Chain of Fools (donald strachey mystery) Page 2

  “One’s a good chain, and one’s a bad chain. It was almost a tall doll with a fractured skull,” Skeeter said, and rolled his eyes up inside his head and made his tongue loll idiotically. That’s when we all agreed it was time for Skeeter to get some rest.

  2

  She was determined to stay calm-I’ll bet she’s a real rock-but you could see that Janet Osborne is frightened,” Timmy said later, as we walked back toward our house on Crow Street.

  A big red moon with an enormous blotch shaped like Sri Lanka hung in the eastern sky, and the August night air was as thick as black tea. As we headed down Madison, the Victorian-revival apartment buildings on our side of the street could have been overlooking an Indonesian waterfront instead of Washington Park. It was tropical Albany at its most intoxicating until we got to the donut shop at the corner of Lark, where the light was cold fluorescent and the smell was of powdered sugar and jelly filling and the illusion was lost.

  “Families are supposed to be safe havens from the violence and irrationality of the larger world,” Timmy said. “To suspect somebody in your own family of killing somebody else in the family must feel like having your soul poisoned.”

  I said, “Homicide is not one of the family values Pat Robertson would encourage, as a rule, but it does crop up from time to time. And that’s not counting, of course, all the subtler intrafamily assassinations that don’t involve bloodshed and therefore aren’t against the law.”

  “Operating a family business must be particularly tricky,” Timmy said, “since business decisions have to be fairly hardheaded and Freudian undercurrents can only muck things up. And then when the business starts to fail, all kinds of old family furies must be let loose.”

  “According to the literature-so I’ve heard-family businesses tend to fall apart, if they’re going to, when the third generation takes over,” I said. “The first generation founds the business, the second builds and secures it, and then the third-generation fuckups arrive and run the whole thing into the ground. The Osbornes are not unique in this, although there’s something especially ugly about a newspaper of the Herald’s history and caliber being wrecked as if it were just a thoughtlessly situated Chinese takeout.”

  “How did the Herald end up near bankruptcy, anyway? Edensburg’s economy should be solid-tourism and the canoe factory are both holding up-and there’s no other paper up there to compete in any serious way.”

  We turned off busy Madison Avenue and onto cozy Crow Street, with its brick sidewalks and historically beplaqued town houses. “I’ll find out more about the Herald when I meet with Janet tomorrow,” I said. “But I know newspapers everywhere in the country are having a tough go of it with newsprint costs way up and ad revenues being drained off by junk mail, shoppers’ guides, cable TV, and whatever else is hurtling down the information superhighway toward us.”

  “The trouble with the information superhighway,” Timmy said, “is that it’s a brave new highway mostly carrying the same tired information, and worse. And it’s destroying institutions like the Herald, where the quality of the information is still considered more important than the extent of the profits that are piled up delivering it.” A thoughtful pause. “I guess I’m beginning to sound like a fogy. Don, am I becoming a fogy?”

  “You were always a fogy.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Gramps Callahan.”

  “Gramps when not Grumps.”

  “Except, Timothy, your fogyism is appropriate in this case-as it is, I’ve noticed as I get older, on any number of occasions. Commercial enterprises with social consciences are getting swallowed up by soulless conglomerates with superior technology, big bucks, and a habit of tossing workers by the thousands out on the street. And the Edensburg Herald, if it’s grabbed, will represent a classic example of the trend. It stinks. If somebody in or outside the Osborne family is using murder to hurry the process along, I’d like to interfere if I can.”

  “Good.”

  “You know, it was interesting tonight to be reminded of how unfogylike you were in your last two years of high school, Timothy. Your information superhighway sure was humming back then.”

  “Well, that’s about what it amounted to-neurons and glands working overtime.”

  “Neurons and glands and hydraulics.”

  “Those too.”

  “Poor Skeeter. For him it wasn’t just teenage lust, it’s now apparent.”

  “No.”

