“I WOULDN’T
know,” Van Zandt said quietly. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“I watched Scott get his and I read all about Karl dying in an alleyway. I don’t have the qualms I used to, Van.” Tanner’s hand tensed. “You’re a free agent. You don’t have the compulsion not to talk. Where is he?”
Van Zandt’s smile faded. His hands on the table top trembled slightly. Then there was something else in his eyes besides fear, the barest shadow of relief.
Tanner felt it at the same instant, like he had felt it once before in Petey’s apartment building. The presence at the side gate lifting the latch, the presence walking up the sidewalk.
The third guest was arriving.
“You’re lucky, Van,” Tanner whispered. “At least for a few minutes. I don’t think Adam’s going to be very happy with you.”
He turned and ran through the house to the front door, then hesitated in the darkness and looked out the front window. There were no cars out front, nobody was waiting.
He eased the door open, held the lock so it wouldn’t make a noise snapping shut, and closed it gently behind him. He ran two doors down, cutting through a back yard and standing in the shadows to watch. He could see through the yards to the Van Zandt corner lot and the street that ran along the side of their house. The front door banged open and he could see a figure standing on the steps. Adam Hart, seeing if he were still around. Then the figure went back in and the door slammed shut behind it.
Tanner glanced at the kitchen window. Only the little lamp on the kitchen table was lit now and it cast fantastic shadows on the windows. He could make out three distorted figures, one of which was gesticulating angrily. Then all motion stopped and the three shadows were carved in black and gray.
The light on the table suddenly went out and the scream, when it came, was more of a whimper than a scream. Tanner felt a slight tingling in the air, as if he had been touched very briefly by a bubble of something intangible that had pulsed outward from the house.
Hart must have been angry because the Van Zandts had failed to keep him there. And he must have realized that the Van Zandts were living not wisely, but too well—and too recently. If and when the government looked into the case, there would be questions. And Van Zandt could supply the answers.
So there had to be
… fury.
There was a flickering, lurid light in the kitchen now. It caught a shadow that danced around the walls, plucking at the cabinets and tearing at the refrigerator and pulling things out, something that hammered at the range and smashed the wooden chairs. There was the faint, muffled sound of smashing china and all the while the light grew brighter and stronger.
Tanner watched, unable to turn away. Minutes passed and now the flames were eating at the chintz curtains and there was the sound of popping windows. A moment later the screen door slammed and a figure in a trench coat and a slouch hat ran down the stairs and over to an automobile on the side street. It got in and the car roared away.
The neighbors would turn in an alarm, Tanner thought, but it would be too late. The house was frame and it burned far too fast … like a house had back in Brockton years before. Van Zandt’s home would burn to the ground. For some reason the coroner would forget to make an investigation and there would be no mention of it in the papers. The wreckers would move in tomorrow and by the end of the week the lot would be leveled and rolled and planted in grass. The neighbors wouldn’t be able to tell you who had lived there, the butcher would only look puzzled if you mentioned the name, the woman in the beauty parlor would say, “Well, really, I’ve never heard of them,” and the delivery boy would give you a stony stare and tell you to go to hell.
Van Zandt and Susan and their two children. At best, they would cause a faint baffled frown if anybody who had known them ran across the name again.
Permanent erasure, not even a memory left.
He walked quickly through the alley, keeping to the shadows of the garages and the back fences.
There was a full moon and the stars were very bright in the sky.
He dodged from shadow to shadow and waited a moment before sprinting across the open streets to make sure that nobody was watching. The avenues were empty and silent—the whole city was indoors, listening to the radio or making themselves midnight snacks or tossing restlessly in hot, stuffy little bedrooms. He clung to the alleys and when he had to use the streets he tried to keep in the puddling shadows between the street lamps or run silently past the houses, ducking in the shadows of trees whenever a car passed.
Four blocks back to his car seemed like four miles.
He drove downtown and parked in the belt of slums that girdled the Loop. It was risky to stay with the stolen car but he was too sick to leave it and spend another night running. It was two in the morning and he was shaking with exhaustion and burning up with fever. He crawled into the back seat and stared out at the lamplit darkness, cradling his Beretta in his lap and waiting. He couldn’t keep his eyes from closing. He’d doze for a few minutes and each time wake up shaking with the chills.
Friday morning came very slowly.
He had breakfast in a cheap cafeteria, sitting in a corner so people wouldn’t notice his whiskered face and his rumpled clothing. An hour to go before the library opened. Another hour or so before Nordlund was due.
And then what?
He dawdled over his coffee until after nine, paid his tab, and left. The reading room of the library was already comfortably crowded with students and bums who had come in for a little shut-eye, safe in the knowledge that the librarians were softer-hearted than cops and wouldn’t throw them out. He spent an hour pretending that he was absorbed in a magazine, then went out to the lobby.
Nordlund was waiting for him, his eyes red-rimmed and his suit rumpled and worn. The Navy man hadn’t done so well that night either, Tanner thought, and somehow he got a small twinge of perverse pleasure out of it.
“I see we were both lucky,” Nordlund said.
“It could have been worse.” The girl in the information booth was staring at them and Tanner started for the door. “Let’s go over to the park and sit down.”
They found a bench on the other side of the Boulevard and Nordlund collapsed into it, hooking his elbows over the back and letting his head sag back. His eyes closed. “What are we going to do about Van Zandt?”
“Nothing. He’s dead.”
Nordlund froze, his head still back and his eyes still closed. His lips formed the silent syllable, “How?”
