The camera followed Mastro’s back as he pried his way through the mob; then it cut to the studio moderator.
Paul switched it off. He crossed to the window and looked out at the lights. A haze brought the sky down low and brightened the city like a stage set.
It was a slim chance, it probably wouldn’t lead to anything. But he had to do it. He had to try.
He went to the phone and searched for Spalter’s home number; he’d written it down somewhere…
Spalter came on the line, cheerful and ebullient. “Hey, Paul, How’re they hanging?”
“Jim, something’s come up. A personal thing, nothing vital, but I’m going to have to be out of town for a couple of days. I won’t be able to start work until the middle of the week. I realize it’s awkward but can you explain it to Childress for me? I’ll report in on Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.”
“You have to go back to New York?”
“Yes. It’s a family thing. My wife’s estate—you know these idiotic legal hassles. But it’s got to be straightened out before it gets any worse.”
“Sure, I know. Okay, Paul, I’ll cover for you with the old man. Hope everything works out okay. I’ll see you Wednesday or so, right?”
“Thanks very much.”
“Don’t mention it, buddy. Have a good trip—give my love to Fun City.”
He rang off and reached for his drink. It was probably a bad hunch. The thing probably was still squatting there under the glass countertop, untouched since he’d seen it weeks ago. But there was a chance. He had to find out.
36
HE WAS OUT and rolling before the Monday morning rush. By seven he was crossing the Wisconsin line. A little while later he left the divided highway and switched off the headlights. Snow lay in deep drifts on the verges: the countryside looked like something in a calendar photograph, sunlight on rolling fields of snow, the occasional farmhouse on a far hilltop. The world was new and clean.
The shop hadn’t opened yet and he sat in the car until restlessness prohibited it; then he walked through town and back while the cold stung his ears and came inside his coat. From a block away he saw Truett limp to the door and unlock the security gate and roll it up. Truett unlocked two or three bolts and perhaps a burglar alarm and finally went inside; two minutes later Paul entered the cluttered shop.
“Morning.”
“Hello there. Mr. Neuser, isn’t it?”
“You’ve got a good memory.”
“Pride myself,”Truett said. His moist eyes peered up at Paul and then he continued on his rounds, switching lights on. “What can I do you for?”
He’d thought of half a dozen lies during the night and rejected them; finally he’d settled on the simplest story and rehearsed it until it was smooth. “I was talking to my brother-in-law about my last visit up here. I mentioned that Luger I saw in your collection. The .45. He got very interested—he’s a gun buff and he served in Germany with the Occupation after the war. Anyway it’s his birthday coming up and I wondered if you still had the thing for sale. I don’t see it here under the counter.”
“Sold that one a few weeks ago. Just a few days after you were here, matter of fact.” Truett still had the folded newspaper under his arm; now he limped around behind the counter and put the newspaper down before he reached up to pull the switch-strings of the ceiling fluorescents.
It was a Milwaukee newspaper. That relieved Paul. If Truett didn’t get the Chicago papers he probably wasn’t aware of the ballistics reports; details that small wouldn’t be printed in Milwaukee papers or reported on Milwaukee television, he was sure.
“That’s too bad,” Paul said, trying to keep his feelings out of his voice. “It’d make such an ideal birthday present for Jerry.”
“I sure am sorry, Mr. Neuser. Maybe there’s something else I might turn up. Got a nice World War Two Walther in the back room, practically mint condition, the old double-action P.38 model. …”
“No, Jerry really got excited over that forty-five Luger. Say, I’ll tell you what, Mr. Truett. Maybe the fellow who bought it from you wouldn’t mind turning a quick profit on it.”
“Well….”
Paul opened his wallet and counted out bills. “Of course you’d be. entitled to a finder’s fee and a commission.” He spread the fifty dollars on the glass. “Do you happen to have the name and address of the fellow you sold it to?”
“Well sure I do. Have to take down all that stuff for the Federal registration, don’t I.”
37
IT WAS a small house on Reba Place in Evanston, in the middle of a block of elderly detached houses on postage-stamp lots, each driveway forming the boundary with its neighbor’s property; the houses were narrow and old-fashioned and the trees along the curbs had attained towering heights. The carport alongside the house had no cars in it. Paul didn’t go up to the door but he sensed the house was empty.
He had a name—Orson Pyne—and this address. He sat in his car and studied the house and tried to form a picture of the man who lived in it. He had little success. But he had a strong feeling the house was empty and that meant either Pyne lived alone or his wife worked. The place wasn’t equipped for two cars but that didn’t mean much; it was only two or three blocks’ walk to Asbury where you could pick up a Western Avenue bus.
There was a filling station on the corner two and a half blocks away. It was worth a try. Before he started the car Paul opened his wallet and sorted through the ID’s and business cards. There was a lot of outdated junk, he saw—even a 1973 plastic calendar—and he was amazed it had been that long since he’d gone through the contents of the wallet. He decided on the card that identified him as a member of the West 71st Street Community Association. It had been sent to him when he’d made a financial contribution to the block association’s campaign to install high-intensity street lighting off West End Avenue. The lettering was too small to be read at a glance and beneath the lettering on the white card was imprinted a pale green shield. At a cursory glance it might pass for an official identification card. He put everything back in the wallet and slid the ID card in so that it was exposed in the Plexigas window. Then he drove to the filling station.
