Time to Murder and Create

Page 10

"I wasn't going to ask."
"What's the story?"
"I'm not sure there is one. I think I saw him a little while ago in Polly's."
"Maybe he's making the rounds."
"Uh-huh. Same rounds I'm making."
"So?"
I shrugged. "Probably nothing. Thanks for the surveillance work, away."
"Do I get a badge?"
"And a decoder ring."
"Neat," she said.
I waited him out. He was definitely paying attention to me. I couldn't tell whether he knew I was taking an interest in him as well. I didn't want to look straight at him.
He could have tagged me from Polly's. I wasn't sure I'd seen him there, just felt I'd noticed him somewhere or other. If he'd picked me up at Polly's, then it wasn't hard to tie him to Beverly Ethridge; she could have set up the date in the first place in order to put a tag on me. But even if he had been at Polly's, that didn't prove anything; he could have picked me up earlier and tailed me there. I hadn't been making myself hard to find. Everybody knew where I lived, and I'd spent the whole day in the neighborhood.
It was probably around nine thirty when I noticed him, maybe closer to ten. It was almost eleven when he packed it in and left. I had decided he was going to leave before I did, and I would have sat there until Billie closed the place if necessary. It didn't take that long, and I hadn't thought it would. The Marlboro man didn't look like the sort who enjoyed biding his time in a Ninth Avenue gin mill, even as congenial a gin mill as Armstrong's. He was too active and western and outdoorsy, and by eleven o'clock he had mounted his horse and ridden off into the sunset.
A few minutes after he left, Trina came over and sat down across from me. She was still on duty, so I couldn't buy her a drink. "I have more to report," she said. "Billie has never seen him before. He hopes he never sees him again, he says, because he does not like to serve alcoholic beverages to men with eyes like that."
"Eyes like what?"
"He did not go into detail. You could probably ask him. What else? Oh, yes. He ordered beer. Two of them, in about as many hours. Wurzburger dark, if you care."
"Not awfully."
"He also said-"
"Shit."
"Billie rarely says 'shit.' He says 'fuck' a lot, but rarely 'shit,' and he didn't say it now. What's the matter?"
But I was up from the table and on my way to the bar. Billie ambled over, polishing a glass with a towel. He said, "You move fast for a big man, stranger."
"My mind moves slow. That customer you had-"
"The Marlboro man, Trina calls him."
"That's the one. I don't suppose you got around to washing his glass yet, did you?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact I did. This is it here, as best I recall." He held it up for my inspection. "See? Spotless."
"Shit."
"That's what Jimmie says when I don't wash them. What's the matter?"
"Well, unless the bastard was wearing gloves, I have just done something stupid."
"Gloves. Oh. Fingerprints?"
"Uh-huh."
"I thought that only worked on the tube."
"Not when they come as a gift. Like on a beer glass. Shit. If he ever comes in again, which would be too much to hope for-"
"I pick up the glass with a towel and put it some place very safe."
"That's the idea."
"If you'd told me…"
"I know. I should have thought of it."
"All I was interested in was seeing the last of him. I don't like people like him anywhere, and especially in bars. He made two beers last an hour apiece, and that was just fine with me. I was not about to push drinks on him. The less he drank and the sooner he left, the happier he made me."
"Did he talk at all?"
"Just to order the beers."
"You catch any kind of an accent?"
"Didn't notice it at the time. Let me think." He closed his eyes for a few seconds. "No. Standard American nondescript. I usually notice voices, and I can't dredge up anything special about his. I can't believe he's from New York, but what does that prove?"
"Not too much. Trina said you didn't like his eyes."
"I didn't like them at all."
"How so?"
"The feeling they gave me. It's hard to describe. I couldn't even tell you what color they were, although I think they were light rather than dark. But there was something about them, they stopped at the surface."
"I'm not sure I know what you mean."
"There was no depth to them. They could have been glass eyes, almost. Did you happen to watch Watergate?"
"Some of it. Not much."
"One of those pricks, one of the ones with a German name-"
"They all had German names, didn't they?"
"No, but there were two of them. Not Haldeman. The other one."
"Ehrlichman."
"That's the prick. Did you happen to see him? Did you notice his eyes? No depth to them."
"A Marlboro man with eyes like Ehrlichman."
"This isn't connected with Watergate or anything, is it, Matt?"
"Only in spirit."
I went back to my table and had a cup of coffee. I'd have liked to sweeten it with bourbon, but I decided it wasn't sensible. The Marlboro man didn't figure to try to take me tonight. There were too many people who could place him at the scene. This was simple reconnaissance. If he was going to try anything on, it would be some other time.
That was the way it looked to me, but I wasn't sure enough by my reasoning to walk home with too much bourbon in my bloodstream. I was probably right, but I didn't want to risk being very wrong.
