Killing Time

Sixteen

The first thing I needed was food. I stopped in at the City Hall Diner, next door to Hutchinson’s Auto Dealers, and had two cheeseburgers and three cups of coffee, and refused to talk about last night’s explosion with Charlie, the counterman.

The next thing I needed was a shave and a change of clothes, and after that I needed wheels. So I grabbed a cab and headed home, and I refused to talk about last night’s explosion with Barnie, the cab driver.

The apartment looked just as bad as the descriptions had led me to expect. I took one look at the former den, and carefully closed the doors on it. Somebody was going to pay for that, God damn it, and if the somebody had to be all of City Hall, that was just tough.

It was while I was shaving that I figured out where and how the guy would try next. He had to keep trying, he had to get me before four o’clock. I finished shaving, changed my clothes, got screwdriver, pliers and hammer from the tool drawer in the kitchen, half-filled a metal pail with water, and went downstairs.

I walked around the building to my Ford, put everything down on the ground, and very cautiously opened the hood. A shoebox, sealed shut with masking tape, was sitting on the block. A ragged hole had been punched in the top, and a couple of wires came out through the hole and went over to the terminals of the battery. Cute.

I went to work with the screwdriver, got the wires loose from the battery, and with all the care in the world lifted the shoebox out of the car. I turned, like a man balancing full coffee cups, and slowly lowered the shoebox into the bucket of water. Then I stood and looked at it, j while bubbles streamed up through the wire-hole.

While I was standing there, I had a visitor. Bill Casale, old Joey’s oldest grandson, a big and lumbering twenty-four-year-old, two months out of the Army. He was wearing Army khakis and a white T-shirt, he was smoking a cigarette, and he looked sore. It occurred to me all at once that the Casale family, for lack of a better target, might decide to blame me for what had happened to its patriarch. After all, he had been killed by a guy who was trying for me.

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“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said.

He pulled a wrinkled envelope out of his hip pocket and held it out to me. “The family’s hiring you,” he said. “To find the old man’s killer. When you find him, you let us know.”

I looked at the envelope, and saw a hint of green behind the white paper. I could picture the family meeting — last night or early this morning — and the hat being passed, the collection taken up, Bill sent to give me the money, to be sure the Casale family got the man who had murdered old Joey, so he wouldn’t be allowed to throw himself on the much tenderer mercies of the law.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said again. “I can’t do it.”

He studied me for a minute, and then shrugged and dropped the envelope on the fender of the Ford. “You just let us know,” he said, and walked away.

I stared after him. Everybody pushing me, everybody shoving me. I wasn’t used to it, and I didn’t like it a bit.

I didn’t open the envelope. I just stuck it into the glove compartment of the Ford, slammed the hood, put the bucket of water and bomb on the floor in front, and drove very slowly downtown. I went to Police Headquarters first, left the bomb for the lab to look at, and drove on over to the office.