Cold moon over Babylon

  “No—no,” protested Nathan: “What you heard was wrong, whatever you heard, it didn’t happen that way. I hadn’t hardly touched Annie-Leigh. I—” He broke off and looked closely at the cheerleader. “Listen, Belinda, what else did you hear? You didn’t hear anything about last night, did you, because—”

  “Last night!” cried Belinda: “Nathan, d’you attack somebody else? What are you talking about? You’re not starting to pick fights, are you? With high school girls?”

  “No,” said Nathan: “It’s nothing. Listen Belinda, Ben and I are going down to Navarre for a while—”

  “You just got back!”

  “I know,” he said: “But we’re going down there again.” He glanced away, and added nervously: “It’s so nice down there this time of year.”

  “It’s sand fly season on Santa Rosa, Nathan, and you hate sand flies you told me.”

  “They’re not so bad this year, not bad at all. Anyway, Ben—”

  “Nathan—”

  “What?” He asked distractedly.

  “Nothing, Belinda replied carefully. “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow. I'm going in to pack now, while it’s still light out.”

  “You cain’t pack in the dark?! Why?!”

  “No—”

  Nathan, what is going on here?!”

  “Nothing, Belinda. Nothing s going on, I just haven’t been feeling the way I should, and Ben and I are going down to Navarre for a while, and just sit out in some sun—”

  “You got some girl down there who’s not as fat as I am, haven't you!”

  “No—”

  “Well,” she said, in some small exasperation: “I don't know what’s got into you now, but it sure is gone be dull around here without you. I’m in love with Mr. Red and everybody in Babylon knows it, and I’m not gone never leave him, but Nathan, I’m not gone like coming here so much when you’re not home. I missed you the last two days. How long you and Ben gone be gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Two weeks?”

  He paused. “Maybe longer.”

  “Nathan,” she said: “You go pack. I’m gone go talk to Ben. Maybe Ben’ll tell me what I want to know. I have never seen you like this. If I can get away, I’ll come down to Navarre and see you. I’ll tell Daddy I’m gone go spend the weekend with my friend Clarisse. I went down there this morning to go shopping with her at Gayfer’s, and she doesn’t have a telephone, so Daddy won’t have any way of knowing I’m not there with her, and I’ll come down and see you, and maybe I can do something that will cheer you up. I’ll lose five pounds, and you won’t even recognize me!”

  “That’ll be real nice, Belinda,” said Nathan and rose from the chaise. “Now, I got to go in and talk to Daddy for a bit, I’ll be back—”

  “You got to let me go with you. He’s expecting me, and I got to let him know I’m here.”

  “You cain’t stay though,” said Nathan: “ ’Cause we got to talk private—”

  “All right, Nathan!” she cried: “But I have never heard of such secret goings-on.”

  When the door to his bedroom was opened, James Redfield looked up expectantly, but his face showed his disappointment that Miss Pie was accompanied by Nathan.

  “I just came to speak,” said Belinda: “Nathan’s not gone let me stay, Mr. Red.”

  “Daddy, I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  James Redfield looked distrustfully at his son. “Why cain’t Miss Pie stay in here? What you got to say to me that Miss Pie cain’t hear? Miss Pie just got here and you are already sending her away?”

  “Daddy,” said Nathan earnestly: “I got to talk to you for a few minutes about family stuff that Belinda doesn’t care anything about. I think you and me talking about family stuff is gone bore her worse than Ben would.” “I’m going!” cried Belinda, to avoid the argument that would quickly be raised between the two men if she remained. “I’m gone go in the guest bedroom and change in my new bathing suit that I bought in Pensacola this morning, which has got about half a foot of thirty-six-inch material in it, and I sure am glad your pool has got a wall around it, because my own daddy would arrest me if he saw me wearing it in public, and I’m gone find Ben Redfield a blindfold to put around his head, and the thing cost me eighteen dollars, which is about three dollars for every polka dot on it, and that’s not counting the six percent sales tax—”

  When she was gone, Nathan told his father that he had decided to remain the rest of the summer at Navarre. “Who’s gone stay here with me?”

