Rafferty

by Bill S. Ballinger

  Some clocks gain minutes shortly before they completely run down. The new drive which Rafferty found in his visit to Viola could not long be sustained. His conversations with Korum did not continue beyond a few days. Soon he was moody, withdrawn, and morose, greeting his friend with only a nod or a few words. He would climb into his bunk and fall into an exhausted sleep. Many times Korum heard him muttering in his uneasy slumber, tossing restlessly, sometimes uttering short, sharp cries in the night. Always in the morning, Rafferty would be up and gone from the bar when Korum awakened.

  It was now the middle of July, and the hot summer sun scorched the buildings, the pavements, and the people on them. Life seemed to drain daily from the city, and it lay prone in a great lassitude. Lieutenant Feinberg called Rafferty to his office, and Rafferty stood before him, gray-faced with red-rimmed eyes; a linen coat hung loosely from his shoulders, and the shirt at his collar was soiled and dirty. He was smoothly shaven, but his person gave an impression of distraction and dishevelment. ‘Emmet,’ said Feinberg, ‘I’m having you put on a three weeks’ sick leave.’

  ‘Something wrong?’ asked Rafferty.

  ‘Nothing, except I think you’ve been working too hard.’ Feinberg walked around his desk and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Take a rest. Go to the beach. This kind of weather is enough to kill a man.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Rafferty stubbornly.

  ‘Christ!’ Feinberg exploded. ‘I’m just trying to do you a favor, man. You don’t have a vacation coming until fall. You got a chance to get out of this furnace, and you act like you’re sore. What’s eating you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Rafferty. ‘I just don’t want any favours.

  ‘Favours! Take a look at yourself!’ Feinberg returned to his desk. ‘You’re so pooped out you can’t stand up straight. On top of that you’ve been drinking; I’ve smelled it on you for months. You stand there looking like you haven’t been out of your clothes for a week... and you talk about a favour. This isn’t a favour. This is an order.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Rafferty. He left the office.

  His time was his own now. For three weeks. Three weeks to find the money and return to Rose. A few more days would complete his search of the Gedney. He looked forward to the end of his labors at the hotel with relief, but without hope. He knew instinctively, as he had known for weeks, that he would not find the money hidden on the premises. But his training had forced him to complete the search. Good police work does not permit overlooking, or dismissing, the consideration of the smallest clue. There was always the possibility (but little probability) that the small package or envelope might be hidden there. But until he was certain that it was not, he must complete his search.

  He did not tell Katherine or his family of his leave of absence and he returned to Brooklyn only to change his clothes and take an occasional bath. He continued to sleep most nights at Vince Korum’s and the remaining hours he walked the corridors of the hotel, searching, probing, looking.

  Eventually, the day arrived when Rafferty knew he had completed his search. The money was not at the Gedney. He had conditioned himself to the disappointment, and it left him only with dull, aching bewilderment. If the money wasn’t at the hotel, where was it? He shuffled slowly through the lobby of the hotel and passed the desk. His comings and goings no longer interested the personnel of the hotel. He had become part of their daily life... seen at all hours of the day and night, walking the corridors, searching the out-of-the-way and hidden places of the building. He talked little, and they had long ago stopped questioning him. He did not interfere with the guests, and he demanded no service. When he walked out of the door for the last time, no one saw him leave; and he had been gone for several days before his absence was even noted. Even then, no one wondered where he had gone or if he found that for which he was searching.

  He returned to Vince’s bar on Third Avenue, and Korum was surprised to see him in the afternoon. Rafferty bought a bottle of liquor from his friend, and carried it to the back room. Slowly he removed his clothes, hiding his revolvers under the mattress, and stripped down to his shorts. Tired, as an old man, he climbed into the bunk carrying the bottle.

  That afternoon he proceeded to get very drunk.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Although numbed with liquor and exhausted with fatigue, a part of Rafferty’s mind continued to wrestle with his puzzle.

  The mysterious impulses of the brain, like a giant electronic business machine punching out cards and assembling data, sorted, sifted, and weighed the bits of information he possessed. Over and over again, the information was reclassified, re-examined, and reprocessed; and each time, the final key refused to drop into place and punch out the final answer.

