The Split p-7

by Richard Stark

  He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stay here because he thought the stranger would come back or because he thought the stranger wouldn’t come back. Still, he kept watching the sidewalk far below and wondering if the gun in his pocket would lire accurately that far, straight down.

  He wished he could go into the bedroom where he’d killed her and look around again. He supposed the body was gone, and that was a shame. Still, just the empty bedroom - he wished he could go in there and look around.

  He squatted by the parapet, lost in his roiling thoughts.

  A sound startled him, but he resisted the impulse to move, to make’ noise of his own. He turned his head and saw the stranger, far across the roof, just stepping off into thin air.

  No, not into thin air. There was a fire escape back there, running down the rear of the building.

  He reached with quiet haste into his pocket for the gun, but it was too late. The stranger receded downward, legs disappearing and then torso and arms and finally head. What a cold face he had!

  He hurried across the roof just as quietly as he could, and got to the back edge just in time to see the stranger disappear into Ellen’s apartment through the window down there.

  Follow him? No, that would be far too dangerous. Sooner or later he must come out again, by this same route. All that was necessary was to wait, and this time not miss.

  It didn’t take long, but it seemed long. At last the stranger reappeared and started up the fire escape in the fading daylight, coming up toward the staring eye peering down at him past the straight line of the top of the automatic.

  He fired and missed. Missed the way amateurs always do when shooting downward, aimed too high.

  The stranger flung himself to the right, flattened himself against the wall down there. But still a target, still a target.

  He fired again, and again he missed.

  The stranger fired back, and shards of brick peppered his cheek as the bullet ricocheted by.

  He couldn’t stand that. If he lived to be a hundred and if someone shot at him with a gun every day until then, he would still never get used to it, never fail to give in to immediate panic. The stranger could be fired at repeatedly and still be alert and aware, still act in defense or offence. He would never know how the stranger did it.

  For the second time he ran. Across the roof, pell-mell, all fears that he might fall through the tarpaper and the roof forgotten. He yanked open the door and pelted down the stairs, not noticing the kitchen chair standing empty in the hallway or the now-open door to Ellen’s apartment. He ran on down, and out to the street, and a block away collapsed inside the Ford, frantic: and ashamed of himself and out of breath.

  After a while he went back to the room, and here he was now, still in it, a small square room with beige walls, the room nine feet long, ten feet wide, nine feet high. He was looking out the window, feeling the stranger’s eyes, knowing he would no longer have the courage to go searching for the stranger himself, knowing he didn’t have the courage to try to run away, knowing he could do nothing but wait here to be found.

  He hadn’t wanted any of this. It was all Ellen’s fault, Ellen’s fault. If only, if only …

  The room was getting smaller, meaner, dimmer. He couldn’t stay here forever, he couldn’t wait here indefinitely like this.

  He deserved some time off. The tension had been so meat for so long, it was about time he relaxed, forgot about things, found some way to amuse himself, distract himself.

  He pulled the dresser away from the door and went out to the hall where the pay phone was. He called a friend of his, a guy he’d known in the old days, who said, ‘When did you get back from Mexico, man?’

  ‘Just a couple days ago. You doing anything tonight?’

  ‘New, you know.’

  ‘Why don’t we take in a movie, have a couple beers?’

  ‘Sure thing. Come on over. Say, wasn’t that something about Ellie?’

  ‘What? Oh, yeah. It sure was. Be right over.’

  He hung up, having made the mistake that would kill him.

  Two

  Detective Dougherty wasn’t at all sure he’d done the right thing. The smart thing, yes, there wasn’t any doubt of that, but the right thing? Maybe not.

  Driving downtown to talk it over with the lieutenant, Dougherty allowed himself little fantasies in which he got the drop on the man who’d called himself — obviously lying — Joe, in which he captured Joe, bested Joe, worsted Joe. In the cellar there, sitting as calm and deceptive as W. C. Fields playing poker, and then all at once - like Fields producing a fifth ace - whipping the pistol out and crying, ‘All right, hold it!’

