I was unarmed. I yelled at them that I didn’t have a gun. They laughed. They would have died laughing, but they were too busy trying to kill me. There were six of them and they were taller than the buildings, and all had guns and behind them stood Luxtro like a human skyscraper, yelling at them to shoot and keep shooting before I could get away. I looked around. A moment before I’d been on a wide highway, but now the boulevard was a garbage-littered alley, and the buildings of the alley were closing in on me and there was nowhere to run....
I woke up, sweating and shaking.
Somebody was pounding on my door.
I reached out and turned on a light beside the bed. The nightlight was weak. The room was thick with shadows, and I had not shaken off the dream when I could hear somebody calling my name at the door.
“Mike—Mike! Wake up!”
I glanced at the electric clock on the bed table as I swung my feet off to the floor. The hands pointed to three in the morning. I had been asleep for an hour.
“All right,” I looked around for a bathrobe, failed to find it and crossed the apartment in my shorts.
Ernie Gault stood outside the door. He wore a rain slicker. His hound-trouble face was sicker than ever.
“Sorry to wake you up, Mike.”
“Thank God you did.”
He frowned. “Could you get dressed, Mike? It’s pretty urgent.”
“Homicide?”
He shrugged. “Would I wake you up for anything else?” He followed me into my bedroom, watched me step into my trousers and shrug on a shirt.
Trying to keep it light, he said, “Why can’t people knock each other off during the day shift, huh?”
But his voice shook.
There were a half-dozen cops at Ed Clemmons’ place out on Pine Street by the time Ernie and I got there. Normally, Pine was a quiet neighborhood, bargain-priced homes with green-stamp lawns, cheap roofing—a place where young couples bought when they were just starting out, or older couples who couldn’t make the fast pace. But now lights blazed in every window for two blocks, and neighbors shivered on their front stoops or stood crowded in doorways. But they kept their distance. These people knew that trouble could be contagious.
Ernie and I got out of the police Plymouth and walked along the short driveway to the one-car garage Ed had turned into a gunroom and workshop. When we got nearer, I could hear a woman sobbing.
“Must be Ed’s wife,” Ernie said.
Norma Clemmons was on the verge of hysterics and the ambulance doctor was giving her a hypo as Ernie and I walked in. When she saw us, she cried out, “Mike—Ernie—”
Ernie went over to touch her shoulder. “Try to take it easy, Norma. I know it’s a hell of a thing.”
Her mouth quivered. “Ed’s dead, Ernie—”
Young Ed Clemmons was sprawled out on the garage floor. He looked as if a gun had exploded inches from his face.
They were getting ready to move his body, but paused to see if I had any suggestions. I shook my head, told them to get it out of there. They lifted his body on the wheel-litter. Ed was still wearing his police uniform.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
A young patrolman spoke from the doorway. “Ed shot himself.”
I turned. “Oh?”
“He was cleaning one of his guns.” The cop nodded toward the collection on the wall of the garage, next to Ed’s tools.
“At three o’clock in the morning?” I said.
“He was a nut on guns, all right. Everybody knew that,” the young cop said.
Ed’s wife cried out again, sobbing. She jumped up and Ernie tried to catch her, but she writhed free of him and ran after the ambulance men who were wheeling Ed’s body out to the ambulance.
I snagged her in the doorway and we had a real waltz before I could quiet her down. But suddenly she sagged against me as if all the life had gone out of her.
“Open that door,” I told Ernie. “I’ll take her back in the house.”
I carried her through the small kitchen, the apology of a dining room, crossed a hall and went into a lighted bedroom. The bedcovers were thrown back violently.
I put her down on the bed. “Is there anybody who can stay with you?” I said.
“I’m all right.”
“Sure you are. I didn’t ask about that”
Despite the sharpness of my tone, she managed a wan smile. “My mother. I’ll call her.”
Ernie spoke from behind me. “Give me her number, Norma. I’ll call her.”
She told Ernie the number and he went into the living room. It was so quiet in the house I could hear him dialing. Norma Clemmons shivered and I pulled the covers over her.
I asked, “Were you asleep when it happened?”
She nodded. “Ed was on the late shift. He—was in a prowl car with Carl Hogan. You know Carl Hogan, Mike?”
I didn’t know many of the later rookies, but I said sure, I knew Carl.
“Well, Ed came in so late every night that I just went on to bed. I used to wait up for him, but he didn’t want me to. He said—no use everybody staying up all night, just because he had to.”
“Was he in the habit of cleaning his gun before he came in to bed?”
She shook her head. “He—never did before.”
“Well, there’s always got to be a first time.”
“Mike, I heard something. I didn’t tell anybody else. I was afraid to—”
“Why were you afraid?”
She scrubbed at her face with her hands. “I don’t know. But Ed was upset all day. He wouldn’t talk about it. Something was bothering him. I was asleep and I heard this shot—from the garage. I didn’t even stop to think. I just screamed for Ed and I jumped out of bed and ran through the house to the garage—”
“And when you got out there he was dead.”
