The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 8

“Don’t move,” said the broken-nosed man. His gun said the same thing.

I didn’t move. I stood there with my arms up over my head and wondered what was going to happen now. My arms almost immediately had gotten tired, and the broken-nosed man hadn’t told me to put them up in so many words in the first place, but I didn’t want to take a chance on lowering them. I stood there and sweated and smiled like a Dale Carnegie dropout.

The broken-nosed man took two steps backward, through the doorway and into the hall. Still watching me, he shouted “Tim! Hoy, Tim!”

From far away downstairs came an answering shout, with a question in it.

“Come up here a minute!” shouted the broken-nosed man.

I heard sliding doors slide, somewhere downstairs, and a clear and beautiful voice called, “Clarence? What’s the matter up there?”

The broken-nosed man — whose parents had apparently been such poor prophets they’d named him Clarence — called back, “It’s all right, Miss Althea, there’s nothing the matter.”

Heavy footsteps thudded up the carpeted stairs. I hoped they belonged to Tim rather than Miss Althea; lovely young girls shouldn’t clump like that.

Tim it was, the white-haired red-nosed chauffeur. He was red-cheeked now, too, from the climb, but the red drained from his cheeks and faded on his nose when he saw his employer. He said, “For God’s sake, what’s happened?”

“This bird killed Mr. Agricola,” Clarence told him.

I shook my head, between my upraised arms. “He was dead when I came in here,” I said.

“For God’s sake,” said Tim.

Clarence said to me, “That won’t do, you. Nobody did Mr. Agricola in but you.”

“No. Really.”

Clarence shook his head and looked as though he pitied my feeble brain. “There’s nobody in the house,” he said, “but me and Tim and Ruby the cook and Miss Althea, and we all been downstairs.”

“Those two guys in the black car,” I said. “That just drove away, maybe they did it.”

Clarence shook his head some more. “Let me just show you it’s no good,” he said. “You made your try and it didn’t work. Mr. Agricola came downstairs with those two boys, and then went back up again after they left. We all saw him.”

Tim, who was still recovering from his first shock, started abruptly and nodded, saying, “That’s right. He came to the doorway where we were all sitting, the three of us.”

“So it’s you,” said Clarence.

I knew it wasn’t me, but Clarence was sure convincing. I said, “How do you know there’s nobody else in the house? I got in, why couldn’t other people?”

“Sure,” said Clarence.

Miss Althea was suddenly in the doorway, saying, “What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Clarence? Daddy?” I was right, her eyes were blue. They were also very wide right now.

Of all the people in the world, Miss Althea was the one I most wanted to know I was innocent. I said to her, with as much sincerity as I could put into my voice, “I didn’t do it.”

Clarence and Tim, meanwhile, were both trying to get her to go back out of the room, but she wouldn’t go. She said, “Daddy? Daddy?” Her eyes just kept getting wider and wider.

Clarence bellowed, “Ruby! Come up here and get Miss Althea!”

Miss Althea, at that point, screamed and fainted.

I still knew I hadn’t done it, but I couldn’t help feeling as though I was somehow the cause of all this trouble and commotion, and I was feeling embarrassed and foolish about the whole thing. I stood there with strained arms and pained expression and wished desperately I was somewhere else. Even in the back seat of the black car, even that much, if it meant I wasn’t here.

There were now two or three minutes of confusion. Tim carried Miss Althea away, and Ruby arrived and immediately trundled off to see to Miss Althea, and Tim came back, and throughout it all the black eye of the gun in Clarence’s hand kept watching me.

When Tim came back, Clarence said, “Frisk him.”

I said, “I swear I didn’t do it.”

“Sure,” said Clarence. “We went through that already, remember?”

Tim came around behind me and went through my pockets, taking everything out and piling it up on the desk beside us. There wasn’t much: my wallet, my keys, a pack of Pall Malls and a folder of matches, twenty-three cents in change, and a pocket pack of tissues.

Clarence said, “What’s the wallet say?”

I said, “Can I put my arms down, please?”

“Go ahead.”

I did, and said, “Thank you.”

Tim had opened my wallet in the meantime. “His name’s Charles Robert Poole,” he said. “He lives in Brooklyn.”

“Poole?” Clarence looked at me with new interest. “You’re the nephew runs the bar?”

“Yes. I came—”

“Who would have thought,” he said. “You showed guts, kid. Not much brains, but lots of guts.”

“Listen,” I said desperately, “I really didn’t—”

Tim interrupted me, saying to Clarence, “Should I call the law?”

“No,” said Clarence. “If this is the nephew, he knows too much. We can’t have him talking to the law.”

