The Fugitive Pigeon Page 8

  I said, “If this is a false address, Uncle Al, I’ll come back here, you can count on it. And I’ll go straight to Aunt Florence.”

  “Charlie, I’m giving you the goods, I swear I am. I can’t help you, I told you that, but you’re like my own son, my own flesh and blood, and the least I can—”

  “Sure,” I said. “But don’t call Mr. Gross after I’m gone.”

  “Call him? Are you nuts? Call him and tell him I gave his private address to a kid with a grudge and a gun? Charlie, the minute you leave here your Aunt Florence and I go straight to Florida.”

  “No, you don’t. You stay here in town. If I have to phone you in Florida, it’s Aunt Florence I talk to.”

  “Charlie, let me build up an alibi!”

  “No. I may need to know something else before this is done.”

  He looked very gloomy when I left, and he didn’t walk me to the front door.

  Chapter 12

  The Packard was still parked next to the fire hydrant, but now Artie was in the back seat with Miss Althea. I slid into the front seat next to Chloe, and Artie explained, “She tried to duck out again.”

  She was being silent and grim at the moment, sitting hunched into the corner, staring straight ahead and ignoring everybody.

  I said, “She’s more trouble than she’s worth. Maybe we ought to get rid of her.”

  “She’s insurance, Charlie,” Artie said. “She’s our hostage.”

  I wasn’t all that sure a hostage would stop Mr. Gross and his organization, particularly when the hostage’s father was already dead and couldn’t complain, but if it made Artie feel safer it was worth it. I’d already come to depend on Artie’s presence, not to do anything in particular to help me but just to be there to talk to, and I wouldn’t want to see him scared away. So I said, “All right, we’ll keep her.”

  Chloe said, “Did you get the address?”

  “Right.” I took the paper from my pocket and read the address aloud: “One twenty-two Colonial Road, Hewlett Bay Park, Long Island.”

  Chloe said, “Hewlett Bay Park. Where’s that?”

  “On Long Island, I guess,” I said. “Have you got a map?”

  “I don’t know. Look in the glove compartment.”

  There was nothing in the glove compartment but a pair of ladies’ black gloves and the automatic I’d taken from Miss Althea.

  From the back seat, Artie said, “We need gas anyway. Get a road map at the gas station.”

  “Fine,” said Chloe. The motor was already running, purring away as though it were brand-new and born to be in a getaway car. Chloe turned the wheel, ignored the traffic coming down 65th Street from behind us, and pulled away from the curb. She was a very individualistic driver, Chloe, and I wasn’t at all surprised when I learned, some time later, that the State of New York refused to give her a driver’s license.

  We were already on the East Side, so we decided to drive on over to the 59th Street Bridge, go over to Queens, and find a gas station there, which we did. Miss Althea told the attendant we were kidnapping her, but we were used to that sort of thing from her by then, so we all laughed it off and the attendant got a chuckle out of it, too. He wasn’t a sourpuss like the toll taker at the George Washington Bridge. Artie bent Miss Althea’s thumb back, to make her stop yelling, and then everything was fine. I got a road map of Long Island, paid for the gas, and we drove away from there.

  Hewlett Bay Park turned out to be on the south shore of Long Island, in the midst of a little flurry of places named Hewlett. There was Hewlett Harbor and Hewlett Neck, Hewlett Bay and Hewlett Point, and even a town just called Hewlett.

  From where we were there didn’t seem to be any sensible way at all to get to Hewlett Bay Park, or any other Hewlett. With all of us but Miss Althea studying the map and making suggestions, we finally decided on what looked to be the simplest route of all. By a complex series of local streets, we got from Queens Boulevard, on which we were now situated, to the Long Island Expressway, which we took to Grand Central Parkway, which we took to the Van Wyck Expressway, which we took to the Belt Parkway (at this point for some reason called Southern Parkway), which we took to Sunrise Highway, which we took to Central Avenue in Valley Stream, which we took to the general vicinity of the Hewletts, at which point we would ask directions.

