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Authors: Frank M. Robinson

BOOK: Power, The
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She shrugged. Tanner listened intently to the phone, then nodded and whispered in her ear.
“I wanna speak to Lootenant Crawford,” she said. Tanner put his hand over the mouthpiece as soon as she got done and waited for the reply. When he heard it, he whispered again.
“Never min’ who it is, just gimme the Lootenant.”
Pause.
“I got somethin’ to tell you, Lootenant. Professor Tanner didn’t—didn’t kill Johnny Olson. DeFalco did.”
Pause. She blinked her eyes and frowned, as if she were just starting to realize what she was doing. Tanner whispered urgently to her again.
“Never min’. Just say it was over … over me.”
He hung up and helped her past the table where he scooped up the money and the bottle and gave it to her. She wanted to sit down. His fingers tightened on her fleshy arm and he pushed her to the door. “Not here,” he said harshly. “Down the street. The cops’ll be here in a minute—you wouldn’t want them to catch you, would you?”
She shook free, blazing mad. “Gitcha goddamned paws offa me! And they don’t have to look me up, I’m gonna tell ’em! You oughtta learn how to treat a lady like a … lady!” She started down the street, then suddenly turned and made a face at him, daring him to do anything about it.
Tanner shrugged and went back in to the bartender. He took a bill out of his pocket. “You don’t have to remember much, do you?”
The man took the money and folded it into a small, flat wad and slipped it into his watch pocket.
“I never seen you come in—I never seen you leave.”
Outside, Nordlund said, “What if she goes to the police?”
“She won’t go near one. And even if they pick her up an hour from now, it will be too late. She’ll be too drunk to remember anything.”
“The call she made—it was pretty crude.”
Tanner’s head felt warm and his stomach a little queasy. Nervous exhaustion had finally caught up with him; he wouldn’t last another day.
“Maybe they’ll believe it, maybe they won’t Commander. It’s only supposed to be a thread between DeFalco and Olson’s murder—just enough to get the police a little interested.”
Nordlund leaned against a lamppost and jammed his hands in his pockets. His face was expressionless. “And then what?”
“If you’ve got money enough, I think I’ll get a shave,” Tanner said slowly. “Maybe you ought to, too. And then we’re going to deliver the body. We’re going to call the police and tell them where they can find DeFalco.”
“You know, I suppose.”
Tanner shook his head. “No, I don’t. But I know somebody who does. Hart’s a logical man. He knows that DeFalco’s absences will be suspicious. But the days don’t have to be explained, and for the evenings he’ll have an alibi. He spent the night with a girl friend. And five will get you ten that the girl friend is Rosemary O’Connor.”
 
 
She had been a clerk in a woman’s clothing store not far from the campus, or so the rumor went. Which meant she had left a trail and wouldn’t be hard to find.
After he and Nordlund cleaned up, they started covering the shops in the campus area. By late afternoon they found the manager of the shop where Rosemary O’Connor had worked two years before. The manager was a prim, prissy little man who looked as delicate as the bow tie he wore.
“Oh yes, Miss O’Connor. I remember her quite well. She was in something of a scandal as I recall. Naturally we discharged her immediately.” He eyed the two Naval Intelligence men speculatively.
“Do you know where she lived? Any files kept on her?”
“Yes, sir, I’m quite sure we still have them.” He waved a wrist at a saleslady behind a nearby counter. “Miss Sherwood, the personnel record on Rosemary O’Connor, if you please.” While they were waiting, he asked, “I know it’s none of my business but is she wanted for something? I wouldn’t doubt it if she was, of course.”
Tanner didn’t bother answering.
“Oh. I didn’t mean to pry, you understand. Just curiosity.”
“Of course.”
The manager looked unhappy and then the salesgirl came up with the file folder marked
Rosemary O’Connor.
Tanner leafed through the contents. Home address and phone, which probably had been changed by now. The address was listed under her own name; she hadn’t been living with her parents.
