I kept it in. In and out of my vision bobbed a small round bald head wearing wire spectacles, while fire and ice coursed through my stomach. The old man kept his hand on my mouth, just to be on the safe side, and the smell and taste of leather filled my senses After a while, the round bald head bobbed up again, and said to the old man, ‘Not a thing broken, would you believe it?’
‘Some of them are experts,’ said the old man. ‘I remember my brother telling me about that kind of thing. Bootleggers working each other over, and hardly leaving a mark.’
‘Well, these men left plenty of marks, I’ll say that much for them.’ His bright small eyes looked down at me, and he said, ‘I’ll tape you up around the middle, make it easier for you to get around. Bandage up that face a little bit. You won’t look like new, but you’ll run pretty good.’
He did as he’d said he would do. In the taping he had to move me around a lot, and I came close to passing out a few times, but I never did. I wished I could. Then he touched a little wet brush to various spots on my face, put patches of bandage on me, and nodded in satisfaction at his work. He and the old man went over by the door and murmured, and then the doctor left and the old man came back to the bed, dragging the armchair over with him. ‘You owe me six bucks,’ he said.
I tried to reach for my wallet. ‘I’ve got it right—’
‘Oh, now cut that out.’ He pushed my arm down again. ‘We got other things to talk about. Pay me tomorrow.’
‘All right.’ My voice was still a whisper, still hoarse, but less painful. Saliva was returning to my mouth, and now the major pain there was when I tried to swallow.
‘My name’s Jeffers,’ he told me. ‘Gar Jeffers. I guess your name must be Standish.’
I nodded.
‘In that piece in the paper,’ he said, ‘they give where you was staying. I took a chance on them getting at least one thing right in that story, and come on down to talk to you. The door was open a little bit, and I seen you laying there. That’s how that part happened.’
I nodded again. It was easier than trying to talk.
‘Now, I want to talk to you about Chuck,’ he went on. ‘They killed him, and he was one of the better young men working around the world today. Chuck Hamilton was my good friend, and I was proud to work beside him. And you know and I know they ain’t going to do anything about the one that did it to him. But I’ll be damned to hell fire eternal if I’m going to just sit back and twiddle my thumbs and say tch, tch, what a shame. Do you know what I’m talking about?’
Another nod.
‘That’s good. Now, I know this isn’t really any concern of yours, you never knew Chuck or anything about him. It’s up to me, and I know it. But I don’t think this is the kind of job I know very much about, so I come around to you to ask for some help.
‘It matters,’ I whispered. I shook my hands in the air. ‘Nobody cared. It wasn’t right that nobody cared.’
He smiled in gratification. ‘I was hoping that’s the way you’d be,’ he said, ‘but there’s so little of that left in the world any more. Everybody thinks like bootleggers nowadays, and I figured anybody who’d go up against the devils around here like the way you and Mr Killy done, you had to have a lot of good in you.’
‘I can’t help,’ I whispered, embarrassed by what he’d said. ‘I can’t even help myself.’
‘I figure you’re young and smart,’ he said, ‘and that’s maybe half the battle right there. And I know the people and some things about what’s been going on, and maybe that’s the other half. Maybe we could team up and whup them.’
We could team up, and Ben could whup us both with one hand tied behind his back, but I felt an irrational pleasure at the idea of siding with Gar Jeffers. He had such a simple clear straightforward view of things. I had been wallowing ever deeper in emotional confusion, but I had the feeling confusion couldn’t survive very long in the presence of this old man.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘You remember that letter we all sent you, with our names on it.’
‘I remember. But I think they got it. If it isn’t in Walter’s briefcase—’
‘That thing over there? Hold on.’ He went over and looked through the briefcase. ‘Nope. Gone.’
‘So they’ve got your names.’
He winked, and the wide mouth stretched wider in a sly grin. ‘I retire in three weeks,’ he said. ‘What do you suppose they can do to me?’
