by Ed McBain
He would have to tell them first, he supposed, that he hadn't been looking for a girl at all last night, although he didn't know why that would be important to them. Still, it seemed important and he thought he should explain that first. I wasn't looking for a girl, he could say. I had just finished my supper, it was around seven o'clock at night, and I had gone back to the room and was just sitting there watching the street and thinking how lucky I'd been to have sold the salad bowls so high and to have made a new contact here in the city, that store in the Quarter.
Yes, he supposed he could tell them. He supposed he could walk in there and tell them all about it.
Last night, he had thought he should call his mother back home in Carey and tell her the good news, but then it seemed to him the happiness he was feeling was a very private sort of thing that shouldn't be shared with anybody, even if it was someone as close as his own mother, that was the trouble with Carey. That small house in Carey, and his mother's bedroom right next door, and Buddy sleeping in the same room with him, all sort of cramped together, there was hardly any time to be alone, to feel something special of your own, something private. And the room in Mrs. Dougherty's house, it was pretty much the same as being home, having to go down the hall for the toilet, and always meeting somebody or other in the hall, the room itself so small and full of noises from the street and noises from all the pipes. What Carey missed, and what the room here in the city missed, was a secret place where a person could be happy by himself, or cry by himself, or just be by himself.
He left the room feeling pretty good, this must have been about seven-thirty, maybe eight o'clock, but not looking for any company, instead really trying to get out of that small room and into the streets, into the larger city, so that the happiness he was feeling could have a little space to expand in, a little space to grow. He wasn't looking for a girl. He just came out of the room and down the steps and into the street it was very cold last night, colder than today and he pulled up his coat collar and stuck his hands in his pockets and just started walking south, not knowing where he was going, but just breathing the air into his lungs, cold and sharp and even hurting a little bit, it was that cold.
He must have gone six or seven blocks, maybe it was more, when he really began to feel the cold. It hit his feet all at once, and he felt his toes were going to fall right off if he didn't get inside someplace quick. He was not a drinking man, he didn't usually drink more than a beer or two, and he didn't much like bars, but he saw a bar up ahead and he knew if he didn't get inside someplace real quick he was going to have frostbite, well, he didn't know if he was really going to have frostbite, but it sure felt like it.
He couldn't remember the name of the bar, he supposed they would want to know its name and exactly what street it was on.
He must have come six or seven blocks,^ was all, walking straight south on Twelfth Street, from the rooming house. But he didn't know what avenue that would have been. He thought the bar had a green neon sign in the window. Anyway, he went in, and took a table near the radiator because his feet were so cold. That was how he happened to meet Molly. He wasn't really No, he thought.
No, it doesn't sound right, that's the difficult part about telling it.
He could visualize it all in his head, just the way it had happened, but he knew that going into that police station and telling it to a detective it would come out all wrong, he just knew it. Sitting face to face with somebody he didn't know and telling him about how the girl had come to the table after he'd been sitting there a couple of minutes, no, he knew it wouldn't come out right, even though he could see it plain as day inside his head, just the way it had happened, her coming to the table and stopping there and looking down at him with a very peculiar annoyed look on her face, her hands on her hips.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"You've got a lot of nerve, mister," she said. "You know that, don't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You see that pocketbook there in the corner, what do you think that pocketbook is doing there?"
"What pocket Oh."
"Yeah, oh."
"I'm sorry. I didn't see it when I sat down."
"Yeah, well now you see it."
"And there wasn't a glass or anything on the table, so I"
"That's 'cause I didn't order yet. I was in the powder room."
"Oh," Roger said.
She had red hair, and the red hair was the only attractive thing about her, and he suspected even that was fake. She was wearing fake eyelashes, and she had penciled fake eyebrows onto her forehead and had made her mouth more generous by running a fake line of lipstick up beyond its natural boundaries. She was wearing a white blouse and a black skirt, but her breasts under the silk blouse were very high and pointed, with that same fake look the eyelashes and the lipstick and the eyebrows had. Her hair was a bright red, almost an orange, straight from a bottle, he supposed. She was altogether a pretty sad specimen. Even her legs weren't too hot; he supposed there was nothing she could do to fake them up a little.
"Well, I'm sorry," he said, "I'll just take my beer and move to another booth."
"Thanks," she said, "I'd appreciate it."
She kept standing by the booth with her hands on her hips, waiting for him to pick up his bottle of beer, and his half-full glass of beer and move to another booth. The trouble was he had taken off his shoes in order to warm his feet against the radiator, which was on the wall under the table, and he had to put his shoes on now before he could move. He swung his stockinged feet out from under the table and then searched for his right shoe. He put that on while she watched him silently with her hands on her hips. Then he reached under the table for the second shoe and couldn't find it, and got down on his hands and knees and went searching for it that way. She just kept watching with her hands on her hips all the while, not saying a word until finally she said, "Oh, for Pete's sake, never mind! I'll move! Would you please hand me my bag?"
"I'm sorry, but"
"Don't be so sorry, for Pete's sake, just givejne my bag!"
"I took off my shoes because"
"What are you, a farmer or something? What do you think this is, your own living room? Taking off your shoes? In a public place like this? Boy, you've really got some nerve, mister, I'm telling you!"