  In the dining-room, as Joe copied down the names, distracted …

  At the front door, as Joe turned to leave …

  ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.’ Francis Bacon said that, whether he wrote Shakespeare’s plays or not.

  Detective Dougherty was a good enough detective to have been aware of all the opportunities Joe had given him to try for an arrest. But he was also a good enough detective to know they were all opportunities given him by Joe, not out of carelessness but as a challenge. Every opportunity given him deliberately to remind him of his wife and children, currently next door, safely out of the house but close enough still to hear the shot that would kill him. And listening for that shot.

  That, Dougherty thought to himself as he drove downtown, is probably the most enervating, the most spine softening, the most weakening thing that can happen to a man: to know that his wife and children are sitting with cocked heads listening for the sound of the shot that will kill him.

  If there had been no wife, no children, Joe would never have walked in and out so casually. Dougherty might have died or Joe might have been caught, but either way it would have ended.

  Of course, he knew full well that if there had been no wife or children Joe wouldn’t have handled it the same way.

  ‘He used my weakness,’ Dougherty said to himself. In his own personal soul, in the part of him that wasn’t a policeman, he hated Joe for that and would pursue’ him more for having done that than for anything involving the stolen gate receipts or the murder of Ellen Canaday.

  He found a parking space now two blocks from headquarters and walked back. It was not quite night; one out of three or four cars passing hadn’t turned their headlights on yet.

  After five o’clock, headquarters always took on for Dougherty the harsh surrealistic pregnant look of an IRA armory. He went up the slate steps and through the lotting doors and down the green antiseptic-smelling hall. When he at last came into the crowded wooden office of the lieutenant, he felt as he always did when in this building in the evening: like an unambitious Javert, a dull Maigret.

  The lieutenant looked like Eisenhower, except that he never smiled, and when he did open his mouth for some other reason his teeth were yellow-brown and rotten and separated by wide gaps. He pointed to Dougherty to sit down and said, ‘I did what you said to do on the phone. Now fill me in.’

  Dougherty filled him in, telling him in flat monosyllables what had happened, giving no reasons or explanations this time through but merely chronicling the events, as though reporting the plot of some movie he had seen.

  When he was done, the lieutenant said, ‘All right, I see why you didn’t try to take him; that was smart, that makes sense, in your own home and all. But why give him the list? It’s legit, the real list?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t have another list of names handy. Besides, since he knew the girl himself he would naturally expect to know at least a couple of the names on any list of her friends I showed him.’

  ‘Did he say he knew any of them?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ But that was the wrong way to say it; the lieutenant looked offended. Hurriedly, Dougherty went on, ‘I figured it was best not to ask him, not agitate him.’

  The lieutenant
nodded and mumbled something, then said, ‘Why give’ him a list at all? Why not tell him the list is here, downtown, you can’t remember the names?’

  ‘This way,’ Dougherty said, ‘we’ve maybe got some leads to him. We know for sure nine people he’s interested in. He naturally knows we’ll be looking for him to come around one of those people, but if he’s in that much of a sweat to get their names that he’ll come around to my house and brace me for them, I figure he’s in a sweat enough to try to get past us to the people themselves.’

  ‘Why? What’s he after?’

  ‘I’m not sure. This whole thing has to connect with the stadium robbery some way. I’d say this guy Joe was in on the robbery and staying with the Canaday woman till the heat was off. It would be my guess that whoever killed the Canaday woman took something of Joe’s away from the apartment and it would probably either be something that would expose Joe’s identity or prove his connection with the robbery, or it was his share of the loot itself.’

  The lieutenant said, ‘Ah. Somebody robbed the money from the robber. That would make him boil, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would explain why he’s so on the prod.’

  The lieutenant nodded. ‘So he’ll have to go after the people on your list. If he wants his money back.’

  ‘If it is the money. It could be something else, something incriminating.’

  The lieutenant waved an impatient hand. ‘Whatever it is, he wants it back in a bad way. You were smart, Dougherty.’

