Bum Steer

  The man who answered the doorbell looked about sixty years old.

  “Yes?”

  The word was like a swat, quick, hard, hissing through the air to land on the pestiferous fly buzzing at his door.

  “Mr. Railing?”

  “Yes.”

  Never had an affirmative sounded so negative.

  “I would like to speak to Mrs. Railing.”

  In fact, I suddenly wanted to speak to anyone but him.

  “She’s sick.” His almost imperceptible glance upward suggested her existence on the second floor. He was tall, thin, and nearly colorless in the way of some Nordic men, with skin the ivory color of the face powder my mother used to wear. His gray-blond hair was parted way down by his left ear, and he’d combed it into long, thin, greasy commas that ended in sharp points beside his other ear. He wore reading glasses of the type you can buy in any dime store; the little half-lenses looked incongruous perched low on his nose in the center of his large face. He stared down at me, over them. “She can’t come down.”

  “I’m sorry to hear she’s ill,” I stalled.

  A mistake. A hint of sardonic humor appeared in his eyes, which were just slightly more blue than your average glass of tap water, and he said, “You’re twenty-five years too late in saying so. She’s in a wheelchair, with multiple sclerosis. What do you want with her?”

  “I’m looking for an Anna Railing who was married to a man named Charles Benet.”

  The sudden tightening of his facial muscles and the further hardening of the ice in his eyes told me I’d definitely found the right people.

  “Come in,” he said harshly.

  I entered his home feeling like a fly who’d gotten through the screen, only to have the nasty feeling that somebody was waiting inside with a swatter. I glanced up at the ceiling, trying to sense her through it. When I looked back at him, I caught him doing the same thing.

  He led me into what was literally a parlor. It was an exceedingly dark room with heavy, brocade, floor-to-ceiling draperies that were drawn together, admitting not a glint of sun, and Victorian-style furniture upholstered in faded patterns of dark flowers. Several threadbare oriental-style carpets lay upon the walnut-colored wood-plank floors. It was decorated for the nineteenth century and might even have been beautiful when the fabrics were new and the drapes framed the light of day. I suspected the carpets and furniture would appear valuable to a knowing eye; they were probably the sort of down-at-the-heels antiques that dealers snatch at estate sales to resell later at exorbitant prices. The room looked and smelled like one into which neither fresh air nor fresh thoughts had penetrated, much less circulated, in years.

  I sat down in a long-backed, upholstered chair in front of a bookcase. Railing didn’t sit but remained standing about seven feet from me, with his feet slightly apart, his hands in his front pants pockets, and those glasses still on his nose. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck, a thin, brown tie with tiny yellow lions rampant, a thin, black belt, trousers the color of peanut butter, and brown shoes with black laces. There was blond hair curling out of the backs of his wrists. He was put together with such exceedingly fastidious bad taste that I was willing to bet he wished he could shave those hairs off. He must have hated them, those ungovernable sprouts of masculinity that betrayed him as human and hormonal. They irresistibly caused me to wonder if wild loops of blond hair also matted his chest—repellent thought.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  I told him. Then I waited for his predictable next question. He didn’t fail me.

  “What do you want?”

  I told him what I thought he’d like to hear, even embellishing it.

  “I am looking for evidence that Charles Benet may have committed fraud. I am hoping your wife can provide me with information that may help me to establish a case against him.”

  I was right. He tried not to give it away, but he couldn’t help but betray his pleasure—the corners of his mouth lifted, a closed-in expression of smug triumph flashed in his eyes, and he relaxed, in the manner of one child when another one gets blamed. He liked this news I had brought him. He would help me any way he could. I disliked him intensely.

  “I’m going to get a drink,” he said suddenly. Not quite grudgingly he added, “You want one?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “Whatever you’re having.”

  He walked out of the room.

  I felt as if I’d been left alone in a funeral home. Surely, I might find a casket hidden among the somber shadows here. To shake off a contradictory feeling of nerves and lassitude, I got up and strolled around the room while I waited for him to return. The walls were desecrated by several enormous and grim still lifes depicting scenes after the hunt: limp rabbits, boars’ heads, dead foxes, shotguns laid down beside spent cartridges.

