The Drill Is Death

by FRANCES

  “Was a chaser? Of baby girls? I certainly didn’t. Also, I find it damned hard to believe. I suppose any man can fall for—call it something special. Very infra dig for a faculty member to show it. But then, he wasn’t, was he? And—perhaps it’s an unkind thing to say, but the Larkin kid wasn’t anything that special. I shouldn’t have thought so, at any rate.”

  Parkins continued to sit on the edge of the table. He had a dark, intelligent face; there were crinkles at the corners of his dee-pset, dark eyes. He was, Shapiro thought, about forty, perhaps a few years younger.

  “You knew her, I gather,” Shapiro said.

  “In a couple of classes of mine,” Parkins said. “The one you walked in on, for one. You saw that—they come in batches. A little hard to tell apart, except that they don’t seem to have much trouble. Or the boys either. Call it ‘knew her’ by which I mean I could, most of the time, tell her from any given one of the others. Smaller than most. Blond. Pony tail. Good average mind—perhaps a little more. What would you think about a cup of coffee, if we’re going on with it?”

  Shapiro thought well of a cup of coffee. They went down to the ground floor, along a corridor, into a lunchroom—what appeared to be, actually, a canteen. They sat at a counter and ordered coffee. There were several people in the small room, and most of them appeared to be students. There were several pony tails. They seemed to come, primarily, in pairs, but, at one end of the counter, three girls talked with animation and, at one of the tables, four boys drank Cokes and talked with heat.

  “Put it this way,” Parkins said. “I said that Reg Grant seems like a good egg. I don’t know him well. I’ve run into him here and there. Had a drink or two with him at the club. We didn’t, I assure you, compare sex lives. For all I know, he’s a Casanova in his off moments. No affair of mine. No interest of mine. But—”

  He paused and drank from his cup.

  “He has a subtle mind,” he said. “An acute mind. A very—sensitive mind. If you’d ever read any of his stuff—”

  “I have,” Shapiro said and was looked at with, he thought, rather unflattering surprise. Shapiro smiled sadly. “Yes,” he said. “Strange as it may seem, Doctor.”

  “Nothing—” Parkins said and then, suddenly, laughed. “O.K.,” he said, “I’m a pompous so and so. You agree about Grant?”

  “Yes.”

  “O.K.,” Parkins said. “None of that—nothing about a mind—keeps a man from enjoying a roll in it. Only—” He paused again. “What bothers me,” he said, “is that I should have thought the kid would have bored him stiff in five minutes. Or, if you want it that way, after five minutes. Because she was so damned young for one thing.” He paused again, and this time long enough to light a cigarette. “So damned young, the poor kid,” he said. “Not yet anybody.” He looked at smoke. “She would have bored me stiff,” he said. “Any of them would. And I’m not a Reg Grant by, I’m afraid, some light years. So.”

  “You never saw him with Miss Larkin?”

  “No. Or with any other kid. As a matter of fact—” He stopped. Shapiro waited. “Nothing,” he said. “I saw him once or twice with Laura Felson. Graduate student and teaches a few classes. Working for her doctorate. Pretty enough. Middle twenties or a little more. Got held up somewhere along the line, at a guess. Very bright in a—in an unobjectionable fashion.”

  “No rumors Grant was dating the Larkin kid?”

  “None I ever heard.” He looked at Shapiro with some intentness. “I gather,” he said, “since you people are checking back on him, you haven’t caught him yet? Because you’d be asking him, wouldn’t you?”

  “Hadn’t last I heard,” Shapiro said. “Was Miss Larkin popular with the other students?”

  Parkins shrugged. He said, “As far as I know.” He said, “We learn not to intrude on their tribal rites.”

  “She was in this morning’s class,” Shapiro said. “That is, she was on other mornings. I wonder, doctor, if you could pick me one of her—contemporaries—I might talk to? A bright one, preferably.”

