Bassett said, “MacAndrews was rapped on the head with a small round pipe—or something like it. I was wondering what kind of tools were used in the plant.”
“There’s machinery. I guess the engineers would have all kinds of tools.”
“I guess they would,” Bassett said. “What time was the fire alarm tonight?”
“At eleven-thirty-five.”
Bassett set his cup on the table, lifted it then, and wiped the circle of moisture from where it would have marked the wood.
“That’s all right,” Scully said. “It’s got a good coat of wax.”
“You’ll make some woman a good husband.” He glanced at the younger man, offering the weak levity.
The lines at Scully’s mouth tightened for an instant. “That’ll be the day.”
“Where were you tonight—until the time of the alarm?”
“Right in this room—from five o’clock on.”
“Working?” Bassett glanced at the books and papers neatly stacked on the other side of the table.
“Working,” Scully repeated. “Though a lot of people in this town wouldn’t call it that.”
“Anybody call you—or come to see you?”
“Nobody. I don’t have a phone. When I can get to it I use that booby trap across the street.”
“But not tonight?”
“What are you driving at, Mr. …”
“Bassett, Ray Bassett. I’m trying to help you establish an alibi … to account for your time.”
“Do I need one?”
Bassett shrugged. “Let’s put it this way—I’m trying to eliminate all possible suspects. You had a fight a couple of years ago with MacAndrews.”
“It didn’t take you long to find that out, did it?”
“What I should like to know for now,” Bassett said quietly, “is whether anything happened tonight—think back now—that would corroborate your statement that you were here, in this room, something, someone on the street, say …”
“I understand,” Scully said. “I do my best not to hear what goes on out there.” The belligerence had gone out of his voice. “I heard the ambulance go by on the way to the plant. You always wonder about that, who’s lost a finger or what. That’s the worst time for accidents, at the end of the shift. And I’ve got my own reasons for keeping track of them. We’ve got a safety record like the Battle of the Bulge.”
It was a strange symbol for so young a man to make, Bassett thought. Maybe not. Maybe he just knew someone who had been there. Oddly, Bassett himself had been.
Scully stopped abruptly, to Bassett’s regret. He would have liked to hear him elaborate of his own will on the Graham operation. Nor did he want to get the boy’s back up again if he could help it. He purposely asked and answered his own questions: “You didn’t go over to the plant to see what happened? No, you’ve already said you were here till the fire.”
“One of the things I’ve learned, Mr. Bassett, trying to get somewhere—in labor relations, I guess you’d call it—is not to telegraph my punches. They can’t keep secrets about who gets hurt on the job at the plant. I’d have found out.”
Bassett nodded. “How long was the ambulance there? Do you know?”
“Twenty minutes maybe. By then I’d decided it couldn’t have been serious. Or else it was fatal.” Scully laughed grimly. “I remember that went through my mind too. I know it was a few minutes after the night shift came off before the ambulance left. You can hear the parade of cars go by here.”
“And it was pay night,” Bassett prompted.
“That doesn’t take long, ordinarily.”
“Just what is the procedure. Do you mind telling me?”
“At eleven o’clock MacAndrews and Kearns would be waiting inside the plant door. MacAndrews would have the box of pay envelopes and call off the names alphabetically. That simple. Ten minutes, maybe.”
Bassett thought for a moment. “And if a man were to question the computation of his wage?”
Scully grinned. “I don’t remember a man ever doing it. Except MacAndrews … someone else’s wage, that is. There’s a story that he found a mistake of seventy-eight cents once in the bookkeeper’s figures.”
“A careful man, MacAndrews. Wasn’t he?”
“That describes him.”
“At the time he died he seems to have been checking over the time sheets. When’s the payroll made up, do you know?”
“Friday noon, for both shifts. I got paid at three o’clock.”
“MacAndrews himself would come on duty with the second shift?”
Scully nodded.
“I’m trying to follow this payroll operation from beginning to end,” Bassett explained.
