“Isn’t that funny?” she said. “I got a new pair Saturday, and when I went to put them on Sunday morning, there was only one stocking in the box.”
Whatever it was, it wasn’t funny. “And before that, had you missed any?”
“Last week … I wasn’t sure. I could have dropped it in the bathroom. Behind the tub, you see, there was a space. I forgot about it. It must have been Thursday. And then, after what happened Friday, the fire, I mean, a stocking didn’t seem very important.”
Not very important, Bassett thought. God in heaven! He was about to go back and force the issue of Georgie’s ten o’clock alibi. The postmaster opened the door without knocking.
“You’ve got to take over out here, Jo. I’m going up to the village hall. The night shift’s just been locked out of the plant.”
Johanna looked at the detective. Her eyes pleaded for release.
“We can talk further at another time,” Bassett said.
18
FROM WHERE HE STOOD in the doorway of the police station, Bassett could tell the temper of the men treading heavily upstairs. Nor was there any sort of recognition of him in the cold, dark eyes of those who measured him in passing. He’d have been more welcome in a New York dope pad than he was at that minute in the village hall of Hillside. He watched the legless man lift himself up the first step. Two men came up behind him and without a word, lifted him, each taking an elbow, and carried him cursing up the stairs.
Bassett turned back to where the chief of police was sitting morosely behind his cigar. “Just like that,” Bassett said, “they can lay off two hundred men.”
“‘Temporary suspension,’” Kearns quoted the official notice posted on the plant gate. “The stinking thing about it is, the men themselves have to decide how to split up the work—who’ll go on the day shift next week.”
“So that’s what they’ve got a union for,” Bassett said sarcastically.
Kearns threw him a sour look. “It don’t take much of a brain to figure out the company’s real motive. This time they’re going to squeeze Scully out all the way. Started by offering him MacAndrews’ job.”
“I know,” Bassett said.
“He should’ve taken it,” Kearns said. “A lot of people depended on him there.”
“If Graham wants him out so badly, why not fire him? They don’t seem to have to show cause to anybody.”
“That way they’d make a martyr out of him,” Kearns said. “And you never just know what that might kick up.”
“And this way, they’ll let his own people crucify him.”
“That’s about it.”
Bassett didn’t say anything more. He watched from the window as others drove up and parked. Martin Scully came out on the stoop of his building, took a stick of gum from his pocket, unwrapped it and stuck it in his mouth. He wadded the wrapper, stepped to the empty waste container and dropped it in. He wore only his jacket, his shirt open at the throat. Bassett realized that the boy was steeling himself for an ordeal. Scully crossed the street and met trouble head-on before he reached the top of the stairs.
“Boy, you got a hell of a nerve coming here.”
“Nobody’s got any better right,” Scully said. “Get out of the way.”
“No, sir. We could’ve been going on work right now if you’d taken the job.”
“If I’d turned myself into a rotten fink! You’d’ve liked that, wouldn’t you? Twenty more years slave labor, part-time, no pensions. And me checking the timeclock. No, sir, by God, I’ll see ’em in hell before they get that kind of cooperation out of me. You want the job? Apply for it. I’ll give you a recommendation. Joe Strego, company man.”
“Don’t be so goddam free with your recommendations. I can make some of my own. For example …” The man raised his voice over a murmuring chorus. While Bassett could not see what was happening beyond the turn in the staircase, he could see the shadows converging on the wall, a grotesque melee. “For example,” the preface was repeated, “Mac’s death played right into your hand, didn’t it? Let me tell you, Scully, I know a thing or two about Red tactics. I know how they work. I been reading a series in the Journal American, and by Christ, if you didn’t write the book for ’em, you could’ve. I want to tell you, man, come the revolution, it ain’t going to come in Hillside.”
An affirmative refrain echoed from those less articulate than Scully’s attacker.
“What’s your recommendation?” Scully said. “You said you had a recommendation. What is it?”
