Time and Again (41 page)

Byrnes was looking at me. "Well?" he said. "Anything to tell me
now?"
And after a moment I shook my head.

The doorbell rang. We heard steps toward the front door, the door opening, the maid's voice, then a man's. Footsteps approached along the hall; then the maid stopped at the doorway, and the cop we'd left at 19 Gramercy Park came walking in carrying his helmet under one arm. He actually bowed, head ducking humbly, then took a step backward, a finger rising to smooth his mustache. The bandaged head on the chaise nodded regally in return, and Mrs. Carmody graciously inclined her head. The little ceremony actually took several seconds, and if I hadn't known this before, I'd have known now that this was a place of wealth and power and that both these cops understood it. "Well?" Byrnes said then, and his voice indicated
his
standing in this room, far superior to that of the uniformed cop.

"Yes, sor." The sergeant unfastened the two brass buttons of his uniform coat just over his belt. He shoved a hand in; then with the instinctive feeling for drama that everyone of this time seemed to be born with, he walked over to the table beside Carmody's chaise longue. Not till he reached it did he pull out a thick paper-banded stack of greenbacks and slap them down on the table. "Found this, sor, in his room." He nodded at me. "The landlady showed me the room, and the money was in his carpetbag, hidden under some clothes."

I was paralyzed, almost literally; I couldn't move or speak. Byrnes had crossed to the table, to lean over and examine the stack of greenbacks. "And is this your money, sir?"

The bandaged head turned as though it hurt, and the inflamed blinking eyes looked down at the money. "Yes, the bills are marked. My bank will identify them, every one." And Byrnes picked up the packet, turned, and walked over to Julia and me, tucking the bills into an inside coat pocket.

"Well?" He stopped before me almost cheerfully, and for the third time said, "Anything to tell me now?"

"There's nothing to tell." I shrugged. "He's lying, and the money is a frame-up to support the lie." I didn't know whether the word «frame-up» was in use yet, but if not he understood me all the same, and nodded. "We never touched that money — " I stopped suddenly; I'd thought of something. "Have you examined it for fingerprints?" I said excitedly. "You'll find his, all right!" I pointed to the chaise longue. "But you won't find mine or Miss Charbonneau's!"

"Won't find what?"

"Our fingerprints!''

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He didn't. I could see that he didn't. I didn't know when the use of fingerprints as identification was discovered, but obviously it was not yet. "Never mind. He's lying. That's all I have to say."

"Well, that's possible," Byrnes answered. The sergeant walked over to him and whispered in his ear. Byrnes nodded, and the sergeant left. Byrnes looked at me speculatively for a moment, then rubbed his chin as though genuinely considering the possibility that I was telling the truth. "We have a chawge and a denial. If you two done it, nobody but Mr. Carmody seen you. Tell me this: Were you there at all? Hiding next to Pickering's office? For some innocent reason, perhawps?" He smiled invitingly.

But I'd had time to understand that it was impossible to admit even being there. How could we explain it? If I admitted we were there but couldn't say why, Carmody's charge seemed true. I shook my head immediately. "No. The only connection between Pickering and us is that we lived in the same boardinghouse. We don't know anything about his blackmailing this man. Or whether it's even true that he was. I begin to suspect that maybe Mr. Carmody here killed Pickering. And left him to burn. He's afraid the truth will come out, and wants a scapegoat before questions start being asked. Since we lived where Pickering did, he hides the money in my bag or has someone else do it, and accuses us."

Byrnes was nodding sympathetically. "Quate possible, if you wasn't in the World Building at all yesterday. And you say you wasn't?" I nodded, and Byrnes stepped to the doorway. "Sergeant!" he called down the hall.

