“It would at that. You applying for the job?”
He nodded, still looking out the window.
“Why?” I asked him.
“I like you, Mr. Smith,” he said again. He looked back at me and grinned. “And I’d like to be with the guy who comes out on top.”
“Here comes Ben,” I warned him.
“Is it a deal?” he asked me.
“What do you want in trade?”
He shrugged. “I’m a very useful type, Mr. Smith. Whoever runs this town after this whole mess blows over will be able to use me. And you could be my character reference.”
“That’s all?”
“All.”
Could I trust him? What the hell had made him offer the deal? But it didn’t matter, I could agree and no harm done, whether I could trust him or not. And what good would it do me to say no?
Ben opened the back door on the street side, then, and slid in, reaching over to hand Art the pack of cigarettes. I said, “Then I think it’s okay.”
“Fine,” he said. “Thanks for the cigarettes, Ben.”
The other back door swung open, and I looked around to see Bill Casale climbing in. “Good to see you again, Bill,” I said.
He was as dead-pan as ever. “Where were you hiding out, Tim?” he asked me.
“Remind me to tell you sometime. Bill Casale, this is Art and that’s Ben.”
They grunted at one another, and I started the Ford. Art said, “Where do we go from here, Mr. Smith?”
“Make another stab at getting that insurance,” I told him. And, whether I liked it or not, the insurance was going to have to be underwritten by Cathy.
Twenty-Two
Cathy was boiling, with that combination of fury and terror that only women really have down pat. I should have spent a while reassuring her, and apologizing to her for making her worry, and all that jazz, but I just didn’t have the time or the patience for it.
“Yell at me later, Cathy,” I told her. “I’ve got too many other things to do right now.”
She stopped her yelling and studied me for a minute. “I want to know where you are,” she said at last. “I want to know what’s happening to you and what you’re doing, and I want to hear about it from you. I don’t want to come to work in the morning and have somebody else tell me you were involved in an explosion last night, and spend all morning going out of my mind, trying to find out where you are and how badly you’re hurt and what’s happened to you. I want you to call me.”
“Cathy, I’ve been running around like a madman. I haven’t had time—”
“Be quiet for a minute,” she said. She wasn’t yelling now, and she wasn’t acting enraged. Instead, two high spots of color on her cheeks were the only physical signs that she was holding anger in. That, and her eyes and voice, both of which were cold and hard.
“I care about you, Tim,” she said quietly, as though stating a rather unimportant fact. “I care about you, and so I want to know whether or not you’re all right and safe. And I want to know that you care about me.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Cathy, I—”
“Just a minute,” she said. “If you care for me, you’ll want to spare me the kind of morning I spent today, if it’s at all possible for you to do so. If you care for me, you will want to know that I am all right.”
“Cathy, look—”
“If I don’t mean anything to you,” she went on, ignoring my interruption, “then just say so. Just say so right now, and we’re finished. You don’t worry about me and I don’t worry about you and—”
“Cathy, wait,” I said. I leaned down over the desk, taking her hands. “Listen, just because you’re mad at me, don’t throw the whole thing away. This last couple of days, I’ve been on the run in half a dozen different directions, not sure what’s going to happen next, and I’ve been having trouble enough trying to think fast enough about all that’s been going on, without trying to live a normal life on the side as well.”
“A normal life? Tim, I simply ask that you call me—”
“Okay,” I said. “I should have called you, and I didn’t. I haven’t been thinking about you as much as I should. For God’s sake, Cathy, I haven’t been thinking about me as much as I should. Wait till this goddam thing is over, will you? Don’t expect me to act the way I normally would under circumstances like this.”
She shook her head. “I don’t see why you couldn’t just pick up the telephone and call me,” she said.
“Because I didn’t think of it, God damn it! Because I’m trying to think of half a million things at once, and I didn’t think about calling you. You want to make a whole soap opera out of it, for Christ’s sake, go ahead. But at least wait until this thing is settled.”
She nodded, but from the expression on her face I could tell she wasn’t convinced. “All right,” she said. “You didn’t come here simply to see me. You don’t have time for things like that. You came here because you want something from me. What is it?”
If I hadn’t ignored the implication, we would have been off into another dandy little squabble, so instead I answered the question. “I have some files hidden, out at Joey Casale’s grocery store. They’re my ace in the hole. I want you to know where they are. If you don’t hear from me by seven o’clock, you go to the Winston Hotel and ask for a guy named Danile. Archer Danile. You got the name?”
Her eyes were widening, but she didn’t say anything, only nodded.
“You tell him where he can find the files,” I said. “If you don’t hear from me before seven o’clock. If you do hear from me, you won’t have to do anything. All right?”
“Tim, what are you going to do?”
“Listen, now,” I said. “The files are in two tomato-soup cartons, in the storeroom at the back of the grocery store, to the right as you face the front of the store. Have you got that?”
“What. Are. You. Going. To. Do?”
“I have an appointment with Jordan Reed,” I told her. “I want the word to get around that I have insurance, that killing me won’t stop those files from going to the CCG.”
“Tim—” She was going to start the other routine now, she was going to be afraid for me, out loud.
I didn’t have time for that, either. “I’ll see you sometime before seven,” I said, and headed for the door.
She talked at my back until I was out of the office. I was afraid she’d follow me out to the hall, but she didn’t. I took the creaky old elevator back downstairs, left City Hall, and returned to the car and my three cronies. It was nearing four o’clock. I made a U-turn and drove toward Jordan Reed’s place.
Twenty-Three
If you look at a map of the town of Winston, it will probably strike you right away that the town is shaped like a balloon on a string, and if you happen to know the particulars of the case, the symbolism of that won’t escape you.
The balloon itself is the main area of the town, the business and residential and industrial districts. The string is a two-lane blacktop road headed northwest into the Adirondacks, called McGraw’s Market Road. I doubt that anybody any more knows who McGraw was or what kind of market he had. And at the end of the string, where the owner of the balloon would be holding it, that’s where Jordan Reed’s estate is.
Reed bought the estate around twenty years ago, and at that time the place was a good five miles from the city line. Which meant it wasn’t hooked up to the town sewage system or water mains, and the county rather than the city had the responsibility for keeping McGraw’s Market Road free of potholes and frost heaves. Two years after Reed moved in, the City Council unanimously agreed that that five-mile stretch of McGraw’s Market Road was really a part of Winston after all.