The public relations man, here to counter anti-union slander if he could, was also small, but wiry, with a long thin nose and eyes as sharp as knives. His name was Phil Katz, and his hand shake was hard and bony. He said, without smiling, ‘Non illegitimus carborundum, guy.’
I smiled, and said, ‘I’ll try not to.’ My voice was better the morning, but still hoarse.
The protector, here to keep the rest of us from being quite such easy prey for the Jerrys and the Bens, was introduced to me as George; I never did learn his last name. He was huge, barrel chested and barrel-gutted, triple-chinned and possessing arms that looked too heavy to lift. His face was so heavily padded by roughened flesh that eyes and mouth and nose seemed insignificant afterthoughts. He grinned, showing crooked broken teeth and said, ‘Just point ‘em out, little friend.’
I hoped I would get the chance.
After the introductions, Fletcher said, ‘Paul, you stay here with Phil and George. I’ll be back as soon as I can; I want to see about getting Killy released. You come along with me, Albert.’
Albeit was Mr Clement. He bobbed his head in our general direction, and followed Mr Fletcher from the room.
George stretched, spreading his arms out like a transport plane, and said, ‘I don’t know about them two, but I’m hungry.’
‘Ditto,’ said Phil Katz. To me, he said, ‘Where do we eat around here?’
‘There’s a diner not far. I’ll drive us.’
In case Gar should arrive before our return, I thumbtacked a note to my unit door. Be right back. Wait for me. Unaddressed and unsigned, just to be on the safe side. Then I joined the other two in the Ford.
We went to the City Line Diner. We didn’t talk much during breakfast, just comments on the weather and so forth, but on the way back Phil said, ‘I hear they got the paper sewed up.’
‘They sure do. You should see the article they did about Walter and me being arrested.’
‘It’s a girl reporter or something, isn’t it? You talked to her.’
‘I didn’t know any better.’
‘Yeah, well, live and learn. You got a copy?’
‘Back at the motel.’
‘Show it to me.’
When we got back to the motel, I saw my note still tacked to the door, so Gar hadn’t arrived yet. Phil Katz checked next door, law that Fletcher wasn’t back, and the three of us went into my unit. George immediately stretched out on Walter’s bed. ‘You ought to lay down after every meal,’ he told us seriously. ‘It’s good for the digestion.’ He lay on his back like a felled tree, his legs together and his arms down against his sides. His chest and stomach bulged up into the air. He kept his eyes open and breathed shallowly through his mouth.
I got the paper with Sondra’s article in it, and handed it to Phil. He read it, his lips pursing and relaxing, his head nodding every once in a while, and when he was finished he said, ‘Awkward here and there, but she’s got the feel of it.’ It was the Impersonal comment of a fellow professional.
And it irked me. ‘I thought it stunk,’ I said.
He shrugged, and grinned at me. ‘Well, it figures. It was your back she stuck it in. Any chance of buying her?’
‘You mean, convince her the union’s right after all? Not much she’s the boss’s daughter.’
‘Well, it was an idea. Here, for your scrapbook.’ He gave me back the paper.
I said, ‘What happens here now?’
‘Phone calls. Everybody calls Washington, and Washington says do this, do that. Then we do this and we do that. In tin meantime, we just sit. You got a deck of cards?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Play gin?’
‘Some.’
‘Good. This George here, you got to tell him what the numbers are.’
‘I beat you one time,’ said George complacently, still gazing up at the ceiling. ‘I took you for thirty-eight cents one time.’ He had a deep voice to begin with, and when he was supine the voice was even deeper.
‘Thirty-eight cents,’ said Phil, as though the figure were beneath contempt. He shook his head, and looked over at me.
‘What about other papers?’
‘What?’
‘Newspapers, newspapers. This thing, the Beacon, it’s the only local paper?’
‘I think so.’
‘What about others? You know, from towns around here What is there, there’s a Watertown or something around here, isn’t there?’
