The Fugitive Pigeon

by Donald E. Westlake

  “They’ll never get us now!” Chloe cried, and crouched over the wheel with the smile of competition on her lips and the glint of motor madness in her eyes.

  I closed my own eyes, and awaited the worst.

  Chapter 17

  Chloe said, not without pride, “I’ve lost them.”

  It was the first word either of us had said in ten minutes or more. Not that the intervening time had been soundless, oh no; the shriek of tires and squeal of brakes had filled in nicely for the lack of dialogue.

  I had spent the time—I never have claimed to be anything but a coward, I hope you’ve noticed that—with my eyes shut. Even so, I could visualize our screaming progress through the tiny towns of Long Island, the long bulky black 1938 Packard roaring down the night-dark streets, the natives peering fearful and open-mouthed from their cottage windows, the whole thing straight out of Carol Reed. I was so caught up in my imagery that now, when I did at last open my eyes again, I was surprised to see the world not in black and white.

  Chloe said, “Where to?”

  “Back to the city,” I said. That much thinking I’d been able to do down in there behind my shut eyelids, while the world had squealed and teetered around me. “I’ve got to find a policeman named Patrick Mahoney.”

  “That should be easy,” she said. “I doubt there’s more than fifty Patrick Mahoneys on the force.”

  “Well, I’ve got to find mine,” I said.

  “Why?”

  There was no quick answer to that. I had to fill her in on everything I had said to Mr. Gross, and everything he had said to me, and when I was finished with all that I said, “The way it looks to me, I’ve got to prove I didn’t inform to the police, and I’ve got to prove I didn’t kill Mr. Agricola. If I can prove I didn’t inform, that ought to help prove I didn’t do the killing.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She sounded doubtful.

  I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “It all sounds too complicated,” she said. “You don’t know any of these people or what the real situation is or anything else. If you didn’t give information to the police, then somebody else did. And if you didn’t kill Mr. Agricola, then somebody else did that, too. Maybe the same somebody, maybe a different one. The point is, you don’t know who these people are or what they’re doing or what they’re after. You’re probably just a sidelight to them, one little corner of some great big thing that’s going on.”

  “I’m learning,” I told her. “What else can I do? I keep moving, from name to name, from fact to fact, and I hope after a while I find out what’s going on and I get everything straightened out, and then I can go back to the bar and forget all this mess.”

  “Do you think so?” She glanced at me, and then back out at the road again.

  I didn’t get what she meant. “Do I think what?”

  “After this is over,” she said. “Even if you get everything straightened out the way you want, do you think you’ll be content to go back to your old life again?”

  “Ho ho,” I said. “You bet your sweet—you’re darn right I will. Content is hardly the word. Those cows on that evaporated milk can are nervous wrecks in comparison.”

  She shrugged. “If you think so,” she said.

  “I know so.” I looked around, out the windshield and the side window. “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure. On Long Island somewhere.”

  “That much I knew already.”

  “I think we’re going north,” she said. “If we are, we’ll cross one of the expressways sooner or later, and we can take it back into the city.”

  “Fine.”

  She said, “Charlie, something else.”

  “Something else?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve thought about this or not,” she said, and stopped.

  “Neither do I,” I told her. “Maybe I will after you say it.”

  She said, “If Gross thinks I’m Althea, and he thinks you are I are in cahoots, and he thinks we’re out to wreck the organization, where do you suppose he thinks we’re going now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She shook her head. “He told you, Charlie, about a crooked cop, what he called the liaison between the organization and the police force. Charlie, he’s sure to think we’re on our way to kill Mahoney.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “If we do find him,” she told me, “we’ll probably find Trask and Slade right along with him.”

  “They can’t be everywhere at once,” I said, though by now I wasn’t so sure.

  “All they have to be,” she pointed out, “is where you are.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do. Mahoney’s the man I’ve got to see next, that’s all.”

  “All right, fine. You’re in charge. Yeah, there’s Grand Central.”

  Grand Central is a parkway. Chloe tooled the mighty Packard around the long curve down from the street we’d been on, and joined the rest of the night traffic streaming toward the city.

  One question Chloe hadn’t brought up, but I’d been thinking about anyway, was how we were going to find Patrick Mahoney. All I knew about him was that he was a policeman. He could be a uniformed cop, or a detective in plainclothes. He could be stationed in a precinct in any one of the boroughs, or he could work out of the main Headquarters on Centre Street in Manhattan.

  Although, come to think of it, the odds were pretty good he was well up there in the police hierarchy. A uniformed cop on a beat somewhere was hardly in a position to be what Gross had called the “liaison” between the organization and the police force. It seemed to me likeliest that Mahoney was some sort of wheel and would most likely be found at Centre Street.

  But how to find out for sure, that was the problem.

  A patrol car passed us, exceeding the posted speed limit, and I gazed after it wistfully, wishing we could catch up with it and flag it down and just ask the cop driving it if he could tell us who Patrick Mahoney was and how to—

  Ah hah!

  I said it aloud: “Ah hah!”

  Chloe jerked, and the Packard lunged into another lane. “Don’t do that!” she said.