  But next to the ornate gold-leafed frame of one of those paintings I found a modern convenience: a room monitor, one of those wall gizmos that invalids use to call for help. It was turned to OFF. On impulse, I switched it to ON then sat down in a chair close to the monitor.

  “Scotch,” he announced when he handed it to me.

  I set it down on the filigreed metal end table beside me.

  “Now.” He nearly smiled as he gazed over the top of his drink at me. “What’d the bastard do?”

  “Cat Benet?” I raised my voice to a volume that might be picked up by the monitor. “What did Cat Benet do to cause me to suspect him of fraud? Well, before he died he—”

  “Dead? Benet’s dead?”

  His excitement, his widening eyes and smile, informed me this was news to him, and that astonished me. Did that mean she didn’t know, either? I hoped I hadn’t caused a heart attack upstairs.

  “Yes,” I said, thoroughly unnerved by the gleam of pleasure in Railing’s eyes. “He died a few days ago in a hospital in Kansas City.” Riding solely on intuition, I plunged on. “He was murdered.”

  His pale blue eyes opened wider and his smile grew almost gay. If this wasn’t a surprise to him, then he was a superb actor.

  “In his will, he left my … company… a valuable piece of property in Kansas, and I’m afraid there may be some sort of fraud attached to the bequest. I was hoping to talk to your wife, to learn more about Benet and his business practices, to see if she might be able to tell me something about his character.”

  “Character?” Railing laughed explosively. “The man had no character. He was a scoundrel and a cheat who married my poor wife and then deserted her and the children. I adopted and raised Mark and Suanna as my own.” Self-righteous pride oozed from him. “I’m surprised somebody didn’t kill him years ago. There must have been dozens of men who hated him, with good reason.” The ice in his blue eyes was melted now by the internal fire of his hate. Interesting, I thought, that he spoke of men who hated Benet, when you’d have thought it might be the women who felt wronged by him. “He went through life taking what he wanted whenever he wanted it, with no regard for anybody else. I have never forgiven him for what he did to my wife and children, never.”

  “Mr. Railing, do you know of any specific instances in which he cheated people?”

  “He cheated my wife by marrying her and then leaving her!” he thundered. “He cheated my children by having them and then leaving them!”

  “What about business deals? Do you know of anybody he cheated in business?”

  “I don’t have to, to know the man.”

  “Was he ever arrested—”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “But you don’t know for sure?”

  “I don’t have to know it for sure—”

  “—to know the man, yes, I see. Then I don’t suppose you know if he was ever imprisoned on any charge, or if any lawsuits were ever filed against him?”

  “A man like that? Of course he was sued!”

  “Of course,” I murmured. “I would still like to see your wife. Could I make an appointment to—”

  “She doesn’
t see people, she’s too ill.”

  He set his glass down with a thud on a table where there were many rings left by many other wet glasses.

  “Then I’d like to call her.”

  “She doesn’t take calls.”

  “Then I’d like to meet your children.”

  “They don’t live here.”

  I took a deep breath and got up.

  “Well, I’ll go then.” I added wickedly, “I’m sorry to be the one to break this sad news.”

  He was suddenly at my side, grabbing my arms in his big hands and shaking me. “If you find out who killed him, I want to know. I want to know it, you’ll call and tell me. I want to know right away. I want to write the man a letter. I want to congratulate him. I want to go where he is and shake his hand!”

  “Let go of me.”

  He released me and wrapped himself in his own embrace, rubbing his upper arms as if he were cold, or gleeful. He followed me back to the front door like that, madly rubbing his arms and grinning all the way. Made his day, I had, maybe his life. Oh, it’s grand to perk somebody up like that. Just grand. As I walked near the monitor, I said, “If there’s anything more you think of to tell me, give me a call. I’ll be staying”—I raised my voice—“at the Best Western by the airport. Ask for Jennifer Cain.”