‘I think so.’
‘So do they sell their papers in Wittburg?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, I never paid any attention.’
Phil shrugged. He did it all the time. ‘So I’ll find out. Listen I got a deck of cards, you want to play gin? Penny a point.’
‘Sure. Why not?’
‘Thirty-eight cents,’ said George dreamily.
‘I was setting you up,’ Phil told him. ‘I’ll be right back.’ He went out. A minute later he came back with the cards, and we both sat on my bed, cross-legged.
When two strangers first play gin, they always discover they know different rules, and the first thing they have to do is decide what rules to use. For instance, I always played that the dealer was dealt ten cards and the other player eleven, no card was turned over to start the discard, and the other player discarded on his first turn without drawing. Phil had always played that both players got ten cards and the top card of the stack was turned over to start the discard. After a while we got squared away, using some of the rules he knew and some of the rules I knew, and then we played. Phil kept score, with triple-scoring and boxes, and in no time at all I owed him three dollars and forty-two cents. He was one of those people who can remember every single card in the discard pile and which player got rid of It. At one point I said, ‘I don’t think I want to play you pinochle.’
He grinned reminiscently and said, ‘Yeah. That’s the game.’
After a while, George grunted loudly and got to his feet. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ he announced. ‘When they coming back?’
‘When they get here,’ said Phil. He had just grinned, and was shuffling.
Eleven o’clock. Where was Gar? ‘Hold it a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to make a phone call.’
‘I’m gettin’ stiff,’ George complained. He stood in the middle of the room and waved his arms around, a serious expression on his face.
I left the unit and walked down to the motel office, where there was a pay phone. Just as importantly, there was a phone book, Jeffers, Gar 121 7th Street… 4-8629.
The phone was answered on the second ring. A male voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘Hello? Gar?’
There was the slightest of pauses, and then the voice said, ‘He can’t come to the phone right now. Who’s calling, please?’
But I’d recognized the voice. I held my breath, as though ex-halation would give my identity away, and shakily replaced the receiver. What had gone wrong?
Back out in the sunshine, I stood in confusion a minute before the office, blinking and wondering what to do. I very nearly won back to Phil and George, to ask them for help, but I remembered in time that Fletcher didn’t want me mixing into this business any more, and he’d surely told George to keep an eye on me and see that I stayed out of trouble.
The Ford was in front of the unit, and the key was in my pocket. I was frightened, because I knew by now my own inadequacies. What could I do to help? Nothing. Still, Gar had come to me, and he and I had chosen to be partners of sorts, and I owed him at least my presence.
I ran across to the Ford, climbed in, started the engine, an. I backed around to face the road. I’d half-expected Phil and George to come barrelling out when they heard the car start I might even, in a part of me, have hoped they’d stop me, so I could have my gesture and eat it too—but the door remained stubbornly closed. I shifted into first and drove out onto the highway and headed toward town.
On the telephone, the voice of Jerry.
Sixteen
&nbs
p; If I had learned nothing else in Wittburg, I had learned a sort of elemental caution, the caution of the sneak thief and the petty criminal. I hadn’t yet learned enough caution to keep me from trying to help a friend, but I did at least know enough now not to go to him directly.
Jerry was at Gar’s house, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still being followed, by Ben or another of Captain Willick’s bully boys. My journey northward through Wittburg was circuitous, with much doubling back and random turnings, and my eye was on the rear-view mirror more than on the street ahead. But I couldn’t find a follower.
I emerged on the hillside grid of the workers’ Utopia at Sarah Street, three blocks west of Harpur Boulevard. In second gear, I drove up the hill to 7th Street, and came to a stop, prepared to turn left.
But just as I rolled to a stop at the intersection, the familiar blue Plymouth passed by on 7th Street, from my left to my right. I froze, hands clamped on the steering wheel, feet locked to the clutch and brake, and stared at them as they went by, but they didn’t notice me. Whereas they crossed my vision directly, I was only at the periphery of their vision.