  There had to be an answer! He remained for several days in Korum’s back room, drinking himself into a stupor, remaining in a condition of semiconsciousness. Occasionally Korum would bring him food. Rafferty would chew at the tasteless sandwiches, and sip the bitter, black coffee from the paper containers, a gesture only to acknowledge the kindness of his friend. Actually, Rafferty could not eat because his stomach, rebelling from the liquor, refused the added burden of the food. And because he could eat little, he gradually began to drink less and sleep more. In this manner, unknowingly, he left his long spell of drunkenness and slowly regained a degree of sobriety.

  But it was an unreal world to which he returned, and Rafferty’s sobriety was a matter of comparison rather than actuality. He was sober in the sense that he was not drunk from liquor, but his mind was intoxicated with the results of his fasting, and he was filled with a strange feeling of lightness and buoyancy. His body, in a detached way, obeyed his will, although his mind regarded both itself and his body as two separate entities. He was seized with a new and frenzied energy. Think, man, his brain commanded, think! And once more he returned to his task.

  When the idea came, it arrived unheralded. Unobtrusively, it slipped into his thoughts, a bit of information he had held for weeks and examined many times. On this occasion, perhaps, the process discharged a new and different chemistry, or opened a different electronic circuit in his mind. But regardless, it released an idea, and the idea began to build. ‘Ackerman,’ he thought, ‘Ackerman. Of course! The safest thing for Stack to do was mail the money to himself. Not in care of himself... Stack, but to himself... Acker-man!’ It was a natural. Sometime after Stack had left Chicago, he had picked up the money and put it in the mail. He knew he was coming to New York, so he would forward it. Where would he forward it? To general delivery. It would be in New York, in the safest possible place, and he could pick it up anytime the day he sailed.

  He knew, without question, beyond doubt, that he had found the answer. A great exultation filled him. He had won; he had bested Stack! Never before had his brain felt so clear, so sharp. Alone, he had performed a nearly superhuman task. He had asked help from no one. The money was now as good as in his hands. He had earned the money; the money was his.

  He looked quickly at his wrist watch, but the watch had run down days before. He walked carefully around the room, gathering his clothes and dressing himself. Fully clothed, he looked in the mirror and was surprised to find a week’s growth of beard covering his face.

  Korum was behind the bar when he entered the room and greeted him with both pleasure and surprise. ‘You all right?’ he asked Rafferty.

  ‘Sure,’ Rafferty replied. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You going out?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got something to do.’

  ‘If you feel all right,’ said Korum delicately, ‘maybe you better go home tonight...’

  ‘What’s the matter? Getting tired of me?’

  ‘Naw... naw,’ Korum replied hurriedly. ‘it’s not that at all, Emmet. It’s just you ain’t been home for a week. The second night you was here, I called your wife. I pretended I was a cop and was passing on a message for you. I told the missus you had to leave suddenly to go to Texas and return with a prisoner...’
>
  ‘Thanks,’ replied Rafierty indifferently.

  ‘Well, the little lady might get worried and call your office or something. Hell, you can’t stay away forever, Emmet...’

  ‘What time is it, Vince?’

  ‘About one o’clock.’ Korum glanced at the window. It’s raining out,’ he added.

  ‘Do you have any old membership cards or letters around?’

  ‘Sure, I guess so,’ replied Korum. ‘Why? Do you want ’em?’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s see what you got...’

  Korum opened a drawer behind the bar and rummaged through it, placing, finally, before Rafferty a stack of envelopes containing bills, advertising, a few personal letters, and he added several small pieces of engraved cardboard... memberships to the local ward Democratic Club, the Dolphin Street Athletic Association, and the Coney Island Beach Club. Rafferty looked through them, selecting three envelopes with business return addresses on which Korum’s name and address had been filled in with ink, and the Democratic Club membership card which had been penciled in. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you around, Vince.’ He put the envelopes and card in his pocket.

