He had what he wanted, in that case. When Honour Mercy looked at the speedometer she noticed that the little red needle was pointing at sixty-five and edging over toward seventy.
“That’s why I travel this road,” he went on. “Thruway takes you from Albany down to New York just the same, but those troopers watch the Thruway pretty close. Limit’s sixty and when you go much over sixty-five they stop you and hit you with a ticket. That’s no fun. Costs a guy twenty, thirty bucks for the ticket plus a few bucks in tolls. No fun at all.”
The needle was pointing at seventy-five.
“You come from Albany?”
She nodded.
“Figure on hitching? Reason I ask is I didn’t see you standing with your thumb out. Just walking. Looked like you were trying to walk clear to New York.”
This was precisely what she had been doing, but she didn’t think the man would accept it as a logical explanation. “I was having trouble getting a ride,” she said. “So I just started walking for a few minutes. I thought maybe I’d have more luck if I went on down to the first intersection.”
He nodded and she decided that she had picked the right reply. “I’m not from Albany myself,” the man was saying. “Pass through there a lot, though. I live up in Rome; got a business up there. You know where that is?”
She didn’t.
“Yes,” she said.
“Have to run down to New York a lot,” he went on. “On business. So I come through Albany. Don’t stop there too often, but this time I made a breakfast stop on the outskirts. I like a cup of coffee now and then when I drive. Keeps my mind on what I’m doing.”
The needle pointed at eighty.
“Quite a thing up there last night, wasn’t there? I had a look at the paper while I was eating; just had time to skim over the front page. Quite a thing. Double killing and all. You hear about it?”
She shook her head. Richie had evidently made the papers, she thought. Maybe if she just let this man run off at the mouth about it she could learn a little more about what had happened.
“Quite a thing,” he said. “Quite a thing. Young kid checked into a hotel with a girl, went out for a walk and a guy came up behind him and blew his head off. Shot him smack dab in the face and there wasn’t a hell of a lot of his face left afterwards. Least that’s what the paper said. They seem to build these things up.”
She shuddered. He looked at her and misinterpreted the shudder as normal female revulsion and patted her knee to soothe her. When he touched her she wondered how long it would take him to make a pass at her. She knew he was going to; knew that was why he had picked her up in the first place. He would make a pass at her and she would let him do whatever he wanted to do with her. He was going to New York and he would take her there, and in exchange he had a right to the temporary use of her body. That was fundamental.
“Who did it?” she managed. “Did they catch the man who did it?”
“Sure did,” the big man said. His hand was still on her knee, not to calm her, not now, and the speedometer needle was moving toward ninety. She hoped they would live to get back to New York. Because that was all that mattered — getting to New York and becoming Joshua’s mistress. That was what she had to do and the man with his big hand on her knee was just another means to the end.
“Caught him in the act,” the man said. “Just about in the act. Red-handed, the way they say it. Paper said he was standing there with the smoking gun still in his hand when the police took hold of him. Didn’t make a fuss or anything.”
He lapsed into temporary silence, becoming preoccupied with her knee, and she had to prompt him. “You said double killing. Who else did he kill?”
“Didn’t kill nobody else. Killed himself. Police had him up at the station house and he took a dive through the window. Fell a couple stories and that was the end of him.”
She shuddered again, as memory tried to intrude, then regretted it because it only got the hand more interested in her knee. Now who in the world would want to kill Richie? It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to her, and she decided that it must have been a case of mistaken identity.
“Do they know why the man did it?”
“Nope,” the driver said. “Don’t know a thing. All they know is his name and the name of the guy he killed. The young fellow’s name was Shaw, Anthony or Andy or something of the sort.”
For the merest shadow of a second her heart jumped at the thought that Richie hadn’t been killed after all, that the dead boy was somebody else. Then she remembered that Shaw was the name Richie had picked out for himself. That was the way he’d signed the register at the hotel.
“Can’t remember the other one’s name,” the driver continued. “It’s on the tip of my tongue but I’ll be damned if I remember it. Just took a quick look through the paper before it was time to hit the road again.”
The “quick look” had nearly committed the whole story to his memory. Honour Mercy could picture him, gulping down his coffee and reading the grisly article with his eyes bugging out of his head.
“Seems I ought to be able to remember the name,” the driver said. “But I can’t.”
“Was he a... gangster?”
The man shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Wasn’t even from Albany. Came from New York. One of them New York lawyers. I’ve met some of those fellows and I wouldn’t put anything past them. Sharp ones, them.”
A warning bell sounded inside the back of Honour Mercy’s head. It wasn’t possible, she told herself. It was a coincidence, that was all. It couldn’t be, just plain couldn’t be.
But she was afraid. Memory was crouched, ready to spring. She looked out the window at the ground that was passing by very swiftly, then looked at the speedometer needle that told how fast the ground was passing by, and then looked at the hand on her knee.
Not Joshua. She was going to Joshua, that was the important thing. It hadn’t been him.
“His name,” she said, slowly. “Funny thing you can’t remember it.”
“Hardly makes a difference.”
“I mean,” she said, “the way you remembered the other one, the boy who got shot. Just seems funny that you couldn’t remember the name of the one who shot him.”
“Yes, funny,” the man said. “Right on the tip of my tongue, too. Paper must of mentioned it a dozen times, if they mentioned it once. And I’m usually pretty good when it comes to remembering.”
Think, she thought. Say it wasn’t Joshua.
“Damned if it isn’t coming back to me now,” the man said, excited at the prospect of demonstrating just how good he was at remembering things. “Some sort of a Bible name, now that I think about it.”
She couldn’t breathe.
“Sure,” the man said. A vein was throbbing on his broad forehead. “Sure, that’s what it was. It’s coming now. Who was it fought that battle at Jericho? The one they got that song about?”
“Joshua,” she whispered.
“Yep,” the man said, happy now. “Joshua. Last name was something like “Crawfish,” but that ain’t it. It’ll probably come to me in another minute if I think about it awhile.”
She wanted to tell him not to waste his time but she couldn’t because she knew that if she opened her mouth she would scream.
She was in her apartment off Central Park West, alone, and she ached all over. Her body ached, first from the four boys, and then from the big man who had driven her to New York, and whom she had obligingly permitted to lead her into the privacy of a motel room en route.
And her lower lip ached from biting it, and her head ached because her brain was spinning around. But the worst ache of all was somewhere inside.