The Fugitive Pigeon

by Donald E. Westlake

  Now there was no longer any excuse to stall. The black car was gone, I was all alone and unobserved. I had come here to see Agricola; now was the time.

  I got to my feet, heavy-footed with reluctance, and started walking.

  Chapter 7

  It was a long way in. The first part, between the pasture and the cornfield, I felt as obvious and exposed as the last house standing in the Dust Bowl, and when I got to the cover of trees without incident I had to stop a minute to calm my nerves and wipe my brow and wind my courage up again.

  Also to get off the dirt road. This copse of trees was thick with underbrush, but I preferred to fight my way through a thicket or two than be caught on that road by Agricola or any of his henchmen. So I labored along, not as quiet as a Cooper Indian nor as fast, but progressing.

  What I was blundering through was a slender arm of forest reaching down between two cleared sections. The farmhouse, when I finally saw it through the trees, stood in lonely grandeur in the middle of a huge clearing all its own. I looked at it, and depression got a fresh new grip on me.

  The building itself didn’t register with me at all, to begin with; only that blank open grassy expanse stretching between me and it. Agricola, I knew, must have had this in mind when he moved into yon house; the business he was in, it must be reassuring to know no one can sneak up on you.

  So what to do? Wait till darkness? But it was now barely three-thirty in the afternoon, and besides, if this was Agricola’s defense against a brutal world in the daytime, what would his defense be like at night? Floodlights at the very least, and maybe armed guards. Visions of slavering dogs leaped in my head.

  Better in than at. I struck out across the open ground toward the house.

  Every nerve-ending in my body developed radar, and they all detected the same thing: machine guns in every window of the house, all aimed at me, all waiting for me to get just a step closer, two steps closer, just a little, little closer …

  I kept walking. Nothing happened, and I kept on walking, following again now the dirt road, and ahead of me the house loomed larger and larger.

  It was a farmhouse, that’s all, of the afterthought variety. Someone had built an ordinary rectangular farmhouse, two stories high, with a bit of a porch in front, and with an A-shaped roof sloping front to back, the roof bulging with two dormers, and then rooms and rooms and rooms had been added as afterthoughts. A chunk had been stuck on at the left side, as full of windows as the bridge of a Staten Island ferry; possibly a solarium or a hothouse or who knew what. Another chunk on the right, windowless. A chunk on the top of the solarium, with modern crank windows instead of the old-fashioned kind on the rest of the house. More chunks, here and here and here, most of them in approximately the same clapboard as the original house, but with a final concrete-block addition on the left and something that looked like aluminum siding used on one second-story chunk on the right. The result, sort of Grant Wood flaccid, had been painted maroon and left for dead.

  The dirt road, in its last stages toward this stack of building parts, stopped being a dirt road and started being a blacktop road. The pasture, too, having been pruned and watered, had graduated to a lawn. The blacktop road cut across this lawn, turned right at the house in order to go past the front door, and turned left again to go around the side of the house to the back. A gray Lincoln Continental was parked in the sunlight at the side of the house, facing me with Chinese eyes and a grille that laughed in evil anticipation.

  I attained the blacktop. No gunshots, no guards, no slavering dogs. Nothing but silence and sunshine and the maroon house and me walking forward and the Oriental Continental. I kept walking, breathing from time to time through an extremely narrow opening in my throat.

  I got all the way to the front door, and still nothing had happened. I stopped there at last, close enough to the door to touch it, and wondered what I should do next.

  Just knock, and wait? But a servant, I assumed, would answer, or maybe a bodyguard. Anyway, not Farmer Agricola himself, that was for sure. And whoever it was, I could visualize the conversation:

  “Mr. Agricola, please.” “Who’s calling?” Charles Poole.” “Bam! Bam!”

  Some other way then. The thing to do was sneak into the house somehow and see if I could find Agricola alone. Then, if only I could talk fast enough and convincingly enough, maybe he’d listen.

