He was south of Washington Square. He found a parked taxi at a nightclub’s curb, and told the driver to go to Times Square. In the taxi he tried to relax, stretching his legs out, holding the wadded handkerchief against his cut.
“Where on Times Square?” asked the driver.
“Times Square and Seventh,” Carter said, just to say something.
The cut was stopping its bleeding. Carter even managed to tie the handkerchief with the aid of his teeth in a way that showed no blood on its outside. Then he paid the driver with two dollar bills that he held ready in his left hand. “Keep the rest.”
He walked to Fifth Avenue, and got another taxi. “Jackson Heights?” Carter asked, remembering that drivers weren’t always willing to go there from Manhattan.
“Okay,” said the driver. “Whereabouts?”
“I’ll show you when we get there.”
Carter leaned forward and told the driver, as they reached Jackson Heights, to turn right, then left, and finally to stop. It was an intersection with restaurants and a bar, and Carter knew it was not more than a five-minute walk to Gawill’s. He paid the driver off, then began to walk toward Gawill’s. It was now a quarter to 12.
He paused in a dark street, thinking he didn’t have to go to Gawill’s, that he could take another taxi home—a taxi without changing halfway—but he couldn’t go home just now. He felt too shaky. He couldn’t even call Hazel now to tell her he’d be home soon. Carter pushed on toward Gawill’s, and stopped in a liquor store, which was just closing, and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
I’ll stay half an hour, Carter said to himself. And Gawill might be annoyed and not let him in at this hour, in which case he’d stick the bottle of scotch at him and go. Then of course he might stay longer than half an hour. He couldn’t predict. He untied the handkerchief and looked at his hand under a streetlamp. The cut was a tiny V in the side of his hand between the little finger base and his wrist. O’Brien’s tooth or something had cut through some skin that looked rather calloused once it was cut. The part that had bled was deep, but very small indeed. It was not bleeding now.
Gawill did not answer his downstairs ring, but Carter took the elevator up, anyway. He rang the doorbell. After a moment, he heard Gawill’s heavy tread, and Gawill opened the door in pajamas and robe.
“You’re late,” said Gawill.
“Too late? Here’s some scotch.”
Gawill smiled slightly. “Kept your promise. Okay, come in for a nightcap.” He went into the living room. “What made you late?”
“Dinner with some office people,” Carter said. “Sitting talking. You know.”
Gawill was fixing drinks in the kitchen. There was a pleasant sound of gurgling liquor from the full bottle. Carter looked around at the untidy, ugly, masculine room almost as if he liked it. Gawill came in with the drinks.
“So what did you have to tell me?” Gawill asked.
Carter lifted his glass slightly to Gawill before he drank. He drank half the glass at once. He had removed his coat. Now he sank down in the big armchair. “You were asking me about Hazel,” Carter said, crossing his legs. “I just wanted to say we’re getting along fine.”
Gawill said nothing, but Carter could see that he believed him. “Well—here’s to it. Matrimonial bliss,” he said sourly, and drank.
Carter drank, too, and finished his.
“Musta been a dry party they gave you tonight,” Gawill said.
Carter smiled. “Chinese dinner. Lots of tea, but—” He got up and went into the kitchen. “You don’t mind if I help myself, I hope?”
“Nope,” said Gawill.
Carter did. Under the tap, as he filled his glass with water, he washed the bit of blood from around the nail of his little finger. The V cut was dry now, and cheerful-looking, like a silly mouth, or like a V for victory. Carter took the bloodstained handkerchief from his jacket pocket, hesitated between sticking it into an empty can in Gawill’s garbage pail or the incinerator chute, and decided on the incinerator. He opened and closed it noiselessly. “Ost-reicher told me something today that I think I ought to pass on to you,” Carter said as he came into the living room again. “They’ve got the material Sullivan was collecting on you and they’re pretty impressed by it—as a motive for wanting Sullivan out of the way.”
“That crap again!” Gawill shouted, standing up.
