ought to check him out. The guy must really be a charmer.”
“Well, it’s funny-he’s not handsome, at least not in a moviestar way, but he’s got the most gorgeous hazel eyes. They light up his whole face.”
“Watch it, lady,” Alan growled. “My jealous muscle is starting to twitch.”
She laughed a little. “I don’t think you have to worry. There’s one other thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Rosalie said Wilma Jersyck came in while Nettle was there.”
“Did anything happen? Were words passed?”
“No. Nettle glared at the jerzyck woman, and she kind of curled her lip at Nettle-that’s how Rosalie put it-and then Nettle scurried out. Has Wilma jerzyck called you about Nettle’s dog lately “No,” Alan said. “No reason to. I’ve cruised past Nettle’s house after ten half a dozen nights over the last six weeks or so. The dog doesn’t bark anymore. It was just the kind of thing puppies do, Polly. It’s grown up a little, and it has a good mistress. Nettle may be short a little furniture on the top floor, but she’s done her duty by that dog-what does she call it?”
“Raider.”
“Well, Wilma jerzyck will just have to find something else to bitch about, because Raider is squared away. She will, though. Ladies like Wilma always do. It was never the dog, anyway, not really; Wilma was the only person in the whole neighborhood who complained. It was Nettle. People like Wilma have noses for weakness.
And there’s a lot to smell on Nettle Cobb.”
“Yes.” Polly sounded sad and thoughtful. “You know that Wilma jerzyck called her up one night and told her that if Nettle didn’t shut the dog up, she’d come over and cut his throat?”
“Well,” Alan said evenly, “I know that Nettle told you so. But I also know that Wilma frightened Nettle very badly, and that Nettle has had… problems. I’m not saying Wilma jerzyck isn’t capable of making a call like that, because she is. But it might have only been in Nettle’s mind.”
That Nettle had had problems was understating by quite a little bit, but there was no need to say more; they both knew what they were talking about. After years of hell, married to a brute who abused her in every way a man can abuse a woman, Nettle Cobb had put a meat-fork in her husband’s throat as he slept. She had spent five years in juniper Hill, a mental institution near Augusta.
She had come to work for Polly as part of a work-release program.
As far as Alan was concerned, she could not possibly have fallen in with better company, and Nettle’s steadily improving state of mind confirmed his opinion. Two years ago, Nettle had moved into her own little place on Ford Street, six blocks from downtown.
“Nettle’s got problems, all right,” Polly said, “but her reaction to Mr. Gaunt was nothing short of amazing. It really was awfully sweet.”
“I have to see this guy for myself,” Alan said.
“Tell me what you think. And check out those hazel eyes.”
“I doubt if they’ll cause the same reaction in me they seem to have caused in you,” Alan said dryly.
She laughed again, but this time he thought it sounded slightly forced.
“Try to get some sleep,” he said.
“I will. Thanks for calling, Alan.”
“Welcome.” He paused. “I love you, pretty lady.”
“Thank you, Alan-I love you, too. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
He racked the telephone, twisted the gooseneck of the desk lamp so it threw a spot of light on the wall, put his feet up on his desk, and brought his hands together in front of his chest, as if praying. He extended his index fingers. On the wall, a shadowrabbit poked up its ears. Alan slipped his thumbs between his extended fingers, and the shadow-rabbit wiggled its nose. Alan made the rabbit hop across the makeshift spotlight. What lumbered back was an elephant, wagging its trunk. Alan’s hands moved with a dextrous, eerie ease. He barely noticed the animals he was creating; this was an old habit with him, his way of looking at the tip of his nose and saying “Om.”
He was thinking about Polly; Polly and her poor hands. What to do about Polly?
If it had been just a matter of money, he would have had her checked into a room at the Mayo Clinic by tomorrow afternoonsigned, sealed, and delivered. He would have done it even if it meant wrapping her in a straitjacket and shooting her full of sedative But it wasn’t just a matter of money. Ultrasound as a treatment for degenerative arthritis was in its infancy. It might eventually turn out to be as effective as the Salk vaccine, or as bogus as the science of phrenology. Either way, it didn’t make sense right now. The chances were a thousand to one that it was a dry hole. It was not the loss of money he dreaded, but Polly’s dashed hopes.
A crow-as limber and lifelike as a crow in a Disney animated cartoon-flapped slowly across his framed Albany Police Academy graduation certificate. Its wings lengthened and it became a prehistoric pterodactyl, triangular head cocked as it cruised toward the filing cabinets in the corner and out of the spotlight.
The door opened. The doleful basset-hound face of Norris Ridgewick poked through. “I did it, Alan,” he said, sounding like a man confessing to the murder of several small children.
“Good, Norris,” Alan said. “You’re not going to get hit with the shit on this, either. I promise.”
Norris looked at him for a moment longer with his moist eyes, then nodded doubtfully. He glanced at the wall. “Do Buster, Alan.”
Alan grinned, shook his head, and reached for the lamp.
“Come on,” Norris coaxed. “I ticketed his damn car-I deserve it.
Do Buster, Alan. Please. That wipes me out.”
Alan glanced over Norris’s shoulder, saw no one, and curled one hand against the other. On the wall, a stout shadow-man stalked across the spotlight, belly swinging. He paused once to hitch up his to get her out there. shadow-pants in the back and then stalked on, head turning truculently from side to side.
Norris’s laughter was high and happy-the laughter of a child.
For one moment Alan was reminded forcibly of Todd, and then he shoved that away. There had been enough of that for one night, please God.
“Jeer, that slays me,” Norris said, still laughing. “You were born too late, Alan-you coulda had a career on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
“Go on,” Alan said. “Get out of here.”
Still laughing, Norris pulled the door closed.
Alan made Norris-skinny and a little self-important-walk across the wall, then snapped off the lamp and took a battered notebook from his back pocket. He thumbed through it until he found a blank page, and wrote Needful Things. Below that he jotted: Leland Gaunt, Cleveland, Ohio. Was that right? No. He scratched out Cleveland and wrote Akron. Maybe I really am losing my mind, he thought. On a third line he printed: Check it out.
He put his notebook back in his pocket, thought about going home, and turned on the lamp again instead. Soon the shadowparade was marching across the wall once more: lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
Like Sandburg’s fog, the depression crept back on small feline feet.
The voice began speaking about Annie and Todd again. After awhile, Alan Pangborn began to listen to it. He, did it against his will… but with growing absorption.
4
Polly was lying on her bed, and when she finished talking with Alan, she turned over on her left side to hang up the telephone. It fell out of her hand and crashed to the floor instead. The Princess phone’s base slid slowly across the nighttable, obviously meaning to join its other half She reached for it and her hand struck the edge of the table instead. A monstrous bolt of pain broke through the thin web the painkiller had stretched over her nerves and raced all the way up to her shoulder. She had to bite down on her lips to stifle a cry.