So I didn’t do any of that. I looked at him, carefully, and said, ‘You’re big to be a coward.’
Jerry laughed uproariously, and pounded my shoulder. ‘Now, that’s what I call spirit!’ he shouted. ‘Wouldn’t you say so, Ben?’
‘A punk,’ said Ben. He turned his head slightly, and spat phlegm.
‘Naw, Ben,’ said Jerry. ‘He’s a college boy. Isn’t that right, Paul?’
‘That’s right.’
‘There, see? I like you, Paul,’ Jerry admitted. ‘I like you just fine. Don’t you like him, Ben?’
‘A punk,’ said Ben again.
Jerry shrugged, and then turned serious. ‘Well, now, Paul,’ he-said, ‘I tell you what. You give your car keys to Ben, here, and then you ride along with me, how’s about that?’
‘What for?’
‘Why, to see Captain Willick,’ he said, as though that explained everything.
‘Now, wait a second,’ I said.
Ben hitched his pants up, and said, ‘That’s it. Resist arrest.’
‘Aw, naw, Ben,’ said Jerry. ‘Paul’s going to be a good boy.’
I said, ‘I suppose you’ll try to strip the gears.’ I handed him the keys.
Ben took them without a word, and went away to the Ford There was a pale blue Plymouth behind it, unmarked, and Jerry led me to it. We got in, and followed the Ford back down into town.
After a while I said, ‘How’d you know I was up there, anyway?’
He turned to grin at me. ‘Why, we followed you, Paul. Watched you eat your breakfast and everything. We take an interest in you, boy.’
‘Oh.’
I turned away and looked out the window. How had I come to this? I wasn’t the kind of person—I didn’t lead the kind of life—where I would be followed, where the police would be constantly dragging me down to headquarters, where mindless pragmatists like Ben could slap me around to their heart’s content. I was a student, and an employee, and an honest man. How had I come to this?
We went back to the familiar ugly building and around to the parking lot in back. Ben wordlessly gave me back the keys to the Ford, and the three of us went inside. This time, we stayed on I he first floor and went to a long narrow room with a bench along one wall. ‘You just have a seat,’ Jerry told me. ‘I’ll be right back.’
I had a seat. Ben leaned against the wall by the door and smoked a cigarette, looking at nothing.
After a minute Jerry came back through the other door and motioned to me. ‘The Captain wants to talk to you,’ he said.
I went on in, followed by Ben. This was apparently the Captain’s office, and was a smallish room dominated by his large wooden desk. Papers were littered all over the desk, and there were two filing cabinets to one side. A window looked out at the street.
Captain Willick was sitting at the desk, looking sour and angry. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s your explanation?’
There was nothing to do but tell him the truth. I wasn’t adept enough in this world to try evasions and cunning. So I said, ‘Mrs Hamilton lied to you. I went up to ask her why.’
‘You did, huh?’
‘Yes. And she told me why. She was afraid to mention the union, and the letter her husband wrote. She didn’t want anybody to know about her husband’s connection with the union. Later on, when she realized it didn’t mean anything any more, she thought it was too late, and she was afraid to admit she’d lied.’
Jerry shook his head in mock admiration. ‘Ain’t he a talker?’
‘Shut up, Jerry.’ Willick said it in a monotone, without raising his voice or turning his head. In the same voice, he said to me, ‘I happen to run the police force around here, young man. I haw the badge and the authority. When the time comes to question witnesses, I do it, or order somebody to have it done.’ He pointed a rough finger at me. ‘You have no authority, and no standing. You’re just a smart-aleck youngster from Washington who thinks he can get away with a lot of lip. Now, we’re still holding that gangster friend of yours, until he decides to cooperate, and by all rights we should still be holding you. But you’re young and you don’t seem to know any better, so I was easy with you, I let you go. But if I hear of you so much as opening your mouth to anyone in this town, anyone at all, sticking your nose in where you’ve got no business, you’ll be back in the cooler so fast it’ll make your head swim. Do I make myself clear?’
I nodded.
‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Get on out of here.’
I should have gone, and I wanted to go, but I stayed a little while longer. Willick had reminded me of Walter, still imprisoned here, and I was the only one who could possibly help Walter. And by now it seemed as though the only way I could get Willick to let Walter go was to let Willick know I could prove who had really killed Charles Hamilton. And to do that I needed information.
So I took my courage in both hands, braced myself, and said, ‘I’d like to ask you a question.’
He looked at me, and his lips compressed. ‘I think you’re getting closer to that cell,’ he said. ‘But go right ahead and ask.’
‘I’m not trying to be a smart aleck, I simply want to know. If you don’t want to answer the question, just say so and I’ll leave.’
‘Cut the preamble.’
I took a deep breath, feeling that I was getting closer to that cell, but driven by Walter’s dependence on me to ask the question anyway. ‘Do you care at all who killed Charles Hamilton?’
The question seemed to surprise him. He didn’t get mad, and he didn’t answer right away. He gazed at me, frowning, and after a minute he said, ‘What do you think?’
‘You’ve assigned two men to follow me. You’ve got other men tied up giving Walter a bad time. But Walter and I didn’t have anything to do with Hamilton’s death, and I think you know it.’
Willick gnawed on his cheek and studied the mess of papers on his desk for a minute, and then he said, ‘I’m going to answer your question. At five o’clock yesterday afternoon, Hamilton left the Work Boot building along with all the rest of the employees, and went into the parking lot next door. As he neared his car, four shots sounded, and he dropped down dead. There were about a hundred and fifty people in the parking lot at the time he was killed. More than half of them didn’t even know it happened, and a lot of them just got into their cars and drove away. But every last one of those employees has been questioned, and believe me that was a lot of work. It added up to nothing, because none of them saw anything. There was a crowd walking through the lot, and anybody at all could have taken a gun out of his lunch bucket, plugged Hamilton, put the gun away in the lunch bucket and kept on going. All he had to do was be dressed like everybody else.’
He sighed, glanced at Jerry and Ben, then looked down at the desk again and went on: ‘The slugs have been retrieved from Hamilton’s body, all four of them, and have been sent to Albany. Hamilton’s locker at the plant has been searched, and so has his car, and so has his home. All of his cronies have been questioned, Including the bartender at the bar where he usually hung out. His girl friends have been questioned, and his wife has been questioned. As a result of questioning Mrs Hamilton, we learned about you two. You’d been acting suspiciously, so we brought you in. When we learned your partner was union muscle, you looked very promising, so we leaned on you a little bit to see what would happen. At the same time, we have been continuing the Investigation on all other fronts. As for yourself, I’m pretty well satisfied now you’re in the clear. But you were away from your partner at the time Hamilton was being killed. I tried to make you change your timing on that, to see how sure you were, and you were dead sure. So you’re in the clear, but Killy isn’t. Nevertheless, you feel a loyalty to him and an antagonism toward us, so you’re harping on Mrs Hamilton’s story, even though what she told us won’t break the case one way or the other. In tin-meantime, we haven’t charged Killy with the crime, and won’t until and unless we have a case we can give the district attorney But Killy isn’t g
oing to leave here until I’m sure in my mind about him.’ He looked up at me at last. ‘You satisfied now?’
I was, though not in the way he meant. I was satisfied that I knew as much about the murder as I was likely to learn from the police. As for his meaning, I wasn’t completely satisfied. Then-were things he’d left out. Mr Fleisch, for instance, being at the motel in his Lincoln. Jerry breaking up our possessions. And he hadn’t said whether he believed Mrs Hamilton was telling the truth or not. But to go into any of that would be to question his motives, to needle him in the soft spot, and I knew how quickly that could enrage him, so I said, ‘I guess I’m satisfied. Thank you.’
‘Sure. Get out of here.’
I got out of there, and climbed into the Ford, and drove back to the motel. On the way, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the blue Plymouth a block behind me. I clenched my teeth and stared through the windshield at the street.
