The Waiting Room (27 page)

Lou continued shaking his head furiously. Tim appeared not to notice. "New car?" he said.

"New car?" I said. I was confused.

"Yeah," Tim said, grinning, apparently pleased to be chatting with an undercover cop, "did—you know—did the department just release it to ya?"

I nodded. Lou continued shaking his head furiously. "Yes," I said, trying for a casual tone, and missing it by a hair. "Yes," I repeated, "I had a Malibu, one of those old Malibus. Nice car. Very fast. But I . . . I wrecked it. Bad torque converter—"

"Bad torque converter?" Tim said, again looking skeptical.

I nodded. I realized sinkingly that I was talking myself into a corner. "Among other things," I added. "So we had to junk it." Lou looked very angry now; Tim still didn't seem to notice.

"Too bad," he said, and nodded at the Plymouth. "Takes regular, huh?"

"Yes," I said, "regular. I'll pull it over to the pumps."

"Sure," Tim said.

And Lou said, "Fawrk!"

Tim looked confusedly at him.

I tried to smile, as if Lou had just told us both some weird one-word joke.

"Fawrk!" Lou said again, and pointed very stiffly at me.

Tim said, "That's a new one on me. He don't talk so good, you know, on account of he's deaf and he ain't never heard no one talk, and I thought I had his whole vo
cab
ulary figured out. But I ain't never heard that one before. Sounds like he's sayin' 'fuck,' don't it?"

I tried to smile again; I was sure it looked asinine. "Yes," I said. I knew what Lou was saying. He was saying, "Fake!" I added, my throat dry, "I'll pull the car up. I won't be a moment."

And I went over to the Plymouth, started it, backed out of the shadows, and roared off, through Shaftsbury Center, toward Arlington, Vermont, the LTD five car lengths behind.

A couple miles south of Arlington, the Plymouth ran out of gas.

I actually said to myself, "This is a comedy of errors," although there was nothing funny about it, and I wasn't laughing. Behind me, the LTD pulled up and parked a few car lengths back. I glanced at it in the rearview mirror, then quickly looked away. "Fuck you," I whispered at it.

I sat in the Plymouth for a good long time. After ten minutes or so I shut the lights off when a car coming my way flashed its high beams at me. The light of the half moon showed me rolling countryside to either side of the road. At the horizon, there was a soft bluish glow that might have been Arlington.

Fate, I decided, had chosen to dump on me yet again. It was fair. Anyone who wasn't bright enough to check his gas gauge now and again deserved to get dumped on.

I did something very stupid then. I picked up the mike, I turned the radio on, and I said into the mike, "Hello? Is anybody there?" I waited. There was no answer. I adjusted the squelch and tried again. "Hello? Is anybody there?" This time, a man answered, "Yes. This is the Arlington substation of the Vermont State Police," he said, "you are on an illegal frequency—"

"I know," I cut in. "It's just that I'd like to report a murder." And I went on at length about what had happened south of Ashley Falls, about why I had taken the Plymouth, that it had run out of gas, and that I was abandoning it somewhere south of Arlington. The cop asked my name. I told him that he didn't need to know my name because I was only someone who had done what was necessary to save a friend. Then, at last, feeling a great sense of release at having shared the events of the past hours with another human being, I grabbed my suitcase, got out of the Plymouth, and began walking. It was, I guessed, about forty miles to Brookfield.

~ * ~

I wasn't stupid enough to use U.S. Route 7. Before I got out of the car I checked my map and saw that a railway line of couple of miles east paralleled Route 7 through Vermont and into Maine.

So, not wanting to discard my previous plans altogether—it was a matter of pride—I shut off the overhead light, reached up, unscrewed it, found a napkin under the seat, wiped my fingerprints off all the smooth surfaces in the front of the car, then I wriggled across to the passenger door, hesitated, and peered cautiously over the seat at the car behind me. Its lights were off. Good. I pushed the passenger door open a little, wriggled out, keeping low, then crawled off the road, onto the shoulder—pushing the suitcase ahead of me—down a slight incline, stood, wincing because I'd scraped my knees and palms on the gravel at the shoulder of the road, and started across a field of quack grass toward a stand of piney woods.

