The Fugitive Pigeon

by Donald E. Westlake

  So I went back down, pulling the afghan up over myself.

  There was the answer, locked away in Slade’s head. Trask and Slade hadn’t gone to see Farmer Agricola, Slade had gone with someone else. That someone else had seen or heard or said something that was dangerous to him, so when they left he said to Slade, “Forgot my cigarettes,” or, “Remembered something I wanted to ask the Farmer,” or, “Hold it, I got to go back and use the head.” Something, anything. Slade waited, the other guy went back in, killed Agricola, came out, rode away with Slade.

  And they might have suspected him, Slade at any rate might have remembered and suspected him, if I hadn’t come blundering onto the scene a few minutes later, taking all the blame and suspicion onto myself.

  I should have realized it long ago, but I was too used to thinking of Trask and Slade as a team, inseparable. But hadn’t they been separate last night, one of them watching Artie’s place while the other was probably with Inspector Mahoney? If only I’d stopped to think then of the implications, that Trask and Slade could survive for short periods of time away from one another, I might now be a lot closer to the solution than I was.

  Still, it was something. I knew how Agricola had been killed, and I could guess why. All that remained now was the knotty question of who.

  And just before the car stopped I realized who it had to be.

  Had to be, absolutely had to be. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who could have known the proper things, who could have been in the right places at the right times, who could have handled this whole mess with such a teetering combination of panic and cunning, desperation and wiliness.

  The car had left the road, was moving slowly now across something that crunched beneath the wheels. Sand, it sounded like. More and more slowly, rising and falling over uneven ground, the big black car finally settled to a stop.

  Doors opened and then shut again. Feet crunched through sand. Another door opened, the one by my feet. Trask’s voice said, “Okay, nephew.”

  I pushed the afghan away and sat up. “It’s all right,” I said. “I know now.”

  “Let’s go for a walk, nephew,” Trask suggested.

  He wasn’t listening to me. “But I’ve figured it out,” I said. “Everything’s all right now, I’ve got it doped out.”

  Trask showed me that big hard gun again. “Come out of the car, nephew,” he said.

  I looked at him. I looked past him, and saw nothing but Slade.

  I had it all figured out, and these two knobheads couldn’t care less. I knew the whole thing, and I’d run the course anyway.

  “Nephew,” said Trask. “Come along. We’re goin’ for a walk.”

  Chapter 24

  Pardon me if you will, but I intend to drop into third-person narration for just a little while now. This next scene is far too nerve-racking for me to relive in first person. I want to view it all from as great a distance as possible—the middle of Long Island Sound, for instance.

  Therefore …

  The setting is a bit of sandy beach not far from Orient Point, one of the two eastern tips of Long Island. The other, Montauk Point, farther to the south, is better known, duller to look at, and more heavily commercialized. A ferry leaves Orient Point three times a day in summer, bound for New London, in Connecticut. In summer, also, pleasure boats cruise these waters, swimmers and sunbathers dot these beaches, but after Labor Day pockets of emptiness appear and grow, and by the first snowfall Orient Point is virtually deserted.

  This particular stretch of beach is one of these pockets of emptiness, or was until a few minutes ago, when an automobile came driving slowly across the rolling sand from the direction of the invisible road. A big black car, new and gleaming, reflecting the mid-September sun. It stopped about a city block from the water’s edge, and two tall men in dark clothing got out. They wore dark topcoats and the sea wind whipped the coat tails around their legs.

  A minute or two later a third man got out of the car, somewhat shorter and thinner than the first two, this one wearing a black raincoat which also whipped around his trouser legs.

  The three began to walk away from the car, in single file, the one in the raincoat coming second. The other two walked hunched and stolid, their hands in their topcoat pockets, but the one in the middle appeared to be talking; his arms were in constant motion, like an erratic windmill, and his head bobbed with the speed and intensity of his words. The other two appeared not to be listening to him.

