Connect that with the fact that Miles Harrison and Ralph Bonney had been killed while Yehudi Smith was keeping you entertained and busy, and that their bodies had been put in the back compartment of your car.
Easy. Smith was an accomplice of the murderer, hired to keep you away from anybody else who might alibi you while the crime was going on. Also to give you such an incredible story to account for where you really were that your own mother, if she were still alive, would have a hard time believing it.
But connect that with the fact that Smith had been killed, too. And with the fact that the pay roll money had been left in your car along with the bodies.
It added up to gibberish.
I took another sip of my drink and it tasted weak. I looked at it and saw I’d been sitting there so long between sips that most of the ice had melted. I put more of the bonded Bourbon in it and it tasted all right again.
I remembered about the gun I’d grabbed up from Kates’ desk, the rusty one with which the two murders had been committed. I took it out of my pocket and looked at it. I handled it so I wouldn’t have to touch their dried stains on the butt.
I broke it to see if any shots had been fired from it and found there weren’t any cartridges in it, empty or otherwise. I clicked it back into position and tried the trigger. It was rusted shut. It hadn’t, then, been used as a gun at all. Just as a hammer to bash out the brains of two men.
And I’d certainly made a fool of myself by bringing it along. I’d played right into the killer’s hands by doing that. I put it back into my pocket.
I wished that I had someone to talk to. I felt that I might figure out things aloud better than I could this way. I wished that Smiley was awake, and for a moment I was tempted to go upstairs to get him. No, I decided, once already tonight I’d put Smiley in danger—danger out of which he’d got both of us and without any help from me whatsoever.
And this was my problem. It wouldn’t be fair to Smiley to tangle him in it.
Besides, this wasn’t a matter for Smiley’s brawn and guts. This was like playing chess, and Smiley didn’t play chess. Carl might possibly be able to help me figure it out, but Smiley—never. And I didn’t want to tangle Carl in this either.
But I wanted to talk to somebody.
All right, maybe I was a little crazy—not drunk, definitely not drunk—but a little crazy. I wanted to talk to somebody, so I did.
The little man who wasn’t there.
I imagined him sitting across the table from me, sitting there with an imaginary drink in his hand. Gladly, right gladly, would I have poured him a real one if he’d been really there. He was looking at me strangely.
“Smitty,” I said.
“Yes, Doc?”
“What’s your real name, Smitty? I know it isn’t Yehudi Smith. That was part of the gag. The card you gave me proves that.”
It wasn’t the right question to ask. He wavered a little, as though he was going to disappear on me. I shouldn’t have asked him a question that I myself couldn’t answer, because he was there only because my mind was putting him there. He couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know myself or couldn’t figure out.
He wavered a little, but he rallied. He said, “Doc, I can’t tell you that. Any more than I can tell you whom I was working for. You know that.”
Get it; he said “whom I was working for” not “who I was working for.” I felt proud of him and of myself.
I said, “Sure, Smitty. I shouldn’t have asked. And listen, I’m sorry—I’m sorry as hell that you died.”
“That’s all right, Doc. We all die sometime. And—well, it was a nice evening up to then.”
“I’m glad I fed you,” I said. “I’m glad I gave you all you wanted to drink. And listen, Smitty, I’m sorry I laughed out loud when I saw that bottle and key on the glass-topped table. I just couldn’t help it. It was funny.”
“Sure, Doc. But I had to play it straight. It was part of the act. But it was corny; I don’t blame you for acting amused. And, Doc, I’m sorry I did it. I didn’t know the whole score—you’ve got proof of that. If I had, I wouldn’t have drunk what was in that bottle. I didn’t look like a man who wanted to die, did I, Doc?”
I shook my head slowly, looking at the laughter-lines around his eyes and his mouth. He didn’t look like a man who wanted to die.
But he had died, suddenly and horribly.
“I’m sorry, Smitty,” I told him. “I’m sorry as hell. I’d give a hell of a lot to bring you back, to have you really sitting there.”
