“Give, Blake.”
“I got it from a friend of Wernitz’s. His only friend, I guess. Janey’s father, Swede. You needn’t get sore. I didn’t think of it till T was walking back from the Maynards’ at three o’clock this morning. It must have been something he said sometime that stuck in my mind. I decided to go take a chance on it. That’s all. It paid off. ” He paused a moment. It hurt the side of his head to talk so much. “I don’t know whether you know Janey’s father. He’s a queer kind of duck himself, sort of solitary, silent guy that likes being a night watchman. Orvie Rogers got him a better job once but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it during the war when they ran a night shift. He and Wernitz were friends. Wernitz used to come out there and do the rounds and sit out on the pier and chew the fat with him, every time the moon brightened the place up. He didn’t come unless there was bright moonlight. They got along fine, Janey’s father said. He’s Czech descent and Wernitz was born there. That was the bond, originally.”
“I’ll be damned,” Carlson said.
He turned the car into Locust Street and drew up in front of the Blakes’ house. It looked even narrower and smaller with no light in the windows, lonely like a shabby deserted child. He put on the brake and switched off the engine.
“Let’s get on with it, Gus. I’ll go in while you change and clean up, and then we’re going down and talk to Janey. And I’ve already told you to shut up. If you and Janey want to fight that’s your business. But you don’t want her killed, Gus. That’s what worries me.”
Gus unlocked the door and switched the hall light on.
“Go on and get cleaned up. There’s a little job outside here I want to look at.”
Swede Carlson went through the dining-room and kitchen and let himself out at the back door. He wanted to look at the footprint the colored boy had planted grass seed over, and he also wanted to give Gus a chance to go through the misery of the abandoned bedroom and nursery by himself without anybody watching him. He shook his head. He hadn’t been actively in love for so long he’d forgotten about it, how hard it could hit a guy. It looked as if it was hitting Gus Blake for the first time. And it was a laugh in some ways. A guy falling in love with his own wife, with somebody like the Maynard witch in the background. It was a pretty left-handed way of doing things.
He turned his flashlight on the damp patch by the border, and nodded approvingly. It was a neat job. The loose soil from the bottom of Janey’s compost heap that the kid had spread over the washed surface of the ground had been painstakingly brushed off, the under surface watered down. It was some of Lieutenant Williams’s fancy F.B.I. stuff, Williams’s idea, and it had paid off. Which was more than Janey’s hunch about the bakery had done. The old man had spent the night there himself on a special order, so that nobody had got out to smoke a cigarette in the grape arbor. And more than the boy Buzz Rodriguez he’d been counting on had done, Carlson thought. He was conscious and he was going to be all right, but he knew less about Doc Wernitz’s affairs than Swede himself knew. He looked down at the print. A substantial amount of it was left. There were a few white specks where the cast had chipped a little where the edges of the print had been raked. It was a right foot, running as Janey had said, size about 11½ thin leather sole, narrow, pointed toe and narrow heel. It could be an evening shoe as Janey had said. Tomorrow they’d find out.
He jerked around and had started running for the house even before he was certain it was Gus’s voice shouting at him from upstairs. The gooseflesh was sharp as splinters of ice up and down his spine. He dashed through the kitchen. But it couldn’t be. Janey couldn’t have come back, not after he’d told her she had to stay away and why. He slowed down and took a deep breath of relief as he heard Gus again. “Come up here. Take a look at this.” Gus was puzzled and excited, but that was all. Carlson went up the stairs. He hadn’t actually realized until then, he was thinking, what a crawling feeling of horror the switched-off lights there in the night had given him, or how positive the conviction in his mind was that the hand that had turned them off was the hand that had beaten the life out of the little gambler in the house out at Newton’s Corner.
“Have a look at this.” Gus was waiting for him in the hall on the third floor. He had switched on the light in the front bedroom, and went back into it as Swede Carlson joined him. “It’s a shambles.”
“Wait a minute.” Carlson stopped him at the door. They stood there looking around. “That’s Janey’s?” He nodded toward the dressing-table in the corner by the window.
“Sure.”
It was torn apart as completely as any dressing-table could be torn apart. Even the box of face powder had been dumped out on the glass surface. The jewel box with its string of pearls, clips, and small trinkets was dumped out. The drawers had been emptied on the floor and the contents left there.