  We crossed Hudson Avenue, where the streetlight was aswarm with tiny insects. “Weren’t you a little rattled by Skeeter’s display tonight?” I asked. “It is not in your nature to intentionally bring emotional pain to another human being. I guess you didn’t know-back in ‘63-just how smitten Skeeter was with you.”

  Looking straight ahead, Timmy said, “I knew.”

  We walked on, but I could feel him tense up beside me. A little farther down the block, he said, “The trouble was, see… I couldn’t face it.”

  “No.”

  “Being a faggot, I mean.”

  “I knew ‘what you meant.”

  “Skeeter wanted us to keep on being-sexually infatuated was what it was for me. For him it was more. I was only in love with sex, but Skeeter was in love with me. He wanted to write, and phone, and visit me in D.C., and for me to visit him in Plattsburg and for us to spend our vacations together. I broke it off partly because I had mixed feelings about Skeeter as a person-he was always just a little too emotionally erratic for me. But mainly I broke off the relationship-it’s as clear to me now as it was back then-because Skeeter was a homosexual, and if I stayed with him that would mean I was a homosexual too.”

  “Yuck. Arrgh.”

  “So I broke it off.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  “I didn’t accept his phone calls in the dorm, I didn’t answer his letters, I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, and at Christmas I faked the flu and never left the house. He phoned twice a day for three weeks, and I told Mom I was too sick to come to the phone. Actually, I was in my room writing a paper on Teilhard de Chardin and reading City of Night, which was camouflaged inside the cover of A Stone for Danny Fisher. Talk about confused.”

  “Your parents never caught on?”

  “I’m sure they were baffled, and worried. They could see that I wasn’t all that sick. I’m sure I was consuming an awful lot of baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise for a flu victim.”

  “And then there was Skeeter baying outside your window. It must have been hellish for him. For both of you.”

  “It was.”

  We came to the house and Timmy, his key out of his pocket and aimed like a derringer for the previous half block, led the way in.

  “I imagined,” Timmy said, “that after Christmas, when Skeeter finally stopped calling and writing, he’d found somebody else. At least that’s what I made myself think.” We headed for the kitchen, where I got a beer from the fridge, and Timmy said, “I guess I’d better have one too.” We pried open the back door, abloat in the wet heat, and sat out on the moonlit deck with the petunias.

  I said, “If you imagined Skeeter with someone else, weren’t you jealous?”

  “Absolutely. It was excruciating. But I was only getting what I deserved, I believed. And I was right. In fact, after what I’d done to Skeeter I deserved even worse.”

  “Nah.”

  “I did.”

  “You only did what a lot of people do at the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood: You leave your childhood sweetheart because you’re both about to become grownups, and your lives and circumstances are going to be different. It’s hard and it’s cruel, but it’s a necessary part of life.”

  “No,” Timmy said, “the main reason I cut Skeeter off was I was afraid of not being normal. Mainly, not being thought of us normal.”

  “Yes, but that’s all you did in the name of normality-end a high-school infatuation. You didn’t-you weren’t like Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist. You d
idn’t commit murder for the fascists in order to fit in.”

  Timmy raised his bottle. “Well, let’s drink to that. No, at least I didn’t do that-assassinate a liberal for the fascists. At least, as far as I can recall I didn’t.”

  We drank.

  I said, “And however much you may have rejected abnormality back in the sixties, Timothy, you certainly made up for it in the seventies. As so many of us did.” I gestured salaciously.

  Timmy didn’t seem to notice this. Gazing at the red moon, he was deep in thought. Finally, he said, “I can never undo what I did to Skeeter back then. It’s obvious that the pain I caused him was so deep and terrible that it will be a part of him until he dies. And it’s going to make his dying too young even worse than it would have been, which is mean and stupid enough.”

  “Timmy, you’re being far too hard on yourself.”

  “But you know,” he said, giving me a weird, feverish look I wasn’t sure I had ever seen on him before, “maybe I can make it up to Skeeter in a small way. I can do this by helping with the thing that’s most important to him now: by finding out who killed Eric, and by keeping Janet safe if she’s in any actual danger. And by saving the Herald from the bad chain, the chain of fools.”

