He gulped it, and then he winked at Reid. And somehow, it wasn’t a friendly or a playful wink; it was hard and brittle and steely.
Reid looked at him with wan curiosity, as though he were seeing him now for the first time. “What are you, son?” he asked suddenly.
Shawn’s eyes flickered, as though he were recharging the batteries behind them. “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m a fellow. My name’s Shawn. I’m twenty-eight. What else is there to say, when you ask me what am I like that?”
“Never mind, I know what you are. I learned to know men while I was still alive. I used to be good at it too; I had fifty years to learn it in. You’re a detective. Either a private one or a municipal one.”
“I am, am I?” Shawn said lamely.
“I’ll tell you more. You’re honest. Look at your face, watch it. Lies slip off it like drops of sweat.” If he’d been able to smile any more, what there was on his face would have been a smile. As it was, there was just a parting of the lips, a contraction of the eyelids.
“I’m a detective,” Shawn said quietly, looking down into his empty glass, as though he were reading the words from there. “I haven’t liked lying to you, passing myself off for something I’m not. That was—”
“Can you save me, son?” Reid cut him short.
“From what?” Shawn answered almost inaudibly. “From words? From—”
Reid wasn’t listening to him. “Lift me up. My back pocket. Reach in. Pull that out. Now that pen you’ve got in your pocket, give it to me a minute—” He scribbled hastily across his knee, there was a rending of perforated paper, and he’d handed him a check, filled in save for the amount. “Fill that in. Write your own figure in here. Any amount, I don’t care! Only—save me, save me.”
Shawn’s fist tightened, and his face tightened to match it. He was getting sore again. He crumpled the check, swept it behind him. “How many of these have you given to Tompkins? How many like this?”
“We’re not talking about that now. We’re talking about you saving me.” His hands climbed up Shawn’s coat sleeve, one over the other, until they got nearly to the top. “Can you, son? Can you?”
Shawn brushed them off like caterpillars. “You can save yourself, Mr. Reid.”
They dropped down, dead. “That comes into it again,” Reid said.
Shawn’s under jaw was tight; it wouldn’t move easily to let him talk. “Why don’t you get yourself a little courage? You’re not only doing this to yourself, you’re doing it to others.”
“It’s so easy to be brave, when you’ve got a slack of forty years. Try it when you’ve got less than forty-nine hours,” Reid said hostilely.
He turned away as though he’d lost all further interest in him. His eyes sought the clock again, clove to it, stayed there.
The drink was aggravating Shawn’s temper.
“Don’t, will you? Don’t keep looking at that thing. It’s beginning to get me myself. It does something to me.”
He wasn’t in the room with Reid any more, as far as the latter was concerned.
“Cut it out!” he said on a rising inflection.
He felt that same irritability as before surge through him, this time with a rush. She wasn’t in the room with them now, to force him to curb it.
He felt an equal hatred of Reid and of the clock, they were both acting like irritants upon his already jangled nerves. His voice was getting hoarser by the minute. “Look away from it for a change. Look over this way for once!”
“You can be extravagant with your minutes,” Reid answered dully. “I have to watch mine. I’m down to my last forty-eight hours’ worth.” His eyes wouldn’t leave it. “My life span isn’t written on your face. My life span is written on this other one here—”
Shawn succeeded in deflecting his sudden hot spurt of anger, when it came, away from Reid and against the clock; and that was about all.
He’d drawn his gun before he realized it. “I’ll fix that Goddamned thing! I’ll show you it’s nothing! You won’t have to look at it!” He closed in, went at it with the gun butt, infuriated. Thick glass dribbled off. The hands dented in in the center where they joined. He struck at it again and again and again.
“Take a look at it now! Take a look! Ask it to tell you something now!”
Something happened to it. There was a violent whirring sound somewhere within the damaged mechanism. The hands began to fluctuate like a pair of compass needles. The minute hand fast, the hour hand more slowly. They telescoped, jammed together, blended in a straight line pointing upward to the top of the dial. They stayed that way. The whirring sound ceased. The apparatus went dead. Time had stopped.
Reid’s hand rose with the slowness of expiring motion. He pointed a bloodless finger at the omen.
There was silence in the room for minutes that the clock could no longer record.
Then Shawn’s overheated voice broke it, coming from somewhere behind him now. “And I say it was just a coincidence!” he barked pugnaciously. “You say it too! Say it, d’you hear me? That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly. And I’d bent them so they couldn’t pass each other. They got stuck there, that’s all. Say it, I tell you! Say it over and over! It was just a coincidence!”
Reid must have heard the charge of water hit the glass, must have heard the strangled gulp. He didn’t look around. He kept staring at the ravaged clock. There was no satisfaction on his face, no triumph. There was only a brooding confirmation on it.
“Who needs the drink now, son, you or I?” he mused sadly.
Shawn stepped to the nearest French window and whipped back the enshrouding drapery, as if he couldn’t get enough air.
Outside it, a tell slender panel of stars suddenly leaped into being.
There was derision in their beaded brightness, their rippling, regimented, pin-pointed expanding and contracting, all at one time all over the sky.
