I paused to glance at some of the photos, saw that they were of men and women combined in activities which seemed anatomically improbable, and went on through the further doorway after the departed trio.
They were long gone; not even the sound of a footfall or a hoarse cry of despair sounded ahead of me. I was now in a long dim hallway with a door at the far end boasting a frosted-glass window. I made for it, found it locked, and turned uncertainly back just in time to see two men entering the hallway at the other end. One was the man who’d been sitting at the cash register in the bookstore, and the other was a tall and heavily built man in a maroon sweater. Both carried short lengths of pipe in their hands, and both seemed very stern.
Midway between us there was a closed door in the left-hand wall. Crossing my fingers, I dashed for this—apparently my two pursuers thought I was dashing for them, because they stood where they were and braced themselves—and wonder of wonders I found it unlocked. I ducked through, saw a flight of stairs leading up, and went up them three at a time.
Four flights later, I was winded and on the roof. This struck me as being poor planning; if any of the people now chasing me caught up with me, all they had to do was throw me over the side. I went near the edge, glanced over, and saw the street several miles below. Ooogg.
Yes, but. Over to my right, three or four buildings away, was one of the 42nd Street movie houses. The building roof was the same height as this one, there seemed to be a fire escape or ladder of some kind leading down to the marquee, and alongside the marquee was a very tall ladder atop which a very thin young man was engaged in changing the lettering announcing the movies playing within.
While I considered the unlikelihood of what I was considering, I heard the roof door behind me grate open and I wasted no more time in idle consideration. Without looking back to see who had caught up with me, I took off across the roofs as far as the movie theater, and down the fire escape to the marquee.
I wouldn’t say that I have an abnormal fear of heights, but that’s probably because I don’t consider a fear of heights abnormal. I mean, you can get killed if you’re up high and all of a sudden you’re down low. People who aren’t afraid of heights are people who haven’t stopped to think about what happens when you reach the sidewalk in too much of a hurry. I have stopped to think about it, and I therefore felt very small, weak, nervous, terrified and top-heavy as I went down those iron rungs on the front of the movie theater, expecting at any second to lose my grip, fall through the marquee like a dropped safe, and make an omelet of myself on the sidewalk.
Amazingly enough, I made it. The top of the marquee was some sort of thin sheet metal, painted black, which bucked and dipped and went sprong as I walked across it. Looking back and up, I saw the two men from the bookstore still up there on the roof, looking down; they made no move to follow me, but contented themselves with threateningly shaking their pipes.
The head of the young man atop the ladder was just short of the top of the marquee. When I leaned down and said, “Hello,” he started with surprise and very nearly took himself and his ladder completely away from me for good and all. But he managed to grab hold of the marquee and steady himself, which was lucky for both of us.
“Excuse me,” I said, swinging my legs over the side and cautiously lowering myself toward the ladder. “I just want to—”
He was holding onto the marquee with both hands and gaping at me open-mouthed, his eyes popping. Fortunately his feet were on the second rung down from the top, so it was possible for me to get a good footing on the very top of the ladder and then to shift my hold from the top of the marquee to the metal letter guides across its face.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said, trying to reassure him, not wanting to get into any sort of argument or fight or anything up here on top of a ladder. “If I could just, uhh, just swing around—”
I went down a step, edged slowly around him, skipping the rung he was on and feeling with my right foot for the rung just below him. Our faces were inches apart, he still hadn’t said a word, and he was staring at me as though his face had been frozen in that expression.
“Just two seconds more,” I said. I was babbling and I knew it, and I knew he wasn’t really listening, but I went on babbling anyway. Panic takes different people in different ways, that’s all. Him it made freeze, me it made babble.
I was finally past him. “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it, thank you very much, I’ll go on now, you do what you were doing, I’ll—” And thus, babbling away, I continued on down the ladder.
I was almost down to street-level when, above me, my inadvertent benefactor finally found his voice and shouted down at me, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”
29
FOR SOME REASON I had a little trouble getting to sleep that night, and so didn’t awaken Wednesday morning until nearly quarter of eleven. I dressed myself haphazardly, still somewhat under the influence of my dreams, which had consisted primarily of my falling from great heights into the open jaws of huge amber-eyed cats with faces like Cadillacs, and as a result had to try three times before I finally got on a pair of matching socks. But I felt a little better after washing my face and drinking a cup of coffee, and decided to begin my day by seeing what the mailman had to offer.
He had junk to offer, as usual. I carried it all upstairs, sat down in the chair near the fireplace, and started to read.
My Cousin Maybelle wanted to study at Actor’s Studio. Citizens Against Crime (Senator Earl Dunbar, Honorary Chairman) was back with another request for me to help stamp out crime by giving them money. The Saturday Evening Post wanted me to put the Golden Disk in the YES pocket and get eighteen years of their magazine for twenty-seven cents. A self-sufficient blind person had knit my initials onto some cheap handkerchiefs, which were being sent along for my inspection. Some crazy company sent me a little square of clear plastic and the information that if I acted fast I could have my automobile seats completely encased in the awful stuff. The National Minuscule Mitosis Association needed my help to rid the world of this dread crippler.
