Read Online The Triumph of Evil by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

crossed, a hand at her chin. “You know,” she said, “when I heard about it I thought of you right away. Some of the things we were talking about before you left. And I wasn’t surprised when it happened, that’s another thing. That’s the thing, nobody was surprised. Somebody was listening to a radio and came down the hall passing the word, and hardly anybody was surprised. As if we all knew they would get him sooner or later. They get everybody.”
    “But the boy was a leftist, wasn’t he?”
    “If he did it.”
    “I didn’t follow the reports too closely,” Dorn admitted. “But I understood it was open and-shut.”
    “It always is, isn’t it? Who always gets shot? Kennedy. King. Bobby. Malcolm. Drury. They’re always leftists, and they always get shot by leftists.”
    “Not King.”
    “No, but it might have looked that way if they hadn’t caught that guy. And even so they want you to believe that there wasn’t a conspiracy, that this Ray broke out of prison and did it all by himself. Nobody believes that. Nobody believes the Warren Commission. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who believes the Warren Commission. And when Bobby Kennedy was killed, well, they caught him right there, he did it, but somebody must have put the idea in his head. I mean, he was this mixed-up little Arab; somebody must have put the idea in his head.”
    “I see what you mean. And Weldon?”
    “I guess he flipped out. The letter he started to write, and he evidently made some strange telephone calls. And he was supposed to be in an accident in a stolen car, and then he used a dead boy’s driver’s license to buy a gun in Vermont. Or else he had someone buy it for him. But other people said he was on campus in Caldwell when the accident took place.”
    “Perhaps he had an accomplice.”
    “Maybe.” She looked doubtful. “I guess he was very militant. So many kids, though. They talk more than they act. That’s part of the game, putting the Establishment uptight. Of course if he flipped out, and then they say he called somebody and said he realized Drury was his father. You know, if he was in that whole Oedipus bag—”
    Was there anyone so easily manipulated as the amateur at revolution? They were suspicious, cautious, their caution occasionally verging on paranoia. They accepted it as highly likely that any adult was a policeman. But they did not honestly believe that anything could happen to them. They were young, and that damned them because the young always assume themselves to be immortal and immune. They may state flatly that they expect to die, that they do not expect the planet itself to survive another ten years. But the idea of personal death, of sudden pointless personal death, is never real to them.
    And so they are oddly careless. It was easy to arrange a secret meeting with Burton Weldon, easy to mention a few of the correct names and phrases, easy to win not his trust but his physical presence .
    “ You may be a cop, man. Let’s say that I take it for granted you’re a cop .”
    But, taking it for granted, he still told no one where he was going or whom he was meeting, he still met with Dorn and went into the Science Building with him, mounted the flights of stairs, entered the chemistry lab.
    “The funeral was on television yesterday,” she said. “A lot of kids watched it. Even some of the ones who had gone around saying that Drury was just a knee-jerk liberal. They changed their attitudes completely the minute his body was cold. I didn’t watch the funeral.”
    “A show,” Dorn said. “Entertainment for the public.”
    “That’s all it is. And I was thinking. There was no big televised funeral for the fourteen kids who died in Washington. Someone was saying that they ought to put Burt Weldon’s funeral on television. You know, under the equal-time code.”
    “There’s a bitter thought.”
    “If Weldon even did it. But I guess there’s no doubt, is there? I mean, he was right there