by Barry, Mike
“It won’t take a second!” he shouted behind him. “Don’t worry about it, I’m fully covered, the company writes my own policy!” They stared after him but did not approach; apparently this satisfied them, or at least if it did not satisfy them, it was no longer their problem, because he was heading toward another part of the floor. Now Coates could hear the nearer shouts of the guard, amazingly persistent for all of his apparent blandness, the man chasing him, still on the track, but the shouts were merely vapor. Coates had other, more immediate things on his mind as he ran down toward the line which had been Shields’s; there he saw the enormous, barren shells of the Fleetwoods coming toward him, glinting like teeth in the fumes of the factory, men like ants pouring in and out of them, carrying their little torches, too absorbed in their work here to notice the commotion, and Coates closed in on them, gesticulating. “Where do they go?” he asked a huge man holding a welding instrument in both hands, the welder shooting fire. “Where do they go?” The man looked at him as if he were insane; in that moment Coates could see that he might be insane, that what he was doing could not in any way be justified by normal explication, but still he had to find out. Didn’t he have the right to know? How could he possibly go onward, dispose of the dope, fulfill his mission, unless he knew to where the cars were shipped? He knew that he had some larger mission in life; the conviction had come over him since he had calculated the series of steps that he would take. He was not a civil servant, not a pensioner; something large and special awaited him down the pike. If it did not, if this were not so, would these opportunities have presented themselves? “Tell me,” he said, and resisted an urge to seize the man by the lapels and shake him, “tell me where they go.”
“Toronto,” the man said. “Toronto depot.” Coates thanked him, and the man said, “What the hell is going on here, anyway? Who are you? Where you come from? Are you an inspector or something like that?”
“That’s right,” Coates said, turning, dodging, preparing to run. “I’m from the main office back in the East. I’m checking out delivery sites.”
“You mean you don’t know where the fucking things are supposed to go? You people back there in the management, you got to ask us employees where these things end up?”
“Well,” Coates said frantically, “well, you see, that’s exactly the problem. There’s a great deal of distance between management and the actual production situation, that’s why the old management was thrown out, as a matter of fact. We’re the new management, and we’re trying to inaugurate a policy of being closer to matters in the field.”
“This is crazy,” the man said. “This is crazy. I never heard of management not knowing where the cars are going. That’s just ridiculous; nothing like that can possibly be.” But Coates had no more time to straighten him out, no time to tell the man about the further and more flexible policies of the new administration that would lead to an ever-closer relationship with the workers in the field. Not only would they be finding out destinations, but they would want to know the workers’ attitude toward their jobs, their feeling about the corporation, their suggestions for how they thought conditions in the plant would be improved. Oh, yes, that would have had quite a stunning effect upon the man; it would have changed his whole aspect, and Coates would have liked to do it, but they were closing in on him, not only on the floor, where a decrease in the absolute level of the noise indicated that machines had been shut off so that his pursuit could be watched; not only on the floor were they closing in on him then, but on the catwalks above they were running to gather at a particular point high above him, people pointing and staring, and Coates realized then how a worker in this plant must feel, observed all the time. The very area was laid out in a way that had as its main goal observation and a total lack of privacy. There was nothing you could do at any given time that could not be seen from almost any point above the floor.
The hell with it. With a cop’s sense he had located a door in the distance which he knew opened up on newer or at least higher ground, and he headed toward that one now. Toronto depot. It would not be difficult to find out from information already readily available where the unloading point in Toronto was, and then he would move on from there, carry his precious cargo, make the contact. Once he had done so, once he had made the difficult and necessary series of arrangements which would precede disposal, his life would be utterly changed, he would never be the same again, and the true and unutterable part of the Coates that he would be would become a reality.
Running toward the door, seeing a little abscess of light twinkling, in the midst of his escape, it never occurred to Coates that he had gone mad. Nor should it. In his own mind he was acting perfectly reasonable; he was coming to terms with conditions at last.
XVI
Hamilton’s wife was mad enough to go to the commissioner about the murder of her husband, except that she had a pretty good idea of what the commissioner would do and decided that it would only be a matter of continued humiliation if she were to complain about the lackadaisical investigation following the discovery of Hamilton’s corpse in a vacant lot. It was not so much a personal sense of tragedy; the fact of the matter was that she did not miss him at all, nor had she particularly liked Hamilton for many years—maybe she had never liked him at all, she would have to investigate that with her psychiatrist, once she got over the immediate shock—but simply that people should not be allowed to go around doing things like that. People should not be allowed to murder men of relative financial and community standing and get away with it without at least some fuss being made, and the department was, Margaret thought, hardly knocking their brains out trying to apprehend Hamilton’s murderer.
