It was now shortly after eight in the evening, and the neighborhood was full of cars from Queens, which is the normal weekend cross we have to bear in this part of the city. The air was very cold, the sky was still leaden and low, and while the main avenues had been cleared of snow the side streets were still rather clogged.
I found the parking garage on First Avenue, and Edgarson’s claim check got me the same dirty blue Plymouth Fury he’d been following me around in. I paid the tab out of Edgarson’s wallet, tipped the boy an Edgarson quarter, and drove on back to my place, where I parked next to Staples’ favorite fire hydrant.
Lugging that Valpack down the stairs was the hardest and least appetizing part of the whole job. Thump, thump, thump all the way down. I couldn’t lift the thing, so I also had to drag it through the snow on the sidewalk and then heave and push and cram it up over the rear bumper and into the trunk. Finally it arranged itself in there, and I slammed the lid and drove out to Kennedy Airport, where a TWA skycap said, “You can’t park here, sir.
“I just want to leave my luggage. It’s too heavy for me to carry.”
He gave me a superior smile, but when I opened the trunk and he tried to lift the Valpack by the handle his expression suggested he’d just found a hernia. “My my,” he said. “That is heavy.”
Should I do a joke about there being a body in it? No, I should not.
The skycap struggled the Valpack onto his cart and said, “Do you have your ticket, sir?”
“Not yet.”
“And where will you be going?”
Feeling a cool climate was best under the circumstances, I said, “Seattle.”
“Fine, sir. You’ll find your bag at the ticket counter.”
I thanked him, gave him one of Edgarsons dollars, and he wheeled Edgarson away.
Driving out to the long-term parking lot, I considered leaving it at that, but time and confusion were my allies here, so I took the inter-airport bus back to TWA, and used one of Edgarsons credit cards to buy him a nonstop round trip ticket to Seattle, first class. My Valpack was tagged, two clerks wrestled it onto the conveyer belt, and Edgarson rolled away on the start of his journey westward. My clerk compared the quickly-scrawled signature I’d just perpetrated with Edgarson’s quickly-scrawled signature on the credit card, was satisfied, gave me the card and the ticket, and wished me a pleasant journey. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I love Seattle this time of year.”
For only fifteen more of Edgarsons dollars, a taxi took me to my general neighborhood in Manhattan. I had emptied his wallet en route, keeping the money and stuffing the cards and papers into my overcoat pockets, and in the course of a six-block stroll I distributed the wallet and its former contents into twenty-five or thirty trash receptacles. Then I returned home, to find that more people had been in conversation with my answering machine.
Two of them; the Staples family. Patricia’s message was first, and was both brief and evocative. What an astonishing way for that woman to talk. When Fred’s voice came on immediately after I felt a certain brief discomfort, which was not at all eased by what he had to say:
“More developments in the Laura Penney case, Carey. I think maybe you could be a big help after all. Call me at the office.” And he gave his number.
I phoned Patricia first, and we said warm things back and forth, about how much we had enjoyed and how much we would enjoy and so on, and then she said she’d be in Manhattan tomorrow afternoon and would I be home between two and three? Oddly enough, I would.
Next, I said, “Sweetheart, I hate to mention this, but Fred does come here sometimes. I’d hate to have him accidentally recognize any voices on my answering machine, if you follow me.”
“You mean you don’t want me to tell you those things any more?”
“Don’t talk to some cold machine,” I explained. “Talk to my warm ear.”
So she did, at some length and in some detail concerning the morrow, and when at last I managed to end the conversation I was feeling a bit humid. I went and washed my face in cold water before phoning her husband.
The guttural New York voice that answered told me Staples wasn’t there, but when I identified myself he gave me a number where Fred could be reached. I jotted it down, hung up, and realized I had just written Kit’s phone number.
Could that be right? Confused notions of swapping, keys-on-the-floor, Fred And Patricia And Carey And Kit, mingled in my mind with the more realistic thought that Staples was at work right now on Laura’s murder, and this work of his had apparently brought him to an interview with my girl.
Which meant I had a choice. I could phone Staples to find out precisely what was going on, or I could use that ticket to Seattle. (Replacing it first, since the original was now in a dozen pieces in as many trash baskets.) So far, though, Seattle was still the alternate; I dialed Kit’s number.
And Kit answered. She sounded, I thought, a little tense. I said, “It’s me, honey. I got two messages to call.”
“Oh, hello, Carey.” Enunciated with clarity but no warmth; announcing me to Staples, of course.
Pretending I hadn’t a care in the world, I said, “Feeling better, eh?”
“Yes. I guess it was one of those twenty-four hour bugs.”
“When I get a twenty-four hour bug, it stays a week.”
“Could I call you back, Carey? I’m a little tied up right now.”
“With Fred Staples,” I said. “That was my other message, he wants to talk to me.”
“Oh? I didn’t— Hold on.”
I held on, and the next voice I heard belonged to Fred Staples. I listened hard for nuances in that voice, changes in his attitude toward me, but he was the same ebullient Fred as ever: “Hey, there, Carey, how you doing?”
“Just fine,” I said.
“You never told me you had such a terrific girl friend.”
I answered in appropriate mode: “Keeping her for myself, Fred.”
He chuckled, then said, “You going to be around the rest of the evening?”
“Sure.” Some long-winded explanation of my absence from the apartment trembled on my lips, but I forced it down. The guilty man flees, as they say, where no man pursueth. Also, there’s the fella that protests too much.
“I’d like to drop over,” Staples was saying. “In half an hour or so, okay?”
“Coffee or bourbon?” (No drink with potential arrestee.)
“Mmmm... Better make it coffee.”
Taking comfort from that hesitation, I said, “I’ll have it waiting.” But I missed the first time, when I tried to cradle the phone.
If you’re going to commit a murder — and in the first place, I don’t recommend it — one thing you should definitely not do afterward is have sex with the investigating officer’s wife. It merely makes for a lot of extraneous complication.
In fact, generally speaking, it seems to me that all police officers’ wives are better left alone. In the first place, their husbands walk around all the time with guns. And in the second place, there are so many other things a cop can do to you if he’s annoyed; he carries as much power in his badge as in his pistol. So all in all I would suggest that policemans’ wives, like nuns, should be left to Mexican bandits.
There’s nothing like ignoring your own advice. But I hadn’t after all intended all that with Patricia Staples; it had just, well, happened.
Whatever my intentions, though, well-armed police officer Fred Staples was about to walk into the scene of (a) Edgarson’s launching, and (b) his own cuckolding. No matter how much Valium or how much bourbon I put away, I remained convinced that something, some small tiny forgotten thing, from at least one of those misadventures would attract Fred’s bright eye. Though I ran the vacuum cleaner, though I made the bed, though I went over the apartment half a dozen times, I still didn’t feel secure when the doorbell rang nearly an hour later. I wasn’t ready, but I let him in.