As I hurried to Gertie’s room with Harry, a sudden and sharper anxiety spurred my heart and pinched my breath. Depending on the ruthlessness of the author, fraught moments like this in novels often led to the targeted girl—me—being abducted to encourage swift payment of the ransom that a mere threat hadn’t yet pried loose from her parents. There was a lesser chance that the enraged intruder would murder her. Sometimes in dire moments, life mirrors fiction as much as fiction reflects life, and then we speak solemnly of the “human tragedy.”
This was not a situation where etiquette required a polite knock and a soft-voiced query. The door to the master suite was not locked. This was still the Bram. As long as the exterior doors were secure, there had never been a need to lock a room door, and habits were hard to change. The bedroom lay in deep darkness, for the moon was low in the eastern sky and the windows were untouched by its ghost light. Harry eased the door shut behind us before switching on his Eveready. My heart quieted a bit and breath came to me when I saw that Gertie was asleep in clean, bloodless sheets.
When I spoke her name, she woke and sat up and squinted into the light and yawned and said, “I thought we were done with that Clyde Tombaugh stuff years ago.”
“Ssshhhhh,” I warned. “Someone’s in the house.”
“Someone dangerous,” Harry clarified.
I whispered, “We’ll go to your parents and barricade their door while they phone for help.”
Gertie turned back the covers and got out of bed and slid her feet into slippers. She yawned extravagantly, her manner languid as she pulled up her pajama pants and straightened the rumpled collar of her top. “I suppose there’s no time to put on a suit of armor.”
“I’ve got a gun,” Harry said.
“That’s why I’d like armor.” Her slippers didn’t match the feet they were on, so she sat on the floor to use her hands with them.
“Are you awake?” I asked.
“I used to be. I’m sure I will be again.”
Harry looked at me. “How can she be half-asleep and still hit us with good smart-ass lines.”
“Why,” said Gertie, “can Satchmo always blow such a hot horn?” She threw aside her slippers. “To hell with it. I’ll go barefoot.”
The journey from Gertie’s room to Franklin and Loretta’s suite didn’t entail a trek as long and arduous as the one that Gary Cooper braved through inFighting Caravansor the one John Wayne undertook inStagecoach. Nevertheless, we felt we needed a basic strategy on which we agreed before leaving this room, where we had a sense of safety that was comforting though entirely false. The idea was to go from here to there without calling attention to ourselves in case the monster from the Middle West was prowling for prey. Gertie would bring her Eveready but switch it on only if, in a crisis, our Harry shouted,More light!I would carry his Eveready so that he could have both hands free for the pistol, but I wouldn’t turn it on until he required it. Harry would lead with Gertie at his side. I would follow, walking backward to be sure we couldn’t be surprised from behind. Except for the call for more light, we would not speak even if a really good smart-ass remark occurred to one of us.
Devising a strategy was meant to give confidence, but in some cases, such as this one, the fact that a strategy was necessary could exacerbate one’s sense of danger. As we moved out of the room and took up ourpositions in the hallway, though I was a freak and had known other freaks who gave me no cause for alarm, I was afraid of Midwest Jack. He who murdered for a penny. He who would slaughter whomever Captain told him to slaughter. Why would my subconscious, which sometimes showed me what was to come, portray him as a mantis that would take a baby from its cradle and devour it? I was afraid for myself, but my greater fear was for this family that had been so kind to me. Midwest Jack was here because of me. By sheltering me, the family became vulnerable to Captain’s greed, to his rage at being rejected, and to something horrific that had come into their home. I heard the pitchman’s voice in memory:In the end, it’s only blood the boy wants, and he can’t help himself.
Harry, Gertie, and I crept warily along the west-wing hallway, where the sconces were so dimmed that shadows owned more than half the territory. Any one of the closed doors of rooms to the left and right might pop open like a jack-in-the-box lid and spring Midwest Jack among us. As we reached the junction with the main hall, even those gauzy lights went off, and a blackness equal to that at the bottom of an oceanic abyss washed around us. We could have ventured forward in the pitch dark by staying on the carpet runner until we judged that we were opposite the master suite. However, the lights had not gone off on their own, and the possibility that the freak of freaks was approaching us seemed to be just short of a certainty. “More light,” Harry ordered. Gertie and I clicked on our Evereadys and let out our held breath when we saw that Captain’s proxy loomed neither before nor behind us.
