He flushed, the quick anger rising in him. ‘You better watch your tongue, boy,’ he said.
I folded my arms and stared at the window.
‘Now, look here,’ he said. ‘I’ve been taking it easy with you, but if you want to make things tough for yourself it’s up to you.’
‘Easy? That moron of yours rips my suitcase and walks all over my clothes and breaks my friend’s typewriter, and you call it easy? You arrest me for no reason at all and lock me away—’
‘I didn’t arrest you,’ he said.
‘Good. I’m going home.’ I got to my feet.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You were brought in for questioning.’
I stood there glaring at him. ‘About what?’
‘Just sit down,’ he said.
‘The hell I will! I—’
Then a hand had a painful grip on my shoulder, and I was shoved back into the chair. I looked up, and saw Jerry smiling down at me, and I clenched my fist, but he said, ‘You don’t want 10 try it, buddy.’
‘Get your hand off me.’
The older man said, ‘It’s all right, Jerry.’
Jerry let me go and went back to lean against the wall again.
The older man said to me, ‘You want to watch that temper, boy. It could get you into a lot of trouble some day.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m just not used to this. In the town where I was brought up, the policemen were decent human beings.’
His palm hit the desk. ‘You watch that mouth. Nobody asked you and that smart-ass friend of yours to come into this town, stirring up trouble—’
”What trouble? We drove around for a while and we talked to one woman, whose husband had asked us to come here. So what trouble are you talking about?’
But he had control of himself again. ‘About that time when you went out for the hamburgers and coffee,’ he said. ‘What time was it you said you went?’
‘I don’t know for sure. Around five o’clock.’
‘And what time did you get back?’
‘Around quarter after, I guess. It took about fifteen minutes.’
‘You don’t know for sure.’
‘No.’
‘But you do know for sure it took fifteen minutes.’
‘About fifteen minutes.’
‘Twenty minutes?’
I shrugged, not seeing any point to all this, just more irritation. ‘Maybe.’
‘Half an hour, maybe?’
‘No, not that long. I told you already, about fifteen minutes.’
‘You walked?’
‘No, I drove the car.’
‘And it was five o’clock when you left.’
‘Yes.’
‘On the dot?’
‘How do I know? Around five o’clock, that’s all I know.’
‘For all you know,’ he said, ‘you could have left there at five-thirty instead of five o’clock, and not got back till six. Isn’t that right?’
‘No. It was around five o’clock when I left and around quarter after five when I got back.’
‘Mmm. What kind of gun has this Killy character got?’
‘I didn’t know he had a gun at all.’
‘You never saw it, huh?’
‘No.’
‘He just told you about it.’
‘He never said anything about it.’
‘Then what gave you the idea he had one?’
I was about to answer, but then I stopped, and forced myself to grin at him. ‘You took a correspondence course in psychology, is that it? You gave me the idea he had a gun. You think I’m one of your local simpletons?’
‘The people around here are all simpletons, is that it?’
‘All I’ve met so far.’
This time he didn’t get mad. Instead, he smiled and said, ‘You’re a smart boy, well educated. Tell me, do you know why they call a jail the cooler?’
‘No, Mister Interlocutor, why do they call a jail the cooler?’
But that didn’t make him mad either. ‘Because it cools wise guys off,’ he said. ‘And you could use some cooling.’ He glanced at Jerry. ‘Better put him away upstairs for a while,’ he said.
‘I get a phone call!’ I shouted.
‘Oh, I know it. But our phone’s out of order.’
Jerry was standing next to me again, reaching out for that grip on my shoulder. I knocked his hand away and stood up. He was an inch or so taller than I, and maybe thirty pounds heavier and ten years older. He was also a fighter and a brawler, from the look of him, which I’m not and never will be, but I meant it sincerely when I told him, ‘You lay a hand on me, and your friend will have to pull me off you.’
Jerry laughed at that, looking past me at the older man. ‘Hotter’n pistol, isn’t he?’
‘I noticed that.’
He nodded and grinned and backed away from me toward the door. ‘All righty, your highness,’ he said. ‘You just come along nice, and I won’t have any call to touch your lily-white skin.’ He opened the door, and made a mock bow as he ushered me out In the corridor. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘Pretty please.’
Six
It’s hard to describe the third floor of that building. You take an old building like that, and on one floor you scoop out all of the interior walls and partitions, leaving just a big empty rectangle bounded by the outer walls. Inside that rectangle you build a metal box, the bottom and top flush against the floor and ceiling,—the sides about three feet smaller than the dimensions of the building, leaving a kind of areaway corridor all around the box. One side of the box you make of vertical iron bars, so air can get in, and at one end you cut a space for a door and put in a metal door with double safety glass in a small window in it at eye-level. Inside this metal box you make new partitions, of slabs of metal and rows of vertical iron bars, and then you daub the whole thing thickly and sloppily with grey enamel paint. Then you have a jail.
Just outside the door to the box there was a desk, and a man in uniform sitting at it. Jerry said something cute to him about me, and he took a large manila envelope out of a drawer of the desk and told me to put my valuables in it, and my belt, and my shoelaces. The only valuable I had was my wallet. I handed the envelope back, and then Jerry said, ‘His glasses, too. We wouldn’t want him to break them and cut himself.’