What interested him most was a letter from an insurance company, asking for a recommendation. It had been a stupid thing to do, he thought. She hadn’t been likely to get a good recommendation from the shop. The carbon of their letter was attached and while it never said so in so many words, it left no doubt as to the kind of girl Rosemary was supposed to be.
He debated for a moment, and then dialed the phone number that was on the letterhead of the insurance company. They hadn’t hired the girl, but they had kept her application on file. The address was a new one on the west side of the city.
If they hurried, Tanner thought, they could be waiting for her when she came home from work.
Her apartment was in a run-down section of town where the fire escapes made a rusty tracery against the deep blue sky. They waited in the tiny entranceway of the building, a cracked-tile cubbyhole where all the names over the mailboxes were scribbled in pencil.
When she walked in, Tanner didn’t have to be introduced. She stopped and stared at them and he knew it was her. She wasn’t an exceptionally pretty girl, which surprised him. Average height and maybe just a little too plump. Good skin and features, dark complexion, and black hair that was thick and a little too oily. The Irish in the family was all on her father’s side, he thought. He could imagine her a few years in the future, cooking spaghetti and taking care of three or four kids.
A strictly average girl, passably pretty and attractive, fairly intelligent, who had once made a mistake she couldn’t possibly have avoided. A patsy for Adam Hart.
He showed his card and jerked a thumb at Nordlund standing behind him. “We’d like to talk to you.”
Her voice was cold. “Come on up.” She led the way up the stairs to a dingy apartment with a colorless rug and a sofa where you could see the springs just under the worn upholstery. She took off her hat and turned to face them. “Well?”
“Do you know Eddy DeFalco?”
“You wouldn’t be asking me if you didn’t think so.”
“Do you know where he’s staying?”
“No.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“That’s your privilege.”
He pointed to Nordlund. “We’re with the government, Rose. We have to know.”
“I don’t have to tell you.”
“You been going with Eddy very long, Rose?”
“Long enough.”
“It’s been a couple of years now, hasn’t it?”
“If you knew the figures, why ask me?”
“You knew he was running around with other women, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew it.”
“And you still stuck with him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“That’s a silly question, isn’t it?”
“He got you into trouble, Rose. You lost your job over it.”
“It was no great loss—it wasn’t worth keeping.”
“Where’s he staying, Rose?”
“I told you I didn’t know!”
“What would you do if I told you Eddy was a murderer?”
She stared at him. “I wouldn’t believe it,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry, Rose, but he is. The other night he killed an entire family.”
She shook her head wildly, her eyes closed as if in pain. “No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong! He’s afraid of something, he’s been running from somebody! He didn’t kill anybody—he’s been worried about somebody killing him!”
“It’s been a front,” Tanner said gently. “And you’ve been part of it.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Where does he spend the nights, Rose?”
“Right here, with me, where’d you think?”
“Got any idea where he is right now?”
“Look, I’m not going to tell you anything … .”
He snapped and was suddenly towering over her. “I’m not looking for him just because he’s your boy friend and I don’t give a damn how many times you went to bed with him! Maybe you’d like to know that Eddy DeFalco isn’t Eddy DeFalco at all, maybe you’d like to know he isn’t even human! Maybe you’d like to know that for the last two years he’s been masquerading and you’ve been nothing but part of his costume!”
She started to cry, tight little tears that trickled reluctantly out of the corners of her eyes.
“I won’t tell you a thing, not a goddamned thing! Go ahead and do anything you want to!”
“Nordlund, get her purse.”
Nordlund disappeared and came back a moment later. Rosemary suddenly stopped crying, her eyes wary. “What do you want with my purse?”
Tanner opened it up without answering and dumped the contents on the sofa. Rosemary made a lunge for it but Nordlund held her back.
Rouge and lipstick and a cheap little compact. A carefully folded handkerchief and a little perfumed sachet of rose leaves. Keys and a small tin of aspirin and a broken pencil. An address book. And tickets. Tickets in four different colors to the city’s amusement park.