To hell with strategy and caution. We hurried to the master bedroom door. Harry knuckled it with three quick raps and then three more, a minimum courtesy. We entered without waiting for a response. Either Loretta and Franklin had been unable to turn off their minds and get the rest they needed, or they were able to shake off dreams faster than Gertie could. They were out of bed even as our lights lanced thedarkness, fumbling with switches on their bedside lamps, which availed them nothing. Rafael, roused from sleep, romped this way and that in expectation that this sudden late-night confab was sure to be great fun. Our elders sought flashlights in nightstand drawers while asking what was wrong, what was happening. “Someone’s in the house,” Harry said. “I sort of heard the guy talking to someone on the phone, probably to Farnam. Now he’s shut down the lighting system.”
“He’s been here since this morning,” I said as Gertie engaged the simple lockset. I put down my flashlight and braced the headrail of a chair under the doorknob, wishing there were a deadbolt. “He must have been told to monitor you and be sure you were getting the hundred thousand together. Instead, Pinkerton showed up.”
Most people would not cope well when informed that a murderous creature like Midwest Jack was loose in their house, as frightening an entity as any in the creepier films by Fritz Lang. Most people would either panic and take ill-advised action likely to get them killed, or they would be paralyzed by the prospect of imminent death and be unable to confront the mortal threat effectively. Franklin and Loretta were not those kind of people. His mother—afflicted by Munchausen syndrome by proxy—had poisoned his sister to death for the sympathy it got her; Loretta lost her entire family in an earthquake; both of them survived an orphanage run by grifters. More to the point, together they swam through the swamp of corruption that was the movie industry in their time, yet they had held fast to their principles and an admirable moral code. After all that, a monster in the house was more of an inconvenience than a terror.
Even when Franklin tried to call the police with the telephone on his nightstand and found that it, like the house lighting, had been sabotaged, he said only, “Of course,” and returned the handset to the cradle. He and Loretta agreed that it was impossible to be certain whether this threat might be Captain’s attempt to intimidate theminto paying up or in fact an expression of bitter vengeance and a plot to commit murder by proxy. In either case, the wisest course was to stay together, stay put, and stay alert. Each of them kept a pistol at bedside, and Harry was armed as well. Whatever Midwest Jack might be, whether mere human oddity or true monster, he could bleed and die. If we waited here until dawn, morning sun would light the Bram better than four Evereadys. At seven o’clock, the entire staff would arrive, and there would be safety in numbers.
We had much to ponder and discuss, and there was no need to confer in darkness. If our strategically placed flashlights failed, a full box of spare batteries was stored in a bottom bureau drawer. Enough chairs were provided when we brought two from the bedroom retreat and the bench from the vanity. Rafael fairly divided his attention during the next two hours, lying asleep on one person’s feet for a while and then moving on to the next of us for an ear scratching. Even in these circumstances—or perhaps I should sayespeciallyin these circumstances—I was very proud of Franklin and Loretta. He was handsome, and she was beautiful, and they were both as self-possessed as if we were gathered here for no reason other than the pleasure of one another’s company. From time to time, one or both of them would pace as they listened to us or contributed their own insights to the discussion, not as if they were pacing worriedly but as if movement lubricated their thoughts. Wearing silk robes over pajamas, they were casually elegant, and because they had not lost their sense of humor even now, I was reminded of William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles inThe Thin Man.
I thought that if I had been born as well formed as they were in body and mind, I would almost certainly have led a less admirable life than they had. The thousands of books that I carry in my memory reveal a nearly infinite number of ways even well-meaning souls can go wrong. From that collection of mistakes, I have no difficulty identifyingscores of grievous errors I might have made if given the opportunity of a normal life. The limitations and humiliations a freak endures might well have saved me from being more like Captain than I dared to consider.