‘That’s right,’ said the uniformed man.
‘I need my glasses,’ I said. I held them on with my right hand, feeling something very close to panic.
‘Not here,’ Jerry told me. ‘There’s nothing to see up here.’
‘Come on, come on,’ said the uniformed man impatiently. He rattled the envelope.
I took off my glasses and gave them to him. He put them in the envelope. Then he asked me my name, and wrote it on the flap, and then he and Jerry escorted me into the box. They put me in the second cell on the right, and left me there.
I have very bad eyes, 20-150 in the left and 20-200 in the right.
I stood squinting and blinking by the bars for a little while, trying in make out my surroundings. The cell I was in was bounded on three sides by metal walls, and contained a metal cot suspended from the wall by chains, a small dirty sink, and a small dirty toilet. On the fourth side was the barred door, facing out onto I lie central open area running the length of the box. There were nix cells on each side of this area, and I could look across through I he bars of my cell and through the bars of the cell across the way which was empty—and through the bars at the back of that cell, and catch a small corner glimpse of a window in the original outer wall. Without my glasses, the glimpse was a vague one.
After a while, when I got used to the idea that they had gone away and left me, I turned away from the bars and went over to sit down on the metal cot. There was a thin Army blanket stretched out on it, and I rubbed the palm of my hand against the rough surface.
I have never been in trouble with the Law, not at home and not in the Army and not at college. I have stayed out of trouble, I think, not ou
t of fear of consequences but simply out of disinclination. Negative morality, you might call it. The sort of thing that leads to arrest and imprisonment had never been the sort of thing that I wanted to do. I hadn’t changed, not in my attitudes nor in my actions, and yet here I was in a jail cell, robbed of most of my sight, bullied and taunted.
Could this really happen? Could malignance behind a badge suddenly pounce on anybody, anybody at all? What a terribly dangerous world I’d been living in, all along, not knowing it.
Being without my glasses for some reason made me feel drowsy and sluggish. My nerves were jumpy, from what had happened and from not knowing what would happen next, but the drowsiness overcame that and after a little while I stretched out on the metal cot and closed my eyes.
I hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but I did anyway, and woke up when the uniformed man was in the cell, shaking me. I came out of it fuzzily, and from a great distance heard Jerry saying, ‘Look out there, Clarence, he don’t like people to touch him.’
‘That’s too bad. Come on, you, on your feet.’
I got up from the cot, stiff and sore, blinking in yellow light. Jerry, standing just outside the cell, said, ‘Come on along, Little Lord Fauntleroy. Captain Willick wants to talk to you again.’
I stumbled out of the cell, and followed him obediently, Clarence trailing along behind me. I had slept humidly and heavily; perspiration glued my clothes to my body, and my head was a hive of buzzings.
We went back downstairs again, and down the same corridor, and into the room with the blue linoleum floor. The older man—he must be Captain Willick—was seated at the desk again, and the hanging globe was now lit, filling the room with bright shadowless light. There were other men in the room, but because I didn’t have my glasses I couldn’t see them very well, they were only shapes around the walls.
Captain Willick said, ‘Come in here, Standish. Sit down.’
I went over to the desk, but misjudged and knocked my knee against the chair as I went around it to sit down. I sat down and rubbed the knee, and Willick said, ‘Where’s his glasses?’
Jerry answered. ‘With his other valuables.’
‘Get them.’ Just two words, but in a tone and manner that surprised me. They were said heavily, and reluctantly, and with a kind of dull anger that seemed to be directed inward rather than at—me or Jerry or anyone else. For the first time, the idea came to me that Captain Willick didn’t like what he and his minions were doing to me, and the idea surprised me. I squinted at him, trying to see his face clearly enough to read his expression but I couldn’t, and I knew it didn’t matter. His face wouldn’t betray him. If I’d had my glasses, if my sight had been working as well as my hearing, if I hadn’t been in the position of having to depend so much on my ears, I might not have caught the inflection in his voice either.
But if he didn’t like what he was doing, then why didn’t he stop? It didn’t make any sense, there wasn’t any answer in the world I could think of, and so I asked him, ‘Why do you do this if you don’t like to do it?’
He answered quickly, and angrily. ‘You shut your mouth! I had enough smart-aleck cracks out of you the last time!’
‘Hut I didn’t mean—’
A calm voice from the side said, ‘Better keep it in, boy,’ as though in friendly warning. I didn’t recognize the voice, and I couldn’t make out the speaker, but I took his word for it. This Captain Willick was very touchy, maybe because of that dislike for what he was doing, and the best thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut. They’d been right; a spell in the cooler had cooled me off. I still felt that I was being treated unjustly, but I no longer believed I was capable of righting wrongs simply by shouting for a specified length of time. This, too, will fade; the evil ones will eventually tire of me, release me, and go prowling for fresher prey.
We waited in silence till Jerry returned and gave me back my glasses. I put them on, and blinked a few times as the world came buck into focus. I saw now that there were three men standing along the wall, the one who had been with Jerry and Captain Willick earlier, plus two more built from the same model. They till had their suit coats open and their hands in their pockets, and I heir ties hung askew on their shirt fronts.
