Quests of Simon Ark Page 10

Next I found Shelly in the undertaker’s office with Rita.

  “Hello, dear. Sorry to be away so long.”

  “I’m used to it by this time,” she smiled. “What did Simon find out?”

  “Not too much, I’m afraid.” I thought of asking Rita about Mara, but decided she’d tell me no more than my uncle had. She was in one of her unfriendly moods, and left the room when she saw I was going to remain with my wife for a while.

  “How’s your brother-in-law?” Shelly asked.

  “He’ll live, I guess. They’re letting him out of the hospital in the morning.”

  Simon Ark joined us and I could see a new thought had crossed his mind. “Could we go out to your father’s house? I’d like to look around.”

  “Well … I suppose so. Wait a minute, and I’ll get the key from my uncle.”

  I returned with the key and we were off again—this time with Shelly too, because she couldn’t take any more of facing my aunt and uncle without my support.

  A cab dropped us at the big house that was so familiar to my childhood. I tried to look at it objectively, not thinking about all the good times. And all the bad times. But it was still my house, and I couldn’t get away from that simple fact.

  The inside was much as I’d remembered it, with the long, wide staircase and the lighted portrait of my mother over the fireplace.

  “You mean he lived in this big house all by himself?” Shelly asked me.

  “He was that kind of a man,” I answered simply.

  “I wish I’d known him better.”

  “No you don’t; nobody who really knew him ever did,” I told her.

  Simon Ark paused in his reconnaissance of the house to face us by the broad silent stairs. “My friend, before we proceed any further in this investigation, I think it would be well for you to tell me just why you hate your father so much …”

  It was out in the open now, and somehow I was glad he’d put it into words. And yet I retreated, still subconsciously fighting the thought. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “It’s been quite obvious from the first. You want it to be your father who was responsible for that auto crash; you don’t want it to be your sister because you loved her.”

  Shelly came to my side and the three of us stood there in silence, alone in the big house that had once been home to me. I realized that they were both waiting for me to speak, and I asked through dry lips, “Do you know which of them caused the crash?”

  Simon Ark hesitated and then replied. “I’ve known that for several hours now, but the question that remains unanswered is why. Why, after all these months—and even years—of hatred between your father and your sister, did it suddenly boil to the surface?”

  “Do you think you know why?”

  “I believe the answer lies with the third judge, Conrad Mara.”

  I didn’t understand his constant talk of this third judge, who was no longer even living in Maple Shades; but I knew from the past that Simon Ark was a wise man.

  We searched briefly through my father’s study, looking for something, yet not really knowing what we’d find. Simon seemed to disregard my father’s legal papers, and even the stack of correspondence got only a brief glance from him. But finally he found what he apparently sought, and he showed it to us.

  “What is it?” I asked. “A business card?”

  “It’s in Spanish,” Simon replied. “It’s the card of a firm of private investigators in Havana.”

  “What does that tell us?”

  “Perhaps that your father was investigating the past life of Conrad Mara …”

  We looked further, and soon Shelly came upon some dusty campaign posters. “Look!” she exclaimed, holding one up. “Here’s your father, and Philip … and here’s a picture of Mara, too!”

  Simon and I were at her side in an instant, looking down at the smiling face before us.

  “He looks so young,” Shelly commented.

  “He can’t be much under fifty if he had a ten-year-old son back in 1937,” I said.

  “His face looks vaguely familiar in some way,” Shelly said, frowning at the campaign photo.

  “The face of evil is always familiar,” Simon Ark spoke quietly. “It is the face of Judas at the Last Supper; of Genghis Khan charging across the Asian plains; of John Wilkes Booth as he shot Lincoln. It is the face of the serpent in Paradise, of the ultimate evil, the devil himself.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, borrowing Simon’s favorite word. “If you’re right, and Mara did bring this evil to Maple Shades, then he must be found and destroyed.”