  Of course, it didn’t work that way. It was now a little after six, and we were caught up in the tail end of the rush hour, and evening was beginning to edge toward us from the east, and Chloe kept getting confused by the signs, and so we managed to be lost more often than not. Still, by fits and starts we approached our target.

  We’d been approaching it for an hour and a half, and had attained Sunrise Highway, when, at about seven-thirty, while we stopped for a traffic light, Miss Althea caught us all by surprise—she’d been quiet as a mouse for nearly an hour—and got the car door opened and leaped to the street.

  Artie shouted, “Hey!” and leaped out after her.

  She was off like a deer across the highway and down the side street. Artie pelted after her, shouting, “Hey! Hoy! Hey!” And there were Chloe and I, just the two of us, with the light turned green in front of us and several drivers turned dangerous behind us. With horns honking away, I said, “You better pull forward. Get over to the side of the road as quick as you can.”

  Of course, we were in the farthest left lane of three, so it took us nearly half a mile to get over to where we could pull off the road—in a discount carpet center’s parking area—and try to figure out what to do next.

  Chloe gazed worriedly out the rear window. “He won’t know where we are,” she said.

  I said, “What if he doesn’t catch her? In fact, what if he does? He can’t drag her screaming and kicking along beside a big highway full of cars.”

  Chloe squinted and squinted. “I don’t see him coming,” she said.

  “He’ll be along,” I told her.

  But he wasn’t. We waited fifteen minutes, and he never showed up. I was feeling pretty impatient anyway, this whole trip taking so blasted long, and sitting there fifteen minutes, in an unmoving automobile and waiting for somebody who continued not to show up, was getting to me.

  Finally I said, “He’s not coming back, you know.”

  “He’ll be here any minute,” she said, squinting away out the rear window.

  I said, “If he was going to get back here, he’d have done it by now. Either he’s chased her so far away he figures there’s no point looking for us here anymore, or she’s managed to get him arrested.”

  “Arrested?” She looked worried. “Are we out of the city limits?”

  “I don’t know, I think so. Why?”

  “Artie has to avoid the city police,” she said, and let it go at that.

  I said, “Well, in any case, he wouldn’t expect to find us here any more. He knows I’m in a hurry, I’m trying to protect my life, so he’ll naturally expect us to go on. He knows the address where we’re headed, maybe he’ll meet us there.”

  “How will he get there?” she wanted to know.

  “How do I know? Maybe he’ll take a cab. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he got there before we do.”

  “And what if he isn’t there?” she said.

  “Then he’ll meet us back at his place, after I see Mr. Gross.”

  “Do you want to try to see Mr. Gross alone?”

  “I didn’t count on Artie coming in with me anyway,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want him to risk getting himself killed on my account.”

  She stopped squinting out the rear window at last, and looked rather searchingly at me. “Do you mean that, Charlie?” she asked me.

  “Well, sure,” I said. It was true; I hadn’t expected Artie would come in with me. I’d assumed he’d wait out in the car, the same as at Uncle Al’s.

  “You’re really something, Charlie, you know that?” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “If I had my way, I’d be right back in Canarsie this minute, behind t
he bar, watching television. This isn’t the life for me, believe me.”

  “I know that,” she said. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “We’d better get going,” I said.

  She turned her head and looked out the rear window again. “Do you really think so?”

  “He’d have been here by now,” I said.

  She sighed. “I suppose so.” She faced front. “I hope nothing’s happened to him. He’s an awful sweet guy, you know.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “He looks up to you,” she said.

  I stared at her. “Artie? Looks up to me?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I thought it was the other way around,” I said.

  She laughed. “You don’t know yourself at all, Charlie,” she said. Looking neither to left nor right, she started the Packard rolling forward and angled it out into the traffic.

  Chapter 13

  Nine o’clock.

  There didn’t seem to be any way into Hewlett Bay Park. We’d found the general area an hour ago, and we’d been circling around and around it ever since, always coming back to the same street, a dark street with a barrier halfway across it and a stop sign on it and another sign saying ONE WAY DO NOT ENTER. So far as I could tell, the other side of that barrier was Hewlett Bay Park, but I just couldn’t find the way in.