“That you get the hell out of town before Kearns gets off his ass down there and finds out what really happened Friday night.”
The next phase, Bassett thought, if something didn’t happen to forestall it: suspicion of the murder cast on Scully. It was a danger he had known to be latent in the situation from the beginning. He turned back to Kearns where he was sulking in a tent of cigar smoke. “How many kids have you questioned, Chief?”
“Ten or twelve. I might as well be whistling Dixie. None of them know from nothing since Saturday night. One of them had the nerve to say it to my face: ‘I can’t remember anything happening around here before Saturday night.’ ‘What happened Saturday night?’ I says to him. And he just stood there, grinning, his hands in pockets jingling his change. Tell me the truth, Bassett, do you think it would do any good if I resigned and let them get somebody in here who could do the job? Me getting caught in that poker game just about washed me up.”
That was the trouble, Bassett knew, authority in Hillside was hamstrung, and the knots accumulating. Old Mrs. Tonelli, for example: he knew she wouldn’t talk to him, a stranger. She had proved that on their one brief meeting. The Rocco kid would swear he was home by ten o’clock the night of the murder and maybe he was; just maybe he was. Bassett couldn’t prove otherwise. He needed time and he needed help. Kearns was all but useless. He realized that he had been counting on Martin Scully. But what was happening on the stairs right now was no encouragement. Everything was getting more rigid. He decided to make a move before it was too late.
He went into the hall and up the stairs a few steps. “Scully!” he called out. “Will you come down here for a minute?”
The men looked down at him, those near the railing. One of them said, “Need some more aspirin, mac?”
Bassett remembered his first meeting with some of these men at the bar in the fire station. “A tranquilizer,” he said, “like everybody else around here.”
He closed the station door after Scully and motioned him onto the bench that served in lieu of extra chairs. “I’m going to ask something of you, Scully. It will go against the grain with you, but I’m hoping you’ll see some merit in it. I need time. And I need more time than I would if I was getting cooperation. The screws are getting tighter all the time—and this business isn’t helping.” He jerked his head to indicate the activity in the upper hall.
Scully was listening, but there was a cold look in his blue eyes that was scarcely less discouraging than the black stares he’d been getting from the rest of the natives.
But Bassett went on. “Why don’t you take the job at the plant for the time being? Get the men back to work till we get the murder solved. A few days on the side of management won’t kill you. You might even learn something useful.”
Scully was shaking his head. “After that nobody’d trust me.
“Who trusts you now?” Bassett said.
Scully thumbed his own breast. “I trust me.”
All Bassett’s persuasions availed him nothing. There was no compromise in Scully, and for all that the detective admired it in him, he saw in the inflexibility part of the reason Scully had got no further in unionizing the plant.
Kearns spoke for the first time. “Goddamn it, Martin, in this world we all got to make compromises.”
“Not with the devil,” Scully said.
Kearns got up and stalked to the door, muttering an obscenity. When he opened the door a young priest was standing just outside it as tho
ugh uncertain whether or not to knock before opening it.
“Afternoon, Father,” the chief said.
“I’m looking for Scully,” the priest said.
Kearns said, “Help yourself,” and went out.
“Well, Martin, I hear you’re embattled,” the priest said. It was not said lightly, but neither was it ponderous. He looked curiously at Bassett who then introduced himself. The two men shook hands. Bassett wondered then why he hadn’t thought of the priest before. Young, open-faced and vigorous, he must be on good terms with the majority of his parishioners. There were disadvantages to being anti-clerical, the detective thought of himself; to being too much anti-anything.
“Mr. Bassett has been trying to persuade me to take MacAndrews’ job at the plant,” Scully said.
“And you’re standing like Horatio at the bridge.”
“I’m not sure what Horatio did at the bridge, Father.”
The priest grinned and sidled his thigh up on Reams’ desk. “Matter of fact, I’m not either.” He looked at the detective. “I’m afraid I’m on Martin’s side, Mr. Bassett.”