Scully asked suddenly, “Was there a robbery?”
“No. But what I’d like to make sure is that there wasn’t one attempted.” Bassett felt that he almost had something. Then it escaped his mind. “The precaution was taken of having Kearns on hand for the walk from the office to the plant. In the afternoon, too?”
Scully nodded. “The chief also escorted the paymaster from the bank every Friday morning. And he’d stay around for an hour or so—as long as it took the cashier to make up the envelopes. We’ve always kidded about whether they didn’t throw him five or ten bucks—whatever was left over.”
Bassett snapped his fingers. “How many men are on the night shift?”
“Maybe two hundred.”
“Have you got some index cards?”
“Happens I do,” Scully said.
“And a few sheets of paper.” In the next few minutes Bassett experimented with the mere physical routine of fingering one card and a sheet of paper, a card and a sheet of paper. He concluded: “It would have taken him a half-hour to check the figures on the envelopes against the time sheets. And he wouldn’t have been satisfied without doing that, would he?” It was an academic question. “And I know for a fact that Kearns was in a meeting at ten-thirty last night. He left it in order to be back here by eleven. That means that MacAndrews tonight—and probably every pay night-opened the safe and checked the pay envelopes against his own figures … before Kearns arrived on the scene at all.”
Scully said thoughtfully, “I guess I knew that all along—without knowing that I knew it, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t. Explain, please.”
“Everybody took for granted he checked the pay envelopes. I just never got to thinking specifically about when he’d have done it.”
Bassett felt let down: the mountain laboring to bring forth a mouse. Everybody took for granted … Everybody was a lot of people, even in Hillside.
Scully sensed his disappointment. He said, “But then it’s always the particular use of general knowledge that starts things rolling, isn’t it, sir?”
“Yes, quite right,” Bassett said, and he realized from that moment on that he wanted to know Martin Scully better—whether in connection with his investigation or outside it. One such lad out of a population of twelve hundred wasn’t so bad, he thought. He got up. “I think we’d better go on from here by daylight.”
“That won’t be long coming,” Scully said.
At the door, Bassett said, “In the meantime, try to remember some little thing—a noise, a smell, something on the street—so that I can check you out on having been here for the time you say you were.”
“I have remembered something,” Scully said. “It was a quarter to ten when I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to call my girl. And, as I always do before going down to the phone booth, I looked out to see if anyone was using it. When it’s empty I go at a sprint. I don’t always make it, but I didn’t even try last night. I looked out just in time to see Georgie Rocco settle into the booth, and I knew the phone was tied up for the night.”
“George Rocco—a quarter to ten,” Bassett repeated. He made a note of the name and the hour. “We always know more than we think we do—except when we know less. Goodnight, Scully.”
“Goodnight, sir.
I won’t leave town.”
Bassett laughed and started down the stairs.
“Not till they kick me out of it.”
An addendum Bassett wanted to think more about—but not at four in the morning.
7
WHEN JOHANNA AWOKE SHE knew almost at once where she was despite the strangeness of the room. She had slept very little but she was seeing the bedroom by daylight for the first time. A row of dolls sat atop the dresser, looking at her with eyes that had not changed since leaving the manufacturer, though time had faded their clothes and hair. She wondered if any child had seen them since perhaps Martin’s mother was herself a child.
She could not remember when last she had slept in a strange bed. She had not been a visiting child. Her father had always wanted her home. He hadn’t ever said so exactly, but the moment he came into the house, he always used to call out first, “Where’s my Jo-Jo?” Sometimes, to tease him, she concealed herself behind the door and watched him. When he got no answer to his call he heaved a great sigh and went along to the kitchen to see if her mother was home. “Papa,” she would then call out. And always now when she remembered him it was as he turned around, his whole face smiling. She could remember the smell of his clothes as she ran full-tilt into his arms and got a moment’s quick enveloping hug. He always smelt a little like damp sawdust, for he had worked in the carpentry shop at the plant.