  The fourth or fifth time we came back to that same place, a Cadillac ahead of us drove nonchalantly around the barrier and on down the street. I looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at me and it hit us both at the same time. The barrier and signs were phony; it was just an exclusive town’s cute way to keep tourists and other rabble out.

  “Anything a Cadillac can do,” I said, “a Packard can do. Onward.”

  “Right,” she said, and around the barrier we went.

  This was another world. Head-high hedges surrounded the homes, each of which sprawled in moneyed elegance on an insultingly large plot of land. There were few streetlights, but many of the driveways we passed were lit with blue or amber lights. There were no sidewalks, of course, because who in this area walked? The street names were lettered vertically on green posts set discreetly at each corner, and the intersections were free of vulgar traffic lights. In the ten minutes it took us to find Colonial Road we saw no other moving automobile.

  One twenty-two was a house to fit the road; Colonial, with a bit of plantation thrown in. White pillars marched across the front of the house, which was of white clapboard with black shutters. Lit carriage lamps flanked the wide front door, and more lamps of the same style, on poles, were spaced along the curving driveway. There was the normal tall hedge all round, and more lawn than any one house could possibly need. The ground-floor windows were lit, the upstairs windows dark.

  I said to Chloe, “Drive on by. Park beyond the next corner.”

  There was a streetlight at the intersection, as dim as a cocktail lounge at midnight. We went past it, and Chloe stopped the Packard up close to the hedge in the next pool of darkness.

  “If I’m not back in half an hour,” I said, “you better not wait for me. I’ll try to get back to Artie’s place as best I can.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Well, sure. I’m no daredevil.”

  The hedge being so close, I had to get out on her side. We stood together a second beside the car, while an odd feeling came over us, or at least over me, and then I said, “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  “Please be careful, Charlie,” she said, with a funny kind of emphasis on “please.”

  It made me uncomfortable. “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  She got back into the car and I walked down to the intersection and through the halo of yellow light there and beyond. It was almost like walking along a country road; the darkness and the high hedges obscured the signs of civilization. There was no sound anywhere but the scuff of my own shoes on the pebbles at the edge of the road. The back of my neck was cold, where the hairs were standing up.

  My right hand was in the pocket of Artie’s jacket, holding tight to the little pistol I’d gotten from Tim. The pistol should have made me feel better—safer, more secure, more in control—but it did just the reverse, serving as a cold metal tangible reminder that I was kidding no one but myself. In fact, not even myself.

  I looked back, and at first I couldn’t see the Packard, but then I caught an evil glint of chrome in the darkness back there. That car was the mechanical Sydney Greenstreet.

  The driveway entrance to Mr. Gross’s house was at the far end of the frontage. I crunched along, seeing his house lights vaguely through the hedge on my left, and after the road’s darkness his driveway, when I stood in front of it, seemed as bright as Times Square. It was wide, and four or five cars were parked along it, all new and expensive.

  Would he have dogs? It seemed to me a place like this required dogs, huge loping animals who’d galumph over and bit your leg off without the least malice in the world. I stood a minute peering into the property in search of them, but all I could see were driveway and lights.

  What I was worrying all the time about dogs for anyway I’ll never know, since it was mostly human beings who’d been trying to do me in the last twenty hours.

  Finally, reluctantly, I stepped onto Mr. Gross’s property. I skirted the driveway and all its lights, and came around at the house from the other side. Light spilled from the windows to guide my way across turf as soft as a Persian rug. These windows were too high for me to look in them and see anything but ceilings, which was just as well; it made it less likely anyone on the inside would glance out and see me.

  I moved around to the rear of the house, where I tiptoed across a slate patio alive with metal furniture. There were no rooms alight at the rear of the house, so I moved in utter darkness here, and my progression across the patio, ricocheting from metal chair to metal table to metal chair like a complex billiard shot, was a series of tiny magnificently distinct noises. When I came at last to a door, a possible entry, I simply leaned against it for a minute to listen to the blessed silence.

