Of course, it didn’t work that way. It was now a little after six, and we were caught up in the tail end of the rush hour, and evening was beginning to edge toward us from the east, and Chloe kept getting confused by the signs, and so we managed to be lost more often than not. Still, by fits and starts we approached our target.
We’d been approaching it for an hour and a half, and had attained Sunrise Highway, when, at about seven-thirty, while we stopped for a traffic light, Miss Althea caught us all by surprise — she’d been quiet as a mouse for nearly an hour — and got the car door opened and leaped to the street.
Artie shouted, “Hey!” and leaped out after her.
She was off like a deer across the highway and down the side street. Artie pelted after her, shouting, “Hey! Hoy! Hey!” And there were Chloe and I, just the two of us, with the light turned green in front of us and several drivers turned dangerous behind us. With horns honking away, I said, “You better pull forward. Get over to the side of the road as quick as you can.”
Of course, we were in the farthest left lane of three, so it took us nearly half a mile to get over to where we could pull off the road — in a discount carpet center’s parking area — and try to figure out what to do next.
Chloe gazed worriedly out the rear window. “He won’t know where we are,” she said.
I said, “What if he doesn’t catch her? In fact, what if he does? He can’t drag her screaming and kicking along beside a big highway full of cars.”
Chloe squinted and squinted. “I don’t see him coming,” she said.
“He’ll be along,” I told her.
But he wasn’t. We waited fifteen minutes, and he never showed up. I was feeling pretty impatient anyway, this whole trip taking so blasted long, and sitting there fifteen minutes, in an unmoving automobile and waiting for somebody who continued not to show up, was getting to me.
Finally I said, “He’s not coming back, you know.”
“He’ll be here any minute,” she said, squinting away out the rear window.
I said, “If he was going to get back here, he’d have done it by now. Either he’s chased her so far away he figures there’s no point looking for us here anymore, or she’s managed to get him arrested.”
“Arrested?” She looked worried. “Are we out of the city limits?”
“I don’t know, I think so. Why?”
“Artie has to avoid the city police,” she said, and let it go at that.
I said, “Well, in any case, he wouldn’t expect to find us here any more. He knows I’m in a hurry, I’m trying to protect my life, so he’ll naturally expect us to go on. He knows the address where we’re headed, maybe he’ll meet us there.”
“How will he get there?” she wanted to know.
“How do I know? Maybe he’ll take a cab. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he got there before we do.”
“And what if he isn’t there?” she said.
“Then he’ll meet us back at his place, after I see Mr. Gross.”
“Do you want to try to see Mr. Gross alone?”
“I didn’t count on Artie coming in with me anyway,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want him to risk getting himself killed on my account.”
She stopped squinting out the rear window at last, and looked rather searchingly at me. “Do you mean that, Charlie?” she asked me.
“Well, sure,” I said. It was true; I hadn’t expected Artie would come in with me. I’d assumed he’d wait out in the car, the same as at Uncle Al’s.
“You’re really something, Charlie, you know that?” she said.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “If I had my way, I’d be right back in Canarsie this minute, behind the bar, watching television. This isn’t the life for me, believe me.”
“I know that,” she said. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“We’d better get going,” I said.
She turned her head and looked out the rear window again. “Do you really think so?”
“He’d have been here by now,” I said.
She sighed. “I suppose so.” She faced front. “I hope nothing’s happened to him. He’s an awful sweet guy, you know.”
“I know that,” I said.
“He looks up to you,” she said.
I stared at her. “Artie? Looks up to me?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I thought it was the other way around,” I said.
She laughed. “You don’t know yourself at all, Charlie,” she said. Looking neither to left nor right, she started the Packard rolling forward and angled it out into the traffic.
Chapter 13
Nine o’clock.
There didn’t seem to be any way into Hewlett Bay Park. We’d found the general area an hour ago, and we’d been circling around and around it ever since, always coming back to the same street, a dark street with a barrier halfway across it and a stop sign on it and another sign saying ONE WAY DO NOT ENTER. So far as I could tell, the other side of that barrier was Hewlett Bay Park, but I just couldn’t find the way in.
The fourth or fifth time we came back to that same place, a Cadillac ahead of us drove nonchalantly around the barrier and on down the street. I looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at me and it hit us both at the same time. The barrier and signs were phony; it was just an exclusive town’s cute way to keep tourists and other rabble out.
“Anything a Cadillac can do,” I said, “a Packard can do. Onward.”
“Right,” she said, and around the barrier we went.
This was another world. Head-high hedges surrounded the homes, each of which sprawled in moneyed elegance on an insultingly large plot of land. There were few streetlights, but many of the driveways we passed were lit with blue or amber lights. There were no sidewalks, of course, because who in this area walked? The street names were lettered vertically on green posts set discreetly at each corner, and the intersections were free of vulgar traffic lights. In the ten minutes it took us to find Colonial Road we saw no other moving automobile.
One twenty-two was a house to fit the road; Colonial, with a bit of plantation thrown in. White pillars marched across the front of the house, which was of white clapboard with black shutters. Lit carriage lamps flanked the wide front door, and more lamps of the same style, on poles, were spaced along the curving driveway. There was the normal tall hedge all round, and more lawn than any one house could possibly need. The ground-floor windows were lit, the upstairs windows dark.
I said to Chloe, “Drive on by. Park beyond the next corner.”
There was a streetlight at the intersection, as dim as a cocktail lounge at midnight. We went past it, and Chloe stopped the Packard up close to the hedge in the next pool of darkness.
“If I’m not back in half an hour,” I said, “you better not wait for me. I’ll try to get back to Artie’s place as best I can.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Well, sure. I’m no daredevil.”
The hedge being so close, I had to get out on her side. We stood together a second beside the car, while an odd feeling came over us, or at least over me, and then I said, “I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Please be careful, Charlie,” she said, with a funny kind of emphasis on “please.”
It made me uncomfortable. “I’ll do my best,” I said.
She got back into the car and I walked down to the intersection and through the halo of yellow light there and beyond. It was almost like walking along a country road; the darkness and the high hedges obscured the signs of civilization. There was no sound anywhere but the scuff of my own shoes on the pebbles at the edge of the road. The back of my neck was cold, where the hairs were standing up.
My right hand was in the pocket of Artie’s jacket, holding tight to the little pistol I’d gotten from Tim. The pistol should have made me feel better — safer, more secure, more in control — but it did just the reverse, serving as a cold metal tangible reminder that I was kidding no one but myself. In fact, not even myself.