“That’s what they told me. A relief off my mind and a big headache for you and O’Brien, I’d say. What’re you going to do about O’Brien? Don’t you think he’s a danger to you?”
“Listen—f’Christ’s sake,” Gawill spluttered, gesturing so that some of his drink went on the floor. “Once and for all, I’ll—Drexel got most of that money. Got half, anyway. He got about half and Wally Palmer the other half.”
Carter blinked. Drexel. That decrepit old churchgoer who looked like a second Jefferson Davis. Drexel, whose character was so above question he had hardly been questioned. Not questioned at all about his own possible complicity, just questioned about the characters of his employees. Drexel, who had salved his conscience by paying Carter a fraction of his pay, and had gone on after the school fiasco to build a couple of other things in the same state. Even his deathbed, if his stroke had given him time for one, hadn’t inspired a confession. Sullivan had never uttered the faintest word of suspicion against him. “Well,” Carter said finally, feeling a little light in the head, “it’s no wonder they couldn’t account for all that cash. Half of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—”
“Drexel stashed plenty of it away.”
“Sullivan certainly didn’t know that. Or did he?”
“No, Sullivan didn’t know it,” Gawill said.
“Why didn’t you tell Sullivan? Especially once Drexel was dead. He’s been dead for months.”
Gawill sank on to the sofa again, but he leaned forward. “I’ll tell you why. I wanted to see Sullivan fail. I wanted—yeah, I wanted to kill him. You know that.”
Yes, Carter knew that. Gawill in his crazy way had wanted to keep his hatred whipped up by letting Sullivan go on looking for evidence against him. “But you must’ve got something out of the Triumph deal, Greg. Didn’t Drexel know you knew he was stealing money?”
“Oh, I got some crumbs. Peanuts! Peanuts! It was like Wally was some millionaire inviting me on a holiday with him and he paid my bills in New York. On weekends sometimes. You call that getting anything?” Gawill asked rhetorically, resentfully.
Carter had to smile. “Why didn’t you gouge them for more? Palmer and Drexel, too?”
Gawill twitched, as if illustrating his memory of being unable to act.
Drexel and Palmer had had something on Gawill, of course. Probably. What else? “Never mind, I understand,” Carter said. He looked at the telephone, and just as he did, it rang. Carter asked quickly, “Where were you tonight, Greg?”
Gawill’s hand stopped on the way to the telephone. “Me?— I was in a bar watching a fight on television.”
“You were with me. All evening.”
“Hah!” Gawill said, nervously.
The telephone rang a third time.
“I met you in the bar. You came home first, I came a little later with a bottle of scotch.”
“A little later. What’s all this?” Gawill frowned.
“Answer the telephone.”
Gawill took his suspended hand away from the telephone, almost back to his lap, then reached out and picked the telephone up. “Hello.”
Carter could hear only a burring masculine voice. He watched Gawill’s face.
“Yeah?— Yeah.— Oh, yeah?” Surprised, taut-faced now, Gawill looked at Carter. “No, I don’t.— Yeah, I’ll be here. Okay.” He hung up. “O’Brien’s dead.” His dark eyes seemed to grow smaller with certainty. “And you killed him.”
r /> “It’s either me or you, obviously. But it better be neither of us, Greg, and we better have been together tonight. I’ll tell Hazel I lied about the office dinner and came to see you. I met you in the bar. Was it a crowded bar?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Northern Boulevard. Not O’Brien’s. I don’t know the name of it.— Yeah, Roger’s Tavern.”
“Okay.— What’s the matter with your watchdog tonight? Isn’t there a policeman on guard downstairs?” Carter stood up suddenly and glanced at the door. He looked at Gawill. “I didn’t see a police car when I came in, but I wasn’t looking for one.”
Gawill wiped his forehead, and ran a hand around his neck, inside his pajama collar. “Why did you kill O’Brien? Was he blackmailing you? Why?”
