I was careful. I pushed the door open, waited a second, and then jumped for the darkness beyond the lighted door-, way. No shots. I crouched low, feeling fatter than my hundred and ninety pounds, taller than my five-foot-ten, and older than my thirty-nine years, and ran for my car, a black ’51 Ford. And still there weren’t any shots. Once in the car, I jammed the key into the ignition, hit the starter and the accelerator, and got the hell out of there. And still there weren’t any shots.
I got about halfway home before I realized that those four big empty rooms weren’t what I needed right now. What I needed was somebody to talk to, somebody to pace back and forth in front of, somebody to whom I could say, “Look, I’m still alive.” Everything had whipped by at 78 r.p.m. back at the diner, and I was just beginning to catch on to what had happened. Somebody had tried to kill me. And I was still alive.
I made a fast U-turn and headed for Cathy’s place. This was no time to be alone.
Two
Cathy Evans is thirty-two, seven years younger than me. She’s tall and brown-haired and firmly built, and she’s good-looking in a level-eyed and practical sort of way. She’s Mayor Wanamaker’s secretary, and she and I have had a kind of arrangement for about six years. Neither one of us is particularly anxious to stop being single, and we’ve never tried to kid each other about being in love and this is a deathless romance and all that jazz, and we have an arrangement that’s friendly and unstrained and strictly casual.
Cathy lived in a little one-story house down on Troy Street. It was nearly two o’clock when I got there, and the windows were all dark. Tomorrow was Wednesday, a working day, so she’d be asleep by now. I pulled into the driveway, shut off the engine and lights, and crunched across the front lawn and up the stoop to the door. It was too late to use my key, even though Cathy didn’t scare easy. I had to ring the bell three times before I saw a light go on. I waited, and after a minute the curtain in the front window moved and I saw Cathy looking out at me, her expression sleepy and bewildered. She blinked at me and then came and opened the door. She was clutching her blue robe closed with one hand, and her first words were, “Tim, it’s after two o’clock.”
“I know,” I said.
“Well—” She looked beyond me, at the street, as though the answer to my oddball behavior was out there somewhere, and then she said, “Well, what is it? What do you want?”
“I’m still alive,” I told her. She looked more bewildered than ever, so I said, “I want to talk. Let me in, I’ll explain the whole thing.”
“I’ve got to get up in the morning,” she said. She turned away, scuffing in the slippers I’d bought her last Christmas, and led the way into the living room. I followed, closing the front door behind me.
In the living room, she said, “You want some coffee or something?”
“Something stronger than coffee,” I said.
“All I’ve got is beer. Come on out to the kitchen.”
We went out to the kitchen, and I told her what had happened, while she opened a bottle of beer and made herself a cup of instant coffee. She kept interrupting me all the way through the story, asking questions I didn’t know the answers to, and when I was finished, she sat at the kitchen table, fully awake now and looking at me with round eyes. “You could have been killed,” she said.
I nodded. “I’ve been telling you. That’s why I came over here. I had to talk, I had to look at somebody and tell them I was still alive.”
All of a sudden, she was crying. She didn’t cover her face with her hands or anything, she didn’t move, she just sat there with her hands on the table and cried, her mouth and eyes all twisted up, the tears running down her cheeks.
“Hey!” I said. I got up and ran around the table to her and put one arm around her shoulders. “Hey, cut that out. I’m still here, I’m still alive.”
“You clown, Tim Smith,” she said, still crying. “You clown, you clown, you clown.”
“It’s all over, Cathy. He’s dead and I’m alive and it’s all over.”
“It is not all over.” She turned suddenly, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me against her. She kept shaking her head and crying and gasping, “You clown, you clown, you clown.”
“Take it easy, Cathy,” I whispered. “Take it easy.”
Slowly she calmed, and when finally she pushed me away and held me at arm’s length I could see her struggling to keep from losing control again. “Tim,” she said, “I can take my vacation any time I want it. I can call in the morning, start my vacation right away. We can go away together. Three weeks.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Cathy,” I said.
“He’ll try again, Tim, he will.”
“No!” I pulled away from her, crossed the kitchen. “This is my town,” I said. “I’m not going to run away.” I turned back, glaring at her, angry now and not sure why. “Why should I run away? This is my town, goddam it. This is my home.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“And the hell he will, too.”
“We can go away for a while, Tim,” she said. “Let the police work on it. They’ll find out who’s behind this—”
“How will they? Why do you think the bastard killed that gunman?” The madder I got, the more nervous I got. I couldn’t just stand there like that, I had to do something, I had to move, go somewhere, be in motion. “I’ll see you later,” I said, and started toward the front of the house.
She was up and after me right away. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. For a drive. I can’t stay still.”
“I’ll come with you. Just let me put on some clothes.”
“You go to bed,” I told her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Wait for me, Tim.” She wasn’t asking.
So I waited, fidgeting in the living room, while she dressed. It took only a minute, but it felt a lot longer. Then she came back, wearing sweater and slacks and loafers, and we went out to the car.
Driving a car is a good way to work off steam, at least for me. We drove in silence for a while, as I glared out at the street, cutting hard into the corners and mashing the accelerator to the floor on the hills. After a few minutes, I started to talk.
“It’s somebody I know,” I said. “It’s a friend of mine. A local boy like me.”
“You don’t know a thing about him, Tim,” she said.
“I know a little. I know he has money, for instance. Hired guns from out of town — from New York, probably — don’t come cheap. And I know he’s influential locally, or at least he thinks he is.”
“How do you know that?”
“The gunman,” I said. “He wasn’t worried. Thirty seconds after he’d blown the job he’d come up with the phoniest cover story in history. But he wasn’t worried. Which means he was counting on more than that phony story to clear him. The only thing that figures is local influence.”
“All right,” she said.
“I know everybody in this town who has two dimes to rub together,” I said. “They’re all my friends.” I made a sharp left turn, accelerating all the way, feeling the car fighting me, hearing the rear tires squeal. “My friends,” I repeated. “The bastards.”
We were up on the North Side, by now, Jack Wycza’s territory. The town of Winston, New York, lies backed against the western edge of a spur of the Adirondacks, with a lot of hilly undeveloped forest land to the east and north. The North Side of town is all up and down.
We passed the North Winston High School, and I slowed, pointing. “You see that goddam school?”
“Yes?”
“You know what kind of cement’s in that goddam school?”