6
Police Procedure:
Dobbs and Sokolsky
SOKOLSKY WAS CARRYING THE SAMPLE case. They turned the corner, suddenly appearing as if from nowhere, and came down the street together. They were not in a hurry. Dobbs had a newspaper folded over and thrust into his outside coat pocket lengthwise, the way one carries a newspaper that is to be taken out and consulted at frequent intervals. It was two in the afternoon.
They walked in silence for the first third of the block.
“Over there,” Sokolsky said abruptly, and slanted toward the curb to cross over to the opposite side.
Dobbs changed direction and accompanied him. “That isn’t it.”
“I know, but there’s a vacancy sign there, don’t you see it? If we’re looking for a room, we don’t pass that by and go on to inquire at a place that hasn’t got one.”
“Aren’t we being too elaborate?”
“There’s no such thing in this business. One little oversight like that can give away the whole show.”
They were on the opposite sidewalk now. Dobbs sighed. “If he can read our minds, what chance have we got anyway?”
“He can read minds—maybe—only when he’s aware of them being there. If he doesn’t know our minds are anywhere around, how’s he going to read them? It won’t occur to him.”
Dobbs gave his shoulders an uncomfortable quirk. “It makes you kind of afraid to think too hard.”
“Is that anything new?” Sokolsky wanted to know sarcastically. “All right, in character now. I’ll be in favor. You knock it. You talk me out of it.”
They went in. They rang one of the street bells. The door opened. A woman was standing peering out at one of the inside doors by the time they had entered.
“Yes?”
“We’re looking for a room. We seen your sign.”
Her face dropped. “Oh, two of you? I’m only looking for one roomer. Two is too many to take care of.”
“We’re not dirty,” Dobbs said aggressively.
“All right, Eddie,” Sokolsky sil
enced him.
“I’d have to charge you double,” the woman said.
“Well, how much is double?”
“Ten; five apiece,” the woman said, a little unsurely.
“Forget it,” Dobbs said. “Come on, Bill.”
The woman was giving ground. “Well, don’t you want to look at it, at least?”
“Yeah, let’s look at it, long as we’re here,” Sokolsky urged. “Maybe we can come to some agreement.”
They looked at it.
“Well, what would you be willing to pay?” the woman said. “I’m trying to be reasonable.”
“Kind of small,” Dobbs said, looking around discontentedly.
“All right, nine then, for the two of you.”
“It’s a single bed,” Dobbs said.
“There’s a cot in the basement. I could have it brought up.”
“That would mean me again,” Dobbs protested shrilly. “Oh, no, nothing doing, no cots!”
The woman’s patience was running out. “What do you expect, twin beds for nine a week? That means double linens and double work. You won’t find a room at such a price anywhere else in the city.”
“Come on, Bill,” Dobbs said.
“I’m sorry,” Sokolsky said diplomatically. “Do you know of any other vacancies available along the block here?”
The woman had accompanied them to the door. Her eyes snapped. “Listen, I’m trying to rent my own room. I’m not an information bureau.” The door closed vigorously.
Outside on the street, Sokolsky pointed rather obviously. “Let’s try our luck up this way.” They trudged on. The window curtain behind them gave an angry fillip.
“For McManus you have to be an actor as well as a plain-clothes man,” Dobbs said in an undertone.
“It doesn’t hurt any,” his partner assured him.
They stopped again presently, as if at random.
“This is it,” Sokolsky murmured.
They went in and rang for the janitress.
“Under or over is what we want.”
“We’ll never make it,” Dobbs said with a pessimistic shake.
“If we can get in the building at all, that’ll be the first step.”
The janitress appeared wearing a coat sweater over some more indeterminate garments, of which she seemed to be wearing several layers.
“We’re looking for a room,” Sokolsky said.
“No separate rooms in this house, only flats. I don’t handle that; you’d have to see some of the tenants themselves.”
“Know of anyone in the house that has a room they’d be willing to rent out? We’ve been tramping the streets since eleven this morning.” Dobbs took the newspaper out of his pocket and flashed it at her. A line of artfully penciled checks ran down the entire margin of the rooms-to-let column, as though indicating offerings that had already been inspected and rejected.
“Have you tried two-fourteen down the block?”
“We just came from there. She wanted to soak us.”
The janitress curled her lip. “She ought to get wise to herself. She’s had that room on her hands for eight months straight.”
“How about this house, though?” Sokolsky persisted.
She shrugged. “Try your luck, if you want, but I’ve got my doubts. Maybe Tomazzo, on the second floor back, would be willing to rent out a room to you; they’ve got one over. The eldest daughter got married on ’em last month.”
They went up the stairs, unaccompanied.
“No good; second floor back,” Sokolsky breathed. He continued on upward. Dobbs followed him acquiescently.
He spoke again, in a whisper, as they rounded the fourth-floor landing. “That’s it. The one on your left. Got it placed?”
Dobbs averted his head slightly, and probably without being aware of it himself, as they sidled by; apparently to keep his thoughts from bearing too directly upon the inanimate woodwork.