“Sullivan’s dead, isn’t he? What do you care why? Yes, I killed O’Brien. Shall I say I saw your hired man going down the steps, rushing out just as I was going in to Sullivan’s? You don’t want me to tell them you planned to kill Sullivan, do you?”
“Jee-sus!” Gawill squealed, and put his hands over his face, in his duped-again-I’m-tortured style.
Carter smiled at him. He lit a cigarette. “You have no choice, Greg. Neither have I. But we can make an agreement. Somebody else killed O’Brien, someone he owed money to, maybe, but not us.”
“Jesus,” Gawill repeated more quietly, through his hands.
“Is it a deal?”
Gawill’s doorbell rang.
Gawill got up and lumbered into the kitchen and pressed the release bell, lumbered in again.
“You went to the bar when tonight?” Carter asked, not knowing what Gawill’s reply would be—hostile, negative, or cooperative.
“Eight thirty,” Gawill said, glancing at him, and there was a helpless look in his eyes.
Carter felt the balance of his fate swing. He said in a calmer tone, “I joined you there around eight thirty. I called you around six thirty this evening to make the appointment.” The doorbell rang on the last words. “Were you in at six thirty?”
“Yeah,” Gawill said. He went to the door.
Ostreicher and a police officer whom Carter had never seen before came in.
“Well, Mr. Carter,” Ostreicher said. “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” Carter said.
“And Mr. Gawill, ready for bed.”
“At this hour, yeah,” Gawill said.
Ostreicher and his companion did not sit down. Ostreicher managed to watch both Carter’s and Gawill’s faces as he said, “Mr. Carter, you probably heard the news. O’Brien was found dead over on the West Side tonight. Beaten up and dead.”
Carter said nothing, only looked at Ostreicher. He held a nearly finished drink in his right hand, his little finger under the bottom of his glass.
“Where were you tonight, both of you, around eleven o’clock? Mr. Carter?”
“I was walking around Northern Boulevard around that time, I think. I’d spent part of the evening with Gawill.”
“What part?”
“From about eight thirty till—about ten thirty, I don’t know.”
“Till ten thirty, then you separated?” Ostreicher asked. “Get this, please, officer.”
And the officer hastened to get out his tablet and pen.
“We sat in a bar for a while talking,” Carter said. “Then Gawill went off. But I wasn’t finished talking, so I bought a bottle of scotch and came over.”
Ostreicher opened his mouth slightly, but said nothing. He looked from Carter to Gawill and back again, as if he might be wishing he had thought to ask them separately where they had been. “You, Mr. Gawill, where were you?”
“I left the bar around—”
“What bar?”
“Roger’s Tavern,” Gawill said, and put a cigarette in his mouth. He was also standing. “Around ten thirty I came home, I think. I dunno. Ask the cop downstairs. He ought to know. Or are you the cop?” he asked the policeman writing, but the policeman only glanced at him and said nothing.
Ostreicher said to the officer, “What time did he come in?”
The officer referred to another page of his tablet. “Ten fifteen,” he said.
“And Carter?”
The officer looked again, then shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get this gentleman’s time of arrival, sir.”
Ostreicher looked annoyed. “What time did you come to Jackson Heights, Mr. Carter?”
“Around eight thirty,” Carter said.
“What were you talking to Gawill about?”
“What do you think I was talking to Gawill about?” Carter said.
Ostreicher’s blue eyes glinted as he looked at Gawill. “Who did you hire to kill off O’Brien, Gawill, and how much did you pay him? Or not pay him?”
“Oh, let me off it!” Gawill yelled back.
“The hell I’ll let you off it. Not this time. This time you’ll spend a few days in the clink. And nights!”
“I dunno who killed O’Brien and I don’t give a damn and you won’t learn a thing from me,” Gawill replied.
Carter admired him at that moment.
Ostreicher looked bested. He turned and mumbled something to the officer, who was still writing, and the officer nodded. Then Ostreicher went over and picked up Gawill’s telephone. He dialed a number, then curtly told whoever had answered to “ask Hollingsworth to stay on.” Ostreicher hung up and turned to Carter and Gawill. “Get your clothes on, Gawill. We’re going first to the bar you were at.”
