Shield for Murder

12

They had a drink in the softly lighted living room and didn’t talk about Nolan for a moment. Outside, a soft misting rain had begun to fall and the street and neighborhood were silent.

Finally Mark said: “When did he leave?”

“About half an hour ago. I watched him drive off, just a few minutes before you called.” Linda sat in a corner of the couch, and her face was lovely in the shadows of a lamp behind her head.

Mark told her about his conversation with Lieutenant Ramussen and of Nolan’s attack on him at the Division.

“He said he’d fix you,” Linda said. “I didn’t know what he meant at first.” She glanced at her glass. “I’m so scared, Mark. I just can’t help it.”

“Well, let’s forget him for a while, shall we?” he said, attempting a cheerful smile. “We can’t let him monopolize our entire lives.”

“I suppose not. May I fix your drink?”

“That’s an excellent idea.”

Mark noticed the easy grace of her movements as she left the room, and then he glanced around at the magazines, records and fresh flowers that all added in some way to a reflection of the girl.

When she returned with his drink, they chatted generally for a while and then, somewhat to his surprise, he found himself talking about the novel he was writing. It wasn’t one of his normal topics, since he had rather an exaggerated dread of turning into a talking writer, long on conversation and short on production. He knew what he was trying to do in his book, and he wanted to get it done and let it stand by itself. But he had been upset and off-balance the last two days, and there was a release now in talking about something that was, in a sense, personal and impersonal at the same time.

“Writing about war is difficult, I find, because all the clichés about it are true,” he said. “It’s a dull flat business for everyone involved ninety-nine percent of the time, and if you show that side of it faithfully you run the same risk as when you do a take-off on a bore. You make the point, all right, but are equally boring in the process.” He smiled at her over his drink. “Or am I being sufficiently boring?”

“No, you’re doing just fine,” she said. “May I ask the one question you’re never supposed to ask? What’s your book about?”

He told her something about the book, and he found somewhat to his amusement that he was working very hard to make it sound honest and significant. Hail, the talking writer, he thought, taking a sip of his drink.

When he was leaving he realized that he was in a fine mood. Two drinks couldn’t have done that, he knew.

“I’m glad I stopped by,” he said. “This book is good therapy for our troubles, I guess.”

“I think it’s more than that,” she said. “I think it’s going to be fine, Mark.”

They stood together at the door a moment, an odd awkwardness between them, and then she smiled at him and patted his arm in a curiously intimate gesture.

“I’m glad you stopped by, too, Mark,” she said.

She opened the door then and let him out, and he went down the steps with a smile on his lips. It was raining harder, he saw, so he turned up his coat collar and walked rapidly toward the nearest intersection. From the middle of the block a car pulled away from the curb and came slowly toward him along the street. It was a black sedan traveling without lights.

Mark stopped at the corner and saw that he had plenty of time to cross the street ahead of the approaching car; and, glancing in the other direction, he stepped off the curb.

He heard the sudden swelling roar of the motor and the hissing noise of wet tires on the pavement, before the headlights caught him in their blinding brilliance. Mark wheeled, instinctively aware of danger, and saw the car hurtling at him, its motor whining in second gear.

The impact of the fender against his thigh knocked him sprawling into the gutter. His forward dive, automatic, unthinking, had barely got him clear of the front of the car.

Mark lay still, his cheek pressed flat against the wet cement, and he could feel the water in the gutter damming up slightly in back of his left foot. The car had stopped ten or fifteen yards down the street; and the instinct that had first warned him of danger now forced him to lie still with his eyes closed.

He heard footsteps coming toward him, heavy squishing footsteps that stopped near his head. For a moment the only sound in the silence of the night was the gentle fall of the rain and the thudding of his own heart; and then he heard a low laugh and again the footsteps sounded, retreating now. An instant later the motor speeded up and he heard the car roar off down the street.

Mark crawled painfully to his knees and watched its fading stoplight, hoping to catch the license number when the car went past a street lamp; but the rain was too heavy and all he saw was the bright orange flash of a Pennsylvania plate. That was a lot to go on, he thought, as he got slowly to his feet.