"It's just that my feet"
"Never mind!"
"Here's your bag."
"Thank you. Thank you a whole hell of a lot," she said, and swiveled off angrily to a booth across the room and at an angle to the one he occupied. He watched her backside as she crossed the room, and thought some women just didn't have anything, some women were just the unlucky ones in this world, they didn't have pretty faces, nor good legs nor breasts, and even their backsides looked like a truckdriver's.
It seemed to him he always got the ugly girls.
As far back as he could remember, even when he was in the second grade at Carey Elementary, when his father was still alive, all he ever got was the ugly girls. There was Eunice McGregor, who was possibly the ugliest kid ever born to anyone in the United States, well, her mother was no prize either, that was for sure. But she had a crush on him, and she told everybody she loved him, and she warned him she would break his nose she was a very big girl if he didn't give her a kiss whenever she demanded one, God she was ugly. That was in the second grade. After his father died, it seemed he got the ugly girls more and more often. He couldn't understand why they were all so attracted to him. His mother had ben pretty as a picture when she was younger, and she still had a fine handsome look about her, it was the bones, you couldn't rob a pretty woman of her facial bones, they were always there, fifty, sixty, even into the seventies. His mother was only forty-six, and she still had those fine bones; sometimes she would actually laugh at some of the girls who were attracted to him. She told him once that she thought he was purposely looking for all the ugly ducklings he could find. He sure as hell couldn't understand what she'd meant by that. He
hadn't said anything to her, he didn't like to contradict her when she said something, she'd only think he was being sassy. But he'd thought about it a lot. It made him wonder, what she'd said.
Looking across to where the redheaded girl was adjusting herself in the booth opposite, doing so with all the fuss and annoyance of somebody who is just about fit to bust, he felt the same happiness he had felt before leaving the room at Mrs. Dougherty's. He watched the girl with an odd, rising feeling of tenderness toward her, pleased by the very fussy little annoyed female things she was doing in the booth opposite, pulling the skirt down over her knees, and smoothing the front of her blouse, and tucking back a stray wisp of hair, and then glancing around for the waiter and signaling to him in a prissy, annoyed, very dignified, feminine way, he almost burst out laughing. She made him feel real good. Now that his feet were warm again (his mother had told him never to take off his shoes when his feet were cold, just leave them on until the feet warmed up inside, and they wouldn't never get cold again that whole day, but he never listened to her about his feet, they were his feet and he by God knew how to make them warm) now that his feet were warm, and now that he had a good glass of beer inside him and was in a nice warm place with a juke box going at the other end with a soft dreamy song, now he began thinking about how much money he had got for the stuff he'd brought to the city, and he began feeling very good about it again, and he thought somehow the redheaded girl, well, the fake redhead, had something to do with the way he was feeling.
He watched her as she ordered, and then he watched as she got up and walked to the juke box and made a selection, and then went back to the booth. Nobody in the place was paying the smallest bit of attention to her. There were maybe a dozen or so men in the bar, and only four girls besides the redhead, but nobody was making a rush to her booth, in spite of the shortage. He sat and watched her. She knew he was watching her, but she very carefully made sure she didn't look once in his direction, pretending she was still very angry because he had taken her booth.
He knew he would go to bed with her.
He wasn't at all excited by the idea because she wasn't pretty or even attractive. He just knew he would go to bed with her, that was all. He just knew that before the night ended, he would be in bed with her.
Sitting on the bench opposite the police station now, he wondered how he could explain to the police that he had known he would be going to bed with the redheaded girl. How could he explain to them that he had known he would go to bed with her but hadn't been excited by the idea, how could he explain that?
How could he go in there and tell them all about this? What would his mother think when she well, it didn't matter, that part of it certainly didn't matter. It was just sitting across from somebody and talking about taking a girl to bed that would be very difficult. There wasn't anybody in the world he talked to about things like that, not even his mother, certainly not his mother, nor even his brother Buddy. How could he tell about Molly to a strange detective?
The idea came to him like a bolt of lightning, just like that, pow, out of the blue.
He would telephone.
He would go to a telephone booth, but wait, there were no separate listings for the precincts, how could he possibly Parker, that was his name. The detective in the luncheonette. Parker, of the 87th Squad, and the globes across the street were each marked with an 87, which meant this was Parker's precinct. Okay, he would call police headquarters and say that he was supposed to call a detective named Parker of the 87th Squad, but he had lost the number Parker had given him, and would they please give him the number. Maybe they would connect him direct, maybe they had a big switchboard down there that connected to all the precincts in the city. Or maybe they would simply give him the number of the 87th Precinct and then he would call it himself and ask to talk to a detective not Parker, absolutely not Parker it would be as easy as that.
Pleased, he got off the bench.
He took a last look at the police station, smiled, and walked out of the park, looking for the drugstore he had been in earlier that morning.
5
The sergeant who answered the phone at police headquarters listened patiently while Roger told his invented story about Detective Parker, and then said, "Hold on, please." Roger waited. He assumed the sergeant was checking to see if there really was a Detective Parker in the 87th Squad. Or maybe the sergeant didn't give a damn one way or the other. Maybe he received similar calls a hundred times, a thousand times each day. Maybe he'd been bored stiff listening to Roger's story, and maybe he was bored stiff now as he looked up the number of the precinct.