The biggest question occupying our discussion-by-flashlights was how Midwest Jack could have moved through the Bram for eight hours, monitoring every act of the Pinkerton agents without being seen or heard. Even at this moment, he must have been listening to us, amused by our speculations, for suddenly he solved the puzzle by letting us know where he was. With one instrument or other, he pounded so hard on the ceiling of the room below us that the floor vibrated underfoot. “The service mezzanine,” said Franklin. The explanation was not as supernatural as we might have been imagining. In a house as immense as the Bram, architects often included a five- or six-foot-high level between main floors. Ventilation ductwork, electrical wiring, phone lines, and plumbing were run through this space, which also housed the gas furnaces, air conditioners, and other equipment that maintained the residence. This interim level, with its own plywood floor and work lighting but no windows, was accessed through a large trapdoor in the ceiling of a storage room on the ground level; ugly mechanical systems were tucked out of sight, and repairmen could easily service them. The estate manager—first Mr. Symington, now Lynette Rollins—dealt with all contracted services and was thus kept aware of the mezzanine. Franklin and Loretta visited that space once, during construction, and had no further business with it. They had put it out of mind just as owners of standard-size homes soon forgot where the clean-out traps were located and which wall concealed the chase for a specific water-supply pipe. Captain must have learned of this interim floor by visiting the building department to review the architect’s plans, which were in the public records.
Now we knew how Midwest Jack had spied on the Pinkerton men—and the family. Every grille-covered heating-cooling vent in everyroom had brought their voices to him. It was creepy to realize that he must be at that moment staring up toward us. But he couldn’t get at us through the floor, which was the mezzanine ceiling. Why had he revealed his whereabouts? What would happen next?
The bedside lamps came on. Franklin went at once to the phone, but our nemesis had not flipped a switch to restore that service. A knock on the door startled everyone and focused our attention. “My dear friends,” Captain said, “since you screwed me, I can’t resist telling you how I’ve screwed you in turn. You might feel that my delight in this reveals a shortcoming in my character, but I would say that people like you have no damn character at all. Only grifters make a deal with the intention of reneging on it as soon as the mark turns his back on them. I’m no damn mark. I’m no damn rube. The architect plans on this joint don’t show a vault, but knowing your view of banks, I was sure there must be one. I never did find one on those damn plans, but I saw what I thought must be a hidden room. Once my boy, my special boy, heard you were hiring Pinkerton for their door-and-window service, his job became getting from the mezzanine into that hidden room. Not so goddamn hard. There’s a three-foot-square air-exchange grille in the ceiling.”
Captain was so high on himself that he salted his language with other words far worse than “damn,” but I will not repeat them here. I quoted as much as I did only to give you the flavor of his rant, so you could see that, even as bad a man as he had always been, he had gotten worse. To save time and avoid further offense, I will condense his abusive tirade to its salient points. Lynette Rollins had left a set of the new house keys in a vanity drawer in Isadora’s room for when she visited home at the end of her tour with the Bob Crosby Orchestra. Midwest Jack had retrieved those keys and used them to let Captain into the Bram once everyone had gone to bed except for me, as I was in the kitchen with a slab of pie. The murderous boy was excited by the prospect ofbeing the star and a partner in the new ten-in-one that was to be set up with Fairchild money. He had shown Captain how to operate the hidden door to the secret room that served as a vault and then went off to monitor the family and be sure they didn’t interrupt the looting. As insurance against future bank collapses, the vault contained $225,000 in hundreds and twenties. Captain scooped that fortune into a laundry bag he’d brought with him. Thereafter, he spent time conducting an inspection of a few rooms by flashlight, looking for small items of value that he could add to his haul—a Tiffany vase and the like. His bag was full. His car was parked along the highway less than half a mile from the Bram. According to plan, the boy would remain in the house to ensure we “dumb damn rubes” didn’t try to alert authorities. Captain would drive straight back here to pick up his special boy, and anyone who tried to follow Midwest Jack would have his face torn off. Through the door, he said, “You thought you were so smart that Einstein should kiss your ass. Now you can kiss mine.”
