Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  “Go for it.” Lesko shrugged. “But make up your mind.”

  Garvey sagged slightly and took a breath. Then he pulled his remaining leg inside and closed the door. He peered at Coletti, noticing for the first time that Coletti' s eyes were closed.

  “What'd you do to him?” he asked.

  “Nap time,” Lesko told him. ”I want to see both your hands flat on the dash.”

  “Who are you?”

  Lesko pressed the .38 into his neck. “You don't want to show me your hands? You want to make me nervous?”

  Garvey stretched both arms forward.

  “What I'm going to do now, Ed, is I'm going to reach over and frisk you. You're not even going to twitch, right?”

  Garvey nodded. Lesko, his gun barrel still pressing into Garvey’ s flesh, used his left hand to pat the other man down, removing first the small heavy crowbar, then a set of lock picks in a vinyl case, then a long thin screwdriver he carried in his inside coat pocket.

  “Now lean forward, Ed,” Lesko suggested. “I'm going to see what you got in back. Then you take your right hand and you pull out your wallet and you just hold it where I can reach for it.”

  Garvey complied silently.

  “No weapon, Ed?” Lesko did not really expect to find a gun or knife. Not on Garvey as long as he was working

  a burglary. You can plea-bargain a burglary. But not if you're carrying. Anyway, Coletti had already surrendered the small automatic he carried in an ankle holster and the one under his seat that he was holding for Garvey.

  “No,” Garvey answered.

  Lesko twisted his front sight painfully into the soft flesh under Garvey's ear. “That was already a fib, Ed. This here screwdriver's a weapon. This here jimmy is a weapon. Here. I'll show you.” Lesko slammed its hard edge down across Garvey's left collarbone. Garvey screamed and lurched forward. Lesko could see his right hand grasping the injured part. Lesko could not see Garvey's left hand but he knew its fingers were frantically searching for the pistol under Coletti's seat.

  “Any time you're ready, Ed. You want to sit up straight please?”

  “What do you want?” Garvey gasped.

  ”I think you were going to hit somebody up there, Ed,.I think you were either going to hit two people with this

  jimmy or you were going to stick them with this screwdriver.” . .

  “You're crazy.”

  “Do I have to get your attention again, Ed?”

  “No.” Garvey flinched.

  ”I mean, here I am calling you by your name, which means Coletti here told me a couple of things, right?”

  Garvey said nothing. But he crossed his left arm up to protect his other shoulder.

  “Then you're up there for at least a fucking hour. I honk the horn and you come down but you come down empty. The lady didn't have at least a couple of rings you could stick in your pocket?”

  Garvey shook his head.

  “Your wallet here says you work for Beckwith Realty. It says you're in Security. Coletti says he's in Security too. Someday maybe we'll all get together and have a good laugh about that.”

  “We were checking out something, that's all. We heard there's a dame lives here and she and her boyfriend been working one of our hotels.”

  ”0h, I see, Ed. That explains everything.”

  Garvey winced again.

  “Here's what I want you to do, Ed. I want you to open your window about four inches and then I want you to stick both your hands out through it just past the wrists.” Lesko jabbed him. “Do that right now, Ed.”

  Garvey complied. Lesko shifted the .38 to his left hand and with his right he reached over and rolled up the window, pulling hard on the crank until Ed Garvey squealed in pain. Coletti stirred, moaned, and jerked into a low level of consciousness. Lesko relaxed him with another elbow to the temple. He then picked up the crowbar once more and tapped Ed Garvey with it.

  “Do you know who I am, Ed?”

  “No.”

  Lesko tapped harder. “For true?”

  ”I swear. What's to lie about that?”

  “How about Mr. Dancer? You know a fellow named Dancer?’'

  “No.”

  “That's another fib, Ed.”

  ”I swear. No. Give me a name I know and I'll tell you.”

  Okay, Lesko thought. Maybe he's just Dancer to me. “He's a little guy, Ed. Wears black suits. He looks and talks like a wind-up toy and he never sweats or gets dirty. He's also a honcho with the Beckwiths.”

