"Yes," I said, "but how long is long enough? Suppose Bill falls under a bus or something. Suppose——"
"Suppose you let us do the best we can. Look, Walt, you've done all right. Now relax. We have an all-points bulletin out. All the surrounding cities have been notified, Cleveland, Akron, Pittsburgh, and especially Newbridge and the Pennsylvania border towns. Somewhere the Liebendorffer boy will show, and we'll get him. So will the others. It's only a matter of a little time."
"Yes," I said. "Sure. I know."
"Their parents must feel terrible," Tracey said, holding Pudge a little tighter in her lap. Bets was having a terrific affair with Hartigan. Koleski sighed.
"I don't think they believe it yet," he said. "That's nearly always the worst of it in cases like this—the relatives, the wives and husbands and parents who just can't believe that the person in question could possibly commit a crime."
"I'm sorry for them," Tracey said. "What kind of people are they?"
I had not seen any of them, of course, and I was glad. Mrs. Liebendorffer had been enough.
"Nice people," said Koleski. "Civilized. Plenty of money, but not too much. Good home. The psychiatrists may be able to figure out some reason why the boys turned out the way they did, but there's nothing showing on the surface. With the Bush boy, now——"
"He's lucky," I said. "He should be damned thankful that he wasn't allowed to go out that night."
"It's a pity any of them ever got together," Hartigan said over his shoulder. Bets was doing her best to steal his nice shiny badge that she had wheedled him into showing her. "One by one they might never have got into any worse trouble than a lot of boys get into and outgrow."
The five, it turned out, went to different schools, which was why Davenport had not been able to get far with Northside High. The Liebendorffer boy went there, like Everett, but Roy Aspinwall and Bobby Stillman went to private schools and Chuck Landry was in college. The meeting ground seemed to have been a record shop on the north side, specializing in the kind of music kids like. A perfectly innocent place, with a pizza palace and a hobby shop next door. No wickedness had been provided for them there. The boys hadn't needed it, anyway. They had brought their own.
Koleski said, "They must have discovered they were soul mates and started to go around together, and sooner or later some spark was bound to set them off. It was your tough luck, Walt, that you had to be around when it happened."
"Yeah. Well," I said, "it's all over now but the waiting. I just hope Bill has sense enough to keep out of their way."
"Now, how," said Koleski reasonably, "can they find him so easily, if we can't?"
It was a good question. It was eminently sensible. The only comeback I had for it was that nothing in this whole thrice-damned business had gone the way it should have.
And all I could think of was Bill Liebendorffer, the donkey who had tried running with the tigers and who now was running away from them, alone and afraid and so pitifully young.
"Let's see those pictures again," I said.
Koleski gave them to me. The one of Chuck Landry was a handsome portrait of a handsome young man. The one of Bobby Stillman was a handsome portrait of an unhandsome but totally undistinguished young man. The one of Roy Aspinwall was a snapshot of a boy grinning and squinting in the sun. They didn't mean anything to me. They were just pictures. They did not in any way reflect the living realities that I knew so intimately. Perhaps this was how they looked by day, and their personalities, vampire-fashion, came out only after dark.
I shook my head and gave them back to Koleski, keeping the one of Adolph Wilhelm Liebendorffer a minute longer. This too was a snapshot, rather fuzzy, of a tall thin boy with a narrow face, standing in front of the house on North Buckeye.
He had long legs. I hoped he knew how to use them.
The phone rang while Koleski was restoring all the photos to their envelope. It was for him, from Headquarters. He listened for a minute, and then he said, in his professional voice, "Right, we're on our way."
Hartigan set my daughter gently on her feet and stood up.
"Holdup," said Koleski, setting the phone down. "Gas station on Logan Road. They shot the guy." He was halfway out the door when he paused long enough to say, "Keep out of trouble, Walt. I am liable to be too busy to help."
He nodded to Tracey and was gone.
Tracey asked, "Who got shot?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "Probably the station attendant."
