“Tap the line and ask them to stall?”
“Nobody can stall long enough for a dial call to be traced. You know better than that, Johnny. It only works on television. Soon as he hangs up the connection is broken and can’t be traced. And it’s a half-day job to trace an open connection. The only chance is that routine of leave your number and we’ll call back, and I somehow have the feeling that wouldn’t work at all.”
“He was looking for a station wagon? What does that mean?”
“Damned if I know. More room. When you’re after bulky stuff, furs, clothing, liquor, a panel delivery makes more sense.”
He looked at me with an odd expression. “Do you have the same funny feeling I have, Fenn? Do you have the feeling we’re going to be outsmarted?”
“We better not be.”
“And we both know where he must have made his Pittsburgh friend.”
“I was thinking of how we could check that over. I can’t see trying to do it over the phone. I think you’re going on a little trip to Harpersburg. I’ll clear it with the Chief.”
Larry Brint listened quietly as I gave him the whole story.
“Under normal conditions,” he said, “I wouldn’t let loose of any man on something this hazy. He’d have to do it on his own time, and even then I might not want to clear it with Hudson. But the pressure is on me to roust him on his way. I’ve bucked it and I’ll keep bucking it, but I just don’t like to think of the mess there’d be if something gets pulled here, and he’s in on it, and somebody gets hurt. Hooper can go up there tomorrow. I’ll talk to Boo Hudson on the phone. Tell him to look hard at recent releases, going back not more than three or four months, as a guess. And I have the hunch he should look for a loner, not anybody out of organized crime, because everybody knows this is a hands-off town.”
I set it up with Johnny, and I arrived home a little after six. The dark blue station wagon was parked on the grass beside my garage, doing the grass no good. I got out of my car and looked at it. The tread marks on the soft grass were sharply defined. I squatted and looked at the tires. He had new tires all around, heavy duty nylons with one of
those all weather treads which are slightly noisy on smooth roads, but are good in mud and snow.
I looked in at the mileage. Fourteen thousand. I opened the door and checked the pedal wear, and guessed they’d turned it back about ten thousand.
“Like it?” McAran said, startling me. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.
“Yours?”
“Bought it today.”
“Nice-looking car, Dwight.”
There had been a sudden change in him. He looked amused, slightly wary, completely alert.
“Needs tuning. Runs a little rough.”
“New tires.”
“All around. Had them put on today.”
“Doesn’t leave you much money, does it?”
“Enough for a little while. I broke a law today, Fenn. After I bought the tires I was riding along and I suddenly realized my license ran out a long, long time ago. And that’s the first time I gave it a thought. So I went over and took a test and got a nice new one, all in order. We law-abiding citizens have to do just what the law calls for. We don’t like to take chances.”
“I’m glad you remembered it. How about insurance?”
“Do I need any?”
“Next year it will be compulsory.”
“But this is this year. I’ll be careful.”
“You’ve been very careful, ever since they let you out.”
“I’m a changed man. I thought you’d noticed.”
“Changed? I notice everything. Like the act with the Perkins girl. I’m astonished you haven’t hustled her into bed. It would be so easy. She’d have to be convinced it was therapy. Maybe you just don’t want any complications right now. Maybe somebody gave you orders to stay away from silly little broads.”
“Nobody gives me orders, brother-in-law. You’ve got a cop walk and a cop mouth and a long, pointed cop nose.”
“We can identify each other a quarter-mile away, McAran. You know what I am and I know what you are.”
“Right now maybe you want to try your luck,” he said. I watched the small changes in the way he stood, the planting of feet, lift of shoulders, lowering of chin. I should have been alarmed, but he suddenly looked ridiculous. I laughed
at him. His face turned a dull red which made the notched scars in his brows look whiter. “We in a school yard?” I asked him. “A hillbilly picnic, maybe? You can whip lots of people, McAran. Mildred, Meg, Davie Morissa, Cathie Perkins. You could probably whip me, but I’ll give you no chance. None. Come at me, boy, and I’ll backpedal fast, and I’ll be lifting out the Special, and I’ll blow your knee into a sack of pebbles and kick your mouth sideways as you go down.”
