When the guard opened the door and let them in, Reilly was the first one to speak, saying, “All right, Fred, you’ve done it this time. I don’t know what smart ideas you’ve got about Karen, but you can—”
“What do you mean, smart ideas?”
“Turning her against me,” he said. “I just had a bad session with that girl, and you owe me for that.”
“Oh, stop it,” I said. “I’m not the one with smart ideas about Karen. You come around here waving your finger at me, why don’t you marry the girl or give her up?”
“That’s none of your business, Fred. You just keep your nose out of my personal affairs.”
Ralph cleared his throat at this point, saying, “Gents, if we could get to the business at hand here—”
“Which is the phone call I’m supposed to get,” I told him.
Steve said, “Well, no, not exactly. We wouldn’t be the ones to see about that. Would we, Ralph?”
“No,” agreed Ralph, “that wouldn’t be our department.”
“We’re more interested in homicide,” Steve explained.
“I’m not talking,” I said.
Reilly said, “Fred, will you start cooperating, for God’s sake? What’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with me? I’ll tell you what’s the matter with me. Somebody sold me out to the Coppo brothers, that’s what’s the matter with me. Somebody told them I was at Karen’s place, and only four people knew that besides me, and three of them are in this cell.”
Steve said, “How’s that again, my friend?”
“You people are too funny to talk to,” I told him.
Reilly said, “And me, Fred? Am I too funny to talk to?”
“I don’t know what you are, Reilly. Until I find out, I don’t talk to you either.”
“Say it in plain language, Fred.”
I met his eye firmly. “I don’t trust you, Reilly,” I said.
Before he could say anything in reply, the cell door opened and an elderly guard stood there blinking at us.
“Which one’s the prisoner?” he asked.
I was tempted to point at Steve, but I said, “Me.”
“Come on along,” he said.
Reilly said, “Hold on, there.”
Ralph said, “What’s up, my friend?”
“Gotta let this bird go,” said the old man. “They’s a lawyer out here with all the paperwork.”
The last I saw of Reilly, he was standing in the middle of the cell with his face purple.
32
IT WAS Goodkind. As lupine as ever, he stood out by the front desk with a smile of self-satisfaction on his face, waiting for me.
“I only heard about this an hour ago,” he greeted me. “I got right to work on it.”
“Thank you.”
“You should have called me, I’d have had you out before this.”
“They wouldn’t let me use a phone.”
“Ho ho?” His nose twitched, smelling a suit. “In front of witnesses? Non-police witnesses.”
“No. They kept it in the family.”
“Well. We’ll have to talk about that later.” He took my elbow, led me toward the door. “We have other things to talk about first,” he said. “Important things.”
I said, “Like the Coppo brothers?”
“Who?” He looked at me with such an absurd attempt at an innocent expression that I almost laughed in his face.
Instead, I said, “Or maybe Walter Cosgrove.”
That got a reaction. Clutching at my elbow he said, “Where did you hear that name? Who’s been at you?”
We were just inside the station house main door, and several uniformed policemen now trooped in, separating us. I went on outside, and Goodkind caught up with me on the sidewalk, grasping my elbow again, saying hurriedly in my ear, “Don’t let them get at you, Fred. Keep away from Cosgrove’s people. Don’t listen to them.”
“Everybody calls me Fred,” I said.
“For God’s sake, it’s your name! Will you stop that, we have important things to discuss.”
“We have not,” I said, and then I shouted, “Help! Police!”
Well, of course, there we were in front of a police station, so we were immediately surrounded by nobody. There’s never a cop around when you want one, including in front of the precinct house.
“Help!” I demanded. “Police!” I insisted.
Goodkind had released my elbow as though he’d just got word about my leprosy, and was looking at me as though he’d just got word about my psychopathic personality. “What are you doing?” he asked me.
“Calling for help.” I demonstrated again: “Help! For Pete’s sake, police!”
Abruptly we were surrounded by a trio of uniformed patrolmen, all of whom wanted to know what was going on. I pointed at Goodkind and said, “This bird just tried to pick my pocket.”
Goodkind gaped in astonishment. “Me? Fred, are you out of your mind?”
“Okay, buddy,” said one of the cops, and grabbed Goodkind the way Goodkind had been grabbing me—by the elbow.
Another of the cops said to me, “You’ll have to come in and sign a complaint, pal.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet my wife, if I’m late again she’ll kill me. Let me come back later.”
“Listen, pal,” cop number two said. “If you want this guy held, you got to sign a complaint against him.”
“I’ll come back,” I promised. “My name’s Minetta, Ff—Frank Minetta, 27 West 10th Street. I’ll be back in an hour.” I started backing out of our little group. “In an hour,” I said.
“We won’t hold him any more than that,” one of the cops warned me.
“I’ll be back,” I lied, and turned around, and trotted away down the sidewalk.
I got half a block when I heard a bellow behind me: “Fred!” I looked back and there was Reilly on the station house steps, waving his arms at me. Goodkind was yak-king at him, clutching at his lapels, and the three cops were trying to wrestle Goodkind around Reilly and into the building.