  “A bright one?” Parkins considered. He looked around the lunchroom, as if in search of a bright one. He said, “hmmm.” He said, raising his voice a little, “Miss Bergmann?” A dark girl—a very pretty girl, with a face which seemed to sparkle—revolved toward them on a counter stool. She was one of the three girls at the end of the counter.

  “I wonder,” Parkins said, “if you’ve got a moment, Miss Bergmann?”

  She slid from the stool and walked toward them. She wore a loose sweater and a tweed skirt, and a red scarf around her throat. Her dark brown hair was loose, curled softly. She said, “Of course, Dr. Parkins.”

  “Mr. Shapiro,” Parkins told her. “From the police. Doesn’t look it particularly, does he? Reads poetry. You knew Jeanette Larkin, the poor girl?”

  She looked at Shapiro for several seconds. Then she said, “Yes. Not specially well. Why?”

  There was no antagonism in the pretty dark girl and there was no special cordiality. Policemen are habituated to a certain lack of cordiality. It was likely also, Shapiro thought, that the girl was defending, in advance, against possible attack, her kind. Those of her age were her kind, and not needlessly to be intruded on.

  “We’re trying to find out who killed her,” Shapiro said. “And why she was killed.”

  “Not Mr. Grant? From the papers—”

  She left it there, not wasting words.

  “We don’t know,” Shapiro said. “He seems to have—disappeared. Did you know she was having dates with him?”

  The girl hesitated. Momentarily, she hid her mind behind a speculative, “Well—” Then she said, “Yes,” but as she said that she narrowed her large dark eyes. “Anyway, she said so.” She looked at Shapiro, again, for several seconds. “She had a crush on him, I suppose,” she said. “She wasn’t the only one.” She paused again. “Of course,” she said, “he’s quite old, isn’t he?”

  Parkins looked quickly at Nathan Shapiro, who was aware of it but did not look at Parkins. Shapiro said, “Quite. Did he and any of the other girls—the ones you say had crushes—have dates?”

  The girl raised slim shoulders under the loose sweater.

  “I wouldn’t know.” She hesitated and revised. “Not that I know of.”

  “Did what she said give you the impression that—” It was Shapiro’s turn to hesitate. The pretty child was very young—“their association was, er—a close one?”

  “You mean, were they sleeping together?” the girl said.

  Parkins chuckled slightly.

  “Well,” Shapiro said. “Yes, Miss Bergmann. I suppose I do.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” the girl said. “Of course, I never saw them together.”

  She is bright, Shapiro thought. Wisdom has come early to this pretty girl. If she had seen them together, she said, without saying, she could have guessed.

  “From the way she talked,” the girl said, “I wouldn’t have thought so. I’d have thought he took her to concerts, maybe. Or—I don’t know. Foreign movies.”

  “You knew him yourself?”

  “No. Oh, I went to one of the evening lectures.”

  “He didn’t send you?” Parkins asked.

  She looked at him, as one might look, with compassion, at one who stumbles over an alien language.

  “He’s an older type,” she said, pleasantly. “Definitely.” She was not really putting Professor Parkins in his place. “I’m not terribly keen on poetry,” she added.

  “Miss Bergmann,” Shapiro said, “you say you never saw them together. Did any of the other girls ever mention to you that they had seen Mr. Grant and Miss Larkin together? Here, say? Or—perhaps merely walking down the street?”

  “No. Anyway, I don’t remember that anybody did.”

  “What did she say about it?”

  The girl hesitated again; was a wary guard at the entrance of the tribal lodge.

  “She—brought his name up sometimes,” she said. �
��What did I think of him? I said—oh, that he was veddy veddy British or something. I suppose she thought I was—oh, calling him a square or something. She said I didn’t know—that really he was wonderful, and that she ought to know because they were—she said, ‘seeing quite a lot of each other.’ Something like that. I said, all right, he was wonderful, if you didn’t mind them being old enough to be your fathers.” She paused. “Jenny and I weren’t best friends or anything,” she said.

  He wasn’t, Shapiro thought, really getting any place. He wasn’t really good at this sort of thing. It was odd they let him continue in it.

  “What kind of girl was she?”

  The dark girl looked beyond him.

