed. The driver of the death car was an electrical appliance salesman from Scranton, named Drugay.
He had nothing to do with the Organization at all.
Twenty-Seven
Eddie Kapp lied to me. He lied to me.
The Organization didn’t kill my sister-in-law.
He lied to me. In some ways, in every way, in how many ways I didn’t know.
Why did he lie to me? So I would stay with him.
But if he wanted me to stay with him, then his lies should have been the truth. His lies made sense, or there was no sense in his wanting me to stay with him.
He said I was a symbol, around which his cronies would gather. Was that a lie? If so, it had no purpose. His cronies had gathered around him. Nick Rovito had tested me. No one had asked what I was doing there. So how could that have been a lie?
He said Ed Ganolese knew about the symbol, and was trying to destroy it. Was that a lie? But a tan-and-cream Chrysler had killed my father, and had tried to kill me. And the same tan-and-cream Chrysler had tried to kill Eddie Kapp. And the same tan-and-cream Chrysler had been parked at the farm where Ed Ganolese was hiding out. So how could that have been a lie?
Or was it only half a lie?
I was alive. I was alive.
The tan-and-cream Chrysler had pulled up beside us, thirty-eight miles from New York, and the man on the right-hand side had reached out his arm and shot my father. That was all.
They must have known my father was dead. They must have seen their bullets hit. And they had driven on.
They hadn’t stopped to be sure that I was dead. They hadn’t even fired a shot at me.
They hadn’t been trying to kill me. They had killed the man Ed Ganolese had pointed at. Will Kelly.
He was the symbol. The trusted lawyer, the right-hand man from the old days. The others might have objected that Eddie Kapp was too old, that he couldn’t handle the whole operation by himself, or that he might die very soon after they’d made their coup, and then there’d only be another power fight, and they wouldn’t want two fights like that so close together. So there was a second man, a younger man, the trusted lawyer, who knew the operation and who could handle its administration, a man they could all agree on to succeed Eddie Kapp. Will Kelly.
Without Will Kelly, Kapp couldn’t rally the others around him. So Ganolese had Kelly murdered.
And Eddie Kapp had given up. He’d written his sister, he’d planned his retirement. And then I came along.
He hadn’t been sure it would work. He’d had to talk and argue and reason and explain for a week on the telephone at Lake George, before the others would go along with it.
I could almost hear the way he’d put it: “Here’s my son, Ray Kelly. Will Kelly took care of him for me while I was out of circulation. Will trained him, gave him the background, explained the set-up to him. The boy’s young, but he knows what’s going on, and he learns fast. He’ll take over when I’m