The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 17

Chloe said, not without pride, “I’ve lost them.”

It was the first word either of us had said in ten minutes or more. Not that the intervening time had been soundless, oh no; the shriek of tires and squeal of brakes had filled in nicely for the lack of dialogue.

I had spent the time — I never have claimed to be anything but a coward, I hope you’ve noticed that — with my eyes shut. Even so, I could visualize our screaming progress through the tiny towns of Long Island, the long bulky black 1938 Packard roaring down the night-dark streets, the natives peering fearful and open-mouthed from their cottage windows, the whole thing straight out of Carol Reed. I was so caught up in my imagery that now, when I did at last open my eyes again, I was surprised to see the world not in black and white.

Chloe said, “Where to?”

“Back to the city,” I said. That much thinking I’d been able to do down in there behind my shut eyelids, while the world had squealed and teetered around me. “I’ve got to find a policeman named Patrick Mahoney.”

“That should be easy,” she said. “I doubt there’s more than fifty Patrick Mahoneys on the force.”

“Well, I’ve got to find mine,” I said.

“Why?”

There was no quick answer to that. I had to fill her in on everything I had said to Mr. Gross, and everything he had said to me, and when I was finished with all that I said, “The way it looks to me, I’ve got to prove I didn’t inform to the police, and I’ve got to prove I didn’t kill Mr. Agricola. If I can prove I didn’t inform, that ought to help prove I didn’t do the killing.”

“Maybe,” she said. She sounded doubtful.

I said. “What’s wrong?”

“It all sounds too complicated,” she said. “You don’t know any of these people or what the real situation is or anything else. If you didn’t give information to the police, then somebody else did. And if you didn’t kill Mr. Agricola, then somebody else did that, too. Maybe the same somebody, maybe a different one. The point is, you don’t know who these people are or what they’re doing or what they’re after. You’re probably just a sidelight to them, one little corner of some great big thing that’s going on.”

“I’m learning,” I told her. “What else can I do? I keep moving, from name to name, from fact to fact, and I hope after a while I find out what’s going on and I get everything straightened out, and then I can go back to the bar and forget all this mess.”

“Do you think so?” She glanced at me, and then back out at the road again.

I didn’t get what she meant. “Do I think what?”

“After this is over,” she said. “Even if you get everything straightened out the way you want, do you think you’ll be content to go back to your old life again?”

“Ho ho,” I said. “You bet your sweet — you’re darn right I will. Content is hardly the word. Those cows on that evaporated milk can are nervous wrecks in comparison.”

She shrugged. “If you think so,” she said.

“I know so.” I looked around, out the windshield and the side window. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure. On Long Island somewhere.”

“That much I knew already.”

“I think we’re going north,” she said. “If we are, we’ll cross one of the expressways sooner or later, and we can take it back into the city.”

“Fine.”

She said, “Charlie, something else.”

“Something else?”

“I don’t know if you’ve thought about this or not,” she said, and stopped.

“Neither do I,” I told her. “Maybe I will after you say it.”

She said, “If Gross thinks I’m Althea, and he thinks you are I are in cahoots, and he thinks we’re out to wreck the organization, where do you suppose he thinks we’re going now?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “He told you, Charlie, about a crooked cop, what he called the liaison between the organization and the police force. Charlie, he’s sure to think we’re on our way to kill Mahoney.”

“Oh,” I said.

“If we do find him,” she told me, “we’ll probably find Trask and Slade right along with him.”

“They can’t be everywhere at once,” I said, though by now I wasn’t so sure.

“All they have to be,” she pointed out, “is where you are.”

I shook my head. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do. Mahoney’s the man I’ve got to see next, that’s all.”

“All right, fine. You’re in charge. Yeah, there’s Grand Central.”

Grand Central is a parkway. Chloe tooled the mighty Packard around the long curve down from the street we’d been on, and joined the rest of the night traffic streaming toward the city.

One question Chloe hadn’t brought up, but I’d been thinking about anyway, was how we were going to find Patrick Mahoney. All I knew about him was that he was a policeman. He could be a uniformed cop, or a detective in plainclothes. He could be stationed in a precinct in any one of the boroughs, or he could work out of the main Headquarters on Centre Street in Manhattan.

Although, come to think of it, the odds were pretty good he was well up there in the police hierarchy. A uniformed cop on a beat somewhere was hardly in a position to be what Gross had called the “liaison” between the organization and the police force. It seemed to me likeliest that Mahoney was some sort of wheel and would most likely be found at Centre Street.

But how to find out for sure, that was the problem.

A patrol car passed us, exceeding the posted speed limit, and I gazed after it wistfully, wishing we could catch up with it and flag it down and just ask the cop driving it if he could tell us who Patrick Mahoney was and how to—

Ah hah!

I said it aloud: “Ah hah!”

Chloe jerked, and the Packard lunged into another lane. “Don’t do that!” she said.

“Canarsie,” I told her. “Never mind Manhattan, drive to Canarsie.”

“Canarsie? Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. Drive to Canarsie.”

“I couldn’t find Canarsie,” she told me, “with a troop of Boy Scouts to help.”

“I could. Stop the car and let me drive.”

“You sure you know how to drive this kind of car?”

Coming from her, that was an insult. But I let it pass. “Yes,” I said simply. “Pull over to the side.”

She did, and we switched places, she sliding over and me running around the front of the car. It was a very large car, with a very long front and a very high hood. I got behind the wheel and immediately felt like a member of Patton’s Third Army Tanks, you know.

What a dream that car was to drive! It was like driving a big old mohair sofa, equipped with a lot of tiny highly oiled ball bearings. It was the first time in my life I ever wished I smoked cigars. I can see why gangsters and little old ladies are assumed to drive cars like this; such a car gives a gangster a feeling of power and importance he can’t possibly get in, say, a Cadillac you can barely tell apart from some minor hood’s Chevrolet, and a lot of time at the wheel of this sort of car would surely keep the bloom of youth in the cheeks of any reasonably hip little old lady.

“No wonder we got away from those guys,” I said, as we rolled merrily along. “This car has too much self-respect to be caught by some four-eyed piece of tin with plastic seat covers.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Chloe.

“The driver helped, too,” I assured her, but I only said it to be polite.