Thorn Page 17

  At first glance the star of the show, an enormous fat man who cavorted naked with adolescents of both sexes, as in some gross parody of more conventional porn, appeared to be Ellison Seabright himself. At a second look it did not appear to be him. The monumental man in the film looked as big as Ellison and resembled him facially but was even older, with a fringe of white hair round his massive head. Now and then he could be seen casting a look toward the hidden camera that must have done the filming through one of the concealed ports in the playroom wall. It was recognizably the playroom-lounge of this very house where the action was going on. The huge old man knew without a doubt that the camera was there. He was intending to watch himself in action later, evidently thus doubling his enjoyment of these acts. Here we did not have your common garden variety of senior citizen. Mr. Thorn, no stereotype of the golden years himself, had no doubt at all that he was beholding the image of Delaunay Seabright.

  The broken safe had yielded up perhaps a dozen cans of film in all, with an equal number of videotape cartridges. A sampling of three, four, five, six of these containers showed no essential variation in content, though the supporting cast appeared to be always different. With one exception. Several times the same lean, dark man of thirty or thereabouts appeared—otherwise the players were all quite young and interchangeable, coming and going like seasonal flowers in a vase.

  After the sixth sample, Thorn turned off the projector and sat in darkness trying to think. He could feel that sunny daylight had come, aboveground, but that did not concern him here. His course of breaking into the safe, despite its first feeling of instinctive rightness, was proving to be of no apparent help. The sad secrets of the safe seemed to have nothing to do at all with Mary Rogers or her death. Nor did they explain why Seabright or anyone else would have any reason to want to eliminate Thorn. Nothing here to tell Thorn who was guilty, where to start a search…

  A faint sound, aboveground, out of doors but near the house. A car had stopped.

  Someone else was coming to the mansion.

  * * *

  There was no hurry on this job, no need to be furtive. As former butler-bodyguard in the house, the man called Brandreth still had a set of keys. If the police or the FBI or reporters should be watching the place this morning, he could tell them he had been sent by Ellison Seabright to check on things, and Ellison Seabright would back him up.

  Brandreth eased his car to a stop outside the iron gates, and got out to unlock them. Even before he stopped, he had noticed the other car, parked a little distance away on the other side of the road. Whoever was watching the place from over there wasn’t trying to be very subtle about it. Brandreth of course would go on in, the perfectly respectable servant doing a job. Only when he was in the house and sure, very sure, that he was alone, would he get on with his real job and go to open the small hidden safe that Gliddon had told him of…

  A couple of hours earlier, about dawn, Brandreth had met Gliddon in a small town in northern Arizona, to get keys and instructions. Brandreth had been at the door of the dingy hotel room, leaving, when Gliddon called him back. “And, listen, if you ever get any ideas about seeing what’s on those tapes and films and putting them to use yourself—”

  “Not me, boss. Not me.”

  “—then you can go right ahead and try. They’re not worth a cent, get me? I’d go and take care of them myself if that was the case, even if I am supposed to be missing. They’re just something that could mean trouble for whoever is found in possession of them, and Seabright tells me he wants ’em out of the house. So get ’em and dispose of ’em, and I mean thoroughly.”

  “I will. I—”

  “How are you going to do it?”

  Brandreth, with an inward sigh, leaned his large body against the doorframe. Gliddon’s stare always unnerved him and he tried to take a relaxed pose in order not to show it. “Want me to bring ’em here?”

  “All the way up here? No. I won’t be here anyway, I have to disappear again. Just tear them up, burn them, scatter the ashes. Then stay in Phoenix, where I can get hold of you by phone. I may have another job for you soon.”

  Brandreth looked a question.

  “No, I don’t think it’ll involve wasting anybody, this time. Never can tell, though.”

  “I did all right on that Blazer, huh?”

  “I guess.” Gliddon looked meditative. “It just bothers me that the guy we were supposed to get wasn’t in it after all. Maybe we shouldn’t have been so cute, using delayed timers and all.”