  I moved away from the front door, off to the right, where the drive went around to the back of the house. I went past the gleaming gray Lincoln and around boxy maroon house additions, and going around the final corner at last I came to the rear of the house, where the blacktop spread out into a solid black pool, a parking lot. A bulky sagging dirty red barn and a low shiny white aluminum four-car garage stood next to one another, both uncomfortable at the association. Beyond the blacktop, varicolored slabs of slate formed a large patio full of tubular lawn furniture in green and yellow. There was no one in sight.

  A door just at the corner of the house attracted my attention. I went over to it and opened it and it led into a narrow sort of entranceway with coats and hats and jackets and sweaters hanging from nails stuck into the walls along both sides. Overshoes and rubbers were lined along the floor, and a snow shovel leaned in the corner.

  I stood thinking of science fiction. Until I started running the bar, I used to spend a lot of my unemployed days flat on my back, reading science fiction. There’s a particular science-fiction story that was written over and over again and that I always enjoyed, about a young man in some future society who goes through a lot of dangerous adventuring, with mysterious people after him and various threats on his life and some sort of secret organization in the background, and at the end of the story you find out nobody ever really meant to hurt the young man at all, the whole thing was a kind of test to see if he was good enough to join the secret organization, and of course he always is.

  As I had opened the door of the house, I remembered those stories, and in a sudden rush of fantasy I had told myself that on the other side of this door would be Uncle Al and Mr. Agricola and Patrolman Ziccatta and Artie Dexter and Chloe and the two men from the black car, and they’d congratulate me, I’d passed the test with flying colors and I was now a member of the organization. But what did I actually find, within that door? Overshoes and sweaters.

  Secret organizations may menace people for the fun of it in future societies, but in the society we live in now they only do it if they mean it.

  Well. There was another door, directly in front of me. I opened it, and it led me to a huge old farm kitchen full of huge new city-kitchen appliances. Like everything else around here, the kitchen was empty. I crossed it, to a swing door that stood open, and moved on tiptoe down a hall.

  Now at last I did see someone. In a room to the right of the hall, three people sat around a table talking. The colored woman the size of a barrage balloon would be the cook, the white-haired red-nosed man in the gray uniform would be the chauffeur, and the husky broken-nosed man in the white shirt and a gun in a shoulder holster would be someone I didn’t want to meet right now. Or ever.

  They were talking about graduated income tax, and they all seemed to be opposed to it, though what they thought it was doing to them I didn’t stick around to find out. None of them was looking in my direction, so I flitted past the doorway like the lover in a French bedroom farce, and continued on down the hall.

  Ahead of me, someone was playing an awful lot of lush piano very badly. I moved closer, down the hallway. Rooms to left and right were all empty.

  The piano-playing was coming from within a room shut off by double sliding doors. But the doors didn’t quite meet; leaning close and peeking between them, I could see a girl in billowing pink sitting at a piano in a band of sunlight, playing with fingers that twinkled and spun. Her hair was yellow bright, and long, and in thick delicate waves like yellow mist reflecting the sunlight. Her face was pretty as a greeting card, and it seemed to me, though I couldn’t see all that clear
ly, that her eyes were blue. She was slender, with slender arms and a narrow waist, and long slender legs tapering to tiny thoroughbred ankles down where her toes in pink pumps touched the piano pedal. She was, I suppose, eighteen or nineteen, and as lovely a vision as could be imagined.

  She was playing the sort of thing Liberace plays, only far worse. And from the dreamy expression on her face as she played, I could only assume she dreamt of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  I turned away. Although I’d only been able to see a narrow pie-slice of that room, the expression on her face had been enough to tell me she was alone there.

  Stairs on my left led upward. There were still rooms I hadn’t seen on the first floor, I was sure of that, but I didn’t know exactly how to get to them. Simply because it was easiest, I chose to continue my search upstairs.

