The Last Coin (8 page)

A pounding on the front door awakened him. There was a simultaneous screaming, coming from somewhere—from over-head, from the attic. Andrew stumbled out into the living room, rubbing his face. He felt like a rumpled, dehydrated hobo. Wrapped in her bathrobe, Rose pushed past him, bound for the front door. She threw it open. There was Pickett, holding a fishing pole and tackle box and wearing a hat. He started to speak, to play out the role he and Andrew had written for him the previous afternoon, but Rose dashed away toward the stairs, shouting at Andrew to follow along.

Upstairs, Mrs. Gummidge stood with her hand across her mouth, outside the open door of Aunt Naomi’s room. Somehow the ’possum had deteriorated sadly in the early morning hours. In the closeness of the room, it outstank the cats, which had, apparently, been at the corpse just a little bit—investigating it, but finally giving up and leaving it alone. It was perfect. Andrew bit his lip and winked at Pickett.

Aunt Naomi sat in bed, her hair curled as it had been the night before. She breathed like a tea kettle. “How,” she demanded in a hollow, lamenting voice, “did that creature get into my room?”

Andrew cleared Mrs. Gummidge out of the way. “Bring me the scoop shovel,” he said, taking command. “Out of the garage. The broad, aluminum scoop.”

“I’ll get it,” said Pickett, hurrying away down the stairs.

Andrew examined the dead ‘possum. “Cats have done for it.” He nodded at Aunt Naomi, who stared at him as if he were talking like an ape. “The cats,” he said, louder. “They’ve worried the beast to death. Look at him, he’s all over scratches. Like the Chinese—the death of a thousand cuts. Very nasty business.” He shook his head. Pickett came stomping up the stairs, carrying the short-handled shovel. “What do you think of this?” asked Andrew stoutly.

Pickett stared at him, then said, “Looks like—what?—the cats got him, I guess.” He bent over to have a closer look, then screwed up his face and backed away. “He’s rather had it, hasn’t he?”

Andrew nodded. “Does he look like the fellow we saw on the back fence two days ago? Same size, I’d say.”

Pickett nodded. “I’m certain it is.” He looked up at Rose, who seemed to be staring at him particularly hard. “Couldn’t
swear
to it, of course, not absolutely. Wouldn’t want to sign an affidavit. If he were in a police line-up, you know …” He let the subject drop and pretended to examine the creature again, shaking his head at the very idea of it.

Rose sat down on the bed beside Aunt Naomi and patted the coverlet over the old woman’s leg. “Can’t you get it out of here?” she asked Andrew, nodding toward the door.

“At once. Back away there, Mrs. Gummidge. One dead ’possum coming down the stairs. Call Rodent Control, will you? There’s a man there named Biff Chateau who has done some work for me in the past. This is right in his line. Thank God for the cats, eh? This place would be hell on earth without them. There wouldn’t be a room in the house safe from monsters like this. He stinks to high heaven, doesn’t he?”

There were more footfalls on the stairs, and Mr. Pennyman hove into view. Imposter, thought Andrew. He’s taken the time to massage his scalp before coming up. There might have been any kind of trouble at all up here—thieves, cavemen, Martians—
he
wouldn’t have been worth a curse. It occurred to Andrew that he could trip right then, and pitch the spoiled ‘possum into Pennyman’s face. No one would claim it wasn’t a flat-out accident. But he wouldn’t. This was art, this ’possum business. It demanded subtlety. There wasn’t any room for farce.

“Excuse me, Mr. Pennyman,” Andrew said, shoving past the man on the landing. “There’s been a ‘possum fooling about in Naomi’s bedroom. Half-terrorized her before the cats got to it. God bless the cats, like I was saying. Lord love a cat. Nothing like them.” He angled away down the stairs, holding the scoop shovel out in front of him, Pickett following. “A cat by any other name …” he said over his shoulder. “Sacred in Borneo, I understand.” He continued to chatter long after Pennyman could no longer hear him. If he stopped, he’d pitch over laughing. He’d convulse. They’d have to call in a doctor to sedate him. The whole successful business would be spoiled like an old fish.