They went up one more flight.
“This is the matching one,” Sokolsky said. He rapped with the back of his hand three times in a row.
They waited.
“Nobody in,” Dobbs said.
Sokolsky held him where he was with a hitch of the head. “I heard something.”
The door opened abruptly, as though somebody had been listening from the inside. A woman with a hard, lined face was looking out at them. Her hair was a lush terra-cotta color. “What do you two want?” she asked surlily.
“We’re looking for a room. The janitress said maybe you might be willing to—”
Her features scarcely stirred. “Beat it,” she said.
“But the janitress said—”
“Tell her to keep her big yap shut or I’ll go down there and shut it for her.” Her features were those of a graven image. Graven stone. “Through?” she added.
She answered the question herself.
“Yes, you are.”
The door closed.
“Gravel Gertie,” Sokolsky murmured.
They stood a moment. Then they turned and backtracked down the stairs.
“Did you get her number?” Dobbs remarked.
“No. What d’you mean?”
“She hustles.”
“She didn’t just hatch,” Sokolsky told him doubtfully.
“If she don’t now any more, if she’s retired and living on what she earned, then she used to hustle. Nobody could get that sandblasted except cruising sidewalks.”
They accosted the janitress once more. “What’s that dame’s name, top rear?”
“Elsie Moore.” She spaced it. “She says.”
They went out on the street.
“What do we do?”
“Phone McManus.”
They went around and did it.
Dobbs came out of the booth, perspiring. “He said, ‘I’ll give you an hour to get into that flat. And I don’t mean get in with her in it. I mean get in it with her out of it. I want you in there by three.’ He’s checking to see if she has a record. And he’s sending two guys over to help us.”
“Help us do what?” Sokolsky wanted to know blankly. “Does it take four of us?”
“I don’t know. That’s how he said it.”
They waited where they were for them, and they came around in about twenty minutes.
“I’m Elliot of the Vice Squad,” one said. “This is my partner. You the guys?”
Sokolsky moved back a little, like a Brahman from an untouchable.
“Sixteen pinches,” Elliot said. “She used the name Elsie Moore the first time, then dropped it, so it’s probably her right one. The last one was six years ago. She’s gone straight since then.”
“She’s taking a dive today,” Dobbs said grimly.
“It’s a dirty trick,” Sokolsky put in.
“Once more won’t hurt her. McManus wants this job done; she’s blocking traffic.”
They went back to the house and posted themselves out of sight. Elliot went in and conferred with the janitress.
He came out again, said, “We won’t have to go up. She’s got one of these floor-mop dogs she airs every day about this time. She’s due out here any minute.”
“You going to do it in broad daylight, right out in the open street?” Sokolsky gasped.
“When they’ve got a record, they’ve got three strikes on them. They don’t have a chance. I could do it right outside a church door and it would stick.”
They waited; she came out.
“Take her,” Elliot said remorselessly.
The second man broke cover, went straight after her. He didn’t attempt to conceal his approach or maneuver around. She glanced back at him suspiciously, continued on her way. He reached into his pocket, took out a spongy bill.
“Hey!” he called after her curtly.
She stopped and turned.
“Did you drop this?”
“No.” She got a look at it, became more uncertain. “I don’t think I did. I’ll take a look and see, if you want me to—” She th
ought she was getting away with something.
“You must have,” he told her. “I just saw it fall.” He pressed it into her hand. “Better put it away.”
She succumbed; the temptation was too great. She opened her handbag, harpooned her hand into it.
Her hand couldn’t come out again, nor let go of the money. Elliot was holding onto her wrist.
“Did you just give this woman money?”
“Yes, I did.”
Elliot wrenched out her hand, with the money still in it.
“You’re under arrest,” he told her.
She began screaming, “What’d I do? Take your hands off me!” and the dog began yipping in reedy tone.
“For soliciting on the public street. Take her away. And turn the dog over to the janitress.”
“She’ll show in night court,” Elliot said, taking leave of them. “It’ll be good for thirty days.”
She could be heard screaming and railing at them all the way to the corner and around it. She didn’t struggle bodily against them—not unduly. It must have been a trip she’d made more than once. A large crowd escorted the party as far as the turn, then melted away. Not a voice was raised in protest. The men smirked sheepishly, the women nodded in frowning approval. A ghost of some previous reputation must have been hovering over her for six years past, waiting to alight in confirmation.
The janitress grinned demoniacally and made a dive for the ownerless dog. “I been waiting a long time to get my hands on this hairy pest!” she gloated. “Giving me extra work on the stairs all week long!”
They stood a moment, watching the street quiet down.
“It’s still a dirty trick,” ruminated Sokolsky.
“It’s nothing more than poetic justice,” Dobbs answered. “For one time she didn’t and got pinched for it, I bet there was a dozen times she did and never got touched for it. Besides, what does it cost her? She saves on her food and light for thirty days. And reputation she’s got none to lose.
“Come on,” he added. “He said we gotta be up there by three. And it’s twenty-to now. It took us forty minutes to gain occupancy.”
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 18