One Lonely Night (20 page)

“Her name was Paula. Like I said, she’s dead. Remember when I came to you with those green cards, Pat? I took them from her. I was walking across the bridge one night when this kid was going into her dutch act. I tried to stop her. All I got was the pocket of her coat where she had the pack of butts and the cards.

“It made me mad because she jumped. I had just been dragged over the coals by that damned judge and I was feeling sour enough not to report the thing. Just the same, I wanted to know what the cards meant. When I found out she was a Commie, and that Charlie Moffit was a Commie I got interested. I couldn’t help it.

“Now the picture is starting to take form. I think you’ve put it together already. Oscar was insane. He had to be. He and that nurse planned an escape and probably went into hiding in their little love nest a long time ago. When money became scarce they saw a way to get some through using Oscar’s physical similarity to Lee.

“The first thing that happened was that Oscar killed a guy, a Commie. Now: either he took those cards off Moffit’s body for some reason, or he and this Paula Riis actually were Commies themselves. Anyway when Oscar killed Moffit, Paula realized that the guy was more insane than she thought and got scared. She was afraid to do anything about it so she went over the bridge.”

It was a wonderful story. It made a lot of sense. The two people that could spoil it were dead. It made a lot of sense without telling about the fat boy on the bridge and setting myself up for a murder charge.

Pat was on the last of his smokes. The dead butts littered the table and his coat was covered with ashes. The fires in his eyes had gone down ... a little anyway. “Very neat, Mike. It fits like a glove. I’m wondering what it would fit like if there was more to it that you didn’t tell me.”

“Now you’re getting nasty,” I said.

“No, just careful. If it’s the way you told it the issue’s dead. If it isn’t there will be a lot of hell coming your way.”

“I’ve seen my share,” I grunted.

“You’ll see a lot more. I’m going to get some people on this job to poke around. They’re other friends of mine and though it won’t be official it will be a thorough job. These boys carry little gold badges with three words you can condense to FBI. I hope you’re right, Mike. I hope you aren’t giving me the business.”

I grinned at him. “The only one who can get shafted is me. You ... hell, you’re worried about Lee. I told you I wouldn’t line him up for a smear. He’s my client and I’m mighty particular about clients. Let’s order some lunch and forget about it.”

Pat reached for the menu. The fires were still in his eyes.

I LEFT Pat at two o’clock and picked up a paper on the comer. The headlines had turned back to the cold war and the spy trials going on in New York and Washington. I read the sheet through and tossed it in a basket then got in my car.

I made a turn at the corner and cut over to an express street to head back to my place when I noticed the blue coupé behind me. The last time I had seen it it had been parked across from mine outside Pat’s office. I turned off the avenue and went down a block to the next avenue and paralleled my course. The blue coupé stuck with me.

When I tried the same thing again it happened all over This time I picked out a one-way street, crept along it behind a truck until I saw room enough at the curb to park the car. I went into the space head first and sat there at the wheel waiting. The coupé had no choice, it had to pass me.

The driver was a young kid in a pork-pie hat and he didn’t give me a glance. There was a chance that I could be wrong, but just for the hell of it I jotted down his license number as he went by and swung out behind him. Only once did I see his eyes looking into his mirror, and that was when he turned on Broadway. I stuck with him a way to see what he’d do.

Five minutes later I gave it up as a bad job. He wasn’t going anywhere. I made a left turn and he kept going straight ahead. I scowled at my reflection in the dirty windshield.

I was getting the jumps, I thought. I never used to get like that. Maybe Pat had put his finger on it ... I’d changed.

When I stopped for the red light I saw the headlines on the papers laid out on a stand. More about the trials and the cold war. Politics. I felt like an ignorant bastard for not knowing what it was all about. There’s no time like the present then. I swung the wheel and cut back in the other direction. I parked the car and walked up to the gray stone building where the pickets carried banners protesting the persecution of the “citizens” inside.