There was Mrs. Gummidge, looming out of the kitchen. She’d gotten nothing but a recording over the phone at Rodent Control. Of course she would have. He’d known it when he’d sent her off, but
she
hadn’t thought of it. What Mrs. Gummidge didn’t think of would fill a book. It wasn’t even six in the morning yet. She’d left a message, and Chateau would discover it later. He’d send a man out in a van later in the day, full of stories about renegade ’possums, about the land being overrun with them.

Andrew was vindicated. That was the long and the short of it. He held the truth on a scoop shovel. They’d been suspicious of his ’possum, had they? Now here one was, giving them all the glad eye. Or the glazed eye. Andrew very nearly laughed out loud. He had taken up the reins and steered the morning out of chaos, right under the nose of Pennyman. He would look in on Aunt Naomi later that morning, after she’d had a chance to compose herself, to haul the god-awful curl papers out of her hair. He would ask her for a small sum, for the restaurant. Five hundred dollars would … Well, it wouldn’t go far. A thousand, though, would buy him the bar implements on his list, with money left over to buy single malt whiskies. His importer listed forty-two, at an average of thirteen dollars a bottle. That was five hundred and what, altogether? Something. He wasn’t any good at sums.

He paused to smile at Mrs. Gummidge on his way out the door, thanking her for making the useless phone call. She grinned back at him and nodded. Pickett stood silently, holding his hat. His mustache desperately needed trimming.

“I’ll just go to Naomi,” said Mrs. Gummidge. “I’ll bring round her tea.”

Andrew winked at her. “You do that, Mrs. Gummidge. I’d suggest chamomile, for its soothing properties. Avoid anything containing caffeine. I’d fetch it up myself, but this fellow here ought to be dumped into a trash can and lidded, before the whole house moves out on account of him. Then I’m going fishing. You’ve met Mr. Pickett, I believe.”

Mrs. Gummidge nodded, still smiling, her teeth set.

“Yes, of course you have,” said Andrew. “Any number of times. Goodbye, then. If Rodent Control calls back, tell them the beast is in a trash can behind the garage. Normally it’s the animal shelter that handles this sort of thing, but I particularly wanted Rodent Control to be in on it. They’re equipped to test for plague fleas.”

Mrs. Gummidge blinked. Andrew nodded to her and went out through the door, dumping the ’possum in an empty trash can and shoving the lid on, then leaning the shovel against the clapboard wall of the garage. Pickett followed along into the cool darkness inside, waiting in the doorway until Andrew turned on the lights. “She’s the grinningest woman I’ve ever seen,” Pickett said, putting his hat back on. “I’d guess she was a waxwork statue if I didn’t know any better. Or an automaton. You can’t trust a face like that. Impossible to read.”

Andrew nodded, messing with a little bag full of white granules on the workbench. On the side of it, in black felt pen, was scrawled something impossible—a chemical name. “She has a vocabulary of about thirty stock phrases, most of them involving tea and Scrabble and changing poor Naomi’s bed linen. All of it sounds programmed. For my money she’s got some dark motive beneath it all.”

Pickett watched him untie and then tie the plastic bag. He looked uncomfortable. “Which one is that again? Chloro-what?”

“Chlorophacinone,” Andrew said. “No, I haven’t mixed it up yet. You use wet cornmeal—press it into cakes.” He put the bag down on the bench, as if he suddenly found it distasteful. “I’d thought of setting the cakes around as if I were poisoning ’possums. Rose would have to take the whole business more seriously then.”

“I dare say she would,” Pickett said. “What if you
do
poison something—a ‘possum, say? What if by accident you poison a
cat
, for God’s sake? You’d never get out of the soup.”

Andrew stared at the powder in the bag. “I’d hate myself if I poisoned anything at all. It was just going to be a blind, a ruse. Only because the cat-stealing trick went bad. I’m certain Rose saw through it. So I’ve got to press on, somehow, and make her doubt herself. Make her see that I’m serious about this ‘possum business.”

“
Are
you serious about this ’possum business? My advice is to let it drop. Cut bait and get out. It’s a shame there
isn’t
a ’possum around the neighborhood. That would settle things.”

Andrew sighed. “There is, actually. I think there’s one living under the house. That’s where I got the idea in the first place.”