Back at the motel, I paced and paced, this way and that across the room, around the furniture and back again, like an animal in a cage, like one of the big cats in the zoo. The urgency was on me stronger than ever, and I was so full of nervous energy I wanted to jump up and down. But there was nothing to do. I had hoped Willick would tell me something I could use for a lead, but he hadn’t. Time inched by, hulking painfully past me, and I prowled the room, alive to dangers I could barely name. There was nothing to do, nothing to do. I wanted to race down Harpur Boulevard, roaring, bearing a burning torch. I wanted to leap and scream and hit out with my fists. But there was nothing to do, nothing to do. The Plymouth waited outside, and I waited for two o’clock.
Walter would tell me what to do. He had to, he had to give me direction. I walked and prowled, I jumped up on the bed and down on the floor again, but I built up the nervous energy faster than I could dispel it, and the sense of urgency grew stronger and stronger. I did sailor jumps in the middle of the room, I did push-ups, I got to my feet again and walked and walked, and I waited for two o’clock. Walter would give me direction.
Ten
I talked to Walter in the same room where I’d met Sondra Fleisch. Captain Willick had managed to get me about half convinced that he possessed a sort of rough integrity, despite everything, but one look at Walter cured me of that idea.
Ben, or somebody else, had leaned a lot harder on Walter than they had on me. One eye was puffed and discoloured, encircled by bluish-grey flesh. He had small raw nicks along both sides of his jaw, as though he’d been hit more than once by someone wearing a ring, and his left thumb was swollen and red. His tit was gone, three buttons had been ripped from his shirt, and the handkerchief pocket of his jacket, where he kept his cigarettes, had been ripped half off and now dangled forlornly.
He was pushed in, not gently, by a pinch-faced man in uniform. The pinch-faced man went over to stand by the window and watch us, and Walter came up to the table, where I was sitting. When he smiled, I saw that one side of his mouth was puffy, too. He said, ‘Hello, there. Welcome to the worker’s Utopia.’
‘What happened to your thumb?’ That was all I could think about, for the moment; I didn’t even bother to say hello first.
He looked at it, in mild surprise. ‘Somebody stepped on it,’ he said. He smiled, and added, ‘By accident.’
‘You should see what you look like,’ I told him.
‘I know.’ He sat down, moving gingerly. ‘Although I came out of a few football games in worse shape than this. But they aren’t very bright around here. In a bigger town, they’d know enough not to leave any marks on me.’
‘What do you want me to do, Walter? They let me go.’
‘They told me. I’m glad of that. I’m sorry I got you into this.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘I thought this was going to be a piece of cake, you know it?
The unbruised side of his mouth smiled. ‘It turned out to be a piece of shit instead.’
The uniformed man by the window said, ‘Watch your language, you.’ His voice was high and nasal, and he glared at us around his narrow nose.
Walter grinned at him, and said to me, ‘If we converse in poly-syllables, he won’t comprehend.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Tell me the causation of the distress.’
‘You don’t know?’
He shook his head. ‘The inquisition has been unidirectional thus far.’
‘Oh. Well, our correspondent,’ I told him, looking around for the right long words, ‘is a decedent.’
His eyebrows raised. ‘Was he assisted on the journey?’
‘Via a quatrain of metallic ovoids, rapidly propelled.’
‘And the decedent’s espoused? There was something about a statement.’
‘A prevarication resulting from panic. Additional panic en-sued, fortifying the original prevarication.’
He nodded. ‘Communication with our point of origin seems indicated. You remember Mr Fletcher?’
I’d never met any Mr Fletcher, but I knew what he meant. ‘Of course,’ I said.
He smiled again, and seemed to relax. ‘The only thing we can do is wait,’ he said. ‘I’m not guilty of any crime, so they’ll have to let me go sooner or later.’
I know.’ The long word game was over. There hadn’t been any real need for it, but we had both enjoyed it, and both needed it in a way. We, Walter more than I, had been ground beneath in impersonal heel, and some dignity and self-respect are bound to be scraped off in the process. This small meaningless victory, using our superior vocabulary over the guard as a kind of code, helped, in a childish way, to restore some of the self-respect. ‘How long have you been out?’ he asked me. ‘Since this morning. By the way, we may get some help in town here.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I talked to a girl this morning, she works for the local paper.’
