She was almost certain what he would say.
He would say that she had done it on purpose, to get him to marry her. And he would refuse.
Fran returned to the bed and sat down again, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. No, now no, she couldn’t think about such things, she had to put it out of her mind. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant after all, maybe everything would be all right given enough time; things always worked out, didn’t they?
At five-thirty, the limping man walked to O’Farrell Street and entered a small coffee shop. He sat in an ersatz-leather booth at the rear. A chubby waitress with eyes like slick black buttons took his order: a fried ham sandwich and coffee, no cream.
When the coffee came, the limping man sat watching the steam spiral upward in thin wisps. At the booth across the aisle from him, a young man in a bright blue blazer was talking in low tones to a pretty flame-haired girl. They were holding hands under the table, their knees pressed tightly together. The girl laughed loudly and happily at something the young man said, showing even white teeth and the long slender column of her throat.
Traffic noises filtered in from the street outside in a regular, almost monotonous, rhythm. The limping man lifted his coffee cup, wondering: How am I going to do it this time?
The first one—Blue, in Evanston—had taken the cleverest planning thus far. Blue always went to the Urban Betterment League meeting on Thursday nights, the limping man had discovered; and invariably, he parked his car at the rear of the lot adjacent to the Elks Club, where the meetings were held. The lot was shadowed, unattended during that time, and the limping man had been able to slip quietly and unobtrusively through the parked cars to Blue’s new Camaro.
He had waited there for some time, to make sure the lot was completely deserted; then, using a small pipe wrench, he had reached beneath the car and removed the drain plug at the bottom of the gas tank. The resultant flood of gasoline—only six or seven gallons—had been greatly absorbed by the dry, gravelly surface of the lot; the spreading stain was hidden almost completely beneath the Camaro and in the deep shadows. When only a few drops remained in the tank, he had replaced the drain plug. Then, with a Phillips screwdriver, he had extricated the left rear taillight and carefully broken the stop-light bulb with the blade of the screwdriver, to expose the filaments. From his pocket, he had taken a three-foot length of lamp cord, slit on both ends, and, with an alligator clip, attached one side of one end of the cord to the positive portion of the filament in the broken bulb. Using another alligator clip, he had grounded the second side of the cord to the metal taillight frame, first having bent it slightly inward so as to take the clip. The opposite ends of the cord had been stripped bare, and he taped those ends together with electrician’s plastic tape, so that the exposed wire tips almost, but not quite, touched—like a spark gap. Then he had removed the gas cap and inserted the cord inside the tank until the wire tips touched bottom, lifted them perhaps a half-inch above it, and then taped the cord in that position with more of the electrician’s tape. The entire operation had taken less than ten minutes.
He had been waiting on a side street when Blue and the others came out of the Urban Betterment League meeting. As was usually the case when a man got into his car, simultaneous with starting it, Blue had depressed the brake pedal. The resultant spark from the stop-light filament to the exposed ends of the cord had ignited the fumes in the tank—and the gasoline puddled under the car—and the ensuing explosion had eliminated all traces of the rigging.
The limping man smiled thinly, thinking about the brilliant orange flash which had illuminated the Illinois sky that night, and the booming concussion of the blast. The chubby waitress brought his fried ham sandwich and departed silently. He chewed thoughtfully on the sandwich, his eyes bright and clear as he visualized the violence.
Gray and Red had offered no real challenge. Gray, for example, had been in the habit of working late at his trucking concern three nights each week. The limping man simply waited in the shadows of the garage, having gained entrance through a rear window with a simple spring catch, until Gray made his usual cursory night check of the premises before leaving. Then he had slipped up behind him and wielded a sand-filled stocking. Propping the unconscious Gray against the concrete wall in front of one of the trucks, he had then released the vehicle’s hand brake; he had already begun climbing through the rear window again when the loud, satisfying sound of truck and Gray and wall fusing into one reached his ears.
Red had kept his private plane at a small airport on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in a hangar which a child could have gained access to. The small cold-expander bomb, which had taken the limping man no time at all to construct in his motel room, had fit neatly out of sight beneath one of the wings. When Red had taken the plane up to a certain altitude, when a pre-set atmospheric temperature had been reached, the bomb—and the aircraft—had exploded. There had been, of course, no trace of the small device in the subsequent wreckage.
The limping man finished his sandwich and coffee. Now at hand was the problem of Yellow. How would he do it this time? Perhaps the solution lay with Yellow himself. Yes, there was one particular habit which Yellow had, one that he had noted during the careful surveillance he had made on his previous trip to California. There was little, if any, risk involved if he proceeded along that particular line. Yes. Yes, of course.
Hurriedly, he dabbed at his mouth with a cloth napkin and stepped out of the booth. The man in the blue blazer and the flame-haired girl were still holding hands beneath the table in the booth opposite, eyes smiling warmly at one another.
A slut and her pimp, the limping man thought. He walked quickly to the cash register.
5
The doorbell rang at seven-fifty.
Conscious of a painful tightness in his chest, as if some unknown pressure was slowly constricting his lungs, Steve Kilduff opened the door. The lean, solemn man who stood there said, “Hello, Steve,” without expression.
Kilduff nodded wordlessly, and the two men studied each other for a long moment, appraising the effect of the passage of eight years’ time. Kilduff thought: He’s changed, he’s really changed, you can see it in his eyes. He moved aside, swinging the door open wider. Jim Conradin came in past him, walking stiffly, hands held in regimental immobility at his sides. Kilduff closed the door and led the way into the living room, turning when he reached the center to look again at the man who had been his closest friend in the Air Force.
Conradin asked, “Drexel?”
“He’s not here yet.”
“It’s almost eight.”
“Yes.”
Conradin walked in his stiff way to the sofa and sat down slowly, like an old man seating himself on a park bench. Without looking up, he said, “Have you got a drink, Steve?” and Kilduff realized for the first time that Conradin was drunk. His gaunt-cheeked face was flushed, and there was a vague filminess to his eyes; the effort he was making to appear natural was obvious now, and he was holding himself in check by sheer will.
I am not my brother’s keeper, Kilduff thought. He said, “Brandy all right?”
“Fine.”
Kilduff took a bottle of Napoleon brandy from the credenza and poured a drink into a small snifter. He carried the glass to Conradin, who accepted it with a steady hand, raising it to his lips, drinking with measured, care, his eyes almost closed, trying to bring it off oh-so-casually, and failing, failing badly. Kilduff looked away.
“Well,” Conradin said, “some funny thing, isn’t it, Steve?”