Then he thought of the suburbs. If a rich man was going to buy a house somewhere right near New York, would he say he was going to New York to buy a house? Yes, he would. And if a man wanted to be handy to New York but also wanted privacy the way Charles F. Wells wanted privacy, would he most likely try to live outside the city limits? Yes, he would.
Stubbs was relieved. He’d thought it out by himself, he’d made his brain go to work after all and remember important things and make important decisions. He put out his latest cigarette and got off the bed, smiling, and left the hotel and walked across town to Grand Central again.
There was a phone book for Nassau County, and the map in the front of the phone book showed that Nassau County was on Long Island, just beyond Brooklyn and Queens. And in the W section there was a listing for “Wells, Chas. F.” Stubbs knew it was the man. He knew without a doubt that this time he’d found the right man. He copied the address and phone number down, and closed the phone book.
Walking across the terminal, he looked ahead and saw Parker. He stopped in his tracks, not believing it, and then other people got in the way and he wasn’t really sure it had been Parker he’d seen. Maybe his brain was playing tricks on him. Nevertheless, he turned around and went off in another direction.
Chapter 6
AT HUNTINGTON, twenty miles from the city line, Stubbs stopped and asked directions again. He asked in a bar, because there’d be more people there to work out the right answer among them, and they all co-operated, the way he’d expected, contradicting each other and suggesting alternate routes and finally hammering out a course for him to follow. He thanked them and finished the beer he’d bought just as a token, and went back out to the car.
He followed the directions.
He stayed on 25A through Huntington and out the other side and kept going till he saw the Huntington Crescent Golf Course. After that, he made the left where they’d told him, and two turns later he was on Reardon Road, near the Sound, though he couldn’t see any water. He stayed on Reardon Road, a winding blacktop road with trees surrounding it on either side and occasional breaks where a narrower winding blacktop road went off to one side or the other. At each break he slowed down, till at last he saw what he wanted. There was a rural delivery mailbox on a wooden post by the road, with stone gate-pillars behind it and the usual narrow winding blacktop road going in among the trees. This time on the mailbox it said, “Charles F. Wells”.
Stubbs turned the Lincoln slowly and drove through the stone gateposts. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and reached out and removed the automatic from the glove compartment. He put in on the seat, where he could reach it fast.
The blacktop road was barely two car-widths, and it wandered and curved back and forth amid the trees. They were thin-trunked trees, young, with the branches starting high up and with not too much underbrush between them. Stubbs rolled along in the Lincoln at a bare ten miles an hour, peering ahead around the curves to see the house, and when he saw it he hit the brake and stopped.
It was stone, and old. Stubbs could just barely see it ahead and to the right, through the tree trunks. He backed up just a little, till the house was out of sight, and then he turned the engine off. There was no place to pull off the road, so he just left the car where it was and climbed out.
It was nearly evening, seven-thirty or so, and the space between the trees were getting dimmer. Stubbs moved away from the car and the road, going in among the trees, moving at an angle towards the house. Soon he could see it again, and then he crouched and moved more slowly.
The house was big, two storeys high and rambling. There was a screen-enclosed wooden porch around the first floor and the rest was stone. To the right of the house, the blacktop road ended at a three-car garage, stone like the house and with white doors.
A slate walk joined a small side door in the garage and the side of the house, with an arched roof over the walk, supported by rough unpainted wooden posts. The garage had a second storey, with windows in it, but they were dark, without curtains or shades. In the house, two windows on the ground floor showed light, and so did one window upstairs.
Stubbs crept forward forwards the house until he came to the edge of the trees, where the blacktop widened in front of the house before coming to a stop at the garage. He could try to cross the bare blacktopped area here, or he could go to the right through the trees and around the garage, to come at the house from the back. That would probably be better.
He remembered how easily Parker and the other one had turned the tables on him, and he didn’t want it to happen again. If Wells wasn’t the one and it was Courtney, it wouldn’t be too bad; but if Wells was the one and he turned the tables on Stubbs it would be the end.
He made his decision, and started to the right. He’d taken two steps when a voice behind him said, “That’s far enough.” He stopped. In that second, he cursed himself, cursed the brain that had gone rotten and prevented him from doing what he had to do, that made him such a feeble hunter and such easy prey.
“Drop the gun,” said the voice, “and turn slowly around.”
There was nothing else to do. He hoped it was Courtney, and that Wells was in the clear. He dropped the gun and turned around, and saw Wells standing at the edge of the blacktop. The man had been in among the trees even before Stubbs had got there, and had followed him when he left the car. It was still getting darker, but not dark enough to prevent a good shot, and in the hand not holding the gun Wells carried a flashlight.
Wells looked at him, frowning, and then smiled. “The chauffeur,” he said. “I’d forgotten about you.”
Stubbs licked his lips, wanting to ask the question but afraid it had already been answered.
“You shouldn’t have phoned,” Wells went on. “That put me on my guard, you know.”
Stubbs shook his head, and was about to say he hadn’t phoned, but just then Wells shot him. Something heavy, feeling much larger than a bullet, hit him in the chest, knocking him backwards. His mouth was still open. He still wanted to tell Wells that a mistake had been made, that he hadn’t phoned, but he couldn’t manage to exhale. No air came out, he couldn’t make a sound.
He felt himself falling. It was getting darker much more rapidly all of a sudden. Then he saw Wells’s face, and Wells was looking past him, at something behind him. There was on Wells’s face an expression of astonishment and terror. Stubbs, falling forward towards the blacktop and the spreading blackness, wondered dully why Wells looked so astonished and so terrified.
But he never found out.
PART FOUR
Chapter 1
PARKER got back into the Ford, and drove away from the farmhouse. He turned the car towards New Brunswick, northwestward. First things first.
Stubbs was gone. Parker had to find him again before he got himself killed and gave the cook back in Nebraska a reason to blow the whistle, but first things came first. Riding in the Ford with Parker was thirty thousand dollars in green paper, and until he’d found a safe place for that boodle he couldn’t afford to do anything else.
He had to follow the plan, with or without Stubbs.
But as he drove along he was nagged by a feeling of incompletion. There was a spiel worked out in his head that he’d been planning to give to Stubbs: “You come with me on this one side trip. It’ll take a couple of days. Then we take a plane to Nebraska and square things with the cook, and after that I’ll give you some help finding the man you want.”
The last part was the only lie, but it was a necessary lie because it would give Stubbs a reason for going along with no fuss. The whole spiel was good and simple and direct, and it would have gone down with no trouble at all.