When Old Men Die (13 page)

For a second his old eyes lit up, and I thought he might challenge me.
 
But then he sank back in his chair and his chin dropped to his chest.

"I'll see you to the door now," Paul Lytle said, and I followed him out of the room.

When I drove away from the mansion, I turned the corner and looked to my left.
 
The side of the house was almost obscured by the trees, but I thought I could see the window of the room where Lytle was sitting.
 

And I thought I could see someone watching me, but I didn't know who or why.

P
atrick Lytle, I thought, was a lot like Dino.
 
If he ever left his house, he would probably panic.
 
I wondered if he watched Oprah and Geraldo and all the rest.

He was also trapped by a past that he didn't really understand, not if he thought that Outside Harry was a glorious representative of it.
 
In short, Lytle was probably a little crazy, not that there was anything wrong with that.
 
Some of my best friends were a little crazy.
 
For that matter, I was probably a little crazy too.

And for some reason that train of thought made me think of Sally West.
 
I stopped at a store for a bottle of Mogen David wine and drove to her house, which was right on Broadway and even older than Lytle's mansion.

The old black man named John answered the door.
 
He never changed from year to year.
 
Sally was ninety now, and while he probably wasn't quite that old, he was at least as old as Patrick Lytle.

"Hello, Mr. Truman," he said.
 
He always said that.
 
"Miss Sally's in the parlor."

He took the wine.
 
"Thank you, John," I said, and followed him to the parlor, where he announced me and then melted away.
 

Sally West was small and frail.
 
She wasn't in mourning, but she was dressed in black, as she had been every time I saw her. She was sitting in a cane-bottomed rocker and, like Lytle, she didn't get up when I entered the room.
 
She could if she had to, but it took more effort than she wanted to expend.
 
Despite her age, her eyes were bright and sharp and her voice was crisp.

"Hello, Truman," she said.
 
"You do have some news for me, I hope."

"A little," I said.

"Oh, good.
 
Then sit down and tell it to me."

I sat in a rocker just like the one she was using and told her about
Braddy
Macklin's murder, Outside Harry's disappearance, and my visit to Patrick Lytle.
 
While I was talking, John came back in with some of the wine in crystal glasses on a silver tray.
 
The wine bottle was on the tray as well, and he set it on a small table by Sally's chair.
 
Then he handed us the glasses and vanished again.

When I had finished the story, Sally had finished her first glass of wine, so I got up and poured her another.
 
I had hardly tasted mine.
 
I wasn't as fond of Mogen David as Sally was.

"You have wonderful stories, Truman," she said.
 
"And you do lead the most exciting life of anyone I know.
 
Hearing you makes me wish you could come by more often.
 
Is there anything I can tell you in return?"

Dino had introduced me to Sally when I first came back to the Island.
 
She was a wonderful source of information about the old days, and she loved to gossip, or to "exchange information," as she put it.
 
To her, it wasn't gossiping.
 
Not to me, either.
 
It was just talking to a friend.
 
Sally had a lot of friends, and she knew almost as much about the Island's present as about its past.

"You could tell me something about Patrick Lytle," I said.

If anyone would know about Lytle, Sally would.
 
On the wall beyond where she sat there was a dark mark painted to indicate the level to which the flood waters had risen in 1900.
 
There was a lot of other history in the room as well.
 
Sally's family had been on the Island as long as nearly any other, and her house and mind were repositories of the Island's lore.

"I'm sure you already know a great deal about Mr. Lytle," she said.

"Just stories I've heard.
 
Nothing I'd put much stock in."

"Most of the stories are probably true.
 
He's lived in that house since he was a boy, just as I've lived in this one.
 
Neither of us gets out much anymore."
 
She took a sip of wine.
 
"He must be a bit like me, living in the past more than the present."

For Sally the past began long before the days when Dino's uncles were running the show on the Island.
 
She didn't resent the gambling days the way Lytle seemed to do, and in fact she seemed to have enjoyed them, but she thought that early decades of the century were the time when Galveston was really alive.
 
From my conversation with Lytle, I suspected that he felt much the same way.

Sally interrupted my thoughts.
 
"How is our friend Dino these days?"

"He's still not getting out much," I said.

"I'm not at all surprised.
 
But didn't you tell me that he was getting better about that?"

"He is," I said.
 
"But not as much as he should be."

Sally had a theory about Dino.
 
She believed that he was a victim of some sort of paralysis of will.
 
Trapped by the legend of his uncles and unable to do anything to bring back the kind of glory they represented to the Island, he shut himself away from the responsibility he believed he had.
 
And from the possibility of failure.

"You've been good for him, though," Sally said.
 
"You've helped take his mind off himself."

"It hasn't been me so much," I said.
 
"It's just that things have been happening.
 
They haven't been such good things, either."

They hadn't, but they'd been as good for me as for Dino.
 