‘Look what they did to me.’
‘You’re a stranger in town, no kin or friends to protect you.’
‘What about Mr Hamilton?’
‘Well, now.’ He came back and sat down beside the bed again. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? Well, I’ve lived pretty near sixty-five years already. That’s quite a bunch.’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, then. They’ve got the letter. I’ll have to get the word round tomorrow. But for tonight, let me just tell you what I know. You remember in that letter, the one you people sent up, you all asked for newspaper stories or things like that. Well, there wasn’t any newspaper stories, and there wouldn’t be, and I guess now you know why.’
I nodded.
‘So Chuck figured maybe he could look around here and there, turn over some rocks, and maybe get some facts for you people. And yesterday, on the job, he was talking like he had something. You know how a man will do, he’d tip me the wink and grin a hit and say he had some news for everybody, soon as the boys from the union came. I told him to keep it low until then, no sense looking for trouble, and he said he surely would.’
I chewed that over, but I didn’t like the implications. There was an easy conclusion to jump to, but I didn’t care for that conclusion. I tried to explain why to Jeffers. ‘I met Mr Fleisch,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t like him, he’s smooth and bland and he doesn’t have any conscience. But I can’t see him killing Hamilton or ordering him killed. He has a big envelope full of bad press about the union, and a line of patter to go with it. He’s ready for the public fight, with both hands full of mud. I don’t think he’d be set up that way if he was afraid of the kind of mud that could be thrown back at him.’
‘Well, maybe what Chuck found out was a great big blob of mud he would be afraid of.’
‘But it’s too extreme. He’s a precise, cautious man, he really li. He wouldn’t kill somebody just to keep his job. Hamilton would have had to know something that would put Fleisch in jail, HI the very least.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me a bit,’ he said.
‘But he doesn’t act that way, like a man with something that terrible to worry about.’ I shook my head back and forth, angry hi my inexperience in this sort of thing. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but it just doesn’t make sense.’
‘Now, take it easy, Mr Standish,’ he said, and laid a gentling hand on my arm. ‘Just take it slow and easy for a little while.’
The use of the formal name got to me. He was forty years older than me, and he called me Mister Standish. I felt even more like an imposter, playing detective, playing grown-up. ‘I just don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘Now, just relax there a minute and don’t get het up, and let me talk at you for a minute. I’ve been thinking about what happened, and what maybe I could do about it, and this is what I come up with: Chuck learned something, found something out I know that as well as I know my own name. Now, see if the don’t make sense. If he found out something, that means there’s something there to find. And if he could find it, that means we can find it. And once we do find it, why, then we’ll know who killed Chuck. Does that make sense to you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You’re tired,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I come back tomorrow morning, and we can—’
‘No. Please, I’m sorry,’ I closed my eyes, and shook my head back and forth. ‘You’re right, we’ve got to think this out. There’s so many of them, and they’re so much better at this than we are—we probably don’t have much
time.’
‘You’re most likely right about that,’ he said. ‘So what do you think we ought to do first?’
‘I just wish I could think straight.’ I covered my eyes with my right hand, and tried to force my brain to work. I could sec through Hegel, for God’s sake, so why couldn’t I do some constructive thinking on this problem? After a minute, I whispered, ‘There’s one more thing we ought to say. Besides that there’s something there to find, and it’s possible to find it. We also know that the killer knew Hamilton had found it. Right?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said.
‘All right. Then there were two ways the killer could have learned that. Either Hamilton tipped his hand in his snooping around, asking questions of the wrong person or something like that, or one of the people he talked to yesterday afternoon passed the word on to the killer.’
‘1 don’t see how that could be,’ he said. ‘I don’t know of anybody he talked to except to me, and I told him right off to keep mum.’
‘Are you sure he didn’t talk to anybody else? Maybe before he talked to you.’
