The Good Old Stuff (35 page)

The unobliging conductor appeared from somewhere on my right, spoke to one of the young law enforcers, and plodded across the tracks toward the distant station, shiny shoulders hunched against the fingers of the wind.

In due course they got to me. They said, “Okay, Pell. Sit over there.” I sat. They were thorough with the ones who came after me. Name, occupation, residence, identification, any personal letters, please. Reason for the trip. All recorded neatly.

A hefty man with a tombstone face who seemed to be in charge said, with considerable satisfaction, “Okay. That’s one ninety-two. He’s on the train, boys. Go get him, and be careful.”

Skipper moved over and sat across from me. “He was afraid to try to bluff his way through. We’ve got him now, Simon.”

It took thirty minutes. The boys came back. They looked as if the old farmer had just rock-salted them out of the orchard.

“He’s gone, chief.”

Tomb-face stood up. “Gone! How?”

“Maybe he dropped off the train before it got here, chief.”

“Impossible! You know that as well as I do. Did you look everywhere?”

“Even the ladies’ rooms,” the thinnest one said with a pretty blush. “One part of them is locked, of course. The train people locked them as we were coming in.”

“Maybe he picked the lock on one of them. Where’s that conductor? Get his keys.”

“He went over to the station. He’ll be back.”

“Get keys someplace, dammit!”

“Yes sir, chief.”

Skipper said, “If they don’t find him that way, the only answer is that he brought his invisible coat along.” She tried to smile, but there wasn’t much heart in it. “We wanted to get this one. Our tipster told us he was very high in the organization.”

I stared at her. I said, too loudly, “He did bring his invisible coat, honey.”

Tomb-face glared at me. “Shut up, you.”

I looked at him steadily. “Friend, maybe you’ve gotten too accustomed to talking to the lower classes. You use that tone of voice on me again, and I’ll slap a little courtesy into you.”

“When we want suggestions, Pell, we’ll—”

“Ask me, because I happen to have one. Something has been nibbling away at the back of my mind. Now I know what it is. If you want to hear it, suppose you tell me that you’ll take it as easy as you can on Mrs. Pell.”

“That isn’t my decision to make, Pell.”

“Then kindly go to hell. Every minute you stall, your friend is getting further away from here.”

That got him. He probably had superiors riding him. He licked his lips and looked almost human.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said uneasily.

“Okay. Did you ever ask a conductor what time it is? He pulls out a big gold turnip and tells you it is three and a half
minutes to eleven. I ask a conductor the time. He looked at a wristwatch and said it was almost eleven. And then I saw him walk right through your cute little cordon out there. Who looks twice at a conductor’s face? I can even tell you where the real conductor is. Knocked out, or dead, and locked in one of the Johns with his own keys.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know what he looked like?” Tomb-face asked, but gently this time.

“I’ve got a vague idea. Five nine or ten. Hundred and sixty pounds. Gray hair, possibly bald on top. Bright red cheeks, high cheekbones, very cold little blue eyes. Big yellow teeth that stick out, making him look like Barney the Beaver. A lot of black hair on the backs of his hands. A gold ring, I think. Deep voice. Some holes in the side of his neck where he’d been lanced once upon a time. The right side of the neck.”

“I didn’t see him on the trip,” Skipper said.

“You’ll probably find a porter that brought his meals to his compartment or bedroom.”

Tomb-face roared out of the car and lit running, bellowing, waving his arms.

“You surprise me, Simon,” Skipper said. “That was a nice job of identification.”

“It doesn’t surprise me as much as it would have a year ago. I’ve just had a lot of training in observation, Skipper.”

They found the conductor with a mild concussion. He had opened a John door and a citizen had yanked him in by the front of his conductor suit and thumped his head against the wall. In there with the conductor was a nice gray expensive suit with the pockets emptied and the label ripped out of it. In a bedroom they found a brown bag, topcoat, felt hat. The hat had been purchased in Los Angeles, the bag in Seattle, and the laundry marks on the shirts were traced to a San Francisco hotel.

