Knight's Gambit Read online

  His hand dropped to the switch; again the car was in motion with the sound of the engine. He turned the headlights on and dropped rapidly down out of the churchyard and into the road and up behind the wagon as the man in the white shirt leaped onto the running board, shouting at him, and Stevens recognized him too: A younger brother of Ballenbaugh’s, who had gone to Memphis years ago, where it was understood he had been a hired armed guard during a textile strike, but who, for the last two or three years, had been at his brother’s, hiding, it was said, not from the police but from some of his Memphis friends or later business associates. From time to time his name made one in reported brawls and fights at country dances and picnics. He was subdued and thrown into jail once by two officers in Jefferson, where, on Saturdays, drunk, he would brag about his past exploits or curse his present luck and the older brother who made him work about the farm.

  ‘Who in hell you spying on?’ he shouted.

  ‘Boyd,’ the other Ballenbaugh said. He did not even raise his voice. ‘Get back in the truck.’ He had not moved—a big somber-faced man who stared at Stevens out of pale, cold, absolutely expressionless eyes. ‘Howdy, Gavin,’ he said.

  ‘Howdy, Tyler,’ Stevens said. ‘You going to take Lonnie?’

  ‘Does anybody here object?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Stevens said, getting out of the car. ‘I’ll help you swap him.’

  Then he got back into the car. The wagon moved on. The truck backed and turned, already gaining speed; the two faces fled past—the one which Stevens saw now was not truculent, but frightened; the other, in which there was nothing at all save the still, cold, pale eyes. The cracked tail lamp vanished over the hill. That was an Okatoba County license number, he thought.

  Lonnie Grinnup was buried the next afternoon, from Tyler Ballenbaugh’s house.

  Stevens was not there. ‘Joe wasn’t there, either, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Lonnie’s dummy.’

  ‘No. He wasn’t there, either. The folks that went in to Lonnie’s camp on Sunday morning to look at that trotline said that he was still there, hunting for Lonnie. But he wasn’t at the burying. When he finds Lonnie this time, he can lie down by him, but he won’t hear him breathing.’

  3

  ‘No,’ Stevens said.

  He was in Mottstown, the seat of Okatoba County, on that afternoon. And although it was Sunday, and although he would not know until he found it just what he was looking for, he found it before dark—the agent for the company which, eleven years ago, had issued to Lonnie Grinnup a five-thousand-dollar policy, with double indemnity for accidental death, on his life, with Tyler Ballenbaugh as beneficiary.

  It was quite correct. The examining doctor had never seen Lonnie Grinnup before, but he had known Tyler Ballenbaugh for years, and Lonnie had made his mark on the application and Ballenbaugh had paid the first premium and kept them up ever since.

  There had been no particular secrecy about it other than transacting the business in another town, and Stevens realized that even that was not unduly strange.

  Okatoba County was just across the river, three miles from where Ballenbaugh lived, and Stevens knew of more men than Ballenbaugh who owned land in one county and bought their cars and trucks and banked their money in another, obeying the country-bred man’s inherent, possibly atavistic, faint distrust, perhaps, not of men in white collars but of paving and electricity.

  ‘Then I’m not to notify the company yet?’ the agent asked.

  ‘No. I want you to accept the claim when he comes in to file it, explain to him it will take a week or so to settle it, wait three days and send him word to come in to your office to see you at nine o’clock or ten o’clock the next morning; don’t tell him why, what for. Then telephone me at Jefferson when you know he has got the message.’

  Early the next morning, about daybreak, the heat wave broke. He lay in bed watching and listening to the crash and glare of lightning and the rain’s loud fury, thinking of the drumming of it and the fierce channeling of clay-colored water across Lonnie Grinnup’s raw and kinless grave in the barren hill beside the steepleless church, and of the sound it would make, above the turmoil of the rising river, on the tin-and-canvas hut where the deaf-and-dumb youth probably still waited for him to come home, knowing that something had happened, but not how, not why. Not how, Stevens thought. They fooled him someway. They didn’t even bother to tie him up. They just fooled him.

