Glass Cell (22 page)

27

B
y 7 p.m. the next evening, Carter had had two very slow scotch and sodas in two different bars in the East 40s, and still the time dragged insufferably.

He called Gawill, and found that he was out. Or at least he didn’t answer. What should he make of that? Were the police holding Gawill so they would be sure he didn’t try to tip Carter off about the police following O’Brien tonight? But why should Gawill want to tip him off? That didn’t make sense. Carter began to telephone Gawill every fifteen minutes. By 9 o’clock, it became an obsession to find Gawill at home, to go to his house even, to see if he were there and just not answering the telephone.

Carter began to be more and more sure he was walking into a police trap. He looked around him so often for someone who looked like a plainclothesman that people began to look at him. Then Carter made himself stop turning his head.

He went abruptly into a movie on 23rd Street.

Now and again, he looked at his watch as he lit a cigarette. At 10:15 he could sit there no longer, and went out and walked south. At the first place with a telephone, a cigar store, he went in and called Gawill, and Gawill answered. Carter almost sighed with relief.

“Well, what’s on your mind now?” Gawill asked in a vaguely annoyed way, and this was also reassuring to Carter.

He had nothing to say. “Have you paid O’Brien yet?” he asked.

“No, have
you
?” Gawill retorted.

It was so to the point, Carter laughed a real laugh, and felt better, like the times in prison when he had laughed at fate, at the truth, at demoniacal accidents. But Gawill was deadly serious, or rather deadly bitter. That, too, was in character with Gawill and comforting to Carter. Carter sobered suddenly and said, “Are you in a little later? I might come by and see you. I’ve got something to tell you.” He hung up before Gawill could say anything, and swung open the door of the telephone booth.

He began to walk rapidly downtown.
Why?
Well, he knew why. It was a kind of limping alibi for “around 11 o’clock,” and also—Gawill was a lower depth, even lower than O’Brien, as low as what he might do tonight. Carter made himself slow his walking, to save his strength, but something inside him seemed to be racing on anyway, spending his energy.

He was five minutes early at 10th Street and Eighth Avenue.

O’Brien came up from downtown, walking casually, a folded newspaper in his left hand. He wore a hat and a trenchcoat unbuttoned with its belt dangling. He saw Carter, gestured with the newspaper, and they joined each other a few yards farther west on the sidewalk of the north side of 10th Street. It was a darkish block, a couple of closed garages on it, the fronts of quiet, low tenements. O’Brien looked behind him.

“You weren’t followed?” he asked.

“No,” Carter said.

“Did you look?”

“Yes.”

O’Brien seemed four inches taller than Carter, enormous in the open trenchcoat, but Carter knew he was very little taller, if any. Just a lot heavier and stronger.

“Were
you
followed?”

“Oh, sure,” O’Brien said, looking straight ahead of him, nodding with resignation. “As usual. But I took a few taxis. I’m not followed now. Usually, I don’t bother.” He smiled slightly, glanced at Carter, and his right hand, which now held the newspaper, gestured nervously. “You got it?”

“Yes,” Carter said. One, two, three, four, he counted off his steps. They were walking rather slowly, the way people would walk who were chatting and not in a hurry. “One thing, O’Brien.”

“Yeah?”

“Is this the last payment, or what should I expect?”

O’Brien laughed a short, nervous laugh. “I really don’t have to tell you, do I? Okay, it’s the last.— Unless I get really gone over by the cops, in which case I don’t think I should get all my teeth knocked out and my nose broken for you, do you?”

The hostility barely registered on Carter as hostility. It was just something
there
, the way it had always been there in prison, among the inmates he walked beside, who might turn on him, who might have turned on him because of his friendship with Max, and who just happened never to have turned. O’Brien was slowing. Ahead of them on the left corner, across Greenwich Street, or Carter thought it was Greenwich Street, loomed the black, windowless side of a warehouse. Below it a wire fence ten feet high, a corner with a lamppost. A man crossed Greenwich Street and came walking in their direction, but on the opposite sidewalk.

“Well?” O’Brien said, stopping.

Carter looked at the man across the street, who was passing them now, paying no attention to them. He reached for the inner pocket of his overcoat, and took his hand out again, empty. “Let’s go over there,” he said, nodding toward the light.