"Hello," the sergeant said.
"Yes?"
"That number is Frederick 78024."
"Frederick 7-8024, thank you," Roger said.
"Welcome," the sergeant answered, and hung up. Roger felt in his pocket for another dime, found one, put it in the slot, waited for a dial tone, and began dialing.
FR7
Quickly, he put the receiver back onto the hook.
What would he say when they answered? Hello, my name is Roger Broome, I want to tell you about this girl Molly, you see we met in a bar and What? they would say.
What they would say.
What the hell is this all about, mister?
He sat motionless and silent for perhaps three minutes, staring at the face of the telephone. Then he felt in the return chute for his coin, leadenly lifted his hand, and deposited the dime once again. The dial tone erupted against his ear. Slowly, carefully, he began dialing.
FR7, 8,0, 2,4.
He waited. The phone was ringing on the other end. He listened to it ring. The rings sounded very far away instead of just a few blocks from where he was. He began counting the rings, they must have been having a busy time over at that station house, seven, eight, nine "87th Precinct, Sergeant Murchison."
"Uh ... is this the police?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
"I'd like to talk to a detective, please."
"What is this in reference to, sir?"
"I'd ... uh ... like to report ... uh ..."
"Are you reporting a crime, sir?"
He hesitated a moment, and then pulled the receiver from his ear and looked at it as though trying to make a decision. He was replacing it on the hook just as the sergeant's voice, sounding small and drowning "in the black plastic, began saying again, "Are you reporting a" click, he hung up.
No, he thought.
I am not reporting anything.
I am getting out of this city and away from all telephones because I don't want to talk to the police. Now how about that? I do not wish to discuss this matter with anyone, least of all the police, so how about that? Damn right, he thought, and opened the door of the phone booth and walked out of the booth and across the length of the drugstore. The colored girl, Amelia, was still behind the cash register. She smiled at him as he approached.
"You back again?" she asked. "I didn't see you come in."
"Yep," he said. "Bad penny."
"You mail your cards off?"
"Yep."
"Did you find your friend at the police station?"
"Nope."
"How come?"
"I figured there couldn't be no friends of mine at the police station."
"You can say that again," Amelia said, and laughed.
"What time do you quit?" he said.
"What?"
"I said what time do you quit?"
"Why?"
"I want to get out of the city."
"What do you mean, out of the city?"
"Out. Away."
"Home, you mean?"
"No, no. Not home. That's the same thing, ain't it? That's the same old box. The city's a great big box, and Carey's a tiny small box, but they're both the same thing, right?"
Amelia smiled and looked at him curiously. "I don't know," she said.
"Go take off your apron," he said slowly, "and hang it on that hook right there, you see that ho
ok?"
"I see it."
"Hang it on that hook right there, and tell your boss you have an awful headache"
"I don't have a headache"
"Yes, you do have a headache, and you can't work any more today."
Amelia looked at him steadily. "Why?" she said.
"We're going to get out of the city."
"Where?"
"I don't know yet."
"And when we get out?"
"We'll see then. The big thing now is to do what we have to do, right? And what we have to do is get away from this city real quick."
"Are the cops after you?" she asked suddenly.
"No." Roger grinned. "Cross my heart and hope to die, the cops are definitely not after me. Now how about that? Are you going to get that headache and hang up that apron and come with me?"
Amelia shrugged. "I don't know."
"When will you know?"
"The minute you tell me what you want from me."
"From you? Who wants anything from you?"
"When you're colored, everybody"
"Not me," Roger said.
"No, huh?"
"No."
Amelia kept looking at him steadily. "I don't know what to make of you," she said.
"The apron," he whispered.
"Mmm."
"The hook," he said.
"Mmm."
"Headache."
"Mmm."
"Can't work."
"Mmm."
"I'll meet you outside. Five minutes. On the comer."
"Why?" she said again.
"We're gonna have fun," he said, and turned and walked away from the cash register.
She didn't come outside in five minutes, and she didn't come outside in ten minutes, and by the end of fifteen minutes he realized she wasn't going to come out at all. So he peeked over the stuff piled in the front window of the drugstore and saw Amelia at the cash register making no sign of taking off the apron or of telling the boss she had a headache, so that was that. He walked away from the drugstore, thinking it was a shame because she really was sort of pretty and also he'd never been out with a colored girl before and he thought it might be fun. Now that he had decided not to go to the police with his story, it never once entered his mind that he should go home to Carey. He had tried to explain to Amelia that Carey, and the city, and the police station sitting on the edge of the park were all one and the same thing, that it was just a matter of degree as to how you classed them one against the other. The police station was a small box, and Carey was a slightly larger box, and the city was the biggest box of all, but all of them were trying their hardest to keep a man all closed up, when all a man wanted to do every now and then was relax and enjoy himself. Which is what he thought he and Molly were going to talk about last night, when they were discussing loneliness and all. But then, of course, she had begun to talk about that man in Sacramento, instead.