To avoid the glare of the sun just rising over the tops of the half-curtains, she sank herself deeper into the bed. She had not lowered the window shade. With that association she remembered the whole sweep of the night’s happenings. “Oh, papa,” she said and, turning over in the bed, buried her face in the pillow.
She was roused by a rap at the door and a strange voice calling out, “Miss Johanna? Wake up, miss. Breakfast in ten minutes. You hear?”
“Yes.”
She listened as the footsteps padded on, and a few seconds later the voice repeated, “Breakfast in ten minutes.” Then, “George, I’m putting a clean shirt in the bathroom, hear? Mrs. Tonelli says you put it on.”
Johanna realized that it was Ida Grey, Mrs. Tonelli’s maid, who came from Moontown every morning on the seven-thirty bus. Johanna sometimes met her, panting and resting at the top of the hill, when she was going down herself to the seven-thirty Mass. Mrs. Grey was a large, friendly woman, one of whose three sons had been in high school with Johanna at the time he was drowned in the creek. After that had happened, Mrs. Grey would stop her now and then and say, “You knowed my son, Albie?”
“Yes,” Johanna would say. “I’ll say a prayer for him, Mrs. Grey.”
“He don’t need it, thank you. But you say it just the same.”
Georgie was late getting down to breakfast. He hadn’t meant to be, but he couldn’t make up his mind whether or not to wear the shirt Mrs. Tonelli had sent up to him. He tried it on, but it wouldn’t button at the neck. Otherwise it fit him well enough. He had played a lot of hunches lately; he decided to play one more and wore his own shirt, dirty as it was at the collar.
“I appreciate you offering it to me, Mrs. Tonelli,” he explained when she asked him why he wasn’t wearing the clean shirt, “but I got a funny feeling about wearing other people’s clothes. I’m kind of like you that way, independent. I figure you got to be if you’re going to get some place in life.”
The old lady merely grunted, but Georgie thought she was not displeased. She sat at the head of the dining room table like in an English movie, with Johanna on one side and him on the other and enough empty space at the other end of the table to shoot pool on. Johanna lifted her napkin and, looking at him, dabbed her mouth with it. What the hell did she think he was going to do with his—blow his nose in it? He shook it out with a flourish and spread it over his lap. Mrs. Tonelli took the cover from the platter of scrambled eggs, and heaped two big spoonfuls of them on a plate. Mrs. Grey took the plate from her and set it before Georgie. Then she brought hot muffins from the kitchen. This was how to live. Man! Johanna had scarcely touched the eggs on her plate. At home, George would have offered to finish them, But not here. No, sir.
“I’ve called the post office,” Johanna said. “Mr. Jacobi said I didn’t have to come in. So the first thing we must do is go up to the hospital and tell mother what happened.”
“Why? I mean won’t it worry her if we tell her right away?”
“She’d hear about it anyway. It’s better that we tell her.”
“Okay,” Georgie said. “Have you got any money, sis?”
He was aware that the old lady had been looking from one to the other of them. She was kind of like a kid; watching a game of catch.
“No, but I get paid next week.”
Georgie took a deep breath. “Mrs. Tonelli, could I borrow some money from you—enough to buy some clothes and toothbrushes and things?”
“Do you want to work for it?”
“No.” Georgie amended quickly, “I mean, not today or tomorrow.”
But the old lady laughed. “Not today, not tomorrow. What do you want to do today?”
“I’ve got to play football this afternoon. It’s the biggest game of the year.”
“Ah-ha. You want to be a hero.”
“I might just be,” Georgie said, a little offended.
“And you will get a scholarship to go to college?”
He was not sure the old girl wasn’t pulling his leg.
But Johanna took her seriously. She took everybody seriously. “He could if he got better marks in school, and he could do that if he tried. He’s very good in some things—like mathematics and science.”