Jerry was driving, and Ben was in the front seat beside him. There was no one in the back seat. So at least they hadn’t arrested Gar, they weren’t dragging him down to their grim brick building for the kind of session they’d given me. But had they beaten him up? An old man like that—but I couldn’t see those two having qualms about beating anyone.
I stayed where I was, the Ford poised at mid-hill, while a minute or two crept slowly by. I stayed there partially from caution, Hot wanting Jerry to notice me in his rear-view mirror, but even more than that I stayed there from confusion and fear. I was afraid of those two men. Mocking Jerry and sullen Ben; I didn’t know which of them I feared more. I was afraid of them as a unit, a combination before which I was jelly, and defenceless.
At last, I forced myself to move again. For the first time in years I drove with conscious movement. As though I were a metal robot, of gears and chromium tubing, I lifted my right foot from the brake, moved it to the right, placed it on the accelerator I angled my right foot down on the accelerator as I angled in my left foot up from the clutch. The car moved forward, as sluggish as its driver, and my hands turned the wheel counterclockwise I executed the turn with the halting precision of a learner taking his driver’s test, and pushed the Ford slowly down the street.
121 was on the left. I parked across the way, and left the car This section of the grid—like that surrounding the Hamilton house—was empty and quiet in the sunlight, as though it had been just yesterday abandoned. I left the car, looked up and down the empty street like a conspirator, and hurried across to 121.
Gar’s house had no individuality. It was on the down-slope side of the street, like the Hamilton house, and could have been its twin. There was even the small rock garden in the steep angle of lawn down from the sidewalk to the house, though this garden was in somewhat worse repair. And the initial on this screen door was J.
I rang the bell, and waited, and then the door opened and a girl looked out at me.
In that first second I saw her, I thought Alice MacCann was seventeen years old. Then I looked again, through the screen door, and she was twenty-seven. Some women, slender and fine-boned, with a delicate carriage and pale thin hands, are deceptive that way. Their faces are tight-skinned, the pale flesh taut over prominent cheekbones and clean straight jaws and small temples, and they grow old without ever ceasing to look young. Lillian Gish is of that type. Every few years, too, an actress in her late twenties or early thirties makes a hit on Broadway playing a twelve-year-old girl—Julie Harris, for instance—and they are almost always of this slender fine-framed type.
True to the form, Alice MacCann had very large eyes, deep brown, and a short straight nose, flared like a thoroughbred. She gazed out at me reluctantly, with fragile solemnity, heightening yet further the impression of extreme youth. But she was garbed In a severe black dress, showing a wasp waist, tapered hips, and well-separated conical breasts.
After a moment of confusion—I’d been about to speak to a teenager, and then suddenly had to shift gears and speak to a woman—I managed to say, ‘Is Mr Jeffers home? Gar? Is Gar home?’
Her voice was very soft, but surprisingly husky. She said, ‘Are you Mr Standish?’
‘Yes. Paul Standish, yes, that’s right.’
‘Come in.’ She stepped back for me, and motioned me to precede her into the living room.
It was a less cluttered room than the one at the Hamilton house. The furniture seemed to be newer, and cleaner of line, and there were no doilies or overcrowded drum tables. Nor was there a television set. I turned in the middle of the room, which was empty when I came into it, and said, ‘Is your grandfather home?’ They hadn’t taken him with them; I was thinking again that they’d beaten him, that he was now upstairs in bed, perhaps still unconscious.
But she didn’t answer me at first. Instead, she said, ‘Sit down.
Please.’
‘ I chose one of the armchairs, and she perched on the edge of the sofa, knees together and angled down and to the side, feet in black flats tucked close to the sofa. Her hands were cupped together in her lap. She looked at me solemnly, and said, ‘My grandfather is dead, Mr Standish.’