“Janey’s coats?” He pointed to two coats with their pockets turned inside out, on the bed nearest the closet. Gus nodded. Carlson looked on around the room. The drawer in the night table between the beds had been turned over on Janey’s spread. The small top drawer in Gus’s chest where he kept collar studs and cuff links had been emptied on the top. Nothing else had been touched.
Swede Carlson went across the room between the beds to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and dialed a number. “Get goin’, Gus,” he said. “We’re in a hurry. Lieutenant Williams. Carlson here, Bill. Good work on the print. Another job for you. At Blakes’ house. He’s been here again. Gone through the top floor front bedroom. Maybe there’s a print—he spilled a lot of face powder and it sticks like glue. If we’re not here use the back door. Any dime-store key’ll open it.”
He put down the phone. Gus was pulling a suit out of the closet.
“You got any answer to this one, Gus?” Carlson watched him get a fresh shirt out of the chest. “Janey brought something home from that party at the Maynards’. The fella killed Wernitz’s got to get it back. Looks like it ties him right in with the killin’. It’s somethin’ small, Gus. Small enough to go in this box of powder. It’s a dead giveaway, of some kind—or the killer thinks it is. He wants it bad.”
Gus stopped a moment, thinking. He shook his head. “Nothing I know of. Better ask Janey.”
“That’s what we’re doing right now. Get goin’, Gus. Time’s runnin’ out. What’s her mother’s number?”
Gus gave it to him, pulled off his tie, and got out of his bloodstained shirt. He wanted to hurry, but he wanted to hear her voice. The voice he could hear over the phone was her mother’s.
“She’s not there, Mr. Carlson. She went to the Sailing Club.”
“She go by herself?”
“No, she went with Orval Rogers. You’ll find her there.”
Swede Carlson’s hand rested for an instant on the cradled receiver. Gus had headed silently for the bathroom. Carlson shook his head. So it was Orval Rogers he was burned up about. He listened to the water running as Gus got more of the muck off his face.
“Was young Rogers at the Maynard party?” He raised his voice so Gus could hear him.
“Yeah.”
“I wish to God you’d step on it, son.” Swede Carlson said that to himself. He thought about all of it. Nobody with any sense could suspect old man Rogers’s son Orvie had killed a guy.
But I ain’t got any sense
, Swede Carlson thought. He looked at his watch and started downstairs. “I’ll wait for you in the car. Make time, will you?”
There was no doubt in Gus’s mind that Janey was at the Club. Halfway up the companionway to the top deck— nobody spoke of stairs or upstairs in the bar at the Sailing Club in Smithville—he heard some dame yell, “There’s Janey! Hi, sweetie!” and the pack with her take it up in full cry. It was always the way. They always acted as if Janey was Doctor Livingstone just pulled in from a year’s trek in the bush. Old sorehead Blake, just in from a short trek out of the ditch. But he wasn’t really sore, not at anybody but himself, that is, and he was wondering how in the hell Swede Carlson thought he was going to get Janey out of the place without anybody noticing she was gone.
“Get her out here, Gus. I’ll wait in the car. Don’t let anybody see you if you can help it.”
Don’t let anybody notice he’d taken the fair-haired child away. Don’t let anybody notice the lights had gone off. He stopped by the tub of palms in the doorway between the circular bar and the long bank of slot machines curving around the corner across the winter-barred French doors to the open deck over the water. All he had to do was look for the biggest crowd. Janey would be right there in the center of it.
Sure, you’re jealous as hell, Blake, but you don’t have to be a stinker, too, do you?
And Carlson had also told him to keep his eyes peeled to see who else was there, who else that had been at the Maynards’ party the night before, if anybody.
He saw her then. At least he saw a black velvet bow on top of some tow-colored hair as soft and shining as silk just fresh from the cocoon. He couldn’t see the rest because she was over on the curving banque behind the table and a lot of people were in front of it. He saw Connie Maynard’s back leaning forward on the table, Ferguson beside her, laughing too loud, needing a haircut. He felt up at the back of his own head. But then he wasn’t a banker with a barber’s date every other Saturday the way Fergie was. Fergie must have missed out today. John Maynard was there, his gray-white poll too magnificent for anyone ever to notice whether it needed a cut or didn’t. And Uncle Nelly. He was there, too, but he always looked like a weed anyway. The rest of the crowd, all except Orvie, and Gus skipped Orvie in his own mind, were people he didn’t know, guests and visiting yachtsmen in the Basin for the week-end, all of them, including the locals, a little high for that early. He noted it approvingly. It was a good idea—he could do with a drink himself, later.
