Killing Mr. Griffin

  He reached them just as the waitress was distributing the last of the drinks.

  “I was wondering where you were,” she said with a smile. “How’s my best customer today? Hamburger and fries as usual?”

  “No,” Jeff said. “Nothing for me.”

  “Not even a soda?”

  “I said I don’t want anything.”

  Betsy slid over to make room for him, and Jeff wedged himself in beside her. His face was without its usual ruddy coloring, and his mouth was set strangely.

  The others regarded him in silence until Maria had moved out of earshot. Then Mark asked, “What’s happened?”

  “I heard it on the car radio,” Jeff said. “They’ve found it.”

  “Then all our worry over where to move it was for nothing,” Betsy moaned. “What did they say, Jeff ? Was there anything about Dave and me being seen parking it?”

  “They didn’t find the car,” Jeff said hoarsely. “It’s the body. They’ve found Griffin.”

  “That’s impossible,” Mark said. “It’s some kind of trick. Nobody knows that place but us. There’s no way they could have found him.”

  “They said they did. His wife’s identified him. They said his wallet was missing.”

  “I knew it,” Susan whispered. “There’s no way we could have gotten away with it.”

  “They’re guessing about the wallet. It stands to reason, nobody’d dump a guy without taking his wallet.” Mark’s full attention was on Jeff. “Did they say where they found him? Did they mention Dave’s Windbreaker?”

  “No. It was real brief, just a news flash. They said the wallet was gone and his Stanford ring was missing from his finger.”

  “Well, that proves it’s a trick. We didn’t take any ring. They’re throwing the whole thing out to see if they can get a reaction. It’s a scare thing.”

  “Do you still want to move the car?” Betsy asked.

  “The sooner the better. Jeff will take you to the lot, and you follow him back to his place. We’re stashing the Chevy in your garage for a while, Jeff.” Mark was all business.

  “I don’t want it at my place,” Jeff objected. “That thing’s hot.”

  “There’s no place else. Keep the garage door shut and give it a fast paint job.” Mark turned to David. “You ride shotgun with Betsy.”

  “I can’t,” David said. “I’ve got to get Sue home and get back to my own place. I told my mom I’d be back by five.”

  “What a life you lead. It’s like punching a time clock.” Mark grimaced. “Okay, I’ll ride shotgun. First I’m going to the men’s room and cut up Griffin’s credit cards and flush them down the john. And I’m dumping the wallet in the garbage. And, so help me, Bets, if you get stopped for a ticket during this ride, you’ve had it.”

  “If you don’t think they’ve really found him, why are you getting rid of everything?” Susan asked in a thin voice.

  Mark did not appear to hear her. He got up and left the table.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Where are we going?” Susan asked. “This isn’t the way to my house.”

  “We’re going by my place first,” David told her. “If my mom’s back from the laundry, I’ll borrow her car and take you home.”

  “But why your place?” She was half-running to keep up with him.

  “There’s something I’ve got to get there.”

  “David, please, slow down. People are staring at us.” She caught hold of his arm, forcing him to slacken his pace, trying to get him to turn and look at her. “Please tell me what this is all about. You’re not—” The thought struck her suddenly, filling her with a mixture of terror and relief—“You’re not going to report it, are you?”

  “Report it? You mean, turn us all in?” Now he did look at her, his eyes wide and incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Kidding? About that? Do you really think I’d kid about anything now?” She tightened her grip on his arm. “We could drive down to the police station and—just tell them. We could explain how it all happened—how we never meant it—”

  “Don’t talk that way,” David said harshly. “Don’t even start thinking like that. It’s too late.”

  “Too late? Why?”

  “They’d never believe us. We’ve waited too long. Maybe you were right in the first place when you wanted to go to your dad. If we’d gone in right after it happened we might have been believed. But not now. My god, Sue, we buried him! We dug a hole and put him in the ground. Innocent people wouldn’t have done that, would they?”