  “That's Ballanchine. Lawrence Ballanchine.”

  Ballanchine? Lesko squinted. Ballanchine. Dancer. There was a guy who ran the New York Ballet. Forever. He's dead now. George Balanchine? Yeah. Probably no relation. Lawrence Ballanchine, the sly little rascal, takes Dancer as his code name, probably thinking that was very intellectual. Ballanchine-Dancer. Oh, I get it. You devil, you got a sense of humor after all, don't you.

  “Who sent you here, Ed? Him or someone else?”

  “Head of Security. Tom Burke.”

  “Burke reports to who?”

  “Ballanchine.”

  “And Ballanchine reports to who?”

  “The old man, I guess. Beckwith. Maybe the family. There's a lot of Beckwiths.”

  “This guy, Tom Burke. How old do you think he was back in 1944?”

  “Huh?”

  “Okay, how old is he now?”

  ”I dunno. Maybe fifty.”

  “You can tell Ballanchine I asked that. Tell him I was wondering whether Burke might be old enough to have been hanging around dark apartments or driving on dark streets in Chicago back in 1944. You know what I'm talking about, don't you, Ed.”

  “Chicago, 1944? What am I supposed to know about that? I never been there. I wasn't even born then.”

  “That was just a little trick question, Ed. I believe you.”

  “Listen, my hands are killing me.”

  “I'm going to fix that.” Lesko slipped the two small automatics into his overcoat pocket. He took Ed Garvey's driver's license out of the wallet and tossed the wallet into the front seat. He held the license for Garvey to see. “So I know where to find you,” he told him. Next, Lesko holstered his .38 and, picking up the crowbar, slid toward the rear right door and stepped out. Slamming the door behind him, he turned and peered through the slit between Garvey's swelling hands, now scarcely two inches deep.

  “Here's a message for Ballanchine,” Lesko told him. “Tell him he deals with me. Tell him he leaves Corbin and the dame alone until I give a green light. Tell him I get very upset when sneaky bastards like you and him try to hurt us decent people. Tell him when that happens, I get even. Show him your hands and he'll believe you.”

  Garvey did not appear to understand that last part. But the first glimmer reached him as he saw the big man with the teeth step back away from the car and rear one shoulder back in the manner of a man chopping wood with an ax. Garvey's eyes went wide as the crowbar whistled down against the back of one hand and he felt a spear of pain that felt like it splintered his entire arm to the shoulder. Garvey’s already injured collarbone split and separated and its jagged ends tried to burrow through his body. The scream rising up in his throat turned into a choke as the crowbar came down upon the second hand, this time sending a spray of blood through the narrow slit into his face. He made an odd hooting sound as he threw his body back from the window, tearing loose the safety glass whose laminated shards cruelly shredded his wrists and palms.

  Lesko was halfway to Lexington Avenue, casually walking, before he heard the first scream Dancer's killer could manage. Near the top of the subway stairs, Lesko found a sewer and dropped the glistening crowbar through the grating. The two pistols followed. Then he walked down the stairs and waited for the first subway to Queens Boulevard.

  Ten

  “How did you sleep, Jonathan?” Harry Sturdevant looked up from the breakfast table overlooking the small garden area at the rear of his house. Cora Starling, who also smiled a greeting, had
poured his coffee when she heard him on the stairs and set it down at his place near a glass of fresh orange juice and a basket of warm croissants.

  “Very well, sir,” Corbin answered, although it seemed he'd spent the entire night going from one fragmented dream to another. ''Gwen's just putting on her face. Good morning, Mrs. Starling.”

  “Mr. Corbin.” She nodded. He saw her eyes flick over to Sturdevant, which told him they'd probably been talking about him. He didn't mind. Corbin wished he could place her though. He thought she might have been in one of his dreams. Maybe not. Maybe someone a lot like her whose name he kept wanting to say was Lucy. Lots of dreams. Margaret was in most of them. And a woman he didn't know at all, named Georgia. No. Georgiana. Then there was a fight dream; there's always at least one, except this time Corbin didn't think he was involved in it. A man, a big guy, had hands that were terribly smashed and torn and there was broken glass. He was screaming. It was awful. But Corbin didn't seem to feel particularly sorry for him.