Chicago’s fun park, the largest in the world, over seventy acres of roller coasters and ferris wheels and lemonade stands. A different colored ticket for every day. Tickets that had been bought for different rides and then not used and stuffed away in her purse. Tickets that still had a crisp, new feel so they must have been purchased fairly recently.
“How often do you meet him there, Rose? Every night? And you don’t actually come back here at all, do you? He sees you for an hour or so and then he disappears, doesn’t he?”
She crumpled then. She sagged into the chair next to the couch, her eyes closed and the sobs shaking her apart.
“We do! Honest to God, we come back here … every … night!”
He had him, Tanner thought. One more faked call to Crawford and the police would be in the amusement park looking for DeFalco/Hart—who would have no idea that the police were after him.
“Don’t try to leave, Rose. There’s a policeman at the front and one stationed in the alley. You can’t help Eddy now anyway.” It was a lie but it would be enough to keep her from trying to warn DeFalco.
Even after he had closed the door, he could still hear her sobbing. She loved DeFalco, he thought, and wondered if Hart had forced her to. Probably not—it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to her how much of a monster he was.
 
IT
was the smells that hit him first. The sickly sweet smell of cotton candy and caramel corn and sugar waffles, mixed with the faint exhaust odors from the diesel engines that drove the rides. The locker-room odor of thousands of people eating and milling about in the open and the sticky smell of Coke and root beer and orange pop. The stink of hot dogs and raw onions and the sharp, rancid odor of buttered popcorn.
And the noises. The cries of the barkers and the drifting shreds of conversation from the crowds.
“ … your luck folks, hit the milk bottles …”
“ … show the little girl how strong you are …”
“ … wanna go on the rolly coaster …”
“ … three for a quarter, try your luck …”
“ … two tickets for the Tunnel of Love …”
“ …
got sick all over me,
your
son …
”
Nordlund had bought himself a hamburger and was eating it, leaning over slightly so the drippings wouldn’t hit his shirt.
“Got any idea how they’re going to work it, Professor?”
Tanner shrugged. “I suspect Crawford will leave only one exit open and the police will watch as the people leave.”
“They’ll have a tough time with this crowd.”
“Maybe.”
Nordlund took a sip from his bottle of pop. “What’s to keep the police from running you in?”
“In the first place I’m not going to walk up and introduce myself, and in the second they’re not looking for me right now.”
“Professor …” Nordlund paused. “Why couldn’t Hart go right over the fence, if he wanted?”
“Why should he? He doesn’t even know the police are looking for him yet. He’s still carrying on the masquerade, he’s still Edward DeFalco, waiting for Rosemary O’Connor to show up. And if worse came to worse, the park isn’t so big it couldn’t be surrounded.”
“Any reason why he can’t walk right out? Different people see Hart in different ways, who would recognize him?”
“That gets the same answer as the other. He doesn’t know anybody is looking for him, he’s still Eddy DeFalco.”
Nordlund finished off the hamburger and wiped his thin fingers on a greasy paper napkin. “How does it feel to be winning for a change?”
“It isn’t over yet, Commander.”
He walked slowly down the midway, listening to the crowds and catching the expectant hush as the roller coasters crept to the top of their hills, the ratchets clicking sharply beneath the cars, and then the thundering roar as the cars caromed down the incline with the shrieks of their riders cutting through the night.
Something wet splashed on his face and he glanced up. Dark clouds had rolled in over the moon and a sharp wind was rattling through the leaves of the trees. It looked like the weather was going to break and there was going to be a heavy summer thundershower, one where it would rain torrents and the sheet lightning would look like fireworks.
Some of the people on the midway felt the raindrops and started to drift toward the exits. Tanner glanced at his watch—the men at the gate would be checking now. And it was just about time that DeFalco/Hart was leaving. He would have gotten tired of waiting for Rosemary to show up. She wouldn’t have been meeting him much before eight—she got out of work at five-thirty, give her time to eat and dress—and he wouldn’t have waited for her much beyond eight-thirty or nine. About an hour together, usually, and then they would have split up.