Tracey looked at the sunlit window and shivered. "And I used to think the world was such a friendly place."
I patted her shoulder. "Well," I said, "as far as we're concerned, Pete's right. All we have to do now is wait."
We waited.
It wasn't so bad. The kids thought hotel life was delightful, eating in unfamiliar places, riding the elevator, pestering a practically endless supply of people. Tracey finally got them to bed long after their usual hour, and I sat with her, talking, until she turned in. I was too restless even to try. I went downstairs and bought a late paper and sat in the bar reading it and envying all the people who could freely walk in and out and around the streets at will, unafraid.
I thought of Adolph Wilhelm Liebendorffer, who was walking the streets somewhere out there in the night, starting at every sound, fleeing from every shadow, not knowing what to do or where to go.
He's had five days, I thought. Five days to sweat and tremble, fighting it out with his conscience. He knows what he ought to do. He knows what he's got to do to save himself, to save others. He can't go on much longer, no matter how scared he is. He's bound to crack. He's bound to give himself up.
Or is he? It's a wide world. Why doesn't he just get lost in it?
I ordered another beer and read the paper gloomily.
There was a story on the gas-station holdup. Two men described as being in their early twenties had shoved guns at the attendant and demanded his cash. They had become alarmed and one of them had shot the attendant. They had cleaned out the till, netting thirty-two dollars and forty-nine cents. The major part of the station's receipts had already been taken to the bank. The robbers had got away. The attendant, an army veteran with a wife and child, was on the critical list.
Crime. You read about it every day.
There is a legend in this land that major crimes are cleverly planned by clever crooks or clever murderers who stand to gain a fortune. Once in a while they are. Once in a while somebody knocks over Brink's for a million or two, and once in a while some woman collects a tidy packet in insurance for each one of a long line of husbands. But most crimes are just plain stupid, stupidly done by stupid people. Joe Nameless is insanely jealous of his sloppy wife. Some fool has got a high-school girl in trouble. A couple of morons decide to make a fortune holding up a gas station. Kids mug old ladies for the pennies in their purses. Stupid. You wish to heaven criminals did have brains. You'd feel so much safer.
A young man liable to die for the sake of thirty-two dollars, and think of his wife and what she's going through. Me and my family hiding in a hole, our lives totally disrupted and made hideous, for nothing. Mrs. Liebendorffer, out of her senses with worry and shame. Three sets of parents just becoming aware that the world has changed for them today and will never be quite the same again. All for nothing. Multiply us by hundreds, thousands. Add the parents of the little girl who went to the corner store for a bottle of milk and never came back, or the little boy found strangled in a wood, or the housewife murdered by a total stranger. Count the names and the misery. Number the victims of the tiger, the careless blood-hungry tiger that is always in our midst. The goddamned stupid tiger.
It dawned on me that I was one of the luckiest victims.
I felt sick and depressed. I went upstairs and went to bed.
I lay for a long time in that dim shadowy state that isn't quite awake or quite asleep, where the thoughts you have been thinking often take a queer turn, and things are illumined by a clear gray light, oblique and colorl
ess but strangely bright.
I thought about Bill Liebendorffer on the run. I saw him on a dark street. No particular street, just a composite image of old brick fronts that could have been anywhere. At the same time I thought of what had happened to me that night on Williams Avenue, and how Bill had hung back, and how he had run to the car and crouched there, taking no part in what was going on.
There was a connection there. I didn't try to figure it out. I just let it come.
After a while it did. I could testify that Bill had taken no part. That would go far to help persuade the police that Bill had had no part in the other things that happened either, but had been forced to go along under threat of injury so that he wouldn't dare to tell on his pals. I could be a friend to Bill or I could be a bitter enemy, and it would make a great deal of difference. Bill might want to know, before he made up his mind to take the plunge, just how I felt about him.
I could go even farther than that. I could imagine that Bill might feel that unless he could get me on his side—the original victim saying, This boy was innocent—it would be hopeless to try and make anyone believe that he wasn't as guilty as Chuck.