  “Some of these croissants have chocolate centers, Jonathan.” Harry Sturdevant passed the basket. “I'd have another except Cora is watching me.”

  Cora sniffed and said nothing, although she did crane her neck to count the remaining pastries. Then, hearing a creak on the stairs, Cora picked up the coffeepot and poured at Gwen Leamas's table setting.

  ‘‘Don't anyone look at me.” She entered the breakfast room palms forward. “Not until I can get my own stuff and paint it on.”

  Corbin looked anyway. He thought she looked fresh and clean and healthy, and it was one of the enduring mysteries of his life why women always thought they looked like hags in the morning but thought an unshaven man looked cute and rumply.

  He'd dreamed about Gwen too, he thought. Sure he did. As a matter of fact, sure, there was one dream about Gwen and Margaret at the same time, maybe finally meeting each other and Margaret saying how happy she was for him that he had found such a lovely woman and how she hoped they would squeeze every moment of joy out of the time they had and try never to be apart. A nice dream. A real nice one. And if it happened the way he sort of remembered it now, that was the first time ever that he saw Margaret while he was Jonathan Corbin and not Tilden Beckwith. There was another nice little dream in which he was teaching Margaret how to ride a bicycle and she was laughing because he wasn't a whole lot better at it than she was. He was Tilden there. Nice to know Tilden had some good times.

  “When you've finished your coffee”—Harry Sturdevant took a final sip—“my car is garaged just down the street. Gwen, I gather you'll want to change at your flat before we drive up to Greenwich?”

  “Take me ten minutes.”

  Cora Starling approached the table with three small cups holding an assortment of tablets and capsules. “These are all vitamins. The way you people eat it's a wonder you're alive. I also fixed up some fruit and some granola bars in a cake box. Remember you got them when Dr. Sturdevant here starts sniffin' for an anchovy pizza around noontime.”

  The phone rang on the kitchen wall. Cora crossed to the receiver.

  '' Sturdevant residence. ”

  She listened.

  “May I say who's calling, please?”

  Cora frowned.

  “Will you tell me who this is, please?”

  She listened again, glancing across the room at Harry Sturdevant.

  “No, we're not interested just now. Thank you kindly.” She replaced the phone. “Just some folks lookin' to clean our carpets,” she said. “Dr. Sturdevant, you got some checks to sign in your office before you go.”

  Sturdevant joined her there while Gwen Leamas was pulling on her boots.

  “What was that about, Cora?”

  “Second time this morning someone called to ask if Mr. Corbin was here. Two different people. First time, he was in the shower and I asked the man to leave a message but he said it's not important and he hung up. That time just now I tried to make that man give a name before I'd say Mr. Corbin was here but he hung up too.”

  “You said it was a carpet cleaning service not to alarm Mr. Corbin?”

  She nodded.

  “Cora, I'm not sure there's a need for alarm,” he told her, “but can you avoid going out today or opening the door to anyone you don't know?”

  ”I just might have someone in to visit with me.”

  “That would be fine. I'll be calling in several times.”

  Sturdevant waited in the double-parked car outside 145 East Seventy-seventh Street while Gwen, Corbin with her, ran up to pack an overnight bag. Corbin might have waited with Sturdevant, but he felt a vague uneasiness about letting her enter the empty flat alone. And then a crunch of broken glass underfoot as he stepped from the car called back the now-distant dream of the man with the torn and shattered hands. It had no meaning to him but it troubled him distantly. Once inside her door he paced the living room as she spent her allotted ten minutes, a promise in which he had no trust whatever, selecting cosmetics from her bathroom and applying certain of them to her cheeks and eyes. As he paced, his own eye kept falling on a single chair that

  sat just inside her entrance hall and which seemed to him out of place by several inches. At last he straightened it.