It was a small one-man station with a single lube rack; the proprietor was squirting grease up into the fittings of a Cadillac elevated on the lift. Paul stood just inside the stall and waited for the mechanic to notice him.
The mechanic lowered the grease gun and glanced at him. “Help you, mister?”
“I’m looking for a man named Orson Pyne. Lives a couple of blocks down here. Thought you might know him.”
“Well I might.”
Paul flashed the wallet, opening it to show the card inside the plastic window. “It’s official.”
The mechanic lowered the grease gun; his face changed. “What’s it about?”
“Just a routine inquiry. Pyne lives in that brown and white house in the middle of the third block down there, does he?”
“Aeah, he does.”
“He have his car serviced here?”
“Yes, he’s been a regular customer a long time now.”
“Is he a family man?”
“What is this, some kind of credit investigation?”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Well he used to be a family man. Wife died a few years ago, lung cancer I think. He’s got a kid, just about grown up now I guess. Doesn’t live at home anyhow.”
“So Pyne lives alone.”
“Yes sir. He’s a quiet kind of guy.”
“Pays his bills regularly?”
“He’s real reliable, yes sir. Takes real good care of his car too. Sometimes that means something about a person, don’t it?”
“It does, yes. What kind of car does he drive?”
“Seventy-two Ambassador. A real cream puff.”
“You look after it for him, do you?”
“Well once in a while he takes it back to the American Motors place. You know, th
e big servicings, twenty-four thousand mile stuff. But I do all the routine work for him. He’s real conscientious about oil changes and all that stuff. I just wish more of my customers would—”
“Do you happen to know where Mr. Pyne works?”
“Sure, don’t you? He teaches college over at the university. Chemistry, biology, something like that.”
“What time does he usually get home?”
“Well I couldn’t tell you that, Mister. I don’t keep tabs on nobody. Sometimes I see him, he stops in here on his way home, it’s different times different days. You know how it is with teachers. But if you want to talk to him he ought to be home by suppertime I guess.”
“Thanks very much for your help. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it under your hat. We wouldn’t want to upset him for no reason. I mean everything seems to check out, there’s no reason to worry Mr. Pyne.”
“No sir, I can see that all right.”
“Thanks again.” Paul went back to his car.
38
IN THE LIBRARY he looked up Orson Pyne in the university catalogue. Pyne was forty-seven, an assistant professor in the Physics Department. He had a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, an M.S. from Cal Tech and a Ph.D. from Northwestern, the latter acquired in 1968. He was one of the five authors of a basic physics textbook used by freshmen. He had served in the Navy from 1947 to 1953. A four-year hitch extended by the Korean War, evidently. There wasn’t anything else about him. Paul tried various editions of Who’s Who but Pyne wasn’t listed in any of them.
He drove back to Reba Place and staked himself out a few doors away from Pyne’s house. He still didn’t know that he’d found his man; it seemed too easy; as the afternoon dragged by he thought of all the possibilities and was ready to conclude it was a blind alley. Truett’s .45 Luger hadn’t been the only one in the world. And it seemed too coincidental to be possible that both vigilantes had armed themselves from the same gun shop. Truett’s was one of a hundred gun shops beyond the state line and it didn’t advertise in the Chicago papers.
But the .45 Luger, if not unique, was very rare and he remembered something Truett had said that first time he’d been there: Far as I know this is the only one like it this side of Los Angeles. Even if he’d been exaggerating its rarity it still made Orson Pyne a possibility….
Factors for-and-against kept warring in his mind but in the end he knew it didn’t matter; Pyne was the only lead he had. If it turned out Pyne wasn’t the second vigilante then he had nothing else to try. He’d have to give it up. He’d had one piece of information the police hadn’t had—Truett and the Luger—and since it was the only advantage he had, he was pressing it. There was no point worrying now about whether it would pay off.
Five o’clock went by before the green Ambassador turned into the driveway. It stopped there, not proceeding back to the carport, and on that evidence Paul suspected Pyne intended to go out again. From his car he watched the man emerge from the car and walk up the porch steps. A tall man, lean with a scholar’s stoop; dark hair combed sidewise across the high forehead; a thin face, almost a satyr’s face. His appearance was hardly sinister.
But then neither is mine.
Full darkness came only a few minute later. Lights came on in the back of the house—the kitchen? The front windows remained dark. Paul slipped on his rubber gloves and opened the dimestore package of fluorescent red tape. He tore off two arm’s-length strips of it and quietly left his car trailing the gummed tape from his fingertips.
Down the block a car arrived home and Paul waited until its driver parked and went inside a house. Then he walked to Pyne’s car and swiftly pressed the tape across the rear bumper. He straightened and went directly back to his own car. The fluorescent tape would make it easier to follow Pyne at a distance in the night; Pyne probably wouldn’t notice it and even if he did there was no harm in it for Paul.
