Nolan drove back to West Philadelphia slowly, enjoying his fresh cigar and the empty silent streets. It was about five, and light would be breaking in another hour. He wasn’t due in at the Division until four in the afternoon, unless Ramussen wanted to see him earlier about his report. But that wasn’t likely. Dave Fiest’s death would be wrapped up in official records and forgotten by tomorrow, he thought with satisfaction.
Suddenly, acting on an impulse he didn’t understand, he pulled his car to the curb and cut the motor. He sat for a moment in the dark silence, frowning at the red tip of his cigar where it glowed between his fingers on the steering wheel. Glancing out he saw that he had stopped opposite the black sprawling mass of a high school where he had spent a semester in his sophomore year. He rubbed his forehead slowly and wondered if it were simply a coincidence that he had parked here.
His thoughts were back-tracking on him again. Everything inside him was stirred up tonight.
There had been a chemistry teacher at this school named Simon. Nolan couldn’t remember his first name. Simon was one of Nolan’s few heroes because he taught a subject that was almost as fascinating as Motor Shop.
There had been a girl in that chemistry class, a slender little girl with brown hair, who wore soft wool sweaters, tweed skirts, and even a thin string of pearls about her throat. She came from a family with money, obviously, because she lived in Haddington, and just as obviously she was a high-class sort of girl. She represented a type Nolan had never known at all, but one which he instinctively resented; and it had amused him, for reasons he didn’t understand, to ridicule and embarrass her in any way he could. That hadn’t been hard because she was naturally shy and timid. However, the ambivalence of his relationship to her was such that while resenting her and hating her he also wanted her to be his girl. One day when there was a dance scheduled in the gymnasium Nolan bought a gardenia with thirty cents he had made setting pins in his neighborhood bowling alley. He hated setting pins because most of the regular pin boys were colored, and Nolan’s father had always warned him against working with colored people. It gave them ideas, his father said, with mysterious emphasis on the word ideas.
Nolan hid the gardenia in his locker and then, casually and scornfully, had asked the girl from Haddington to go to the dance with him. She had refused and Nolan, in a sudden frightening rage, grabbed her shoulders and shook her until the books she was carrying tumbled to the floor. Then he strode off, confused and scared. She complained about him to Mr. Simon, the one person he was afraid of displeasing, and Simon had told him to wait after class.
Nolan remembered the scene vividly. He could recall the intermingled smell of dust and chalk, the acid stink of the chemicals they had been working with, and Simon’s white face and the pinched look about his nose.
“Nolan, you’re a dirty lout who should be horsewhipped,” he had said in a cold intense voice. “You don’t belong in a school like this. You belong in South Philly with the Ginzos.”
Nolan had begun to explain about being transferred here after his father died. He hadn’t got far.
“Shut up! I warn you, Nolan, if you pull another stunt like this, I’ll have you thrown out of school the same day, but first I’ll break a ruler over your head. Do you understand that?”
“Sure, sure,” Nolan said quickly. He was still scared and confused. The hot uncontrollable anger he had felt toward the girl had frightened him by its intensity. What had made him behave like such a fool?
“Now I’ve got a job that’s just suited for you,” Simon said.
He had made him clean up the classroom that afternoon, although there was a regular janitor to do the work. Nolan had worked three hours, doing nothing but digging the puttylike accumulation of dirt and grease from between the grooves of the floor with a penknife.
He hadn’t minded the work, or Simon’s loud-mouthed yapping; but what hurt was being treated like a criminal because he’d presumed to date a little bitch from the fancy section of Haddington.
That had been his last year in school anyway. When he cleaned out his locker at the end of the term he found the gardenia, brown and withered, on the top shelf. That had made him feel very sad.
Nolan threw his cigar out the window and grinned at the dark school buildings, tinted now with the first light of dawn. Kids took things hard, of course. Thinking back now, he couldn’t even remember that girl’s name. Odd, he’d never been able to remember it; within a week after he’d left the chemistry class it was gone from his mind forever.
He put the car in gear and drove slowly down the street, thinking of Linda and the bulge of money in his left trouser pocket. He laughed and thought: I’d like to meet that fancy-pants little bitch from Haddington now and tell her about Linda and Dave Fiest’s money. There were a lot of people he’d like to tell about those two things, he thought, smiling now, confident and good-humored.
5
Mark Brewster woke the next morning about eleven. Sun slanted through the Venetian blinds of his apartment and broke on the green rugs and flat gray walls. He drifted for a moment in a hiatus between sleep and consciousness, aware only of a disquieting sense of oppression.
Then he remembered. A cop named Nolan had shot and killed a gambler named Dave Fiest. Mark swung his legs off the studio couch and picked up a cigarette from a box on the coffee table. Why should that bother him? Why did he care what Nolan did?
Standing, he scratched his head and realized he couldn’t answer those questions. He was depressed, and that was that. He walked barefooted into his tiny kitchenette, put the coffee on and opened a can of orange juice; then he slipped into slacks and a sports shirt and went down to the corner for the papers. Murchison had said he would try to do a run-down on Nolan’s line-of-duty killings; but it turned out that he hadn’t.
The story was on page three, with a one-column cut of Nolan, and had nothing in it but the bare facts. “An escaping prisoner was shot fatally early this morning by Detective Bernard Nolan of the Thirteenth Division...”
Mark read the story and walked back to his apartment. He drank his coffee and orange juice and thought about Nolan and the girl who’d been with him last night. He hadn’t noticed her particularly, but his impression had been that she wasn’t Nolan’s sort. What would be Nolan’s sort, he wondered. What was Nolan? That seemed to be the important question in Mark’s mind. He was curious about Nolan, but he didn’t know why. There was a terrible fascination in any man who could coolly and deliberately shoot another person in the back, he decided, finishing his second cup of coffee. He gave up Nolan and shaved and showered with the idea of getting down to work. But, once at his desk, he found his thoughts straying back to the detective. Frowning, he dug a wedge of typewritten manuscript from the drawer and began rereading the last few pages he’d done. It was all going to add up to a novel, one of those days, he hoped. Mark knew only too well that it was traditional for newspapermen to have a novel or a play tucked away in a trunk somewhere and serving as a rather wobbly prop to their conviction that they could clear out of the news racket any time they wanted to and become serious writers.
He hoped he’d be different; he hoped to finish the book.
However, it seemed pretty flat this morning. Even the captain, the character he liked best, failed to hold his interest. He made an effort to get started by slipping a clean sheet of bond paper into his typewriter; but after staring at its discouragingly blank expanse for several minutes, he lit a fresh cigarette and walked out to get another cup of coffee.
That didn’t help much and he finally realized that he wasn’t going to get any work done until he settled some of the questions about Nolan that were picking at his mind. Once he came to that conclusion he immediately felt better. There was that much of the born reporter in him that he couldn’t ignore a potential story — even though the only curiosity to be satisfied was his own.