  Rafferty walked slowly down Third Avenue, the drizzling rain clinging moistly to his suit. Above him, the Third Avenue elevator rumbled, while impatient taxis played ceaseless tag through the interlacing pattern of the structure’s supporting pillars. A block away from Korum’s bar, he turned into a tiny barbershop, and squeezed his way along the wall and into the single chair. ‘A shave,’ he told the waiting barber. Afterward he continued down Third Avenue.

  On the next corner, there was a drugstore and he entered it making his way to a tumbled counter, a jumble of setup displays and shoddy merchandise. From the perspiring clerk, in a stained yellow jacket, he ordered a bottle of blue-black ink, a penholder with a steel pen point, an artgum eraser, a medium hard pencil, and a bottle of ink eradicator. Paying for them, he took his materials to the soda fountain, where he asked for a glass of water. With the water, and materials, he seated himself in a small booth near the deserted fountain.

  He placed the three envelopes on the table, and carefully applied the ink eradicator to Vince Korum’s name, leaving the address and city untouched. As the blue ink turned to brown, then to yellow, and slowly faded into a light gray, he blotted the eradicating fluid with a paper napkin. Meticulously, he applied a second coat of chemicals, and when it dried, only a careful examination would have disclosed the few remaining marks left on the surface of the papers. Opening the bottle of ink, he dipped his pen into it, and thinned the color in the glass of water. He worked deliberately until he was satisfied that the shade of blue-black ink on his pen was the same as that on the envelope.

  Matching his writing as closely as possible to the address on the envelope, he wrote the name of Ackerman on each one, varying the first name from Eddie to Edward, and finally to simply the initial E. He placed the envelopes to one side, to dry, and began working on the membership card. Gently he erased the penciled name of Vincent Korum with the art-gum eraser, and then printed boldly, and in ink, the name of Edward Ackerman. Rafferty inspected the envelopes and card critically, and then, satisfied, returned them to his pocket. He arose from the booth and departed from the drugstore, leaving the ink, pen, and eraser behind him on the table.

  The mail clerk at Manhattan’s main general delivery station, 90 Church Street, had checked carefully and then re-checked. ‘I’m sorry,’ he had said, ‘but there’s nothing here for you...’

  ‘It’s got to be here,’ Rafferty had replied. ‘I know it’s here, for me... Edward Ackerman.’

  ‘Maybe it hasn’t gotten here yet,’ the clerk had said.

  ‘Stop back tomorrow or the next day.’

  ‘It was mailed six months ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ the clerk had said. ‘That’s different. We don’t keep general delivery letters here after ten days.’

  Rafferty had felt, in his stomach, the smooth, cold clutch of fear. ‘What do you do with them?’

  ‘They’re returned to the main post office near Penn Station,’ the clerk had explained patiently. ‘If there’s a return address... they’re sent back...’

  ‘No!’ Rafferty had exclaimed. ‘There was no return on this letter. It couldn’t be sent back!’

  ‘Then,’ the clerk had replied, ‘if that’s the case, it goes to the dead-letter office. They hold it there for a while. If it isn’t claimed they finally open it, and if it’s important they try to trace the sender.’

  ‘Christ!’ Rafferty jammed his hands into his pockets to control his shaking.

  ‘What’d you say?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘How long do they hold ’em at the dead-letter office?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly...’

  ‘It’s a year, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said the clerk, ‘not that long. Not for a year...’

  ‘Six months, then?’

  ‘Maybe... maybe for about six months. I think maybe that’s it, but it isn’t for any more than six months...’

  ‘Thanks!’ said Rafferty. He hurried to the general post office located at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-first Street. It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when he arrived at the great, solid stone building, nearly two blocks long, soiled and begrimed by the breath of its neighbor—the Pennsylvania Railroad Station. The building stood aloof and with dignity behind rows of columns, flanked and guarded by the tiers of stone steps protecting it. Rafferty, standing at the foot of the broad flight of steps, read the legend carved in stone across the face of the building:

  NEITHER SNOW, NOR RAIN, NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.

