"Say, lookit-" She dragged on the cigarette and her expression had turned quizzical. "Tell me somethin' then. If you think Mackie's playin' around with your boyfriend, why don't you just give your boyfriend a piece of your mind? Tell him to shape up or ship out. What do you want to go both-erin'
Mackie for? Jeez, you might get him in trouble with the parole office for perversions. Listen, fella, I can handle Mackie. If he's gonna keep gettin' between my legs he's gonna have to quit foolin' around with degenerates who might give out that new disease that came up from Hades. What's it called?"
"AIDS."
"That's the one. I heard it can make you awful sick."
"That's why I want to find Mack today, Flo. I think Jack is with him right now, and I want to find them and talk some sense into Jack before it's too late. Do you think they might be at Terry Clert's house? Terry lives over on Third Street in the North End of Albany, I've heard."
"Yeah, they might be. Mackie went out early this morning and said he was picking up Terry and they had some work to do. But maybe that was just a line. Do you think?"
"Yes, I do. I think that was just a line."
"Men! You can't believe a word they say."
"No. No, I guess you can't."
I parked in front of the Clert house on Third Street at ten till two. The green pickup truck was nowhere in sight, nor was any other vehicle I had ever seen before. I watched the house for fifteen minutes and saw no sign of life. I knew Mrs. Clert would still be at Pug Lenihan's, though Corrine had mentioned a Kevin Clert who stayed with Pug overnight, and he could have been asleep inside the ramshackle frame carton I was looking at.
Slogging through the melting snow, I moved to the rear of the house and popped the lock on the back door with a credit card. I walked in with my revolver drawn. I'd never shot a human being and didn't want to now. But I knew I would do it if it meant saving Timmy or myself, both of whose lives I valued more highly than Mack Fay's or Terry Clert's. I knew now the kind of people I was dealing with, and if they were badly hurt and suffered exquisitely during whatever was coming next, I could learn to live with it.
The house was silent except for a dripping faucet and a humming refrigerator in the kitchen where I stood. If Timmy was in the house the leaky faucet would be driving him crazy, so I gave the handle a hard shove.
The drip-drop-drip continued. The washer was shot but I didn't take the time to replace it.
Finding no person, awake or asleep, in the downstairs rooms, I climbed the stairs and checked the bedrooms. There were three, each recently having been slept in, all unoccupied at the moment. One room, neat, feminine and freshly Airwicked, was obviously Mrs. Clert's. The other two, malodorous and chaotic, with pants flung over chairs and soiled twisted sheets on the beds, apparently belonged to the two male Clerts. I poked through the debris but found nothing incriminating or helpful.
Back downstairs I went to the telephone on the kitchen counter hoping to find an address scrawled on a notepad, as in Boston Blackie or Martin
Kane, Private eye, but there wasn't any.
I did not know where to look next for Timmy. A jar of instant coffee was next to the teakettle on the gas range, so I fixed myself a cup and sat at the kitchen table drinking it in the trapezoid of dusty sunlight that shone in the back window. I did not at all want to do what I decided to do next, but it seemed that both survival and neatness required it.
Back at the Hilton, I made nine telephone calls to acquaintances in New York City before I was able to complete the arrangements I had in mind. I skimmed off fifty thousand dollars from the two and a half million in the closet, stuffed it in my coat pockets, went down and picked up the car, and headed south.
I was in Manhattan by six, out by six forty-five, back in Albany just before ten. That gave me two hours before I was to meet Timmy and his captors at our house on Crow Street. From the hotel room I placed several more phone calls, the first of which was to my friend the narc.
TWENTY-ONE
The temperature had dropped back to three degrees and was headed, the radio said, down to eight below. For once, that was good. I picked up two friends at their house on Chestnut Street and drove them over to Rensselaer and back. Then I drove them over to Rensselaer and back a second time.
"On the phone you said you needed our help, but all we're doing is riding back and forth across the river. What is it we're supposed to do?"
"Pant."
"No, really."
"I want rapid breathing. Pant for me."
Casting nervous glances at each other, they panted until I dropped them back at their house.
"Thanks for your moisture."
"Don, are you okay?"
"My feet are cold, but my faculties are intact."
"Why don't you try turning the heater on?"
"Ah, but then I wouldn't have your frozen breath preserved on my window glass."
"You aren't going to go somewhere and lick it off, are you? I would consider that low-risk sex, but I suppose the ultra-cautious might insist it constituted an exchange of body fluids."
I shoved them out into the cold night and drove over to Crow Street, peering through the peepholes I had scratched in the film of ice. No lights were on in the house and Mack Fay's truck was nowhere on the street. With one window rolled down I backed into a space half a block from the house.
I turned off the ignition, shut the window, and waited invisibly. It was 11:26.
Two cars rolled by in the next twenty-four minutes, their headlights brightening the icy opalescence in front of me, but neither car stopped nor even slowed. At ten till twelve a third vehicle moved slowly up the street with a fourth close on its tail. Through the peepholes I made out Fay's green pickup, which backed into the last available space on the block, forcing the car behind it-the beige Buick I'd seen in front of my office the week before-to park alongside a fire hydrant.
One man emerged from the truck and three from the car. Of the three, the one in the middle-Timmy's height and build, and wearing Timmy's coat wore something that covered his face and head, possibly a pillowcase. The two others were leading him by the arms. The party of four met in front of the house and moved up the front steps. The door was unlocked and they entered, shutting the door behind them. After a moment, lights went on behind the living room draperies.
At three minutes till twelve I retrieved a bundle from under the car seat and, moving quietly, attentively, walked down the block. I opened the door of Fay's truck and inserted the bundle under the driver's seat. I thought, this is not perfect justice, but in an imperfect world, it will serve, it will serve.
At midnight precisely I walked up the front steps of my home and stomped the snow off my feet. I glanced up and down the street and, satisfied that no one had observed my recent odd actions, entered the house.
The four of them were seated around the picture of the fire. Two stood up as I entered. "I'm glad you got my message," Timmy said, remaining seated. "It's been an unusually long day." His smile was sincere but lacking in joie de vivre.
"Did they mistreat you?"
"Not to any lasting effect. I'll have to have these pants cleaned and pressed."
"We didn't want to mess him up too bad," Fay said. "Not with him being worth two and a half million. You got an expensive little girlfriend here, Strachey. Hey, you didn't know that before, did you?"
Fay had a two-day stubble of beard, nicotine-stained teeth, and dead black eyes. He grunted smugly and glanced at the other two to see if they were having a good time too. The younger Clert, Kevin, I figured, was a chunky gimlet-eyed youth who closely resembled a kid I knew in the eighth grade who sat in the back row sticking a pencil in his ear. The older Clert, Terry, was taller, rangier, better-looking and twitchier, and he kept his finger on the trigger of a sawed-off shotgun aimed at Timmy's midsection.