  Dougherty smiled, but inside he was cringing. He could’t help himself, but whenever the lieutenant complimented him he promptly remembered that the lieutenant hadn’t finished high school. It was an odd fact he’d learned nearly by accident several years ago, before he was even in plainclothes. He never thought of it other limes, but whenever the lieutenant complimented him, told him he’d done a job well, he’d been thinking on his feet, gave him any kind of praise at all, some nasty voice within Dougherty’s mind promptly spoke up and sneered, ‘Not even a high school diploma.’

  The lieutenant was saying now, ‘What you ought to do, you ought to get together with Robbery Detail, whoever’s working the stadium job, tell them what you’ve got, then start running the mug shots. How’s he compare with the composite drawing, by the way?’

  Dougherty shrugged. ‘The way they always do. If you see the guy first, then you can see where the drawing looks like him. But if you see the drawing first, you can’t see at all where the guy looks like it.’

  ‘Then get together with the artist, whatsisname, get together with him, help him make up a new composite.’

  Dougherty took a deep breath. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I’d like to get switched off the Canaday case.’

  ‘You’d like to what?’

  ‘Have somebody else take that over for me, will you? Put me on temporary loan with Robbery Detail.’

  The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed and his mouth opened. Now he didn’t look like Eisenhower at all. ‘You got a bee in your bonnet, Bill?’

  It was a rare thing for the lieutenant to call him Bill; it usually preceded a chewing-out. Dougherty said, reassuringly, ‘I don’t want to be the Lone Ranger, Lieutenant, honest to Christ, I’m not the Robert Ryan type.’

  ‘You just want to be in on it.’ When the lieutenant was being sarcastic, he wanted the world to know about it; he carved his words out of blocks of wood and bounced them off the floor.

  Dougherty let the sarcasm thud by. ‘That’s right,’ He said.

  ‘I want to be one of the people that runs him down.’

  ‘You don’t care who bumped poor little Ellen Canaday.’

  ‘Not for a minute.’

  It almost looked as though the lieutenant would smile. Instead he opened his mouth and rubbed the side of his forefinger against his top front teeth, a rotten habit he had. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Go on home and get some sleep for a change. When you get back here I’ll have the paperwork through on you.’

  ‘Thanks, Lieutenant.’

  ‘You think you’ll find him again?’

  Dougherty smiled in anticipation. ‘I’ll sure as hell look,’ he said.

  Three

  Kifka lay like a Teuton prince on a hill of pillows. He was in Unit One at Vimorama, the only cabin there equipped with a telephone. Janey, in an excess of zeal, had glommed the keys from Little Bob Negli and rifled the pillows from all the other cabins, heaping them up in a white slope against the headboard of the bed Kifka was arranged in till he was lying more on pillows than on bed, and he looked like a madam in an albino whorehouse. He felt like a turtle on its back, waving its legs and unable to turn over.

  Only two things were within reach: Janey and the telephone. He was occupied with both, grasping Janey to him with his left hand and holding the phone to his ear with his right. Into the phone he said, ‘Buddy, if I wanted to tell a story I’d sell it to the movies. Answer the question or don’t, it’s up to you.’

  The telephone said, ‘Face it, Dan, I’m curious. Ellie’s just killed a couple days ago, now you call up about her, naturally I want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Nothing’s going on.’ Kifka rubbed Janey against his bare chest and winked at her. ‘I want to know who knew Ellie, that’s all. Who do you know that knew Ellie that I don’t know, you know?’

  Janey made a face and whispered, ‘No new new no.’ Kifka pushed her face down into the pillows.

  The telephone said, ‘When it’s all over, for Christ’s sake, then tell me, all right? I mean when it doesn’t matter any more.’

  Kifka said, ‘Sure.’

  ‘All right,’ said the telephone. ‘Let me think.’

  Kifka played with Janey.

  The telephone said, ‘How about Fred? Fred Whatchamacallit, Burrows. You know Fred?’