  “Nina.”

  “Has she said she would?”

  “I haven’t asked her yet, but she will.”

  “Nathan,” said his father: “You cain’t do it. You’re president of that bank, you begged me to make you president—”

  “I didn't—”

  —and I did it against my better judgment. And now you are coming in here and telling me that you want to take off right in the middle of the yearly audit, and leave the place to wrack and ruin, well I’m just not going to let you—

  “Daddy, the bank’s not going to wrack and ruin. It’s just that I’ve been tired lately...”

  “Tired? Nathan, you look like you spent half your life out on a logging track somewhere, felling pine trees by twisting ’em off in your bare ten fingers. You don’t look tired.”

  “Tired, Daddy. You know what kind of tired I mean.” “Breaking down?” said the old man suspiciously.

  Nathan nodded.

  “You telling me you about to have a nervous breakdown, and that’s why you want to go to Navarre?”

  Nathan nodded again. “I’ve been on the edge. A couple of things have happened—”

  “What?”

  “Daddy, listen, I just got to get out of here for—” “No!” cried the old man. “Nathan, you cain’t up and leave the bank! You can take a couple of weeks off when the audit’s over, but you got to be back at the beginning of August for the tax men. I don’t know what you’re thinking about. Besides, you’re not going to leave me here with Ben, you—”

  “Ben would go with me, Daddy.”

  James Redfield paused at this. “Nathan,” he said slowly: “You are up to something. I know you’re up to something, you and Ben, and I’m not gone be a party to it. You go away, you go away to Navarre if you want, or wherever it is that you’re really going—but I’m gone appoint a new president of the bank—and you know I got the power and the right to do it. You go off now, and you don’t ever step foot in the CP&M again. You go off now, and you will never see me again, and you will never see a penny of my money again. You understand?” Nathan nodded, rose, and walked out of the room. Behind him, the old man’s voice called: “Send Miss Pie in here! Where’s Miss Pie?!”

  Chapter 43

  After leaving his father, Nathan went directly to his room. There the curtains were still drawn, and though he suspected that the windows weren’t locked, he hadn’t the courage to pull aside the drapes to check. He was fearful of what might be standing just outside. He locked the door, looked carefully to make sure no one was hiding in the bathroom, and then moved quickly and repeatedly from the suitcase open on his bed to the chest of drawers and closet, untidily tossing in more clothes than he would ever need in Navarre.

  At the last he wrapped a white handkerchief about his hand, took from the top bureau drawer James Redfield’s pistol, and loaded it. Then from the folder which held his certificate of honorable discharge from the Air Force, Nathan took a sheet of CP&M stationery that bore his father’s legitimate signature three quarters down. This page, which had been prepared during his father’s first long illness for the convenience of his secretary, Nathan placed in the small manual typewriter on his desk, and typed out the following note:

  I have been sick for the past two years and there is no hope of my ever getting any better. I am constantly tortured with pain in my spine, and this pain has become unbearable. I have therefore decided to kill myself. I want to thank
Nina and Belinda Hale for nursing me. If it hadn’t been for them, I would have killed myself a long time ago. Nathan, when you read this, 1 want you to make provision for both of them out of the money I have left you. Fix it so that Nina doesn’t ever have to work again, and see to it that when she graduates from high school, Miss Pie can go to any nursing school that she wants.

  Nathan wondered why he had not made this essentially simple decision before, why he had allowed his father for so many years to constrict and sour his life. Tonight, when Belinda had left the house, he would go into his father’s room, shoot him through the temple, and place the smoking gun in his lifeless hand. Ted Hale and Raymond Everage would find the note on the bedside table.