She covered her face with her hands, nodding. “But there’s something else.”
“What?”
“I never told anybody. I was afraid to, like I said. But just after I heard that shot—before I got out of this room—I heard a car drive away out front. It was going fast. You think I should tell anybody about that car, Mike?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Now you’ve told me. It could have been just a neighbor. But I’ll look into it. There’s no point in your saying more about it.”
But why had it frightened her that the killer had possibly come and gone in a car? Many of them do.
I rode in a black Ramsey-Angell funeral Cadillac with Carolyn that afternoon at three. We were the first car behind the hearse. Her face looked starkly white against her black dress and hat. The youthful chauffeur kept his eyes straight ahead.
“Thanks for coming with me,” Carolyn said.
“I wanted to.”
“I don’t know what I would have done. Tom has such a large family— yet I felt completely alone. I hope you never feel as alone as I have been, Mike.”
I watched the small blue fender pennant whip in the wind. “Biggest funeral I ever saw,” I said. “If that means a damned thing.”
“It doesn’t,” Carolyn said. Her chin tilted. She looked even more gaunt than she had yesterday. “They’re all here. Not only his family, but everybody who ever hated Tom Flynn has shown up today. I never saw so many black suits, and black ties—and black dirty hearts.”
“It’s a winning combination this year.”
“Even Jerry. He should be with me today, but I know how he disliked Tom. They lived their lives at opposite poles. But it’s Jerry I’m worried about, now Tom is dead. Tom was a good influence on Jerry, no matter how contemptuously Jerry talked to him—and about him. Jerry’s bitter. He keeps saying that Tom asked for it—and got it. Almost as if he knew all along it was going to happen.”
“He doesn’t mean that, Carolyn. He only means that Tom was fighting some powerful people and lost. Maybe he figures Tom must have known all along he was going to lose.”
She nodded. “I suppose he did.”
“He was doing what he believed in,” I said. “There are worse deaths.”
My God—Doc Yerrgsted had said that.
The funeral director had reserved a canvas chair for Carolyn near the open grave, under the green striped canopy where the Flynn clan had gathered.
She shook her head, and stood to one side with me while the minister read the final words of the burial ceremony. She barely seemed aware that I was beside her, and yet I had the damnedest feeling that she was leaning on me, clinging to me, and that behind the stark white mask of her face she was weeping uncontrollably.
I was glad to have her to think about I stared at the black suits, black ties—and black hearts she had mentioned. Fred Carmichael had a black band on his sleeve. His face was rigid and set. Mayor Bibb’s eyes were red. Stewart Mitchell, the Police Commissioner, was leaning on his son’s arm.
I moved my gaze beyond them—to men from the local bar association, Tom’s college fraternity, the veterans’ organizations. I saw Police Chief Clyde Waylin and Captain Neal Burgess, their faces set, eyes straight ahead.
“Oh, God!” Carolyn whispered. “Oh, my God!”
I turned quickly and looked at her. But she was all right. She was standing tall and straight in her black dress, her gloved hands clenched together before her.
Across the grave I saw Ernie Gault and Grace, and beyond them stood Doc Yerrgsted in a shabby gray suit. Beside him slouched the Greek.
I felt slightly better seeing Doc and the Greek. They made the whole affair a little cleaner.
The chauffeur drove swiftly on the way back. He still kept his eyes straight ahead, but now he used the Cad like a hot-rod.
“I know now what it was that Tom wanted to tell me,” Carolyn said. She seemed unaware of the way the car jockey handled the Cad, unaware of anything outside her own thoughts.
“Yes,” I said.
She turned and looked at me. “Do you know, too, Mike? Have you figured it out?”
The funeral pennant on the fender was snapping in the wind. I nodded. “It was easy.”
He had been threatened. That was what he had wanted to say to me that afternoon in his library, what he almost said to Carolyn—his life had been in danger. But he had not been able to bring in the issue of his personal safety in a public campaign. That was the Flynn pride. He could plead with me to help him clean up a dirty town. But he could not ask anyone to save his life in that same connection.
“They threatened him, Mike,” Carolyn said. “They threatened to kill him, unless he stopped.”
“Yes.”
She pressed her hand against her mouth. “He thought—he thought he would be all right—if he could get you to help him.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess he did. But believe me, Carolyn, I couldn’t have saved him. He helped make the police force in this town what it is today. He didn’t mean to, but he did. He was, in some ways, an outsider and he made mistakes. But he wasn’t wrong. Believe that.”
Carolyn nodded and then it was as if she went away from me. She sat beside me in the back seat of that swift moving car, but she seemed far away, out of reach.
I watched the fender pennant snap in the wind. The sound did not reach into the silence between us.
Big Fred Carmichael’s car was parked out front of her house when we got there. I did not even get out to go to the door with her.