WHEN I CLOSED THE TRUNK I got in the car and faced Bobbie Lee. I said, “You still in this?”
“It's borderline. The excitement of doing nothing night and day is almost more than I can bear.”
“If everything goes all right,” I said, “I'll be able to give you a lot of work soon.”
“So you keep promising.”
“We might even work out some kind of partnership or something.”
“You get the jobs and I do them? You know what's going on and I don't? You go into the motel and I sit outside? Thanks, fella, but I know all about partnerships like that.”
She followed me to College Avenue. Cecil Redman's “flat-back” truck was not outside his house.
We parked in front of the house next door. The house I loved, with its veranda and its gables and its decaying arch.
Bobbie Lee watched as I went to my trunk and took out two suitcases and a plastic bag.
I carried everything to the house.
The door was locked, but that was no problem. I walked in through the wall.
The idea was to dump the bomb makings somewhere anonymous, as if the Scum Front had done it.
I found myself in the living room. Artistically, I favored a dump in the fireplace. It was big enough, and the remains of the mantelpiece showed that it had been a beautiful feature.
But there was a massive hole in the floor in front of it and the signs of rot nearby convinced me to take a more practical course.
There was a closet in the room. I put the suitcases and the bag in that.
I spent a long time dealing with possible fingerprints.
Then I leaned the closet door against the frame from which it once had swung.
“I want you to watch the house,” I told Bobbie Lee.
“Makes a change from watching a motel, I guess,” she said.
“Kids play around here sometimes. They shouldn't play with what I left inside.”
She said nothing.
“But the cops will be here soon. You can go when they arrive.”
“And what building do I sit outside after that?”
“My office,” I said. “With any luck I shouldn't be all that long. And I want to talk to you about our future.”
“Our future?”
Miller was out when I arrived, but his secretary let me wait in his room while she tracked him down.
Captains get comfortable chairs. I leaned back and put my feet up on his blotter.
Miller would not like it when I refused to give him the membership list of the Scum Front.
But I would counter by offering to phone in an anonymous tip-off about where he could find a closet full of explosives. In the closet he would also find a farewell message from the Scummies. “Continuing police pressure,” it would say, “has forced us to end our campaign prematurely. We very much regret our contribution to the atmosphere that led OTHERS to injure the Ohio Street night watchman. We oppose physical violence of any kind. We now see that our campaign was misguided, however laudable its aims.”
A literary analyst might see that the style of the Farewell Message differed from Early Scum Front.
I didn't think the police would care a lot about that.
I was betting that they would settle for being given the credit for driving the Scum Front out of existence. And recovering the bomb-making stuff would give them something physical to show the press and the public.
I was betting that would be enough. That they wouldn't also insist on a body. Someone to prosecute. Someone to spit at. Not when they still had other, “real” bombers to find. Nuts who had blown up a building on Ohio Street and a man with it. And about them I genuinely knew nothing.
As for the Scummie Wrap-up, surely Miller needn't even “know” who tipped him off.
I might just get out of the whole thing unscathed.
Could that happen? Was it possible even though we were dealing with terrorists here, however dangerless? Wouldn't someone have to pay?
I finally heard footsteps outside.
I took a breath and prepared.
As Miller walked through the door I said, “Come on in, Jerry. Sit down. Get comfy. But I warn you, you're not going to like everything I have to say.”
Miller said nothing. He just stood. He looked terrible but before I had a chance to make a crack about it he was roughly pushed aside.
Behind him a man came through the door with a gun in his hand.
I recognized the man from pictures. And from Charlotte Vivien's party, a lifetime ago. He was the Chief of Police.
“Consorting with terrorists, huh, Samson?” he said. “Well, you're not going to like everything I have to say either.”
Miller finally spoke. He said, “Sorry, Al. Sorry.”