He frowned, doubling the creases and lines of his face. ‘I can’t be sure,’ he admitted. ‘But even if he did, it would have been just to some of the other boys what signed that letter, and it wouldn’t have been any of them, carrying tales up to the management.’
‘Maybe one of them mentioned it to somebody else.’
‘No, sir, Mr Standish, I’ll stake my life on it, they’d know better.’
‘Well, you know them, Mr Jeffers, I don’t.’
‘Oh, come on now, forget that Mr Jeffers stuff. An old lag like me. Call me Gar if you don’t want me to get all choked up.’
I glanced at his smiling ugly face, and winced in embarrassment. He had called me Mr Standish twice. I should have been the one to say, ‘Call me by my first name,’ but politeness and protocol and the social graces have never been my strong suit. Even coming in second, I still felt awkward when I said, ‘Then you ought to call me Paul.’
‘That I will, Paul,’ he said, and nodded hugely, and smiled at me in comradeship. ‘And pardon me for interrupting your train of thought.’
‘No train. Barely a handcar. But what I was going to say, you know those other workers and I don’t, so I’ll go along with you, at least for now. That means we can concentrate on the other possibility, that Hamilton exposed himself in his snooping around. Do you have any idea where he did that snooping, who he talked to or where he searched?’
He shook his head slowly, staring past me at the far wall. ‘No, sir, I don’t. I didn’t even know he was up to anything, not until yesterday.’
‘Then we’ll have to go it blind. Try to figure out how Hamilton thought, where he would have gone and who he would have talked to.’
‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘that’s where I need help. I couldn’t even begin to make a guess about a suggestion of a perhaps.’
‘If I worked for a company,’ I whispered, ‘and I was looking for dirt about that company, to give to a national union, where would I look?’ I thought it over, staring at the ceiling, and then I said, ‘I know two places I’d look. First, I’d look at the company union. Second, I’d look at the bookkeeping department.’
‘Well, sir, you’re absolutely right!’ He slapped my forearm and beamed at me. ‘See if the company union’s doing anything it shouldn’t, and then see if anybody’s playing ring around the rosy with the company money. Yes, sir!’ He leaned forward, old eyes aglitter. ‘And I tell you, Mr—I tell you, Paul, I can help you a little bit. I got me a granddaughter works in the bookkeeping department. What do you think about that?’
‘I think that’s great,’ I told him.
‘Right you are! And you just let me think about it, and talk to one or two people, and see if I can come up with somebody we can talk to in the company union, how’s about that?’
‘Now, it doesn’t have to be in either of those two places,’ I warned him. ‘It might be something in the shipping department, or in the department that buys the raw materials, whatever it’s called. Or it could be in administration, or almost anywhere. Those are just the first two places I’d look, and I’m trying to guess they’d be the first two places Hamilton would look.’
‘Well, of course they are, I can see the sense of that.’ He got to his feet, spry and eager. ‘Now, I tell you what you’re going to do, Paul,’ he said. ‘You’re going to get yourself a good night’s sleep, and then in the morning I’ll bring you home and you can talk to my granddaughter. She’s lived with me the last nine years, since her folks got killed in an auto crash.’
‘I don’t think we have time—‘ I started, rising up on the bed.
‘I know just what you’re going to tell me,’ he interrupted, ‘but a man can always make time to get a decent rest. You can’t do your best work when you’re behind on your sleep. So you just get yourself rested up, and I’ll come around in—’
The door jolted open, and we both twisted around, staring at it, as Sondra Fleisch came striding into the room.
Thirteen
‘Don’t think I want to be here,’ she said. There was sullenness in her, but there was a lot more, too. She had the cold angry sorrowful bitter determined urgency of a Greek queen deciding to kill some relatives. Her gaze nicked at Gar, and she said, ‘Who the hell is that?’
Gar, looking worried and apologetic, started for the door, saying, ‘I guess I’d better be—’
I raised my hand and shook it at him, whispering, ‘Don’t go.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said to me. Her voice was icy with contempt. ‘I’m not going to beat you up.’