  “That was your—”

  “I know, my idea.” Gliddon spoke very patiently and reasonably. “I just didn’t want your thing going off in the hotel garage, injuring innocent bystanders and all. Too much heat gets generated that way. It’s bad publicity. Well, it looks like maybe we got rid of Thorn anyway; he may still be running. And I don’t think our employer’s really unhappy either that we blew up that bothersome broad. Teach her to go out with strangers.” And Gliddon had smiled.

  Brandreth, watching, felt something like a shudder, purely internal. Even if Gliddon was not as big, and a queer besides, Brandreth was afraid of him.

  * * *

  Now, several hours later, Brandreth going calmly about his butler’s business had just got the iron gate unlocked when he heard a car door from across the road. He looked up and saw that a lone man had just got out of the vehicle, an ancient sort of wreck, that was parked over there. The man was walking across the road toward Brandreth, approaching tiredly, almost reluctantly. Not a cop, probably not a reporter either, although there was nothing specific about him to rule out either possibility. He had long brown hair and an unkempt beard, and looked as if he hadn’t slept all night.

  When the man got close he said: “I was just watching, wondering if anyone was home over here.”

  “The house is vacant now, sir.” Brandreth was wary, but confident. He had several inches and about thirty pounds on the other man, not taking into account the pistol in his belt under his jacket, if this turned out to be a game of some kind. “I’m one of the staff. I just come round periodically to check if everything’s all right.”

  “Oh.” The other considered this, with vacant sadness. He put his hands in his pockets and brought out a big-bowled pipe and put it away again. “I’m Robinson Miller. Mary Rogers was … was a good friend of mine. She used to live here once. Maybe you knew her.”

  “Sir?”

  “Mary Rogers. The girl who was blown up with a bomb last night. I’ve been at the morgue, looking at her, trying to find out something from the police. You ever look at anyone in a morgue? Who’s been all torn to pieces by a bomb?”

  Brandreth had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. Talk about coincidence, this was good. Gliddon would get a chuckle out of this one when Brandreth told him—or would he? “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. There was something on the radio about someone being blown up in a car.”

  “She was out here, at this house, last night, you see. With a man named Thorn, the one the car was rented by. Did you know that?”

  “No, sir, I had no idea she was here last night.” Brandreth found the impulse to smile completely gone. He was watching this dazed man very carefully and at the same time trying to think. “Dorlan, he’s the regular caretaker, would have been here then.”

  Robinson Miller wasn’t really listening. “You see, I talked to the police at the morgue, but I didn’t really say anything important. I wanted to think things over, first. Like I might have an idea of who was behind the bombing. It was these people here, this Seabright bunch, who killed her, one way or another. Oh, I don’t blame you, you just work here. There was a man named Gliddon who worked here too, and he’s supposed to be dead now but he’s not.”

  “He’s not?” Brandreth had no trouble at all in sounding surprised.

  “No he isn’t. Thorn told us that and they killed him, or tried to. Mary knew it, and they killed her.”

  This sounded like it might be too s
erious to let it get by without taking action. “Sir? You really don’t look well. Would you like to come into the house for a moment? I can get you a cup of coffee, or a drink, or something.”

  Miller sighed. He rotated his head, and rubbed the back of his neck in weariness. “That’s good of you. Maybe I will, if you’re sure they’re all gone. I wouldn’t want to face them just now. I don’t know what I might do.”

  “They’re all gone, I’m sure. Listen, there might be a thing or two I could tell you about the Seabright’s, if you’re interested. I don’t want to get involved, though.”

  Miller suddenly looked somewhat more awake. “A thing or two? Like what?”

  “Oh, not about bombings. Nothing like that. But … look, sir, why don’t you just drive your car in through the gate, and park near the house? There’s been some problem lately with vandalism in the neighborhood.”

  “With my car, it doesn’t matter,” Miller said. But then when Brandreth looked anxious he trudged back across the road and started up his engine. With the gate standing open, they drove both cars in; then Miller waited in his while Brandreth locked up the gate again. Then he followed Brandreth’s car up to the house, where neither car would be visible from outside the gate.