DeFalco would have had more serious duties for the rest of the evening. An hour to keep up the pretenses with Rosemary and then back to stalking the streets of the city as Adam Hart.
He stopped at a shooting gallery and bought a quarter’s worth of ammunition from the woman who ran it. She absently handed him the gun, frowning at the people hurrying past the booth towards the exit.
“Looks like we’ll close early tonight.”
Tanner aimed the gun, spattered the targets at the back, and handed it back to her. “Bad night, huh?”
She leaned over the counter and lowered her voice confidentially. “Y’know, there’s a rumor going around that they got a murderer trapped in here.”
Tanner felt cold. However it had started, it might tip off Hart that something was up.
“You believe it?”
She racked the rifle and laughed. “Why not? Gives a body a little excitement to look forward to.”
Tanner laughed and walked away.
He hadn’t taken more than half a dozen steps when he heard it. It was dim and faint and sounded like nothing more than a car backfiring or somebody at another shooting gallery a few hundred feet away. He turned to Nordlund. “You hear that?”
Nordlund nodded. “It sounded like a shot.”
Tanner glanced around. The midway was almost deserted and the lights had started to go out in the different booths. The rain was spattering down now, hitting the crumpled candy wrappers and the remains of ice-cream cones and the little bits of bun that littered the ground. A few concessionnaires in raincoats were rolling down the canvas in front of their booths.
And then people started to come back up the midway, coming back from the exit like water backing up in a drain. A few were running and looking over their shoulders, others were scrambling off the midway itself into the shadows of the booths and the different rides.
Another shot from the direction of the exit.
Tanner smiled crookedly. What was it that Karl had once said? They were like dogs trying to catch the dog catcher? But it had worked. Hart had panicked and had used a pistol. The police wouldn’t have shot him, they wanted him merely for questioning. So it must have been the other way around. A brief moment of panic and Hart had lost.
A policeman was running down the midway.
“Get off the midway, everybody off the midway!”
Tanner and Nordlund moved back into the shadows of a concession booth and sat on a bench. Nordlund turned up his collar and pulled down his hat to keep off the blowing rain. His eyes closed and his chest started to move with an easy, deep rhythm.
“Don’t you want to watch, Commander?”
Nordlund reluctantly opened one eye. “There’s nothing we can do one way or the other. And I’m so beat I can’t stand up.”
A mile away, Tanner could hear the first, faint cries of the sirens. The reinforcements were coming up and the man hunt was about to begin.
 
 
The man stepped out of the shadows two hundred feet away and started sprinting down the midway. There was a shot and the man staggered and for a fraction of a second Tanner was looking at the wild, tortured face of Edward DeFalco. Then DeFalco was past him, twisting and dodging and running faster than Tanner had ever seen a man run before.
Then there were other men on the midway, running and ducking into the shadows and firing after the fleeing figure. DeFalco turned in mid-stride and flame spurted from a pistol he held. A policeman far down the midway screamed and dropped to the ground. There was a fusillade of shots and DeFalco stumbled again, then was up and running. He wasn’t going to die easy, Tanner thought.
DeFalco suddenly ducked between two concession stands and was lost to sight. Tanner could see the spot where he had disappeared; the space between the stands was nothing but shadows and darkness.
Other people were filling the midway now. The police, lugging rifles and riot guns, and the surging, curious crowd. Then other policemen were blocking off the area and holding the crowds back.
Tanner felt cold and wet. He sneezed and tried to wrap his collar tighter around his throat. Nordlund was at his side, offering him a cigarette. “This has turned into a pretty big man hunt, hasn’t it, Professor?”
“They’re hunting a pretty big man.” He didn’t feel a great deal like talking. The tension had built up within him and it was fighting with the fatigue that was making him sick. He knew when it was all over that he would lie down and collapse some place for forty-eight hours.