  ‘Yeah. I already know him.’

  ‘Oh. Well, how about women? You want to know girls that knew her?’

  ‘Anybody.’

  ‘Rite Loomis. You know her?’

  ‘No. What’s her address?’

  ‘Uhhhh, Carder Avenue, I don’t know the number. She ought to be in the book.’

  ‘Right.’ Kifka poked Janey and motioned at the pad and pencil over on the dresser. ‘Rite Loomis,’ he said, ‘Carder Avenue.’ Janey went over reluctantly and wrote it down.

  Janey stayed at the dresser the rest of the conversation and had two more names to write down before she was done, one with an address and one with a phone number. Then Kifka hung up and she said, ‘How much more of this, Dan? Can’t you put that silly phone down for a while?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’ He felt time crowding in, too much time. It was yesterday afternoon that Parker had been ambushed outside Ellie’s place, and since then there hadn’t been a sign of the bird they were after. Last night they’d all moved out here and Kifka had started his phone calls while the others had gone snooping around after the people Kifka turned up. The nine on the cop’s list they weren’t bothering with yet, hoping they wouldn’t have to. Around midnight last night they’d packed it in, and started again this morning. Now it was almost noon and nothing was happening. Kifka was getting irritated and impatient, and Janey was getting worse.

  She said, ‘You could take five minutes away from the phone, Dan.’

  ‘Parker’s right,’ he said. ‘I’ll never get over this virus with you around.’

  ‘Body heat,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be good for you.’

  ‘Sure.’ He made his voice sound aggravated, but he was pleased by Janey. She was an odd thing to happen to Dan Kifka and he was having trouble getting used to it. Kifka was a big blond-haired heavy with two assets: strong arms and an ability to drive. He pushed a hack sometimes for bread and butter, and took what other jobs came his way, punching heads if he was paid to, driving for operations like the stadium heist. He was thirty-four and used to the idea of who he was, and not expecting anything like Janey to come waltzing into his life.

  The way it happened, he was
driving the cab at the time, and a fuzzy-faced youth with a nasal condition and Janey had flagged him and given him an address out in the suburbs. All the way out they argued back there, the two of them, sniping at each other, the youth injured in a haughty way and Janey coldly furious. While the cab was stopped at a light, she’ finally threw him out, pushing the door open, pushing him on out onto the cobble stones, chewing him out the whole time. The youth ended in a paroxysm of snippishness, slammed the cab door, and stalked off into the night. The light changed and Kifka turned his head and said, ‘You want to wait for him, lady?’

  ‘Lady’ was inaccurate. She was a girl, not a lady, young and tender as garden vegetables. She was wearing a pink dress with a lot of crinolines and petticoats and doodads and gewgaws, and she was enough to make strong men chew carpets. She said, ‘I wouldn’t wait for that twerp if he was my Siamese twin. Drive on!’

  He drove on, and three blocks later she said, ‘Stop at a nice bar, I want a drink.’

  The customer is always right. He stopped at a neighborhood-type tavern and she said, ‘I don’t go in these places unescorted. Come with me.’

  He said, ‘You see how I’m dressed?’ He meant wrinkled trousers and a brown leather jacket and a Humphrey Pennyworth cap.

  She said, ‘So what?’ and that was the end of it.

  In the bar, over a glass of sauterne, she became a compulsive talker, telling him her own life story and everything she knew about the kid who’d just walked out on her. There was nothing special about either; both of them college kids from one family houses, on their own in a city bigger than their home towns.

  What he was, after just a little bit of it, Kifka was bored. She paid for her own sauterne, glass after glass, but meanwhile he wasn’t picking up any fares, so it was still costing him money. Eventually he figured the one sure way to get rid of her was make a pass, so he did, and forty-five minutes later they were in bed together at his place.

  It had been going on for eight months now, with time out for her summer vacation from college when she’d gone home for three months. Kifka had figured that was the end of it right there, but come September and there was Janey again, twitching her rump with pink impatience.