Killy

by Donald E. Westlake

  ‘All right.’ The older man looked around the room. Aside from what had been already in it when we’d arrived, there were now the three suitcases along the back wall, a blue laundry bag next to the bathroom door, Walter’s portable Smith-Corona typewriter on the writing table, our suit jackets lying on our beds, and some leaflets and pamphlets on the night table where I’d left them.

  The older man looked at all this, and then at Walter again. No one looked at me, not even the man with the gun. The older man said to Walter, ‘When did you two get to town?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’re representatives—Can we put our arms down?’

  He made an impatient gesture. ‘Put them down. But don’t do any walking around.’

  I lowered my arms, gratefully, and felt a tingling in the tips of my fingers as the blood rushed back. I turned my head and watched Walter’s carefully expressionless face as he said, ‘We’re representatives of the American Alliance of Machinists and Skilled Trades.’

  The older man frowned. ‘What’s that, a union?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking into the possibility of organizing the workers in the shoe factory here.’

  The three of them glanced at one another, and the older man raised and lowered his eyebrows. Then he said to the man with the gun, ‘Keep an eye on them.’ He pulled open the door and went outside and closed the door again.

  There was silence. The two policemen and I looked at Walter, and Walter looked at the door. He smiled just a little, and then he wiped it off.

  I tried to say excuse me, but all that came out was a sort of hacking cough. Everybody looked at me, and I tried again, with a little more success. ‘Excuse me.’

  They were all looking at me already, and waiting. I licked my dry lips with my dry tongue and said, ‘Is it all right if I sit down?’

  The policemen were both grinning at me. The one with the gun said, ‘I think it would be all right,’ with mockery in his voice.

  I didn’t care. I needed to sit down. I backed up to the armchair and dropped into it, and immediately felt even weaker. I put one hand up and wiped the clamminess from my forehead.

  We waited three or four minutes, and then the older man stuck his head in and said, ‘Jerry.’ Jerry went outside with him, and closed the door. Another minute, and they both came back in. The older man looked at me sitting down, raised and lowered his eyebrows, and then said to Walter, ‘We got to search the room for the gun. Any objections?’

  ‘I always abide by a search warrant,’ Walter told him.

  ‘That’s good,’ said the older man. He motioned, and Jerry started towards our suitcases.

  Walter cleared his throat. ‘You forgot to show me the warrant,’ he said.

  ‘I forgot to bring it with me. You want me to make an extra trip. You wouldn’t want to make things tough for me, would you? I could so easy make them tough for you.’

  Walter shrugged, and the small smile licked at his lips again.

  Jerry went on over to the suitcases. He opened them one at a time and dumped everything onto the floor. In moving around, he stepped on the clothing, and he held my suitcase too far open, so I heard something rip. Then he went over to the writing table, and in opening the drawer he knocked the typewriter onto the floor. He looked at Walter and grinned. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Walter told him.

  Jerry searched the writing-table drawer, dumping the stationery onto the floor, and in going over to the bathroom he stepped on the typewriter keyboard. He paused to empty the socks and underwear out of the laundry bag, and then he went on into the bathroom.

  Walter looked over at me and said, conversationally, ‘What do you bet he finds it taped to the inside of the top of the water closet?’

  I didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t say anything. The way they were breaking things, I wouldn’t have said anything anyway, not wanting to draw attention to myself.

  The older man said, ‘What do you mean by that crack?’ I looked over at him and saw his face flushed dark with anger. He was glaring at Walter.

  Walter shook his head, and the smile came and went again, a tantalizing superior sort of smile, and I had the feeling he was going out of his way to antagonize these people. ‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to imply I’d plant evidence on you?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ Walter told him. ‘And I wouldn’t imply your man would do anything like break up my typewriter on purpose, either. Or rip my friend’s suitcase.’

  ‘You want to register a complaint, is that it?’ He was very angry now, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Walter. ‘I think you deserve a commendation, to tell you the truth, for the way you do the job you swore to do.’

  Before the older man could say anything, Jerry came back from the bathroom. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  ‘Keep looking.’

  ‘Right.’

  He took the beds next, stripping off the covers and knocking everything to the floor, and managing to walk on both of our coats. He looked under the beds, and searched the night table. ‘Careful with the lamp,’ Walter told him quietly. ‘That doesn’t belong to us.’

  Jerry just grinned at him and went on searching.

  The door opened and a man came partway in, wearing the first police uniform I’d seen. He said to the older man, in a stage whisper, ‘Mr Fleisch is here.’

  ‘Shut up!’ The older man spun on the new one, his rage getting even worse. ‘Get the hell out of here, you damn fool!’

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir.’ The policeman backed away from the doorway, blinking rapidly, and the older man followed him out and closed the door.

  I looked over at Walter, but of course he’d caught it, too. Fleisch was the name of the man who managed the Mclntyre Shoe Company for the relatives who owned it. Walter smiled sweetly at me, and went back to watching Jerry wreck our room.

  By the time Jerry couldn’t find anything more to take apart, the older man was back in the room. Jerry told him he hadn’t found it, and the older man said to us, ‘Put on your coats.’

