“Darn!” Arbogast said, with his usual forcefulness. “I hate to keep being recalled to the present like that.”
“It’s no fun for the rest of us either,” responded the driver, whose name I have in my voluminous research somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. I’ll look again later.
“Gosh, you’re morose and irritable today,” Arbogast said, his usual modest and amiable demeanor returning to him with the speed of light (one hundred eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second).
“Ah, go fumigate yourself,” retorted the driver. “And get out of the car.”
“Listen,” said Arbogast, his tone now demonstrating that no more nonsense was to be taken, “I understand you have personal problems, as haven’t we all, but we are both cops together, both ultimately concerned with the greater good above minor personal contretemps, both working together—”
The driver reached across Arbogast, opened the passenger-side door, lifted his knee, pressed the sole of his black Thom McAn shoe against Arbogast’s hip, and kicked him into the gutter, where he landed, all unnoticing, on a suicide note.
Before Arbogast could counter with a stinging denunciation of violence in interpersonal affairs, the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon had growled away in the rain, becoming instantly invisible in the stream of traffic.
Arbogast sat there, on the suicide note, and watched the traffic go by in the rain. It was funny, he reflected, how things happened in this old world. It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...
He was recalled to the present by the honking of the selfsame bus horn that had rousted him the last time. Looking up, his annoyance now reaching the point of spilling over, he saw directly to his left the right double headlight of a 42nd Street Crosstown bus. Looking up, he saw the windshield, with the big wipers going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And through the windshield he saw the angry face of Fred Dingbat.
See how the threads are beginning to cross?
Of course, Arbogast didn’t yet know it was Fred Dingbat he was seeing up there through the windshield, but he was about to find out. Getting to his feet, both angered and saddened by the necessity of what he was now going to have to do, Arbogast went around to the side of the bus and knocked forcefully on the door. “Open up,” he said. “Police.”
Fred Dingbat opened the door. “Don’t you know you were obstructing me?” he demanded. “I have miles to go before I sleep. I have—”
“Don’t you know—?”
“Just a minute, will you?” Fred insisted peevishly. “I’m not done. I have miles to go before I sleep.”
“You already said that,” Arbogast pointed out.
“I have to say it twice,” Fred explained.
“Oh. Well, in any event, I am a police officer of the law, and here is my rain-soaked badge. See?”
“It’s rusting.”
“Being a cop isn’t all apples and kickbacks, you know. In any event, in blowing your horn in the New York City limits you have violated Municipal Ordinance 147, Part C, Subparagraph 12a. Now I don’t know how often your business brings you into New York City, but around here—”
“I’m here all the time! I drive this bus!”
“Around here,” Arbogast persisted, knowing how the public in general tried to avoid hearing the truth about these situations, “we have a municipal ordinance against blowing horns. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of these by-the-book boys, but if we don’t follow the letter of the law, how do you suppose we’ll ever manage to follow its spirit?”
“I never thought of that,” Fred admitted.
Arbogast nodded. “Most members of the general public never do,” he said. “So I’m afraid I’m just going to have to give you a summons.”
“Well,” Fred said, “if you have to, I guess you have to.”
“I have to.” Arbogast took his rain-soaked summons book from his pocket. “What’s your occupation?” he asked.
“I drive this bus!”
“I see.” Arbogast wrote out the summons, gave it to Fred, and stepped out again onto the rain-soaked curb. Looking back, he gave Fred a stern look and said, “Don’t let me see you around here anymore.” And then he turned toward the Bryant Park Comfort Station. The bus drove away. The rain rained.
9:00 A.M
The man who stepped down from Fred Dingbat’s bus in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station at seven minutes past nine that Tuesday morning, turning his coat collar up against the rain drenching an already-drenched city, his other hand clutched tightly around the handle of the black satchel in his other hand, was late for work. Seven minutes late, in fact. Unlike Mo Mowgli, however, who had also been late for work this morning, this man was going to be a lot later before he was done, because this man was not going to work.
His name was Herbert Q. Luminous, and his history was almost a cliché of what can happen to a mild-mannered bookkeeper who meets a young blonde woman in a bar and finds in her companionship the kind of self-fulfillment and excitement that had never been his at home with his aging mother or at the office with his aging NCR computer or even down in the cellar of his house on Long Island with his aging issues of CPA Journal and the model train set which was his pride and also his joy.
And now, he reflected bitterly as he stepped down to the sidewalk from the bus, he would never see that model train set again. No, nor the carefully retained issues of CPA Journal, nor his aging mother, nor the NCR computer at the office. They were all in the past now, and it was time to forget the past and start to think about the future.
It was almost a cliché the way it had happened. At forty-two years of age, Herbert Q. Luminous had taken it for granted his chances for romance and adventure had passed him by, and if truth be told he didn’t really mind all that much. He liked his life, or at least he thought he did, with its regular hours, aging along with everything else that surrounded him.
Until the night, last winter, of the big snowstorm. Herbert was driving home (his reminiscences, like Arbogast Smith’s, tended to do without the pluperfect) from the Long Island Railroad station and his car got stuck in a snowdrift. Seeing red lights not far away, he fought his way through the snow and discovered a bar, and in it — her.
She said her name was Floozey. She was young and blonde and desirable, and he found himself buying her drinks, telling her his life story (it didn’t take long), and trying to impress her with his ability at shuffleboard bowling. It was almost a cliché, but it seemed to him he knew from the instant he had seen her that they were going to be very important to one another.
After that first meeting, there had been others. He went to her apartment in the city. He went again. He went some more. He had gone again and again.
And she was expensive. She liked the finer things in life: nightclubs, dancing, expensive restaurants. And gifts: perfumes, clothing, false eyelashes. Whatever she wanted, Herbert got it for her, because she was what he wanted. It was almost a cliché, really, his falling for her like that. But he did.
She went through his savings fast, and when he had no more money he was afraid to tell her. He knew it was almost a cliché to think a thing like this, but in his heart of hearts he was afraid that if she knew he had no more money she would leave him. And he couldn’t stand that, to lose her.
That was when the embezzling started. Herbert was a good bookkeeper; he knew how to manipulate figures without leaving any trace of his handiwork. And his embezzling was modest, never very much at one time, only enough to cover the checks he wrote for the things Floozey wanted.