Authors: Frank M. Robinson

Power, The (4 page)

BOOK: Power, The

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He turned back to the water. So restful, so peaceful …

“Hey, Mac, don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t go off!”

There was a moment of confusion and silent regret and then something sank out of his mind like water draining from a basin. He felt weak and collapsed to his knees on the pier, almost falling over the side. Two men were racing towards him, down the strip of concrete. Soldiers, from a couple of cars parked on the slight cliff overlooking the lake. Their dates were standing on the shore, the wet wind plastering their dresses against them.

The man in the belted raincoat was gone.

“What the hell’s wrong, fella? You weren’t going to go off, were you?”

His teeth were chattering and they had to help him to his feet.

“Tell us where you live, buddy, and we’ll take you home. Life can’t be that bad. A good night’s sleep …”

“Not home,” he mumbled. “Some all-night restaurant where they’ve got a big crowd … don’t want to be alone.”

They helped him back towards the shore. He was so damned weak, he thought. So damned out of it. And so miserably frightened.

Something had toyed with him, like a very superior cat toying with a very stupid mouse. He had been handled like a two-year-old. Somebody had pulled the strings and he had jerked like a marionette, doing what they wanted him to, thinking what they wanted him to think.

He was a strong man, physically and mentally, but he had been handled like putty. A moment more and he’d have committed suicide. A dive into the lake and that would have been it.

Exit Professor Tanner. Exit the curious Professor Tanner who was in charge of a research project for the Navy and who had uncovered something that he shouldn’t have. Exit Professor Tanner who was in a position to learn too much.

It started to rain harder, the water coming down in huge drops that splashed on the pier and made small explosions in the lake and wet his hair until it was plastered over his forehead like tape.

The soldiers had thrown his friend off, he thought. They could probably have been handled but they were unexpected and apparently it took time to gain control of a man’s mind. So he had been saved. But at least it settled the questions that Marge had brought up earlier in the evening. Their friend was a menace and apparently his talents were limited. He had only one. One simple, terrible gift.

He could make people do what he wanted them to.

Tanner shivered and felt horribly sick. The night still reeked with murder and somewhere in the city a monster was loose.

THE
soldiers took him to an all-night restaurant, had a cup of coffee with him, and left. After they had gone, he retrieved the Sunday papers that somebody had left behind and read everything including the want ads. Then he ordered more coffee and battled grimly with his nerves, looking up apprehensively every time somebody came in. When the morning finally came, he went to a Catholic church and sat through every Mass, hearing nothing of what was said but absorbing the comforting presence of the people in the pews. After lunch he went to a movie and saw a complete show. Twice.

People gave him a feeling of security, he was afraid to be without them. And he dreaded the evening when the streets would be empty and he would have to go home alone. He could go to the movies again, he thought—maybe take in an all-night feature. But the crowd would thin out at midnight and the interior of a deserted movie house would be just as bad as the lonely streets.

He finally went back up north to a druggist he knew and talked the man out of a small box of sleeping pills. Perhaps the danger was not in going to sleep but in staying awake … .

He roamed the crowded streets until six and then, without giving it any conscious thought, walked over to a little spaghetti house that was open Sunday night and which the bachelor faculty members had made their own particular hangout. He still hadn’t called Olson. He hadn’t gotten his courage up to that point.

He didn’t frighten easy, he thought, but this time he was scared to the point where he was close to being physically sick. No longer to be his own master, to feel that he was being
used
, that somebody had—in effect—put him on as casually as they would put on a glove … .

He spotted Eddy DeFalco alone in one of the booths and immediately tried to shrink back out of sight. DeFalco was too good a bet, too logical a choice for whatever had stalked him the night before.

“Hey, Bill, let’s be sociable—come on over!”

The restaurant was fairly crowded and he had a feeling that safety lay in numbers. He walked over woodenly and sat down.

DeFalco started to butter a thick slice of Italian bread. “You changing your diet? You’ve never had spaghetti on Sunday night before.”

I’m not good at acting,
Tanner thought.
I wonder if my suspicion shows. Have to be casual.

“I’m not having it now, either. Just coffee.”

DeFalco’s eyes narrowed. “You look white as a sheet, Bill. Feeling okay?”

No, I don’t Eddy. And maybe you know why … . “
I guess I’m a little jumpy.”

DeFalco looked sympathetic. “Everybody’s upset. Nobody knows for sure yet whether it’s coincidence or exactly what it is.”

He had a curious feeling of disorientation, as if he and DeFalco were talking about two different things. “I wish to God that I had never gone to that meeting yesterday,” he said carefully.

“Who doesn’t? I’m not too happy I was there myself.”

He couldn’t help talking about it, even to DeFalco who might know all the answers. It was like reminding himself over and over that he wasn’t going to use a certain word and then having the pressure build up until he had to. And Eddy might say something about it that would give him a clue … .

