He looked at his list. One Charles Wells lived on Central Park West, and the other Charles Wells lived on Fort Washington Avenue. Central Park West was closer, and sounded rich, so he tried that first.
There was a doorman in this building, but he didn’t stop Stubbs or ask him any questions. Stubbs got the apartment number from the mailbox and took the elevator up.
A middle-aged woman answered his knock. She looked severe, and when Stubbs asked her if Charles Wells was home she said, “My husband is at work.”
Stubbs thought about that for a minute, while the woman asked him if he was applying for the chauffeur’s job. “Does this Charles Wells have black hair except grey around the ears and real thick eyebrows?”
The woman looked surprised. “My husband is bald.”
“Been bald long?” Stubbs asked.
“For years. What in the world is this all about?”
“I’m looking for a Charles Wells. But he isn’t the right one.”
Fort Washington Avenue was way uptown, up by the George Washington Bridge. Stubbs found a parking space on 181st Street and walked back to the address. It was a walk-up again, and Charles Wells lived on the third floor.
When Stubbs knocked, the door was opened by a young man in his early twenties. He wore tight black slacks and an orange shirt with the tails tied in a knot over his rib-cage, leaving his midriff bare. His eyes were made up and he had rouge on his cheeks. His hair was far too long, waved, and dyed a rich auburn. He struck a pose in the doorway. “Well, look at you!”
“I’m looking for Charles Wells,” Stubbs said.
“Well, you just come right in, dearie.”
“Are you Charles Wells?”
The boy made a kissing motion. “Come on in, dearie, and we’ll talk about it.”
Stubbs frowned. He remembered this kind of boy, there’d been some in the Party. Not many, but some, and Stubbs had never liked them, because he’d thought they’d give the Party a bad name. Not that it mattered in the long run. But he also remembered that there was only one way to get this flighty type to calm down and make sense, so he reached out and thumped the boy gently on the nose.
The boy’s eyes started to water, and his face squinched up, and he made a sound like a mouse when the trap hits it, only smaller.
“Are you Charles Wells?”
“My nose,” said the boy.
Stubbs held up his fist. “Yes or no.”
“Yes! Yes! Don’t you dare–-“
“All right,” Stubbs said.
He went back downstairs. Four possibilities, and none of them had been the man he wanted, and two and one half of them had been women. He went back to the car and drove to Grand Central Station.
It was impossible to park anywhere around that area, since it was now five-thirty Friday afternoon and the middle of the week’s worst rush hour. Stubbs pushed the Lincoln around in the traffic for a while until he saw a sign that said, “Park”. He turned in at the garage entrance, and got out of the car. A man came up and asked him how long he’d be and Stubbs said just a little while. When the attendant took the car away, Stubbs walked back to Grand Central.
There was a whole rack of phone books, alphabetical and classified. There was Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Nassau County and some other suburbs. Stubbs got out his old envelope and ballpoint pen. He ignored the suburbs and just looked in the books for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
If Charles F. Wells was in New York, he was in New York and not some place nearby.
When he was done with the three phone books, Stubbs had eleven more possibilities.
Chapter 5
IT TOOK all of Saturday and most of Sunday for Stubbs to find out that none of these eleven was the right Charles F. Wells either. He had found a hotel on the west side of Manhattan that looked close enough to the one in Newark to be its twin, and when he got back to his room from the Bronx late Sunday afternoon he didn’t know what he was going to do next. He sat on the bed, because there wasn’t any chair, and smoked cigarette after cigarette and tried to think.
Charles F. Wells lived in New York. But he wasn’t in any of the New York phone books. Did that mean he wasn’t in New York after all? Or merely that he didn’t have a telephone? Or that he had an unlisted number?
If he lived in New York that was supposed to mean that he lived in New York. So the thing to do was to figure that he either had no phone at all or a phone with an unlisted number. And since he was a rich man, then he had a phone with an unlisted number.
Stubbs put out his cigarette and immediately started a new one. All right. This Wells, the one Stubbs wanted, had an unlisted telephone number. That meant Stubbs couldn’t find him in the phone book, which meant that Stubbs would have to find him some other way.
Thinking, struggling for an answer, Stubbs remembered the old days when sometimes a situation like this would come up. You’d go into a city and there was a man you were looking for and you had to find; he was with you or against you or you needed him one way or another. But then there had been the Party, and the local contacts. Always the local contacts, either Party people or sympathizers, and you could go to them and tell the problem to them. They knew the local situation, they had an in here or an in there, and they could find your man for you. But now there wasn’t any Party any more. And anyway this situation didn’t have anything to do with the Party.
Stubbs rubbed his head and remembered the days in the Party, the good times when thoughts slid through his head like they were on wheels, when he knew the questions and the answers. He didn’t know now what he thought of the Party, whether he thought what had happened to him had been worth it or not, because he never really thought of the Party at all but only of people. He remembered faces from that time, and frozen moments of import in strikes, like the moment when the deputy had driven his car over the little girl. That had been good because it had solidified the workers and made the strike as hard as steel, until some damn fool had killed a foreman over a personal grudge, and then predictably the workers had become afraid and the strike had fizzled out.
It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all.
Charles F. Wells. He brought himself back from remembering, angry at himself for losing the straight line again even for just a minute. He had to find Charles F. Wells. Not with the Party, because that was a dead thing now, but by himself.
Except he didn’t know what to do next.
Wells was in New York, that much he knew. How did he know it? Because May told him. How did May know it? Because Wells had talked with her and with the doctor and with the two nurses, and Wells had said that after the bandages came off he was going to go live in New York.
Buy a house in New York.
Stubbs squinted up his face, and stared at the pattern on the bedspread. Was that what May had said? Charles F. Wells was going to go live in New York, go there and buy a house, and he already had a couple of real-estate agents looking around for him. That’s what Charles F. Wells had said, and that’s what May had told Stubbs, and Stubbs had forgotten all of it except the part about New York.
The two weeks in the darkness at the farmhouse had made him forget a lot of things, and this important thing about buying a house was one that he’d forgotten. He thought now of the apartments he’d been to, apartment buildings all over New York, and all that time wasted. One of the people he’d gone to in Brooklyn had lived in a house, and two of the people in Queens, but none of them had lived in the kind of house a rich man would live in. Where in New York would there be the kind of house a rich man would buy and live in?