Killed in Fringe Time Page 20

  I picked it up there and explained how Frank Harlan had been a freelance writer, a successful one as such things go, but such things don’t actually go very far. He made a living, and that was about it.

  He’d gotten his idea for his book about the multimillionaire hermit, but everywhere the response was the same. No dice without an interview.

  So he’d gone after an interview. He went out to Montana, and like Richard Bentyne a few months before, had started looking over the mountains. Bentyne had found Bates by accident; Harlan counted on finding him.

  “Now he says he found Bates at the bottom of a rock-slide, practically dead from broken bones and exposure, and that he died before he could do much for him.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  I shrugged. “I think maybe I do. They’ve got him dead to rights on Bentyne, and he’s confessing his head off. Seemed kind of proud of himself, the way he’d played the part of mountain man, the way he’d found the recipe for flourless fried chicken on Bentyne’s home computer, the way he fired his pistol off into the woods to confuse the issue in advance, make it look like there was some kind of plot to get Bentyne. Other than his, of course.

  “So, if he confesses to all that, I don’t know why he would go all falsely virtuous over another one.”

  “Maybe they have capital punishment in Montana,” Roxanne suggested.

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Anyway, whether he caused it or found it, he had Bates dead. Then two things occur to him—nobody has seen Bates in thirty-five years, and Bates is the proprietor of a hundred and thirty million bucks.”

  I rapped knuckles against my temple. Mistake. It hurt. “Ooh,” I said. “You see, that’s where I went wrong. I kept thinking about the wrong money. I got so bedazzled about the forty-five million we’d agreed to pay Bentyne—”

  Roxanne made a noise. “Heck, I’ve got more than that.”

  I goggled at her. I’d known she was loaded, but I hadn’t known she was that loaded.

  “You do?”

  “I love you for not knowing that, Cobb.”

  Falzet harumphed forcefully. He obviously thought I was a schmuck not to know that.

  With difficulty, I forced my way back to the point. “As I was saying, I got so besotted with the obviously insignificant petty-change paltry sum of forty-five million dollars, that I totally ignored, on the seeming fringes of the case, a character who had three times that much.

  “That’s the stake Harlan was playing for. He’d decided to take Bates’s place. He was ten or fifteen years younger than the dead man, but there was a rough general resemblance, and with a beard and a little while of roughing it, who would expose him?

  “He had plenty of time, he thought, to perfect his imposture, to figure out how he was going to ease back down the mountain, back into society, and spend some of that lovely money. He was already laying some of the groundwork for that before he came to New York.

  “Apparently, he had read some of the reports that Bates’s staff had diligently prepared for him over the years and learned that everybody who’d known him at the company had retired and moved away, or had died. He was going to take a couple of years to practice Bates’s handwriting. Harlan wasn’t sure Bates had ever been fingerprinted, but he was going to cross that bridge when he came to it.”

  “Oh,” Roxanne said. “I’d forgotten about that. Had he?”

  “During World War II, it turns out. Sugar and mining for the government. Harlan said he didn’t figure it would make a lot of difference, since he didn’t intend to buy an NFL team or build an amusement park or anything. He just figured to come down off the mountain and live like a king on the income off the fortune. Remember, he’d already researched Bates for his book. He was ready to chance it.”

  “He must have been crazy,” Roxanne said.

  “All writers are crazy,” I told her.

  Falzet, whose features had been a puzzled scowl, said, “But why did he come to New York? Why did he attack ...” Then the dawn broke. His face opened into an “Ohhh.”

  Roxanne smiled at me and said, “By George, he’s got it.”

  That brought the scowl back, fast. Falzet didn’t enjoy being mocked in front of one of his underlings.

  “You’ve got it, Mr. Falzet. He’s sitting there in the cabin, eating his pancakes, made from L.L. Bean mail-order pancake flour, when he hears in the distance the whistle that tells him the mailman has just put something in the box on the stump. He goes down and gets it and finds a letter from Richard Bentyne, reminding him of the month they spent together, how impressed Bentyne was, and how delighted he is that Bates has decided to come to New York and be on the show.”

  “That must have bothered Harlan,” Falzet speculated.

  “It must have made him sick. He’d thought he was well on his way to being home free. Now he finds out that a national celebrity knows Clement Bates’s real face. And he’s the only one who does.

  “Now, he can do one of two things. He can just walk away from the money, go back to being Frank Harlan again; after all, Harlan is a freelance writer and a drifter, nobody keeps track of him. His return won’t attract any more notice than his disappearance did.

  “Or he can brazen it out, eliminate Bentyne (ad libbing it all the way, he didn’t know what he was going to find, after all), and then go back to the mountain and proceed with the original plan.

