The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 19

All the streets in Greenwich Village are one way the other way. I pushed the Packard around most of the Village, like a landlocked Flying Dutchman, and finally came on Perry Street from the rear. “Almost there,” I said.

“It’s about time.”

“If you knew a quicker way,” I said, “all you had to do was speak up.”

“You’re driving,” she told me. For some reason, we’d been snapping at each other since Canarsie.

I was about to answer — about to say, in fact, “Thanks for the information” — when I saw the black car, the famous black car, parked by a fire hydrant directly across the street from Artie’s apartment. I almost missed it, almost passed it by, because there was only one of them in it, either Trask or Slade, and I had come to think of them as inseparable, like the Doublemint girls. But there was no reason they wouldn’t split up from time to time, for one to rest or go get fresh orders or some such thing. In this case my guess would be the other one was with Deputy Chief Inspector Mahoney.

Chloe, still blissfully unaware, said, “There’s a parking space. Isn’t that incredible?”

It was, but I went on by. The next intersection was West Fourth Street — this was two blocks north of where West Fourth crosses West Tenth and one block south of where West Fourth crosses West Eleventh, if you’re keeping a crime map — and West Fourth Street is one way west, or south, so I took it.

Chloe said, “Hey! That was a parking space!”

“Trask or Slade,” I said.

“What?”

“The killers. One of them is parked across the street from Artie’s place.”

She turned around in the seat and looked out the back window, although we’d now turned the corner and gone an additional block, so it was unlikely she could see in front of Artie’s place too clearly. She squinted and said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I know those guys pretty good by now.”

“In front of Artie’s place? How come they’re in front of Artie’s place?”

“They’re ubiquitous,” I said.

“They’re what?”

“That means you told Uncle Al I was there once before.”

“Oh.” Then one beat late, she took offense: “What are you talking about? How was I supposed to know—”

“All right, never mind. The point is, what now?”

“I’m tired, Charlie,” she said. “I can’t tell you how tired I am.”

“Were there any lights in Artie’s windows, did you notice?”

“No. I was looking for parking spaces.”

I had come to Seventh Avenue and a red light. I was just as pleased to stop, since I had no idea where I was going. I said, “Is there any back way into his building, around from the next street?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“I don’t know how you’d know. I’m tired too.”

She said, “Isn’t there any place else?”

I shook my head. “Artie was the only guy I could think of last night. What about your place?”

“Sorry. I’ve got two roommates, and they’re both schizo enough as it is. I’m not about to bring a man in, in the middle of the night.”

“Then I don’t know.”

The light turned green. Seventh Avenue is one way south. I turned that way, went about five feet, and was stopped by another red light.

Chloe said, “What about across the roofs?”

“What?”

“We’ll go in the building on the corner, and up on the roof, and along the roofs to Artie’s building, and down inside to the apartment.”

I said, “How do we get into the building on the corner?”

“Oh,” she said.

This light also turned green, and once again I turned right, this time onto Grove Street, which I took to Hudson Street, where the light was red.

She said, “We could drive around like this all night, you know.”

“Please. I’m trying to think.”

“Then we’re lost,” she said.

“Ha ha,” I said. “Very funny.”

The light, as they all do, turned green, and yet again I turned right. Hudson Street is one way north. I drove one block, to Christopher Street, and got stopped by a red light.

“This is ridiculous,” Chloe pointed out. “There’s got to be some way to get in there.”

I said, “Such as.”

We were both silent. We sat and watched the red light, and after a while it did guess what. I drove north up Hudson Street, past West Tenth Street — hello, West Tenth Street! — and past Charles Street, and past Perry Street — hello, Artie’s apartment, a block and a half to our right — and between Perry and West Eleventh I found a parking space. It was a little small, and I stuck the Packard in it like someone putting a marshmallow in a ring box. When it was at last within walking distance of the curb, I turned everything off and said, “All right. The apartment is two blocks from here. Let’s think of a way in.”

So neither of us said anything for a while. I sat with arms folded and stared gloomily out at the hood, glinting evilly in the night. I couldn’t think of a thing. In fact, I had trouble thinking about thinking about the problem. I kept going off into reveries in which none of this had happened, in which I was at this very moment standing behind the bar in the ROCK GRILL, watching Baby LeRoy, on television, throw the can of clams at W.C. Fields.

Chloe said, abruptly, “Maybe...”

Wrenched back from Baby LeRoy — now spilling the molasses on the floor — I turned my head and said, “Maybe what?”

With maddening slowness she said, “It might work.” She was gazing out at the street and frowning in concentration.

A trifle impatient, I said, “What might work?”

“Neither one of them,” she said thoughtfully, “got a good look at me. You’re the one they know by sight.”

“So?”

“In fact,” she said, “Mr. Gross thinks I’m Althea, and Trask and Slade know what Althea looks like, so I’m perfectly safe. Perfectly safe.”

