And it had been Bogan, he must not forget that he would never forget, nobody but Bogan, who had ended Roderick's law career before it had had a proper chance to begin.
Yes, Bogan and Harry Dorman were two of a kind, but this time Roderick had his past experience to profit from. If Harry was now allowed a chance to double-cross him, if he were to meet an untimely end... (Though whose end; really, could be timelier?) He had pronounced the words himself that sentenced him now: 'My mistake was not rubbing out that sonofabitch stool pigeon before he went to the police.' Or, Roderick might amend, before he was caught by them.
There was, in the bottom of Roderick's dresser drawer, a gun, an unregistered war souvenir he'd bought as a young man. He had never had occasion to use it, though a few rounds of ammunition had come with it. Thinking about that gun helped to ease the tense muscles of his neck and shoulders, and his face assumed a more usual hue—a transformation that the bartender, observing it from the other end of the bar, regarded with approval.
Back at the post office on that same Monday, 2nd of July, the clerk was still busy filling out notices to box renters, reminding them that the rent for the third quarter of the year had come due. Box rental was something nobody seemed to remember—probably because it only came up four times a year. By noon almost every box in the building had a notice in it.
Chapter 12
It was misty but not chill that Tuesday morning. Roderick was again sitting in Carrol Park, he was again feeding the idiot pigeons from a bag of crumbs. A black attache case was lying in his lap, and the hand that held the bag of crumbs lay upon this. Barring the pigeons, he was alone.
A man approached through the mist, wearing a hat and a tan trenchcoat. He took a seat beside Roderick. 'Mr. Raleigh?' Roderick nodded. I'm Agent Fields.' They shook hands.
'Excuse the crumbs,' Roderick apologised belatedly. He returned to his benevolent task.
'Quite all right. You're early, I see.'
'I couldn't sleep, thinking about... And the house depresses me—without Alice in it.' 'You have the money?'
'I have the money. Jason Duquesne, my wife's brother, brought it to us last night.' 'And the case ...?'
'Is the one the kidnappers mailed to us.'
'We can go to the railway station now.'
'The instructions were to be there at eight o'clock. I don't suppose it would upset them if I appeared a few minutes early —they might not even know—but I should like to finish up this bag at least. To be candid, I'm afraid not to hold to the letter of the law, if one may speak of law in this case. And then too, once we get to the station you and I won't be able to talk. Talking helps. At least it is supposed, in theory, to help.'
Roderick and Agent Fields turned with one accord to watch the feeding pigeons, who seemed, in the absence of sunlight this morning, especially drab. Their thick red feet toddled and their heads bobbed with the abrupt and seemingly autonomous motions of a mechanical toy or a spastic. 'Do you like animals?' Roderick asked.
'Uh huh,' said Agent Fields.
'You may think it crochety of me, but I always judge a man by that. Is my daughter ... Is there any word ... ?'
'Nothing yet, Mr. Raleigh. We're checking out every possible lead.'
Roderick sighed. 'I pray to God...' he whispered, but did not go on to tell Agent Fields the precise nature of his
communications to the divinity.
Are there,' Roderick asked, after another respectful viewing of the pigeons, 'many others at the terminal?'
'Each entrance is being watched. If either Dorman or the Negro that Miss Godwin identified come in, we'll be able to tail them.'
'But there won't be any arrests? Not, at least, until Alice is safe at home. You did promise that.'
'And we'll keep to the promise. Your daughter's safety is our paramount concern at this point too, Mr. Raleigh.'
Thank you, thank you. If I could only tell you what these last days have been like for me ... Alice's mother has not borne up under the strain very well. She is an invalid, you know. As for myself, I'm afraid I owe you apologies...'
'You're doing fine, Mr. Raleigh. We all admire your courage, and we realise what a strain you must be under. It won't be long now, sir.'
A Negro paperboy came by and flashed a headline at them, of which Roderick could catch only the word, violence. He viwed the boy on.
'I am not a religious man, Mr. Fields. I daresay I don't go to church above two times a year. However, in times like this a person realises how important his faith is. I wouldn't have been able to go through with this if I didn't feel that there was someone ... up there ... helping me. Perhaps this embarrasses you.' The bag of crumbs, empty now, was tossed aside.