  “Canarsie,” I told her. “Never mind Manhattan, drive to Canarsie.”

  “Canarsie? Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding. Drive to Canarsie.”

  “I couldn’t find Canarsie,” she told me, “with a troop of Boy Scouts to help.”

  “I could. Stop the car and let me drive.”

  “You sure you know how to drive this kind of car?”

  Coming from her, that was an insult. But I let it pass. “Yes,” I said simply. “Pull over to the side.”

  She did, and we switched places, she sliding over and me running around the front of the car. It was a very large car, with a very long front and a very high hood. I got behind the wheel and immediately felt like a member of Patton’s Third Army Tanks, you know.

  What a dream that car was to drive! It was like driving a big old mohair sofa, equipped with a lot of tiny highly oiled ball bearings. It was the first time in my life I ever wished I smoked cigars. I can see why gangsters and little old ladies are assumed to drive cars like this; such a car gives a gangster a feeling of power and importance he can’t possibly get in, say, a Cadillac you can barely tell apart from some minor hood’s Chevrolet, and a lot of time at the wheel of this sort of car would surely keep the bloom of youth in the cheeks of any reasonably hip little old lady.

  “No wonder we got away from those guys,” I said, as we rolled merrily along. “This car has too much self-respect to be caught by some four-eyed piece of tin with plastic seat covers.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Chloe.

  “The driver helped, too,” I assured her, but I only said it to be polite.

  Chapter 18

  I found Patrolman Ziccata walking along East 101st Street, practicing with his nightstick. He wasn’t doing too well tonight, so I heard him before I saw him: Clatter, and, “Damn!”


  We’d been driving around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, moving very slowly with all the windows open. It was heading toward midnight and all Canarsie was, as usual, comatose. My competition, the other two neighborhood bars, were both open, of course, their windows full of red neon, but if they were not comatose they were at least somnolent. My own bar, the ROCK GRILL, was comatose; it was strange to drive by and see it closed and empty. How I wished I could get out of the car and go in there and open the place up, light it up, turn on the TV, put my apron on, maybe have a little small-talk with a customer or two, assuming a customer or two might come by.

  The late show tonight, I remembered all at once, was Kiss of Death, where Victor Mature wants to go straight and Richard Widmark won’t let him and pushes the old lady down the stairs in the wheelchair. And the late late show was going to be It’s a Gift, the old W.C. Fields comedy, where Fields buys the orange grove in California.

  That was an awful lot of good television to be missing, all on account of somebody making a stupid mistake some place.

  So anyway, we drove around the neighborhood about fifteen minutes before the clatter and damn told me I’d found Patrolman Ziccatta. I stuck my head out the window and, keeping my voice down as much as possible, said, “Hoy!”

  “Eh?” I could see him on the sidewalk, in the darkness midway between two streetlights, bending over to pick up his nightstick. Staying bent over, he swayed this way and that, like somebody involved in a religious ritual of some kind, looking around to see who’d called him.

  “Over here,” I said. “It’s me, Charlie Poole.”

  I’d meanwhile brought the Packard up to the left-hand curb, near him. Patrolman Ziccatta looked over at me, finally found me and recognized me, said, “Oh! It’s you, Charlie,” picked up his nightstick, straightened, and came over to the car. “You buy this?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, the car. No, I just borrowed it.”

  “I noticed the place closed before,” he said. “I was wondering were you maybe sick or something.”

  “I had things I had to do,” I said. “I can’t talk about it right now, if you don’t mind. No offense.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Why should I stick my nose in your private business?” And he bent forward again to smile past me at Chloe and raise his uniform hat. “Good evening,” he said.

  She smiled back, and nodded her head, and said, “Good evening.”

  “Patrolman Ziccata,” I said, going through the amenities although my heart wasn’t in it, “this is Chloe—uh—”

  “Shapiro,” she said.

  “Shapiro,” I said. “Chloe Shapiro. Chloe, this is Patrolman Ziccata.”

  They both said, “How do you do?”

  I was beginning to feel impatient. Any minute we’d be serving tea and chocolate-chip cookies. I said, “Patrolman Ziccatta, there’s a question I wanted to ask you.”

  “Sure, Charlie. Name it.”

  “In confidence,” I said. “And I can’t tell you why I have to ask this question.”

  He put his left hand on his badge, though I guess he meant the gesture to be hand on heart, and said, “I don’t snoop, Charlie, I don’t pry. Why should I be a nosy parker?”

  I said, “Fine. What I want to know is, there’s a man somewhere on the police force named Patrick Mahoney, and what I—”

  “I’d be surprised if there wasn’t,” said Patrolman Ziccatta, and laughed. He bent forward again, and looked twinkle-eyed at Chloe, and said, “Wouldn’t you, miss? Be surprised if there wasn’t?”

  The smile she gave him this time was perfunctory, I’m happy to report. I said, “This is serious, Patrolman Ziccatta, it really is.”

  He sobered immediately, and straightened till he was practically standing at attention. “Sorry, Charlie,” he said. “It just struck me funny, that’s all. You can see that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The question is, I want to find this guy Mahoney. I think he’s probably stationed at Centre Street, but I’m not sure.”

