The Fugitive Pigeon

by Donald E. Westlake

  Mahoney scrunched his face up. He was watching me like a hawk, and thinking hard.

  I said, “If I didn’t kill Mr. Agricola, then whoever did kill him is still wandering around loose, nobody looking for him or even thinking about him, and maybe he does want to kill you, too.”

  Slade tossed the pistol in the air. “How about this, nephew? What’s the rod for, ballast?”

  “Self-defense. All you people keep trying to kill me.”

  Mahoney said, “Only one thing so far makes sense. Why come here to bump me off if you know where I live?”

  So I’d made an opening. I nodded enthusiastically, saying, “Sure. You can see the whole idea falls apart right there.”

  “Does it? In that case, what I—”

  He was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. He glanced at Trask and Slade, and then picked up the phone and spoke into it. “Hello? … Hold on.” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Trask and Slade, “It’s all clear now.”

  Trask said, “Fine. So we take the nephew.”

  “I’m not done listening to him,” Mahoney said. But he looked doubtful.

  I said, to keep him convinced, “You’ve got more at stake than these two. You can give me five minutes.”

  He nodded. “Five minutes.” He said the same thing into the telephone: “Give us five minutes, then let us know the next time it’s clear.” He hung up and looked at me, long and thoughtful. Then he sat down behind his desk and said, “Okay. You got one point on your side. Now I got a question. If you didn’t come here to bump me off, how come you’re here?”

  “For information,” I said.

  “You want information? You’re supposed to be the one gives information.”

  “But that’s just it, I’ve never given anybody any information about anything. The reason I went to Mr. Agricola and Mr. Gross was to find out why the syndicate was down on me, because I hadn’t done anything. Mr. Gross told me it was because you said I was being an informer. But I wasn’t, so I came here to ask you who told you I was.”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “Tough Tony Touhy.”

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Anthony Touhy, Mob & Rackets Squad, known as Tough Tony. He’s the one been getting the information on that bar you run, and when I asked him where the dope was coming from he said straight from the bartender, from the guy that runs the place for the syndicate.”

  “He said—” But I couldn’t go on. I was dumbfounded. I had never in my life heard of Tough Tony Touhy. Why should he say such a thing?

  Mahoney said, “Tough Tony is an honest cop, a nonbought cop. I’m his superior officer. When I ask him where he gets his information from, he tells me. He’s got no reason to lie.”

  I said, “But he did lie.”

  Mahoney held up two soft palms, making believe they were scales. “On the one side,” he said, “we got the fact it don’t make any sense you should come to the station to try to kill me. On the other side we got the fact it don’t make any sense Tough Tony should lie to me.”

  Trask said, “The nephew killed Farmer Agricola. We know that for sure.”

  Slade said, “And I was there not half an hour before that. It makes me feel bad to think of it.”

  Mahoney still mused over his upturned palms. “Over here,” he said, “we got to add the fact Tough Tony has never lied to me before, and we got to add the fact everybody agrees it was you bumped off Farmer Agricola, and we got to add the fact you come here toting a gun, and we got to add the fact you was in the best position of anybody to give us the information that was passed over.” The hand he was considering was sinking lower and lower under the weight of all the things he felt he had to add to it. Now, after a quick glance at me, he turned his attention to his other hand, which was way up in the air all by itself. “On this side,” he said, “we got nothing to add, nothing at all. So maybe you did come here to kill me instead of waiting outside my house, and maybe you tried it this way because you’re a dumbbell or you figured on the element of surprise or something.”

  Trask and Slade both nodded. Slade said, “That’s it, nephew. That’s the way it adds up, all right.”

  “Somebody,” I said, rather shakily, “somebody is using me for a fall guy. I never said a word to Tough Tony Touhy in my life, I never even heard of him until just now. Either he lied to you or you’re lying to Mr. Gross, and I wish I knew which.”

  Mahoney actually looked insulted. “Me lying? What the hell for?”

