“I’ll tell Rosamund you send your love,” Givens said.
“I’d appreciate that.”
“You’re the only thing she talks about anymore.”
Guard tapped his nightstick again. “You hear me, mister? Time’s up.”
“I thought,” said Givens, “we still had five minutes left. According to what they told me—”
“You want to take the time and go up and ask them again, fella? If you do, I’ll dock your friend here five minutes on his next visitation. You want me to do that?”
Givens sighed, shook his head.
“Take care of yourself,” Givens said, standing up.
He watched Givens walk out of the visiting room.
Guard looked at him and grinned. “You bastards over in D. You think you’re going to get away with hittin’ Bernie the way you did, don’t you?”
“I didn’t hit him.”
“Yeah, but it was your friend who hit him.”
“He isn’t my friend. I don’t even know him.”
“You cons are all the same, don’t matter whether you know each other or not. You stick together.” He knocked his nightstick against the Plexiglas. “Well, us guards, we stick together, too.”
That night, an inmate got his nose and three ribs busted up, same guy, by a big coincidence, who was the cellmate of the guy who’d hit Bernie the guard.
This was the talk of D for the next three days, how the guards had deliberately busted up the guy, and how D was going to pay the guards back.
But who cared?
He was, at long last, going to get out of here.
10:25 A.M., May 26, soybean field to the north.
Yes, ma’am; oh, yes yes, ma’am.
He let the other cons lay on their bunks and stew and sulk about that nasty guard and that poor defenseless con.
All he thought about was the soybean field.
The soybean field...
8
One day, I got authorization to go up to the Office of Technical Services, which is where the Agency keeps all of its James Bond devices, and a very friendly old chap spent an hour with me bringing me up to speed on devices for tapping phones and photographing documents and new ways to plant bugs. Most people don’t realize this, but the Agency employs a good number of cabinetmakers, leatherworkers, woodworkers and general carpenters who do nothing but devise better ways to conceal electronic bugging devices. When the old man finished telling me about his department, he said, “There’s only one thing we haven’t come up with yet.”
“And what’s that?”
“Some way for you agents to occupy your time while you’re on a stakeout.”
How true.
I gave Jane Avery a ten-minute head start and then I drove over to the McNally block and parked at the far end, between two cars, so I’d be less conspicuous.
Her police car sat right out in front of the McNally’s. As I drove by, I’d seen both of them in the lighted window, behind the gauzy cover of sheer white curtains.
Jane had been in there more than an hour.
As for me, I now had time to brush up on my three favorite sports: thumb-twiddling, sighing and keeping the cheeks of my backside from going to sleep.
Oh, yes, and one other sport: playing guess the Sears house.
Around the turn of the century, a lot of Iowa people bought house kits from Sears. These weren’t little shacks, either, the homes from these kits. In fact, the most popular in-town model was the Dutch Colonial, a two-story job with a gambrel roof and authentic reproductions of “Colonial sidelights” flanking the front door.
There were probably three or four hundred Sears houses still standing in Iowa, which said something about the quality of craftsmanship in those days.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see any Sears houses on Eve McNally’s block, no matter how hard I looked, no matter how many times I lifted my binoculars and checked them out.
Maybe the owners had done what the Mesquakie Indians used to do, before the white man came. They made houses from reed mats that lasted about seven years, which was also the time it took to exhaust the firewood in a given area. So the Mesquakies never, as it were, sought a home-improvement loan; they just moved on to a new area where they built new houses and started life afresh, members of a truly mobile society.
Jane Avery came out just as I was starting to rub my backside, prickly numbness having started to overtake it.
I slid down in the seat, figuring her lights would sweep across my door when she pulled out. As they did.
After a flash of headlamps, there was just darkness again. I pulled myself up, opened the door and walked across the street.
It was misting now, a chill spray that reminded me of lying with Jane on her bed. I smiled.
At the door, Eve McNally peered out through the dark glass before turning on the porch light. An aged yellow lamp above my head came on. It had probably chaperoned teenagers back in the days of Benny Goodman and swooning over Sinatra.
After recognizing me, she shook her head, waved me away.
From inside my jacket, I took a number-ten white envelope that was folded inside my shirt pocket. The envelope contained nothing more exciting than some notes I’d scribbled down about my biplane. But Eve McNally didn’t know that.
I held the envelope up and pointed at it importantly.
She was nice enough to fall for it.
It was an awful trick to play on a woman whose daughter had been kidnapped — she was likely hoping against hope that the envelope contained word of Melissa — but I didn’t have much choice.
She said, “What’s in the envelope?” Her words were muffled by the glass and the dusty door curtains.
“You need to let me in first.”
She shook her head again.
“I’ve got news,” I said.
A kind of frenzy overtook her. “News? Of Melissa?”
She looked confused a moment — should she let me in or not? — and then she made her mind up.
The inside door was jerked open.
All that separated us now was a screen door. I tried the handle. She had the door latched.
“What news?”
“I lied. I shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up that way.”
“You lied? You lied?” She sounded hysterical. “About having news? You are really a dirty sonofabitch, you know that?”
“I am. Yes, I am. I’m really sorry.”
“I thought—”
“I know what you thought. And I apologize again. I know you don’t believe this but I’m trying to help you.”
“Oh, sure you are.”
“Just let me in a moment. Please.”
“You didn’t need to lie to me,” she said, then surprised me by quietly lifting the latch and stepping back.
She went in and sat down on the edge of the couch and stared forlornly at the floor.
She was close to the end-table lamp so I could see her face now, the bruises, the cuts above her right eye, most likely the result of a ring scraping her as she was being punched.
I went over and sat next to her on the couch. At first I didn’t know what to do or say. I still felt bad about having raised her hopes.
She was staring at the floor as if she were in a coma. Most of the room was in darkness; we were in a little ring of light.
I slid my arm over her shoulder and said, “You need a friend.”