On the face of it, ridiculous. Involved, yes. Responsible, yes. Were not the two words, the two conditions intertwined? And if I am involved, responsible, then Ben Caldwell must also be drawn into the chain. And he is. He admitted as much in his office only this morning. Grover Frazee? Yes. Bert McGraw? Certainly. The list began to multiply with computer speed, its possibilities almost endless.
Then who was not to a greater or lesser degree involved, responsible? Incredible question, without answer.
He had welcomed Barnes, the black cop, to the lodge of blame. Now Nat thought: welcome yourself to the human race, friend; maybe now you are beginning to see what it is all about. Maybe—
“Nat.” Patty’s soft voice, almost pleading.
He looked down at her sad smile.
“The list is finished,” she said. “Every name. Every address.” She paused. “Somehow just by the act of writing them down, I’m—part of them. Can you see that? I probably don’t know one of them, and yet I know them all. I’m—” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I am.”
“Involved?” Nat said. His tone was gentle. “Responsible?”
The change in her eyes, in her face, was something to see. “You do understand, don’t you? Thank you, Nat.”
“Maybe I’m beginning to,” Nat said.
30
Police Lieutenant Jim Potter sat with his captain and the chief inspector in the large quiet office. Potter had his notebook on his knee. He kept his voice purposely expressionless.
“John Connors,” he said, “Caucasian male, age thirty-four.” He paused. “Widower. No children. Occupation: sheet-metal worker when he worked, which hasn’t been very often recently.” He paused. “A history of mental disturbance commencing three years ago.” He paused again, waiting.
The captain said, “What happened then?”
“His wife died.” Potter’s face was that of a poker player in a big-stakes game: totally expressionless. “She died in jail.” Pause. “In the drunk tank.” Again he waited. The chief inspector said, “She was a lush?”
“She didn’t drink.”
“She was on drugs?”
“Just one.” Potter took his time. “Insulin. She was a diabetic. They picked her up because she had collapsed and was lying on the sidewalk and they thought she was drunk.” He closed the notebook carefully. “So they tossed her into the drunk tank, and without medication she died.”
In the silence the captain said, “Didn’t she carry some kind of identification? Something to say she had diabetes?”
“Maybe.” A little of the sad bitterness showed now in Potter’s voice. “And maybe nobody bothered to look. The investigation after the fact wasn’t very thorough. Connors was the only one who cared much, and he had gone off his rocker.”
The big office was still. The chief inspector let his breath out in a noisy sigh. “Okay,” he said, the word was without meaning. “But so he did have a grudge, and so he wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards, why the World Tower building?”
“I’m no shrink,” Potter said. “But the World Tower building was the last real job he had. He was fired, there’s a connection, but maybe you have to be loony to see it. I don’t know. All I know are the facts.”
In a vague kind of way it made sense. All three men felt it. The Establishment had killed Connors’s wife, hadn’t it? The World Tower building was the brand-new shining symbol of the Establishment, wasn’t it? Well? They sat quietly, thinking about it.
At last, “Sometimes,” the chief inspector said slowly. “I think the whole goddam world has gone crazy.”
“Amen,” said the captain.
In slow, almost interminable succession, the women were helped or loaded into the canvas bag, and their legs poked through the twin holes. Almost without exception their eyes were wide with terror. Some cried. Some prayed.
Paula Ramsay was number twenty-two. “I don’t want to go,” she told the mayor as they waited for her turn. “I want to stay here with you.”
The mayor was smiling faintly as he shook his head. It was not his well-known campaign smile; this was the real man exposed. “I want you to go, and that is purely selfish.”
“You, selfish?”
“I want you to go,” the mayor said, “because I would rather have you safe than have anything else in the world.” The smile spread, even mocked himself. “Including the White House. Jill needs you.”
“Jill is a big girl now. We agreed on that,” Paula I looked around. “Where is Beth?”
“In the office with Bent. Their little time together.”
“I thought,” Paula said, “that she was ahead of me.”
The mayor could not remember when last he had lied to his wife. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, and stared out the window as the breeches buoy began its swaying trip back from the Trade Center roof.
The secretary general said, “Number twenty-one, if you please.” There was no answer. He repeated the call. ! “Hey,” somebody said, “that’s you. Here’s your ticket.” The girl in the bikini briefs dancing in the comer stopped her automatic gyrations. She shook her head as if to clear it. “I thought I was forty-nine.’ She giggled.
“Funny.” She waved her hand in the air and lurched forward, bare breasts bouncing, toward the loading window. “Here I come, ready or not.”
“God,” the mayor said. “She goes ahead of—anybody at all? Why?”
“You are usually kinder than that, Bob.” Paula’s smile was gentle. “The girl is drunk. And frightened.” The ‘ smile spread. “The difference between us is that I’m not drunk.”
“Or naked.”
“Does it matter now?”
The mayor made an almost angry gesture. “I am stuffy enough or square enough to believe that some values—” He stopped suddenly. “No,” he said in some surprise, “it doesn’t matter, does it? We’re down to basics.”
“And my basic wish,” Paula said, “is not to go but to stay—with you.”
“You’ll go,” the mayor said. There was a new tone of command in his voice.
Together they watched the half-naked girl being lifted into the canvas sack. Someone tossed her dress into her lap. She stared at it in bewilderment, and then, as if only that moment realizing her nakedness, she crossed both hands over her breasts and began to cry. “What am I doing?” Her voice was almost a scream. “I—can’t—!”
“Lower away!” This was the first commissioner, in command of the operation. “Hang on, sister, and you’ll be home free before you know it.”
The girl’s shrieks were lost in the whistling wind.
The mayor took his wife’s arms and walked with her toward the loading window. “Like airplanes and ship sailings,” he said, “there’s never anything to say, is there?” They stood quietly, holding hands, watching the breeches buoy near the Trade Center roof, reach it. They watched the chief lift the girl out of the canvas sack as if she were weightless. Her dress fell to the roof. The chief held her upright with one hand and picked the dress up with the other. Then he gestured toward the Tower Room and the breeches buoy began its return journey.
The mayor’s wife watched it approach. “Bob.”
“Yes?”
Paula turned to look up into the mayor’s face. Slowly she shook her head. “You’re right. There is nothing to say. You can’t put thirty-five years into words, can you?” She closed her eyes as the breeches buoy swung through the window and halted, swaying gently.
“Number twenty-two, if you please,” the secretary general said.
Paula opened her eyes. “Goodbye, Bob.”
“Au revoir,” the mayor said. He was smiling gently. “Your words to Jill, remember? Give her my love.”