  But the job was to get in. After I’d caught my breath and my wits, I tried the knob and the door proved to be unlocked. I could hardly believe my luck.

  Well, it wasn’t luck. I pushed open the door, stepped through in unbroken silence, shut the door as silently behind me, and forty lights went on.

  I was in a smallish dining room, with secretarys and highboys against the walls and a sturdy English-looking table in the center. Leaded windows overlooked the patio and, I suppose, a garden. Quiet elegance bespoke itself softly in this room, just as in my Uncle Al’s apartment, and similarly, too, the human element provided the only discordant note.

  In this case it was the Three Stooges, one of whom had turned on the lights, principally a crystal chandelier suspended above the table. I say the Three Stooges, but of course I mean only an imitation of the Three Stooges. But for all that, a pretty good imitation.

  Moe, in a black chauffeur’s suit, held an automatic, pointed more or less at me. Larry, in a butler’s tux, had armed himself with a basketball bat. And Curly, in white apron and tall white chef’s cap and blackface, hefted a meat cleaver. All three glared at me with the belligerence of fear.

  This was the last thing I’d expected to find in the house of Mr. Gross—amateurs like myself. They were, in their own way, more frightening than professionals. Like dogs, there was no reason to suppose they could be talked to.

  I raised my hands over my head. “Don’t shoot,” I said. “Don’t hit. Don’t cut.”

  They advanced.

  Chapter 14

  From the window I could see the driveway and lawn and hedge, and down to the right, beyond the hedge, I could make out the streetlight at the intersection. Just beyond there, I knew, Chloe sat waiting in the Packard. I stared off that way, but of course I couldn’t see the car.

  The Three Stooges had grabbed me up like blockers on the kickoff forming around the man
with the football. They’d run me up a narrow flight of stairs—back stairs, service stairs, whatever they call them—up here to the second floor, and locked me away in this bedroom facing the front of the house. Larry, the butler with the bat, had frisked me and relieved me of Tim’s little pistol—which he handled with complete terror—and then they’d backed out of the room, bumping into one another and watching me with round eyes. I heard them talking through the door, deciding Larry and Curly, the cook, should stand guard at the door while Moe, the chauffeur, went downstairs to tell Mr. Gross what they’d caught.

  Well. I was in the Gross house, under the Gross roof. There was even a chance I was going to get to see Mr. Gross himself in a minute or two. And wasn’t that what I wanted?

  Of course it was.

  Then why did I keep looking around for some place to hide, some way to escape? I didn’t want to escape, did I?

  As a matter of fact, I did. Hopelessly, miserably, but certainly.

  The room I was in seemed to be a spare bedroom, reserved for guests. The bed was a high wide ornate old thing with a canopy, dominating the room. Flowers and vines and so on were carved into the wooden head-board, and the same motif was followed through on the dresser, the vanity table, the writing desk, and the night tables. Paintings of fox hunts graced the walls. Heavy drapes framed the windows.

  Yes, a guest room. The dresser drawers I opened were all empty. I don’t know why I expected to find a Gideon Bible in one of them, but its absence surprised me.

  A key turning in the lock made me start and slide shut a dresser drawer with embarrassed haste. As though that counted! Poking into empty dresser drawers was hardly something to agitate Mr. Gross; aside from having already broken into his house, there was whatever else he thought I’d done that had made him put me on the spot in the first place.

  I turned and the Three Stooges popped through the opening doorway all at once and spread out, and after them came Mr. Gross.

  Up till then I’d assumed that “Gross” was the man’s name, but it was his description. He looked like something that had finally come up out of its cave because it had eaten the last of the phosphorescent little fish in the cold pool at the bottom of the cavern. He looked like something that better keep moving because if it stood still someone would drag it out back and bury it. He looked like a big white sponge with various diseases at work on the inside. He looked like something that couldn’t get you if you held a crucifix up in front of you. He looked like the big fat soft white something you might find under a tomato plant leaf on a rainy day with a chill in the air.