Skipper kept me informed. I had to remain in Chicago. I was the guy who could make a positive identification, when and if they picked up our boy. Evidently Barney the Beaver had walked through the station and into a bottomless pit. The man they had been able to grab on the train was small fry, and he was not inclined to be talkative.

Yes, Skipper
kept me informed. She let me hold her hand in the movies. The petaled eyes stared at me over the rims of cocktail glasses. Her stride was long beside me as we walked dark streets. She let me kiss her, and, unlike Marj, it wasn’t a tigress reaction. It was more like a kitten when you start to cuddle and then it takes a surprisingly sharp slash at you. We traded life histories, exchanged likes and dislikes, discovered a song that was “our song,” and all the rest of it. You can’t dress it up. It is common, ordinary, everyday falling in love. To the people involved it feels like it had never happened before to anyone in just that way.

Marj’s charms had been startlingly self-evident. But Skipper had a knack of creeping up on you. She would happen, by accident, to turn just so or stand in a certain way, and
whoomp
!—there would be a line so breathtakingly lovely, so full of a soft and lingering promise, that it could make a bill collector weep.

Over 3
A.M.
coffee in a bean wagon, I told her she better marry me. She was lifting her cup and it stopped in midair, wavered, and floated back down to the saucer. Her lips were the shape of your first game of post office.

“This is so sudden. Give me time to think it over.… Okay, I’ve thought it over. Yes, Simon.”

The ham-handed counterman propped his chin on his fists and looked dreamy. “So lovely,” he purred. “Such a beautiful emotion, love.”

Coffee was on the house. Wedding present number one.

For three days I went around patting children on the head. Some of the hard-bitten Chicago tykes spat through a curled lip and said, “Go pat ya own head, ya creep.”

My phone rang beside my hotel bed in the middle of the night. “Simon, darling. I’m down in the lobby.”

“Check in with the house dick and come up.”

I had time to ice-water my face and belt myself into a robe and jam the ugly toeless foot stubs into the trick shoes before she came through the door I had opened for her.

I kissed her. “Aha! You are now in my powah, fair maid,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “Simon, I had to come and tell you this. I had to be the one to tell you. Dear Simon. I’ve been so jealous of her, of what she had of you and what she took away from you. Now I’m so ashamed.”

I stared at her, at tears she ignored. “You talking about Marj?”

“Get yourself a drink, Simon, and sit down.”

I obeyed orders. I slugged myself with a dollop of bourbon. I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like this.

I didn’t like it at all. Mrs. Pell, in the middle of the night, had taken her baggy gray prison dress and had ripped it into strips, woven the strips into a makeshift rope, fashioned a slipknot. Then she had soaked the rope so that the knot would slide tight. There being nothing in the cell she could hang herself to, she had merely put the noose around her neck, tied the free end to a bar of the cell door, then thrown herself backward. Apparently she had tried to change her mind later. She had clawed and torn her throat in the area of the wet knot, but it had buried itself too deeply.

I got up and walked to the windows, looking out, seeing nothing. I was remembering things. The position in which she always slept. Curled up, childish, seemingly innocent. Her passion for lizard shoes. Sound of her laughter. Her warm lips.

Though I had thought myself cured of her, some part of me died while I stood and looked out the windows at the sleeping city.

Incongruously, I remembered two marine sergeants who had hated each other with bloody fervor. Twice they had gone after each other with knives. No name was too foul to call the other. Fate had trapped them in the same outfit and kept them there. And then I had seen one of them by a swing bridge over a jungle river, crying like a child, vocalizing his sobs, staring at the mortar-smashed body of the other.

Skipper came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you want me to stay for a while, Simon?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay in the morning. Thanks for telling me right away, Skip.”

“I love you, Simon. Remember that.”