  On Wednesday night he received a telephone message from the Mottstown agent that Tyler Ballenbaugh had filed his claim.

  ‘All right,’ Stevens said. ‘Send him the message Monday, to come in Tuesday. And let me know when you know he has gotten it.’ He put the phone down. I am playing stud poker with a man who has proved himself a gambler, which I have not, he thought. But at least I have forced him to draw a card. And he knows who is in the pot with him.

  So when the second message came, on the following Monday afternoon, he knew only what he himself was going to do. He had thought once of asking the sheriff for a deputy, or of taking some friend with him. But even a friend would not believe that what I have is a hole card, he told himself, even though I do: That one man, even an amateur at murder, might be satisfied that he had cleaned up after himself. But when there are two of them, neither one is going to be satisfied that the other has left no ravelings.

  So he went alone. He owned a pistol. He looked at it and put it back into its drawer. At least nobody is going to shoot me with that, he told himself. He left town just after dusk.

  This time he passed the store, dark at the roadside. When he reached the lane into which he had turned nine days ago, this time he turned to the right and drove on for a quarter of a mile and turned into a littered yard, his headlights full upon a dark cabin. He did not turn them off. He walked full in the yellow beam, toward the cabin, shouting: ‘Nate! Nate!’

  After a moment a Negro voice answered, though no light showed.

  ‘I’m going in to Mr. Lonnie Grinnup’s camp. If I’m not back by daylight, you better go up to the store and tell them.’

  There was no answer. Then a woman’s voice said: ‘You come on away from that door!’ The man’s voice murmured something.

  ‘I can’t help it!’ the woman cried. ‘You come away and let them white folks alone!’

  So there are others besides me, Stevens thought, thinking how quite often, almost always, there is in Negroes an instinct not for evil but to recognize evil at once when it exists. He went back to the car and snapped off the lights and took his flashlight from the seat.

  He found the truck. In the close-held beam of the light he read again the license number which he had watched nine days ago flee over the hill. He snapped off the light and put it into his pocket.

  Twenty minutes later he realized he need not have worried about the light. He was in the path, between the black wall of jungle and the river, he saw the faint glow inside the canvas wall of the hut and he could already hear the two voices—the one cold, level and steady, the other harsh and high. He stumbled over the woodpile and then over something else and found the door and flung it back and entered the devastation of the dead man’s house—the shuck mattresses dragged out of the wooden bunks, the overturned stove and scattered cooking vessels—where Tyler Ballenbaugh stood facing him with a pistol and the younger one stood half-crouched above an overturned box.

  ‘Stand back, Gavin,’ Ballenbaugh said.

  ‘Stand back yourself, Tyler,’ Stevens said. ‘You’re too late.’

  The younger one stood up. Stevens saw recognition come into his face. ‘Well, by—’ he said.

  ‘Is it all up, Gavin?’ Ballenbaugh said. ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘I reckon it is,’ Stevens said. ‘Put your pistol down.’

  ‘Who else is with you?’

  ‘Enough,’ Stevens said. ‘Put your pistol down, Tyler.’

  ‘Hell,’ the younger one said. He began to move; Stevens saw his eyes go swiftly from him to the door behind him. ‘He’s lyin
g. There ain’t anybody with him. He’s just spying around like he was the other day, putting his nose into business he’s going to wish he had kept it out of. Because this time it’s going to get bit off.’

  He was moving toward Stevens, stooping a little, his arms held slightly away from his sides.

  ‘Boyd!’ Tyler said. The other continued to approach Stevens, not smiling, but with a queer light, a glitter, in his face. ‘Boyd!’ Tyler said. Then he moved, too, with astonishing speed, and overtook the younger and with one sweep of his arm hurled him back into the bunk. They faced each other—the one cold, still, expressionless, the pistol held before him aimed at nothing, the other half-crouched, snarling.

  ‘What the hell you going to do? Let him take us back to town like two damn sheep?’