  In their dark clothing, in the wind, in the sunlight, silhouetted against the light tan of the sand, the three walkers were impressive, curious, somehow frightening. They moved across the sand in a deliberate way, the two bigger ones picking their feet up high and leaning forward and moving their shoulders a great deal, the way men will walk through sand when their hands are in their topcoat pockets and they have a specific place to go. The one in the middle slid around in the sand more, seeming to be constantly on the verge of throwing himself off balance with his waving arms.

  They walked at an angle in relation to the water, not directly toward it but rather off to the right away from the car, toward a small break in the beach where the ocean had eroded away a tiny cul-de-sac of water, a minuscule pool or cove or lagoon, walled in by sand. Gray driftwood choked this cul-de-sac, and more gnarled twisted pieces of driftwood up on the sand ringed it in.

  As the procession moved closer to this cluster of driftwood the walker in the middle seemed to grow more and more agitated, as though the driftwood held for him a significance he found both unpleasant and impelling. His rapid, disjointed half-sentences rang out across the water, whipped away by the wind.

  The trio reached the driftwood. The two taller men situated the talker where they wanted him, standing at the edge of the little drop to the water, standing amid the driftwood, his back to the water. They moved away from him, still facing him, and both took small machines from their pockets.

  The one standing shin-deep in driftwood talked louder and faster than ever, and an occasional whole sentence blew out across the water: “What if I’m right? What if you’re wrong and I’m right? How did I know who went with you to the farm?” And other comments, loud and rapid and urgent in tone.

  The other two raised the machines in their hands and pointed them at the talker. But then one of them lowered his machine and said something to his partner. The two of them spoke briefly together. They seemed undecided.

  The talker kept talking, waving his arms. The wind blew his raincoat around him and the sun gleamed on his perspiring forehead.

  The other two finally came to a decision. They motioned to the talker, who came back out of the driftwood and walked with them across the sand again to the car they’d arrived in. While the talker and one of the other two stood beside the car, the third man opened the door, slid behing the wheel, and operated an automobile telephone mounted under the dash.

  A name was spoken, blew out over the waves: “Mr. Gross.”

  There was a brief telephone conversation on the part of the man in the car, and then he handed the telephone receiver to the talker, the one who had just recently been standing amid the driftwood. The talker began to talk again, this time into the telephone, but just as urgently and rapidly as before. He stopped talking to listen, and then he talked again. The telephone was handed to one of the others to speak a word of corroboration to the man at the other end, and then handed back to the talker to talk into some more.

  The wind blew. The sun shone. The water lapped at the beach. The black auto gleamed. The talker talked. The other two stood stolid and patient, dispassionate, not caring whether the talker convinced the man on the other end of the phone line or not. One of them lit a cigarette, hunching his back and cupping his hands to protect the match flame from the wind. The white smoke blew away, out to sea, along with the words of the talker, along with anything else that might be left here.

  The talker was finished. He handed the telephone to one of the others, who spoke into it brief
ly, listened, nodded and spoke again, and then put the receiver back on its hook under the dashboard.

  The trio got into the car, all in the front seat, the talker—now silent—in the middle. The car made a wide U-turn and drove away from the beach, toward the invisible road.

  Chapter 25

  Phew!

  Let me tell you, that was close. Down among the driftwood there, I thought it was all up, all over but the shooting. I talked like Broderick Crawford in a hurry, I said everything five or six times fast, and I kept jumping up and down and waving my arms to try to attract their attention, and for a while it looked as though I might as well have been talking French. But I just kept at it, telling them who had killed Agricola, and why he’d done it, and how come he had to be the one who’d really been giving the syndicate information to Tough Tony Touhy, and pointing out how I’d guessed he was the guy Slade had taken with him to see Agricola, and then going over the whole thing all over again, and after a while it finally did begin to seep into their skulls a little, like rain through concrete.

  It was Trask who finally said, “What can it hurt? Let him talk to Gross. If Gross says he’s on, he’s on.”

