Suppose Natalie hadn’t kept her two o’clock date with Susanna? Or suppose Henry had picked up her trail as she left the building on Ninety-sixth, and then lost her later? Or suppose, even, that Natalie and Arthur did not plan to go where I expected them to go at midnight? Would this mean that they could ride over the horizon with obliterated pasts (his past, at least), free of Helene Wylie, free of police pursuit, free of anything but their own unlikely consciences?
Not a chance.
I knew who they planned to become, you see. Which was why I was relatively certain they’d be at the midnight mass Natalie had noted on her calendar. The mass was to be held in their honor. The mass was to be a sanctification of sorts. Not legally binding, but Natalie had probably insisted on it, and if a man is willing to commit murder in order to escape his past, he’s willing to go along with anything.
They’d had it.
Either tonight, or three weeks from tonight, or three months or three years, somebody would knock on their door wherever they were, and politely introduce himself as a cop, and just as politely inform them that they were being charged with the murder of one Peter Greer, not to mention the minor charge of having swiped John Hiller’s corpse and set fire to it later. They would protest. I’m not Arthur Wylie, the man would say, you’ve made a dreadful mistake. Here, let me show you all sorts of identification, let me prove to you…
No, Arthur, it wouldn’t wash.
Not tonight or any night in the future.
Just come along quietly, there’s no death penalty for murder in this state.
Morosely, I sat in the kitchen and waited for the phone to ring. The apartment was unusually still; even the bird was silent. It occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to Maria all day, but I didn’t dare phone her now and tie up the line.
“Are you hungry?” I asked the bird.
The bird said nothing.
“Edgar Allan?” I said. “Are you hungry?”
The bird peeped. He did not squawk, he did not yammer, he did not caw. He peeped. I went to the cabinet, took out a can of tuna fish, opened it, and spooned the contents into the cage. He was not a bad-looking bird. His black feathers were sleek and shiny, his eyes were intelligent and alert, and he certainly had a hearty appetite.
“That’s a good bird,” I said.
I did not know very much about birds, good or otherwise, but I seemed to recall (from the Hitchcock film I’d despised) that there was a difference between crows and blackbirds, and whereas Maria had offhandedly named this bird Edgar Allan Crow, wouldn’t he take offense at such hasty baptism if he were not a crow but instead a black...
I suddenly remembered something.
“Excuse me,” I said to the bird, and left him eating in his cage, and went through the apartment to my bedroom. I didn’t bother looking through any of my dresser drawers. The only articles of clothing in the top drawer were handkerchiefs, underwear, and socks. My sweaters, in the middle drawer, were pullovers and cardigans, but they were in varying shades of blue (my favorite color) and wouldn’t do. My shirts, in the bottom drawer, were white, blue, beige, and pink (just one, a gift from Maria). I opened my closet door. I owned a black sports jacket, but it had cost three hundred and fifty dollars to have it hand-tailored, and I certainly wasn’t about to cut it apart, not for this miserable case. There was also a black raincoat hanging on the wooden clothes rod. I had bought it when I was in the Navy. The last time I’d worn it was in 1942, when I had “Peg” tattooed forever on my arm. I left the raincoat where it was, walked through the apartment again, and opened the door of the hall closet. “Raincoat” had triggered “rain,” and “rain” had triggered “umbrella.” Whereas my mother had always warned me never to open an umbrella in the house, I opened it now. It was black, all right, but was it big enough? I carried it into the kitchen, took a pair of scissors from the drawer near the sink, and got to work.
Occasionally, I glanced up at the clock. The phone refused to ring. It was eleven before I finished cutting the black silk. I carried the pieces into my study, placed them on the desk, and then went into the spare room Lisette used for ironing and for watching television, not necessarily in that order. From her sewing basket I took a needle, a spool of black thread, and a thimble. The last sewing I’d done was aboard the U.S.S. Sykes in the year 1946, just before I was sent home from the Pacific. This hardly qualified me as a tailor, though; I had fastened a button to a pea jacket and darned three pairs of socks. I sat down at the desk now, threaded the needle, slipped the thimble over my finger, and began hoping the phone would not ring till I was finished.
It rang at twenty minutes to midnight.
I snatched the receiver from the cradle.
“Hello?” I said.
“Ben, this is Henry.”
“I’ve been waiting.”
“I’m outside an abandoned church on Haley and Somers,” he said. “The Fletcher girl is in there with a baldheaded guy. There’s something going on.”
“Give me ten minutes,” I said.
“The truck’s parked across the street, near a boarded-up Chinese laundry. If I’m gone by the time you get here, it means they took off, and I’ll call you later.”
“Right,” I said, and hung up.
I took my holstered .38 Detective’s Special from the bottom drawer of the desk and clipped it to my belt. I did not know what to expect at the church on Haley and Somers, and whereas a rolling stone may gather no moss, a stitch in time most certainly saves nine. Gathering up my own stitchery, I stuffed the products of my handiwork into the pockets of my topcoat, and then left the apartment.
It was raining outside, and I’d just cut up my only damn umbrella!
Twenty-Eight
“How long have they been in there?”
“They went in maybe five minutes before I called you,” Henry said. “I wanted to make sure they were staying before I looked for a phone booth.”
We were sitting in the cab of his truck. The engine was running, and the windshield wipers swept aside the heavy rain, affording us a good view of the dark and silent church across the street.
“There’s condemned signs all over it,” Henry said, “and the windows are boarded up. I counted maybe two dozen people going in since Fletcher and the bald guy got here. They been going in one at a time or in pairs, Ben, through the back there—you see that gate in the iron railing?”
“Yes, I see it.”
“A patrol car went by about ten minutes ago, but either they been paid to ignore it, or they didn’t see nothing.”
“Where’d you pick up Natalie?”
“Outside that building on Ninety-sixth, like you said. I followed her out to Hainesville. She went in a rooming house there, didn’t come out again till almost dark. Then she drove down near the Tolliver Street Bridge—you know the bridge down there? Something must’ve happened down there, Ben. There were fire engines and police cars all over the place. Anyway, she picked up the bald guy about four blocks away from the bridge. He was carrying two heavy suitcases.”
“Where’d they go after she picked him up?”
“They went to eat, and then to a movie. They came out about eleven-fifteen, and I followed them here.”
“Good, Henry. You ready to go in there?”
“What’s in there?” he asked.
“A wedding,” I said.
He cut the engine, and we walked through the rain toward the church. An iron railing surrounded the small graveyard behind it. We went through the gate. As we approached an arched wooden door in the rear stone wall of the church, I reached into my pocket.