Killing Time

Twenty-Eight

Danile had already arrived at the hotel. I got his room number from Charlie, the desk man, and told him to never mind announcing me, I’d announce myself. Then I took the elevator up and knocked on his door.

The door opened after a minute, and I came face to face with my second example of the Citizens for Clean Government. This one, Archer Danile, turned out to be a huge, full-faced, red-haired, florid individual who looked upon all the world, it seemed, with the same high degree of impersonal contempt. His eyes were small and pale blue, set deep beneath shaggy red brows, and his mouth was a thin wide line, permanently down-curved at the corners. The backs of his fingers were underbrushed with straggly red hairs, and the red-hair motif was followed through in thick waves atop his head. His massive chest and stomach were covered by a broad expanse of white shirt, with a black tie draped precisely down the middle of all the whiteness. He wore a black suit, the jacket open, and on his red-haired left wrist was a watch with a gold band.

“Archer Danile?” I said.

He nodded, slowly and with dignity.

“I’m Tim Smith,” I said. “Mr. Masetti may have mentioned me.”

“Licensed investigator,” he said. It was a category, and I’d just been filed away in it, and that took care of me.

I nodded and stuck out my hand, to see what he’d do with it.

He shook it. His handshake was too strong to be natural, and I got the idea this was a man who constantly tested his fellow beings for the degree to which they had failed to reach perfection, the yardstick being, quite naturally, himself.

I felt somewhat more optimistic. Judging by Masetti, a prerequisite for an honest, unbribable reformer was a miserable personality. Danile seemed to have that qualification to excess.

He frowned, puckering his lips out the way Sidney Greenstreet used to do, and when he said, “Come in,” I knew it was only after a long interior struggle.

He turned away into the room, leaving me to close the door after myself. I did so and went down the two-pace-long hall to the living room of the suite. Danile, ahead of me, settled himself down upon the sofa with the weighty dignity of Henry the Eighth at a rural court of high justice, and motioned with one hand for me to take the armchair to his right.

I did so, and he said, “Quite frankly, Mr., uh, Smith, I am not as yet fully apprised of the situation here in Winston. I haven’t yet read Mr. Masetti’s report, and so I honestly don’t know just what the current status is in this city, nor where you stand within it.”

“Masetti asked me to co-operate with the CCG,” I said. “I turned him down, thinking my loyalty was more to the people in the town than to outsiders.”

He nodded heavily. “An attitude, unfortunately, that we quite often have to contend with.”

“But there’ve been a number of changes since then,” I went on. “Two people have been murdered in attempts to kill me. I no longer have any feeling of loyalty to stop me.”

“And now you do wish to co-operate with us, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

He pursed his lips again, thinking, his eyes gazing off into the middle distance. At last he said, “And of what would this co-operation consist, Mr. Smith?”

“Information,” I told him. “Kickbacks, nepotism, fake construction bids, mismanagement of municipal funds...”

“I see.” He rested his hands in his lap, and tapped the tips of his fingers together. He studied the effect for a while, and then said, “You have learned of all these things in the time since Mr. Masetti talked to you?”

“No. I have comprehensive files for the last fifteen years.”

“Files?” He looked at me. “You mean you have known of these things for fifteen years?”

“I’ve kept complete files,” I said.

“Have you ever, before this, attempted to get this information into the hands of the proper authorities?”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t my job. My job was—”

“Not your job?” He sounded honestly shocked. “Surely, Mr. Smith, it is every citizen’s job—”

“No,” I said. For all his individual personality and appearance, completely unlike Masetti, he wound up spouting the same tired civics-class garbage. “My job,” I told him, “was to be a confidential investigator. If the facts I learn wind up in court, I’m not useful.”

He shook his head slowly back and forth, the lips once more pursed. “I don’t know, Mr. Smith,” he said. “I have no idea what sort of arrangement Mr. Masetti had in mind, or what offers he made you, if any, but I’m afraid I’ll have to know quite a bit more about the situation here in Winston before agreeing to do business with you. If you are attempting now to gain immunity for yourself by making some sort of deal with the Citi—”

“Immunity? What the hell kind of immunity?”

“Now, really, Mr. Smith,” he said ponderously. “After all, you have just stated to me that you have in your possession a record of governmental crimes in this community covering the last fifteen years, and that you have, until this very moment, never once attempted to reveal this information to the proper authorities. Quite the reverse. You have gone so far as to admit to me that you have actively concealed the evidence of these crimes.”

“Never!” This interview wasn’t going at all as I’d expected, and I was beginning to lose my temper. “I have never,” I told him angrily, “concealed the evidence of any crime. The evidence has always been there, and is there now. And any proper authority who’s interested can go find it exactly the way I did, by looking for it. It isn’t my job to do the proper authority’s work for it.”

“Your job, as you describe it, Mr. Smith,” he said pompously, “is a dishonest one.”

“As a matter of fact,” I went on, talking over him, “what lousy proper authorities anyway? The District Attorney? He’s one of the biggest crooks in the state. The Mayor? The Chief of Police?”

“That isn’t the point,” he said.