He felt along his left thigh and winced. Nothing seemed to be broken, but a king-sized bruise was in the making. He thought of returning to Linda’s to call the police, but decided it would be pretty pointless to call the police anyway.

Mark knew it had been Nolan behind the wheel of that car. He couldn’t prove it, of course; but he would bet his life on it. And he might have to, he thought bitterly, as he turned and limped slowly toward Chestnut Street where he knew he would find a cab.

Nolan drove back to his rooming house in a bitter mood. He was at a loss to understand what he’d done; and that added a frustrating confusion to his anger. Something had caught hold of him when he’d seen Brewster leave Linda’s apartment...

In his room he undressed to the waist, carried a glass in from the bathroom and poured himself a drink of rye from the bottle on his dresser. He drank it off in one gulp and sat down, breathing heavily and beginning to perspire in the muggy closeness of the room. For several moments he stared at the floor, consciously thinking of nothing at all, and letting the whisky work on him; and then he had another drink and lit a cigar. He was trying to keep his thoughts away from her, trying to exclude everything from his mind but the quietness, the whisky, the cigar.

Rubbing his forehead tiredly, he poured another drink, and then, sure that he could sleep, he rolled onto the bed without removing his shoes or trousers. But instantly he was wide awake, alert; in the stillness his thoughts seemed to be revolving with painful slowness and clarity.

She wasn’t for him, he knew. He was attempting to use her as counter-balance against his gray and empty life, as a substitute for the cheapness and meanness of his background, his job, his friends. And in a clear quiet area beyond drunkenness he knew that it couldn’t work out that way.

Nothing had ever worked out for him, he realized. He remembered one summer when he had tried desperately to go to a boys’ camp that was sponsored by the parish. Everything was free, but you had to bring your own clothes. He could still see the scrawled list he had brought home to his mother: four pairs of khaki shorts, four khaki shirts, sneakers, socks, a sweater and raincoat. The total came to sixteen dollars. His mother said she’d see about it. Barny felt it was all set, and bragged with the other kids at school about what he was going to do at camp. Then the dream burst. His father shouted that he was no millionaire, and to get those camp ideas out of his head. Even the parish priest, Father Tim Monahone, hadn’t been able to help. Father Tim said he’d lend him the money, but both his father and mother were affronted at that. “We can do without his charity,” his mother had sniffed. And his father had claimed that he needed no help in caring for his family, and that he wished the priests would stop putting these fancy ideas in his son’s head.

That was when he was eleven, Nolan thought, counting the years carefully. Even at that age he hadn’t been surprised by his father’s and mother’s attitude. Even then things hadn’t worked out in his favor...

Finally he fell asleep.

The next morning he woke at eleven, nervous and irritable, his mouth sour, his head aching intolerably. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor and looked about the drab room with distaste. The one window faced an iron fire-escape, and the occasional air that came in smelled of heat and rust.

Nolan showered, shaved and dressed, careful not to notice the things hovering on the edge of his mind. He looked indecisively at the almost empty bottle of whisky but finally turned away from it and went downstairs. He drove to the nearest drugstore and went into the telephone booth.

He wanted to call Linda but the thought of her brought a surge of anger and confusion; and so he sat unmoving in the heat of the booth, conscious of his body and the hard starched rim of his collar and the dull pain that spread across his forehead and down to the base of his skull.

Then after a while it occurred to him that he could have been wrong about her. Mark Brewster might have called on her, unwanted, unexpected; and she had probably been too polite to tell him to clear out. That could have been it, he thought. Cheered by this rationalization he dropped his nickel and dialed her number.

Her voice when she answered was tired.

“This is Barny,” he said. “How’s the head?”

“Oh, hello. It’s better, I think.”

“Fine. How about making a day of it? I’m off until tomorrow night, you know.”

“Barny, I’m sorry, but I can’t.” She spoke rapidly. “I— We’ve got a rehearsal this afternoon. Something’s wrong with the timing on the show and Bill wants to run through it to see where it’s off.”

“I get it,” Barny said.

“It... it’s quite a nuisance.”

“Yeah, I know. Came up pretty sudden, didn’t it?”

“Yes, yes, it did.”