Very good if you called passing good, Georgie thought. But he realized Jo was trying to build him up. Jo knew even better than he did that Grandma Tonelli had money, money she wasn’t willing to spend on Martin. For just a moment Georgie contemplated saying that he’d like to be a pharmacist. But that was just too corny.
“And good in football,” the old lady said, nodding her head vigorously as she sometimes did as though she couldn’t stop nodding it.
Georgie said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
Mrs. Tonelli steadied her head then and looked at him for a long moment. He did not like to be looked at like that, as though she was making sure she could see him inside and out.
“No, Georgie,” the old lady said at last, “there is only one way for every person, their own way. But I am sure you are able to skin a cat.” She rang the little silver bell at the side of her plate. When Mrs. Grey came to the dining room door, she said, “Will you bring my pocketbook, Ida, please?”
Georgie said, “You’d better get ready, Jo, if we’re going to make the next bus.”
“Take the red sweater, Johanna,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “You need some color. I will put the other things away in case Mr. Proud here changes his mind.”
“Thank you,” Jo said, and left them.
Georgie remembered his manners at the last moment and scrambled to his feet. He sat down again when Johanna was gone.
“How much insurance did you have on the house?” Mrs. Tonelli asked.
He had no idea, but he said without hesitation, “Twelve thousand dollars.” He could always say later that he had made a mistake.
“Twelve thousand dollars. That would make a very good dowry.”
“For who?” Georgie blurted out.
The old lady leaned across the table and gave him a poke with her long, stiff forefinger. “Well, not for you, you bull calf.” She laughed aloud and after a moment’s hesitation, Georgie joined in the laughter.
Catherine Rocco was alone in the semi-private room when her children arrived at the hospital. They had had to get special permission to see her outside visiting hours, and asking it at the admissions desk, Johanna had been aware of an exchange of glances between the nurses. She could not understand why hospital people always acted so superior. She was sure they were pretending. Nobody could feel that superior all the time.
Jo and her
brother never knew what to expect of their mother on normal occasions, much less confined to a hospital bed. The day before she had been sitting up, laughing, making jokes to the woman in the bed across the room, a woman whom it had hurt to laugh but who had laughed nonetheless. Now, although her bed had been partially raised, Mrs. Rocco lay back in the pillows and stared straight ahead as though she did not even see the children come into the room.
Georgie noticed the funny smell in the place. He hated hospitals even more than schools.
Johanna took in the bleakness of the room, the screen set back against the wall, the stripped bed opposite her mother’s. She too noticed the smell, a little sweet, a little foul, and she suspected at once what had happened.
“Hello, mama.” She went round the bed and, leaning down, brushed the cold forehead with her lips. Immediately she took a piece of tissue from the side table, saturated it with cologne from the bottle Martin had sent her mother, and patted the sick woman’s cheeks and forehead with it.
The dark eyes, so much like her own, brightened, acknowledged and were grateful.
“She was terribly sick, mama,” Johanna said quietly of the woman no longer occupying the bed across the room.
Her mother’s eyes welled up with tears.
“Poor mama,” Johanna said, and patted awkwardly at her arm.
Georgie stood gawking at the empty bed, finally catching on.
Mrs. Rocco motioned for some tissue. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, wincing a little at the pain too hard a blow had caused her. “I said the prayers for the dead for her with Father Walsh. And nobody came but him.”
“And you,” Johanna said soothingly. She had a way, this girl, of making people know their own importance. “You were her friend.”
“So soon,” her mother said. “A few days only and we were friends. Time is a funny thing … a minute can be a lifetime. And what is a lifetime?” she sighed and answered herself: “A minute, that’s all. Georgie, stop gawking and come here to me.”
He shuffled slowly around the foot of the bed and stood at her side. “Hi, mama.”
She looked him up and down, the powerful shoulders, the pink plump cheeks and pouty lips that made him remind her sometimes of the cherubic faces around the Virgin on painted holy cards. His hair looked to have been plastered onto his head. It made him stand up straight anyway, trying to keep it in place.
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