Free Live Free

by Wolfe, Gene

  “Finishing setting the table or finishing eating, Mrs. Baker?”

  “Finishing eating, but Lord, that didn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Then I got up and went to the door and they came in and I turned the TV off and gave them some tea.”

  “How long would you say the frozen stew took to cook?”

  “Wait just a shack.” The old woman got up and hobbled across her kitchen to the outside door. “This is the one those nice policemen broke,” she said. “I have to get it fixed.”

  She stepped out onto the snowy porch, and returned a moment later holding a shiny little carton. “I always keep my garbage back there until collation day. They used to come oop the alley, but now they won’t, and I don’t see why. Anyhow here’s the stew box, Mr. Barnes. I was wrong about the Irish—Hungarian galosh, they call it. I haven’t got my glasses, so you’ll have to read the back yourself. I only wear them when I want to see something. How long does it say?”

  Preheat oven to 350 F, Stubb read. Ready in 20 min. “Twenty minutes,” he told the old woman.

  “Then it must have been about six when they came.” She filled her mouth with cornflakes and milk.

  “Yeah. And that’s about half an hour after Free’s face was on the news. But they wouldn’t have come here—next door—first. First they would have gone to Free’s and poked around a little to see if he was still there, or had maybe left a note for the milkman or something. Say ten minutes for that. They got here in about twenty minutes from wherever they were. Did they have a car?”

  Mrs. Baker nodded and swallowed.

  “Did they say they had one, or did you actually see they did?”

  “There was a car in front of the house when I got the door, and when they left I heard a startup. I saw the lights in my curtain too, now that I come to think. What lights through yonder window breaks, as they say, though naturally they didn’t really break it.”

  “When you came to the Consort, how’d you get there, Mrs. Baker?”

  “Cab.” Her mouth was full of cornflakes. “Drink your cooco. It’ll be as cold as a cumberbund.”

  Stubb took a sip. “You phoned for one and it came? Or did you go to a busy street and flag one down?”

  “Phoned.”

  “When it came for you, did the driver stop in front of your house, where the two women’s car had been?”

  “I believe so, but I can’t imagine where it makes no never blind.”

  “It means it’s probably no use for me to look for tracks from the women’s car in the snow. What sort of car was it?”

  “Like General Matters, you mean? I didn’t see.”

  “Standard? Subcompact?”

  “Kind of bewitched and between.”

  “That’s a compact. Old or new?”

  “New, I think. It looked kind of shinish. But listen here, Mr. Barnes.” The old woman scooped up more cereal. “Suppose I knew just exactly how it was—I don’t, but preposing I did—what good would it do for poor Mr. Free?”

  “I don’t know,” Stubb admitted. “Maybe none. But maybe I’d come across that car someplace else and be able to link the two up.”

  “If they come again, I’ll look better.”

  “Thanks. Write down the license number if you can. Getting back to this time, you said it looked shiny. What color was it?”

  “Black, I think, or midlight blue.”

  “Could it have been gray?”

  She shrugged. “You know what they say—at night all cars is gray. Is that important too?”

  “It’s the usual color for cars in the General Services Motor Pool, that’s all. Two doors or four?”

  “Four, I believe. Two on the side I saw.”

  “You didn’t see the women get out of the car? Or get back into it?”

  She shook her head.

  “When you saw the car, could you tell if there was anybody else still inside?”

  “Not for curtain sure, but I don’t think so.”

  “Was it the women who told you where we had gone?”

  She shook her head again. “You wasn’t even there already, when they come.”

  “Then how did you know? It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours between the time Madame Serpentina checked in and the time you knocked on the door.”

  Mrs. Baker sat silent, refusing to meet his eyes.

  “If I guess, will you tell me if I’m right? You were sitting in your parlor watching TV, and you happened to overhear—”

  “Well, you’re a cushion! That’s what my mother used to say. You make the hard things easy.”

  “You did overhear us, then.”

  “Not really overhere, Mr. Barnes.” She swallowed, although all her cornflakes were gone. “Mr. Barnes, I guess you’re too much of a gentleman to scald a old lady.”

  “I never scold people. That’s not my job.”

  “Like you said about overhereing—I would have, you know, just sat here out there and overhered if could have. But only I couldn’t, so I opened the window a little teenie and scrootched down on the floor and dropped just like Eve in the Garden of Edam. I’d been watching, you know, and I saw Ms. Snake come in, and I was overworried about poor Mr. Free.”

  “I’m glad you did what you did, Mrs. Baker, and if you were trying to help Mr. Free, nobody can blame you for that.”

  “And then later I heard Ms. Girth ask about a hotel, and somebody said the Consort. But I didn’t know you were there until I tapped one of those hoppers.”

  Stubb nodded to himself.

  “Are you about finished, Mr. Barnes?”

  He took a final sip of cocoa. “No, I haven’t really started yet, Mrs. Baker. I want you to tell me everything about those two women. We might begin with the way they were dressed.”

  “Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch.” Mrs. Baker shook her head in wonderment. “And the Dutch meet the Devil.”

