Well, was there? Had there been? Could I have approached Chloe last night? I still wasn’t entiely sure that was what she meant. She could just as easily, women being what they are, have meant she’d expected an approach from me that she would have repulsed. Not that she had wanted it but that she had expected it, and was insulted when it hadn’t been forthcoming.
Now she was at the sink, banging Artie’s dishes around dangerously. And what was there for me to say to her? I tried, “I’m sorry.”
That got no response.
I stood up and moved closer, though not too close. “Chloe,” I said to her back. “I really am sorry.”
Still no response. She seemed to be washing all the dishes in the sink, not just the ones she’d used for breakfast.
“What I did,” I said, “or that is, what I didn’t do, or what I didn’t try to do, it wasn’t because I’m a snob, it really wasn’t. It was because I’m dumb. It was out of ignorance that I did it, or didn’t do it, or didn’t try to do it.”
She turned, soapy halfway to the elbow, and gave me an eye as cold as a caveman’s toenail. “Now,” she said, “you’re laughing at me.”
“Laughing at you? For Pete’s sake, Chloe, I’m trying—”
“You certainly are,” she said. She waggled a sudsy finger at me. “Let me tell you something, Charlie Poole. You’re in no position to take any high moral attitudes, an underworld underling like you.”
“Hey now! Whadaya mean, underworld underling? I’m no—”
“Yes, you are. You ran that bar for the underworld, and you held packages for the underworld, and you helped the underworld get out of paying its taxes.”
“I don’t even know the underworld! My Uncle Al—”
“Don’t talk to me about your Uncle Al.” She’d waggled practically all the suds off her finger by now. “It’s you I’m talking about. You, Charlie Poole. You can’t just say you don’t know, and your Uncle Al. You can’t say, ‘Not me, Chloe, I just work here, I don’t have to take a moral stand, Chloe,’ because that’s Adolf Eichmann talk, that’s what that is, and I don’t think I have to tell you what I think of Adolf Eichmann.”
I was getting mad. Adolf Eichmann! Talk about blowing things out of proportion! “Listen,” I said. “Talk about—”
“I’m done talking,” she said, and turned her back on me again. Splosh went her hands into the water. “Shouldn’t you get going?” she asked, busy with the dishes. “You’ve got to find your friend Mahoney, remember.”
I squinted at her back. “You’re not coming along?”
“I’ve got my own life to live,” she told the sink. “I’m supposed to go up and see my Linda today. Besides, I want to get back to my own place and see if there’s any mail.”
“So,” I said. “You’re not coming along.”
“No. I’m not coming along.”
“Well, then,” I said. “In that case, you’re not coming along.”
She said nothing. Taking her silence to mean she wasn’t coming along, I left the living room and went into the bedroom to get my shirt, which looked as though it had been washed in Brand X.
No. It was too dirty, that’s all. I rooted around and found a clean white shirt of Artie’s. It was too small, of course, but by leaving the collar open and rolling the sleeves up to my elbow I made it fairly presentable. I also found, in the bedroom closet, a black raincoat which must have been too big for Artie because it practically fit me to a T. I saw that it had been made with a removable inner lining, which had been subsequently removed, so maybe that was the explanation; with the lining in, it would fit its owner. Particularly if the owner — Artie — were wearing a suit coat or jacket under it. Sans coat and lining it was Charlie-size.
I stuffed the little pistol in the raincoat pocket, left the larger automatic behind, and went back out to the living room. Chloe was standing at the window now, working away at another cigarette and glowering down at the street. I said, “Well, I’m going.”
“Good-bye.”
So? What did she want from me? I’d already apologized once, that was enough. Besides, that Eichmann line still rankled. “Good-bye,” I said.
I was almost to the door when she said, “Dummy.”
I stopped. “What?”
“You don’t even know if they’re still watching the apartment. You didn’t even look out the window first.”
She was right, I’d forgotten about Trask or Slade, parked by the fire hydrant across the street. But I said, “If they’re still there, I’ll go the back way.”
She shook her head. “They’re not there,” she said, with affected weariness, as though to say she’d had all she could bear of me.
Well, the feeling was mutual. “Thanks a million,” I said. “Good-bye.” I went out and closed the door.
It was true Trask or Slade was gone. Standing at the front door, I could see the fire hydrant across the way, shining in the noon sun. I went down the steps and turned left, toward West Fourth Street. I didn’t look up to see if Chloe was still standing at the living-room window.
I was on my own.
Chapter 21
You’d think the restaurant at Grand Central Terminal would have to be good; look at all the trains parked out front. Well, they’re wrong.
Or maybe it was my fault and not the fault of the restaurant that everything I put in my mouth tasted like sand. I know I was emotionally awash, and there’s nothing like an upset mind to cause an upset stomach.
The upset in my mind involved two very different people: Chloe Shapiro and Patrick Mahoney. I was still mad at Chloe, and yet at the same time last night’s hankering hadn’t left me, and besides that I was uneasy at continuing my odyssey without her, and over all, there was a layer of perplexity because I didn’t really understand what the girl was all about. As to Mahoney, I wanted to find him and I wanted to avoid him, in more or less equal parts. If you remember Volto, the old-time Grape Nuts Martian, whose left arm repelled and whose right arm attracted, you’ll have some idea what Deputy Chief Inspector Patrick Mahoney meant to me.
Well, like a visit to the dentist, the best thing to do about Patrick Mahoney was get him over with. So I paid for my sand, left the restaurant, and went out to the main part of the terminal, where, under a Kodak electronic poster as complicated as a Sally Rand strip-tease, I found a beehive of telephone booths. At the rear of the beehive were the directories I’d come to Grand Central to consult. Eating sand had been secondary, the result of my having redeveloped hunger on the subway trip uptown.
I’d come to Grand Central because it was the first place I thought of that would have telephone books for all the New York City boroughs, and I wanted those telephone books because I had a plan for tracking down my man Mahoney.
Watch:
First I went through the phone books for Mahoney, Patricks, and Mahoney, P’s, and found four in Queens, seven in Brooklyn, three in Manhattan, five in the Bronx. Then, armed with a handful of dimes from the restaurant cashier, I went into one of the booths and began dialing. Each time a man answered I said, “Chief Inspector Mahoney?” and each time a woman answered I said, “Is Inspector Mahoney at Headquarters now?” I got a variety of answers, all of them negative for my purposes and a couple of them pretty comical in their own way, until at last one woman said, “Yes, he is. He’ll be there all day.”
Ah hah. But was this actually my Patrick Mahoney’s household, or merely the household of a relative who would be aware of my Mahoney’s whereabouts? So I said, “Will he be home before six?”