‘Dead!’ I was suddenly on my feet, though I have no idea Where I thought I was going. After Jerry and Ben?
‘He was murdered,’ she said. Her words and tone were flat, emotionless. Her brown eyes gazed at me solemnly. She was reporting a fact which she herself did not yet fully believe, which she was probably refusing to believe.
I should have had sense enough to realize that this outer dispassionate calm was only a desperate attempt to keep herself from flying apart completely, I know that. But I was too caught up in my own worries, too involved in my own hellish maze, to be able to think quickly enough about anybody else. So I did the worst thing I could possibly do—I asked her how it had happened.
She was all right at first. ‘I had to go to the store this morning,’ she said. ‘We were out of butter. Everybody has the morning off, you know, because of the funer—because of Chuck Hamilton. So I went to the store—about nine o’clock. I was gone about twenty minutes, and when I came back Grandpa wasn’t downstairs. I called him and he didn’t answer, so I went—’
She stopped and closed her eyes. Her hands now were clenched into fists in her lap, and she looked so rigid that I thought if she were pushed slightly she would fall off the sofa onto the floor without changing position.
Belatedly I realized what I’d done. I was still on my feet, and now I took a hesitant half-step toward her, my hands out, and said, ‘You don’t have to. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—’
‘It’s all right.’ Her eyes were still closed. ‘It’s all right, I’ll tell you. I want to tell you.’ I knew that she was making the fact real for herself by relating its details to me, and that now she’d started she couldn’t stop.
She finally opened her eyes again, but didn’t look at me. She looked beyond me, at the window, with its constricted view of the rock garden. ‘I went upstairs,’ she said. Her voice was still soft and flat and emotionless. ‘He was lying on his bed. He’d been shot, and the gun was lying on the floor beside the bed. They think it was the same gun as the one that killed Mr Hamilton.’
‘And it happened while you were out at the store?’
‘Yes. He was alive when I left. We’d been talking about you He was alive, and he kidded me about letting the butter run out, and then I went away to—I went out to the store and—he was alive when I—’
‘Wait. Wait!’ I hurried across the room and went down on one-knee and grabbed her hands. At the end there, her face had been virtually falling apart, the eyes getting wider and glassier, the mouth twisting around the words, and the words themselves had been jolting out of her in broken phrases, forced out, propelled by a kind of dulled hysteria. Her hands, when I clutched them, were cold and lifeless.
‘Wait!’ I cried, trying to stop her, stop the disjointed pulse of words, and she shuddered, coming to a stop, coming to silence, and slowly her eyes focused on me. And then she collapsed in tears.
I scrambled up onto the sofa next to her, wrapping my arms around her, and she clung to me as she sobbed. She wept brokenly and entirely, her whole body shaking and quivering. The sounds of her were ugly, and it was cruel that this slight body should ever have to be racked so. I grimaced in self-contempt, knowing my idiot question had brought this on. It was a moment she would have had to live through anyway, sooner or later, but still I had made it happen sooner.
I don’t know how long it took her to exhaust herself, and she didn’t stop until at last she was too worn to do anything but gasp for breath. I only know it seemed for ever that I held her tight, feeling the fragile bone structure and the tender flesh shaken and beaten, and I even had the wild fear that in the force of her grief she would break her body to pieces, her bones would snap under the strain.
But at last she lay against me, spent, quivering only slightly at each inhalation, and I took the chance of letting her go. But she didn’t want to be let go. She clung to me even more fiercely, and so we sat together that way a while longer, till finally the tension drained out of her body and she released me. I got to my feet, one hand still supporting her, and then lifted her legs and stretched her out on the sofa. She suffered me to move her, as willingly as a child. Then I straightened, and looked at her.
Her face was puffed and red from weeping, but with still the delicate tracery beneath. Yet, she looked more her age now. And, in some strange way, sensually attractive. Not with a good sensuality: erotic imaginings rose in me, veneered by only a sham tenderness.
Killy Page 13