  Chapter 26

  A BETTER NEIGHBORHOOD

  The doorman’s whistle sounded less often now. Most of the businessmen were at the airport, and the hurrying crowds of office workers had thinned to sauntering shoppers. The sun was higher and the blue shadows had gone, but it was still bitterly cold.

  The witch wore a ranch-mink coat appropriate to the Consort. It had a hood, and the hood was up, so that her exotic face was framed in soft fur. She walked half a block past the doorman and his line of cabs, then left the sidewalk and stepped into the path of a Cadillac sedan.

  The driver braked. Although the street was largely clear of snow and ice, the big car skidded, its rear wheels sluing before it came to a stop with its bumper touching the witch’s mink. She opened the right front door and got in.

  “Young woman,” the driver said, “you were very nearly killed.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Not perhaps.” He was a man of fifty-five or sixty, with a clipped white mustache. “I almost couldn’t stop. If my reaction had been a trifle slower, you’d be dead at this moment.”

  “How fortunate for you that I am not. It would have been most embarrassing.”

  He took his foot from the brake and let the car drift toward a dozen others waiting at the light. “You don’t seem much shaken up.”

  “It is my nature,” the witch said. “Within, I am seething, often. Outside, nothing.”

  “Your legs aren’t trembling?”

  “No.”

  “Then may I drop you off someplace?”

  “Yes. The address is sixteen twenty-three Killdeer Lane. It is in Bellewood. That is a suburb to the north.”

  “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. It’s at least an hour’s drive.”

  “In this car, at this time of day, it will take no more than forty minutes.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t spare that. I’m going down this street to Broad, then turning left on Broad to Nineteenth. I’ll be happy to drop you anywhere along the way.”

  “You will take me to the address I have given you,” the witch told him. “Or if
you are in a great hurry, you may drive to your destination and give me your keys. I will take care of my errand and return your car there—certainly, I would think, before five o’clock. I will leave your keys beneath the seat.”

  As the traffic began to inch forward, the driver stared at her. “You’re insane.”

  “No. I am only a determined woman in urgent need of transportation. What are your alternatives? You are a wealthy and distinguished man, married, with several children and many business contacts. You may, if you like, drive to a police station or merely stop where you see a policeman. I will cling to you and scream. Cry. You may drive to your destination; I will do the same thing, and it will be still worse.”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “It will not matter. I will give a name—any name—and the police and the journalists will believe that you have given me a false one. No doubt it will be a bit of gossip that will enliven many business lunches.” The witch opened her purse, took out a compact, and inspected her face critically in the mirror. “I am a beautiful woman, but I am not asking you for a hundred thousand dollars, or even for a nice little condominium on the most fashionable side of the park. Only for an hour or two of your time. You will drive me where I wish to go, and I will get out, and you will never see me again. You will get off very cheaply—if you act now.”

  “You are a very clever young woman,” the driver said. “But it isn’t going to do you any good.” He accelerated the Cadillac to make the next light.

  “No. I am a deep young woman, if you like, Mr. McAlister. A desperate young woman. But not clever. To tell the truth, I am too busy to be clever.”

  He spun the wheel to swing the big car around a corner. “A clever and unscrupulous young woman, ready to use my position against me.”

  “This is not Broad Street.”

  “No,” he said, “but this will get us to the freeway. Want to give me that address again?”

  “Sixteen twenty-three Killdeer Lane. Mr. McAlister, my kind of person has been telling your kind for many centuries that you are enslaved by your possessions. It is irrational of you to resent it because occasionally your master chooses to crack his whip.”

  There was a radiotelephone in the Cadillac’s dashboard. McAlister picked it up. As they turned onto the On ramp, he said, “It’s me, Bill. Tell them I’m having a little trouble—I’m going to be a couple of hours late. Make my apologies, will you?”

  The witch used the Cadillac’s lighter to light one of her Turkish cigarettes and turned her head away as though to study the grim, costly buildings they passed.

  When the Cadillac was purring down a boulevard lined with winter-naked oaks, McAlister announced, “I live here myself. I’d just driven in when you stopped me.” It was the first time he had spoken since they had turned onto the Interstate.

  His passenger permitted herself a slight smile. “Are you not afraid I may use that information against you?”

  “Certainly I am, but you could have gotten it from the telephone book. If you try another stunt like this, you’ll find I’m not such easy meat.”

  “You regret that you did not call the police? Do so now. There must be police in Bellewood.”

  He shook his head. “I said I’d take you, and I will. Just don’t try it again.”

  The witch laughed.

  Killdeer Lane was a winding residential street where large, well-kept houses stood on three-acre lots. As McAlister stopped the car in the drive of sixteen twenty-three, he asked, “How are you going to get home?”

  “You have guessed already that this is not my home. That is very clever of you.”

  “I told you I live here. We’re a community of only about three thousand, and if you lived here too I’d have noticed you.”

  “Unless I had just moved in.”

  “Let’s not beat around the bush. How are you going to get back to wherever you came from?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Somebody here will drive you?”

  “Perhaps. I doubt it.”