  Slade said, “I don’t want to take a lot of time.”

  “This won’t take long,” Trask told him.

  So that was how it was. We walked on back to the car, and I figured at first it meant we’d be taking another long ride together, back across the Island and south to Hewlett Bay Park, but it turned out the car had a telephone in it. I’d heard about that before, telephones in automobiles, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one.

  You’d think, with my reading in science fiction and all, I would have thought about the wonders of science and like that when I saw the telephone in the black car, but that wasn’t what came into my mind at all. The black car on the sand dunes, the deserted area, the tough type calling his boss on a telephone in the car—it was all exactly like a scene from one of those movie serials I used to watch on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid. I looked up into the sky for Superman or Spy Smasher, but nobody showed.

  Except Mr. Gross, of course, on the other end of the telephone. Trask had made the call, while Slade stood next to me with his hand suggestively in his pocket. After a minute or two of fiddling with the phone company, Trask finally reached Mr. Gross and told him the situation. He and Gross talked back and forth a minute, and then he handed me the phone and said, “He wants to hear it. Tell him the story.”

  So I went through the whole thing again, in as orderly a manner as I could manage under the circumstances. Mr. Gross asked a few questions, and I answered them as best I could, and then he said, “It sounds possible. Not necessarily true, you understand, but possible. An alternative explanation. We will have to learn which explanation is accurate. Put Trask back on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I handed the phone to Trask, there was another brief conversation, and then the call was over. Trask said to Slade, “We’re supposed to bring him to see Mr. Gross.”

  I exhaled. It was, I believe, the first time I’d exhaled in about three minutes.

  Salde shrugged. “So we’ll never get done with this job,” he said. But he didn’t seem irritated, just fatalistic about it all.

  Trask motioned a thumb at me. “Come on, nephew,” he said. “Back in the car.”

  “Under the afghan again?”

  They looked at each other. Slade shrugged and Trask said, “No. Climb in front.”

  I was happy to. Not only did I anticipate a much more enjoyable ride sitting on the seat in the open air than lying on the floor under an afghan, but letting me sit up there was kind of letting me know they pretty much believed me.

  Slade drove again, and Trask sat on my right. Slade steered the car around in a wide U in the sand and headed back for the highway. As we reached it and turned west, toward the late afternoon sun, Slade put the visor down and said, “I hope you’re telling the goods, nephew. I never did like that bastard anyway.”

  “Neither did I,” said Trask.

  I agreed with them both.

  Chapter 26

  There was quite a group waiting for us when we got to Mr. Gross’s house. Aside from Mr. Gross himself, there was my Uncle Al, there was Farmer Agricola’s bodyguard Clarence, there was Inspector Mahoney, and there were two tough-looking types I’d never seen before. Uncle Al and Clarence and Inspector Mahoney all looked worried, and the two tough-looking types looked like all other tough-looking types: tough-looking, uninterested, and not very bright.

  We came in, Trask and Slade and me, and Mr. Gross said, “Ah. Here you are. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  This was the room where three bridge games had been in progress the last time I’d been in this house. The card tables were gone now and rather frail-looking chairs and end tables were spotted here and there around the room. On the floor was a very clean oriental rug.

  Mr. Gross had gotten to his feet as we came in, and now he motioned me to a chair where I’d be the inevitable center of attention. “Sit down, Mr. Poole. Make yourself comfortable.”

  I sat down, but I wasn’t very comfortable. Would I be able to convince them?

  I felt all the eyes on me and I was feeling a fright that was only partially stage fright.

  Mr. Gross said, “I called these people here to listen to your ideas. I want you to tell it all again, just like you told it to me over the phone. They can tell us if the story holds together right.”

  Mahoney said, “This is dangerous, Gross. I shouldn’t be here, this is endangering my usefulness to you and myself and the whole organization.”

  Gross waved a sausagy hand at him. “Relax, Mahoney. Just sit and listen.”