“Last night. Hart got him. Like Olson. Like Grossman. Van Zandt and his whole family.” He took a ragged breath. “Don’t feel sorry for him. Van was working with him, working with him all the time.”
People walking up the Boulevard stared at them and quickly looked away. A cop strolling by didn’t even glance at them. Like the library, the park was in limits for bums.
Nordlund’s voice was nervous. “That doesn’t leave many, does it?”
“DeFalco’s it.”
Nordlund leaned forward and held his head with his hands. He looked like he was going to cry. “And now that we know it, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do, Tanner? This guy is superman—what the hell are
we
doing chasing him?”
“Don’t overestimate him. He makes mistakes, he gets panicky, too.”
“He makes mistakes?” Nordlund asked bitterly. “Here you sit, dirty and sick, and there he goes, free as a bird. And you think he makes mistakes?”
“I’m still alive,” Tanner said quietly.
Nordlund took a deep breath and let it out in a sob of resignation. His hands were shaking. “Okay, Professor, I’m still with you. But what do we do now?”
He had to consider it logically, Tanner thought, to ignore the fact that he was sick and burning with fever. He had solved a major problem: he knew who Hart was. But now that he knew, what was he going to do about it?
And then he thought he had part of the answer. Hart had planted evidence to hang John Olson’s murder on him and he, Tanner, had obliged by running as soon as he had heard about it. But maybe that was a game that two could play at.
“Maybe we could frame Hart—for Olson’s murder.”
A tired laugh. “You’re crazy, Professor. They want
you
for the killing.”
“But
I
didn’t kill Olson, DeFalco did—Hart did.”
“The police won’t believe it—all the evidence is against you.”
“Nobody’s admitted the crime, Commander. The murderer wasn’t caught red-handed, nobody saw him do it. Without an admission of guilt, and with the supposed murderer a formerly respected member of the community, all the evidence in the world would still leave a lingering doubt.”
Nordlund shook his head. “It’d be your word against his. You haven’t got the time to manufacture any evidence against DeFalco, and if you turned yourself in and insisted you were innocent you know damn’ well what would happen. You need an assist.”
Eddy DeFalco, Tanner thought. Clean-cut, young, personable. And he should be for he was actually Adam Hart—and nobody could help but love Adam. But now maybe Hart had made a mistake. Hart was probably spending just as much time and effort in looking for him as he was in trying to avoid being found. Maybe Hart was superman but he couldn’t be in two places at once. While Hart was out looking, DeFalco couldn’t possibly be home.
He had been on the run for the last two weeks, Tanner thought, which also meant that Hart had been on the run—and DeFalco must have had to disappear for long lengths of time.
“I think I might have my assist, Commander. When the police finally agreed that it was murder, didn’t Lieutenant Crawford ask that none of you leave town? Since you all knew me, you were all valuable witnesses.”
“One of his men dropped around every night to bring me up to date, too, but so what?”
“He came around to see that you were still on the string, Commander. Now do you see it? DeFalco’s disappeared—Crawford will at least be suspicious. And maybe that gives us an in.” He stood up and started walking west, across the Boulevard.
Nordlund caught up with him and grabbed his arm. “How does that tie up? Where are you going now?”
Tanner felt lightheaded and weak and a little tired of explanations. He couldn’t understand why Nordlund couldn’t see what was perfectly obvious to him. “If Crawford is suspicious of DeFalco now, it will take only a thread to tie him up to Olson, only a suggestion to make Crawford want to pick DeFalco up for questioning.”
“And what if he does?” Nordlund said stiffly. “Everybody loves Adam, everybody will believe whatever he has to say.”
Tanner didn’t want to argue, he was getting to believe something now and he didn’t want it spoiled, he didn’t want it knocked down. “Hart won’t run the risk of having three or four people question him at once, he won’t run the risk of being questioned with a lie detector. A machine isn’t flesh and blood, Commander—a machine won’t love him!”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Tanner started to laugh, then choked and spit phlegm into the gutter. “Adam Hart’s off balance, Commander—and I’m going to push a little.”
And then he added to himself:
if Adam doesn’t catch me first.
They turned west on Madison Street. Across the river, Madison, the business street, turned into West Madison, the street of forgotten dreams for the drunks and the bums. He picked a hole-in-the-wall tavern that was open and walked in past a balding man who was sweeping down.
What he wanted was slumped at a table in the back of the room, for the moment the only customer in the house, her head on her arms and her brick-red hair streaming over the sticky wooden table top.
“You got some money, Commander?”
Nordlund gave him some and Tanner threw the bills on the table and shook the woman roughly.
“Huh? Wassamatter?”
“You want to make a few bucks?”
Her eyes swam slowly to a focus and she tried to arch her back so her flabby breasts jutted out, then gave it up as a bad job. She put her head back on her arms. “Go ’way—it’s too damned early in the morning … .”
Tanner added another bill.
“All you have to do is make a phone call.”
She sat up and stared at the money. Tanner motioned to the bartender, who brought over a bottle of cheap wine. He set it on the table, just out of her reach.
She stood up, hanging tightly to the table for support, and squinted up at him. “Whaddya wan’ me to do?”
He took her over to the pay phone and slapped her once, hard. Her head rocked back and the bleary look faded.
“Get your filthy hands offa me!”
“Look, you don’t sober up for five seconds it’s no money and no wine, you get me?” He dropped a coin in the box and dialed a number. “All you have to do is say what I tell you to say and you’ll get enough liquor to last you for a week.”