  “What is he, a wheel?”

  “I think so. But maybe not.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “Could you find out some way if there is a Patrick Mahoney stationed at Centre Street, or a Patrick Mahoney who’s a wheel stationed somewhere else? And find out on the quiet, so Mahoney doesn’t get wise?”

  He frowned at me. “Charlie, are you up to something you shouldn’t? I don’t want to talk like a cop now, you know that, I want to talk like a friend. If you’re involved in something you shouldn’t, your best bet is get out of it, right now, before it’s too late.”

  “I’m not involved in anything I shouldn’t,” I told him, which wasn’t exactly true but on the other hand was true for what he’d meant. I said, “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t ask me about this.”

  He spread his hands, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, “All right, Charlie, I don’t snoop, I don’t interfere. Your business is your business.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And I’ll do what I can,” he said. “You’ll stay here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll walk by the station house,” he said, “see what I can find out.”

  “Quietly,” I said.

  “Naturally.”

  “I could drive you over to the station house,” I said. “That might be quicker.”

  “I got to walk,” he reminded me. “But I’ll meet you there. It’s over on Glenwood Road, you know?”

  “I know. I’ll park down the block from it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “I haven’t found out anything yet,” he told me.

  We waved at each other and he walked on his way, practicing some more. I put the Packard back in gear and headed for the 69th Precinct station house on Glenwood Road.

  Chloe said, “He’s sort of sweet, isn’t he? For a cop.”

  “He’s a nice guy,” I said.

  She said, “I bet you’ve got a better class of friends than somebody like Artie.”

  “What do you mean? Artie’s my friend.”

  “Sure. But you’re one of the best people he knows, and he’s one of the worst people you know.”

  “Artie? What’s wrong with Artie?”

  “Never mind,” she said. She patted my hand the way a teacher might pat the hand of a kid who’d just stayed back in kindergarten. “You just be yourself.”

  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s to be patronized. But I couldn’t think of a really good comeback line, so I just hunched over the steering wheel and fumed.

  Neither of us said anything more until I’d parked the car down the block from the station house, a converted frame one-family house that didn’t look any more like a police station than like a moon rocket. Then Chloe said, “I wonder where Artie is now.”

  “Home, I suppose,” I said. “But what about Miss Althea, that’s what I wonder.”

  “We’re better off without her,” Chloe said. “She was all trouble, and no use to anybody.”

  “Listen,” I said. “About that crack you made about Artie before.”

  “Charlie, you know Artie as well as I do. Why talk about it?”

  “Well, you’re his girl friend, for Pete’s sake. Why do you say things like that about him?”

  She smiled crookedly. “That isn’t the question,” she said. “The question is, I say those things and they’re true, so why am I Artie’s girl friend? And I’m not really even his girl friend, Charlie. At the best I’m one of his girl friends, and at the best he’s one of my boy friends. I’m his morning-after-girl, I told you that.”

  I said, “Why?”

  She cocked her head to one side and seemed to consider the question. After a minute she said, “I’m twenty-three years old, Charlie. Puberty struck me when I was twelve. That’s eleven years. When I was seventeen I got married, to a boy eighteen, believe me he was a mistake. Two years later I got a divorce for reasons of desert
ion. Not here, over in Jersey where we lived in Elizabeth. Maury worked in the Esso refinery until he ran out. Is this beginning to sound like a true-confessions story just a little bit?”

  I said, “If you don’t want to tell me about it, I don’t—I mean, it’s your personal business, I’ve got no right …”

  “No, let me. I’m started now, so let me go. You’ve been taking a very simplistic attitude about me, Charlie, it’s time you got a more complicated picture. Like for instance I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, Linda, my parents have her up in the Bronx.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re darn right oh. One thing I’m happy about, I didn’t let Maury talk me into quitting high school the middle of my senior year. I finished, I got my diploma. The last four years I’ve been working here and there, going to night school at NYU, sometimes I keep Linda and sometimes my parents keep her, and so it goes. You got a picture in your head now?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, here’s another point. After Maury, after getting married too early, one thing I haven’t been in any hurry for is adult responsibility, you follow? That’s why I unload Linda on my parents every chance I get, that’s why I hang around with people like Artie and his crowd where there’s no responsibility at all, you know what I mean?”

  “I never got married when I was seventeen,” I said, “but I guess my job at the bar is the same thing. Avoiding responsibility.”

  “All right, so you understand that part. Now, one last point, and I hope I don’t make you blush. Remember, puberty at twelve. Married at seventeen. A mother at eighteen. I’m long since no virgin, Charlie, and I’ve got drives and needs just like anybody else. So I’ve got these drives and needs, and I don’t want responsibility, so I wind up Artie Dexter’s morning-after girl. You got the picture?”

  “You didn’t have to, uh,” I said.

  “Shut up, Charlie,” she said. “I just want you to know what Artie is to me and what I am to Artie. And that I know what Artie is and it’s just the weakness in Artie that made me connect with him.”

  I said, “Well, uh, what about this social-conscience thing, this TV special and not selling the pills any more and all?”