One of the punks carrying a placard was at the meeting in Brooklyn the other night. I crossed the line by shoving him almost on his fanny. An attendant carried my note in to Marty Kooperman and he came out to lead me back to the press seats.

Hell, you read the papers, you know what went on in there. It made me as sick to watch it as it did you to read about it. Those damned Reds pulled every trick they knew to get the case thrown out of court. They were a scurvy bunch of lice who tried to turn the court into a burlesque show.

But there was a calm patience in this judge and jury, and in the spectators too that told you what the outcome would be. Oh, the defendants didn’t see it. They were too cocksure of themselves. They were The Party. They were Powerful. They represented the People.

They should have turned around and seen the faces of the people. They would have had their pants scared off. All at once I felt good. I felt swell!

Then I saw the two guys in the second row. They were dressed in ordinary business suits and they looked too damn smug. They were the boys who came in with General Osilov that night. I sat through two more hours of it before the judge broke it up for the day. The press boys made a beeline for the phones and the crowd started to scramble for the doors.

A lot of the people covered it up, but I had time to see the general’s aides pass a fat brief case to another guy who saw that it reached one of the defendants.

All I could think of was the nerve they had, the gall of them to come into a court of law and directly confirm their relationship with a group accused of a crime against the people. Maybe that’s why they could get ahead so fast. They were brazen. That brief case would hold one thing. Money. Cash in bills. Dough to support the trial and the accompanying propaganda.

Nuts.

I waited until they went through the doors and stayed on their heels. At least they had the sense not to come in an official car; that would have been overdoing it. They walked down a block, waved a cab to the curb and climbed in. By that time I was in a cab myself and right behind them. One nice thing about taking a taxi in New York. There’re so many cabs you can’t tell if you’re being followed or not.

The one in front of us pulled to a stop in front of the hotel I had left not so long before. I paid off my driver and tagged after them into the lobby. The place was still jammed with reporters and the usual collection of the curious. General Osilov was standing off in a corner explaining things to four reporters through an interpreter. The two went directly up to him, interrupted and shook his hand as if they hadn’t seen him in years. It was all very clubby.

The girl at the newsstand was bored. I bought a pack of Luckies and held out my hand for the change. “What’s the Russky doing?”

“Him? He was a speaker at the luncheon upstairs. You should have heard him. They piped all the speeches into the lobby over the loud-speaker and he had to be translated every other sentence.”

Sure, he couldn’t speak English. Like hell!

I said, “Anything important come out?”

She handed me my change. “Nah, same old drivel every time. All except Lee Deamer. He jumped on that Cossack for a dozen things and called him every name that could sneak by in print. You should have heard the way the people in the lobby cheered. Gosh, the manager was fit to be tied. He tried to quiet them down, but they wouldn’t shut up.”

I opened the Luckies and shook one out. I hung it in my mouth and fumbled for a match. A hand draped with mink held a flame up to it and a voice said, “Light, mister?”

It was a silly notion, but I wondered if I could be contaminated by the fire. I said, “Hello, Ethel,” and took the light.

There was something different about her face. I didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t the same any more. Fine, nearly invisible lines drew it tight, giving an Oriental slant to her eyes. The mouth that had kissed so nice and spoke the word that put the finger on me seemed to be set too firm. It pulled the curve of her lips out of shape.

She had a lesson coming to her, this one. Bare skin and a leather belt. Either she was playing it bold or she didn’t think I had guessed. Maybe she thought she couldn’t have made it out the door without my seeing her and decided to make the first move herself. Whatever her reason, I couldn’t read it in her voice or her face.

I was going to ask her what she was doing here and I saw why. The reputable Mr. Brighton of Park Avenue and Big Business was holding court next to a fluted column. A lone reporter was taking notes. A couple of big boys whose faces I recognized from newspapers were listening intently, adding a word now and then. They all smiled but two.