  When I reached my rental car, I looked back at the house. Downstairs, he was closing the front door. Upstairs, the lower corner of a curtain was raised, at about the height that a woman in a wheelchair might be able to lift it. I stared at that spot until the curtain dropped. Would she call me?

  * * *

  The answer to that was no.

  I thought about staying in my room all that night in case she called, but I’m not good at waiting around for other people to do things. So I called some college friends who lived in Chicago and arranged to meet them for pizza in the city that evening.

  It was two in the morning when I returned to the Best Western. I was sober but fuzzy with exhaustion and with the excitement of seeing old friends. As I put the key in the door of my room, I was preoccupied, recalling old jokes, remembering other old friends, smiling to myself. I was totally unprepared for the slamming of the car doors and the footsteps pounding toward my back.

  28

  I whirled to face my attackers, room key held weapon-high, mouth open and ready to scream. And then I saw them.

  Whatever I had been expecting, they weren’t it.

  Two people, a man and a woman in their thirties. The only “weapon” in her hands was a bulky purse; his hands were empty.

  Still …

  “Stop right there” I said.

  They did, though she immediately began to edge closer to me again.

  “Stop that” I brandished my key at her.

  The man hissed at me: “Shh!” He stared about, with a wary, frightened expression, at the line of motel rooms, then stared reprovingly at me. “You’ll wake people up!”

  Thoughtful muggers. This was very odd.

  “Yes, that’s the idea”

  I pointed my key threateningly at him. He put his hands up to his face and stepped back as if I’d actually scared him with my puny weapon: Stand back, or I’ll carve a new lock in you. Granted, these two weren’t very scary, but my knees still felt like soufflés on the verge of falling, and my heart was a Ping-Pong ball in play.

  The woman spoke past me to the man, “She thinks we’re going to mug her, Mark. Tell her who we are.”

  “B-but how do we know it’s her?”

  “She’s got her room, doesn’t she?” The woman sounded exasperated with him. “Who else could she be but her?”

  I looked back and forth from him to her during this confusing and ungrammatical volley of pronouns.

  “Her who?” I said.

  They both looked at me.

  “Jennifer Cain,” he whispered.

  I didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Tell her who we are,” the woman demanded of him.

  “Great idea,” I said. “And do it right now.”

  “I’m M-M-Mark R-R-Railing.” He moved his right hand abruptly, prompting me to jerk back in fear, but he was only gesturing toward the woman. “Th-th-this is m-my s-s-sister, S-S-Suannnna.”

  “Take a deep breath,” she commanded.

  I did, and then I realized she meant him.

  “My sister,” he said again, and sighed.

  I lowered my key a little bit. “Anna’s kids?”

  He nodded. She edged closer to me, and I raised my key again.

  “Number one, prove it,” I said. “Number two, it’s after two in the morning, and what do you want that couldn’t wait until after breakfast?”

  “We were afraid you’d leave town,” she said.

  “W-we have to talk to you.”

  “Who was your natural father?” I demanded.

  He looked puzzled, but she understood and said promptly, “Charles Whitepaw Benet the fourth.”

  “What was his profession?”

  “Cattle rancher.”

  “When did he divorce your mother?” “Nineteen fifty-six.”

  I lowered the key. “Answer number two.” “M-Mother asked us to,” he said.

  I opened the door to my room. “All right, come in.” But I turned on all the lights and propped the door open.

  They were twins, alike in their dark, graying hair, in their pudgy Tweedledum and Tweedledee bodies, and their blue eyes, but very different in temperament. She wasn’t so bad, really, although she seemed gruff and pushy compared to her shy, stuttering brother. Mark Railing stuttered less as he relaxed more. There was something both endearing and annoying about this timid, middle-aged son of Cat Benet, and his twin sister.

  They settled into chairs on either side of a round table by the window; I sat on the bed, facing them.

  “We’ve been sitting in Mark’s car all night waiting for you,” Suanna Railing told me.

  “Why?”

  She leaned forward. “Did you tell Father about the trusts that our … Dad … left us?”

