He chewed on his ham and cheese, studying me suspiciously. I studied him back. Not only was he younger than I, he was taller and a lot better looking. A whole lot better dressed. The white suit he'd worn that afternoon was flashy. This one wasn't flashy, but it was cut nicely out of real English fabric—seventy-five dollars at least, and matching shoes that hadn't come from any Thom McAn I ever saw. He said suddenly, "Nyla thinks your alibi witnesses are lying."
I'd started to pick up the rest of my sandwich. I put it down again. "How do you know what Nyla Christophe thinks if you're not FBI?"
"We're friends," he explained. "I've got a lot of cop friends— not just in the FBI. You ought to know that."
"I know what you did," I said. "I don't know why you did it."
"Why shouldn't I do a favor if! want to?" he demanded. "Get back to your witnesses. Are they lying?"
"No! If they were, would I tell you? But they're not."
He chewed the rest of his ham and cheese in silence, keeping his eyes on me as though some change in expression might resolve the problem for him. I let him keep his quiet. I finished my own sandwich, drank the last of my coffee, waved the waitress over for a refill. He tapped his cup for the same, and when she had gone away again he said, "I didn't think they were, actually."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"Oh, don't come with that supercilious crap with me, Dominic. You're in trouble up to your ass, you know that?"
I hadn't known that. "Christophe told me I could go home!" I objected.
"Why shouldn't she? You couldn't get out of town if you tried. She's not through with you."
"Why not, damn it?"
"Because," he explained, "photos and fingerprints don't lie."
"But I wasn't there!"
He said slowly, "I swear, I think you mean it. I think your witnesses mean it, too, and that's pretty hard to swallow. I think you people might even pass a lie-detector test."
"Why not? We aren't lying."
"Oh, hell, Dominic!" he exploded. "Don't you know you need help?"
"Are you going to help me?" I asked.
"Me? No," he said. "But I know somebody who might. Pay the check, Dominic, and let's go for a ride."
Around this time in August the sun doesn't go down till eight or so, but it was already full dark before we got to where we were going. There wasn't much traffic, once we got out of the Chicago suburbs heading south. We went past cornfields by the mile and small towns by the dozen, and every time I asked this Jimmy person where we were going he only shook his head. "The less you know," he said, "the less trouble you can get anybody in."
"When are we going to get there, then? I'm not a night owl, Jimmy, and I've got a job, and they expect me to be working in the morning—"
"What you've got," he said patiently, as he slowed for a light, "is trouble with the FBI. If you don't get that straightened out, no other trouble is going to matter."
"Yes, sure, Jimmy, but—"
"But quit your bellyaching," he ordered. "We're just about there. It's right outside this town."
"This town," according to the sign on the road, was called Dixon, Illinois, population 2250, Rotary and Lions Club met every Thursday and Friday in the Holiday Inn. We turned off the main street at a square with a World War II 75-millimeter cannon in a little green patch, drove a few blocks, and then Jimmy took a tire-whining left into a private road.
Who the road belonged to it did not declare. There was no cute little "Welcome to Hiddenwell Acres" sign, no name, nothing to identify it and certainly nothing to make us feel at all welcome. On the contrary. What distinguished this road from any other around was the swinging-gate barrier that blocked us at the first turn. There was a little wooden guardhouse next to the gate, and out of it leaned a large, nonwooden guard. "I.D.," he ordered. Jimmy passed him something. What it was I knew not, but it satisfied him. Well, it almost satisfied him. He pored over it for a while, licking his lips. Then he picked up a phone and discussed it with someone on the other end. Then he cranked the barrier up and waved us through.
A quarter of a mile farther along the road split, to loop around a lawn with a fountain. We circled and stopped in front of a veranda with huge white pillars. I'd seen it before—in, I think, the movie Gone With the Wind. And the servants came out of the same film. A cheerful young black man came at us from one direction to bob his head and take Jimmy's car to an invisible parking lot behind a grove of apple trees in fruit. A plump, middle-aged black woman came from another direction to admit us to the house. She didn't greet Jimmy by name, and didn't pay any attention to me at all. She didn't ask questions. She didn't volunteer any answers. The list of things she didn't do was, in fact, very long. What she did do was lead us silently through a huge three-story foyer with a carpeted stairway curving down to the entrance, through a passage, through a little sort of living room, with a fireplace and comfortable couch and armchairs, all unoccupied, through a glass door into, finally, a sort of combination hothouse and gymnasium. It had been hot enough outside. It was twice as hot within. The place was full of tropical plants stretching up to the glass roof, with vines clinging to the trees and a sort of general jungly smell of decaying plants and humid soil.
In the middle of it all was a swimming pool, long and narrow. And in the pool was an elderly man; and on the elderly man was nothing at all. He was skinny-dipping. It did not seem to concern him. He was doing laps. He splashed to our end of the pool, gasped, "Ninety-eight," swam a sort of sloppy Australian crawl to the far end—"Ninety-nine"—did the last stretch back to us at top speed, arms slipping gracefully into the water ahead of his white topknot, feet frothing up the water behind in a vigorous eight-beat kick. "One hundred," he said, panting, and clung to the edge of the pool. Another young black man, this one grave rather than cheerful, handed him a towel, and he dabbed at his face and grinned up at me. "Evening, gentlemen," he said.
I made a noise at him. It wasn't exactly a "Good evening," but it was polite. Jimmy did better. He crouched down beside the pool, took one of the old swimmer's wet and slippery hands, and pumped it enthusiastically.
"Ron," he said, from the heart—anyway it sounded as though it came from the heart—"I can't tell you how grateful I am to you for seeing us tonight."
"Not at all," said the man courteously. "After all, Larry, you said it was a significant civil liberties issue."
"Yes, I think it is," said "Jimmy" gamely, carefully not looking to see if I'd picked up on the name. "It's about Dominic here. He has an unusual problem with the FBI. They claim he was detected breaking into a secret government research installation. They have pictures and fingerprints to prove it. But he has unimpeachable witnesses to prove he was a thousand miles away at the time."
Ron had pulled himself out of the pool and was toweling himself dry. He had to be in his seventies, anyway, but when I looked at his tapering torso and absolute lack of any spare tire around the waist, I only wished I could live to be that kind of seventy. He not only looked good, he looked sort of familiar. Then he finished drying himself, dropped the towel on the tiling, and let the black man help him into a white terry-cloth robe. "I don't do private-eye movies any more, Larry," he said, grinning, and I realized why he looked familiar. He was an actor. Had been an actor, anyway. In the movies. Never a big star, but one of those faces you kept seeing until your subconscious remembered it even if the rest of you didn't. Until there was some kind of scandal. Scandal? Trouble, anyway. I couldn't remember the details, but he had been fired. Not just from the job; from the industry. It had been something political, maybe. .