The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 3

In a phone booth at the corner drugstore, I had all the numbers dialed except the last one. I hesitated before I gave the dial that final spin.

The question pulsed in my mind and brought a small feeling of suffocation to the phone booth: Presuming Nick’s innocence, could I do anything about it? A stranger’s life and trust would have been inviolable — and this was Nick. Did I have the right to dial the final number and wait for a phone to ring downtown? Once the steel closed around Nick, everything would depend on me.

I had no starting point, nothing. The slippers were negative evidence. I was the only one who would accept and believe their meaning. At that, they simply indicated that he’d been asleep while an inhuman fiend had slaughtered three people and framed an innocent man without compunction.

I had to start out by believing in the existence of this fiend with no evidence of it.

I hadn’t even the clue to a character pattern to help. His was not merely a criminal mind. He might never have killed before. He might never kill again. He could be a wanderer, a thousand miles away by now. His might be a bland, everyday face on a Tampa street at this moment.

There was an alternative, which I hadn’t mentioned to Nick or Helen. I had connections in Ybor City, some extending to a political refugee or two from a revolution in a Latin country. In swarming Ybor City, the grave gentleman playing dominoes in one of the old men’s clubs might yesterday have been a secretary of state. I knew one man who might help get Nick out of the country. Central and South American revolutions had been hatched over rum toddies in Ybor City. A matter this small could be handled.

With Nick out of the way, the pressure on me would not be so great.

And that gave me the insight to my thinking.

I was thinking of myself, not of Nick or Helen. Flight on Nick’s part would entail hardship and privation. It could cost him his life.

I can’t run very far, Ed.

An old war, like a story of not-quite-real goblins to today’s kids, had taken care of that.

I spun the dial.

After a moment, I got Ivey.

“I have Nick Martin,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“We’ll get to that. There’s a condition.”

“I can’t bargain, Rivers.”

“Want me to hang up?”

“What is it?”

“I know Nick will be treated as decently as possible,” I said. “You’re doing a job that you have to do; you’re not out for blood.”

“That’s right.”

“I want you to understand one thing clearly. I didn’t find Nick. He called me. The surrender is his own doing and entirely voluntary on his part.”

“What’s your condition?”

“Patience, Ivey. One more thing I want you to know. I believe that Nick is innocent. I wish you would too, but I’m not counting on your being able to do anything about it. You’ve got too many official strings on you. I haven’t, and I’m going to act on the belief.”

Ivey said nothing.

“Now we get to the condition,” I said. “Technically, Helen Martin aided and abetted her husband’s flight. Turn your back on all human elements, and you could call her an accessory after the fact. It’s a technicality I can’t stomach, circumstances being what they are. I don’t think Nick could, either. I don’t think he’s thought of it yet. He’s been too busy thinking about the way he fancies he’s dragged her into hiding.”

“You’re pretty free with suggestions, Rivers. I expect to hear another any second.”

“And it’s a simple one, Ivey. Write into the record that she was forced into it, that she did it under duress.”

“Let her go free?”

“She won’t be free,” I said, “as long as Nick is in a cell. You won’t have to warn her or have any men watching her to keep her from leaving Tampa.”

Ivey thought about it briefly. “I can’t prove she left the cottage on the Point with him, unless one of them admitted it. If he happened to be alone when I picked him up, I wouldn’t have much of a case on her.”

“All right,” I said. Then I told him where Nick was.

Ivey’s knock sounded on the motel shanty door about twenty minutes later. Nick and I were alone in the place. I crossed the front room and opened the door.

Ivey came in, looked at me, then at Nick. He took off his Panama, wiped the sweatband with his fingers.

“Nick Martin?” Ivey asked.

“Yes,” Nick said.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

Nick rose slowly from the couch, picked up a small suitcase. Now that the moment was here, I could see the sinking sickness hit him inside. It showed in his eyes. He tried to grin it out. “Okay if I take my toothbrush?”

“Sure,” Ivey said.

Nick moved to the door, his tall, spare body hunched. “Well, Ed—” He stood trying to keep the grin on his gaunt face, wiping the palm of his free hand on the thigh of his pants. He raised the hand, balled it into a fist, and chunked me on the shoulder. “Don’t forget how to duck, old son.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Nick looked at Ivey. “What are we waiting for?” He stepped into the courtyard and started toward the street.

I watched a uniformed cop get out of a patrol car parked at the curb. He opened the door of the car and Nick and Ivey got in.

The car pulled away, with Nick looking straight ahead.

I closed the cottage and went down the street to the restaurant where Helen was waiting. The place was narrow and gloomy. She sat in one of the crude wooden booths near the front.

I squeezed across the booth from her.

She sat twisting a paper napkin in her fingers. She looked at me with a dazed sorrow dulling her eyes. She didn’t need to ask questions, and she was determined not to make a display.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” I said. “Well go downtown to eat.”

“I’d rather find a place to stay first, Ed.”

“Okay.”

“Would you mind — getting my things from the motel? They’re all packed. I’d rather not go back.”