  ‘That’s for me to decide,’ Tyler said. He looked at Stevens. ‘I never intended this, Gavin. I insured his life, kept the premiums paid—yes. But it was good business: If he had outlived me, I wouldn’t have had any use for the money, and if I had outlived him, I would have collected on my judgment. There was no secret about it. It was done in open daylight. Anybody could have found out about it. Maybe he told about it. I never told him not to. And who’s to say against it anyway? I always fed him when he came to my house, he always stayed as long as he wanted to, come when he wanted to. But I never intended this.’

  Suddenly the younger one began to laugh, half-crouched against the bunk where the other had flung him. ‘So that’s the tune,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it’s going.’ Then it was not laughter any more, though the transition was so slight or perhaps so swift as to be imperceptible. He was standing now, leaning forward a little, facing his brother. ‘I never insured him for five thousand dollars! I wasn’t going to get—’

  ‘Hush,’ Tyler said.

  ‘—five thousand dollars when they found him dead on that—’

  Tyler walked steadily to the other and slapped him in two motions, palm and back, of the same hand, the pistol still held before him in the other.

  ‘I said, hush, Boyd,’ he said. He looked at Stevens again. ‘I never intended this. I don’t want that money now, even if they were going to pay it, because this is not the way I aimed for it to be. Not the way I bet. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do you need to ask that? I want an indictment for murder.’

  ‘And then prove it!’ the younger one snarled. ‘Try and prove it! I never insured his life for—’

  ‘Hush,’ Tyler said. He spoke almost gently, looking at Stevens with the pale eyes in which there was absolutely nothing. ‘You can’t do that. It’s a good name. Has been. Maybe nobody’s done much for it yet, but nobody’s hurt it bad yet, up to now. I have owed no man, I have taken nothing that was not mine. You mustn’t do that, Gavin.’

  ‘I mustn’t do anything else, Tyler.’

  The other looked at him. Stevens heard him draw a long breath and expel it. But his face did not change at all. ‘You want your eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.’

  ‘Justice wants it. Maybe Lonnie Grinnup wants it. Wouldn’t you?’

  For a moment longer the other looked at him. Then Ballenbaugh turned and made a quiet gesture at his brother and another toward Stevens, quiet and peremptory.

  Then they were out of the hut, standing in the light from the door; a breeze came up from somewhere and rustled in the leaves overhead and died away, ceased.

  At first Stevens did not know what Ballenbaugh was about. He watched in mounting surprise as Ballenbaugh turned to face his brother, his hand extended, speaking in a voice which was actually harsh now: ‘This is the end of the row. I was afraid from that night when you came home and told me. I should have raised you better, but I didn’t. Here. Stand up and finish it.’

  ‘Look out, Tyler!’ Stevens said. ‘Don’t do that!’

  ‘Keep out of this, Gavin. If it’s meat for meat you want, you will get it.’ He still faced his brother, he did not even glance at Stevens. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it and stand up.’

  Then it was too late. Stevens saw the younger one spring back. He saw Tyler take a step forward and he seemed to hear in the other’s voice the surprise, the disbelief, then the realization of the mistake. ‘Drop the pistol, Boyd,’ he said. ‘Drop it.’

  ‘So you want it back, do you?’ the younger said. ‘I come to you that night and told you you were worth five thousand dollars as soon as somebody happened to look on that trotline, and asked you to give me ten dollars, and you turned me down. Ten dollars, and you wouldn’t. Sure you can have it. Take it.’ It flashed, low against his side; the orange fire lanced downward again as the other fell.

  Now it’s my turn, Stevens thought. They faced each other; he heard again that brief wind come from somewhere and shake the leaves overhead and fall still.

  ‘Run while you can, Boyd,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough. Run, now.’

  ‘Sure I’ll run. You do all your worrying about me now, because in a minute you won’t have any worries. I’ll run all right, after I’ve said a word to smart guys that come sticking their noses where they’ll wish to hell they hadn’t—’

  Now he’s going to shoot, Stevens thought, and he sprang. For an instant he had the illusion of watching himself springing, reflected somehow by the faint light from the river, that luminousness which water gives back to the dark, in the air above Boyd Ballenbaugh’s head. Then he knew it was not himself he saw, it had not been wind he heard, as the creature, the shape which had no tongue and needed none, which had been waiting nine days now for Lonnie Grinnup to come home, dropped toward the murderer’s back with its hands already extended and its body curved and rigid with silent and deadly purpose.

