He digested this. “How about Chi? You been there?”
I nodded.
“And Vegas? And Miami?”
“All those places,” I said.
“Who do you know in Buffalo?” Tony asked.
“Not a soul,” I said. “I’m a stranger.”
The bartender brought me a fresh drink. Tony Quince was drinking sour red wine. He emptied his glass and the bartender poured him another. Tony took a small sip, put the glass down and ran his tongue over his full lips. I found a new cigarette and put a match to it.
“You working, Nat?”
“Vacation,” I said.
“Just passing through?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I’ll stick around. It’s a nice town.”
He worked on his drink and I worked on mine. The television set was off now and the room was quiet. A couple of high school kids wandered in and the bartender told them he wouldn’t serve them. They left.
I finished my drink, picked up part of my change and stood up. I put out my cigarette.
“Later,” I said to Quince.
He looked at me. “Sure,” he said. “I figure we’ll run across each other now and then.”
I walked back to the Malmsly. There was no tail this time.
Thursday morning’s paper told me that I was out five bucks. My horse had run third in a field of eight. I had my usual brunch in the Men’s Grill and stepped outside. There was a pool hall on the second floor of an old building on Main next to a bus terminal. I walked up a flight of creaking wooden stairs, picked out a table and found a cue. A Puerto Rican kid racked the balls for me and I tossed him a quarter. He caught it in one hand, flipped it to the other and found a pocket to keep the coin in. I chalked my cue and broke the balls.
The place wasn’t crowded. A few sharks tried to hustle each other. Two antique Italians who looked like retired barbers played three-cushion billiards. They were pretty good.
I wasn’t. I stuck to aimless pocket pool and was lousy. I poked the balls around the table for half an hour. Nobody tried to hustle me for a game. A few kids, including the one who juggled quarters, looked me over out of the corners of their eyes. They were admiring my shoes.
When the game got boring I paid for my time and left. There was mail for me at the Malmsly desk. Two of my idiot letters had made the return trip, one from Chicago and one from Philly. The bank had sent over my checkbook, twenty-five pretty green checks, the name Nathaniel Crowley neatly imprinted in the lower right-hand corner of each. I stuck the checkbook in my pocket.
That night I went to a movie. I don’t remember what it was about or who was in it. I sat in the balcony and thought about Nat Crowley and the way his little world was developing. I didn’t waste much time thinking about Donald Barshter. There wasn’t very much to think about. In four days he had managed to fade away to a shadow. Sometimes it was hard to remember what he was like, how his mind worked, how he spent his time.
It occurred to me that Barshter couldn’t have been much of a guy. Too thin, too empty. In four short days he was all gray, all fuzzy at the edges. He must have been pretty useless to begin with.
I wondered if they had found Ellen yet. If they had buried her. And then I let those thoughts trail off. There were better things to worry about.
After the movie I stopped at a short-order restaurant for ham and eggs. Then I dropped in at Cassino’s for a bottle of German beer. Nothing much happened there. I recognized a few men from the night before but nobody bothered to talk to me. Tony Quince wasn’t there.
On Friday the wool farm came through with my new clothes. I put on a new shirt and a new tie and new shoes. I put on the gray sharkskin and left the lamp black and my original suit hanging in the closet. I got rid of my own shirts — they still had a Barshter laundry mark and there was no way I could keep wearing them. I scorched out the laundry marks with the end of a cigarette and stuffed the shirts into a paper bag. I carried the bag outside and found a trash can to dump it in.
The last concrete physical link with Donald Barshter was gone now, stuffed into a trash can and forgotten. I walked over to my bank and cashed one of my nice new checks. My wallet had been gradually emptying itself and I had to fill it up again. On the way out a little vice-president stopped me with half a smile and asked how Buffalo’s weather compared with Miami’s. I told him it was warmer down there but I couldn’t complain.
I spent the afternoon going through motions that were becoming almost too familiar. I found a horse in the paper and bet another five on him. I walked around some more, catching an occasional nod from people I’d seen at Cassino’s, people who had seen me. The picture was encouraging but hardly exciting.
There was a newsstand near my hotel that sold out-of-town papers. I resisted the temptation to ask for Barshter’s home town paper and settled for a New York sheet instead. I went through it twice but couldn’t find anything about Barshter and murder. I threw the paper away and ate a meal.
It was getting boring. I was slipping into a role neatly enough, putting on a new personality the way I had put on my new pearl-gray suit. But nothing was happening. I wasn’t making the connections yet, wasn’t hooking up with the people I was looking for. They nodded at me now and one of them had talked to me and somebody had taken the time to follow me once. But that was about all.
And something had to pop soon. For one thing, I had to find a way to earn a living. Nat Crowley spent his money freely and had to have it to spend. More important, I had to have a somewhat more permanent cover than the hard-stranger-in-town gambit. The gambit was effective but you couldn’t make a lifetime out of it.
Anyhow, I treated myself to a thick rare steak in a wood-and-leather steakhouse and then headed for Cassino’s. What the hell — at least that bar had music on weekends. I could drink my rye and soda with music behind it. And maybe something would happen.
Something happened.
But not at the bar.
As I was passing a basement coffeehouse that sent forth twelve-bar blues from somebody’s guitar, a car pulled to a stop alongside me. An unmarked car, black, a year or two old. The driver pulled up the emergency brake but left the motor running. The man with him opened the door on his side and got out of the car. I waited for him, my hands at my sides.
He walked over to me. He was my age, my height. His hat had a longer brim than mine. His shoes were heavier and older.
I watched him put one hand into a pocket and come up with a wallet. He flipped the wallet open and let me look at the flashing silver of a badge. He was a cop.
“Come on,” he said roughly. “Get in the car.”
I hunched into the car and sat next to the driver. The other cop came and sat next to me. I was the meat in the sandwich. The driver put the car in gear. We took off.
Nobody said anything. I wondered where I had gone wrong, how they had figured me out. And whether or not they still had the death penalty for murder in Connecticut.
5
Police headquarters was a dark red-brick building four stories high. Imitation gas lamps flanked the double doors at the top of a brief flight of heavy stone steps.
We parked across the street in a Police Only parking zone. The driver yanked the emergency brake again. This time he killed the engine. The other cop opened his door and motioned me outside after him.
“Come on,” he said. “Move, Crowley.”
I tried to keep relief from showing on my face. I tried not to react when he called me Crowley instead of Barshter. It was not easy. Maybe I managed it — it was hard to tell because the cop’s face showed nothing.
I got out of the car. “Just for curiosity,” I said, “what’s the charge?”