“Just tell me where she is . . .” he gasped.
Luther spat out a wad of blood-tinted phlegm before speaking.
“You’re out of your fucking mind, man, you know that? I don’t know where she’s gone. Ask the big white father. He’s the one who feeds her fucking heroin.”
Of course; in that revelation lay the answer to half a dozen mysteries. It explained her reluctance to leave the old man; it explained her lassitude too, that inability to see beyond the next day, the next fix.
“And you supply the stuff? Is that it?”
“Maybe I do. But I never addicted her, man. I never did that. That was him; all along it was him! He did it to keep her. To fucking keep her. Bastard.” It was spoken with genuine contempt. “What kind of father does that? I tell you, that fucker could teach us both a few lessons in dirty tricks.” He paused to finger the inside of his mouth; he clearly had no intention of standing up again until Marty’s bloodlust had subsided. “I don’t ask no questions,” he said. “All I know is I had to clear out her room this morning.”
“Where’s her stuff gone?”
He didn’t answer for several seconds. “Burned most of it,” he said finally.
“In God’s name, why?”
“Old man’s orders. You finished?”
Marty nodded. “I’ve finished.”
“You and I,” Luther said, “we never liked each other from the start. You know why?”
“Why?”
“We’re both shit,” he said grimly. “Worthless shit. Except I know what I am. I can even live with it. But you, you poor bastard, you think if you brown-nose around long enough one of these days someone’s going to forgive you your trespasses.”
Marty snorted mucus into his hand and wiped it on his jeans.
“Truth hurt?” Luther jibed.
“All right,” Marty came back, “if you’re so good with the truth maybe you can tell me what’s going on around here.”
“I told you: I don’t ask questions.”
“You never wondered?”
“Of course I fucking wondered. I wondered every day I brought the kid dope, or saw the old man sweat when it started to get dark. But why should there be any sense to it? He’s a lunatic; that’s your answer. He lost his marbles when his wife went. Too sudden. He couldn’t take it. He’s been out of his mind ever since.”
“And that’s enough to explain everything that’s going on?”
Luther wiped a spot of bloody spittle off his chin with the back of his hand. “Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil,” he said.
“I’m no monkey,” Marty replied.
41
It wasn’t until the middle of the evening that the old man would consent to see Marty. By that time the edge had been taken off his anger, which was presumably the intention of the delay. Whitehead had forsaken the study and the chair by the window tonight. He sat in the library instead. The only lamp that burned in the room had been placed a little way behind his chair. As a consequence, it was almost impossible to see his face, and his voice was so drained of color that no clue to his mood could be caught from it: But Marty had half-expected the theatrics, and was prepared for them. There were questions to be asked, and he wasn’t about to be intimidated into silence.
“Where’s Carys?” he demanded.
The head moved a little in the cove of the chair. The hands closed a book on his lap and placed it on the table. One of the science fiction paperbacks; light reading for a dark night.
“What business is it of yours?” Whitehead wanted to know.
Marty thought he’d predicted all the responses-bribery, prevarication-but this question, throwing the onus of inquiry back onto him, he hadn’t expected. It begged other questions: did Whitehead know about his relationship with Carys, for instance? He’d tortured himself all afternoon with the idea that she’d told him everything, gone to the old man after that first night, and the subsequent nights, to report his every clumsiness, every naïveté.
“I need to know,” he said.
“Well, I see no reason why you shouldn’t be told,” the dead voice replied “though God knows it’s a private hurt. Still, there are very few people I have left to confide in.”