  Everything would come to him: the bank, the oil leases, the freedom to leave Babylon. He could abandon the plan to get the Larkin blueberry farm, and let Charles Darrish have the whole thing if he wanted it. He and Ben would move to New Orleans or Houston or Atlanta, and never be bothered again. It occurred to him oddly now that the Larkins’ murders had been a great waste; none would have been necessary if only he had got rid of his father first.

  Nathan smiled in anticipation, read through the page again, and then slipped it beneath the blotter on the desk. Cautiously, he stepped out into the hallway, and moved quietly toward his father’s room. He heard the old man’s voice. The door was open, and a soft light burned inside. Nathan was thinking of some excuse to have Belinda leave the house, but he realized quickly that his father was speaking not to Belinda, but to someone on the other end of the telephone.

  Nathan went dose to the door and listened.

  “No,” he heard his father say: “I didn’t. I thought he’d be home by now. Ginny, listen. Do me a favor and call Charles up at the office, and tell him to get over here as soon as he can. Yes, I think maybe something is wrong, but I don’t know what...”

  There was a long pause now; the old man’s breathing became more labored. Nathan suspected that Ginny was telling his father what had happened at the White Horse the night before.

  “Ginny,” said James Redfield at last: “Call Charles. Get him over here right now. This minute, you hear me?” His voice was a hoarse whisper.

  He hung up, and Nathan returned to his room, with altered plans. He did not trust Charles Darrish to remain on his side, especially if the lawyer discovered that James Redfield had decided to change his will in favor of Ginny.

  He pulled out his father’s suicide note, and slipped it into the typewriter again. Between the first paragraph and the signature he added these lines:

  I have recently discovered that Charles Darrish, who has been acting as my lawyer for the past twenty-two years, has been embezzling funds from my estate, and has actually tried to kill me with an overdose of my medicine. He planned to suppress my most recent will, in favor of one which left the bulk of my money to his wife Ginny. I have decided that it is necessary to kill him before I die, so that I may insure the financial well-being of my two sons, Nathan and Benjamin Redfield.

  A slight scratching at the glass doors made Nathan jump. But boldly he moved toward the drapes, and pulled aside one corner of the material. He was relieved to find that it was only the tip of a dead pine branch that had brushed against the glass.

  Just around the corner of the house from Nathan’s bedroom, Belinda and Ben splashed about in the pool. Dusk gathered about them, but their eyes became accustomed gradually to the failing light. Though she knew that James Redfield waited for her impatiently, Belinda remained with Ben in order to quiz him on Nathan’s reasons for wanting to leave town. Ben proved as evasive as his brother, but the girl was determined to get at the truth before she left that night.

  James Redfield was frightened. He suspected his sons of some devilment that he was helpless to discover on his own. He feared that Nathan had sent Miss Pie home, and was nervous to think that he might be alone in the house with them.

  Still Belinda did not come, though he lay breathless and sweating, constantly listening for her footsteps down the carpeted corridor. He marked the passing of time by the diminution of light. In this part of the house, the air-conditioning was turned off. The glass doors were opened, and the cool air of twilight blew lazily through the screens.

  The wind through the pines gradually sent him off into a light troubled sleep. He was awakened by some slight disturbance in the room. James Redfield turned his head on the pillow. By the intensity of darkness, he realized he had slept for half an hour or more.

  The wind no longer blew lazily, but with some force through the screen. It was chill and unpleasantly moist. He lifted his head groggily from the pillow, expecting to hear the first drops of rain. The room was dark, the patio outside scarcely less so. The sky beyond the waving black foliage of the pines was a deep blue; but no storm clouds had gathered, which would explain the dampness in the air.

  He held the confused notion that someone had come through the screen door. He wondered if perhaps Belinda weren’t standing in a dark corner of the patio, having entered the room, and gone out again, not to disturb him. He started to rock himself up into a sitting position, so that he might call. His tilting head, turned toward the patio, caught the slightly gleaming outline of a human figure traced in water on the screen, as if someone—of small and slight stature—had leaned up against it while very wet, leaving water in thousands of the tiny squares of mesh. He moved his head to see the outline more clearly, but it disappeared, and though he turned this way and that, he could not find it again. In the failing light, he noticed a trail of water, small puddles that glistened faintly on the carpet, leading from the patio screens to the door into the hallway.

