need to have more to go on. If what you said is true, then it won’t take but a few minutes to get confirmation.”
“Of course,” said Stillman in the same cool, even tone. “I don’t blame you.”
“Good,” said the chief with finality. He began to turn toward the doorway where Carlyle had disappeared.
“But,” said Stillman. The chief stopped in mid-turn. “It’s just that I happened to notice that there seemed to be only one road out of town.”
Chief Raines cocked his head. “Yeah. We have noticed that too. Sit tight and I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve gotten through to Springfield.” He walked off to the complex of inner offices.
Stillman turned, walked across the open floor, and sat down on one of the benches. Walker hesitated, then went to join him. Stillman was hunched over, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on the floor.
Walker whispered, “Is this the way you expected it to go?”
Stillman pursed his lips as though deciding not what the answer was, but whether he was going to answer. “I was hoping they’d haul them in and take care of the formalities at their leisure. But he’s doing pretty much what he’s supposed to do, given all considerations.”
“What considerations?”
“He doesn’t work for us. He works for the town of Coulter. The voters don’t mind if he locks up a couple of out-of-town murderers, but there’s not much thanks in it. He’s not going to take on any foolish risks to do it.”
“What do we do?”
“We already did it. Now we wait.”
Walker looked at his watch. It was two thirty-five. He sat back on the hard wooden bench and stared at the front of the wooden counter across the big room. He stared until he got to know every line of the wood grain, then stared at the smooth floor until he began to alternate the patterns in the dark granite squares and the white marble squares, first seeing them as a white floor with black on it, then as a black floor with white on it.
He heard a door swing open on the back hallway, and stood up to walk to the center of the floor. He counted six policemen striding out the rear entrance to the parking lot. He saw Stillman’s eyes on him and nodded. Stillman’s shoulders lowered, as though the muscles had relaxed, and he leaned his back on the bench. When the sounds of engines starting and cars in motion reached him, Stillman looked at his watch again. Walker didn’t have to. Twenty-five minutes had elapsed.
Chief Raines emerged from the door beyond the counter and beckoned to them once. When they had moved close enough so he didn’t need to raise his voice, he said, “Okay. You’re for real, and the murder is real. We ought to have them before long.”
“Thanks, Chief,” said Stillman. He turned to go back to his bench.
“Before they get in here, you and I had better have a talk,” said the chief. He stepped to the side and lifted a hinged section of the countertop to make an opening.
Walker and Stillman followed him into a large office in the corner of the building. Walker had started anticipating the questions. He had been in three police stations in a month, and he was beginning to feel expert. Raines had the manner of a man who had a great penchant for getting straight to the part of a story that mattered, but whose position made everybody he ever listened to give him obfuscation, evasion, and misdirection. He sat down behind his desk, leaving Walker and Stillman to decide whether they wanted to sit, and which of the four chairs in the room they would do it in.
“What are these two suspects from Illinois doing in Coulter, New Hampshire? What do they want here?”
Stillman said, “We can’t say for sure, of course. What we think is that they’re here because they had a friend—a confederate in the fraud case, anyway—who lived here. He was killed in Florida, and they’ll want to be sure he didn’t leave anything that will get them into trouble.”
“Who killed him?”
Stillman answered, “Strictly speaking, it was my friend Walker, here.” Walker’s jaw tightened, and Stillman hastened to add, “Purely in self-defense.”
“And he lived in Coulter, you say? What was his name?”
“Scully. James Scully. He lived over on Birch Street.”
Raines grunted, but Walker couldn’t tell whether it was puzzlement or a confirmation of a long-held expectation. He looked at Walker. “Has it crossed your mind that they might be here looking for you?”
“Sure,” said Stillman.
Walker nodded, hiding his surprise. He had never thought of the possibility, and Stillman had never mentioned it. Walker felt foolish. He had allowed the enemy to become a group of nonhuman abstractions, beings who acted only out of logic and efficiency. He had imagined them simply trying to steal the most money and gain the most anonymity because that made simple sense. Motives like hatred and revenge had dropped out of his cogitations. He had fallen into a trap that he had never known existed, and it could have killed him.
The chief persisted with his questions, but Walker’s tension was not the fear of incrimination that he had felt when he had been interrogated in other places. He was acutely aware that time was passing. He told himself that the chief’s glacial pace meant nothing had gone wrong, but behind the voice he kept straining his ears for gunshots. The distance couldn’t be more than half a mile, he estimated. The chief had by now perceived that there was no question he could ask that Stillman could not answer instantly and flawlessly but to little purpose, so he directed one now and then to Walker. It was always one that Walker had anticipated, because he had become adept at picking out which parts of Stillman’s answers the chief would want to rephrase and repeat to Walker to detect a contradiction. When the questions came, he was not alarmed. It was what cops did.
When he heard footsteps outside the door, Walker stiffened. The door swung open and the tall cop stood in the doorway without stepping inside. Raines slipped outside and closed the door behind him. Walker strained his ears, but he could not hear the voices, and Stillman had settled again into his barely animate stolidity, his eyes focused on the wall as though he were unaware of Walker’s impatience. After a minute or two, Raines returned. His expression was weary and irritated.
“When you recognized those suspects, they must have recognized you too,” he said. “They weren’t in the coffee shop. Officers have been checking other shops and restaurants for over an hour, but they haven’t turned up.” He walked to his desk, took a roll of Life Savers out of the top drawer and put them in his pocket, then walked back to the door. “I’ve just sent one team to Scully’s house to watch that. But it’s not looking real good. There aren’t a lot of places in this town where two strangers could hide.” He opened the door and walked out.
35
For a minute after Chief Raines disappeared, Stillman sat in his state of immobility, staring at the carpet. Then he stood abruptly. “You heard the man. We’re waiting around for nothing.” Walker noticed that when Stillman stepped to the door, he opened it only a crack, then listened before he swung it wide. They stepped quickly through the hinged opening in the counter, then out the rear entrance to the parking lot. Stillman set a quick pace until they had returned to Constitution Avenue. Then he slowed a bit, as though he was forcing his body to convey a kind of leisure.
Walker said, “If leaving was the right thing to do, why did you peek out the door to be sure nobody was looking?”
“Because I didn’t want somebody to give me a competing opinion that I had to listen to.”
“Are we going back to Keene?”
“Afraid not,” said Stillman.
“Is there something I’m missing?”
“It took us about five minutes of fast walking from the time we saw those guys on Main Street until we got to the police station. We didn’t even stop to get the car, because it would have cost us extra time to circle around those guys and back to Main to get it. So why did they leave?”
“Maybe the chief was right. We saw them, and they saw us.”
Stillman’s eyes were narrow and intense. “Suppose he is right. What would those two guys do?”
“Beats me. Get in their car and leave, I guess. If the car wasn’t there when the police arrived, I’d say it’s settled.”