At seven a man came out of Pyne’s door and descended the steps. At first Paul was confused. The man had pale hair—grey or blond—and a long pale mustache. Then he realized it was Pyne in wig and false whiskers. It made him smile a bit. Pyne backed the Ambassador out of the driveway and rolled toward Paul. When the Ambassador had disappeared at the corner by the filling station, Paul made a quick U-turn and followed.
It was easy tailing the bright strip of red tape. He hung back more than a block, letting traffic intervene. Was it going to be this easy?
There was a shopping center on the right and the Ambassador turned into its parking lot. Paul slowed as he went past, and cramped the car into the second entrance to the lot. He cruised through the lanes—most of the stores were still open and there were hundreds of cars.
Pyne had pulled into a slot at the far end of the lot. Paul reached the end of a row, went around the parked cars and started slowly up the next row; through the glass of the cars he watched Pyne. The tall man got out of the Ambassador and locked it. Did he have some secret knowledge of a crime planned here in this parking lot?
Then Pyne went into his pocket and brought something out. It was too small to be visible; certainly not a gun. He walked across the aisle between parking rows and looked all around him. Paul turned and came driving toward him down the aisle. Pyne stooped, fitting his key into the lock of a battered old car.
He’s changing cars.
How brilliant, he thought. It’s something I should have thought of.
It was at least ten years old—the kind of car you could buy for a hundred dollars cash with no questions asked. A phony name, a phony address. Untraceable.
Pyne was backing the old car out. Paul gave it close scrutiny as he drove past. It was pocked with dents and rust stains; it squatted low on its springs. It was a four-door Impala; it had once been blue but had faded toward grey. It had a Wisconsin plate. He recognized the deep treads of the snow tires: Pyne wasn’t taking chances on getting stuck. Probably the car was in much better mechanical shape than the exterior implied; Pyne was a physicist, he’d have a respect for mechanical things and an awareness of the need for maintenance to ensure reliability. But it was a sure thing he didn’t have it serviced in that filling station where he took the Ambassador.
Well of course he was clever. He’d have been caught long ago otherwise.
But if that was the case why had he used his own name and address when he’d bought the Luger from Truett? And why the Luger at all, since it was so rare and easily identifiable?
It was a question to which he couldn’t provide an answer out of pure speculation. Possibly when Pyne had bought the gun he hadn’t had vigilantism in mind; perhaps that had come afterward. There were a lot of ifs and none of them really mattered; the only thing that mattered was the answer to one question: was Pyne the other Vigilante?
He knew how to force Pyne to cease his raids. But he couldn’t confront Pyne until he was absolutely certain Pyne was the right man. Confront an innocent man and the whole thing could backfire in his face: an innocent man would have no reason not to turn Paul in to the police. Only the second vigilante could be counted on to keep Paul’s secret.
He followed the Impala south into Chicago.
39
HE SAW another reason why Pyne had chosen the dilapidated old car: it blended into the neighborhoods Pyne liked to prowl. Nobody was likely to mistake it for an unmarked official car.
It fascinated him to watch the way Pyne worked: it was as if he himself had trained the man. Pyne tried twice to entice muggers to follow him out of night-service pawnshops on the South Side. When that failed he parked the car on a side street and went into a bar and fifteen minutes later came stumbling out, patently drunk, and went wandering in search of his car. No one trailed him. Pyne was perfectly sober when he got in the car and drove away.
Paul gave him a one-block lead.
In the back streets of the ghetto Pyne drove at a crawl, searching the shadows. Paul had to take risks, veering away and driving around a block and waiting for Pyne to go by in front of him; otherwise Pyne
would have realized a car was dogging him. He seemed preoccupied with his own hunt and Paul saw no indication that he was worried about surveillance but there was no point making his presence obvious.
Paul reached under the car seat. He pulled out both of his guns; slipped the Centennial in his right coat pocket and the .25 automatic in his left. He had to get rid of them tonight. He had the cleaning kit under the seat as well. He knew where he’s get rid of them, on his way home.
The Impala made a right turn into a dark narrow passage. Paul turned right a block earlier and went quickly along the parallel street to the corner, and looked left, waiting for the Impala to appear a block away.
It took too long; the car still didn’t show up. Paul made the left and drove to the corner.
It was there, stopped in the middle of the passage; the lights were off. In the darkness it was hard to make things out but he saw the car door open slowly. The interior light did not go on; evidently it had been disconnected. A shadow emerged from the car—vaguely he could see Pyne’s light-colored wig. And the hard silhouette of the gun in Pyne’s hand.
Pyne’s head was thrown back; he was looking at the upper windows of a four-story brick tenement. Paul turned everything off—ignition and lights—and let the car roll silently through the intersection to the far side. When it stopped he set the emergency brake, got out and walked back to the corner.
Pyne had his back to Paul. He stoòd on the sidewalk looking up at the building across the street from him. Paul began to walk forward, not hurrying.
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