  Simon Ark nodded in agreement. “Let us search further. If your father was interested enough to dig into Mara’s past, it’s quite possible he knew where he went after leaving here.”

  And so we searched.

  But there was nothing. Whatever reports my father might have received from the private detectives in Havana, there were no traces of them now. And even his address book contained no hints as to Judge Mara’s destination, after leaving Maple Shades.

  Finally, almost in desperation, Simon picked up a Cincinnati telephone book and glanced through it. We all stared as the phone book fell open to a page with a folded corner. There, halfway down the column, one name and number had been circled, the Southern Gateway Hotel. And next to the number, in my father’s familiar scrawl, was the single word “Mara” …

  We were going back, back along the broad pavement of U.S. Highway 50, back to the sprawling confines of Cincinnati. We were crowded into the back seat of a taxi, and not one of the three of us spoke. Shelly’s face was white and drawn and I was beginning to be sorry we’d brought her along. On the other side of me Simon sat tense and expectant. I had a feeling that the end was near, but the end of what?

  “I never even looked inside the coffins,” I mumbled, half to myself. “I don’t even know for sure that it’s them inside.”

  “It’s them,” Simon Ark said. “I already considered and rejected the possibility that the whole accident was faked for some reason.”

  “Then what’s the answer?” I wanted to know. “Which one of them was it? Which one of them caused the accident?” The questions had been becoming more important as the hours drifted past, and now they were the most important thing in my life—more important than my job, or Simon, or even Shelly. Because if it was Stella whose mind had been warped by this evil thing, then somehow I had failed. I had run away and left Stella at the mercy of the family, at the mercy of my father and Uncle Philip and Aunt Rita.

  It had to be my father. It had to be …

  We came in Seventh Street, past the New Telephone Building, and Shillito’s, and all the other familiar and unfamiliar landmarks of a city that was no longer mine. The cab turned right, glided two blocks south into Fountain Square and Government Square, then into Main Street and south toward the river.

  The Southern Gateway Hotel, when we finally reached it, was a run-down three-story structure almost at the river’s edge. Already the night shadows were slipping in around us, and from the hotel’s lounge came the mighty wail of a jazz trumpet, splitting the evening air with a mournful note. We passed through the lounge, noting the young kids and their girls, getting an early start on a Saturday night, because perhaps the Southern Gateway was not the type of place you came to later in the evening.

  And I remembered them, because I’d been one of them twenty years earlier. I’d been one of the kids with pimples on their faces, escorting the girls with the jutting jaws or the pushed-in faces, and kidding themselves that they were out with the most beautiful girl in Cincinnati.

  I’d listened to the blues played on a black man’s horn, and I’d watched the lithe movements of the girl singer’s hips as she went through the motions of a song in the night.

  It was the same now, with these kids. It would always be the same. This, I guess, was life. At least it was life in the fifth decade of the twentieth century.

  Beyond the trumpet and the piano and the bass and the girl
singer the hotel’s desk clerk lounged in the doorway, enjoying the music while waiting for the customers who wouldn’t come until the night grew a little darker.

  Simon Ark moved among the swaying couples on the dance floor until he reached the man’s side, and then he asked, “Is there a man named Mara staying here?”

  The room clerk looked him up and down, trying to judge whether or not we were detectives. Then he saw Shelly and decided we weren’t. “Upstairs. Third floor. Room 316.”

  Simon started up the dimly lit stairs, and I turned to Shelly. “You’d better wait down here, dear. If any of these creeps try to pick you up, just give a yell.”

  I smiled at her and followed Simon up the stairs. The place reminded me of one I’d often stayed in while I was in the army.

  And finally we were at the door of Room 316. I wondered if Satan was always this easy to find, for those who looked.

  At my side, Simon said, very quietly, “Libera nos a malo …”

  “Is that another of your Coptic prayers?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “This one’s Latin,” he answered simply, and then knocked on the door of Conrad Mara’s room.

