I found the cut and turned into it, and stopped the motor. It became suddenly very still. I picked up the flashlight and got out. I walked down the rutted track.
They had taken Marjorie’s car away, of course, and the comings and goings of men and tow trucks had pretty well flattened everything in sight. But I found where the car had been. I looked all around at the crushed brambles, the rank weeds and the Queen Anne’s lace. Then I walked a little farther down the track where no one had been. I walked slowly, watching my feet. I circled around to the side of the track, as one would in walking around a car. My trouser legs were wet to the knees with dew. The briars caught in them and scratched my shins. I went back to Prioletti’s car and sat sideways, with the door open, picking a batch of prickly green beggar’s lice out of my socks. The socks, and my shoes, were wet.
I backed out of the cut and drove into town again, to Prioletti’s.
He was waiting up for me, as he had promised. We sat in the kitchen, smoking, and all the time he watched me with his bright dark eyes.
“Carmen,” I said, “suppose you’re a girl. You’re wearing an evening dress, sheer stockings, high-heeled shoes. You decide to kill yourself. You drive to a nice quiet spot, an old logging cut off a back road. You have brought a hose with you—”
Carmen’s eyes were fairly glittering now, but wary. “Continue.”
“You wish to attach that hose to the exhaust pipe, and then run it in through the front window. Now, to do this you have to get out of the car. You have to walk around it to the back, and then around it again to the front. Right?”
“Indubitably.”
“All right. There are briar thickets, weeds, beggar’s lice, unavoidable, and all soaked with dew. What happens to your nylons and your fancy shoes?”
“They’re pretty much of a wreck.”
“Hers were not.”
“I see,” said Carmen slowly. “You’re sure of that? Absolutely sure.”
“When I found her on my porch she was neat and pretty as a pin. Carmen, she never got out of that car until she was carried out, dead.”
I filled him in on Sheila Harding, and what she had told me. Then we were both through talking for awhile. The electric clock on the wall touched two and went past it. Carmen smoked and brooded.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked finally.
“That depends,” I said. “How much are you willing to risk? The minute certain people around Headquarters realize you’re suspicious, you’ll be in trouble.”
“Leave that to me. I used to be proud of my job, Greg. Now I tell my kids I’m not really a cop, I play piano in a disorderly house.” He clenched his hands together on the table top, and shivered all over. “This might be it. This might just by the grace of God be it.”
“You’ll have to play it mighty close to the vest. Now, what I would like to know is whether the autopsy report mentioned any external marks, no matter how slight, around the wrists and ankles, and maybe the mouth. Or a bruise on the head, under the hair.”
“I’ll see what I can find out. We’d better not be seen meeting. How about north of the lake in Mill Creek Park, around three?”
I nodded and got up.
I walked home. I didn’t meet anyone along the way. When I got within a block or so of my apartment house I took extra pains to stay in the shadows. I figured to come in the way I had gone out, across the alley and through the back door. I figured the boys out front would never know I had been away.
I was happy in that thought right up to the minute I actually opened the door. Inside, in the narrow well of the service stairs, a dim light was burning, and I saw a man there. A large man, with a crushed hat pulled down over his eyes. I saw him in the act of leaping toward me, and I let go of the door and turned to run, and there was another man in back of me. He hit me as I turned, and then the man in the stairwell came out and banged me across the nape of the neck. I went down on my hands and knees in the alley, onto the uneven bricks, and there we were again. A visit with old friends. Justinian’s boys.
One of them pulled me up and wrenched my head back, and the other one gave me a fast chop over the Adam’s apple. That was to stop me yelling.
Then he said, “Where were you?”
I coughed and choked. Nameless, who was holding my arm doubled up behind me, gave it an upward twist. I winced, and Faceless, who was in front of me, with his hat still pulled down so that nothing much showed in the dark of night, asked again, “Where were you?”
I whispered, “Out for a walk.”
“Yeah,” said Faceless, “I know that. You didn’t take your car. So where’d you walk to?”
“Around. No place.”
He hit me twice, once on the left cheekbone, once on the right.
“I’m asking you,” he said. “Me. The dame came to see you, and right away you went sneaking out. I want to know why.”
“No connection,” I said. “She just dropped by. And it wasn’t right away. I was restless and couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk. So sue me.”
Nameless said conversationally, “I could break your arm.”
He showed me how easy it would be. I went down on my knees again. There was a taste of blood in my mouth. I thought my face was bleeding. I thought I could feel it running down my cheeks, hot and wet, to spatter on the bricks.
“If it hadn’t been,” said Faceless, “that we could hear your phone ringing and ringing through the open window, and you didn’t answer it, we wouldn’t never have known you’d gone. Now, that kind of thing can lead to trouble.” He kicked me. “Get up, buddy. I don’t like to have to bend over when I’m talking.”
I got up. I couldn’t stand the feeling of blood on my face. I got up fast. I threw myself backward, butting Nameless as hard as I could with my head. It must have been hard enough, because he grunted and let go. He fell, and I fell oft top of him, whipped around with my feet under me, and went for Faceless. He looked very queer. He was cloud-shaped, huge and looming, and the alley and the building walls were all twisted and quivering as though I was seeing them through dark water. I hit him full on and he went over backward, floating, slow-motion, like something in a dream. The blood ran down my face, filling my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I thought, This is what it feels like to be crazy. I knocked his hat off and got hold of his head and beat it up and down, up and down, hard, hard on the alley bricks.
It was nice, but it didn’t last long. It hardly lasted at all. Nameless got up. He was mad. He hit me with something much harder than a fist, and pretty soon Faceless got up, and he was mad, too. They let me know it. I heard one of them wanting to kill me right now, but the other one said, “Not yet, not till we get the order.” He shook me. “You get that, buddy? The order. It can come any minute. And when it does, you got nothing left to hope for.”
He threw me down and they went away, down a long black tunnel that lengthened until I got dizzy watching and shut my eyes. When I opened them again I was lying in the alley, alone. It was still dark. I wanted to go to my apartment. I know I started and I know I must have made it up two flights of the service stairs, because I was lying on the landing when Shelia found me...
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said and helped me up, and we walked together up the rest of the steps and down the hall to the apartment. I told her to pull the blind shut.