He wanted to ask her if she’d gone straight to bed after he’d dropped her off the night before; or if she’d seen Mark Brewster again. But he couldn’t have stood it if she bed to him, and so he didn’t ask.

“Well, all right, kid, I’ll see you,” he said, and rang off without saying goodbye.

Outside the sun was shining and wind sang clearly in the trees. Kids from the nearby school ran along the streets shouting to each other and to the policeman at the intersection.

Nolan climbed in behind the wheel of his car, and drove slowly along the block with no destination in mind. He drove for half an hour through the middle-class residential streets of the city. There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing he wanted to do, except to see Linda, and that was impossible.

He drove aimlessly for a few more minutes and then headed for a taproom far out in the west section of the city. The man who owned the place was named Al Newman, a patrolman at the Ninety-second District. His brother was a city fireman, who helped out when Al was on duty. Nolan had spent a lot of time there in the past. It was a homey, relaxed joint, with dark wooden booths, bowling machines, and a juke box.

Nolan went in and said hello to Al. He ordered whisky with a beer and they talked for a while of men they knew in the department, and the heat; then Al went down the bar to serve another customer.

Nolan finished his drink, feeling slightly relaxed, and walked to a telephone booth. He called a woman he knew, a waitress who worked a nightshift, and after enduring her good-natured complaints at being waked in the middle of the day, asked her to meet him at Al’s that afternoon.

She laughed and said all right.

Nolan had another drink. There were two other men in one of the booths, and a customer at the bar. The waitress was sitting at a table, laboriously writing out a sandwich menu. The air, while hot, smelled cleanly of cigarettes and beer.

He was on his fourth drink when Nora Winters arrived. He waved to her and she walked over to him with a grin on her face. Nora was in her late thirties, a solidly built woman with coarse but good-natured features and streaky blond hair. She was wearing heavy make-up, high-heeled strap-sandals and a gaudy print dress.

“Barny, you’re looking fine,” she said, taking the stool next to his, and grinning at Al. “What’re we celebratin’?”

“Any damn thing you want,” Nolan said. Nora was wearing a sweet perfume that smelled like after-shave lotion. “How about starting to catch up?”

“Oh, oh, here we go again,” she said, putting both hands to the sides of her head.

“Well, let’s go then.”

Barny had known Nora for several years. She was a good sport, he was thinking, a woman who took things as they came and was always ready for a laugh, a gag or a drink. He watched her with some fondness as she followed her whisky with a sip of beer.

“Let’s make this a big one,” he said.

“I’m a working girl, remember?” she said, laughing. “What’ll my customers think if I give ’em oyster stews instead of steaks tonight? I’ll just take it nice and slow.”

The whisky had made Nolan feel somewhat better. This was his life, he thought, ordering another round. Real people, real fun, and to hell with everything else. He bought Al a drink and sent beers back to the men in the booth.

Nora said, “That’s right, Barny, you only live once, I always say.”

“That’s right, kid. I’m making this one count, don’t worry.”

His mood gradually became belligerent. Splintered thoughts shot through his mind, worrying him, destroying his sudden good humor. Linda would have lied to him, he knew. She would have told him Mark Brewster hadn’t been in her apartment. Brewster was in the hospital now, the smart bastard. He was smart like Dave Fiest. All the smart, wise boys, the screw-artists, the good-English kids, were all going to wind up like Dave Fiest.

Nora was singing a lewd version of Barnacle Bill, and Nolan slapped the top of the bar and shouted with laughter.

“That’s the stuff,” he said. “Let’s show ’em who’s smart.”

He ordered drinks for everyone but Al shook his head. “Barny, for your own good, you and the girl friend should get something to eat. That yocky-dock is getting to you.”

“Well, get us some food then. What do you want, Nora?”

“That’s better. Go over to a booth and the girl will bring you some sandwiches.”

“Supposing you go to hell,” Nolan said, anger flowing through him hotly. He caught Al’s tie and jerked him forward. “You think I’m some damn toad, eh? I’ll eat and drink when I want to, understand?”

Al’s hands were underneath the bar, and Nolan knew he was feeling for a club or an ice pick.