“Small-time cop,” he said in a soft, sighing, dangerous voice.
“With nothing to prove about myself, one way or the other.” I smiled at him and walked by him into the house. Meg wanted to know why I was grinning like a fool. I told her I’d been comparing muscles with her brother and learned I had some he’d never heard of. I said I had admired the twenty-three-hundred-dollar automobile, and we’d talk about it later on. I went into the living room, inhabited by Lulu, Judy, Bobby and the Three Stooges. After a few minutes of flying pies, Meg called the kids to dinner. It was a new pattern for us, to feed them earlier and separately. It was easier than having the five of us at the table at once. That made too much tension for everyone.
Dwight came in and stretched out on the couch without glancing at me. We watched the evening news and weather. When it was over, an underwater adventure thing came on. He seemed to be watching it, so I didn’t turn it off. I tried reading a weekly news magazine. It didn’t mean very much to me. I don’t think they mean very much to anybody any more. I suppose we should be interested. We’re in these towns and cities, all of us, and an impacted wisdom tooth or an increase in the water rates, or three days of steady rain means more than the Congo. Maybe it was always that way. But now there’s so much communication, so many people trying to tell you about the things that are shaking the earth, and behind it all is the chance of somebody suddenly turning you into nothing at all, by accident or on purpose. If you are in a room where eight or ten people are talking at you, all at once, telling you eight or ten terrible things, you stop listening to all of them and start thinking about when you’ll get the haircut you’ve been needing for a week. It used to bother me, looking at Huntley and Brinkley and just watching their mouths moving and not
hearing anything, as if I had the sound off, and then I found out it was that way with a lot of people. Everybody is telling us so much, you just hear the funny stuff.
I was trying to read about aid to education, because I thought I should know about it. But my eye was moving across the words, and I could have been holding the magazine upside down. In the top layer of my mind I was wondering what McAran was planning. I could hear his tone of voice in the car on the way back from Harpersburg. “Brook City took something away from me. I want it back.”
And on the next layer of consciousness was the problem of how best to beef up the midnight shift with three men out with a virus. And what to do about three current files that were bogged down because the legwork wasn’t producing anything new.
Meg called us to dinner. The kids took over the television for their final half-hour before bed. Meg continued her forlorn effort to make mealtime festive. I tried to help her. The unyielding presence of McAran made it like trying to play a banjo in a crypt. That was the biggest single change in him, that almost total withdrawal.
Near the end of the meal, as Meg was telling me about one of our neighbors deciding to move to Arizona to try his luck there, McAran dropped his fork onto his plate and said, “The kid can have his room back Thursday. I’ll be pulling out about then. Let me see you cry real tears, Hillyer.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“People on probation, people on parole, they have to say please can I go, sir. I don’t. I went the route. You keep forgetting that.”
“I haven’t forgotten it for a minute. It was a polite question. Brotherly interest. Somebody says they’re leaving. You say where are you going. Everybody does it.”
“Please! Both of you!” Meg said. “Where
are
you going, dear?”
“No secret. I’m going back into the hill country for a while. The weather’s getting mild enough now. Once I get the wagon running right, I’ll pick up some gear and grub and go get lost back there for a while. It’s been a long time since I’ve been by myself. I want to see what it feels like.”
He smiled at her. Both the smile and the little speech had all the plausibility of Confederate money, but Meg looked
delighted. She clapped her hands. “Dwight, I just think that’s a
wonderful
idea.”
“Better than sitting around your house, honey. I won’t eat as good, or sleep so soft, but it’s something I’ve been thinking of doing.”
“You never cared to be alone, the way I always did.”
“You appreciate it, Sis, when you can’t get any of it. Like anything else I guess. I get too lonesome, I’ll find a Saturday night dance and some little girl that might like camping out for a while.”
“Now you be careful, boy, or you’ll get yourself stomped some, or cut up.” The hill cadences had grown stronger as they talked, and it was a kind of talk which closed me out.
“I’ll find me one has nobody close about to fuss. Or maybe I should take the Perkins kid along.”