  I got up from the chair and picked up my coat from the floor. I brushed off Jerry’s footprints, shrugged into the coat, and Walter and I went out into the late afternoon sun. The sky was red, far away to the west, and the sun was red-gold and close to the horizon. A black Lincoln Continental was parked on the gravel, near the motel sign, with a chauffeur at the wheel and a figure vaguely distinguishable in the back seat.

  There were two police cars there, bracketing our Ford. They put Walter in one of them, with Jerry and the other man, and I rode in the other with the older man and the uniformed one. As we drove out onto the street, I craned for a look at whoever was in the back seat of the Lincoln, but he was in shadow and I could make out no features.

  Five

  The police station was one block west of Harpur Boulevard, on the wrong side of town. This close to the main street, the neighbourhood hadn’t quite deteriorated into the slum it would become two or three blocks farther west. Here on Clinton Street were the secondary shops, housing plumbers and cobblers and television repairmen and automobile-body shops. Amid them was a brick building, three storeys tall, lined with blank windows and looking like a smaller version of one of the plant buildings, and this was the police station. Four slate steps led up from the sidewalk to double arched doors flanked by ancient green light globes with black lettering POLICE curved across their street sides. Beside the building was a blacktop driveway, which the two cars went down to a gravel parking lot at the back. There was a fire escape rusting on the back wall, garbage cans rusting next to the three cars already parked there.

  There had been no talk on the trip in, and when the car stopped, there was still no talk. The grey-haired man simply got out of the car and motioned for me to do the same. I saw Walter get out of t
he other car. They marched us through a black metal back door and up a flight of steps and down a long green corridor. The floor was old and oil-soaked, the boards shrunken away from one another and the dust of years black in the cracks.

  They stopped us at a door, wooden and unmarked, midway down the corridor. The older man took out a batch of keys, selected one, and unlocked the door. Then he motioned to Walter, saying, ‘Inside.’

  Walter went on into the room. I started to follow, but the older man grabbed my arm and said, ‘Not you. This way.’ So I followed him to the next door, while Jerry and the other man went into the room with Walter. The older man unlocked the other door, told me to go inside, and I did. He closed it, and I heard him lock it again, and then I was alone.

  It was a small grey room, with drab blue linoleum on the floor The one window, overlooking the driveway at the side of the building, was covered by a heavy mesh screen on the outside and crossed metal bars on the inside. There was a hanging light globe, unlit, in the middle of the ceiling, directly over the smallish battered wood desk which was the room’s main piece of furniture. Behind the desk was a wooden chair with wooden arms. An olive-drab round metal wastebasket was on one side of the desk, and a wooden chair without arms on the other side. A brass ashtray stand stood in one corner, a third chair—armless in another. An empty coat rack filled the corner by the door.

  For a minute or so, I just stood there, waiting, wondering what was going to happen next. But nothing happened next. Either the walls were thick, or the station was unusually silent; I heard nothing but muffled street noises filtered through the dusty window. I looked around at the room, and felt my heart pounding, and what finally broke the spell was my thinking, I wonder what Dr Reedman would think about this. The idea of that bent, gentle man assigning one of the students to this room in this police station struck me so funny I laughed aloud, though the thought wasn’t really funny, nor was it even very clear in my mind. I just needed something to get my brain started again, and the thought of Dr Reedman was what did it.

  I took out my cigarettes, lit one, and started to put the pack away again. Then I hesitated, because I didn’t know how long I was going to be kept in here, and counted the cigarettes I had left. Including the one I’d just lit, eight. At two an hour, I could survive four hours in here. After that, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.

  I put the cigarettes away and looked again at the desk. Curiosity prompted me to go around and open the drawers, just to see what this room was usually used for. The drawers were all empty, except for the ubiquitous blue and red stains that seem to grow of their own accord on the bottom of every old desk drawer in the world. So the room, therefore, was usually used for nothing. They’d been saving it for years, just for me.

  Just what was I doing here, anyway? With the shock and the excitement—and the abject fear inspired by the show of guns 1 hadn’t really asked myself that question before. Policemen had come into my room and searched my person and ripped my suitcase and walked around on my clothing. Then they had taken me to police headquarters and locked me away in an unused room. But I hadn’t done anything. What had I done? Nothing Illegal, nothing at all. So none of this could possibly have happened. So what was I doing here?

  There was the door. All I had to do was go over and knock on it, and when somebody came I would explain that I had done nothing, and ask that somebody to tell me just what they thought I had done, and straighten everything out with no trouble at all, and then Walter and I could go back to the motel, with apologies from the policemen, and they would pay Walter for the broken typewriter. And if they refused to listen to logic and truth and common sense, I knew that I was supposed to be allowed one phone call, and I would call a lawyer.

  I thought back, into everything I’d ever heard in a classroom, into everything I’d ever read in any textbook, to see if anywhere in my education I had been given any sort of reason for not following that plan, for not going over and knocking on the door. There was none. My entire education, all fifteen years of it, whenever it had touched on law and police matters at all—which had, in fact, been rather seldom—had either stated or implied that knocking on that door was the only thing I should even think of doing.

