Mallets Aforethought Read Online Free PDF Page B

prison. So George stepped up. But that won’t be in the record, of course. And it’ll take two minutes for it to come up on their computers, that old conviction.”
    My father was a lean, clean man with pale blue eyes, strong hands with knobby knuckles, and thinning white hair pulled back in a straggly ponytail that he fastened with a leather string.
    “Well. There are convictions,” he said consideringly. “And then there are convictions.”
    We were in my cellar inspecting the leaking part of the foundation. These days he was a magician at tricking stones and mortar into stable configurations. But years earlier, before he changed his name and became a famous fugitive, he’d been what passed in those quasi-innocent days as an urban terrorist.
    He gestured at the part of the cellar wall he hadn’t already replaced. “All this here has got to go,” he decreed. “Leaks now, and the water between the stones’ll freeze later. Every year, worse.”
    He kicked pebbles into the gutter at the foot of the wall. Called a french drain, it was meant to carry water back outside.
    It didn’t. “Nonviolent crime,” he said. “Took his medicine, been a good boy since. I doubt one old pop’ll hurt him much. An actual threat, though. Malice aforethought. That’ll hurt him.”
    “Maybe the police won’t hear about that.” But I was grasping at straws. My father looked up at me from where he was examining the sump pump, the old trace of a feral twinkle still in his eye.
    “How long did it take you to hear about it?”
    I let a breath out, defeated. “Twelve hours.” People liked Ellie too much to have gone to her with the Duddy’s Tap story, or she’d know, too.
    “Okay,” I conceded, “I get your point. They’re going to look hard at George. He had a motive and odds are he also had access to the method.”
    On that big ring of his, George had a key to nearly every garage, barn, storage hut, and garden shed on the island, as well as to many houses. And he’d been rat-killing for Cory Williams.
    With I didn’t know what, yet, but the way things were going I could hazard a guess. “As for opportunity, we don’t know when Gosling died. But George doesn’t punch a clock. Nobody keeps tabs on him. He sets his own schedule and mostly he works alone.”
    I thought a moment. “Still, it would’ve been pretty stupid. Saying you’d like to get rid of a person and then going out and doing it.”
    But my father was already shaking his head. “Cops think all criminals
are
stupid,” he pointed out.
    He reached over and tested the float mechanism on the sump pump. “They never seem to get the reason, though. Which is that the stupid ones are the only ones
they
ever meet.”
    When water leaked into the cellar it flowed into a barrel I had set into the floor, its upper rim an inch or so below floor level. As water in the barrel rose, it lifted a float attached to a long rod, which in turn was hooked to the pump switch.
    And—voilà. Or viola, as my son insisted on pronouncing it. Sam has dyslexia, tries to be good-humored about it.
    Mostly. “All you can do now is see how things play out. Nice gadget,” my father added approvingly.
    Then out of the blue: “Not so easy to go on the run with a wife and baby,” he said, still examining my flood-control arrangement.
    You could buy sump pumps but I’d built mine out of toilet tank innards and an old bilge pump, for the economical fun of it and because George had bet me a dollar that I couldn’t. My father now fiddled with the float and set it so the pump switched on sooner.
    “Don’t want to let the barrel get full,” he counseled. “Get a big run in, barrel’s full, pump might not be able to keep up.”
    It hadn’t been easy for my dad when he ran, his own wife blown to smithereens, his toddler daughter ending up under a heap of rubble in the tiny yard of a Greenwich Village town house.
    The daughter being me. He tinkered with the float angle, his knobby fingers