Then early on Sunday morning the phone rang. Tracey climbed sleepily out of bed to answer it. She came back almost at once, no longer sleepy, and said, "It's for you, Walt. It's that detective. Koleski."
I hobbled to the phone. "Yes?" I said. "What's up?"
Koleski's voice sounded distant and impersonal. "When was the last time you heard from Finelli?"
"Yesterday morning. Why?"
"What did he tell you?"
"Nothing. He didn't have anything to tell."
"But he was still working for you?"
"Yes. What's happened?"
"He was still trailing the Bush boy?"
"That's what I was paying him for."
"Do you know whether he was following the boy last night?"
"I suppose he was."
"But do you know for sure?"
"Well," I said, "no, I don't suppose I could swear he was. For God's sake, Koleski. What is this?"
"Finelli ran his car off the road last night about midnight. He's dead. Killed instantly."
That hit me, as it does when it happens to someone you know. I thought of the niece and the golden-wedding party.
"How did it happen?" I asked. "And where?"
"The curve on Route 422, just this side of the strip mine. He was headed west. There were no witnesses. There was apparently no other car involved." He stressed that one word lightly. "Someone had burned rubber on the road there, close by, but there's no definite connection."
"I wonder," I said. Suddenly I was flushed and hot, and my temples were pounding. "Listen," I said. "Listen, he was shadowing Everett Bush. Everett has laid low for days now but last night he must have thought he was safe and joined the others. Finelli followed them. He must have seen them do something, and then somehow they spotted him. They drive fast, those kids. They drive like hell. I'll bet they ran him off the road."
"I figured that was about what you would figure," said Koleski. "But I was hoping you might have something definite to back it up." I could almost see him yawn tiredly and rub his hand over his face. "Traffic Detail says accident, pure and simple. Finelli was a notorious fast driver. Well, I guess we'll have to leave it at that."
"Can't you even question Everett?"
"About what? About a traffic accident twenty miles from where he lives? They'd scream persecution and they'd be right."
"There might be something in Finelli's notes. His written reports."
"We'll go over them, of course, but it's not likely. There was nothing on his body, by the way, and nothing in the car. But he'd hardly have had time to make any notes if he was following them. If he wasn't, well, that's obvious. And, of course, he could have been following them and still have had an accident through no fault of theirs."
He paused, and I heard him striking a match. Then he went on again.
"It's all a little coincidental, though. That part of 422 runs right along the river and the railroad yards, in the same general area where those tramps got themselves beaten up. You bother me, Sherris. You bring up these things, and more and more they take on the outlines of a nice symmetrical structure. The only trouble is the whole thing hangs in thin air, without one damned infinitesimal fact to support it. And nobody got beaten last night, either."
He sounded really angry.
"Was Finelli a friend of yours?" I asked.
"I knew him around. I wouldn't say a friend, exactly, no. I didn't know him that well. But he was a nice guy. Straight."
"Maybe it was an accident, Pete," I said. "The fellows who investigated ought to know. That's their job."
"Maybe," said Koleski.
There was another pause.
"Accident or not," said Koleski, "if he was trailing the gang and they saw him, they may put two and two together and come after you. You were warned."
"Yeah. But are they likely to connect themselves with the thing that way? I mean, they'd be admitting they knew all about Finelli."
"They wouldn't be admitting anything. Your boy Chuck says he never heard of Everett Bush, and Finelli wrecked his own car. So what's to tie him to that? He could make up any story he wanted to for your benefit. The end result would be the same."
Church bells began to ring faintly at Koleski's end of the line. He yawned again and said, "I'll leave you with that thought. But you be damned careful what you shoot at."
He hung up. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, but for me the good days were over. The shadow had come back.
It was wider this time, and deeper. It had swallowed up Finelli. I had hired a man to do a job, and he had been killed doing it. Accidentally? Deliberately? Or a combination of both? Anyway, the man was working for me, I hired him and paid him. I felt like hell.
Then I got to wondering. I thought about asking Chuck if he would kill me and I remembered his answer. I might. We haven't tried that yet. We might like it.
Had they tried it with Finelli?
No, that wasn't their way. They liked to get close to it, to hold it in their hands and feel and taste it. If they ran his car off the road deliberately, it was for necessity, not for pleasure. But was it one of those things where they had realized they were being followed and had wanted to shake him and had done too good a job without really meaning to?
Or had they designedly and with murderous intent forced his car off the road, and then, perhaps, paused long enough to make sure that he was dead?
If so, why?
Why exchange an assault charge, or even several assault charges, for a potential charge of murder?
What had Finelli seen them do? It was important to know. It was not important to Finelli now but it was to me.
Because, of course, Koleski was right. The boys would learn Finelli's profession from the notice of his death in the paper, and it would take no great effort of mind to figure out who had hired him, and why. They would be angry and they would be afraid, too, because they would not know how much Finelli might have found out about them and passed on to me.
If they hadn't had anything to do with it, and Finelli had been on other business of his own, it didn't matter. But I couldn't believe that.