He chuckled. “Don’t get maudlin, Doc. It’ll spoil your thinking. You’re trying to think, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “But I had to get it out of my system. All right, Smitty. You’re dead and I can’t do anything about it. You’re the little man who isn’t there. And I can’t ask you any questions I can’t answer myself, so really you can’t help me.”
“Are you sure, Doc? Even if you ask the right questions?”
“What do you mean? That my subconscious mind might know the answers even if I don’t?”
He laughed. “Let’s not get Freudian. Let’s stick to Lewis Carroll. I really was a Carroll enthusiast, you know. I was a fast study, but not that fast. I couldn’t have memorized all that about him just for one occasion.”
The phrase struck me, “a fast study.” I repeated it and went on where it led me. “You were an actor, Smitty? Hell, don’t answer it. You must have been. I should have guessed that. An actor hired to play a part.”
He grinned a bit wryly. “Not too good an actor, then, or you wouldn’t have guessed it. And pretty much of a sucker, Doc, to have accepted the role. I should have guessed that there was more in it than what he told me.” He shrugged. “Well, I played you a dirty trick, but I played a worse one on myself. Didn’t I?”
“I’m sorry you’re dead, Smitty. God damn it, I liked you.”
“I’m glad, Doc. I haven’t liked myself too well these last few years. You’ve figured it out by now so I can tell you—I was pretty down and out to take a booking like that, and at the price he offered me for it. And, damn him, he didn’t pay me in advance except my expenses, so what did I gain by it? I got killed. Wait, don’t get maudlin about that again. Let’s drink to it.”
We drank to it. There are worse things than getting killed. And there are worse ways of dying than suddenly when you aren’t expecting it, when you’re slightly tight and——
But that subject wasn’t getting us anywhere.
“You were a character actor,” I said.
“Doc, you disappoint me by belaboring the obvious. And that doesn’t help you to figure out who Anybody is.”
“Anybody?”
“That’s what you were calling him to yourself when you were thinking things out, in a half-witted sort of way, not so long ago. Remember thinking that Anybody could have got into your printing shop and Anybody could have set up one line of type and figured out how to print one good card on that little hand press, but why would Anybody——”
“Unfair,” I said. “You can get inside my mind, because—because, hell, that’s where you are. But I can’t get into yours. You know who Anybody is. But I don’t.”
“Even I, Doc, might not know his real name. In case something went wrong, he wouldn’t have told me that. Something like—well, suppose you’d grabbed that ‘DRINK ME’ bottle when you first found the table and tossed it off before I could tell you that it was my prerogative to do so. Yes, there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong in so complicated a deal as that one was.”
I nodded. “Yes, suppose Al Grainger had come around for that game of chess and we’d taken him along. Suppose—suppose I hadn’t lived to get home at all. I had a narrow squeak earlier in the evening, you know.”
“In that case, Doc, it never would have happened. You ought to be able to figure that out without my telling you. If you’d been killed, you and Smiley, earlier in the evening, then—at least if Anybody had learned about
it, as he probably would have—Ralph Bonney and Miles Harrison wouldn’t have been killed later. At least not tonight. A wheel would have come off the plans and I’d have gone back to—wherever I came from. And everything would have been off.”
I said, “But suppose I’d stayed at the office far into the night working on one of those big stories I thought I had—and was so happy about. How would Anybody have known?”
“Can’t tell you that, Doc. But you might guess. Suppose I had orders to keep Anybody posted on your movements, if they went off schedule. When you left the house, saying you’d be back shortly, I’d have used your phone and told him that. And when you phoned that you were on your way back I’d have let him know, while you were walking home, wouldn’t I?”
“But that was pretty late.”
“Not too late for him to have intercepted Miles Harrison and Ralph Bonney on their way back from Neilsville—under certain circumstances—if his plans had been held in abeyance until he was sure you’d be home and out of circulation before midnight.”
I said, “Under certain circumstances,” and wondered just what I meant by it.
