He went past the place where Ellen had lived, and saw no sign here either that murder had been done within that building last night. On impulse, he parked the Ford in the next block and walked back.
The stranger had been living in there. Would he? be in there again?
He went in, and up the stairs, and too late saw the policeman sitting on the kitchen chair outside the closed door. He couldn’t go back down any longer, so he took the remaining alternative; he went on by the policeman and continued up the stairs. The policeman, reading a tabloid with huge black letters on the front, hardly gave him a glance.
There was no place to go but the roof. He emerged onto a flat deserted world with black tarpaper underfoot and the gray sky of late afternoon overhead. He walked cautiously across the roof, plagued by the idea that it wouldn’t support his weight, that he’d crash through into the apartment below, and when he got to the front edge with its knee high wall he squatted and looked carefully over, staring down at the street far below.
Would the stranger come back here? It seemed to him somehow necessary. Besides, there were only two locations where he knew the stranger might be, here and the Kifka place, so it was sensible that he should wait in one of these locations until the stranger should pass by again. Of the two, this was the better place to stay.
He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stay here because he thought the stranger would come back or because he thought the stranger wouldn’t come back. Still, he kept watching the sidewalk far below and wondering if the gun in his pocket would lire accurately that far, straight down.
He wished he could go into the bedroom where he’d killed her and look around again. He supposed the body was gone, and that was a shame. Still, just the empty bedroom - he wished he could go in there and look around.
He squatted by the parapet, lost in his roiling thoughts.
A sound startled him, but he resisted the impulse to move, to make’ noise of his own. He turned his head and saw the stranger, far across the roof, just stepping off into thin air.
No, not into thin air. There was a fire escape back there, running down the rear of the building.
He reached with quiet haste into his pocket for the gun, but it was too late. The stranger receded downward, legs disappearing and then torso and arms and finally head. What a cold face he had!
He hurried across the roof just as quietly as he could, and got to the back edge just in time to see the stranger disappear into Ellen’s apartment through the window down there.
Follow him? No, that would be far too dangerous. Sooner or later he must come out again, by this same route. All that was necessary was to wait, and this time not miss.
It didn’t take long, but it seemed long. At last the stranger reappeared and started up the fire escape in the fading daylight, coming up toward the staring eye peering down at him past the straight line of the top of the automatic.
He fired and missed. Missed the way amateurs always do when shooting downward, aimed too high.
The stranger flung himself to the right, flattened himself against the wall down there. But still a target, still a target.
He fired again, and again he missed.
The stranger fired back, and shards of brick peppered his cheek as the bullet ricocheted by.
He couldn’t stand that. If he lived to be a hundred and if someone shot at him with a gun every day until then, he would still never get used to it, never fail to give in to immediate panic. The stranger could be fired at repeatedly and still be alert and aware, still act in defense or offence. He would never know how the stranger did it.
For the second time he ran. Across the roof, pell-mell, all fears that he might fall through the tarpaper and the roof forgotten. He yanked open the door and pelted down the stairs, not noticing the kitchen chair standing empty in the hallway or the now-open door to Ellen’s apartment. He ran on down, and out to the street, and a block away collapsed inside the Ford, frantic: and ashamed of himself and out of breath.
After a while he went back to the room, and here he was now, still in it, a small square room with beige walls, the room nine feet long, ten feet wide, nine feet high. He was looking out the window, feeling the stranger’s eyes, knowing he would no longer have the courage to go searching for the stranger himself, knowing he didn’t have the courage to try to run away, knowing he could do nothing but wait here to be found.
He hadn’t wanted any of this. It was all Ellen’s fault, Ellen’s fault. If only, if only …
The room was getting smaller, meaner, dimmer. He couldn’t stay here forever, he couldn’t wait here indefinitely like this.
He deserved some time off. The tension had been so meat for so long, it was about time he relaxed, forgot about things, found some way to amuse himself, distract himself.
He pulled the dresser away from the door and went out to the hall where the pay phone was. He called a friend of his, a guy he’d known in the old days, who said, ‘When did you get back from Mexico, man?’
‘Just a couple days ago. You doing anything tonight?’
‘New, you know.’
‘Why don’t we take in a movie, have a couple beers?’
‘Sure thing. Come on over. Say, wasn’t that something about Ellie?’
‘What? Oh, yeah. It sure was. Be right over.’
He hung up, having made the mistake that would kill him.
Two
Detective Dougherty wasn’t at all sure he’d done the right thing. The smart thing, yes, there wasn’t any doubt of that, but the right thing? Maybe not.
Driving downtown to talk it over with the lieutenant, Dougherty allowed himself little fantasies in which he got the drop on the man who’d called himself — obviously lying — Joe, in which he captured Joe, bested Joe, worsted Joe. In the cellar there, sitting as calm and deceptive as W. C. Fields playing poker, and then all at once - like Fields producing a fifth ace - whipping the pistol out and crying, ‘All right, hold it!’
In the dining-room, as Joe copied down the names, distracted …
At the front door, as Joe turned to leave …
‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.’ Francis Bacon said that, whether he wrote Shakespeare’s plays or not.
Detective Dougherty was a good enough detective to have been aware of all the opportunities Joe had given him to try for an arrest. But he was also a good enough detective to know they were all opportunities given him by Joe, not out of carelessness but as a challenge. Every opportunity given him deliberately to remind him of his wife and children, currently next door, safely out of the house but close enough still to hear the shot that would kill him. And listening for that shot.
That, Dougherty thought to himself as he drove downtown, is probably the most enervating, the most spine softening, the most weakening thing that can happen to a man: to know that his wife and children are sitting with cocked heads listening for the sound of the shot that will kill him.
If there had been no wife, no children, Joe would never have walked in and out so casually. Dougherty might have died or Joe might have been caught, but either way it would have ended.
Of course, he knew full well that if there had been no wife or children Joe wouldn’t have handled it the same way.