Siren sounds had all vanished. The uproar of voices and running, pounding footfalls sounded all over the building. Highmark Meadows had come alive with noise. Utterly disgusted and defeated, I walked around the room, digging out my cigarettes, waiting for the official police.
As an unofficial scab, I had done my best and yet it was my worst. Not even Monks' Well Dones was going to make me feel any better.
I'd blown it.
The whole caper.
Gregory was still as out of his mind as ever.
Stephanie Orodney was still dead. And corpses are completely useless. No good to anybody at all. Least of all, policemen.
It was all of a half hour later, with Monks at my side, helping me find Melissa somewhere behind the main building, bound and gagged helplessly in a private quarters apartment which the Madame and Cosmo Pappas had used as a hide-out after quitting Fifth Avenue, when I realized that I had broken the second and third fingers of my right hand. The not-yet-healed flesh had cushioned very little of the haymaker I had hung on Cosmo Pappas. But that didn't mean anything, compared to the happy knowledge that my own Most Beautiful Woman In The World, was okay. All in one piece and nothing more than worried blue and sick at heart about what had been happening to the man in her life.
Monks had grumbled, assigned his men to checking out the building, taken Dr. Deming into custody, as well as Madame Alarma's muscular confederate and put in some hurried calls back to the Department in the city. The lid had flown off a lot of things. But there was nothing anyone could do for the quiet man in the chair, staring toward the wall. A man who could say nothing, explain nothing and see nothing.
The Great Gregory was gone, again.
For how long and how severely, I didn't know.
No one knew.
Melissa huddled against me while everybody milled all around, talking, thinking, trying to make some sense out of everything. Monks was a tower of efficiency. There wasn't anything he needed from me at all save the answers to all the questions he would ask me later on.
"Ed," Melissa murmured at my ear, "you'll be the death of me yet. Make that both of us. Can't we go into some other kind of business? You know—like potting geraniums or something?"
"We'll see," I said, hugging her close to me as if she was going to run away. "Just a little more time, that's all."
"I can wait," she said, "for you."
I was still looking at Gregory sitting in his chair.
Sitting like a dead man. Like an automaton without gears.
I silently wished with everything I had in me that he was tuning up his Stradivarius, priming to play some great selection from Beethoven as only he could play it. It was a dream, of course. A dark cloud of unreality. Ephemeral and ghostly. The first bullet he had put into the cameo face before him had taken all that away. Maybe, forever. For all time. Certainly for a twenty-year stretch.
Nobody could say for sure.
The stuff that dreams are made of, can be just as artificial and unreal, as that black bird statuette they called The Maltese Falcon, pursuit of which had led so many people down the river.
Don't play it again, Sam.
Just make room for me.
And the Great Gregory.
We drove back to New York, Manhattan New York, that night.
After dark. In the Buick.
Monks and the squad car crowd were still back in Highmark Meadows, winding up matters. There was always a lot to do before a Murder One could be locked up tight for official delivery. The old bulldog had sent us on home, with his mixed blessings, strangely enough, congratulating me for letting him in on what I had before making my grandstand play. Instead of the usual Lone Wolf routine.
I was still unhappy, though. Something Melissa was quick to spot and quicker to remedy. She lay against the hollow of my shoulder as I moodily sped back to the Crooked City. The other doctors at the cypress-tree filled institution in the country, once proved free of any conspiracy with Dr. Deming, had put several more nails in old Gregory's mental coffin. He had retrograded alarmingly, according to their expert opinion. He was worse than he'd been when they'd first laid their equipment on him. The prognosis was—hopeless.
Inky black night kept pace with the Buick as we winded and droned toward home. There was no moon for lovers, not even a vagabond star. It was as if eternal darkness had settled over everything. A damn blackout, from the word Go.
The car radio was on. Soft, filtering, lazy sort of music filled the shut-tight interior. It had been too cold to open any windows. The heater was toasting our shoes. The quiet, melodic strains edged into my sub-conscious. It was What Now, My Love?, delineated in strings, with barely any brass at all. Which figured, the way I was feeling.
Just the sort of nightfall serenade for a long drive for two people who intended to spend a lot of future time together.
But it only made me sadder, somehow.
I kept thinking about Gregory and Valentin and Gerard and that smiling Gunnery Sergeant. And poor beautiful crazy Madame Alarma. Nobody had really gotten what was coming to them. Nobody at all.
Did anybody ever, when you got right down to it?
"We still going to do it, Ed?" Melissa asked quietly, the soft music counter-pointing the words.
"Just try to back out of it, now. I'll break your arm."
"Your fingers are broken, Ed. Two of them. Won't that kind of slow up things? We can wait another week or so—if you want to."
"I don't want to wait, Mercer. I want to get married."
"You sure, Noon?"
"It's about the only thing I am sure of."