He frowned, studying me. ‘I hope you were careful,’ he said.
‘She’s a schoolmate of mine. She’s on her six months too, at the local paper.’
‘So what did you tell her?’
‘Everything.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t like that,’ he said. ‘It could boomerang.’
‘She’s on our side, Walter, she really is. She was shocked when I told her what had been done to us. By the way, she’s Fleisch daughter.’
He started, and said, ‘By the way! For God’s sake, Paul!’
‘Now, wait a second. Don’t prejudge her, will you?’
‘And you gave her the whole story.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can hardly wait to see the paper,’ he said.
‘Maybe they can carry your picture in tomorrow’s edition,’ I told him.
‘Just call Fletcher, will you? Reverse the charges.’
‘Okay, I will.’
There was a pause, and then he said, ‘You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you, would you?’ He napped his dangling com pocket and said, ‘They took mine away from me.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ I reached for my cigarettes.
‘No smoking in here,’ said the guard. So he had his small meaningless victory, too.
Walter shrugged, and smiled at me. ‘No imagination,’ he said.
‘They’ll have to let you go eventually.’
‘It’s the occupational risk,’ he said. ‘Union organizers aren’t always welcome. I should have checked this place out better be fore bringing you up here.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I told him, and oddly enough at that moment it was true. Just being able to talk to Walter had done a lot to calm me and bring back my self-confidence. I said, ‘Is there any thing I should be doing? I’ve been walking around in circles.’
‘Just call Fletcher,’ he said. ‘And then sit tight.’
‘I went to see Mrs Hamilton,’ I told him, ‘but after that I couldn’t think of anything else to do.’
Walter smiled at me, and reached out to pat my arm. ‘You’re a good friend, Paul,’ he said.
I was embarrassed, and di
dn’t say anything.
The guard said, ‘Time to go.’ He sounded pleased that it was so.
We stood up, and Walter said, ‘Be sure to call Fletcher first thing.’
‘Right.’
We shook hands, and I left the building as Walter was taken back upstairs. I’d left the Ford a block away. I walked over to it, lighting a cigarette on the way, got in, and drove back to Harpur Boulevard. After two blocks, I found an angled parking space near a drugstore. Leaving the car there, I went on into the store and got two dollars’ worth of change, then closeted myself in a phone booth to make the call.
It took a while to get through, since I didn’t know the number, but finally a cigar-smoker’s voice said, ‘Fletcher here.’
‘My name’s Standish, Mr Fletcher,’ I said. ‘I’m in Wittburg, New York, with Walter Killy.’
‘Uh huh.’ He sounded as though he was writing everything down as I said it.
‘Our contact up here was murdered, Mr Fletcher, and they’re holding Walter in jail.’
‘Uh huh. Charged him?’
‘No, they’re holding him for questioning. They had me in there for twelve hours. Walter calls this a sewed-up town.’
‘Uh huh. Where you staying?’
‘The Wittburg Motel.’
‘Uh huh. What’s the nearest city to you?’
‘Watertown, I think.’
‘Never heard of it. Something bigger.’
‘Syracuse.’
‘Uh huh. Make me a reservation in that motel for tonight. Can you get in to talk with Walter?’
‘Not till tomorrow. Visiting hours are from two to three.’
‘Uh huh. All right, I’ll be up tonight. Better reserve two double units.’
‘All right, I will.’
‘Good.’ Click. He was gone.
I came out of the phone booth feeling at least two hundred per cent better. There had been something about the dry dispatch with which Mr Fletcher had handled the call that had instilled total confidence in me. Walter was a good man, but his field was union organizing, not legal shenanigans. I felt assured that when Mr Fletcher arrived Captain Willick and his bully boys would suddenly find the tables turned. Mr Fletcher would stand for no nonsense.
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