I could picture Bill thinking, If Sherris backs me up I'll tell the police all about it, but if he doesn't I'll run far away and hope never to be heard of again.
And in this dopey half-world I was in I could see Bill writing notes and making calls on telephones, but the notes lay unread in a big white rural mailbox marked SHERRIS, and the telephone rang and rang in an empty house.
The fantasy stayed with me until I did, finally, go to sleep. By the time I woke up again it had receded and grown faint, remaining as a kind of uneasy prodding at the back of my mind.
Maybe I would have forgotten it completely if anything new had turned up. But it was one of those obstinately blank days when you are wild to hear something, but everyone you know has entered in a conspiracy of silence. I fidgeted around the room, barely able to stand my own wife and children. I called the Liebendorffer home, but Marthe had not heard anything either. I called Koleski, but he was out. The desk sergeant, or whoever it was I talked to, seemed to think he would be out indefinitely. Hartigan, too. I managed to get hold of Davenport in Juvenile, but he didn't have anything to say either.
"For heaven's sake," said Tracey, "stop pacing up and down like that. You're driving me crazy."
"Sorry," I said. I sat down. Then I got up again.
"What now?" asked Tracey. She looked at me and then she rose and put her arms around me. "Be patient, Walt. You found out who they are, you did what you wanted to do. Be patient now. Don't give them any chance at you."
"No," I said. "Of course I won't."
"You're worrying about that boy, aren't you?"
I had to admit I was.
With just a trace of hardness in her voice, Tracey said, "He got himself into this, you didn't."
"I know," I said, thinking of Mrs. Liebendorffer, "but he's our witness, Tracey. If anything happens to him or he can't be found, we don't have much of a case."
"You can certainly swear to what they did to you."
"And I know what a really good defense attorney could do to me in court, too. On my identification, I mean."
I was still thinking of Mrs. Liebendorffer. The state and I would both lose if anything happened to Bill. But we wouldn't lose anything like as much as Mrs. Liebendorffer.
"Well," said Tracey, "I don't see what you can do about it, anyway."
I didn't myself.
"I think I'll go over to the garage and see how the car's coming," I said. I had taken it in to have the damaged glass replaced. "Now for Pete's sake, Tracey—it's broad daylight and I'll take a cab. Let's not carry this to where it's ridiculous."
She smothered the quick look of alarm that had come into her eyes. "All right, Walt," she said, and sat down again. I realized how badly Chuck's phone call had frightened her. I bent and kissed her. "Don't worry, honey," I said, and went out, knowing that of course she would worry until I came in again.
I couldn't help it. I couldn't sit in that hotel room any longer.
I took a cab to the garage. The car was ready and I drove it out into the sunlit streets. I wanted to go out to the house. If Bill had tried, or was trying, to get in touch with me, that would be where he would do it. He would probably not have any way of knowing that I wasn't staying there.
But Chuck knew. He had called my father-in-law's house when he wanted to threaten me. He would not be looking for me at the other place at all.
Probably the safest place in town for me, I thought. But I went the long way around, swinging westward and then back to come onto Laurel Terrace from the north, avoiding the north road and the glen where Chuck had ambushed us. I did not see anything of a gray convertible, anywhere along the line, and the street was peaceful in the late summer warmth. Children played, dogs barked, women worked in flower beds or hung up clothes, and certainly violence would never touch this well-fed community.
I parked in front of the house I owned but was afraid to live in.
Andy White's wife, Jane, spotted me from where she was cutting flowers in her garden, and came to meet me, asking how we all were. I talked to her while I got the mail out of the box at the curb. There was quite an accumulation of paper there. I riffled through it. Nothing.
I thought, well, so much for that, and tossed the mail into the car. A boy about twelve years old rode by on a bicycle. He had a small brown-and-white dog with him. He and the dog lived three houses up and across the street. He looked at me intently, and the dog woofed. Jane waved to the boy and I nodded, and he waved back and then went pedaling furiously down the street, with the dog after him.
