5
WHEN ARGYLE HUNG up the telephone his hand was shaking. He stood by the desk for a moment, getting a grip on himself, then stepped across and turned up the stereo. The children out on the playground had just come out for their midmorning recess. The sound of them shouting and screaming and laughing gave him a headache, or worse, and he’d found that tapes of special-effects type noises—train sounds, ocean waves, thunderstorms—served to drown out their voices better than music did. And these days the sound of music was nearly as intolerable as the sound of children. Nothing was free. Everything had its price.
He realized that his phone was ringing, his personal line, and he turned the stereo volume down slightly and picked up the receiver, sitting down at his desk. “Robert Argyle,” he said. He listened a moment. It was George Nelson with news about Murray LeRoy—good news; LeRoy was dead.
“When?” Argyle asked. His momentary enthusiasm for LeRoy’s death started to wane as Nelson went into detail, and he found himself staring at his desktop, recalling the conversation he’d had a few moments ago. Probably he should have offered Flanagan more money, pushed all his chips into the center of the table. “What did the police say? Did they have any kind of explanation for it?”
“They found the metal parts of a Bic lighter in the alley and the presence of gas from the manhole that’s right there. One theory is that the lighter leaked butane gas into LeRoy’s pocket, and then when he lit his cigarette the gas followed his hand to his mouth and ignited. Apparently it happens more often than you’d guess. If he was wearing flammable clothes, he could have gone up like a torch. All of this is just conjecture, of course, since there aren’t any clothes left to examine except one of those damned white patent leather loafers that he wears, with the tassels. Everything else burned to ash. Even his shirt buttons vaporized. The heat was incredible.”
“And the fire investigators buy this? The butane lighter and all?”
“There was the manhole, too. Apparently gasses might have built up out there in the alley. A spark can set them off. They think it’s some kind of combination of this stuff, perhaps aggravated by chemicals like deodorant and cologne. I suggested kids—punks, skinheads, street gang, something like that—but they didn’t like the idea. The city doesn’t need that kind of talk. There’s also a good possibility that it was a suicide, that he doused himself with flammable liquids and lit himself on fire. There was no gas can, though, no more evidence of suicide than anything else.”
“And you were the one that told them who it was, who you thought it was?”
There was a pause, then Nelson said, “I didn’t think I had any choice, and it turns out I was right. It seems that a couple hours before dawn, LeRoy broke into Holy Spirit Church, up on Almond. He roughed up the old priest and smashed some windows. Apparently our man had a very busy morning, dragging those white shoes all over town. I’ve got it on good authority that the priest described them to the police. I’d swear that LeRoy wanted to be caught, or at least didn’t give a damn if he was recognized. There must be fifty people around town who’d know straight off the shoe was his. I couldn’t see any choice but to identify it myself.
“Anyway, what I said is that I was expecting him at the office, that we were supposed to head across the street to Moody’s for breakfast at six. I saw the flames through the curtains and ran out with a fire extinguisher, but couldn’t do any good. Every part of that was true, including my trying to put out the flames. Of course I didn’t know who it was then, but I didn’t say so.”
“Who was the investigating officer?”
“Tyler, from Accident Investigations.”
“And he’s satisfied?”
“There’s no reason he shouldn’t be. As I said, it’s the truth, lock, stock, and barrel. Oh, and by the way, somebody kicked apart the nativity scene in the Plaza early this morning, too. We know that was LeRoy, don’t we? That’ll be his footprints in the flowerbeds?”
Argyle wondered suddenly if the question was simply rhetorical, or whether it was full of implication. “Of course it was him, unless there’s something you’re holding back.”
“I’m not holding anything back,” Nelson said, and then paused again, letting his silences speak volumes. Argyle waited him out. “One way or another,” he continued, “I hinted around that LeRoy had been talking about destroying the creche, which is true again; half a dozen people heard him. You should have seen him last night, crying and swearing. His tears were pure gin. No wonder he burned like that; his cells were saturated with alcohol.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I’m a lawyer. I’m not in the business of believing in things. I simply wanted to make sure you understood the entire affair. As far as the police are concerned, the case is closed, and I can tell you that I’ll breathe a little easier now. But I think we ought to get together tonight anyway, just to make sure we’ve all got the same perspective on things.”
Argyle hung up the phone finally, moderately satisfied. It was certainly convenient to have a dead man to point the finger at, if a finger needed pointing. They could clean out LeRoy’s house at the first opportunity. Probably there was nothing there to implicate either of them anyway. There was no reason to think they’d have any trouble with the police. Nelson was thorough and convincing—utterly treacherous.
He listened to the noise on the stereo, thinking about how close he had come last night to destroying himself, and at very nearly the same moment that LeRoy had fallen over the edge! What horrors had been visited upon Murray LeRoy? What urges and fears had driven him into the darkness at last? A surge of disconnected terror swept through him, the knowledge that he was somehow being swept into the same uncharted seas into which LeRoy had sunk, beneath black tides of compulsion and desire….
He picked up the phone and called Flanagan again, but the line was busy now.