“Don’t bring your hands up,” he said. He jerked the tie and brought Al’s chin down onto the bar. “I’ll shoot hell out of you, you hear? I’ll haul you in.”

“Barny, cut it out, for God’s sake!” Nora said.

“Aw, shut up.” He turned to the men who had come out of the booth. They avoided his eyes. “I’ll arrest you punks, too, damn it,” he shouted.

Nora slipped off the stool and ran for the door. Nolan released Al’s tie and hurried after her, his anger subsiding.

“Wait a minute,” he yelled, as she tottered down the sidewalk in her high-heeled sandals.

People stopped and stared as he ran heavily after her and finally pulled her up short with a hand on her arm.

“Take it easy, Barny,” she said, panting and scared.

“Look, are you nuts? I pull a little gag and everybody gets a fit.”

She regarded him for a moment with a doubtful expression; and then she shook her head. “What a gag!”

“Come on, let’s finish our celebration.”

“Not back there.”

“All right, let’s go get some food. How about that? Steaks, the works.”

“Suits me.”

They drove into the center of the city and ate enormous dinners at an excellent restaurant. Nolan had several shots of whisky afterward, while Nora sipped a frappé crème de menthe. The food settled heavily on his stomach, and he was tired and depressed. What the hell had he blown his top for at Al’s? That had been a meat-headed thing to do, he knew. He felt like crawling into bed and staying there for a week, and not thinking about anything else for the rest of his fife.

He suggested the first proposal to Nora and she thought it was a good idea, so they checked into a nearby hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Barny Fiest.

“Where’d you get that name?” Nora asked him, when the bellhop had gone away after opening a window and snapping on the fights.

“What name?”

“Fiest. I get the Barny part, but where’s the Fiest from? Your mother’s name?”

“My mother was Irish,” Barny said, staring at her angrily. He sat on the bed and loosened his tie, wondering what had prompted him to use Dave Fiest’s name. He hadn’t thought about it at all, actually. The name had simply flowed out of the end of the fountain pen. Dave Fiest, the smart guy who was riding home in a box after a life-time of trying to outsmart everybody else.

“I don’t know,” he said heavily.

“Well, let’s get a drink. You look like you could stand one.”

“Sure. Call Room Service. I’m going to stretch out a minute.”

“Sissy.”

He removed his coat and lay down on the double bed. The food and liquor had made him hot and his buoyancy was gone. For a few minutes he stared at the overhead light, thinking of the past few days. Then he fell asleep.

When he woke the room was dark except for a floor lamp. There was a tray of glasses and bottles on the table near the bed. He heard water running in the bathroom.

Sitting up, he rubbed his forehead.

“Nora?”

“Yeah, I’ll be right out.”

He glanced at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. She must have skipped work, he thought. He poured himself a drink and drank it down quickly, steeped in self-revulsion. His shirt was damp with perspiration and his head throbbed with pain. This was the perfect picture of his life, he thought. A hangover in a cheap hotel with a cheap woman. The web of his existence was threadbare, dirty, gray.

Nora opened the bathroom door and came out wearing only a brassiere above her skirt and walking awkwardly in her unstrapped high-heeled shoes. She was sturdily built, but the bones of her shoulders and elbows were angular and graceless. Her skin was very white.

She sat beside him and put an arm about his waist.

“Feel better?”

There was a large bruise on her left arm, he saw, just above her elbow. In the dim light it looked like the sooty imprint of a man’s hand.

“Who did that?” he asked.

She looked down at the spot. “Gosh, I don’t know. I didn’t notice it until one afternoon. Some Superman, I guess. It couldn’t have hurt much.”

“You might have been too drunk to feel it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she said, and yawned.

Nolan pushed her away from him and stood up, trembling with confused and bewildered fury. “You should know who did it to you,” he said. “That’s the least you should know.”

“Barny, it don’t matter.”

“You’re a tramp, a bum,” he said in a low and bitter voice. “You’d let a man do anything to you as long as he filled you up with booze first. You think you’re the best I can get, don’t you? Everybody thinks that, I know. But they’re wrong. I’ve got a girl who wouldn’t breathe the same air you do.”

“Barny, you can’t talk to me like that,” Nora said in an uncertain voice. “I ain’t never done anything to you.”

