I said, "Yes. It must have been. Have you seen Obermeyer?"
"Not today. Why?"
"I want to know how soon I can get out of here."
She looked at me narrowly. "What's all the sudden hurry?"
"I've got something to do."
"Walt, are you crazy? You leave that to the police."
"Police," I said. "Ha."
"That's unfair. Koleski's doing everything he can. They can't just pick people out of thin air."
"This didn't happen to Koleski. It happened to me. I've got a special interest."
"You forget it. If you want to know about that letter, you ask Tracey."
"Do you think she's likely to admit she made it up?"
"I don't know," said Mae, "but I know what happened to you the last meeting you had with those boys. I don't think you could stand another one."
I thought probably she was right. But at that particular moment I didn't care. From now on, no matter what Tracey did, there would be a wall between us until I got the truth about that letter.
That was on a Tuesday. On Thursday, Tracey came back. She walked in unheralded, as fresh and pretty as a bunch of roses, and she kissed me and put her arms around me and cried, and it was just as though there had never been a question between us, or a second's doubt. Nothing had changed, nothing was any different, except that there was a little line now at each end of Tracey's mouth, very faint, almost invisible from being so new, but quite hard, quite set. I noticed, too, that it was difficult to catch her eye. It got to be a game, trying to make her look straight at me. I played it all the time she was there. I lost.
I didn't say anything to her. I didn't have so much pride that I could afford to throw it around and somehow I didn't want to bring up the whole subject, anyway. If she had been telling the truth, I didn't want to be the one to accuse her unjustly. If she hadn't, I couldn't prove it. Not now. That would come later. Much later, when I wasn't so sore and bruised inside, when I was better used to the idea and wouldn't mind seeing her forced out all shamed and naked from behind her sheltering pretenses.
Pretty and gay and a lot of fun. Mae was right. This sort of thing didn't give Tracey much scope for her particular talents. She looked at the rig they had on my leg, with the toes sticking up out of it, puffy and bluish, and then she went and stood by the open window, taking deep breaths.
"I'll get better," I told her. Suddenly I wanted to laugh, not because anything was very funny, but because she looked sicker than I did, and I felt I had to cheer her up.
"They're going to take more X-rays Monday. If they look good they'll put another gismo on it and then maybe I can go home."
"That's wonderful."
"I'm damned sick of this place, I can tell you."
"I'll have everything ready. Without the children there to bother you, you can get a good rest."
The last thing I planned to do was rest, but I didn't argue.
Then she asked me if I had seen Mr. Koleski lately.
"He dropped by yesterday," I said.
"Has he found those boys yet?"
"No."
Do you want them caught, I wondered, so that your children will be safe? Or do you not want them caught, because they will deny your story?
Her face was turned partly away from me. I couldn't read it.
"I suppose he is trying," she said. "But it does seem terrible if people can do a thing like that and get away with it."
"Tracey," I said, "you get around the neighbourhood more than I do. Do you know a tall skinny boy named Bill?"
She looked puzzled until I explained. Then she bent her head and frowned, as though she was trying hard to think. Finally she said, "No, I don't."
"He's the key," I said. "If we could find him we could find the others."
"Who is we?" said Tracey. "The only business you have now is to get well."
I didn't argue that, either.
"Walt."
"Yes?" She had her back to me now, full on, looking out the window at the sooty mill sheds. It was one of those northwind days when spring goes gray and cheerless, and there was not even the Bessemer to liven the view.
"Father came up to Boston. He seemed to think I was trying to——" She hesitated, choosing her words. "He practically accused me of trying to evade my responsibilities."
That was interesting news, but I made no comment.
She asked me point-blank, "Is that what you think?"
Attack, I thought, is always the best defense. I looked at her. She had taken her hat off, and her hair. was fleecy bright around her head like a Botticelli angel. Her back was slim and her hips were just nicely rounded, and her ankles were fineturned and graceful. She was lovely. She was Tracey. She was my wife, and we had had children together and laughed together and been happy. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her of course I didn't think any such thing, and I wanted to mean it.
I said, "You did what you had to."
She stood by the window for a long time. "Yes," she said at last. "I did."
The nurse came in to tell us visiting time was up. Tracey turned around and smiled and kissed me, and I kissed her, and we made the customary jokes with the nurse, and then she left, and I lay there feeling like hell. Donne said that no man is an island. He was wrong. Every living thing is an island, and sometimes our shores touch, but that's all. The inner country remains inviolate and inviolable, no matter how much we may want to open it up. And this is a damned lonely thing.
I pretended to go to sleep, and after the nurse went out I watched the gray day darken outside the window and the darkness got into me too. I thought of five boys and what their act of casual violence had cost me. I thought of what I was going to do to make them pay for it. I got a new clear feeling in me, not a pleasant one, but very strong. I got a new taste in my mouth. The bitter, stimulating taste of vengeance, not here yet but surely coming.