  “The one thing he knows he can’t do is sit tight and ignore the letter. Bentyne is liable to do anything. He might come back with a camera crew to see if the old guy is okay. He might do countless Clem jokes, send journalists back in the files, send photographers out to find him before he’s ready.

  “So Bentyne obligingly sends him, driven by me, to his own house, where Bates ferrets out the necessary secrets from the computer he’s not supposed to know how to use. Monday morning, he wanders the studio, slips out to buy the rat poison, unless he’s taken some the night before right from Bentyne’s house. He snitches some of the flypaper he’s sent the show in advance of his coming from the prop room to focus attention on the show’s staff later, and he poisons the chicken, all before Bentyne has a chance to see him, or denounce him if he has seen him.”

  I paused for breath.

  “Once again, he thought he was home free. But his whole safety rested on nobody doubting for a second that he was the real Clement Bates, the Man with No Motive.” I shrugged. “Eventually, I doubted him. After that it was easy enough to prove. He hadn’t had a chance to perfect Bates’s signature yet, let alone the handwriting of a document of several paragraphs.”

  Falzet took a deep breath and squared his shoulders, like a man about to face an unpleasant task.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Network should come out of this quite nicely. That, ah, rhino horn business hasn’t been in the paper today. Good job, Cobb.” He saw Roxanne beaming at my side and added, “Excellent.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I did a terrible job. Because the fact is, Harlan’s impersonation was engaging and colorful, but he made a lot of mistakes. Mostly to me, and I missed them all until the end.”

  “Like what?”

  I waved my hands. “Dozens of things. The first time he talked to me, and the last time he talked to me, he proved he was a liar about at least one part of Bates’s biography.”

  “What do you mean, Matt?” I hadn’t told Roxanne this part of it. Ashamed, I guess.

  “First time, driving up route 95 on the way to Connecticut, I said that if he looked out the window, he could see the Sound. I meant Long Island Sound, but the phrase ‘see the sound’ should have sounded like gibberish to him, to anybody but a New Yorker or somebody from Seattle—they’ve got Puget Sound out there. But the legend of Clement Bates said he made his fortune never going any further than Helena.

  “Then at the end, when I was pretending I’d take him to the airport, he made a crack about being stranded on the BQE. You and I know it stands for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but woul
d it mean anything to a legit Bates? Would he have it so comfortably in his brain he could toss it out in banter?”

  I made a face. It got more embarrassing the more I talked about it. There must have been dozens of things, if I’d only been paying attention. I remember now he knew who Sybil was.

  “But the big thing,” I said aloud, “the thing that marks me as a total, complete and irredeemable idjit, as Harlan would say, is the goddam pancakes.”

  “Pancakes?” Falzet echoed.

  “Yes, pancakes. Harlan spun out a nice little fiction for me about how he and Bentyne had supposedly spent their month together—something, by the way, we’ll never know, now—and he was always going on about how Bentyne had eaten piles and piles of those L.L. Bean pancakes.

  “Well, no, he didn’t. If he had, he wouldn’t have lived to make it back to New York. I found out from Bentyne, just before he died, that he had a gluten allergy. He could never have eaten the pancakes.

  “So I knew enough to expose the imposture right there, maybe even—probably even could have saved Bentyne’s life. But it didn’t register and Bentyne is dead.”

  Falzet harumphed again. “I know you have a big ego, Cobb. One has to to last in this business. But this is the first time I’ve ever suspected you of thinking you were God. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I looked at him. I had my suspicions—that he was being easy on me because he was just as glad Bentyne and his Big Contract were out of the way.

  “The fact remains,” I said, “if I’d been on the ball, this whole mess might have been avoided.”

  Now I took a deep breath. It was amazing how hard the next sentence was to get out. “Mr. Falzet, I want out of Special Projects.”

  Roxanne almost applauded. Undoubtedly, she had suspected I wouldn’t go through with it.

  But as soon as I said it, I knew it was the right thing to do. I was getting jaded and cynical, and on my way to possibly becoming a person I wouldn’t like very much.

  Falzet showed the salesmanship skills that had brought him to the Network presidency. He tried everything he could think of to talk me out of it.

  And he didn’t go away empty-handed. Somehow, he bamboozled me into making it an indefinite leave of absence rather than a straight resignation.

  Roxanne held my hand all the way down in the stainless-steel elevator and across the lobby and out onto Sixth Avenue (the real Clement Bates would have called it “Avenue of the Americas”).

  I had tears in my eyes as I left the building. Of course, that might have been because Falzet had clapped me on the bad shoulder before I left his office.

  When we got to the end of the block, I tried to look over my shoulder at the Tower of Babble, but Roxanne said, “Don’t look back, Cobb. There’s a whole great big world out here to look at.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I smiled and kissed her, and we went on, holding hands, home to walk the dog.

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