Chapter Eighteen
Joseph Leroy Agnew was dreaming. It was definitely one of his better dreams. There was a girl in it who looked something like he remembered his mother had looked, but he Knew the girl couldn’t be his mother because then he wouldn’t have felt about her the way he did.
They were in the front seat of a car, parked under two palm trees silhouetted against an intensely blue sky. The automobile horn started blaring when he kissed the girl, and it wouldn’t stop. As though some unseen hand were pressing it as a warning to him that he shouldn’t go any further with the girl in his arms.
So he stopped kissing her, but the horn kept right on blowing. It was uncanny, that’s what it was. His sixth sense didn’t seem to be working very well because he couldn’t understand it at all.
Then he rolled over in the double bed and his left hand encountered his wife’s warm, bare rump, and he woke up and the telephone beside the bed was shrilling insistently, and for a moment he was so sore when he realized it was the phone that had spoiled his dream that he thought he wouldn’t answer it.
But Irma was awake now, too, and she shook him and reached out to turn on the light and he yawned and rolled over to pick up the telephone and mutter, “Whatsit?” into the mouthpiece.
A man asked, “Is that Joe Agnew? The taxi driver?”
Somehow, he thought he recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it even with his sixth sense. He mumbled, “Yeh,” and his caller went on briskly, though in a lowered, confidential tone.
“I’m in a real bad jam, Joe. Need a cab quick as you can get here.”
“Wait a minute,” protested Joe, glancing at the bedside clock. “It’s past two o’clock. Whyn’t you call one of the all-night companies?”
“Be a good scout, Joe, and do a fellow a good turn. One of my friends told me you didn’t mind going out after hours on special trips. This is a special trip, see? Real special. My car’s broke down and the lady that’s with me — she’s real anxious to get home without anybody seeing her. Catch on? Call one of the regular companies, the trip gets entered in the log and all that. Have a heart, will you?”
“Well... sure,” Joe agreed. He knew how it was, all right. A man out with some other man’s wife at two o’clock in the morning! Sure. He got it. Ought to be a nice tip in it.
He asked, “Where you at?”
“Hundred and Forty-Eighth off the Boulevard to your right about a block. I parked here, see, and now the damn engine won’t start.”
“Take it easy,” said Joe with a grin. “Be out there in about thirty minutes.” He yawned again and replaced the phone, winked at Irma, and told her, “Some sport stuck with a dame that ain’t his wife.” He swung thin shanks over the edge of the bed and stood up to strip off his pajamas.
“You ought to let a man like that fry in his own juice, Joe Agnew,” said his wife tartly. “Aiding and abetting adultery, that’s what it amounts to. You work hard enough all day long, you need your night’s sleep.”
“Probably make as big a tip out of this one trip as I’d collect all day in dimes.” He was pulling on his clothes as he spoke, keeping his face averted from Irma so she wouldn’t see the sly grin on his face. Women were sure funny the way they resented a man getting a little bit of fun that didn’t rightly belong to him. Sometimes he thought they were that way just because they never got a chance to slip away and have some fun. Take Irma, now. He was sure she never had had another man except him. But he bet, by God, she’d like to. Way down deep inside, that is. He’d seen a look on her face sometimes when she’d be half-tight on two cocktails.
You bet, she’d like to. But she didn’t dare. And so it made her mad to think of some other woman having a little fun outside of bounds.
Far as he was concerned, he’d help a man out of a mess like that any time even without the expectation of a fat tip. Men had a way of sticking together, he thought, that no woman seemed to understand. He pulled on his hackie’s cap and felt in his pocket for his keys, told Irma, “Turn out the light, hon, and go back to sleep. I’ll be real quiet when I come back so’s not to wake you up.”
He went out whistling softly to himself, let himself out the back door into the balmy night air that gave him a sort of lift as he breathed it in deeply. A thing like this gave a man a sort of good feeling of adventure. Wheeling a cab around the city all day was pretty humdrum business. Made you feel alive and sort of young again to get called out like this on a mission of an amorous nature.
He had his key ring out as he approached the garage, and in the moonlight selected the flat key to the padlock on the door.
He stopped and frowned when he found it wasn’t even locked. Now that was funny. He always locked it when he put the taxi up at night. Long as he could remember, he’d never forgot to lock it before. He tried to think back and recall why he had neglected doing it the evening before.
Let’s see now. He’d been a little late getting home. Nothing really unusual. Well, maybe he had been a little excited about calling the police and all, he conceded as he opened the double doors wide and got under the steering wheel.
Yeh. That must have been it. He’d been going over in his mind the story he would tell Irma. Sort of building it up a little bit, maybe, to make it sound more important than it really was. But that was just to please Irma. She always waited up for him no matter how late he was, and was always pestering him to tell her all the interesting things that had happened to him that day. She never could get it out of her head that hacking was just like any other kind of work. She’d ask him what important people he’d carried, how pretty were the women and did any of them make passes or invite him into their houses for a drink when he took them home.
And generally he couldn’t think of anything much to tell her, but last night had been different and he’d been full of it when he put the taxi up and went in.
He was so full of remembering about it now as he backed the cab out of the driveway to the street that he didn’t pay any attention to the dark automobile parked inconspicuously at the curb half a block away.
There wasn’t any really good reason why Joseph Agnew should have paid attention to the parked car. It might have been the automobile of any householder along the street who’d come home late and hadn’t bothered to garage his car.
But Joe’s sixth sense was a little lacking when he failed to note that the parked car pulled away from the curb without headlights and swung in behind him as he turned the first corner onto a northbound avenue; and that before he had traveled two blocks on the avenue, twin headlights of a car turned the same corner behind him and continued to follow along a few blocks behind while he hurried to keep the rendezvous.
But he was too full of thinking about how he had finally had something interesting to tell Irma, and how he’d added on a few touches to make it sound like he’d been smarter than the police.
She’d listened to the embellished story with open-mouthed admiration, too, making him out to be some kind of hero for reporting it to the police and all, and even wondering if there mightn’t be a reward for him if the girl killer was caught as a result of his quick thinking.
He’d discouraged that idea, but now he remembered the interview with the skinny reporter from the Daily News and the famous detective, and how the reporter had promised to write up a story all about him maybe put in, too, how he was on call at home at night if anybody needed a cab special. If he did put that in the paper, Joe Agnew reasoned happily, thousands of people would read about it and as a consequence there might be a lot more calls like this one tonight in the future.
Maybe he’d even be able to build up a sort of special clientele in time, so he could really be in business on his own and not have to split with a company.