  “We’re not innocent, but we’re not murderers either. If we confessed, it would be all over.”

  “It would be over all right, but not in the way you mean it.” His voice was flat and expressionless. “The one hope we’ve got is to keep our mouths shut and cover our tracks as completely as possible. You heard what Mark said about getting rid of the credit cards.”

  “Mark says it’s a trick—that they didn’t really find him.”

  “It isn’t a trick.”

  “Mark says—”

  “I don’t care what Mark says,” David said shortly. “It isn’t a trick. They’ve dug up Griffin and identified him. That part about the ring is right. It wasn’t on his finger.”

  “How do you know?” Susan asked.

  “Because I took it off.”

  “You—what?” She couldn’t believe she was hearing him correctly. “You took off his ring—and kept it?”

  David nodded.

  “How could you do such a thing? Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to know. You had to be thinking of something. Were you planning to sell it?” The moment she asked the question she longed to snatch it back again. The idea of David Ruggles stealing a ring from a dead man’s hand in order to sell it was inconceivable. Yet, was it more incredible than anything else? What other answer could there be? The whole thought was sickening. She pictured him kneeling on the earth, the thin, limp hand in his, pulling and twisting to get the ring off over the knuckle, and a thick, sour liquid rose in her throat and filled the back of her mouth.

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “I told you the truth, Sue,” David said miserably. “I just don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times. I just know that when I saw that ring on his hand, there was something about it that made me feel—” He faltered and left the sentence hanging incomplete.

  “Feel, how?” Susan pressed him.

  “As though—it was—mine,” David said haltingly. “It was as though it was something that belonged to me a long time ago, and I had lost it.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Susan said.

  “I know it doesn’t. I can’t explain it any more than that. I don’t understand it any better than you do. I took it, and that’s that. Now I’ve got to get rid of it.”

  “Why didn’t you say something back at the diner when Jeff told us about the announcement on the radio?” Susan asked. “Why did you sit back, when Mark said no one had taken the ring, so the broadcast had to be some sort of trick?”

  “I just didn’t want to have to get into it,” David said. “Mark was in one of his nasty moods, and I didn’t want to have to explain a lot of stuff I didn’t have answers for. I feel shitty enough for having done such a dumb thing. I don’t need Mark on my back too.”

  “We can’t keep secrets from Mark,” Susan said. “Mark has to know everything, or he won’t be able to tell us what to do.”

  “If Mark knew about the ring,” David said, “all he’d do would be to tell me to get rid of it fast. I’m going to do that anyway. That’s why we’re going to my house. I’ll get it, and on the way over to your place I’ll dump it down a sewer grating or something.”

  “Where is the ring right now?” Susan asked him.

  “In my bedroom,” David said, “in the top drawer of my bureau, in a little box where I keep spare change and stuff. That’s the house, over there, th
e brown one on the corner. I’ll have the ring in about two minutes.”

  They covered the distance in silence. When they reached the house, David said, “The car’s not here. I guess my mom isn’t back yet. I’ll have to walk you home.”

  He turned the knob and shoved the door open, motioning Susan in ahead of him. She stepped hesitantly into the small, darkened room, glancing nervously about her.

  “Don’t you lock up when nobody’s here?”

  “My grandmother’s always here,” David said.

  He closed the door hard, and a voice from a back room immediately called, “Davy? Is that you?”

  “Sure, Gram. It’s me,” David called back. “I’ve brought home some company.”

  “I thought you would!” The shrill, old voice cracked with a note of excitement. “I told your mother just a while ago that you’d be doing that. Bring him back here!”

  “It’s not a him, it’s a her,” David said. He took Susan’s arm and steered her through the living room to the bedroom doorway. “This is Sue McConnell. Sue, this is my gram, Mrs. Ruggles.”

  “How do you do,” Susan said politely to the gray-haired woman in the blue flowered robe.