"Is it all right if I say I'm glad? Gladder than I've ever been?"
"It's all right. Say it."
"I'm gladder than I've ever been."
The lovely music segued into a station break. A time signal. A nasal and wide-awake announcer crackled on about the next selection and suddenly, I wasn't thinking about Gregory anymore. Or any of the lunatic mess I'd left behind my wheels. I was thinking of fine legs, warm nights, an unforgettably lovely face and the wonder of the world with a woman in it that said she loved you and the marvel that you loved her back. Maybe the System had something to say for itself, at that. I started to hum, under my breath. Melissa hugged my arm, shaping her body to mine. A great joy climbed all over me.
"I love you, black girl," I said.
"I was kind of hoping you did, white man," she whispered.
I did, all right.
I no longer had to wonder about that.
It was the one single thing, the only thing, in the whole wide Rand-McNally that I was sure of, anymore. The only thing I'd bet my life on. My practice on.
Without a .45 for insurance, either.
More music came, saturating the close interior of the Buick, as the announcer's voice faded, and another instrumental penetrated the silence. Up ahead of the stabbing headlights, the country road was a curving ribbon of ground, leading toward another day, another dawn. A Tomorrow that maybe had more hope in it than Yesterday or Today did. I didn't know. Unlike the Madame Alarmas of this world, I really didn't want to know. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Dangerous? It was downright deadly, more often than not.
I drove on, with Melissa curled at my side, hopefully, too.
Anderson's Fiddle-Faddle leaped from the car radio, all the strings going on a wild, merry romp. If it had been David Rose's Holiday For Strings, I would have considered it just as ironic. And just as fitting, somehow.
The music was all too appropriate.
Another splendid Swan Song.
To close a violin case, that is.
I had paid the fiddler, too.
Tadeusz Anton Gregory had paid him far more than anybody.
That was the unhappy coda to it all.
There had been Paganini, Heifetz, Menuhin, Kreisler, Szigeti, Elman and Isaac Stern, and then there had been Gregory.
On a Stradivarius.
He was going to be a hard man to forget.
CODA
(An office in Manhattan. The time is early December. We see the same sort of furnishings and accessories which characterized the room in ACT ONE. There is a man and a woman kissing Center Stage. The man is tall and attractive in the American way; the woman is lovely. A black woman of exquisite, thoroughbred beauty. Toward Stage Left, on a smaller desk than the large one to the right of it, stands a curious telephone. It is of red-white-and-blue color, almost a psychedelic pattern. The man and woman hold the kiss for a long time. As the Curtain rises, the two people break apart, smiling happily at each other, and the red-white-and-blue phone begins ringing. Loudly, insistently, like a summons of the greatest urgency. . . .)
ENCORE, WHITE HOUSE
"Answer the phone, Ed. Don't just stand there looking at it as if it were going to disappear in a puff of smoke."
"I don't want to answer it. I've got nothing to say to him that I didn't say the last time."
"He's the President, man. He's not a salesman asking you to buy his household detergent."
"He's a salesman, all right. He just got himself re-elected back there, didn't he? On top of four years of Vietnam, too. To hell with him. Everytime I talk to him I wind up in some faraway place getting my tail shot up—"
"Answer the phone," Melissa said quietly, regretfully. "You owe him that much. He wouldn't call unless it was important."
"Stop it," I roared, trying to drown out the damned din of the phone. The office walls echoed with the ringing interruption. "City Hall tomorrow, remember? You want to risk losing that again? Don't sacrifice yourself. Not after all these years. You know how I am. If he pours it on and makes it real good, I'll say Yes to whatever he asks and then I'll stall around, wanting more time and before we both know it, we won't be saying I-love-you with our own teeth. I don't want—"
"If you don't pick up that phone, I will."
She meant it, too. There was more fire and steel in her than all the munitions factories there are in the world.
"Let it tingle its brains out," I snarled.
"Stop beating yourself. You have to talk to him."
"Sure. Just like I have to pay taxes and have to die someday."
"Go ahead, now."
"I tell you I don't want to."
The phone was still ringing. It might have been eavesdropping.
"Do it now before it stops ringing. He'd only call back later. You know that. Please. For me." She smiled across the room at me. The brave smile, the one that might be losing everything.
"Yeah, I know it. And you are crazy, Mel, you know that?"
"Sure I am." Her low sigh cushioned the lie, made it hurt less.
The red-white-and-blue phone was just on the verge of shutting down when I lifted the receiver very slowly and made the connection.
Melissa Mercer put her lips together and blew me a soft kiss across the great divide of another kind of world that separated us.
I knew exactly what she meant.
There's been no way invented of ever really saying goodbye to the White House.
Maybe, there never can be.
ENDNOTES
QUICK POISON
*London Bloody London 1972 Curtis Books
Killer on the Keys Page 14