  “Maybe it was your fault that information got into the wrong hands,” I told him. “And you’ve been trying to cover up by putting the blame on me.”

  “That’s about all I want to hear,” Mahoney said.

  I appealed all at once to Trask. “It’s possible,” I said. “You must have talked with Mr. Gross by now, you must have compared descriptions and you know that wasn’t Miss Althea with me last night.”

  Trask frowned. “So what?”

  “So Mr. Gross figured I was in cahoots with Miss Althea and that’s why I was squealing to the police and killing people. But if I’m not in cahoots with Miss Althea, what’s my motive?”

  Slade said, “Maybe it’s just plain orneriness.”

  Trask said, “It ain’t our business to worry about your motive.”

  I told him, “It’s your business to worry about whether the syndicate is running right or not. What if it is Mahoney behind this whole thing, covering up like mad for something he did wrong? So you take me out and kill me and it doesn’t change a thing, everything’s still all loused up. And Mahoney picks somebody else to be his fall guy next time, maybe even one of you two, and it just goes on and on and on.”

  Mahoney got to his feet, rather hurriedly, crying, “Now, wait just a damn minute there!”

  Trask, without looking away from me, waved a hand at Mahoney to shut up and sit down. Trask was looking both amused and interested, and he said, “All right, nephew, keep it up. What else you got to say?”

  “I’m being used for a fall guy,” I told him, “that’s all I know for sure. Maybe it’s Mahoney, maybe it isn’t.”

  Trask said, “What if it isn’t?” Like he was just killing time, just humoring me until the phone should ring again.

  All right, I had the time, no matter what his reason for giving it to me, so it was up to me to use it. I said, “Did it ever occur to you, maybe the police force has caught on to Mahoney. Maybe they’re not sure, but they suspect he’s sold out to the syndicate, so just to be on the safe side they don’t give him any information that could make trouble. Like not telling him who the real informer is in a case like this, when the informer might still have more things to tell.”

  Mahoney was gaping at me open-mouthed. Trask, still looking amused, now turned his head and said, “Well, Mahoney? What do you think of that?”

  “I think,” said Mahoney, somewhat strangled, “I think that’s a lot of crap, that’s what I think.”

  Slade said, “There’s one quick way to check.”

  “Good,” I said, turning to him. “Fine. Let’s do it.” Mahoney looked at him somewhat warily. “What’s that?”

  Slade said, “Is Touhy around?”

  “I think so,” said Mahoney. “He should be in his office, yes.”

  “Trask and I’ll get out of sight. You call Touhy in here. The kid says he’s never seen Touhy, never heard of him before this. Let’s see if Touhy recognizes him, see what Touhy says to him.”

  “All right,” I said quickly. “That’s good.” And it was, it seemed to me, very good. Step by step I was coming around the circle to find the charges against me and the name of my accuser. From Uncle Al to Agricola to Gross to Mahoney, and now to Touhy. If only this could be at last the end of the line.

  Mahoney seemed less pleased by the idea. “What if he spills the beans? What if he starts talking to Touhy?”

  Trask smiled and shook his head. “He won’t. He’d only be killing Touhy, because we’d have to shut him up. You wo
uldn’t want to do that to poor Touhy, would you, nephew?”

  I shook my head. “No. I won’t say anything.”

  Mahoney said, “Shoot Tough Tony? Right here in my office?”

  Slade told him, “I got a silencer. And we can carry the body out when we get the all-clear on the nephew.”

  “Besides,” Trask added, “there won’t be any need for any shooting. Will there, nephew?”

  “No,” I promised.

  Mahoney, doubtful, said, “Well …”

  “Come on,” Trask told him. “We don’t have much time.”

  Mahoney shook his head; he still didn’t like it. But he said, “Let me see if Touhy’s in his office.”

  We waited and watched as Mahoney used his phone. From his talk, Touhy was in. Mahoney wanted to know could he stop by the office for a minute. Then he hung up and said, “He’ll be right in.”