Footsteps sounded immediately on the parquet flooring of the hall; then the sergeant stopped in the doorway, his helmet still under his arm like a football. A man walked past him into the room, and I realized that I knew him but for a few seconds couldn't place him. He nodded politely to Mrs. Carmody, then glanced at the bandaged figure on the chaise, but looked quickly away. He stared closely at Julia and me for several seconds, then nodded to Byrnes. "Yes, it is they." He glanced at a pair of photographs in his hand, and I recognized them; they were copies of the police photographs of Julia and me taken earlier. "I recognized them from your photographs," he was saying, handing them to Byrnes. "As Dr. Prime told you, they escaped as he did; I helped them climb into my office." He looked at Julia and me again, his eyes genuinely troubled. "I am sorry if they are in trouble," he said, and it was an apology to us for the necessity of doing what he'd done. Byrnes thanked him, and J. Walter Thompson, into whose office we'd climbed from the burning World Building yesterday morning, nodded around the room and left. In spite of what he'd just had to do, he was a nice man and I almost wished I could call after him, and assure him that his little one-man business was going to succeed, and even grow.

We were deeply in trouble now.
Anything to tell me?
Byrnes had asked in the carriage on the way to Police Headquarters, and several times afterward. And certainly if we'd been in the World Building fire at all, we had something to say to an inspector of police unless we were hiding something. He'd pointedly offered us the chance to speak, I was sure now, in the certainty that it would make any explanation we made after we'd been accused seem like an obvious lie. He'd pinned us nicely, and I knew that in spite of the absurd way he talked this was a dangerous man.

"Congratulations, sir," he was saying, offering the credit to the bandaged man on the chaise. "Appears like you caught a pair of murderers."

"Thanks to you. When I am somewhat recovered, and back on Wall Street, I should like to thank you again. In my office. You still retain your well-known interest in the Street, Inspector?"

"Oh, yas, indeed."

"Splendid; we all appreciate it. Not a pickpocket, not a troublemaker down there since you established the John Street deadline. I will let you go now, Inspector. I know you will be fully occupied in making entirely certain this pair does not escape justice.
Once that is done
… come see me at my office."

"Count on both those things, sir."

I was hypnotized, listening to these two bargaining over us. And I was scared. But when I looked at Julia to smile reassuringly at her, it wasn't false; we were in trouble but I knew that for Carmody to prove anything against us in a courtroom, his word against ours, would be a lot different from persuading Inspector Byrnes.

And in less than a minute I learned that Byrnes thought so, too, and I began to feel almost cheerful. We were hustled out of the house, the sergeant between us, one hand gripping an arm of each of us, Byrnes behind us. At the curb Byrnes stepped forward to open the carriage door. But then, a hand on the door handle, he stopped, and turned to look at us thoughtfully. He said, "In the cawtroom, he'd charge and you'd deny. There's the money found in your room and Thompson's identification. But there is the smell of Tweed Ring scandal around Carmody too, isn't there? And he
did
pay blackmail, howsomever small." For a moment he was silent, looking at us consideringly; then he opened the carriage door. "Jump in, Sergeant!" he said, and the sergeant looked surprised but he let go our arms and did what he was told. Then Byrnes turned to us, his back to the sergeant, and spoke quietly; neither the sergeant nor the driver could hear him, I'm certain. "Constitutional rights, you say," he murmured as though the novel sound of the phrase intrigued him. "Well, all right; I think it's too soon to arrest you. I think we have to find more evidence." For a moment longer he stared at us, then seemed to reach a decision. "On your way," he said. "But you're not to leave the city, understand?" We looked at him, not entirely sure he meant what he seemed to be saying. "Be off with you!" he said almost kindly, smiling with a kind of fatherly affection for Julia, at least as well as that hard face could manage.

It was no time to wait till he changed his mind, I thought, and I took Julia's arm, and we walked away, fast, south on Fifth in the opposite direction from the way the carriage was headed. A dozen steps, twenty steps, thirty, and he hadn't changed his mind and called after us. I couldn't resist looking back. He was still standing by the carriage watching us. "Sergeant!" he yelled suddenly, and yanked open the carriage door. Then he pointed after us: "Our prisoners are escaping!"

I stopped, my hand on Julia's arm swinging her around with me, and we stood staring. My mind wouldn't translate what was happening into sense. Because the sergeant's helmeted head had appeared out the street-side window of the carriage, and he was pointing at us, his arm extended, his forefinger aiming. But it wasn't his finger at all, because I saw it flash, heard it roar, felt the
zing
of the bullet split the air near our heads.