“Why the hell isn’t it? I live in Winston, in the real world. I have to make my living in Winston, in the real world, and that means I have to make my peace with the people who run Winston, and who run the real world. I tried that, and it’s always worked pretty well. Now you people have come in and rattled this town out of its wits, and that arrangement doesn’t work any more. I’m adapting myself to the new conditions, that’s all. I’m no more honest or dishonest, in the vague abstract total way you use those terms, than anybody else alive in the world. I have a job, an honest and proper job, licensed by the state of New York and the city of Winston, and I do that job as well as I can. And a part of that job is its confidential nature. My job is confidential in exactly the same way that a lawyer’s job or a doctor’s job or a psychiatrist’s job or even a priest’s job is confidential. Is a lawyer supposed to report every crime he hears described in his office? Is a priest supposed to report every crime he hears described in the confessional?”

“That is not the same thing, Mr. Smith!” And from the shocked, wide-eyed way in which he said that, I knew I had blasphemed.

“And just why the hell isn’t it the same thing?” I shouted. I was on my feet now, without knowing how or when I’d stood up, and I kept shaking my fist as I shouted at him. “I’ve been responsible for crimes solved, reparations made, injustices corrected, without the people involved getting into a lot of bad publicity, and without anybody getting a useless jail sentence, and I’ve—”

“Useless?” That one brought Danile to his feet, too. Blasphemy against the penal system was apparently even worse than blasphemy against the church.

“Yes, you’re goddam right, useless! Look, you take a kid—” I had to stop and shake my head and take a deep breath and start all over again, so the words would come out slow enough to be pronounced. “You take a kid,” I said. “He burgles a grocery store. The law gets him, and the court gives him six months in a reformatory, and he comes out a worse kid than when he went in. And ten years and four penitentiaries later, he winds up in one of these modern clinks with the pastel-pink bars and more psychiatrists than prisoners, and they spend five years trying to undo the damage that was done by that reformatory.”

“That’s an oversimplification!” he shouted.

“How else are we going to talk, if we don’t simplify, you fat-headed fact-filled do-gooder?”

“I didn’t come here—”

“To be insulted, I know. All right, now listen. You take that same kid, only instead of the law getting him, I get him. And nobody knows about his crime but me and the grocer and his parents. He gets the scare of his life, when he sees how easily he was caught, and he gets the word on what would have happened if the cops had found him instead of me, and the grocer gets his money back, and the kid never pulls that kind of stunt again.”

He shook his head rapidly, saying, “And you accuse me of idealism, when you expect—”

“Expect, hell! That’s what happened! That is exactly what happened with a kid who broke into Joey Casale’s grocery store. The hell with your theories. I’m telling you what works, and I’m trying to tell you what the goddam system is in this world, and how I fit into that system. And if I don’t fit into that system, I’m through.”

“If Satan himself—” he started, but I cut him off. “You’re goddam one hundred per cent right!” I snapped. “If Satan himself were Mayor of Winston, and all the lesser devils had all the offices in City Hall, they would be the ones running my world. And if I expected to live in that world, I would have to make my peace with them.”

“Make a deal with them, you mean.”

“Say it any way you want,” I said.

He took a deep breath, then suddenly turned away from me and walked over to the window. He stood looking down at Winston for a long minute, and then he glanced back at me and said, “You ought to leave Winston for a while, Mr. Smith. You ought to leave right away.”

And he was a different man. The voice, the manner of speaking, the words, the expression on his face, all were totally different. In that one split-second, he had gone from Archer Danile, reformer and idealist and prim Puritan, to Archer Danile, practical and realistic human being.

The switch was too fast for me. I was still mad at that other Danile, and so my voice was unnecessarily loud and harsh when I said, “Why should I?”

“There are things here you know nothing about,” he said. “You live too close to the surface. You shouldn’t judge men on the assumption that they, too, live close to the surface. I sympathize with you and, in a way, I agree with you. And I am giving you friendly advice when I suggest that you leave town for a while, and that you do not leave a forwarding address behind you.”

“Speak plainly,” I said.

He shook his head, smiling a bit. “I have. I can’t speak more plainly.”

The telephone rang then, interrupting my question before it got fairly started. Scowling, Danile picked up the receiver, listened a moment, and said, “Five minutes.” He listened again, and said, “All right. And what about Miss London? Isn’t she back in her room yet?... Yes, you do that.”

He hung up, looked back at me, and said, “Not tonight, Mr. Smith. Perhaps tomorrow, if you are foolish enough to still be in town, and dependent upon circumstances, of course — perhaps tomorrow we can make some arrangement. In the meantime, good night, Mr. Smith.”

I studied him, and I could make no sense out of him. “Good night,” I said, and left the apartment.

I rode down in the elevator, thinking glum thoughts, and in the lobby I noticed somebody I knew, a little old man in a black suit and a chauffeur’s cap. His name was Tommy O’Connell, and he was sitting over in a corner, apparently waiting for somebody, and his presence answered a number of questions.

But I’ll take direct evidence in preference to circumstantial evidence every time, as I’d mentioned to Harcum this afternoon. So I walked over and said, “Hi, Tommy.”

“Oh, hi there, Tim,” he said. He grinned up at me, so he hadn’t been told who he should or shouldn’t talk to.

“Danile will be down in a couple of minutes,” I said.

He nodded. “I know,” he said. “The guy on the desk just called him.”

So that was that. I said so long to Jordan Reed’s chauffeur and walked out of the hotel.