361 - Donald E. Westlake [29]
“Oh, crap. You’re just trying to get under my skin. I’ve got it narrowed down to two people. A cop named Fred Maine. And a guy named Dan Christie, he’s an investigator works for Northeastern Agency. It’s got to be one of those two. I’m pretty sure Maine gets two paychecks every week, one of them from the city. And Christie is a poker buddy of Sal Metusco, he’s a numbers collector midtown on the west side.”
“Keep up the good work,” I told him. I didn’t say anything about the veteran in the parking lot, because Johnson would only have told the next guy who broke his arm.
We talked a little, about nothing at all, and I said I’d call him back. I didn’t say when. Then I looked at Beeworthy’s number, but I resisted the impulse. He’d want to do a lot of interviewing, and I wasn’t in the mood.
Bill wanted to go to another movie that night, but I couldn’t take it. So we sat around the room and drank and after a while I threw a gin hand out the window. A little after midnight, we went down to 42nd Street and saw an important movie that had been made from a Broadway play called A Sound of Distant Drums. It was about homosexuality and what a burden it was, but the hero bore the burden girlfully. It didn’t convert me.
Wednesday we checked out of the hotel. We also went down and checked out of the Amington. We figured they were looking for us somewhere else by now, so we didn’t sneak around. Nobody noticed us particularly. Then we took the tube to Jersey City and got the car and drove up to Plattsburg. I rode in the back seat because I still couldn’t face highway driving in the right front. Sitting back there, I read the papers we’d bought in the city. The Post had an article about Eddie Kapp getting out of prison tomorrow. They were unhappy about it, and wanted to know if Eddie Kapp had really paid his debt to society. There was a blurred photo of him twenty-five years ago. No other paper referred to him at all.
In Plattsburg, we checked into a hotel on Margaret Street. Bill was bushed, he’d driven three hundred and thirty miles in eight hours. I went out alone and found a bar and traded war stories with a guy who’d been stationed in Japan. If he was telling the truth, he had a better time in Japan than I did in Germany. If I was telling the truth, so did I.
In the morning, we checked out again and drove the fifteen miles to Dannemora.
Dannemora is a little town. In most of it, you wouldn’t know there was a penitentiary around at all. The town doesn’t look dirty enough, or mean enough. But the penitentiary’s there, a high long wall next to the sidewalk along the street. The sidewalk’s cracked and frost-heaved over there. On the other side, it’s cleaner and there’s half a dozen bars with neon signs that say Budweiser and Genesee. National and local beers on tap. Bill had Budweiser and I had Genesee. It tasted like beer.
The bar was dark, but it was done in light wood lightly varnished and it was wider than it should have been for its depth. You got the feeling the bar wasn’t dark at all really, you were just slowly going blind. The bartender was a short wide man with a black mustache. There were two other customers, in red-and-black hunting jackets and high leather boots. They were local citizens, and they were drinking bar scotch with Canada Dry ginger ale.
The Post had said Eddie Kapp would be a free man at noon, but we didn’t know for sure. We got to town shortly before ten and sat on high stools in this bar where we could see the metal door in the wall across the way. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Eddie Kapp. The picture in the Post was blurred and twenty-five years old. But he was sixty-one years of age. And how many people would be getting out all in one day?
We sat there and nursed our beers. I wore my shirt-tail out, and when I sat leaning forward with my elbows on the bar, the butt of Smitty’s gun stuck into my lowest rib. Bill had the same problem with the Luger.
At eleven-thirty a tan-and-cream Chrysler slid to the curb in front of the bar. Bill looked at it and turned to me and said, “Is that them? Is that the ones