Mystery

“If I put him down, I’ll never want to pick him up again,” Tom said.

They carried him beneath the white arch and through the open door. Upshaw’s feet hooked the rug and dragged it along until it caught in the study door and fell back as his feet slipped over the top of the fabric. Through the ringing in his ears Tom could hear Mrs. Kingsley ranting in a room somewhere far back in the house. Her husband gave tired monosyllabic answers.

“I suppose you want to put him in the desk chair.”

“Right,” Tom said.

“Don’t let him fall until I brace the chair, or we’ll have to clean a lot of blood up off the floor.”

They dragged the body toward the desk. A dozen envelopes of various sizes and colors had been neatly stacked on the shiny surface. Natchez leaned forward to twirl the chair around, and Tom hastily dipped under the body when it began to slide away from him. “Okay,” Natchez said. “We have to turn around and try to get his ass over the seat of the chair.”

They revolved, and Natchez went up on his toes to try to get Upshaw’s legs in the right position. “Let’s go down slow,” Natchez said. As they bent their knees, both Natchez and Tom reached back for the seat to hold it steady. They pulled it forward and bent another six inches. Glendenning Upshaw landed in the chair with a soft wet sound. Tom straightened up, and Natchez bent over to get the body to sit more naturally. Then he grunted and pushed the chair toward the desk. He wiped the back of the chair with his handkerchief.

Tom fanned the letters out on the desk and picked up the four with hand-printed addresses. He ripped open the envelopes and took out the four pieces of yellow paper and put them down before the body. The other letters he gathered into an untidy pile beside the ripped envelopes and the notes. Finally he took the heavy black pistol from his pocket and put it on the desk. He looked over his grandfather’s body at Natchez.

“You think he dropped off all his records at Wendell Hasek’s place,” Natchez said.

“I’m sure he did.” Tom stepped back from the desk.

“I hope to hell you’re right.”

“He wouldn’t give them to Carmen Bishop. She’d burn them as soon as he left the island. He’d trust Hasek with them, because Hasek’s a crook. When my grandfather had his own company robbed, Hasek stored the stolen money for him. He distributed payoff money for him for years. My grandfather was used to trusting him.”

Natchez nodded slowly. He slid the gun toward him on the desk, moving it around the notes with their stark block letters. “Poetic justice, hell,” he said.

“That’s part of it,” Tom said. “My mother’s another part of it. She’ll have to learn a lot of things about her father, but I don’t want her to know that he was shot while he was trying to kill me face to face.”

“But what you really want to do is make him look even worse than he was.” Natchez picked up the gun and began wiping it down with his handkerchief. “You want to make it look like he broke—like he crumbled.”

“He can’t look any worse than he was,” Tom said. “But you’re wrong. I want poetic justice.”

“You think life is like a book,” Natchez said. Holding the barrel of the gun in the handkerchief, he came around behind the back of the chair to Upshaw’s right side and bent down to fit the grip in his open palm. He closed the thick fingers around the grip and wedged the index finger into the trigger guard. Then he straightened up and pushed Upshaw’s body back against the chair while he held the hand with the gun upright. Glendenning Upshaw sat upright at his desk in a bloodstained suit, his head tilted forward and his eyes and mouth open. His tongue protruded a little bit between his teeth. Natchez took a handful of white hair in his left hand and yanked the staring head upright. He bent the hand with the gun around so that the barrel faced toward Upshaw and lined it up with the wound. Natchez laid his own index finger on top of Upshaw’s, and grimaced while he brought the barrel right up to the black hole above the bridge of his nose.

“Well, here goes nothing,” he said. “Literally.”

Natchez pressed the dead man’s finger into the trigger. The gun went off with a roar, and the head jerked in his hand. Blood-soaked brains, hair, and bone splattered on the wall behind Upshaw’s corpse. Natchez dropped the head, and bent down to let the hand fall open and release the pistol.

“Sometimes life is like a book,” Tom said.