4
IT must have been six or seven weeks later when I dropped in on Koleski in the big dingy gray-stone building that houses the Mall's Ford Police Department. I know it was one of the first times I was out by myself without Tracey to drive me. They had taken the cast off my leg and put a brace on it instead, and the orthopedics man was very happy. The knee was responding better than he had hoped, and he figured that in two or three years, with the right care, there wouldn't be a thing the matter with it. This made me happy too. It made me so happy that I limped into a bar across the street from the hospital and had two double whiskies to keep from laughing till I cried. But I could get around now. And the first place I went was Koleski's office.
Other matters, I suppose, had come up in the meantime, because for a second or two he was a little vague about the case. But he gave me a chair and a cigarette and warm handshake, and after that the bad news.
"I'm afraid it's a dead end for the present, Mr. Sherris. We haven't turned up a thing."
"'For the present,'" I repeated. "Then I take it the case is still alive."
"A case is always alive until we make the arrest. Do you know anything about crime detection?"
"About as much as the average layman, I suppose."
"Well," said Koleski, "you probably know that a hit-and-run deal like this is the hardest of all to pin down. There's nothing to go on. Unless you get a break like a license number or a positive identification, something really definite, you just have to wait until the criminal makes a mistake, or somebody talks too much. Usually, with juveniles, that isn't too long."
"It sounds pretty indefinite to me."
Koleski shrugged, with just a shade of annoyance. "Tell us who the boy named Bill is, and we can have the bunch of them in five minutes."
"That's the funny thing," I said. "I've beaten my brains out trying to think. Bill is a common enough name and tall skinny boys come in job lots, but I can't find him. If the shape is right, the name is wrong, and vice versa. I've worn my wife to a shadow, driving me around. The service station, the supermarket, neighbors I never saw
before. I've checked everything I could think of. Nothing."
"Then you have some idea of what we're up against."
"Yes," I said. "I have. But there's one difference. You can go home and forget about it. I can't."
He said earnestly, "Don't let this become an obsession with you, Mr. Sherris."
"That's what my wife's been telling me. But I wonder. Maybe somebody ought to be obsessed. Look at these."
I took two newspaper clippings from my pocket and laid them on his desk. They were small clippings, these little three or four-line fillers you find at the bottom of a column on days when there was a half inch of space left over and nothing better to put into it. Koleski read them, frowning. Then he put them down again neatly, side by side, and shook his head.
"People like this, Mr. Sherris —transients and cangangers—are always getting into trouble."
"But not this kind of trouble. These weren't ordinary brawls. These were beatings, where the victim was all by himself and was suddenly set upon for no reason, and by nobody he knew. I'd like to know if there were more cases like this, ones that never did make the paper. I'd like to know exactly what the victims said."
He looked at me as though he was now convinced that I had gone queer on the subject of beatings.
"Listen," I told him. "Take me. They thought I was a tramp prowling in a dark lonely place. Now suppose they decided they liked that kind of work and wanted to do more of it? Who do you think they'd pick for their victims? And you know what happens, sooner or later."
"What?"
"Somebody gets accidentally hit too hard and you have a murder on your hands. Or perhaps it's the other way round. One of the victims defends himself with a knife, or perhaps he has a gun. Either way——"
He sighed. "All right," he said. "I'll get the files."
He was gone for a while. When he came back he had a batch of folders.
"These are all the assault cases for which no arrests have been made, dating from April seventeenth. That was the night they got you."
"Yes," I said. "I remember."
We began to go through the typed reports. Most of them were the usual thing and of no interest to me. There were several cases involving a gang of boys, but Koleski said Juvenile Division had a line on them, they thought, and they weren't mine. I agreed, because the cases were all purse snatchings, and the victims, all women, had been slugged merely in the line of business.
We wound up with four. Two of them were the full reports of the cases mentioned in the clippings. The other two were identical except in detail.
"You're the detective," I said, "and I'm not trying to tell you your business. But look at these." I shoved the folders at him. "Here are four men. Two of them are transients—to put it more crudely—tramps. Two are members of the local cangang, which comes to about the same thing. Each one of them was savagely beaten up by persons unknown, in a place where there were no witnesses and at a time when the victim was too drunk to defend himself, or to remember clearly what happened. There was, of course, no question of robbery involved. Now look at the dates. With me as the starting point, it figures out at roughly one every three weeks. That's an awful lot of unprovoked assaults even for that stratum of society, isn't it?"
Koleski looked genuinely thoughtful. "It's hard to say. A lot of things happen in the jungle that we don't ever hear about. Also, these guys don't like cops. They don't tell a straight story. They don't want to get mixed up with the law and if they are pulled in for questioning they just play dumb. Sometimes they don't even know their own names."
He turned the typewritten pages over.
"Three of them are unable to say how many attacked them. The fourth refers to his assailants as 'a couple of guys.' If it was the same group each time, and I'll admit there's a similarity in these cases, all right, it still doesn't sound like your five boys.''
"It was dark, and the man was blind drunk. He wouldn't know the difference."
"Even a drunk, Mr. Sherris, usually knows whether it was one guy or five that hit him. And I wouldn't depend too much on these statements that the attackers were unknown. The victims would say that in any case. They don't pull the law into their private quarrels."
I said, "Then you don't think it would be any use to question these men again."
