Number One.
She stood up convulsively. The police. She had to go to the police. She had to tell them—
Tell them Jim Conradin had been a thief?
Tell them the man she loved had been a vicious criminal?
Hurt his family, hurt her family, destroy his name?
But she had to. If he had been murdered, his killers couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished. And even if his death had been accidental, or suicidal, she couldn’t live with the knowledge of his crime—she knew that—she couldn’t live with it for one single day as he lived with it for eleven long years. She had to go to the police, she had to.
Jim, I have to, she thought, and she picked up the newspaper section from the floor and put it into the safe deposit box and swung the hinged lid closed. Jim, I have to, and may God have mercy on your soul and on mine for what I have to do; there’s no other way.
She picked up the box—frightened, trembling, crying—and ran out of the cubicle.
11
Late Wednesday afternoon.
The phone rang at 4:55.
Kilduff came out of the kitchen where he had been making coffee and caught up the receiver on the second ring. There was the taste of chalk in his mouth. “Hello?”
“Steve? Larry.”
“Yes?” tensely.
“I’ve got something.”
Kilduff let breath spray almost inaudibly between his teeth. “Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone.”
“Christ, Larry—”
“Later,” Drexel said. “Tonight.”
“Where are you now?”
“Chicago. I’m booked onto the seven-thirty flight to San Francisco.”
“Are you coming here?”
“No. My place. San Amaron Road in Los Gatos, Number 547. Can you find it?”
“I’ll find it,” Kilduff said. “What time?”
“The plane gets in at ten, Coast time. Give me better than an hour to get home. Say eleven-thirty.”
“All fright.”
“Listen, Steve, is everything okay with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been sticking close to your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t talked to anyone?”
“Who would I talk to?”
“What about your wife?”
“I told you about her,” Kilduff said. “She’s gone.”
“Okay, just stay cool.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“Larry, what is it you’ve got?”
“Tonight,” Drexel said. “Make sure you’re there, Steve.”
“Larry—” Kilduff began, but he was talking to a dead line.
He put the phone down and returned to the kitchen and looked at the coffee maker. The same painful constriction he had known on Saturday night was back in his chest, and his breathing had a nasal, labored quality. Well, what now? Had Drexel located Helgerman somehow? He’d sounded uptight on the phone, almost apprehensive, and that wasn’t like him—always steady, always in command. Something was bugging him, bugging him heavy . . . Christ, Kilduff thought, suppose he’s already found Helgerman? Suppose for some inexplicable reason Helgerman went home after he killed Conradin, and Drexel found him and . . .
Suppose he’s already killed him!
I’d be an accessory before and after the fact, and wouldn’t that make me equally as guilty as Drexel in the eyes of the law? Wouldn’t that mean the gas chamber for me, too? The gas chamber—no, there weren’t any more executions in California, were there? They only gave you life imprisonment now, life in a cage—what does it matter, anyway, because one is no more preferable than the other and there’s no Statute of Limitations on the crime of murder—The doorbell chimed.
Kilduff started, and a cold slimy thing attached itself parasitically between his shoulder blades. He sucked breath into his lungs like a gaffed fish. But then he rubbed a hand across his face and thought: Take it easy, now, just take it easy. No jumping at shadows, no reading malice into everyday sounds. Easy, son, easy. Hell, it was probably Mrs. Yarborough, the manager. He hadn’t paid the rent for the month yet. Sure, Mrs. Yarborough. He went out to the foyer and pulled the door open.
Two men stood in the hallway outside. One was tall and thin, in his early thirties, with sandy hair immaculately combed and expressionless brown eyes and a chin that came to a long V-point. He wore a neat gray suit and a gray and white striped tie and a pale yellow button down shirt with silver teardrop cuff links. The other man was shorter, older by ten years, but of the same leanness. He had a narrow, protracted nose that curved oddly, like a fishhook. He was dressed in a dark brown shiny-trousered suit, and in his left hand he carried an old brown hat with a torn sweatband.
The sandy-haired one said, “Mr. Steven Kilduff?” in a soft, almost mellifluous voice.
Kilduff looked at them and knew instantly who they were. He had an insane desire to fling the door closed, to turn and run, flee, run, run, but there was no place for him to go. The knot in his chest tightened until his lungs seemed to be rejecting the entrance of oxygen, and he tried to control the panic that was rising like a flood tide within him. It’s something else, he thought, a traffic violation, something else; but he was lying to himself and he knew it. He put out his hand involuntarily against the door jamb, and washed saliva around in his mouth, and forced words past the dryness of his throat. “Yes, what is it?”
“My name is Commac,” the sandy-haired one said. He brought his left hand up, and nestled against the palm was a leather case with a shield pinned inside. “Inspector Neal Commac, San Francisco police. This is my partner, Inspector Flagg.”
His knees were suddenly jellied, and he knew the color had drained out of his face. He just stood there, holding onto the door jamb.
Commac watched him with his expressionless eyes. “Is something the matter, Mr. Kilduff?”
“No, I... no,” Kilduff answered.
“We’d like to talk to you, please.”
“About—what?”
“Inside, if you wouldn’t mind.”
He worked some of the saliva onto his lips. “No, of course not.”
The two men came in past him and entered the living room. They stood with their eyes moving slowly over the interior, photographing it. Kilduff shut the door and went in there. “Well,” he said, facing them, trying to get a smile on, trying to brazen it out, knowing that he wasn’t even close to pulling it off, “sit down, won’t you?”
“Thank you,” Commac said, and they sat down on the sofa. Flagg put his hat on his knees, balancing it there.
“Can I... offer you anything? Some coffee?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
Kilduff sat on one of the chairs opposite, leaning forward, and got a cigarette out of his pocket. He managed to keep his hand steady as he lit it. “What is it I can do for you?”