  We waited …

  From the inside, very softly, came the sound of music, as if from a radio. Simon Ark knocked again. “Judge Mara,” he called out; “we know you’re in there. We want to talk to you.”

  And now an odor reached our nostrils, the heavy odor of a perfume, perhaps mingled with the scent of incense. Simon Ark tried the door, but it was locked.

  He knocked again, and we listened. Now, in addition to the faint music, we could hear something bumping at regular intervals.

  “Should I get the room clerk?” I asked.

  “There’s no time; it might be too late already. Help me break down this door.”

  We hit the thin wooden door together, and the lock sprang open. And then we were in the room. And we saw it …

  Conrad Mara, the third Judge of Hades, was hanging from the light fixture in the center of the small room, a thin chain wrapped tightly around his neck. He was dressed in a woman’s black bathing suit and his body was doused with perfume.

  “God!” I gasped, “what is this?”

  Simon Ark stared at the swollen, dead face, and at the incense burner, and at the scattered newspapers on the floor. “We’re too late,” he said simply. “We’ve come too late to save Conrad Mara, but not too late to trap the devil of Maple Shades …”

  V

  Finally I asked, “Who killed him?” when I’d had time to recover from the shock of the scene before me.

  “Perhaps his past,” Simon Ark replied. “Perhaps our modern civilization. Perhaps a force beyond our knowledge.” He paused a moment and then added, “Conrad Mara took his own life …”

  “Suicide? Like this? Why, that’s impossible, Simon. Who’d ever dress up in an outfit like that, with perfume and everything, to hang themselves?”

  “A masochist,” Simon answered simply. “People talk quite openly these days about rapists and homosexuals, but there are other areas of aberration less well known to the general public. Conrad Mara received sexual pleasure from the experience of physical pain; and in hanging himself with that chain he experienced the supreme masochistic thrill. There’ve been a number of similar cases on the West Coast in recent years.”

  “But …” I began, still not wholly convinced, “how can you be so certain?”

  “It’s been obvious to me for several hours that Mara was being shunned by the people of Maple Shades because of some act. It wasn’t criminal, or they’d have talked about it—rather, it was some sort of sexual act, something that was discovered and ruined his career as a judge.”

  “Then you never really believed he was the devil?”

  “Sometimes, my friend, Satan enters the bodies of those he would destroy. Who is to say he was not inside of this body until a few hours ago?”

  Simon stepped to the house phone and called downstairs. “There’s been a suicide,” he said simply. “I suggest you call the local police. And you might tell the young lady who’s been waiting in the lobby that we’re all right and we’ll be down presently.” Then he hung up and turned back to me, averting the hanging corpse as much as possible.

  “But why did he pick today to kill himself? Surely he must have had this … aberration for many years.”

  Simon Ark pointed to the scattered newspapers on the floor. “But it was just today that he read about the accident in Maple Shades; and he realized the truth of it.”

  “You mean he was in some way connected with the deaths of my father and sister?”

  Simon nodded. “In a way. You might say that his existence was the cause of the deaths on the River Road yesterday morning.”

  “Is it all over, then?”

  “Just about, my friend. As soon as the police get here, we’ll start back to Maple Shades. There’s only one Judge of Hades left now. He will, perhaps, be interested to learn of these developments.”

  And then the police were on the stairs, and all around us; one man was asking us questions while another was taking pictures, and two others were gently lowering the body of Conrad Mara to the floor …

  And so we went back, for the last time, to the town of Maple Shades, across the state line, and along the highway lined with the maple trees that gave the place its name, at some time in the forgotten past when pioneers in wagons and explorers in boats had first made their way into this wilderness.

  I thought about it, and I thought about my own early days in Maple Shades, and about my father. And Stella.

  The cab deposited the three of us in front of the funeral parlor, and we stood watching the twinkling lights of the town by night. And suddenly I knew that this was no longer my home and these were no longer my people. My home was back in New York, among the glistening towers and the narrow streets, as I always thought it had been.