Yehudi Smith smiled. He lifted his glass and looked at me mockingly over the rim of it before he drank. He said, “Go on, Doc. You’re only in the second square, but your next move will be a good one. You go to the fourth square by train, you know.”
“And the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff.”
“And that’s the answer, Doc,” he said, quietly.
I stared at him. A prickle went down my back.
Outside, in the night, a clock struck four times.
“What do you mean, Smitty?” I asked him slowly.
The little man who wasn’t there poured more whisky from an imaginary bottle into his imaginary glass. He said, “Doc, you’ve been letting the glass-topped table and the bottle and the key fool you. They’re from Alice in Wonderland. Originally, of course, called Alice’s Adventures Underground. Wonderful book. But you’re in the second.”
“The second square? You just said that.”
“The second book. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. And, Doc, you know as well as I what Alice found there.”
I poured myself another drink, a short one this time, to match his. I didn’t bother with ice or seltzer.
He raised his glass. “You’ve got it now, Doc,” he said. “Not all of it, but enough to start on. You might still see the dawn come up.”
“Don’t be so God damn dramatic,” I said; “certainly I’m going to see the dawn come up.”
“Even if Kates comes here again looking for you? Don’t forget when he misses that rusty gun in your pocket, he’ll know you were at the courthouse when he was looking for you here. He might recheck all his previous stops. And you’re awfully damned careless in filling the place with cigar smoke, you know.”
“You mean it’s worth a thousand pounds a puff?”
He put back his head and laughed and then he quit laughing and he wasn’t there any more, even in my imagination, because a sudden slight sound made me look toward the door that led upstairs, to Smiley’s rooms. The door opened and Smiley was standing there.
In a nightshirt. I hadn’t known anybody wore nightshirts any more, but Smiley wore one. His eyes looked sleepy and his hair—what was left of it—was tousled and he was barefoot. He had a gun in his hand, the little short-barrelled thirty-eight Banker’s Special I’d given him some hours ago. In his huge hand it looked tiny, a toy. It didn’t look like something that had knocked a Buick off the road, killing one man and badly injuring another, that very evening.
There wasn’t any expression on his face, none at all.
I wonder what mine looked like. But through a looking-glass or not, I didn’t have one to look into.
Had I been talking to myself aloud? Or had my conversation with Yehudi Smith been imaginary, within my own mind? I honestly didn’t know.
If I’d really been talking to myself, it was going to be a hell of a thing to have to explain. Especially if Kates had, on his stop here, awakened Smiley and told him that I was crazy.
In any case, what the hell could I possibly say right now but “Hello, Smiley?”
I opened my mouth to say “Hello, Smiley,” but I didn’t.
Someone was pounding on the glass of the front door. Someone who yelled, “Hey, open up here!” in the voice of Sheriff Rance Kates.
I did the only reasonable thing to do. I poured myself another drink.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You are old,” said the youth,” one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose——
What made you so awfully clever?”
KATES hammered again and tried the knob.
Smiley stared at me and I stared back at him. I couldn’t say anything—even if I could have thought of anything to say—to him at that distance without the probability of Kates hearing my voice.
Kates hammered again. I heard him say something to Hank about breaking in the glass. Smiley bent down and placed the gun on the step behind him and then came out of the door into the tavern. Without looking at me he walked toward the front door and, at sight of him, Kates stopped the racket there.
Smiley didn’t walk quite straight toward the door; he made a slight curve that took him past my table. As he passed, he reached out and jerked the cigar out of my hand. He stuck it in his mouth and then went to the door and opened it.
I couldn’t see in that direction, of course, and I didn’t stick my head around the corner of the el. I sat there and sweated.
“What you want? Why such a hell of a racket?” I heard Smiley demand.
Kates’ voice: “Thought Stoeger was here. That smoke——”
“Left my cigar down here,” Smiley said. “Remembered it when I got back up and came down to get it. Why all the racket?”