  “No.”

  She heaved an enormous sigh and fell back into her chair. “Thank God.”

  “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  They looked at each other, seemed to come to some sort of tacit agreement.

  “W-we don’t want h-h-him to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “We want to use the money to help Mother,” Suanna interjected. I was ashamed that I found it such a relief when she did the talking instead of him. “We want to take her to the Mayo Clinic and we want to get her a new wheelchair and we want her to travel and we want to fix up the bedroom, make it pretty for her, and put in a chairlift for the stairway, and …” She sighed, a sound that somehow combined sadness and frustration with excitement and hope. “But if he finds out where the money came from, he’ll refuse to let us do it, or he’ll take it away from her. He’d never let us get by with spending a cent of … Dad’s … money on Mother.”

  I asked, “Where are you going to tell him you got it?”

  Mark: “W-w-won a lottery.”

  Suanna: “Made it in the stock market.”

  Mark: “F-found it somewhere.”

  Suanna: “Got raises at our jobs.”

  “You haven’t entirely thought this through?” I asked gently.

  He shook his head in the solemn way he had, and she sighed again. I had a feeling he was a great head shaker and she was a sigher of the first order. Did they get these traits from their presumably long-suffering mother? Had she sat upstairs in her wheelchair for years, sighing in boredom, shaking her head in despair?

  “Where’d all the other money go?” I asked them.

  “What other money?” Suanna said.

  I looked at her for a moment before I said, “The settlement your father made with your mother. And the child support for you.”

  They stared at me.

  “That money,” I said.

  They were still staring at me.


  “Look, I don’t know for sure it’s true,” I said quickly, “but I was told that your father settled financially with each of his wives, and that he continued paying support until you were twenty-one.”

  “We don’t know anything abbout this,” Mark said.

  “When M-M-Mother married F-Father, she told us we’d have to live on what he provided, which wasn’t much. He’s a r-retired accountant; he worked for a smmall company and he didn’t make much m-money.”

  “Oh, yes, he did! If this is true, he made all of our money! Yours and mine, and probably what was left of mother’s, that’s what he made!”

  “B-but where is it, Su?”

  “I don’t know where it is! Maybe he’s got it in a secret Swiss account and when Mother dies, he’s going to abscond with all of it!”

  “B-but he could have done that years ago, Su.”

  “Then maybe he gambled it all away.”

  “F-F-Father? Gamble?”

  “I don’t know, Mark!”

  “Please don’t jump to these conclusions just because of what I’ve said,” I pleaded. “Please investigate, ask your mother—”

  “We will,” she promised. It had the sound of a vow.

  “Su? D-do you think Mother knew?”

  His sister shrugged, but it was more a gesture of helplessness than of doubt. “If Father didn’t want us to have the money, what could she have done about it, Mark?”

  His fists clenched, and his face red, he said without stuttering, “Lots!”

  But this time it was her turn to say, skeptically, “Mother?”

  “Did your mother ever talk to you about your natural father?” I asked them.

  “S-she didn’t d-dare,” Mark said. “He … he … wouldn’t allow it.”

  “He hated our … Dad,” Suanna explained. “Because our … Dad … cruelly cut us off without a penny …” She trailed off, hearing from her own mouth the big lie of their childhoods, the monstrous lie that had ruled and possibly ruined their lives. As she sat speechless, her brother took up the tale. He stuttered less now, his indignation seeming to give him a new power that slid the words more easily from his tongue.

  “About a week aggo, Su and I got letters from our … D-dad. He said he was sick and he wanted us to know that he hoped we’d be happy in our lives, and he was leaving us each a trust fund. We thought he was trying to make it up to us, for neglecting us. We told Mother about it and made her promise not to tell F-Father. Then when the lawyer called from Kansas City to say D-Dad had died, luckily F-Father was out and M-Mother took the call. She told us, and not him. So when you showed up at the house today, she called Su and told her and Su told me and we came to plead with you not to tell F-Father about our in-in-inheritance.”