  Yet, somehow, I didn’t do it. Somehow, I understood instinctively that all I had been taught about the law had been a sort of complicated Piltdown man; a hoax. A well-intentioned hoax, perhaps, an attempt on the part of sympathetic educators to keep me from the harsher realities of life, but a hoax nevertheless. I was helpless. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all the Wars Fought for Democracy existed every one of them in the land next door to the one occupied by Peter Pan; for in the world containing this grey room with its blue linoleum floor, I was as helpless and defenceless and doomed as a baby sharing a crib with a hungry rat. But why talk to the baby about justice? If you can’t talk the truth, Dr Reedman, why don’t you shut your toothless mouth for ever?

  Anger was churning in my belly, the anger of the natural victim, the anger of the serf whose wife has been taken away to the castle, the anger of the slave whose child has been auctioned to a different buyer, helpless muted anger which I knew I dared not show. I sat at the desk and smoked my cigarette, and despised myself for not being numbered among the fittest in this pretty jungle in which we live.

  I don’t know how long I waited. I was on my third cigarette when they came in, but I think I’d been smoking more than two an hour. I hadn’t worn a watch since the mainspring had broken on my old one a year and a half before.

  The older man came in, and Jerry, and the third man from the motel, plus another man in mufti whom I hadn’t met before. This man, carrying a stenographer’s pad and a pencil, went immediately to the chair in the corner. The older man looked at me behind the desk and said, ‘On your feet.’

  I stood up.

  ‘Put out that cigarette,’ he said. ‘Over there,’ motioning at the ashtray stand in the corner. ‘And pick those butts off the floor. You wouldn’t throw butts on the floor in your own home.’

  Retorts sprang to my mind, but not to my lips. I did as I was told. When I turned back, the older man was seated at the desk, He looked sour and grim. He said, ‘Put your wallet on the desk here, and sit down.’ He motioned at the chair beside the desk.

  Once again, I did as I was told. Sitting there, with Jerry and the other man leaning against the wall to my right, I watched the older man finger my wallet. ‘Paul Standish,’ he said. In the corner, the stenographer started writing. ‘Here’s an activity card from Monequois University. That where you went to school?’

  ‘I still do,’ I said.

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  ‘At Monequois, we study for six months and then work at a job connected with our major for six months.’

  ‘What’s your major?’

  ‘Economics.’

  ‘Mmm. Where’s your draft card?’

  ‘I’ve been in the Army already. Three years.’

  ‘You volunteered?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Maybe you volunteer too often.’ He closed the wallet and tossed it to me. It fell on the floor and I stooped and picked it up and put it back in my pocket. He said, ‘You ever been in trouble before?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said. I hadn’t meant to say sir; it just slipped out. I promised myself it wouldn’t slip out again.

  ‘All right.’ He hitched around in the chair and said, ‘Tell us your movements today. All day long.’

  ‘I got up about eight o’clock. We went to the City Line Diner for breakfast around nine-thirty. Then we drove around town till maybe one-thirty or two o’clock this afternoon. Then we went to see Mr Charles Hamilton, but he wasn’t home. We talked to his wife, and Mr Hamilton was supposed to come see us at the motel by seven o’clock, so we went back to the motel and waited for him.’

  ‘What time did you get to the motel?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe two-thirty, maybe earlier than that.’

 
‘And you stayed there all the time?’

  ‘Around five I went out and got us hamburgers and coffee to go at the diner.’

  ‘You did. How long were you gone?’

  ‘Maybe fifteen minutes.’

  ‘And your partner, this Killy character, he was there when you got back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he leave at any time during the afternoon?’

  ‘No, because he wanted to be there when Mr Hamilton showed up.’

  ‘Where do you know Hamilton from?’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘Where does Killy know him from?’

  ‘He doesn’t know him either. We just—’

  ‘How do you know he doesn’t know him?’

  ‘Well, we were just—’

  ‘How long you known Killy?’

  ‘Just a few days.’

  ‘So he could have known Hamilton for years, and you’d never know it.’

  ‘He would have said something about it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, of course I’m sure.’

  ‘Mmm. What’d you want to talk to Hamilton about?’

  I hesitated. The hostility we’d met could only be in reference to our roles with the Machinists. These people didn’t know me as a student, as a veteran, as a son, as a human being; they only knew me as an employee of the Machinists. I didn’t know how much to tell them, therefore, about the business of the Machinists. ‘About union business,’ I said.

  ‘What union business?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. I glanced at the other two, leaning against the wall, but they were acting bored, and neither of them was even looking at me. To the older man, I said, ‘Listen, why are you asking me all these questions? What am I supposed—?’

  ‘I ask the questions,’ he said. ‘You give the answers.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He looked at me, and his eyebrows went up and down. ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘You people can go to hell,’ I told him. Not because of what the teachers and the textbooks had said, but just because even a baby can stick his finger in the rat’s eye. What worse can the rat do than what he intended anyway?