  Trask and Slade receded toward a door on the far side of the office. “Remember, nephew,” Slade said, and Trask grinned at me, and they both slid out of sight.

  Mahoney and I stood facing one another, both of us nervous, both of us silent. Time hung in midair, like a pendulum stuck at one end of its swing.

  There was a single sharp rap at the door, and then it opened, and a tall black-haired tough-looking lantern-jawed big-knuckled guy came in, the sort that’s called the Black Irish. A cross between John Wayne and Robert Ryan.

  Mahoney started talking before this big fellow was halfway in the door. “Something’s come up, Tony, I’ll have to talk to you later, an unexpected visitor, I’ll get back to you in about half an hour, sorry to call you away like this for no reason at all.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” He waved a big hand, then looked at me for the first time. “Well, Charlie!” he said, and grinned wide in surprise and pleasure. “Fancy seeing you here! You giving the dope straight to the boss these days, us hired hands ain’t good enough for you any more?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out but air.

  This big bastard poked me playfully on the upper arm. “That’s okay, Charlie,” he said. “I understand. You don’t have to say nothing. I’ll see you around, okay?”

  And he was gone.

  I stood there and stared at the door through which he had entered and exited. Behind me I heard Trask and Slade coming back into the room, but I didn’t turn to look at them. I stared at the door and tried to understand what had just happened to me.

  In the silent room, the phone rang. Mahoney’s voice said, “Hello?” And then silence again, and then, “Okay, good.” And the sound of the receiver clicking into its cradle, and Mahoney saying to Trask and Slade, “Okay, it’s clear now.”

  Their hands were on my upper arms. One of them murmured, “Don’t make no fuss now, nephew.”

  Fuss? I couldn’t make a fuss. I was just trying to figure out what had happened.

  We were moving, the three of us, along a corridor and down some stairs and out to a blacktop driveway. The black car was there, the famous black car. They had me lie down on the floor in back and they threw a knitted afghan over me that smelled for some strange reason of horse. In multicolored darkness under the afghan, bewitched, bothered and bewildered, I rolled away on the last ride.

  Chapter 23

  If ever you have a problem, I mean a really knotty problem, a first-class puzzler, like the square root of two, for instance, or who really killed Farmer Agricola and why, allow me to recommend a long ride in the country, lying on the floor behind the front seat of an automobile, covered by a varicolored knitted afghan smelling pleasantly of horse.

  The trip took well over an hour, most of it happily on good roads. At first, I admit, I gave myself up to a stunned absence of mental processes, a blank mindlessness of shock, but slowly I began to thaw down from that frozen plateau and I began to get in there and do some no-holds-barred thinking.

  There was so much to think about. Who had killed Farmer Agricola, and why, and how? Who had been informing to the police, and why? Why had Tough Tony Touhy identified me as the informant?

  I poked at it the way I occasionally poke at the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times. You struggle and struggle, trying to get just a couple good long words to give you a kind of a grip on the problem, and from there on with any luck at all you can get half or two-thirds of the puzzle lickety-split. Lying there under the afghan I poked and pried at everything I knew, everything that had happened, everything I understood and everything I failed to understand. There was a lot of that last-mentioned stuff.

  I also did a lot of thinking about the people involved, all the people I’d come up against the last three days. My Uncle Al, and Farmer Agricola and his daughter Miss Althea, and Mr. Gross, and Inspector Mahoney, and Tough Tony Touhy, and Trask and Slade. And the ones who’d helped me, willingly or not: Artie Dexter and Chloe and Patrolman Ziccatta. I wondered, for instance, where Artie and Miss Althea were by now. And I wondered where Patrolman Ziccatta would get his quick nips on windy nights from now on, and would it ever occur to him to start an official inquiry into my disappearance, and I shook my head because I supposed it never would, not with his habit of keeping his nose out of other people’s business. And I wondered why Tough Tony Touhy had lied, and why and how and by whom Farmer Agricola had been killed, and who had really passed the information on to the police.

