That one was still, in a detached way, feeling slightly surprised at this Morgan who was showing such unexpected capacity for cool planning. (The Morgan who’d been kicked around just once too often and this time was fighting back.)The original Morgan was still uneasy about the whole thing, but quite frankly, he realized, not from any moral viewpoint: just about Morgan’s personal safety, the danger of being found out.
He wrote down the address as the man read it out to him. "How’s that spelled?-it’s a new one to me."
"T-A-P-P-A-N. Over past Washington some’eres, I think."
"Well, thanks very much," said Morgan, putting his notebook away.
"I still can’t hardly believe it," said the clerk worriedly. "Lindstrom, doing a thing like that! Last man in the world, I’d’ve said-why, he thought the world of his wife and the boy. Never missed a lodge meeting, you know, and I don’t ever remember talkin’ with him he didn’t brag on what good grades his boy got at school, all like that. One of the steady kind, that was Lindstrom-no world-beater, but, you know, steady."
"That so?" said Morgan. He lit a cigarette. He felt a kind of remote interest in this Lindstrom thing, no more, but it constituted his main lifeline, and it must appear that he’d been working hard on it, been thinking of nothing else all today.
"Never any complaints on him, he always did an honest day’s work, I heard that from a dozen fellows been on the job with him. He was working for Staines Contracting, like I said. He was a member here for three years, always paid his dues regular. We did figure it was sort of funny, way he quit his job and quit coming to meetings all of a sudden. When his dues didn’t come in, we sent a letter, but it come back. But things come up in a hurry sometimes, sickness or something. You know. Last thing in the world I’d’ve expected a guy like Lindstrom to do-walk out on his family." He shook his head.
"You haven’t heard anything from him since, no inquiries from other lodges of your union?"
"No, not since last August when he stopped showing up."
"Well, thanks." The man was still shaking his head sadly when Morgan came out to his car.
It it hadn’t been for this other thing, he’d have been interested in the Lindstroms more than he was. Funny setup: something behind it, but hard to figure what. Had the hell of a time getting a definite answer out of the woman about where they’d been living when the husband walked out. Sometimes they let out something to one of the neighbors, a local bartender: it was a place to start. Then, when he did, she gave what turned out to be a false address. He hadn’t tackled her about that yet; it wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, and there were other ways to check. He’d found Lindstrom, got this last address for him, through his affiliation with the Carpenters’ Union.
The thing was, concentrate on Lindstrom today, keep the nose to the grindstone. Forget about tonight, what was going to happen tonight. It would all work out line, just as the inside, secret Morgan had planned it. There was only one thing both Morgans were really worried about, and that was, whether and when, about telling Sue. Not, of course, before; she mustn’t guess, or she’d be too nervous with the police. Not easy to put over the story on her, Sue knew him too well, but he thought he’d got away with it-that he was still stalling Smith, trying to bring him to compromise. It was going to be very tricky, too, afterward, when he had given the police one story and had to meet Sue before them. There was also the woman and the boy, but you had to take a chance somewhere. It was very likely that the woman (if indeed she was still living with Smith at all, and knew about this) would be too afraid of getting in trouble herself to speak up. And Sue was very far from being a fool; Sue he could count on.
It would go all right, always provided that the man was there. Otherwise it could be awkward, but Morgan figured that as Smith was renting a three-room flat instead of just a room, the chances were that his wife, or some woman, was with him, and he’d be home sometime around the dinner hour. So that was the first way it might go: the upright citizen Morgan, visiting one of his cases on his lawful occasions-if it was after hours, well, it was a case he’d got interested in, there was no law against zeal at one’s job. The Lindstroms’ flat was on the second floor; Smith’s was on the third, so the mail slots told him. Those landings would be damn dark at night, not lighted anyway. Wait for him to come down on his way to collect-the ransom, only word-wait on the i second-floor landing. And get up close, to be sure-but no talk. The first story, then: this man put the gun on me at the top of the stairs, before I got to the Lindstroms’ door-I never saw him before, no, sir-he was after my wallet, when he reached for it I tackled him, tried to get the gun-we struggled, and it went off Remember (and not much time to see to it, after the shot) to get his prints on the gun. They were so very damned careful and clever these days, about details.
And if he missed Smith there, it would have to be in the street. If he was at that corner: or, if again he redirected Morgan to a bar, stall him off in there, and follow. A chance again, that the bartender would be honest, would remember them together: but in most of these places down here, hole-in-the-wall joints, the chance probably on Morgan’s side. The second story: I was on my way back to my car, when this man tried to hold me up They would never trace the gun, never prove it didn’t belong to Smith. Nobody could. Morgan had taken it off a dead German in 1944, the sort of ghoulish souvenir young soldiers brought home, and he’d nearly forgotten he had it; he had, being a careful man, taken the remaining three cartridges out of the clip, but they’d been put with the Luger in the old cash box his father had kept for odds and ends, locked away in a trunk in the basement. Morgan had gone down there at three this morning, when he was sure Sue was asleep, and got the gun and the cartridges. It was an unaccustomed weight in his breast pocket right now.
He ought to be somewhere around where this street came in; he began to watch the signs. The third was Tappan. He turned into it and began to look for street numbers.
At that precise moment, Mendoza was having an odd and irritating experience. He was discovering the first thing remotely resembling a link between these two cases (if you discounted that gouged-out eye) and it offered him no help whatsoever. If it wasn’t merely his vivid and erratic imagination.
"I’m real glad I clean forgot to th’ow that ol’ thing out," said Mrs. Breen, soft and southern, "if it’s any help to you findin’ that bad man, suh. Ev’body knew Carol thought the world an’ all of her, nice a gal as ever was. Terrible thing, jus’ terrible."
Mendoza went on looking at the thing, fascinated. It was a good sharp commercial cut, three by five inches or so, one of a dozen in this dog-eared brochure, three years old, from a local toy factory. Mrs. Breen, maddeningly slow, determinedly helpful, had insisted on hunting it up for him, and as he hadn’t yet penetrated her constant trickle of inconsequential talk to ask any questions, he’d been forced to let her find it first.
"You can see ’twas a real extra-special doll. Tell the truth, I was two minds about puttin’ it in stock, not many folks’d spend that much money."
Was it imagination? That this thing had looked-a little-like Elena Ramirez? After all, he told himself, the conventional doll would. The gold curls, the eyelashes, the neatly rouged cheeks, the rosebud pout, the magenta fingernails. The irrational thought occurred to him that even the costume was exactly the kind of thing Elena would have admired.
He said to himself, I’m seeing ghosts-or catching at straws. What the hell, if the thing did look like her, or the other way around? Dolls. The whole thing was a mare’s nest. Overnight he had begun to suspect uneasily that he was wrong, dead wrong about this thing; he hadn’t taken a good long look at all the dissimilarities-he’d wanted to think this was the Brooks killer again, without any real solid evidence for it. Wasting time. Look at the rest of the facts!