And if they had murdered Finelli, for whatever reason they found good and necessary, I couldn't see what would hold them back from trying it again with me.
12
WE were living under siege again.
This time Tracey refused absolutely to leave me. Her folks came back to town and brought the children with them, and she spent the days with them when I wasn't at home. But in the afternoon after work I would pick her up and we would go back to the house together. We felt safe enough in the house. It was the outside, the darkness and the waiting quiet, that were bad.
But it was not so bad now as it had been before. Tracey was with me. She was afraid, and we both knew it, but she was going to stick, and she was so proud of herself, like a little kid that's finally walked the trestle, that I gave up trying to force her to go. I didn't want her to go, of course, for purely selfish reasons. I didn't want any more of those nights alone. I was more worried than I had been before but less scared.
Until something happened. Then it was different.
The rest of Sunday was uneventful. Monday I went downtown in my lunch hour to go over Finelli's report with Koleski. It was in Finelli's office, with that curious feeling of vacuum you get in a place where you have known someone and they have died. The niece cried. There were a couple of other relatives there, packing up books and papers. I felt as guilty as though I had killed him myself. I found out he was married but separated from his wife. I hoped they had been separated a long time, and for her his loss would only be a minor sadness.
There was nothing in the report. Nothing but a neat, meticulous record of a seventeen-year-old boy spending the dullest couple of weeks in his life, going nowhere, speaking to no one.
"Almost too good to be true, isn't it?" Koleski said. "Vacation time, warm nights, a healthy kid. It's not natural."
"Nothing about this whole mess is na
tural," I said. "But it's all negative. I feel as though I'm being smothered with negatives, like the old Chinese torture where they drowned a man in feathers. Still no word of anything happening in the railroad yards that night?"
"Not a peep."
There were three copies of my report, an original and two carbons. I put the original in my pocket and went out with it. It was an expensive trifle. It had cost me some money, but it had cost Finelli more. It weighed on me, the weight of a man's life.
"Did you look at his car?" I asked, as we went down the hall to the elevator.
Koleski shrugged. "No need to. The Traffic lab has been all over it. No signs of impact other than that involved in the accident itself, and not a fleck of foreign paint. He wasn't sideswiped or rammed."
"He was a fast driver, you said."
"On the road, yes."
"But he was a good driver?"
"Nobody's too good to have an accident."
We got into the elevator and clanked slowly down.
"On the other hand," said Koleski, "his car was mechanically in good shape. The road was dry, visibility was perfect, and he must have been over that road and around that curve a million times. That was the way he always drove to and from Newbridge, where his family is. So it's coincidental he should have cracked up there, especially since he hadn't been to Newbridge that night, and that road doesn't go much of anywhere else, unless you're headed straight through to Pittsburgh."
We got out of the elevator.
"His family didn't know anything about what he was doing?"
"No," said Koleski. "Well. See you."
He got in his car and drove away. I sat in mine for a while, thinking. When I did go I drove to Noddy's instead of to the office where I belonged.
It was a slack time there. I sat at the end of the bar and talked to Noddy. I told him how I had hired Finelli and what had happened to him. He was only mildly interested. Then I said, "You never called me."
"About what?"
"Those two guys I wanted to talk to. Harold Francis and the other one, Vorchek."
"Well, I'll tell you," said Noddy. "I couldn't get no place, so what was the use of calling you?"
"Couldn't you locate them?"
"Oh, sure, I asked around. That wasn't too hard. But like I said"—he spread his hands wide—"Francis has been staying with his sister in Mahoningtown since he got out of the hospital. She took care of him, see? And she's one of these Godshoutin' women, won't let anybody near him for fear they'll get him drinking again."
He called her a name or two in whatever language was native to him. "I don't stand on the sidewalk and force 'em in here, do I? Is it my fault if her brother's a lousy white-liner? I don't encourage that kind to hang around. I don't even like 'em in here. But it ain't my fault what they do."
I gathered Francis' sister had blistered his ears for him.
"Vorchek, now," said Noddy, "he's dead."
"Dead?" I straightened up. "How?"
"He didn't have a sister. His friends were so glad to see him back out of the charity ward that they filled him full of cheap wine, and he laid all night in the rain under the East Bridge. Next day he was back in the ward with pneumonia. The end of the week he was in a hole in the ground." Noddy spread his hands again. "So."
"So," I said. "Noddy, is anyone missing since Saturday night?"
"Anybody like who?" His eyes narrowed into that hard jungle look I was beginning to know.
"Just anybody," I said. "Or maybe they're not even missing. Maybe they just got a beating and kept quiet about it, or maybe they didn't even get that. Maybe the boys were scared off."
"The boys again, huh?"
"That's what I want to find out."
"But why Saturday? What's with Saturday?"
I told him. He heard me out, getting the point long before I put it into words, watching me with that cold intent stare.
"You know?" he said.
"What?"
"You should of taken your beating and been glad it wasn't worse. You should of forgotten about it."
"Would you?"