A whisper started to float through the crowd.
“The fun house—they’ve trapped him in the fun house!”
The crowd surged down a street just off the midway and Tanner followed it. The crowd packed itself around the fun house in a huge arc. It was a real professional setup, Tanner thought. The fun house was surrounded on all sides, there were spotlights on the entrances, and Crawford was talking over a small, portable loudspeaker. His words sounded high and querulous in the mounting wind.
And then silence. The sound of the rain pelting down and the breathing of the crowd and little snatches of mumbled conversation. The lights and the trees and the big wire trash baskets etched sharply against the night. The gaudy front of the fun house, the face of a gigantic clown with a bulbous nose and a grinning mouth for an entranceway, the red paint and the gilt gleaming wetly in the lights.
The police threw in tear gas and half a dozen men with masks disappeared into the grinning mouth.
They almost missed DeFalco when he made a break for it. Even with the lights, a little window in a corner, about six feet above the ground, was in the shadow. It opened noiselessly and a man wriggled silently out.
“There he goes!”
DeFalco ran straight down the midway, running the gamut of the guns and the lights. The guns chattered and he stumbled, then somehow made it to his feet and was running like the wind. A hundred yards, two hundred yards, and he was running through the thin stretch of grass that separated him from the wooden framework of one of the roller coasters.
The lights and the cars and the hunters moved after him, flowing down the street like a gigantic amoeba. In the shadows of the wooden framework, a figure worked its way rapidly towards the top, leaping from beam to beam with an agility that far surpassed that of any human being.
“ … lights, get the lights …”
“ … there, at the top …”
“ … can’t miss, all over …”
“ … all over!”
A scattering of shots from the figure high in the framework. Then the lights were on him, first one picking him out and clinging tenaciously and then the others until the whole roller-coaster framework was bathed in light. DeFalco was caught in the center, like a fly in a web. Somehow Tanner thought he heard the man scream,
“Oh my God!”
Then the riot guns caught him and he fell and the guns still clung, their invisible fingers plucking at him while he was still in the air. He hit the ground and bounced and it was all over.
All over.
The crowd surged forward. Tanner got near enough to catch a glimpse of the thing on the grass and felt sick. An ambulance drove up and two men with a blanket and a stretcher took away what was left of Edward DeFalco. The telltale stains lingered for a while in the rain and then were diluted and dissolved and washed away and the green of the grass showed through, the mud at its roots looking a little richer.
Tanner stood in the rain and stared for long minutes, then turned and walked slowly back to the overhang of a concession booth. The spotlights were winking out one by one and the brilliant white of the roller-coaster framework faded to oyster gray and then a dirty gray and then almost disappeared entirely against the black sky, just a shadow in the darkness.
Men stripped apart the riot guns, put them back into cases, and slung them into waiting automobiles. There was the gentle purr of motors and one after another the cars drove to the entrance. The crowd was breaking into little groups and heading for the exit. The amoeba was flowing away from the park now, out into the city, to split up and go back to its various homes and stations and garages.
She had loved him,
Tanner thought.
She didn’t care what kind of a monster he was. And she had cried and said he couldn’t have done it.
Somebody said something to him and he turned blindly around. It was Crawford. “Commander Nordlund said you were over here, Professor. We’ll need a statement from you in the morning, of course.”
“Certainly.” Tanner started walking through the beating rain towards the exit.
He didn’t see the girl at first, didn’t even know she was there until she had thrown herself on him and was sobbing in his ear. “Bill, Bill, I’m so glad you’re safe!”
Marge. The police must have asked her down to help identify DeFalco.
“Bill, it’s been a nightmare!” She stood there in the rain, expectantly, waiting for him to take her into his arms or kiss her or walk arm in arm into the sunset. Sunshine and health and the faint odor of “Tweed” perfume.
A new Chevvy pulled up and Commander Nordlund stuck his head out the window. “Hey, kids, Crawford lent me a car—can I give you a lift?”

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