"No use in the world. Matter of fact, it isn't even possible with at least two of them. The nonresidents were sent on their way as undesirables as soon as they were discharged from the hospital."
"You could pick up the other two. Just for questioning."
"Look, Mr. Sherris. You just said you weren't trying to tell me my business." He leaned forward in an attitude of pleading. "We're a hard-working police department, no matter what anybody says. We're shorthanded. Vacations, an epidemic of summer flu, and two patrolmen in the hospital with gunshot wounds incurred in the line of duty. We have a murder case on our hands and two major robberies. Please be reasonable."
I got up. "I've written down the names, anyway. You don't mind that, do you?"
"I can't stop you from doing what you want to on your own. But I'm telling you, Mr. Sherris, you'd do much better to leave this entirely to us."
"You mean you don't want any amateur assistance."
"I mean you were lucky once," he said. "Don't count on it twice. We'll get them. It may take us a while. But we'll get them."
"I'm sure you will," I said. "Thanks anyway."
I left him looking worried and went back to the parking lot to get my car. It was a stinking-hot afternoon with an ugly blue-blackness building up in the west. My shirt stuck to my back, and the brace chafed and my leg ached, and I felt low and mean as a rattlesnake crawling down that blistering stretch of sidewalk, leaning like an old man on a cane.
I got into the car and drove to Beekman Street and parked in the middle of the block. I could see the sign of Noddy's bar and grille ahead. Behind me, around the corner on East Federal, was the number given as the residence of one Harold Francis, the victim of the most recent of the four beatings.
I hesitated a minute on the sidewalk and then I turned up to Federal. The pavement was dirty and so were the building fronts and the pawnshops, the barrooms and the ill-smelling markets and the people. Little knots of men with unshaven chins and ragged pants leaned against the buildings and watched me go by. I had on a clean shirt, clean that morning, anyway. I felt overdressed and uncomfortable, the target of every eye.
I passed the decent windows of the Welfare Industries showroom and found the number I was looking for, a grimy doorway with a glass bulb hung out over it. The bulb said HOTEL. Inside was a hall so badly lighted you couldn't see the dirt, you could only smell it. There was a desk there, and a big shaggy man behind it. I asked him about Harold Francis.
He looked at me and my clean shirt with the cold hostility of a man looking at an enemy.
"Who?"
I repeated the name. "He gave this as his address. I'm not a cop. There's no trouble. I'd just like to talk to him."
"He moved."
"Where?"
"How should I know? He got in some kind of a beef, I ain't seen him since. I don't keep track, mister."
"Would you know anyone who could tell me? A friend of his, maybe?"
"No."
And that was that. I gave up finally and went back down the street to Noddy's. The corner of Beekman and Front had an international flavor, all right. There was a Greek coffeehouse, a Spanish restaurant, a Puerto Rican restaurant, an Italian food importer, and some kind of a Syrian lodge with a sign in Arabic. The block running east seemed to be solid Negro, full of women sitting in the hot doorways and little brown children playing on the pavement. That block dead-ended against a high black wall, and beyond the wall was my old friend the Bessemer, going like a Roman candle fifty feet high in a showering glory of burning flakes, sending up a plume of reddish smoke. Thunder muttered distantly in the west. I went into Noddy's and sat down on a stool at the bar.
It was cooler in there, but
the air was dead and stale, moving heavily where the blades of the two big ceiling fans pushed it. Four couples sat at tables and there were several men at the bar. A juke box was banging away. Otherwise the place was reasonably quiet, and clean enough to get by the health inspector. I ordered a beer. The bartender gave me a close look, and I asked him,
"Are you Noddy?"
"That's me. Bottle or draft?"
I told him draft, and he brought it. He was a thick-jawed, thick-shouldered man, shrewd, intelligent, and tough as a tenpenny spike. I liked him. He'd been able to make out and do well in a world where I wouldn't have lasted five minutes.
"My name is Sherris," I said. "Last April you had trouble with some boys who came in here and raised a row because you wouldn't serve them."
."I didn't, either," he said. "Who are you?"
"Nobody from the Liquor Control Board." I told him who I was. He looked sympathetic but he shook his head.
"I already talked to the cops about that. I don't know anything more than I said. But I'll tell you, mister. They blame all this juvenile-delinquency stuff and like that onto the poor slum kids, but you never hear about what these young punks from uptown get away with. You know why? Because their fathers pay off their fines, and their mothers bawl, and the judge, he thinks these are real nice people, let's give 'em another chance. Hah! "
"Look," I said, "isn't there some little thing you could remember about them, something you didn't tell Koleski? Just a stray word, maybe, anything that might give a hint what part of town they came from, where they went to school."
Noddy thought hard. "Nope. Nothing. The other four didn't say too much. They let the big one do the talking. He was a dandy."
"Yes," I said. "And strong, too."
"Good-looking kid, if he wasn't so snotty. Real handsome, you know? Smart, too. I wish my own boy was half as smart. But"—Noddy made a gesture of pushing away—"no good. Too smart, maybe. You know? Sometimes too smart is worse than being a little dumb."
"What about the tall skinny one?" I asked. "Can you tell me anything about him?"
The Tiger Among Us Page 3