I took what I'd seen of the guy and pasted in Ehrlichman's eyes and Billie's general impression of him, and I tried to match up the picture with my three angels. I couldn't make anything work. He could be some construction roughneck off one of Prager's projects, he could be a healthy young stud Beverly Ethridge liked to have around, he could be pro talent Huysendahl had hired for the occasion. Fingerprints would have given me a make on him, but my mental reflexes had been too slow for me to take advantage of the opportunity. If I could find out who he was I could come up around him from behind, but now I had to let him make his play and meet him head on.
I guess it was about twelve thirty when I paid my tab and left. I eased the door open carefully, feeling a little foolish, and I scanned both sides of Ninth Avenue in both directions. I didn't see my Marlboro man, or anything else that looked at all menacing.
I started toward the corner of Fifty-seventh Street, and for the first time since it all started I had the feeling of being a target. I had set myself up this way quite deliberately, and it had certainly seemed like a good idea at the time, but ever since the Marlboro man had turned up things had become very different. It was real now, and that was what made all the difference.
There was movement in a doorway ahead of me, and I was up on the balls of my feet before I recognized the old woman. She was in her usual spot in the doorway of the boutique called Sartor Resartus. She's always there when the weather's decent. She always asks for money. Most of the time I give her something.
She said, "Mister, if you could spare-" and I found some coins in my pocket and gave them to her. "God will bless you," she said.
I told her I hoped she was right. I walked on toward the corner, and it's a good thing it wasn't raining that night, because I heard her scream before I heard the car. She let out a shriek, and I spun around in time to see a car with its high beams on vault the curb at me.
Chapter 10
I didn't have time to think it over. I guess my reflexes were good. At least they were good enough. I was off balance from spinning around when the woman screamed, but I didn't stop to get my balance. I just threw myself to the right. I landed on a shoulder and rolled up against the building.
It was barely enough. If a driver has the nerve, he can leave you no room at all. All he has to do is bounce his car off the side of the building. That can be rough on the car and rough on the building, but it's roughest of all on the person caught between the two. I thought he might do that, and then when he yanked the wheel at the last minute I thought he might do it accidentally, fishtailing the car's rear end and swatting me like a fly.
He didn't miss by much. I felt a rush of air as the car hurtled past me. Then I rolled over and watched him cut back off the sidewalk and onto the avenue. He snapped off a parking meter on his way, bounced when he hit the asphalt, then put the pedal on the floor and hit the corner just as the light turned red. He sailed right through the light, but then, so do half the cars in New York. I don't remember the last time I saw a cop ticket anybody for a moving violation. They just don't have the time.
"These crazy, crazy drivers!"
It was the old woman, standing beside me now, making tsk sounds.
"They just drink their whiskey," she said, "and they smoke their reefers, and then they go out for a joy ride. You could have been killed."
"Yes."
"And after all that, he didn't even stop to see if you were all right."
"He wasn't very considerate."
"People are not considerate any more."
I got to my feet and brushed myself off. I was shaking, and badly rattled. She said, "Mister, if you could spare…" and then her eyes clouded slightly and she frowned at some private puzzlement. "No," she said. "You just gave me money, didn't you? I'm very sorry. It's difficult to remember."
I reached for my wallet. "Now this is a ten-dollar bill," I said, pressing it into her hand. "You make sure you remember, all right? Make sure you get the right amount of change when you spend it. Do you understand?"
"Oh, dear," she said.
"Now you'd better go home and get some sleep. All right?"
"Oh, dear," she said. "Ten dollars. A ten-dollar bill. Oh, God bless you, sir."
"He just did," I said.
ISAIAH was behind the desk when I got back to the hotel. He's a light-skinned West Indian with bright blue eyes and kinky rust-colored hair. He has large dark freckles on his cheeks and on the backs of his hands. He likes the midnight-to-eight shift because it's quiet and he can sit behind the desk working double-acrostics, toking periodically from a bottle of cough syrup with codeine in it.
He does the puzzles with a nylon-tipped pen. I asked him once if it wasn't more difficult that way. "Otherwise there is no pride in it, Mr. Scudder," he'd said.
What he said now was that I'd had no calls. I went upstairs and walked down the hall to my room. I checked to see if there was any light coming from under the door, and there wasn't, and I decided that that didn't prove anything. Then I looked for scratch marks around the lock, and there weren't any, and I decided that that didn't prove anything either, because you could pick those hotel locks with dental floss. Then I opened the door and found there was nothing in the room but the furniture, which stood to reason, and I turned on the light and closed and locked the door and held my hands at arm's length and watched the fingers tremble.
I made myself a stiff drink and then I made myself drink it. For a moment or two my stomach picked up the shakes from my hands and I didn't think the whiskey was going to stay down, but it did. I wrote some letters and numbers on a piece of paper and put it in my wallet. I got out of my clothes and stood under the shower to wash off a coating of sweat. The worst sort of sweat, composed of equal parts of exertion and animal fear.