In the morning, before we left, Bill wanted to do something nutty like bury him in the cellar or leave him on a side road in his own car and with a bullet in his head from his own gun. “If we let him live,” he argued, “he’ll go right back and let them know we’re coming.”
“No, he won’t,” I said. I looked at Smitty and talked to Bill. “He’ll have to tell them he talked to us. They won’t believe he didn’t give names. So he won’t go back to New York at all.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t.” His words were slurred, because of his puffed lips.
“He’ll go west some place,” I said, “and change his name.”
He caught the quote. He said, “You won’t ever hear from me again.”
After a while, Bill took my word for it, and moved his Mercury out of the driveway. Smitty backed his Plymouth out and drove away. He didn’t pause to ask directions.
Bill had to go into town and say goodbye to his boss and his kid, and get his money out of the bank. I stayed behind and packed suitcases and locked the windows. When he came back, we loaded the trunk and headed for New York.
I was still shaky in the right-hand seat. I tried driving for a while, but it was too hard. Not only the distance judgment, also the right ankle. They hadn’t been able to fix it completely. It wouldn’t bend any more, and made me gimp a little. I had to push the accelerator down with my heel, and it was awkward. So we switched again, and Bill drove the rest of the way. We went down through Pennsylvania, 11 and Carbondale and 106 and the Delaware Water Gap. It was the same distance, and 17 made us leery.
We went down Jersey and over the bridge to Staten Island and across Staten Island and over the new bridge to Brooklyn. Then we went up the Belt Parkway and through the tunnel into Manhattan.
We’d kept Smitty’s revolver. Bill had a Luger that maybe still worked, but no ammunition for it. He’d tried in Binghamton, but neither he nor the clerk was sure what size cartridge it wanted. He was going to try again in New York. Also in the trunk we had two deer rifles.
We got a hotel way up Broadway, 72nd Street, fairly cheap with a garage. Bill had almost four thousand dollars. I had not quite a hundred. The Air Force had sent the second hundred of my mustering-out pay to the hospital. God knew where the third hundred would go. That should be coming soon. Next Monday I’d be out two months. That seemed hard to believe.
It was only a little after two when we checked in. Bill found a bank a couple blocks down from the hotel. He put three grand in a joint checking account. We both signed cards and got a checkbook. They were unhappy. They wanted to give us one with our names on the checks.
After lunch, we went back to the room and sat on the beds. Bill said, “Now what?”
I said, “We go in two directions. The license plate of Smitty’s car is one. But I think that was probably stolen. The other is Dad. He was a lawyer in New York, way back when. He had something to do with the underworld.”
“That’s a lie. That punk was lying.”
“No. It’s something from that time that killed him. They were looking for him, maybe. He figured it was safe to come to New York, after all these years. But he was nervous about going out of the hotel.”
“But why Ann?”
“Tell me about that.”
“She was in the Civic Theater. You know, amateur. She spent two, three evenings a week at rehearsals. She’d take the bus in and get somebody to drive her back. I couldn’t go get her on account of Betsy. And the bus doesn’t run that late. That night, she took the bus in like always. It was three blocks to walk to where they rehearsed. She was cross-c-crossing the street. It wasn’t even dark, it was only seven-thirty. Early evening. The car came ou-came out of the side street, clipped her. She got kno-knocked—”
“Okay,” I said. “Take it easy. You don’t have to tell me now.”
“I’ll get it over with,” he said. He lit a cigarette. “Back onto the sidewalk,” he said. “The car knocked her back-back—”
“Okay.”
“Jesus.” He breathed loudly, inhale and exhale, staring at the bedspread pattern. He laid his hand on the bedspread, fingers splayed out. He pressed down and said, “Three people saw it. Nobody saw it clear. The car didn’t even slow down.”
I said, “I wonder if it was the same car.”
He looked at me. “As went after you?”
“Uh huh.”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. Nobody saw it clear.”
He finished his cigarette. I went over to the phone, and looked at the directories. They had the Manhattan and the Brooklyn and the Bronx. I found Chester P. Smith in the Brooklyn book, at 653 East 99th Street. Nightingale 9-9970.
A woman answered. I asked for Smitty, and she said, “Who?”
“Chet. Chester.”
“He’s at work. Who is this?”
“I think we were in the service together,” I said. “If this is the right Chester Smith. Medium height, thin-faced.”
She laughed, as though she were mad. “There’s nothing thin about this Chester,” she said.
“Can’t be the same guy,” I said.
I hung up and looked for the public library in the Manhattan directory. It said there was a Newspaper Division at 521 West 43. I said, “I’m going out for a while.”
Bill said, “Where?”
“Library. You could figure out how we check that license plate.”
“What the hell you doing at the library?”
“I want to see if Dad ever made the paper.”
“You mean with the underworld? Bootleggers?” He got to his feet, frowning and mad. “That punk was lying, Ray. What kind of a son are you?”
“A son with his last eye open,” I said.
He hung fire, and then turned away. “Hell,” he said. “I haven’t been getting any sleep.”
“I’ll be back after a while.”
He flung himself face down on his bed and I left the room.