‘I’ll see you in the morning, Paul,’ said Gar.
‘Tell her to get out of here.’
‘Nobody tells me anything.’ She flounced into the armchair. ‘I can wait,’ she said.
Gar looked from her to me, puzzled. I think he’d originally thought she was my girl friend or something, but now he wasn’t so sure. He said to me, ‘Do you want me to stay, Paul?’
She was so blasted angry. And if she didn’t want to be here, why was she here? ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s all right. She does her fighting with one of the few pens around that isn’t mightier than the sword.’ Gar looked more puzzled than ever, so I said, ‘This is Sondra Fleisch. She’s the one did the article in the paper.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Fine.’ He glanced again dubiously at Sondra, and then left.
Lying flat on my back, I felt at a disadvantage, so I hitched myself to a half-sitting position, my back propped against the pillow and the headboard. It hurt my stomach, but not badly, and I felt in a psychologically better position. ‘All right,’ I whispered. ‘What do you want?’
She grimaced. ‘Cut it out,’ she said.
‘Cut what out?’
‘That idiotic whispering. And all the grunting and making faces when you sit up.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, ‘but I have to whisper. My voice is gone And my stomach is taped up; it hurts when I move. I’m sorry if it bothers you, but I didn’t ask you here.’
‘Who taped your stomach? The old geezer?’
‘A doctor.’
A little doubt had crept into her expression. ‘They really beat you up that bad?’
‘Badly,’ I said.
She flushed, and half-rose from the chair, but then settled back onto it. ‘I don’t really blame them,’ she said. ‘If anybody ever went around looking for a beating, it was you.’
I closed my eyes. ‘Why don’t you go home?’
‘I came here because my father asked me to,’ she said. ‘He sent me with a message for you.’
I kept my eyes closed. I hated all these people, all of them Even Charles Hamilton, the one whose letter had brought me here, had turned out to be a cheap adulterer, according to what his wife and Captain Willick had said. And Mrs Hamilton was a moronic frightened fool. Captain
Willick and his bully boys, Leonard Fleisch and his daughter—what a scurvy collection of jackals they all were. I wanted nothing from Sondra Fleisch but her absence. I kept my eyes closed, and waited for her to go away.
She didn’t go away. Instead, she said, ‘My father wanted you to know he didn’t order your beating, and he doesn’t condone it. Jerry Mosca called a little while after you left, looking for you, and we told him you’d been at the house. He got those other two and came here of his own accord. He wasn’t following orders from anybody. My father was very angry, and so was Captain Willick.’
‘And will I please forget the whole thing when I go back to school. Is that it?’
‘I don’t care what you do,’ she said. ‘I told you my father sent me. And I’ll tell you something else, too. It wasn’t my father in the Lincoln yesterday, when you were arrested. It was me. I wanted to see what union tough guys looked like. You didn’t look so tough.’
I opened my eyes at that, and gazed at her. She was trying to look very scornful, but she was failing. At last, at long last, she was troubled. ‘I’m not tough,’ I told her. ‘I never claimed to be tough.’
‘Why don’t you get away from here?’ she asked me, as though she meant it. ‘Why not just pack up and go away? You can only get hurt here.’
‘From what you said in the paper, I shouldn’t try to leave town.’
She brushed it aside with an impatient gesture. ‘Never mind that. You can go, if you want. I think Captain Willick’s ashamed about what happened to you. I know my father is.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and for once she was trying to be honest. ‘You have a talent for making me mad, but I don’t think you’re really mean. I think you’re just in over your head.’
‘Sure.’
‘Why don’t you go? It would be better for you, Paul.’
‘And what about Walter?’
‘Who? Oh, the other man.’
‘Yeah, the other man.’
‘What about him? He can take care of himself.’
‘He’s my friend.’
Killy Page 11