“Why?” asked O’Brien suspiciously.

Because beside them were dwellings, where someone might stick a head out at a noise, or yell, Carter thought, and the warehouse was a deserted warehouse. “Safer,” Carter said, starting across the street before O’Brien could protest.

O’Brien followed him, but slowly, hands in his trenchcoat pockets. Finally, there was twenty feet between them, as Carter stepped on to the sidewalk by the warehouse, and O’Brien off the curb opposite to follow him. O’Brien looked right and left. A taxi’s headlights flowed across Greenwich Street, paused at the intersection, then went on across.

Carter bowed his head with his hands not far from his chest, as if he were counting bills he had just pulled from his pocket. He stood about fifteen feet from the streetlamp, facing it.

O’Brien came up beside him, saying, “Christ, do you have to count it again?”

Carter turned so his back was to the light, so O’Brien would not see that he had nothing.

O’Brien faced him now and bent a little to see.

Carter raised both hands simultaneously, catching O’Brien under the chin, which did nothing to O’Brien but toss his head back, but that was all Carter wanted. O’Brien came at him with a quick right, but Carter sidestepped, and slashed sideways with his left hand—between the front and side of O’Brien’s throat, not where he would break any bones. It didn’t seem to jar O’Brien’s bulk, but it hurt him. He bent over a little, and Carter gave him another backhanded blow with his left hand, and a right to the back of the neck just below the skull. O’Brien was down on the sidewalk, and now Carter used a foot on his neck. He glanced about and saw a hunk of cement, but it wouldn’t dislodge because it was part of the wire fence support. Carter slammed a foot down again on the side of O’Brien’s neck. O’Brien wasn’t moving. Carter might have kicked his face, which lay in profile against the sidewalk, but he couldn’t, or didn’t.

“Hey!—
Hey!
”

Carter ran from the voice. He ran into the first street to the left, eastward. Then he trotted lightly, not too fast, in the shadow of the buildings on the north side of the street, because a couple of men were walking toward him. Carter began to walk. Whoever had yelled would be looking at O’Brien for a few seconds before chasing after him, Carter thought. Carter crossed an avenue, not bothering to see what avenue it was. Now he was walking normally, not hurrying, he knew, though it seemed like slow motion to him. He walked southward, zigzagging eastward at every street. A trickling sensation on his right little finger made him lift his hand, and he saw blood running down. Carter sucked at the stinging place on the side of his hand. The cut felt small to his tongue. He found a Kleenex in his overcoat pocket, and held it to the cut as he walked, using the fresh blood to wipe off the drying blood on his finger. When the Kleenex was soaked, he tossed it in a rubbish basket and took his handkerchief from his breast pocket.

He was south of Washington Square. He found a parked taxi at a nightclub’s curb, and told the driver to go to Times Square. In the taxi he tried to relax, stretching his legs out, holding the wadded handkerchief against his cut.

“Where on Times Square?” asked the driver.

“Times Square and Seventh,” Carter said, just to say something.

The cut was stopping its bleeding. Carter even managed to tie the handkerchief with the aid of his teeth in a way that showed no blood on its outside. Then he paid the driver with two dollar bills that he held ready in his left hand. “Keep the rest.”

He walked to Fifth Avenue, and got another taxi. “Jackson Heights?” Carter asked, remembering that drivers weren’t always willing to go there from Manhattan.

“Okay,” said the driver. “Whereabouts?”

“I’ll show you when we get there.”

Carter leaned forward and told the driver, as they reached Jackson Heights, to turn right, then left, and finally to stop. It was an intersection with restaurants and a bar, and Carter knew it was not more than a five-minute walk to Gawill’s. He paid the driver off, then began to walk toward Gawill’s. It was now a quarter to 12.

He paused in a dark street, thinking he didn’t have to go to Gawill’s, that he could take another taxi home—a taxi without changing halfway—but he couldn’t go home just now. He felt too shaky. He couldn’t even call Hazel now to tell her he’d be home soon. Carter pushed on toward Gawill’s, and stopped in a liquor store, which was just closing, and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

I’ll stay half an hour, Carter said to himself. And Gawill might be annoyed and not let him in at this hour, in which case he’d stick the bottle of scotch at him and go. Then of course he might stay longer than half an hour. He couldn’t predict. He untied the handkerchief and looked at his hand under a streetlamp. The cut was a tiny V in the side of his hand between the little finger base and his wrist. O’Brien’s tooth or something had cut through some skin that looked rather calloused once it was cut. The part that had bled was deep, but very small indeed. It was not bleeding now.

