not to lose it or your apartment will be secure against everyone, including you.'
'There's a thought.'
'You've got a lot of security here,' I said. 'He put an escutcheon plate over the cylinder so it can't be pried out, and the cylinder itself is some space-age alloy that you can't drill into. While he was at it I had him install a similar guard over the existing Segal deadbolt. All of this probably amounts to overkill, especially if you're planning to catch the next plane toBarbados , but I figured you could afford it. And you ought to have decent locks, Motley or no Motley.'
'Speaking of him—'
'He's not dead and he's not in prison.'
'When did he get out?'
'In July. The fifteenth of the month.'
'Which July?' She looked at me and her eyes widened. 'This July?
He drew one-to-ten and served twelve years?'
'He wasn't what you'd call a model prisoner.'
'Can they keep you there beyond the maximum sentence? Isn't that a violation of due process?'
'Not if you're a very bad boy. That sort of thing happens now and then. You can go to prison for ninety days and still be inside forty years later.'
'God,' she said. 'I guess prison didn't rehabilitate him.'
'It doesn't look that way.'
'He got out in July. So that's plenty of time to find out where Connie went to and, and—'
'I guess it's time enough.'
'And time to clip the story out of the paper and send it to me. And time to wait around while the fear builds. He gets off on fear, you know.'
'It could still be a coincidence.'
'How?'
'The way we said last night. A friend of hers knew you were her friend and wanted you to know what had happened.'
'And didn't send a note? Or put on a return address?'
'Sometimes people don't want to get involved.'
'And theNew York postmark?'
I'd doped that out, too, lying on the couch and looking atLong IslandCity 's skyline. 'Maybe she didn't have your address. Maybe she put the clipping in an envelope and mailed the whole thing to someone she knew inNew York , asking him or her to look up your address and send it on.'
'That's pretty farfetched, isn't it?'
It had seemed plausible while I was stretched out watching dawn break. Now it did look like a stretch.
And it seemed even less likely an hour later, when I got back to my hotel. There weren't any messages in my box, but while I was checking I collected the letters I'd left behind the previous night. There was some junk mail, and a credit-card bill, and there was an envelope with no return address and my name and address block-printed in ballpoint.
It was the same story clipped from the same paper. No note with it, nothing scribbled in the margins.
Something made me read it all the way through, word for word.
The way you'll watch a sad old movie, hoping this time it'll have a happy ending.
United had a nonstop out of La Guardia at 1:45 that was due intoCleveland at 2:59. I put a clean shirt and a change of socks and underwear in a briefcase along with a book I was trying to read and took a cab to the airport. I was early, but after I'd had a bite in the cafeteria and read the Times through and called Elaine I didn't have long to wait.
We were on time getting off and five minutes early at Cleveland-Hopkins International. Hertz had the car I'd reserved, a Ford Tempo, and the clerk gave me an area map with my route toMassillon marked out for me with a yellow highlighter. I followed her directions and made the drive in a little over an hour.
On the way, it occurred to me that it was just as well driving was one of those things you didn't forget how to do, because I'd done precious little of it in recent years. Unless there was a time I was forgetting, it had been over a year since I'd been behind a steering wheel.
Last October Jan Keane and I had rented a car and driven to the Amish country aroundLancaster,Pennsylvania , for a long weekend of turning leaves and folksy inns and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. It started off well but we'd been having our problems and I suppose the weekend was an attempt to cure them, and that's a lot of weight for five days in the country to carry. Too much weight, as it turned out, because we were sullen and sour with each other by the time we got back to the city. We both knew it was over, and not just the weekend. In that sense you could say the trip accomplished what it was supposed to, though not what we wanted it to.
Police Headquarters inMassillon is housed in a modern building downtown onTremont Avenue . I left
the Tempo in a lot down the street and asked the desk officer for a Lieutenant Havlicek, who turned out to be a big man with close-cropped light brown hair and some extra weight in the gut and jowls. He wore a brown suit and a tie with brown and gold stripes, and he had a wedding ring on the appropriate finger and a Masonic ring on the other hand.