Gawill started to move, then looked at his watch. “They’re early closers. They close around twelve thirty.”
“We’ll find someone,” Ostreicher retorted.
The bar was closed when they got there in the police car. Ostreicher went into a bigger bar that was still open down the street, presumably to telephone the dark bar to see if anyone would answer, or possibly to ask the proprietor’s name, which Gawill hadn’t known or hadn’t disclosed when Ostreicher asked him. He came back after about five minutes. “Let’s go to the precinct,” Ostreicher said to the officer who was driving.
As soon as they got there, Carter asked if he could telephone his wife. Ostreicher said yes, but then rudely stayed three feet away from Carter while he called from the desk telephone, so he could hear what Carter said.
“Where are you?” Hazel asked.
“I’m okay,” Carter said, not smiling, but in a tone of unmistakable cheer. “Can’t talk to you now because I’m not alone, but I’m okay and I don’t want you to worry.” No, not even if they beat the hell out of him tonight. He could take it, he was okay, and he’d finally be home.
Ostreicher kept them up until nearly 4 a.m., separately and alternately questioning them. Carter did not see Gawill at all after they arrived at the station. An air of defeat began to hang about Ostreicher toward 3 a.m., as surely as his questions were repetitious. Then came Ostreicher’s pretense that Gawill had broken down.
“Gawill said you refused to pay O’Brien for him—even though he promised to pay you back later. But you were going to pay for this one to help Gawill out. Who were you going to pay, Carter?— We’ll find out and connect you, just like we connected Gawill with O’Brien. Why put it off?”
“Why on earth should I help Gawill out?” Carter sat calmly in a straight chair, his arms folded, his legs crossed. It was a luxurious cross-examination compared to prison experiences, compared to being hung up by the thumbs. “You’re wasting your time,” Carter said quietly. He was prepared—mentally at least—to stay up the rest of the night, all day the next day, while Ostreicher slept, and all night tomorrow night, with Ostreicher again. And he was sure Gawill hadn’t broken down, or Ostreicher would be putting his statements much more forcefully, perhaps underlined with a punch
in the ribs. Carter felt quite secure with Gawill as a partner, in these circumstances. Gawill was out to protect himself.
“You’re wasting yours. I’m not wasting mine,” Ostreicher said, reminding Carter suddenly of church services on Sunday morning in prison: Your time here is not wasted, because you may profit by it to reflect upon . . .
Carter looked him steadily in the eye.
A little later, Ostreicher gave it up for the night. Carter was taken by an officer—who had sat with him in the intervals while Ostreicher talked to Gawill—to a cell down the hall, where gray pajamas were laid out for him on the wall-held cot as if by a chambermaid. There was only cold running water from the single tap at the basin, but the toilet was immaculately clean, and it was a hotel room compared to the cells Carter had known in the penitentiary. Carter still saw no sign of Gawill, but he was sure Gawill was spending the night somewhere here, too.
Nothing happened until 10 a.m., when Ostreicher appeared with two men Carter had never seen before. They were the proprietor and a barman of Roger’s Tavern. Both said they had not noticed Carter in the bar, but might have missed him. They did not know Gawill by name, but recognized him by sight, as he had been in “a few times.” Carter was present when Ostreicher confronted Gawill with the two men, because the men were then asked if they remembered seeing Carter and Gawill together.
“I don’t,” said the barman, shaking his head, “but there was such a big crowd last night watching the wrestling, you know, people would come up by themselves to get a couple of drinks and take them back to their friends, maybe in a booth.”
“You remember him buying two drinks last night any time?” Ostreicher asked, nodding at Gawill.
The barman moistened his lips and answered carefully, “I honestly don’t, but I could be wrong. I mean, there was so many people standing three deep at the bar. I don’t want to say the wrong thing and get somebody in trouble, you understand. I just don’t remember.”