Duncan Kline died from exposure during a winter storm.” Dear God, Pittman thought. He finally understood. Involuntarily, he murmured, “The snow.”
“That’s right, Mr. Pittman. The snow. Duncan was an alcoholic. When we met him at his cabin, he refused to be budged by our arguments. He insisted that if we didn’t soften our policy toward the Soviet Union, he would expose us as former Communist sympathizers. A blizzard was forecast. It was late afternoon, but the snow was falling thickly enough already that we couldn’t see the lake behind Duncan’s cabin. He’d been drinking to excess before we arrived at the cabin. He drank heavily all the while we tried to reason with him. I suspect that if he’d been sober, we might have had more patience with him. As it was, we used the alcohol to kill him. We encouraged him to keep drinking, pretending to drink with him, waiting for him to collapse. Or so we hoped. I have to give Duncan credit. After a while, even as drunk as he was, he finally suspected that something was wrong. He stopped drinking. No amount of encouragement would persuade him to swallow the scotch we poured for him. In the end, we had to force him. And I have to give Duncan credit for something else-all those years of rowing had made him extremely strong. Drunk and in his sixties, he put up quite a struggle. But he wasn’t any match for the five of us. You helped hold his arms, didn’t you, Winston? We poured the scotch down his throat. Oh yes, we did. He vomited. But we kept pouring.”
Pittman listened, repelled. The scene that Gable described reminded Pittman of the way in which Gable had murdered his wife.
“At last, after he was unconscious, we picked him up, carried him outside, and left him in a snowbank,” Gable said. “His former students and faculty members knew how extreme his alcohol problem was. They thought that the reference to exposure was discreet, since privately many of them were able to learn the true nature of his death. Or what they thought was the true nature-that he’d wandered drunkenly outside in his shirt sleeves and passed out in the snowstorm. No one ever discovered that we had helped Duncan along. We removed all evidence that we’d been in the cabin. We got in our cars and drove away. The snow filled our tire tracks. A relative of his became worried when Duncan didn’t return to Boston after the reunion at Grollier. The state police were sent to the cabin, where they saw Duncan’s car, searched, and found his bare foot sticking out from under a snowdrift. An animal had tugged off his shoe and eaten his toes.”
“And almost forty years later, Jonathan Millgate began having nightmares about what you’d done,” Pittman said.
“Jonathan was always the most delicate among us,” Gable said. “Strange. During the Vietnam War, he could recommend destroying villages suspected of ties with the Communists. He knew full well that everyone in those villages would be killed, and yet he never lost a moment’s sleep over them. But about that time, his favorite dog had to be destroyed because it was suffering from kidney disease. He wept about that dog for a week. He had it buried, with a stone marker, in his backyard. I once saw him out there talking to the gravestone, and that was two years after the fact. I think that he could have adjusted to what we did to Duncan, a bloodless death, falling ever deeply asleep with snow for a pillow, the corpse preserved in the cold, if only the animal hadn’t eaten Duncan’s toes. The mutilation took control of Jonathan’s imagination. Yes, he did have nightmares, although I assumed that after a time the nightmares stopped. However, a few years ago, I was surprised, to say the least, when he began referring to them again. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Instead of being jubilant, Jonathan reacted by saying that the fall of communism only proved that Duncan’s death had been needless. The logic eluded me. But the threat didn’t. When Jonathan began pouring his tortured soul out to Father Dandridge, I felt very threatened indeed.”
“So you killed him, and here we are,” Pittman said, “trying to come to terms with your secrets. Was it really worth it, everything you did to me, the people who died because of the cover-up? You’re elderly. You’re infirm. The odds are that you would have died long before the investigation led to a trial.”
Gable rubbed his emaciated chin and assessed Pittman with eyes that seemed a thousand years old. “You still don’t understand. With all that you’ve been through and with all that we’ve discussed this afternoon, you still somehow fail to understand. Of course I’d be dead before the matter even got as far as a grand jury. I don’t care about being punished. Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, I did nothing for which I deserve to be punished. What I care about is my reputation. I won’t have a lifetime of devoted public service dragged into the gutter and judged by commoners because I eliminated a child molester, a drunkard, and a Communist. Duncan Kline was evil. As a youth, I didn’t think so, of course. I admired him. But eventually I realized how despicable he was. His death was no loss to humanity. My reputation is worth a hundred thousand Duncan Klines. The good I have done for this country is a legacy that I refuse to allow to be smeared because of a desperate act of necessity that protected my career.”
“Your career.”
“Precisely,” Gable said. “Nothing else matters. I’m afraid that I brought you here under false pretenses. The million dollars, the two passports, I regret to say that I never intended to provide them. I wanted to discover what you knew. Quite a lot, it turns out. But without proof, it’s all theory. You’re hardly a threat to my security. But you are very much a threat to my reputation. Winston’s behavior this afternoon shows that he, too, is a threat to my reputation. He can’t guard his tongue. Fortunately both problems have a common solution. Mr. Webley.”
“Yes, sir.”
Webley proceeded toward Pittman and stopped behind him. Pittman’s bowels turned cold when he heard the hammer on his.45 being cocked.
“No!”
The barrel of the.45 suddenly appeared beside him. The shot assaulted his eardrums. Across the room, Winston Sloane gasped, jerking back, blood erupting from his chest and from behind him, spattering the sofa upon which he sat. The old man shuddered, then collapsed as if he were made of brittle sticks that could no longer support one another. His head drooped, tilting his balance, sending his body sprawling onto the floor. Pittman was sure he heard bones scraping together.
The shocked expression on Pittman’s face communicated the question he was too horrified to ask.
“I told you, I need to eliminate problems,” Gable said. “Mr. Webley.”
The gunman stepped from behind Pittman and walked toward the entrance to the room. He stopped, turned, set the.45 on a table, and pulled a different pistol from beneath his suit coat.
“Perhaps you’re beginning to understand,” Gable told Pittman.
Terrified, Pittman wanted to run, but Webley blocked the way out. The instant Pittman moved, he knew he’d be killed. His only defense was to keep talking. “You expect the police to believe that I came in here, pulled a gun, shot Sloane, and then was shot by your bodyguard?”
“Of course. The.45 belongs to you, after all. Mr. Webley will wipe his fingerprints from it, place the weapon in your hand, and fire it so that nitrate powder is on your fingers. The physical evidence will match what we insist happened.”
“But the plan won’t work.”
“Nonsense. Your motive has already been established.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Pittman’s voice was hoarse with fear. He stared at the pistol Webley aimed at him. “The plan won’t work because this conversation is being overheard and recorded.”
Gable’s wrinkle-rimmed eyes narrowed, creating more wrinkles. “
“You were right to be suspicious,” Pittman said. “I did come here wearing a microphone.”
“
“You saw me search him thoroughly. He’s clean. There’s no microphone.”
“Then shoot him!”
“Wait.” Pittman’s knees shook so badly that he didn’t know if he could support himself. “Listen to me. When you searched me, you missed something.”
“I said shoot him, Mr. Webley!”
But Webley hesitated.
“My gun,” Pittman said. “The.45. Before I came here, I went to a man I interviewed five years ago. He’s a specialist in security, in electronic eavesdropping. He didn’t recognize me, and he didn’t ask any questions when I said I wanted to buy a miniature microphone-transmitter that could be concealed in the handle of a.45. I knew the gun was the first thing you’d take from me. I was counting on the fact that you’d be so pleased to get it away from me, you wouldn’t stop to realize it might be another kind of threat. You checked my pen, Webley. But you didn’t think to check the gun.”
Webley grabbed the.45 off the table and pressed the button that released the pistol’s ammunition magazine