Our minds worked then; we were running for our lives, and we heard the explosion of the sergeant's revolver, the high-pitched
zing,
and I saw a chip fly out of the balustrade of the brownstone house just ahead. Again the astonishingly loud explosion of the big revolver, then we were at the street corner, and in the instant of hurling ourselves around it I had to look back once again: Byrnes was in the street, his hand on the sergeant's wrist forcing the gun straight upward; not to save us, I knew that, but because there were too many startled citizens now, stopped and staring, between us and the gun.

We were around the corner on Forty-seventh Street running hard, Julia with her skirt gathered up in one hand, people gaping. Across the street a man on the steps of the Windsor Hotel suddenly ran down and across the cobbles toward us, his hand raised in a «halt» gesture, saying something, I couldn't tell what. But I raised a fist, and he stopped at the curb and watched us tear past. It was a long crosstown block, an endless row of identical brownstones, and halfway down it Julia gasped, "I can't, I have to stop!" We slowed to a walk, and I looked behind. But though people were turned to stare after us, others leaning out of carriage windows or looking back from the drivers' seats of delivery wagons, no one was chasing us and there was no sign of Byrnes or the sergeant, I didn't know why.

We reached Madison Avenue. A horsecar traveling south was just past the far corner, and we stepped out into the street, and I helped Julia up onto the rear platform as it moved past, then swung up after her. It was rolling along about as fast as we could have traveled on foot unless we'd run full speed without letup, which was impossible; and this was a lot less noticeable. I paid our fares, we sat down and stared out the window, getting our wind back and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. But no one looked at us. People sat staring out their windows at the quiet street. I'd walked along here in the sun, with Felix's camera, day before yesterday. People coughed, yawned, and got on or off the car, crunching down the aisle through the ankle-deep straw that was supposed to keep your feet warm and didn't. At Forty-fourth Street and again at Forty-third, I looked down the short block to our left at Grand Central Station standing exactly where it was supposed to stand, and where I'd seen it countless times. Only now it was red brick and white stone, and only three stories high.

Forty-second Street just ahead was busy, noisy; we could hear the endless clatter of iron-tired wheels over cobble paving, and two cops stood out in the street directing traffic. One was short, the other tall, but both had great protruding stomachs bellying the blue cloth of their long uniform coats. Our tracks curved east onto Forty-second Street, and the tall cop beside the tracks glanced toward our car, then took off his helmet and peered into it.

We drew abreast of him, starting to take the curve, and when he was directly beside our window I leaned across Julia's lap to peer down into his helmet and see what he was looking at. I don't think I've ever been more astonished. There, jammed down into the deep crown of his felt helmet, lay my face looking up at me. Beside it lay Julia's — our police photographs again, mounted on heavy cardboard — and now I understood why Byrnes's photographer had actually run from the little basement room with his plates. From that moment on, as fast as he could work, our photographs were being duplicated. And as we'd jogged block after block uptown in the carriage, as we'd stood listening to Carmody, to Byrnes, to Thompson, these photos were being rushed to very possibly every cop on duty in the city —
the warning to look for us already out while we were still in custody.

Now in the instant of our passing, the cop on Forty-second Street looked up from the helmet in his hand. And I knew too late that for an hour or more he'd been checking our photographed images with the faces of all the pedestrians crossing before him and of the passengers in each car passing his post; there was probably a promotion for the man who got us. Our eyes met and, a foot from mine, I saw his widen in startled recognition and — this astonished me — in sudden sharp fear. What he'd been told about how dangerous I was, I didn't know, but — we were a car length past him now — I heard the urgency in his voice as he turned and shouted at the other cop. He answered — I couldn't make out what he said — and they both began to run down the middle of the street after us.

They were twenty yards behind, and they didn't gain — running heavily, flat-footedly, heads far back, each with a hand on his jiggling belly. It was a scene in every way precisely like many another I'd seen in old-time silent-movie comedies. They weren't shouting now; they needed all their breath to run. But the short one pulled out the long nightstick hanging from a loop of his wide leather belt, held it high over his head, brandishing it threateningly, and the resemblance to the Keystone Cops — they even wore mustaches — was complete.