by FRANCES
They hailed a cab. In it, because O’Hara’s open face was openly puzzled, Shapiro said that it had just occurred to him that Miss Larkin might have a visitor; told O’Hara, briefly, what had occurred to him.
And then Shapiro watched the sudden disintegration of O’Hara’s pleasant face, and heard O’Hara say, slowly, “My God! Oh, for God’s sake.”
A defective telephone, and one with its roots gone is certainly all of that, is normally a minor inconvenience. For a moment, watching the red-haired girl shake a dead telephone angrily, as if it might be shaken back to life, Reginald Grant was gently amused; was inclined to say, “There, there,” tolerantly, to quiet a disturbed female. “Not all that serious,” he was inclined to say, further, since euphoria still persisted. (Very satisfactory to find the very thug he had been looking for; highly gratifying to be able to knock him out neatly. Life in the old fist yet.)
“All right,” Peggy Larkin said. “You look pleased with yourself. All right. What do we do now?”
She seemed exasperated; what, then, had she said which was, in an obscure fashion, pleasing? Surely not merely that she had used “we” instead of “you”? Nothing to him that she—
“We—” he began, and began with confidence. And stopped.
A defective telephone is slightly more than a minor inconvenience if one wants to report a fire. Or, if one needs to call the police, asking them please to come around and pick up a disabled thug. A temporarily disabled thug.
He looked down at the square man. The square man now lay on his back, but his eyes were open and it occurred to Reg Grant that they did not look as dazed as they had looked. There was a rather unpleasant expression in the man’s eyes.
Stand him up and knock him down again, only this time harder? The idea was unappealing, for a variety of reasons. Setting aside the fact that that was not something one did, there was a more immediate problem. Fists unused for years tend to soften up. Reg looked at his right fist. Knuckles bruised, even bleeding slightly. It did not occur to Reg Grant that he could, expeditiously, use the toe of a shoe.
The man looked heavy, and had felt heavy when hit. It was, therefore, absurd to speculate on the possibility of taking him along with them until they found a policeman.
“We could call out the window,” Reg suggested, with not too much assurance. “Probably be a constable around, what?” He looked down at the girl. “No?” he said.
“A thousand to one against,” she said. “Also—people who would hear us would think we were playing games, probably. By the time somebody got around to—”
She lifted her shoulders, let them drop.
“Quite,” Reg said. “I could—” He looked down at the man on the floor. Couldn’t, obviously, leave the girl to cope if he came to, as he rather looked like doing.
She was quick on the uptake.
“I’ll go,” she said. “There’s one at the corner. You stand by to knock him down again.”
She looked up at him.
“I must say,” she told him, “that you’re a surprisingly strenuous—er—poet. Were you a champion or something?”
“Not really,” he said. “That is—just as an amateur, y’know. And only light-heavy.”
She giggled, which was as unexpected to him as anything might well be.
She went out of the flat and he could hear her feet, quick, on the staircase. He walked the length of the room and looked down through one of the tall windows toward the street.
The girl, only a little foreshortened, moving fast, came into sight and went down the stone steps. Moved well—pretty little thing—different somehow from most of them—what made her giggle as if I had—
She turned to her left at the foot of the steps, walking west. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, all facing toward the east. One was a dark gray saloon which looked somehow a little—
The thought was not finished.
A man—a tallish man in a dark topcoat—got out of the rear of the car just as Peggy Larkin came up to it. He stood in front of her. She moved to her left and for an instant Reg, watching, thought that the man had been merely awkward. But the man moved to intercept her.
They stood so, facing each other, close together, for an instant. The man did not, so far as Reg could see, use violence. He jerked his head toward the car and the slender girl turned toward it. Something he had not seen? A gun? Of course, a gun. Unless she—
Reg was running by then—running the length of the room, tugging at the door (and ducking under the lintel when it opened and he was through) running down the stairs.
