I hadn’t connected the name before, primarily because I didn’t really know Sondra Fleisch. But she had a column in the Indian, the college paper, so I’d noticed the name more than once, and I’d seen her on the campus now and again. We’d never met because she travelled with the rich crowd and I travelled with the grizzled vets, and never never never will that twain meet.
But now, under rather odd circumstances, we had met after nil, and I looked upon Miss Sondra Fleisch as though she were an old friend. A familiar face—no matter how vaguely familiar—a reminder of the more normal and sensible and sane world in which I’d always lived; she was worth more to me than diamonds. I just sat and stared at her.
She enjoyed my staring, I think. She smiled again, with obvious pleasure, and went around to sit across the table from me. ‘You surprise me,’ she said. ‘I never thought to find a schoolmate In our local bastille.’
‘I never thought to find me here,’ I said. ‘But what the—what In the name of all that’s holy are you doing here?’
‘I’m on my six months,’ she said. ‘Daddy wants me to be home at least part of the time, so here I am. I’m a journalism major, so my six months in the field are spent on the Beacon.’ She shrugged, smiling. ‘It isn’t the New York Times,’ she said, ‘but I guess that can wait till I graduate.’
‘Boy,’ I said. I really and truly said, ‘boy.’
‘After all the cr—all the, the nonsense I’ve been through, you’re a sight for sore eyes, I mean it. And sore jaws,’ I added, and stroked my face Inhere the generalized toothache was still slowly receding. She frowned at that. ‘You mean they hit you?’ “That isn’t the half of it.’
‘Well, now.’ From a large black shoulder bag she withdrew pencil and steno pad. ‘You tell me all about it,’ she said. I did. I told her about my job, and the letter from Charles Hamilton, and everything that had happened since we’d come to Wittburg. She took notes in a rapid shorthand, and asked questions to fill in details, and listened all the while with a serious disturbed expression on her face. When at last I’d finished, she sat for a minute, gazing at her notes, and then she said, ‘This is terrible, Paul. I never thought the police in this town could be a vicious, and I can’t believe my father would ever have ordered them to act like this. They must have done this on their own, and if they thought my father would be pleased they were wrong. I’m going to tell him about it, believe me, and I’m going to talk my editor into putting this story on the first page. You wait till you see the paper this afternoon. They won’t get away with this, Paul, believe me.’
‘I’d love to think they won’t,’ I said.
‘They won’t.’ She got to her feet, very young and very determined and very good-looking. ‘You just wait and see. Are you still staying at that motel?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I’ll give you a call there,’ she promised. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this.’ As she spoke, she was coming around the table. When she came close to me, she held out her hand again, and this time I took it. ‘This is what a reporter is for,’ she said. ‘To see that the people get the facts.’
I smiled at her earnestness. ‘We’ll give them hell,’ I said.
‘You bet we will.’ She gripped my hand hard, and released it. ‘I’ve got to get back to the office, make sure this story gets into today’s paper.’
‘Right you are.’
‘I’ll call you, Paul.’
‘Right.’
We went out to the hall together, and I walked her as far as the front desk, where a man in uniform, with stripes on his sleeves, sat high on a raised platform behind a massive oak desk. There we shook hands again, and she promised again to call. She walked out of the building, and I went over to the desk. ‘I’m Paul Standish,’ I said. ‘You have my wallet.’
‘That’s right.’ He reached under the desk and came up with the envelope. ‘Check the contents,’ he said, as though by rote, ‘and sign this form if everything is intact.’
Everything was intact. I signed the form, and then put my belt and shoelaces back on, and stuffed my wallet into my hip pocket. Then I went back to the desk and said, ‘I want to talk to my friend. Walter Killy.’
‘Visiting hours,’ he said, in the same memorized manner, ‘are from two to three.’
‘Visiting hours? Is he under arrest?’
‘You can talk to him at any time between two and three.’
‘Well, but—why aren’t they letting him go? They let me go.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘Visiting hours are from two to three.’