Nolan put both hands to his head. He felt as if his skull might split open.

“Barny, you’re acting crazy.”

“Yeah, I guess I am,” he said, dropping his hands wearily to his sides. He stared at her thin scared face, his thoughts spinning riotously. What was the matter with him anyway? Nora was a good sport. He picked his coat from the back of a chair and fumbled through the pockets until he found the watch he had bought for Linda. “Here, kid, take this,” he said, holding it out to her on the palm of his hand. “Go ahead, take it. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“Barny, lie down and rest a while.”

“No, I got to run along,” he said, tossing the watch on the bed. “Bye, kid.”

“Barny, please don’t go.”

He shook his head, picked up his hat and left the room...

Nolan went to a Turkish bath on Camac Street and, after checking his wallet, undressed and went down a flight of stairs to the noisy, moisture-laden steam rooms. He sat on a stone bench and sipped ice water from a plastic glass, and the perspiration broke out on his thick chest and shoulders and ran down his body in tiny rivulets. There was a comfort in the anonymity of his nakedness, and in the opaque atmosphere of the room. Other men moved back and forth before him, their faces blurred by the swirling steam, and their identities hidden from him by their nakedness. They might be bankers, gamblers, cops, anything, Nolan thought. In his liquor-raddled state the idea seemed very significant.

After baking out for twenty minutes, he left the room, swaying weakly but feeling cleansed and refreshed. He took a hot and cold shower, and that helped too. An attendant toweled him vigorously and led him to the dormitory where Nolan stretched out gratefully on an army cot. He lay with his arms above his head, listening to the insistent hammering of his heart. It was banging away all right, he thought. It was a damn good heart.

There were two rows of cots in the long dark room and about two-thirds of them were occupied. At one end of the dormitory, above the doorway, a large clock with neon hands and numbers cast a faint sickly glow on the sleepers. Some of the sprawled figures twisted and jerked spasmodically, as if they were being prodded with sharpened sticks as they slept. Occasionally they muttered incoherently, or laughed out loud, or gushed out streams of putrescent obscenity. Most of them were sleeping off too much liquor, and their splintered reactions were nightmarishly revealing.

The man on Nolan’s left was particularly noisy. He was a young man, in his early thirties, with a deep, sharply ribbed chest, and the long powerful legs of a runner. He was tossing his head from side to side, as if in pain, and muttering about his father. His father was strong and wonderful, but the young man cursed as he sobbed out paeans to his memory. There was a girl whom he talked about uneasily, and something about a sales quota that hadn’t been met, and a great deal about drinking. The girl, Nolan learned without wanting to, was the young man’s wife. She was in Detroit.

Nolan sighed and stared at the ceiling. The young punk was hiding from his wife behind a bottle. Probably he was a creep. Praising his old man but hating him in his heart. Well, maybe he couldn’t help it, he thought wearily. His old man might have been a bum.

A man across the aisle hoisted himself on one elbow, and said, “Hey, knock it off, for God’s sake.”

This did very little good, so he climbed from his bed and stepped over to the young man’s cot. He looked down at the young man with disgust. “Hey, shut up!” he said. “I’m going to call an attendant to toss you out if you can’t keep quiet. I got to get some sleep.”

“Why not let him alone?” Nolan said.

“You mean you like this noise he’s making?”

“He can’t help it,” Nolan said. He got slowly to his feet and stared at the man, who was heavily built, with a hairy chest and strong confident features. “He’s going to confession, that’s all,” Nolan said.

“This is a hell of a place for that.”

“Well, it may be the only place he’s got. Let him alone. He’ll go to sleep after a while.”

“He’d better,” the big man said, with an uncertain glance at Nolan’s shoulders. Then he returned to his cot.

Nolan sat down on the edge of his bunk and studied the young man’s troubled face. He talked to him in a low voice, saying nothing very interesting or important, but gradually the tone of his voice got through to the young man, and, after a few more imprecations against his father, he fell into an exhausted sleep.

Nolan stood and walked slowly out of the dormitory. He dressed slowly, listlessly. There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing he wanted to do, except see Linda. And, instinctively, he knew that if he did he would only be hurt again.