  Mrs. Ruggles stared back at her, blankly.

  “Who’s she?” she asked David.

  “I told you, Gram, she’s Sue McConnell. She’s a friend from school.”

  “That’s the ‘company’?” The woman’s pale blue eyes clouded with disappointment.

  “That’s right,” David said. “You two visit a minute while I get something I left in my room. Then I’m walking Sue home.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Susan started to say, but David had already left her. There was nothing to do but to move on into the room and stand there awkwardly, trying to smile down at the woman in the chair by the window, though Mrs. Ruggles had now shifted her gaze to the empty doorway.

  “There’s nobody else?”

  “No,” Susan said apologetically. “There’s just me.” Then, as silence grew, she attempted to fill the gap by adding, “We were with a bunch of other people this afternoon, but they didn’t come back here with us.”

  With those words she seemed to reclaim the old woman’s attention. The pale eyes focused sharply on Susan’s face.

  “Did you meet Davy’s daddy?”

  “No,” Susan said, bewildered. “From things David has said, I thought his parents were separated.”

  “They are, but his daddy’s come back,” Mrs. Ruggles said. “That’s who I thought you were when he said he’d brought ‘company.’ I knew he wouldn’t bring him when she was here, but with her gone to the laundry and all, it seemed the right time.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Susan said. “David hasn’t told me anything about his father being in town.”

  “He is, he is. I’ve got the proof of it.”

  There was the sound of footsteps and David appeared abruptly in the doorway. His face was pale and worried.

  “Gram,” he said, “has anybody been in my room today?”

  “Your mother changed the sheets in there. You know it’s Saturday.”

  “Besides that, was anyone in there? I can’t find something I had in my bureau.”

  “Things get lost sometimes,” Mrs. Ruggles said. “Especially little things. They can fall down cracks.”

  “There aren’t any cracks in my bureau drawer, and how did you know what size it was?” He regarded her with suspicion. “Gram, have you been into my coin box? Tell me the truth now.”

  “Now, why would I go there?” the old woman asked innocently.

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Why would you?” He came over and stood beside her chair. “Look, Gram, things don’t just disappear into thin air. I had a ring in that box. What happened to it?”

  “Perhaps your daddy came and got it?” Mrs. Ruggles suggested.

  “My father? What do you mean by that?”

  “Now, don’t you play games with me, Davy Ruggles,” his grandmother said. “I know my own boy’s college ring when I see it. All the money we spent sending him to that big college in California, I ought to know the ring. I even know the inscription. ‘Die Luft der Freiheit Weht,’ it says. He used to read it out loud in German and then translate it because he liked it so much. It means ‘the winds of freedom blow.’”

  “Then it was you who got into my things,” David accused her.

  “I was just going to borrow a couple of quarters to get me a candy bar. You know your mother, she never leaves a single penny anywhere, and a person does get hungry sometimes for a little something sweet.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” David said, “I want the ring. What have you done with it?”

  “I didn’t say I took it.”

  “Gram, you did!” David put his hand on the blue flowered shoulder. “Look, I’ll get you a dozen candy bars if you want them, just give the ring back to me. You know you wouldn’t like it if I got into your things and took something.”

  “It wasn’t yours, Davy,” Mrs. Ruggles said. “It was your daddy’s. Your daddy was wearing that ring the day he left here. The only way you could have it is if he’s come back again and given it to you. You’ve been with your daddy. You know where he is. Why are you keeping it a secret?”

  “I swear, Gram, that’s not my father’s ring,” David said. “I haven’t seen my dad since I was a little kid. You’ve got things all mixed up.”

  “I’m an old woman, Davy, and I want to see my boy before I die.”

  “Then I hope you will, but I can’t bring him to you. I didn’t get that ring from my father.”

  “Then where did you get it?” Irma Ruggles asked him.

  “I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “On the sidewalk.”