“So am I, but I’ve got a murder to solve and all these sideshows aren’t making the job any easier.” Bassett thought he was beginning to sound a little hysterical himself. “Take that gambling business Saturday night; all the kids who were in on it wore stockings over their faces. I’m pretty sure MacAndrews’ killers did too. Coincidence? I don’t think so. But can I get anybody to talk freely with me? No.”
“Did you see Johanna?” Martin asked.
“Yes. She talked—up to a point. Then she had a bad memory—or maybe too good a memory.”
“Why Johanna?” the priest asked.
Martin answered him, Bassett hesitating. “In my book, her brother qualifies as a fine prospect for juvenile delinquency.”
“I see.” The priest wasn’t smiling. “That gambling business was nasty, wasn’t it?” He addressed himself to the detective.
“Vicious,” Bassett said. He would have liked to know when and how the priest had heard about it.
“I’ve just been to call on one of its beneficiaries,” Father Walsh said. “Her husband asked me to. He owes somebody money who’s putting the pressure on him, and he can’t raise a cent, not even from his own wife. I didn’t get any further with her than he did. She just sat and rocked and shook her head and said of her seventeen-year-old hero, ‘My son is a good boy.’ It would be funny if it weren’t tragic.”
If the priest couldn’t get any place, Bassett thought, what chance had he?
“I’d better go upstairs if I’m going,” Martin said. “They don’t want me, but they’re going to get me.”
“Martin, wait a minute and I’ll go with you,” the priest said. “Those of the men laid off can go on unemployment insurance, can’t they?” Scully nodded.
“I was talking to somebody who wants to build a ceramics factory in the county—cheap reproductions in quantity. God knows why people would want them. But they do. This whole expansion of light industry—why don’t we get some of it into Hillside? Give Graham a run for the labor market. It can’t happen overnight. But let’s call this blind man’s bluff of theirs.”
“I think it’s a hell of a good idea,” Bassett said, “if you don’t mind an outsider’s opinion.”
“What we need is to bring in a few more outside opinions,” the priest said.
Scully said, “That’ll be the day.”
“You’re wrong, Martin,” Father Walsh said. “This’ll be the day. Bassett?”
“Yes, Father?”
“Are you coming up?” The priest got to his feet.
“Yes. Why not?”
No one barred their way but even the priest’s reception in the men’s midst could not have been called more than polite. And when Mayor Covello asked him if he wanted to say a few words to the men, and the priest launched into a spirited presentation of his idea for breaking the Graham tyranny, he might as well have been preaching a Sunday sermon—a dull one at that. They heard him out, and Bassett thought, if he had passed the collection plate at that point, he might have collected the few pennies left in the men’s pockets. But no one else in the room, including Martin Scully, Bassett suspected, had either vision or wish to see beyond the Graham smokestack.
Suddenly the priest was angry, his face ruddy with wrath. He took off his Roman collar and threw it on the table. The eyes of the men standing near focused on it for a moment, then on him. Bassett felt his own-heartbeat quicken.
“So what are you going to do, gentlemen? Draw lots to see which of your families eat and which go begging? That’s real gambling, isn’t it? That’s a game of chance worthy of real men.” His sarcasm was scathing. “After that’s decided, you’ll be masters in your own homes again, won’t you? How in the name of God will you look yourselves in the eye, much less your sons and your sons’ mothers after that?”
Now, Bassett thought, he was getting through to them. The shuffling feet, the downcast eyes. Give ’em hell, Father! he thought.
“Don’t you see that you can’t escape tyranny by obedience to it? You all want your jobs, don’t you?”
A murmur of assents.
“Then stop laying one another off! That’s what it amounts to. Either all of you go back to work! Or none of you go back to work. The answer to half a lock-out is a whole strike. Do you think for a minute that if they wanted to close this plant they’d take your vote on it? You know as well as I do—in one week they’d dismantle and ship the machinery out of here—the very machinery half of you are going to keep warm for them till they’ve got all of you where they want you—hungry and servile. They’re thirty years late with these tactics. For the love of God and one another let’s turn our clocks up in this town.”