  Uncle Al said to me, “Charlie, what are you up to now? How much trouble you want to get yourself in?”

  “That’s enough,” Gross said. He sat down, like a white toad settling himself under a mushroom, and crossed pudgy hands over his white-shirted black-suited torso. “Begin,” he said.

  I said, “Two things happened, and you thought I did both of them. Somebody gave away secrets to Tough Tony Touhy, and somebody killed Farmer Agricola. You were wrong about me doing them, but you were right it was the same person did both. The reason you thought it was me was because you had Inspector Mahoney find out where the leak was coming from, and he asked Touhy, and Touhy said it was from me.” I turned to Mahoney. “But at first,” I said, “he didn’t say precisely that I was the one talking to him. You said to him something like, ‘Where’s this information coming from?’ And he said something like, ‘It’s coming from the bartender at the Rockaway Grill.’ Isn’t that right?”

  Mahoney shrugged and spread his hands and looked at Gross. “How do I know?” he said, talking directly to Gross. “How do I know what exact words was used? What difference does it make?”

  “The difference,” I told him, “is you asked one question and Touhy answered a different one. Most policemen keep the identities of their regular informants secret as much as they can, at least that’s what I’ve always read, so I guess Touhy didn’t ever think you wanted to know the name of the informant. You asked him where the information was coming from, and he thought you meant what was the ultimate source in the organization, and that was me. But he didn’t mean I was telling him anything directly. What he meant was, the guy who passed the information on to him first got it from me.”

  Mahoney said, “So you worked through an intermediary. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Not an intermediary,” I said. “There was only one person I ever talked to about organization business, and I only talked to him because it was supposed to be safe to talk to him, he was a member of the—”

  Uncle Al jumped to his feet and shouted, “Wait a goddam minute!”

  Mr. Gross pointed a sausage at him. “Sit down, Gatling.”

  But Uncle Al stayed on his feet. “What is this, a goddam railroad? You think you can pull—”

  Mr. Gross made a small gest
ure with the sausage. The two tough-looking types had already moved over close behind Uncle Al’s chair. Now they reached out and put their hands on his shoulders and pushed him very slowly and quietly back down into his chair. He went down, mouth open, and just sat there. He watched me, and his mouth was open, but he didn’t interrupt any more. And the two tough-looking types left their hands on his shoulders.

  I said, “Touhy got something on Uncle Al, I don’t know what. But instead of pulling him in, he used Uncle Al to give him information about syndicate business. Including dope about shipments of things going through my bar. Every time I was with my Uncle Al we’d talk about how I was doing at the bar, how much work there was, what the story was with shipments and packages and all that. He knew as much about what was going on there as me, and he was the only one I ever talked to.”

  Mahoney was watching me at last, instead of Mr. Gross. He said, “That’s just your word against his. He’s been a trusted member of the organization for years, so why should we believe you?”

  “Because he killed Mr. Agricola,” I said.

  Clarence spoke up, saying, “Not so’s you’d notice it. You’re the one killed Mr. Agricola, and nobody else.”

  “No, I didn’t. When I got away from Trask and Slade the second time, at Artie Dexter’s place in Greenwich Village, they had Uncle Al with them. They phoned Mr. Agricola, and he said Trask should keep watch some place or other, and Slade should come out for further instructions, and bring my Uncle Al along to fill him in on his nephew Charlie Poole.” I turned to Slade. “Isn’t that right?”

  Slade nodded. “Right.”

  “I should have figured that out long ago,” I told them, “but I kept thinking of Trask and Slade always together, like Siamese twins. Anyway, while they were there Uncle Al let something slip, something that Slade wouldn’t know about but that Agricola would, something that Agricola didn’t catch right away. I don’t know what it was, but Uncle Al realized he’d made the mistake and knew Agricola would catch on sooner or later, so after he and Slade went out to the car he made some excuse to go back inside—”