Stubbs rubbed his head and remembered the days in the Party, the good times when thoughts slid through his head like they were on wheels, when he knew the questions and the answers. He didn’t know now what he thought of the Party, whether he thought what had happened to him had been worth it or not, because he never really thought of the Party at all but only of people. He remembered faces from that time, and frozen moments of import in strikes, like the moment when the deputy had driven his car over the little girl. That had been good because it had solidified the workers and made the strike as hard as steel, until some damn fool had killed a foreman over a personal grudge, and then predictably the workers had become afraid and the strike had fizzled out.
It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all.
Charles F. Wells. He brought himself back from remembering, angry at himself for losing the straight line again even for just a minute. He had to find Charles F. Wells. Not with the Party, because that was a dead thing now, but by himself.
Except he didn’t know what to do next.
Wells was in New York, that much he knew. How did he know it? Because May told him. How did May know it? Because Wells had talked with her and with the doctor and with the two nurses, and Wells had said that after the bandages came off he was going to go live in New York.
Buy a house in New York.
Stubbs squinted up his face, and stared at the pattern on the bedspread. Was that what May had said? Charles F. Wells was going to go live in New York, go there and buy a house, and he already had a couple of real-estate agents looking around for him. That’s what Charles F. Wells had said, and that’s what May had told Stubbs, and Stubbs had forgotten all of it except the part about New York.
The two weeks in the darkness at the farmhouse had made him forget a lot of things, and this important thing about buying a house was one that he’d forgotten. He thought now of the apartments he’d been to, apartment buildings all over New York, and all that time wasted. One of the people he’d gone to in Brooklyn had lived in a house, and two of the people in Queens, but none of them had lived in the kind of house a rich man would live in. Where in New York would there be the kind of house a rich man would buy and live in?
Then he thought of the suburbs. If a rich man was going to buy a house somewhere right near New York, would he say he was going to New York to buy a house? Yes, he would. And if a man wanted to be handy to New York but also wanted privacy the way Charles F. Wells wanted privacy, would he most likely try to live outside the city limits? Yes, he would.
Stubbs was relieved. He’d thought it out by himself, he’d made his brain go to work after all and remember important things and make important decisions. He put out his latest cigarette and got off the bed, smiling, and left the hotel and walked across town to Grand Central again.
There was a phone book for Nassau County, and the map in the front of the phone book showed that Nassau County was on Long Island, just beyond Brooklyn and Queens. And in the W section there was a listing for “Wells, Chas. F.” Stubbs knew it was the man. He knew without a doubt that this time he’d found the right man. He copied the address and phone number down, and closed the phone book.
Walking across the terminal, he looked ahead and saw Parker. He stopped in his tracks, not believing it, and then other people got in the way and he wasn’t really sure it had been Parker he’d seen. Maybe his brain was playing tricks on him. Nevertheless, he turned around and went off in another direction.
Chapter 6
AT HUNTINGTON, twenty miles from the city line, Stubbs stopped and asked directions again. He asked in a bar, because there’d be more people there to work out the right answer among them, and they all co-operated, the way he’d expected, contradicting each other and suggesting alternate routes and finally hammering out a course for him to follow. He thanked them and finished the beer he’d bought just as a token, and went back out to the car.
He followed the directions.
He stayed on 25A through Huntington and out the other side and kept going till he saw the Huntington Crescent Golf Course. After that, he made the left where they’d told him, and two turns later he was on Reardon Road, near the Sound, though he couldn’t see any water. He stayed on Reardon Road, a winding blacktop road with trees surrounding it on either side and occasional breaks where a narrower winding blacktop road went off to one side or the other. At each break he slowed down, till at last he saw what he wanted. There was a rural delivery mailbox on a wooden post by the road, with stone gate-pillars behind it and the usual narrow winding blacktop road going in among the trees. This time on the mailbox it said, “Charles F. Wells”.
Stubbs turned the Lincoln slowly and drove through the stone gateposts. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and reached out and removed the automatic from the glove compartment. He put in on the seat, where he could reach it fast.
The blacktop road was barely two car-widths, and it wandered and curved back and forth amid the trees. They were thin-trunked trees, young, with the branches starting high up and with not too much underbrush between them. Stubbs rolled along in the Lincoln at a bare ten miles an hour, peering ahead around the curves to see the house, and when he saw it he hit the brake and stopped.
It was stone, and old. Stubbs could just barely see it ahead and to the right, through the tree trunks. He backed up just a little, till the house was out of sight, and then he turned the engine off. There was no place to pull off the road, so he just left the car where it was and climbed out.
It was nearly evening, seven-thirty or so, and the space between the trees were getting dimmer. Stubbs moved away from the car and the road, going in among the trees, moving at an angle towards the house. Soon he could see it again, and then he crouched and moved more slowly.
The house was big, two storeys high and rambling. There was a screen-enclosed wooden porch around the first floor and the rest was stone. To the right of the house, the blacktop road ended at a three-car garage, stone like the house and with white doors.
A slate walk joined a small side door in the garage and the side of the house, with an arched roof over the walk, supported by rough unpainted wooden posts. The garage had a second storey, with windows in it, but they were dark, without curtains or shades. In the house, two windows on the ground floor showed light, and so did one window upstairs.
Stubbs crept forward forwards the house until he came to the edge of the trees, where the blacktop widened in front of the house before coming to a stop at the garage. He could try to cross the bare blacktopped area here, or