Behind me, I heard someone else moving through the weeds. I stopped. A man's voice called breathlessly, as if the effort of following me through the weeds was gargantuan, "Please stop. I don't have the strength to come after you."

"Dammit!" I whispered. "No!" I called, but in-stead of sounding angry, or determined, as I'd meant it to sound, it sounded petulant, like a little boy refusing to put his toy trucks away and go to bed.

"Oh, give me a break!" the man called.

I stopped.
Give me a break?
I knew that the man behind me (when I turned my head I could see him only as a massive swelling in the darkness) was not Art DeGraff. Art was my age, and his voice, at least when we'd gone to high school together twenty years before, had been like a high-pitched whine. This man's voice was middle-aged and it had a deep and weary kind of authority to it. It was, I realized deadeningly, a cop's voice. I called back to him as I continued on through the field of quack grass, "I haven't done
any
thing. Leave me alone, dammit!"

I heard the man cough; I heard him wheeze heavily. I stopped. "Are you okay?" I called.

He continued to wheeze heavily.

"Dammit," I called again, "are you okay?"

The wheezing lightened up. Eventually, the man called back—his voice clearly the voice of someone struggling for air—"Asthma. It's all right."

"Who are you?" I called.

"No one." He cleared his throat noisily. "I'm a friend of Abner's. Sort of. I'm a cop." Another pause; he wheezed a few times. "My name's Whelan."

"Jesus," I breathed. I remembered what Abner had said about Whelan:
There's someone after me. A detective; his name's Whelan. He's trying to pin something on me
. I called, "You're no friend of Abner's. He's
told
me about you."

Whelan chuckled gurglingly.

I repeated, "You're no friend of Abner's."'

He'd been moving closer to me through the tall weeds and now was only about a dozen feet away. He stopped there, as if afraid he'd spook me.

I could see him more clearly. He was a big man, stout, and tall, and his breathing came in small, quick gasps.

I asked, "Do you have any medicine for that?"

"Sure," he answered. "I've got an inhaler."

"Don't you think you should use it? You sound awful."

Again he chuckled. "Yeah, I know." A quick breath. "I did use it."

I paused, then I said, "I can't help you, Mr. Whelan."

He chanced a step forward, then another. He stopped. "Well," he wheezed, "maybe you can, and maybe"—a quick breath—"you can't."

In the light of the half moon I could see his face now. It was square, the nose large, the eyes small and close-set, the cheeks puffy. It was a face which once might have been bearishly handsome. Now it had a kind of weary strength. He was wearing a ridiculous, private-eye kind of hat, a dark fedora, and he had the stub of an unlit cigar in his mouth, which he rolled back and forth theatrically between his lips as he spoke. "Maybe," he repeated, catching his breath at last, "you can help me, Mr. Feary. And maybe you can't."

I was going to ask him the predictable
How did you know my name?
but decided it would have surprised me if he
hadn't
known my name. I said, instead, "You have no jurisdiction here, Mr. Whelan."

He rolled the stubby cigar back and forth between his lips as if in thought. He was wearing a light-colored overcoat, open, and what I supposed was a brown suit.

He shoved his hands into his pants pockets.

"Well, Mr. Feary," he said, again finding that weary, low-pitched kind of authority he had had five minutes earlier, "I don't have any jurisdiction anywhere. I'm retired. And I'm glad of it, too. I put in forty long years and I deserve a rest. I got myself a little house down in Florida. You know, practically all my life I swore I'd never move to Florida. Too hot, I said. Too buggy. And you've got to put up with the Floridians, you know. But then I got old; I'm sixty-seven, Mr. Feary.
Sixty-seven years old!
Jesus, there are
trees
that aren't that old." He paused. I smiled at his little joke. He took a quick breath, continued, "And I got to feeling the chill of these god-awful winters in my bones, and I got this fuck-in' asthma. So I went down to Florida and bought my little house, and I found out that the Floridians aren't half bad, if you give them a chance. So I'm going to give them a chance. As soon as I catch up with Art DeGraff. And that'll happen as soon as you find your friend, Abner Cray."