“It’ll only fake a minute,” I said.

I walked to the motel, picked up the two suitcases by the cottage door. I left the tagged key in the lock when I closed the cottage door from outside.

A young, squat, dark man in a rumpled sport shirt and slacks stepped from the manager’s cottage as I carried the bags toward the street.

“I saw the cop car,” he said. “What’s with the couple in number seven?”

“They won’t be back. The lady asked me to get her bags.”

“I dunno...”

“The lady is in the greasy spoon down the street if you want her O.K.”

“I guess I better.”

“They owe you anything?”

“Nah, but I don’t want any beefs about lost luggage.”

He shuffled along beside me toward the restaurant. “What’s with them, anyway? Why the cops?”

“They took a wooden nickel.”

“Smart guy, huh?”

“Just not talkative,” I said.

He followed me into the restaurant. Helen rose as I went toward her. The manager craned his neck to look her up and down.

“She’s accepted the luggage,” I said, putting the bags down and tapping him on the shoulder. “Now scram.”

He looked at my face and backed off, with a sneer of bravado forming on his lips. He walked out of the place with a tough, swaggering gait.

The Martin car took us apartment-hunting.

We found her a place on Florida Avenue. Downtown, the street is a main drag in the business district. As it pushes out mile by mile, stores, shops, and office buildings give way to garages, used-car lots, and one-time grand old gingerbread homes which have been converted to apartment buildings and rooming houses.

An ad in the classified section of the newspaper led us to a rambling, three-story white house. The apartment was small, but clean and comfortable — not bad for what Helen could afford to pay. It consisted of a tiny sitting room, a bedroom with a bay window overlooking the hustle and noise of the street, and a small kitchen with apartment-size refrigerator and gas stove. A pay phone was right outside the door in the hallway. I took note of the number.

When the placid, bovine landlady had completed her quiz, accepted Helen’s money, and plodded downstairs, I carried Helen’s bags into the bedroom.

“Sure you won’t eat downtown?” I asked.

“No, I’ll fix something here.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks for everything, Ed.”

She was standing with her back to me, looking out the window.

I left quickly.

When a woman has reached the point where she must weep alone, she’s entitled to that much privacy.

I had a Cuban sandwich and a pint of cold beer for dinner.

Twilight came like a hot mist rising from the river. People dallied in cocktail lounges and restaurants. A fresh edition of one of the papers hit the street with Nick Martin’s picture on the front page.

I wondered if the fiend was still in Tampa to enjoy the photography — somewhere in a plush apartment, or a pink-and-proper stucco in a subdivision, or a vermin-ridden hole in West Tampa or Ybor City.

Relax, fiend. Take your first deep breath in two days.

It was the only hope I had at the moment. I wouldn’t think of the alternative — that he was eating in Atlanta, or hitching a ride in the Carolinas, or stoking the boilers in a freighter that had pulled out of Port Tampa for South America.

I made my way through the theater and windowshopping crowds on Franklin Street, went up to the office on Cass, and turned a light on.

I work for a big outfit, and there’s a routine I have to follow.

I took out the triplicate forms and filled them out. Employer’s name: Helen Martin. Nature of investigation: Husband arrested on suspicion of murder.

After I’d scrawled a signature that could be mistaken for Helen Martin’s, I took out my checkbook and eyed the balance. I work on a salary-commission setup. There was enough in the bank to pay a retainer for several days. Meantime, my salary-commission checks would be coming through. I could keep the financial cycle in motion for a considerable time until the home office cuts dried it up.

With the report ready for the mail, I went around the corner to the Journal building. Ed Price was on the city desk. We swapped our usual and obvious “Hello, Ed.”

“I want to see some files in your morgue,” I said.

“Library’s closed. Librarian goes home at five o’clock, Ed. You know that.” A tall, lean man, Price dropped a copy pencil on his desk, stood up.

I followed him out of the office, down the corridor. “What’s the story,” he asked.

“None yet.”

“The Yamashita thing?”

“You’re a close guesser.”

“Yeah, I’m a walking ouija board. You’re Nick Martin’s close friend. Today he surrenders. Somebody arranged that.” Price stopped before a heavy wooden door.

“I’m doing this for nothing,” he said.

“The Journal’s been my favorite paper in the past.”

“I know. Hence, the favor. You haven’t a chance in hell of helping Nick Martin. Under the setup you couldn’t even frame somebody else for the job.”

Price unlocked the door and clicked a switch, and long fluorescent lights went on overhead. The newspaper morgue smelled warmly and mustily of newsprint and paste.

Price rolled open drawers and carried a small stack of clippings in manila envelopes and photographs to a table. I sat down and he parked his skinny rump against the edge of a nearby table.

He lighted a cigarette, folded his thin, pale arms, and stood chewing the end of the fag as he smoked.

“This should be good,” he said. “This appeals to the perverted sense of humor you seem to pick up around a newspaper office. Wish I could go every step with you, Ed, until you bust a gut with frustration. Man ought to learn something about the meaning of life, watching a bull beat his brains out charging a wall of nothingness.”