“You’re my girl. That woman was a stranger. Someone I happened to know once upon a time.”

I smiled at her, but I guess the smile wasn’t too convincing. Maybe the ache and sense of loss was showing. Her tears had stopped and her smile was measured, precise, careful.

“Good night, Simon.”

I walked her to the door and opened it. Barney the Beaver slid in, kicked the door shut, and slid along the wall. His gun was aimed in exactly the right place to keep me from moving—right where Skipper’s high round hip curved into her slender waist.

“You’re the bright boy,” he said huskily.

“You’re looking a little shopworn,” I said. “Lost weight, haven’t you? Where have you been hiding? In the zoo with the rest of the beavers?”

“Pick the girl up. Go on. Pick her up.”

I did so. One arm under her knees, one arm under her shoulders, my left hand under her armpit where I could feel, against my fingers, the delicate rib cage, the hard
ka-thud
of her heart. It was a cute idea. She couldn’t do anything and neither could I. Unless I wanted to rush him, using her as a shield.

“What are the plans?” I said.

“With you gone, Pell, they haven’t got anything that will stand up in court. They can inconvenience the hell out of me, but they can’t prove anything for keeps.”

“Sounds logical. Gets you out of one jam and into another.”

It is distinctly a lot of Shinola about guys fresh from combat sneering at a feeble little thing like a Police Positive with a two-inch barrel. I did not feel confident that I could catch those slugs in my teeth and spit them back at him. I felt that they would make large holes in me and those holes would hurt like hell, and I wanted no part of them.

His face was more yellow than I remembered it. He still looked, though, as if he should be wearing a conductor suit. He chomped his underlip with those horse teeth.

He appeared to be thinking.

Skipper looked at him for a long time, then turned her face toward my chest. Her arm was around my shoulders. I didn’t
blame her for looking away. A truly evil man is never pretty, particularly when he is busy contemplating evil. He gave a little shrug that meant he had made up his mind.

“Now do just like I tell you, and it won’t hurt either of you a bit.”

“What are we going to have, a suicide pact?”

He sucked the big teeth. It sounded like a Ubangi kiss. “Out the window hand in hand,” he said. “Lover’s leap. But you’ll be sleeping while you drop, kids.”

Skipper took a deep breath and began to tremble more violently. She wasn’t at all brave. Me, I showed no reaction at all, if you don’t count the sweat that was running down into my socks.

“Set her down,” he said. I did. “Now come here, girl. Circle around so I can keep an eye on smart boy. That’s a girl. Now turn around. Easy.”

As soon as her back was to him, he reached out with his free hand and grabbed her wrist, twisted it up between her shoulder blades. Her small whimper was quickly stifled. I saw her face turn gray.

“Now, smart boy, sit down at that desk and write. Move!”

Any hesitation I felt was immediately canceled out by her slightly shriller sound of pain. She didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. She stood and took it and shut her teeth hard on the pain of it.

Chess is a lovely game. The opponent starts making a series of forcing moves. You make the predicted answering move each time. And you wait and you hope to find a hole in the attack.

“Write what I say. ‘To whom it may concern. We are taking the only way out. We have no regrets.’ Got that?”

The hotel nib scratched along the stationery.

“Sign it,” he said.

I signed it. My own death certificate.

“Now don’t move. Put your hands flat on that table and don’t move a muscle.”

My chance. I put my hands flat on the table. My ears went to work for me. I could hear the grass growing in a park three blocks away. I could hear city traffic in Cleveland. And with
my hands braced, I heard the soft scuff of shoe leather on the rug. I heard the fabric of his sleeve scrape against the fabric of the side of his coat as he lifted his arm.

I shoved myself back toward him, hard. With all the strength I could put into my arms and legs, I shot back at him. And shot back into the direct path of some damn fool who was driving through the hotel room with a tractor-trailer combo. He ran me down and smashed my head like a stomped pumpkin.