It wouldn’t take them long to straighten things out back there, and then everybody would be after me. I started to run.
33
WHEN KAREN opened the door I said, “First of all, I want to apologize again.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “We took care of all that on the phone. Come on in.”
I went on in.
When I’d run away from Goodkind and Reilly and the police force, at first I hadn’t been able to think of a place to go. The Coppo brothers and their mob might not believe a man would be dumb enough to hide out in his own apartment, but Reilly knew me and he could believe it with no trouble at all. That’s how he’d gotten me the last time.
So where else was there? I wasn’t sure I could get back into Gertie’s apartment, nor was I sure it would be a good idea for me to be there; the mob knew about that place and might have it staked out just to be on the safe side. Since Gus Ricovic’s occupancy, Uncle Matt’s apartment was also too dangerous now.
Then I thought of Karen. She’d been angry at me when last we’d parted company, and I did want to get that straightened out, make my apologies, and whatnot. But besides that, she was apparently mad at Reilly now, at least according to what he’d said in that cell, and she just might be inclined to help me against him.
At any rate, I thought it worth a phone call, which I made from a stuffy phone booth in a dark and crowded drugstore on Eighth Avenue. When Karen answered, I identified myself and launched at once into my apology, but she cut me off midway through the first sentence, saying, “No, Fred, you were right. I’m glad you opened my eyes, glad.”
I kept on trying to apologize anyway, but she would have none of it, so I switched to the other reason for my call, and she said she’d be glad to hide me out again, and now here I was.
“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t followed,” I said, as I walked down the hall into the living room. “That’s what too
k me so long getting here. Back-tracking and whatnot.”
“You’re getting skillful at all this,” she said, smiling at me. “Tell me what you’ve been doing since you went away from here.”
“Oh, wow. You wouldn’t believe half of it.”
But she did believe it, all of it. She laughed at the idea of Dr. Osbertson knocking himself out rather than answer questions, she was wide-eyed at all I’d been told by Professor Kilroy, she shivered delicately at the discovery of Gus Ricovic, and she grew as incensed as I was at the treatment I’d been given in jail.
As I was finishing, the street bell rang, and when Karen went to the callbox to ask who was there we both heard the gruff angry voice say, “It’s Jack. Let me in.”
“No,” she said, and walked away from the callbox.
The bell rang again.
I said, “Karen, listen, I really don’t want to come between—”
“Don’t worry about it, John Alden,” she said. She came over and sat down beside me on the sofa. As the bell sounded yet again she said, “Well, now. What shall we do this evening?”
34
WHAT WE DID mostly was talk. Or, that is, I talked, Karen being one of those rarities, a good listener. I think I talked so much primarily because I was terrified that if I ever did stop talking about my troubles she’d start talking about hers, and I really didn’t want to hear the sad saga of Karen and Reilly and the hypotenuse.
What I talked about mostly was the money. “It’s brought me nothing but grief,” I said several times. “Nothing but trouble and worry. I don’t see that it ever will bring me anything but trouble and worry.”
“It just doesn’t seem right to give it up,” she said. “Not that you need it or anything, you’re right about that. It’s just—I don’t know, it’s as though if you give it up you’ve let the world beat you somehow.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m no fanatic, if I’m beaten I’ll cry uncle.”
“Well, what would you do with the money?” she asked me. “If you didn’t keep it, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Give it to some charity. CARE, maybe, if they promise to send packages around to all the city jails. Or the Red Cross. I wish that’s what Uncle Matt had done. Let the Coppos take out their mad on the Salvation Army.”
“It just doesn’t seem right,” she said.
That was the conversation, with variations, that we kept having all evening. In a way I agreed with her, it would be admitting defeat to give the money up. But that was pride, nothing but pride. I didn’t need the money, I didn’t really even want the money. To keep it simply out of pride, when to have it in my possession meant I was marked for death, was only foolish.
Oh, well. Another thing we did during the evening was not answer the phone. Karen did once, and it was Reilly, and she hung up on him. “My eyes have been opened about that man,” she said to me.
Quickly I said, “I wonder if maybe the USO would be a good place to give the money?”
Then also I spent a part of the evening planning what I would do tomorrow. I would go see Wilks—it had been too late this afternoon by the time I finally got away from the jail—and I would also go to the newspaper library and see what I could learn about the Coppo brothers.
Would it be smart to get in touch with them direct? The Coppos, I mean. Maybe if I was to call them, explain to them I’d never even met my Uncle Matt, I hadn’t asked for this money, I was intending at once to turn it over to my favorite charity, maybe they’d leave me alone.
And maybe they’d come wiggling through the telephone line and bite me on the throat.
Ugh. I gave up that line of thought at once.
I also spent a lot of time not saying anything in response to Karen’s line about John Alden. I knew this girl only slightly, she was having an affair with a friend of mine—or at least a former friend of mine, time would tell—we’d never dated, and yet that comment about John Alden had certainly seemed like a suggestion that I make some sort of move in her direction. It was true I’d kissed her once, but the circumstances had been a little unusual and I didn’t think the kiss should count as having been a step in any sort of courtship.