"With me it's different. This ain't your kind of a deal."
"Well, it was handed me, anyway. Will you ask around?"
Suddenly he smiled. "I'll ask."
I got Francis' sister's address from him, though he assured me it wouldn't do me any good. Then I called the office and told them I wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be back that afternoon.
I drove to that part of Mall's Ford known as Mahoningtown.
Mahoningtown is railroad. It smells and sounds and tastes of railroad. The soft black soot coats the slate roofs and the clapboards of the old four-roomed houses, lined up side by side on their narrow lots, two rooms up, two rooms down, and a toilet in the cellar. The houses are all the same color. No matter what they were painted, they come out the same uniform dull gray. In some of them women with more time or energy or optimism than their neighbors keep their curtains white. The rest have lost heart. There is a roundhouse and miles of yards. All day and all night the engines chuff and grunt and rumble and shake the ground. All day and all night they talk in their different voices, deep-throated, shrill, mild, querulous, peremptory, pleading, interrupted now and then by the coarse blatting of the Diesels on the through freights and the fast passenger trains. When there's a strike and the road is idle the town dies.
I found the street and the number I wanted and pulled up in front of the house. There was a man sitting in an old swing on the narrow front porch. I walked toward him, up a thin strip of cracked cement between two tiny patches of hard earth with a sprinkling of grass blades on them. He watched me come. He looked clean and well fed. He was wearing a pair of cheap striped cotton pants and a faded blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up short of the elbows and the collar open. His hair and the stubble on his chin were almost white, but that was not what made him seem old. It was his eyes, pale and empty in a face like a piece of paper someone has crumpled up and thrown away. His hands hung down between his knees. He was not resting. He was not waiting for anything. He was just sitting.
"Are you Harold Francis?" I asked.
He looked at me as a man does through a heavy fog. Perhaps he was trying to remember.
"That's right," he said. "Who are you?"
A woman came out on the porch of the house next door. She peered at me and at my car and went back in again, hurrying.
"I'm Walter Sherris," I told him. "You don't know me, but we have a lot in common. I got beaten up too, before you did."
"Oh," he said, and blinked at my leg. "Is that what happened to you?"
I said it was. There was an old wicker chair by the door. I pulled it up and sat down. Francis put both hands on his body.
"That's where they got me. In the belly. Ain't been right inside since. I tell you, mister. My sister cooks up this slop and I eat it, but I ain't been right. I keep telling her I ain't right. I keep telling her I need medicine, but these goddamn women, they know it all, they won't listen."
He leaned forward, suddenly cunning, his eyes becoming more alert as hope grew up in him.
"Now, you're a man, now, you know how it is. Don't you?"
"Sure," I said, deliberately missing his perfectly obvious point. "I know how it is. I think it was the same gang that beat us both up. Can you remember anything about them, Mr. Francis?"
"They kicked me," he said, putting his hands back on his body again. "Ain't been right since. If I was to get some medicine——"
"How many were there?"
"How many?" He thought about that for some time. The woman next door came out again. She was a very short wide woman in a very clean pink cotton dress. She folded her thick forearms and stood planted by the porch rail, watching.
"Couple of guys," said Francis. He shook his head.
"What do you mean, a couple of guys? Two? Or could there have been more?"
"I was drunk that night," he said, and laughed. "Godawful drunk. I used to be able to drink, mister,
I'll tell you."
"But how many were there?"
"Couple. Three. Four. I don't——" He became conscious all at once of the woman on the porch next door. "Goddamned old crow," he said furiously, "she's called my goddamn sister again. I ain't allowed a minute's peace——"
He turned to me. For the moment he looked almost bright, and that was bad, because now his face was no longer pathetic, it was nasty and deceitful, the weak, selfish face of the chronic drunk.
"Listen, mister," he said hurriedly. "I remember a lot. I could tell you a lot of things you want to know. If we was to get in your car and go somewhere, where these goddamned women couldn't interfere, I could tell you. If we was to go before my sister comes——"
He stood up. I glanced past him at the woman on the porch. She made a move as though she would go down the steps, but when I shook my head at Francis and stayed put, she hesitated, poised with one hand on the rail.
"What can you tell me?" I asked. "Were there four or five? Was one big and one short? I don't have a lot of time, Francis. You'll have to tell me now."
He was squinting over my shoulder, down the street. His lips were wet and quivering with eagerness. "If," he said, "you was to give me a little something to buy medicine with, so's I could quiet this pain I got inside——"
I turned and looked too. There was a short gray-haired woman coming up the street, walking fast. She wore a starched white smock over her dress, as though she worked, perhaps, as a checker in the small corner grocery.
"I'm afraid I can't do that," I told Francis.
For a moment his eyes were hateful, and then it seemed that he might cry. He sat down heavily in the swing. The gray-haired woman turned in at the walk. She nodded at the woman on the porch next door and called out, "Thank you, Mrs. Barnard." Mrs. Barnard waved and nodded and remained where she was, watching.
The Tiger Among Us Page 9