  As he led the way up to the main door, Brandreth looked the place over carefully. The house looked tightly closed up, all right. But as soon as he had unlocked and opened the front door, he stopped; an overhead light just inside was burning, and he had thought that the electricity was supposed to be already turned off. Well, things might go a little easier on this visit if it wasn’t. Like a good butler Brandreth switched the overhead light off now, then gestured deferentially. “The bar’s downstairs, sir. If you’d like a drink.” Downstairs was more certainly private, if things should happen to take a turn for which privacy appeared desirable, as Brandreth was beginning to feel sure they would.

  “It’s morning, but—hell yes, I want a drink.”

  Since the power was still on, Brandreth led the way toward the elevator. Once he had his guest down in the rec room at the bar, he filled an order for Scotch on the rocks, and then tried to reach Dorlan on the intercom that communicated with the caretaker’s quarters. No one answered. Evidently the man and his wife were gone, and the dogs with them, as Gliddon had said they would be. All satisfactory, the place would be lonely as a tomb.

  Brandreth flipped off the intercom and gazed across the bar at Miller, who already looked like a lonely drunk. Half the Scotch was gone. Brandreth asked: “Did I understand you correctly, sir? That you have some reason to think Mr. Gliddon is still alive?”

  Miller looked up, though not as if he really saw Brandreth, or heard him. He chewed his brown mustache. “You know, she just wouldn’t leave it alone. She wouldn’t. She kept harassing Seabright, and threw that stuff on him, and then she went off with Thorn to cook up something more. I don’t know what, but … I guess she never really understood how dangerous the world can be.”

  “Sir, I can make you another one of those if you’d like.”

  Robinson Miller looked down at his glass for a fairly long time. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  “Excuse me, sir, I just want to check on something in here.” While Brandreth was waiting for his man to get drunk and/or talk some more spontaneously, he thought he might as well do the job that he had come here for in the first place. Switching on more lights as he went, he walked off into the white tunnel and through it to the laboratory area just off the museum. Here a white panel in the wall came loose, just as Gliddon had said it would, and the small safe hidden behind it opened properly for Brandreth when he used the combination Gliddon had provided. He closed up the safe again and started to walk back to the lounge. All the valuable art had already been taken out, of course, and everything looked—

  What was that wrecking bar doing, lying beside the inner laboratory door? Brandreth detoured a few steps and stood looking down at the tool. He thought he recognized it as one that was customarily kept in a shed near the caretaker’s lodging.

  He had broken into houses himself in his time, and he had a feel for when something was going on along that line. The lab door was locked, but it took Brandreth only a moment to find the right key in his bunch. With gun in hand he opened the locked door, to behold ruin—a big wall safe, one Gliddon hadn’t even mentioned, yawning open. The door of it had somehow been cracked, with parts dangling from their steel roots in the concrete-reinforced wall.

  Someone was behind him, and Brandreth spun, brandishing the gun. Miller had doubtless been approaching innocently, for he was carrying his drink in hand. At the sight of Brandreth’s face and weapon he recoiled, and seemed to come fully awake for the first time.

  Miller started to say: “You’ve got to be in on—” before he caught himself. Then he tried again, lamely: “There’s been a robbery.”

  “Brilliant, cocksucker,” said Brandreth, and raised the gun. He had been surprised and upset at a moment when he thought himself in control of the situation, and when that happened he sometimes tended to lose his head. Miller turned, cowering away, trying to protect his head. Brandreth brought the gunbarrel down, cracking on a forearm, bringing a yelp of pain. Then he laid the second blow alongside Miller’s hairy head, not too hard. Miller pitched forward on his face, and lay there groaning, trying to move.