'Not at all,' said Agent Fields with embarrassment. 'I'm a Catholic myself.'
'Then may I ask you to grant me a very important favour?'
'Please do, sir.'
Roderick gripped the detective's hand between his own, rubbing off crumbs. 'Would you pray for me, Agent Fields?'
Agent Fields blushed. 'Of course, sir. We're all praying for you.'
Roderick made no effort to wipe away the tears rolling down his cheeks. Thank you, oh thank you.'
The Baltimore railway terminal had been built along the ample, Roman-baths model of the era of the robber barons; beneath its vast barrel-vault the modern blazonry of adversers seemed to be scaled to almost human proportions, though the presence of some few hundred actual humans was sufficient to contradict this false seeming. Both this cathedral,
and the writing upon its walls, had been fashioned for another and more heroic order of beings than the puny things that scurried through it this Tuesday morning whom it tolerated only until the Olympians, for whom it had been intended, should arrive and take possession.
Even as a child Roderick Raleigh had not been able to enter this building without feeling himself inflated, transformed into something a little larger than life, something Wagnerian, and now ... now the old feeling came over him with such force that he was obliged to stop at the threshold to catch his breath. Today this usual afflatus was merely the illusion of art, for now he was transcending the bounds of the merely human, all-too-human; now by his cunning and his courage his spirit was grown large enough to fill the high vault comfortably.
The large Bulova clock on the west wail gave the time as 7.58. Roderick proceeded directly to the bank of telephone booths beneath the clock, following the instructions that had been brought back by Miss Godwin. Thanks to the police, the end booth was blocked by a conspicuous out of order sign. Roderick took the sign off the door and entered the booth, which fitted him snug as a coffin. He tried to get through the time by examining the graffiti smutched on the metal walls or cut into the wood of the door, an alphabet soup of initials and obscenities. He enjoyed a momentary, high pleasurable quiver of indignation at the oafs who had defaced the phone booth this way. What did they think to gain by deeding to the world these meaningless, unbeautiful scrawls?
He twisted about impatiently in the booth. On the hook the plastic receiver was growing sticky in his hand. He opened the glass-panelled door to let in fresh air and saw, spread out on a bench, an out-of-town newspaper. On the left side of the front page was the two-column headline: klan violence predicted for the fourth. Beneath this, in smaller type: Second Day's Civil Rights Agitation Sees Twelve More Arrests. He was unable to make out the small type of the news story.
The phone rang. 'Yes?' he said into the receiver.
'Raleigh?' It was unmistakably Harry Dorman's voice.
'Yes.'
'You go over to the other side of the station, understand? The east side, where there's another bunch of phone booths. You go into the right-hand booth and wait till I call you there.'
'Would you repeat that?'
Harry Dorman hung up. Roderick, his face turned to the
back wall of the booth, smiled. He imagined the chagrin that the policeman eavesdropping over the tapped line must be feeling now. There would not
be time to tap the line to 782-8840, where Harry would call now.
Roderick left the booth and walked across the expanse of granite floor to the other side of the terminal. Agent Fields caught his eye, and he pantomimed dismay.
It was quite genuine dismay, for he had seen, at the same moment, that the booth Dorman had designated was occupied already—-by a Negro so fat that he had not been able to close the door of the booth behind him. Roderick was thereby afforded the added agony of overhearing the man's assinine small talk, a monologue as unsignificant as the initials that had been scrawled in the other phone booth: 'Uh-huh ... Uh-huh ... He is, and Mae-Pearl is too, uh-huh ,.. Uh-huh. I don't know... I said to her that I'd stay with the kids on Saturday night, but I don't know if they can go now. Did you talk to her afterwards? ... Uh-huh, uh-huh ...'
Roderick ground his heels against the granite in a fury of impatience, but the man in the phone booth had no sense of his causing an inconvenience, for the entire row of phone booths stood empty. Ordinary Roderick prided himself on his attitude towards coloured people, which was almost Northern in its liberality, but at times like this he realised that the Negro race was, after all, essentially inferior.