  James Redfield cried out feebly: “Miss Pie! Miss Pie!”

  The full moon rose over Babylon.

  Chapter 44

  Friday morning Charles Darrish thought hard about what he had witnessed at the White Horse Inn. Nathan Redfield had lost control, assaulted the McAndrews: mother, daughter, and son, and probably would have laid hands on the father if he had been around. This tallied uncomfortably with the report that Darrish had just received of Nathan's attack on Annie-Leigh Hooker in the bank. It was particularly disturbing that this assault had taken place only a few minutes after Nathan had left Darrish’s office.

  Over a sandwich and coffee in the drugstore, Darrish became convinced that Nathan Redfield was out of his wits and had killed Evelyn and Jerry Larkin. A few minutes more, and he had credited Nathan with the murder of Margaret Larkin as well, not to mention the desecration of the cemetery.

  A man who opened graves couldn't be trusted with a box of wet matches, Charles Darrish decided to drop Nathan Redfield.

  When Darrish returned to his office, he knelt before his safe, squinted at the dial, and twirled the sequence of twelve numbers that opened it. He took out the papers relating to the proposed acquisition of the Larkin blueberry farm, and carefully cut them up with a large pair of rusty scissors. Then he made several phone calls to halt the plans that he had set in motion for the establishment of Panhandle Enterprises, Inc., as they had dubbed the dummy holding company. Because he had performed his part carefully, he was able to do this without arousing suspicion in those who had helped him, and in a manner that could not easily be traced later. He had never told Nathan with whom he was dealing, and though Nathan thought that all Charles’s representatives were in Mobile, they were in fact in New Orleans and Birmingham. He and Ginny had traveled to Atlanta on other business entirely.

  At the very last Charles took out the forged loan payment card that Nathan had brought him. He compared this with the original that had been preserved in a hidden well in the rear of his desk. He burned the forgery in an ashtray, poured the cinders into an envelope, folded the envelope, and with a splintered broom handle pushed it to the bottom of his wire wastepaper basket.

  A final telephone call at six o’clock, to a man who had spent the afternoon on a golf course, served to cut Darrish off completely from his complicity with Nathan Redfi
eld. He could now safely deny that he had had any commerce at all with his wife’s cousin.

  Just as Darrish was preparing to go home, his wife telephoned, and related James Redfield’s importunate plea that Darrish go right over to him.

  “Charles,” Ginny said: “James sounded scared. Especially after I told him about what happened at the bank the other morning, and then last night at the White Horse—”

  “Listen, Ginny,” said her husband: “I think James has got every right in the world to be scared, because I think Nathan killed all three of the Larkins.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” demanded Ginny at last.

  “Because I didn’t want to see you upset. Nathan’s your cousin, Nathan’s family, even if he’s not close. I had to make sure before I said anything.”

  “I wish you had said something sooner,” said Ginny hotly: “Maybe Evelyn and Jerry wouldn't be dead now.”

  “No,” he said: “They would be though. I didn’t know enough at first to know what Nathan was about. I don’t think at the time we even knew Margaret was dead, did we?”

  “Yes,” said Ginny dryly: “We did.”

  “Well,” went on Charles unperturbed, “there wasn’t enough to go on. Now I think there is. Nathan attacked those people in the restaurant, knocked Jean McAndrew right up against the door, and looked about to throttle her, or something worse, right there in front of forty paying customers, and it was right then that I was pretty much sure that something was wrong.

  “Why didn’t you say something then?”

  “I wasn’t really sure, so I came in here today, and I thought it all out, made a few phone calls, that’s all. I called the bank this morning. Nathan’s at home. He didn’t come in. They had already heard about what happened at the White Horse. I think they’re hoping he’ll stay away. They asked me if I’d go over and talk to James about all this.”