“Ed, how do you feel towards him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you dislike him, do you hate him?”

“You know damned well I’ll feel towards him exactly the way he wants me to.” DeFalco carefully wound up a forkful of spaghetti. “If I have my own way, I suppose I’ll dislike him. In fact, I might even hate his guts.”

“Why?”

“How well do you know me?”

Edward Marconi DeFalco, Tanner thought. Thick, black hair, high cheekbones, and full, sensuous lips. A beach-boy tan and physical build, just beginning to flesh out the way most athletes did later in life. The crooner type in light gray slacks and charcoal sport coat. A lot of men disliked him on sight and so did those women who considered him too “pretty” to be entirely masculine and then made the mistake of giving him a chance to prove it wasn’t so.

“Nobody ever really knows anybody else, Ed.”

“Then I’ll tell you something. Everything I am, I’ve had to work for.”

“Everybody …”

DeFalco held up his hand. “I don’t mean it that way. By what I am, I mean personality and I know how tough it is even to define the word. A person’s mannerisms, the way he acts, the little expressions he gets on his face—the things that go to make up the
you
that people remember. Like two kids selling popcorn in a ball park. One will make a mint and the other won’t be able to move half a dozen bags. What’s the difference? The personality.”

He pushed the plate of spaghetti away and dabbed at his face with a napkin. “I manufactured my own personality. I mean it. I made a study of what people liked in other people and tried to develop those traits myself. Hell, I even used to stand in front of a mirror and practice my winning ways. And if that makes me a hypocrite without a sincere bone in my body, I’ll admit it. But I only did consciously what every kid does unconsciously.

“And then I met a man who
was
a personality. He was the most alive person I ever met—there was more life in his little finger than in my whole body.” He hesitated. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I was running after little girls when I was nine years old. But like I say, I used to pal around with this friend of mine and you know what happened one day? I wasn’t Eddy DeFalco any more. I was this other person down to the last little mannerism, down to the way he used to accent his words. His personality had run right over mine and I was a carbon copy clear down to my toenails.”

He studiously stirred some sugar into his coffee. His voice was low. “As soon as I realized it, I hated him. But you see the same thing every day. Movie stars, athletes. People worship them, people copy them. People
want
to be an extension of somebody else’s personality. Now just imagine what the world would be like with your superman running around.”

Tanner sat there and felt the fear damming up within himself again. To a lesser extent it was exactly how he had felt on the pier. Run over, flattened, an extension of somebody else’s personality. DeFalco had done an excellent job of describing it.

DeFalco drained his coffee and made a face. “People would only come in one model then. God knows I don’t think too much of the human race sometimes but I would be willing to kill a man to avoid that.”

Tanner studied him carefully. “Would you be willing to kill him if I told you who it was?”

DeFalco stared at him and Tanner felt his teeth want to chatter; he gripped the table to keep his hands from shaking. The intense dark eyes and the sullen, brooding face.

And behind it … ?

“You know, I suppose.”

“I think John Olson knows. I think that’s why Olson was scared to death yesterday morning.”

DeFalco’s face showed nothing. “So all we have to do is ask John, is that what you’re driving at?”

“That’s right. That’s all we have to do.”

“You haven’t run into Marge or Petey or Karl or any of the others today, have you?”

“I haven’t been around.”

“Well, you won’t be able to ask John Olson about it. Not tonight or tomorrow or any time.”

He suspected what was coming. “Why not?”

DeFalco’s voice was flat.

“Because John died at three o’clock this morning.”

HE
checked in at the neighborhood YMCA early Sunday night, when there were still people on the streets.

The night clerk was a little too prim and uncooperative. “I don’t know, sir. We don’t ordinarily rent rooms to people without baggage.”

“It’s only for one night. I … haven’t any other place to stay.”

The clerk’s eyebrows arched slightly and Tanner guessed what the man was thinking. He could try to bribe him, he thought, but it would be expensive and the clerk impressed him as the type who would scream for the police.

“My wife,” he said, looking sheepish. “We had an argument and you know how it is. Locked out and I don’t want to call the cops and let the whole neighborhood know. By morning it’ll probably blow over but right now …”

The clerk studied him a moment longer, then relented. He passed over a card for Tanner to sign and took a key off the rack behind him.

“It’s on the sixth floor. Bathroom down the hall and there’s a telephone by the stairway.”

He took the elevator up and padded down the deserted hallway to his room. He went in, locked the door and jammed a chair in front of it. Then he switched off the light and stood to one side of the window, staring down at the street below. A few couples drifting by on the sidewalk, two or three customers in the delicatessen on the corner. But nobody in the shadows across the street, watching. Nobody in a parked automobile looking up at his window.

