“You might take a look at the corpse too, though it’s not strictly necessary,” Andes said. “We know who he is.”
“Who?”
“Steve Adams. The one you called Turk.”
“Turk? Dead?”
“Know him by the fingerprints.”
“I thought he was in jail in Ajax.”
“He jumped bail. So I’m told.”
Tony Hastings was trying to figure out the difference in Bobby Andes’s appearance. It was his loss of weight, grooves around his mouth and nose and under his eyes where it had been greasy smooth before.
Tony Hastings checked in across the street. When he came back, Andes said, “I guess you’d like a lineup like the other time.”
“I thought that’s what I was here for.”
“I could take you to see him and ask you who the hell he is, but I guess you’d prefer the lineup, more up and up.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Go get some coffee. If we’re going to have a lineup I need to round up some guys.”
There was something not wholly serious about the lineup when they finally got to it. They had it in the office with the desks. They put Tony at one of the desks. Six people came in from the side door and stood in a row in front of the counter. It was a moment before Tony realized this was the lineup. The first of the six was a woman in brown who had been sitting a few minutes before at the desk where Tony sat now. She was giggling. The second was a policeman in uniform, trying not to grin. He looked familiar, and Tony wondered if they were trying to trick him by disguising the suspect. Later he realized this was the policeman named George who had brought him back from the crime in the woods on that day. The third and fourth people were handcuffed to each other. One was a heavy man with yellow hair, dressed like a garage mechanic, the other was an old man in a dirty open-collar shirt. The fifth and sixth were also handcuffed. Both wore beards and plaid shirts. The beard of one was brown and full. He looked independent and intelligent. The other’s beard was black and clumsily trimmed. His eyes groped around the room in confusion, and Tony Hastings watched in amazement as the unknown face turned like merging binocular images into a face he knew.
He knew by the eyes which had looked at him differently in the night, and the mouth in the beard also different then. He watched the man looking around the room, not knowing why he was there, who had not yet located Tony at the desk, whose eyes then passed over Tony without recognition, not noticing how intently Tony was staring trying to be sure. Testing him now against the woods and the car, superimposing him upon the stored memory, seeing him by the tire with Ray and Turk, in the car beside him as he tried to slow down at the trailer, and in the woods, his distinct words, Out! You’ll get killed if you don’t watch it!
At last the man noticed Tony staring at him but still did not recognize him. Blank, puzzled. But Tony knew him. Not sure how glad he was, afraid of what being glad could lead to, he whispered to Bobby Andes, “Yes.”
Andes loud. “Yes? Yes what? You know somebody?”
“The one with the beard.”
“Which beard? They’re two beards there.”
“The one on the end.”
“The man with the beard on the end. The red plaid shirt. The blue jeans? You’ve seen him before?”
The man with the beard, shirt and jeans was looking at him now, perplexed.
“That’s Lou.”
“Lou who? Who’s Lou?”
“Lou’s the one who drove me, who made me drive his car when the others went off in mine, who made me drive into the woods and left me there.”
“This guy? He don’t seem to understand. Lou. Hey, you! Is your name Lou?”
“You know my name. I told you. What’s going on?”
“You ever see this man before, Lou? Think carefully. You ever see him?”
Lou staring at Tony. Tony unable to tell if some slow recognition was appearing in the stare. “No.”
“You sure?”
“I don’t know him. Who is he?”
“Tell him, Tony. Tell him who he is.”
“Last summer, you—he—”
“This man?”
“This man and his friends forced us off the road on the Interstate. Then two of them forced their way into my car with my wife and daughter, and this man—”
“This man here? Lou?”
“Yes, Lou, made me drive his car and took me into the woods where he made me get out. Later my wife and daughter were found dead at the same place.”
“What say to that, Lou?”
It was all fear on Lou’s face, obscuring whatever recognition there might be. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What do you know about this man’s wife and daughter?”
“I never saw him in my life.”
“What do you know about Ray and Turk?”
“Never heard of them.”
To Tony: “Just one thing now. Are you sure this is the man?”
“Absolutely.”
“Would you swear to it in court under penalty of perjury?”
Tony’s breath. “Yes.”
They took him to the morgue, where they uncovered a waxy gray face with stubble. Eyes closed, no glasses, the nose like a beak, mouth in a grimace, it could have been anybody. Tony could not imagine this person awake. He had no memory of Turk to mesh with him. He could not even recall the faces of Turk he had been unable to identify in Ajax and in the picture.
“It’s hard,” he said. “I guess it’s Turk.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” he said.
Bobby Andes took him to dinner. He was elated. “Good man,” he said. “We got him now.”
Exhilarated. He coughed and coughed. “We’re going to charge him with murder.”
“You got enough evidence?”
“We got you, and we got fingerprints. We’re going to check hair samples.”
He ran over the case. “This Lou, it’s his prints on the trailer and the car. That’s why I wanted you to look at him.”
“Then he did go back to the trailer after leaving me.”
“Looks like it. Probably he went back and told them where he left you, and that’s why they went back with the bodies.”
“To get me.”
“I’m betting your friend Ray was the third in our holdup.”
“The guy who escaped running?”
“The description fits.”
“What happens next?”
“We’ll work up the case against Lou. You’ll have to come back, you prepared for that? Meanwhile, I’m gonna find Ray.”
Tony Hastings returned home the next morning with shaky joy, the face of Lou, which he thought he wanted to spit in, looking at him with frightened eyes.
SIX
Looks like we’re going to chase crooks, Susan says, with Part Three to mark the point. We’ve killed Turk, caught Lou, and are after Ray. Good. The crime hangs over this story like a poisonous cloud. It needs to be washed away, which can’t be done, Susan believes, without going after the perpetrators. Lou’s discomfiture just makes plainer the need to get Ray.
Yet something odd is happening. That facetious police lineup. Tony’s identification of Turk in the morgue. What’s Edward doing with these hints of sleaze? Complicating the simple division between bad Ray and innocent Tony? It makes her queasy, wondering if she can keep her balance as she follows.
She’s queasy too about Tony’s little tribute to wife and child, more mannered than usual with its compressed phrases and sparse oddly chosen details. The quease slides into Arnold. She wonders, if he praised her like that, what odd detail would he elevate? As for Edward, she remembers the rowboat in the harbor when he was depressed. He said, I’ll descend into oblivion. No one will ever know what I saw or thought. She said, I’m in oblivion now. No one knows my visions and thoughts, either. He said, You’re not a writer. It doesn’t mean as much to you.