The Sandler Inquiry Part 75

His double chin shook gently, too. "I've told you everything I can.

Really, I have' I., Their eyes met.

"Please," said Grover again. He motioned to the door and a tone in his voice suggested that the next request would not be as polite.

Thomas was halfway down the flagstone path when he pa.s.sed Susan Grover.

The little girl was in a buoyant mood. She'd been talking to the lady in the car, she said, and her daddy could talk just like that.

"What?" asked Thomas, hardly slowing his step. Leslie sat in the car, facing away from the house.

"Daddy can talk just like the Queen," said Susan.

"The Queen of-' "Susan!"

Grover stood at his front door and bellowed at his daughter.

"Susan! Get in here!"

The little girl was frightened. She turned and ran toward her father, not knowing what she'd done wrong. She'd never seen him like this. A man of many voices and faces, both voice and face now denoted one emotion: anger.

Grover glowered at Daniels.

"Get off my property, mister," he said.

"When we meet again it will be on my terms." The fat man raised his hammy forearm to his face and bit savagely into what appeared to be a m.u.f.fin. He glared and chewed simultaneously.

Thomas turned and walked to his car. Leslie had witnessed the scene on the flagstone path. She'd heard Grover, but not his daughter.

Thomas slid into the driver's seat. Leslie appeared disappointed.

"Your exit didn't look friendly," she noted wryly. She had a pad and in her hand and was drawing an oval on it, and oval which, penci 11 as the basis of a sketch, would form a head.

Thomas glanced away from the pad, back to the house where the door was slamming.

"He wouldn't talk," said Thomas, turning the car key in the ignition slot.

"It's back to New York."

She nodded.

They drove through miles of wooded forestland in northeastern Pennsylvania. Leslie continued to sketch, even in the moving car.

He marveled that she could do it and occasionally glanced down at her work. A man's face was appearing on the paper. Thomas recognized it.

Grover. De Septio.

"Why are you doing that?" he asked.

As you Americans would say," she said, "'for the h.e.l.l of it' She continued. A strange sense was upon Thomas; miles had pa.s.sed before he recognized it.

He'd been here before. Not in Grover's house, and never within Grover's company. But the section of the country, along the way, he recognized from his early teens.

On bitterly cold autumn mornings, when brown leaves crunched underfoot and formed coiled, hissing whirlwinds with the breeze, his father had taken him deer hunting.

"Bag a buck before Christmas" William Ward Daniels had told his boy rhetorically.

"Hunters built America" Daniels, Senior, had been a lethal shot.

"Learned how to shoot in the war," he'd always explained. His father had never even seen a combat zone. But he'd taught kis boy how to shoot.

"It could save your life someday," opined his father.

"Like when?"

Daniels, Senior, thought.

"Like when a buck is charging you," he suggested.

No buck ever charged them. Most of the bucks had wanted no part of them at all, but some had managed to fall within rifle range.

For his part, Thomas was rooting for the deer and often missed his shot on purpose until quickly his father began to suspect.

"You're as good a shot as I am, maybe better," the older Daniels concluded one day.

"Now kill something, d.a.m.n it!" he ordered.

Thomas brought down his next deer, a clean kill through the shoulder and heart. The father was elated. The boy could shoot.

Proficiency with a rifle, marksmans.h.i.+p that was accurate at hundreds of yards, had to be learned young. Then it would never be lost.

"I hate blood sports'" Thomas said absently to her as the car pa.s.sed out of the wooded regions into farming land.

Leslie looked up from her pad, closed it on the likeness of Grover, and glanced at Thomas with interest.

"Hunting?" she asked, mystified.

He nodded.

"You know how to shoot?"

"I suppose," he said.

"I haven't for a long time' ' She let it drop and the next two hours of the drive were pa.s.sed in silence.

Lincoln Tunnel brought them into Manhattan at Tenth Avenue and West Thirty-eighth Street. Thomas turned southward. Five minutes later he'd pulled his car to a halt in front of her building.

The shabby block was remarkably quiet in the early hours of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. She realized immediately that only she would be getting out of the car.

"You're not coming up?" she asked.

He shook his head.