Captain was pleased with himself—“very damn pleased”—and wanted to assure us that his new identity had been so well crafted that a thousand Pinkertons could never find him. He was so euphoric and getting such pleasure from belittling us that, as he ranted on, he became more enfevered and less judicious about what he said. I was pretty sure the “little freak who was not born but was puked up instead” must have been a reference to me, but that was not what got him in trouble. He said Pinkerton and the FBI and “Jesus Christ Himself” could spend eternity searching for him in “every carnival there ever was or will be anywhere in the world” and would fail to find him. This seemed to imply that he had no intention of using the money to create a new ten-in-one. You might infer that he did not, after all, mean to return to the Bram to pick up Midwest Jack after carrying the loot half a mile and loading it in his getaway car. That was certainly the inference Jack made. Jack evidently believed that he no longer had any hope of beinga freak-show star, would never be a partner in a lucrative enterprise, and would never have enough money to buy even an hour with one of the girls in those under-the-counter magazines. We all know how sad and frustrated we become when someone we trusted, someone who made a solemn promise, proves to be a liar. We can only imagine how much more intense are the emotions of a psychopathic, schizophrenic, cyclothymic, paranoid, lycanthropic, idiomorphic, devil-worshipping kleptomaniac who has been called ugly all his life and then realizes that he also has just been played for a fool. In all the years I had known Captain, I had never heard him scream. Yet I had no doubt that the screamer in the upstairs hall, on the far side of the bedroom door, was my old keeper from whom I’d been liberated eight years earlier. I do not wish anyone a painful death or any kind of death at all, so I was badly shaken even though his scream did not last long.
Although the six of us bearing the surname Fairchild (which included Rafael) were no less the victims of Captain Forest Farnam than anyone else, Midwest Jack had arrived at the conviction that we and Captain were seven of a kind, all of us aligned against him. Shrieking at us, his language even more disgusting than that of the man he had just murdered, he pounded the door with such force that it seemed he possessed Thor’s hammer and would split the wood. His voice shrill with fierce glee, he promised to kill us all and swore he wouldn’t break his promise as our kind did. With unrelenting maniacal ferocity, he tore at the doorknob until metal squealed and cracked. Such strength! The knob on our side fell out of the door. Key parts of the lock assembly rattled loosely against one another, and the latch bolt retreated from the striker plate in the jamb. As Jack threw himself harder against the door, we heard the joints of the bracing chair begin to splinter.
Their pistols in a two-hand grip, Loretta and Franklin shouted at us to get behind them. They needed the door to be thrown open, to see the target. That was a reasonable response, although Harry hada better one: deal with the threat before it got into the room where, even wounded, it might kill one of us. Our Harry, amateur historian and military buff, knew the accuracy of his weapon, knew how much punch the cartridges in the magazine would deliver, and was sure they would penetrate the door. He squeezed off seven rounds in quick order, grouping them in the middle square of three recessed panels. Every round passed through, but I cannot know how many still had lethal velocity on the far side. Whatever the number, it seemed to be enough, for Captain’s proxy fell silent, his voice replaced by the fading roar of gunfire that echoed along the hallway and down the stairs into the ground-floor rooms. Harry didn’t assume he’d dealt a fatal blow to the boy who was no mere boy. He judged that the situation didn’t merit hesitation. He kicked aside the half-broken chair and pulled the door open and stepped onto the threshold and fired his last three rounds into a crumpled figure on the floor.
I will not sicken you with a description of the scene in that upstairs hallway. There are only two things you need to know. First, this family into which I had been welcomed was in many ways as warm and cuddly as the March family in Louisa May Alcott’sLittle Women, but at the core of each of them, there was something harder than bone, stronger than muscle. They knew loss and failure and hardship, but they did not know defeat. They ventured into the carnage of the hallway, stepping with care so as not to soil their feet, quickly discussed what must be done: reactivate the telephone system, call the sheriff, recover the laundry bag containing the money, close the door to the hidden room if Captain had left it open, brew a large pot of coffee for the tedious hours ahead, lead curious Rafael away from the cadavers and keep him downstairs. They hugged me, one by one, and said not a word because they knew how this episode must have affected me and understood that words were unequal to a loving embrace. Confident that the thick walls of the house and the length of the gardens combined to ensure that neitherChef Lattuada nor Lynette Rollins, in their apartments, had heard the gunfire, the members of the family went their separate ways to attend to the tasks awaiting them. No one needed a pill to settle the nerves.