  “If it’s just a found thing, why does it mean so much to you?” The old woman turned to Susan. “Where did Davy get the ring?”

  “He found it,” Susan said thinly. “Just like he said he did.”

  “You were with him?”

  “Yes. It was lying there on the pavement, and the sun hit it, and the stone sort of caught the light, and David picked it up and said—and said—‘Somebody must have dropped this.’” The words came stumbling forth, sounding so contrived to her own ears that she almost strangled on them.

  She was not surprised to see the look of disbelief on the wrinkled face.

  “There was no stone in the ring,” Irma Ruggles said with dignity. “There was a tree. The German words go all the way around the ring, and the tree is in the middle.”

  Silence settled heavily upon the room. Susan closed her eyes. When I open them, she told herself, this whole room will have vanished and this dreadful woman with it. Ten years will have gone by, and I will be grown and far away in my private cabin on the shore of a lake. I will look out through my fine window onto deep, calm green, with millions of tiny ripples shining and sparkling in the sunlight, and a breeze will come, clean and sweet across the water, smelling of pine trees. I will think back and ask myself, Where was I ten years ago? What was I doing? What was I feeling? And I won’t even remember.

  But when she opened her eyes once more it was all still there, the cramped room with the two narrow beds stripped of their sheets to reveal the thin, sagging mattresses, the portable television set sitting lifeless on its stand in the corner, the old lady glowering from the depths of her chair. Through the window behind her there was another window and another bedroom and another woman. The neighbor woman stared at Susan with undisguised interest and then glanced past her at the unmade beds and began to smile.

  “Come on, Sue,” David said in a low voice, “I’ll walk you home.”

  “But you haven’t gotten what we came for!”

  “That’s okay. I’ll get it later. Gram will change her mind.”

  No, she won’t, Susan thought with a sick sort of despair. She will keep that ring hidden away like a squirrel with a nut, day after day, week after week, while she waits f
or David to produce his father. And then one day she will realize that the father is not coming, and she will bring out the ring from under her pillow or out of a cold cream jar or wherever she has put it, and she’ll say to David’s mother, “Look what Davy says he found on the sidewalk? Though he didn’t really find it there, because this girl he brought home with him one day, who was supposed to have been with him when he discovered it, couldn’t describe what it looked like. Why did they lie to me about this? Where did he really get it?” And David’s mother will say—

  She could not force her mind any farther.

  “You don’t have to walk me,” she said to David. “It’s not far. I can go home by myself.”

  “I’d like to take you.”

  “No—please—I don’t want you to.” Susan turned quickly away from him. “I’m glad to have met you, Mrs. Ruggles.”

  Whirling on her heel, Susan rushed through the bedroom doorway and stumbled through the living room, bruising her shins against the edge of a coffee table that was lost in a shadow pocket by a plastic-covered sofa. She pushed past a chair and found the door to the outside. She pulled it open and burst through, and the soft, spring dusk came upon her in a gush of cool air and golden, slanted light.

  The car that David had driven the times he picked her up at the house was parked at the curb, and a tall woman with thick, dark hair was lifting a laundry basket from the backseat. Another time Susan would have looked at her with curiosity, but now she sped by with hardly a glance, intent only on putting distance between herself and the place she was leaving.

  Halfway down the block she began to run, grateful for the cold purity of the wind against the heat of her face.

  That is where David lives, she thought incredulously. That is where he goes when he leaves school in the afternoon. That place and the people in it are his life!

  The winds of freedom blow, Susan thought, and she could have wept for him, but the panic that had started to build within her now began to take her over.

  David’s grandmother was not dumb. She was old, yes, and confused, but there had been a sharpness in her eyes and a craftiness in the way she had managed to twist the conversation that denied stupidity. David would not have an easy time getting the ring away from her. That much Susan knew with certainty. With the ring in her possession, and among the shifting lights and shadows of her faded mind, Mrs. Irma Ruggles was dangerous.