“Well there you are! Point him out to Rose. There’s your evidence, right where you want him.”

“I can’t let on that there’s
really
one living under the house. She’d want him out of there.”

Pickett stared hard at Andrew, as if trying to make sense of nonsense. “So you’re telling me that despite the poison and the dead ’possum in Naomi’s room and your fears about having been caught up on the roof in the middle of the night, what you really want to do is
protect
the ‘possum living under the house?”

Andrew shrugged and then nodded weakly. “They’re such great-looking little guys, with that nose and all.”

“I can’t do anything for you then,” said Pickett. “You’ve made a mess of your priorities.”

“I can’t stand talk about ‘priorities.’ They tire me out.” Andrew picked up the sack full of poison. It seemed suddenly to contain a coiled snake or a nest of spiders. “I ought to pitch it into the trash, right now, while I’m thinking straight. Don’t tell Chateau, though, will you? I don’t want him to know that I tossed it out after begging five pounds of it off him to assassinate non-existent rats.”

Pickett shook his head. “Toss it out. That’s what I’d do. I’m afraid of poisons, especially with Pennyman around. There’s no telling what you’ll find in your beer.”

Andrew nodded. “Done,” he said, and he stepped out into the daylight, dropping the bag into another trash can and hauling the can across the backyard, away from the garage so that Rodent Control wouldn’t find it while looking for the ’possum.

“I left my pole and tackle box in the living room,” said Pickett, remembering suddenly.

“Go after them then. I’ll get my stuff together. I’d better not go back in—not just now.” Somehow the idea of coming face-to-face with Rose filled him with terror. He’d wait until the dust settled.

Just as Pickett turned to go, the house door slammed shut, and there was Mrs. Gummidge, carrying a dripping coffee filter full of steaming grounds. She grinned at them. “Can’t put these down the disposal,” she said. “They’ll clog the septic tank.”

“We haven’t got a septic tank,” Andrew said, grinning back. “Nothing but sewers for us.”

She stepped across and lifted the lid from the trash can that Andrew had just moved. She set the lid down and looked in suspiciously, then dropped the grounds in. “No ’possums in that one,” she said cheerfully, bending over to pick up the lid. She banged it back down onto the trash can and hurried away toward the house, muttering about “poor Naomi” and “given such a fright,” her voice trailing away into nothing.

The door slammed again, and Pickett stood watching the empty porch, lost in thought. His eyes had that vacant, dangerous look that meant he was “onto something,” that he was beginning to see things clearly at last. He was lost in plots, assembling and disassembling them, thinking of blowfish and assassins and lights in the sky, thinking of Moneywort and Pennyman, thinking of Uncle Arthur steering across foggy midnight oilfields in his red, electronic car, bumping over ruts, watching, perhaps, for the telltale glow of a suddenly uncovered lantern that would reveal to him in the instant of illumination the secret tiltings of world banks, the moment-to-moment machinations of governments. He turned around stiffly and set out after his fishing pole.

Robert Louis Stevenson
“Looking Glass River”

W
HATEVER WAS HAPPENING
had the feeling of nightfall about it, the feeling that twenty centuries of battles and betrayals, of civilizations and the shifting of continents, were crashing to a stony close. Something was coming full circle—slouching in on a wind out of the east. It was hot and thin—a desert wind with the smell of sagebrush and riverbeds on it, yanking off roof shingles in the night and scattering sycamore leaves and blowing spindrift off the back of the cold north swell as it hammered through pier pilings and surged up onto an almost deserted spring beach.

The wind tore fruitlessly at the newspaper in the hands of Jules Pennyman, who sat at a redwood table in the shade of the old pier and drank black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He knew as he sat there, idly sipping his coffee and watching the sea across the top of his newspaper, that something had loosened in the world; something had awakened, and was plodding toward him, or with him, across the aimless miles. He smiled and stroked his beard, then flicked a bit of thread from the knee of his white trousers. He could hear the deep, hoarse breathing of it on the wind, like an out-of-tune, bedlam orchestra. There was just the suggestion of the first trumpet behind it all, and there would follow in the days to come a rain of hail and fire and blood, maybe literally. He rather hoped so.