We waited and watched as Mahoney used his phone. From his talk, Touhy was in. Mahoney wanted to know could he stop by the office for a minute. Then he hung up and said, “He’ll be right in.”
Trask and Slade receded toward a door on the far side of the office. “Remember, nephew,” Slade said, and Trask grinned at me, and they both slid out of sight.
Mahoney and I stood facing one another, both of us nervous, both of us silent. Time hung in midair, like a pendulum stuck at one end of its swing.
There was a single sharp rap at the door, and then it opened, and a tall black-haired tough-looking lantern-jawed big-knuckled guy came in, the sort that’s called the Black Irish. A cross between John Wayne and Robert Ryan.
Mahoney started talking before this big fellow was halfway in the door. “Something’s come up, Tony, I’ll have to talk to you later, an unexpected visitor, I’ll get back to you in about half an hour, sorry to call you away like this for no reason at all.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” He waved a big hand, then looked at me for the first time. “Well, Charlie!” he said, and grinned wide in surprise and pleasure. “Fancy seeing you here! You giving the dope straight to the boss these days, us hired hands ain’t good enough for you any more?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out but air.
This big bastard poked me playfully on the upper arm. “That’s okay, Charlie,” he said. “I understand. You don’t have to say nothing. I’ll see you around, okay?”
And he was gone.
I stood there and stared at the door through which he had entered and exited. Behind me I heard Trask and Slade coming back into the room, but I didn’t turn to look at them. I stared at the door and tried to understand what had just happened to me.
In the silent room, the phone rang. Mahoney’s voice said, “Hello?” And then silence again, and then, “Okay, good.” And the sound of the receiver clicking into its cradle, and Mahoney saying to Trask and Slade, “Okay, it’s clear now.”
Their hands were on my upper arms. One of them murmured, “Don’t make no fuss now, nephew.”
Fuss? I couldn’t make a fuss. I was just trying to figure out what had happened.
We were moving, the three of us, along a corridor and down some stairs and out to a blacktop driveway. The black car was there, the famous black car. They had me lie down on the floor in back and they threw a knitted afghan over me that smelled for some strange reason of horse. In multicolored darkness under the afghan, bewitched, bothered and bewildered, I rolled away on the last ride.
Chapter 23
If ever you have a problem, I mean a really knotty problem, a first-class puzzler, like the square root of two, for instance, or who really killed Farmer Agricola and why, allow me to recommend a long ride in the country, lying on the floor behind the front seat of an automobile, covered by a varicolored knitted afghan smelling pleasantly of horse.
The trip took well over an hour, most of it happily on good roads. At first, I admit, I gave myself up to a stunned absence of mental processes, a blank mindlessness of shock, but slowly I began to thaw down from that frozen plateau and I began to get in there and do some no-holds-barred thinking.
There was so much to think about. Who had killed Farmer Agricola, and why, and how? Who had been informing to the police, and why? Why had Tough Tony Touhy identified me as the informant?
I poked at it the way I occasionally poke at the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times. You struggle and struggle, trying to get just a couple good long words to give you a kind of a grip on the problem, and from there on with any luck at all you can get half or two-thirds of the puzzle lickety-split. Lying there under the afghan I poked and pried at everything I knew, everything that had happened, everything I understood and everything I failed to understand. There was a lot of that last-mentioned stuff.
I also did a lot of thinking about the people involved, all the people I’d come up against the last three days. My Uncle Al, and Farmer Agricola and his daughter Miss Althea, and Mr. Gross, and Inspector Mahoney, and Tough Tony Touhy, and Trask and Slade. And the ones who’d helped me, willingly or not: Artie Dexter and Chloe and Patrolman Ziccatta. I wondered, for instance, where Artie and Miss Althea were by now. And I wondered where Patrolman Ziccatta would get his quick nips on windy nights from now on, and would it ever occur to him to start an official inquiry into my disappearance, and I shook my head because I supposed it never would, not with his habit of keeping his nose out of other people’s business. And I wondered why Tough Tony Touhy had lied, and why and how and by whom Farmer Agricola had been killed, and who had really passed the information on to the police.
I kept coming back, time and time again, to the killing of Farmer Agricola. It seemed to me that had to be connected with my own plight some way, that his having been killed in the short interval between his talking to Trask and Slade about me and my own arrival at the farm was too pat for coincidence. But where was the connection, where did it connect, that was the problem.
Lying there in multihued darkness, like being inside a cathedral in late afternoon under the stained-glass windows, lying there under the afghan, breathing the smells of afghan and horse, I kept chewing it, chewing it, chewing it. Was it possible Farmer Agricola had been killed by the same person who was really giving information to Tough Tony Touhy? Could the connection between the killing and my plight be quite that specific?
What if... What if Agricola hadn’t been entirely satisfied that I was the squealer? Yes, and what if he’d done some additional investigating, and he’d discovered that I was not, in fact, the squealer? And what if he’d been about to call off the hunt for me and redirect his killers, Trask and Slade, at the real squealer? Wouldn’t the squealer, if he knew about it, kill Agricola in self-defense? Of course he would.
Except, how could he possibly have known? Or, knowing, how could he possibly have gotten there and committed the crime? At the time Trask and Slade left him he apparently still believed I was the squealer, and it was less than half an hour later than I found him murdered. In the interim, I didn’t see how anyone could have come to the farm without having been seen by me. And the three servants in the house, Clarence and Tim and Ruby, alibied one another.
Unless... Now, what if, what if... What if the killer was the killers? What if Trask and Slade were the ones themselves? Agricola had begun to suspect I wasn’t the squealer, so he told them to lay off me while he did some more investigating. So they killed him and then went on hunting me just the same in order to cover themselves. The bodyguard at the Agricola farm, Clarence, had told me Agricola was still alive after Trask and Slade left, but one or both of them could have snuck back into the house, followed Agricola upstairs, and stuck the knife into him, using the knife instead of their more-accustomed guns because a gun might have been heard by the others in the house.
Scrunched down on the floor, feeling the road vibration all over me like one of those agitator beds in the new hotels, I thought about that possibility, and the more I thought about it the less I liked it. It would explain the knotty problem of how Agricola had been killed, of course, but for the rest of it, it didn’t make sense. Trask and Slade were hardly squealers in the first place, and besides that they wouldn’t kill Agricola just for not suspecting me so much any more. They’d play a waiting game, see how things were going.
No, it wasn’t Trask and Slade. Somebody else, somebody else.
I ran through more theories, possibilities, suggestions, but none of them were any good. I tried coming at the problem through Tough Tony Touhy, and I tried coming at it through the reason for killing Farmer Agricola, and I kept on getting nowhere. I also returned time after time to the how of the killing of Farmer Agricola, how someone had managed to get there and kill him between Trask and Slade’s departure and my arrival, which in many ways was the most baffling part of all.