Of course, it was possible that the reason for this was that Hamilton’s murder was somehow connected with the department itself, that is to say that some cop might have killed him. She was not at all naïve, she liked to think that she had been around as much as anyone else, and to have been in Detroit in the late sixties was to understand that one simple law of human contact applied: if the worst could happen, it probably had. The department might well have set him up, at least; at the most, it was a cop who had done it.
Nevertheless, she could have lived through this. Her life with Hamilton had been no fiction; she knew exactly what he had been doing, in all likelihood, there was involvement in the drug trade at one level or another, probably fostering it through the network with some kind of supply function. That was all right with her, along with all of the women that she was sure he was seeing on the outside and the fact that he had barely gone through the motions of this marriage for many, many years. Even that could have been tolerated. They had been married for a long time, Detroit was a rough place, the world itself looked crueler and crueler when you were forty-six years old, and perhaps Hamilton was doing better than most people of their generation in coming to terms with what had happened to them, better than Margaret herself. He was a realist anyway. If the world was full of dirt and deceit, he at least was going to turn something out of it. What more could one want?
So she had gone pretty well along the line to adjusting to the situation two weeks after Hamilton was buried. The insurance had been almost a quarter of a million dollars from a grab bag of policies which Hamilton had picked up over the years, the settlement from the company on their own policy had been quite generous, and Hamilton had turned out to have all kinds of bank accounts, which totaled almost half a million dollars—at least, the bankbooks that she could get hold of. She suspected that there were others that she would never see. He had no will, but that was a convenience more than anything else; if he had had a will, Margaret was pretty sure that she and the children would have been cut out of it to the exact maximum allowed by law, whereas his dying intestate meant that the whole thing, sooner or later, would fall into her hands.
So it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t like being twenty-one again and looking forward to her wedding, to the wonderful life that she would have with this wonderful man
who seemed so dedicated to the company at which he had already been for some three years, but it was a better end than a lot of people could have come to, including her husband. She was even thinking of how three-quarters of a million dollars might make her appear attractive in a way that she had not thought of being in more than twenty years. Her life was falling into place and doubtless would have continued to do just that, shaking out up and down the line, the northern suburb in which they lived already seeming limiting, Grosse Point beckoning, when she came up against the man who had murdered her husband and realized that her life had radically changed. It was impossible to go on in the same way of widowhood after you had met the man who had caused it; not even Margaret was detached enough for that.
The man who had murdered her husband came to her home at eight-thirty on a bright Tuesday morning, and sweating heavily in his patrolman’s blues, told her at the door that he had something important to tell her. All of the children were already back at college, Hamilton’s death having made as little impression upon their lives as did his existence, and the maid was not in that day, but even so she felt no nervousness about letting him in, even though she was sure from the very moment that she saw him that he was her husband’s murderer. At least, that was how Margaret Hamilton looked back on it later; she would say that she had had the feeling from the moment she had seen this policeman that he was the murderer because she had suspected something like this and because in dreams she had glimpsed over and over again the moment in which the assassin would reveal himself, and he even looked like that assassin. He said that his name was Coates and that he had something to tell her.
Immediately after she had let him through, after he had kicked the door closed, he started to act peculiarly. First he said that he was not sure why he was there at all, that he was probably crazy to come to this place, that anyone would tell him that who had half a brain, but damn it, he was going to come there anyway because he had a perfect right to, and that was the end of it. He mumbled something then about her husband having ruined his life. She went over to the couch and sat quite calmly, holding her hands one within the other and hearing him out. It was inconceivable to her that she was in any danger whatsoever. Something really large and disastrous happening to someone close to you took away all sense of personal vulnerability for a while; that was one of the great purgative effects of funerals. They made you feel a little immortal, because nothing so terrible could happen to you, a tasteful person in control of her life. “I killed your husband, you know,” the patrolman called Coates said. “I shot him and killed him. I had to do it, you know. He was a murderer. He had killed a lot of people.”
“Shouldn’t you leave now?” she said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I have to tell you. You have to understand that I had a right to do it and that it was the best thing for all of us, that if I hadn’t done it, someone else with even less consideration would have. Besides,” Coates said rather wildly, his eyeballs fluttering like pennants, high-stepping in the pile of the rug, running his hand over the bullets in his belt, “besides, I can’t get rid of the stuff. I mean, Canada’s a huge place. It’s gigantic, and even Toronto isn’t narrowing it down too much. How much can you narrow down Toronto? They all thought I was crazy, but I was just trying to get information. But what the hell am I supposed to do now? There just isn’t any point to it.”
“I’m sure I can’t help you,” she said. “If you did kill him, though, shouldn’t you turn yourself in …” And then she cut off her flow of words, because she had almost said in to the police, which would have been altogether quite a stupid thing to say. “I really don’t think I can help you,” she said. “Your answer isn’t here, you know.”