The men were staring at him now. They were not with him, but not against him either. When the priest waited for their response, Martin Scully said quietly, but clearly: “It sounds wonderful, Father. But it won’t work. Not this time. We can draw unemployment compensation during a lay-off, but not during a strike. They know the position we’re in. But next time … If we start getting ready for it now there might not even be a next time … if we start a strike fund: something every week. And that’s what we can vote today.”
“To be paid out of what if half of you aren’t working?” the priest said.
Scully drew a deep breath. He looked at Bassett. Then he said, “If we vote a strike fund today and elect a man in charge of it, I’ll take their goddamn night manager’s job.”
There was no cheering, only the sounds men made beginning to see hope, a sort of change in their breathing.
The priest said, “They don’t want you, Martin. That’s what this is all about. They knew you wouldn’t take the job when they offered it.”
“Then they knew wrong,” Scully said.
“And if they won’t take you now?”
Scully looked to the plant workers.
One of them shook his fist in the air. “Then we strike, fund or no fund.”
This time the assents rang loud enough to be heard round the hall.
One could only hope, Bassett thought, that if Scully won it would not turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
19
GEORGIE WAITED AT THE Crazy Cat for Johanna to meet him as soon as she got off work. By reminding Pete of how much money he had spent there after the football game Saturday, he persuaded the old gentleman to trust him for a Coke until his sister got there. This knighthood bit was rugged, giving all that dough to the old lady. He’d have been willing to bet half the guys sneaked a buck or two for themselves. Maybe not. Pete was groaning about how awful business was.
“Hey, Pete! Where is everybody?”
“Eh?” Pete turned his good ear.
“Nobody’s around,” Georgie said.
“Good,” Pete said, whatever the hell that meant.
Johanna arrived no more than a minute before the bus was due. Georgie started out to meet her.
&
nbsp; Pete called to him, “Hey, big shot!” By the rubbing of his fingers he reminded Georgie of the short-term credit.
“Sis, give me a dime. Nobody trusts nobody in this dump.” He plopped the dime on the counter while Johanna got more money from her purse for the bus. “Keep the change, Pete.”
Johanna was silent in the bus, her mind turned in on her own thoughts. She was trying not to think of the detective, or of her brother: she didn’t like Georgie, really, but she had never allowed herself to admit that before, feeling rather strongly that even if it were so, it was a sin to admit it. She didn’t even like the way Georgie sprawled his legs so that, fat as they were, the one next to her rubbed against her own. Involuntarily she drew away.
“Excuse me,” Georgie said, and got up and moved to another seat.
Johanna followed him. “I’m sorry, Georgie.”
“Too bad I ain’t a priest.” Johanna pulled herself into her shell. “C’mon, sis, I didn’t mean that. It was you made me sore first. What if ma wants to come home?”
Johanna forced herself to tell her plans. “I’ve put up a notice in the post office asking if anybody has a small furnished apartment—cheap.”
“You’ll get us another firetrap,” Georgie said. “Why can’t we stay with the old lady? Mrs. T. wants us. She’s begging us to stay.”
“I don’t want to,” Johanna said, “but if you can get mother to say yes I won’t say anything against it.”
“’Atta girl. See, I’ll do some work around the place for Mrs. T., you know, repairs, things like that, and it won’t be as if we weren’t paying our way. Besides … I already gave her some money.”
“Where did you get it, Georgie?” His sister looked round at him, sharp as a woodpecker.
He shouldn’t have said anything, he realized. “A guy owed me some money. It wasn’t a fortune. You don’t have to worry.”
“But I do worry. That Mr. Bassett, the detective, came to see me in the post office.”
“What for?”
“He wanted to know about when you came home—Friday night.”
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