“It was damn near half an hour ago when I was here,” Kates said belligerently. “Cigar doesn’t burn that long.”
Smiley said patiently, “I couldn’t sleep after you were here. I came down and got myself a drink five minutes ago. I left my cigar down here.” His voice got soft, very soft. “Now get the hell out of here. You’ve spoiled my night already. Didn’t get to sleep till two and you wake me at half-past three and come around again at four. What’s the big idea, Kates?”
“You’re sure Stoeger isn’t——”
“I told you I’d call you if I saw him. Now, you bastard, get out of here.”
I could imagine Kates turning purple. I could imagine him looking at Smiley and realizing that Smiley was half again as strong as he was.
The door slammed so hard it must have come very near to breaking the glass.
Smiley came back. Without looking back at me he said quietly, “Don’t move, Doc. He might look back in a minute or two.” He went on around behind the bar, got himself a glass and poured a drink. He sat down on the stool he keeps for himself back there, facing slightly to the back so his lip movement wouldn’t show to anyone looking in the front window. He took a sip of the drink and a puff of my cigar.
I kept my voice as low as he’d kept his. I said, “Smiley, you ought to have your mouth washed out with soap. You told a lie.”
He grinned. “Not that I know of, Doc. I told him I’d call him if I saw you. I did call him. Didn’t you hear what I called him?”
“Smiley,” I said, “this is the screwiest night I’ve ever been through but the screwiest thing about it is that you’re developing a sense of humour. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“How bad trouble are you in, Doc? What can I do?”
I said, “Nothing. Except what you just did do, and thanks to hell and back for that. It’s something I’ve got to think out, and work out for myself, Smiley. Nobody can help me.”
“Kates said, when he was here the first time, you were a ho—homi—what the hell was it?”
“
Homicidal maniac,” I said. “He thinks I killed two men tonight. Miles Harrison and Ralph Bonney.”
“Yeah. Don’t bother telling me you didn’t.”
I said, “Thanks, Smiley.” And then it occurred to me that “Don’t bother telling me you didn’t” could be taken either one of two ways. And I wondered again if I had been talking to myself aloud or only in my imagination while Smiley had been walking down those stairs and opening the door. I asked him, “Smiley, do you think I’m crazy?”
“I’ve always thought you were crazy, Doc. But crazy in a nice way.”
I thought how wonderful it is to have friends. Even if I was crazy, there were two people in Carmel City that I could count on to go to bat for me. There was Smiley and there was Carl.
But damn it, friendship should work both ways. This was my danger and my problem and I had no business dragging Smiley into it any farther than he’d already stuck his neck. If I told Smiley that Kates had tried to kill me and still intended to, then Smiley—who hated Kates’ guts already—would go out looking for Kates and like as not kill him with his bare hands, or get shot trying it. I couldn’t do that to Smiley.
I said, “Smiley, finish your drink and go up to bed again. I’ve got to think.”
“Sure there’s no way I can help you, Doc?”
“Positive.”
He tossed off the rest of his drink and tamped out the cigar in an ash-tray. He said, “Okay, Doc, I know you’re smarter than I am, and if it’s brains you need for help, I’m just in the way. Good luck to you.”
He walked back to the door of the staircase. He looked carefully at the front windows to be sure nobody was looking in and then he reached inside and picked up the revolver from the step on which he’d placed it.
He came walking over to my table. He said, “Doc, if you are a ho—homi—what you said, you might want to kill somebody else tonight. That’s loaded. I even replaced the two bullets I shot out of it earlier.”
He put it down on the table in front of me, turned his back to me and went back to the stairs. I watched him go, marvelling. I’d never yet seen a man in a nightshirt who hadn’t looked ridiculous. Until then. What more can a man do to prove he doesn’t think you’re insane than give you a loaded gun and then turn his back and walk away. And when I thought of all the times I’d razzed Smiley and ridden him, all the cracks I’d made at him, I wanted——
Night of the Jabberwock Page 16