"Has anybody been around?" I asked Jane.
"Not a soul," she said, and then went on to elaborate. Finally I said I had to go, and she told me to give her love to Tracey and the little ones and she certainly did miss us. "Oh, and, Walt, would you want us to do anything about phone calls?"
"How do you mean?" I asked, every nerve springing to attention.
"Well, we were out in the yard last night, it was so warm, and we could hear the phone ringing and ringing in your place. We were afraid it might be important but of course we couldn't get in, and I was going to say that if you wanted to leave us a key I'd be glad——"
And there it was, the telephone that rang in an empty house.
I had guessed right.
Then I caught myself. It still didn't have to be Bill calling. Everyone else who would have any reason to call me knew I wasn't there, but it still didn't have to be Bill. It could be someone I hardly knew. It could be an insurance salesman or a telephone canvasser. It could be a wrong number.
"No," I said slowly, "if that's the call I hope it is, nobody could take it but me."
"Something about the case?" she asked eagerly.
"Yes. I don't know. Maybe."
If he had called last night, and no one had answered, would he try again? Or had I missed my chance? Had I got my bright idea too late?
"What time was that?" I asked.
"Around ten. Maybe a little earlier. If it was really important, they'll call again. Listen," she said, "we'll be home. Why don't you wait with us? We can sit out in the garden where you can hear the phone if it rings, and Andy can keep an eye on the house."
"Thanks," I said, "but I guess I'll just go in now and stick right beside the phone."
That was the beginning of a long afternoon, and an even longer night.
20
I CALLED Tracey, of course, first thing, to let her know where I was. She was not happy about it, but after some fairly heated words I managed to convince her that I was going to stay there.
"I can't take a chance on missing him again," I said.
"If he calls again, and if it was Bill. It seems to me that you've dreamed this one up right out of your own head, just because you can't stand it not to be doing something."
I agreed with her that it was perfectly possible. Even p
robable. Just the same, I was going to stay.
"Well, I'm going to let Mr. Koleski know about it."
I told her to go ahead, not adding that Mr. Koleski had other things to do at the moment beside worry about where I was.
"Anyway, honey, this is the last place the boys would expect to find me." I explained that all over again carefully. "And I won't take any chances."
She did not argue it any further. "When will you call me?"
"As soon as I know. It might be late, really late. So don't worry." Don't worry, indeed. I wondered how many thousands of times I had said those meaningless words already.
I said good-by, and then settled myself in the most comfortable chair near the telephone. I had put the car in the garage and closed the doors, so that no casual passer-by could tell that it was there. When night came I would not put on any lights. I had my gun. All I had to do was sit.
I could see a thin segment of street between the window curtains. The boy on the bicycle rode by going the other way, with the brown-and-white dog bounding behind him. After that there was nothing but an occasional car.
The afternoon wore on. Nothing happened. The house was warm and stuffy. I got heavy-headed but I didn't want to sleep. I got hungry and found a box of cookies in the kitchen, and washed them down with tap water. They were very sweet cookies, and I did not feel well after I ate them. My leg took a spell of aching, and no matter how I squirmed and twisted I couldn't ease it. I was bored to the point of madness and too petulant to read.
And the damned phone would not ring.
It was not going to ring. The whole thing was a pipe dream, and Bill was a thousand miles away by now.
Or it would ring, and it would turn out to be good old So-and-So you used to know in the Army, in town for a few days, and how are you?
The shadows got longer and deeper and the light went out of the sky.
Someone knocked.
I nearly came out of my skin, but it was only Andy and Jane, bringing sandwiches and a Thermos of coffee. I was starved again and grateful, and I said so. We sat around in the dark for a while, talking, and they tried to get me to come and sit in their yard, but I didn't want to run the risk of not being able to get back in time if the phone did ring. It was kind of creepy in the house with all the lights out. I didn't blame them for wanting to go. I asked Jane to call Tracey for me, and she said she would. It was lonesome after they left. The Thompsons, on the other side, were out.
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