Heartstone

Billy found the dirt road that led up to the house. A farmer had built it in the late eighteen hundreds and it had been remodeled after that, but the farmer had died and his children had moved away and it was empty now. It was a bulky house. Thick and wide, a two-story silhouette, black space against the early morning night sky.

“Shut her up, Bobby,” Billy yelled.

“Easy, Elaine. Everything will be okay. Don’t be frightened.”

The girl continued to cry. Billy parked in the backyard so that it would be more difficult to see the car. He got out and ran around the side of the house. He peered in the side window that looked in on the kitchen. It did not appear that anyone was living in the house. Last time out they had had to beat up some hobos who were squatting.

Billy was about to double-check through the front window when he heard Bobby curse. He raced toward the back of the house. The car was empty and the door on the back driver’s side was open. He could see a vague shape thrashing through the high grass that had once been a wheat field. He ran as fast as he could after the disappearing figure. He heard a grunt and a high-pitched, female scream. Two bodies crashed to the ground. In an instant he was pushing his brother off the fallen girl, straddling her, slapping her face from side to side, screaming “bitch” in a voice filled with animal lust and hate.

“Stop it. You’ll kill her.”

Bobby was grabbing his arms. His chest was heaving. The girl was moaning. Blood was trickling from her nose. Billy took a deep breath. He glared at the girl. He was sexually aroused by the sight of someone he had desired, but had been denied, now powerless and under his control.

“Let’s get her in the house,” Billy said.

They forced her to her feet and half dragged, half carried her, into the house and up to the second floor bedroom. There were a few mattresses on the floor, carried there during the last party and left for the future.

Billy threw her down roughly on the floor. He turned to Bobby.

“Wait outside.”

“But, Billy…” Bobby started to say, but one look at his brother’s face silenced him.

A half hour later, the bedroom door opened. Billy looked played out, his anger and hatred spent. He nodded toward the naked girl huddled on the floor.

“She’s yours, if you want her,” he said wearily.

Bobby shook his head. He couldn’t. It wasn’t just the fear and fatigue. It was the horror of what they had done that night, creeping up on him as he waited for his brother in the darkened hallway. His mind had been racing in a dozen directions, searching for a solution to the problem the girl presented.

“Billy, we have to get rid of her.”

“Kill her?” Billy asked. He was too weary to do it tonight.

Bobby shook his head.

“I couldn’t.”

“We can’t let her go. She knows about Walters.”

“I have an idea. Remember those two guys you owe the money to on the dope deal.”

“Pasante and Heartstone?”

Bobby nodded.

“You still owe them, right?”

“Yeah.”

“See if they’ll take the girl.”

“As payment?”

“Or to…to do it for us. Billy, I can’t do it. Not like that.”

Billy looked at him.

“I can do it.”

“Billy, don’t,” he said desperately. “Besides, if they get caught with Elaine, everyone will think they killed Richie.”

“I don’t like it. They might let her go or she might get away.”

It was then that Bobby broke down. Sobs wracked his body. Billy did not know how to react. It was unmanly to cry, yet he vaguely understood what his brother was going through.

“All right, kid. I’ll try it.”

Bobby had turned away from him. He let him cry. The girl was out of it. She was curled in the corner, looking at him. He looked at her with contempt.

“He paid us one hundred dollars to kill her. Sold dope for us to cover the debt. We said we’d do it right away, but we didn’t. He never knew. Thought we done it the first night.”

Heartstone coughed again. This time he spit up blood and the coughing seemed to go on forever. Caproni stood up and walked to the window. Guilty and i

“Mr. Caproni,” Louis Weaver yelled. He turned from the window and walked rapidly to the bed. It only took him one look to tell that Willie Heartstone was dead.

The snow had stopped falling and the streets were starting to fill with five o’clock traffic. Caproni sat in the back seat of the car with his eyes closed. It was all over. Coolidge had been a murderer after all. Now that he knew, it didn’t seem to make any difference. He realized that what he had done in his youth was no more and no less than what all his fellow human beings had done at one time or another. He had been idealistic and naive and he had failed to live up to the goals that he had set for himself because he was a human being. He was not perfect. But he tried to be a good man. If he had failed on that one occasion, he had succeeded on many, many others.

Caproni looked at the tape recorder in his lap and ejected the cartridge. No need to keep this around, he thought. He would erase the tape tomorrow. He was too tired right now.

“Back to the office?” Pat Kelly asked from the front seat.

“No, Pat. I think I’ll just go home.”

About the Author

PHILLIP MARGOLIN is the author of Gone, But Not Forgotten; Sleeping Beauty; Wild Justice; and many other New York Times bestsellers. He is a longtime criminal defense attorney and lives in Portland, Oregon.

www.phillipmargolin.com