Dead of Night

Chapter twenty: A spray of bullets

My reflexes made me bend over the wheel, jam the accelerator to the floor, swing the car to the left to bump him; it happened too fast for me to reason out the best thing to do.

The shots kept coming. Sparks reflected in the spiderweb of the shattered glass. Staccato explosions like backfiring. A pinggg as a slug ripped the door at my side. Tinkle of glass on the pavement. Tildy screaming. And the terrific crash as my fender collided with him.

I must have been getting up to forty when we hit. It didn’t slow me, but it jounced the wheel so I had to wrench hard to keep from climbing the opposite curb. Tires screeched. The taxi’s headlights swerved left. The cab socked a hydrant with a smash like an ash can full of bottles being dropped from the second story.

I managed to straighten out, zoom around the Atlantic Avenue corner without slowing. There was a subway kiosk at the next corner but I kept revving it up until we’d covered nine more blocks to the next station.

It wasn’t safe to drive any more than I had to. The windshield couldn’t have had more cracks in it if a sledge hammer had worked on it. I couldn’t tell whether intentionally or otherwise the guy with the gun had drilled a tire or my gas tank. Besides, the three bullet holes in my windshield couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else by a traffic cop; we couldn’t have driven much farther without meeting one. I was allergic to blue broadcloth right then.

I braked, slewed in behind a parked florist’s truck. The streets were swarming, shirt-sleeved men standing around open-front candy stores, old women sitting in darkened doorways, couples jitterbugging on the sidewalk to music from an orchestra in a second-floor dance hall.

Tildy was still crouched, low on the seat, twisted around so she could look out through the jagged glass of the rear window. There weren’t any taxis coming up the avenue behind us; from the sound of that smashup I thought that particular cab wouldn’t be in shape to drive for a while.

She didn’t seem as much frightened as stunned when I helped her out, made some banal crack about “the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be” for the benefit of bystanders who were showing curiosity about our windshield. The only thing she said, as I led her down the subway steps, was, “He was trying to kill me.” I couldn’t deny that!

Psychology sharps use a trick to impress their pupils with the difficulty of observing and remembering an unexpected incident of violence. In the middle of a lecture two students will suddenly stand up, engage in a fierce fisticuff. A third stooge attempts to interfere, gets knocked down for his pains. A girl finally separates the contestants. The prof then asks one and all to put down on paper their recollection of what went on. He usually gets as many variations of the facts as there are students in the class. So I didn’t expect to get much help from Tildy’s description of what had happened. I was in error.

“When that guy in the cab started blasting, I was so busy handling the car I didn’t get a look in my rearview,” I told her while we walked up to the end of the platform to avoid the crowd. “You see him?”

“It was the same man.” A tiny sliver of glass had stuck to her cheek; she removed it, held it on her finder tip in fascination. “The one who came to the hotel.”

“Not the guy who shot Johnny the Grocer?”

“No, no. The one who — who must have killed Herb Roffis.”

I was fed up with all that hodelyo; probably a delayed take from those near misses and the damage to a good Buick. “Godsake, give me something to go on,” I said crossly. “Mustache? Beard? Fan ears? Pug nose? Was he dark? Or light?”

She leaned close; the Manhattan-bound train thundered in; it was hard to hear anything. “Florid, I should call him. Yes. A red face. No mustache.”

We slid into the first car, sat up close to the motorman’s compartment. There were only four other people in the car; the only one who paid any particular attention to us was a skinny girl with mean, narrow-set eyes. She nudged the older woman at her side; they whispered with much animation, craning their necks to get a better view of Tildy.

“How old would you say this bird was?” I kept after her. “Twenty? Forty?”

“In between. Say, thirty-four or five.” Tildy looked as if she might be sick to her stomach.

It took until we got to the Manhattan side to get the description. What it summed up to — the man she described could easy be arrested if the cops were looking for Roy Yaker. Or vice versa.

That gave me pause.

When Tildy asked if we were going straight to the hotel, I said, “We were. But I don’t believe that’s very smart, now. This boy with the lethal notions will expect us to do that. He may be there before we are.”

“I am so horribly afraid.” She showed it plainly. “For myself — for Dow. And — for you.”

“Fellow wasn’t after me.” I wasn’t as confident about that as I may have sounded; she hadn’t been in the car with me on the way in from Dave’s Place, but I’d been trailed just the same.

The skinny girl swayed up the aisle, bent over, eyes fixed on Tildy. “Pardon me, but aren’t you Tildy Millett?”

There were half a dozen others in the car by then; every head was turned our way.

Tildy smiled, shook her head in mock amusement. “I suppose you’re the thousandth person to ask me that.” She leaned close to me, smiled at me. “I guess she doesn’t ride in subways much, does she?”

The girl fumbled with “excuse me’s” and “the resemblance is astonishing,” went back to her companion.

I got Tildy off at the next stop, Thirty-Fourth Street. There was a drugstore on the corner. I shooed her in, went to a phone booth, called the hotel.

Mona answered, “Law, Mister V. How long can you be paged! Tim is going out of his mind—”

“A short trip and a merry one. Let me talk to him.”

“Holy Mother, Mister Vine!” When Tim “Misters” me, there is something very nokay and usually someone else in the office with him. “How quick can you get over here?”

“Whatsit, Timothy?”

“We — uh — got another one of those things upstairs.”

“Another what? A killing?”

“Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to say too much, Mister Vine, because I think prob’ly our beer is bein’ tapped, but it’s Mister L.”