The car had been rather closely parked. That helped a little. But it had passed the house, moving east with increasing speed, by the time Reg Grant reached the stoop.
He ran down the stairs. He began to run after the car. The car was leaving him behind. The license number of the car. Get the license number of the—The car was too far ahead of him. The license plate was dirty.
At the end of the block the car had stopped. He ran faster. Now he was coming up to the stopped—
A taxicab was running slowly along in the roadway. The driver looked at him with interest. The meter flag was up.
Reg ran between parked cars and grabbed the door handle of the moving cab, and the cab stopped. Reg yanked the door open.
“Car ahead,” he said. “Gray”—he groped for the American word—“sedan. Follow that.”
The cab driver did not start his car. He turned and looked at Reg Grant.
“You the police, or something?” the cab driver asked. “That what you are, Mac?”
Reg grabbed his wallet from his pocket, grabbed a bill out of it, pushed the bill at the driver without looking at it.
The cab driver looked at it. The driver said, “Jeeze, Mac. O.K.”
Now he did start the cab. But now the gray saloon car, which had been held up by a traffic light, had started too. It turned to the right.
The cab jumped after it. It made the light and turned south. The gray car was not in sight.
The cab driver did not hesitate. At the next corner he turned right. “All he could uv done,” the driver said, and was right. The gray car was ahead, not going especially fast.
“O.K., Mac,” the driver said. “Running off with your girl, or something?”
“Call it that,” Reg said, to call it something.
“O.K.,” the driver said. “Only listen, Mac. No shooting, huh? Not whiles you’re in the hack, huh?”
It made two of them, Nathan Shapiro thought, gloomily. The two cops least likely to succeed.
“You weren’t expecting him there,” Shapiro told Tim O’Hara. “Like you say, the light was bad in the vestibule.”
“He was getting his key out,” O’Hara said. “So naturally I figured—”
“Sure you did,” Shapiro said. “Anybody would have.” (Either of us would have, anyway.)
“Anyway,” O’Hara said, “it could have been somebody else. Could have been somebody who lived there.”
“Sure it could, Tim. Probably was. Probably getting all worked up about nothing.”
“Goddamn it to hell,” Tim O’Hara said. “Goddamn it to hell.”
The superintendent’s wife came up from the depths, through the area, to let them in downstairs. Nobody needed to let them into Peggy Larkin’s apartment. The door stood open. They looked in and O’Hara swore again—swore dully, hopelessly, and at his own stupidity.
A telephone table knocked over. The telephone itself torn out of the wall. That told them enough, as they stood in the doorway and looked into an empty living room. They had got there too late. Like us, Nathan Shapiro thought, and led the way in.
Nobody there—not now. Nobody in the long living room, in the narrow bedroom which also had windows on the street, in the bathroom which opened off the bedroom. Nobody in the apartment’s single, but rather large, closet. A good many clothes—clothes for two young women—in the closet. The kitchen an alcove, with gas plate on top of small refrigerato
r. Nobody anywhere. But there had been.
They did not touch as they looked through the apartment, or touched as little as they could. It was O’Hara who found the topcoat, a Burberry, behind the opened door to the bedroom. They touched that.
“His, I think,” Shapiro said. “The one he was wearing when I let him go. You’d better call in, Tim.”
O’Hara left to call in.
Grant had come to get the girl, Shapiro thought, standing in the center of the living room, looking around it. He had got the girl. That was not certain; that was the way it looked.
(Better, anyway, than finding he had killed the girl to silence her. With each opened door—to bathroom, to closet—Shapiro’s breathing had momentarily stopped.)
Got her and taken her away. Why? No use speculating on why, yet. Probably to silence her elsewhere, at some place more convenient because more secret. Bodies turn up in the end, but it can take time. North River, East River, and the Harlem connecting. Or wasteland to the north. Or even behind bushes in a park.
A struggle first, obviously. She had tried to telephone, and he had stopped her, but not without some trouble. Had had to yank the instrument loose to stop her, pull it out of the wall. A white telephone.