  “Now, son of a bitch,” said Brandreth. “You’re gonna tell me—”

  He reached down, meaning to yank the smaller man to his feet. But something that felt like a gorilla’s paw closed on Brandreth’s own left shoulder. His reaching arm was stopped. Then his whole body was yanked into the air, as it hadn’t been since he was pint-sized and in the orphanage. Now he was being thrown. The room spun round him with his flight, and smashed him with its far wall, almost hard enough to knock him out.

  He wasn’t that easy to take out, though. Gun still in his right hand, he got himself up on one knee, ready to use it on—

  —on one thin man in dark, burned-looking clothes. A man with a pale, half-familiar face, calm now as an utter lunatic. Thorn, God yes, it was Thorn. Brandreth, when playing butler, had one day answered the front door of this very house to let him in. He must be a black belt in judo, to throw a man of Brandreth’s weight like that … but Brandreth held the top card in his own hand now. As his head cleared, he smiled, even though his left shoulder still wasn’t working, and was going to begin to hurt like a bastard in a minute.

  The situation, and Thorn’s burned clothes, made Brandreth smile again. “Holy shit,” he remarked. “You must have been standing right beside the car.” Then he made a preemptory motion with his gun. “Who else is in here?”

  “No one,” the singed man said calmly. “We three are quite alone.”

  “You blew that safe? I guess you’re pretty good in the trade yourself.” Brandreth could see, in the far corner of the room, Robinson Miller getting slowly up to his hands and knees. A drop of blood dripped from Miller’s head to the carpet. But this time it wasn’t going to be Brandreth’s job to clean up anything.

  Thorn inquired: “In the trade?”

  “You know. Making things go bang. I’m pretty good at that myself.”

  At last there came a change in Thorn’s madly cool expression—a relief for Brandreth, it had begun to make him nervous to have someone look back at him like that from the wrong end of a gun.

  “Then it was you,” said Thorn, “who planted the bomb…?” He had no need to finish. He could read his answer in Brandreth’s face. “How fortunate,” he added in a softer tone, and came walking forward.

  “You’re better off dead, you lunatic,” said Brandreth, and fired. Twice. And somehow missed. both times. How could he have missed? And fired again, and—

  The grip this time came on the arm that held the gun. Brandreth screamed, feeling the bones go.

  * * *

  When he came out of it, or at least out of it enough to know where he was, he wished he hadn’t. He was sitting propped up i
n one of the chairs inside the laboratory, which was almost dark. In front of him a projection screen had been rolled open, and Thorn stood nearby, fussing with a projector. Beyond Thorn the door was open to the small room with the cot, and Brandreth could see that Robinson Miller was lying in there. Miller’s face looked pale in the dim light but he was only sleeping, for his chest rose and fell.

  Thorn lifted his head from what he was doing, enough to glance at Brandreth from the corner of an eye. He inquired softly: “What is on this film that you were carrying?”

  “Honest to God … I don’t know.”

  “We shall soon see, in any event. Why did you come to this house today?”

  “I—I was the butler here. Just checking up—”

  Thorn put out a hand and touched him on the arm. “That is a half-truth, and not acceptable. Ah, if screaming will relieve your feelings, pray continue. I feel sure that those who scream down here are never heard outside.”

  * * *

  The next time Brandreth’s senses cleared, Thorn was bending over him again, but only speaking very gently, pointing to a frozen image on the screen. “That is the face of Delaunay Seabright, is it not?”

  “I…” Brandreth tried his best to see the screen clearly. He was still slumped in his chair groggy with shock, bathed in a cold sweat. His left arm wouldn’t work and his right felt as if the bones might be about to poke out through his coat sleeve. He didn’t want to know if they really were. “I dunno.” His voice was pitiful. “I never saw Delaunay. Honest to God. Ellison’s the one who hired me.”

  “And Gliddon?”

  “Gliddon was already working for the Seabright’s. I take orders from Gliddon. He passes on what … Ellison wants.” Brandreth drew a deep, shuddering breath. Once he had been seriously afraid of Gliddon. But now he understood more fully what it could mean to be afraid. “Gliddon’s supposed to be dead now. But he’s not.”