Meg abruptly ceased smiling. “Don’t do that to her, Dwight. You could talk her into it, probably. But that isn’t what she wants.”
“You so sure what she wants, Sis?”
“She wants to help you find yourself, if you’ll give her the chance.”
“In an all-electric kitchen?” he said, with a nasty grin. “After all those showers for the pretty bride? The whole routine, Sis? Little budget envelopes, take-home pay, diaper service?”
“What’s so horrible about all that?”
“It would be heaven, Sis. The only way they can tell you’re dead is when you stop smiling. I could be as deliriously happy as you are with this hound-face cop.”
“If that’s the way you feel,” Meg said, “don’t see that girl again.”
“Have I been chasing after her? I’m going away, aren’t I? What the hell more do you want?”
After a long silence Meg said, “What will you do after your—vacation, Dwight? How long will you stay up there?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make any good plans until I can unwind. I don’t know how long it will take. I’ve got a few hundred left. I could make it last through the summer if I have to. Then I don’t know. Maybe I’ll come back here. Maybe I’ll move on some other place. I’ll let you know.”
She gave him a fond, warm smile. “I’m happy about it, Dwight. I was afraid you were—too bitter about everything, and you’d keep on brooding until you—got into trouble.”
He stood up. “They gave me the dirty end of the stick. But that’s over. If I stick around here, they might jump me again. And I know it’s been hard on you too, Fenn. If it’ll take some pressure off you downtown, why don’t you just tell them you threw me the hell out.”
He went to his room. I stared down into my coffee cup and slowly shook my head. “How stupid does he think we are?” I looked over at Meg and saw the luminous joy fading.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I guess it means he’ll never make it as an actor, honey.”
She looked at me with an expression too close to hate. “You won’t give him any kind of a chance. You won’t give him any benefit of the doubt, will you? You don’t want him to have a chance! You have to be so hard and cold about everything, don’t you?”
“You aren’t being very fair about—”
“He’s trying to do the best thing—”
“What best thing, with whose money? Can’t you see he hasn’t had a single normal reaction to anything since he got out? Can’t you see he’s been playing a part since he got out? Can’t you see how careful he’s been? He doesn’t act like a man just released after five years in prison. He acts like a man holed up.”
“But now he’s—”
“He’s got word from somebody, so now he’s through waiting. He’s on the move.”
She looked pleadingly at me. “Can’t we trust him a little? Can you do that much for me?”
“I’d like to know just what he—”
“But if he’s trying to straighten himself out, it isn’t fair to have you—doing things like talking to that girl.”
“When I think of her, I think of her as poor Cathie. There’s a sort of inevitability about it, Meg. Poor Cathie.”
“Fenn, you have to promise me you won’t keep checking up on everything my brother does. There’s something so changed about him it—scares me a little. But I have to believe he wants to stay out of trouble.”
I crossed my fingers, a childish hedge against deceit. “Okay.”
“Your work has made you too suspicious of people, darling.”
“Probably it has.”
She looked content again. “He knows those hills. I miss them sometimes. Could we go camping this summer? Bobby and Judy have never really had a chance to get to love it the way I do. I spent the most miserable years of my life back in the hills, darling, but it wasn’t the fault of the hills.”
“We can try to do that.”
“Golly, I wish we could afford to buy just a little bit of no-good land and put up a shack, and a little garden patch.” She stood up, smiling in a wistful way. “And a yacht and a villa and a peck of diamonds, huh? I’ve got to shoo the animals off to bed. You going back?”
“A little later. Got to straighten out the late shift, steal a few patrolmen, maybe.”
She poured me more coffee, and marched in to break up the gunslinger group.
On Wednesday the memory of my crossed fingers did not make me feel any less guilty when I traced the garage which was working on McAran’s new car. I hit it on the fifth phone call, and they said they would have the work finished by three that afternoon. I sent Rossman out to the Quality Garage at four o’clock and he was back forty minutes later to report. He is a quiet and thorough young man who looks more like a bank clerk or insurance adjuster than a detective. But, unlike Hooper, he has no liking or talent for administration.