Shapiro walked over to look at it. A white telephone with red spots on it. Not many red spots. Scratched her hand, probably—or she had scratched his; just as likely—as, briefly, they struggled for the telephone. Left blood on the telephone. Not much blood.
He went around the room carefully, leaning down, looking for more blood. No blood he could see with casual looking. Scatter rugs, one of them clearly misplaced, lying partly over another. Slipped when somebody ran across it, in flight or in pursuit? Or when somebody had fallen on it, and slipped with it on polished floor? One guess was as good as another. Whatever I guess will be wrong anyway, Nathan Shapiro thought. Strange they don’t finally recognize that I’m no good at this sort of thing.
Men came, after a short time, from precinct; after a somewhat longer time from the lab.
“The Larkin kill,” Shapiro told the uniformed sergeant from the precinct. “This was the kid’s sister’s place. I’m afraid this man Grant was here. Looks like his coat.”
The sergeant looked at the coat. He said the stain on it looked like being blood.
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “From the girl’s body. The girl in the cab. Old blood.”
But it hadn’t been, he thought. It had been young blood, almost a child’s blood.
They knew within an hour that Grant had been there, right enough—been there and left fingerprints widely scattered. Prints on the telephone, and the girl’s prints on it too. No doubt they were hers, since they were numerous throughout the apartment and in places an occupant leaves prints—on the under sides of drawer pulls; on the glass shelves of a bathroom cabinet. His as certain, matching prints which had been lifted in his apartment.
Several prints on both knobs of the front door. The girl’s again, and Grant’s again. And O’Hara’s. And, somewhat smudged, on the inner knob, the prints of three fingers of someone who might, from their position, have reached behind him, with left hand, and pushed the door closed. Not good prints; just possibly good enough. They would be run through. They would probably turn out to have been left by the building superintendent, or by a delivery boy from a nearby grocery store.
Nathan Shapiro was not in the apartment—there was nothing he could do there—when the print identification of Grant came through. He was in the office of Lieutenant Stein, acting, at Homicide, Manhattan West. Neither Lieutenant Stein nor Detective Shapiro was in the least surprised.
“It was pretty dim in the vestibule,” Shapiro said. “Always is, probably. You know the kind. Tim wasn’t expecting him there. No reason he should have been. Tim had never seen him, of course. Tim’s a good, hard-working kid.”
“We all slip up,” Stein said.
“Some of us more than others,” Shapiro said, gloomily. “I was the one turned him loose. If he’s killed another, or’s going to, it comes back to me.”
“We all slip up,” Stein said again. “Nothing at Dyckman?”
“Not that helps much,” Shapiro said. “He hasn’t been there long.”
Therein, in effect, lay the difficulty.
To catch a fugitive, certain routine things are done. Descriptions are distributed. Of such and such a height, a fugitive is; weighing so much, of this coloring or another; having, or failing to have, distinguishing marks; wearing, or wearing when last seen, clothing of a certain color; with glasses or without glasses, and bald or with heavy hair. (Or, as was depressingly often the case, having only a conventional amount of hair, of an entirely conventional color.)
Now and then such descriptions, together with photographs, have the result desired. Luck sometimes runs with the police.
But it is usually true that the police know certain likely places in which to look. It is difficult, even when in flight, to make breaks clean. It is lonely, running. The familiar tempts—a place where one has often eaten, perhaps; or a bar, perhaps; or, and this most often, a person to go back to—go back to for help, for reassurance, for relief from loneliness.
But this assumes an existent pattern of life, before the pattern is broken by flight. And Reginald Grant’s pattern lay in London, not in New York. Or, if in New York—even if faintly in New York—not yet come upon.
“There’s a woman named Felson,” Shapiro said. “Laura Felson. Seems he saw a bit of her. She’s not there this morning. Has a couple of classes this afternoon. I thought—am I still on the case?”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Nate,” Stein said.
