Ivey glanced at me. “I see. You understand, Martin, that you asked for me to listen to you, that you are doing this voluntarily, that it will be used against you.”
“I understand,” Nick said.
“I’ll get it taken down,” Ivey said, “and you can sign it.”
Nick said nothing for a few seconds. When he raised his head, I, not Ivey, received his attention.
“Well, Ed?”
“Well, what?”
“You haven’t said anything. Just stood there.”
“He no longer has an interest in the case,” Ivey said. “How come you decided to confess, Martin?”
“I remember now,” Nick said, “It came back — like in a dream.”
“And the house slippers?”
“Weak alibi,” Nick said dully.
“Nick,” I said, “you’re a liar.”
Ivey said sharply, “Lay off him, Rivers.”
I paid no attention to Ivey. “Why, Nick?”
“The lieutenant has given you some good advice,” Nick said, and before I could say anything more, Ivey added, “I sure as hell have. Not another peep out of you. Outside, Rivers, and I don’t mean ninety seconds from now.”
He had signaled the hovering jailer. The cell door was opened. Ivey motioned me out and the jailer crowded me down the corridor between the cells.
I came out on the street under a full head of steam. Okay, fiend, I thought, chalk up another for yourself.
You created this job for me; I didn’t want it.
You’ve put me in deeper than ever. Before this, I needed only enough to build reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury, enough to free Nick. That was my job. That was more than plenty. The police could have had the rest of it, once I’d got enough to free Nick.
Now my job is different. You’ve made it a lot bigger, and I don’t like that. You’ve taken away what choice I had. You’ve burned all my bridges behind me and given me only one end result that I’ll have to reach, if I’m ever to live with myself in the future.
I’ll have to find you, fiend, to learn how and why you can reach out invisibly and make a man lie away the tattered remnants of the wreckage of his life.
In a busy downtown drugstore on Franklin Street, I pushed into a phone booth and called Tillie Rollo.
“Yes?” she said, in her softly modulated voice.
“Ed Rivers. Anything on our friend?”
“Not yet. Have you talked with the man downtown?”
“I just came from there,” I said. “They can’t identify our friend.”
“Did the man ask any questions about me?”
“No,” I said. “I’m keeping my end of our bargain.”
“And my appreciation,” she said. “I’ll do what I can for you.”
“You’d better do your best, or the man may be asking you a lot of questions.”
“I’m not accustomed to receiving threats...”
“And I don’t make a practice of handing them out,” I said. “I’m merely telling you the facts of life. My back is against a wall and I don’t like the feel of it.”
“I’ll keep you posted,” she said, and the line went dead.
I left the drugstore and went to a tavern just off Franklin to grab a bite of lunch.
I was finishing the Cuban sandwich and beer when a midday newscast from the radio behind the bar came cutting at me through the babble of talk and rattle of glasses.
The newscaster elaborated and drew out the gory details. The gist of it was that the police had wrapped up the triple murder which had rocked Tampa. Nick Martin had confessed.
The same voice was bleating from a similar plastic box in Helen Martin’s room.
I threw a bill on the bar, slid off the stool, and elbowed my way to the phone booth in front.
I closed the booth, dropped a coin in the slot, and dialed.
The phone at the far end rang.
The little fan inside the booth whirred.
Sweat began squeezing out of my forehead, like brain fluid, under the sudden pressure inside my head.
Again and again her phone was ringing.
Pay phone right outside her door.
House of working people. It was understandable that workdays might often empty the house.
But she’d said she would be there. She wasn’t out momentarily, to buy groceries or anything like that. Not at this moment. She’d mentioned that she was catching the newscasts, for what little hope one of them might offer. She wouldn’t have missed the important midday newscast.
Her phone kept screaming its fool head off, blindly, purposelessly.
Remembering her discouragement of last night, I had a sickening certainty — her number not only doesn’t answer; it’s not going to answer.
Chapter 12
No man is born to be naturally unlucky or lucky. It depends on the turn of mind. If a man finds solace in thinking of himself as cursed by continual bad luck, he can prove it to himself by thinking on and magnifying the strokes of tough luck he’s suffered. Subconscious forces will then determine action and choice favorable to ill luck. The contrary is equally true of the individual who cannot doubt his luck.
I’ve always figured that luck, good and bad, just about evens out.
Right then I was very lucky.
I found a cab, at the hack stand outside the tavern.
It was driven by a co-operative, dark young man of Latin extraction. When I flashed the photostat of my license and assured him I would take full responsibility, he welcomed the diversion from boredom so much his pencil-thin mustache twitched.
He took me out Florida Avenue with an absolute disregard of traffic laws, life, or property.
He drew rein in front of the old rooming house, the cab pitching as he locked the brakes. I left a five-dollar bill in the cab and went into the house.
Up from the gloomy, musty, cooler-than-outside lower hall.
I caught the first whiffs of the pungent smell when I reached her apartment door.
I opened the door and left it that way. I could hear the pet cocks of the gas stove and space heater hissing.
She’d closed the windows tightly. The sliding portion of the big bay window was stuck. I picked up a chair and smashed it.
Wheeling, I opened a second window, which overlooked the alley at the side of the house.
Another three or four seconds and I had the gas shut off.
Then I turned to Helen. She lay on the old brass bedstead in the small bedroom. One arm dangled from the edge of the bed. The other rested at her side. There was a creeping grayness in her face. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.
I took hold of the head of the bed and swung it so that her face was in the stream of fresh air coming through the smashed window.
There was a small bottle of spirits of ammonia in the bathroom. I used that, plus cold compresses, and chaffed her wrists.
A bubbly moan came from her. I gave her another strong whiff of the ammonia. Her eyes opened. The pupils were dilated, blank. Then they began to focus. She moaned again. A spasm started in her stomach and shook her body.
She murmured something I couldn’t understand. I went into the kitchen, covered the bottom of a glass with ammonia and water. I gave her that, a few drops at a time. She was unresisting, as if she didn’t realize what she was doing.
Then her faltering functions began to mesh, to operate. She turned on her side, held her head, and gasped, “What a terrific headache!”
“Lie still and gulp that fresh air,” I said. “I’ll get some coffee going.”
I made coffee and looked in the bathroom for aspirin. None was there. On a hunch, I searched the purse in the bedroom. Amid her lipstick, wallet, keys, compact, was a small tin of aspirin. I gave her three of them with steaming black coffee.
Later, she sat on the edge of her bed. Her elbows were on her knees. Her knuckles pressed her temples. The thick, silver-stranded auburn hair fell about her face. A faint touch of color was beginning to stain her cheeks, but she still looked plenty haggard.