  He pulled his eyes from the words, and his breath welled deep within him in his excitement. Deliberately, he searched his pockets for a cigarette, finally finding a crumpled package. He shielded his match from the rain and lit the cigarette, cupping his hand protectingly around it. He walked slowly up the sweep of steps, and stood in the shelter of the building’s facade, examining the fears in his mind. If the letter from Stack had been opened, the postal authorities would certainly be on the alert to pick up anyone coming for the package. Obviously, they would not know who had sent the money, or to whom it belonged, but they would be interested. Very much interested. On the other hand, he was an authorized officer of the law. He had worked on the Stack case. He still could be following up on his own. Although—theoretically—if he had any ideas about the money, he should get in touch with the postal authorities and work through the regular channels of procedure. But then, why couldn’t he be just another cop trying to grab off all the glory for himself? He could be. It would be difficult to prove that he wasn’t. He threw away his cigarette, and entered the looming building.

  The clerk was a comparatively young man but already beginning to grow old in the postal service. Into his voice had crept a permanent note of querulousness. ‘If it was mailed around the middle of February. I don’t think we’d have it now,’ he said shaking his head.

  ‘Look for it,’ Rafferty urged; ‘take a look around anyway.’

  ‘People can’t expect us to hold letters forever,’ the clerk replied defensively. ‘Whyn’t you come in for it before?’

  ‘I never knew the guy had sent it,’ Rafferty explained.

  ‘Then I just happened to run into him on the street. Today! See? I asked him about it, and he said he’d mailed it when he’d been in the Middle West around the middle of February, he thought.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I used to use general delivery until I got a permanent address. Then I never used it again: that’s why I never picked it up...’

  ‘All right,’ said the clerk. ‘I’ll go back in and check. What was that name again?’

  ‘Ackerman,’ said Rafferty,’ Edward Ackerman.’

  The clerk disappeared and remained away for many minutes. Rafferty shifted uneasily at the window. His face was hot with excitement, and he leaned it against the marble wall,
soaking in its coolness. Impatiently, he lit his last cigarette, but it tasted harsh to his tongue and he ground it out. As the minutes crawled by, he looked at his watch, forgetting that he had failed to rewind and reset it. He pushed his hat back, leaning his elbows on the window and rested the weight of his body against his arms.

  Eventually the clerk returned, his face solemn. ‘There’s twelve cents due,’ he said.

  The breath escaped from Rafferty’s lungs in a low sigh. ‘I’ll pay it,’ he said, keeping his voice steady.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ replied the clerk. ‘If it hadn’t been for the postage due, we’d of destroyed it. We couldn’t return it, because he had no return address. Ordinarily, we don’t keep letters around this long... three... four months... that’s all...’

  Rafferty pushed a dime and two pennies through the window. ‘Here’s the dough,’ he said.

  ‘You got any identification on you?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘Sure,’ said Rafferty. He pulled the Democratic Club card from his pocket and showed it through the window. ‘And I’ve got some letters,’ he added, fanning the three envelopes he had taken from Korum. The clerk glanced at them casually. ‘That’s okay, huh?’ said Rafferty. ‘Want any more?’

  ‘No,’ the clerk replied indifferently, ‘that’ll do.’ He shoved an envelope of heavy brown paper through the window. Rafferty, his face betraying no emotion, put the envelope in his pocket, and walked quietly down the corridor.

  It is like that; a matter of fifteen seconds. One moment you stand tired and hopeless and nearly broke, and in fifteen seconds an envelope exchanges hands. Suddenly, you have money—seventy-five thousand dollars—and the world is yours! The problems... the big problems you once had, evaporate like mist under the warming rays of the money. You buy your freedom and the world is yours! You pick up an envelope and put it in your pocket and walk down a hall. You open a door and walk down a broad flight of steps; suddenly you are standing on the sidewalk, and the rain is no longer wet and moist and uncomfortable; it is nothing, absolutely nothing. If your suit and hat are wet, you can throw them away and buy new ones. In fifteen seconds, life changes; within a fifteen-second span of time, a baby draws breath for the first time; a dying man stops breathing for the first time; an envelope changes hands, and for the first time you have what you want!