Bohannon gave him no time. Lifting his left arm, he glanced at his wrist watch.
“I got a black coupe parked downstairs with the keys in it. You get into it with Daly’s uniform on in fifteen minutes or that call goes in to headquarters.” Looking up, his eyes narrowed. “Or don’t you think it would?”
Shaking his head, Mickey Gavegan said slowly, “I guess it would go in all right, Bohannon.”
“I guess so too,” the pale man added. He threw a piece of paper to the table. “The first address is where this sister lives; the second is where you bring this Joe Larkin when you get him. If he squawks about not going to headquarters you say the D.A. wants to see him personal; he’s not taking chances on any leak from his office.” He opened the door, nodded, said, “Fifteen minutes,” and left.
Even after Mickey Gavegan was alone, it seemed hard to get it all straight in his head. He thought of those guys in the cell block — how many claimed they had been framed? Say some of them lied; a few had told the truth. They’d done it to the other men and they’d do it to Gavegan. Unless...
He walked into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and looked at Luke Daly’s uniform. Blue shirt, blue pants, blue coat, blue tie — some buttons, a shield, a holster, a gun. Then he looked at the paper Bohannon had left, which he held mechanically now in his hand. Ann Larkin, 441 Court Terrace; and under that 64 Arverne Road, Ransom’s Beach.
He put the paper on the dresser, next to the jeweler’s box that held the bracelet Luke Daly had shown him. Luke had forgotten that, he thought; but he’d be over at his girl’s house probably before he found it out. Too late anyway to come back for it; he wouldn’t be home now till twelve or one. And Mickey Gavegan could be through then, and safe; the suit would be hanging up the way Luke had left it, as if it had never been touched. Only—
Mickey Gavegan forced his mind away from that only. He kept it as empty and thoughtless as he could. He took off his clothes and put on Luke Daly’s. Then he went out to the hall, listened there, and started down quietly, his head lowered.
Nobody met him in the hall; nobody noticed him on the street. He got into the black coupe that was parked where Bohannon had said it would be and drove across town to 441 Court Terrace. The number and the name were very clear in his mind; he did not have to look at Bohannon’s paper. The number and the name, Ann Larkin — they might have been painted on a board before his eyes.
When she came into the front room where the landlady had asked Mickey Gavegan to wait, this Ann Larkin had a tension in her features that showed mostly in the trembling line of her lips.
“Yes?” she said, in a shaky voice, looking at him as he sat on the couch, in Luke Daly’s uniform, with Luke Daly’s cap on his knee. She was a tall girl, with steady, rather serious brown eyes, very slender in a dark blue dress. Her eyes were bright now with anxiety or fright, he could not tell which; but the moment he saw her, Mickey Gavegan knew he wouldn’t have any trouble here,
Bohannon had been right: the uniform was enough. Mickey Gavegan repeated what Bohannon had told him to say, calm now, sure of himself, everything conquered, even the shame; and she listened to him quietly, her eyes meeting his, dropping away from them, all the while he spoke.
For a moment after he stopped she was silent; then she looked up at him again and said what, of all things, Mickey Gavegan had not expected her to say. She said in a soft breath, as if she weren’t frightened any more: “I’m glad you came. It’s — Joe will be glad too. He wanted to go to the police before — I told him to. But always, at the end, he was afraid to. Afraid of what that man would do. Joe wouldn’t even tell me where he was living. All I have is a phone number.”
When Mickey Gavegan asked her what that was, she shook her head at him.
“No. He wouldn’t be there now — he never is before eleven. I think it’s a restaurant where he goes to eat. They always have to see if he’s there. But I’ll go with you now, wherever you want; I’ll call you for him at eleven. You see—” she looked at him with a timid, painful smile — “it may help him if I’m there. Please take me, too.”
“I can’t do that,” Mickey Gavegan said. Bohannon wouldn’t like this at all. “Sorry, lady.”
“But I’m going,” she told him, in an unsteady voice. “Why not? He hasn’t done anything wrong. If they just want to talk to him I can be there. I can help.”
It struck Mickey Gavegan that if he protested too much she might get obstinate; she might insist on calling the DA.’s office herself.
The fall night, damp and rainy, seemed to seclude them very close together in the little coupe. As soon as they started off, she began to talk about her brother and that man he’d met. After a while Mickey Gavegan realized who she meant: Bohannon.
Moving around in his seat, grunting answers, he began to wish savagely that she’d shut up; he wasn’t asking her life’s history. How she’d left the small town upstate when her mother died, how she came here, got a job, and sent for Joe. Maybe, she said, it was all her fault, because if she hadn’t sent for him he’d still be back home; he’d never have met that man. Did he — her face turned dimly to him — did he think this would be very serious?
Maybe not, he said shortly. He thought they could fix this up all right. Yes — her voice lifted there. They could, couldn’t they? It wasn’t as if Joe had done anything terrible; he’d just taken the bag Bohannon had given him and put it in a safe-deposit box downtown. He didn’t know what was in it; and when he suspected, from what Bohannon let slip one night, he was afraid to go to the police, he slipped out of sight because he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That was all he’d done, and they couldn’t punish him for it, when they understood how it was. The bag? The one with the money — the money Bohannon and his friends had stolen last month in the payroll holdup.
Mickey Gavegan remembered then what Luke Daly had said about the holdup, and Dingbat Green and the leader who must be Bohannon; and he remembered the car that had passed him last night. That’s where Bohannon had seen him, from the car, after he’d killed the other man. And he’d hooked in Joe Larkin the way he’d hooked in Mickey Gavegan years ago — a chump to hold the bag, a sucker who didn’t know what was going on.
Mickey Gavegan’s lips were strangely colorless in his set face went they came to the little village of Ransom’s Beach, and he stepped under a light to look at the address on Bohannon’s paper again.
Around them all the store fronts were dark, the streets deserted; rows of cottages sloped desolately away under the indifferent pale pools of street lights. He looked through his pockets for Bohannon’s paper once, twice, a third time; he didn’t find it. In his other suit maybe, left there when he changed. But Arverne Road anyway, and a low number; he remembered that much. The coupé went on more slowly then, until on a corner signpost he saw the letters he was watching for.
There was only one bungalow lit up, far down near the beach; he pulled in to the curb before it and told her to stay in the car, for he knew he had to see Bohannon alone, and tell him she was there too. Because she had said she knew Bohannon; and if she saw him first she’d never call her brother. She’d know then that Gavegan—
“I’ll be back,” he said harshly. “I’m not sure this is it.”
After he rang, Bohannon opened the door, but his thin body was sheltered from the car by Mickey Gavegan’s bulkier one. In the hall, with the door closed, Mickey Gavegan told him how it was; he listened, fretting at his lower lip.
“She knows me all right,” he said when Mickey Gavegan was done. “You’ll have to get her to put in the call. Tell her you’re a little early, and the D.A. won’t be here for a while. After she calls him I’ll run things. That call is all we want out of her.”