“Johnny and me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get into this at all. I don’t see why I should have to.” She came closer to him and spoke in a whisper. “One of them came to the house this afternoon. He said he was an insurance agent. He said Johnny had taken out a policy in favor of me and that he had to come around to check up. He asked me if Johnny and I were going to be married. I got suspicious because I’d never heard of insurance agents doing that, and Johnny never said anything about an insurance agent, so I made an excuse and went out into the hall and phoned Johnny...”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “Yeah.”
“So Johnny told me, he said somebody had killed her and I was to keep quiet if anybody asked me questions about us. And then” — she gulped — “somebody else was on the phone, because a man said, ‘That’s enough, Heath.’ ”
“Yeah.”
“So I hung up. I went back and told the insurance agent that he was mistaken and that Johnny was just an old friend and wouldn’t have taken out a policy in my favor. He knew I knew, then, but he went away without saying anything else.” She put her hand on his arm. “Stevie. Joey said there was a cop here tonight.”
“There is.”
“What’s he like? Is he... is he big, with a red face and gray hair?”
“He’s small. No red face.”
“Oh.” She smiled shakily. “Just a coincidence. It’s not my cop.”
“Mine, maybe,” Stevie said.
“What? What did you do?”
“We’ll see,” Stevie said. “We’ll soon see.”
It came sooner than he expected. It came while Marcie was on and Stevie was standing behind the curtain watching her. He was standing behind the curtain and somebody was standing behind him, close behind him so that the voice sounded right in his ear.
“Mr. Jordan?”
Stevie turned around, slowly, casually. “Yeah.”
“Have you a match?”
“A match?” Stevie patted his pockets, one after another. “No, sorry.”
“Well, I guess I don’t need any after all. Look,” the man said.
Stevie kept his eyes rigidly ahead of him.
“Look, Mr. Jordan. I have a whole boxful.”
“Yeah?”
“I got them out of your car a few minutes ago. My name is Higgins.”
Stevie smiled sardonically. “Now you know my name and I know yours, so that’s a dead end.”
“In my profession nothing is a dead end.”
“In the insurance business? Well, tell me about it some time. I’ve got to go on now.”
He raised the curtain and went out. Marcie had sunk into a small exhausted heap, which was her bow.
Stevie led the clapping and told the audience how good Marcie was and how good they were. When he came back, the man in the dinner coat hadn’t moved. He was still holding the box of matches under his arm, casually, as if it was part of his costume.
“You still here?” Stevie said. “Maybe you’d like a cigarette to go with all those matches.”
He hadn’t intended to mention the matches again but the man was staring at him, he had to say something to break the stare.
“You’re the one,” Higgins said. “You were up there last night in your car.”
“Up where?” Stevie said. “What car?”
If the man didn’t have that box from the car he wouldn’t have any evidence at all. Mr. Heath couldn’t identify him. There had been only the light from the dashboard and he’d had his hat pulled down. If it weren’t for the matches...
“Your car,” Higgins said. “A Chevrolet coupé, 1940.”
Stevie edged closer. “So I was up where?”
“On St. Clair Avenue.”
“Doing what?”
Higgins smiled. “That’s my question, Mr. Jordan. I have the answers — to what goes before. I know you were there.”
“I left work and went home,” Stevie said. “I can’t prove it because I live in a boardinghouse and by the time I get in at night the rest of the house is asleep.”
“Except Mrs. McGillicuddy. Mrs. McGillicuddy reported your absence to the police early this morning. She was afraid you’d had an accident. You were gone all night.”
“I was with a dame,” Stevie said. If he could get the matches...
The girls would be coming out in a minute. If he was going to do anything he’d have to do it now. Now.
Higgins didn’t see the fist coming. It caught him on the chin and he fell easily and gracefully like a woman fainting. The box of matches flew from under his arm. The lid fell off and half the paper packets were scattered on the floor.
With a little cry of rage Stevie got down on his knees and began stuffing the packets back into the box. Hurry — the girls — any minute — hurry! He had to jam the rest of them into his pockets, there wasn’t room in the box.
Hurry. He had them all now and Higgins was still unconscious and the girls hadn’t come out yet. He moved quickly towards the alley door. He heard footsteps behind him, the tap of high heels, the scream of a woman, but he was outside now and the door was closed behind him and he had the matches.
He ran down the alley, effortlessly, as if his fear and his ecstasy of triumph had combusted and given his body an engine that drove him along.
He reached his car, parked in the widening of the alley. The car was just the same except that Higgins hadn’t relocked the door, and the engine wouldn’t turn over.
The engine was dead.
“Oh, God,” Stevie said, and the engine inside him died too because the triumph was gone. He hadn’t won after all. Higgins had done something to his car. Maybe Higgins had wanted this to happen, had been waiting for Stevie to give himself away.
He sat there for a minute staring dully In front of him. Then he heard the shrill blast of a police whistle from the Bloor Street end of the alley. He slid from behind the wheel, and the running began again.
The alley was a whole block long. He didn’t look back until he got to the end of it, and had to stop running anyway because of the people walking along Davenport. He looked back only for an instant, and saw nothing but the alley itself unwinding like a gray ribbon, getting thinner and darker until it dissolved into the night.
Nothing else. He had won. Except that he had left the matches in the car he had won.
“Oh, God,” Stevie whispered.
He had to lean against the show window of a store to keep from falling. A grocery store, he always remembered that. He heard someone walk past, stop and come back again. He didn’t look up until a man’s voice said, “Could I trouble you for a match?”
“No,” Stevie said hoarsely. “No. No, you couldn’t! I haven’t got any matches!”
“Well, you don’t need to get tough about it.”
The man walked away. He was wearing a gray suit and his shoulder blades stuck out under it like wings.
A streetcar roared past and stopped at the next corner fifty yards up. Stevie began to run. The conductor saw him running and held the car for him.
Stevie swung aboard.
“How much?”
“A dime. Four tickets for a quarter.”
Stevie brought out the dime. He became aware then that he was in evening clothes and that people were staring at him. The car was not jammed, it was just crowded enough so that he’d have to stand and people would get a good look at him.
He put his hand on the overhead rail and began to read the ads. They would see how engrossed he was in the ads and stop staring at him. They did stop, most of them, but only when the car had paused again to let on somebody newer than Stevie. Six or seven more blocks made Stevie a veteran. He was one of them now, he even had a seat.
All kinds of people were getting seats. An old lady scrambled past a fat girl, and the fat girl moved over and a middle-aged man sat down beside her. Then the fat girl got out and the man was left by himself. You could almost tee the man expand with relief when the girl left, he seemed to grow suddenly and fill more of the seat, even though he was a very thin man. His bones stuck out, his shoulders were sharp underneath the gray coat It was when the car jerked suddenly and the man leaned forward in his seat that Stevie saw the shoulder blades sticking out like wings...