  McAlister nodded. “And I don’t think you’ve got money for a cab. They charge double outside the city, so it’s about a thirty-dollar ride. Miss—Ms. whoever you are, I’ll pay you fifty dollars right now, cash, if you’ll tell me how you knew my name.” He slipped a calf-skin wallet from his coat and took out two twenties and a ten.

  She smiled at him. “Suppose I take your money and tell you it was magic?”

  “I don’t think you’ll do that. I think you’re a young woman who keeps her bargains.”

  “Firm but fair. Is that not what they say of you in the boardrooms?”

  McAlister nodded. “Sometimes.”

  “I, also. All right.” She plucked the bills from his fingers before she got out of the car. “What do you call that thing that holds the wheel? Not you, the other thing.”

  “This? The steering column.”

  “I know you would know the name. Your registration, Mr. McAlister. It is held to that steering column in a little window frame. When I took out my compact, I read your name in the mirror. Was that worth fifty dollars? Here—” She held it out. “Do you want your money back?”

  “No,” McAlister said. “It was worth the fifty.” He waited for her to close the door.

  “Then I will give you for nothing information that is worth much more. I am a witch, Mr. McAlister. Discovering your name was not magic, but I am. I can often read the future … and do certain other things. Someday soon, you may find you require such a person. I am living at the Consort under the name of Serpentina.” Without waiting for him to reply, she shut the door of the Cadillac and turned away.

  Sixteen twenty-three, where she had told McAlister to drop her, was not her destination. When his car was out of sight, she walked down the driveway to the street, then down the street, stepping carefully to keep her high-heeled boots off the worst patches of ice.

  Even now, in the dead of winter, it was an attractive neighborhood. All the houses were large, and most were white. They were sufficiently separated that there was no clash of architectures; each seemed set among its own groves and lawns as though it were intended to be remote and its neighbors were present merely by accident. Clumps of birch thrust pale arms through the snow, hollies and blue spruce spoke of Christmas almost a month past, Christmas now almost infinitely remote at the distant end of the year.

  Moving among all this in her dark furs, her fringed black dress and black boots, the witch seemed as out of place as some tropical animal, large-eyed and slender-legged, a bit of the city blown far from its gritty streets and bright windows by the winter winds. She might have been the sister of a notorious gangster (not his wife or mistress, since such men favor florid blonds). She might have been the sister of a nun. Once a green Mercedes passed her, cracking the ice, crunching snow. She waved to the man and woman inside as though she knew them, and they, thinking that perhaps, that certainly somewhere, they knew her, waved in return.

  When she had walked about three-quarters of a mile, the open lawns on one side of the street gave way to a stone wall eight feet high. She followed it for another hundred yards, and at last reached an iron gate. There was a pushbutton beside it, but it was a long time, ten minutes at least, before a dark man in a buffalo jacket pulled it back.

  “Hello, Pete,” she said.

  “Hello yourself, Marie,” Pete answered as she stepped inside. “How you doing?”

  “All right.”

  “Nice coat. You walk?” He shut the gate again and locked it with a heavy steel bar.

  “Friend gave me a lift.”

  “Ah, you got a gadjo boyfriend. Don’t tell the King.”

  “I haven’t got any boyfriend, Pete. You crazy?”

  “That’s the idea,” Pete said. “Don’t tell anybody. He’ll beat you black and blue.”

  When they reached the door of the white brick house, he opened it for her but did not go in with her. The foyer was dark and musty; the drapes were drawn, and the
re was a smell of cooking, of much coffee and of ham. After a moment, a handsome, sallow woman pushed aside a curtain. There was a red kerchief knotted around her head, and she wore gold earrings and three gold chains.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said. “I saw it.”

  The witch nodded.

  “You don’t believe me, huh? I did. I been tellin’ everybody for weeks. You ask the King.”

  “I believe you, Rose.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Is he upstairs?”

  “No, I’ll show you. Someday you and me are goin’ to be friends, Marie. If the King asks, tell him I was real nice to you, okay? He likes you. He talks about you. This way—” She motioned the other down a dark hall. “Maybe once a week. For him, that’s a lot.”

  The door was closed. When the woman in the red kerchief opened it, she released a new smell, of woodsmoke and cigars.

  The room itself was bright and cold. There were seven wide windows—four in one wall and three in another—and their blinds were up and their curtains drawn back. One window was half open. A big fire blazed in a big, fieldstone fireplace, watched by a big old man in a dark blue suit.

  “Hello,” the witch said. “How are you?”

  His eyes never left the fire. “Is that the way to talk to me? I am the King.”

  “Should I talk like the gadje? Should I say hello Your Majesty?”

  “Our people say King. Here you are one of us.”

  Her voice fell. “Always, King.”

  Perhaps he had not heard. A poker with cruel hooks stood beside the fireplace. He picked it up and stirred the fire.

  “I have something for you, King. A gift.” She held out the fifty dollars McAlister had given her; then, when he still did not turn to look at her, walked across the room to him and laid the money gently in his lap.

  He glanced down. “Bah! Tens, twenties. Today they get you nothing! Paper! Just paper.” He wadded up the bills, rolled his big hands back and forth, flung crumpled green paper into the fire.