'That buzzing sounds like we're gonna be cut off, Nitty. Lemme see if I got another dime.' He dug into his pockets: no dimes. He held out a quarter to Roderick. 'Hey mister, would you be able to change this quarter for me?'
'No!'
The fat Negro gave Roderick a peculiar look. 'Listen, Nitty, before they cut us off, whyn't I give you my number here? I'll wait inside the booth till you call back, okay? The number here's 782-8840.'
Roderick wanted to tear the phone out of the man's fat fingers. When he'd hung up, he came forward and addressed him very earnestly: 'Please, I'm waiting for a very important call on this line.'
The Negro smiled and shrugged. 'Sorry, mister, I didn't know I was in your place of business. I'll be off in just a minute now.'
The phone rang and both their hands reached for it. The Negro pushed Roderick very firmly back from the booth before
he lifted the receiver off the hook. 'Hello. Hello, Nitty? ... Who?' He turned to Roderick. 'Your name Raleigh?' Roderick nodded. He held his breath. The Negro seemed to be debating whether or not to hang up.
With a wry smile he handed the phone to Roderick. 'It's for you.'
'Who was that, Raleigh?' Dorman's voice asked. 'You haven't called the police in on this, have you?'
'For...' Roderick bit his lip. (He had been about to say: For Christ's sake, Harry, of course not!) 'No. Please, what are my instructions?'
'If you came to the station with any fuzz you tell them that you're going to take the local train to Norfolk. And that you should take a seat on the left-hand side of the train and watch for a red convertible with a big Freedom Now sign on it. Understand? Buy your ticket, and then you excuse yourself to go to the bathroom. Understand? The men's room is one level down on the west side. Bring your satchel with you. Go into the last pay toilet in the row. Unwind the toilet paper and you'll find your next instructions.' Harry hung up.
Roderick crossed to the ticket window and bought a ticket for Norfolk on the 9.30 local. Agent Fields was now waiting on the bench beneath the Bulova, reading the discarded newspaper whose headline Roderick had been studying. They conversed with each other through the paper. Roderick explained about the red convertible. Then he excused himself to go to the toilet.
As Roderick neared the men's room, his throat tightened and his stomach seemed to sing. He was carrying on such a good masquerade that half the time he found himself taken in by it. He strode across the gleaming, disinfected tiles, his dime already pinched between thumb and forefingers. All the pay toilets were occupied. He waited. It was the fat Negro who had been in the phone booth who came out of the last toilet in the row. He smiled at Roderick peculiarly. Roderick, blushing hurried into the stall and pulled the door shut behind him. Roderick and Fields were the last ones to mount the Norfolk-bound local. During the tedious quarter-hour that it took the train to escape the cindery yards of Baltimore, Roderick asked to borrow the paper that Fields had picked off the bench, and he read about the Klan violence expected in Norfolk. There was little more to be learned from the story than what had been said in the headline. Someone with the improbable name of Exalted Cyclops Stroud had made the apocalyptic promise that the Grand Dragon of Virginia would be present at the threatened Fourth of July demonstration outside the African church. Roderick knew a moment of soothing contempt for the poor trash who needed such cant and Boy Scout mysticism to give their hollow lives a sense of importance.
Once out of the city, they began to watch for the red convertible.
'Don't look so worried, Mr. Raleigh,' Fields said. 'I know this is a hell of an ordeal, but it'll be over soon.'
Roderick tried to look a bit more worried at these words, but inwardly he had to chuckle. Because he knew it was already over.
Not until the train had left Maryland, crossing the trestle bridge over the Potomac, did Roderick take the crumpled piece of paper out of his coat pocket and hand it to Fields. 'The man on the phone told me to go to the men's room,' he explained. 'Into the last pay toilet. This note was rolled up in the tissues there.'
Fields read the typewritten note to himself: 'Shove your briefcase under the partition to the next stall, take the briefcase that the man in that stall pushes back. Flush these instructions down the toilet. When you return to the waiting-room, act as if nothing has happened. Get on the train to Norfolk and pretend to watch out for the red convertible. Don't open the new briefcase till you get to Norfolk. Your daughter's life depends on you! If you want to see her alive, obey these instructions!' Agent Fields swore.