He opened the box of sleeping tablets and juggled one in his hand, debating whether or not he should take it. He was dead tired but he had so much on his mind that he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it. Then it occurred to him that once asleep he might be easy prey for the questing mind that had almost driven him off the pier.

But nobody knew he was staying at the Y, did they?

It’s a gamble,
he thought. They could check his apartment and once they discovered he wasn’t there, it wouldn’t take too much trouble to track him down. But on the other hand he had already been one whole night without sleep and he was riding the rim of nervous exhaustion. He couldn’t last it out another evening.

He took the pill.

When he awoke in the morning it was with a splitting headache and a confused recollection of a nightmare about the lake.

But the important thing was he was still alive.

He was jittery, he didn’t want to go back to the campus. But there were classes to be taught and a salary to earn and in broad daylight his courage was several notches higher. And he didn’t want to give in to the fear that he felt.

There were the same gray, gothic buildings and the same tired ivy crawling up them but somehow the campus was different. It wasn’t hard to put his finger on it. The difference was in the students. Little knots of quietly gossiping collegians fell silent and stared at him with a bright-eyed curiosity as he walked past. A few feet away the whispers started up again and he knew they were rehashing every time he had said something to or about John Olson.

Whether he liked it or not, he was going to wear Olson around his neck like an albatross. Olson had been on his committee and Olson had been about the same age, so it would naturally be assumed that he had known Olson fairly well.

And that was one of the rubs. He had known Olson hardly at all.

Petey was sitting at her desk in his shoe-box office on the third floor, staring stonily out the window. Her hands were folded in her lap and her face looked as if it had been hewn from granite. Her hair had been pulled back into an even tighter bun than usual and she was wearing a black dress with a high, starched collar and long sleeves. The only touch of color was in the two pink, plastic combs in her hair, and that just made the rest of her seem more forbidding.

Petey in mourning, Tanner thought, looking ten years older than she actually was.

“You didn’t have to come down, Petey.”

“What else could I have done?” Her voice was mechanical and precise, without inflection. “There was nothing I could do at home or over at the Van Zandts’. The police told me that. So I came up here.”

He wondered what she was actually seeing, staring out the window. Not the scenery, he was sure of that.

“I wish I could think of something clever and sympathetic, Petey. I guess all I can say is that I’m sorry.”

“Everybody’s sorry,” she said slowly. “It’s too bad that people don’t feel sorrier for each other when they’re alive.”

Tanner felt uncomfortable. “I didn’t know John very well.”

“Nobody did.”

“How did it happen? Do the police have any leads?”

She turned away from the window. “Leads?”

“Leads on who killed your brother,” he said, watching her face carefully.

The look of granite crumbled at the edges. “Who said anything about John being killed?”

He felt like he was in one of those conversations where you talk with somebody for ten minutes and then discover that each of you is talking about something else. But it shouldn’t have been like that this time, he thought. They should have been talking about the same thing.

About who had murdered John Olson.

“Tell me about it, Petey.”

She wet her lips. “I don’t know too much about it. Susan Van Zandt found him—the body—at seven in the morning. He had set the alarm so he could go to Mass and it went off and rang and kept on ringing. When nobody turned it off, Susan went up and knocked on the door. There wasn’t any answer so she used her key and went on in.”

While she was talking, Petey tightened her fingers around a crumpled wad of handkerchief, twisting the cloth until Tanner thought she would tear it. Her fingers looked thin and hard and scrawny.

“John had been sitting at his desk, writing a letter. He never finished it. He was slumped in his chair, half lying on the desk. Later on, the police said he had been dead for four hours, that he had died at three in the morning.”

“Stop it, Petey. I’m sorry I asked you.”

“The detective said there had been no struggle,” she continued with a horrible, dry-eyed composure. “John hadn’t been shot or knifed or blackjacked or strangled, he had just …”

“Petey, do you have any friends who might be home today?”

The starched face nodded silently.

“Then take the day off and go and see them. Come back whenever you feel up to it. Next week, maybe two weeks …”

After she had left, he went to the window and stared out, trying to regain his sense of proportion. There was the green grass three stories below, the ivy that trailed up the broken brick to frame his one window, and the small, industrious spider that had cast its web in the upper left-hand corner. Two flies buzzed futilely just outside the pane: the first signs of summer. In a nearby tree, a squirrel chittered angrily at him and on the lawn below, a student stretched out to doze and forget the worlds of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

There was nobody watching the building, nobody at all.

He brewed himself a cup of scorching hot, black coffee, then went to class and lectured to a suddenly wide-awake audience that was far more interested in the death of John Olson than in anthropology. He bluntly parried questions about it, dismissed the class, and went to lunch.

Early in the afternoon he dropped in on Susan Van Zandt.