‘I’ll wait for him,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
There was a bench along the opposite wall. I went over and sat down. A large clock on the wall behind the man at the desk read six-twenty. It was morning already, and I’d spent twelve hours in this building. I lit a cigarette and hitched around to a comfortable position on the bench, ready to spend twelve more. I had to talk to Walter, find out what was going on and what I was supposed to do about it all. I was an amateur at this game, lost without Walter.
At twenty-five minutes to seven, Jerry came wandering into the room from deeper in the building. He came over to me, and grinned and said, ‘Do you know what the sentence for loitering is?’
‘I’m waiting for Mr Killy,’ I told him.
He glanced at the clock. ‘See the second hand? There it goes, past nine. The next time it goes past nine, you’ll be loitering. And I’ll take you over to the desk there and book you for loitering. And then you’ll spend thirty days in here. Do you think you’ll like that?’
Leave Walter? But I’d be lost without him, I wouldn’t know what to do. I watched the second hand go round, past twelve to one and two and three, and wondered if it was worth trying to out bluff him. I couldn’t go alone into this town. The second hand went past four and five and six, and I looked up at him and knew he wasn’t bluffing, that he would like nothing more than for me to still be sitting on that bench when the second hand reached nine again, so he could have an excuse for bringing me back inside again. As the second hand swept past seven I got to my feet, and as it was reaching out for nine I was pushing open the front door.
The sky was dirty with dawn, and the street looked old and abandoned. I went down the steps to the grey sidewalk, feeling the chill of early morning, and stood there on the sidewalk looking back at the building, until Jerry came out to the top step and stood grinning down at me. Then I moved, heading away to the left.
Where could I go? What could I do? They still had Walter; I had to rescue Walter. I had to save us both, break us both free of this town. But how could I do it?
I should call someone. Passing a closed drugstore, I noticed the metal blue telephone bell sign beneath the window, and 1 thought to myself, I should call someone.
Who? Should I call Washington? But I didn’t know anybody in Washington, I’d never really met anyone at the Machinists building except Walter. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, and so far as they knew, Walter was working in a town where there were no problems at all.
Who then? Dr Reedman? The thought came to me, and I stared at it, offended. What the hell could he do?
I came to Harpur Boulevard and turned, and ahead of me I saw a diner open. I tried to keep concentrating on the problem—Walter was still in jail!—but that lit neon confounded me. I was starving. I hadn’t really noticed the fact before; there’d been too much else to think about.
I tried to walk past the diner, feeling it was unfair to Walter for me to think of food at a time like this, but I couldn’t. Shamefaced, I went in, and put away two orders of bacon and eggs, an order of wheatcakes and sausage, and three cups of coffee. Afterward I felt better both physically and mentally. Smoking as I took my time with the last cup of coffee, I relaxed somewhat and started to think.
Most of my thoughts, it seemed, ended with question marks.
What was happening to Walter at this very minute? What was
going to happen to me? How were the two of us going to get ourselves away from this terrible town? And who had in reality killed Charles Hamilton, and did his death have anything to do with the presence in town of two representatives of the Machinists?
Up to a point, I could begin to make sense out of the sequence of events. First, Hamilton had been killed. Shot to death. The police had gone to his wife, and she had told them about us, but for some reason she had distorted our visit and said she hadn’t known why we wanted to talk to her husband. Then they had come to us, coming in with drawn guns because we were mysterious strangers who had threatened a woman and then quite possibly murdered her husband. As soon as they found out we were from the Machinists, Willick went out to the car and phoned the news in and got his instructions from Fleisch; give the boys from the union a bad time. Fleisch had even hopped into his limousine and hurried down to get a look at us.
From the moment they knew who we were, I don’t suppose Willick and the others had really thought of us as murder suspects tiny more, but they’d been busy following Fleisch’s orders. They’d given us a bad time. They were still giving Walter a bad time. I could only assume they had eventually let me go because they realized I was too naive to understand the bad time and was liable to get self-righteous on the long-distance phone after a while.