'I had to do what was written there,' Roderick said earnestly. 'For Alice's sake. You understand that, don't you? I disobeyed when I thought it would be safe—I didn't flush the note down the toilet, and I didn't wait until Norfolk ...'
'You waited long enough. Whoever took the money has had a good long time to get out of the railway station. Let me look at that briefcase.' Roderick handed it to him. 'It looks the same.'
'They probably bought them at the same time,' Roderick offered weakly.
After a bit of trifling the locks sprang open, and wadded newspapers spilled out.
The train was pulling into a station. The sign said dahlgren. 'I'd better get off here, Mr. Raleigh, and phone back to Baltimore. Do you want to give me that case and the note? Thank you. And you can catch a lift back to Baltimore with me, if you like.'
'Thank you, but I think I'd best go all the way to Norfolk. Someone may be watching for me there. I don't want to take any chances. Alice's life may depend on the slightest little thing. I'll call your office as soon as I get there. And will you call my wife and tell her everything seems to be turning out for the best?'
The train began pulling out of Dahlgren, and Agent Fields had to walk alongside the churning iron wheels.
'It is, isn't it?' Roderick asked loudly. 'It is turning out all right?'
Agent Fields (who was running now) shouted something that could not be heard above the roar and commotion. He was smiling. He waved at Roderick. Roderick waved back, smiling bravely. 'Good-bye,' he shouted. 'Good-bye, suckers! Goodbye!'
Roderick left the train at Ordinary, an inflnitesimally small town twenty-five miles outside of Norfolk. There was no one on the platform, no one in the station waiting-room, no one at the ticket window. When the train had pulled away Roderick very carefully peeled off his toupee and put it in a cellophane bag in his coat pocket. The absence of the toupee added ten years to his face; unless one knew him very well one would not have been able to recognise him now.
Outside in the small parking area adjacent to the station the tan Chevrolet that Bittle had rented in Hampton two weeks before was waiting for him. Still no one had seen him. He unlocked the car door and slid in behind the wheel. The engine started faultlessly, and in a moment he was sailing down the asphalt-topped state r
oad, watching for the Dr. Pepper sign that marked the turn-off to Bittle's cabin.
'Wonderful,' he whispered to himself. 'Just wonderful.'
It was past noon, and if there had been any mist this far from Baltimore the heat of the midday sun had quite dissipated it. Roderick stopped the car, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, rolled down the windows. He had forgotten what a joy it could be driving through the countryside on a fine summer day like this.
'Perfect,' he whispered. 'Oh, flawless.'
He chuckled, as he imagined the F.B.I, men examining the washroom attendant, trying to get a description from him of the man who had occupied the stall next to the end stall at 9.10 that morning. And even if the attendant had an eidetic memory, it would make no difference. Because there had been no man in the next stall—at least, there need not have been. Ever since Roderick had seen Fields that morning the briefcase he had had with him had been filled with newspapers. The actual transfer of the cases had been effected in Carrol Park.
Roderick had arrived at the park with the money at 7.15. Beneath a designated bench lay an attache case identical to the one he was carrying, which contained the ransom money. Roderick had exchanged the cases and walked on. A turning to the right and then a few benches on Roderick had passed a delivery boy with a bag of newspapers. The boy rose from the bench and walked off in the direction from which Roderick had come. He would put the case of money into his delivery bag and bring it to young Bittle, who was waiting some few blocks away in the car that Roderick was driving now. (Bittle's old Buick was useless now, since Miss Godwin had given the police its description.) When Bittle had the money, the newsboy (now ten dollars richer) Was instructed to return to the park and walk past the bench where Roderick was feeding the pigeons. Nothing more than that. And so he had, and so, all the while that he had performed his pantomime at the railway station, Roderick had known that the essential task had been accomplished. By now, the money would be in Bittle's cabin, spread out probably in four piles—the largest pile being Roderick's, naturally. And the three others would be for Bittle, for Bessy, and for Harry Dorman.
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