“I’m happy for you,” I said. She seemed less irritated now, no longer waspish, but I was having trouble making the adjustment.

“No, listen,” she said, letting sarcasm pass for the first time in over an hour. “I’ll go first. I’ll walk along like I’m drunk, and when I get to his car I’ll make a racket. I’ll sing or something, or fall all over his car. I’ll make a great big fuss and distract him, and you duck inside: Then I’ll come in.”

“What if he gets suspicious?”

“Why should he get suspicious? A drunk girl in Greenwich Village at one o’clock in the morning? What could be more natural?”

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“You think you should disapprove,” she told me, “because I’m female and because Errol Flynn would disapprove.”

“Then go right ahead and do it,” I told her, cut to the point where I hoped she would get into a jam with Trask or Slade. “Have a big time,” I told her.

“Don’t be snippy. I know we’re both tired, but control yourself.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m controlling myself.”

“Good. Now, here’s the key. It unlocks both the downstairs door and the apartment door.”

“Last night,’ I said, “the downstairs door wasn’t locked.”

“Oh?” She didn’t seem very interested. She opened the door on her side. “Leave your jacket in the car,” she said. “I’ll wear it when I come back around, so he won’t know I’m the same girl.”

I said, “You really want to do this?”

“Yes. I’m tired, and it’s perfectly safe, and we haven’t been able to think of anything else.”

I shrugged and got out of the car. I took my jacket off and left it on the front seat, then locked the door on my side and walked around to the sidewalk, where Chloe was standing and waiting for me. I said, “Maybe we ought to get a hotel room some place instead.”

She looked at me. “There are so many things wrong with that idea,” she said, “I hardly know where to begin.”

“Like what?”

“Like number one, for instance, he couldn’t get a hotel room, we’d have to get two hotel rooms.”

“You could sleep at your own place.”

“If I leave you alone, God knows what you’ll do. Number two, neither of us have the money to waste on hotel rooms. Number three, we still want to get back in touch with Artie, and how do we do that if we don’t go to his apartment?”

I said, “All right. You convinced me.” I locked the door on this side of the car and gave her the keys. “Good luck,” I said.

“Watch me,” she said, and winked.

We walked down to the corner of Perry and Bleecker Streets together, and I stationed myself against the corner building, where I could peek around Perry Street and see what was doing. Chloe said, “Wait till I’ve got him good and distracted.”

“Right.”

“See you,” she said, and walked around the corner. She began at once to sing, very loud and not on key: “‘Hail to the bastard king of England...’” And so on.

I’d never heard that song all the way through before. That was really a very dirty song.

Singing, waving her arms in grandiose gestures to amplify the song, Chloe tottered down the block and angled across the street toward the black car. In her dungarees and black turtleneck sweater and long straight black hair she was every Greenwich Village free-love cliché ever spawned, and I didn’t see how Trask or Slade could be anything in this world but distracted out of his mind.

Chloe, however, was taking no chances. Still singing, she brought up against the front left fender of the black car, and stood swaying there a few seconds, studying the obstruction. I couldn’t see Trask or Slade from where I was, but it seemed a safe bet he was looking at Chloe and not across at Artie’s building. I took a deep breath and prepared to make my dash.

Then Chloe took her sweater off.

The clown; she distracted me. I just stood there and gaped.

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’” Chloe bellowed, top of her voice, and climbed up on the black car’s hood. She arranged her sweater as a pillow and curled up on the hood like a cat on the hearth.

She wore a black bra.

Lying there, she finished the prayer, allowed a second or two to go by for reverence’ sake, and then began to sing that song again.

Trask or Slade abruptly came boiling out of his car, shouting and hollering and waving his hands, like an orchard owner shooing kids out of his apple trees. “Get offa there! Come on, come on, get offa there!”

Chloe told him something I will not record, and rolled over on her other side.

At last I moved. I ran, like unto the wind. Chloe and Trask or Slade continued to shout at each other — I’m not sure but what I heard Chloe mention rape, as a matter of fact — and I did a Roger Bannister halfway down the block, turned left, up the steps, and into the building.

The downstairs door was unlocked tonight, too. I thundered up the stairs and unlocked my way into Artie’s apartment.

There was no light on in here, and I had to leave it that way. If Trask or Slade looked up and saw light from these windows, he’d surely come and investigate. Still, there was faint illumination from outside, and I made my way around the perimeter of the furniture lumped in the middle of the room, and when I got to one of the windows I looked down and saw a very rumpled-looking Chloe standing on the sidewalk next to the black car, pulling her sweater on. Trask or Slade stood on the street side of the car, still making shooing motions with his hands. The two of them were still hollering at one another.

No one came out of any buildings to see what was going on. No police showed up. Everything was nice and private.

