University Place wasn’t far, so I walked. It was cold, and still, and the crust of frozen snow crunched under my feet on the dark streets. I thought about Sammy Weiss who just automatically played the big man, who had to say it had been his own $25,000 he had gone to collect. I had a sinking feeling that Weiss was not only running from a murder charge, he was running with $25,000 Paul Baron considered belonged to him.
The University Place building was big and bright with lights. I went up to the apartment Deirdre Fallon had named. I got no answer to my ringing. This lock was a deadfall, police-type. I couldn’t open it if I had wanted to. I rang some more. When there was still no answer, I went back down and across to the I.R.T.
On the uptown platform I walked to the rear away from the thickest part of the early night crowd. I figured I’d have a new try at George Ames. He’d called the cops to get me off the case awful fast. If that didn’t work, I could try to find Weiss again. I thought some more about Weiss running with the police after him and with Baron after him. Baron could be the worse danger.
I was in the air and falling!
Out over the subway tracks, clawing air.
I braced to hit the tracks, and heard the train coming.
Then time seemed to stop, reverse, blend past and present and future all together in the same instant.
I heard the train and felt the push at the same time.
I saw, in a brief flash, a slender man in pale gray. A handsome face turned for one intent look at me. A trim gray back walking away. A gray Homburg-jaunty. I thought: He’s killed me.
I fell, and saw the gray man, and heard the train, and knew I was dead, and saw a train roar past me all in the same moment.
I hit the tracks and knew with great clarity that I was not dead because Astor Place was a local station. You see, on the I.R.T. the local and express often come almost side by side. I had been pushed by the sound, not the sight, of the train. The express was some six cars ahead of the local. A mistake, you see? He had pushed me six cars too soon.
I lay in between the tracks, and the local came and stopped above me. I lay in an icy stream of water. Voices: Hey! Hey! You okay? Yes, yes! I’m okay! In time they would move the train. I would get up, wipe myself, go on.
I rolled from under and walked across the express tracks to the downtown platform. I climbed up. They stared. Subway cops yelled. A train came and I got on. I rode down four stops. I thought. I got off and went up into the night. I found a taxi. I went to Pennsylvania Station. There was a train for Philadelphia. Marty, that was what I wanted.
I sat and watched the Jersey Flats, the factories, the towns, the pine woods around Princeton. I shook. I saw Marty’s face in the dark window. She would wipe off the dirt and kiss me. I rode all the way to Trenton before I remembered that Marty had her own needs. I got off and waited two hours for the train back.
When I got home I locked my door and sat at a window and drank Irish whisky. I watched the night sky. When I went to bed, I began to shake again. I shivered without control until I fell asleep.
6
Life Begins in darkness and ends in darkness and in between is a nightmare.
A man in a bar in Algiers told me that. It was in my mind when I woke up to the gray cold of another day.
All you can do, that man said, is stay out of it. He may be right, but life is short. If you stay out you’ll never know if you could have done something to make it less a nightmare. Like doing something about men who push other men under trains.
I was angry, and lay in bed enjoying the anger that had replaced the shaking of last night. I also thought about our ability to forget once an immediate threat has passed. It’s our strength, I suppose, but also our weakness, and in the safe light of day I was sure no one could kill me. Stupid, of course, but without that belief, who could go ahead being a detective or anything else?
After a big breakfast to prove how good my nerves were, I spent the morning looking for Weiss again. I walked with one eye looking behind. I was brave, but not crazy. I didn’t find a smell of Weiss, but I found that Paul Baron was still looking.
In the afternoon I checked out Deirdre Fallon. She was a regular at the Charles XII, she was well known, and she had been there with Radford. Her hairdresser backed her up, too. George Ames also checked out, but not as definitely. He had arrived at his club around noon all right, and had left around 5:00 P.M., but it was a big club with many doors, and Ames had not been with someone all the time.
I took the late afternoon train for North Chester. When I got off, there was a clean tang to the cold air: country air. The suburban town had a rural feel, with tree-lined streets, and a single old black limousine at the taxi stand. When we were out of the town and in the country, I asked the driver if he had seen Walter Radford get off the train on Monday.
“Come in on the one-fourteen. That’s the twelve-ten out of the city. He took my cab. Old lady Radford come in on the three-two; the two-eight out of the city. Cops already asked me that. You a cop?”
“Private,” I said.
“You don’t say?”
The driver glanced at my empty sleeve and looked like he would like to talk some more, but I wasn’t in the mood to tell any of my stories about losing the arm. We finally turned through a high iron gate and went along a curving drive through thick woods deep in snow to a house set in a large, snow-covered lawn.
It was a big house, but austere. The simple three-story brick center section was over a hundred and fifty years old. Two white frame wings had been added later, but no later than 1850. My driver had another train to meet, but he’d come back in an hour unless I called earlier. I knocked and waited in the brittle cold and impossible silence of a country twilight.
A short, dark man in a butler’s outfit answered the door. Walter Radford was not at home. I gave my name and asked if I could talk to Mrs. Radford. The butler bowed me into an elegant entry hall and vanished through sliding doors to the left. A fine Federal Period staircase curved upward at the rear of the entry hall. A thin woman came through the sliding doors.
“Mr. Fortune? I’m Gertrude Radford.”
She had the neat white hair, veined hands, and loose skin of her years, but there was a youthfulness about her. It was her eyes: wide, blue, almost innocent eyes. They were the eyes of someone who had faced few hard knocks, and who had never had to doubt anything. She wore a long black silk dress. Her pale face and nervous hands were the only signs that she might be disturbed by what had happened.
“I’d like to talk about Monday, Mrs. Radford? About your brother-in-law?”
“You’re the detective George and Deirdre mentioned,” she said. “I don’t understand what you want. The police assure us that the man will be caught soon. He must be put away.”
“They’ll throw away the key.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Fortune,” she snapped, and frowned. “We are at coffee. You’ll join us for a cup.”
It was a command. I followed her into a dining hall of ornate sideboards, high-backed chairs, and a center table as long as six pool tables. Portraits of grim men from the past hung on the walls, all of them having a vague resemblance to the late Jonathan Radford and to George Ames. There were some fifteen people in the room. One of them was George Ames. They were all drinking coffee.
“How do you like it prepared, Mr. Fortune?” Gertrude Radford said.
The question would have been a surprise except that I was looking at the sideboards. There were percolators of every type; drip pots; filter-paper pots; silex types; espresso pots; one large urn; pots for boiling; and some ways of making coffee I couldn’t even name.
“We each brew our own, Mr. Fortune, in our own way,” Mrs. Radford said. “A family tradition going back over a hundred years. Coffee was the original Radford-Ames business. I myself favor a simple percolator.”