“Was he wearing a uniform?”
“What kind of uniform?”
“Any kind of uniform.”
“No, he was wearing what kids always wear.”
“Have you seen him in the past day or so?”
“No, not since him and his old man came that first day,” the woman said. “You think I got nothing better to do than check who comes and goes around this neighborhood?”
“Don’t you read the newspapers, lady?”
She made a snorting sound. “If I want rape and murder, I turn on the television.”
“All right, then. As far as you know, the boy’s still in the house.”
“As far as I know.”
“Anybody else?”
“The mother, I guess.”
“Besides her.”
“I couldn’t say,” the woman said. “Listen, what’s going on? You going to arrest somebody?”
“Just routine, lady.”
“Balls to that,” the woman said knowingly. “I just hope there ain’t going to be any shooting.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I left her there and went out of the driveway and started down the hill. There was still no movement at the white house.
When I got to the corner, I turned into the small grocery store there. A clock on the rear wall, above a refrigerated case, said that it was almost three. Eberhardt had told me yesterday that he was working the four-to-midnight swing, and it was a safe assumption that he would have that tour all week; chances were good that he would still be home now.
I stepped up to a small check-out counter in front of a window looking out on Alaska Street. An old guy in a pair of red-and-gray suspenders was sitting on a stool, reading a pocketbook western. He looked up at me with tired eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. “Help you?”
“Have you got a phone here?”
“Pay phone?”
“Any kind of phone.”
“Local call?”
“Police business,” I said.
“Hell,” the old guy said, “whyn’t you say so?” He reached under the counter and brought out a telephone and put it down on the scarred surface. His eyes were not quite so tired now, watching me.
I moved around to where I could look through the window. The Corvair was visible from there, and the gate in the gray-white picket fence. I dialed Eberhardt’s home number, and he answered on the third ring with typical cordiality: “Yeah, what is it?”
“Plenty, Eb,” I said, and I gave it to him fast and sketched out. He did not interrupt. When I was finished, he said, “You think this Hanlon girl is in there alone with the kid?”
“It looks that way, but I can’t be certain.”
“Where are you now?”
“A little grocery store at the bottom of the hill.”
“Can you see the house from there?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure she can’t get out through the rear?”
“Not down that slope, she can’t.”
“And you disabled her car?”
“Two flat rear tires.”
“Okay,” Eberhardt said. “I’ll have a couple of plainclothesmen there in fifteen minutes, and squad cars on stand-by in the area.”
“Are you coming yourself?”
“Twenty minutes from here.”
“No sirens, Eb.”
“Hell no,” he said, and rang off.
I gave the phone back to the old guy. He was sitting there with his mouth hinged open. “Goddamn,” he said. “God-damn!”
I stood at the window and stared up the hill and nothing happened. The old guy kept looking at me with his eyes bright and excited behind the spectacles, and it began to make me nervous. I went outside and leaned against the building, head bowed against the sting of the wind.
Sixteen minutes had passed when the unmarked black Ford sedan came hurtling up Wisconsin, slowed midway in the block, and pulled smoothly and silently to the curb behind Erika’s Valiant. Four men in dark suits got out and came over in front of the grocery. I knew one of them slightly-an inspector named Gilette.
He touched my shoulder in greeting and said, “Anything happen since you called the lieutenant?”
“Nothing, Ray.”
He moved to where he could look up the hill. “Which house is it?” he asked me.
“The big white one at the end.”
“Okay.”
“What now?” one of the other inspectors said. He was young and sandy-haired and grim-jawed.
“We wait for the lieutenant,” Gilette told him.
Eberhardt arrived three minutes later. I was staring down Wisconsin, and I saw his four-year-old Dodge make the turn off 23 rd Street and pass a patrol car that had pulled up there in the event it was needed. He took the Dodge in behind the unmarked sedan and got out and walked over to us with his long legs moving in wide, hard strides.
Eberhardt seemed to have been fashioned of an odd contrast of sharp angles and smooth blunt planes. He had a high, squarely intelligent forehead, a slender bifurcated nose, a perfectly even mouth, a sharply V-pointed chin. His upper torso was thick and blocky, but he had those long legs and the long-fingered angular hands of a musician. His hair, a light brown color made to seem dusty by a salting of gray, was wavy on the sides and straight on top. He was wearing a loose topcoat over a perennial off-the-rack blue suit that was too tight in the shoulders and too baggy in the legs. In a corner of his mouth was another perennial fixture: a short-stemmed, flame-scarred black briar pipe, cold and empty now.
He nodded to me and said grimly, “She still up there?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Gilette took him to the corner and pointed out the house. “Sheffield and I will go up on either side if you want it that way, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah,” Eberhardt said. He looked at the sandy-haired cop. “Go ahead, Sheff, but take it nice and slow.”
“Right.”
I watched Sheffield cross the street and start up the hill on the other side. Eberhardt let him get forty yards along, and then said to Gilette, “Go, Ray.”
Gilette moved out on this side like a guy looking for a particular house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Eberhardt said to the other two inspectors, “When they get up there and in position, the three of us will move. Dan, around to the back door. Jack, you and I right up the stairs in front.”
They nodded in wordless understanding, and the four of us stood there and watched Gilette and Sheffield climbing the hill. There should have been some tension in the cold air, but I could not feel it; maybe it was because the whole thing was out of my hands now, and there was no more pressure.
Sheffield had reached the circle and was starting around the Corvair, and Gilette was nearing the point where the street leveled off, when the blonde suddenly came out of the house holding tightly onto the arm of a small boy.
I stiffened, leaning across Eberhardt’s shoulder, and I could see that the boy was wearing dungarees and a lightweight jacket. He appeared to be unafraid. And then he and Lorraine Hanlon came through the gate in the picket fence and she saw Gilette and Sheffield hurriedly converging on her with their coats thrown back now and their hands resting on the butts of the service revolvers holstered at their belts.
She came to a complete standstill there on the sidewalk. She did not try to run; she made no move at all.
She just stood there like a piece of sculpture, holding on to Gary Martinetti’s arm, until Sheffield reached her and took her hand away.
Eberhardt and the other two inspectors ran up to the top of the hill and through the gate and scattered across the yard. Gilette and Sheffield pulled the blonde and the boy out of the way. Eberhardt kicked open the front door, and he and the cop called Jack went into the house with drawn guns. But by the time I made it up to the circle they had reappeared again, revolvers holstered, to announce that the premises were otherwise empty.
That’s all there was to it.
* * * *
14
Eberhardt said, “We’ll talk to the boy first.”
We were in the house now, in a narrow and musty-smelling hallway just off the kitchen. In the living room, Sheffield and the inspector named Dan were standing watch over Lorraine Hanlon; the third inspector, Jack, was with Gary Martinetti in a rear bedroom, and Ray Gilette was making a systematic search of the house.