I read each letter—and each initial—with a great deal of care, and then threw everything into the fireplace. Except the square of plastic, which I suspected might melt instead of burn, and in any case would surely smell bad.
The letter from Citizens Against Crime I almost kept, it seemed so specifically to be directed at me; in fact, I found myself wondering if Uncle Matt himself might have written it. “Dear Citizen,” it began, “Have you ever been bilked by one of the estimated eighteen thousand confidence men currently plying their nefarious racket in these United States? Are you one of the more than three million annual burglary victims?” And so on. The rest was more general, but that opening sentence hit me where I lived. Have I been bilked by one of the eighteen thousand con men? Listen, Senator Earl Dunbar, Honorary Chairman and signer of this letter, I, Fred Fitch, Honorary Chump, have been bilked by all of them.
In went that letter, too.
A little later, as I was putting breakfast on, I found myself thinking about the money again, trying to decide what to do about it. Was Professor Kilroy right, did my only safety lie in getting rid of it, giving it all to some charity so the Coppo brothers would leave me alone? I had gnawed at that question during my sleepless hours last night without coming up with any useful answer, and now I was at it again.
The trouble was, the question had a thousand sides and each side had a thousand arguments for and against and maybe-maybe. I should give up the money because it was blood money, bought with murder and lies. But I shouldn’t allow the Coppos to intimidate me. But they did intimidate me. But with all that money I should be able to buy some sort of protection for myself. But how could I trust anyone at all so long as I still had the money? But the money was mine. I should be allowed to do with it what I wanted to do with it. But I didn’t really need the money, I already had whatever I wanted. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Well, there
was one thing I could do with the money, if I decided to give it up. Donate some of it to every nut that sent me a letter. In no time at all it’d be gone.
But would the Coppos take my word for it?
More important, did I really want the Coppos to dictate my life for me?
Even more important than that, did I want the Coppos to end my life for me?
What did I want with all that money, when you came right down to it? I didn’t want to live in Uncle Matt’s apartment, or any other apartment like it. I had an occupation that suited me and that I would prefer to keep up with anyway; what would I do with myself all day if I didn’t work? All the money could do was make me its nervous watchman, keep me permanently what Professor Kilroy had so accurately termed paranoid. With my record as a sucker, I could see a nervous breakdown within six months. So maybe, after all, I should simply find an appropriate charity, turn the whole wad over to them with a lot of public fanfare, and return quietly to the life I was used to and content with.
But doggone it, that would be admitting defeat! Pushed around by a bunch of thugs. Harassed, browbeaten and conquered.
And so on and so on, around and around and around. So the heck with it. I would make no decision at all just yet, I still had another string to my bow. It was my intention today to call upon Prescott Wilks, the attorney whose piqued and somewhat cryptic letter I’d found in Uncle Matt’s apartment. I wanted to know what sort of legal services his firm had done for Uncle Matt, why Uucle Matt had terminated those services, and just what that veiled threat in his letter had been all about.
After breakfast I looked up Wilks’ address in the phone book, and there he was: Latham, Courtney, Wilks & Wilks 630 Fifth Avenue. That would be Rockefeller Center Right.
I left the apartment just after noon, went outside, and ran directly into the arms of Reilly, who grabbed me tight, said, “There you are, you damn fool,” and hustled me across the sidewalk to an unmarked car.
30
I WASN’T taken for a one-way ride to the Jersey swamps after all. Reilly drove me to a police station and marched me inside.
“I get a phone call,” I said.
“Later,” he said.
He went with me to the cells at the back, and watched me locked away. “I’m doing this for your own good,” he said.
“I want my phone call,” I said.
He shook his head and went away.
I made a great deal of noise for a while, shouting, rattling the barred door of my cell and so on, but no one paid any attention to me at all, so after a while I subsided.
It’s a good thing I’d eaten a large breakfast; the lunch they brought me didn’t even look edible. A phlegmatic guard came a while later and took the tray away again, and when I told him I wanted to make a phone call he didn’t appear to hear me. In any case, he just picked up the tray and shuffled off.
A little after two o’clock another guard came and unlocked my cell. I told him, “I want to make a phone call.”
“You got a visitor,” he said.
“A what?” I peeked mistrustfully out at the corridor. Who would be coming to see me here?
“A visitor,” he repeated patiently. “A nice young lady. Don’t keep her waiting.”
“Gertie?” I hadn’t meant to say the name aloud, but I did.
“She didn’t tell me her name,” he said. “Come along.”
I went along. I was taken to a scruffy-looking room with a long table in it, the table surrounded by chairs, at one of which was sitting Karen Smith. I looked at her and said, “Oh.”
“Jack told me you were here,” she said. “He doesn’t know I’m coming to see you.”
