He pulled the dresser away from the door and went out to the hall where the pay phone was. He called a friend of his, a guy he’d known in the old days, who said, ‘When did you get back from Mexico, man?’
‘Just a couple days ago. You doing anything tonight?’
‘New, you know.’
‘Why don’t we take in a movie, have a couple beers?’
‘Sure thing. Come on over. Say, wasn’t that something about Ellie?’
‘What? Oh, yeah. It sure was. Be right over.’
He hung up, having made the mistake that would kill him.
Two
Detective Dougherty wasn’t at all sure he’d done the right thing. The smart thing, yes, there wasn’t any doubt of that, but the right thing? Maybe not.
Driving downtown to talk it over with the lieutenant, Dougherty allowed himself little fantasies in which he got the drop on the man who’d called himself — obviously lying — Joe, in which he captured Joe, bested Joe, worsted Joe. In the cellar there, sitting as calm and deceptive as W. C. Fields playing poker, and then all at once - like Fields producing a fifth ace - whipping the pistol out and crying, ‘All right, hold it!’
In the dining-room, as Joe copied down the names, distracted …
At the front door, as Joe turned to leave …
‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.’ Francis Bacon said that, whether he wrote Shakespeare’s plays or not.
Detective Dougherty was a good enough detective to have been aware of all the opportunities Joe had given him to try for an arrest. But he was also a good enough detective to know they were all opportunities given him by Joe, not out of carelessness but as a challenge. Every opportunity given him deliberately to remind him of his wife and children, currently next door, safely out of the house but close enough still to hear the shot that would kill him. And listening for that shot.
That, Dougherty thought to himself as he drove downtown, is probably the most enervating, the most spine softening, the most weakening thing that can happen to a man: to know that his wife and children are sitting with cocked heads listening for the sound of the shot that will kill him.
If there had been no wife, no children, Joe would never have walked in and out so casually. Dougherty might have died or Joe might have been caught, but either way it would have ended.
Of course, he knew full well that if there had been no wife or children Joe wouldn’t have handled it the same way.
‘He used my weakness,’ Dougherty said to himself. In his own personal soul, in the part of him that wasn’t a policeman, he hated Joe for that and would pursue’ him more for having done that than for anything involving the stolen gate receipts or the murder of Ellen Canaday.
He found a parking space now two blocks from headquarters and walked back. It was not quite night; one out of three or four cars passing hadn’t turned their headlights on yet.
After five o’clock, headquarters always took on for Dougherty the harsh surrealistic pregnant look of an IRA armory. He went up the slate steps and through the lotting doors and down the green antiseptic-smelling hall. When he at last came into the crowded wooden office of the lieutenant, he felt as he always did when in this building in the evening: like an unambitious Javert, a dull Maigret.
The lieutenant looked like Eisenhower, except that he never smiled, and when he did open his mouth for some other reason his teeth were yellow-brown and rotten and separated by wide gaps. He pointed to Dougherty to sit down and said, ‘I did what you said to do on the phone. Now fill me in.’
Dougherty filled him in, telling him in flat monosyllables what had happened, giving no reasons or explanations this time through but merely chronicling the events, as though reporting the plot of some movie he had seen.
When he was done, the lieutenant said, ‘All right, I see why you didn’t try to take him; that was smart, that makes sense, in your own home and all. But why give him the list? It’s legit, the real list?’
‘Yes. I didn’t have another list of names handy. Besides, since he knew the girl himself he would naturally expect to know at least a couple of the names on any list of her friends I showed him.’
‘Did he say he knew any of them?’
‘No, of course not.’ But that was the wrong way to say it; the lieutenant looked offended. Hurriedly, Dougherty went on, ‘I figured it was best not to ask him, not agitate him.’
The lieutenant nodded and mumbled something, then said, ‘Why give’ him a list at all? Why not tell him the list is here, downtown, you can’t remember the names?’
‘This way,’ Dougherty said, ‘we’ve maybe got some leads to him. We know for sure nine people he’s interested in. He naturally knows we’ll be looking for him to come around one of those people, but if he’s in that much of a sweat to get their names that he’ll come around to my house and brace me for them, I figure he’s in a sweat enough to try to get past us to the people themselves.’
‘Why? What’s he after?’
‘I’m not sure. This whole thing has to connect with the stadium robbery some way. I’d say this guy Joe was in on the robbery and staying with the Canaday woman till the heat was off. It would be my guess that whoever killed the Canaday woman took something of Joe’s away from the apartment and it would probably either be something that would expose Joe’s identity or prove his connection with the robbery, or it was his share of the loot itself.’
The lieutenant said, ‘Ah. Somebody robbed the money from the robber. That would make him boil, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would explain why he’s so on the prod.’