Dorsey Syms was just coming back from playing the machines. Martha Ferguson was saying, “Not a dime. Not even a cherry,” as a couple of people moved out so Dorsey could get back in his place beside Janey. Dorsey on one side, Orvie on the other. It was the way it had always been. It had a special irony at the moment. It was one of the things he’d gone over too many times, batting around the country roads, trying to get away from himself and everybody else. It was one of the reasons he’d married Janey. Just to show a couple of small town hot shots they couldn’t play fast and loose with a kid from the wrong side of the tracks even if her father was just a night watchman at the Rogers plant. He’d marry her and show the so-and-sos. It didn’t make any difference to him whom he married so long as it was a girl and she didn’t have buck teeth and a club foot. Blake, God’s nobleman. Big-Hearted Ben Blake. And he still might have been right about Dorsey Syms— if he hadn’t been wrong first about Janey. And how wrong could you be about Orvie? He’d been it, whatever its degree.
But that wasn’t getting Janey out to Swede Carlson. He couldn’t go over and drag her out. He’d have to explain all about the cut on his face. And maybe she’d refuse to be dragged out, he thought uncomfortably. He hadn’t forgotten the way she’d turned tiger-cat in the kitchen that morning.
He went over to the bar.
“Scotch, Mr. Blake?” One of the barmen reached for his favorite brand. Gus shook his head.
“No, Buck. I just want to get my wife out of there a minute. Will you go ask her if she’ll come over?”
The barman was looking at the patch on his face.
“Just a scratch.” Gus put his hand up to it. “I was going too fast on a bad road.”
“Looked like you’d been in a razor party, there for a minute.” Buck grinned and raised the hinged section of the bar. “I’ll tell Mrs. Blake.”
Gus watched him cross the noisy room. Something mixing up inside his stomach suddenly made his eyes twitch so that he had to swallow to get rid of a watery taste in his mouth. He was acting like a school sophomore crashing the junior prom. He knew that, but it didn’t help very much as he waited, trying to look his age, anyway. And there was no way at all of getting her out without anybody noticing. Buck was speaking to her. He saw everybody start, the ones with their back to him turn, the sudden movement opening up a path across to the table with Janey sitting at the end. She was bolt upright, both hands around her ginger ale, her small face already white, her lips parted a little, her blue eyes still widening, going from Mediterranean sky-blue to paler blue, gray-blue like a washed-out hyacinth. He saw her swallow, loosen her fingers twined around the glass, and get up, rigid as a wooden doll.
They all started moving then. Connie first. She was halfway across the room to him before Orvie and the others on the banque between Janey and the end could move to let her past. And then it happened. She wasn’t coming. Gus saw her eyes flash from him to Connie and turn pitch-black, smudges like soot above her high pale cheekbones that were not pale now but a slow, bright pink as she stayed where she was, just getting ready to sit right square back down again. Gus held up both hands to stop all of them. Not only Connie but Martha Ferguson and John Maynard were heading for him. He grinned at them, waving them all back.
“It’s my wife I want. Go back! The rest of you go back and have another drink!”
“But Gus—your face!” Connie cried. She started toward him again.
“My face is fine.” He managed a false hearty cheerfulness. “I just pushed it against some broken glass. That’s why I want Janey. I want something to eat and I want her to chew it for me. I’ll bring her back and tell you all about it.”
He looked past them. Janey was half down on the seat, but she was coming up again, her eyes like anxious stars. He took a deep breath. At least she cared enough to worry about him getting hurt.
“Will you come, please, Janey?”
If he hadn’t made it sound as casual as he could, they’d all have seen he was begging her to come. It was the way he felt. He wanted to touch her, just once to see if she was still real. She didn’t look it, moving as woodenly as she was, her lips breathlessly open.
“Gus!” she whispered.
He took her arm. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m afraid I wrecked the car. The tires are shot.”