  And hit the jackpot on the first try. At the head of the stairs—carpeted, happily—was a hall, and on the right a door slightly ajar. I looked in there, and it was a den or office, with bookcases on the walls and a desk and leather sofa and bar and filing cabinet. The man sitting at the desk, glowering in irked thought at the door, must be Farmer Agricola. Husky, fiftyish, jowly, with the arrogant look of the wealthy and powerful, this could be no one but the head of the house.

  I ducked back before he saw me, and took the time to gather what few wits and what tiny shreds of courage I could find, erecting them into a shaky substitute for a backbone. I stood there three or four minutes in the hall, at the head of the stairs, taking deep silent breaths and letting them out just as silently, with the faint sound of that lovely girl’s rotten piano-playing in my ears, and finally I forced myself to move, striding forward and pushing the door open the rest of the way and marching directly into the path of that glower.

  “Mr. Agricola,” I said, talking fast, “I’m Charlie Poole, and I’ve got to talk to you because you’re making a terrible mistake.”

  He didn’t move. No surprise showed in his features at all. He glowered at me as though I’d been standing in front of him like this for hours and he was beginning to get bored with me.

  Had he known all along? Was there someone behind me, waiting only for the nod from that heavy head?

  “Mr. Agricola,” I said, and turned my own head quickly, but there was no one behind me at all. I looked back. “I’ve got to talk to you, Mr. Agricola,” I said.

  Nothing.

  Suspicion struck me, horrible suspicion. I said, “Mr. Agricola?”

  I moved forward, across the room. His eyes did not follow me. He kept glowering at the doorway.

  Ripples were running up my back, shivering that had nothing to do with cold. My teeth even began to chatter a little bit. “Mister,” I said. “Mister.”

  The room wasn’t very brightly lit, not very brightly lit at all. Heavy draperies across the windows cut down the sunlight to a mere bronze memory of itself, and the massive dark furniture with which this study was furnished seemed to absorb what light was left. In the semi-dark, only his eyes were oases of light, glowering in fury at the doorway.

  I moved around the desk, beside him, and I could see that the hilt of the knife in his back had caught in the back of his chair, holding him upright. As though he’d been standing behind the desk when he’d been stabbed, and had dropped into the chair, hooking the hilt and hanging himself there in final impotent rage.

  This was the first corpse I’d ever seen without a camera between me and it, so I don’t know how long I stood there, fascinated by the knife and the balance of the body the way a bird is fascinated by the snake, but I hadn’t moved when the voice from the doorway said, “Hey!”

  I was startled out of reverie. I turned my head, and saw the broken-nosed man just unlimbering the gun from its shoulder holster. I put my hands up in the air and said, “Don’t shoot.”

  He pointed the gun at me, but he didn’t shoot. “I got him, Mr. Agricola,” he said.

  “Uhhhh,” I said, wondering how to break the news gently.

  But I didn’t have to. This broken-nosed man surely had more experience than me with corpses; at any rate, it took him less time to understand he was in the same room with one. He said, “Oh ho?” And then, “All right, you.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. Talk about whistling in the dark.

  Chapter 8

  “Don’t move,” said the broken-nosed man. His gun said the same thing.

  I didn’t move. I stood there with my arms up over my head and wondered what was going to happen now. My arms almost immediately had gotten tired, and the broken-nosed man hadn’t told me to put them up in so many words in the first place, but I didn’t want to take a chance on lowering them. I stood there and sweated and smiled like a Dale Carnegie dropout.

  The broken-nosed man took two steps backward, through the doorway and into the hall. Still watching me, he shouted “Tim! Hoy, Tim!”

  From far away downstairs came an answering shout, with a question in it.

  “Come up here a minute!” shouted the broken-nosed man.

  I heard sliding doors slide, somewhere downstairs, and a clear and beautiful voice called, “Clarence? What’s the matter up there?”

  The broken-nosed man—whose parents had apparently been such poor prophets they’d named him Clarence—called back, “It’s all right, Miss Althea, there’s nothing the matter.”

  Heavy footsteps thudded up the carpeted stairs. I hoped they belonged to Tim rather than Miss Althea; lovely young girls shouldn’t clump like that.