  He was in the tree, Stevens thought. The pistol glared. He saw the flash, but he heard no sound.

  4

  He was sitting on the veranda with his neat surgeon’s bandage after supper when the sheriff of the county came up the walk—a big man, too, pleasant, affable, with eyes even paler and colder and more expressionless than Tyler Ballenbaugh’s. ‘It won’t take but a minute,’ he said, ‘or I wouldn’t have bothered you.’

  ‘How bothered me?’ Stevens said.

  The sheriff lowered one thigh to the veranda rail. ‘Head feel all right?’

  ‘Feels all right,’ Stevens said.

  ‘That’s good, I reckon you heard where we found Boyd.’

  Stevens looked back at him just as blankly. ‘I may have,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Haven’t remembered much today but a headache.’

  ‘You told us where to look. You were conscious when I got there. You were trying to give Tyler water. You told us to look on that trotline.’

  ‘Did I? Well, well, what won’t a man say, drunk or out of his head? Sometimes he’s right too.’

  ‘You were. We looked on the line, and there was Boyd hung on one of the hooks, dead, just like Lonnie Grinnup was. And Tyler Ballenbaugh with a broken leg and another bullet in his shoulder, and you with a crease in your skull you could hide a cigar in. How did he get on that trotline, Gavin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stevens said.

  ‘All right. I’m not sheriff now. How did Boyd get on that trotline?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The sheriff looked at him; they looked at each other. ‘Is that what you answer any friend that asks?’

  ‘Yes. Because I was shot, you see. I don’t know.’

  The sheriff took a cigar from his pocket and looked at it for a time. ‘Joe—that deaf-and-dumb boy Lonnie raised—seems to have gone away at last. He was still around there last Sunday, but nobody has seen him since. He could have stayed. Nobody would have bothered him.’

  ‘Maybe he missed Lonnie too much to stay,’ Stevens said.

  ‘Maybe he missed Lonnie.’ The sheriff rose. He bit the end from the cigar and lit it. ‘Did that bullet cause you to forget this too? Just what made you suspect something was wrong? What was it the rest of us seem to have missed?’

  ‘It was that paddle,’ Stev
ens said.

  ‘Paddle?’

  ‘Didn’t you ever run a trotline, a trotline right at your camp? You don’t paddle, you pull the boat hand over hand along the line itself from one hook to the next. Lonnie never did use his paddle; he even kept the skiff tied to the same tree his trotline was fastened to, and the paddle stayed in his house. If you had ever been there, you would have seen it. But the paddle was in the skiff when that boy found it.’

  Tomorrow

  Uncle Gavin had not always been county attorney. But the time when he had not been was more than twenty years ago and it had lasted for such a short period that only the old men remembered it, and even some of them did not. Because in that time he had had but one case.

  He was a young man then, twenty-eight, only a year out of the state-university law school where, at grandfather’s instigation, he had gone after his return from Harvard and Heidelberg; and he had taken the case voluntarily, persuaded grandfather to let him handle it alone, which grandfather did, because everyone believed the trial would be a mere formality.

  So he tried the case. Years afterward he still said it was the only case, either as a private defender or a public prosecutor, in which he was convinced that right and justice were on his side, that he ever lost. Actually he did not lose it—a mistrial in the fall court term, an acquittal in the following spring term—the defendant a solid, well-to-do farmer, husband and father, too, named Bookwright, from a section called Frenchman’s Bend in the remote southeastern corner of the county; the victim a swaggering bravo calling himself Buck Thorpe and called Bucksnort by the other young men whom he had subjugated with his fists during the three years he had been in Frenchman’s Bend; kinless, who had appeared overnight from nowhere, a brawler, a gambler, known to be a distiller of illicit whiskey and caught once on the road to Memphis with a small drove of stolen cattle, which the owner promptly identified. He had a bill of sale for them, but none in the country knew the name signed to it.