I said, "That's quite a speech, Mr. Whelan."

He shrugged. "I've had a few hours to practice it." He rolled the cigar back and forth. "You're a hard man to keep track of, Mr. Feary. Where'd you learn your little disappearing acts? Jesus, it's easier to keep track of a cockroach."

I sighed. "Yes," I said, "I imagine it is." I paused. "I'm sorry, Mr. Whelan, but I still can't help you."

He took a few more steps forward and gently took hold of my arm, as if he needed my support. "Then maybe I can help you, Mr. Feary." His breath smelled of asthma inhaler and chewed cigars.

I looked at it this way: He was a lot older than I, he was out of shape and overweight, and when he'd been standing there with his coat open I had seen no evidence of a gun. Hell, if necessary, I could always clobber him with my suitcase. So I shrugged and said, "Why not?" and with him wheezing and panting up the short slope to the shoulder of the road—I tugged on him once, to help him up—we went back to his car.

It was the silver Chevette Scooter.

I got in. He climbed into the driver's seat and started the car. The interior also smelled of cigars and asthma inhaler.

I said, "You drive this thing like a maniac, you know?!".

He turned the headlights on and started the engine. "No, Mr. Feary," he said, and pulled onto the road, "you're the maniac. You and that friend of yours in the Ford. I couldn't be a maniac in this thing if I
wanted
to."

I smiled, grimly amused at the revelation I was about to make. "That 'friend' of mine in the Ford is Art DeGraff, Mr. Whelan." I expected a gasp of surprise. I expected he'd slam on the brakes, grab me by the collar, and swear in frustration and anger and disbelief. But he didn't do any of that. He said matter-of-factly, "No it isn't. It's some other asshole."

I continued smiling. I still thought my revelation was sneaking up on him. "Oh, but you're mistaken, Mr. Whelan," I said.

"No, I'm not. I've seen the guy driving that Ford, and it isn't Art. It's some old fart in a gray suit."

I said nothing.

Whelan said, "I went after him when he ran down that cop. I got this piece of shit all the way up to eighty-five before it started rattling. So I turned around and went after you."

"Christ," I breathed.

"Don't be upset." He tuned his radio to a classical station; harp music ebbed and flowed on waves of static. "We all make mistakes." He glanced in his rearview mirror, then at me. "There he is now, Mr. Feary."

I craned my head around. I saw the headlights of the LTD five car lengths back. I turned back. I said, my gaze straight ahead, "Do you have a gun, Mr. Whelan?"

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shake his head. "Nope. I gave them up. I gave up booze, too. And cigars—well, I don't light 'em, anyway."

"Great," I said.

"And so," he asked with mock cheerfulness, "where are we going?"

"Brookfield," I answered.

I don't know when, precisely, I became aware of the woman in red. I'd dozed off (which normally would not be an easy thing for me to do in the bucket seat of a Chevette Scooter, but I'd had a long and tiring day), my head to the side, so I was facing Whelan, and as I came around I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, someone sitting stiffly in the cramped back seat. I lurched in surprise.

"What's the matter," Whelan asked, "you got a pain or something?"

I didn't answer at once. I stared hard at the woman in red sitting so very stiffly in the back seat. The only light in the car was from the dashboard and some reflection from the high beams, but I could see well enough. She looked seedier than when I'd first seen her, as if she were a vegetable that had been left out on a table for a day or two.

She was wearing a kind of wretched smile. Not the I've-just-swallowed-a-canary smile of the Mona Lisa, but a smile that said,
I'm
going to do something murderous; you wait and see
.