  While he'd been pacing, Corbin had also found himself identifying and avoiding two spots on the floor, which

  squeaked when stepped upon. A remote anger stirred within him as he did this and his hands tightened into fists. Corbin

  looked at them, shook his head, then made them relax, disinclined to dwell on what was just one more of the many

  peculiar thoughts and emotions that whispered within him these days. Besides, soon he would be in Greenwich. No

  such thoughts ever annoyed him there. Nothing annoyed him there. ·

  As Gwen Leamas changed into a bulky sweater and a blue suede skirt, Corbin wandered into her kitchen, idly touching the appliances and countertops there. His fingers brushed across her refrigerator door, then its chromium handle, and then the anger simmered in him once again. He opened the door.

  “Still hungry?” she called from the other room. “I'm afraid there's not much.”

  ”I guess not,'' he answered. “Thanks.”

  There was a tub of cottage cheese, inverted for a better seal, the remains of a chicken, a partial bottle of good Chablis, a few eggs, and a six-pack of Molson's from which one can had been removed. Also a jar of peanut butter— Corbin did not understand people who ate peanut butter cold—a pint of half-and-half, and a plastic bottle of milk, which was empty save for a quarter inch. He took out the bottle and allowed the door to swing closed as he examined it in his hand. Corbin saw his fingers tremble for an instant and then curl in against the plastic bottle, crushing it, spitting off its top, which fell to the floor and rolled. Someone had been here. The man with the ruined hands had been here. Corbin no sooner had that thought than his mind began at once to deny it. He'd seen nothing. Nothing wrong. An almost empty milk bottle in Gwen's refrigerator meant that Gwen had put an almost empty milk bottle in her refrigerator. Period. There was no man with ruined hands. Corbin knew that. But he also knew that there was and that the man had held this milk bottle. He dropped the crumpled plastic into her trash.

  “Do you mind if we go up the West Side Highway?” he asked Harry Sturdevant once he settled into the back seat, where Gwen joined him.

  “If you wish. The Triborough's much more direct”

  “The West Side Drive is prettier. Anyway, we're facing that direction.”

  “We are indeed,” Sturdevant answered. He put the car in drive and started across town, toward the roadway through Central Park, glancing into his rearview mirror several times each block to see whether by chance a strange car might have fallen in behind them. He saw none.

  “Gwen, dear. Did you bring me that medication I asked you for?”

  “I'm sorry, Uncle Harry. It slipped my mind,'' she lied.

  As the tires of Sturdevant’s Mercedes hissed along the park transverse road
at Seventy-second Street, Corbin settled back, Gwen's hand in his, and felt himself relaxing. The park was beautiful. The morning sun had not yet melted the snow, which turned each tree and bush into fragile shimmering glass. Tilden and Margaret. He wondered how often they came here in winter. They'd come ice-skating, he was pretty sure. On the big lake up near the Dakota Apartments. Maybe just Tilden skated. Yes. Margaret was pregnant, wasn't she. She would sit by one of the bonfires, munching on a capon and watching Tilden try to show off and laughing each time he went splat. And they brought a carriage up here in the summer. Several times. They would either just go riding or tie up down near the Mall and listen to band music from inside the carriage because they were still being careful about being seen together then. And Margaret's belly was just beginning to show.

  The Mercedes left the park and continued across Seventy-second Street to the West Side Highway. There, turning north along the Hudson River, which was dotted with slow-moving floes of ice, Corbin leaned forward in his seat to better see the view ahead of him. The concrete highway stretched out before him in an almost straight line leading to the George Washington Bridge, but Corbin's mind erased both of these. He focused instead on the gentler, slower roadway of Riverside Drive and on the lovely old homes that lined it, each with fine vistas of the river and the green cliffs of New Jersey. There were now high rises on those distant cliffs, but Corbin's mind erased those as well. This mental purging of the landscape was a deliberate act on Corbin’s part. It involved no ghost; none, at least, that Corbin feared this morning.