  He had lit a citronella candle to keep the bugs away, and its light flickered across his fine-featured Irish mug and in his suddenly brighter eyes. He seemed almost possessed by this sudden notion, which to me felt vaguely but surely like trouble.

  I said, “Hey, Timothy. I’m the detective, and you’re the pragmatic but idealistically motivated social engineer. Remember?”

  This didn’t seem to register. “I’ll hire you,” he said, “and I’ll take time off from work-the Assembly is in the August doldrums now-and I’ll help you out. Anyway, Don, you’re-‘between projects’ is the euphemism, I believe. It’s something we can do together, and it’s something I can do for Skeeter. One last thing.”

  I thought this over, but not for long. “Timothy, I don’t know. Your impulse is worthy. It’s your decent heart asserting itself. But as for our working together, that sounds risky. Often you don’t like the way I operate. My methods have sometimes left you despondent. Outraged, even. The whole thing could become… awkward.”

  His face glowed in the strange moonlight. He said, “I’ll take that chance. I certainly can’t think of anybody I’d rather hire than you, Don.”

  “No, Timmy, you can’t think of anybody you’d rather share a roll of dental floss with than me. Detective-client relationships are different. Anyway, Skeeter might want to hire me, or Janet Osborne might.

  Either would make a lot more sense. This whole business of Eric’s unsolved murder being connected to any possible attempts on Janet’s life is highly speculative. Janet wasn’t all that sure that the so-called Jet Ski attack that Skeeter was blithering about was even an attack on her at all. I’ll talk to Janet tomorrow-I’ve agreed to do that with no charge or obligation to anybody. But how about if we just take this thing one step at a time?”

  “Okay,” he said, “but if it’s all right with you, I think that tomorrow I’ll just come along for the ride. We can decide later on who’ll pay.”

  This was unprecedented This was not good I said, “Well, I think you just won’t come along for the ride tomorrow Timmy, even if you were my client, I don’t generally take clients along while I’m working on an investigation They tend to get in the way, and you would not want to do that. Look, how about if I don’t come to work with you and you don’t come to work with me’ How’s that?”

  “I’ve helped you out plenty of times,” he said levelly, “and on cases that were just as murky in the beginning as this one is. I’ve done my share of cleaning up the murk. I’ve never-as you put it-gotten in the way. Admit it. Have PI have only been helpful-sometimes extremely helpful-and occasionally in dangerous and ugly situations.”

  “This is different,” I said, knowing exactly where this was heading. “You are emotionally involved.”

  “Well, of course, I’m emotionally involved,” he said, throwing up the hand that wasn’t tightly clutching a bottle of beer. “Skeeter is going to die, for God’s sake’ And since I hurt Skeeter very badly at the beginning of his adult life, I think I owe it to him to make things easier, if I can, at the end of his life. I’m in a position to help Skeeter and ease my own guilty conscience over the hell I put him through thirty-two years ago. And damn it, Don, I want to do it!”

  I thought, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter.

  3

  The Edensburg Herald had been founded in 1895, when young Daniel Lincoln Osborne, a fire-in-the-moral-soul Eugene Debs progressive, borrowed $11,000 from Hiram Young, his father-in-law, a foundry owner esteemed for his fair-labor practices, and merged two weekly newspapers of no particular distinction into the town’s first daily. The new paper soon made a name for itself-not a good one, according to local mossback Republicans. From the beginning, the Herald railed against the depredations of the robber barons, supported labor and trustbusters, and was passionate in its editorials favoring the preservation of the Adirondacks’ water, air, wildlife, and rugged natural beauty. It was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of six state and two national parks, one containing what is now Lake Osborne, New York, and another Osborne Falls

  Later, the Herald welcomed FDR’s New Deal, which the Eden County Republican Committee branded “the triumph of the Bolsheviks.” When Hiram Young was in his eighties, he was still shunned by Edensburg families prominent in banking, real estate, and canoe manufacturing who never forgave him for bankrolling his son-in-law’s renowned and apparently indestructible purveyor of-in the words of the president of the Eden County Savings Bank-“socialist hog offal”