That much I could reason out for myself. But why Mrs Hamilton had lied I couldn’t begin to understand. Why her husband had been killed, and by whom, I couldn’t understand. How I could have lived for twenty-four years without knowing that any of this was possible I couldn’t understand.
I glanced up at the clock, as I put my cigarette out in my saucer, and was baffled to see it read five minutes past eight. That couldn’t be; it hadn’t even been seven o’clock when I’d left police headquarters.
Time was slipping by me, time and time, and all I had was lime. No knowledge, no power, no influence, no nearby friends, nothing but time; and even that was limited.
A sudden feeling of urgency came over me, as I realized how much time I’d let slip away since being released, and I hadn’t yet done a thing, not a thing. I had to do something, I had to get to work somehow.
I thought again of making a phone call to somebody or other, but once again rejected it. Aside from the fact that I couldn’t think of anyone worth telephoning at such an hour, the making of a phone call to ask for help was essentially a passive move, and I wanted to be active. I’d been released; now I had to make the most of it.
Well, what was there to do?
There was Mrs Hamilton, damn her. I could go find out just what she thought she was pulling.
I paid the check, left the diner, and started walking southward toward the motel. Full day had arrived by now, still damp with birth. Traffic got steadily heavier on Harpur Boulevard, all heading northward, deeper into the city. I walked along, feeling the casual glances of the people in the cars as they went by, wanting to turn and scream at them, ‘Do you know what your town has done to me? Do you know, do you know?’ I lit my last cigarette, and continued to walk.
The emotional jag brought on by my hours in jail hadn’t really worn off yet. A whole host of emotions were all quivering close to the surface, popping out one after the other, swaying this way and that. Rage and fear and self-pity and confident joy and the calm of panic all ebbed and flowed within me, so that from one minute to the next I was never exactly the same person. But from one minute to the next I continued to walk southward toward the motel, stopping off to buy more cigarettes, and continued to be sure that what I was going to do was confront the Widow Hamilton.
I finally reached the motel. Going past the office, I glanced in and saw by the clock on the back wall that it was now nearly quarter to nine. I went on and tried the door of our unit, and it was unlocked.
Nothing was changed. The mess was still as it had been when Walter and I had been taken out of here. Even the keys to the ford were still on the writing table, next to where the typewriter had been before Jerry broke it.
I picked the typewriter up and put it back on the writing table and looked it over. Jerry had done a good job on it. The keys were bent far out of alignment, there was a gouge out of the platen, and the whole carriage was sprung. The typewriter, I knew, belonged to the union rather than to Walter, but the senseless vicious destruction was still sickening. I left the typewriter and went on about the room, straightening things up the best I could. I’m not sure why I took time to do that, rather than go straight out and head for the Hamilton house, but I was working under a kind of neatness compulsion or something.
My suitcase, an antique to begin with, was now beyond hope. The top had been half ripped off, and Jerry had managed somehow to pull one side of the handle out. I put the poor thing down and gathered up the spilled clothing. Shoe marks were on our white shirts, on our underwear and socks. There was a squat bureau in the room and I stowed everything into it, Walter’s clothes intermingled with mine. Then I put the dirty clothes back into the laundry bag, the scattered stationery back into the drawer of the writing desk, and the sheets and blankets back onto the beds. When I got to Walter’s briefcase, some impulse made me look through the papers in it. The letters from Charles Hamilton were gone, and somehow I had known they would be. So now Willick—and Fleisch—had the names of the twenty-five men who had signed the second letter.
They had to be warned. I sat down on the edge of my bed, and tried to remember at least one of the names; if I could warn one, he could warn the others. But I’d never really paid any attention to the names, and now I couldn’t find one of them in my memory.
Well, Mrs Hamilton might know some of the men who’d signed, and she could tell me. She damn well had better tell me, that and also why she’d lied to Willick.
I left the motel unit at last, locked the door behind me, and climbed into the Ford. I backed out away from the parking space, and headed northward on Harpur Boulevard.