Tim waved his hands, saying, “I don’t want to know nothing about that. I’m a chauffeur, that’s all I am. I don’t want to know nothing about nothing.”

“Sure,” said Clarence. To me he said, “Put your stuff back in your pockets.”

I put my stuff back in my pockets. I wanted to ask him what he was planning, what he was going to do, but I was afraid if I asked him he’d tell me, so I kept my mouth shut.

Clarence backed out of the room again and motioned with the gun. “Let’s go,” he said.

Tim said, “What do I do about Mr. Agricola?”

“Leave him be. Call Mr. Gross, tell him the farmer bought the farm. You got that? The farmer bought the farm.”

“The farmer bought the farm,” said Tim.

Clarence said, “His number’s in the pad there, on the desk.”

“Right,” said Tim.

Meanwhile I had come out to the hall. Clarence turned his attention to me again and said, “Downstairs, you.”

We went downstairs, me in the lead. I said, “If you’d just let me explain,” and paused because I expected to be interrupted. But Clarence didn’t say a word, so I went on, saying, “I didn’t kill Mr. Agricola, I really didn’t. I’m the wrong type to do something like that, you can see that just looking at me. All I wanted to do was talk to—”

“Turn right.”

We were at the foot of the stairs. I turned right, and walked toward the kitchen.

“—Mr. Agricola about what was going on, why anybody would want to kill me, because I didn’t do anything. Somebody was making a mistake somewhere, and all I wanted to do was talk to Mr. Agricola.”

“Through that door there,” he said.

I opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight. That blacktop, that sunlight, the silence and emptiness made me think of firing squads.

“Over to the barn.”

I walked toward the barn.

“I wouldn’t kill him,” I said. “Honest to God, I wouldn’t kill him. I wouldn’t kill anybody. Why would I do something to Mr. Agricola? I wanted him to tell those two guys not to kill me, what good would it do me—”

“He couldn’t do that,” Clarence said. “He had his orders, like anybody else. Open the door and go on in.”

I pulled open the barn door, which creaked and groaned, and went on in to darkness and a musty smell.

“Orders from who?” I said.

“Never mind,” said Clarence. “Walk straight ahead.”

The barn wasn’t being used for anything. Empty stalls, empty bins, empty nails stuck in the walls, empty loft up above. Sunlight gleamed in cracks in the outer walls, filling the interior with soft vague indirect lighting as though we were underwater in a lagoon.

The left rear corner had been closed off into a tiny windowless room lined with rough-plank shelves. This was empty now, but not for long; Clarence pushed me in and shut the door behind me. I heard a hasp lock click shut. I was alone.

Now what? I supposed Clarence had decided he couldn’t do anything about me on his own account, and so he’d just locked me away here for safekeeping until he found out what was what from Mr. Gross. I also supposed Mr. Gross was the man higher up, the one Mr. Agricola had taken his orders from.

So it was Mr. Gross I should be trying to see, not Mr. Agricola.

Well, it didn’t look as though I’d get to see him. If anybody wanted to set up a Charlie Poole pool, I would put my money on the two guys in the black car for the next people I’d be seeing. And the last.

A rotting old barn like that, there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t escape from it. I kicked at one of the exterior walls, experimentally, and managed only to hurt my big toe. I hit my shoulder against the door, and hurt my shoulder. I hit my palm against one of the interior walls, and hurt my palm.

While there were still a few parts of me that didn’t hurt, I decided to quit.

How long would it take? Clarence and Mr. Gross would have to talk together, guardedly, on the telephone. Then Mr. Gross would have to get in touch with the two men in the black car, and they’d have to drive on out to Staten Island again. An hour at the least, maybe two hours.

I sat down on the dirt floor, and gave myself up to depression.

It was only fifteen minutes before I heard someone unlocking the door out there. I scrambled to my feet, and my mouth got dry while my palms got wet. I kept clearing my throat and clearing my throat; when that door opened, I was going to have to talk faster than I had ever talked before in my life. And I wasn’t even sure what I was going to say.

The door swung open at last, and it was Miss Althea standing there, as beautiful and improbable as a Disney heroine, but distorting her beauty was a terrible frown of grief and rage that stroked her face with heavy angry lines. In the right hand she raised toward me was, incredibly, a gun, a great big automatic. Her hand was barely large enough to hold it, and she had to bring her left hand up to help keep it steady.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“You killed my father,” she said. Her voice was hoarse with strain.

“No no,” I said. “No, I didn’t, no.”

“I’m going to kill you,” she said, and pulled the trigger.