The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 14

From the window I could see the driveway and lawn and hedge, and down to the right, beyond the hedge, I could make out the streetlight at the intersection. Just beyond there, I knew, Chloe sat waiting in the Packard. I stared off that way, but of course I couldn’t see the car.

The Three Stooges had grabbed me up like blockers on the kickoff forming around the man with the football. They’d run me up a narrow flight of stairs — back stairs, service stairs, whatever they call them — up here to the second floor, and locked me away in this bedroom facing the front of the house. Larry, the butler with the bat, had frisked me and relieved me of Tim’s little pistol — which he handled with complete terror — and then they’d backed out of the room, bumping into one another and watching me with round eyes. I heard them talking through the door, deciding Larry and Curly, the cook, should stand guard at the door while Moe, the chauffeur, went downstairs to tell Mr. Gross what they’d caught.

Well. I was in the Gross house, under the Gross roof. There was even a chance I was going to get to see Mr. Gross himself in a minute or two. And wasn’t that what I wanted?

Of course it was.

Then why did I keep looking around for some place to hide, some way to escape? I didn’t want to escape, did I?

As a matter of fact, I did. Hopelessly, miserably, but certainly.

The room I was in seemed to be a spare bedroom, reserved for guests. The bed was a high wide ornate old thing with a canopy, dominating the room. Flowers and vines and so on were carved into the wooden head-board, and the same motif was followed through on the dresser, the vanity table, the writing desk, and the night tables. Paintings of fox hunts graced the walls. Heavy drapes framed the windows.

Yes, a guest room. The dresser drawers I opened were all empty. I don’t know why I expected to find a Gideon Bible in one of them, but its absence surprised me.

A key turning in the lock made me start and slide shut a dresser drawer with embarrassed haste. As though that counted! Poking into empty dresser drawers was hardly something to agitate Mr. Gross; aside from having already broken into his house, there was whatever else he thought I’d done that had made him put me on the spot in the first place.

I turned and the Three Stooges popped through the opening doorway all at once and spread out, and after them came Mr. Gross.

Up till then I’d assumed that “Gross” was the man’s name, but it was his description. He looked like something that had finally come up out of its cave because it had eaten the last of the phosphorescent little fish in the cold pool at the bottom of the cavern. He looked like something that better keep moving because if it stood still someone would drag it out back and bury it. He looked like a big white sponge with various diseases at work on the inside. He looked like something that couldn’t get you if you held a crucifix up in front of you. He looked like the big fat soft white something you might find under a tomato plant leaf on a rainy day with a chill in the air.

He was beautifully dressed, but in his case it was a mistake. Had he worn overalls, a dirty flannel shirt, it would have been better. But the tailored black suit, the crisp white shirt, the narrow dark tie, the gleaming black shoes, the golden cuff links and the broad plain wedding band and the large flat wristwatch with its gold expansion bracelet, all they did was emphasize the grossness and pallor and sickliness of the white parts that bulged out at collar and cuff.

Stuck on that face like raisins on a cake were two expressionless eyes. They looked at me, the fat lips twitched, and out of them came a cracked soprano, a voice so high and foolish I inadvertently looked at the Three Stooges to see which was the ventriloquist. But it was Mr. Gross speaking, in his own voice:

“What did you want in here? Are you a burglar?”

“No, sir, Mr. Gross,” I said. I tried to keep looking him straight in the eye, to show him I was honest, but it was just impossible. He was so vile-looking it was embarrassing, I had to keep looking away.

Falsetto, cracking, there-are-sharks-in-these-waters voice: “One thing I cannot stand is incompetence. Incompetence. How could you expect to break in with the house full of people?”

“I wanted to see you, Mr. Gross,” I said. Looking everywhere at once, like Artie when he first sees you again, the way he did last night when I showed up at his party. And now doing the same thing myself, because Mr. Gross was as painful to the eye as a wrong piano chord is to the ear. Did I say he was bald? With a head that looked as though if you squeezed it, it would stay squeezed.

He held up Tim’s gun in a tubby white hand. “With this?” What an idiotic voice. “You wanted to see me with this?”

“For protection,” I explained.

“I have little time,” he said. “I am dummy this hand. We have three tables tonight, all close personal friends. You are an embarrassment to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“If you want to see me—”

“Her-bert!” A shout from downstairs.

His face twitched. Indecision, and then the mind made up. “Keep watch,” he told the Three Stooges. To me he said, “I will return. When next I am dummy.”

He went away, and the Three Stooges settled down to watch me. I told them, “I’m not going to try and get away. I want to talk to Mr. Gross.”

But I don’t think they believed me.

While they stood grouped near the shut door, I went back over to the window. Nothing had changed down below. I stood gazing, and all at once a shadow flitted, out at the end of the driveway, by the edge. I blinked, but it was gone.

Behind me, the Three Stooges were talking together, deciding to send one of their number for a deck of cards. Larry, the butler, was the one to go.

I watched and watched. Was that motion along the hedge, in the darkness? I couldn’t be sure.

Moe, the chauffeur, said, “You.”

He had to mean me. I turned and pointed at myself.

He said, “You play bridge?”

“A little,” I said. “I’m not very good.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “We need a fourth.”

“All right.”

But Larry hadn’t yet returned with the cards. I turned and looked out the window again, and now I did see her, following my route exactly — Chloe, pussyfooting across the lawn toward the house.

“You,” Moe said. “Come on, we got the cards.”