Captain Willick had a thin stack of papers on his desk, stapled together at the corner and covered with typewriting. He was studying the top sheet gloomily, but now he looked over at me and said, ‘You feel like answering questions now?’
I hesitated, pushing down the angry answers, and said, ‘Yes.’
‘Good. Now, tell me about the first time you met Charles Hamilton.’
‘I thought I told you—I never met him.’
‘Never at all.’
‘No.’
‘Mmm. And when did Killy first meet him, do you know that?’
He seemed to want to antagonize me all over again, but I refused to let him get to me. I said, ‘He’d never met him either.’
‘You’re sure of that, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘He told you he never met Charles Hamilton.’
‘He told me we would both be meeting him for the first time.’
‘In so many words?’
‘I don’t remember his exact words.’
‘When you got back to the motel at six o’clock, you say Killy was there?’
‘I got back at quarter after five, and he was there.’
‘Did he leave before you went to the diner, or after?’
‘It must have been after,’ I said, surprised. I hadn’t known Walter had gone out at all. Then, too late, I realized that had been another of the twist questions, that Walter hadn’t gone out and wouldn’t have gone out, because he’d been waiting for Hamilton.
But Willick didn’t seem to take any notice of the answer. All he said was, ‘And neither of you went out from the time you got back till the time we showed up, is that right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And when you were with Killy earlier in the day, he hadn’t visited anybody but Mrs Hamilton, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did he visit while you went to the diner?’
‘Nobody.’
Willick glanced at me, affecting a sluggish surprise. ‘Then where’d he go?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘You said he went out while you were gone.’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t say that?’
‘No.’
‘I could have sworn you said that.’ He looked over at the men leaning against the wall. ‘Isn’t that what it sounded like to you boys?’
They all agreed that was what it had sounded like to them. I pointed at the male stenographer, at work again in his corner, and said, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’
Willick studied me as though I’d just asked to marry his daughter. Slowly, he said, ‘Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re just trying to irritate me,’ he said. He got to his feet and said to the men against the wall, ‘I’ll be back in a little while, fire if you can get a straight story out of him.’
‘You betcha,’ said Jerry. He came over and sat behind the desk, grinning to himself, while Willick left the room. The other three men came over and stood around me, looking down at me.
Jerry said, ‘You were gonna tell the Captain about Killy’s gun. You can tell me instead.’
‘He doesn’t have a gun,’ I said.
One of the other men said, ‘He just keeps contradicting himself, doesn’t he?’
‘1 know it,’ said Jerry. ‘Take off your glasses.’
‘What?’
‘The specs,’ said one of the other men. He reached out and look them off me. ‘We want them off.’
1 sat blinking, suddenly as afraid as when I’d first seen the (tuns. I sat lower in the chair, and my shoulders hunched.
Jerry said, ‘Now, did Killy tell you where he went while you were at the diner?’
�
��He didn’t go anywhere.’
One of them slapped my face, open-handed and not very hard, mid a voice said, ‘Just answer yes or no, boy.’
‘I’ll repeat the question,’ said Jerry. ‘Did Killy tell you where he went while you were at the diner?’
I said, ‘No.’
‘Do you know where he went?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know what he did with the gun?’
‘He didn’t—No.’ I heard a chuckle.
‘All right,’ said Jerry. ‘Now, why did Killy threaten Mrs Hamilton?’
I said, ‘No.’
There was a baffled silence, and then Jerry said, ‘What?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘You told me to answer yes or no.’
One of the others said, approvingly, ‘Oh, he’s a cute one,’ and I he hand slapped my face again, a little harder.
‘Now, Paul,’ said Jerry, ‘why make things so difficult for your self? This is a serious business here, don’t you realize that?’
‘No.’ The hand slapped me again, and I said, ‘I’m beginning to realize it.’
‘That’s good, Paul.’ Jerry rested his hand on my knee and said, ‘You know, boy, I like you. You’ve got guts.’
‘I hate your guts,’ I told him.
This time the hand swung hard, and I nearly lost my balance and fell off the chair.
Jerry said, ‘Easy there, Ben, you bumped into the witness that time. Now, Paul, I want to ask that last question again. Why did Killy threaten Mrs Hamilton?’
‘Ben’s going to hit me again,’ I said. ‘Killy didn’t threaten her.’
I didn’t get hit, which surprised me. Paper rustled, and Jerry said, ‘This I don’t understand. Listen to this, Paul. Mrs Hamilton told us Killy said to her, and this is a quote, quote, if your husband doesn’t show up at the motel by seven, you’ll be sorry. He better show up or else, unquote. Now, Paul, do you mean Killy never said that?’
‘Not in those words,’ I said, ‘and not with that kind of meaning.’
‘Paul, you aren’t trying to play word-games with me, are you? Killy’s admitted those are his words.’
‘But they aren’t. Mrs Hamilton didn’t want the neighbours to see her husband talking to union people, so we said we’d talk to him at the motel instead, but if he didn’t show up by seven we’d go back to the house and talk to him there, that’s all there was to it.’
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