  Tim it was, the white-haired red-nosed chauffeur. He was red-cheeked now, too, from the climb, but the red drained from his cheeks and faded on his nose when he saw his employer. He said, “For God’s sake, what’s happened?”

  “This bird killed Mr. Agricola,” Clarence told him.

  I shook my head, between my upraised arms. “He was dead when I came in here,” I said.

  “For God’s sake,” said Tim.

  Clarence said to me, “That won’t do, you. Nobody did Mr. Agricola in but you.”

  “No. Really.”

  Clarence shook his head and looked as though he pitied my feeble brain. “There’s nobody in the house,” he said, “but me and Tim and Ruby the cook and Miss Althea, and we all been downstairs.”

  “Those two guys in the black car,” I said. “That just drove away, maybe they did it.”

  Clarence shook his head some more. “Let me just show you it’s no good,” he said. “You made your try and it didn’t work. Mr. Agricola came downstairs with those two boys, and then went back up again after they left. We all saw him.”

  Tim, who was still recovering from his first shock, started abruptly and nodded, saying, “That’s right. He came to the doorway where we were all sitting, the three of us.”

  “So it’s you,” said Clarence.

  I knew it wasn’t me, but Clarence was sure convincing. I said, “How do you know there’s nobody else in the house? I got in, why couldn’t other people?”

  “Sure,” said Clarence.

  Miss Althea was suddenly in the doorway, saying, “What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Clarence? Daddy?” I was right, her eyes were blue. They were also very wide right now.

  Of all the people in the world, Miss Althea was the one I most wanted to know I was innocent. I said to her, with as much sincerity as I could put into my voice, “I didn’t do it.”

  Clarence and Tim, meanwhile, were both trying to get her to go back out of the room, but she wouldn’t go. She said, “Daddy? Daddy?” Her eyes just kept getting wider and wider.

  Clarence bellowed, “Ruby! Come up here and get Miss Althea!”

  Miss Althea, at that point, screamed and fainted.

  I still knew I hadn’t done it, but I couldn’t help feeling as though I was somehow the cause of all this trouble and commotion, and I was feeling embarrassed and foolish about the whole thing. I stood there with strained arms and pained expression and wished desperately I was somewhere else. Even in the back seat of the black car, even
that much, if it meant I wasn’t here.

  There were now two or three minutes of confusion. Tim carried Miss Althea away, and Ruby arrived and immediately trundled off to see to Miss Althea, and Tim came back, and throughout it all the black eye of the gun in Clarence’s hand kept watching me.

  When Tim came back, Clarence said, “Frisk him.”

  I said, “I swear I didn’t do it.”

  “Sure,” said Clarence. “We went through that already, remember?”

  Tim came around behind me and went through my pockets, taking everything out and piling it up on the desk beside us. There wasn’t much: my wallet, my keys, a pack of Pall Malls and a folder of matches, twenty-three cents in change, and a pocket pack of tissues.

  Clarence said, “What’s the wallet say?”

  I said, “Can I put my arms down, please?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I did, and said, “Thank you.”

  Tim had opened my wallet in the meantime. “His name’s Charles Robert Poole,” he said. “He lives in Brooklyn.”

  “Poole?” Clarence looked at me with new interest. “You’re the nephew runs the bar?”

  “Yes. I came—”

  “Who would have thought,” he said. “You showed guts, kid. Not much brains, but lots of guts.”

  “Listen,” I said desperately, “I really didn’t—”

  Tim interrupted me, saying to Clarence, “Should I call the law?”

  “No,” said Clarence. “If this is the nephew, he knows too much. We can’t have him talking to the law.”

  Tim waved his hands, saying, “I don’t want to know nothing about that. I’m a chauffeur, that’s all I am. I don’t want to know nothing about nothing.”

  “Sure,” said Clarence. To me he said, “Put your stuff back in your pockets.”

  I put my stuff back in my pockets. I wanted to ask him what he was planning, what he was going to do, but I was afraid if I asked him he’d tell me, so I kept my mouth shut.