Nine
On 4th Street, it was yesterday again, hot and sunny, with a clear blue sky. The same unmoving quiet hung over the block today, with the impression of housewives watching television in darkened living rooms while their children were all out somewhere playing or swimming or taking hikes. I parked the Ford in front of the Hamilton house, went down the steps to the front door, and rang the bell.
There was no answer at first. I rang again, and waited, and then simply held my finger pressed to the button. At last, the door was yanked open, and she stared out at me with a kind of feral fear in her eyes. ‘Go away! Don’t come back here! Leave me alone!’
‘I want to talk to you,’ I said. I was calmer than I’d thought I’d be; her excess of emotion had served to settle mine somewhat.
‘Go away!’ She hissed the words, harsher than a whisper but not loud enough to be a normal speaking voice.
‘Because of you, I spent the night in jail,’ I told her, my voice rising. ‘My friend is still there, and it’s your fault. You lied to the police, and I want to know why.’
Her eyes flickered, and her face became troubled. ‘I don’t want any of this,’ she said, speaking softly, more to herself than to me. ‘I don’t want any part of this.’ Then, looking at me again: ‘My husband is dead. Don’t you understand? I have to be to the funeral parlour this afternoon.’
‘I want to know why you lied.’
The screen door separated us, and she peered through it, begging me to go away, but I was too angry to feel compassion. Finally, she slumped against the door frame. Gazing dully at my tie, she said, ‘I was frightened. I didn’t want to say anything about the union, about Chuck’s letter, I didn’t want them to know. I was frightened and I didn’t think, and then it was too late, I’d already said one thing and I couldn’t change it.’
‘You can change it now,’ I said. ‘My friend is still in jail. You can call down to police headquarters and tell them—’
‘No, I can’t, I—‘ She looked up at my face, and then beyond me, and her face suddenly changed. ‘Leave m
e alone!’ she shouted. ‘I don’t want to talk to you!’ And she slammed the door.
I turned and looked up, and saw Jerry coming down the steps toward me, smiling and shaking his head. One of the others was standing up on the sidewalk. Jerry said, ‘You just don’t have a brain in your head, do you?’
‘Did you hear her?’
He nodded, slowly and mockingly. ‘I heard her. She told you to go away. I think that’s just a great idea.’ He reached out for my elbow. ‘You come on along, sonny. That’s twice now you’ve upset that lady.’
I pulled away from his reaching hand. ‘But she told me why! She told me why she was lying, why she lied to you. She was afraid to mention the union, that’s all. Ask her, she—’
This time he got the grip on the elbow, and squeezed down hard. ‘Haven’t you got any natural feelings? That woman’s just been widowed, don’t you know that? Now, you leave her alone.’
‘But she was lying to you.’
He was pulling my arm one way, and I was pulling it the other. Now we both stopped, and he looked at me and sighed, and said, ‘Do I have to tell Ben to come down here and help me with you?’
I looked up at the other man. ‘Oh, is that Ben?’
‘That’s right,’ said Jerry.
‘He’s the one that was slapping me, isn’t he?’
Jerry grinned. ‘I do believe he bumped into you a couple of limes, yes.’
I peered up at the other man, remembering the helpless fear and anger I’d felt when he was slapping me. ‘I had my glasses off then,’ I said, ‘so I couldn’t see very well which one of them was doing it.’
Jerry tugged at my arm again. ‘Why don’t you come on up for a closer look?’ he asked me.
There was a trembling in my stomach, as though I was going to do something rash and was preventing myself from knowing what it was. ‘I’d like that,’ I said.
We went up to the sidewalk and I looked at Ben. He was big. and slightly sloppy, like all of them, like ex-Marines who’d gotten way out of condition, and his eyes were too tiny for his heavy jowly face. I looked at him, and he looked back at me with no expression at all on his face. But he expected me to do what my stomach was afraid of; he wanted me to do it. He wanted me to take a poke at him, or try to kick him, or jump at him.
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