Besides, my attitude toward Karen was as confused and ambivalent as my attitude toward the money. In a way I wanted very much to follow up the John Alden line, but at the same time I was very much intimidated by her beauty and her—what shall I call it?—her sexual emancipation, if you’ll excuse the expression. In any case, I did nothing, and Karen dropped no more hints on the subject, and our conversation seemed to travel along well enough without it.
A little before midnight it occurred to me to try phoning Gertie again. I explained to Karen, “I don’t have much hope, but I try once or twice a day anyway.”
“I’ll make us fresh drinks,” Karen said, and took our glasses out to the kitchen.
I dialed the number, it rang twice, there was a click, and a voice that was surely Gertie’s very own said, “Hello?”
35
“GERTIE?”
“Fred?”
“Gertie, is that you?”
“Is that you, Fred?”
“You got away!” I shouted, and Karen came in from the kitchen to see what was going on.
“I been calling your place, Fred,” Gertie was saying. “You at home, or where are you?”
“When did you get away? How did you do it?”
“I climbed out a window. You should of seen me: Daredevil Gertie, the Human Fly. I only got in here a little while ago.”
“Gertie, you better get out of there. They’re liable to come looking for you again.”
“I figured to go to kak in the morning,” she said.
Karen was waving frantically at me, and pointing at the floor with her other hand. I nodded at her, and said into the phone, “Gertie, come on over here. You’ll be safe here, and we can talk.”
“Here? Where’s here?”
“I’m at Karen Smith’s place.”
“Oh, yeah? You and her are a thing, huh?”
“I’ll give you the address,” I said. “You got pencil and paper?”
“Hold on.”
She was gone so long I was beginning to think she’d been kidnapped again, but at last she did come back and I gave her the address and she promised to be right over.
“Be circuitous,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Make sure you’re not followed.”
“Oh. You betcha.”
We hung up and I said to Karen, “She’ll be here in a little while.”
Karen said. “Well?” She had a very odd expression on her face, sort of waiting and humorous and fatalistic.
I had no idea what she meant, and therefore said, “Well what?”
“Fred,” she said, and shook her head, and gave a long-suffering sigh. “I can see you’re going to be a lot of trouble,” she said. “I only hope you’re worth it.”
“Karen, I don’t—”
“Don’t you realize,” she said, “that if you’re going to kiss me before Gertie gets here you should start now?”
36
TIME PASSED which is no one’s business but my own.
Gertie arrived about forty-five minutes later, looking none the worse for her experience. She marched in, grinned at Karen, and said, “So this is the competition. I better lose a few pounds.”
“I was just thinking I should fill in a little,” Karen told her. “Come in, sit down.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “I thought they’d killed you.”
Gertie dropped into an armchair, adjusted her skirt, plunked her patent-leather purse down on the floor beside the chair, and said, “If you ask me, they didn’t know what they were up to. First off I figured like you, I figured it was all over for little Gertie. But no, they took me out to Queens some place, some cruddy section, little houses, all grimy, locked me away in a room upstairs. Then I figured, oh ho, it’s the fate worse than death. Well, I’ve had worse than t
hat. But no, it wasn’t that either. All they did was keep me there, and talk a lot on the phone. They didn’t know what they were doing, those boys, they were a couple of lunkheads. I told them so myself.”
“Two of them?”
“Yeah. The same two that grabbed me. They used chloroform on me in the hallway, or it would have taken more than two.”
“Then that’s why I didn’t hear you scream or anything.”
“You kidding? I didn’t get a chance to scream. Listen, Fred, you ever hear of anybody named Coppo? Some name like that.”
“You’re darn right I did,” I said. “Where’d you hear it?”
“That’s who they were calling all the time,” she said. “With my ear down by the keyhole I could hear part of what they said. Mostly bitching about having to keep guard on me, wanting to know what was up, what should they do with me, stuff like that. And the guy they talked to mostly was this Coppo. ‘Lemme talk to Coppo,’ I heard them say that a dozen times.”
“There’s two of them,” I told her. “Two Coppos. They’re brothers. I heard about them from Professor Kilroy.”
That startled her. “Kilroy? That old buzzard’s in town? I figured he was still down in South America some place.”
“No,” I said. “He’s in town, and he got in touch with me.” Then I told her about meeting Professor Kilroy, and what he’d told me about Pedro Coppo and the Coppo brothers.
When I was done, she said, “So it’s the dough they’re after, huh?”
“Professor Kilroy thought I should give it all to some charity.”
“Give it all to putting those bums in the chair, you mean.” she said.
“What about the police? Did you go to them yet?”
“Are you kidding? There’s cops in on this somewhere, I heard that part, too. Those two lunkheads telling each other the only good thing about the whole caper was the cops were cooled off.”
“I thought so!” I jumped to my feet, excited and angry at having my suspicions verified. “They’re all around us,” I said. “You don’t know who to trust, you just don’t know who.”
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