I watched, and Chloe finally went shuffling away, still singing and doing her drunk act. Trask or Slade stood in the street and glared after her till she’d rounded the far corner, and then he turned and looked up at me — that is, at the window behind which I was cowering — and then he got back into his car. I watched, and a few seconds later a match flared in the car as he lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

Six hundred seconds went by, one at a time. I stood at the window and watched the street.

A young guy in work clothes — dungarees and a black jacket and cap on his head — came walking down the street from the direction in which I had come. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and his hands were in his jacket pockets. A rolled-up newspaper jutted out of a hip pocket of his dungarees.

He came down the street and stopped in front of this building and flipped his cigarette in the street and I saw it was Chloe. I also saw the pale face of Trask or Slade across the way, looking at her and satisfying himself she wasn’t me. Then she trotted up the steps and out of my line of vision.

I waited at the hall door for her. She came to the second floor, grinning, taking the newspaper from her pocket and the cap off her head. All of her hair had been stuffed into the cap one way or the other, and it now fell all asnarl around her face. She brushed it away, came into the dark living room, and said, “Well? How’d I do?”

“Great,” I told her, “but the Hayes office made us cut the scene.”

“Come on in the bedroom,” she said. “We can turn the light on in there.”

“Right.”

I had grown somewhat used to the darkness by now, so I led the way, taking Chloe by the hand. We went through the doorway into the bedroom, I shut the door, and she switched on the light.

Artie didn’t believe in cleaning up. The bed was unmade, the whole room was still the disreputable mess it had been when last I’d seen it. But it was a relatively safe place, and it contained a bed, and its only window faced on an airshaft, so I didn’t object too much.

Chloe, taking off the jacket, said, “Well. He’ll remember me awhile.”

“Where’d you get the hat?” I asked her.

“Off a drunk sleeping on Charles Street,” she said. She looked at it in disgust and threw it in a corner. “I hope I don’t get bugs from it.” She ruffled her already-ruffled hair. “Well,” she said, “you slept on the floor last night, so you can have the bed tonight. I’ll sleep out on the sofa.”

“I thought you said I was Errol Flynn,” I reminded her. “This is more the Cary Grant bit, isn’t it? He was always the one spending the night in the same room with a woman and they’re not going to do it.”

“That’s right,” she said offhandedly, “we’re not going to do it.” She’d been looking around the room. “No note in here,” she said. “Maybe there’s one in the living room, we’ll look when it gets light.”

I didn’t say anything. Sex had just hit me in the stomach and I was having trouble inhaling.

I couldn’t tell you the last time that had happened to me, and after all this time with Chloe that it was happening now was as surprising as it was inconvenient.

It was the damnedest thing. This morning I’d seen her take her dungarees off, and nothing. Tonight I’d seen her take her sweater off, and nothing. In between, I’d ridden all over the Greater New York area in the Packard with her, and nothing. Just a minute ago I’d taken her hand to lead her through the dark living room, and still nothing.

I think it was ruffling the hair that did it. She stood there in that messy bedroom, a rumpled sexy elf looking warm and distracted and tired, and she raised her right arm and ruffled her hair, and there it was. What they call in books a heightened awareness came over me.

A heightened awareness. Yeah, I’ll say. I was suddenly so aware of Chloe as a female body, a collection of feminine parts, that I was paralyzed. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, I could hardly breathe.

Flashback: The summer that I was fourteen, I worked as a messenger boy for a deli in midtown Manhattan, carrying coffees and sandwiches into the office buildings along Fifth and Madison avenues. One afternoon, having left an order in an office in the Longines-Wittnauer Building, I boarded a crowded down elevator, and the next floor down three very sexy busty hippy blondes got on board. I guess there was a talent agency on that floor or something. Anyway, we were all crammed together in that elevator, and I had one of those girls pressed against my front, and another one pressed against each side. By the time we reached street level I was so shaken I went over to a White Rose on Sixth Avenue and lied about my age and had my very first shot of bar whiskey. I hated it.

Until tonight, with Chloe, I had never had the old heightened awareness that much ever again. And now the intervening ten years, all the dates with girls, the rare — I’m ashamed to say how rare — scores, all were washed away as completely as though a dam had burst. I was fourteen again, crowded into the elevator again, afraid again to tremble.

Chloe raised her arms over her head and stretched. “Well,” she said, while I died. “Anything you want to talk about, or shall we just go to bed?”

“Bed,” I said.

“Good. I’m too tired to think, anyway. I’ll have to turn this light out before I open the door.”

I nodded.

One hand on the doorknob, the other on the light switch, she looked over at me and smiled and said, “You’re a real nut, Charlie.”

I roused myself, flashed her a nervous smile of my own, and managed to say, “You’re something of a goober yourself.”

“Huh.” She switched off the light, opened the door, and went out to the living room. “Good night,” she said, in the dark, and shut the door again.

“Good night,” I mumbled, though she couldn’t hear me.

I didn’t get as much sleep as I needed.