The house that John Olson had died in was an old-fashioned, white clapboard affair that had been built around the turn of the century. It was a landmark the university had acquired in a will and promptly turned into a faculty home. It was set far back on a huge corner lot. Two oak trees stood sentry duty near the front walk while a small row of shrubs ringed the sides of the house. The shrubs were a tired, speckled green, dusted with small flakes of white paint that had chalked and run off the clapboards during the rainy season.

The interior of the house looked incomplete. A wall had been knocked out between the living and the dining rooms to make one room that was much too large for the furniture it contained. Worn oak flooring showed at the edges of a large, floral-patterned rug that hadn’t been quite big enough. It barely crept under the edges of a sagging sofa by the window and lapped just over the edge of the brick apron of a fireplace that had been painted white in an attempt to make it look modernistic. A black-oak tea table sprawled in front of the sofa, half hidden beneath dog-eared magazines and a square, glass ash tray that had been emptied but not washed so a fine crust of gray ash still clung to the bottom.

A desk stood by the fourth wall, under guard of a straight-backed, wooden chair with a hand-hooked woolen seat cushion of roses against a background of blue. Next to the desk, along the wall, was a radiator with a tin cover, green paint peeling in spots. A small coffee tin of stagnant water stood on top of it.

A lived-in, rumpled room that somehow reminded Tanner of Susan Van Zandt herself.

She had let him in, smiled a dutiful smile, and relaxed gratefully back on the couch. She still had her bathrobe on and Tanner knew there would be dust on the mantel, dishes in the sink, and an icebox full of slowly souring leftovers. Her thick, brown hair wasn’t brushed and her eyes had the faintest suggestion of circles beneath them. She had been slim and attractive at one time, he thought, but after marriage she had slipped easily into an early middle age and had let motherhood coarsen her. She hadn’t regretted either one.

“I don’t think John ever roomed anyplace else,” she said nervously. “Central Housing sent him over here as soon as he showed up on campus. I think he always liked it here.” She waved her hand around the room. “It’s comfortable and then he had his own key and could come and go as he pleased.”

“Did he ever go out much?” Tanner asked. “Did he ever have any friends that he went out drinking with, anything like that?”

“No, he never had many friends.”

He lit his pipe and toyed with the match a moment before letting it fall into the tray. “The night he died. Had he had any visitors earlier that evening? Anybody who might have stayed behind for a good part of the night?”

“No, I don’t recall any. He went out for a walk and when he came in he told Harold and myself that he was tired, that he was going to do some reading and write a letter or two.”

“Sue.” He hesitated a moment, wondering how he should phrase it. “Do you know if anybody on campus hated him enough to kill him?”

The heavy-lidded eyes flew open. “Oh, no. He wasn’t killed. The police said there were no signs of a struggle or a fight. He had been writing a letter when it … happened.”

“Can I see the room?”

She pulled her faded bathrobe tighter around her stomach and led the way to the second floor. Olson’s room was a door down from the bathroom. She worked a key in the lock. “I don’t know why I keep it locked up like this but the police asked me not to touch anything and I guess this is the best way.” She was suddenly doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you in.”

“Don’t worry, Sue, I won’t disturb anything.”

She opened the door and he walked in. The windows were closed and the room smelled a little musty. Sunlight slanted through faded curtains, highlighting a miniature of the downstairs rug and a small, blue throw rug by the side of the bed. The bed was neatly made, the pink, tufted chenille spread smooth and unwrinkled.

“Did you make up the bed?”

“No, I guess he just didn’t sleep in it.”

“About what time did he get in?”

“About an hour after you called. Midnight, I guess. Van and I were watching TV”

John Olson had come in at midnight and died at three, Tanner reasoned. For three hours he had sat in his room—doing what? And then he had put on his bathrobe and sat down to write a letter. To whom? And what about?

One thing was almost certain, however. He could eliminate Van. It was hardly likely that Olson would be living in the same house if Van …

Or was it? Van Zandt had been watching Olson like an eagle in the seminar room. Waiting for Olson to say something? To give him away?

He glanced at his watch and breathed a little easier. Van Zandt had classes all afternoon; he wouldn’t be around.

“Is the letter still here, Sue?”

“No, the police lieutenant has it. I … never got a look at it.”

He glanced around the room again. A small, oak bureau with a dust-soiled dresser scarf on it. A desk by one side of the window, a half-open closet door showing a few hangers with a drab gray suit, a gray topcoat, and a rack of small-figured, dullties.

There was a blue blanket tacked on the wall over the desk. In the middle of it was a large gold felt “B,” with “Basketball” embroidered on it in small blue script.

It didn’t fit.

“I never knew John went in for sports. He never seemed like the type.”

“I don’t think he was, either. He never talked about them and never seemed to have any interest in them.”

BOOK: Power, The

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