“It might be worth while talking to her then,” Shapiro said. “Although I didn’t gather they were especially close.”
“He’s English,” Stein said. “People flock together when they’re away from home. Make colonies. Anything in that, you think?”
“There’s another Englishman on the faculty,” Shapiro said. “Maybe more than one—probably more than one. One I’ve heard of. Name of Pepperill. He might have a lead to a—colony. Same nationality and, of course, same profession. Trouble is, he’s not around. They don’t even know whether he knows Grant, come to that. Except, I suppose, by reputation. As I did.” He sighed again. “Which, I guess, is why I pulled the boner. Because, killer or not, he’s quite a poet. Hard to figure a man can write like that would—” He shrugged. But the shrug seemed to freeze.
“Is London cabling a picture?” he asked, in a different voice.
Stein said it had been asked to, and that he supposed it would and that, so far as he knew, it hadn’t yet. He raised his eyebrows.
“Nothing,” Shapiro said. “Only—I suppose our Grant is really Grant?”
“You mean, somebody’s moved in on them? I shouldn’t think it likely.”
“No,” Shapiro said. “Only thing is, he writes such damn good poetry.”
“They’d know the man they hired,” Stein said.
“Sure,” Shapiro said. “They did arrange it by letter, apparently. But you’re right, of course.”
“Dig up what you can,” Stein told him. “Any place that looks likely.”
VIII
The gray sedan did not seem to be trying evasive manoeuvres. There was that. They were lucky, at the start, on lights. There was that. And it was probably all precisely the wrong thing to be doing. There was also that.
They were nosing northward in Eighth Avenue, half a block behind the gray sedan, when Reginald Grant permitted logic to overcome him, so that he realized he had made a rather outstanding mistake. About what to do and, face up to it, about the girl.
His belief that she had been forced into the gray sedan had been almost automatic—it had been less a belief than an entirely emotional reaction. He realized that completely as the cab, following the gray car, turned left on Twenty-third Street. For some reason, but actually for no reason at all, he had become convinced that she was not a conscious part of this—that
she was, in some still unfathomable fashion, a victim, as he was, and that hence they were on the same side. So when she joined the man in the dark topcoat, and got into the car with him, she had done so because the man held a gun on her.
But, of course, he had seen no gun. He might merely have imagined a gun. This might be no abduction, but a joining of forces, probably as planned. The square man had come to pick him up again, and the girl had been in it with him. The struggle between them had been staged, to smoke him out. Their plan had fallen through, because neither the red-haired girl nor the square man had known that Reginald Grant had been a rather outstandingly good light-heavy fifteen years ago and had not forgotten quite all he knew.
With one confederate knocked out, the girl—too bad she was so damned pretty—had thought fast. Probably, while he was using fists, she had used hands and yanked the telephone loose. Certainly she had rejected his, it now seemed quite reasonable, suggestion that they yell out of the window for help. She had been the one to suggest that she go to telephone—quick on the uptake, he had thought her. Probably he had been right enough.
Go to telephone, indeed. Go to a man waiting for her in the gray sedan, leaving the square man to whatever wolves might be.
And I, Reginald Grant thought, with some bitterness, removed the wolves. By now the square man is on his way; by now the bird in hand has flown. By now I am mixing metaphors, too. Because a girl, without half trying, had me on. Hereafter, the hell with red-haired fillies.
Why not, then, call if off? Tell the driver I’ve changed my mind, and want to be taken to the nearest police station, to give myself up on a charge of murder? Tell the police what has so far happened and leave belief up to them? Leave explanation up to them, and the capture of a man in a dark coat and a red-haired filly up to them, too? Why not, for once in a way, be logical?
He did not tell the driver to go to the nearest police station. He did not tell him to do anything but what he was doing, which was to follow a gray sedan, turn behind it onto a ramp, roll after it along the West Side elevated highway.