  “Like anybody, I guess,” she said. “I don’t really know what you mean. Pretty. Intelligent, I guess.” She paused again. “I don’t know what you want,” she said. “She was—maybe she was more serious about things than most of us. The bombs and things like that. And politics.” She looked at Shapiro with sudden intentness. “Sometimes, I thought she was terribly young and—and enthusiastic. I suppose you think it’s funny for me to call somebody else young?”

  Shapiro said, “No, Miss Bergmann. I don’t, especially.” He thanked her; she went back to the other two girls at the end of the counter. She talked to them with animation, and then the two revolved on their stools and looked at Nathan Shapiro. They turned back and began to talk again. Shapiro was glad he could not hear what they said.

  V

  There was pressure on his chest—discomforting pressure. He moved uneasily to escape the pressure. He put up his hands to push away whatever was pressing on him. It was curved—it was on either side—it—

  Reg Grant pushed himself back from the steering wheel of a car, over which he had been slumped. He felt groggy and a little sick and his head ached. He had been leaning forward to see what was on a dinner tray and—He shook his head to clear it, and it ached more violently.

  In a car. Behind the wheel of a car.

  They—both of them or one of them—would be in the back seat of the car. He turned. The back seat was empty.

  He was alone in the car. The car was parked in a large, only partly occupied, lot. There was something on the floor of the car, in the rear. Not another— He leaned over the back of the seat to look. His suitcase.

  He felt the back of his head, where the pain seemed to center. A bump. Not a large bump. A smooth bump under smooth hair. He looked at his fingers in the dim light. No blood on his fingers.

  Something like a sandbag. That must have been what they had used. No laceration. Not really a hard bump. But—enough to knock him out, and for some hours. If this dawning was that of the next day. The day would be—what would the day be? Thursday. Yes, it would be Thursday, if the next day.

  Hit and knocked out and—and what? Put in a car and driven—driven where? He looked out—tried to look out—of the car. The windscreen and the windows were fogged over. It was cold in the car. Or was it another foggy day? Put things in order, Reg told himself.

  Driven somewhere. Or—had he himself driven? Come to, been told to drive, perhaps forced to drive, driven to where they wanted him and been knocked out again? He didn’t think that was what had happened; thought that, if it had been, he would have remembered, even if foggily. Another foggy day and—Stop it The first thing—where are you now?

  In a car, in a parking lot. Still in New York City?

  Part of the mist on the glass was on the inside. He cleared a space with his hand. The parking lot was very large. As he watched, several cars pulled into it. People got out of cars and walked away from them. They all walked in the same direction. Toward?

  Toward what looked like a railway station, but not one he had ever seen before. Think. You’ve got a mind. Use it to think with. People—men for the most part—parking cars and walking toward a railway station. A good many of them, now. The lot beginning to fill up.

  Of course—a suburban railway station. The men were suburbanites on their way to work. Catching the—

  Did he still have a watch? He looked at his wrist. He still had a watch; the time was almost eight. Catching the eight something; perhaps even the seven something. He was pleased to have worked this out.

  He had his watch. The rest? He felt through his pockets. He seemed to have everything—keys, change. Yes, his wallet. Identification cards in place. And—bank notes. About a hundred dollars. About what he usually carried.

  Kidnap. Sandbag. Then drive to some suburban parking lot near a railway station and leave intact—or reasonably intact—supplied with money and identification; supplied even with a suitcase, presumably still containing clothes. What kind of silly game was—

  Several men had come into the parking lot and come on foot. In the lot, they separated—four shadowy men. They went from car to car, looked at car after car, and went on—no, did not go on—came closer. Looking for something—looking for the car he was sitting in.

  They’d changed their minds, apparently. Were coming back, apparently, to pick him up again. And—had forgotten where they had put him?

  Anything was possible—after what had already happened, there was no point in trying to guess what would happen next. Perhaps these men, checking off cars, constituted a second detachment, a new detail. “We’ll park him; you pick him up.” That might be the drill. God knew why.