  “Simon,” I said, “we’re not going back in there. Shelly and I aren’t waiting around for the funeral; we’re going back to New York tonight.”

  They both looked at me as if I was crazy, but I knew it was perhaps the only sane thing I’d said in the last twenty-four hours.

  “Let us walk together for a ways,” Simon said quietly. “Shelly, you wait for us inside.”

  And we walked, down the main street of the town that was no longer mine, passing the people I no longer knew, and the unfamiliar stores and all the glistening tributes to suburban living.

  “I don’t want to know,” I told him finally, as we walked. “I thought it was the most important thing in the world to me, to know which of them it was. But I don’t want to know any more. I don’t want it to be my sister, and I don’t want it to be my father. I don’t want you to tell me which one it was.”

  “I’m sorry,” Simon Ark said, “but the truth will always come out. If I don’t tell you now, some day—some night—next week or next year, you’ll want to know. You’ll be warm and happy, but suddenly you’ll be sorry you didn’t know.”

  We’d passed through the main part of town now, and we faced the million-dollar county hospital rising silently in the night before us. “Come,” Simon said. “We will pay a visit to Frank Broderick and clear up the attack on him last night. It is a good starting place for my story.”

  I said nothing, and followed him into the hospital. A nurse informed us it was after visiting hours, but in his usual mysterious manner Simon talked his way past her. And upstairs, on the top floor of the building, we found Frank Broderick’s room at the end of a long white hall.

  “How are you getting along, Frank?” I asked as we entered. He gave a start and then relaxed when he saw who it was. “Can’t complain,” he replied. “I’ll be out of this place in the morning.” He was sitting up in a chair, reading a book, and we could see his taped ribs through the open front of his pajamas.

  “We’ve come to clear up the attack on you,” Simon said.

  “Oh? Did they catch the guy who did it?”


  “Not exactly,” Simon replied slowly.

  “Well …?” Frank Broderick looked at me with a puzzled glance that I transferred to Simon.

  “Judge Mara killed himself in Cincinnati this afternoon,” Simon stated.

  And then, before our eyes, Frank Broderick’s face and composure seemed to crumble. He sank deeper into the chair and watched us through thin terrified slits of eyes.

  Simon Ark stepped to the room telephone and asked the operator for the number of the funeral home. After he got it he called the number and requested to speak to Hallison James.

  “Mr. James? This is Simon Ark. I’d like you to come over to the hospital right away. Frank Broderick would like to make an official statement about the auto accident.”

  Then he hung up, and the three of us faced each other, and Frank Broderick said through clenched teeth, “Damn you, how did you find out …?”

  It was very quiet in that room, and we might have been the only three people in the universe just then. But we weren’t. District Attorney Hallison James was on his way, and Simon Ark and Frank Broderick knew what that meant, even if I didn’t.

  “How did you know?” Frank Broderick repeated.

  “Stella’s body was thrown through the windshield when the two cars hit,” Simon explained, in a voice that hardly rose above a whisper. “Did you ever hear of the driver of a car being thrown through the windshield in an accident? No, you never did, because the steering wheel is in the way.”

  The words were a roar in my brain, and I tried to cling to the wall for support. What was he saying? What did Simon mean?

  “Stella went through the windshield because she wasn’t driving, because she was sitting next to the driver at the time. And once I knew that, I asked myself who had been driving. I asked myself who would have been driving your car if Stella wasn’t, and of course there was only one possible answer. You, Frank Broderick! It was you who saw Richard’s car coming down the River Road in the morning’s dawn. It was you who aimed your car at his, disregarding your wife’s frantic screams, and then leaped to safety just before the two cars hit!”

  Frank Broderick mumbled something deep in his throat, and I faced him as a stranger. It had not been my father who caused the accident; it had not been Stella. It had been this man before me.