Gawill did not answer his downstairs ring, but Carter took the elevator up, anyway. He rang the doorbell. After a moment, he heard Gawill’s heavy tread, and Gawill opened the door in pajamas and robe.

“You’re late,” said Gawill.

“Too late? Here’s some scotch.”

Gawill smiled slightly. “Kept your promise. Okay, come in for a nightcap.” He went into the living room. “What made you late?”

“Dinner with some office people,” Carter said. “Sitting talking. You know.”

Gawill was fixing drinks in the kitchen. There was a pleasant sound of gurgling liquor from the full bottle. Carter looked around at the untidy, ugly, masculine room almost as if he liked it. Gawill came in with the drinks.

“So what did you have to tell me?” Gawill asked.

Carter lifted his glass slightly to Gawill before he drank. He drank half the glass at once. He had removed his coat. Now he sank down in the big armchair. “You were asking me about Hazel,” Carter said, crossing his legs. “I just wanted to say we’re getting along fine.”

Gawill said nothing, but Carter could see that he believed him. “Well—here’s to it. Matrimonial bliss,” he said sourly, and drank.

Carter drank, too, and finished his.

“Musta been a dry party they gave you tonight,” Gawill said.

Carter smiled. “Chinese dinner. Lots of tea, but—” He got up and went into the kitchen. “You don’t mind if I help myself, I hope?”

“Nope,” said Gawill.

Carter did. Under the tap, as he filled his glass with water, he washed the bit of blood from around the nail of his little finger. The V cut was dry now, and cheerful-looking, like a silly mouth, or like a V for victory. Carter took the bloodstained handkerchief from his jacket pocket, hesitated between sticking it into an empty can in Gawill’s garbage pail or the incinerator chute, and decided on the incinerator. He opened and closed it noiselessly. “Ost-reicher told me something today that I think I ought to pass on to you,” Carter said as he came into the living room again. “They’ve got the material Sullivan was collecting on you and they’re pretty impressed by it—as a motive for wanting Sullivan out of the way.”

“That crap again!” Gawill shouted, standing up.

“That’s what they told me. A relief off my mind and a big headache for you and O’Brien, I’d say. What’re you going to do about O’Brien? Don’t you think he’s a danger to you?”

“Listen—f’Christ’s sake,” Gawill spluttered, gesturing so that some of his drink went on the floor. “Once and for all, I’ll—
Drexel
got most of that money. Got half, anyway. He got about half and Wally Palmer the other half.”

Carter blinked.
Drexel
. That decrepit old churchgoer who looked like a second Jefferson Davis. Drexel, whose character was so above question he had hardly been questioned. Not questioned at all about his own possible complicity, just questioned about the characters of his employees. Drexel, who had salved his conscience by paying Carter a fraction of his pay, and had gone on after the school fiasco to build a couple of other things in the same state. Even his deathbed, if his stroke had given him time for one, hadn’t inspired a confession. Sullivan had never uttered the faintest word of suspicion against him. “Well,” Carter said finally, feeling a little light in the head, “it’s no wonder they couldn’t account for all that cash. Half of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—”

“Drexel stashed plenty of it away.”

“Sullivan certainly didn’t know that. Or did he?”

“No, Sullivan didn’t know it,” Gawill said.

“Why didn’t you tell Sullivan? Especially once Drexel was dead. He’s been dead for months.”

Gawill sank on to the sofa again, but he leaned forward. “I’ll tell you why. I wanted to see Sullivan fail. I wanted—yeah, I wanted to kill him. You know that.”

Yes, Carter knew that. Gawill in his crazy way had wanted to keep his hatred whipped up by letting Sullivan go on looking for evidence against him. “But you must’ve got something out of the Triumph deal, Greg. Didn’t Drexel know you knew he was stealing money?”

“Oh, I got some crumbs. Peanuts!
Peanuts!
It was like Wally was some millionaire inviting me on a holiday with him and he paid my bills in New York. On weekends sometimes. You call that getting anything?” Gawill asked rhetorically, resentfully.