The sour pusses were General Osilov and his interpreter. The little guy beside the general talked fast and gesticulated freely, but the general was catching it all as it came straight from Brighton himself.

A couple hundred words later Ethel’s old man said something and they all laughed, even the general. They shook hands and split up into new groups that were forming every time a discussion got started.

I took Ethel’s arm and started for the door. “It’s been a long time, kid. I’ve missed you.”

She tried a smile and it didn’t look good on her. “I’ve missed you too, Mike. I halfway expected you to call me.”

“Well, you know how things are.”

“Yes, I know.” I threw my eyes over her face, but she was expressionless.

“Were you at the luncheon?” I asked.

“Oh ...” she came out of it with a start. “No, I stayed in the lobby. Father was one of the speakers, you know.”

“Really? No need for you to stick around, is there?”

“Oh no, none at all. I can ... oh, Mike, just a moment. I forgot something, do you mind?”

We paused at the door and she glanced back over her shoulder. I turned her around and walked back. “Want me to go with you?”

“No, I’ll be right back. Wait for me, will you?”

I watched her go and the girl at the counter smiled. I said, “There’s a ten in it if you see what she does, sister.” She was out of there like a shot and closed up on Ethel. I stood by the stand smoking, looking at the mirrors scattered around the walls. I could see myself in a half dozen of them. If Ethel watched to see whether or not I moved she must have been satisfied.

She was gone less than a minute. Her face looked tighter than ever.

I walked up to meet her and the girl scrambled behind her counter. I took out a dime, flipped it in my hand and went over and got a pack of gum. While the girl gave me my nickel change I dropped the ten on the counter. “She spoke to a couple of guys back in the hall. Nothing else. They were young.”

I took my gum pack and offered Ethel a piece. She said she didn’t want any. No wonder she looked so damned grim. She had fingered me again. Naked skin and ten extra lashes. She was going to be a sorry girl.

When we got in the cab two boys in almost identical blue suits opened the doors of a black Chewy sedan and came out behind us. I didn’t look around again until we had reached the lot where I left my car. The black Chevvy was down the street. Ethel kept up a running conversation that gave me a chance to look at her, and back over my shoulder occasionally.

If I had been paying any attention I would have gotten what she was driving at. She kept hinting for me to take her up to my place. MAN MURDERED IN OWN APARTMENT. More nice headlines. I ignored her hints and cruised around Manhattan with the black sedan always a few hundred feet behind.

Dusk came early. It drove in with the fog that seemed to like this town, a gray blind that reduced visibility to a minimum. I said to her, “Can we go back to your cabin, kid? It was pretty nice there.”

I might have been mistaken, but I thought I saw the glint of tears. “It was nice there, wasn’t it?”

“It was you, not the cabin, Ethel.”

I wasn’t mistaken, the tears were there. She dropped her eyes and stared at her hands. “I had forgotten ... what it was like to live.” She paused, then: “Mike ...”

“What?”

“Nothing. We can go to the cabin if you’d like to.”

The Chevvy behind us pulled around a car and clung a little closer. I loosened the .45 with my forearm and a shrug. The dusk deepened to dark and it was easy to watch the lights in the mirror. They sat there, glowering, watching, waiting for the right moment to come.

How would it be? Ethel wanted it in my apartment. Why? So she would be out of the line of fire? Now what. They’d draw alongside and open up and they wouldn’t give a hoot whether they got the both of us or not. It was a question of whether I was important enough to kill at the same time sacrificing a good party worker. Hell, there were always suckers who could rake in the dough for them. Those two headlights behind me trying to act casual said that.

We were out of the city on a wide open road that wound into the dark like a beckoning finger. The houses thinned out and there were fewer roads intersecting the main drag.

Any time now, I thought. It can happen any time. The .45 was right where I could get at it in a hurry and I was ready to haul the wheel right into them. The lights behind me flicked on bright, back to dim and on bright again, a signal they were going to pass.