  There was, obviously, no use in waiting until they had worked up to him. Whatever they were, it wasn’t chums. Reg Grant slid across the seat and slid out of the car. He did not bother with the case; he might have to run for it and a suitcase hampers.

  The car he had left was one of a row of cars nosed up to a barrier—heavy timbers set on low posts, marking the boundary of the lot. The direct way to the station led not over the barrier, but across the open lot. The open lot was occupied by searching men.

  Reg went over the barrier and found himself in weeds. He plowed through the weeds for perhaps twenty paces and came to a shallow ditch. There was a rough road beyond the ditch. He jumped the ditch to the road and followed it. It ended behind several low buildings. At first, the buildings seemed to constitute a continuous wall. Then he saw that there was a passageway between two of them—a paved lane, giving access to this area (evidently a parking place for those who worked in the low buildings) from the front.

  He went, not running but walking fast, through the passageway. He went between petrol—no, gasoline—pumps and was on one side of a wide street. The railway station was on the other side. So—what now?

  It occurred to him, belatedly, that he might merely have driven off in the car. The ignition key had been in the lock. He could remember it quite clearly in the lock. With a car—

  No, that would have been the expected thing—the thing they expected. For the moment, all he could do was to guess at what was expected and do, as nearly as he could manage, the opposite. He had been right to leave the car, because staying in it and driving off in it would have been the normal thing to do.

  Still—what now? In due course, certainly, get to the police—the real police—and tell them he had killed no one, and run from nothing. Tell them—

  The thought of what he had to tell them was a somewhat chilling one. Kidnaped, turned loose complete with car—after having been slugged and barely bruised? That he had not recognized a girl who had been in at least one of his classes, and never “dated” her, although her sister said he had? It was, Reg thought, standing on the curb in the attitude of one who awaits an opening in traffic, about as unlikely a story as any he had ever heard. He suspected the police would agree.

  There was an opening in the traffic and Reg Grant crossed the wide street toward the railway station. He felt conspicuous crossing the street and went expecting a shout—an American “Hey, youl” Nobody shouted at him and he went through the station yard, where he was less conspicuous—where he was one of a dozen hurrying men, most of them with brief cases. He went onto the train platform and read a sign and knew the name of the p
lace he was—Stamford. Stamford? It meant nothing.

  Most of the men with whom he found himself associated, like one of whom it was safest at the moment to look, went down a flight of concrete steps, and he went down with them and through an underpass. Midway of the underpass, he heard a rumbling overhead and the two men in front of him began to trot. He trotted. That was the drill; the rumble above was, clearly, that of a train they were all catching. On their way to offices, to desks.

  He realized, as he ran up the concrete steps, that the train he, with others, hurried for would be one bound for New York. He was hurrying back toward the place in which Poet was Sought. Was that what they expected? There was really no way of telling. At a guess, it was not. One flees from, not toward, trouble.

  The train waited. He was one of the last to go up the steep metal stairway into the nearest of a string of coaches. A trainman said, “New York Express. Next stop One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street,” and, when Reg and two other men had gone up into the coach, the trainman swung up after them and, almost at once, the train started. Reginald Grant found a seat and tried to look like a commuter. He did not feel that his success was at all considerable. For one thing, he had no newspaper to hide behind. For another, when the trainman came to collect tickets, Reg could produce no card to be punched, no book of coupons from which one might be extracted. He had to pay in cash.

  Pay in cash and, of course, leave spoor. The trainman would, undoubtedly, remember a man without a card to be punched; quite evidently, he’d look at Reg with interest as he made change, as a man may who marks another man down for future reference. Thinking, Looks like that poet chap they’re after?

  I’m getting a fugitive’s point of view, Reg thought; I am wary, a man on the run. Is there some way this blue-uniformed man can send a message on ahead, so that when we reach New York they will be waiting for me?

  It was as he thought this that Reg Grant fully realized that he was not going, first, to the police; not going to give himself up and tell a story nobody would believe. And, as he realized this, he knew, as plainly as if somebody had written it out for him, what he was going to do.