He worked that night, and he worked the thirteenth day except when Parker came to let him out for a while. On the fourteenth day he crawled out on to the ground and rolled over on his back and looked up at the sky. The sun was straight up above him, so it was noon. He lay on his back for a while, smelling the world and looking up at the sky and listening to the small sounds the trees and bushes made in the breeze, and then he got to his feet.
He knew Parker always came in the afternoon some time. He remembered vaguely that Parker and Handy had told him they would let him go soon anyway, but he’d stopped paying attention to what they said. And even if it was just tomorrow when they’d let him out, he didn’t want to wait. He wasn’t going back in that cellar again.
He went around back and into the basement because he was hungry. He ate cold beans out of a can and drank some water, and then he saw the small mirror Parker had brought with the razor and the can of lather. He looked at himself and knew he had to take a chance on staying long enough to shave.
He shaved, and that made him feel better. Then he took the automatic from the card table and went back around to the side of the house, where he threw out his jacket and cap before climbing out himself. He brushed them off as best he could, brushed his trouser legs, put on the jacket and the cap, and walked out to the road. The automatic was out of sight under his jacket, tucked under his belt.
The first thing he wanted to do was see if the car was still there in Newark. He had money in his pockets, and if the car was still there he could go ahead and do what he’d set out to do two weeks ago, before Parker had trapped him. He didn’t want to get even with Parker or blow the whistle on Parker. He wasn’t interested in Parker at all, any more than Parker was interested in him. He just wanted to get away and continue looking for the man who’d killed Dr Adler.
A middle-aged man who said he repaired tractors gave Stubbs a lift into New Brunswick, and from there he took a train to Newark. Once he got to Newark he ran into a problem because he didn’t know where the car was. He remembered some street names from when he’d been trailing Parker away from Skimm’s house, so he took a cab to one intersection he remembered and walked from there.
It looked different in the daytime and pretty soon he got lost. But then he caught sight of a railroad bridge crossing a street down to his left, and he remembered the car had been left at the end of a street by a railroad embankment.
He picked a direction, hoping it was right, and walked along parallel to the tracks, a block away, looking down each cross street he came to. After a while he saw a church on a corner that he vaguely remembered, so he thought he must be on the right track. He kept going past the church, and two blocks later he saw the car, still parked where he’d left it.
He sighed with relief, because he’d thought the police might have towed it away by now. The engine didn’t want to start at first, but after a while it did, and Stubbs carefully turned the Lincoln around in the narrow street.
There were two men left to find, and one of them was supposed to be in New York City. These days he was using the name Wells.
Chapter 2
IN 1946, money was loose in the United States. But from another angle, money was tight. That was the year between the war and the cold war, and at the top level money was tight because the men at the top level expected a reduction in government spending now that the war was over. This would mean a reduction in heavy manufacturing and a general tightening of the belt until the nation had made the adjustment from a war to a peace economy. The men at the top gloomily looked forward to a long hard peace, and money with them was tight.
But at the bottom level, money was loose. The servicemen were getting out, and they were getting theirs. The GI Bill let them go to school or buy a house or just sit around on their duffs for fifty-two weeks. The defence plant workers — who’d been getting theirs all along — now had something to spend it on. Cars were being manufactured again and new housing was springing up everywhere, and rationing and other restrictions were disappearing. So the men at the bottom happily looked forward to a long soft peace, and money with them was loose.
There was this man named Wallerbaugh, C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and he had made a very good living for a number of years by doing the sort of things with stocks that no one is supposed to do. He had a Seat, and his racket was its own respectable front, and no one bothered him. The men at the top ignore the Wallerbaughs for the same reason that a police force retires a graft taker rather than prosecuting him — exposure of dirtiness in a part of the system reflects on the rest of the system. So Wallerbaugh did well, and the only men who could have stopped him ignored him. But in 1946 money at the top was tight, and Wallerbaugh, as usual, had over-extended himself.
Wallerbaugh looked around and saw that money at the bottom was loose. He saw what the money was being spent on, and he thought the situation over, and then he became one of the first of the really big-scale Florida land speculators. He had two-colour brochures made up, and he sent them out by the bale. There are companies that supply mailing lists of any desired kind — people who own foreign cars; people who belong to correspondence schools; people who have subscriptions to a particular magazine; people who have sent for pornography through the mail — and from one of these Wallerbaugh got a list of ex-servicemen who were married and going to college. Thousands of these got the two-colour brochure.
It was a good brochure. It told the ex-serviceman of the unlimited potential of Growing Florida. It told him about the new aeroplane plants, the industrial boom, the fact that Florida was becoming a First-Rate employment market in practically every field. It also told him just how cheaply he could own his own plot of land on Florida’s west coast, and how little more it would cost to build a brand new house on that land. The ex-serviceman could start paying for that lot and house right now, then it would be ready for him when he graduated from college and he and the Missus were ready for the Big Move.
Wallerbaugh took a lot of servicemen. He sold land that was totally inaccessible by car. He sold land that was eight feet under water. He sold land to which he didn’t hold clear title. He sold land that washed back out into the Gulf of Mexico before the ink was dry on the cheque.
The Land Grab was bad in Florida for a while, with the speculators all trying to grab from each other, so in 1947 Wallerbaugh took on a partner, a man named Grantz. Grantz had just served a rap for income tax evasion. He’d lived off the black market during the war, which wasn’t as easy or as profitable as liquor had once been, and he was happy to bring his know-how into the corporation.
The bubble lasted three years. Wallerbaugh had thought it would last for ever, just as the stock game should have lasted for ever, but he was wrong. At the top they could afford to ignore him. But now he was working at the bottom, and at the bottom they couldn’t afford to ignore him. It was government money, passed by the GI Bill through the hands of servicemen and then into Wallerbaugh’s hands, and he was being careless. Grease kept the deal alive for a while, but in 1949 the warrants came out. They arrested Grantz, but Wallerbaugh made it out of the country. His profits were safe in a Swiss bank, and his new home was in Lomas de Zamora, a suburb of Buenos Aires.
But after more than a decade, Wallerbaugh hungered for home again, to be able to move freely in the States once more. Passport and other papers proving him to be Charles F. Wells, retired stockbroker, were expensive to come by but certainly not impossible. But Charles F. Wells had the same face as C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and that face had been plastered all over the newspapers of the nation in 1949. And for all Wallerbaugh knew that face was still featured on the walls of post offices. The face was a problem; it kept him in Lomas de Zamora a while longer.