“Is that right?” I looked at the guard, standing in the doorway, not seeming to be listening at all to the conversation. I looked again at Karen, who didn’t seem particularly dangerous sitting there with her coat open showing pink sweater and white skirt, and I decided to see what everybody was up to now, so I went over and sat down across the table from her and said, “Now what?”
“You’re mad at me,” she said. “I know you are. Is it that receipt?”
“Receipt?”
“The one you left on the coffee table. Neighborhood Beautification or something.”
“Oh!” I’d completely forgotten that damn thing in all that had happened since. Now, remembering it, I also remembered where I’d gotten the money to pay for it, and I felt my face getting red.
Meanwhile, Karen was saying, “I feel as though I’m responsible for that. You didn’t have any way to know it wasn’t something I’d agreed to give money to, and it just as well might have been. So I feel as though I ought to give you your money back, and when Jack catches the man he—”
She was opening her purse. I began to wave my hands in front of myself, saying, “No, no, please. No, that’s all right. Really.”
“No, I want to,” she said. “After all, you were my guest.”
“No,” I said. “Please. Listen, you don’t owe me anything at all.”
“But I feel I do.”
“Uh. Well, you don’t. As a matter of fact—” I cleared my throat, and looked around at the guard—he seemed to be asleep on his feet—and finally I said, “As a matter of fact, I’m the one that owes you money. You see, I didn’t have enough myself to pay him, so—uhhh …”
“But I didn’t have any money there,” she said.
“Well, yes, you did. Uhh …”
“Oh! The money in the dresser!”
I didn’t meet her eye.
She said, “But how did you know about that?”
I studied my fingernails. They were clean, but I went on studying them. “I’m not normally like that,” I mumbled, “I want you to know that. But there just wasn’t anything to do there, I didn’t know what to do with myself …”
“So you went through all my things.”
I nodded miserably.
“Well, you poor man! I didn’t even think! There we left you all alone all that time, it’s a wonder you didn’t have a fit or something.”
“Well, it wasn’t that bad.”
“No, that was terrible of us. Is that why you left?”
I finally chanced a look at her, and her expression was serious but sympathetic. Apparently she hadn’t chosen after all to look on me as a sex maniac who’d gone slobbering through her bedroom, for which I was grateful. I said, “No, that wasn’t it. What happened, I got a phone call Monday afternoon.”
“A phone call?”
“A man’s voice. He said my name, and when I said yes he sort of chuckled and said, ‘So there you are,’ and hung up.”
Her eyes widened. “The killer?”
“Who else?”
“Oh, Fred, no wonder you ran away!”
“They could have been calling from right down at the corner.”
“Of course! But why didn’t you let us know? Why didn’t you call me in the evening, when I was home from work? Or why not call Jack?”
“The question I couldn’t answer,” I said, “is how they found out where I was. I still can’t answer it.”
With her eyes even wider than before, she said, “You mean us? Jack and me? Why would we—how could we—how could you!”
“How did they find out, Karen?”
“Well, I didn’t tell them! I didn’t tell anybody!”
Looking at her now, torn between outraged shock and sympathetic understanding, I was prepared to believe her. Karen Smith, I was now convinced, was no more than an innocent pawn in all this, as I was. I said so: “I believe you, Karen. But when I left there, how could I be sure? And how can I be sure now of Reilly?”
“Jack? But he’s your friend!”
“I’m told a favorite line of my uncle’s was, ‘A man with half a million dollars can’t afford friends.’”
“Oh, Fred, that’s so cynical. Don’t get cynical, please, don’t let money change you.”
“I’m changed already,” I said.
“Jack is your friend,”
she insisted. “You know that as well as I do.”
“Jack Reilly,” I said, “is half con man himself, I’ve known that about him for years. That’s how he knows so much how to handle other con men. Look how he’s conned you.”
Her face paled and she said, “What do you mean? What has he done to me?”
“All that jazz about the religious reasons,” I said. “Reilly’s get himself set up with—”
“I don’t want to hear anything like that!” She stood up so quickly she almost knocked the chair over. “If you were a true friend of Jack’s, you wouldn’t say such despicable things! If you were a friend of mine—” She stopped, and bit her trembling lower lip. Clasping her purse in both hands, she fled from the room.
Now what had I done? What kind of idiotic wrong thing had I said this time?
Knowing exactly what I’d done, and wanting only to turn the world backward and erase the last three minutes and run through it all again without that stupid business about Reilly, I headed around the table after Karen, calling her name, going out the door after her and down the corridor.
The guard caught me halfway to the front door, and grabbed me in a very painful hammerlock. “Not so fast, my bucko,” he panted. “You’re a guest here, you remember?”
He trotted me back to my suite.
31
ABOUT THREE-THIRTY the corridor in front of my cell suddenly grew dark with cops. All of my favorites were there; Steve and Ralph and Reilly. Steve and Ralph had on their faces the slight smiles of an old vaudeville team waiting in the wings to go out and do their favorite number for the ten thousandth time, but Reilly looked sore.
God Save the Mark Page 16
