Judy said: “He seems to have disappeared from his motel this morning.” She sounded almost casual about it, which made Joe feel vaguely relieved.
Johnny’s eyes widened. “I hope those guys didn’t . . .”
“The kidnappers?” Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so. The cops were watching the motel all night, I’m sure.”
“Then how’d he get out?”
“That’s a good question.” Joe had his own ideas about that. His police instincts, if after eight years in the business you maybe began to have such things, told him that the old man had not looked at all like Dr. Corday when he came out, and furthermore Dr. Corday was not going to be easy to find again. Because Dr. Corday no longer existed. Disguises were generally nonsense, of course. But `the kindly old family doctor from London’ had itself been a disguise, one good enough to work, for a while anyway and among strangers. Except . . . Clarissa, of course. Granny Clare. Joe was going to have to talk to her in private when he got the chance. She hadn’t met his eye directly all morning.
“Jeez, I hope he’s all right.” Johnny was starting to get upset about it.”
“I’m sure he is,” said Judy impulsively, sounding like there could be no doubt.
“I’m just as glad he’s gone, myself,” said Joe, and felt astonished at the violence of the glare that Judy turned on him.
She said: “He got my brother out of there.”
“Yes, he did do that.” Joe turned to the window, to study the grayness of middle-class Evanston in midwinter, through black skeletal trees. “Afterwards, though, Corday and I were talking, alone. The dead man was there on the cot in the same room. The deputies were out in their car using the radio. Corday was talking pretty crazy, then. I’m saying this because if he pops up again I think you all ought to use care in dealing with him.”
“Crazy how?” Judy challenged.
“Well. Like it might very well have been him who killed that fellow, that way. Though he didn’t confess it in so many words. To brag about something like that, whether you really did it or not . . . I’ve got to see Charley Snider later today and go over all of this with him.”
Judy was angry. “If he killed a kidnapper, does that make him crazy?” Her brother was watching numbly. Clarissa was hiding her face, or maybe just resting her eyes.
Joe continued: “And then he said some incoherent-sounding things, like how the man had run down the hill to get to running water. That man’s not normal . . . Clarissa, you all right?”
“Running water,” repeated Granny Clare, through lips suddenly gone pale. Looking worse than Johnny in his hospital bed, she started to get up, clutched at a bedside table, sent papers spilling to the floor. Then she sank back in her chair.
Judy, her normal self again, hurried to fuss over her grandmother. Clarissa popped a nitroglycerin pill, took some water, looked a lot better.
Joe asked: “Does running water mean anything in particular?”
Judy scowled at him again, and turned to her brother, changing the subject. “What did the other people look like?”
“Oh, the only ones I really saw were the two men in the car, the ones who grabbed me. I got the best look at the one who was driving but he was sort of ordinary-looking, I guess. See, I was walking along the side of Sheridan Road there, after dark, coming home from the Birches’, and this car just pulled up slowly, and this guy with a dark beard rolled down his window and asked for some kind of phony directions. Then the back door opened, and this real monster sort of jumped out. I didn’t get much of a look at his face, not then anyway, but man was he big. He was the one who . . .”
John’s voice trailed off. His eyes fell to his bandaged hands, and for a moment the boy’s face showed shock, as if it were just coming through to him now what those bandages really meant. “I’ll be able to use my hands almost as good as ever,” he added, with the air of doggedly repeating something he had been told.
“You said there was a woman,” Judy prodded, probably just trying to snap Johnny out of his dark contemplation.
He looked vacantly at his sister for a moment before answering. “Yeah. There in the house, at night. She looked into the closet at me, but it was too dark for me to see her. I dunno. It’s all kind of vague.” Suddenly turning into a hospital patient after all, Johnny lay back on his pillows.
“I think we’d better let you rest.” Judy bent over her brother to hug him one more time.
When it came Joe’s turn to say farewell, he grinned at the boy and shook his own two hands together. “Let us know if we can bring you anything.”
“I will.”
Judy had paused to restore the papers fallen from the table. Looking at one sketch, she gave a little sniff and almost smiled. “Know who this looks like to me? I met him once, when he was trying to get Kate to go on a skiing weekend with him. Craig Walworth.”
FIFTEEN
You didn’t just find upper-crust society in the Chicago phone book, of course. But if you were in the police department you knew a number to dial to be told the address of someone with an unlisted phone.
Alone after dropping Judy and Clarissa off in Glenlake, driving on south toward the Loop’s sky-notching towers, Joe considered for the dozenth time why he shouldn’t just lay Craig Walworth’s name on Charley Snider. The main reason, he decided, was his feeling that the evil old man wanted him to do just that. Why else had the old man brought the name up out of nowhere when they were alone? Who is Craig Walworth? Damn the old man to hell, anyway, for asking that and then disappearing. So there was no real Walworth-connection to be pointed out to Charley. One question, from someone who was very clever and not to be trusted; and one sketch that might look a little like Craig Walworth but had evidently been discarded because it didn’t look too much like the bearded kidnapper.
When they had given Joe his days off to mourn for Kate, they hadn’t specifically warned him to keep from muddling up the Southerland investigations by doing any poking around on his own. The captain evidently hadn’t thought him dumb enough to need a warning of that kind. Well, he wasn’t dumb. And he wasn’t getting into the investigation, he told himself now. He was only trying to get it clear in his own mind whether there might be anything that could tie Craig Walworth into it.
While driving Judy home he had questioned her casually—as casually as he could manage—about that skiing weekend invitation. Judy had been very definite that Kate had never accepted any proposition like that from Craig Walworth. But Judy would say that now, anyway, just to spare Joe’s feelings.
When he reached the tall apartment building on Lake Shore Drive, Joe had a qualm about using his police ID to get in. He compromised by using it and then telling the doorman he wanted to see Walworth on personal business. The doorman, an old-timer whose badly fitting jacket suggested he might just have been called out of retirement, told him, sure lieutenant, that’s okay, I’ll watch your car, just leave it in the drive. I’ll just give him a buzz to let him know you’re coming. Oh, yes, the ID helped.
Joe went up alone in the small elevator, up to a small marbled foyer where someone’s old raincoat hung covering a mirror or picture. He touched a bell button beside a dark door of massive wood, that reminded him of yesterday’s broken-in front door. A lean old fellow like Corday, wiry-strong or not, could hardly have done that without a sledge . . .
Walworth himself came to answer the door. And Judy had been right about the sketch, it hadn’t been far off at all in depicting this man’s face. The dark hair and even the short beard were messed up now. Walworth was wearing a loose, short, very fancy robe of some kind, his hairy, muscular arms and legs protruding. He had the look of someone just out of bed, even to the puffiness around the eyes. He also looked a little jumpy. But a great many perfectly innocent people looked jumpy when you came on as the police.