I'd been so depressed about Jan that I'd just about dropped out of life until Dino got me involved with finding his daughter.

"You shouldn't judge things so hastily," Sally told me.
 
"Wait a few years.
 
Time gives you a much better perspective."

I wondered if I would have her perspective even if I lived as long as she had.
 
I doubted it.

"What was Lytle's attitude toward the uncles?" I asked, getting back to the subject I'd come about.
 
"And about gambling in general?"

"There's a story there," Sally said.
 
"Would you refill my glass, please, Tru?"

I did, and then she told me the story.
 
It was one I hadn't heard before, but that was because I was too young to know about it when it happened.

"
Braddy
Macklin stole Paul Lytle's wife," she said.
 
"Her name was Laurel, and she was a lovely girl.
 
She dearly loved to gamble.
 
That's how she met
Braddy
, you see.
 
His own wife didn't approve of gambling, and she didn't approve of
Braddy's
job.
 
He came off the docks, and his wife thought of that as good clean work.
 
It was hard, of course, but decent.
 
She never forgave him for going to work for Dino's uncles, and their relationship was quite strained."

She looked at me over the top of her wine glass.
 
"You know that a certain kind of woman is attracted to a rugged man, one who looks as if he might have the potential for violence?"

I hope she didn't think I was like that.
 
"I can imagine it," I said.

"Laurel Lytle was like that, and it showed.
 
Braddy
wasn't immune to that kind of silent flattery, and before long they were an item."

That went a long way toward explaining Lytle's feelings about Macklin and about gambling on the Island.
 
Or that's what I thought until Sally went on with her story.

"Patrick Lytle didn't seem to mind," she said.
 
"I don't recall that he was much of a gambler, though he may have been.
 
Either way, he did nothing to prevent his wife from going to The Island Retreat.
 
I'm sure that if you could see any of the newspapers from that time, you'd find her in the background of some of the photographs they made when the stars came to town."

"What happened to her?" I asked.

Sally smiled.
 
"That's the mysterious part of the story.
 
She disappeared."
 
I was about to interrupt, but Sally stopped me.
 
"Don't get excited.
 
It's not as interesting as I'm trying to make it sound.
 
Braddy
Macklin didn't kill her, and Patrick Lytle didn't bury her in the back yard.
 
It was all much more mundane.
 
She apparently told several of her friends that she was getting bored with life on the Island and that she was going to ask Patrick for a divorce.
 
She said she was thinking of going to Las Vegas.
 
Maybe to California.
 
After the divorce, she simply packed up and left."

"So what's the mystery?"

"Only that no one ever heard from her again.
 
Some of us expected that she might turn up in a movie, perhaps in a bit part.
 
Or, failing that, perhaps become the mistress of some notorious gangster.
 
I suppose that the truth was much more tiresome.
 
She probably married some colorless individual exactly like Patrick and lived miserably ever after."

I wondered if that were true.
 
And I wondered if Laurel Lytle were back in town.
 
Stranger things had happened.

"There's a grandson," I said.
 
"Paul.
 
He was at the house today."

"Oh, yes.
 
Paul.
 
He was the son of Laurel's daughter, Mary Elizabeth.
 
Mary Beth, she was called.
 
She grew up here on the Island, but she left as soon as she graduated from high school.
 
Did you know her?"

I vaguely recalled a girl a few years older than I was.
 
In those days, a few years made a lot of difference, especially if it was the girl who was older.

"I think I remember her," I said.
 
"But I didn't know her."

"There was some kind of problem between her and her father, but whatever it was, they kept it in the family."

I took that to mean that Sally hadn't been able to find out what the problem was.

"At any rate," Sally went on, "she went to school out of state, married, and had a son.
 
Soon after that, both she and her husband were killed in a traffic accident.
 
They were on the way home from a party, and he tried to beat a train to a crossing.
 
He didn't, and they both died instantly.
 
The son was sent here to live with his grandfather, and I think he's been quite a help."

"What about the old man's legs?" I asked.

"I'm not sure I like to hear you call him an ‘old man'," Sally said.
 
"He's not nearly as old as I am."

"I didn't mean that he was old," I apologized.
 
"I just meant that he's older than his grandson."

"That's all right, then.
 
Patrick was in an accident, too, but his involved something other than a car and a train.
 
He told everyone that he fell."

There was something about the way she spoke the last sentence that sparked my curiosity.

"Don't you believe him?"

"I'm not sure.
 
There was always something unconvincing in his story."

"What?"

For a second she rocked in her chair.
 
Then she said, "He was always such a careful man that it was hard for me to believe that he could fall in his own house.
 
I suppose that the insurance company believed him.
 
He was rumored to have gotten a fair settlement from them."

There wasn't much evidence of any money from insurance or anywhere else in Lytle's house now, but I wasn't really worried about Lytle's legs, so I moved on to other things.

"What was
Braddy
Macklin up to lately?" I asked.