The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 13

Nine o’clock.

There didn’t seem to be any way into Hewlett Bay Park. We’d found the general area an hour ago, and we’d been circling around and around it ever since, always coming back to the same street, a dark street with a barrier halfway across it and a stop sign on it and another sign saying ONE WAY DO NOT ENTER. So far as I could tell, the other side of that barrier was Hewlett Bay Park, but I just couldn’t find the way in.

The fourth or fifth time we came back to that same place, a Cadillac ahead of us drove nonchalantly around the barrier and on down the street. I looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at me and it hit us both at the same time. The barrier and signs were phony; it was just an exclusive town’s cute way to keep tourists and other rabble out.

“Anything a Cadillac can do,” I said, “a Packard can do. Onward.”

“Right,” she said, and around the barrier we went.

This was another world. Head-high hedges surrounded the homes, each of which sprawled in moneyed elegance on an insultingly large plot of land. There were few streetlights, but many of the driveways we passed were lit with blue or amber lights. There were no sidewalks, of course, because who in this area walked? The street names were lettered vertically on green posts set discreetly at each corner, and the intersections were free of vulgar traffic lights. In the ten minutes it took us to find Colonial Road we saw no other moving automobile.

One twenty-two was a house to fit the road; Colonial, with a bit of plantation thrown in. White pillars marched across the front of the house, which was of white clapboard with black shutters. Lit carriage lamps flanked the wide front door, and more lamps of the same style, on poles, were spaced along the curving driveway. There was the normal tall hedge all round, and more lawn than any one house could possibly need. The ground-floor windows were lit, the upstairs windows dark.

I said to Chloe, “Drive on by. Park beyond the next corner.”

There was a streetlight at the intersection, as dim as a cocktail lounge at midnight. We went past it, and Chloe stopped the Packard up close to the hedge in the next pool of darkness.

“If I’m not back in half an hour,” I said, “you better not wait for me. I’ll try to get back to Artie’s place as best I can.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Well, sure. I’m no daredevil.”

The hedge being so close, I had to get out on her side. We stood together a second beside the car, while an odd feeling came over us, or at least over me, and then I said, “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Please be careful, Charlie,” she said, with a funny kind of emphasis on “please.”

It made me uncomfortable. “I’ll do my best,” I said.

She got back into the car and I walked down to the intersection and through the halo of yellow light there and beyond. It was almost like walking along a country road; the darkness and the high hedges obscured the signs of civilization. There was no sound anywhere but the scuff of my own shoes on the pebbles at the edge of the road. The back of my neck was cold, where the hairs were standing up.

My right hand was in the pocket of Artie’s jacket, holding tight to the little pistol I’d gotten from Tim. The pistol should have made me feel better — safer, more secure, more in control — but it did just the reverse, serving as a cold metal tangible reminder that I was kidding no one but myself. In fact, not even myself.

I looked back, and at first I couldn’t see the Packard, but then I caught an evil glint of chrome in the darkness back there. That car was the mechanical Sydney Greenstreet.

The driveway entrance to Mr. Gross’s house was at the far end of the frontage. I crunched along, seeing his house lights vaguely through the hedge on my left, and after the road’s darkness his driveway, when I stood in front of it, seemed as bright as Times Square. It was wide, and four or five cars were parked along it, all new and expensive.

Would he have dogs? It seemed to me a place like this required dogs, huge loping animals who’d galumph over and bit your leg off without the least malice in the world. I stood a minute peering into the property in search of them, but all I could see were driveway and lights.

What I was worrying all the time about dogs for anyway I’ll never know, since it was mostly human beings who’d been trying to do me in the last twenty hours.

Finally, reluctantly, I stepped onto Mr. Gross’s property. I skirted the driveway and all its lights, and came around at the house from the other side. Light spilled from the windows to guide my way across turf as soft as a Persian rug. These windows were too high for me to look in them and see anything but ceilings, which was just as well; it made it less likely anyone on the inside would glance out and see me.

I moved around to the rear of the house, where I tiptoed across a slate patio alive with metal furniture. There were no rooms alight at the rear of the house, so I moved in utter darkness here, and my progression across the patio, ricocheting from metal chair to metal table to metal chair like a complex billiard shot, was a series of tiny magnificently distinct noises. When I came at last to a door, a possible entry, I simply leaned against it for a minute to listen to the blessed silence.

But the job was to get in. After I’d caught my breath and my wits, I tried the knob and the door proved to be unlocked. I could hardly believe my luck.

Well, it wasn’t luck. I pushed open the door, stepped through in unbroken silence, shut the door as silently behind me, and forty lights went on.

I was in a smallish dining room, with secretarys and highboys against the walls and a sturdy English-looking table in the center. Leaded windows overlooked the patio and, I suppose, a garden. Quiet elegance bespoke itself softly in this room, just as in my Uncle Al’s apartment, and similarly, too, the human element provided the only discordant note.

In this case it was the Three Stooges, one of whom had turned on the lights, principally a crystal chandelier suspended above the table. I say the Three Stooges, but of course I mean only an imitation of the Three Stooges. But for all that, a pretty good imitation.

Moe, in a black chauffeur’s suit, held an automatic, pointed more or less at me. Larry, in a butler’s tux, had armed himself with a basketball bat. And Curly, in white apron and tall white chef’s cap and blackface, hefted a meat cleaver. All three glared at me with the belligerence of fear.

This was the last thing I’d expected to find in the house of Mr. Gross — amateurs like myself. They were, in their own way, more frightening than professionals. Like dogs, there was no reason to suppose they could be talked to.

I raised my hands over my head. “Don’t shoot,” I said. “Don’t hit. Don’t cut.”

They advanced.