The odd line jostled memory, and I looked at her thoughtfully. “Where did you get that?”
She shrugged. “I’ve known it for years. I’ve always liked that poem, because he seemed to write it for me. I’m the girl who looks in the mirror and wonders what difference it made.”
I wanted to hear her say more, but she was suddenly silent, as if she had revealed too much of the self that she usually kept carefully wrapped and put away from the curiosity of strangers.
I took the pillows from her, stacked them under my arm. We walked back to the house together, saying nothing. Her jaw was set, and there was a melancholy look in her eyes, as if she were reaching back to another time that had held more promise than now. At the patio I left her and went to the garage, picked out a car for the drive into town.
At seven o’clock I placed the call. I listened to the drone as it rang for a long time at the other end. Then she answered. “Yes?”
“You told me to call,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Do you know where Railroad Avenue is?”
“I can find it.”
“Get in touch with a man called Harry Small at Nineteen Railroad Avenue.”
“Why?”
“He raised Carla Kennedy,” she said. “He knows where she is now.” The connection was broken with a hollow click.
I wrote the address down, left the Coral Gardens Hotel. In the car I unfolded my city map and found Railroad Avenue. It was a two-block street that ran diagonally into the Seaboard’s Moreland Yards, not far from the bay.
I found the street without much trouble. It was hardly wider than a driveway, lined with gray, tottering rooming houses, narrow brick buildings. I parked near the entrance to Railroad Avenue, beside a littered embankment next to the railroad property. A long diesel freight pounded by on the outside track as I got out of the Buick.
Number Nineteen was half a block from the glittering bands of tracks. I picked out the number lettered above the door in the light of a lamppost on the corner. It was a deserted store of some kind. The windows had been painted over, and there was a large rusted padlock on the door. It probably hadn’t been opened in years. Somebody had scratched a ludicrous face in the scaly paint near the keyhole.
I wasn’t amused. I had bought myself twenty bucks worth of nothing. I looked up and down the dark street. Lights burned here and there in the high windows, but there were no faces, no people to share the ledge of sidewalk with me. I walked past the store slowly, stopped. There was a crevice between two buildings, barely four feet wide. A dozen steps down this brick canyon a small yellow light glowed feebly, making long groping shadows. There was a door beneath the light.
I listened to the sound of boxcars clanking together in the freight yard, the deep chuff of an old locomotive. I walked down the alley, my feet rattling the trash. A furry shadow raced from a small paper box ahead of me, darted into blackness beyond the reach of the light.
No one answered my knock. I looked down at the brass doorknob. It gleamed dully. No rust. I touched it. My fingertip came away clean.
I put my hand around the knob, turned it slowly. The latch clicked, the door was free of the jamb. I pushed it open.
Inside, it was stifling. The one window was shut, shade pulled over it. The only light came from a battered metal table lamp in the center of the room. A man sat upright in a wheelchair beside the table. He was a short man with a bald head, powerful arm and shoulder muscles. His hands dangled at the spokes of the big wheels. He wore a T shirt, gray pants, suspenders. His face was yellow and dry, the eyes half open and slightly protruding. His parted lips twisted convulsively. He leered at me. It was nothing personal. He would leer at anybody who came through that door, even the cops who would have found him sooner or later, if I hadn’t come first.
I walked closer to him, trying to smell death in the hot room. But he hadn’t been dead that long. I found out what was holding him up so stiffly. A knife had been thrust through the canvas back of the wheelchair, getting him just to the side of the left shoulderblade. From the size of the handle I judged it was a pretty large knife. The blade was aimed slightly downward. It had probably got the heart or one of the important arteries nearby. He would be a big sack of blood. A little of it had run down his T shirt in back, dried darkly.
It would have required a husky man to stab him like that, through the thick muscles developed from years of self-locomotion in the wheelchair. The tread on the rubber-capped wheels was almost worn away.
A stock of up-to-date newspapers and magazines with the front covers missing suggested he probably made his living as a newsdealer. His room needed a good cleaning. He didn’t have enough shelf space for all his books. They were piled on the windowsill, on the floor, under a bunk bed. There was one on the table near the wheelchair, opened at about the middle. I glanced at the cover. It was a collection of poems by Robert Browning.
Next to the Browning reader was a telephone, and a small notepad was stuck halfway under the base of the phone. I pulled it out, looked through it. It wasn’t new, but there was only one notation in the little book, a Bay- view phone number. I picked up the receiver of the phone, dialed. There were six rings, then a sound as if someone had cut in.
“Stan’s Restaurant,” a female voice said cheerfully.
I hung up, looked at the number again. I tore the page out of the notebook and shoved it back beneath the telephone. Apparently Harry Small had had Stan’s private phone number at the restaurant. They cut in from somewhere else when he didn’t answer.
Listening to the echo of my own thoughts in the silent room was making me nervous. Perspiration soaked my face. For a moment I almost envied him his dry skin.
I walked around the table and my foot kicked a piece of broken porcelain. I looked down and saw a little glazed figure, a Napoleonic soldier standing stiffly at attention. His feet and rifle were broken and there was a long crack down his face to the white cross-chest cartridge belt. I wrapped him in my handkerchief, not taking time to look for the missing feet, and put the broken doll in my coat pocket.
It was almost impossible to find anything in the cluttered room, but I gave it a try, looking in the most likely places for pictures. I found none. No faded snapshots of little Carla Kennedy. No trace of the girl at all. And Harry Small was supposed to have raised her.
I was ready to go. I had stayed too long already. But I went to the phone and dialed another number, the number the old woman had given me. It rang again and again. I waited for her to answer, but she never came. I hung up and wiped the phone with a towel from the sink. I thought about turning off the light above the door and leaving through the alley that led to the rear of the building. But I was liable to blunder into more trouble if I didn’t go out the way I had come. I left Harry Small, smearing the doorknob with the palm of my hand as I went out. As far as I could tell, no curious eyes tracked my progress down Railroad Avenue to where the Buick was parked.
At a quarter after eight I parked the Buick in a metered rectangle on Kelvin Boulevard, walked half a block to Monessen. Down at the other end of the street, near the apartment house where Victor Clare had lived, children gathered under a streetlight. This end of Monessen was deserted.
There were no lights in the grim brick fortress of the used-furniture store. I cupped my hands against the glass plate in the door, looked inside. It took me a few seconds to notice the splinter of light between the curtains at the rear. I watched it, reached out with my fist and knocked loudly. Nothing happened. I knocked again. The light went out suddenly.
I thought about that. Then I turned and walked across the street, stood partially behind a leaning tree to see
