sent some of her corporate thugs to do the dirty deed of snuffing out a blackmailer? She seemed to Nick like a woman capable of such a thing.
But why? The documents Armiger wanted were awaiting discovery. They weren’t here. She already knew that. In fact, she’d urged Nick to go to Natchitoches to recover them. And when Nick had accomplished his job, Corban’s proof would have been gone; his allegations would have been dismissed as sheer lunacy. Killing him was unnecessary, unbusinesslike, a useless courting of danger.
Unless there was another reason, one Armiger didn’t want Nick to know. Hadn’t Corban denied on the phone that he was blackmailing Armiger about her Jewish ancestry? If that was so, if her impassioned explanation was indeed a lie, what else had Corban held over Natalie Armiger’s head?
The answers were locked away in the old man’s inert brain.
Nick suddenly wondered if he himself was safe. Armiger needed him to burn the books, to purge the records of the offending facts–whatever they were–so no new Corban could come along and make threats, sneaking up on her through her family’s past. Didn’t she? And when Nick was no longer useful? If she was the killer, was there a noose waiting for him, too?
Whatever it was Corban had on her, it just didn’t seem to him worth the life of a man. Or two.
He returned to the kitchen. Making coffee didn’t seem to Nick the action of a man about to do himself in. To avoid leaving fingerprints, he covered his hand with his shirttail to shut off the gas at the range. No sense imperiling the whole neighborhood with a fire. The kitchen itself was a contrast to the disorder of the rest of the place. Nick noted Corban even had two places set for the next meal at a folding card table in a windowed alcove. There were bits of yellowed paper on the floor, below the table.
He remembered what Corban had said on the phone about volunteers from the Jewish community center. He had been expecting a visitor to bring lunch, not death.
Car doors slammed out front. Footsteps thudded on the porch. Heavy, official footsteps, vibrating through the house and clinking the chandelier pendants.
Nick peeked down the hall. Two policemen were nosing around the front door, peering in the windows. Probably, someone at the community center had called to remind the old fellow, and, getting no answer had asked the police to check on him. Maybe that phone call had scared off the killer.
Time to leave. Authority and Nick never had been on cordial terms, and now there was the difficult question of what he was doing in the house of an unreported suicide or a murder victim. The back door seemed clear still. The alley leading off the back yard offered an escape route.
At a fast walk Nick followed the alley, exiting on a street around the corner. Then, heading back toward the scene, he made for his car, which was parked a few houses down from Corban’s place, beside a pair of mailboxes.
Nobody seemed to notice him. He felt that his every pore shouted with the sweat of near panic. An ambulance had arrived; a few neighbors congregated in the street around it, quizzing one another for information.
Nick drove slowly away from the growing commotion.
.
11
The straitjacket of guilt paralyzed Nick. He didn’t know what to do. He spent much of Monday morning fishing the paper clips out of the rubber bands in an old tarnished silver box on his office desk. He was alone in his morass of guilt; Hawty was on campus attending to her own projects.
He tried to convince himself that, despite motive and ability, as well as his own strong intuitive suspicions, Natalie Armiger did not have Corban killed. Surely it was the suicide of a man who had endured one of the most horrible episodes of human history, a man whose grief finally had overpowered him. Nick desperately needed to believe he wasn’t working for a murderer.
But the dead face of Max Corban accused him; and the words that had seemed to float in the foul air of Max’s apartment still echoed through Nick’s memory: I fought them to the very end. You are a coward if you do not fight back. You are as guilty.
He called Artemis Holdings seven times throughout the morning, only to be told that his previous messages had been noted–in other words, bug off. Then he thought better of trying to get through