“But if it isn’t here, where is it? Where am I supposed to go?” Coates said. His eyes appeared to be dimming; his expression was suddenly abstracted. “I mean, this is the place where the answer should be, isn’t it? I can’t do everything myself, you know. I’ve got to get some more definite clues, some more definite information on destination.”
“Destination of what?”
“Listen,” he said, and unless Margaret was mistaken, the man appeared to be crying, “you were his wife. You must have been very close to him, you must have known everything he was up to. After all, that’s what a good marriage is, you share everything, you share information, there’s a real closeness there. You must have known what he was doing and where he was putting it.” He fell to his knees in a gesture that was somehow less plaintive than brutal, and raised his arms to her. “Please,” he said in a barely controlled voice, “you’ve got to tell me where he was delivering the stuff. That’s not too much to ask, is it? It’s not as if I wanted to know really confidential stuff like your sex life or how much money he was making out of it.”
“You’re a very sick man,” she said, looking down at him. “Something’s got to be terribly wrong with you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. If I were you I would leave; I think that’s best.”
“No,” he said, “no, I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that you didn’t know. Look here,” he said, his arms still in the air, little dank stains in the armpits, “I’m pleading with you. I’m down on my knees to you; I’m not threatening or trying to hurt you at all. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone anymore, I couldn’t do that kind of thing to people. All that I want is a little information, and I’ll leave you alone.”
“Leave,” she aid, “leave right now. I don’t know what you think my husband was doing or what I could tell you, but it’s nothing.”
“I didn’t really mean to kill him,” the man said. “It was just something that seemed necessary at the time. He was a very bad man. He was hurting people, you know? He was just pushing people around, and things were starting to get worse and worse, and eventually he would have hurt even more, so I did it for their sake. But if I had it to do over again, I swear, I wouldn’t. It was really just an irresistible impulse. Probably temporary insanity. Please, Mrs. Hamilton. Where was he delivering it? You were probably running the thing together; that’s the kind of marriage that I bet you had. I’m sure that you had a beautiful marriage, great closeness and all of that.” He reached into his hip band, took out his pistol, and showed it to her. “You see this?” he said. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she said, trying not to bite her lips. “Yes, I see it.”
“I’ll give it to you. Toronto’s such a goddamned big city; they’ve got two million people in the metropolitan area, you know that? I’ll give you the gun, just as a gift, if you’ll tell me where he was unloading it. If I didn’t think you knew,” the man said with a horrid reasonableness, the twitch of an ingratiating smile at the corners of his features, “if I didn’t think you knew, I wouldn’t come in here like this, I wouldn’t come in with a gun and make such an issue of this, because then I’d be crazy, you see, and I’m not really crazy, not at all. I’m just trying to make my own way in the world, just like Hamilton was.”
There was nothing she could do, Margaret saw. She could not get past the man out of the house, she could not reach the telephone. Nor could she talk him out of the line of reasoning in which he was trapped like a fly in gelatin; all of her struggles or his would only imprison him more deeply. There was absolutely nothing at all that could be done, she thought, and with this there was a sense of peace, relaxation, an utter commitment to the worst of all possibilities. There was a luxury in finally seeing, accepting, merging with the worst that could happen. You could go no lower than that, ever. All of your life, she thought, or at least all of her life, she may have been looking for something so terrible that she would not have to try to cope anymore, and now here it was. She sighed, feeling animals move across her chest. “I know nothing,” she said. “I know nothing at all. I don’t know what you want or what you think I have to tell you, but I can offer you nothing at all.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” the man said. “I was really afraid that you would say that. You’re just l
ike the rest of them, you won’t try to help, you won’t try to cooperate so that this thing can be over sooner. Instead, just like the rest of them, you have to fight me. Defy me at every turn,” the man said like an irritated teacher, and extended the gun, leveled it, and shot her in the face.
XVII
When Wulff came back to the room after his first reconnoitering of Motown, Jessica was gone and so was the coke, which had been closeted in a sack. All of the ordnance, however, was there. The one valise she had had with her was also out of the room, which meant presumably that she had left him, but she had not even had the decency to write a note of farewell.
Well, Wulff thought, that was all right. He should have expected nothing different, and she had her own position to protect too, although the way in which she had left him only indicated that he had been something of a fool and had incurred, perhaps, bigger risks than he had any need to, something which he had not done in a long time. Usually his judgments of people were fairly acute, and he should not have left himself so vulnerable with her. On the other hand, she had obviously had little interest in him, a great deal of interest only in the coke, so this meant that his judgment had not been too far off; he had not placed himself in actual physical danger because of his lapse. Maybe in the long run it was just as well, having her out of the picture, that was to say. He had, after all, used her to the limit of the only point that she could prove to him, which was that sex existed, that he had not been cut off from its benefits and drawbacks. Not that this was any major experience for him, of course.