  The paper won its first of three Pulitzers, just before old Dan’s retirement in 1945, for its editorials urging the formation of the United Nations. The second came during the Vietnam war, when Dan’s son and successor, William T. “Tom” Osborne, drove Lyndon Johnson to distraction with antiwar screeds so elegantly incisive that papers all over the country regularly reprinted them, and Frank Church and J William

  Fulbright read them aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The Herald’s third Pulitzer, ten years later, went to Eric Osborne for the “Letter from the Wilderness” reports that ceased only when he died the previous May, bludgeoned to death on one of the mountainsides he had so lustrously vivified for his readers.

  Eric’s was the most recent addition to a gallery of photographic portraits that half-filled the wall at the end of the Herald’s second-floor newsroom in an old Victorian block on Edensburg’s Main Street. Founder Dan Osborne was there, and his son Tom, and a series of managing and news editors, one of the earliest scowling out from under a green eyeshade, several of the later ones sporting polka-dot bow ties above their bulging oxford-cloth collars-the entire gallery comprising what I later heard some of the younger Herald reporters refer to as “the dead white males.”

  Janet Osborne was the Herald’s first female editor, selected by her father upon his retirement in 1985 because, he told her, “You’re the best man for the job.” No one within the family, and few outside it, doubted the wisdom of the choice. Among Janet’s siblings, only Eric had been as qualified as she was to put out the paper, and he hadn’t been interested. He’d have had to come in out of the wilderness too often.

  Eric’s and Janet’s brother Dan, namesake of the founder, had approximately the right politics for the editor’s job, but he was notoriously hotheaded and inept in his interpersonal relations and would have driven the entire news staff at the Herald up the wall or out the door in a matter of weeks. Nobody in the family wanted that, despite the tug of Dan’s name, pedigree, and gender. Nominally, Dan Osborne was “publisher” of the Herald, but a nonfamily member actually ran the business side of the paper, freeing Dan to organize on behalf of leftist third-party political candidates and lead sugar-harvest expeditions to Cuba.

  Dan’s early participation
in the Venceremos Brigades was a source of sour amusement with the two of Tom Osborne’s offspring who somehow turned out politically conservative. Chester, an Edensburg stockbroker, and June, who had devoted her years as head of the Eden County Museum board of directors to keeping twentieth-century art out of the museum and all but out of the county, regarded their siblings’and parents’ and grandparents’-unshakable principled liberalism as a family pathology. Some families produced a lot of harelips, others a lot of liberals

  Neither Chester nor June, however, had ever dared interfere with Herald editorial policy. For one thing, deference was due Osborne family tradition, however mushbrained Chester and June considered it. And anyway, the two weren’t about to tangle with Janet and Dan-both scrappers who could get rough-or their widowed mother, Ruth Osborne. Even as her health had begun to falter, Ruth was understood by family members to be fully capable of protecting the Herald’s progressivism with savvy, diligence and-on rare, awful occasions-cold fury. Once, at a family picnic, June’s husband, Dick Puderbaugh, chortled over a Herald editorial calling for Richard Nixon’s impeachment-this was early in Nixon’s first term-and Ruth tore into her son-in-law savagely, calling Nixon and Henry Kissinger war criminals who ought to be in United Nations-run prisons, and making a connection between the napalming of Asian babies and Dick Puderbaugh’s fuel-oil dealership. This was a linkage that even young Dan, then a leader in the SDS, thought might be going too far.

  Ruth’s role in Osborne family affairs had been complicated recently by early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, but only Janet knew about that. She did not expect her mother’s so far negligible mental impairment to figure in the family battle over whether to sell the Herald to the good chain or the bad chain-the daisy chain or the chain of fools. But Janet was concerned enough over her mother’s mental state that every day she stopped by the old Osborne family home on Maple Street after work en route to “the lake house,” the Osborne summer home that Janet now shared year-round with her lover, Dale Kotlowicz