“The funny part of it was he never fell down. He stayed sort of stuck to the wall — partly. And partly to the fender and radiator. He even got all over the engine too, I understand. They had to whitewash the wall and scour the sidewalk with creosote.
“The driver felt very bad about it. It preyed on his mind, until a few months later he took his own life by tying his hands to his feet and jumping into the river. I don’t believe anyone remembered who he was by that time any more. I happened to, of course, but that was all. No one was to blame, you understand. How could they be?” I chewed the lining of my cheek and made my eyes hard as marbles. “No one was to blame.”
He just looked at me. After a while he said quietly, “Thought a lot of him, didn’t you?”
I let my eyes drift. “There was never any very great — feeling between us, compared to what there is between Mr. Colby and myself now.” I took my lower jaw and shifted it tenderly back and forth, as if to see whether it had been fractured or not lately.
He shook his head half pityingly and looked down at the floor. Finally he said, as if winding up the interview: “Then he was here from three o’clock on, Tuesday night?”
“From three on. I stake my life on that.”
He shuttered his eyes at me understandingly, as if to say, “I guess you do.” He got up. “I’m going to ask you to let me take a look in your laundry bag before I go.”
I shifted my eyes over to the bath door, then back to him again. “That’s a very strange request,” I said primly. “I can’t imagine what possible—”
He went over to it while I was still talking, stuck his arm down into it, and pulled the bottom up through the top without anything falling out. “Empty,” he said.
“I take it out on Mondays as a rule, but this week, for some reason—” I looked at him hard — “I put it off until just yesterday. Just yesterday Mr. Colby noticed it was rather full, and reminded me I hadn’t taken it out.” I rubbed my shoulder as though it still ached. “I can’t imagine what made me so absent-minded. If he hadn’t called my attention to it, it would have been still here.” Our eyes met.
He’d sat down again. I said, in my best tea-table manner, “Will you excuse me while I get a cigarette?” He held out a leather case from his pocket. I ignored it. He raised the lid of a box standing there right beside me, full. I didn’t seem to see him do it. I got my handbag and brought it back and dug out a crumpled pack. A little vivid green tab of paper came up with it “accidentally” and slipped to the floor. It had two ink-brush ideographs on it, and a couple of words of English — the laundry’s name and location.
He picked it up for me, looked at it, and handed it back. I put it back in my bag and put my bag back where I’d got it. The cigarette wouldn’t draw, was split from being battered around so much; it didn’t matter, I seemed to have got over wanting a smoke any more by that time.
He hitched his chair closer, dropped his voice until you could hardly hear it. Nine parts lip motion to one part of vocal sound. “Temple’s my name. Why don’t you come down and see me, if you’re leery about talking up here? We’ll give you protection.”
I clasped my hands in hasty, agonized entreaty, separated them again. “I beg your pardon?” I said in a clear, ringing voice. “Did you say something just then?”
“Take a walk, buddy!” Buck was standing there in the open doorway, Louie looking over his shoulder. I put on a great big relieved expression, like I was sure glad they’d finally shown up. Buck came on in, with his lower jaw leading the way by two inches.
“Now listen, you questioned me at my club oilier tonight, and I took it good-natured. I soitainly never expected to find you here half an hour later. How long does this keep up?”
“What does he want, hon?” I said with wide-eyed innocence. I could have saved myself the trouble, he didn’t even give me a tumble.
“Now if ya think ya got anything on me, out with it, and I’ll go anywheres you say and face it! If ya haven’t, there’s the way out and don’t lemme see ya around here again.”
This Temple dick took it meeker than I thought he would. He got up and went toward the door. He went slow, but he went.
“Nothing to get sore about,” he drawled mildly. “I’m just doing my job. No one said anything about having anything on you.”
“You bet no one did!” Buck blared, and slammed the door on him.
None of us said anything for a few minutes. Then Louie looked out to make sure he’d gone, and Buck opened up.
“Y’did better than I expected, at that,” he said to me. “It’s a good thing for you y’did.” He tapped his side meaningfully. “I heard the whole thing from outside the door. We been out there for the past ten minutes. There’s only one thing I don’t like about it. What did he want with that laundry bag?” He poured himself a shot, wiped the dew away on his sleeve. “I don’t get it. I burned—” He didn’t finish it. “How did he know? How did he get onto that?”
He came over at me and his finger shot out like a knife. “Hey, you!” I nearly died in the split-second before he came out with the rest of it. “Did you take any collars over with the rest of that stuff yesterday?”
“I don’t think there were any,” I mumbled vaguely.
“Yes or no?”
My next answer came from the other side of the room, where he’d kited me. “No,” I groaned through a constellation of stars. “They were frayed so I—”
“Just the same you get over there the minute that place opens up in the morning and get that stuff back here, hear me? If they want it, then I want it twice as bad.”
“Sure, Buck,” I said, wiping the blood off my lip. “I’ll bring it back.”
“Why you so worried about collars?” Louie asked him, puzzled.
Buck explained in an undertone, “She’s been kissing me on the neck and I been finding lip-rouge on ’em when I got home. That’s the only tiling I can figure he’s looking for. I burned one but there may be others.”
“Yeah, but how would they know?” said Louie with unanswerable logic. “You brought the marks back with you, they didn’t stay down there with her.”
His face had a look like something was within an inch of clicking behind it, and I knew what that something was: A loud checked coat leaving a dead girl’s doorway only a few minutes after he had the other day. If it’s possible to shrink inside your own skin and take up lots less room than before, I shrank. That fool Temple, I thought, he may have killed me by making that pass at the laundry bag.
But before the chain of thought Louie was working on could click, Buck saved me by cutting across it and distracting his attention. “There’s something ain’t working right. I don’t know why they haven’t jumped you-know-who by now. They went up and questioned him all right, but I notice there ain’t been a word printed about their bringing him back with them. He musta sprung an alibi that held up. Put your ear down to the ground and find out what’s up, for me, Louie. You got ways. If it don’t move, looks like we’ll have to put a flea in their ear about—” He pressed his fingertips down hard on the table to show him what he meant.
He was standing over me shaking me at seven-thirty the next morning. And when Buck shook you, you shook. “G’wan, get over there like I told you and get that wash back. I don’t care if it ain’t ironed or ain’t even washed yet, don’t come back here without it!”
The owner’s name was Lee. It was just about a block away, down in a basement. They were up already, three of the little fellows, ironing away a mile a minute; they must have lived in the back of the place. I tottered down from the street level, put the bright green wash ticket down on the counter.