I jerked him to his feet by the collar. “All right. Come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“To make a phone call.”
I dragged him down to the public phone booth outside Dunkin’ Donuts and made him call the answering service. He left a message that he’d seen me put a suitcase in the trunk of my car, as if preparing for an early morning departure. Did Mr. Jones want him to follow me if I left town, or would somebody else take over? It wasn’t much, I’ll admit, but I felt I had to put Smith to some use before I let him go.
We stood by that phone for forty-five minutes, feeling the cold creep up our bodies like freezing water in a bathtub. I was better dressed for it than Smith, but even I was starting to hurt. I had decided on a public phone on the off chance that someone else might be watching the apartment, but I was beginning to think that frostbite might be too high a price for discretion.
When the phone finally rang, Smith could barely hold the receiver. “This is Bob Smith,” he chattered. He listened for a moment and hung up. “I’ll be damned.”
“What did he say?”
“He left a message. I’m fired and we’re both supposed to get out of the cold. Thanks a lot.”
I handed him his gun and wallet and walked away without saying a word.
I was asleep in bed. That much I knew for sure-I remembered turning the electric blanket on high to thaw the chill out of my bones. But I was also having a dream unlike any I’d ever had before. It was a sound dream, with no pictures, and just one voice.
The voice was just as Bob Smith had described it: not high, not low-average. It didn’t have a detectable accent, either, which made me think of somebody else’s description of it-John Woll’s. I’d been scornful then-as if all bad guys had accents-but now I thought maybe there was something to that. Maybe the man was a foreigner faking a nonaccent, or an actor pretending to be a foreigner faking a nonaccent. All of a sudden, I became convinced that the solution to this whole thing lay in the absence of the accent. Of course… that was it; it had been in front of my eyes all along. Or at least my ears.
My ears, in fact, were beginning to hurt. It was the voice, of course, yelling. I opened my eyes.
Black against black; it was hard to see, and it was all spinning slightly. I could make out a head, or something like a head, with pale holes where the eyes normally were. And there was an enormous white hand near the head, moving quickly back and forth, making slapping sounds to which I was keeping rhythm with my head. In fact, the head with the pale eyes wasn’t moving-my head was. And the hand was slapping me. That was it; I was almost sure. But I didn’t feel anything.
The voice stopped and things suddenly tilted. I felt my bed shift under me and slide away, leaving me to thump on the floor. The softly lit ceiling moved before my eyes. I saw the top of my bedroom door go past, then my living room ceiling. It was almost like being dragged along the floor, except I couldn’t feel the floor.
Abruptly, it got colder. I saw the ceiling of the landing outside my apartment door. Somebody grabbed my collar and propped me up against a wall; there was that head again in front of my eyes, looking just like an animated ski mask.
“Can you hear me, Joe?”
I noticed the eye holes of the mask had pretty red stitching all around them-nice touch.
“Nod if you hear me.”
I could do that, if that’s all he wanted. Things bobbed in front of me a couple of times, and I felt slightly nauseous. Had I nodded?
“Good.”
All right. I guess I had.
“Look at me.”
I’ve been doing that. I even complimented your mask.
“They tried to gas you, Joe. They tried to kill you. It would have looked like an accident or something. Do you understand?”
Sure, I guess.
“Do you?”
He wanted another nod, but that hadn’t felt too good. I grunted.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
Oh, for Christ’s sake. I nodded again and s kd ad.
“They want you dead, but they don’t want it to look like murder. They don’t want to draw attention to the Harris murder. The Harris murder is the key, Joe; you’re right about that. Stop chasing down blind alleys. We’ve brought them out into the open, you and me, so keep the heat on.”
He shook me violently-that felt just great. “But remember: they’ll try to make something normal turn against you, like your stove or your car, to make it look accidental. Remember that. Do you understand?”
I tried to grunt again. This time he bought it. In fact, he disappeared. I went back to sleep.
I woke up at dawn, shivering in the cold, wondering if I’d just collapsed at the foot of the public phone. I was still on the landing, dressed only in my pajamas, bathed in the dim red, blue, and yellow hue from the stained glass window over the stairwell. My neck ached from being propped up against the wall, but when I tried to move, the pain brought tears to my eyes.
Slowly, a living monument to mind over matter, I got to my feet and opened the apartment door. A freezing draft of air made me gasp and lurch toward the open windows. I slammed them shut, cringing at the noise. Then I locked and chained the door, relit the stove’s pilot lights, and got back in bed.
As the blanket brought some feeling back to my body, I went over what had happened, and for the first time since Korea, the taste of real fear rose in my throat.
10
As soon as I thawed out and could stand without falling on my face, I swallowed half a bottle of aspirin and dialed the office.
“You sound like death warmed over,” was Murphy’s cheery greeting. “Where the hell are you?”
“At home. Did you get any reaction to that bug?”
“Not yet. How was Woodstock?”
“I’ll tell you later. You haven’t sent anyone back to where Kimberly Harris was murdered, have you?”
“Why would I?”
“Talk to the manager again, whatever residents date back that far; you know, whatever.”
“That’s your hot potato. I’ve got people all over town digging into every nook and cranny on the Reitz-Phillips thing. I’m not about to touch Harris too.”
“Okay. I’ll be in in an hour or so.”
I left the apartment and headed north on the Putney Road to the Huntington Arms. It was a medium-sized rental complex of twenty units, forming a U on three sides of a too short, too shallow, empty swimming pool. The open end of the U was blocked by a ten-foot-high brick privacy fence.
It looked like all its clones across America: two stories, an outdoor balcony running around the inside of the U on the second floor, rhythmically intercepted by metal staircases leading down, a tunnel-like entrance from the parking lot to the inner court. It was flat-roofed, ned red-bricked and generally looked like a motel, albeit a fairly good one. I knocked on the manager’s door, the first left off the entranceway, and showed him my badge. “Are you Mr. Boyers?” My voice rattled around my head like a billiard ball.
He was a short, skinny man with glasses-the high-school nerd grown old. “What’s up?”
“Is your name Boyers?”
“Yes.” He seemed embarrassed by the fact. “So you were the manager when Kimberly Harris was killed.” His mouth opened and shut a couple of times in astonishment.
Whatever subtlety I’d used on others when mentioning the Harris case had been literally beaten out of me by now. All I wanted from this bird was some answers.
“Kimberly Harris?”
“You do remember the name.”
“My God… Of course.”
“Tell me about it.”
“But that was years ago. I mean, they caught the guy.”
“I’m aware of that. I’m cleaning up some paperwork.”
“Paperwork? I thought you people were all working on that shooting.”
“Most of us are. I will be too once you’ve helped me out a little here.”
“This really is a little crazy, you know? What’s left to be said?”