I dressed, putting on a white sport shirt like the one the pug had been wearing. It was just eleven o’clock. Plenty of time, I thought, beginning to feel tight in the chest. But I didn’t want to cut it too fine. Sometimes the graveyard man came early and they sat out there and talked, two lonely old men who had only their jobs and bleak boarding-houses to fill their time. I couldn’t take a chance on two. I’d better go, even though it meant more time to kill outside before I could come back.
I locked the door, picked up the key case, and went up on the pier. The wet trail I’d left before was still there on the concrete. I remembered the car was a green Oldsmobile. That was good. Mine was a tan Ford. He’d remember all right; there couldn’t have been any mistake. I didn’t have the flashlight now, but I groped around until I found it. I got in and started the motor. I was nervous. Suppose he was standing outside the shack where he could see right into the car? I wouldn’t know it until I’d come out the doors at the other end of the shed, and then it would be too late.
I thought of the answer to that. Switching the lights on, I turned the car around until it was headed for the door at the far end, and turned them off again. As soon as my eyes were accustomed to the darkness I went slowly ahead. There was no danger of running into anything, and I could see the door just faintly ahead of me. When I was within thirty or forty feet of it I eased to a stop and got out. Slipping up to it on foot, I peered around the edge. It was all right. There was only the empty gate with the hot cone of light above it, and the vacant lots beyond. He was inside. I turned and ran lightly back to the car.
Remembering to slouch low in the seat, I eased the door shut, flipped the lights on, and went ahead. My mouth was dry. It was a hundred miles. I was outside now. I turned left, crossed the railroad spur. Not too fast. Slow down a little approaching the gate. The car was right in front of the shack now. Lifting a hand, I looked just once, out of the corners of my eyes.
He was sitting on a stool at the desk just behind the window, pouring coffee out of a Thermos. He glanced up casually, waved a hand, and then looked back at the cup. I was past.
The tension gave way, and I felt as if I’d flow out over the seat like spilled water. Every nerve in my body relaxed. There was nothing to it now.
I turned left at the next corner and went down a dark street toward town. It was about fifteen blocks to the honky-tonk district. Parking the car in a dark spot a half block from a gaudy burst of neon and noise, I looked quickly around and got out, taking the keys and locking it just as he would have. No one had seen me. I went up to the corner and turned right, away from the water-front. As I passed a vacant lot I threw the keys far into it in the darkness. I was free of him now. I thought of him and shuddered. The poor, vicious, unfortunate little bastard. Why couldn’t he have stayed away?
I didn’t know how far I walked. It must have been miles. I avoided lights and kept to the quiet residential districts, going away from the waterfront all the time. At twelve-thirty I was near an all-night drugstore. It was late enough now. It would be around a quarter of one by the time I got back. I went in a side door and back to the telephone booth and called a cab. When it came I was waiting out at the side in the shadows. I got in without the driver’s getting a look at my face. Everything was all right now. I sat back in the corner, where he couldn’t see me in the mirror.
We passed the last street and were approaching the gate. No one was in sight. “Just slow down there so I can tell him who I am,” I said to the driver. “You don’t need a pass to drive in.”
“Right, chief,” he replied.
He braked to a stop in front of the shanty. The 12-to-8 watchman was looking out the window. “Manning,” I called out, keeping my face in shadow. He lifted a hand.
“All right, Mr. Manning.”
The driver shifted gears and started to move ahead. Then he stopped. Somebody was calling out from the shack. “Mr. Manning! Just a minute—”
I looked around. The watchman was coming out. “I almost forgot to tell you. A woman called about ten minutes ago—”
But I wasn’t even listening now. A prickling sort of numbness was spreading over my whole body as I stared at the window of the shack. It was old Chris. He had just got up from a chair and was looking out, a puzzled frown on his face. Then he turned toward the door.
The other watchman was still talking beside the cab window. “. . . Chris was just about to walk out and tell you. He said you was on the barge.”
I couldn’t move, or speak. Chris was standing beside him now, looking in at me. “Son of a gun, Mr. Manning. When did you go out? I didn’t see you.”
I fought to get my tongue broken loose from the roof of my mouth. “Why—I—” It was impossible to think. The whole thing was like some crazy nightmare. “Why, I came out a while ago. Remember? When my friend left. We drove out to have a couple of beers. It must have been a little before twelve—” I’d got myself started, and now I couldn’t stop. I could hear my voice going on and on. “—that’s when it was. A little before twelve. I waved at you, remember? He was an old friend of mine—get a couple of beers—”
“You was in that car when it left?” He peered at me, more puzzled than ever. “Well, I’ll be go to hell. I looked right at it, too, and didn’t even see you. I must be gettin’ absent-minded. And here I was about to walk all the way out there to the barge and tell you that woman called—”
He broke off suddenly, and then went on with quick concern. “Why, Mr. Manning. What’s wrong with your face?”
That was the absolute horror of it. There was nothing happening, really. I wasn’t being accused of anything, or tortured by a Gestapo, or given the third degree. I was just being clucked over by two gentle, lonely old men trying to be helpful. They took an interest in me. They had to sit there eight hours a day and guard the goddamned place and I was the only thing in it alive or moving or that you could talk to or from which you could get even the vicarious illusion of still being connected with a world where some day somebody might conceivably do something, so they liked me and took an interest in my comings and goings. That was all it was. And they would remember every word of it.
“Oh,” I mumbled, feeling my face as if I were surprised at the fact of having one. “I—uh—I was getting something out of the storeroom and fell.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” he answered solicitously. “But you ought to put something on them cut places. Might get infected. You never know. I think it’s the climate around here, the muggy air, sort of—”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Thanks.”
Somehow, we were moving again. It was over. At least, that part of it was over. The nightmare itself came right along with me. The driver went on through the shed and stopped at the end of the pier. I got out under the light. It didn’t make any difference now. Nothing made any difference.
He handed me my change. I tipped him a quarter, and he said, “Thanks, chief.”
Then he grinned at my face and swollen hand. “Hate like hell to see the other guy,” he said.
He left.
I walked over to the big stringer at the edge of the pier and put my foot on it, looking down into the shadows below me, only half conscious of the big diesel tug muscling a string of barges up the waterway ahead of me. Again, it was the simplicity of it that terrified me. It had been nothing but an old man who hated to go back to the four bleak walls of a boarding-house room.
I tried to think. How much chance did I have now? In a few days he’d float up, somewhere along the water-front, and the police would start looking. One of the first things they’d do would be to question all the guards along the piers—