  I kept coming back, time and time again, to the killing of Farmer Agricola. It seemed to me that had to be connected with my own plight some way, that his having been killed in the short interval between his talking to Trask and Slade about me and my own arrival at the farm was too pat for coincidence. But where was the connection, where did it connect, that was the problem.

  Lying there in multihued darkness, like being inside a cathedral in late afternoon under the stained-glass windows, lying there under the afghan, breathing the smells of afghan and horse, I kept chewing it, chewing it, chewing it. Was it possible Farmer Agricola had been killed by the same person who was really giving information to Tough Tony Touhy? Could the connection between the killing and my plight be quite that specific?

  What if … What if Agricola hadn’t been entirely satisfied that I was the squealer? Yes, and what if he’d done some additional investigating, and he’d discovered that I was not, in fact, the squealer? And what if he’d been about to call off the hunt for me and redirect his killers, Trask and Slade, at the real squealer? Wouldn’t the squealer, if he knew about it, kill Agricola in self-defense? Of course he would.

  Except, how could he possibly have known? Or, knowing, how could he possibly have gotten there and committed the crime? At the time Trask and Slade left him he apparently still believed I was the squealer, and it was less than half an hour later than I found him murdered. In the interim, I didn’t see how anyone could have come to the farm without having been seen by me. And the three servants in the house, Clarence and Tim and Ruby, alibied one another.

  Unless … Now, what if, what if … What if the killer was the killers? What if Trask and Slade were the ones themselves? Agricola had begun to suspect I wasn’t the squealer, so he told them to lay off me while he did some more investigating. So they killed him and then went on hunting me just the same in order to cover themselves. The bodyguard at the Agricola farm, Clarence, had told me Agricola was still alive after Trask and Slade left, but one or both of them could have snuck back into the house, followed Agricola upstairs, and stuck the knife into him, using the knife instead of their more-accustomed guns because a gun might have been heard by the others in the house.

  Scrunched down on the floor, feeling the road vibration all over me like one of those agitator beds in the new hotels, I thought about that possibility, and the more I thought about it the less I liked it. It would explain the knotty problem of how Agricola had been killed, of course, but for the rest of it, it didn’t make sense. Trask and Slade were hardly squealers in the first place, and besides that they wouldn’t kill Agricola just for not suspecting me so much any more. They’
d play a waiting game, see how things were going.

  No, it wasn’t Trask and Slade. Somebody else, somebody else.

  I ran through more theories, possibilities, suggestions, but none of them were any good. I tried coming at the problem through Tough Tony Touhy, and I tried coming at it through the reason for killing Farmer Agricola, and I kept on getting nowhere. I also returned time after time to the how of the killing of Farmer Agricola, how someone had managed to get there and kill him between Trask and Slade’s departure and my arrival, which in many ways was the most baffling part of all.

  I could understand it if Trask and Slade had done the killing. They leave the house, Agricola stops to say something to Clarence and then goes upstairs, Trask or Slade sneak back in, follow him up, kill him, go back down, leave the house again, and they drive away. But they hadn’t done it, they just hadn’t done it, of that I was positive.

  Then I saw it.

  It hit me so hard I sat up, shedding afghan on all sides. Bright sunlight angling low through the back window blinded me—we were going east, which didn’t help me much, except to tell me we were somewhere on Long Island—and I squinted against it and pointed at Trask. Both of them were in the front seat, Slade driving. To Trask I said, “You didn’t go along!”

  He turned his head and scowled at me. “Down, nephew,” he said.

  “Tell me,” I insisted. “When Slade went to see Mr. Agricola, you didn’t go along. You stayed watching Artie Dexter’s place, or my mother’s place.”

  Trask said, “So what? Lie down and cover up.”

  To Slade I said, “Who went with you? Who did you take to see Farmer Agricola?”

  It was the answer of course, the ultimate answer. But I wasn’t to receive it, not that easily. Slade didn’t say a word, and Trask reached over a big-boned hand with a big hard gun gripped in it and clonked me gently on the head with the barrel. “I said down, nephew.”