12

So the weather changes, and the seasons come and go, marching past blindly. Clear skies follow angry storms; clouds sweep across the endless heavens, some high and wispy thin in the shimmering sunlight, some dark and lowering on black horizons, fertile with threat. Rain slashes down, warped sheets in the howling night; and mist curls lightly through forested glades, giving them ghostly brightness. Snow beautifies bare branches, furnishing ornament until spring; and ice throttles rivers and chokes lakes, weighs down masts and crashes through rigid shrouds. Wild wind tears across oceans, whipping towering waves to torment, drowning ships; and soft breezes flutter the corn tassels and lean the grass gently in patterned softness.

And the wash of crime across the police blotter flows and ebbs, its clear effluent seeping quietly away in the silent sands of the past; the dregs are retained, recorded, studied, compared, and then buried with the other detritus of our current civilization. Cells fill and are emptied; pages of painfully penned names and addresses drift like idle seed-pods into numberless filing cabinets and disappear forever in shadowed archives. Ranks, names, and assignments change on duty rosters; squad car models advance from year to year, glistening with all the latest gadgets. The price for living in communal harmony is promptly charged and promptly paid each day of each year …

Thursday–8:30 P.M.

Mary Kelly was waiting for Clancy when he emerged from the precinct. The street was heavy with slush; a slight fog was springing up. The overhead street lamps glowed faintly down on pavements damp with melting snow. Clancy came down the worn stone steps, his coat collar raised, his hat pulled tightly over his brow. Mary Kelly met him at the bottom step, putting her arm protectively through his. For a moment something in him resented the intimacy; then the firm body touching him seemed, instead, a sudden source of strength.

They crossed the darkened street to his car. He held the door open for her, closed it behind her, and walked around the front to get in at his side. He closed the door behind him; his fingers found the keys to the ignition and he reached forward towards the lock. Her fingers came forward to grasp his hand; he turned, facing her in the shadows of the darkened car.

“Did you have a hard day?” she asked softly. Her warm eyes were studying him with sympathy.

He turned from her, staring through the streaked windshield at the deserted street beyond. A hard day? The picture of a small body spread-eagled on the bloody chair in the apartment on Eighty-fifth Street came to him, and then the photograph of the old man caught in a compromising position in the rear seat of a blackmailer’s cab. Warnicki’s sneering, hard young face crossed his mind. And then, dominating all else, the pallid freckled face of Timmons, leaning forward earnestly, explaining so easily, so logically, so reasonably—and so falsely!—why he had murdered an innocent, harmless old man. The bile rose in his throat, threatening to choke him.

And then, suddenly, the pictures were all replaced by a small mahogany face with huge black eyes looking at him earnestly, asking him a question, honestly wanting to know. Would five hundred dollars be enough to buy a shoe-shine stand—with chairs—big enough for him and his grandfather to work together?

He turned back to her, suddenly noticing the beauty of her fine face, the loveliness of her dark eyes, the very warmness of her body and her sympathy across from him. He felt the harshness drain away in him. His fingers tightened against hers.

“No,” he said gently, honestly. His eyes surveyed her, alive and calm once again. “No; it was a good day …”