not going to try to discuss with Charley Snider. The old man was not a vampire.
Charley meanwhile had seated himself casually on one corner of the desk. “Okay,” he said cheerfully to their prospective witness. “What name would you like?”
An expression flickered across the old man’s face, come and gone again in a moment; Joe had seen something like it on the faces of prisoners who were being offered some kind of a deal that they knew was really too good to be true.
In this case the real wish was not to be attained. “Hawk will do,” the old man said, in a voice of compromise.
“Hawk. Okay, then, Hawk. Mr. Hawk, is it?”
A shrug.
“Any complaints about the way you been treated here?”
“Just about the fact of being picked up. Since you wanna know. You guys didn’t have any reason at all to pick me up.”
“For your own good, Mr. Hawk. Your protection.”
“Huh.”
“And then, you see, that garment you have on there, it sort of suggested to the patrolmen that maybe something a bit unusual was going on. I’d even be inclined to think that way myself.”
“Huh. I wasn’t drunk,” the man who used to call himself Feathers insisted. “I’m not drunk now. You charging me with that?”
Charley appeared to take a careful, judgmental look at the old man’s condition. “You’re talking sensibly so far. Maybe you ain’t drunk. I don’t s’pose you’re gay, either, but that is quite a fancy getup. Want to tell me where you got it?”
The ancient one flushed faintly. “I didn’t steal it.”
“Didn’t say you did.”
“A man wants to be decent, to try to keep from gettin’ busted, well, he’s gotta wear something.”
Charley’s large brown hand was now cupping a photograph of Carados. One of Charley’s favorite tools in questioning was the sharp change of subject. “Seen this man recently?”
Hawk appeared to be grateful for the sharp change. He gave the picture some deliberate thought. When he looked up from it he was obviously making some mental calculation, one in which fear did not appear to have a value; as if, thought Joe, this business of being in jail were only a kind of game, that tomorrow would be over with and forgotten.
“Yeah,” said Hawk at last, surprising both policemen by cooperating at once like the prince of solid citizens. He nodded deliberately. “That looks a lot like the guy who picked me up on the street a couple days ago. I’m pretty sure it’s him.”
“Pretty sure? Or sure?”
“It’s him.”
Joe and Charley exchanged a glance. “Where is he now?” There was a controlled tightness in Charley’s voice.
When Hawk shook his head, conveying ignorance, Joe put in: “Where and when did you see him last?”
“I’m not clear on what day it was.” Hawk pulled at his own beard, as if the length and feel of it were a matter of surprise and some distaste. “This’s what?”
“Friday night.”
Hawk shook his head again; the blur of time in the eye of his memory was all too visible. “Anyway, I know where.” He named a street intersection deep in the inner city. “He picked me up there, took me into a tavern a block away. It was late in the afternoon. Then he fed me something in a drink and I passed out.”
“And where were you when you woke up?”
Hawk looked at them both, not the way a street bum ought to be looking at detectives. “Next thing I can tell you I was back on the street, and your man was busting me for being in drag, or whatever. Ask him what for. And now I’m here.”
Charley was tapping the photograph with one big finger. “This man’s name is Carados. That mean anything to you?”
“Name? I don’t care anything about his name.”
“You say he picked you up. Why’d he do that? What did he want?”
“Said he wanted to buy me a drink. I said sure. We had a drink and I passed out, but not just drunk. He drugged me, like I said.”
Charley was silent for a moment, trying to choose which way to go next. It had to be as obvious to him as it was to Joe that this was not your ordinary wino. But if Hawk wanted to play that part, they would go along with him, for a while at least.
Joe chimed in: “You’re looking good, Mr. Hawk. Like maybe you’ve been off the booze, resting up for a couple of days?”
The blue-gray eyes considered him fearlessly. “Like I said, I can’t really remember anything since I passed out in that tavern.”
“But you could try to remember something. How about this—when you woke up, how were you dressed?”
Charley flicked the photo. “You don’t want to do this man any favors, do you? After the way he treated you?”
Hawk was thinking again. They let him take his time. At last Hawk said: “All right, I’ll give it to you for what it’s worth. The way I remember it, I woke up in a castle.”
“Castle,” repeated Charley. Under the circumstances the flatness in his voice had to be taken as courtesy.
Joe Keogh’s reaction, was different, fortified as he was with the memory of a certain phone conversation. He took a long shot now. “See any swords in that castle, Mr. Hawk?”
The old man flared at Joe silently; he’d hit home, though in exactly what way Joe wasn’t sure.
“Whadda you mean by that?” Hawk demanded at last.
“Just wondering. Swords, castles, they go together. Describe the place for us.”
“Don’t think I can,” the witness muttered sullenly. “About all I remember is the inside of some stone walls.”
“You mean,” said Charley, “you were in a big house with stone walls when you woke up?”
“All right, yeah, that’s what I said, a big house. Listen, you guys, can you get me some clothes besides this?”
“We’re gonna take care of that right away. Did you see Carados in this house? The man who picked you up?”
“It’s kinda embarrassing, sitting here this way.”
Joe stuck his head out into the corridor and called. Presently he came back in and shut the door again. “Some clothes are on the way,” he said. “Just jail issue for now, okay? We’ll work out something else later.”
“Okay.”
“Now tell us,” said Charley, “some more about Carados.”
Somehow he never did, although the interrogation session went on for about an hour. There were a lot more sessions planned, Hawk was sure, but meanwhile he was at least dressed in some acceptable clothes again. There had been a time, long ago, when he would have thought nothing of wearing a gaily decorated robe as his sole garment; one adapted to the times one lived in. Unfortunately, in periods of rapid change, one sometimes found one’s learned attitudes lagging by a few decades.
The face of the little girl who’d kindly given him the absurd robe stuck uncomfortably in his memory, even now after the garment itself was gone. She wasn’t his responsibility, of course. He hadn’t meant her any harm. He couldn’t afford to get involved with her situation.
So he got through the first session of questioning, playing dumb, then acting weaker and more tired than he felt. It wasn’t that he’d made a decision to tell the police nothing more of substance about Nimue and her friends. The decision had somehow been made for him. He couldn’t tell them anything more, certainly not that Nimue was up to something involving murder, because…
